| Unexpected anon comments! |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|11:05 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | Ow | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Please be nice though, or I will cry | ] |
Have you got a story you'd like to share? A request for advice? A trvia question? A poem?
Go on, say something anonymous, see what happens.... |
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| Agnes - I Need You Now.
Agnes is deadly serious about her... |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|10:00 am] |
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http://katstevens.tumblr.com/post/266127114
Agnes - I Need You Now.
Agnes is deadly serious about her attempt to break the world land speed record (currently 763 mph): she’s even hired a Native American in traditional garb to test out the salt flats and check whether the conditions are perfect.
But it’s not long before DISASTER STRIKES - Agnes gets some pretty nasty engine trouble at 1.53 and her nearest branch of Kwik-Fit is literally miles away. It could have been worse, at least there are no opportunistic desert bandits waiting to pounce on her, but it looks like she’ll have to bolster her horsepower some other way. |
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| Breakaway |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|10:42 am] |
Currently sitting idle in a radio studio in Chelsea. A perfect opportunity to post the first track by Gentlemen's Agreement. Smooth. Enjoy. Good times.
http://bit.ly/break-away |
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| John Storm Roberts |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|12:57 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Rihanna "Te Amo" | ] |
Luc writes:
Sharing this with you-all because I don't know anybody else who would appreciate it. I bought my local newspaper this morning (the Kingston Freeman, which I look at three or four times a year), and opened it to find an obituary for John Storm Roberts, aged 73, who lived in my town although I never met him. He wrote two books of variable quality (Black Music of Two Worlds and The Latin Tinge), but more importantly for 20 years ran Original Music of Tivoli, which got me (and a lot of other people) really really excited about African music, country by country, in what were effectively a series of mix tapes. (Did he ever actually acquire the rights to the material? Dunno.) In the early '80s in NYC you could find Fela and King Sunny Ade and some soukous and township jive compilations, but Roberts brought out tarabu and Kenyan dry guitar and that postwar period when Congolese music went Cuban, and much more besides. It was manna. So I take off my hat to him.
I'll add that while The Latin Tinge was too much a list - and the update left out freestyle altogether - it was a list that changed my perception of where a lot of America's music comes from ("America" meaning the United States, in a bit of unconscious chauvinism I grew up in without noticing). Three-chord rock, for instance, plays progressions that I now think of as coming up from Mexico and the Caribbean. And the Bo Diddley rhythm is a cousin to the Cuban clave. And then there's the quite well-known impact on jazz and swing and reggae and raggaeton and country. Still, when the U.S. thinks of "Latin" music there's still a sense of exotica, as something irreparably foreign. |
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| Everything you do is a moth |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|03:51 pm] |
Ooh but aren't these similar? I hadn't noticed it before but the chord structure is basically the same (the second takes approx 1:43 to get going):
Mmmmm dreamy spacey mysterious music. |
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| Without Borders |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|02:44 pm] |
Back in the saddle with a pinch and a punch; just been a wee bit under the weather over the last few days, hence the radio silence, plus I've been spending more time than a healthy growing boy should trawling through broadcast archives (and if you're interested I'll do a post about those). Needless to say, the Legislation of Sod is in force as usual, what with today being a Quiet News Day and the weekend's news having been covered comprehensively enough over at the usual channels. So instead I'm going to talk about bookshops.
Very sad to see the demise of Borders, but not entirely surprised. As I've said in this blog before, it was the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in March 1997 that acted as a hammer blow to friendly neighbourhood bookshops and, once the larger publishers such as HarperCollins (prop. R. Murdoch) chose not to contest it, set the wheels in motion towards heavily discounted books by non-authors becoming available as loss-leaders in non-traditional outlets and relegating the more literary and specialised titles to much smaller distribution, if published at all. Needless to say the big chains like Borders (and competitors such as Waterstones) saw this as a good thing at the time. What they did not bargain on, a decade down the line, was a combination of the global recession and the flourishing online sector, of which Amazon is possibly the brand leader, squeezing their very raison d'être out of business. While it's still a pleasure to wander around a bookshop, and the Leeds branch of Borders was no exception, what with its otherwise unobtainable American computer magazines and its complimentary coffee after 6pm, the temptation to stay at home and buy online is irresistible, especially when you're in a cultural desert like I am. Besides, I just know that a trawl around the bookshops[1] for, say, A Piece of The Sky Is Missing by David Nobbs or The Last Englishman[2] by Lt.-Col A. D. Wintle[3] is going to end in much wasted shoe-leather and, probably, with empty pockets after an impulse splurge on something I had no intention of buying in the first place - though that scenario has become much less likely as the literary fiction and computing manuals get supplanted by more and more misery-lit and ghosted autobiographies of such as the creature called Jedward from some popular televisual entertainment or other of which I have no knowledge.
Still, people continue to buy books, but all too often they're the wrong sort of books and the wrong sort of people. I present the following for your edification, courtesy of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) hooloovoo_42 via mia_oia. Weep. but don't read - or better still, buy a copy of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood instead.
Also - why do bills all seem to arrive at once, just like buses, but earlier? It's a damned good job I have a little bit of extra work coming in at the moment to offset them. Still, it should have no adverse effects upon any of my plans for December as I have Things to Do and People to See (and hopefully an improved overdraft facility!)
[1] - Now you know what to buy me for Christmas!
[2] - Not to be confused with Hereward The Wake, Arthur Ransome, or indeed the great J. L. Carr, all of whom have had biographies published with that title.
[3] - Ah, Freddie "Mad Jack" Wintle, one of my all-time favourite historical figures, and a great English Liberal and eccentric as well as a hero in both world wars. A few years ago the BBC made a biopic of him, starring Jim Broadbent, but sadly it's just as out of print and almost as unobtainable as the book. If you like I could do you a post about this remarkable gentleman, who had more than a touch of the Rawlinsons about him. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|02:27 pm] |
I bought chewing gum at lunchtime, but I seem to have lost it between Tesco and the office. Bah.
I did the fairly obvious lunchtime walk from here - along to Tower Bridge and across, then back to London Bridge and across. I like the bit in front of Custom House, which is pretty much directly opposite the office where there are a couple of wooden posts that look like they might have been pier supports at one time, but now they're where the cormorants hang out. There was one of them holding his wings open, probably to dry them but he looked just like a giant bat. Sadly, I had no camera with me. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|02:09 pm] |
 If you can make your man happy, the rest will fall into place, says Kirstie Allsopp as she sets her sights on the House of Lords [Daily Mail] |
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| This is an announcement! |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|01:17 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | poptimism | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Scooter - The Question Is What Is The Question? | ] |
Please refrain from not attending Poptimism this Friday!
It's an end-of-decade special, so we'll be playing all the best tunes from 2000-2009.
Horse Bar by Lambeth North tube, free entry, things kick off around 7ish. See you there! |
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| Steak for Chicken |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|12:43 pm] |
Hi dere! Have a steak, unless yr vegetarian, in which case have some chips.*
( Cut for photo of m34t )
Today I don't really feel like a steak. I don't much feel like a burger either, but I'd like to try out the new burger place (Byron) that's taken over the long-abandoned Intrepid Fox pub building on Wardour Street. Sometime. This week maybe.
Today's lunch is the same as yesterday's, which will likely be the same as tomorrow's, which is: soup. I should rename myself "foodjournal".
* actually, the Bleeding Heart Tavern menu was really very good and had lots of veggie options, most of which sounded every bit as tasty. I was so tempted to order All Of The Food. |
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| Interesting |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|12:32 pm] |
Hmm. I reached a sort of impasse yesterday, where builders that weren't just local geezers wouldn't come round and give me a quote without instruction from the managing agents and a report from a structural engineer, and the managing agents wouldn't do anything else before I got a quote. However after several phone calls to and fro, the managing agents said they'd send a structural engineer round, and he came this morning. The results are sort of a mixed bag but on the whole I'm a lot happier for having someone who knows about walls come and look at it.
So: (I write this mainly so I remember how this goes; none of the rest of you are foolish enough to buy a house made of bungaroosh)- This is not the freeholder's problem, it's mine. The freeholder has a duty to maintain the fabric of the building, and although this hasn't been being done, the ten year gap since the last redecoration and the cracks in the external render being pertinent points I raised, this hasn't contributed to the state of that there bit of wall. It's only become a problem because I removed the boiler, a thing which the leaseholder is responsible for, and if the sleeve of the flue was holding the wall up, it's my duty to provide something else to hold the wall up. If the freeholder had the wall rebuilt in something solid, that would be an improvement, which the freeholder is not duty-bound to do.
- The falling-down-ness of the wall is actually right. This is how bungaroosh walls are. If someone was to strip back the wall and try and get back to a non-crumbly bit to rebuild from, they'd knock the whole house down before they found something solid. I knew the external render was important on a bungaroosh wall to keep the damp out, but actually it's structural - it acts like a skin that keeps the contents of the wall inside. And, get this, so does the internal plaster. Yes, that's right, the plaster on my walls is structural.
- And when he explained that and I looked at the kitchen wall, the plaster there is at least an inch thick. A large chunk of the screwing depth is plaster, so going through solid plaster into the interior rubbly mess will, in fact, be enough to hold a boiler up.
- So. To repair it, the rubble that's there doesn't need removing, it just needs sticking back together again. The hole can be bricked up, and then render stuck to the outside, and then plaster stuck to the inside, and that'll be it. Given what we're trying to fasten to the wall, it would probably be a good idea if the internal plaster was a sand and cement render in this case, to make it stronger, but bandaging is all it needs, not rebuilding.
- Which means the main skill I need in someone to repair this is plastering, not general wall-building. That's useful to know.
Not that I've managed to get even any of the local geezers to come and look at it yet; the plumber's mate what's a builder failed to show or even ring me again, so bugger him. I have contacted a couple of people from mybuilder instead, now I've got a better idea of what needs doing.
You know, wikipedia doesn't have a page or even any search references for bungaroosh. I wonder if I ought to start one?
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| Another day of fail. |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|10:42 am] |
Am missing my morning seminar partly because of breathing crap (poss the weather) and partly because of panic. Today is a day of panic. Am not managing to make any headway with terrible course. Am now too panicky to work at all - reading does not penetrate, and I have no idea what I'm meant to be doing with either assessed piece of work, and I have ONLY ONE MORE WEEK OF TERM. No belief whatsoever in the usefulness of my head of course now - he was pretty unhelpful last time, as previously discussed.
Do not like panicking. It is a rare emotion for me, and most bothersome. Very much an ADHD thing, I think. Also makes me incapable of doing simple things like renewing library books (now a week overdue). I've never been especially annoyed by my "special" brain, it's just what it is, but it's really bugging the hell out of me now.
Urgh, hate this course so much. I am plagued by the intense desire to learn, and do, other things, but horrible Masters is hanging over my head and sapping my will to live. Wish I could make it go away. This is so much worse than I was expecting it to be. It's the lack of escape which bothers me the most.
Going to hide under pillows some more - instead of doing reading for afternoon seminar, of course.
Why did I forget how much I hate institutional learning? Oh yeah, that's because I *have* to be here if I ever want to leave my job, ever ever. Stupid career-progression bottleneck. |
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| The Bright Club |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|10:06 am] |
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http://inuitbikini.blogspot.com/2009/12/bright-club.html This was this odd thing I went to in London with Mr "Chocolate Socialist". It took place in a pub, featured people giving somewhat brainy talks about stuff, was compered by some comedian Johnny (whose name I don't remember, but I think he might be famous as I saw him on TV a few nights later), and it had some cockney geezer come on and force participation in a sing-a-long. I thought maybe the comedy-not comedy transition jarred a bit, but it was a conceptually interesting evening. The talks were about various London things – sewage disposal, bugs, Bloomsbury.
Oh, and there was also some guy reading a bit of his book, which was called Foxy-T. I took against him at the time, as the book was written in this patois that was oh-so-street, while the guy who had written the book was plainly not street. However, in retrospect I am a bit more fond of him. Maybe I will keep an eye out for his book.
I'm not so sure about Chubby Charley (or was it Cheeky Charley?), the cockney sing-a-long geezer. Although I am a cockerneee by birth, I was brought up away from Bow Bells, and being forced to take part in a "knees up" goes against my reserved nature. Or maybe I am just a curmudgeon who hates fun. These are not incompatible positions.
I wish I could remember the comedian's name, he seemed quite good. Maybe he was Mr Ince or something. He seemed like a pleasant enough person from his interaction with the audience, which seemed more like friendly badinage rather than a smartarse encouraging roffles at some unfortunate's expense. The great paradox of my life is that while I conceptually hate stand up comedy, I typically enjoy it when I encounter it. |
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| i dremt i dremt (grebt thinkers reconsidered edition) |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|10:48 am] |
i dremt that adorno -- revisiting his return from the US to post-war germany in 1953 -- decided that, with this chace to do it all over a different way, he would not devote his life to critical theory but to MASTERY OF THE POGO-STICK! He would refashion a better culture by jumping up on down, transforming it square-by-square DRENCH style
(this is the second time in successive nights i ave dremt abt transformation of the world DRENCH-style, but the FIRST TIME EVAH i dremt abt adorno on a pogo stick!) |
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bitchy
curious
not actually v hungry atm
miserable