SibLINGSHOT ON THE BLEACHERS

9.11. dexter, sinister

2011-09-11T10:30:00.000+01:00

On the subject of 9/11, I have little to say, save that I notice an elderly man across the street has planted American flags in his window. One large flag taped to the centre pane, two smaller ones either side.

The wound is too raw, even ten years on, the ceiling torn away so toweringly iconic, that it is difficult to reconcile trauma on the ground with repercussions rolling out from its epicentre.

I watched old footage of Bush, Jr on our television this morning. Bumbling toward some public play at catharsis. All sense of emotion evaded him then, I seem to remember, the human scale of things. Wide-eyed like a nodding imbecile in the classroom, he merely looked to have soiled himself.

New York City's mayor made a better job of mobilizing a response. Bill Clinton, stepping out of retirement. Dogshit and disgrace.

I was listening to the Ramones when flight 11 nose dived into the North Tower of the World Trade Center - 'Road to Ruin', I am not fabricating events - and I could not engage a pause. I sat and smoked a cigarette. The telephone rang. The word 'apocalyptic' is frequently misused, but the unfolding of the impossible seemed to resonate with biblical import. Twenty-two floors up, myself, small potatoes granted, I sat on my little wooden stool and braced myself for further impact; an explosion of concrete and glass.

Chicken Little, stripped to the bone.

I worried for my young son's safety - just three-years-old at the time - and decided there was nothing to be done.

poem for a stand up guy, in beer

2011-09-10T11:17:00.012+01:00

I could not listen
for the scraping retort.

The
Cackling;
Hooting;
the explosive Guffaw,

Ears burning,
pricked by stitching,

Even the word
'Nipple'
Arousing raw heights
of inanity,
Spittled lips puckered
Wetly
in rows, front and back,

The spotlight trained
on
tired, spotted flesh,
Sticking
at the armpits,
Small beer, short shrift,

Arrivists in cashmere
Sweaters,
Hanging on each word.

Finally,
it is not the metal taste
of fear
which saws and stings -

the spoon,
the knife, the fork -

It is the copper ringing,
the dread
of the seasoned familiar,
The strings,
The posies,
The lantern jaw of the
wooden marionette in the
Shadow of a beard,
The singing of the crowd,
The flaccid chatter,

The monkey,
the organ, the grind.

I tossed out the above poem, listening to it rattle through my skull, between a supermarket trip and charging electricity to my key. Milo had been shrieking since 7 AM. There was no respite from his teething. Whingeing. He headbutted me twice, I think. He may have unplugged a tooth.

The last of the loosely presentable.

I was thinking on 'Hostage', recorded live at Redondo Beach in April, 1980; Jon's Trotskyite cronies in Echo Park, 1972, too consumed with politicking to peer over their noses long enough to register discomfit.

From a grandiose brownstone, to a pier on Venice Beach.

I don't know if you are familiar with 'Hostage'. It is all but insufferable. Charles Bukowski, it is alleged, detested public performance. The routine humiliation.

There is no sense in stepping in a prize stallion's shoes, it is remarked, unless one is prepared to break from the stalls at a gallop. Of course. Charles Bukowski studied form.

The odds, the skinny, shortfalls in rent.

Despite all this, he could not stomach the notion of pandering to the crowd. There is more joy, perhaps, in trudging pavements in the snow. I have tried that too. I have written of it in private correspondence.

Coming home from the night shift with one's arms three inches longer. Fingers torn and bloody from mail sacks fresh off the 3 AM flight. Falling straight into bed knowing Christmas is in the bag.

Well. The postman brings good news. A Trust here in Glasgow has agreed to finance a good part of my tuition fees. I am relieved. Ecstatic. That they have backed my horse before it is dragged off to the knacker's yard, that I have composed my mouth in one last gasp.

Allen Ginsberg famously courted the crowd. It was a good gig, while it lasted.

Such as it is, I am of a mind to visit a home recorded reading from New Orleans, Louisiana - of all places - from 1970, forty years and many ailing dogs ago.

Of course. I have not arrived. Not quite yet, I am not so addled, though the Merlot is back on the menu. The beer tucked away in our fridge.

It is a nod, to the living at least. As much a public nicety as I am capable of.

▼ CHARLES BUKOWSKI: HAMMER AND LEASH from "King Of Poets" CD (Chinaski Records) 1997 (US / Germany)

jock's away, in a manner of speaking

2011-09-06T18:25:00.019+01:00

Oscar Wilde • Brendan Behan • Sean O'Casey • George Bernard Shaw • Samuel Beckett • Eugene O'Neill • Edna O'Brien • Lawrence Stern • Sean Kavanaugh • Sean McCann • Benedict Keilly • Jimmy Hiney • Frank O'Connor • Catherine Rhine • Russell Hoban • Charles Bukowski • William S. Burroughs • Robert Stone...

Recorded by Ian Sommerville.

From a lecture given by WSB at
the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,
Naropa Institute, April 20, 1976,
and Brion Gysin's Permutational Tape fragment,
BBC Studios, London, 1960.

Sans Big Jimmy Paterson on trombone.

▼ WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: ORIGIN AND THEORY OF THE TAPE CUT-UPS from "Break Through in a Grey Room " CD (Sub Rosa) 1994 (US/UK)
▼ BRION GYSIN: RECALLING ALL ACTIVE AGENTS from "Break Through in a Grey Room " CD (Sub Rosa) 1994 (US/UK)

4 million buys you shit

2011-09-04T16:06:00.002+01:00

photograph by robert altman.

"It was cheap; cheap; cheap-uh," squealed Jonathan Richman at the age of 41, moved by the vaguely unclean spirit of Bubba-Ho-Tep. Mo Diddley. Blue Mask era Lewis Reed as dessicated hip priest. "Nowadays I hear the rents are steep."

I fell back on the futon, feigning a head cold. My wife busied herself in preparation of a Sunday morning expedition to the swimming pool. With our young son. My stepchildren. If I wasn't unspeakably selfish, I might never find the space to scribble.

Such is the routine loneliness - surliness - of the long distance sniveller.

I sheltered behind a paper shield. Saturday's edition of what was once a broadsheet.

Like everything else, it has diminished in stature somewhat.

"Mumbai's slums are being gentrified," writes their foreign correspondent, "as middle-class Indians... sell their flats in distant suburbs and purchase illegal shanties in the city's central areas."

Actually. It was the headline which glued my eye.

"'SLUMDOG' SHACKS SOAR IN PRICE AS COMMUTERS SWAP SUBURBS FOR CITY"

In a week which saw UK mobsters, RBS slapped with a writ issued in the US - for their part in the subprime confidence trick which all but crippled global faith in free market religion - India races one step farther in paying through the nose for a silk purse fashioned entirely out of a pig's ear. Stealing the show in staging a masterclass in the art of turning the other cheek.

In a country where it pays better to dabble in out-sourced customer 'service' from a US or European financed call centre, than to take the Hippocratic Oath, India's new wealth is defined by hard currency.

It is not immediately apparent just who is making a killing.

On the face of it, it is those people living in the heart of Mumbai's slums who stand to make a profit. Typically, investing in a slum dwelling may net the aspiring buyer a loss in straight 'trade'. A modest shanty in Sewri, for example, may fetch as much as "four million rupees". £50,000. The stench of human waste running freely in the gutter seals the deal; vermin openly feeding on untreated filth.

But as rents soar as a direct result, it is those families who settled there generations previously who are being squeezed out. To establish new illegal settlements in ever more harrowing no-go zones.

No schools. No community. Scant opportunity to make ends meet.

The scandal evolving, then, has less to do with the modern parable of playing pass the parcel with toxic securities than the age-old saga of slum landlords ruthlessly embracing token regeneration.

Lest one forgets. In the 1980s, the darkly comedic double act of Regan and Thatcher popularized the free market economy to a staggeringly gullible and avaricious electorate. Privatizing one industry after the other; peddling them back to the public at large in shrink-wrapped token stocks and shares.

Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, not so much asleep as intoxicated at the wheel, were impervious to the consequences.

In such a climate, social housing was auctioned off with the rest of the family silver. Many individuals turned a tidy profit. Others inherited negative equity.

A lot of people spoke quite often of "collateral damage". Laughing all the way to the bank. A newly entrenched underclass - in Detroit, Glasgow, Manchester - took on the mantle of India's untouchables, and never shook it off.

House prices rocketed. Entire inner city areas, too, turned to shit.

Of course, there will always be a vocal element who stand to profit from shrouding the great illusion in still more smoke and mirrors. Mumbai, they will argue, is on the up. What's happening in Sewri, Dharavi, is indicative of India's commitment to eradicating poverty.

Really ? I think we've heard word to that effect numerous times before.

The Commonwealth Games village in Delhi dribbling sewage on the white hand stitched leather uppers of its athletes' Nike Airs, while government shoots for the moon. And an estimated £1 Billion in International Foreign Aid which still can not be accounted for. Not this side of Bollywood's space race.

Jonathan Richman tells it more entertainingly than I, sibling.

At some time in 1972 I guess he relocated to Venice Beach. In the company of David Robinson, Ernie Brooks and Jerry Harrison. The original Modern Lovers.

On the heels of an east coast session for Warner Bros., recorded at Intermedia Studio in Boston, Massachussets, the group secured two demo sessions in LA; the first overseen by one John Cale. The Venice they encountered then might just have been invaded by surfers operating out of Dogtown, a seedier bay area on the south fin of Santa Monica.

In 1972, Jeff Ho, in partnership with Skip Engblom and Craig Stecyk, founded Zephyr Surfboard Productions in the decrepit heart of Dogtown. Stecyk, a local artist, invested Ho's board designs with a delinquent edge informed by graffiti tags seen all over the street; wholly at odds with those saccharine airbrushed sunbursts washed up on Muscle Beach. In Dennis Wilson's beard.

Dogtown's surfers were hard core. Digging in and occupying an abandoned amusement park on the Pacific Ocean Park Pier - the P-O-P - midway between Venice Beach proper and their home turf back in Dogtown. The P-O-P was a dangerous spot to surf, seemingly teeming with rotting timber pilings, an Iwo Jima fought for and defended with dogged enthusiasm, it is alleged.

In 1972, too, polyurethane skateboard wheels emerged, and Dogtown's Zephyr crew slipped the leash, taking to the streets and sidewalks like punk Angels on a staggered run.

Zigzagginng as ferociously as hoodlum circus collies on rollerblades.

In 1972, this would have been a part of The Modern Lovers' Venice Beach. A part of the scene they stumbled into. Between the shabby rooming house inhabited briefly, and that studio session produced by Cale.

Who could have anticipated it ?

Slumdog. Dogtown. Roadrunner, Once, Twice, Three Times.

▼ JONATHAN RICHMAN: ROOMING HOUSE ON VENICE BEACH from "I, Jonathan" CD (Rounder) 1992 (US)

MUMBAI: PREVIOUSLY ON THE BLEACHERS

"an experimental approach to understanding burnt fish bone"

2011-08-31T18:56:00.021+01:00

The rain threatened, a sickly purple glowering, and I was listening again to some Charles - Bukowski not Ray - while my wife dressed the baby between coffees. '90 Minutes in Hell', via Nothin' in Sacramento.

Three short damaged pieces. I did not get so far as 'May Make Paris Yet'.

The readings are almost perfect, the theatrics of the title forgivable, his delivery - the timing - telling. Charles was acquainted with his own failings more intimately than most.

The mildly wheedling Hollywood inflection reminds me a lot of Bernstein - Steven Jesse, not Leonard - despite the younger man's relocation to Seattle; a maladjusted adolescent in oversized glasses. Pimpled round the edges.

The tone of each reminds me of all that is fine in poetry.

It startles me greatly that some are quick to dismiss his writing as miserable, coming out the armchair with scalpel blade as bookmark in their 'Grapes of Wrath'. Stabbing at perceived haemorrhoids, 'Their Finest Art' made tumorous flesh. Carver, for example, strikes me as more acutley grim. Editorially concise. Even while I admire the economy.

I don't know. There is nothing so silkily noir in those utterances from a bungalow with the drapes half drawn. Just the sense of making sense of routine.

Restriction. Absurdity. Disability.

We bundled Milo into his buggy and set out for the second hand shops permeating Dumbarton Road. An outdoor market. The rain held off for a little more than half an hour.

I had the most peculiar dream much later, in the early hours of the morning, with our youngest son waking us for the third time before the grey of 5 AM.

I saw a book opened in front of me. A line or two in sharp relief.

"...Red on the outside with blackened channels, charred transgressions touching 1 mm at the bone."

I could not make sense of it. It conjured for me notions of plague. Bubonic transmissions. That "1 mm", though, seemed altogether too modern. Anatomically precise.

The metric overture to an excision.

I sat in front of the desktop monitor after I'd made coffee and punched open a tab. Googled the line as I remembered it. The computer is growing too sluggish to be smartly useful, the beach ball spins and idles. Like its operator, it may require therapy. Psychiatric intervention.

The search unexpectedly yielded more than one result. Nothing verbatim, but close enough.

"illustrate the taphonomic complexity involved in the formation of burnt fish .... transgression, supra-tidal berm building, ... fragments smaller than 1 mm in size. ..."

"DNA from burnt bone in the early stages of burial. Nicholls. (2000) also considered bone mass as a ...... in the site at all levels, particularly in the 1 mm fraction'. ...... transgression (c.6000 BP). Thus, the archaeological record ..."

More than a possibility, then. "An Experimental Approach to Understanding Burnt Fish Bone"; something more vaguely archaeological. Well. I am no chef. I might occasionally dabble with sauces on the side, but my capability with fish is strictly third rate. Raw tuna; a breaded haddock tossed under the grill.

I don't remember consulting any recipe. Less, any stone cold treatise. Locked in Mesozoic deposits.

This conundrum, such as it is, is more curious than debilitating.

King Charles' 90 minutes - 12-14 of them, at least - has again given me pause for thought. The finances are not good, but I am working up contingencies. Drumming up a sweat.

The poetry waits in its implementing.

The telephone rang.

"Hello, " a passive aggressive voice intoned. A woman's voice. Crisply officious, faintly bored. "We have your son here at the office. He does not look too good."

"Well, " I said. "That's a matter of opinion."

"No. He does not look good. Period. You will have to collect him."

I left for the bus stop with a bottle of Peptac Liquid in a plastic carrier bag. Aniseed. The Peptac Liquid, not the bag. There is a world of difference between heartburn and underlying condition. When I was a young man, I suffered from heartburn a good part of the time.

A little Milk of Magnesia always worked a treat.

"Hey," I greeted my older son. Bowed over on the bench and clutching his chest. "How are you feeling ?"

When I was staring at my teens, the notion of credentials got in the way. I decided I had not lived enough. That all good writers must first acquire a consumptive skin; tanned by alcohol, at least, like Kerouac. Yage, as with our more exotic Uncle Bill.

Except for Hemingway.

Even strawberry nosed bank managers, I knew, sought quite earnestly to emulate that inflated florid robustness. Right down to the ridiculously tidy maritime cap. Seemingly reserved for holidaying in remote Scottish parts; possibly called upon as an aphrodisiac where oysters failed.

The irony, of course, is that Kerouac - up on bricks - was more often off, than on the road. Visions of Neal. Cody. The train hurtling past his bedroom window as he sat at a desk and fed white paper in and out.

It was the rhythm which appealed to me, I think. The music of it. Before Eliot. Plath. Camus. Joyce. Stone. Trocchi. Ezra pounding.

An unabashed exuberance. Sharp creases duly crumpling.

"Listen," I said. "It's all simple chemistry. The litmus test."

Well. You are familiar enough with dipping those little squares of paper. Coming up red or indigo, occasionally a neutral yellow green. The rainbow in a bruise.

It's all the forensics I know.

It's why the Latin crash course feels so apposite. I am less taken with dispassionate bebop, possibly, than the heat of the rash. Heartburn. Thrush. Immediacy.

'An anger which moves', emphatically.

Maybe a Pablo could make sense of it all.

And my older son ? Thank you for asking, he's doing quite well. A lukewarm glass of milk was all it took. At a pavement cafe. Stay with me awhile, and we'll maybe figure it out.

Cold suite to follow.

hurricane irene | descargas in miniature

2011-08-28T16:07:00.060+01:00

The last I looked, Manhattan was Joe Bataaning down the hatches in preparation for the worst. All along the financial district, while the last revelers refused to vacate Times Square even as the tourists were being flushed north. Within an inch of Harlem.

Irene, Irene. Turbulent of eye. The calculating stare of a catatonic in heat.

Cruelly inflicting Category 3 destruction in the Caribbean where she first dabbled in tearing down the house, horrifying astronauts in perpetual orbit; truck drivers from Carolina through Virginia.

A raffia skirt whipping. Foam from the chops of a slavering dog.

Born in Havana in 1918, the universe of Israel 'Cachao' López was shaped - moved - by waves from the outset. Schooled at home by classically trained parents, indulged by a burgeoning extended family of professional musicians, López stepped in on contra bass for the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana before he turned thirteen.

Credited with devising the mambo, circa 1937, his role in popularizing African rhythms - integrating them seamlessly into mainstream Cuban culture as an immediately identifiable motif - is impossible to overestimate.

"He played the acoustic bass with his late brother, multi-instrumentalist Orestes López. The brothers composed literally thousands of songs together and were heavily influential on Cuban music from the 1930s to the 1950s. They introduced the nuevo ritmo ("new rhythm") in the late 1930s, which transformed the danzón by introducing African rhythms into Cuban music, which led to mambo. They co-wrote the danzon "Mambo" which was called the "Mother of all Mambos" by Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante."

More crucially still, in the thick of Batista era corruption, Havana's love affair with the tourist dollar - those government sanctioned rackets catering to Meyer Lansky's junkie cronies at the Hotel Nacional - Cachao was able to cement Afro-Cuban music as something beyond the disposable; a hoodoo preamble to louche excess.

A pastel coloured zoot suit. A lonely valise parked under the bed. An airline ticket. Prophylactics.

The exhausted platinum bleach job wilting at the table; the priapic used car salesman with his face melting like a French pastry on the beach.

In 1957, in those neon early hours staggered on from one paid set to the next, Cachao allegedly assembled a posse of musicians in a Havana recording studio to kick out the jams. To give vent to those emotions festering behind an endless circuit trotting out the same tired staple for vacationing guests.

The result was an outpouring of improvisation on a par with Miles.

Locked down in New Jersey with Pete Rugolo; Gil Evans. Hatching his birth of the cool. Plotting, maybe, some rudimentary sketches of Spain.

Israel López dropped the needle straight on the groove.

Delighted with what he knew lurked in the can, Cachao immediately set about touting the reel to Panart, Havana's leading independent record label, situated on San Miguel 410, between Campanario and Lealtad, founded 14 years earlier by musician and engineer, Ramón Sabat.

Panart, allegedly, did not share his enthusiasm. Nonetheless releasing his 'descargas'. Under the title, "Descargas: Cuban Jam Sessions In Miniature", issue # 2092.

The world pricked its ears. Fidel proved not so generous.

Whatever seeds of disquiet were sown in vinyl, the Revolution of 1959 turned at a different rate. Havana's reign at centre of a profligate storm was finished, felled with a rifle shot straight between the eyes.

Cachao himself, walking wounded.

Departing for Miles' Spain with Ernesto Duarte's Orchestra in 1962 - while he could, or as directed - Israel López threw on the yoke of self imposed exile, trading the Egypt of his fathers for New York City, then Vegas. A dead red sea.

Faux pyramids; pharaohs; jazz and jism.

The hurricane, when it arrived, was all but spent. Spitting pennies onto the carpeted forecourt of a jangling casa. Front of house. An affront. Clasping hands, laundering old favours with those CIA pension cheques stacked up in chips.

Irene, Irene. She'll give you a slap, still.

All the way from her sulking retreat in a Latin safe harbour, those tortured silk knickers.

An acquaintance of an acquaintance - several times removed - is said to have alighted here. Arriving by cab, these past 48 hours.

"I don't get it," he is said to have said. "Is it real ? Pretense ? It reads like shit."

What's to get ? You're either on, or off the bleachers. Puckered in, or nudged between the benches on a trombone's sliding fart. Breaking wind in the dark.

Everything else is circumstantial.

▼ CACHAO Y SU RITMO CALIENTE: DESCARGA CUBANA from "Descargas: Cuban Jam Sessions in Miniature" LP (Penart) 1957 (Cuba)
▼ CACHAO Y SU RITMO CALIENTE: TROMBON CRIOLLO from "Descargas: Cuban Jam Sessions in Miniature" LP (Penart) 1957 (Cuba)

IN MINIATURE THROUGH A TELESCOPE

incremental air strikes

2011-08-24T09:44:00.030+01:00

Incoming.

It had all the ingredients of some kind of coup d'état. What began with an 8:30 AM jaunt to the labour exchange - "wash n' go", the knives safely locked away for sharpening - saw me madly waving in the coordinates for an air strike less than one hour later.

Cellphone in hand. Leaning out over the geraniums on our balcony.

There was no rumbling approach of tanks. No three-wheeled baby carriages, even.

While insurgents were busy strafing Gaddafi's compound with heavy calibre machine guns mounted in flatbed trucks, an old friend of mine had lost her bearings.

"What's that ? " I screamed into the phone. "Just follow the road straight on down. No, no. Right, I said. Turn right."

My wife left the baby with me to go and intercept my friend and her four-year-old daughter. Needless to say, they missed each other by a couple of streets.

I windmilled my arms and paced back and forth like Fidel on his mountain in 1957. I lit a cigarette. It has been years since I have been close to a good cigar.

Fidel might have been dribbling a basketball, still, in baseball shoes.

We met up. We drank some coffee and ventured back out to collect my friend's five-year-old from school. He has just completed his first week there; my older son, his first out of the primaries. One through seven. Not an election in sight.

On the way there, her daughter stumbled and split her knee. The blood was streaming into her shoes. She did not cry. She is made of sterner stuff.

Her five-year-old was immensely affable. Dispensing observations on the nature of the duckbill platypus. And snakes. The hooded cobra, to be precise.

His sister imprisoned Milo in a chalk circle. Fitted dancing shoes on his little sockless feet.

We made our way home in the middle of the afternoon. Stopped off at the supermarket for groceries. The leaves on the trees have not begun to redden quite yet, but it is coming all the same. We turned the corner and caught up with our three older children, in time to redistribute the weight.

The key had scarcely turned in the lock when my stepdaughter stepped on the mail. Airmail, at that. Incremental Decrepitude. #1.

All the way from Connecticut.

Well. It's author, Dave Brushback, claims to have borrowed the title from one of my posts. I don't know. I'm immensely flattered, of course. I'm astounded that he managed to turn it around.

It has been a while since I've fallen back from the monitor into hard copy. The issue of obsession. Photographs; copy; the works.

"This issue was made entirely by hand.
Which is why you probably didn't get one."

The digital revolution has been something of a godsend to all manner of peons, the world around, on and off the bleachers. One base on an overthrow. The elimination of the need for camera ready artwork. Paste-up. The prerequisite to get to grips with paper; to wrestle with pagination.

A staple through one's index finger.

Newspaper is all but finished. News International, PLC. It strikes me, though, that should it all come down - incrementally, all at once - the digital paragraph will be the first to fail. SMS; ADSL.

Just goes to show. Don't throw your hat in the air next time those NATO jets scroll by. Or raise a clenched copper fist. How does one know if the postman knocks a third time, if nobody's home to hear it ?

GET YOUR COPY HERE.

hot sauce | no colonel sanders, fast food pharaoh

2011-08-21T15:53:00.021+01:00

photograph by james joern.

It was vaguely my intention, late into last week, to bring Alice Coltrane onto the bleachers. To dispel all notion of Yoko to her John. I don't know.

Dizzy psychotropic laments. Meandering astral flights in the footsteps of pharaohs, priests.

Instead, I tumbled through Friday afternoon into the weekend proper swaddled not by harp, but immersed in bugalú. Old Seeco and Tico releases from the barrio. Feverishly documented by Teddy Reig, Pancho Cristal, Miguel Estivill, Art Kapper and Joe Cain. Engineered, in the main, by Fred Weinberg.

A handful of Puerto Ricans dug in with the cockroaches up in Spanish Harlem before those Beatles disembarked at JFK: Tito Puente, Joe Cuba, Héctor Rivera.

By the end of it, I was itching to book a ticket to Havana. Pummelled half unconscious by mambo; cha-cha-cha; salsa; too much hot sauce.

I don't own a passport, and I am a woefully poor dancer, but I like to marvel at the women. The cars. Those tail fins; the radiator grills like the grins on a party of circling sharks.

Hot-pants. Basketball vests. Mojitos. Fidel's rationing out the good times when the generators fail. The gangster resorts of the Batista regime reclining in the twilight, a ring of fingers along the Malecón.

It is a little late in the summer to be thinking this way. The riots have subsided into facile politicking. A mother of two, languishing in gaol after receiving looted goods, has seen her ludicrous sentence overturned; David Cameron has set off to Cornwall to reconvene his holiday in the sun; the fractured jaw of the Malaysian student mugged on a London pavement seems to be mending nicely.

The tabloids have commenced a campaign to reclaim England's streets.

Tico Records was established as an outlet for Latin music by New York garment dealer turned impresario, George Goldner, in 1948. While Goldner was allegedly compelled to sell all stakes in Tico, Roulette Records, Rama and Gee in 1957 - to cover considerable gambling debts - his commitment to the label never waned. Artists signing to the label in its lucrative first phase included Mambo Kings, Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, and Machito; huge draws on the dance hall circuit, but unable to capitalize on local demand for recorded product.

By the early 1960s, however, the US embargo on Castro's socialist republic was making an impact on those Cuban influences so integral to Tico's trademark sound. Its islands fell under quarantine as the Bay of Pigs fiasco ushered in yet worse to come.

The second generation of Latin youth, too, in New York City - born and raised in Manhattan's north-east quarter - was gravitating more towards those influences filtering out of Detroit, Berry Gordy's Tamla Motown. Incorporating elements into a new wave of homegrown music. Bugalú. Salsa.

Percussively anchored in familiar Caribbean rhythms, but buoyed - energized - by drifting currents.

Partly in response to Tico's success - now exclusively under the partnerhip of Joe Kolsky and Morris Levy - and partly informed by its decline, Fania Records opened business on 888 7th Avenue on March 25th, 1964. Dominican born musician, Johnny Pacheco, and Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American divorce lawyer who had previously worked in Havana's visa department, forged an alliance which sought to service that fundamental shift in focus.

To refine it. Market it to a global audience.

Fania incorcorated Tico records in 1974, with Masucci stepping out as chief producer for the imprint between that time and its ultimate collapse in 1981.

Bang, bang. Revolution - 45rpm - and foment.

▼ JOE CUBA SEXTET: EL RATÓN from "Vagabundeando! (Hangin' Out)" LP (Tico Records) 1964 (US)
▼ JOE CUBA SEXTET: LA MALANGA BRAVA from "Wanted Dead Or Alive ('Bang! Bang' + 'Push, Push, Push')" LP (Tico Records) 1966 (US)

book of job

2011-08-18T19:58:00.001+01:00

leonaert bramer, circa 1630.

Good things, it is said, come to those who wait.

In my experience, it is more often a case of the postman's second knock. A bum rap. Seldom - if at all - a welcome intrusion. Chinaski in tissue overshoes.

And puddles on the stairs.

Our mail, it is observed, largely arrives by brown envelope. From somewhere in Manila. Unwanted circulars. Bills and warrants, more commonly. Harbingers of farther ill tidings.

Knock-knock, the door goes. The letterbox.

In the absence of the giro - an anachronism - it is safer to remain in bed, the kitchen, to wait for the kettle to boil out the dread. The toast to pop. Or steam seal the cigarette paper, still on tiptoe, a resting bus conductor driven by fears.

No news is good news, they are wont to say, too, fudging the issue.

In the event that first avalanche of mail drops like a stone; ill met by a sneer or ritual sign of the cross, the expected lottery result.

An ashen face fallen to scowling. A fermented apple, sourly caving in on itself.

I mention this, by way of habit. Better by far to prepare for the worst.

There is no mileage in premature ejaculation beyond the inevitable anticlimax, the disappointing end to a coveted false start. Better by far to dress for a funeral when all are making wedding plans. Better to buy in a litre or two of lamp black paint.

Then again. One would not want it said that one was parsimonious. In terms of casting runes.

Ejecting the unsolicited.

Even druids must have good days, though the very sound of it seems a contradiction. A sacrificing of verisimilitude.

I know of one druid at least who was always smiling, through one catastrophe to the next, it was his preordained lot to nod where others might wince. It was in his nature. The first time the mob turned on him he embraced it quite affably, the fool, they turned him upside down and the idiot grin did not falter. Without a hint of the Biblical, let's get that straight. He was as heathen as they come.

He spent some time in dharma. Absconded from it quite unpenitent.

"I don't know," he said, coming up for air on the Ducking Stool. "It's all so much water under the bridge."

Well. Such was his crime. When it all came down, he was unable to relinquish the predilection to paint a good face on it. An Easter egg. A beating.

In much the same way, it might be argued, I am inured to all talk of frogs; boils; gnats and lice. Staff and rod, and smiting.

Let my people go.

A caravan of wind-up amputees falling down. Marching off the table.

the BBC observes | the GLC protests

2011-08-13T20:59:00.015+01:00

tottenham high road. after Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes.

▼ WIRE: REUTERS from "Pink Flag" LP (Harvest EMI) 1977 (UK)

goodbye blackberry way

2011-08-12T21:05:00.032+01:00

montage by ib.

While the bleachers blistered through July into the beginning of August, it was never going to get hot enough to legitimately demand intensive care. The contrast of just a few degrees makes all the difference.

I largely avoided commentary on the London riots because, in common with most of those people who immediately started banging on the pots and pans as luncheon vochers spontaneously smouldered - erupting in flames from one borough to the next - my perspective on it seemed indelibly coloured by what I watched on TV. As close to 'live' as it gets. From the comfort of my greasy spot on the carpet.

In short, I was not actually at the game; I had little enough foresight to even book a seat.

The temptation was there from the outset to lay claims that those tensions ignited by the shooting of a twenty-nine-year-old man in Tottenham were somehow inevitable. Darcus Howe, a shade hysterically, played the disaffected race card as invited by the BBC in the televised autopsy which (inevitably) ensued, but his exaggerated wielding of a scalpel - to seek to draw parallels with events in 1985 - seemed ill-advised and hopelessly out of touch.

Neither did he seem in possession of incontrovertible material facts.

The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police no doubt sparked unrest; the wholesale rioting which followed directly on its heels was wholly cynical and opportunistic.

Engineered by a welter of Fagins on Blackberry phones. A closed network choreographing its own closed network of very damaged children.

It is ironic that the very device which proved so effective in galvanizing support in the election campaign which would return the world's first black president - Obama might have lost the race to the Whitehouse if not for his Blackberry - should, three years later, play a key role in such meticulously orchestrated looting and civil disorder. Adopted by every Artful Dodger seeking to grab a slice of pie before the authorities fell out of bed. The last gang in town.

It is not remotely credible to attempt to politicize events, none of which have even spurious parallels with civil unrest as reported elsewhere in the world. Greece. Syria. It has nothing to do with the overturning of an inalienably corrupt regime; it has little to do with the post-apocalyptic living death of capitalism. Unless one digs deep beneath the rubble.

There was no targeting of government collateral, here. No attempt to besiege fiscal infrastructures, beyond the occasional corner shop ATM.

Plain and simple, those London riots in 2011 were nothing more than an unexpurgated shopping spree: the sociopathic desire to line the pockets of a purloined pair of Georgio Armani slacks.

Should a mother and her children accidentally burn to death in the process, should local businesses fail, it is of no consequence. Like hooded rats, the tide of lobotomized youth simply out-pedals the screams; returning home to their lairs by bike to deposit the spoils.

Mick Farren made an enlightened stab at it, but got it only partly right:

"A tribe of Sids Vicious without a Joe Strummer among them."

John Simon Ritchie might have been empty as a hole without a Lydon or McLaren, but Strummer, too, had his Simonon and Rhodes. Uncle Bernie. There are a million Sids in tens of thousands of decrepit council estates - from East London to Merseyside, Wolverhampton to Easterhouse - but the element of iconic nihilism lacks hard currency.

This isn't a youth movement. It's genocide in the waiting.

Consumerism in extremis, a plague of locusts operating with impunity.

In this era of bland conformity, hive mentality, the events of last week are nothing more than England's 'Trumpton Riots'; as superficial and lacking in substance as any cretin mugging his way vacuously into this year's final of the X-Factor.

An audition. An experiment in CCTV containment.

Flummoxed ?

Don't be. In the final analysis, this is England's just reward. No future. No vision. No hope for evacuation.

Police and Thieves, with scarcely a unform in sight.

London may have burned for three and a half minutes, but the object of its charring was not a tinderbox of parliamentary misrule, so much as a sofa on Reeves Corner, Croydon. Too unwieldy - or just plain ugly - to stash in the back of a ringed white van.

the grape, the grate, and me

2011-08-11T10:35:00.040+01:00

photograph: the old kichen window, and others, by rosa b.

Me and the grape appear to have come to a parting of the ways.

Whether we are finished, or whether he is merely on holiday, is cause for some debate. A sobering thought. Either way, our rules of engagement - the gushing over that till death do us part - are on ice.

I was turning the bacon. Musing on the convoluted paths we've trod. We used to get on together so famously, stopping some way short of setting the house on fire, but lately things have turned a little sour. Routinely I might wake in the morning, sharing the outline of a long-running joke into the pillow, only to find he'd fled.

Closing the door mid conversation with a whisper.

Bedroom. Kitchen. The parlour with its shades of the morning after partly drawn.

Of course. Many sip their share of one-night-stands. Illicit slumberings between the decades. The grape slowly maturing. We took comfort in each other's arms, certainly, neither one of us giving the advantage. Shook hands quite amicably in a gentleman's agreement; while the hands simply shook in the morning.

The times we had.

I remember when we both fell out with cousin jack - sometimes 'Jack', more often 'Mr. Walker'; what's in a name ? - his humour ran a little dry. Shallow as a snorting drain.

"What's that all about ?" me and the grape exclaimed, in unison, when jack fell heavy on a curse. And did not make it up off the floor again.

Well. We gave that bum his marching orders. Sent him to Coventry before the quarter broke out in flames. Again. Let's not split hairs; we met up occasionally from time to time, Mr. Walker turning up unannounced in that awful raincoat peppered with holes - bowed over with heartburn and remorse - but things seldom flowed quite the same. Too dark and unsavoury by far, for my liking. Blood in the urine. Staining the bowl.

Me and the grape frequently argued about it. The easy option, to forgive, forget.

This was something which was spoken about at length. Never resolved. And, too, there was that small matter of walker's continuing peccadillos behind our backs. Nothing wholly outrageous, true, but a source of irritation nonetheless. Extramarital affairs. Innuendo. It did not sit well. Untidy as the wrong bottle cap screwed down at sixes and sevens, a dribbling tap which could not be turned off. No matter how determinedly one went at it.

He never could exert one ounce of self-control.

That is not to say we did not miss him. I did not miss him. We exchanged letters all through that winter he was in stir, but I refused to visit in person.

And let's not forget to consider how we were always moving in opposing directions. All the way back to god knows where. In the rain. The snow. Throughout it all, me and the grape remained tight. Thick as thieves. If jack fell asleep at the wheel of the getaway car, we two were never at fault. Of that I am more than certain.

He ought never to have fallen in with us in the first instance. We ought to have been more careful.

Of course, it's easier to read the bluff when the cards are finally laid out for all to see. Palms up, hands raised. Hindsight is a peculiar thing. Like taking aim through the back end of a telescopic sight, tracking a bead straight along the barrel to where the eye yawns huge; unblinking.

I think on this as I ladle the bacon over on itself, the pools of crackling fat.

It has been some time now, but I cannot say I miss the grape. Not really.

Sometimes - fixing breakfast, for example - I wonder if the grape and jack might not have been in cahoots all along. Conspiring against me. Enjoying a laugh at my expense. That is the problem with people like that. One might spend all one's years in and out their company, for better and worse, but one never knows for sure.

Oh, we were tight alright. You can't take that away.

But how well does one ever know what makes another person tick ? Especially in a bind. For all I know, the grape and jack are living it up with ginnie, mary - the hired help - while I am alone here in the kitchen. Pouring over a mess of scorched flesh. Eggs breaking wind.

When all's said and done, people like that are no end of trouble. Jack shit. The grape included. And you know how much I loved him.

Come here a moment. Listen. Did I ever tell you all about that one time me and the grape and mean jack black got ourselves in the most ridiculous scrape ?

milo

2011-08-08T14:50:00.002+01:00

milo, by rosa b.

three from the tombs

2011-08-06T11:07:00.026+01:00

the gorbals, 2008. photographs by rosa b.

Of course, this is not the first that I have pried up the corners of anonymity. Cautiously. An ill advised act of self sabotage, I am inclined to believe.

The faint waft of marzipan. Imagined sulfur.

The forensic evidence - provided by my now wife - is of your sibling from a period sometime in 2008. Or 9. Broadly coinciding with the first phase of 'regeneration' which prompted my wandering out onto the bleachers. Driven by the starting pistol in a convoluted demolition derby. At first glance, it appears to capture the no longer quite so young bohemian in pensive mood. Hangover is by far the safest scenario; the attempt to memorize a shopping list, windows ablaze, the greenhouse effect. Nothing of substance can be seen through the fragment of glass between lower face and shirt cuff. A bottle. A four storey blur down on the street.

On the whole it is a quite flattering representation. I have come across much worse.

The second photograph in the above series of three opens a window on the universe we inhabited until September last year. The third, by its nature, is more easy to document with confidence: a little after 9:30 AM, July 1st, 2008; south west as the crow flies, shot from my kitchen window. They did not bother to evacuate us that first time. The building rumbled up through our feet, the panes rattled.

When it was done, I may have curtsied like a fighter in the tenth round. Glass jaw exposed. Weaving back to my stool after a mandatory count.

Our very diluted Hiroshima.

We breakfasted and dined on dust. Teeth rudely pulled. Marveling at the cavities.

Three from the tombs, midnight to six.

For lack of USB support, nothing was uploaded.

Our camera - my wife's camera, to be precise - met its end sometime over Christmas that same year. The result of a tumble, I am told. Did it fall or was it pushed ? The former, I suspect. We did not replace the camera until very recently. Either way, that the flash card survived is some cause for relief. Perversely more robust than those undeveloped spools of old. I have allowed too many memories to wither and fade. In and out their can. The fridge. A stretched canvas paling over sprockets.

Twelve years ago, when I stepped out of the elevator onto the 22nd floor, I was of a mind to establish a dark room of sorts. In two minds, more accurately. The walk-in cupboard never proved inviting enough. The electricity meter jostling for supremacy from behind the coats like drapes.

So it is we resurrected something of the path between Bridge Street and Partick, and several stops between. The stuttering trajectory of a clockwork orange.

Ripened. Squeezed. Poured.

Well. The temptation largely prevails to bombard one and all with snapshots of Milo. My youngest son. To blow the lid for good. For various reasons, this unsettles me vaguely. I might ask him, of course, to waive all rights; I might take a wobbly grin as tacit consent.

Tottering without guile as I ink his little thumb on a plate of pureed tomato. For the record.

For better or worse I have resisted the urge.

Some time last year my wife encouraged me to apply to the Creative Writing Programme at Glasgow University. Much of the material which formed the basis for my portfolio submission was culled from pieces originally published here. It is quite some time since I have dabbled in academic circles. A quarter of a century. Their offer of a place took me a little by surprise.

So did the announcement that my wife was pregnant. Those routine demands of a baby. A move across the city, fortuitous though it was.

I deferred until this year. I accepted a renewed offer.

Well, wait just a second. While I am elated to have at least secured the opportunity, the end result is far from a foregone conclusion. Not even here is funding at postgraduate level a given. The not insignificant cost of tuition fees.

All the thornier when one is seemingly unemployable, a burden on the public purse.

Am I boring you yet ? Is that cr@ss enough for you ?

Still. I have determined to somehow do it. This may be my last stab at turning things around. I have applied to an assortment of trusts, of course. Those ones for which I am even shakily eligible. The activity of drafting 'begging' letters fills me with dread. Some days I have embraced it quite enthusiastically, some days I am given over to crippling anxieties.

A general proclivity to fall in line with the great economic downturn of our times.

I mention this merely as a means of belatedly lancing the boil. To spill my cards out on the table.

I have never been much of a one for poker.

The wise money, granted, may predictably ride on those who play their diamonds and spades close to their chest. Red and black. The short odds.

Frankly, I am sick and tired of the yellow.

Better to let it all hang out. Better to deck the empty bleachers with steaming crimson coils.

auntie | stalking runes on stilts

2011-07-14T13:54:00.072+01:00

The legacy of the British Broadcasting Corporation as laudable custodian of culture is something of a poisoned chalice.

Ever financially accountable to its board of governors, and - by extension of its reliance on a mandatory license fee - the public purse, its historic policy of erasing tapes of significance in a bid to balance the books has courted grieving and contrition.

At the same time, it is only as a direct result of its quite impeccable role in the fostering and nurturing of emerging talent, that such criticism might be justified.

Whereas in the commercial recording sector - EMI at Abbey Road; Decca Studios at Broadhurst Gardens - master reels may have been 'lost' due to human error, less than meticulously implemented systems of archiving, for decades the BBC deliberately pursued a quite ruthless policy of wiping - a relentless marching back to Year Zero - wholly at odds with its much trumpeted position as cornerstone of popular culture and the arts.

And while coverage of key institutional events was zealously preserved for posterity, a dusty corner in the vaults was seldom a given for the rattle of pots and pans in the servants' quarters.

Sadly, in the era before negotiating overseas rights became financially lucrative, and the domestic technological boom saw video transfer usher in a whole new market, that which could not be recycled was all too often irretrievably destroyed or swept straight into landfill.

So many canvases painted over.

The millions squandered as it sought to compete with the ITA for a share of prime time audience make those pennies saved all the more ludicrous.

A curious paradigm of the cult of dubious celebrity. The galloping cost of auntie's costume jewelry.

The zeitgeist, then, through the 1960s into the late 70s and Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee, may have been broadcast but it was glimpsed as a flash in the pan.

In 1998 Hux Records was launched as a conduit for hitherto unreleased archive recordings, often specializing in sessions originally commissioned at the BBC. Working in collaboration with those featured artists where possible, each release is a painstaking effort of restoration; compiling and remastering material where found, the end result annotated by extensive liner notes corroborating detail where speculation previously reigned.

The 2007 twin CD release of those BBC recordings made by the Incredible String Band between 1969 and 1974, 'Across The Airwaves', is an indispensable document gathering material from sessions for John Peel, Stuart Henry, and Pete Drummond, in addition to three 'In Concert' live performances at the Paris Theatre and Golders Green Hippodrome, London, recorded and broadcast between 1971 and 4.

With fourteen pages of liner notes researched by Adrian Whittaker, and - for the first time - a complete sessionography, 'Across The Airwaves' plays in perfect counterpoint to official studio releases. Across and through '5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion'; 'Wee Tam & the Big Huge'. 'The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter'. As Whittaker observes:

"The ISB soon adopted an adventurous approach to their BBC work, using the sessions to try out new, unreleased... or radically rearrange older material. This makes their sessions particularly deserving of a wider audience, as many of the tracks remained otherwise unrecorded."

Of the thirty-three cuts included here, thirteen had never been issued in any shape or form.

Nothing from the band's first two sessions - Pete Drummond & Tommy Vance's Top Gear from October, 1967; John Peel's Nightride from March, 1968 - survives in sufficient fidelity to merit selection (albeit both sessions may be accessed on the seven CD bootleg, 'God's Holiday'), but a further session for Peel's Nightride, recorded and originally broadcast in March of the following year is represented in its entirety; intriguingly so, given that the closing track of the session, the Robin Williamson composition 'Fine Fingered Hands' - which would only resurface years later on his solo 1998 release, 'Ring Dance' - missed its scheduled spot when a live poetry reading from Adrian Mitchell ran well over time.

The track was broadcast, but not until after the 1:00 AM news bulletin, into a wholly unrelated segment of programming, and the original tape was consequently mislaid. That it features here at all is entirely fortuitous; preserved as it was by String Band aficionado, Richard Bartram, who captured its airing on his father's reel-to-reel.

The Incredible String Band, of course, trod a very peculiar path.

The highlight of those studio sessions, for me perhaps, is Mike Heron's arrangement of the traditional Hindu devotional, 'Raga Puti' (Ragupati) which was twice recorded for the BBC over separate sessions in late 1970: Stuart Henry's Sound of the Seventies in September, and Peel's Top Gear a month later, the broadcast of which was uncharacteristically postponed until January, 1971. The version which appears here, as on 'God's Holiday', is from the former; performed by Heron and Williamson, Rose Simpson and Likky McKechnie.

In the period broadly coinciding with the recording of 'U' for Elektra and Joe Boyd's departure as manager and producer.

Again, the original session tapes, we are informed, have not survived. But for amateur "off-air" recordings of the original broadcasts, such insights may almost certainly have perished.

Heron's 'Raga Puti' is every inch as gloriously deranged as anything by the Velvet Underground in their finest incarnation. Or the first Amon Düül. Well. Almost. Itself an interpretation of a treatment by Ananda Shankar - according to Whittaker's sleeve notes - Heron and Williamson weave an addled dervish over an insistent cauldron pulse, a Northern Irish lambeg drum, stirred over by Rose and Likky as watchful acolytes.

These two sessions focus on the Incredible String Band as an intimate circle in transition. A knot unravelling. By the time of 1971's 'BBC In Concert', recorded on 28th March, Malcolm Le Maistre was drafted in as official replacement for Simpson, an integral functioning part of the collective since 1968.

The performance is polished but - to my ears, at least - queerly inhibited, showcasing new material which would not grace their first album release for Island that August, 'Liquid Acrobat as Regards the Air', or find its way onto vinyl at any later date.

Further sessions for Peel and Drummond were commissioned in October and November but are not represented on either 'Across the Airwaves' or 'God's Holiday'. A subsequent session for Peel's Sounds of the Seventies was recorded in February of 1972 and broadcast - in part - that March. Once more, the original tapes were wiped, but a transcription produced by BBC International yielded 'Secret Temple', a joint composition by McKechnie and Williamson tentatively slated for release on 'Earthspan', and never aired.

"Lyrically it's rather an opaque song - is it addressing a lover, or a deity, or both ?"

Neither Williamson or Heron profess any shred of understanding as to motivation, seemingly preferring to maintain a respectful distance. Allowing it to speak in tongues. A language lost.

As it stands, it steals out of the lungs of Autumns gone as Likky's last breath as part of the Incredible String Band.

By no means, though, would I wish to suggest that this changing of horses effectively hobbled progress. Even a casual listen to 'No Ruinous Feud' refutes that, and further sessions for John Peel through August 1972 to October 1973 demonstrate Williamson and Heron experimenting with a revolving personnel to fine effect.

This last session, in particular - featuring promoted roadies Stan Schnier on pedal steel and Jack Ingram on drums, alongside Le Maistre and the newly recruited Graham Forbes - is arguably one of the String Band's most successful in that it produced the immediately engaging and never officially released Mike Heron composition, 'Jane'. And Williamson's 'Dreams of No Return'; the latter later resurfacing on their twelfth and final album release, 1974's 'Hard Rope & Silken Twine'.

Admittedly, this particular session was covered previously through Strange Fruit's 1997 CD issue, 'On Air', compiling 12 songs from various Peel Sessions, but where 'Across the Airwaves' excels is in mitigating the damage done by the very body responsible for commissioning such a tangle of fabric in the first instance. The administration of a trust fund under a benign but bipolar tottering maiden aunt.

Setting it out in something approaching a fully lucid chronological context; inviting the listener to draw educated comparisons between material in the raw, and the evolution of a very fluid winding jaunt as presented by a series of definitive studio releases.

No small undertaking. No ruinous feud.

Painting detail(s) and study by Richard Dadd; Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix.

▼ INCREDIBLE STRING BAND: RAGA PUTI from "Across The Airwaves: BBC Radio Recordings 1969-1974" 2 x CD (Hux Records) 2007 (UK)
▼ INCREDIBLE STRING BAND: DREAMS OF NO RETURN from "Across The Airwaves: BBC Radio Recordings 1969-1974" 2 x CD (Hux Records) 2007 (UK)

iggy mcgonagall. invested

2011-07-12T22:03:00.004+01:00

I once owned a denim waistcoat.

Indigo
Blue, running thru
Petrol, a real cheap shit affair.

My balls had not dropped,
which was probably just as swell,

The pockets were fake
as silicon valley runarounds,
rebounds,
No place to put 'em
in a pinch
Or file them away like insurance
Returns.

I mention this in passing,
Water,
Kidney Stones as ripe as melons,
Tobacco Talons on
Naugahyde, Eggs over Topaz -

Blah fuckin' Blah

- And all the while this irascible
Itch.

This is why I may campaign for
Stooge
In elevator shoes, smelly lifts,
The notion of socks.

This is why

I play long odds, even stevens,
though I am far from a betting man.

I once owned a denim waistcoat.

▼ ALICE COOPER (A DETROIT COTERIE): I'M EIGHTEEN from "Love It To Death" LP (Straight) 1971 (US)

citizen

2011-06-30T15:32:00.003+01:00

Well, you know, contrary to certain misinformed rumblings - if there ever were any - I have yet to be abducted by malign forces; farces; filtered sprites. Lurking in the dim end of the spectrum.

Nor am I susceptible to summary, spontaneous levitations.

I mention this in passing, merely.

Not that I am immune to demons. Of the sort which howl and niggle in those grey hours between comatose reclining and startling. The ritual wrestling between id and ego.

Of course, the unabashed bohemian in me protests. Brought to heel presently by a snot-nosed brat in utility boots: Leery stomping Leary; hammered - choked - with garlands in turn.

Such is the duality. Of rodents. Rubes. A perfect interlocking cross to bear.

Well. Just what I might be trying to scrape off my chest escapes me, all gut intuition, the dry heaving over porcelain with the fuse to the morning sun not quite lit. It has taken more months than expected to settle.

As for chores, virtual house clearing evaded me. While routine chipping, and gouging, and filing has not.

I have resisted all sensible urge to update my profile, irritating as it is. That inaccurate barometer of fleeting curiosity. The earth snake coming out a hole: tumbling out the sky in shock.

We have been back, of course, to visit. To marvel at the rubble. To excavate neighbourly ties. To retrace footsteps.

"I have a suspicion that my writing smacks of Chintz curtains of late. Albeit stained - holed - but fidgety nonetheless. A scent of magnolia masking mothballs.

The lifts are often thick with that smell. Eastern Europeans arriving with tightly sprung suitcases, folded bed linen. Heirlooms."

"Looking down on the rose garden, I see the wrought iron waste bin standing alone on one corner.

It is still new enough that I often mistake it for an elderly person stooping to feed the pigeons. The sunlight gleams on yellow painted seams so they protrude like pencil sharpened elbows. Toothpicks. My vision is not what it once was, I have sometimes misidentified black refuse sacks peppering the grass. Even Merle Haggard seems a little distant.

When he steps out on the stage.

I made the dinner pouring gins. Not quite neat, but I know my kitchen like the back of my hand. I can sidle around it slicing mushrooms as well as any blind man.

I fry eggs as big and fat as cataracts.

I can shuffle like Lemon Jefferson, and pour them dry and mean."

The following - one of five wholly instrumental collaborations - was recorded and produced at Robert Quine's loft apartment in NYC between September 1979 and July 1980. Don't throw that knife. Or come unstuck, vibrating in the park.

▼ JODY HARRIS & ROBERT QUINE: DON'T THROW THAT KNIFE from "Escape" LP (Lust/Unlust) 1981 (US)

forecast remains unsubstantiated

2011-06-28T16:27:00.004+01:00

Farther calibrating The Fall's stammering decline into the jaws of August. The last gasp of summer, before it has properly commenced.

Paper Cut by Hans Christian Andersen. Uncovered here.

▼ THE FALL: WEATHER REPORT 2 from "Your Future Our Clutter" CD + LP (Domino Records) 2010 (UK)

jazz domino

2011-06-24T11:25:00.004+01:00

Three Corners #1:
Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Tony Rice

Authentic Deep Pan #2:

Miles Davis

▼ JERRY GARCIA, DAVID GRISMAN, TONY RICE: SHADY JAM from "The Pizza Tapes" CD (Acoustic Disc) 2000 (US)

▼ JERRY GARCIA, DAVID GRISMAN, TONY RICE: SO WHAT from "The Pizza Tapes" CD (Acoustic Disc) 2000 (US)

28 days later | never | redux

2011-06-16T10:38:00.013+01:00

bagpipe |ˌbagpʌip |
noun (usu. bagpipes)

The bagpipe is a wind instrument used among the ancient Greeks but is known as a Scottish and Irish instrument.
Source: Foster, Ellsworth D. The American Educator (Chicago: Ralph Durham Company, 1921)

Had viral collagists, God Speed You! Black Emperor occupied a space somewhere in Europe between 1969 and 1975, they may well have been tarred with the ugly pointed stick underpinning Progressive Rock. The nomenclature. Compared, uncharitably, to Tangerene Dream, their incestuous tangle is - to my nose - an altogether more appealing blend.

Pardon me while I cough. Uncork the Coedine Linctus.

The bagpipe is a punctured lung. Impaled on congenitally stricken ventricles.

As it is, this Montreal collective make interesting music with an anaesthetic bent. Their "Dead Flag Blues" - to my own ears - reminds me vaguely of Sun City Girls. "Not In My League". Maybe it's the ancestral blood transfusion. A cellular migration. Newfoundland, free church lairs; ramshorn kirks.

The orphaned bone is pallid. Through and through.

Lightly freckled with moss.

Those bagpipes on "East Hastings" convince me just how much cloying sentimentality invades the shallows. The best piper I have listened to is Portuguese, hands down, but here evangelical moribundity prevails.

"East Hastings" is an east to westerly gael, anchored in three parts:

2.1: 'Nothing's Alrite in our Life / Dead Flag Blues (reprise)';
2.2: 'The Sad Mafioso';
2.3: 'Drugs in Tokyo / Black Helicopter'

1998 was the year my first born was conceived.

He is not so old as to be wholly mute in crisis. On top of his game. Just yesterday I bathed the wound on his shin; bandaged his ankle.

School nurses, it seems, have elected to embrace phage therapy. Dispensing with the iodine. The notion of untenable costs.

The puddle water smelled foul. Crawling with pathogens. Opportunistic infections.

"East Hastings" - after surgical intervention - appears fleetingly in Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later". Surrender to sleight of hand, you will almost certainly miss it.

Postscript: < infection detected: contained: antibiotics implemented >

▼ GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR: EAST HASTINGS from "F♯ A♯ ∞" LP (Constellation) 1998 (Canada)

family guy

2011-06-09T17:11:00.012+01:00

I picked up two books
from the 2nd hand store.

Kinky Friedman;
Early Dashiell Hammett.
A zippered jacket for Milo
with embroidered dogs.

It is much too big for him,
Still.

Of the two exercises in
Running to Seed,
I prefer the Hammett.

Hard Spined.
Hard Boiled.

Not quited there yet,
Flawed,
better between Sacramento
and Tijuana. The Hop.

My older son's hair
has grown way past
Shoulder-length.
All but half way to
His ass.

I am itching to cut it,
to escort him to the barbers.

Such are those mundane
Things
which prompt me to
Log in. Out.

I creak, and I cough, and I pace.
Quite the
Old School motherf@cker.

@sshole

2011-06-06T21:12:00.006+01:00

A couple of days ago, I was deliberating on the apparent demise of certain voices. Some articulate pockets of resistance. Querulous individuality.

"The curious vilage of Blog houses a fragile temple. Twatter made a dent on it. Bookface corroded its foundation," I wrote.

Of course, that is only part of it. The relief is that quite so many voices persist.

Well. I was cataloguing those both currently above and below the radar - outlining the beginning of a tentative line of enquiry - when I inadvertently hit the 'publish' button. A case of spastic finger, no less. My surety of touch is slowly failing; along with my once adequate vision. My gums. My teeth.

The error was quickly contained, I thought. I killed the wayward article and promptly set out to the park to feed some ducks. A ballet of swans, I am told. Dispersing stale bread with impunity.

I had not counted on the RSS feed, though. I was too embroiled with tagged birds. Beaks. The blanket tucked over my baby's feet.

In my own absence - again - my in-tray has become so coagulated, that I can no longer depend on automated devices. Bells and whistles. I scratch my head and dither this way and that. Sniffing my underarms. Following partial scents.

"Sometimes I have questioned its will to live - in and out of DMCA pogroms; snideful interjections - but mainly, I feel, it is the case that every voice is finite. I am not so fond of Social Networking sites, admittedly, I like to hang my own shit out like a flag. An upended bag of washing. If one rallies around it, fine and dandy, if not I'll still wring out the stain of it in the morning. Mark my last stand with (territorial) pissings."

You get the gist. Nothing substantial enough to warrant publication. The sort of inane rant I am often sadly prone to in unguarded comments, but generally try to avoid up front.

"Shall we gather at the river ?

Only should the washing machine fail. The tumble dryer fuse in the wall."

Still. I got back from the park to find my laundry had been snagged. The sole good thing in this was that it might have prompted the odd hippie bus driver to blow the dust off between the chickens; the hawks; the castrators of prose and poem. The ineffable attraction of cue and recoil.

I have missed the clarity.

Still unresolved is the stubborn silence - too many months now - from @eloh.

There. I have said it, finally.

I hope that you are well. In spite of your daughter's assurances, I have worried. Sometimes it is hard to begin from where one last left off. Chew on the rust.

I have no idea whether you might read this or not.

Don't let the @ssholes grind you down.

falun gong | falun dafa

2011-06-06T15:24:00.012+01:00

As I mentioned by way of aside, our recently expanded family of six chanced upon some volunteers and practitioners of Falun Gong in the park.

Actually, there were seven of us. Less than magnificent. Enticed there by the spectacle of carnival atmosphere, our minor logistical nightmare was all but devoured by incipient rainbow of colour. A tattoo of voodoo drums.

It is something of an annual event, the opening Mardi Gras parade. We do not always make it a date.

I plucked Milo out of his stroller and bundled him to my chest. The path was a scrum of knees and dubbined boots. I feared for his safety this close to the ground.

His stroller is not robust. I envisioned it disintegrating into so much kindling.

An older Chinese woman approached my wife. Three yellow robed devotees of Qigong were engaged in a conspicuously public sitting meditation just feet away from where we loitered.

"Hallo," the woman said to us. "Are you interested in Falun Dafa ? Chinese history ? The Buddha Showing a Thousand arms ?"

Her voice was naturally pitched for intimate conversation. There was a deal of noise in the air - Samba; a welter of Jazz - but in less than two minutes she cut through my Sunday hangover. In less than three, I concluded that I liked her.

She was born some decades before Mao's Year Zero. When the Kuomintang and the Communists were still embroiled in hostilities, quite possibly.

When she was just six, some party officials took her mother from her and imprisoned her next to her school. She and her siblings made a daily pilgrimage to visit her and speak to her through the narrow windows of what was effectively her cell; to pass her what scraps of food they could gather. After several weeks of this, the party faithful boarded up those windows. Incarcerated and tortured her in the dark.

They kept her like this for several years. When they finally released her - this woman's young mother - she was quite broken. All light in her extinguished.

She told us this and stroked Milo's curious hand. He warmed to her immediately.

Falun Gong is the world's most popular expression of Quigong, an ancient practice flourishing only behind closed doors until recently. In 1992, Li Hongzhi brought it to the public in China. Similar in principle and visual expression to t'ai chi - yoga - by 1998, official reports estimated that between 70 - 100 million Chinese citizens had embraced the practice; a figure intolerable to the Party, not least because it eclipsed CCP membership.

I looked at those people exercising in our Glasgow park.

The practice has been outlawed in China since July, 1999. Relentless persecution since then has not altogether undermined its influence. Such a public display, however, would be unthinkable. Internationally corroborated reports attest to routine organ harvesting among those detained, in addition to wholesale torture and disappearance.

"They take both kidneys, then the heart and the skin and the corneas and the liver, and your body is then thrown into the incinerator"
- David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State.

"More than 40,000 additional unexplained transplants have been recorded recently in China since 2001"
- Edward McMillan-Scott, European Parliament Vice-President.

We signed the petition.

We queued in front of a studious looking man bowed over a table with ink dipped brush. He translated Milo's name into Mandarin with painstaking precision. Impervious the older kids' awkward push and shove. Extraordinarily focused.

Later that same evening, I watched the first hour of a five part BBC documentary chronicling the rise of the megacity.

Shanghai featured prominently.

Andrew Marr contends that it now boasts 7,000 billionaires. While those figures have been condemned as wildly innacurate - one report I have read claims there were 'merely' 66 documented billionaires in China in 2010 - it seems to me sadly incontrovertible that while human rights abuses persist on an epic scale, the wider political agenda appears to have been rewritten to accomodate China as economic superpower.

Its unqualified rehabilitation as free market bedfellow.

Please give your attention to some of those very real case sudies as cited here. Reflect on the calamity in that.

droogs of stonehenge

2011-06-04T12:21:00.027+01:00

Now. It is my assumption that the following 2'57" is not some veiled reference to NASA fueled excesses over the plains of New Mexico. Or covert cold war dramas outrunning missiles over Soviet air space.

Tearing the back seat out of the sound barrier.

This, despite dandified drummer Steve Tindall's passing resemblance to Thunderclap Newman's Speedy Keene; offset, even more bizarrely, by a ludicrous calabash pipe of the type favoured by a cocaine addled Sherlock Holmes. On and off his game.

NYC based The Druids established their order in 1965. Sessions for Nola Records produced a fairly pedestrian concoction of standard garage fare heavily indebted to the 'British Invasion'. A crudely propelled biplane cobbled together with Cow Gum and string.

Three years later, the appended Druids of Stonehenge upped sticks and promptly relocated to the patchouli scented intersection of Haight-Ashbury, settling into orbit around the UNI label.

Their resulting stab at the big time, "Creation", proved more of a rudimentary feint than a well honed blow. Those druids. All dressed up in the height of summer and still no place to go.

Almusic's Richie Unterberger rightly celebrates the strand of 'surliness' resistant to Susan on the west coast waiting. More so, his assertion that vocalist Dave Budge evinced a hint of cabaret at odds with any genuine attempt to break out of the room. The inclusion of covers - "I Put a Spell on You"; "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" - seems more desperately recalcitrant than righteously cynical. Minor league in spite of the original material showcased throughout.

Their opting for Arthur Lee's "Signed D.C." is especially predictable. If altogether symptomatic of lovely winds of change.

Still. Nowhere have I stumbled upon any dedicated reference to the particular highlight here. Well. Swan Fungus got the jump on me with its inclusion in one of his Sunday Mix Tapes, infuriatingly. Rather, that would be case had I heard it there first.

Not for the first time, Fungus exhibits taste.

A proto switchblade jab of neanderthal punk, paced at a stumble, "Speed" ought to have been on jukeboxes everywhere in the dark corners of 1968. Luddite tub thumping on an overseas U.S. Air Force base. While the twelve-year-olds safely raid the medicine cabinet; the military policeman's wife irons his stripes.

Nobody was listening.

image: Mr. Natural Comix #2, R. Crumb.

▼ THE DRUIDS OF STONEHENGE: SPEED from "Creation" LP (UNI) 1968 (US)

index SIN CD 9

2011-06-02T00:18:00.017+01:00

Albrecht Dürer ices
Huffs of breath.
Bandanas shiver,
Pimple at 2:00 AM.

Between the kitchen and
this porch,
Refrigerator motors idle.

'The Knight, The Devil and Death'

Written and produced by

Craig Leon; Mark E. Smith; Simon Rogers.

Note: the version subsequently compiled on 'Sinister Waltz' is the
truncated backing track, shorn of Brix Smith's utterances.

Far from airless claustrophia, there is a sense of travel throughout,
or the urge to; astral projection and vending machines.
Electric fans whispering. Ceramic tiles. A long corridor. Clocks.

▼ THE FALL: THE KNIGHT, THE DEVIL AND DEATH from "Ed's Babe" EP (Cog Sinister) 1992 (UK)

74" in a cold riot

2011-05-30T18:29:00.015+01:00

Nothing solid
is made out of wood
any more,
The heart of it
is sandwiched pulp,
Shavings, glue,

Pressed cardboard,

The planed edges
Curling like veneers
over long teeth,
horns...

Peeling. Yellow. Clipped.

For all that,
it seemed quite flawless,
Hunkered down,
On all Fours
in the 2nd hand shop.

A good price.

A steal.

"Just how do you intend
to get it home ?"
the woman asked,
my £10 note
Crisply disappearing.

I stared at the casters.

"We'll wheel it there,"
I said.
"Up around the corner."

"You can't do that.
The wheels will break."

Pencilled eyebrows
Darting, lightly drawn,
Scribbled

"On the pavement."

"Well..." I said.
A little unconvinced.

We upended it onto the
Trolley, finally.

My wife waved as she
Lit out ahead
with the baby stroller.

Boxing clever.

I was scarcely out the
door when it listed,
Crashed,
Wounded itself at
my feet.

"Watch out !"
the woman winced.
Two steps right
behind me.

I wrestled it upright,
Made it over the kerb,
before it slid off again.

Hal Roach's music box.
in and out a clinch.

I caught up with my
wife, my son,
Snatched it off the
trolley and onto the
Stretcher.

"It's no use," I grimaced.
"All advice is lethal."

We returned the trolley.
Trundled it home
Without further incident.
Up two flights of stairs

To convalesce by the sofa,

Cracked. Scarred.
Mean black toes intact,
but bruised. Jack Johnson

On coiled uppers.

Penultimately, quite

A'right.

▼ MILES DAVIS: RIGHT OFF from "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" LP
(Columbia) 1971 (US)

revolution .000

2011-04-03T22:57:00.024+01:00

The revolution is not so much on pause, as riven by incertitude.

The click track - you may have observed - has fallen foul of synchronization: Stalling; Steiner, and Bradley. As unreliable as Ukrainian trains. Between Kiev and October.

Burrowing under creaking autonomous sod. Moles. Metro gnomes. Travelling in fits and starts; co-opted SMPTE time.

1/4; 1/8; 1/16.

Incremental decrepitude.

A tree leaning into the broken tooth of a circular saw, filmed for posterity in crackling stop motion.

June 1883. The Chautauquan.

"Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion."

Naked science.

An old African proverb tackles the nature of suddenly uprooted trees with telling prescience:

"Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped."

By extension, keep one foot in front of the other. And don't forget to tie your shoelaces. When not dancing barefoot; or broadcasting 'Radio Ethiopia' before a lolling wave.

Lumberjacking; sawdust traumas; pissing in the river in a force nine gale.

Of course. Mixing metaphors is similarly as perilous, mixing metaphors while mixing one's drinks - injecting intravenously - an ill-advised taboo.

It was not Bill Burroughs who remarked "If we can hit that bullseye then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards..." but Zapp Brannigan.

Zip gun boogie. Billy West. East. North and South.

"Checkmate". I digress.

The revolution is not so much on pause, as low on ammunition.

One month blurs into another as camel charges in Cairo's Tahir Square give way to rocket salvos over Bin Jawwad; the waters recede in Fukushima to expose fuel rods in meltdown.

Cesium-137. Iodine-121.

Tsunamis. Turbulence in Syria.

A changing of the guard on the road to Damascus.

Four horsemen on overtime. Double time. A plague of Sundays.

Somewhere between one month and the next, the bleachers fell into disrepair. The fiddles went quiet.

The ferryman sailed by, empty-handed. Lantern-jawed. Granite sprung.

The emails gathering one on top of the other like so many dessicated leaves.

Well. I have lost the will to rake the ashes. I began one post and could not see an end to it. The music is of saws and knives. Scraping knotted bone.

Paul of Tarsus can keep his fine opinions to himself.

hypnotizesomeoneforbeginners

2011-02-17T18:36:00.008Z

My wife seized the wheel
of the skillet,
I took the stool and nursed
a glass of wine.

" You like risotto ?"
she asked.

"I don't mind paella,"
I said.

"It's the same thing, without
the seafood," she went on.

I took a sip.

"Well. I don't care for
anything with peas throught it."

"That's right," she said,
"you like plain rice."

"I like that red and white shit
Better," I allowed,
Admiring the mushrooms as they
Snuffled around the pan.

Noses. Brown leather buttons.

"Yes." she smirked. "And saffron.
Nothing but the best."

I sat a while. Considered this.

Rolled the grape,
Round and round.

"Well. I hope to get a taste again.
Before I kick the bucket."

The mushrooms sizzled.
The baby hiccuped.

It did not seem to go down well.

said the ticktockman

2011-02-15T15:29:00.014Z

> who are the brain police ? <

"When I was a little kid, and I was going to East High in Cleveland - my dad had died in '49, and my mom and I were living there - I cut school one morning and I went to, I think it was Halle Brothers, down in the public terminal, the Cleveland Terminal Tower. And John Steinbeck was on tour, and he was speaking... and I couldn't get through the crowd...
it was deep...

Because there stood John Steinbeck, who was an ex-prizefighter - I mean, he looked like a fire plug! He was a tough guy. He worked like I had worked! I had ridden on boxcars, worked on demolition teams, and driving truck, and crops, and all that shit. But I was a little skinny squirt of a thing."

A failing Harlan Ellison muses on the nature of epiphany - sometime during the 1950s, underneath the observation deck of the watchtower - in a 90 minute interview from his California home, September 2010.

As I remarked, in a reply to a comment in an earlier post:

The smoke has always been as much out as in the bottle. Too much volatility. The cork won't settle.

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones..."

- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" (1849) as reprinted in the preface to "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman", 'Galaxy' magazine, winner of the Nebula Award, Best Short Story, 1965.

"...the end will take care of itself."

- Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman", 1965.

This reading, reissued on The Harlan Ellison Recording Collection, in 1981, is long out of print. Paired with a reading of "Shatterday", written in 1975, both sides to the original Alternative World Recordings imprint - AWR 6922 - can be sourced on Digital Meltd0wn.

▼ HARLAN ELLISON: REPENT, HARLEQUIN! SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN from "Harlan! Harlan Ellison Reads Harlan Ellison" LP (Alternative World Recordings) 1976 (US)

MORE HARLAN ELLISON ON ISLETS OF LANGERHANS

the mouse barks, the caravan passes

2011-02-11T12:34:00.030Z

Or. Tracking the ongoing ballad of a part time rating agency assistant.

"Köpek ürür, kervan yürür." In Turkish.

"ha kla-vim novchim, v'ha-shayarah o-veret." In Hebrew.

"Wot ? Wot ? Wot ?" Nathan NØ.

Have mouse, will travel.

"But what has been entrusted to one's care one does not laugh at; to do so would be a breach of duty; the utmost spite that the most spiteful amongst us can vent on Josephine is when they sometimes say: 'When we see Josephine it is no laughing matter."

- Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk", published 1924.

Let me begin by explaining, yet again, my protracted absence from the bleachers. This time around, it has less to do with those recently accumulated factors in stress - a birth; moving home; a death in the family - than a spurious addiction. My voluntary exposure to WOT in the course of the past two weeks has brought me out in rash. A belt of welts. From collar to cuff.

The Web of Trust did not impose itself. I actively sought it out.

A hive activity governed by Bayesian inference; or rejection of hypothesis based on the posterior probability.

Confused ? Well. I am too.

The Web of Trust is nothing remotely approaching a secret order. On the contrary, WOT currently has two million registered users as of January, 2011, and an online participating community estimated in the region of 17, 000, 000.

That adds up to a lot of contributing fingers.

A tad more than those swords employed by the Knights Templar.

"Browsing the Web with the Web of Trust extension gives a completely different sense of security. Instead of browsing alone, you have millions of people helping point out what sites are trustworthy, are safe for your children, and respect your privacy. No matter how you use the Web, Web of Trust is an essential tool to browse safely in today's sometimes uncertain environment."

Indeed.

That is the central premise.

The reality underpinning the notion of trust is a good deal more impenetrable. Perception is just that, if one goes no farther than blind faith in those coloured ratings returned in one's browser. Or the default splash warning.

From WOT Wiki:

"Users are rewarded activity points for rating websites and writing comments. All users have an activity score, which is visible on the add-on's rating window and the profile page for registered users."

For every rookie there is a platinum plated wannabe. The popular misconception is that level 'ranking' somehow equates with rating reliability. This is not the case.

"The rating reliability is a computed estimate based upon demonstrated talent and ability, aka: merit."

Deduce from this that a rater with a higher reliability carries more weight in his or her ratings, that the resulting evaluation is that much harder for any casual rater to overturn. WOT is not so much democratic, as a firm proponent of meritocracy. This is valid, when one considers that an especially active participant might not necessarily be driven by egalitarian motives; but, on the contrary, might be galvanised by personal agenda.

Or grudge.

In fact, it has been the case - in my short spell as active participant on WOT forums - that I have witnessed factions fighting up and down the flanks when opinion has been polarized. And rational debate disintegrates into something far more partisan.

A rain of neckties all along the lonesome trail.

This was never more so than in one particular instance where the submitting party to a graphic design site was publicly dissected on the grounds of the domain proprietor's alleged association with Scientology. This, in spite of there being no trace of evidence that said site espoused values demonstrably sympathetic to L. Ron Hubbard's 'spiritual' auditing.

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party ?"

No flying saucers. But enough light sabre rattling to implicate Tony Manero in a rhumba with Darth Maul.

In these trying circumstances, the forums run red and green in turn where the high ground is pursued.

Unsecured. Fought to a bloody stalemate.

And yet. Through it all runs a thread of prevailing sanity, even though rating reliability remains undisclosed. Guessed at. Whispered.

"...reliability estimates aren't public to make gaming the system more difficult and to encourage everyone to rate honestly. Also, even though the estimates are automated and perfectly objective, I'm sure some users would take them personally and publishing them would create all kinds of unwanted friction in the community. I don't think anyone wants that."
- Sami 18 January, 2010

Often, the process employed to arrive at an equitable rating is painstaking. And quite transparent to anybody following a submitted topic. It involves more than just a rudimentary grasp of any single technical process: virus checking; the routine examination of PTR records to resolve IP addresses into hostnames; the exposure of malicious redirects.

The whole nine yards.

A closer inspection of any one unravelling thread more often as not reveals something approaching forensic science. All of this conducted by volunteers.

In the space of two short weeks, and some 200 posts - typically 'comments' in blogging parlance - I have observed quite severe threats exposed and rated accordingly. Activities ranging from blatant Phising scams to deeply unethical corporate practices. And this is one area where WOT collectively excels.

The reasons for my initially coming into contact with the WOT community are fairly pedestrian and well enough documented in a previous post. The impact of a negative rating cannot be underestimated. Equally, not nearly enough consideration is given to the various motivations which govern a rating. The community, in common with any community, is populated by disparate individuals harbouring equally disparate ideals.

Not everyone can be trusted.

Still. One of the fundamentals I have taken from this is how readily privacy is overlooked. Less, protected.

Many bloggers originating on blogspot.com, or a wordpress equivalent, do so because the platform eliminates the necessity to understand CSS and HTML; to design - or commission the design of - a website from the ground up.

As a result, many bloggers appropriate code from third party sources with no acute sense of how that code impacts on privacy. I am no less typical in this regard.

The most innoccuous byproduct of this behaviour is the inadvertent setting of cookies.

Given that many bloggers employ some form of traffic monitoring as a means of assessing their site's popularity - Google Analytics, Statcounter, etc - setting cookies is a prerequisite. The information gathered includes IP addresses, browser details, timestamps and referring pages. This is the primary function of traffic analysis.

Since the majority of bloggers operate non commercial sites, and are therefore not legally obliged to carry a Privacy Policy, the temptation is to absolve oneself of all responsibility to inform as to how that information is handled.

Consider this.

In 2010, Quantcast settled out of court to the tune of $2.4 Million after UC Berkeley published findings disclosing that it knowingly employed 'zombie' cookies in to gather Personally Identifiable Information in a"pattern of covert online surveillance".

Quantcast advertises itself thusly:

"... a new breed of measurement service helping buyers and sellers quantify the characteristics of digital audiences against which they can activate addressable advertising solutions."

A commercially optimised form of traffic analysis, in other words.

Wikipedia asserts that:

"...the Quantcast code causes the user's browser to access Quantcast's servers, at which time they can log the user's IP address and information Quantcast places in cookies that are stored in the user's browser. The cookies significantly aid in making inferences. Quantcast also provides affinities revealing other popular sites that the average viewer browses. This is possible by tracking "referrer" information that is normally included as part of every HTTP request made by the user's browser."

The terminology - 'zombie' cookies - is deliberately pitched for maximum effect. The reality is that flash cookies - Local Shared Objects, as utilized through all versions of Adobe Flash Player - share the characteristic to surreptitiously 'respawn' after user deletion. In short, the facility to be deployed as Spyware.

I have come across several blog sites which utilize Quantcast to monitor traffic. Feedjit, likewise, employs an LSO.

To date, MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd have all appeared before a federal court in the US on Quantcast related charges. Ustream, SodaHead, Warner Bros. have faced similar charges, in utilizing a Clearspring Technologies widget to clandestinely monitor children's online activities.

And. Lest we forget, let's hear it too for good old uncle Walt.

It's heartening to know one's kids are in safe hands.

Postscript:

My brief time as a participating member on these forums should in no way be regarded as an attempt to infiltrate, or deliver the skinny. We are not riding with Angels here - not even the Finnish Chapter - and while I have witnessed prescriptions for Snake Oil change hands along the trail, I am nobody's Doctor.

Besides. I don't have the stamina to stay upright in the saddle for the long haul.

My loitering on the forums, I suspect, has been more tolerated than embraced. That is the way of it with these clubs. The one percenters. If one wants to don the patch, one has to put in the miles. Prepare to get a little bloodied. I have met some interesting characters along the way, a handful of especially righteous members. I started out kicking against the pricks. I end it now without grudge.

A little respect is overdue. Retrospectively. I have intentionally picked out those last few words in bold; for those with tired eyes.

bounce and rhyme

2011-01-20T21:12:00.003Z

"Bounce and Rhyme,"
the handbill reads,
"FREE for
Babies under Three!"

So we bring ours.

We arrive at the library
ten minutes late,
The Reading Room
filled with noise,
Cleared of books,
Smoke,
An ocean of mothers
cross legged
on turquoise carpet,
Gurgling parcels
Dangled in velour lap.

Thank god, I am not
the only man in here.

There is one. Two.
I am possibly the oldest.
But freshly shaved.

We double park
the buggy under a
Frieze
of grazing elephants,
and waste no time
in squatting down,

"Wind! the Bobbin in..."

a guerilla battalion of
Mothers
well versed, armed
to the teeth,
with loaded gesture.

"Pull, Pull, Clap, Clap."

The rhymes are more
or less
Uncharted territory,
Forgotten,
I might have been
Schooled
in another country, a
Dialect modelled on
Quite the wrong note.

Our son leers up off my
knee with hobbled
optimism as we busk it,
grumbling,
Mincing over intricate
patterns,
Drawn in the air,
an orchestrated handclap
or two
to startle
an eye gone over to sleep.

What's that ?
he might be thinking,
You stitched
me up,
What happened to those
scratches
of Sesame Street we've
been busy rehearsing ?
The Count.
The modal jazz.

It's not my fault, kid,
I covertly sign,
We have to work with
what we've got,
a clouded palette,
Don't hold it against
me,
there's still a chance
we may
make it through.

"Wind! the Bobbin up..."

His mouth turned down.

And looks straight through
me, teary, crestfallen,
Lets go loudly in
his new corduroy suit.

ensenada drive, woodland hills, 1969

2011-01-16T21:03:00.011Z

The piano may not have been drinking, but I have; to a civilized degree. Purloined from the original German, here; the root and trace of it seeded from a sugarmegs microdot of a torrent sown, originally, in 2006. With supporting observations from John French.

A roll of the dime. As invited within the offices of the good doctor, Faust.

A sequence of eight annoted short pieces, recorded somewhere between the onset of winter, 1968 and the spring of 1969, none of it features on the official "Grow Fins" compilation of outakes from those Trout Mask Replica Sessions. I learned of the captain's passing, first, in a report from Casa Nada, sometime in Sacramento.

01-Untitled Piano Song (1:33)
02-Untitled Piano Instrumental #1 (1:53)
03-A Lot Of Money For You, A Lot Of Money For Me-Untitled Piano Instrumental #2 (1:19)
04-Short Whistling (0:10)
05-Untitled Piano Instrumental #3 (2:04)
06-Why Can't We Be Free? (0:50)
07-Untitled Piano Instrumental #4 (0:58)
08-Untitled Piano Instrumental #5 (0:31)

▼ DON VAN VLIET: THE BEEFHEART PIANO TAPE (OR, THE TROUTWOOD NOT TELL ME WHERE THE SUSHI'S HID / SUNDAY EVENING) Original Reel > PC Wav > FLAC > MP3 (Bootleg) 1968/9 (US)

a dose of vitamin e [reduced]

2011-01-15T19:37:00.031Z

Gustave Doré, 1886.

In a good mood, then, I leave my wife dawdling over the pram in the more sanitary side of town and duck into the supermarket.

Our sage bag of tricks has piled on one and a half lbs in the course of one spare week. Something less by metric alchemy.

I do not find what I am looking for.

"DOYOUDOSUSHI?" I enquire. Karaoke out a Can. Barry Sheen, after a stroke.

We kick-start the pram and travel in caravan to the park at the top of the road. By the time we get there I could eat a horse. As it is, we prowl around in search of a dry bench and fall upon the sushi. Devouring every shard.

It is all right.

I do not care for George Osbourne. I do not like him at all. An 18th century engraving of a man divested of powdered wig and rouge. Ankle breeches. Buckled shoe.

Give his coalition seven more months, and there will be a poor house back on every corner. Jacobins swinging in Tyburn.

We take a meandering route back home past vast Georgian houses hugging avenue and circus, a puzzle of lanes. This part of this city I am largely unfamiliar with. An adjunct to its commercial heart. Among the nursing homes and divided lets, an odour of squandered wealth persists, blackmail, sculduddery; under quarried flagstone and vans deploying fibre to the curb; out of rockery and reclaimed wind.

When Gilmour's charge did dandle, Parliament Street did blush;
Should Lutyens' stone be littled, with swords brought forth be hushed.

We open the door on mail forwarded from our old place.

A solicitor's letter on behalf of the utility company demanding £154 on top of all we fed in to its niggardly prepayment meter in the course of this year past.

This, despite a credit carried over in that last quarter of some £56. Plus a £20 late payment surcharge; £30 court fees; £50 solicitors costs. Oh, and £1.14 statutory interest.

Just one more reason we are forever in debt.

▼ THE FALL: I AM DAMO SUZUKI from "This Nation's Saving Grace" LP (Beggars Banquet) 1985 (UK)

triage

2011-01-12T17:58:00.006Z

Christmas Trees
have taken over our
Pavements,
Creeping out under
cover of
Darkness,
Flood Warnings,
Dragged out out of
bed to sober
Up,
unwanted guests.

By morning they have
Succumbed to frostbite.
Shedding
needles like so many
Fingers. Toes.

Walking back
from the brink of
Shrivelling,
we step behind a
Dislocated limb,
allow a woman to
move past us,
Uninterrupted.

Thanks, she yawns,
Her breath a
Fog. Steaming like
Warm breakfasts.
Tea. Toast.

We nod and pretend
to examine the tree,
Stooping
like Undertakers on
The Job,
Measuring a corpse
left out in the rain.

1010011010:~$sudo su

2011-01-10T13:01:00.009Z

There was a time when all was word,
from font of crackling spindle
Searing Moses ear,
to Albert James Freed on the AM dial.

Before that too, the coiled copper wire
of the fallen, whispering for Adam.
Serpents. Rose seeds.
Unplumbed wormholes in the garden.

The nature of the word is virus.
Binary. Hyperlinked. Self-replicating.
It will not rest, in cave nor cache,
what began as babble is storm, torrent.

philip kindred got it nailed, the sepsis.
Dancing round hospital in wheelchair.
Denounced as hack, hacked in turn,
Warding off infection with icthys palm.

What began with an apple
Scrolled on the Mainframe, vavvavvav,
Scripted on the backs of eyelids,
Blessed, archived, embedded in host.

The voracious appetite to overwrite, 1.1

all out to fink, inc.

2011-01-08T22:03:00.011Z

..."La Fleur De Barbe" is not among those eight recordings of Dubuffet's reissued by İlhan Mimaroğlu on "Musical Experiences" (Finnadar SR 9002). Certainly, it hails from those original pieces recorded by Dubuffet - in collaboration with Danish painter and ally, Asger Jorn - between December, 1960 and March, 1961; twenty issued on six 10" LPs, with perhaps eleven additional pieces on a farther four 10" vinyls, each in a limited pressing of 50 copies individually numbered and signed by the artist.

"The first tape produced in these circumstances is rather unusual as it is a poem, La fleur de barbe, which is declaimed, chanted and vaguely sung by several voices mixed together (which are all in fact mine) with occasional instrumental accompaniment."

OUT OF PRINT SOURCE: THUNDERPERFECTMIND

▼ JEAN DUBUFFET: LA FLEUR DE BARBE from "Experiences Musicales" 6 x 10" LP (Unknown Label) 1961 (France / Italy)

all out of ink, inc.

2011-01-08T14:14:00.014Z

"Bowery Bum (May 1964) is the piece that occasioned my association with Dubuffet and opened the way to my discovery of his own extraordinary music (of which I eventually made a first commercial edition on Finnadar SR 9002). The visual impetus of the Dubuffet drawing, one of his Bowery Bums, suggested the form, the content, and even the sound source - the sound of a sole rubber band used as a counterpart to the India ink of the drawing. The outer formal character of the piece corresponds to that of the drawing - a seemingly random maze of lines through which appears a human figure, pathetic and droll."

- İlhan Mimaroğlu, sleevenotes:
"Face The Windmills, Turn Left" (Finnadar SR 9012).

The trail which led - for me - ultimately to İlhan Mimaroğlu begins with a stark one colour caricature of Mingus by Greg Condon. "Changes One" and "Two" - recorded in NYC in December, 1974, with Don Pullen on piano; George Adams on tenor sax; Jack Walruth on the horn - are variously celebrated as a high, or derided as elevator music climbing only so far as a wedding planner schmoozing in the honeymoon suite of an uptown hotel. The last position is thoroughly strange when one considers that much of the content from these two sessions was informed by the Attica Prison Riots of 1971, mitigated only marginally by allowing that both albums were produced by Turkish electronic avant-gardist, İlhan Mimaroğlu.

For some, the blame lies not with the featured composition or performance, but the veneer and polish of the final Atlantic release. In short, those essential qualities Mimaroğlu brings to bear in consenting to channel the muscular Mingus at the top of his game.

Born in Istanbul in 1926 and educated at Lycée of Galatasaray, Mimaroğlu "studied in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Center under Vladimir Ussachevsky" after his move to the US in the 60s. In 1971 he collaborated with Freddie Hubbard on the critically acclaimed "Sing Me a Song of Songmy: a Fantasy for Electromagnetic Tape". For his part, Mimaroğlu was rewarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. One assumes Mingus was himself impressed; there is no record that the decision to draft Mimaroğlu into service on "One" and "Two" was anything bar consensual.

Beginning in earnest in 1964 - with "Bowery Bum" (after an ink drawing by Jean Dubuffet, executed 12 years earlier) - Mimaroğlu's experimental compositions are simultaneously linear; collaged; perplexing. Founding the Finnadar label in 1973 as a conduit for both acoustic arrangements and his continuing experiments in stereo and quadraphonic sound, Atlantic bought over distribution of his back catalogue in 1981.

"Musique Noires", released in 1983, compiles - so far as I can gather - earlier "tape parts realized in the studios of Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center" overdubbed with traditional instrumentation and voice. In the following instance, with cello by Charles McCracken.

There. I just thought I'd hurl out a curved ball.

▼ İLHAN MIMAROĞLU: BOWERY BUM from "Face The Windmills, Turn Left" LP (Finnadar) 1976 (US)
▼ İLHAN MIMAROĞLU: STILL LIFE 1980 from "Musique Noires" LP (Finnadar) 1983 (US)

AVANT GARDE PROJECT 30

behind the nib of sleep

2011-01-05T23:21:00.021Z

This post has been amended, pending investigation into possible po-facedness.

Sleep. No, not the recumbent John Giorno from Warhol's 321 minute anti-film - premiering to nine people in total in a Manhattan loft on January 17th, 1964, two of whom fled within its first hour - but the absence of it. The dessication of self as bodily fluids coagulate. And major organs fail.

Tim Sullivan got me started thinking on it in an afterthought to his piece on horses; horseshit; bridles and bits. A trail of "secret creepo rays beaming out from Disneyland". This is not an attempt to distil his original meditation. More precisely, it was not so much sleep deprivation which was mentioned, as insight. Looming up through a tangible fog on wings which beat and dazzle. I sat down to brood over it, got up to pour a cup of instant coffee, and realized one cigarette was not about to get me through the night. My wife offered to set out for the shop, but I could not allow it.

Of the two of us, she has had less sleep by far. Her breasts are tender, her nipples chafed from our child's feeding, the whites of her eyes veined like cracked porcelain. Besides, it was I who made it first to the end of the pack.

I put on my shoes and walked up the street to the shop on the corner with my older son. Really, the shoes are no use at all in this weather. The snow melted some time between Christmas and the approach of a new year, but it has been raining constantly - a freezing drizzle - and the pavements are carpeted with municipal grit. A poor man's salt of the earth. And the road we must cross rises quite steeply, steeply enough that I have seen rivers washing over it. And the green light over the shop's canopy dispelling any kind of welcome as we near it. As dismal, maybe, as the bar in Venice Beach. Its proprietor seemingly despising all who purchase tobacco products or alcohol.

Glasgow is littered with this type of convenience store. Jaundiced shopkeepers irrately dispensing forbidden fruits to the infidel. And his children. In the event that we all succumb to a sudden rash of cancer, there is an alcohol dependency unit situated conveniently nearby; just to keep the cash register chirping.

So. I bought the cigarettes, my son paid for a bottle of chocolate milk, and we trudged back home to pick up where we left off.

Back to sleep, then. Or the rationing out of it through these lean times.

It is not a taxable commodity, I don't believe. Not yet. The rising tide of the clinically depressed may yet tip the scales in favour of a referendum on it, even chronic alcoholics habitually embrace it. Junkies, of course, are perpetually on the nod. And when the urge to hit at the keys is on the wane, I even put my monitor to bed.

It is an untapped market of huge potential. Only the FTSE never sleeps, now the tiger is awake.

Well. There is no Bill's Bar to bring one's woes to.

Even the best of them will chew you up and spit you out just as soon as the eyelids flutter; the fingers grope for pennies to shield the retina from the cold soaking glare. I cannot pretend to have amassed an ounce of advice worth a button. Not that anyone is asking. There is no respite. That's the truth of it. The soft tissues brittle over like crystallized syrup; the arteries harden and the blood becomes like ice. A redundant muscle with too much heavy traffic wheezing in and out.

The biggest sleep we've all been chasing.

Leaning in to it like skittles, squandering the passing of days as we suck it in and shit it out. Contorted monkies, finally, racing to the finish.

I forgot to mention.

An advertisment dropped through my letterbox today. Four figures in washed out black, the ink laid on sparingly as a mafioso's kiss, and not - as you have every right to second guess - the four horsemen of the apocalypse. "SINGING RESERVOIR DOGS WANTED" - looking just like the Walker Brothers, what are the odds ?

"FOR 1950s DOO WOP GROUP. WILL BE EXPECTED TO BUSK IN TOWN, SO AS TO LEARN TO ENTERTAIN FROM THE GROUND UP." No specific reference to burial, or promise of resurrection, but the allusion to it nonetheless. "YOU WILL RECEIVE AN EQUAL SHARE OF THE MONEY AND I WILL PAY EACH OF YOU £10 ON TOP OF THAT."

I could be tempted.

image by Pablo, 1933.

A nod, too, to Nathan Nothin's procurement of jam and "Jerusalem" as the veneer of democracy starts to fade, and to jonderneathica for supplying an invitation to the quietus.

▼ SLEEP: EVIL GYPSY / SOLOMON'S THEME from "Sleep's Holy Mountain" CD (Earache) 1992 (US)

fingers in the pies

2011-01-04T14:43:00.019Z

Antonio Prohías, 1961.

"A Ha to Doctor Johnson
Said Scipio Africanus
Lift up my Roman Petticoat
and kiss my *@!$! Anus"

- William Blake, Complete.

The following (quoted) piece first appeared the day preceding Hogmanay; under a different badge. I promptly reset it to draft, given my alarmism seemed a tad overblown.

In hindsight, I'm not so sure.

There exists a spate of reports out there documenting persons being locked out of their Google or Facebook accounts. Contact lists violated; emails circulating in the wild. The repercussions, when one pauses to reflect on it, are potentially grave enough to raise a code red. After months of plunging into the surf without a seatbelt, internet security is very much back on my agenda.

Legitimate concerns after the careless activation of a Java Applet.

Not content, then, on promoting catalepsy with my waxing lyrical on parenthood, I reinstate it now as a means of further cudgeling the casual wanderer onto the Bleachers. Or to merely propogate unwarranted dread.

"A curious thing happened on the way to the forum, today, to paraphrase Zero Mostel as Pseudolus.

Or Frankie Howerd. Chose your poison.

I was sitting in front of my portal to the world with the sound turned way down low and my browser open. My fly zippered. Out of sheer laziness, I left the tab logged into my Google account. Staring absentmindedly at the baby in my lap; daydreaming myself into a coma.

Well. An hour or two might have idled by. I did not notice whether the monitor drifted off to sleep. The grey afternoon licking at the window petered into twilight; the lamps up and down the close across the street stuttered awake like drunken fireflies. I could have leaned out to start a cigarette. I could have leaned out to start an argument, but nobody was listening.

I am still getting used to the change of water. A different sort of fishbowl entirely. If I ever move again it will be to a croft parked on the edge of a sheer cliff - a broken lighthouse - with nothing but glowering skies between me and the sea.

So. Mildly irrated at this slipping into genteel dotage without so much as a properly diagnosed seizure, I sidled my son into the crook of one arm and lunged at the keyboard for a timely interruption. I punched the volume up as far as it would go. And that's when I heard it. That's when I became aware of some kind of terrible intrusion.

At first I was tempted to dismiss it as a bad rip.

A sloppy stab at binary encoding.

I quit the file and the sound persisted. Keystrokes. F@ckin' keystrokes. Jamming away like a trio of ambidextrous Ukranian crooks. Or the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Dear lord.

Now, I am not so quick as to dismiss myself as wholly cretinous when it comes to desktop security. I have a modest grasp of the internet; those pitfalls to avoid. I laid my son in his crib and opened up my system preferences, navigated to sharing. Firewall on ? Check. No exceptions ? Check. Internet sharing off ? Check. Back to security. A cursory search to make sure passwords are enabled, then on to accounts.

The devious hacking of remote keys upped a gear and appeared to be reaching its crescendo.

I logged out of everything I could - force quit what I couldn't - restarted and ran a standard Symantec test for vulnerable ports; everything clean and stealthy. The keystroke noise, of course, had disippated. I logged into my router's firewall and closed down anything which did not seem essential. I did this, and I did that. Oh, yeah. So what.

Last, but by no means least, I logged back in to my Google account, changed the password, deleted an obsolete default email address, and made sure port forwarding was not enabled. Everything appeared to be as it should, bar the one lamentable oversight, which lay with the integrity of the original password itself, perhaps. A glaring error. Possibly.

Like Mr. Kurtz, at the atrophied epicentre of his heart of darkness, I have gotten lazy. Prone to infection and possession.

Like Marlon Brando in his precarious temple, I have gotten fat and routinely neglectful; complacent in the face of complexities. But not an inch too paranoid.

Apocalypse now ? Last tango in Partick, motherf@ckers."

postscript:

I habitually monitor downloads with Clam Xav; a freeware program. I monitor, too, inbound and outbound connections via the indispensable Little Snitch. As an added precaution, I installed Sophos Home Edition and scanned the entire volume for evidence of Trojans or Worms; in particular any DNS Changer which might have embedded itself somewhere in the directory. Nada. I also ran a subsequent fully authorised scan through a separate program to check for any Malware Sophos might have missed; specifically Keystroke Loggers. Nothing. Theories ? Spurious observations or informed conjecture ? Hit me with it. I'm all ears. Let me begin the new year with cigarette burns peppering the hood on my sweatshirt; a glass tumbler to bottle up the smoke.

the wrestler

2011-01-03T14:29:00.017Z

Of all those odd jumbles of vowels
my son brings with him to the world -
the gurgles; yelps; indian war whoops -
broken consonants, riddles, squawks,
the strangest by far is that piercing
screech; a squeal of brakes on a
dodge scraping the corner, hubcap
flapping, all this accompanied by tiny
fists flung out over each shoulder,
as he comes to in his crib, half drunk
on milk, one expression after another,
mouth yawning; lips smacking in
a perfect 'o'; forehead furrowed with
all that effort required just to break
wind, squeeze out a fart: a pistol shot.

It is an undecipherable conundrum.

The letting go of past lives, the
slipping of an old soul into a new shoe.
The lacing and interlacing of self,
eyelash and fingernail, an epic struggle.

There was a free thinker named Boehme,
much admired by the engraver, Blake.

"Man must be at war with himself,"
he wrote, "fighting must be the watch
word, not with tongue and sword,
but with mind and spirit, and not to
give over."

Peaceful soldier. Wrestling with tigers.

image from the comic book,
"Fiasco Bombasco", by Ive Sorocuk.

know your conjurer

2010-12-29T19:29:00.018Z

To those of you who looked no farther than the sacrificial goat, you left the feast empty bellied; to those of you who asked no more from pablo's danseurs than a festive showing, you missed a merry treat.

Squatters on the Bleachers - and there are a few - will be aware by now of my fixation on the astral unravellings of one Daevid Allen; the dark archipelago where hippie collided with punk in those eruptions from Planet Gong. The liaison was fittingly brief. It culminated with a startled Dingbat Alien fleeing passing searchlights - luminous burning spearings - to seek refuge in the bush; it ended with Mark Perry's ATV hijacking a free bus in the Here and Now.

In much the same anarchic spirit, Dave Sez of Know Your Conjurer - aided and abetted by pinkpressthreat - wassailed the house to alert me to a Megapost on some very hard to unearth gems from the band first formed in Ladbroke Grove in 1974. Never once in print jams and unreconstituted vinyl rips. Soundboard Recordings. What began as one man's labour of love seems to have escalated into something more deeply collaborative.

From who ? Where ?

Know Your Conjurer. From Pablo to Bosch. * * e d o * *.

This unforseen doffing of the - conical - cap took far longer to orchestrate than anticipated. A two fingered jab at the keys, and my dashing off to shake a knitted monkey over the crib. Lest I forget, I would like to say a brief hello to baby Cal, too, who entered the world to share his birthday with Stacia of Hawkwind just three short evenings ago. Glad tidings.

Three weeks on the heels of my own impossibly small son; Milo, the Sagittarian. Registered, at last, today.

Know your conjurer.

no reasön

2010-12-26T20:52:00.005Z

Recorded in Escape Studios, Kent, 1977; produced by Speedy "Thunderclap" Keen(e).

Written by Ian Kilminster.

▼ MOTÖRHEAD: MOTÖRHEAD from "Motörhead" LP (Chiswick) 1977 (UK)

pablo dillinger, on registering a birth

2010-12-22T00:04:00.015Z

A knife. A fork.

And the forceps not so small,
nothing remotely tidy,
or encircling in pentameter.

Two feet and a long syllable;
drawn out, redly yawning.

The cerci of an earwig.

This is not what immediately
occurred to me, or even after
the fact. The blood still
drying on my hams. The wailing.

And the young doctor's face:
contorted with the exertion
required to change a tire.
A 4x4. Something heavy hurtling.

I did not think to thank her until
much later, back in the corridor
between soda machine and bins.
Fearing the worst and hindsight.

A knife. A fork.

Not to spell apple, but application.
Raw, dispassionate intervening force.

I do not remember if I did - thank
her - at this late stage. Not formally.

A smile. A nod. That is properly
the size of it; wan, if not quite
hostile. The fleeting discomfit of a
husband discharged. Discarding
gown and overshoes in sanitary
fashion. Dishevelled. Irritable.

And yet. I threw my arms around
the midwife while they weighed
my son, thankfully she did not
think to escape. Imagine the
effrontery. The potential for sheer
awkwardness; "you crazy fool !"
my wife chiding, from the stirrups.

A knife. A fork.

And the forceps not so small,
but my son a rosy bundle,
scalded and petulant; mewling.

illustration from Picasso's "pichet tête"
(1953); partial glaze on white ceramic.

three minutes to three, december 6th

2010-12-07T13:37:00.031Z

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The encroaching murmur of sleigh bells.

The due date came and went as the ice fastened and snow drifted. On our trip to the bus stop for what was officially our last antenatal appointment, all that was missing was the donkey. Magi. Three wise men overtaking us by taxi.

The wait was crippling. Or seemed so, as Scorpio fell under the centaur's arrow. And the great goat Pan up to his midriff in dirty slush; spotting by his elbow.

Whittled by uncertainty, all semblance of resolution gone in a puff of smoke, I found myself slyly coveting a random assortment of 70cl bottles on supermarket shelves. Impervious to cajoling, not one absconded in my basket. Fairweather friends. Down to the grain.

The scales stalled at tipping point. Worse, the scales sat empty.

A pregnant pause. A timing of contractions.

Well. Something had to give. The bump was having none of it, the hospital did not want to know.

"Keep an eye on those contractions, you'll know soon enough," the midwife on the line pronounced. She might easily have been an imposter. A mental patient stopping by the desk to pick up the phone.

A falsetto brute with pharmaceutically doctored balls.

Another Saturday came and went. Blanched under two feet of snow. And the madman downstairs, stamping his feet at one AM; belting out "The Sash my Father Wore". I wanted to burst him good, the unenlightened orange balloon.

I took to eavesdropping on Holy Warbles. I was too unnerved by then to even leave a comment. The Holly and the Ivy.

Pascal Comelade is a Frenchman by birth. A Catalonian by calling.

On Sunday afternoon, I was dipping into his Haikus. I pulled out "Put a Straw Under Baby" and cranked up the volume on the PC's wheezing internal speakers. So far as I was able. This apple is so elderly, it ought to have fermented into cider. Acid green and volatile. I have wanted to euthanize my disagreeable neighbour under King Tubby's dubby boom for some weeks now, but our living room echoes like the chilly wooden benches of a Siberian train station, and I have not had the heart to hard wire the woofers out of their box. The patience.

We are in limbo.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," my wife cried out. "My waters have broken! Get me up before I ruin the couch."

On arrival at the hospital she was five centimetres dilated. By 8PM, she was fully dilated and the midwives were convinced she would breathe our baby out by suppertime. Debbie and Lauren. I warmed to them almost immediately.

In my limited experience, midwives are a grounded lot. Where consultants - even nurses - routinely grate or inflame, midwives are the exception. Of course, we had time enough to establish a rapport.

It was not an entirely easy birth, though. Let me attest to that.

By 12:30 AM, as December 5th slipped into the 6th, it became alarmingly clear that my wife was not going to breathe our baby out without some kind of clinical intervention. I am ashamed to confess that after eight hours of attending her labour, I was beginning to tire. My wife kept pushing, and I kept pushing my wife.

Faintly tetchy. Craving the nicotine.

I wanted some of that diamorphine to myself.

By 1:30 AM, the decision was made to move her into theatre. I made my way down through the warren of deserted corridors for a cigarette and a lungful of freezing air while she was prepped, then put on the mandatory ridiculous hat, overshoes and gown. The old hospital is an eerie place at the best of times. The Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The Maternity Unit is a recent addition, but late on Sunday night through Monday morning, most of its wings are locked off and only the most persistant of housebreakers can negotiate admission.

Orderlies and porters are nowhere to be seen, if they retain earthly form at all.

I have visited aged relatives on their deathbeds in there; deep in the bowels of the old building. I have had wounds treated in its accident and emergency unit. Like many people, I have an aversion to hospitals in general. I care for this one even less.

It was a forceps delivery when it came right down to it.

Our son was heaved into an alien world full of halogen lights, scrubs and strange voices at three minutes to three on Monday, the sixth of December. As cleanly as I could muster, I cut the umbilical cord and placed him on his mother's chest.

Skin to skin.

He is a brave little thing, his cheeks a little marred from the steel of the instrument which was used to pry him from his mother's womb. I am told this will certainly fade. With time.

His eyes were quick to seize on mine when I spoke to him and cradled him in my arms. The tiniest bit unfocused at first, awake and mildly curious.

He has yet to grow into a name, my youngest son. Waiting on the whisper.

▼ PASCAL COMELADE: PUT A STRAW UNDER BABY from "Haïkus de Piano" LP & CD (Les Disques du Soleil et de L'Acier / Eva Records) 1992 (France)

neville brand ate all the flies | the five gates to hell

2010-11-17T12:57:00.020Z

"I'm a Buddhist. In case of an emergency call a Lama.”
- Col. Vincent Kane

The fly had been following the end of my brush for close to two days, flitting from room to room like a ball of lint on rotor blades.

I do not care for flies. Houseflies; blowflies; bluebottles. Calliphoridae. Like something decaying off the coast.

Where I might nudge a spider gently on its way - to scuttle under the bed, or abseil behind a door - I have little patience for the fly. The karmic goodwill runs thin. The stingiest dribble of undercoat.

So. After experimenting overnight with a dose of Quick Dry Satin - the ninth configuration of synthetic finishes - I observed enough shredding around the jambs to prompt me to opt instead for an oil-based eggshell. The drying time is a killer, 18 to 24 hours over an offending battleship grey, and all of it an unsightly stippled gloss.

The antichrist of painting and decorating.

I was on the second coat, having walked on down the hall, to where the ghost of a toy tugboat floated face down in the bathtub, when the insect which had been tailing me hovered up and alighted right of frame. I did not miss a beat. Anchored in the greasy slick, the brush caught up with it easily. Swept straight over it. Airbrushed out with a bubblegum pop; a napalm kiss on celulloid.

And what became of Neville Brand ? Lee Marvin’s thuggier twin.

I would not mention the incident with the fly if it did not bother me. Just a little.

Slow witted and lazily sculpted, Brand bristled with the neanderthal menace of the faintly retarded or simply psychotic. A slack jawed insouciance melting into bulging eye and pit bull leer on the turn of a sixpence. Or the onset of a stroke.

Neville Brand wore sharp suits and Brylcreemed hair. His face hewn blunt. Liver lipped. Itching to be cut by a cornerman with trembling hands between the 6th and 7th round.

In truth, I planted both feet heavy in the schoolyard bully’s shoes when I flattened that fly. Smeared on the door with the cigarette fastened between my teeth. I was irritable. Tired. Bitten by self-pity.

In bad need of a slave.

But wait. Killer Kane. Boyd, not Arthur. And several times removed from Stacy’s Colonel.

Neville Brand was no simple bad boy bum. Weighing in for a preliminary bout in Griswold, Iowa, and cremated in Sacramento, his nine times decorated army grunt was D.O.A. from the first. Painted into a corner, I contest, as the result of Dutch and Celtic ancestry. The white heat of Illinois steel.

Typecast by villainous hacks - the revolving door of misplaced mediocrity - the former shoe salesman turned Warner Bros. stooge traded bleeding out by the Weser River for an afterlife of two bit parts.

Sometimes shiny as a quarter in the gutter. Often overlooked.

“I’m a loser! I’m a loser!” he cried, but the truth was far from that.

Scant regard is given the 30,000 books reportedly amassed between petulant acts of cruelty; teased out of acting classes paid for through the G.I. Bill. The raging thirst to distance himself from understudy. Shadow.

“Let me out! Let me out!” he sang.

And all the while the whiskey and remorse. The inability to rearrange at sub molecular level: to set the atoms dancing; to walk - as Captain Fairbanks yearned to - between and through the impenetrable. Walls and floors.

Buttresses.

I have no idea if Neville Brand ever flirted with Buddhism. Perhaps. I suspect not. Myself, I have only used the term emphatically when laid up in a hospital bed. Just to see the charge nurse stiffen.

The closer I peer into cracks and examine those hairline fissures tumbling off into chasms, the weaker my resolve becomes. An endless cycle of filling and painting. Sanding. Immersing bristle and forearm in litre upon litre of turpentine substitute.

It was emphysema which did for him in the end. And the library all up in flames.

Still. The fly is my concern alone. All this chatter of Neville Brand and Hollywood is just so much passing the buck.

Well. It could be worse. Don't ever get me started on the time I aimed a .22 at a crow on the lamb and missed.

calling cllct

2010-11-02T18:36:00.009Z

Why. Those unholy Oreaganomics get better and unrulier by the minute.

Straight from the lips of lapsed ordainment:

"We had to mortgage our soul to Satan to get it done & I know you'll like it
(That's a promise right from the "source")."

What's not to like ?

Late last week with the rain coming down heavy - the pavements along the Crow Road laced with black puddles - I hunched out through the spray of taxi cabs for rent in search of Jim Beam or an iced Jack watered down with Pepsi. My head was pounding.

Our house felt small. In need of a lick of paint. And the varnish was burning in my nostrils.

I fell through the saloon doors and bruised the rail along the bar. The ceiling was high. Pocked with little glass lanterns glowing like whiteheads on the brow of a passed out whore (Hubert might have observed). A trio of jazzmen were two fingers in to the last number of their set. The vocalist sat it out. A glass of stout on the table in front of her and her knees together, tidily.

An empty house. And the keyboard player refusing to let it needle him too much. The drummer laying on some syncopated flourishes with delicious irony.

I finished my first just as they wound it down for the eight o' clock wave of serious spenders. The lights did not go up or down any. A smattering of dry applause. Drowned by the splash of mixer straight into a tumbler two dripping raincoats along.

And that was their cue.

Milton Ager and Jack Yellen. Chasing rainbows. "Happy Days are Here Again".

It was a sterling snook of tumultous wonder, let me tell you. All that was missing was a pint size plastic uke.

If I had a kazoo I'd have whipped it out my pocket. As it was, I turned and clapped my hands together and caught the heel of one shoe on the trailing hem of my pants.

I would like to believe Oreaganomics might have enjoyed a warmer reception. An Acapulco ovation in the last resort. They are deserving of such. "Hand Turkey", as they promise, is the unreconstituted stuff of leg-end. A refusal to be stymied; blindsided; bluffed.

God bless them.

▼ OREAGANOMICS: GHOST TOWN GENERATION from the forthcoming "Hand Turkey" LP / CD (CLLCT) 2010 (US)

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD ON AN EMPTY HOUSE RUSE

another council tenancy < slight return >

2010-10-31T17:23:00.026Z

So. Here we are, then. Surrounded by a jumble of unopened boxes still, the lingering itch from a hastily amputated limb.

We packed the parachute before we leapt and slammed into the ground running.

The pregnant one rode out ahead of the marital bed, while I scuttled back and forth between floors and jettisoned all that seemed feasible. We reunited amidst a coil of soldering wire and commenced our tenancy before the school bells sprang a chime.

It took three weeks for an engineer to arrive and connect our phone. Another seven days before a replacement in overalls could be dispatched to correct the overlooked fault.

The line had shredded in its yellowed plastic jacket some time in the previous forty years. Between telegraph pole and bedroom window. And while the signal was intermittent, my ire at placing calls cloaked in crackle and drag was anything but. In these days of fibre optic cable - telecoms cabinets on every street corner - I had assumed those slowly rotting timbers were surely decorative. The second engineer resembled a hungover Glen Campbell in hard hat karaoke as I watched him emerge from the foliage by way of a steel ladder.

One clear October day before the ritual carving of the pumpkin.

Well. The DSL lamp is awake and constant now. Touch wood. The connection is made. It is altogether quieter out west here on the river. Too quiet, perhaps. Though the soundproofing is dreadful, it is as if our neighbours have adapted to this intrusion on their privacy by bedding down shortly after 10PM. If one strains one's ear - even marginally - one can follow a whispered conversation almost word for word. The floorboards squeak above our heads; below our feet.

I find myself pining at times for the dysfunctional pattern of muddling by on the 22nd floor. Insulated by concrete. The asbestos which erupted in a mushroom cloud when they brought our sibling crashing to its knees.

We snuck back on the subway to watch it coming down. They evacuated our old building, of course, but I spoke to a neighbour who barricaded himself in bed and rolled one fat one after another. Just to brace himself against the bang.

The klaxon sounded as we rode the escalator up to ground zero.

We were a street away when the detonators blew, three in quick succession. Shakin' Street. The MC5. The dust was all enveloping. It followed us as we crossed back over the river and clung to ligaments along the bridge and burrowed down into our throats.

Our noses were furred. The children's hair prematurely grey.

Overnight, I developed a hacking bronchial cough; aggravated by my digging into the floorboards at our new address with a ridiculous detail sander fit for windowsills and skirting boards at best. And the cigarettes. Always the cigarettes. Taxed to the butt from recession through depression.

The staple diet of the institutionalized and soon to be interred.

I will get used to the sudden quiet, I expect. Already I am lulled by it on early mornings when the rain falls like rustling paper where once it stuck like an angry slap. A wet towel or a razor strop.

The rest is likely errant nostalgia. A character defect.

Vic Godard: vocals;

MarkBraby (previously Sidi Bou Said): bass, acoustic guitar;

KevinYounger (Armitage Shanks): guitar, piano; organ;

GaryAinge (Felt/Gokart Mozart): drums, percussion.

Special Guest: Paul Cook on drums and percussion;

Guest Backing Vocalist: Simon Rivers.

Recordedby Jon Clayton at One Cat Studios South London,

Mastered by Dallas Masters.

Mixed and Produced by Jon Clayton and Vic Godard.

The ‘We Come as Aliens’ Tour kicks off with a couple of dates in Catalonia on 8th October,

The John Peel Festival Koln on 23rd, then Munster, Berlin, Hamburg,and Hanover 4-7 November.
Candy Apple red glass globe shade available from SeaGullLighting for $51.99,
Subway Sect's "We Come As Aliens" for considerably less.

▼ SUBWAY SECT: OUT OF OUR ZONE from "We Come As Aliens" CD / Ltd Edition Vinyl (Overground Records / GNU) 2010 (UK)

long time no jeer

2010-09-22T22:20:00.010+01:00

Fiends; roamings; scribblings.

Let me begin, before apologising for my protracted absence, by stalling just long enough to ease a splinter from my eye. Gingerly now. A sliver of pine; an inch of sixty year old plaster.

There has been no motorcycle accident. I am not in traction. Nor have I succumbed to a bout of leather veined blackness.

Neither have I jumped ship in the dead of night to throw in my lot with the ghost of Tubby. A bullet riddled bulwark floating just off the coast of a sinking isle.

The waters are a little choppy, but the sailing is fair. Or promises to turn so once we negiotiate the dog leg. Her majesty's cannon.

There is a smell of tar and feather in the air. The ship's cat whipped and tethered to the mast.

Nine tales untold, or merely rudely stuttered.

The inky twin tower paired with ours is resigned to demolition, hobbled and bandaged and its windows gouged out. It will be blown to its foundations the first week into October; more trouble and rust.

Enough is enough.

My wife is seven months gone already - pregnant, I mean - and the case for celebration has been tempered with anxiety. We are moving. We are in the process of moving. West of the Gorbals, north of the river. We are leaving behind a blueprint of regeneration before the dust settles. Before late autumn winds gather their breath through the fall.

I am somewhat old to be starting out as a father again. I have had some practice.

The overture to a new tenancy came quite out of the blue.

It would have been churlish to refuse. Unhinged. We are trading two up in a tenement for a 22nd storey shuttle diplomacy accessible only in a steel cage. There are few seagulls where we are going, though we are close to a still functioning shipyard or two. The tenements are too squat to easily confuse with a crumbling sheer face to nest.

Where there are rats, I have glimpsed only brazen squirrels.

Of course, there remain tiny piercing doubts; at the best of times, I can scarcely put one foot in front of the other. I have invested eleven years in this grim place. Close to a life sentence, under British law.

And. I am a Taurean. My neck bristles with territorial huff.

My son took his first steps here. I will miss the uninterrupted view, even though the windows leak.

Our soon to be home needs a lot of work.

Every sheet of paper peeled away reveals an old disaster. Twice I have nearly crashed through the floorboards. I dragged 10 litres of paint through the door only to discover I had misread the label. I live in constant fear that we will not be able to meet removal costs.

Like James Brown speeding out of blacktop, I wake up at 3 AM in a cold sweat. If you have survived the horror and suspense of awaing a decision on a DWP funded Budgeting Loan you will doubtless know the script.

Some things never change.

Still, I am reeling at our good fortune. This is as close to humble as I can bear to err. I am nothing if not not a cautious motherf@cker.

So. Finally. Apologies to all those good people whose e-mails I have conscientiously avoided if not quite ignored. Audio submissions and manual labour. The deaf log is hallucinatory. Nothing is lost, I trust; no trust has been irretrievably fractured.

Let us repair. Without a surly Van.

I may lose my connection for a period, I almost certainly shall.

In the meantime, I leave you temporarily in the capable hands of sibling, Alexis Blondel. Of Year Zero. He stubbed his toe on the bleachers quite by accident.

"Sound Iration in Dub" - the digital brainchild of Nick "Manasseh" Raphael and Scruff, aka Steve Gilder - was originally released in 1989 through WAU! Mr. Modo Records; a fledgling collaboration between Youth - of Killing Joke - and The Orb's Dr. Alex Paterson.

Little Youth, if you catch my drift.

In 2010 it was reissued on a double CD, compiling 14 previously unreleased demos. Alexis informs me it is slated to make its second appearance on (180 gram) vinyl later this month. For audio purists.

You can eavesdrop on more samples via Sound Cloud, here.

Stay tuned for further - wholly erratic - transmissions.

An occasional table in transit.

▼ SOUND IRATION: MELODY ROOTS (PART 1) from "Sound Iration in Dub" LP / 2 x CD (WAU! Mr. Modo Records / Year Zero) 1989 / 2010 (UK)

augustus pablo swaby paints

2010-08-26T21:46:00.007+01:00

kingston, 1976, photographer unknown.

Overtaken by a weakness to bludgeon the house senseless with a royal flush of dubs, the bleachers echo with the whisper of melodica.

From 10PM to 5AM, its disinfected concrete steps slump tiredly. A stomach emptied. Hosed down with cobalt blue.

Tubular rails faintly thrumming.

A late August cough nudging silver wrappers. A polystyrene cup impaled on a straw.

By 1AM, the sirens falter. Subside to a wheeze. The hammers to the south bed down in a pulse.

Pablo never sleeps. Not really. The quiet he inhabits are those spaces between sinew and joint. The dials twitch. The tape rolls. Spooling behind eyelids, the fluttering of moths. East of the Nile. A mile upstream.

The engineering is not so critical as the end result. Chin to midrift. Thickening to a river.

Tubby.

Augustus Pablo started out as an anonymous outpouring, a splash from a carafe, a water bearer.

As with Miles, the climate is tertiary. Around it. Through it. To it.

Written and produced by Horace Swaby.

Mixed by King Tubby.

▼ AUGUSTUS PABLO: CHAPTER 2 from "East Of The River Nile" LP (Message) 1977 (Jamaica)

a sanitary riot

2010-08-26T09:37:00.005+01:00

On threading our rented trolley
between the aisles of a supermarket,

we acquired a bottle of bath oil.

As one does.

"Revive & Restore", the label advises.
Very calming. Very restive.
When one is prone, susceptible.

It prompts the smoke detector to howl
everytime we pour a bath.
It triggers a bout of anxious scrabbling.

The effect is less than therapeutic.

Sandalwood, surely, is quite innocuous,
a dash or two of an essential tear.

The pepper spray is an alarming twist.

the ponderosa and the ark of the weak heart

2010-08-25T14:24:00.021+01:00

Twenty-two floors above, the green JCBs resemble not so much a rise of the machines as their last bronchial rattle. Scrabbling in the dirt for purchase. Listing drunkly like a man with motor neuron disease. Clinging to employment.

The blueprints for fuel efficient housing will be rolled out where they are needed least, I suspect.

They will not be built round here - not in my lifetime, at any rate - nor in those mountainous rural backwaters to the east, where every last penny of huminatarian aid is siphoned to stem a tide of mainiacs squatting behind RPGs.

Or to line the pockets of a few bent shopkeepers.

At present, those compact intended domiciles exist only as a byproduct of social etiquette. I am supposed to peer out my window and enthuse.

"Oh! What an excellent idea! How nice to see all those young men doing something constructive at last."

Instead, I am having none of it.

The solar panels look splendid. The clay brick and whitewashed wall. When the 4x4s eventually pour in behind the fence with offers, those same young men will hurry back to their street corners. Their leaky tenements and blistered detention zones. Brewing milky teas over toast while they huddle in pyjamas.

A scrum of newspapermen will descend on them with cameras - to take their picture as a local concilor rumbles into a microphone and hands out diplomas - and the instant will immediately be interred.

They will tear down the two little houses they have built. Harvest its parts for organ transplant.

They will lay polythene sheeting over the supparating foundations to prepare the space for a car park.

They will chisel and gouge and my contorted face will be at the window still. A little more lined, simian. A monkey. A nun. A sentinel fed by tubes.

A stain.

Gradually fading away to nothing like a sun bleached snapshot. A splash of urine drying in the crotch of a mildly befuddled hospital patient.

There will be no spontaneous protest which has not first been vetted three times over by the politically correct. The first out of the trenches will be mown down as they fumble for the switch on an antique bullhorn. The ones idling just behind will obediently fall back to their beds.

The nursey is what we know. Sand. Gravel. We fasten to its smoke and mirrors even as the generators fail.

Postscript:
The LP which came to be known among collectors as "E-E Saw Dub" - twelve original Jacob Miller riddims mixed and overdubbed by King Tubby at his Waterhouse studio - was a paper sleeve only limited release, mislabelled as Earl Zero's "City of the Weak Heart". Recorded at Randy's and Joe Gibbs, and produced by Ian and Roger Lewis of Inner Circle, these dubs are celebrated in no small part as the result of quite innovative techniques involving synth patterns overlaid by IC keyboardist, Bernard 'Touter' Harvey and enhanced by Tubby.

"Ghetto On Fyah Dub", too, specifically brings Augustus Pablo's contribution centre stage.

While the original vinyl release is much coveted and fetches exorbitant prices at market, the LP was subsequently reissued in digital format - with two bonus cuts - as "King Tubby Meets Jacob Miller in a Tenement Yard" through the independent UK label, Motion Records, active between 1996 and 2007.

Horsemouth Wallace & Santa Davis: drums and percussion;

Ian Lewis: bass guitar;

Chinna & Michael Chung & Roger Lewis: guitar;

Bernard "Touter" Harvey: keyboards and synthesizer;
Augustus Pablo: xylophone.

▼ JACOB MILLER / INNER CIRCLE (FAT MAN RIDDIM SECTION): GHETTO ON FYAH DUB from "E-E Saw Dub" 12" / LP (E-E Saw) 1975 (Jamaica)

royal dub pretender, phase ii

2010-08-18T17:48:00.022+01:00

One more dub from Kingston 11.

"His Majesty's Dub" - produced and arranged by Jah Woosh - was variously recorded at Channel 1, Joe Gibbs and Randy's with The Revolutionaries before the reels were taxied over to Tubby's for mixing. On the back of a motorcycle.

Dillinger was far from uptight. At Black Ark, it was business as usual.

Lloyd James and Tubby steal top bill on this release, although Errol Thompson in his role as engineer at Joe Gibbs Studio and Lancelot "Maxie" McKenzie for Channel 1 deserve joint credit. A huge fat blunt. Oiled and smoking.

This particular dub, with all its off kilter eccentricities is a particular highlight, I feel. "Throne of Judgement" is often cited as the riotous jewel in the crown, garnering accolades for its thunderous drum rolls and momentous foreboding, but this one is whacked out joyful. Or just plain daft.

Lloyd James first lit up a studio at the home of his in-laws in Waterhouse, Kingston 11 some time in the mid seventies. A sound system veteran, he learned his trade operating an electrical repair shop from his mother's house in the late 1960s. When an opening was peeled back from the kerb at Tubby's place in Dromilly Avenue, just around the corner, Jammy leapt at the chance.

The district of Waterhouse was alive with cable and valve; a solid state tower built from the ground up, straight off the grid.

By 1977, the prince graduated from mixing and engineering to full scale production on Black Uhuru's "Love Crisis". A major player in the evolution of dub from analogue to those entirely digital rhythms and effects adopted in the 80s, this dub illustrates to what outlandish degree the chicken predated the egg.

"His Majesty's Dub" was eventually reissued through Original Music, a label established by Jah Woosh in 1989 as a vehicle for his own back catalogue and various related productions.

Save me from the dancehall. I don't got the stamina nor stomach for it no more.

▼ PRINCE TUBBY V KING JAMMY: JAH WORKS from "His Majesty's Dub" LP (Sky Juice) 1976 (Jamaica)

22 unM4SKed

2010-08-17T15:39:00.006+01:00

"the hollows" by simon woolham. biro on paper, 2008.

Honest to Christ, that drill.

A machine gun rattling in its pillbox. Stalling ocasionally, the bit overheated, encased in concrete. Starting up again in earnest before one can catch one's breath.

At 3 AM, I rolled off the futon to close the windows. Hobbled into the kitchen to slam both catches when it occurred to me the noise had merely jumped channels in a stereophonic assault.

The demolition is ongoing. Every morning, too, entire new sections of the M74 have been bolted into place.

The shoemaker's elves spit rivets all through the night.

And speaking of drills, it would appear I have missed a dental appointment. I am forced to grovel to avoid a fixed penalty.

As if losing one's teeth is not punishment enough.

M4SK 22 - a collision of postcodes - is an experimental project fusing input from artists Simon Woolham and David Moss. They met in Manchester in the mid 90s, but did not begin making music together until January, this year.

"We make music and videos as products which we work on furiously, then we put them out online and move on to the next idea."

There is no obvious manifesto. Working remotely on passages traded via the internet, each bends the material as the moment dictates; throwing out a curve and letting it float. Simon is a renowned visual artist, David makes music and film. Their product is tested on M4SK 22.

"The Spindle of the Dowie Dens" began as a guitar part recorded by Woolham, with additional strings - piano and more guitar - overdubbed by Moss and relayed back. Moss was keen to to evoke a sense of traditional Scots and Irish melody familiar to him from childhood, and Woolham responded with a spoken word narrative shaped by recurring themes in his drawings and installations.

Looting archived public domain film footage, Moss then developed a short animated visual sequence incorporating stock elements of George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". Musically, the end product is faintly claustrophobic. Full of echoes. Reeds. Inkeeping with the historic ballad which in part informs it, a rhyme of the Yarrow Water running through the Scottish borders. Collected in 18 variations in Francis James Child's "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads", first published in ten volumes between 1892-8.

"The Spindle of the Dowie Dens" drags one out of the past by the scruff of a cigarette burned anorak.

Into the nettles growing through the inner tubes of bicycle tyres a child might paint as snakes. Discarded bottles of Buckfast Tonic.

Of course, nothing is linear. Or quite so transparent.

M4SK 22 aim eventually to commit to a series of live performance. Until then, by far the best way to familiarize yourself with their sometimes challenging product is to visit the archive direct.

▼ M4SK 22: THE SPINDLE FROM THE DOWIE DENS from "M4SK 22: The Screen We Face is the Primitive Mask of a Global Society " MP3 / Multimedia (M4SK 22) 2010 (UK)

banksy may, or may not, have been here

2010-08-15T19:53:00.006+01:00

Well. The origin of this post - the inclusion of this one song here, at least - is convoluted and curious. A matter of chance. Straightened roots. Jonderneathica - from Underneathica - certainly provoked, in part, this latest slide into phase 2 of the dub. With timely intervention and nod to Ari Up's mischievous association with On-U-Sound. Her continuing adventure in a black market cut. The role of Keith Levene in aiding and abetting.

And then, more specifically, there was the matter of my friend, Jon - the other Jon, the New Jersey refugee with Tillie from Asbury Park still breathing in his armpit - and his very recent account of how "Staggering Heights" provided lucid relief from "too much liquor, guns, drugs, unhappy girls, poverty and small town life."

Or absolute surrender to a script straight out of "comedy central".

I did not recognise the sleeve. I did not stop to measure up, or try on the jacket.

In fact, were it not for yet more coincidence - the "Copper Shot Dub" of Roots Radic on a passing bus - I might have never made the connection. And that would be an abysmal shame.

Recording "War of Words" for Adrian Maxwell Sherwood's London label in late '81, proto dub syndicate, Singers and Players was - loosely - a collaboration between various musicians formed out of celebrated Kingston session players, Roots Radics, and top flight superstars including Prince Far I, Bim Sherman, Mikey Dread. Guitarist, Eric "Bingy" Lamont and bassman, Errol "Flabba" Holt were seasoned professionals; contributing to a string of dance hall hits as part of Channel One house band, The Revolutionaries. Half a decade before the the departure of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare prompted a change of identity, if not direction.

The On-U-Sound back catalogue, mirroring those Kingston launched imprints Sherwood coveted, is an impenetrable tangle of poorly indexed releases. Myriad pressings. Mixes. Much of it, allegedly, incompletely represented in later compilations.

Sherman's "World of Dispensation" from "War of Words" - released through Ed Bahlman's NYC based 99 Records in the US - would be reprised on the dub, "Resolution (Part 2)" on the On-U-Sound sequel, "Revenge of the Underdog" in early '82, but by 1983 Ashanti Roy - formerly of The Congos - brought a wholly lighter flavour to the table.

While the resulting "Staggering Heights" may be fondly remembered for Far I's splendid and fanciful, "Bedward the Flying Preacher", or Roy's "African Blood" - issued as an appetizer ahead of the LP - closer inspection reveals the following song to be something of a show stealer. Stripped to the bone and fleet of heel.

Gamely dodging bullets. Bouncing over cracks. Like The Clash shadowing Junior Murvin after a bright summer's drinking in the park.

And that is probably exactly how one should hear it, on balance. On a boombox. A ghetto blaster. Not basking in the shade in front of a finger smeared monitor on a Sunday afternoon, fatigued from god knows what or when. The bass tuned out a little, the brilliance of clarity dimmed by a yellowing blind.

Still. I made it to the supermarket. The chilled aisles packed either side with exotic fruits and choice meats. I bought a mango. I smoked two or three cigarettes between underground rides; I endowed my default browser with a new persona; I tidied my desktop.

I watered an orchid.

The skies are ablaze. I will share the mango when it has ripened on the window sill. The cigarettes I could do without, but can't.

Written and sung by Roydel Johnson.

▼ SINGERS AND PLAYERS: SNIPERS IN THE STREET from "Staggering Heights" LP (On-U-Sound) 1983 (UK)

on the route of the 19 bus, again | a detour

2010-08-13T17:18:00.002+01:00

Recorded sometime in the 1980s, the rythym track behind this dub appears to have been laid down by either the Midnight Rock Crew or Roots Radics; at Channel 1, Harry J's, or Dynamic Sound in Kingston, W1. The precise location is not so much shrouded in mystery, as clouded - I suspect - by amnesia.

Produced and arranged by Nkrumah "Jah" Thomas, the magic ingredient - of course - could only have been procured from one source. King Tubby's Home Town Hi-Fi. Never an exact science, despite what the label might read, Overton Brown cannot be faulted in his supporting role here as sorcerer's apprentice.

In the course of these burning sounds - compiling, in the main, compositions from Thomas - Tubby keeps the dub deep n' loaded, while Scientist's occasionally irritating electronic flourishes never truly underwhelm the mix.

Their take on "Copper Shot", penned by Don Drummond Jr. and Tommy McCook, is for me the highlight in a wholly decent set.

Leaving even "Ghetto Dub" face down in the dirt. Like so many empty bottles.

▼ KING TUBBY & SCIENTIST: COPPER SHOT DUB (MUSIC IS MY OCCUPATION) from "King Tubby's Meets Scientist at Dub Station" LP & CD (Burning Sounds) 1996 (Jamaica)

attack of the rabbit hole

2010-08-13T10:48:00.001+01:00

Produced by Bunny Lee. Written by Bunny Lee.

heh, heh, heh

▼ PRINCE JAZZBO: THE WORMER from "The Wormer b/w The Great Pablo" 45 (Attack) 1976 (Jamaica / UK)

out of the fish, a dark crocus emerges

2010-08-11T22:04:00.008+01:00

According to those annals curated by Ubu Projex, Proto Pere stole under the wire into what was soon to become Ubuttoir De Facto in the city of South Euclid, Ohio sometime in late 1975. Therein seeding the earliest documented shoots of their "Heart of Darkness".

While drummer, Scott Krauss shares writing credit on its definitive coupling with "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" - released on Hearthen (Hearpen) in that same year - the dress rehearsal is anchored solely by Tim Wright's bass; the shadowy weight of an exploratory craft set adrift with one hand pummelling on its rotten hull.

Quite what the cargo is, or where it is going, is subject to conjecture.

Undecided. Agitated. It sails drunkenly on stagnant, uncharted waters.

Underlining Conrad; foul orchids; the potential for misdirected violence.

In its protean form, it remained unreleased until its appearance on the terminal drive of Cooking Vinyl's "Datapanik in the Year Zero" some twenty-one years later. Its direct descendant, more than any other offering from Pere Ubu, perfectly anticipates the concrete chambers and valves of Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures". Muscle and tendon infused with lead.

Peter Laughner is restrained. Strung out. Focused. Pere Ubu, a coiled tuberous corm.

In one song - one might reasonably claim - stocking a reservoir of refracted dystopia for years to come.

Well. We have been here before, you will doubtless recall. I am infected with the unfolding of the crocus still:

"At times a virus infected spider scrabbling over shards of brittle glass, at others a bleak mushrooming nerve agent, the corpulent presence of Thomas and the nihilistic but hugely inventive experimental tones created by Laughner coalesced into a cold blue flame licking out broken windows in the seedy bars of Cleveland to ignite pockets of interest outwith even America."

That Pere Ubu's earliest Cleveland recordings continue to elicit fascination owes much to Laughner's part in the group dynamic, of course, but does not alone explain it. Those nutrients percolating down into the basement propelled Ubu out of the tombs into the blank triumph of "The Modern Dance" and beyond. Peter Laughner's tragic demise was a wound which Pere Ubu survived. In those days before David Thomas chased out Vachel Lindsay, or outwardly bore witness to Kingdom Hall, the forces which galvanized him seemed not so much biblical as tainted by universal pollutants.

Vietnam. Recession. Listlessness. Fright.

The interment of an irrational optimism which flourished briefly in the 1960s.

Much of the time, I find myself not so much in disagreement with any dire prognosis, as simply astonished that one day continues to follow on the last; an endless succession of crisis and war - disorder - a flipbook animation of human distemper travelling all the way back to Adam and Eve.

One holocaust after another.

So. Same as it ever was. A tangle of angels and words. Jihadi. Pulchritude.

Mortal combat.

Endurance of the human condition through procreation rather than spiritual rebirth.

The 'p' in Hearpan might be Anglo-Saxon for 'th' - the whole a harp or lyre - but I hear mostly moist flutterings. A deluge of insects.

David Thomas: vocals; Peter Laughner: guitar;

Tim Wright: bass; Dave Taylor: EML synthesizer.

▼ PERE UBU : HEART OF DARKNESS (REHEARSAL) from "Disc V: Terminal Drive: Rarities (Datapanik In The Year Zero)" 5 x CD (Cooking Vinyl) 1996 (US)

white socks | lost in laundry

2010-08-08T16:17:00.014+01:00

Just over a year ago, you may recall, I featured a still from photographer, Wayzata Camerone's 'Glendale Series' after stumbling on an enlightening piece on Nothin' Says Somethin'.

Most people, I suspect - passing familiar with Camerone - will remember him as feverish vocalist and player with white L.A. rioters, The Braniacs. Nathan Nothin' also recalls that he ran a "notorious afterhours punk club frequented by X, Blasters, Plugx, Go-Go’s, Fear, Weirdos"; a rotating cast now almost as noirishly delinquent as 1950's mugshots. Flipped over on a sticky ringed bar.

Let's get lost.

Less well known, perhaps, is that Wayzata Camerone was himself an accomplished practioner in 10 x 8. Teaching F-Stop and depth of field in a class in Pasadena in the 90's. Perfecting, I waxed back then, "a hardboiled eroticism perfectly at home in the seedier Californian haunts once home to would-be Hollywood screenwriters and miscreants". Images snatched with all the delicacy of a safecracker in the thick of armed robbery.

Well. Posthumously, Wayzata deserves his share in the heist bankrolled by east coast upstarts of the calibre of a Richard Kern. Should anybody call on me as a witness, I will gladly attest to it.

The Wordpress blog, Wayzata Camerone, is an attempt to set the record straight by executors of his estate. Director, India Jennings recently got in touch with me to the effect that more negatives have been uncovered; "probably made between ’93 and ’94 at Wayzata’s cottage-studio in Glendale, or at a West LA apartment he rented from ’94 to ’95."

The above slice of tail is one of two original prints dusted out of a cottage he procured while on the run. From demons, maybe. A scarlet virus.

It is almost perfect. I would clap my hands, but the ghost of recalcitrance gets in the way. The gnawed shaft of a #3 wood.

Let's get crossed. Off everybody's motherf@ckin' list.

I know a hit when I smell one. The perfect fairway strike continues to elude me.

postscript:
WDC is alive and swell. MCB. Not so much drunk with funk, as fine and finnegan; reconstituted in DC.

▼ CHET BAKER: LET'S GET LOST from "Chet Baker Sings & Plays With Bud Shank, Russ Freeman & Strings" LP (Pacific Jazz) 1955 (US)
▼ CHET BAKER: LOVE VIBRATION from "The Incredible Chet Baker Plays & Sings" LP (Carosello) 1977 (US)

a cruel and incontinent punishment

2010-08-04T01:12:00.011+01:00

If I did not know it for the broken crock of shit it almost certainly is, I might hazard that my game is cursed.

For some time now, my son has been fond of golf.

What began simply enough as idle simulation on a games console quickly gravitated to genuine curiosity on the green. Junior clubs were procured and for several months now he has been honing his skills on municipal courses.

Now. Golf is all very well - even old stooges have a weakness for it, I realize - and while its modern form may have originated here in Scotland, I for one have never truly graduated beyond a passing fancy for park life pitch and putt.

Shepherds knocking stones down rabbit holes on the site of the old course at Saint Andrews ? Sounds suspiciously like fallacy through the wrong end of the looking glass.

Anyway. Having previously demonstrated no fear on both the front nine and a driving range, last Sunday I ferried my son by bus to break his 18 hole cherry.

Since kids get in for free I could hardly argue. And since adults similarly enjoy a waiving of fees, providing they are merely there to escort a minor round said sprawl of urban wilderness, I settled on merely caddying. Besides, years of bad posture have taken their toll.

My back is not up to swinging a shortened stick.

As a family, I feel I must add, we also possess a forty year old set picked up in a thrift store, but these are "Ladies Clubs" - each one has this failing branded into the iron like a caution, even the woods - and while I concede there is no real justification for me to turn up my nose, one has to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

I would sooner desist from doing so with a ladies' wedge.

Well. The boy done good. He hit some more than decent balls. He did not tire, or peak too soon, he did not whinge. Nor did I cajole.

So. A good neighbour of ours caught us slouching home, weary but jubilant, and promptly made a gift of a set of full-size clubs. It was an offer I could not refuse, or accept on loan, he knocked on my door and insisted I take them.

For all my reservations, I was delighted. If nothing else, I could do with the excuse to get out there and burn off the bloat, as much as the shriveler's block.

He is a good egg, this neighbour.

Almost but not quite a novice then, I struck out alone to get in some practice.

On the first tee, I sliced my drive into the rough. I recovered with a shot straight into the bunker guarding the green. There ensued several woeful attempts to clear the ball. More buckloads of sand than Dylan on the beach. When I did at last make good contact, the ball sailed respectably aloft and onto the front of the green. My putting was adequate.

Close to exceeding my stroke limit, I did not bother writing up the scorecard.

The next two or three holes went by void of drama. And no spectators to witness me make amends.

On the sixth, a steep incline on a fairly short par three, the wind picked up. Once again I was fighting from the rough. I made the shot. My bag toppled over on the fairway behind me, spilling clubs like Pick Up Sticks.

I righted it and immediately saw that the vintage putter - a Fred Letters' Silver Swan, no less - had sheared clean through at the foot of the shaft. I have no idea why this might have occurred, unless there were some inherent weakness to it when it was cast. Still. It had clearly lasted decades without incident.

I soldiered on.

Somewhere between the seventh and the ninth I lost the vinyl cover to the No. 10 Driver. I retraced my steps half-heartedly but there was no sign of it in all that sea of green. I was glad my neighbour seemed entirely plausible in his largesse. I had no stomach to dwell on, less report, this second loss.

With every subsequent drive, my game deteriorated rapidly.

I made it to the 12th playing the same ball that I began with. At least there was that. Some teenagers appeared over the brow of a hill. Making off with the flag. Whooping drunkly like a tribe of native americans sold down the river for beads.

The green was pocked with litter and plastic bottles. I still made the putt in two.

There I stood on the 13th. "The Wave". A small pond choked with weeds. Farther on, an undulating sculpted feature right across the fairway.

I pressed in the tee and balanced the dimpled ball on it.

My arms and shoulders were aching now, my face and neck awash with sweat. On the 17th, to my left, a father and his two young sons were busy making inroads with a couple of well judged pitches. A pin-seeking chip. The youngest son cavorted cheerfully on the lip of the green while his dad remonstrated without much feeling.

I lit a cigarette and smoked it down to the butt before settling into the drive. Two afternoons previousy, my own boy had struggled with this one. It was a psychological thing. He fluffed two or three attempts before I stepped up to the plate and smacked it high up in the air, a good ten yards or so beyond the undulating horizon.

It felt good. Showing him how to rein in that fluttering dread.

I drew back on the stick and let fly with it. Ping! It smacked down in the water with an almighty splash. The six-year-old on the 17th stopped cavorting and silently watched me fish a second ball out of my trouser pocket. No matter. I was justifiably piqued, seeing as I had made it this far with the ball I started out with, but it was a minor gripe. Sploosh! The second ball fell dead in the water in the exact same spot. This time I could feel the second kid watching me. His father too.

I fidgeted my shoulders and lined up a third ball. Not counting that first ball, I had another five in the zippered pocket of my golfing trolley. What the fuck. I could make it on home with enough balls to spare.

Plop! went the third. The fourth. Now I was seriously pissed and sweating worse than before.

The father and his sons drifted away to tee off on the 18th - "Past Caring" - a little too hesitantly for my liking. I dug out the fifth ball and noticed there was no sixth. Between that distant first fairway and this one, I must have lost one somewhere in the deep grass. I did not remember, but I knew I set out with six.

That Sunday drive could not have been a fluke.

I wandered down to the edge of the pond and spotted a fat white globe caught in the reeds. I plucked it out of the water and dried it off on the sleeve of my shirt. Well, all right. Now I had a backup.

I squinted at the three of them disappearing over the hill towards the clubhouse and teed up the fifth. An affluent looking bastard in khaki had by now taken their place on the 17th green. I hadn't seen him coming.

The fifth and sixth balls went the same way as the rest. I was out of balls. Humiliated. Emasculated.

I was relieved, then, my son was not beside me to share in any of it.

I stashed the clubs away and heaved the bag up on my back. It felt heavy as lead. Heavier than an unsorted sack full of mail. I have worked for the Post Office, too, you know. I have tossed crates around for the odd paycheck between meals; here and there, this way or that, but never once freshly slaughtered slabs of meat.

Well. I lumbered off that golf course under my cross and carted those clubs the extra half mile or so to catch a bus.

On the way through the gates I stooped to pick up a single ball lost between the vege and chain link fence. I could not leave there empty-handed.

More circumspect men than me might have gone to pieces. As it was, I arrived home to a conveniently empty house and hooked up the hog to get it all down. For posterity. Austerity. An absence of silverware, winning smirks.

There is no home run, I find, in the long run home.

red army fetish

2010-07-30T16:24:00.046+01:00

Judy Nylon, now sixty-two years old, arrived in London sometime in 1970.

Between the death rattle of the swinging 60s and the arrival of glam rock, most of the British Isles - the media would have had one believe - was deep in the grip of a very public mourning over the demise of The Beatles.

Beards predominated, as Nick Kent - and assorted terrified children - observed.

Dense thickets of facial hair deep enough to hide a monkey in.

Divorce and therapy became the order of the day. A primal scream or two, if one could gather together enough coin. While up and down the country everybody's mum and dad was stroking their chin and brooding over Alex Comfort's "The Joy of Sex", I was still getting off on "Meet the Monkees"; glueing my fingertips together in the struggle to get an Airfix B-52 off the ground.

Look ma, no prints.

Patti Palladin took a little longer to scrape together the airfare. Connecting briefly with Nylon via a transatlantic telephone conversation; leaving New York City three years after John & Yoko moved in, nailed the windows shut.

By 1974, of course, the complexion on and around the Thames was a good deal more refreshed. The popular charts were once more ablaze with spots. Teenage acne. Jimi Hendrix was dead, and his closest living relation was a diminutive imposter who had not long since traded his white swan for a metal guru.

Jim Morrison's beard floated south in a bath tub in Paris back in '71, and by 1974 even Marc Bolan no longer seemed quite so elfin. Of course, by then he'd been on the game for close to ten years.

Suzi Quatro from Detroit was in vogue. Paper Lace. Mud. The Rubettes.

A predatory paedophile called Gadd.

In hindsight, there was really very little fairy dust being flung around. Snorted. Despite all the glitter. Nothing remotely glamorous. The London which propelled Snatch out of obscurity into more of the same was a soot bricked Dickensian warren of shysters; apprentice Fagins peddling smack on the side; swarthy entrepreneurs from the Midlands resembling Fred West.

In fact. The beards might have been shorn but, underneath the undrneath, it was all still business as usual.

Look a little closer and one is hard pressed to unearth a single genuine teenager lurking near the top slot. Just a bunch of corseted paunches masquerading as puppy fat. Propping the stage door open to usher in an endless procession of wan underage meat.

Between 1974 and the emergence of punk commercially, any blushing roué on stacked heels was virtually guaranteed an audience. Just chauffeuring the Glitter Band radiated enough of a spark to leave an adolescent open to persuasion.

I suspect.

Well. It might not have been Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Butt. A steel capped size nine in the seat of the pants was nevertheless just what the doctor ordered.

"I.R.T.", back to back with with "Stanley" on Lightning Records and Bomp in 1977, may have basked a little in the receding spectacle of a sweet jane disappearing into the dark maw of the subway painted on "Loaded", but really it had more to do with those fluoroscent tunnels trailing under Piccadilly Circus; a blinking strip light in Finchley Central.

Rumour continues to circulate that The Damned's Captain Sensible makes his presence felt on "Stanley", but so far as I'm aware it has never been corroborated. Exactly who plays on it subject to speculation. Judy and Patti have never openly dispelled the myth, but The Heartbreakers play a later documented role in their fabric of conspiracy.

In 1978, Snatch very nearly scraped the bottom of the UK Top 40 with a double A-Side - "All I Want" b/w "When I'm Bored" - featuring ex New York Doll and one time Heartbreaker, Jerry Nolan on drums. It got to No. 54 and promptly sank without a trace. Nylon and Palladin appeared unperturbed.

There followed a collaboration with Brian Eno. Another single: "R.A.F.". By then I only had time for Hurricane fighter planes.

In 1983, Pandemonium Records compiled a string of demos and those all too few 45 releases titled, simply, "Snatch". Irritatingly, although it includes versions of the tracks which appeared on the 1980 Fetish issued EP, "Shopping For Clothes" - their final release, produced by John Cale - those versions differ markedly from the (uncompiled) original Fetish product.

The Pandemonium curated mixes are a good deal crisper, more commercial than the Fetish issue. Interesting, but only by way of contrast.

Now. I did not buy into this snatch of vinyl first time around. "Shopping For Clothes" passed me by. The following vinyl rip(s), then - so far as I can gather now completely out of print - were cribbed from the now defunct Direct Waves.

▼ SNATCH: JOEY from "Shopping For Clothes b/w Joey / Red Army" 12" (Fetish Records) 1980 (UK)
▼ SNATCH: RED ARMY from "Shopping For Clothes b/w Joey / Red Army" 12" (Fetish Records) 1980 (UK)

a fluttering of owls

2010-07-30T11:36:00.006+01:00

Some years ago, too many years ago, I was arguing with my then partner over breakfast. I no longer remember exactly what prompted it or where it went from there. I had arrived somehow in my thirties - a good way past the stain of the big "3-0" - without hitting the panic button, and I couldn't summon the energy to do much more than grunt.

We were sat at the table - me in my boxer shorts, she in my boxer shorts too - and the grey light shone like a beacon through our tenement window. The table was big and round, dressed with some kind of cloth to protect the faux teak, and for all our squabbling the setting was fairly civilized.

"Listen," she might have said, "you are turning into some kind of old fart."

"Well," I retorted, "You can gripe all you want. If I don't wash the dishes and occasionally drag the hoover around we would be up to our knees in shit."

Perhaps she had returned back from a night out with her friends to find me darning a hole in my jacket pocket. That might have torn it. That, or the fact I was content to do my drinking at home.

The last gasp of punk rock. Mending holes. Needlepoint.

The words were washing over me when I noticed a lump on my thigh. I prodded the raised flesh, immediately fearing the worst, moving back in my seat to shed a little light on it.

"Sure," I said. "Uh-huh. Whatever you say, dear."

Actually. Bar the music burbling from the stereo, we more or less fell back into the not quite truce of silence. Each with our separate ashtray, a carcinogenic his and hers.

Well. I poked at my leg until I was all but certain it was merely a boil. I dug my fingers under it and bore down until I felt something give.

It did not so much erupt as ignite like an indoor firework. As fascinating to behold as these inocuous little brown pills which, when lit, keep going until they leap up out the box and hang like ripe intestines. As big in diameter as a plug of toothpaste.

"Dear Christ!" I exclaimed. "Just look at that thing!"

My partner got up and left the table with a dignified little snort of contempt. I did not give a fig. I felt only a peculiar sense of liberation. As if the accumulation of a decade or so of bad karma was being exorcised inch by inch. Drained out of me by invisible shamans. Operating at ceiling height, somewhere in the cornicing.

Chemicals, certainly, but more than that. Arrows. Slings. Toxic mutterings from an industrial zone in deep space.

The minute it was done, I jumped up and danced into the bathroom to splash what passed for iodine over the evacuated area. Oh, I was light headed; cleansed. And only the tiniest of indentations. Not even the trace of a scar.

Our cat, Biff - a gentle old tom who could be found most nights under the tables of the free house three doors down - lay grooming himself on the floor as I bathed the wound. Owlish, alert, but quite disinterested.

Of course. By two or three o'clock that same afternoon, I was back to pouring all that bad shit in, I did not hesitate or waver. What started out, quite benignly as some kind of karmic zit, quickly mutated into something more entrenched.

Subcutaneous. Learning to conceal itself, slyly burrowing deeper.

What did you expect ? A happy ending ?

newtown #1 | take two

2010-07-27T17:39:00.006+01:00

That is thing with new towns. Architectural interventions. Less than ten years on, the paint is worn; the litter and graffiti proliferates. Thirty years on, and the third generation has evolved its own indecipherable mother tongue.

Postscript

On 19th September, 1977, Arianna Forster, Viv Albertine, Paloma Romero, and Tessa Pollitt - collectively The Slits - recorded four tracks with Tony Wilson at BBC studios.

Three of those songs would be later worked on in the spring of 1979 - by which point a suitably retiring Palmolive slipped on her raincoat to be replaced by Budgie - at Ridge Farm Studios. Produced by Dennis Bovell for Island, "Cut" eventually hit the racks almost two full years after that session's initial broadcast on The John Peel Show, 27/09/77.

"Vindictive" would not see a commercial release until its inclusion on the 1987 Strange Fruit EP release of that first session, five years after the group disbanded.

It was subsequently repackaged - alongside their second Peel session from April, 1978 (broadcast May 22nd) - as a budget LP and CD issued in November, 1988.

photograph, sans palmolive, by anton corbijn.

▼ THE SLITS: NEWTOWN (19/09/77) from "The Peel Sessions" 12" EP (Strange Fruit) 1987 (UK)

silkwood, wormwood, taggart | ghetto defendant

2010-07-26T20:29:00.009+01:00

My wife sat down to watch the latest instalment of "Taggart" last night, hobbling on to our screen with all the weariness of a geriatric nosing after a curled fish supper. I caught most of it out the corner of one eye. Preoccupied as I was with clipping my toenails.

It has never been the same since Mark McManus withered away in hospital. It was never really much to begin with, I suspect, but between McManus and the local topography it sometimes sufficed.

Last night's episode was filmed on location in the Gorbals. Right on my doorstep. Shored up with an implausible imported cast.

The topic, loosely, was one of urban regeneration.

One scene was even filmed in the high rise my wife occupied before we were married; the only vaguely successful attempt at refurbishing a twenty-two storey apartment building in two square miles.

"Look at that!" we exclaimed. Stupidly agitated at just seeing the tedious rejunivated on tv.

A clinically depressed woman sat frozen in her armchair drinking tea, the view west through her double-glazed picture window noticeably marred by a few indiscreet palm prints. Placed there, no doubt quite diligently, by some halm-fisted old fruit.

Let me tell you. That building is almost immaculate - sensibly maintained - but in the summer its tenants bake in central heating. Unhealthily indulged. Passing out between floors while struggling to escape for cigarettes. A loaf.

The episode was filmed some time in winter, I believe. The housing association closed down one lift for the better part of two days just to ensure a few rampant egos were not compelled to rub shoulders with the great unwashed.

They could not have similarly enticed a pampered cast into our own freezing building. The windows leaking condensation and howling drafts; the coffin sized elevators stacked with junkies on gangrenous legs.

There is not enough shortbread or 12 Year Old Single Malt in Glasgow to bribe a unionised film crew to set foot in such filth.

Briefly, the backdrop was one of heroic politicking. A lone ranger riding side-saddle on behalf of a seething inarticulate mass.

The truth is more a prosaic tale of design and procrastination by committee. The vacillation of the inept or plain corrupt as they waver between chasing awards and profit. The same the world over. That would have made for a genuine crime worth persuing. That might have made for good television.

Well. I might be a whingeing ineffectual bastard, I won't deny it; if you have made it this far down the page - and I have my doubts - let me pause and advise you that this post is distressingly long-winded. And I might as well warn you while I'm at it that I'm not about to let anybody off the hook by stapling on some oblique gem of a song.

Just so you can scroll quickly to the foot of it and dispense with the reading.

There. I've said it. This is just another instance of my scraping three shades of shit off the chest. Unbuttoning my shirt and letting it spill. You might as well fuck off now while the going's good.

All right with you ? Good. See you later.

In January or February this year, we called in the buildings inspector.

"Before you begin," I said, poking a hand out between raised glass and drizzle. "Take a look at this."

I ran my fingers lightly along the sill and four or five inches of mulched wood came away without any teasing. A plague of wasps could not have made a more thorough job of it. The buildings inspector sniffed and examined the mould creeping along the perished rubber seal.

"No doubt about it," he said. "All the windows are rotten, subject to water penetration. I don't need to see any more to get a handle on it, but I had better do it by the book."

I was relieved. I had thought it might have taken more of a fight, but here he was, writing it up without argument.

"Listen, " he said. "I'll submit my report and you should hear word back in two to three weeks. They're putting in new windows, finally. They're putting up the cages to make a start on the worst of it."

Should might be the most overrated word in the English language.

The cages went up, but I could see little activity. Four weeks came and passed. I was about to pick up the telephone when two more men arrived without warning to measure up those bad windows. All the windows are uniformly the same dimensions, but what do I know ? At least things were progressing.

A month or so later and the cages came down. And not a new uPVC window in sight. I scurried about peering up at the building from every side but I could not detect any.

This would have been approximately the same time the foul smell appeared in the ground floor foyer.

The children would travel down in the lifts to set out for school in the morning and gag as they sprinted to the front door. My wife would hurry back with groceries and lock herself in the bathroom to vomit.

Twice, I telephoned the Ghetto Housing Authority.

"What's it got to do with you ?" a voice enquired the second week around. "Do you actually live there ?"

"Of course I live here, " I said. "That is the reason I'm telephoning. Maybe it's a bad mop. It smells like a bad mop. I'm not suggesting nobody is actively cleaning up in here, everyday I see pople pushing around a mop, but the smell is indescribable. Appalling. The same smell follows you into the lifts now too."

"It's not a mop, " the voice snapped. "Those mopheads are changed regularly."

"So I'm given to understand, " I said. "The woman I spoke to here last week told me the concierges are not permitted to use bleach, these days. Disinfectant. A health and safety ruling. Just what's the procedure with rotating those mops, anyway ? Do the concierges in our block have access to running water ?"

I have lived here for more than ten years, but I still have no clear idea how things work. Every second day or so I might see one concierge or another disappearing into a mysterious warren of rooms just off the ground floor lobby. I say hello, but that is as far as it goes. The job they do is far from pleasant. Unrewarding. Like most jobs.

The voice on the other end of the line had no more of an idea of shop floor procedure than me.

"How the hell should I know ?" the voice screamed in my ear. "I am a housing officer. Not a concierge."

"Listen," I said. "I don't give a rat's arse whether you breakfast at city chambers. This is the second time I've raised this same complaint. I expect something to be done about it. I'll bet that if there was a similar stink right outside your office it would disappear pretty damn fast."

I was close to losing it entirely. I barely managed to hang on to the phone.

"I'll get back to you," the voice rasped. The connection went dead.

That rat's arse was just a figure of speech, a little rash maybe, but as it was it proved queerly prophetic. One has to be careful when dealing with the GHA. They can use your own words to stitch you up as efficiently as a death squad operating out of a cubicle somewhere in Latin America.

Good for screwing dissenters out of their hovels. Precious little else.

The smell, you will have guessed, was later traced to a decaying rodent in a disused room.

One night, possibly late last summer when the foyer door was taken off its hinges and left yawning invitingly for close to two weeks, it appears it wandered in off the street and squeezed under the locked interior door. Its mummified remains discovered inside an open trunk only when one concierge grew so disgusted that he resorted to breaking and entering.

The irony is not lost on me.

Well. The smell gradually faded after the rat was dug out and disposed with. The windows, though. That's another story.

It is a well established fact that the roof of our building bristles with all manner of antennae and masts. From one mobile telecommunications industy to the next, the Ghetto Housing Authority milks huge annual profit from what goes over its tenants' heads. There is little doubt in my mind that those profits explain why this one building remains standing while all around is demolition; chaos; splinters and dust.

For years now I have idly wondered whether we all crackle radioactively from the unseen effects of sustained bombardment.

Those supplemented rents certainly explain why the GHA might be prompted to protect its investment. Raking it in year after year, spending next to nothing on the upkeep of core stock while projected demolition dates come and go.

And so, when they finally went ahead with the scheduled demolition of the building just adjacent to us, and all these people still living here, they had little option but to confront the unpalatable option of spending some of that cash.

"Let's give those radioactive little bastards some new windows," the minutes might have read. "Face facts. Too many fuckers are beginning to ask questions."

So. Where was Karen Silkwood while all of this subterfuge was going on ? who didn't blow the whistle when those cages came tumbling back down ?

Where was our local MP ? MSP ? City councillor ? That one man band prancing about on "Taggart" ?

As I mentioned previously when covering our recent flaccid general election, not one politician of any party or stripe appeared on our doorstep to canvas. Dance a little. Feign hard of hearing while cupping an ear. It is hard to pretend that a jutting twenty-three storey apartment does not exist, even should one chose to avert one's gaze.

A blight on the landscape. Inescapable.

Well. A little bird whispered to me that those cages came down when it was discovered the frightful network of satelite dish and transmitter had spread right across our roof like so much poison ivy.

They just could not get those cages in place where they were most needed.

And all the while the distasteful sight of more recently deployed uPVC windows being stripped out of that empty shell less than one hundred yards away. Rooted out with hammer and chisel. Jettisoned prematurely in advance of the plastic explosive.

We went down there to speak to a housing officer in person. Some of them coasting into retirement. Others just out of school.

"Well," a young woman responded. "We are still waiting for the Building Inspector's report. There's been some delay."

She was not at all discourteous. The job had not gotten to her yet.

"Jesus," I said. "That is some delay. He filed his report four months ago."

"You have to understand," she went on, "a lot of permanent staff have been on holiday. Some of our key people have just this month or so retired. We'll let you know as soon as we get word back. We'll keep you in the picture."

"Is there any substance to the allegation that those masts extend so far over the roof that the GHA can not carry out essential repairs ?" I enquired. Feeling more like Jimmy Olsen than Karen Silkwood. Less competent. Decrepit.

She pursed her lips.

"That's a new one on me. I've certainly not heard anything to that effect. There is, however, a funding shortage, as I'm sure you are aware."

And so. Yet more weeks fly past.

There has been so much rain here recently that I am reminded the winter will be upon us all too soon. They will evacuate us briefly to detonate the charges some time in September. We will be back inside for tea. The drilling will eventually cease just in time to welcome in the gales. Sheets of glass buckling under sheets of still more rain.

Water puddling under the sills. The sudden cold taking us by surprise again.

The absence of silence will get to you. The tension of it just makes things worse.

divided alien | kif-kif da bus

2010-07-24T16:51:00.020+01:00

On the eve of Planet Gong's scheduled European tour through March to April, 1978, archastral projectionist, Dingbat Alien was allegedly assailed by dark forces set loose in the here and now. The doors of perception stood ajar but Alien's free pass was permanently revoked.

From Planet Gong:

"I couldn't actually get on stage. It was as though there was a a n invisible curtain of force that was stopping me from going through the door. I threw myself at the open door and bounced back, off nothing. And this blew my mind so thoroughly that i just ran out of the theatre into the rain and started hitch hiking on the road with all my clothes, my stage clothes, my costume and face painted with fluorescent colours. And then a woman looked at me so strangely that i started thinking i was a murderer and i was hiding in the bushes. Finally i got picked up by somebody who had left the concert and was taken home, and then i had to realise that i had to leave gong, so that's the way it all ended."

The non event in Cheltenham - a centre of healing since mineral springs were discovered there in 1716 - marked the unforseen end of a chapter. Without fanfare, the alliance forged between Gong and Here & Now simply ceased to exist. In the material world, at any rate.

Allen decreed the band were free to continue to traffic as Planet Gong, but collectively Kif Kif, Steffe, Keith the Bass and singers Ano and Suze da Blooze elected to return the name first assumed squatting in Ladbroke Grove in 1974. Reclaiming the moment, regrouping and scouting Deptford Fun City for props.

Capitalizing - in the kindest sense only - on their sharing the bill with Captain Beefheart at the Paris Hippodrome a year earlier, and the subsequent release of "Live Floating Anarchy 1977", Here & Now embarked on a free tour with Mark Perry's Alternative TV. Falling into loose formation with Mark E. Smith and small wonder, Patrick Fitzgerald along the way.

Profit was never on the agenda. Between March and December, 1978, Here & Now committed to four grueling British free tours, playing several key festivals. Deeply Vale included. The sleeve to their shared live LP with ATV - "What You See... Is What You Are" - poses the family collective in front of their converted bus, No. 777, a motley tribe harking back to Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and the Incredible String Band of "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter".

Only Mark P. vents ambivalence. Stuffing his fingers into his mouth. A half-baked pantomime of self-induced vomitting.

Or merely scoring a jacket potato.

Frank Honest documents in his rediscovered "Gospel of the Free" that Deptford Fun City successfully sabotaged the first 1,000 pressings of the Here & Now / ATV joint venture; ensuring that the Ladbroke Grove side hit point of sale recorded backwards. My own heftily discounted vinyl copy - £1.75 - clearly left the factory after the jest was put right. Like their tour bus, though, it has not survived. Inveterate nostalgics may redress a similar loss in full by hyperlinking promptly to kill your pet puppy.

"It's not surprising that the details of that year are rather blurred. Not surprising really that, on the mid-winter solstice, on the way back in to London after the last gig of the last tour of 1978, our new bus broke down. But completely. The crankshaft had snapped from the strain."

"...thus endeth the Gospel of Free according to Frank Honest", and thus endeth a minor sin of omission.

Postscript:

The Charly Records EP - released, I believe, in 1979, after "What You See... is What You Are" can be found on the 1996 French Spalax CD reissue of "Give and Take" with two other bonus tracks: "End of the Beginning" and "Choke a Kola".

▼ HERE AND NOW: ADDICTED from "Dog In Hell b/w Floating Anarchy Radio / Addicted" EP (Charly Records) 1978 (UK)
▼ HERE AND NOW: ADDICTED from "What You See... Is What You Are" LP (Deptford Fun City) 1978 (UK)

▼ PLANET GONG: FLOATIN' ANARCHY from "Live Floating Anarchy 1977" LP (Charly Records) 1978 (UK / France)