jazz domino

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

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

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

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

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

 
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

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


Between the kitchen and
this porch,
Refrigerator motors idle.

ib

'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

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

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

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

>  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

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

"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

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]

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

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

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.

..."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.

"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

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)