three from the tombs

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

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

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

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

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

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.