I miss my mother
I miss my lovely, brave mum
August 3, 2008 at 7:28 pm (Uncategorized)
Sure on this Shining Night
setting by Morten Lauridsen
(lyrics taken from ‘A Death in the Family’ by James Agee)
Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand’ring far alone
Of shadows on the stars.
I’m it …
June 25, 2008 at 3:03 pm (London, computers, culture, meme, morocco, yummers)
The lovely Patroclus has tagged me for a meme. This is good because, to an extent, I seem to have mislaid my mojo. There are all sorts of reasons for this and I’m not too worried about it overall, but it’s still nice to have something to focus on. I’ve got another couple pending too – including one from Mr Locker - which I will get to presently (honest). In an ideal world, this present meme would involve making a podcast but I don’t have the first idea about how to do that (tbh, I’m not even sure I know what a podcast is), so you’ll have to make do with links to …
Anyway, the idea is to list seven songs I’m particularly into at the moment. The only problem has been paring down the list. I listen to music a big lot, and I’m very subject to earworms (please say you know what I mean by that). Like Patroclus, I will throw in – free of charge – some vacuous commentary. Don’t say I’m not good to you.
1) The Cure: Friday, I’m in Love
This is an acoustic version and very lovely too. I’m a big fan of deceptively simple jingly jangly pop and this hits the spot. Doesn’t the bass player (Simon Gallup?) look like David Tennant? My daughter nearly fainted when I played this for her. Anyway, I’m very interested by Robert Smith – he seems to have huge talent and integrity. And his hair is a bit like mine. Really!
2) Talking Heads: Listening Wind
I remember vividly the first time I heard this one. I was living in Paris at the time. I was at a friend’s appartment in Rue Amelot. It was very late. There was a bloke I was vaguely interested in there. Maybe I was a little bit drunk. The bass line – probably Tina Weymouth – is fantastic, don’t you think? I used to have it on vinyl but I recently replaced it with a CD from Tesco – yes, I know, I know. It has a slightly world music feel to it too – although world music hadn’t been invented back in those days. Y’know, if I could have studied anything at all, money (and practicality) no object, I think i’d have done ethno-musicology. Which sort of brings me to …
This is the song I’ve got on my Myspace profile – that’s how much I like it. I’ve managed to miss seeing them twice in the last couple of years, but I have high hopes for this summer! I can’t even remember where I first heard them, but there’s something about the instrumental part that reminds me of Fairport Convention! How weird is that? Ooh – that bloke in the middle there – that’s what my hair looks like today. Well, a cross between that and Robert Smith.
Ludicrous video. Great song. It’s almost disco, isn’t it? This really dates me, of course - I don’t care. Listen to that bass line – so supple! Poor old Joe – a sad loss to British music. I saw them a couple of times – unforgettable. Is that how you spell Kasbah? Totally unrelated (but while I’m on the subject of Kasbahs), I went to Marrakech with my daughter lately – and Essaouira. It was wonderful.
5) Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
Not a lot of people know this, but I originally studied music at university. I am, to all intents and purposes, the most tremendous geek. I’m very fond of minimalism, and Reich is one of my favourite composers. It was very difficult to find a clip that adequately gets over how fantastic this work is. This is made up of lots of little fragments but the whole piece is quite long and very intense. Try listening to the whole thing – really – it’s hypnotic and, I think, very uplifting.
Listen to those lyrics. Poetry, isn’t it? So tender and so Londonish. And Ray Davies has GOT to be one of the coolest men alive. I used to live in Highgate, and so did he. And I quite often used to see him walking around the village. And I’d go all wobbly and try not to look as if I was staring (which I was).
Please listen to this one, even if you don’t bother with anything else. It’s like one of those optical illusions where one minute it looks like two faces and the next it looks like a vase. You think you know this song – the original version by Outkast is great – but this is like a completely different song. If you haven’t heard of them already, the band Obadiah Parker, of which Matt Weddle is a member, is really worth getting to know. The audioclip on their Myspace is better than that Youtube link, actually, but it doesn’t have the advantage of cutting between Weddle and Andre (Ice Cool) 3000. What’s going on with the timing here, btw? Is it an 11-bar phrase? Say of 2/4 bars? Curious.
Notable ommisions: B-52s: Roam (I’m going to see them soon); Stranglers: Duchess; Bob Dylan: Boots of Spanish Leather; Couperin: Les Barricades Mysterieuses; Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli … gosh, I could go on and on.
Pleural epithelioid haemangioendothelioma …
January 9, 2008 at 2:44 pm (Uncategorized)
… is every bit as much of a bastard as it sounds.
But with a mere handful of cases each year, worldwide, it is extremely rare.
So how did it manage to find my mother?
Does anyone … and I mean anyone at all …
December 1, 2007 at 4:12 pm (Uncategorized)
… like glace cherries?
I mean, honest to God, who could take a lovely, lovely gorgeous scrummy thing like a cherry (they are my desert island fruit, after all) and make a slimy, chewy, sickly, fakey abomination of it and then expect people not to notice?
I’ve not yet met a single solitary person who actually likes them. Not everyone, admittedly, runs screaming from the room whenever they’re mentioned, the way I do. But most people at least prise them from whatever they’re eating and leave them pointedly on the side of the plate.
So how, pray, has the glace cherry industry survived all these years? I can only conclude that glace cherries are a by-product of some other process – you know, like flouride was with uranium mining, or whatever – and some clever dick has managed to persuade the masses that they actually had a use. Maybe it’s those cherry stone heated pillows that you can buy at Christmas markets up and down the country.
It’s the only explanation.
I have no idea how to do this … but I’m soooo proud
June 1, 2007 at 8:35 am (Uncategorized)
I have been weighed in the balance by Moobs and have been found tenuous.
Vote for me. Go on … you know it makes sense.
(I’m not sure how you do it, but head on over to his gaffe and don’t be distracted by any of the other bogus attempts at celebrity you’ll find there.)
Bacon rind. What’s not to love?
April 17, 2007 at 7:40 pm (Uncategorized)
Except for the fact that it’s basically pigskin.
Nope, sorry. I’m thinking about that as hard as I possibly can, but it’s just not putting me off. And do you remember when it used to come with an inky blue tattoo? Or bristles? And when it used to sometimes have a little hard bony bit in it that could take you by surprise. Blimey – eating bacon was risky in those days. Even so I was undaunted.
It’s just that bacon rind hits so many points. It’s salty, like peanuts. It’s chewy, like gum. It’s full of saturated fat, like … er … saturated fatty things.
It’s basically fatty, salty gum. Someone should market it. Never mind Juicy Fruit. How about Salty Rind?
Those days are long gone, of course. Now bacon comes hermetically sealed from Tesco (or elsewhere), and you’d hardly even know it had once roamed the plains on four little trotters. (Must quickly explain that I only ever buy free-range meat, so there’s no need to tell me about the miserable existence of the average pig)
Sometimes, it even comes with the rind removed.
Now, I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong.
It’s like only eating peeled fruit, surely. And we all know the vitamins are in the skin, don’t we? It’s as bad as wanting your crusts cut off. And eating crusts gives you curly hair, doesn’t it? (Doesn’t it? Wait til I next see my mother!)
And what do they do, pray, with the rind they steal from us? Apart from feeding it back to the piggies, or possibly to school children in the form of chicken nuggets. They make pork scratchings, that’s what. Pork scratchings – that most noble of British bar snacks. A bristle in every bite!
But the scarcity of NHS dentists will, no doubt, pose a serious threat to the pork scratching industry. Few of us can afford to pop a crown any more, and I’m seeing trouble ahead. There’ll be lay-offs, industrial action, riots, maybe.
I say, leave the rind on the bacon.
Why don’t they ask me?
I have issues. Big ones
March 30, 2007 at 12:38 pm (competition, consumerism, damn lies, gifts you can't live without, i'm cold, lunacy, making my fortune, vague embarrassment)
There’s only one person left in the whole world that still calls me ‘babe’.
And I have to pay him.
He’s the Big Issue vendor that stands outside the bank. Oh – and he looks a bit like this:
Now, obviously, he’s not a cat. That would be silly. Nor does he have a fly on his nose. He doesn’t need one. But you get the idea. In fact, it’s surprising, in a way, that he doesn’t call me ‘babes’.
Anyway, to me it’s £2 well spent. He gains, I gain. But today, when I pocketed my copy along with my sad pathetic ego boost, I got to thinking about the far off days when I was ‘babe’-d all over the place. I don’t think I appreciated it. In fact, I know I didn’t. I was all high-horseish, and sexist-crappish, and phallocratic-oligarchyish.
Hah. Supply and demand. When the ‘babe’s flowed free, I despised them. Now they’ve dried up, I see their value. I crave the ‘babe’s. So this is why I have 150 copies of The Big Issue on my desk. This is why I stump up every week to the visually challenged homeless man, instead of spreading my largesse more evenly between him, the man with all the badges on his hat and Yugoslavian John. (I know!) Nothing to do with helping the homeless. It’s all about me.
What am I going to do, though, when even he realises that I’m very much post-babe? (Apart from singing Tina Turner songs at the top of my voice.) I suppose I could transfer my affections and my small change to the Salvation Army man outside the Halifax but, somehow, ‘God bless you’ doesn’t quite do it for me in the same way.
Someone should start up a business, selling anodyne compliments, free from any expectation of ironing, or lifts to the station, or sex, to middle-aged women. They’d clean up. To tell you the truth, this is a far better idea than my knitted uterus one. Dragons’ Den calls again …
Or maybe I should save my Big Issue money up until I’ve got enough for botox … because I’m worth it.
I am, aren’t I?
Go inappropriate yerself!
March 27, 2007 at 10:37 am (bleeeuurgh, damn lies, lunacy, press, unwanted advice, vague embarrassment)
We writers are very sensitive creatures. 
Frankly, you only have to look at me to realise that I’m operating on a higher plane than most people. We drift around, thinking exquisite thoughts – more often than not in iambic pentameter – and are physically pained by the use/misuse/abuse of language we encounter in everyday life.
Thus it is that I am suffering – suffering, I tell you – because of the inappropriate use of the word ‘inappropriate’. I come across it an awful lot, too, because I’m a school governor and have to read reams and reams of utterly boring crap important briefings and policy documents produced by civil servants and apparatchiks whose main aim in life seems to be making it utterly impossible to run a school without falling foul of some new code of practice or filling out forms in quadruplicate – having first completed a risk assessment facilitating the efficient implementation of the government’s excellent and coherent education policies in all our schools.
‘Inappropriate’ looms large in the public sector. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that society as we know it today would fall apart without the word. Cos it’s saying something without saying anything. And I’ll bet you can’t be sued for saying something is inappropriate (I’ll have to check with Moobs on this – although it may be inappropriate to do so).
And since it doesn’t mean anything, ‘inappropriate’ can, paradoxically, mean anything you want it to. So – ‘inappropriate’ – here are some possible interpretations. Feel free to add a few more: stupid, bratty, crap, slutty, boring, smelly, common, foreign, funny, vulgar, intellectual, elitist … the list is, almost by definition, endless.
Now, I may have said something inappropriate in this post – and I just know that picture is – well – inappropriate.
But – you know? I really don’t give a flying inappropriate.
Wrappers Delight
December 23, 2006 at 2:44 pm (Uncategorized)
A little entertainment from the early – and more innocent days – of rap, to help you through the last-minute tussle with sticky tape, paper and ribbons. Dig those groovy dance moves!
Have lovely holiday. Hope Santa lives up to eveyone’s great expectations.
See you next year, when we can deconstruct the whole thing.
x
