Haven't been in the mood to write lately. I'd say I haven't had the opportunity but if a fellow really wants to write or blog or add a few words to the declining pile that is LiveJournal he'll find a way, even if his laptop is dead and he is looking after a 15-month old child who doesn't take kindly too be kept from the on/off button.

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Rode an elephant with Miles a few weeks ago. Doesn't matter that it was at the Texas Renaissance Festival, lasted about 15 seconds, cost us each $5 and left me walking funny. I rode an elephant with my son. That's enough. I still approved of the Renaissance Festival more than you or an earlier version of myself might imagine. Didn't enjoy it as much as last time we went, however, as it was pretty much exactly the same, down to the identical patter of the acts, and you really have to be younger, suitably attired and drunk to surrender to the full-on, anachronistic, turkey-leg waving release of the whole thing. Also I prefer the exotic mock-eastern elements to the cod-Celtic, "Misirlou" to "Danny Boy" and the veiled, mysterious houris to the hoicked-up embonpoint of ye olde saucy wenches. I tell you, four hours of the TRF and I never wanted to see another square yard of tremulous pasty bosom again.

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Unemployment Insurance almost all used up - another couple of weeks to go. Next comes 20 weeks of Emergency Unemployment Benefit Tier 1. Which is a relief but the nine month COBRA subsidy also ends this month, which means finding an extra $370 a month. Which sucks. I suspect the recession was supposed to be over by now and the Obama Utopia gleaming on the horizon, unemployment in negative figures and Glenn Beck back on the bottle and selling used cars in Alaska. It sure was a nice vision for a month or so back at the start of the year, all that hope floating around, although I've forgotten whether I had been laid off at that point or not.

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It's not been a great year. I woke up on my nnth birthday with a migraine, which doesn't promise anything much better for the near future. Blah, blah, blah. Although it got better after that, via Curra's for Chilaquiles and Oaxaca coffee. Etc.

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More later. You want to know what I thought about The Prisoner, don't you?

12.43pm and both kids are napping so I can use the computer.

Oh, spoke too soo

Got around to reading David Peace's Nineteen Eighty, the third in his Red Riding Quartet. Wanted to like it as the previous volume had shown promise, moving from Elroy wannabe to something darker and more individualistic. But this just does not work. The stylistic tics and the one word paragraphs that worked in his early books just become tired padding here. The monotony, repetition, overused and lazy similes and sheer bloody pointlessness of 90% of the book annoyed the hell out of me. Nothing happens except tired coppers have meetings where nothing is said and cups of cold tea are spilled. The lyrics to the Seeds "No Escape" pop up at one point, Fall song titles are worked in and references to Throbbing Gristle sneak in. You can see what he's trying to do, but he gives the reader so little to work with, just staccato cliches, affectless notes towards the inevitable unresolved ending. I had no idea who killed whom and why by the end.

You want depressing urban noir UK, read Derek Raymond. You want to know what it was like to live in West Yorkshire when Peter Sutcliffe was at large read Gordon Burns' Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son.

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Also read Jess Sublett's Tough Baby, which is set in Austin back at the start of the 90s. Sublett's a cool guy - his biography, Never The Same (2004) is searing stuff, covering the murder of his girlfriend when he was 22 and his battle with the normally terminal form of cancer a few years back. He was in one of the first local punk bands, the Skunks, wrote three crime novels in the 90s and now writes documentaries and plays stand-up bass around Austin. Unfortunately his music isn't my thing - the Skunks played that sort of speedy R & B that seemed to appear concurrent with "real" punk and just got on my nerves. This book is sort of a generic crime novel set in the music biz with an obligatory shoot out at the end. Too much about the blues and bass guitars for my tastes, not enough about the dark underbelly of 78704.

Now reading something else. Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss. Which so far is rather good....

Doing a mammoth 1,000 page cut and paste job so only time for a quick post while my brain recovers....

Time for the annual reposting of the Ace of Wands theme song. Yes, this show did freak me out as a kid and the theme remains one of my favorite pieces of cod-psychedelia. Or any kind of psychedelia. .



And to ask "why oh why hasn't Johnny Trunk put together a compilation of all the music used on Vision On?"

Accroche-ti Caroline!
Left Bank Two
The Gonk

And if we're really getting into nostalgia, Alan Hawkshaw, Keith Mansfield et al plays those iconic 70s TV themes live.





And this could be the best YouTube Channel ever, for music at least: Morricone Rocks

Now back to the million tables of US Foreign Affair Guidelines, which is about 0.0000001% as interesting as it sounds.

I managed to sit through most of Glenn Beck's show yesterday on Fox and therefore deserve some kind of medal or at least emergency medical treatment. It was one of his more insane performances, driven by the usual mix of paranoia, hysterical free-association, random bursts of anger and the obligatory brandishing of Mein Kampf, which passes for intellectual argument amongst Beck's kind -- although he does seem to be learning to pace himself, not breaking down into lip-quivering and tears until near the end. Unlike many I do believe Beck's tears are real and a sign that he is both sincere and some kind of imbecile. I suspect that before long the tears and soggy-faced bluster will become so routine that he'll need to take his emotional infantilism to the next level and start wetting himself. AND IT WILL ALL BE YOUR FAULT VAN "MARX" JONES AND ANITA "MAO" DUNN....

This has to be the greatest Beck video ever. Just four minutes long it cuts through the mock outrage, the funny voices and chalkboard props. It follows a strange tirade about the five books he seems to have read since leaving school and how no one knows who Ben Franklin and Samuel Adams were anymore, veering off into something more personal and strange....


What's interesting is that the commercials that get him all verklempt about an era when America was great and whole and united are from the mid 70s, which may not have been a golden age for many but it was just before the 12-year old Beck's parents got divorced. I'm no psychiatrist but the man has problems. Unresolved issues that have mutated into something all-embracing. (Yes, I know about his mother's suicide, his coke addiction and other bad behavior during his 80s shock DJ incarnation.) If he was an out of work steelworker unable to leave the house without strong medication it would be tragic - but he's turned his derangement into a multi-million dollar fortune and has a growing legion of dangerous, gullible loons hanging onto his every nonsensical disclosure. Which is something else entirely.

And sometimes laughing at him sometimes feels like a cop out.

Seem to be settling into role of househusband, looking after kids while wife works, with the occasional little bit of freelance work coming along. Not ideal and or even sustainable once unemployment benefit runs out as in Texas teachers' salaries are intended to keep spinsters in cat food rather than support a family, but I'm getting into it. Pros: no managerial bullshit or corporate fear.  Cons: no spare cash, little chance to do anything creative with a three year old and one year old vying for my attention. Nick in particular is hard work, now being mobile and keen on dismantling everything within reach. He can not merely switch off the computer with apparently a single key press but render it unusable for the next half hour. He can do things with the TV remote I didn't know were possible.
Útvarp Kántrýbær - Iceland's only Country Music station. Via listenlive.eu.

I've been having better luck with my Kaito KA1102 of late. I managed to pick up the BBC World Service on Sunday night on the Kaito, which might not sound like a big deal but the BBC World Service does not broadcast to the USA any longer and this transmission was being broadcast toward the Middle East from Cyprus. The only Western European countries that transmit in the direction of the USA these days are Czech Republic, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. Radio Exterior de Espana comes in clearest but their transmissions to North American are only in Spanish. If you hear English on SW from here the chances are you've either found a Chinese or a Christian station. I can't even get the Voice of America very well, since that's not intended for domestic use.

The reason why the Christian stations come in so clear only occurred to me recently. They too are not intended for home listeners but we happen to be in the way of their evangelistic outreach. WWCR and WWRB in Tennessee are blasting out 100,000 watts of god fearing stuff, half a million watts in the case of Alabama's WEWN. Not much chance of missing those...

Note: DXing with the KA1102 does not make for interesting YouTube videos.

I recalling wanting the "remake" of The Wicker Man to be decent, simply as a rebuff to all those overblown claims made about the original and the lazy assumption that all Hollywood remakes can be dismissed as bad without having to go deeper and explain why.

The original is sort of a great film, although a lot of its charm is due to the dissonance between its high themes and  thoroughly rotten acting. And sometimes Nic Cage can bring a hapless, lunkheaded quality to a role that would defeat a less limited actor. But not here - and the remake was worse than anyone could have expected.

Except as comedy. And material for YouTube fun. There's quite a few snippets from the movie and in many cases nothing can be added to make Cage's performance any more ridiculous. I mean how can you improve on Cage dressed in a bear costume and running across a glade to punch a woman? But this made me laugh.

An hour of off-the-beaten-autobahn Krautrock for you. None of the obvious names, except Tangerine Dream, and it's a very different sounding Tangerine dream than post-1974 listeners may be comfortable with. Opens and closes with somewhat soothing tracks that may be familiar to grownups but you're on your own with the rest. More to follow if it doesn't fall entirely on deaf ears.



And no, I didn't mean to mispell "Krautrock." Typing with a flailing infant on ones lap is no easy matter.

Suddenly very autumnal in Austin, temperature in the 60s, overcast and wet, leaves falling, heating switched on. Hard to believe the temperature was in the 90s a few days ago. Listening to Holst's "Moorside Suite," which seems like highly appropriate music, although it does send me into a nostalgic reverie to an age when I had the time for wallowing in the exquisite dullness of an English Sunday.

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Meanwhile, back in the present and the USA, the Obama Nobel uproar has reminded me that there wasn't some freak cosmic incident in the wingnutosphere that drove all the crazy into the doughy head of Glenn Beck. All those other clowns that have been overshadowed by the The Silver Gopher of late have all popped up to shriek that the Nobel Committee's vote to give the award to Barry "Hitler" Obama is proof that Europe is an evil socialist prison state, that the whole world is laughing at Obama and anyway Norway did not invent the Internet or the polio vaccine  AND  WHO  SAVED  YOUR  ASS  IN  DOUBLEYOU  DOUBLEYOU TWO, HUH? amongst other shocking revelations. Because you know, it stands to reason that giving any kind of award to the US president is an attack on America. The least crazy are saying Obama got it simply because he isn't George W. Bush, but they say it as if that in itself wasn't a good reason. A better one is that he kept Sarah Palin out of the White House, which is cause for enough for anyone, sane, European or otherwise to celebrate in my book.

Peggy Noonan has been jolted back on form by this, probably because it reminds her that her beloved St Ronnie didn't win any kind of Nobel. Her piece in the Wall Street Journal, "A Wicked and Ignorant Award", comes within a dolphin's splash of her maddest stuff and is a piece that should be savored and read aloud, preferably in the voice Homer Simpson used for mimicking Ned Flanders.

More, much more, at Roy Edroso's Rightbloggers column at the Village Voice.

Nick Hornsby seems to have written the novel I was planning to write - no really, after the fifty others I was planning to write once I could get past the words CHAPTER ONE of the first - although in my version the obscure, mysterious musician the main characters are obsessed with would have been more in the Don Bradshaw Leather mold than a boring singer/songwriter.

I assume 37% of the six people still reading this already know about Don Bradshaw Leather and his curious album, Distance Between Us, released in 1972 on his own label and about as obscure and freaky as you could ever hope a record (or double LP) to be. Nothing much is known of Bradshaw Leather. If his name wasn't on the NWW list it's unlikely anyone would know about this record. I don't think it's ever been reissued but you can easily find a download online. It's not the greatest record ever made - much of its appeal is in its obscurity, the fact that it trumps just about any other cultish artifact. It's a lot like Tangerine Dream at their most pre-Virgin and pre-synth primal (eg "Wahn" or Klaus Schulze's Irrlich only with more piano, tribal drums, organ and jabs from a mellotron that seems to be stuck not just on the same tone but the same note. It's a murky relentless, tuneless slab of gloom which has sent me to sleep every time I've listened to it and then woken me up feeling horribly disorientated. In other words, not something I'd advise spending $200 on an original vinyl copy.

Talking of the NWW list, I was going to cut and paste and make it into one of those LJ meme things where you put the ones you've heard in italics, the ones you like in bold, the ones you've heard and hate in blinking pink comic book sans or something. But that would be too much of a chore/bore. Who cares if I've heard Fernando Grillo's Fluvine and whether I have the original French vinyl, Japanese limited edition CD reissue or downloaded it from eMusic?

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Meanwhile, it's always good to have a handy link to an online copy of Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which is, to use the cliche, as relevant today as it was when it was published back in 1964.

Having geeky fun with GlobalTuners, or something approaching geeky fun, given that being as the interface is Flash-based it has a tendency to crash browsers and lose that 15,999 word LiveJournal post you've been working on all day. It's a way to log into a network of computer-controlled radio receiver around the world - the parts of the world where people are likely to have computer-controlled radio receivers, at least - enabling you to take control of a radio in, say, Italy or Japan or wherever and tune in to stations you'd never otherwise hear. Like Voice of Korea.

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Meanwhile. The opening episode of this season's DOLLHOUSE convinced me what I should have already known. Nothing about the show makes sense. Paul, who spent the whole of the last series obsessed with bringing down the Dollhouse now works there and is only slightly disturbed by Echo being implanted with the personality of an undercover cop who is pretending to be someone else who really marries a criminal mastermind and has sex with him just so she can look in his desk drawers.... And, um, you can activate the hidden personalities of Echo by slapping her the right number of times? It's lucky he knew the right number of slaps or else she would have turned into a midwife or dominatrix or blind simpleton rather than super kick-ass girl when faced with half a dozen men with guns.

Also watched almost two hours of ABC comedy shows last night and never want to watch television again. It's not that they were bad, just that all US sitcom writing for the past decade or so has had the same feel - where you're more aware of the dozen or so studio writers reworking every line into some smart-ass gem than the actors delivering them. You might think "that's a funny line" a dozen times during an episode but never "this is a funny show."

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Reading John Ross's Murdered by Capitalism. Keep Glenn Beck away from this book or he'll try to tie ACORN to the Haymarket Bombing....

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Is it ACL this week? Guess so. It's the sort of thing I've always avoided* but if I was going these are the "acts" I'd want to see aside from Ghostland Observatory, who I really wish would start being promoted as the musical face of Austin rather than all those acoustic singer-songwriters still recycling the Cosmic Cowboy schtick.







That's not many for a three day festival, is it?

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*Two lapses - the first Futurama (1st day only) and something at the end of the 80s in Finsbury Park featuring Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Fall, Wire and Psychic TV.

Amazing how clicking on Post in LiveJournal causes N. to wake up from his morning or afternoon nap - the only chance I get to go near the computer - screaming. Works every time. Which explains lack of posts for the past year.

Click.

SCREAM!!!

LOLbecks. Thank you.



Feel free to play along at home.

Now I've achieved one post of more than 100 words for the first time in a geological age I've got the mad urge to do another within 24 hours.

So let's see. What do folks talk about on the LiveJournal these days? Amanda Palmer? Well now, I really don't get Amanda Palmer. I suspect this is because I can't subscribe to the whole package and her music, taken alone, is fairly nondescript, neither challenging nor fun. And her lyrics are a jumble of unresolved and rather obvious fragments about big and obvious topics. Taken with the videos and the books and the blog and the whole AFP persona it all obviously adds up to something that fills a certain need in a certain crowd but it's Tori Amos in a vintage garter belt as far as I can hear and I didn't like her either. Also, I've always had an aversion to both theatrical intrusions in music and cultish fanbases, and I get a Rocky Horror vibe from the whole thing, which combines both and that's always been a phobia of mine.

I suspect a lot of her fans are people who don't really like music qua music and need to believe there's something extra going on, some connection to experience and sensation that "pop" music alone fails to provide, at least for them. And Palmer supplies this in spades. Bisexuality, rape, abortion, body issues, corporate censorship, sexism, all those issues eager, earnest fans like to think have never been touched upon before. Throw in Neil Gaiman and you know that people who love that kind of thing are really going to love this kind of thing.

But wouldn't you really have some of this, from 1969? Brigitte Fontaine with the Art Ensemble of Chicago? A shame there's no video....

In my capacity as a parent of two little-uns I've noticed something about children's parties, which sadly are the only kind we get invited to these days. For the first birthday of their firstborn, parents serve wine and a surfeit of beer, fancy food, have the house decked out with a theme way beyond the child's comprehension, invite all manner of friends and acquaintances along, maybe have a groovy soundtrack playing and other cool stuff, etc, etc.... But for the second birthday and all birthdays of subsequent offspring' things are very different*. They'll take place in a public park at some ungodly hour, the only drinks will be cans of coke and juice boxes and the food will be a plain white slab cake from Costco and maybe a giant bag of chips if they really planned ahead. It's as if the first birthday is the parents' way of saying "Look, we're not like other parents, we're not going to change, we're not going to allow ourselves to be taken over by the oppressed parent mindset!" Then after that it's "Okay, everyone else is right, let's just get it over with. Go play on the swings while we sit here with our diet cokes and swap gruesome diaper stories." It's rather sad. But understandable.

Yesterday we attended a party of the first variety so I got to drink St. Arnold's and browse someone else's book collection while Vampire Weekend played in the background. It was like a flashback to another existence. As opposed to suffering heatstroke, trying to make a 4oz box of apple juice last and keeping wasps and perverts at bay.

(Obligatory aside: Don't get me wrong. I love having kids - our two, anyway. But I miss interacting with the world as me rather than as the dad of one and three year olds.)
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* Of course I'm talking about those first three or four birthdays where the parties are as much for the parents as the kids, if not more so. After which it's another story altogether and no kid wants crowds of boozy adults hanging around, hogging the CD player and getting in the way of the grilled shrimp and fancy canapes.

Boo and, if you must, hoo.

My paid account has just expired and so things will now revert back to basics. How will I cope? Not sure I actually used any of the super-enhanced, bleeding-edge features you get with a paid account or even knew what they were besides the extra icons, which were all very nice but mostly gave me a further opportunity to prevaricate and piss around (if I can't find a picture of Megan Fox wrestling with a giant lobster this 30,000 word post on drinking vinegar for fun and profit won't be worth starting....)

Anyway. I actually worked this week, albeit for about 20 hours, but otherwise all that is happening on the job front is that the end of my Unemployment Insurance approaches inexorably. Boo and, indeed, hoo.


Nick (who I'm sure will call himself Nic or Nik in the future) took his first steps last week on his birthday. Once that would have merited a post and a photo - and I trust that time will come again.

I've forgotten... what's this LiveJournal thing I used to do?

Oh yeah. Um. Writing about the vicissitudes of life and the joys and sorrows of whatever. And links to stuff you've already seen. Maybe if I have a little lie down first I can fire up the old enthusiasm, dredge up a quip or two and....

Just a little lie down mind....

Yes, it has been a while since I last posted here. A fetid stew of ennui, entropy and depression has claimed me and not posting to LJ is the least of my concerns. But things are... well, stabilizing. Citalopram hydrobromide seems to have halted a recent, scary decline. And spending days at home with my youngest son as he approaches his first birthday is an experience I wouldn't trade for anything work-related....

First week of listening to shortwave has been a bit disappointing. I was expecting something a bit more exotic, that there would be evocative snatches of music and speech from the places around the world that haven't succumb to Western homogeneity. What I really should have got was a model with some kind of time machine built in, I guess. Not because every radio transmitter from Afganistan to Zimbabwe has been blasting out Michael Jackson tributes but because no one aims their transmitters at the USA anymore. They've all stopped over the last decade, assuming I guess that all North Americas have web access to their streaming internet broadcasts or own satellite radios. The BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Radio France International, Radio Netherlands Worldwide and doubtless many others can only be heard if you've got a more than decent antenna rigged up and equipment powerful enough to pick out stray signals meant for, say, the Caribbean.

I guess this explains why most websites about radio talk about equipment rather than what can be heard.

You can get plenty of Chinese broadcasts. Radio China International in particular seems to occupy half the world band airwaves. Plenty of Christians too, if you can't get your fill of crazy evangelists and their unsavory friends elsewhere. (I assume they're all over the SW in preparation for the end times they're always on about, ready for the days when they head up into the hills with their wind-up radios, ammo and jerky.) Plenty of Alex Jones, Texe Marrs and their like, frothing about Obama and his Zionist thugs amongst the merely ranty. I did spend some time listening to Radio Australia last night and also picked up Radio New Zealand, Voice of Russia, Radio Habana, Radio Prague and Radio Japan, which is pretty good to say I was listening in bed and not hanging out of the window waving the arial at he sky. No numbers stations yet but I gather they mostly broadcast in Spanish in the USA....

Looking after both kids today. Since they are both napping right now I shall do something I hardly ever do: post to LiveJournal. Maybe even read your entries too.

By the way, if I've "unfriended" you or whatever the LJ version of that dire act is called, it's probably not because of anything you've done but because I rarely get time to use the computer these days and read LJ on my internet-enabled but clunky phone. (Or I did until Nick decided to use it as a teether and get infant slobber into the works. It's en route to the repair shop right now.) And scrolling through the entries of certain longwinded folk had become rather a pain in the thumb. If you can deliver an interesting cat anecdote in ten lines I've kept you but if I felt that some potential lifelong injury awaited me in order to get to the end of your 50,000 word account of what Mister Puddypudkins the Third did in your beret then we must have a temporary parting of the ways. Until my technology improves.

Also, my laptop is now totally junk. Add that to the list of things to replace when I get a job and------

Both kids awake now... end of transmission...