It's been a few days since I last updated. My waning LJ enthusiasm finally bottomed out with a couple of single line posts that took all day to write and which I deleted as I wasn't interested in what I had written so why would anyone else be? But I think I'm through with that weedy mood and it's time to write.

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NaNoWriMo? Oh, it's too early in the month to even be thinking about that. Give me until the middle of the month to come up with a good opening line and an amusingly named protagonist and we'll see how it goes from there.

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Listening to Body and Soul, the 4 CD Joy Division boxed set that came out in, crikey, 1997. It's only recently that I've been able to take more than a couple of tracks of Joy Division at a time and I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it through all four discs today, although this is mostly because there are a bunch of live tracks and they were frequently bloody awful live. The one time I saw them they were truly awful, in both senses of the word, a terrible beauty being born, a transfixing but almost unwatchable struggle to wrench out each sound and all the other near cliches people would use at the time.

All the dead wood from jungles and cities on fire - Can't replace or relate, can't release or repair - Take my hand and I'll show you what was and will be....

For  a while Joy Division meant too much to me. But that was an age - over half a lifetime - ago. The music can still chill me from within though, drag me back to a period in my life where the world really did seem to resemble the cover of  "Atmosphere".

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My copy of Douglas Leedy's A Very Merry Electric Christmas (Capitol ST-339, 1969) once belonged to the Portland, Oregon library system which means the sleeve is both in perfect condition and totally ruined as someone with a scalpel or guillotine turned it into an approximation of a gatefold sleeve before encasing it in plastic. What's interested is that Douglas Leedy was born in Portland, Oregon and the sleeve carries an ex-libris sticker saying the album was presented by one Douglas Leedy. You find yourself wondering if the Portand libraries would have discarded the album if their hometown boy had been a bigger name in modern classical music. What level of fame would be needed for a public outcry?

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Bought a new PC yesterday. 500 GB hard drive as standard. That's about twelve thousand times larger than my first PC back in 1991. Costco sell terabyte external drives for about $300 if we need more space.  When did such astonishing technological advances become so commonplace and boring? 

Before there was goth, Altered Images were goth. Then they got cute and made some great records. But I always had a soft spot for this song, which I always thought was the epitome of goth in sounds and lyrics. But to make the ultimate goth dirge and then move on to make some of the happiest pop music of the decades, how cool was that?