what happened after the storm / is everyone ok

This morning's rainy day travelling music:

Sometimes you happen upon perfection, just for a moment - as cheesy and poetic as it may be - to have these sounds in your head and watch the brown and gold leaves fall from trees across rows of steel train tracks. (While I sat at the station, there were 2 homeless dudes trying to get dog-ends off the train tracks at the same time, but I chose to not include them in this particluar image). This album is so underrated.

The boss

Click HERE for a nice Ed Templeton interview over at Juxtapoz Mag.

Some Vinyl

Part 2 of my 'cataloging my coloured vinyl for no real reason...' pictures:

A small victory

‘‘I understand the concept of synchronicity – I mean my favourite movies are always brought up in my favourite TV shows. That means I’m doing something right, right?’’

Today I ate more pasta than any human has ever eaten. It was 2 sittings of cheesy goodness and now I’m ‘fit to burst’, as they say. I watch the girl across from me nibble on salad and sip a thin soup. Lightweight.

Last night as I lay awake in bed, eyes open - my body tired, my mind racing - I thought up an entire stand-up comedy routine. It totaled about 5 minutes and it killed them, the whole room, blackened except for small red table lights and the single spot, roared.

For a moment or two I considered jumping out of bed and writing it all down. Unreal as these jokes were that I had just happened upon, they would work in real life, I knew that without any doubt.

But, laziness plus tiredness, plus warmth divided by stupidity stayed my legs and instead, I closed my eyes and concentrated on the imagined success of that fragile moment.

You can’t lose if you don’t try, I thought as I curled up to her warm back and ass. And burying my face in her neck of long brown hair I felt a little like a failure – but I was a warm, comfortable failure.

Real Gone

While still drinking coffee and reminiscing over Point Break, I am listening to this for the first time. Yeah, Johnny-come-lately strikes again – anyway it’s a good listen, totally different to what I’d expected of Tom Waits and goes well with this Autumnal and grey morning.

Aw, man...

1952 - 2009.

Human, all too human

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

Mercurial

Wow. Another really relevant Mercury Music Prize win! Maybe it’s kismet – some kind of planetary alignment - that so close to the anniversary of 9/11 we are now experiencing yet another world-changing event. How lucky are we to be alive right now.

‘To me, Michael Jackson’s story of his life is very similar to Jesus. This young guy who, from when he was very young, showed signs of being exceptional. Jesus went around preaching the gospel and touching people to make the blind see and making lepers better. Michael Jackson’s gone around the world and done that – he might not have literally touched someone and made them see, but apparently, I don’t know if this is true, there were kids around him that had cancer that didn’t have cancer anymore.’

‘ I don’t know if this is true...’ Really? Maybe best not repeat it in the national press then baby. (Sample album lyric by the way: ‘He's got a dead beat dad, that beats his mum real bad’)

Honestly, I don’t care if your record sounds like Definitely Maybe or What’s Going On, if you espouse that random shit in public, I’m gonna go ahead and assume you’re running on a low battery. So, your name's 'Speech' and you're a rapper? I see what you did there! Dumbass.

f o n t

 
Elephant and Castle, 1991 to 1993. Graphic Design and Typography.

By the end of the course we had discovered some ‘rules’ of design... some of which still exist today. For example certain fonts are always a no-no, whereas others are always a safe bet. The paradigm of typeface avoidance was always Cooper Black (found this pic which confirms this philosophy still stands in 2009)

Close your eyes and pretend it didn’t happen.

Where have I been all these months?
Years even..?
I can see only a few feet ahead -

and now everyone tells me that
Since I’ve been away,
Mirrors no longer exist.
Souls have flown from bodies like birds
From a tree.

How many of them will I miss..?
Only a few.
You would need a bigger,
Stronger heart than
This
To care about so many others.
Lungs,
Breath,
Lips,
Arms...
The smalls of their backs and soft arches
Of their feet.

My idling thoughts continue floating
Out of reach,
Out of sight.
While my hard clay flesh
Lays slumped on the ground,
Pushing up and falling in unison
With the concrete,
With the earth,
Worms,
Spiders,
Dogs, dead bird skeletons.

Grey kindling dust is picked up on the wind.
I cover my face
To make sure it doesn’t get in my eyes,
With all the other mess.

GG

 

So... you make a tube thing, look through it at the sky and think ‘Wow, this may be able to further improve us as a species.’ Then the church gets involved...

Christian biblical references Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 include statements to the tune of: "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Similarly, Psalm 104:5 says, "the Lord set the Earth on its foundations; it can never be moved."

400 years ago today, On 25 August 1609, Galileo demonstrated his first telescope. He was found "vehemently suspect of heresy," i.e: of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to “abjure, curse and detest" those opinions.

He was ordered imprisoned; a sentence later reduced to house arrest. His ‘offending’ Dialogue was banned; and in an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was forbidden, including any he might write in the future.

Yay.

what are we looking for again..?

How many planets exists which might support life? Indeed, what is required for life to exist? How does life start? How does it evolve, and what fabulous creatures can evolution produce? How often do intelligent creatures appear in the giant tapestry of life? It is exactly these questions, and all of them, which are being addressed by the scientists of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

Backspacer

 

New album artwork by Tom Tomorrow (pen name of editorial cartoonist Dan Perkins)

This wasn't on the DVD

You now what I used for eat for breakfast?

''You now what I used for eat for breakfast? Cocaine. You know what I used to eat for lunch..? Cocaine''

Watched this last night - far funnier than expected, and these 4 guys are the main reason.

1 Year ago...

...at about 2.25 a.m, this happened:

Happy Birthday Isaac!

On the day of the new moon, in the month of Hiyar

 "On the day of the new moon, in the month of Hiyar, the Sun was put to shame, and went down in the daytime...''

This quote is one of the earliest written records of an eclipse of the Sun, on 3 May 1375 BC, found in the city of Ugarit in Mesopotamia.

So, here's where my confusion lies; There's press coverage of the solar eclipse from India yesterday, wherein people are bathing and praying in the Ganges BECAUSE OF the eclipse. So, you're praying to a planetary phenomena? The polar opposite of anything even vaguely religious happening? Meh?



Aaaanyway - there are quite a few 'standard' photos of the Asian eclipse on the net, but I prefer this one - taken from a plane - to the usual shots. Also, there seems to be a little Channel 4 logo to the lower left. See it? Spooky.

''We choose to go to the Moon...

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.''

40 years ago, on July 14th, 3 guys went for a ride. They landed on July 20th. This photo was taken by Frank Borman.



40 years on from Earth Rise, we are now able to see images like this:



'In October 2008, Hubble aimed its Wide Field Planetary Camera, at a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147, that lies in the constellation Cetus, and is more than 400 million light-years away from Earth. (for reference - the moon is about 384,400km away.)

The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline, thereby scoring a "perfect 10" both for performance and beauty.

The two galaxies happen to be oriented so that they appear to mark the number 10. The left-most galaxy, or the "one" in this image, is relatively undisturbed apart from a smooth ring of starlight. It appears nearly on edge to our line of sight. The right-most galaxy, resembling a zero, exhibits a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation.'

Not to go all preachy - but imagine looking down from up there, at all the monkeys on Earth fighting over little bits of land, 'our precious turf' to quote Cyrus.

Silly, silly humans.

Best to remember the good times I suppose...

pressure. warmth

Dry eyes itching
It is summer
Come round again to burn us all

More cars
More citizens
Walking in circles under the leaves of trees,
The petals of flowers
Arctic daylight overstaying its welcome
Teenagers cry out into the 5am darkness
Drunk and high
As old men try to sleep
Dry eyes closed for a few hours
In the cool grey shade

Where the ghosts of old ladies still hide
Nowhere else to go
Nothing else to
Do.

which witch?

This is a witch bottle, and was found 15 minutes from my house... I knew there was something up with this bloody area...
 
From New Scientist:
The salt-glazed jar was discovered 1.5 metres below ground by archaeologists from The Maritime Trust, a Greenwich-based charity that preserves historic sailing vessels. When it was shaken, the bottle splashed and rattled, and an X-ray showed pins and nails stuck in the neck, suggesting that it had been buried upside down. Further computed tomography scans showed it to be half-filled with liquid, which later analysis showed to be human urine. The bottle also contained bent nails and pins, a nail-pierced leather "heart", fingernail clippings, navel fluff and hair. The presence of iron sulphide in the mixture also suggests that sulphur or brimstone had been added.

Witch bottles were commonly buried to ward off spells during the late 16th and 17th centuries, but it is very rare to find one still sealed. During the 17th century, British people often blamed witches for any ill health or misfortune they suffered, says Massey. "The idea of the witch bottle was to throw the spell back on the witch," he says. "The urine and the bulb of the bottle represented the waterworks of the witch, and the theory was that the nails and the bent pins would aggravate the witch when she passed water and torment her so badly that she would take the spell back off you."

Is that all rap is about..?

I found this blog which is a listing of samples used in hip hop records. It's pretty definitive but still ongoing, mad interesting for B-boy geek outs.

More sketchy...