Half Gatsby

I am halfway through "The Great Gatsby" by F Scott Fitzgerald and to me, it is very American and reminds me a lot of "The Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger. Like that book, I find it boring but oddly captivating, but I am fine knowing that it is fairly short so I know I will finish it this week.

I am listening to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band who make even the most mundane music more than listenable to the point of being absolutely excellent.

I wrote a Vocal story called "The Great Catsby" that you can read below.

Also Leslie West of Mountain was a great guitarist and a very big man and I think he had an album or nickname called "The Great Fatsby"

If you want to buy a book my dark poetry is on the link below.

The music is "Everythings Gonna Be Alright" by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band

I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not others. C'est La Vie.

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

1. Barter Books - An Amazing Bookshop In A Railway Station In Alnwick
2. The Plagiaristic Poetry Series - Poems Taken From Random-Themed Lines
3. Another Raven - A Take On Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"
4. The Cleaner - An Autism-Focused Christmas Special
5. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
6. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
7. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
8. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer

Steppenwolfing

I am a third of the way through the book (you know I am a very slow reader) and am on the third part / chapter . whatever the "Treatise on the Steppenwolf" and have seen the first references to the main subject Harry Haller as a were-wolf, though this is philosophy as a novel, with the man wolf situation almost like the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of Robert Louis Stevenson.

The book drifts between mundane normality and dark areas where the reality becomes more than  a bit blurred and maybe it's this that is keeping my interest. I am not sure that I will pick up another Hermann Hesse book but even though I bought this it nearly never got read. 

I suppose it's like "The Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger , "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac and "Tarantula" by Bob Dylan, books that grace your shelf but maybe you have never read. I still haven't done "On The Road" ,, yet but I am sure I will do.

So musically we will keep the wolf theme going with "Will The Wolf Survive" by Los Lobos which I thought sounds almost like a Stevie Winwood song, it is rather excellent.

Fry Television

"The Catcher In The Rye" is on the pile to go to the Charity shop, but since then have discussed it and Fiona pointed out that it was probably the genesis of the anti-hero. At one point the nover was the most censored and most read novel in the USA and probably the UK. See, despite me not liking the experience of reading it I am still writing about it and thinking about it and would recommend it to anyone who wants to stretch their mind a little.

At the time the novel was published (1951) there were children and there were adults, there was nothing in between and "Catcher In The Rye" addressed that. Today we still deem sixteen year olds not mature enough to vote but mature enough to get married, raise a family and shoot a gun. Then there was the Mark Chapman connection elucidated far better than I could here. Hopefully that puts a lid on it on this blog for me.

I wanted more fiction for my next book and noticed Stephen Fry's debut novel "The Liar" in my reading pile. I thought I had read it but ten pages in I don't recognise it at all so that will be my reading for the next week or so.

On my walks I have been listening to the first two Television albums "Marquee Moon" and "Adventure" and while they sound a little underproduced and rougher than I remember there is no doubt that music, particuarly the guitar play between Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd is well worth listening to. The songs mainly consist of basic rhyms driven by complex guitar motifs rather than chords.

The song "Marquee Moon" is ten minutes of mostl;y two simple chords allowing the guitars to weave the song on top of this construct plus the brilliant couplet:

"I remember how the darkness doubled

I remember lightning struck itself "

Conjusring up som amazing images. "Ain't That Nothin'" from "Adventure" at the time was one of my favourite guitar solos and when I heard it on John Peel that made me rush out and buy. The digital copies contain alternate takes and rough demos and are worth listening to. These albums are still must haves for any collection.

So enjoy your Easter Monday my friends.

March Final

It's after ten and this is my last post for March 2018. The weather has been miserable and I couldn't do that much walking although I hit my target for March.

I'm fifty page from completing "The Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger an have decided it is worth the effort of completing it, but it's a bit like cleaning gutters or unblocking a drain. It's not pleasant but has to be done. The protagonist is not pleasant. If he were in the UK today he would read the Daily Mail and vote Tory without being articulate eno0ugh to give a reason why. He always finds a reason to despise people especially if they are not well off. He himself is provided for by well to do parents that he is still, for want of a better word, a git. This book makes you think of how to deal with annoyances like Holden Caulfield, a privileged nobody who believes the world owes him whatever he wants. I haven't finished the book so I may be completely wrong in my evaluation, but if you take this book on don't expect to feel better after reading it.

Yesterd I took deliver of "Suffice To Say: The Complete Yachts Collection" on Cherry Red Records  masterminded by Henry Priestman the music behing The Christians. I've moaned that The Yachts had never appeared in digital format apart from the odd track on compilations, but now that has been rectified and I ordered it from the excellent Action Records in Preston, and it really is an excellent set.

It's funny that I was thinking twent quid for three CDs is expensive but it really isn't. In 1975 (I think) I was on the dole and my JSA was £3.25 a week (it was subsidised by undeclared lump work so I could actually live) . Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" came out  and was priced at £3.25. So if albums had kept in line with JSA we'd be paying £80 for an album.

So I will leave you with "Yachting Types" and you can buy the albums mentioned below.

Catcher Not Caught

A couple of days ago I started reading "The Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger and while I know virtually everybody else has read it, and it gets four and a half stars on Amazon, the only thing I like about it so far is the cover. Published in 1945 therefore of it's time the writing is vaguely film-noir  and the protagonist is just annoying. A friend of mine told me not to bother, which made me slightly more determined to read it and now I'm half way through it. I had the impression it was about a kid skipping school, but it's an older student being expelled (again) and ping ponging between being an annoyance and pretending to be an adult.

Today there ice on cars and rooves and there's fog as well so the walk into work may be a little chilly.

It's the day before the Easter weekend so I now have a four day weekend, I could definitely do that permanently.

Anyway for some reason the video for John Fogerty's "The Old Man Down The Road" from "Centrefield"  came into my head because of the incredibly long guitar lead that runs through. It's an unusual way of linking a lot of disparate scenes of American.

So enjoy your Thursday and make sure you have all your Easter Eggs.

The Audacity of Psi Power

I finished "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets" by Simon Singh and now I am embarking on "The Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger, which is one of those books that everyone has read apart from me, I'll let you know how it goes.

Today I also managed my first multi track recording using Audacity and managing to deal with teh Windows Latency issue. It involved a little lateral thinking and switching off the sound pass through for the recorded track in Audacity. This basically means letting the recorded tracks play through the computer sound system while listening to the track being recorded through the U-Phoria box which feeds into Audacity via the USB connection. This means I can actually start building songs on my computer, they won't be sophisticated but will end up on Soundcloud here.

Over the last few days an odd thing has happened with my listening, normally I listen to album once or twice at the most but I have had an album on repeat and have listened to it four or five times so far. When I first put on I though the production was a bit lacklustre but the songs were more than listenable. Each song was excellent and slightly influenced by the punk ethic at the time. The album is the debut by the Hawkwind alter ego band Hawklords, and almost every song has a two word chorus refrain., the album is "25 Years On"  and clocks in at just over half an hour.

It opens with "Psi Power" (using the title as the catchy refrain) segueing into "Free Fall" with a slight lull for the short "Automaton" before hitting the title track. "Flying Doctor" is great an it's refrain is "Cabinet Key" and that's the song I will share with you.

The fact that I only gave it a cursory listen when it first came out but now I feel I know all the songs intimately shows just how good it actually is. Definitely another on ethat every one should have.

Books To Read

I've been finding it difficult to keep up with the walking, basically due to personal laziness. The thing is the last couple of days I've done more than my required steps to keep my rolling three month million steps going and keep thing am I obsessed or am I focussed and is there a difference. The thing is I know it benefits me physically so I know I have to keep doing it, and I will keep doing it as long as the weather is reasonable , and if it's not I will find another way of keeping up. I have Fenham Community Pool less than ten minutes walk away.

It's funny , while I am not an avaricious reader , I am reasonably well read. I am proud to have passed that on to both my daughters, Kirsty is always reading and recommends some good stuff and Juliet had read "Lord of The Rings" by the time she was 8. Her teacher at her new school didn't believe her so gave her a grilling, and she answered every question he asked. He was well impressed. It's a book I have a few copies of and have read about five times even though it consists of six different books, and often released as three separate books. I was introduced to Tolkein at secondary school and "The Hobbit" was one of the first books we had to read and most of the class loved it. A great introduction and great preparation for "Lord of The Rings".

My favourite book of all time is Clive Barker's "Imajica" , incidentally another book that is often split into three separate volumes. I love it, it has everything you could want from a twisted fantasist spanning five dimensions with magic , horror and lots more.

There are two books that everyone is assumed to have read and be familiar with that I have not touched. They are:

• "Catcher In The Rye" by JD Salinger and
• "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac

It's something I am going to do something about before the end of the year. I am currently reading "David Bowie: A Life" by Dylan Jones which is essentially a chonological compilation of interview snippets, but still interesting to get an idea of Bowie, although the number of people who come on the when appeared doing "Starman" on Top of The Pops their life changed and nothing would ever be the same again seems a bit far fetched to me. Yes Bowie was innovative but he was also a magpie and loved attention, and this got it in spades.

It can't happen again because at the time most of the population watched Top of The Pops religiously, now we have the internet, and so many ways of communication and finding an sharing information that were not available at the time.

Incidentally at my second ever gig somewhere in Ingol someone asked us to play it, and though I'd never played it before we managed to do it!! 

A lot of people these days can barely listen to two minutes of a song.

So it's obvious what I will leave you with isn't it.....