Showing posts with label Television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Television. Show all posts

Monday 2 March 2020

Not Bored


I don't do blog posts when I'm away on short breaks although I haven't posted in nearly a week, which is quite a long blogging break for me, but Edinburgh was great but cold.

Edinburgh whilst being the joint capital of Scotland seems a remarkably unplanned city , which just adds to it's interest, and is small enough to easily explore on foot as well as having some amazing buildings and constructions. It's also full of small alleys, high level walks, stone steps and you can usually see some landmark so you can always find your way back if you ever get lost.

I got back yesterday evening and watched two episodes of 30 Rock, two of Veep and the final Frankie Boyle Scotland travelogue and then thought I don't have time to blog and realised how the quantity of choice on television can actually steal your time. The thing is I don't even have Netflix and despite it having lots of series I want to watch , my ivo disk is 90% full and I have Amazon Prime, BBC iPlayer and the commercial channels hubs to watch so much television that I really don't have the time.

People often tell me they binge watch series, but more than two episodes of anything is too much for me, and then I have two Clive Barker books on the go and music to listen to too.

So as I close off this first March post to go to work , the sun is shining outside, and tomorrow I am going to visit Kirsty and Mark to see and hear Mark's latest record player upgrade and Edinburgh did provide me with four more pieces of vinyl , two New Order 12" singles , "Fans" by Malcolm McLaren and "Gris,Gris" by Dr John so I'll go with "Confusion" by New Order which has one of the cleverest covers I have ever seen, although I have seen similar examples before, but even the guy selling it in Vinyl Villains wasn't too sure what it was, and the remix I'm sharing (cos it uses the cover) was used in the film "Blade".


Saturday 14 December 2019

Stay Free


I don't need any more vinyl, bet deciding on coffee at Meli Cafe near Haymarket, I had to drop into Stay Free Records. I had no intention of buying anything, but Tony is a really canny guy who knows his stuff and we chatted about general stuff , the price of music and what have for what seemed like a very short time but I thought it was later than it was but it wasn't.

Anyway I looked At what was around and there was a Queen flexi disk which I thought my friend Jim may want, the a copy of Al Stewart's "Past Present and Future" for £4 . If there is one Al Stewart album I would have bought on vinyl it would be this. I had also been considering buying "All The World's A Stage" by Rush, and he had a copy of that for £8 . So it was a total foregone conclusion, two vinyl albums on three discs (or is it disks?) both of which were stuff I wanted.

I've also ordered 12" vinyl copies of Television's "Marquee Moon" and "Prove It" from Discogs and think I will ask my daughters to get the album for my Christmas present as I have been considering that.

I need to trim my vinyl collection and Tony has told me to bring some stuff in, so I may do that over the next week of two, but I have plenty to play at the moment so will enjoy my new additions tomorrow morning. So what to share, we had Television the last post, so I thing I will go for Al Stewart's "Nostradamus", one of the reasons I love this is that it is relatively easy to play (or seemed so when I was a teenager, and I reckon I could give it a good stab now if I could remember all the lyrics), I've shared a recent live take but every recorded version is worth listening to.

Every Word


One of the reasons I am finding David Sheppard's "On Some Faraway Beach" slow going rather than hard going is as well as the small typeface and word cramming, I really do have to read every word because skimming immediately loses the sense of what you are reading. In the same way that the human eye / brain combination constructs your vision from limited input I often read books in the similar fashion, but this is definitely not an option with this one. It is engrossing and is continually throwing things up that I did't know about Brian Eno and therefore provides more music to share with you.

Essentially it is reminding me of things music that I love although I need to further investigate "The End" the album by Nico, but I was unaware how impressed Brian Eno was with Television, who's "Marquee Moon" is one of my many favourite albums , combining rock and free jazz stylings with Richard Lloyd's and Tom Verlaine's twin guitars intertwining into an amazing sonic tapestry. The thing is , if free jazz were this wonderful I would listen to a lot more of it.

The Label feature on this blog is still very slow, so I'm not sure what is happening there.

So I am going to share "Venus De Milo" from the album "Marquee Moon" by Television. I found a live version from 2016 and also a demo version from the seventies here.

Monday 14 October 2019

Walking Off The Walking Dead - #Oktoberfest #16 - Jockey Full Of Bourbon - Tom Waits


I've finally given up on The Walking Dead as it seems to have drifted too far from it's main concept. Yes it's post apocalyptic and things can go off it so many directions but I am still vaguely wondering what happened to Rick when he was spirited off in that unknown helicopter. I'm not that observant so I may have missed something and the latest series started and it was like I couldn't remember where I was in it and the zombies are just an embellishment rather than the result of what caused this situation. No doubt people will be able to enjoy it and I didn't stop watching because it was bad, but because it had run out for me.

One of the problems is there is some much excellent television and only a limited amount of time. There is nothing wrong with ending a series, I'm thinking "Game of Thrones" , "Black Sails" and "Breaking Bad" but I have now picked up "Vikings" and "Preacher" and with "His Dark Materials" on the way I think my television time is spoken for well into 2020.

For some reason I thought I could hit a record number of annual posts this months by instigating #Oktoberfest but I still have to post 43 more seventeen days to go , so three posts a day is not going to happen but I will likely complete it in November.

So the #Oktoberfest song today is "Jockey Full of Bourbon" by Tom Waits from "Raindogs", and it was Hannah Berry (Comic Laureate) on here Paperback Writers show on 6Music yesterday who played it and reminded that if I need songs about drink Tom Waits provides a rich vein to mine. I had been having problems trying to think of songs related to drink but I am sure I can hit another 15-20 by the end of the month.

It's a greyish Monday but go out and hit the world.

Wednesday 15 August 2018

Phone Blinkers


For lunch I nipped to the Mean Eyed Can for a couple of Empanadas and a diet coke (see here), and found it almost amusing the number of people sat in the sun, or walking but engrossed in the mobile devices almost oblivious to anything else.

While I listen to music (and now radio) on my phone I very seldom do anything that distracts me for walking or whatever. If I want to take a picture or video I stop and make sure that I am not blocking anyone or at risk of running into anything.

While listening to John Niven he told me about a book "Makin' Tracks" by Debbie Harry and Chris Stein that resulted in him getting into Television.

So although phones are very useful they do seem to act as blinkers for so many people, blinding them to all that is going on around them. Having said that I have been guilty the odd time of concentrating too much on my phone and nearly walked into to a person or stationary object.

Listening To John Niven


On Sunday 6Music broadcast a show by one of my favourite authers John Niven. The series is called Paperback Writers and has a writer talking for an hour about music that has shaped him and influenced him.  If you want to catch it (before September 2018) you can listen to it here.

Now I'd missed it on Sunday, but then remembered there;s a BBC Radio iPlayer app that you can download onto your phone, and thought "Aha" . As well as music and podcasts I can listen to radio shows on demand on my phone.

So that was my listening for my walk to work this morning. He opened with Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Up Around The Bend" a song I loved since I first heard that razor sharp opening riff, although the lead guitar parts seem remarkably muted compared to the main riff.

He played a lot of great music including Television's "See No Evil" which I tried to emulate in my song "Communication" for The Bok  (and failed totally), and actually pointed out a very dark concept of Middle of The Road's "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" that I hadn't countenanced before about losing your mother as a child.

He also talked about and played a song from The Wishing Tree, the band he was a member of in his early twenties who, from the song he played, well worth a listen.

Basically this has given me another option for listening on my walks, which is all very good.


Monday 2 April 2018

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.

Thursday 30 April 2015

TV IS KING!


Well it is and it isnt. I'm old enough to remember only two channels, being really annoyed when Kennedy got shot because ITV took all their programs off and just had some woman playing piano and I missed my weekly episode of Bonanza. I saw the transition from black and white to colour, the moon landings and England winning the World Cup..

I remember getting BBC2 and that was a 50% increase in available TV , then we got Channel 4 and Brookside and Channel 5 was a relatively recent terrestrial addition , plus there was the proliferation of satellite , Sky's money managing to make and sterilize football in one fell swoop.

When we had limited channels , audiences could be huge , but people complained like hell about repeats. We now have digital channels that are completely repeats. People complain about the TV License but happily shell out five times as much for subscription TV that STILL is full of advertisements.

The switch to digital came and gave most people loads of effectively free content funded by adverts. Plus these days we can have catch up TV and recording boxes that allow you to skip adverts, enabling you to watch what you want when you want.

It's very seldom these days that you need to get home for a TV program unless it's a televised live event, but we now probably watch more TV than ever before. It#s ubiquitous. We have TV on Mobile devices and there's a TV screen visible wherever you sit at work.

TV IS KING!
And my point is people still say "There's nothing on television" , apart from the off switch you have all the options above. My TIVO box is 90% full and Netflix and Amazon Prime don't even touch my radar. There are times when you channel hopand cant find anything you want but there are so many catch up and record options you should always be able to find something.

And if not, why not read a book or call a friend , that's even better than TV!

Though the Tubes song was appropriate as it gave the  post it's title.