Ishtar X

It's a lockdown Easter Weekend. Easter Sunday is one of the two days a year that everything is shut, so most retail staff actually get a rest.  Easter has been linked with Ishtar and Eostre (see this article) and a lot of Christian festivals have been appropriated from non Christian festivals but it's something that doesn't trouble me too much I'm hardly the most religious person in the world and when Christians and Pagan start arguing about things like this they come out as bad as each other.

Coincidentally this weekend I started rereading "Behold The Man" by Michael Moorcock , which is basically about a conflicted time traveller who goes back in time (28 AD) and , well , you can guess what happens. This book is an award winning novel and clocks in at 124 pages (definitely not unusual for Moorcock) and is possibly one of the reasons I though that "The Stand"  by Stephen King could have been told in 300 pages rather than the thousand in the version that I read (I believe there was an extended version as well). Stephen King is an author I never got into, although I like him as a person and love most of the TV and film adaptations of his work (I feel the same about Terry Pratchett)

So I am enjoying "Behold The Man" but will finish it fairly rapidly, and then need to choose a next book to read, so am open to any suggestions but have a huge pile of "worth revisiting" books.

The post title is an obvious wordplay on "Easter Eggs" rather than anything meaningful, so we will go with "Easter" by Marillion which was a great post Fish song, a band that sort of mirrored Genesis, but are still producing some excellent music and never fell into the mainstream pop like Genesis , with the odd exception did.

Keep Me In Your Heart

I've been wanting to post this for a while , essentially to share the wonderful Warren Zevon song "Keep Me In Your Heart For A While" which he recorded shortly after he was diagnosed with inoperable pleural mesothelioma (a cancer of the lining of the lung), and it was released just two weeks before his death on September 7, 2003. It is a truly beautiful song and has been covered by many people including Jorge Calderon on the "Enjoy Every Sandwich" tribute album, and a recent cover by Alfie Boe, a classical based singer but impressive taking the lead in the orchestral "Quadrophenia" and fitting right into the alt-folk / country for his take which I discovered below.

I have a lot of close friends who have lost parents , partners and children and if they read this I hope this will warm their hearts. All three takes are beautiful. I lost my mum thirty years ago and due to my (unscientific and non religious beliefs) I have dealt with that, but loss affects everyone in their own way.

I really don't know what else to say on this, it is a great song , by a great artist and no doubt we will see more covers in time , but here is the youtube search if you want to discover more versions of this wonderful song.

Je M'Ennuie

No, I'm not bored ( je m'ennuie is French for I'm Bored in case you were wondering what I am on about)  but I think others might be in this COVID-19 Lockdown. On my Discogs store I sell a CD maybe once every two weeks but this week it's more than one a day. I think people are getting bored and browsing Discogs and buying CDs , a sort of online retail therapy. It's good that people actually buy music as opposed to getting a Spotify subscription, alth I suppose buying from me doesn't really benefit the artist, but it is helping people get through the Lockdown.

In my last post I said how good "Crocodiles" by Melt Yourself Down was , and they had a great conversation with me on twitter although  Melt Yourself Down is a great name for a song and reminds me of "Melt The Guns" by XTC , but Crocodiles is a great name for a band. Anyway I am gonna be pursuing their music much wither but the sax riff on "Crocodiles" is something else, it could almost be classic Van Der Graaf Generator (unusually for a rock band they had no bass and no guitar in their early incarnations but still managed some of the most impressive music you will hear).

So I'm going to share "I'm Bored" by The Bonzo Dog Band , because I am sure that is hitting a lot of people at the moment, but a litle good music can definitely dispel the ennui and we drift into lockdown Easter, and on Amazon I've just seen a Cheese Easter Egg!!

Good

The weather is nice and I think things are improving with the lack of vehicles and planes travelling. Wildlife is more prevalent and things look good. I would like a lot of things to stay like this.

I don't particularly like working from home as the days are much longer and I end up eating while working , something I generally don't do in the office, but I listen to a lot more music and that is another good thing.

There are some people who are only happy when they are miserable and have something to complain about, but you can always find something wrong , look for the things that are right. I was tempted to use the Smiths "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" which I once had as my ringtone for a good friend Lee when I was at EE , a great character and great at pretending he was grumpy. He definitely wasn't.

I haven't ridden a bus for two weeks although surprising I have kept almost on target with my step count. With this weather that is very easy to do while working my way through "Monkey Island" by the J Geils Band , which is a very listenable album.

One song that has caught my ear on 6Music is "Crocodile" by Melt Yourself Down with it's insistent driving saxophone motif, and I kept hearing and didn't even know who the band were, well now I do, and so do you.

As I post this I noticed my boxed set "The Smith Complete" is priced at £1200 on Amazon , who the hell would pay that much for a CD box?

Coincidentally Coronavirus

I had no plans to post again today but still reading and enjoying  "What If" by Randall Munroe  and the latest question was "Could we eliminate the common cold if we stayed apart" . The common cold is a rhinovirus , that is it attacks the nose and throat and goes on to analyse that the basic concept probably would work but there are many other things that need to be taken into account and I was struck by the obvious correlation with the current COVID-19 that we are in at the moment.

Although they are different they are both virus based and a lot of the ways of combating them are based on stopping them from spreading, as all sensible people realise that prevention is far better than cure, unfortunately it is difficult to deal with the "stupid" segment who just ignore guidelines of what action to take.

I have been put in the "stupid" section because I go out for a walk or two each day. If I lived in flats or narrow streets and there were a lot of people around I would probably stay in , and maybe walk round the garden or garage. I live in Fenham  and the streets and footpaths are very wide (though it doesn't stop some couples from managing to take up the whole width of the footpath, almost playing Coronavirus Chicken, which forces me in to the road as traffic is a lot sparser but doesn't happen often)

So because I never planned to write this it's fairly short so my choice of music, so I reckon "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats is fine as it could be a description of the footpath scenario I described above.

Something Negative

It's into Sunday morning and one of the things this Social Distancing / Isolation is doing is (at weekends) allowing me to stay up very late knowing that I don't have to get up tomorrow morning. While I see people out , I don't see any gatherings and I am wondering if the cramped aisles of local shops (and supermarkets) may have to change. Certain people certainly know how to block your way.

I am now reading "What If" by Randall Munroe and it is quite interesting trying to seriously and scientifically answer some completely absurd questions. Randall Munroe is responsible for XKCD "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". What does XKCD stand for (I think it looks like a Roman Numeral but the K knocks it out ("K" in European metrics is a thousand but "M" is a Roman thousand) but this is what it says on the site:

What does XKCD stand for? 

It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.

So follow the link to find out more and read the book to enjoy some absurdities , there is a section about lightning and tonight watching the final "Righteous Gemstones" episode Baby Billy got struck by lightning and forgave his brother in law and meeting his dead sister, so there's a coincidence.

So I only said something negative because the last post was something positive, so maybe we should get something dark and gothic to play out with, maybe "Bring on the Dancing Girls" (available as a free download from Bandcamp by clicking on the title) by Dead Eyes Opened who impressed my as a support band at the Cluny a few years back.

Something Positive

Obviously everything I post will be influenced at least in some part by the COVID-19 scenario. There are some positives to be taken from this, although it is still a frightening situation.

I can almost walk across the road at will , traffic is a lot sparser. There are still people out and on my walks I have said hello to a lot more new people than I normally would , a lady this morning explained (at a distance) about the impressive stick she had in her hands.

Animals, in theory , may be a problem because unless they are on a leash they will always investigate new people, I've had both cats and dogs approach me over the last few days.

There has been good weather and bad weather this week, but not so bad that I can't get out, although I am wanting to go a little further afield although I have plenty of green areas to walk through so hopefully I won't get too bored.

I am one of the lucky ones, I can work from home , but although it's fine when you are working singly,  I find screen sharing a little trying.

This really one of those posts where I have nothing to say, although it is my first post in April and last April I did 50 posts, so that's a definite no go this year.

Today I actually listened to some CDs (Dead Eyes Opened, The Yachts and Ethiopiques - Ethiopian jazz , which is very disconcerting) because my speakers take a feed from the TV screen that is my new monitor and when  I use it for my work monitor it's not really an option to play music on it. So we can go with "Tezeta (Nostalgia)" by Mulatu Astatke which I think I may have shared before after discussing with Nadine Shah , The music just seems a little off/strange making it very compelling listening, I could listen to this all night , although we are just past midnight here.

Billy Bolero Again

One of the things about working from home is that my sleeping seems have got much better, not that it was bad, it's just better.I can go to bed later , get up later and still put in a good day. The working environment is not quite as good as work but I have found how to split my 24" screen so that I still have effectively three screens to work on (see here)

Yesterday I was posting on Ravel's "Bolero" and then after searching wanted to include Alex Harvey's "Billy Bolero" but it wasn't available on Youtube, so I found a version with Frank Zappa conducting his band in "Barcelona" which was good.

This morning I decided to put together a slide show but Windows Movie Maker has been removed from Windows 10 and the alternative method is to use Photos which is slow and has far less functionality than Movie Maker. So I downloaded Movie Maker 10 recommended on the Microsoft Store. All was going fine until I wanted to save the project . No you have to buy it, admittedly only a tenner.

But you have to time every clip individually and can't apply durations and transitions across the whole slideshow or time the transitions. So it's adequate and better than Photos.

So I've created a slideshow , and this is the first one I 've done with this software, hopefully I've missed something , and documentation seems to be an unnecessary extra for them, but at least the song is now on Youtube and you can enjoy it, I love it.

It's only available as a demo on digital download , but if you can get a copy of "Soldier On The Wall" then you will be fine.

Billy Bolero

The intention was not to post as often as last year , and up to now I am outstripping last year, though last year i posted 50 times in April and doubt that will happen this year, this is post 63 so averages two posts every three days which should be adequate, no one is asking for more and there is plenty of more pertinent stuff for you to enjoy.

Today I went out for a walk, I am slightly worried I am going to miss my monthly target, but it was a beautiful day and it was quite amusing with so many people practising social isolation but waving and shout / chatting greetings. Then I was walking along Nunsmoor Road and there was a woman walking her dog on the other footpath and it wasn't on a lead, and when it saw me it ran into the road , cue much shouting. It's a dog!! Dogs get distracted. The only problem with some dogs is idiot owners.

Then there was another lady who was hailed from across the road by her friend , then her friend stepped into the road and nearly got hit by a cyclist. No malice intended , just a bit of not taking notice of what was happening.

Which brings me to the actual point of this post Maurice Ravel's "Bolero" , it always been a piece I've loved and is like two separate piece played at the same time , the almost menacing simple three note backing, then the beautiful wandering surface melody (does this sound like I know what I'm talking about or make me sound like a moron) . A bolero is

• A Spanish dance
• The music it is danced to
• A ladies' short jacket

Not to sure what inspired Ravel, but it has been picked up by several rock bands such as Frank Zappa , I thought Jethro Tull had , but the piece was "Bouree", Jeff Beck gave us the excellent "Beck's Bolero"  and ELP gave us "Abbadon's Bolero" on their album "Trilogy". The reason it came to mind was that as I was stripping the bed it came on Classic FM but I just started playing "Billy Bolero" by Alex Harvey and I just love that song , but it's not on Youtube yet , ao that's a video for me to put together, so you can make do with Frank Zappa's version, it ain't often you see Frank conducting.

Synchronicity on Monkey Island

I am currently reading "Cabal" (AKA "Nightbreed") by Clive Barker and a priest appeared who is being blackmailed by a ne'er do well and was thing how technology can date both film and writing . The priest says "I burned the negatives" the ne'er do well replies "I made copies". A similar situation underpins "The Righteous Gemstones" except the technology is iPhones and hard drives. That series is wonderful black comedy in which everyone bar none is utterly beneath contempt, absolutely awful in self righteous right wing Christian way.

While going out for a little shopping through hail, snow and rain I decided to play an album I hadn't listened to for many years, "Monkey Island" by the J Geils Band "Monkey Island" was also a favourite game of both my daughters many years ago in the days of efficient code when a game could fit on a single floppy disc.

The album does contain some great songs , "I Do"  is a particularly good rock and soul example and the album features some great harp / harmonica from Magic Dick (why was a harmonica called a harp or a mouth organ) but the title track is nine minutes of epic story telling with an absolute killer chorus. I found a live version from 1977 at Winterland and the intro takes up almost half the song. I think the studio version is better , but this is good.

This is a revisitation of something I know is good, unlike the "Grand Hotel" by Procol Harum which I was unaware how brilliant that still is , so it will be getting a lot of revisitations.

Enjoy , and Monkey Island the game is available on Steam for around a tenner.

No Future

This is not as negative as the title might sound and is an excuse to share the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen" from which I extracted the title of this post. When I first heard the Sex Pistols I was sort of disappointed because they were more heavy metal than punk though that also might be down to having decent production

This is about the situation we find ourselves in with the lockdown. Normally we have something we have to do , and something we look forward to , like seeing people at work and socially , going to town , for some people shopping, everything is something to look forward to, but the lockdown has stopped a hell of a lot of that.

I am lucky enough to work from home and make random Teams calls to people to maintain sociability , but if your work is closed down you may suddenly lose a huge amount of social contact. We often think that the people we work with are just co workers but they are often friends and do provide social interaction and friendship as well , giving us something to look forward to.

Luckily I live in Fenham , Newcastle which has wide roads, wide footpaths , parks , green areas like the Town Moor which enables me to get out and walk while maintaining social distancing.

Today I went to the local Boots to pick up a prescription, but it took me well over an hour in freezing conditions. I was worried I was going to collapse the cold was so bad.  The other thing I hadn't thought a bout was there were two vapers spewing out their smoke over everyone behind them in the queue. They complainingly desisted when me and another guy told them they could be infecting everyone  their smoke / vapour hit. Smoking and Vaping is OK as long as you don't breathe it on anyone else.

The thing is you need something to look forward to. We have phones , social media, and an unfeasible amount of TV choice. Then there's books and music.

So we can give ourselves new things to look forward to , however small, something to look forward to is something worth having. There are still people who seem to relish things going wrong and telling you you must be miserable because things will only get worse, but I do not subscribe to that.

Although things will change, we can slightly change our goals and look forward to a bright future when we come out the other side.

So find something you like to look forward to. Enjoy your Saturday.

2222

Yes , this is post number 2222 , probably the next significant number will be 2345, but this is one of the goals I mentioned in a recent post. I have now got 98 positive reviews on Discogs so still two off the century there. I added a few more CDs one of which was a BEF box set with is going for around fifty mounds so it must be quite rare, but I am never going to play it again so I can make some room.

I'm slightly worried that the lockdown will hamper my walking although I have kept up my steps so far and likely to be ok for March , but April may be a different kettle of fish. I have been out and am surprised at the number of people who seem to go out of their way to stop social distancing, managing to take up the width of a Supermarket aisle on their own, so it just means finding another way round.

So it is quite late on this Wednesday , so I doubt anyone will read this, but given our current situations here's another one for it, "Clampdown" by The Clash.

Thank you and good night.

Home Is The New Work

Today I was going to use a bit of my free time to put together a slideshow of "The Murderous Memorandum" by David King, but I am in contact with him and his partner and my friend tattooist Sophia Gourley and sent a message that he should do that given that he is an excellent artist and musician / composer. I shared my Nick Cane / Dr Faustus video which has proven quite popular and you can enjoy it here.

So that means I need to find something else to put my talents to, I am learning a couple of songs which may find their way to my Youtube channel and I have a couple of deliveries scheduled.

I have the first two series of "Orange Is The New Black"  which I am working through and am now on the final series of 30 Rock, but my TIVO disk is still 75% full so my Netflix trial is still on hold and I need to get a week of Now TV to watch series 3 of Westworld and Series 2 of Britannia.

I supposed that influenced the title of the post, and Home Is The New Work. I am wondering if people will have problems going back to an office environment if this ever gets back to normal. The situation has been predicted is so many dystopian future novels, and I am shocked how incompetent the UK and USA governments have been handling this.

As I am writing this I am listening to "Grand Hotel" by Procol Harum, and to be quite honest I don't think I have listened to it before and it is absolutely excellent. Windows Media Player and being at home is allowing me to explore my music collection a lot more than I have in years. iTunes and even MusicMatch were nowhere near as fast , efficient and convenient. People keep telling me a Kindle with Alexa is fine , but it keeps suggesting I get Spotify , and doesn't even reference the stuff I've bought on Amazon , and as for my ripped music , I can forget about that.

So we'll go with the title track from "Grand Hotel" and it is as impressive as it's title. Check it out.

Isn't Life Changed

So the UK moves towards a sort of lockdown, with too many people think that they are OK. I THINK I am Ok but I don't KNOW that I am OK, and that is probably true for everyone not showing symptoms. My posts will probably address the situation for the near future, but I am thinking this may never be over. Even if COVID-19 is dealt with there may be something more virulent waiting round the corner.

On the other the other hand many forms of Cancer are curable , as a kid that was it , AIDS , SARS etc have all been faught successfully so COVID-19 is just another battle to be fought.

We need to keep away from people we don't know (sounds like advice you give to children) but many adults seem to be just ignorant of this. I had to take a bus today , there was one other passenger on the bus so sat well away from them. Then someone else got on the bus, sat on the seat in front of me (plenty of others further away to choose from) and got on the phone to berate someone about the fact that the person they were phoning needed to make sure they kept away from others. Luckily my stop was next so I went to the front of the bus to distance myself and get off to renew my driving licenses.

Sharing "Isn't Life Strange" by The Moody Blues which seems vaguely appropriate for these times. One of my biggest worries is actually keeping my steps up, though I don't see us being confined to houses , just confined to as little interaction with people we don't know as possible.

Today I had a phone consultation re my Cirrhosis of the Liver but I know the consultant well and that was fine. We may find we don't have to travel as much. I remember the shock of someone at work saying "Maybe I shouldn't be travelling to London every day for a one hour meeting. My jaw dropped. Some people are either unbelievably stupid or selfish or both.

A Timely Writing - Group Hug

A semi poem for our current situation:

Group Hug

I don't know that you have it

You don't know that I have it

Let's stay a little away from each other

We can still talk

Wave

Sing to Each Other

Speak

Text

Speak on our phone

or Skype

Or Many Social Media Platforms

Look out for those Who Can't

We Can Still Be Friends

We Can Still Share So Much

You Matter To Me

And (I Think)

I Matter To You

We Will Get Through This

And We Will Hug Once More

Let#'s Look Forward To

A Massive Group Hug

Round Grey's Monument

(Or Wherever)

We Are Bigger , and Stronger thank this

Group Hug

And a song so go with it ... from the appropriately named "Life'll Kill Ya" album another of my favourite Warren Zevon songs "I Was In The House When The House Burned Down "

Inside

I'm glad to see that my posting is down this year, although I don't think the quality has improved any.

I am listening to a lot more of my purchased music thanks to this lockdown but also doing quite a lot more planned walking as it would be terribly easy to just stay at home.

I am thirty pages from the end of "Weaveworld" and the story has not gone exactly the way I remembered it,  although it is a definite one for a revisit, and think it would make a great film, it's gonna be followed by "Cabal" which did surface as the film "Nightbreed" in which humanity show themselves to be the true monsters , a situation reflected in how b=people are behaving these days.

I did receive to amazingly excellent news today which I can't share with anyone but close friends until the news becomes public.

I've also caught up on a lot of recorded TV and if it keeps on like this I may have to watch some DVDs , it's a long time since I did that.

We'll go with "Inside" by Jethro Tull which is semi appropriate for these times

Memory

The last few days I've forgot things I should know , but the fact that I've remembered that I forgot means my memory is not totally shot, though it has never been good.

Firstly I forgot the name of a model of a Ford that I once had (two cars) , I knew the car just not the model name then I forgot the name of someone I've been working with. Someone mentioned her name and it clicked in, the information is in there just at times it refuses to surface.

I did a search of Ford car models and there it was , Ford Sierra, a car I liked but the name just wouldn't come to mind. And that's the thing , I may not know things, but I know where to find things , or to spot things in the midst of other things. The thing is , if my memory is so bad , how can I know how to find things , because that ability must be something that resides in memory.

It's not something that bothers me, because I always fine what I need.

I'm going to share a Spanish video of Soft Machine's "Memories" with Robert Wyatt on vocals, which is a song I've always liked and has been revisited by Robert down the years.

Windows Media Player?

Yesterday I tried using the recommended Windows 10 Media player Groove which would not recognise the music library. For years I've been using iTunes , but that is just slow , cumbersome bloatware,  and Amazon Music is not much better.

I then went to Windows Media Player and accidentally pressed a small icon which changed the view and very shortly had logged all my network music in it's library (iTunes took about two days to do this) , the only slight problem being that it defaults to the 32 bit version , but I have put the 64 bit version on the quick access bar.

So today I have listed to a Joy Division boxed set, a best of Julian Cope and a best of Warren Zevon. While the sound quality is a bit imperfect , it's great to listen to my own music collection rather than my normal 6Music diet, not that there's anything wrong with 6Music.

The thing is I am very happy with my musical options around my computer.I'm now listening to "God Save Us" by The Oz Elastic band which was released on Apple Records (and featured John Lennon) to raise money for the Oz Magazine Obscenity case.


So we'll go with "Mr Bad Example" one of my many favorite Warren Zevon songs, I think it's a polka , the lyrics are just perfect. Just a thought he looks very like Heisenberg (Walter White) from "Breaking Bad" which would be very appropriate ......