JFDI

Many years ago when I was still being paid by the PPA , a team played a trick on their manager. In IT there is always a new "better" methodology and you hear word like "agile" , "structured" and many others , we used JSP and Bachman as well, anyway there was an article on JFDI and how it always delivered on time and fast. The manager said they had to sort out training courses in this methodology as soon as possibly (ironic considering what JFDI mens). I'm quite surprised at the number of toned down meanings of the phrase, and Nike dropped the "F" for their tag line, not surprising for a company that has never made any of it's branded products, they outsource everything.

So yeasted after god knows how long I had lunch at Snack Wallah with my friend Nicky Black (one of her many names) and we had a long catch up discussing art and Facebook bans and what we were doing and going to do. Also the fact that last time I saw her I mistook her for another friend, and this is the problem when you don't see people often enough. We always can find a reason to put something off til next week but we should really do things as soon as we can.

I need to go and visit my dad and his girlfriend , see my girls , and know that this will happen eventually but really we should have much more JFDI in our lives, and we will enjoy life much more.

So for no reason other than it's a great record and he was mentioned in the Brian Eno documentary "The Man Who Fell To Earth 1971-77" which I am watching on Amazon Prime , when Island put together the Ayers , Cale , Nico, Eno (unfortunate acronym) gig at the Rainbow  to celebrate the the signing of ex Velvet Underground members John Cale and Nico, I'll leave you with "Barracuda" from the album "Fear".

Growly Night

There's thunder, lightning and rain. It's getting dark early. I'm amazed how accurate the weather information app is though I always look out the window to confirm what's happening . Another lightning flash , another roll of thunder.

Today when mowing the lawn there was a small short shower, but now we have the reall stuff. The positive is that I don't have to water the garden. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to walk into work without being forced to get a bus.

I wasn't going to post today but the image of "growly night" just seemed to be something worth capturing and recording.

My grandma used to say that thunder was the angels playing then pin bowling, which is a fairish analogy.

So given that I've nothing really to say I'll share an appropriated of music, "Night on Bare/Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky possibly rearranged by Rimsky-Korsakov and featured in Disney's "Fantasia" which he created to teach children about classical music and it is largely successful with stunning animation.

"Night on Bare Mountain" was also rejigged as "Night on Disco Mountain" on the soundtrack of "Saturday Night Fever"

So enjoy.....

Anyone For Tennis?

This is nothing about tennis, which is a game I find generally tedious (I can't play or hit a return serve), although Wheelchair Tennis actually does command my total respect, I cannot play being reasonably fully mobil and these girls and guys do it from a wheelchair, how absolutely amazing is that.

The Bok had a song called "Tennis" but I don't have a recording of that, maybe I should try and recreate it, but this is just about the Cream song which is one of those Cream songs that is like nothing else Cream did and I like it and actually think it's good. There are others like "Pressed Rat and Warthog"(the "B" side) that are just plain silly, and I suppose lots of bands tried and keep trying completely different sounds to the point of taking on alter egos to either be able to play more intimate gigs aor see if it's just their name that sells.

"Anyone For Tennis" is the Theme from the film "The Savage Seven" (a biker film lost in time but available on Amazon.com) and was recorded during the "Wheels of Fire" sessions and released as a single and on the album soundtrack. It was written by Eric Clapton and someone called Martin Sharp

I don't know why I wanted to post this, possibly because I saw a "Best of Cream" (which doesn't feature the single) in Beyond Vinyl but it's Saturday , it grey , and it's the first day of the Football season, so all is reasonably good.

I keep looking at posts I've done and often notice spelling and grammatical mistakes and more and more I think I am being wrongly autocorrected rather than mistyping, or maybe I am just being paranoid. The latest was a post which had "their" instead of "there". Now given that I am a bit of a grammar stickler myself that is not a mistake I think I would make but autocorrect might.

I know it's short (this post) but see what you think .

Realisation

Nothing deep, but due to my rate of posting from March this year , if I post twenty two times a month for the rest of the year then I will have another record year. I'm not expecting to do that though given this is my second post today you may not believe it.

The thing is the more you post , the more you feel like posting. I just wish I could get myself into gear with writing , and writing songs and recording them. I have all the tools so no excuse not to do it, just the extreme lack of discipline.

Today I found a couple more covers of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by The Cure and "Ceremony" by Radiohead. I was completely unaware of these though the song has been covered by almost everyone but it still belongs to Ian Curtis.

These songs don't seem to have been officially released but they are on Youtube so you can listen fairly easily.

So enjoy them , I am off to my pit.

Closer

It's one of those English words that in isolation you cannot be sure of what it means or how it's pronounced. It can mean nearer (and this is probably how you actually normally read it) or the opposite of opener.

The reason I've chosen it it is because of a section in the Joy Division film where they talked of the title of their second album, which I always assumed was the former meaning, but give the tomb on the cover, the death of Ian Curtis and the fact that it was the final Joy Division album the latter meaning makes far more sense.

This is the first post of August and we had another downpour during the night but the sky is just a uniform grey as it was last November recorded in this post.

I watched a film "The Colony" last night which was a lot better that it's 5.3 IMDB rating although there was some Walking Dead grade horror, but my only problem was the extremely sudden ending when there was actually and decent chink of hope.

So we obviously go with "Colony" from "Closer" by Joy Division on this first day of August.

Night Watch

I can hardly believe the extreme heat and extreme rain we've been having, and amazed the the people in power don't seem to see a problem. We've been lucky we haven't been hit by floods but I made the mistake of trying to walk to work without an umbrella today and got hit by two heavy showers. Looking out the window it's grey with some impressive cloud formations.

"The Illuminatus Trilogy" is going along but it's essentially stream of consciousness slipping between realities with long meaninglessly titled chapters / splits but I'm about two thirds through book one "The Eye In The Pyramid" coming across the detective Saul Goodman, Atlantis , gratuitous sex ., pyramids, giant submarines and right wing southern USA jail stays but you are never in the same place for long. I'm enjoying the read / ride but this will not be most people's cup of petrol.

I watched a couple of films on Amazon Prime including the remake of "Suspiria" which has a lot of touchpoints of "The Illuminatus Trilogy" and an experience to watch with a Thom Yorke soundtrack, I may have to watch the original now which is an hour shorter.

I also watched a documentary on Joy Division which again was excellent and to me their music sound as fresh and pertinent now as when it first came out. The thing is everything was generally analogue so the sounds and noises were actually made and not just something downloaded. A highly watchable film following on from Nico 1988 that I watched the other week.

So I am going to share the excellent video for Joy Division's "Atmosphere" always one of my favourites, as i get ready for bed.

2001

Like the 1999 post the 2001 post will go the same way except not with the Prince song but the Arthur C Clarke book and the Stanley Kubrick film which still look jaw droppingly awesome now, fifty years sich it was brought to us in the days before CGI, and thank god no one has decided to to ty and remake it for a modern audience.

The original main theme is "Also Spake Zarathustra" (there are various alternate spellings and wordings by Richard Strauss , also used to open Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special , but remember being shouted down in a pab discussion when the shouters said it was Holst, proves that shouting louder does win the argument.

Johann Strauss was the composer of the "Blue Danube" for the docking scene included below.

So this is post 2001 with some appropriately great video and musical accompaniment. I know there's not many words but it is good to be able to share this film and book and if you haven't read the book or seen the film do yourself a favour and make time to do it now.