Humphrey Bogart is the only person I have ever seen who could light up a cigarette and still look cool. This might be an odd intro to a blog post but it is highly relevant as it's inspired by the book I am reading, "On Some Faraway Beach" the Brian Eno biography by David Sheppard.
It is just talking about the first Roxy Music album , and although the songs mostly follow the standard rock time 4/4 time format with solid rhythm (the longest vowel-less word I know) backing from Graham Simpson and Paul Thompson most of the songs don't contain standard choruses. I'd never really noticed it before but it is true , and if you have a copy listen to it and if you haven't got a copy get one.
The closing song on the album is Bryan Ferry's wonderful tribute to Bogart, "2HB" (nothing to do with pencils) but it is a great song and I just wanted to share that this frosty Monday morning.Ferry also did a solo version so I will share that, the song and the soundscapes and sentiments are so perfect.
I'm lucky enough to be on holiday in one of my favourite places, Settle, and thanks to the internet and technology I can share time and pictures with all my friends all over the world.
Today has been relaxing wandering around Settle , down to the Ribble and up Castlebergh Crag sharing pictures and generally feeling good knowing that I can share all this with my friends.
The cake was well and truly iced when I switched on the TV and the film"Local Hero"w as playing, one of my favourite feel good film, which has a perfect Mark Knopfler soundtrack which is an album I never tire of. The album reminds me of the film and the film makes me feel good and it is good to share these things with friends.
Also I handed a found wallet in to the local police station. It looked like it had been stolen and emptied but it had photographs which may have been important to the owner. The lady police officer looked and said I know those children I drop it into them, so that made me feel good.
We should appreciate all the things that make use feel good and try our best to do more of those things.
So for this first post in December I'm going to go with Mark Knopfler's "Going Home / Wild Theme" from the film "Local Hero". If you haven't seen it .. see it and get a copy of the soundtrack.
I know it's the day after Black Friday but until last year I didn't know why Black Friday was called Black Friday. I'd always assumed it was something bad like the Black Friday stock market crash of 1869 or the Black Monday one of 1987 and the Black Friday of 1989, and this was reinforced by the Steely Dan song I'm going to soundtrack this with from "Katy Lied".
But now Black Friday is the "sale" to mark companies going into the Black,except really we know that isn't true, it's just another "sale" to offload the crud that they couldn't sell at full price to make way for "new stock".
The thing is something is only a bargain if you wanted it anyway, I knew a guy who bought industrial coffee makers each Black Friday which was going to cost a fortune in running costs. I said I got my beans freshly ground at Pumphreys, and I have a cafetiere and that more than does me, though I'm hardly a coffee aficionado.
This month this blog has had over 50K visits, I'm not sure that'll happen again though I said that last month when I went over 40K so who knows.The post a day for this year is something within reach and if I don't do it now I won't do it so in December you will see days with multiple posts like today.
So I will leave you to enjoy a little Steely Dan (and if you want to know the origin of that check out "The Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs.
Sometimes the odd things cause me to write posts. Yesterday I was walking to work and the path was littered with puddles so it was difficult to keep in a straight line as I didn't want soaking feet and there were people walking slowly in my direction and towards me and they were trying avoid puddles as well.
The ideal thing when you are walking is that you keep to the defined path, but everyone was all over the place, at want point I had to walk outside of the parked cars on the main road.
This reminded me of an instrumental piece that I bought in the early seventies called "Floating Music" by Come To The Edge and ensemble featuring and led by percussionist Stomu Yamash'ta and I bought it as a mid priced Island release because of the beautiful cover. It was also the first album that I bought when I started recollecting vinyl.
The piece was "Keep In Lane" and the premise was that the instruments kept in their own lanes but played at different speeds overtaking and being overtaken but keeping to their own path. Whatever the concept I think it is an excellent piece and you can judge for yourself. I still love it and a digital copy often accompanies me on my walk. "Keep in Lane" is eighteen minutes into the video as I could only find it as part of the complete album, though the whole of it is worth listening to.
This is the final post of November 2019, it's a bright frosty day and I am now packing and waiting for a taxi to take me to the station to take me to Settle , Christmas Lights and the Pigs In Blankets Pie at The Talbot.
"TURKEY AND PIGS IN
BLANKETS PIE £10.95
Turkey breast meat and
bacon wrapped sausages
in gravy
Today people often try and share Spotify playlist with me. I don't contenance Spotify, it's not my inner Ron Swanson but the fact that it's not a business model that rewards almost all the artists who are on it's available catalogue. I suppose the other thing is that as a teenager if I wanted to share music with friends it required recording records in real time, at first recording via microphone and later when I got a job a music centre which recorded directly from the radio.
I didn't realise that the compact cassette first appeared around 1965 (comprehensive Wiki history here) , I thought it was a Sony invention because of the Walkman which allowed music on the move.
To create a cassette you had to record in real time, the playlist was just the initial plan, even when MiniDisk and CD superseded cassette it was still real time although CD recording speeded up significantly but there is still the production and labelling of the CD to do.
In October 2016 when I was 59 I started the #ALifeInNumbers which ran into November that year and I've referenced often since I did it. I haven't burnt a CD for ages and am not sure if I can use iTunes to create playlists (I'm sure you can but it's such bloatware that it is more about trying to make me buy things that actually play music), I may try that soon and then I need to print the CD label (as I still have a printer that can do that!).
I have just remembered that I can use Youtube to create playlists such as this two song ska one here , I used to do mixes on Grooveshark but their model wasn't sustainable, but I am going to investigate Youtube further.
I was going to list some significant records for me to pad out this post but here are a few, and maybe I will create a playlist at some point:
Abba - The Visitors & Happy - The Carpenters , two of my mums favourites that I still love
Lights Out - Jerry Byrne & Sea Cruise - Frankie Ford , two that remind me of my missed friend Chris who we lost to lung cancer
Negativeland - Neu! , I was shocked when my dad asked me if I had this record asthis was way out of his comfort zone
All Along The Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix , if I only could have one record this would be it, Hendrix playing , Dylan's words
Hound Dog - Elvis Presley - apparently the first record I ever liked (aged 3)
Jig A Jig - East of Eden - The first single I ever bought
Come On - Chuck Berry - one of the first songs I played and sang live and I would be condent of doing it now
Egyptian Reggae - Jonathan Richman - The first instrumental cover I played live
I could go on and on but I'll stop and share "Happy" by The Carpenters (incidentally the title of my favourite Rolling Stones song , and they - the Stones - covered Chuck Berry's - Come On).
Oscar Wilde famously said "I can resist anything but temptation" and I am definitely the same, and the latest one is that this is post 322, and another 44 posts means that for this year I will have averaged more than one post a day. While I hopefully put quality over quantity, I started the year slowly but it April I posted fifty times that's like four every three days, and in August 2018 I posted 54 times for my #August50 sequence, so although I have trashed a December sequence, I may come up with one because I don't think I'll get the chance to do this ever again because of may inherent extreme laziness. 44 posts in 35 days is most definitely doable, nut we shall see whether I do do it.
Reading "On Some Faraway Beach" by David Sheppard is difficult. The writing and subject matter is excellent but the text is so small and dense that when I look at it my my screams, well not quite screams but becomes avers to, but I start reading and then I want to keep reading. It's just each time I open the book the format tries to push me away. It mentions "Musique Concrète" and a precursor and influence on some of Eno's output and this also is a perfect description for the effect the book seems to have on me. I was also surprised to find out that Brian Eno's surname is his family surname (though I knew of his brother Roger Eno) but it's a contraction of the word Huguenot so that's something else that I have learned.
I've decided to included "Deserts" by Edgar Varese which is mentioned as an example of Musique Concrète, it is challenging and in my opinion interesting, I'm listening to it as I finish this off. I do like pieces that grab my attention, but it would certainly clear the house at a party, but it's a piece I was unaware of til this morning and has piqued my mind to explore the genre further..
I would definitely give it a try but I know a lot of people will dismiss it as rubbish, but, in my opibion, the function of all art is to have an effect and this certainly does.
Surprisingly this month is already the highest monthly hit rate for a month since I started and effectively this seemed to be kicked off my the demise of Google+ , because I looked for another way of sharing my posts and tried MeWe that doesn't really seem to have taken off but provides an easy way to copy the link post which I shared on Twitter. That then seemed to kick it off. Under google posts, generally a good visit count would be 100 , average about 50 but when Google+ went I was lucky to get 20. Facebook doesn't really seem to help although a few of my friends visit via that link.
Anyway after sharing on Twitter I was picked up by Feedburner and since then I have had more than a thousand visits a day, still very few comments, so maybe it's all robots, though I would love to see comments from friends. Yesterday I had 2,600 visits , that's more than one a minute which is impressive.
I finished "The Secret Commonwealth" by Philip Pullman and although I am a very slow reader I always have a book on the go, and while my last few books have been fiction, I have a lot of music biographies and commentaries still unread. I briefly considered "Tarantula" by Bob Dylan which I have read several times, and for me is an easy enjoyable read being a stream of consciousness based narrative by Dylan. I decided to take "On Some Faraway Beach" by David Sheppard , the biography of Brian Eno.
When I opened it I immediately baulked, 450 pages of of tiny unrelenting text, books like this really do initially put me off and need to be special to keep me on board. I'm on to chapter two so it is actually a goer and will be my book for the next few weeks.
Today I am also going back to contact lenses so that's another restart for me, and at the moment the lenses feel absolutely fine.
Looking out the window it's still dark grey and featureless, but every day is another day of potential to discover and do new things. The David Sheppard book opens with a quote from the brilliant Edward De Bono who's books and methods taught me a hell of a lot:
"“The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all. ”"
... and I suppose that just hooked me into the book. Many of the chapters are named after Brian Eno songs and pieces, so we will go with the creepily ominous "The Great Pretender" from "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" a truly wonderful album.
