The Odd Price of Music

I am selling CDs I'll probably never play again on my Discogs store and am sometimes surprised at the prices that things actually go for, although you can price at any level and it's only good if you actually make a sale, but on my latest additions there were a few surprises:

• The Cramps "Off The Bone / Songs The Lord Taught Us" around £4
• Roger Daltrey "Moonlighting" up to £60
• Louis Jordan "The Anthology" £30

I could obviously unload via CEX or Music Magpie and get 20p a CD if I'm lucky, but I use Discogs to sell and price and sometimes get several times the original purchase price.

Again the thing is I might see a CD priced at £250 on Amazon like "The Handy Wah Whole" but you have to want to sell the item AND you need a buyer. Sometimes these things come together and you find a buyer, I remember selling a copy of "Anarchy In The UK" for £25 in the early eighties after they went from EMI to A&M to Virgin and then bought the LP for a couple of quid leaving me twenty pound to the good.

I tend to love the music rather than the format and as long I can listen to it then that's OK by me.

I do realise that I have bought records mainly to support the artist, resulting in a very large collection that is now subject to a very slow cull, I don't need to sell it , and any CD that is priced less than two quid goes to the charity shops.

I'm not sure how much these are on Amazon but you can see on the list below.

It's quite early but I am feeling a bit iffy like I'm coming down with something, hopefully a night's sleep will sort me out.

Every Piece Of Vinyl ....

I was looking at all the books I have,  and was thinking "Will I ever read all of these?" . The same goes for DVDs and CDs . With the digitalisation of music, plus streaming , and the phenomenal fall in price music has become easy to buy without listening to it.

People used to make tapes and that had to be done in real time , but now it's just a playlist and if there is little effort in producing it then there will be little attention payed to it by listener. I see loads of playlists shared each day , but will take more notice of a single song in some format or other.

Digital media is so easy to aquire , put aside for future listening, then never revisit. Books are slightly different in that you may put them aside, but usually you have them displayed in a bookcase or something and always tend to buy them with at least the intention of reading. That is not always the case with digital media, and you can include ebooks with that , so easy to acquire and so easy to forget about.

I have bought very few ebooks but have acquired a lot as many are public domain and available for free or very cheaply.

Back to vinyl , every record I have has been played at least once, and many times more often. Buying vinyl creates a sort of tangible connection with the music, the covers are often an adventure in themselves (thinking Hawkwind's "In Search of Space" and Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" newspaper cover).

I have a few picture discs including Kate Bush's zoetropic picture disc of "Running Up That Hill" and the Star Wars and Jack White " Lazaretto"discs with the etched holograms all of which need lights or strobes to bring out the images, but I can't find the Kate Bush one although I posted it on instagram a few years back, maybe I will try doing it again soon and put it on Youtube.

So what should I share this time, we'll go with "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath because of the Vertigo Swirl which is one of the best simple optical effects I have ever seen , and you don't get that on digital, sometimes it's great to watch the record just  play.

Dreich

A good description of this Saturday morning Dreich which if you follow the link you will get the definition. It's grey, wet and cold, the wind and rain beating aginst the window panes. And that's it.

While I do enjoy a shower, I just want to come out ready for the day , but hate having to dry myself, apply deodarant etc before you can actually get dressed. I've known people who say that deodorant is just a trick to con more money out of you , not the sort of people to get too close too.

One of the main problems I have with lockdown is the lack of physical contact with people, although I still have contact via phone , social media , and video apps , but to compensate for this I speak to people when out for walks (while maintaining social distancing)  and have spoken with a lot of people although I will probably never see or speak to them again.

In the time I've been writing this the sun has started to poke through so it may turn out to be a decent day , but we shall see how it goes.

Lots of ideas are going through my head , thinking about a podcast / radio show as it used to be that music couldn't be included in podcasts , but the BBC has a lot of shows / podcasts that do include music, but I first need to grab some software to do this , although I could just record in analogue form, but we shall see, and it may go like many of my other purported projects and never get started, although I do know I can do things when I put my mind to it otherwise I couldn't do a job.

We're in June and we should be well into summer weather but you have seen how I've described it, although we have had some great weather this week so I'm just trying to think of some music to share, and then I found this father/daughter quarantine take on "The Time Warp" from Richard O'Brien's "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" which in my opinion is one of the most fun things ever.. Watch this , you may love it. My daughters love The Rocky Horror Picture Show and loved the computer game on the old Amstrad.

Enjoy

The Titles of Budgie

I was originally going to title this "Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman" which is one of the many startling titles from the Welsh Heavy Metallers Budgie. Other titles are "It The Grip of A Tyre Fitters Hand" and "Breadfan" the latter covered by Metallica here among other places.

Their titles also vaguely remind me of the titles that Amon Duul II had on their albums which only just about made sense.

This morning I awoke from a dream it which lots happened but most has melted away now although one thing I remember was going back to the office except walking in was more like a packed church, withe everyone at their desks , then I realised I had forgotten my laptop so had to go back home , but it was pointless going back to the office because there was no place to sit anyway.

My mind is empty tonight (as usual) so I will leave you to enjoy the Welsh metal.

Long Distance

I have a Canon SX620 camera and it enables me to take long distance pictures. The control says I can take up to 100x zoom although the front of the camera says 25x optical zoom so that maty be why my longer distance pics get a bit less detailed, after 25x the zoom becomes digital.

I use the photos of long distance shots as a screensaver on my desktop and love when I see something and try to work out lots of things that I had never noticed before in relatively familiar surroundings. From the top of Cow Hill I can photograph from The West Road to Wallsend taking in the City Centre and St Jame's Park.

Having a sizeable zoom worried me about privacy , but I trued taking photos in my front room and front bedroom and the lack of light and glass reflection ensures good privacy. I do wonder about controllable drones that could easily be used to snoop, although I have seen some great outdoor drone shots.

Today Shaun Keaveny brought up the fact that you can use scissors to cut pizza, something I had never thought about , but I suppose you could , although the take aways I get are usually ready cut , and I haven't had a frozen pizza for a long time (Dr Oetker and Morrisons are my preferred ones when I feel in a pizza mood).

So given that this started about cameras we shall go with "The Camera Eye" by Rush

Parallel Reading

This year I was determined not to post so much, and although I am posting less than last year I am still posting. There are seldom two days between posts unless I am away for a weekend and don't take a laptop with me.

For the first time I am actually reading two books simultaneously , one on paper "The Great and Secret Show" (c 800 pages) and "Imajica" (c 1200 pages) on my Kindle Fire , both by Clive Barker , both excellent and getting through them at a reasonable pace which I don't normally do. These are rereads and though I know the overall story the detail has gone , so it's like I am reading a book I know I will like , which is always a good thing.

This morning on my walk I was listening to "Diamond Dogs" by David Bowie and I still think that "Rebel Rebel" is one of the greatest riffs ever because a) I can play it and b) it's probably the greatest Rolling Stones song that they never wrote or recorded.

I always go one about how brilliant Bowie is but yesterday I realised I have a particularly awful song by him from the covers album "Pin-Ups" . The rest of the album is great, the version of "Sorrow" is sublime and most of the others hit the spot , but "Shapes of Things" , the Yardbirds cover,  in which he sounds like he is impersonating one of his big influences Anthony Newley. The guitar solo is OK but it is really a sore thumb on a decent covers album

My reasons for disliking it it that the original is a great Yardbirds song , and Jeff Beck covered in with Rod Stewart as he had every right to do and that turned out fine .

Unfortunately for all other covers Nazareth threw the kitchen sink plus lots of phasing and heavy metal turning it into a perfect piece of prog metal , tagging on "Space Safari" giving us an excellent closer to their finest album "Rampant", so that's what we start June with.

The New Time

One of the problems with getting older is that the days seem to get shorter and you seem to have less time to do things, well that's how I feel. A number of people with children want to get the children back to school mainly because they are missing their friends, and of course looking after young children 24/7 is not an easy task.

The thing is that six weeks of lockdown for a six year old is a fiftieth of their life , where for me it's one five hundredth so it seems a lot longer for them that it does for me although the actual time is the same.

I am now trying to find a way of perceiving time in the same way that a child does and see a week's holiday or even a weekend as a long time. A weekend is around 62 hours from work finish to work start for most Monday to Friday workers and we should be able to see that as time to enjoy and do things.

I'm often reminded of "The Eighty Minute Hour" by Brian Aldiss where the controllers speed up clocks when we are not at work and slow them down when we are at work, and if that were happening  would we know?

People often waste weeks wishing for Friday , I used to be like that but now think "What Can I Do Today?" . If you are always looking forward to Friday you effectively throw away five days of your week , and the weekend is only two days so that makes your time seem to fly by.

My aim is not only to slow time down , but to do more in that time. I often am bothered by going for
walks because , by it's nature, that takes time, although usually I listen to music while walking as they are complimentary activities and listening to music can almost make the activity go faster. The paradox is that you want to finish your walk , but you want to enjoy your time doing it and if time speeds up you feel you are losing out.

Matt Haig wrote one of his excellent books "How To Stop Time" which also took this as part of his premise, and his self help page from "Reasons To Stay Alive" is excellent , so I am now FEELING TIME as well as taking my final part in the #maywriteabit , because tomorrow is the first of June.

So what song should we go with , there are many songs called "Time" , Pink Floyd and David Bowie come to mind, and even "Five Years Time" by Noah and the Whale and "Minutes" by The Human League came to mind.

I decided to go with "The Waiting" by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers as it is sort of appropriate for the position we are in now and does contain a lot of pertinent lines to the lockdown situation.