Progress

Just thinking about what we can do now as opposed to what we could do ten , twenty or thirty years back. We used to buy from the local shop, market or high street although big business was giving us supermarkets and hypermarkets and shopping malls.

Our phones are communication devices , we can do video calling , share video as well as text and speech. Thanks to Arpanet and Tim Berners-Lee we have 24/7 to an unbelievable knowledge resource.

Also we used to only have radio , then TV , but although we still have these they also come through digital channels and where there were just a couple of options now thanks to digital , we seem to be unlimited , though the Bruce Springsteen song "57 Channels And Nothing On" sometimes comes to mind , but now that programs are on demand , you can never say there is nothing on.

I remeber having to order anything slightly out of the ordinary from record shops , "No Woman, No Cry" and "Jah Live" by Bob Marley come to mind, but remember being told "We don't sell singles and we only stock the top 20" when asking for a copy of "Ummagumma" by Pink Floyd at a furniture shop that also sold records. These days you can have your music or video immediately as long as you have the ability to pay for it.

Phone advertisements are always promoting the camera abilities of the device, the sound and connectivity is seldom mentioned, though the thing is that they are generally hand held computers, thought we can't use them for transportation ... yet. That's something that always confuses me, when, in Star Trek someone is transported where the atoms are disassembled at point of departure and reassembled at the point of arrival is that just a clone at the point of arrival or the original person , and if the clone has all the memories of the original person , how would it know that it is a clone. The other side of that is that our bodies shed and recreate layers and we are not the same person we were last year. I'm sure that could be the basis of a short story , it is about time I actually wrote one.

I could go one about driverless cars and other vehiles and Smart everything but think it's time to share some music.

Maybe we will go with the Springsteen one , while we have hundreds of channels and streams , a lot of it is filled with rubbish , but a lot of it is the highest quality. You can never say there is nothing on.

An Accidental Hello

Yesterday I received a strange text request from a friend ,  he needed something from someone in the Financial Sector, nothing major and the fact he was just around the corner from me. Now either he has moved or his round the corner is a lot further than mine .While I work with accountants and have worked in banking , I am definitely not a financial sector person. So I called him, immediately receiving an apology as he had texted the wrong Mike S adjacent in his phone list.

The conversation was not short , and we had a great catch up as a result of a mistake. It's very easy to say next week or next month and all of a sudden nothing actually happens. As I get older in some ways I get lazier, almost preferring TV to socialising. I am on the final series of "Vikings" and have finished several others but have others to watch, although I can't bingewatch in reality.

I'm also quite surprised how the spellchecker on this blog , misses some things and seemingly autocorrects using the wrong word. For instance "bank" became "back" which could prove a little embarrassing.

Anyway today for the first time in months I played a CD. CDs are convenient but actually need to be close to hand and not in boxes or drawers. I ended up playing several starting about nine o'clock and going through til finishing work. I finished with Roxy Music's awesome soundscape "Avalon" which has one of the most unreadable covers I have seen , and on the way included three compilations "This Is Soul" , an Motown summer promo and "Fools Gold" (Chiswick Chartbusters) but I played the Louise Distras "Street Revolution" EP about four times. I met her at The Cluny (see here) and we had a great crack on , so I am going to share "Solidarity" , a live take of the closer from that EP.

Two Minutes

The time on my Google Pixel 2XL phone is two minutes ahead of the time on my work and home computers.I am assuming they use a different source for their times because two minutes is a significant amount of time, Unless it's like the clock at The Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh that since 1902, the hotel's clock has been set three minutes fast to ensure that the people of Edinburgh wouldn't miss their trains. This is still the case today. The only day that the clock runs on time is on 31 December (Hogmanay) for the city's New Year celebrations.

The weather has been very dreich over most of this week, the sun seems to fight it's way out but then disappears.

"Everville" is still continuing on and after a hundred pages some of the characters from "The Great And Secret Show" have now turned up, although I am still no wiser as to what will happen in the book. I cannot believe I have a book by one of my favourite authors that I haven't read , especially as it is a follow up to a very good book. I will probbly mention it a few more times before I finish it.

Today I have been listening to Hothouse Flowers , Gay Dad and General Fiasco but before I switched the radio off two of my current favourites were spun by Lauren Laverne , one was "Slum Lord" by Baxter Dury and the other was "Take Back The Radio" by Katy J Pearson which , to me, sounds like "Aeriel" era Kate Bush, and that is certainly no bad thing.

This is the thing , there is always great music being produced, it's just sometimes a case of finding it. I would hate to be stuck in a particular time period with my musical taste like so many people I know, although I suppose really they are happy with their choices.

So have a listen to Katy J Pearson  , she is rather excellent.

Into Everville

Having finished and re-enjoyed "The Great and Secret Show" by Clive Barker I have now picked up the follow up / companion book "Everville" to revisit / reread. Reread? I certainly don't remember any of what happens in the first sixty pages, and while my memory is not that great, I am getting the feeling that I bought this and never read it , because I was reading something else when I bought it. The intro vaguely reminds me of the Hell sequences in "Preacher".

I have an idea of some of the characters who may come into this and after "The Great and Secret Show" I am not sure if this runs in tandem or as a prequel of sequel though it is described as "The Second Book of The Art" .  So I may provide you with updates as I wander through it.

Weatherwise it's very dreich , but I managed to hit my steps for June despite leaving an 11K daily target (which I often exceeded).

Totay I have been listening to the Urban Dance Squad , and having your collection digitally with a reasonable play set up makes it easy to listen to . I'm finding BBC6 Music becoming pretentiously cliquey with a lot of the music being very bland (or sometimes mindless techno - which is fine in the right place - but not for an hour or two in the afternoon) . Having said that Urban Dance Squad or hardcore Dutch Hip Hop but also very listenable, "Deeper Shade of Soul" shows them off brilliantly.

The Inconvenience of Convenience

Last week I bought two albums "Two Sevens Clash (40th Anniversary)" by Culture  and "Kitchen Sink" by Nadine Shah (oddly being released digitally song by song) and after consideration decided to but just the digital version. I didn't buy the CDs because I thought I would be unlikely to play the CD but have played the albums several times since purchase , plus because of the convenience of my digital apps (BubbleuP'n'P and Windows Media Player) I have played several related albums forsaking my normal work soundtrack of BBC 6Music.

I often reckoned that the introduction of CD was a McDonaldisation of music (see my post of music media history from 2015 here) which essentially allowed you to store more music in a smaller place , skip songs , program the order and lots more and was stored in a digital format which does lose a lot of the original sound by letting only hear what we can / need to hear.

The thing is I think nothing of playing a vinyl album or single but digital discs are are now a chore , you have to find it , open the case open the player and then either play or select what you want to play. We have been conditioned to get want we want with a click or two. When was the last time you played a CD or DVD? We are all part of the "click" generation.

I am not sure it can go much further, ever song I share on this blog is on Youtube or Vimeo , and as I am writing this I have "Two Sevens Clash (40th Anniversary)" playing on Windows Media Player. When I go down I will listen to some vinyl or maybe watch something on my Tivo , Netflix or Amazon Prime.

Looking outside the cloudy sky is looking very ominous, more thunderstorms on the way.

"Two Sevens Clash (40th Anniversary)" by Culture is an absolutely essential reggae album, I think this is going on my phone to listen to when I walk.

The Great and Secret Show

I haven't written much about "The Great and Secret Show" by Clive Barker but am thoroughly enjoying it, although I've read it before , thirty pages from the end I am still not sure of the final outcome. The Great and Secret Show is on the isle of Ephemeris in the dream sea Quiddity which is between the Cosm and Metacosm home of the Iad (the main baddies in this story).

This is the good thing about my memory , I know enough to know it's a great book, but every time I read it , it's like a new adventure, although a vaguely familiar ride. I will probably finish this , this weekend and I have so many other places to revisit

Tonight we have had a thunderstorm shaking the street and houses , a little rain but it seems to have passed.

So I know this is incredibly short , but the heat is just stifling my creative writing faculties, so I will sign off.

This week I have been listening to a lot of reggae but given that Armageddon like nature of "The Great And Secret Show" maybe I will go with "The Four Horsemen" by Aphrodite's Child (featuring Vangelis and Demis Roussos featuring the end of the world scenarios by local North East artist John Martin.

Attention Span

Midway through series two I gave up on this series because it was getting too complicated for me and wasn't really what I expected. I am now midway though series 5 Part 2 and looking apprehensively at the end of series 6.

My basic problem is that I was Ok with the Vikings , hitting Lindisfarne and Northumbria, but when it started getting further afield with Wessex and Mercia I felt it was losing me. That's my short attention span. However I did pick it up again and now we have seen Paris , Spain , Sicily ,Rome , Iceland,  The Sahara , and back to York, and the introduction of Alfred The Great.

While historical accuracy is more of a very vague guideline and provider of nails to hang a story on, the series has provided some amazing set pieces , extreme violence and great characters . How the hell they sold the character of Ivar The Boneless (you can't use your legs) to Alex Hegh Andersen I haven't got a clue.

It's just a lesson that sometimes you don't know what you are missing if you don't stick with things.

Reading wise I'm still on with "The Great and Secret Show" (on paper) and "Imajica" on Kindle Fire by Clive Barker and enjoying both rekindling the fires of earlier readings with lots of forgotten memories and characters, both excellent books and clocking in at 700 and 1200 pages not exactly short either.

I must say I am enjoying revisiting these books, stimulating my imaginatation.

This morning I have again ditched 6Music andam on my fourth Horslips album which has been a great mornings listening. The albums have been:

• The Táin
• Book of Invasions
• The Man Who Built America
• Aliens

Even though it's one of my favourite albums ever (It was the only album I played for two weeks when I bought it in 1976) , today I found out for the first time it was based on Lebor Gabála Érenn, a collection of poems and prose narratives in the Irish language intended to be a history of Ireland and the Irish from the creation of the world to the Middle Ages. I knew is was based on Irish mythology frollowing on from "The Tain" but never delved further than that.

Given that I started this post talking about Vikings I am going with "America: What Time Is Love?" by The KLF as the video makes me thinks of Vikings, boats , raids and overseas madness.