Physical Book or EBook on St Andrew's Day

p> I am currently reading two Clive Barker books , "Imajica" (my favourite ever book) and "Coldheart Canyon" (rather excellent) the former on my Kindle Fire the later a hardback edition . The former I'm only a quarter through (though this is the biggest ebook I have ever read) and the latter I am 90% through though it's half the size of of "Imajica" but I still find physical books easier to read than ebooks although ebooks are very convenient.

With a device like a Kindle you can carry a library with you and if you have an internet connection you can add to that very easily , but it must always have power, but that does allow you read in the dark, but reading is dependent on the device having power and working.

ebooks are great for reference books of any form as they allow you to easily search and can be updated and annotated, though you can do the latter with physical books. 

Both formats have their benefits and I benefit from both, although I have added to my ebook library with numerous free volumes which I have yet to read , whereas with physical books I think I whether I have somewhere to put them (I don't but that never stops me).

Today is St. Andrew's day and I have a feeling that Scotland will soon be leaving UK much to the delight of the Scots and Little Englanders, so maybe we will go for the excellent "Little Britain" by Dreadzone.

Leaving The Devil's Country

On my walk on this foggy Sunday I noticed a few cars with a full set of flat tires and two tire outers that had come off something. I would think that if you can't be bothered to keep your tyres up then get rid of the motor rather than sit and let it rot. The cars were all fairly neglected and soften used as a dump for detritus that they had decided not to bin.

Coming to the end of "Coldheart Canyon" and the Devil's Country has served it's purpose and has now unraveled and been taken apart by Lilith and the ghosts and there is still seventy pages left in the book , which has been rather excellent. The Devil's Country is almost a McGuffin as the story could have been told without it, but it's the only part that really stuck in my mind from the first time I read the book.

But the finale now has me wondering what is going to happen next, which is always a good thing when you are reading a book.

So it's a long time since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 , that's not last century, it's the century before last, and I have been enjoying a lot of vinyl over the weekend , and for some reason Cozy Powell's "Fance With The Devil" comes to mind with the riff lifted from "Third Stone From The Sun" which my friend Harry Clark reckoned was lifted from the "Coronation Street" them, listen to them all on the Amazon links below and see what you think.

Positively Negative

 For the first time in a long time the temperature was negative this morning, according to my Google Pixel -4˚ Centigrade , there was ice on the car windscreens, and it was inviting me to go out for a walk. I did go out tonight and it was 3˚ Centigrade but actually felt quite warm , and it was 7˚ higher than this morning, but we are not in December yet and I'm not sure if Autumn has become Winter yet , although this tells me that the seasons start o, the appropriate Solstice and Equinox days so Winter starts in about three weeks time on the 21st of December.

Normally by this time I am in bed but need to use the alarm on my phone to get me up tomorrow and it was down to 20% so thought thought I would pen a few lines while it charges.I have also watched the second "Borat" movie which is enjoyably subversive and working my way through American Horror Story:Freaks which is excellent but essentially a tragedy about exploitation, when I finish it that will be up to date on all released series of the show.

Some of the music has been rather good although seventies and eighties classics sit oddly with the fifties timeframe of the series, but go well nevertheless.

So musicwise I have been listening to Thin Lizzy , Stats Quo amd Curved Air on vinyl so will go with "The Rocker" by Thin Lizzy which has one of the best blockriffs (that's a riff played with chords rather than notes) you will ever here. Listen and enjoy Thin Lizzy from their Decca years.

Classical Ruination

I said this year I wouldn't post as much, last year it was over a post a day, but this is post 188 so that is still and average of a post every two days, although some gaps between postings have been bigger than that , and obviously this is a post straight after yesterdays post.

I've listened to a chepo compilation called "Rock Instrumental Classics: Volume 3 - The Seventies" which barring Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" , Electric Light Orchestra's "Daybreaker" and "Apricot Brandy" by Rhinoceros , is made up of funk and pop. There is "Rock and Roll Part 2" by Gary Glitter (and yes Paul Gadd , is an evil , vile person quite rightly behind bars, but should that stop us from appreciating the work of the rest of the band and his cowriter Mike Leander?) which it compares to "Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac , in that there's no real tune just a relentless sound with primeval calls and is still, in my opinion and impressive pop record , but I hope Gadd's royalties have been sequestered to help the sort of people the vile man abused.

Anyway in the songs on th ealbum are "Joy" by Apollo 100 a take on "Jesu Joy of Man's Desire", one of my favourite Bach pieces , "Also Sprach Zarathustra(2001)" an jazz take on the Strauss piece by Deodato , and "A Fifth of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy , all of which are more than enjoyable , especially the Deodato one. That's three classical lifts on one single disc compilation.

Manfred Mann's Earthband got permission from Gustav Holst's estate to use the composer's theme from "Jupiter" in "The Planets" suite in their single "Joybringer" . Keith Emerson with The Nice and Emerson Lake and Palmer plundered the classics  impressively over the years , with Mussorsky and Copland featuring highly in the band's repetoire.

Lots of pop songs left classical themes and melodies , Pachelbel's "Canon" reappearing so many times in the charts in various guises.

I've hardly scratched the surface on this, but will leave it here for now.

Goozlegogs

"Coldheart Canyon" is a lot more interesting that I remembered, though I am down to the last hundred pages now, and don't have a clue how it is going to finally end.

I'm quite surprised it's a week since my last post, although I've kept to my promise to post less this year than I did last year, and I think I may end up with around two hundred posts.

Though I've lived in Fenham for twenty years , there's still lots of places I've never visited and one is the Moorside Allotments Association shop , who sell gardening related stuff and other things and I finally visited them this Sunday morning past, and bought three jars of their home made jam, one of which was Gooseberry which I have not had for years, and certainly not homemade. I think my great , but sadly missed friend Chris used to call Gooseberries Goozlegogs , which I think is a great word, though it generally seems to be Goosegogs an the internet. If you live in or near Fenham it's well wort a visit , though only open Saturday and Sunday ten til 12.

So I've been listening to a lot of music this week as always and am wondering what to share with you, I would like something gooseberry or jam related and I suppose a gooseberry is the one who make it a crowd so for some reason the song that has sprung out at me is "The Uninvited Guest" by Marillion, which is a wonderful song and a good one to share as Friday draws ever closer.

Listen Now

We often do things that may become monotonous if they are seemingly long tasks. I like walking , but the nature of walking means it takes time , and in this lockdown often the paths I take are repetitive. It's the same with work, you often have to do repetitive tasks or do tasks that require repetition.

Although your mind needs to be on the task it also wants (or mine does) something to break up the repetition , and I find listening to music is a great way of making repetitive things fly by. I had been walking but not listening to music and this week (because it's cold and my headphones keep my ears warm) I goy out the headphones and have listened to Roxy Music and Janelle Monae , and given that it's only 2°C outside I will need them today.

Workwise , working from home, enables me to listen while I do work , and share what I'm listening to on my Instagram channel. My Rhino box sets (when they came out it was roughly five albums for a tenner) have provided a lot of listening, recently that has been Grunge , Jean-Luc Ponty , Cockney Rebel and De John,

Each day I don't know what I am going to listen to , and this actually means I am not listening to the radio , but sometimes your own choice is a good thing to trust . During th eseventies there were two instrumentals that I loved , one was Deodato's take on Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" the the theme from Stanley Kubrick's "2001" , and  Roger Williams take of Bach's "Toccata" used as the them to "Rollerball" in 1975 , so I will share both of those with you , which you may or may not enjoy on this cold Friday Morning.

So Why Vinyl?

Seems like a fair question. I once said that CDs were the McDonaldisation of music, MP3 and digital music even more so. All of a sudden album content became irrelevant. See this post from 2015 for more thoughts. 

We see people doing mixtapes and playlists but anyone can list some songs or drag a couple of MP3 and share them , or share a bloody Spotify playlist, but there's hardly any personal investment and the chances are that the person receiving the said item will look at it and not bother listening to it. The iPod generation , or is it iPhone generation often don't even listen to whole songs let alone an album. 

I once watche da bit of the X-Factor and the act covered the Moody Blues "Nights in White Satin" (a five minute song) which was cut to ninety seconds for the performance, so I wasn't impressed by that.

Digital media is great for when you are walking and this morning I was listening to the non album disk of  "The Thrill of It All" by Roxy Music and "Sultanesque" came on, one of my favourites. It's a Bryan Ferry composition , five minutes of drone sound and was the "B" side of "Love Is The Drug" , and I used to love putting it on pub jukeboxes much to the annoyance of most of the clientele , but it is a great piece of music and a great example of Ferry's adventures in tone and sound, "South Downs" is another similar piece. I am thinking of buying th evinyl single because I like it so much.

So "Why Vinyl?" . Well thanks to the persuasion of my friend Marek at RPM I have a wonderful retro reconditioned record player, and when I listen to an album apart from providing a warm deep bas backbone to the music, there is no skipping or resequencing songs . You listen to the album , well at leas a side of it , and that is twenty minutes or so, which is long enough but not too long.

CDs are up to eighty minutes and digital streams can never end , so vinyl lets you listen in manageable chunks an dthe only choice you have is what to put on.

It is my preferred listening medium these days, although I listen to CDs and digital when I work from home , and digital when I am walking. 

So I will share "Sultanesque" with you as the sun goes down on this November Tuesday.