If You Don't Know Where You're Going ... Any Road Will Take You There

This morning is 7 degrees and it's cold it's feels like -4 degrees band you know sorry I'm just having a very very brief walk out I feel less pressure now that I've reduced my daily target from 11000 steps to 6000 steps. I’ve now  dropped the million steps and  I feel like I can turn around and go back at any time which is good because I'm still walking still going out but it's great when you can do something to remove pressure

I have decided that my talking does not leave a generally readable post, so I may use it to capture ideas , but not to actually produce stand alone blog posts.

I wasn't intending to post today but I shared an Instagram meme and and it was Alice in Wonderland with the Druggy Caterpillar on the mushroom and she was asking which road she needed to go down and the Caterpillar said “well where are you going?”

Alice says “I don't know where”

and the Caterpillar says “Well if you don't know where you're going any road will take you there”

On double checking , what I thought was a druggy caterpillar is actually a pink Cheshire Cat glowing in a tree , absolutely the right sort of person to take advice from.

Now I'm not too sure if this is a definite “Alice in Wonderland” /  Lewis Carroll thing but the first time I heard this was in a George Harrison song which is “If you don't know where you're going any road will take you there”. 

It's one of my favourite George Harrison songs I love it so I now need to investigate whether it was Lewis Carroll whether George Harrison actually made it up or where we actually find it found it

With a little web research I have discovered it was the Cheshire Cat , not the druggy caterpillar that was credited with Lewis Carroll’s words , so that is obviously where George Harrison to his inspiration from.

Now the other thing is that Lewis Carroll stayed at , and has a room named after him in my favourite hotel , “La Rosa” in Whitby and I have stayed in the “Lewis” room which looks across the river to the Abbey , where Dracula came ashore in the Bram Stoker novel.

So in this post I have accidentally managed to connect George Harrison , Lewis Carroll , Bram Stoker by way of a Cheshire Cat and Whitby Abbey. I’m sure no one expected that , and I certainly didn't.

Back to the walking and writing though ….

I have actually finished this using Google Docs which seems to be faster than Microsoft Word and is certainly very handy. I use Google Sheets to record my steps so I amd used to the Google Office suite and it is more than efficient.

One of the things I've noticed is that when things on Vocal is that the minimum post is  600 words, and my blog posts tend to be about 300 words . When I was doing it by talking the day before yesterday I did  about 1200 words and yesterday was 800 words so talking actually sort of gives you a lot as you to do a lot more than typing.

The problem is that after you've typed you then have to really edit it so I'm not too sure whether this comes out of the readable but we shall continue on doing this and as I say this was not planned but it means that while I'm actually walking I can actually blog as well.

I don't believe in giving yourself unnecessary pressure so no that's just about it now I'm gonna finish this post here but you and the music is going to be obvious . It’s the George Harrison song. 

I hope you managed to get something from this and everything in it is well worth investigating.

Writing While Moving Again

 

Ok yesterday was first time in a long time that I've used my voice to actually write a blog post and I realise that I say the words “and you know” and lots of things like that with my normal conversation.

 

It seems that when I actually stop it then does a new paragraph so that's something else that I've actually learnt while doing this. So if I keep speaking continuously I just get one long stream of text which I then obviously take home and put it into my word processor to to punctuate it

 

So this looks like it may be potentially I could actually do my blog posts. I can be a bit more disciplined in it because now I know that when I finished speaking if I pressed return that's a paragraph and obviously it's not just one massive text like I had to do yesterday.

 

It's looking like a definite option so will be publishing this today after I've actually tidied it and I've got everything in there

 

One of my problems yesterday is that I was talking and not looking at my phone and this actually meant that couple of times I would think it was recording and it wasn’t. I would come to the end of something and then I had to think whereabouts I was, what I needed to say, how could I continue so but again it's like anything you've just gotta learn how to actually use it to your benefit

 

In the middle of this I am walking along Fenham Hall Drive and the pictures and the sunrise look quite I don't know vaguely impressive but vaguely threatening as well. Hopefully I will put in a link to this into my blog post but I am quite happy with what's actually coming out of this and think that tonight's editing will be a lot easier than yesterday's. Also going to publish it on Vocal as well which they'll hopefully put on there and hopefully somebody will read it.

 

It’s quite impressive capturing things you want you want to record, and yes it's easy to actually type but it's a lot easier to speak. I much prefer talking to people on the phone or you know on a video call then actually writing a text or an email.

 

Right I am now walking down towards St James and St Basil's and they describe their garden is an oasis of calm. I like walking down there in the morning so it's just a great start to the day it means I've got a bit of walking in and I'm ready ready to  hit the day

 

I've decided to drop my million steps every 3 months target it's just because I've been doing it for so long. I will still do at least 5000 steps a day which is basically more than 2 miles a day but so there is a slight target there, but it means I will have more time to do other things I enjoy.

 

So that's I'm going to wrap this up now. I always put a piece of music in to accompany my post but it's more about doing the writing so we will see what this looks like when I finally publish it tonight.

 

Last week I was listening to a “Best Of” Talk Talk so we sill go with “It’s My Life” from that album to accompany this. My apologies if a lot of this doesn’t make sense of sounds like someone who can’t even string a sentence together. It’s still very experimental and I am am still learning have to use this to it’s best advantage.

 

Generally when you type you are fully in control , but when you are dictating to software it is making a best guess at what you are saying so you have to edit it. So that’s another step. We shall see if I can do anything tomorrow.

 

Who Knows.

 

Writing While Moving

 I’m am slightly in awe of the way we are becoming a TV watching proletariat. Though that’s a discussion for another time. I decided to see if I could do a blog post as I walked and this is the result. I hope my edits manage to make it readable

One of the problems with writing, walking, doing things they always take time.I was just wondering that out on my morning walk could I actually record this and use phone and Google Docs to record my thoughts.

I'm not sure if I can do paragraphs or how to actually make breaks but anyway this is going to be a stream of text which I can then take apart when I actually get home and you know so that we can actually see if this actually works.

I do write about music and that is a big part of my life. When the lock down hit last February or whenever I suddenly spent a lot of time and listening to 6 Music listening to radio and hearing what they had to play and share.

The I also you realised that my CD collection is too big. I mean I've ripped most of it to my network but when CDs are in boxes or even worse in an attic then you may as well just get rid. I've actually got a pile that I've for sale on Discogs now .I'm not looking for money as such, more just to make space ,and as I say, I've got a lot of boxes of CDs but what then happened is that whilst I listened to stuff through my Kindle fire and speaker system, I realised that my radio also had a CD player so I thought well I will listen to some of these CDs I've got for sale because it's very close, while I work.

Then I thought you know so even the ones I have on saleI will listen to those as well and it's progressed so that I spend my working day listening to music on CD.

A lot of people have actually said oh well you're not with the times. You should be using Spotify or a streaming service and yeah I can stream on YouTube or whatever the odd one, there are full albums on there they do get taken down.

I now listen to my CD collection as it  is very convenient and as I say I have lots of CD box sets and I do believe that my purchase of CDs a lot of the time it was more about supporting the artist then actually getting the CD and you know I've not listened to lots of my music.

I probably I have hundreds of thousands of tracks and I know this from ripping them to my digital store. I've also bought albums from Bandcamp recently by Edward II and Jordan Reyne because Spotify does not support artists. Spotify is flawed because there are a few people making a lot of money from it and artists not the ones. If you're an artist trying to break through you are not really going to make all that money you can't. I tried it and I got paid 0.00001 didn't get paid anything because he was too small to pay but basically Spotify make a lot of money.

A couple of years ago daft punk's random access memory what's the biggest selling album and biggest streamed album of the year and they got paid £13,000 . When you can see that the people in Spotify are all millionaires making millions from this it's not the artist who's getting the money.

I'm told that I'm behind the times and I should have a Spotify account and you can get it free with advertising whatever but it's a very bad model for the artists.

The model does not encourage new music.It’s alright it's just using what's there and if there was no new music produced ever Spotify would still go on it would be ok.It would still make money because shall we say the market the market has now got so much music.

 I mean we've got music from a couple of centuries and even just normal popular pop music is like 70 years of Music so Spotify has this huge amount of music for people to actually stream and listen as and when they want and it's convenience but I once actually said that CD was the McDonaldisation of music by its convenience you can actually skip tracks sequence tracks in the order you want make playlists.

The move to mp3 and digital even made that's more convenient and Spotify you don't even have to o that you just let Spotify choose what you want to hear and you know it's a perfect medium for people to actually or the corporations to decide what you want to listen to.

When I was with EE the streaming service was Deezer and I saw an advertisement for it and it was just it just chooses exactly what I want to hear no it doesn't it chooses what it thinks you should hear and that is my problem

I see Amazon suggestions and old you bought this so you might want to buy this which force you to actually do it like listen to it and decide it's not what I want or he might listen to it in here something and decide yeah if it's what I want but you know side of my preferred way is you know when I listen to the radio or walk into a record shop and hear something and think what the hell's that .

Luckily these days with digital radio you can find out what you actually playing with online lists or it shows you on the actual DAB player and the DJ usually tells you.

When I was a teenager when you heard something and then the DJ didn't say who it was or it because they said at the beginning of the song in you came in like 20 seconds in then you know it was a little more difficult and that happened so many times with me where I heard things and I'm going like what the hell is that you know.

Today we've got you got things like Shazam which will recognise music most of the time so you know and then you should have it and then you can actually get it from wherever so there is no need for it for my old site apart from a legacy thing where people wanted to hear know what the music was so many years ago and such an advert you know but again it's just like people who want that it's so few now that the sites not worth maintaining all I've got it on Facebook and if I see a decent advert I will put it on there because the advert will be on YouTube and it's it is one of those things that even with adverts these days there are very few that are worth noting and again if you want music on your device then you got it

So the first song that made me start the Song of The Salesman site was a Guinness advert that used “Burke’s Law” by Prince Buster so I will signoff with that. Though I can’t find it so we will share “Guaglione” by Pérez Prado with the fabulous Dancing Man advert.

This has been mostly spoken into my phone and recorded by Google Docs so I will blame that for all my mistakes.

Vocalising

 I do write quite a lot and when I post something on my blog it does really give me great pleasure when someone reads it and comments on it. People for some reason seldom leave comments on the actual posts, probably because they do require identification.

It would also be nice to be able to monetise my writing but people have to read it and then click and buy through the advertising around it, such as the Amazon music links you can see below in the actual blog post, but I’m not sure whether Google and Facebook steal the click throughs as they would have the technology to do that and would justify it because my blog is sitting on their platform.

Also over the years Amazon have put more and more caveats on sales, such as you get nothing for your own or purchase from people who have a connection to you, so if I buy a present for someone then they buy something through one of my links, I receive nothing. Also, it’s only the first purchase that I actually get anything, so I’ve probably made Jeff Bezos a fortune over the years.

Ten years back I was bringing in a hundred pounds a month from Amazon, HMV and many others, but with the rise of streaming and the demise of online physical music sales plus things like Shazam the end was determined for my Song of The Salesman site although I do maintain it is a very compact format on Facebook

Anyway recently I have seen various platforms that are meant to reward you with reads and contracts. One is Vocal that is on, but does not allow links or personal ads so you will have to visit my actual blog www.sevendaysin.co.uk to see the sort of stuff I recommend in ads. The other is Get Blogged that gives a fixed price for related blog posts but they need to be on specific subjects and I’ve not yet had any feedback.

I’m going to change my blogging method to create the document in Word then paste it into Vocal and my blog and then see how it progresses. It’s going to make it a bit more convoluted but we shall see if it generates any response and interactions.

One of the good things about producing the document using a word processor is that you can keep a constant tab on how many words you have written, which the blogging software does not.

So today has been bright and sunny and this morning I listened to the Lou Reizner production of The Who’s “Tommy” with the London Symphony Orchestra and various guests. I wasn’t impressed with Rod Stewart’s take on “Pinball Wizard” although the arrangement is excellent and Merry Clayton’s take on “The Acid Queen” is wonderful though possibly eclipsed by Tina Turner’s take on the same song in the Ken Russell film. I have listened to all the main versions of “Tommy” that I have on both digital format and on vinyl, and it still holds up in it’s best bits. There are a few awkward instances like Uncle Ernie and the Tommy’s Holiday Camp concept but there are a lot of fine musical sequences which make it an essential listen.

I am going to share Merry Clayton's take on "The Acid Queen" which I talked about above.

So now I want to see what happens when I paste this into my blog. It will probably keep the word font (I’ve used Ariel this time) but hopefully it will still be readable to everyone.

The other thing is because I intend to publish on Vocal my posts will be longer, but hopefully short enough for people to still want to read them. 

Influential

This week I have been watching a couple of music programs / documentaries that I noticed on Amazon Prime. They were "Tom Waits : Under The Influence" and "Captain Beefheart: Under Review" . I am still working through the Captain Beefheart one which is is an in depth take on his development and influences with input from band members and music critics.

The Tom Waits one is an interesting one because it concentrates on the influences on Tom Waits' music by giving you potted histories of the artists that influenced him (sorry about the repetition of the word influence there ) . This has the effect of introducing you to each of these artists by sharing interviews , live video , music and text.

So we see Jack Kerouac , Frank Sinatra , Lord Buckley , Captain Beefheart (he an Tom have more than a passing visual resemblance)  , Ken Nordine who made his way doing voiceovers but also rapped as well as Kerouac and the beat poets but Nordine was low in his delivery letting the listener have time to take in the verbal images he was sharing. This documentary packs so much into it that you want to find out about the artists who influenced Tom Waits. 

As well as these Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht surface in the "SwordfishTrombones" universe with songs like "Underground" confirming this.

Beefheart's marimba influence appears on "Sixteen Shells" but the sound is undoubtedly Tom Waits.

Waits took things on board and progressed the ideas to make a decidedly Waitsian sound  and in that he has become an influence for many artists going forward , being covered by artists as diverse as The Eagles , Rod Stewart , Screaming Jay Hawkins and The Ramones.

Bothe documentaries feature the very articulate John French , "Drumbo" drummer and guitarist with various incarnations of Beefheart's  Magic Bands,

"Captain Beefheart: Under Review" concentrates on Beefheart and his music and bands and while challenging, is a great primer for the music , how he reinvented the standard song structures resulting in sounds that are most definitely challenging to the ear.

So what songs do we go with , well for Tom Waits it's "Sixteen shells from a thirty ought six" and Captain Beefheart "Big Eyed Beans From Venus" . If you can watch the documentaries , but check out the music. You never know you may discover something you like.

On a side note if you do blog you can earn a little pin money by advertising various things like the music links below and adsense to the right. , or direct links such as tattoo style fonts online which have some snazzy music related fonts to featuring in your work.

I am still writing "Mitarantula" so again that might be another repostory to use some eye striking fonts, although just on the front page rather than the whole book or document. The right font in a book can drag the reader in or throw the reader out. 

Good fonts should be easy to read and should not  put the reader off. I think most of this is plain Ariel.

Coincidentally ... Ken Nordine

A couple of days ago on my Instagram #MusicWhileYouWork sequence i shared some of "Stay Awake" a collection of off the wall takes on Disney classics and the opener "Hey Diddle Dee Dee, An Actors Life For Me" from "Pinocchio" featured a spoken rap by someone called Ken Nordine who I was sort of unaware of but I, and you, have probably heard his voice.

His perfect enunciation was ideal for voice overs and "Dispepsi" by Negativland features a lit of uncredited adverts and I am sure that Nordine is in there. 

You can listen to him in the video above but while a lot of the beat poets hit the listener hard and fast , Nordine gives the listener time think and absorb the words and idea.

In the documentary "Tom Waits: Under The Influence" Tom Wait's influences' get mini documentaries themselves and Nordine has his and was active until his death in 2019, a very well spoken man and someone who I will be investigating further as he takes listening in another direction.

It's not everyone's taste, but I am glad to have discovered someone else that stimulates my imagination.

Take a listen and see what you think.

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Keep Reading

I am half way through "The Keep" by F Paul Wilson and thoroughly enjoying it, with it's second world war setting , links to vampires and HP Lovecraft with the release of  Molasar a possible strigoi or as described in the book moroi . Hence the title of this post, it's an easier read than a lot of my recent ones, but it's always good to keep reading, and this is the first in a series of six books , so that's going to be a bout two thousand pages of The Adversary Cycle

I am so glad that we have Wikipedia to at least point you in the right direction when I can't be bothered to expand on what I am writing.

Today I have been listening to "Tommy" by The Who on vinyl , and it shows how magpie like like I have been with my buying. I didn't even know is was an American Decca release. Also disc one consists of sides one and four and disc two sides two and three , implying it was meant to played on a stack deck like you did with singles. I don't think I've seen any new decks like that although I am sure RPM will have some around. The think is singles have a raised edge around the label to ensure the grooves don't come into contact with each other , whereas albums don't (why would you want to stack albums , twenty minutes of music should be more than enough for you).

So we'll go with a live take of the "Overture" from "Tommy" from 1989 . I have ten takes on "Tommy" including I think five live sets from various live albums and was shocked to see the deluxe version of "Who's Next" going for £1200 on Amazon and the extra disc on that has a live take of "Tommy". The thing is you can put any price on anything, but it's only worth it if someone want to buy , and I don't want to sell although if someone was to chuck me a grand I may be tempted