Yup. Country Joe and the Fish are alive and well in Diveland.
Those old enough to remember Woodstock will be singing that all day now.
Hee hee.
Right!
I think it's time for a guest blogger today.
He doesn't know he's a guest blogger here, but his essay in The Guardian Review this morning was good enough to distract me from a fairtrade latte with an extra shot and a yummy pecan slice until my coffee was cold (that takes some degree of persuasion, believe me).
I brought the essay home and just read it again.
I have another cold mug of coffee.
So …
Your guest blogger today is Mister Ian Mc.Ewan (yes, that one).
He's the "Atonement" man, so you know it'll be worth letting your coffee go cold and taking the time out of your weekend to have a good read.
If you sacrifice one crappy TV programme today and read this instead, the world will be a better place.
Read every word (especially those among you professing to a religious bent). Skim over any of it and I'll slap you.
It is jolly good stuff.
"The Day of Judgement"
An essay by Ian Mc.Ewan.
Reprinted without permission (sorry, Ian).
Since 1839, the world inventory of photographs has been accumulating at an accelerating pace, multiplying into a near infinitude of images, into a resemblance of a Borgesian library. This haunting technology has been with us long enough now that we are able to look at a crowd scene, a busy street, say, in the late 19th century and know for certain that every single figure is dead. Not only the young couple pausing by a park railing, but the child with a hoop and stick, the starchy nurse, the solemn baby upright in its carriage - their lives have run their course, and they are all gone. And yet, frozen in sepia, they appear curiously, busily, oblivious of the fact that they must die - as Susan Sontag put it, "photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction ..."
"Photography," she said, "is the inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony. Photographs show people being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in their lives; [they] group together people and things which a moment later have already disbanded, changed, continued along the course of their independent destinies."
We are well used to reflections on individual mortality - it is the shaping force in the narrative of our existence. It emerges in childhood as a baffling fact, re-emerges possibly in adolescence as a tragic reality which all around us appear to be denying, then perhaps fades in busy middle life, to return, say, in a sudden premonitory bout of insomnia. One of the supreme secular meditations on death is Larkin's "Aubade":
... The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
We confront our mortality in private conversations, in the familiar consolations of religion - "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade," thought Larkin, "Created to pretend we never die." And we experience it as a creative tension, an enabling paradox in our literature and art: what is depicted, loved, or celebrated cannot last, and the work must try to outlive its creator. Larkin, after all, is now dead. Unless we are a determined, well-organised suicide, we cannot know the date of our demise, but we know the date must fall within a certain window of biological possibility which, as we age, must progressively narrow to its closing point.
Estimating the nature and timing of our collective demise, the end of civilisation, of the entire human project, is even less certain - it might happen in the next hundred years, or not happen in two thousand, or happen with imperceptible slowness, a whimper, not a bang. But in the face of that unknowability, there has often flourished powerful certainty about the approaching end. Throughout recorded history people have mesmerised themselves with stories which predict the date and manner of our wholescale destruction, often rendered meaningful by ideas of divine punishment and ultimate redemption; the end of life on earth, the end or last days, end time, the apocalypse.
Many of these stories are highly specific accounts of the future and are devoutly believed. Contemporary apocalyptic movements, Christian or Islamic, some violent, some not, all appear to share fantasies of a violent end, and they affect our politics profoundly. The apocalyptic mind can be demonising - that is to say, there are other groups, other faiths, that it despises for worshipping false gods, and these believers of course will not be saved from the fires of hell. And the apocalyptic mind tends to be totalitarian - which is to say that these are intact, all-encompassing ideas founded in longing and supernatural belief, immune to evidence or its lack, and well-protected against the implications of fresh data. Consequently, moments of unintentional pathos, even comedy, arise - and perhaps something in our nature is revealed - as the future is constantly having to be rewritten, new anti-Christs, new Beasts, new Babylons, new Whores located, and the old appointments with doom and redemption quickly replaced by the next.
Not even a superficial student of the Christian apocalypse could afford to ignore the work of Norman Cohn. His magisterial The Pursuit of the Millennium was published 50 years ago and has been in print ever since. This is a study of a variety of end-time movements that swept through northern Europe between the 11th and 16th centuries. These sects, generally inspired by the symbolism in the Book of Revelation, typically led by a charismatic prophet who emerged from among the artisan class or from the dispossessed, were seized by the notion of an impending end, to be followed by the establishing of the Kingdom of God on earth. In preparation for this, it was believed necessary to slaughter Jews, priests and property owners. Fanatical rabbles, tens of thousands strong, oppressed and often starving and homeless, roamed from town to town, full of wild hope and murderous intent. The authorities, church and lay, would put down these bands with overwhelming violence. A few years or a generation later, with a new leader, and a faintly different emphasis, a new group would rise up. It is worth remembering that the impoverished mob that trailed behind the knights of the first crusades started their journey by killing Jews in the thousands in the Upper Rhine area. These days, when Muslims of radical tendency pronounce their formulaic imprecations against "Jews and Cru-saders", they would do well to remember that both Jewry and Islam were victims of the crusades.
Now, the slaughter has abated, but what strikes the reader of Cohn's book are the common threads that run between medieval and contemporary apocalyptic thought. First, and in general, the resilience of the end-time forecasts - time and again, for 500 years, the date is proclaimed, nothing happens, and no one feels discouraged from setting another date. Second, the Book of Revelation spawned a literary tradition that kept alive in medieval Europe the fantasy, derived from the Judaic tradition, of divine election. Christians, too, could now be the Chosen People, the saved or the Elect, and no amount of official repression could smother the appeal of this notion to the unprivileged as well as the unbalanced. Third, there looms the figure of a mere man, apparently virtuous, risen to eminence, but in reality seductive and Satanic - he is the anti-Christ, and in the five centuries that Cohn surveys, the role is fulfilled by the Pope, just as it frequently is now.
Finally, there is the boundless adaptability, the undying appeal and fascination of the Book of Revelation itself, the central text of apocalyptic belief. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, making landfall in the Bahaman islands, he believed he had found, and was fated to find, the Terrestrial Paradise promised in the Book of Revelation. He believed himself to be implicated in God's planning for the millennial kingdom on earth. The scholar Daniel Wojcik (in his brilliant account of apocalyptic thought in America, "The end of the world as we know it") quotes from Columbus's record of his first journey: "God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St John ... and he showed me the spot where to find it."
Five centuries later, the United States, responsible for more than four-fifths of the world's scientific research and still a land of plenty, can show the world an abundance of opinion polls concerning its religious convictions. The litany will be familiar. Ninety per cent of Americans say they have never doubted the existence of God and are certain they will be called to answer for their sins. Fifty-three per cent are creationists who believe that the cosmos is 6,000 years old, 44 per cent are sure that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead within the next 50 years. Only 12 per cent believe that life on earth has evolved through natural selection without the intervention of supernatural agency.
In general, belief in end-time biblical prophecy, in a world purified by catastrophe and then redeemed and made entirely Christian and free of conflict by the return of Jesus in our lifetime, is stronger in the United States than anywhere on the planet and extends from marginal, ill-educated, economically deprived groups, to college-educated people in the millions, through to governing elites, to the very summits of power. The social scientist JW Nelson notes that apocalyptic ideas "are as American as the hot dog". Wojcik reminds us of the ripple of anxiety that ran round the world in April 1984 when President Reagan expressed that he was greatly interested in the biblical prophecy of imminent Armageddon.
To the secular mind, the polling figures have a pleasantly shocking, titillating quality - one might think of them as a form of atheist's pornography. But perhaps we should enter a caveat before proceeding. It might be worth retaining a degree of scepticism about these polling figures. For a start, they vary enormously - one poll's 90 per cent is another's 53 per cent. From the respondent's point of view, what is to be gained by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a clipboard? And those who tell pollsters they believe that the Bible is the literal word of God from which derive all proper moral precepts, are more likely to be thinking in general terms of love, compassion and forgiveness rather than of the slave-owning, ethnic cleansing, infanticide, and genocide urged at various times by the jealous God of the Old Testament.
Furthermore, the mind is capable of artful compartmentalisations; in one moment, a man might confidently believe in predictions of Armageddon in his lifetime, and in the next, he might pick up the phone to inquire about a savings fund for his grandchildren's college education or approve of long-term measures to slow global warming. Or he might even vote Democrat, as do many Hispanic biblical literalists. In Pennsylvania, Kansas and Ohio, the courts have issued ringing rejections of Intelligent Design, and voters have ejected creationists from school boards. In the Dover case in 2005, Judge John Jones III, a Bush appointee, handed down a judgment that was not only a scathing dismissal of the prospect of supernatural ideas imported into science classes, but was an elegant, stirring summary of the project of science in general, and of natural selection in particular, and a sturdy endorsement of the rationalist, Enlightenment values that underlie the Constitution.
Still the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, and perhaps its most bizarre, certainly one of its most lurid, remains important in the United States, just as it once was in medieval Europe. The book is also known as the Apocalypse - and we should be clear about the meaning of this word, which is derived from the Greek word for revelation. Apocalypse, which has become synonymous with "catastrophe", actually refers to the literary form in which an individual describes what has been revealed to him by a supernatural being. There was a long Jewish tradition of prophecy, and there were hundreds, if not thousands of seers like John of Patmos between the second century BC and the first century AD. Many other Christian apocalypses were deprived of canonical authority in the second century AD. Revelation most likely survived because its author was confused with John, the Beloved Disciple. It is interesting to speculate how different medieval European history, and indeed the history of religion in Europe and the United States, would have been if the Book of Revelation had also failed, as it nearly did, to be retained in the Bible we now know.
The scholarly consensus dates Revelation to AD95 or 96. Little is known of its author beyond the fact that he is certainly not the apostle John. The occasion of writing appears to be the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Domitian. Only a generation before, the Romans had sacked the Second Temple in Jerusalem and are, therefore, identified with the Babylonians who had destroyed the First Temple centuries earlier. The general purpose quite likely was to give hope and consolation to the faithful in the certainty that their tribulations would end, that the Kingdom of God would prevail. Ever since the influential 12th-century historian Joachim of Fiore, Revelation has been seen, within various traditions of gathering complexity and divergence, as an overview of human history whose last stage we are now in; alternatively, and this is especially relevant to the postwar United States, as an account purely of those last days. For centuries, within the Protestant tradition, the anti-Christ was identified with the Pope, or with the Catholic Church in general. In recent decades, the honour has been bestowed on the Soviet Union, the European Union, or secularism and atheists. For many millennial dispensationalists, international peacemakers, who risk delaying the final struggle by sowing concord among nations - the United Nations, along with the World Council of Churches - have been seen as Satanic forces.
The cast or contents of Revelation in its contemporary representations has all the colourful gaudiness of a children's computer fantasy game - earthquakes and fires, thundering horses and their riders, angels blasting away on trumpets, magic vials, Jezebel, a red dragon and other mythical beasts, and a scarlet woman. Another familiar aspect is the potency of numbers - seven each of seals, heads of beasts, candlesticks, stars, lamps, trumpets, angels and vials; then four riders, four beasts with seven heads, ten horns, ten crowns, four and twenty elders, twelve tribes with twelve thousand members ... and finally, most resonantly, spawning 19 centuries of dark tomfoolery, "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred, three score and six." To many minds, 666 bristles with significance. The internet is stuffed with tremulous speculation about supermarket barcodes, implanted chips, numerical codes for the names of world leaders. However, the oldest known record of this famous verse, from the Oxyrhynchus site, gives the number as 616, as does the Zurich Bible. I have the impression that any number would do. One senses in the arithmetic of prophecy the yearnings of a systematising mind, bereft of the experimental scientific underpinnings that were to give such human tendencies their rich expression many centuries later. Astrology gives a similar impression of numerical obsession operating within a senseless void.
But Revelation has endured in an age of technology and scepticism. Not many works of literature, not even the Odyssey of Homer, can boast such wide appeal over such an expanse of time. One celebrated case of this rugged durability is that of William Miller, the 19th-century farmer who became a prophet and made a set of intricate calculations, based on a line in verse 14 of the Book of Daniel: "unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." Counting for various reasons this utterance to date from 457BC, and understanding one prophetic day to be the equivalent of a year, Miller came to the conclusion that the last of days would occur in 1843. Some of Miller's followers refined the calculations further to October 22. After nothing happened on that day, the year was quickly revised to 1844, to take into account the year zero. The faithful Millerites gathered in their thousands to wait. One may not share the beliefs, but it is quite possible to understand the mortifying disenchantment. One eyewitness wrote:
[We] confidently expected to see Jesus Christ and all the holy angels with him ... and that our trials and sufferings with our earthly pilgrimage would close and we should be caught up to meet our coming Lord ... and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the bell tolled twelve at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all our earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept, and wept, till the day dawned.
One means of dealing with the disillusionment was to give it a title - the Great Disappointment - duly capitalised. More importantly, according to Kenneth Newport's impressive account of the Waco siege, the very next day after the Disappointment, one Millerite leader in Port Gibson, New York, by the name of Hiram Edson had a vision as he walked along, a sudden revelation that "the cleansing of the sanctuary" referred to events not on earth, but in heaven. Jesus had taken his place in the heavenly holy of holies. The date had been right all along, it was simply the place they had got wrong. This "masterstroke", as Newport calls it, this "theological lifeline" removed the whole affair into a realm immune to disproof. The Great Disappointment was explained, and many Millerites were drawn, with hope still strong in their hearts, into the beginnings of the Seventh Day Adventist movement - which was to become one of the most successful churches in the United States.
In passing, I note the connections between this church and the medieval sects that Cohn describes - the strong emphasis on the Book of Revelation, the looming proximity of the end, the strict division between the faithful remnant who keep the Sabbath, and those who join the ranks of the "fallen", of the anti-Christ, identified with the Pope whose title, Vicarius Filii Dei (vicar of the son of God) apparently has a numerical value of 666. I mention Hiram Edson's morning-after masterstroke to illustrate the adaptability and resilience of end-time thought. For centuries now, it has regarded the end as "soon" - if not next week, then within a year or two. The end has not come, and yet no one is discomfited for long. New prophets, and soon, a new generation, set about the calculations, and always manage to find the end looming within their own lifetime. The million sellers like Hal Lindsey predicted the end of the world all through the seventies, eighties and nineties - and today, business has never been better. There is a hunger for this news, and perhaps we glimpse here something in our nature, something of our deeply held notions of time, and our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness of eternity, or the age of the universe - on the human scale there is little difference. We have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things.
In The Sense of an Ending , Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality, the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a "consonance with our more naive requirements of fiction". We are born, as we will die, in the middle of things, in the "middest". To make sense of our span, we need what he calls "fictive concords with origins and ends. 'The End', in the grand sense, as we imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations." What could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Kermode quotes with approval from Wallace Stevens - "the imagination is always at the end of an era". Even our notions of decadence contain the hopes of renewal; the religious minded, as well as the most secular, looked on the transition to the year 2000 as inescapably significant, even if all the atheists did was to party a little harder. It was inevitably a transition, the passing of an old age into the new - and who is to say now that Osama bin Laden did not disappoint, whether we mourned at the dawn of the new millennium with the bereaved among the ruins of lower Manhattan, or danced for joy, as some did, in the Gaza Strip.
Islamic eschatology from its very beginnings embraced the necessity of violently conquering the world and gathering up souls to the faith before the expected hour of judgment - a notion that has risen and fallen over the centuries, but in past decades has received new impetus from Islamist revivalist movements. It is partly a mirror image of the Protestant Christian tradition (a world made entirely Islamic, with Jesus as Mohammed's lieutenant), partly a fantasy of the inevitable return of "sacred space", the Caliphate, that includes most of Spain, parts of France, the entire Middle East, right up to the borders of China. As with the Christian scheme, Islam foretells of the destruction or conversion of the Jews.
Prophecy belief in Judaism, the original source for both the Islamic and Christian eschatologies, is surprisingly weaker - perhaps a certain irony in the relationship between Jews and their god is unfriendly to end-time belief, but it lives on vigorously enough in the Lubavitch movement and various Israeli settler groups, and of course is centrally concerned with divine entitlement to disputed lands.
We should add to the mix more recent secular apocalyptic beliefs - the certainty that the world is inevitably doomed through nuclear exchange, viral epidemics, meteorites, population growth or environmental degradation. Where these calamities are posed as mere possibilities in an open-ended future that might be headed off by wise human agency, we cannot consider them as apocalyptic. They are minatory, they are calls to action. But when they are presented as unavoidable outcomes driven by ineluctable forces of history or innate human failings, they share much with their religious counterparts - though they lack the demonising, cleansing, redemptive aspects, and are without the kind of supervision of a supernatural entity that might give benign meaning and purpose to a mass extinction. Clearly, fatalism is common to both camps, and both, reasonably enough, are much concerned with a nuclear holocaust, which to the prophetic believers illuminates in retrospect biblical passages that once seemed obscure. Hal Lindsey, preeminent among the popularisers of American apocalyptic thought, writes:
Zechariah 14:12 predicts that "their flesh will be consumed from their bones, their eyes burned out of their sockets, and their tongues consumed out of their mouths while they stand on their feet." For hundreds of years students of Bible prophecy have wondered what kind of plague could produce such instant ravaging of humans while still on their feet. Until the event of the atomic bomb such a thing was not humanly possible. But now everything Zechariah predicted could come true in a thermonuclear exchange!
Two other movements, now mercifully defeated or collapsed, provide a further connection between religious and secular apocalypse - so concluded Norman Cohn in the closing pages of The Pursuit of the Millennium. The genocidal tendency among the apocalyptic medieval movements faded somewhat after 1500. Vigorous end-time belief continued, of course, in the Puritan and Calvinist movements, the Millerites, as we have seen, and in the American Great Awakening, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Adventist movement. The murderous tradition, however, did not die away completely. It survived the passing of centuries in various sects, various outrages, to emerge in the European 20th century transformed, revitalised, secularised, but still recognisable in what Cohn depicts as the essence of apocalyptic thinking - "the tense expectation of a final, decisive struggle in which a world tyranny will be overthrown by a 'chosen people' and through which the world will be renewed and history brought to its consummation".
The will of god was transformed in the 20th century into the will of history, but the essential demand remained, as it still does today - "to purify the world by destroying the agents of corruption". The dark reveries of Nazism about the Jews shared much with the murderous antisemitic demonology of medieval times. An important additional element, imported from Russia, was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , the 1905 Tsarist police forgery, elevated by Hitler and others into a racist ideology. (It's interesting to note how the Protocols has re-emerged as a central text for Islamists, frequently quoted on websites, and sold in street bookstalls across the Middle East.) The Third Reich and its dream of a thousand-year rule was derived, in a form of secular millennial usurpation, directly from Revelation. Cohn draws our attention to the apocalyptic language of Mein Kampf : "If our people ... fall victims to these Jewish tyrants of the nations with their lust for blood and gold, the whole earth will sink down ... if Germany frees itself from this embrace, this greatest of dangers for the peoples can be regarded as vanquished for all the earth."
In Marxism in its Soviet form, Cohn also found a continuation of the old millenarian tradition of prophecy, of the final violent struggle to eliminate the agents of corruption - this time it is the bourgeoisie who will be vanquished by the proletariat in order to enable the withering away of the state and usher in the peaceable kingdom. "The kulak ... is prepared to strangle and massacre hundreds of thousands of workers ... Ruthless war must be waged on the kulaks! Death to them!" Thus spoke Lenin, and his word, like Hitler's, became deed.
Thirty years ago, we might have been able to convince ourselves that contemporary religious apocalyptic thought was a harmless remnant of a more credulous, superstitious, pre-scientific age, now safely behind us. But today prophecy belief, particularly within the Christian and Islamic traditions, is a force in our contemporary history, a medieval engine driving our modern moral, geopolitical, and military concerns. The various jealous sky-gods - and they are certainly not one and the same god - who in the past directly addressed Abraham, Paul, or Mohammed, among others, now indirectly address us through the daily television news. These different gods have wound themselves inextricably around our politics and our political differences.
Our secular and scientific culture has not replaced or even challenged these mutually incompatible, supernatural thought systems. Scientific method, scepticism, or rationality in general, has yet to find an overarching narrative of sufficient power, simplicity, and wide appeal to compete with the old stories that give meaning to people's lives. Natural selection is a powerful, elegant, and economic explicator of life on earth in all its diversity, and perhaps it contains the seeds of a rival creation myth that would have the added power of being true - but it awaits its inspired synthesiser, its poet, its Milton. The great American biologist EO Wilson has suggested an ethics divorced from religion, and derived instead from what he calls biophilia, our innate and profound connection to our natural environment - but one man alone cannot make a moral system. Science may speak of probable rising sea levels and global temperatures, with figures that it constantly refines in line with new data, but on the human future it cannot compete with the luridness and, above all, with the meaningfulness of the prophecies in the Book of Daniel or Revelation. Reason and myth remain uneasy bedfellows. Rather than presenting a challenge, science has in obvious ways strengthened apocalyptic thinking. It has provided us with the means to destroy ourselves and our civilisation completely in less than a couple of hours, or to spread a fatal virus around the globe in a couple of days. And our spiralling technologies of destruction and their ever-greater availability have raised the possibility that true believers, with all their unworldly passion, their prayerful longing for the end times to begin, could help nudge the ancient prophecies towards fulfilment. Wojcik quotes a letter by the singer Pat Boone addressed to fellow Christians. All-out nuclear war is what he appears to have had in mind. "My guess is that there isn't a thoughtful Christian alive who doesn't believe we are living at the end of history. I don't know how that makes you feel, but it gets me pretty excited. Just think about actually seeing, as the apostle Paul wrote it, the Lord Himself descending from heaven with a shout! Wow! And the signs that it's about to happen are everywhere."
If this possibility of a willed nuclear catastrophe appears too pessimistic or extravagant, or hilarious, consider the case of another individual, remote from Pat Boone - President Ahmadinejad of Iran. His much reported remark about wiping Israel off the face of the earth may have been mere bluster of the kind you could hear any Friday in a thousand mosques around the world. But this posturing, coupled with his nuclear ambitions, becomes more worrying when set in the context of his end-time beliefs. In Jamkaran, a village not far from the holy city of Qum, a small mosque is undergoing a $20m-expansion, driven forward by Ahmadinejad's office. Within the Shi'ite apocalyptic tradition, the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, who disappeared in the ninth century, is expected to reappear in a well behind the mosque. His re-emergence will signify the beginning of the end days. He will lead the battle against the Dajjal, the Islamic version of the anti-Christ, and with Jesus as his follower, will establish the global Dar el Salaam, the dominion of peace, under Islam. Ahmadinejad is extending the mosque to receive the Mahdi, and already pilgrims by the thousands are visiting the shrine, for the president has reportedly told his cabinet that he expects the visitation within two years.
Or again, consider the celebrated case of the red heifer, or calf. On the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the end-time stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam converge in both interlocking and mutually exclusive ways that are potentially explosive - they form incidentally the material for the American novelist Bob Stone's fine novel, Damascus Gate . What is bitterly contested is not only the past and present, it is the future. It is hardly possible to do justice in summary to the complex eschatologies that jostle on this 35-acre patch of land. The stories themselves are familiar. For the Jews, the Mount - the biblical Mount Moriah - is the site of the First Temple, destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586BC, and of the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans in AD70. According to tradition, and of particular interest to various controversial groups, including the Temple Institute, the Messiah, when he comes at last, will occupy the Third Temple. But that cannot be built, and therefore the Messiah will not come, without the sacrifice of a perfectly unblemished red calf.
For Muslims of course, the Mount is the site of the Dome of the Rock, built over the location of the two temples and enclosing the very spot from which Mohammed departed on his Night Journey to heaven - leaving as his horse stepped upwards a revered hoofprint in the rock. In the prophetic tradition, the Dajjal will be a Jew who leads a devastating war against Islam. Any attempt to bless a foundation stone of a new temple is seen as highly provocative for it implies the destruction of the mosque. The symbolism surrounding Ariel Sharon's visit to the Mount in September 2000 remains a matter of profoundly different interpretation by Muslims and Jews. And if lives were not at stake, the Christian fundamentalist contribution to this volatile mix would seem amusingly cynical. These prophetic believers are certain that Jesus will return at the height of the battle of Armageddon, but his thousand-year reign, which will ensure the conversion of Jews and Muslims to Christianity, or their extinction, cannot begin until the Third Temple is built.
And so it came about that a cattle-breeding operation emerges in Israel with the help of Texan Christian fundamentalist ranchers to promote the birth of the perfect, unspotted red calf, and thereby, we have to assume, bring the end days a little closer. In 1997 there was great excitement, as well as press mockery, when one promising candidate appeared. Months later, this cherished young cow nicked its rump on a barbed wire fence, causing white hairs to grow at the site of the wound and earning instant disqualification. Another red calf appeared in 2002 to general acclaim, and then again, later disappointment. In the tight squeeze of history, religion, and politics that converge on the Temple Mount, the calf is a minor item indeed. But the search for it, and the hope and longing that surround it, illustrates the dangerous tendency among prophetic believers to bring on the cataclysm that they think will lead to a form of paradise on earth. The reluctance of the current US administration to pursue in these past six years a vigorous policy towards a peace settlement in the Israel-Palestine dispute may owe less to the pressures of Jewish groups than to the eschatology of the Christian Right.
Periods of uncertainty in human history, of rapid, bewildering change, and of social unrest appear to give these old stories greater weight. It does not need a novelist to tell you that where a narrative has a beginning, it needs an end. Where there is a creation myth, there must be a final chapter. Where a god makes the world, it remains in his power to unmake it. When human weakness or wickedness is apparent, there will be guilty fantasies of supernatural retribution. When people are profoundly frustrated, either materially or spiritually, there will be dreams of the perfect society where all conflicts are resolved, and all needs are met.
That much we can understand or politely pretend to understand. But the problem of fatalism remains. In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the cold war would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear, mass death. The words of Ayatollah Khomeini are quoted approvingly in an Iranian 11th grade textbook: "Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."
And if we let global temperatures continue to rise because we give room to the faction that believes it is God's will, then we are truly - and literally - sunk.
If I were a believer, I think I would prefer to be in Jesus's camp - he is reported by Matthew to have said, "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
But even a sceptic can find in the historical accumulation of religious expression joy, fear, love, and above all, seriousness. I return to Philip Larkin - an atheist who also knew the moment and the nature of transcendence. He once wrote a famous description of a church:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious ...
And how could one be more serious than the writer of this prayer for the interment of the dead, from the Book of Common Prayer, an incantation of bleak, existential beauty, even more so in its beautiful setting by Henry Purcell: "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay."
Ultimately, apocalyptic belief is a function of faith - that luminous inner conviction that needs no recourse to evidence. It is customary to pose against immovable faith the engines of reason, but in this instance I would prefer that delightful human impulse - curiosity, the hallmark of mental freedom. Organised religion has always had - and I put this mildly - a troubled relationship with curiosity. Islam's distrust, at least in the past 200 years, is best expressed by its attitude to those whose faith falls away, to apostates who are drawn to other religions or to none at all. In recent times, in 1975, the mufti of Saudi Arabia, Bin Baz, in a fatwa, quoted by Shmuel Bar, ruled as follows: "Those who claim that the earth is round and moving around the sun are apostates and their blood can be shed and their property can be taken in the name of god." Bin Baz rescinded this judgment 10 years later. Mainstream Islam routinely prescribes punishment for apostates that ranges from ostracism to beatings to death. To enter one of the many websites where Muslim apostates anonymously exchange views is to encounter a world of brave and terrified men and women who have succumbed to their disaffection and intellectual curiosity. And Christians should not feel smug. The first commandment - on pain of death if we were to take the matter literally - is "Thou shalt have no other gods before me". In the fourth century, St Augustine put the matter well for Christianity, and his view prevailed for a long time: "There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try to discover the secrets of nature which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which man should not wish to learn."
And yet it is curiosity, scientific curiosity, that has delivered us genuine, testable knowledge of the world and contributed to our understanding of our place within it and of our nature and condition. This knowledge has a beauty of its own, and it can be terrifying. We are barely beginning to grasp the implications of what we have relatively recently learned. And what exactly have we learned? I draw here from a Steven Pinker essay on his ideal of a university: among other things we have learned that our planet is a minute speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified; that we cannot create energy or use it without loss.
As things stand, after more than a century of research in a number of fields, we have no evidence at all that the future can be predicted. Better to look directly to the past, to its junkyard of unrealised futures, for it is curiosity about history that should give end-time believers reasonable pause when they reflect that they stand on a continuum, a long and unvarying thousand-year tradition that has fantasised imminent salvation for themselves and perdition for the rest. On one of the countless end-time/rapture sites that litter the web, there is a section devoted to Frequently Asked Questions. One is: when the Lord comes, what will happen to the children of other faiths? The answer is staunch: "Ungodly parents only bring judgment to their children." In the light of this, one might conclude that end-time faith is probably as immune to the lessons of history as it is to fundamental human decency.
If we do destroy ourselves, we can assume that the general reaction will be terror, and grief at the pointlessness of it all, rather than rapture. Within living memory we have come very close to extinguishing our civilisation when, in October 1962, Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads to installations in Cuba confronted a blockade by the US Navy, and the world waited to discover whether Nikita Khrushchev would order his convoy home. It is remarkable how little of that terrifying event survives in public memory, in modern folklore. In the vast literature the Cuban missile crisis has spawned - military, political, diplomatic - there is very little on its effect at the time on ordinary lives, in homes, school, and the workplace, on the fear and widespread numb incomprehension in the population at large. That fear has not passed into the national narrative, here, or anywhere else as vividly as you might expect. As Spencer Weart put it: "When the crisis ended, most people turned their attention away as swiftly as a child who lifts up a rock, sees something slimy underneath, and drops the rock back." Perhaps the assassination of President Kennedy the following year helped obscure the folk memory of the missile crisis. His murder in Dallas became a marker in the history of instantaneous globalised news transmission - a huge proportion of the world's population seemed to be able to recall where they were when they heard the news. Conflating these two events, Christopher Hitchens opened an essay on the Cuban missile crisis with the words - "Like everyone else of my generation, I can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me." Heaven did not beckon during those tense hours of the crisis. Instead, as Hitchens observes, "It brought the world to the best view it has had yet of the gates of hell. I began with the idea of photography as the inventory of mortality, and I will end with a photograph of a group death. It shows fierce flames and smoke rising from a building in Waco, Texas, at the end of a 51-day siege in 1993. The group inside was the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists. Its leader, David Koresh, was a man steeped in biblical, end-time theology, convinced that America was Babylon, the agent of Satan, come in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI to destroy the Sabbath-keeping remnant, who would emerge from the cleansing, suicidal fire to witness the dawn of a new Kingdom. Here is Susan Sontag's "posthumous irony" indeed, as medieval Europe recreated itself in the form of a charismatic man, a messiah, a messenger of God, the bearer of the perfect truth, who exercised sexual power over his female followers and persuaded them to bear his children in order to begin a "Davidian" line. In that grim inferno, children, their mothers, and other followers died. Even more died two years later when Timothy McVeigh, exacting revenge against the government for its attack on Waco, committed his slaughter in Oklahoma City. It is not for nothing that one of the symptoms in a developing psychosis, noted and described by psychiatrists, is "religiosity".
Have we really reached a stage in public affairs when it really is no longer too obvious to say that all the evidence of the past and all the promptings of our precious rationality suggest that our future is not fixed? We have no reason to believe that there are dates inscribed in heaven or hell. We may yet destroy ourselves; we might scrape through. Confronting that uncertainty is the obligation of our maturity and our only spur to wise action. The believers should know in their hearts by now that, even if they are right and there actually is a benign and watchful personal God, he is, as all the daily tragedies, all the dead children attest, a reluctant intervener. The rest of us, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, know that it is highly improbable that there is anyone up there at all. Either way, in this case it hardly matters who is wrong - there will be no one to save us but ourselves.
Good, eh?
Now argue amongst yourselves. I'm off to a film festival that Joy has organised in Norwich.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Going The Ron Way
Anyone fancy a rambling discourse with no discernible point?
If not, look away now.
If you do, then brew up a coffee, pull up a chair and listen to me talk bollocks for a bit.
Since last week's startling archæological discovery of hundreds of tapes of Dive's musical prehistory that I was convinced I'd lost decades ago, an hallucinogenic mélange of random memories is assaulting my consciousness in a quite alarming manner.
Chunks of mislaid time, long imprisoned behind decayed synapses have escaped and are running amok in my brain.
Like a thousand unruly two-year-olds, high on illicit food-colourings, the gibbering faces of people I've not seen in many a decade loom at me from the darkness, as scary as clowns; inexplicable and long-forgotten encounters leap suddenly to the front of my mind, rudely elbowing my current train of thought into the gutter … which is a bummer when I'm trying to talk to the boss.
I feel I am watching "Life Of Dive - the Special Edition DVD" with hundreds of hours of "previously unseen footage".
A part of me attempts to acknowledge that I must have been present during the filming, but I honestly don't know which are memories and which are madness.
Lost time is nothing new to me …
My long-time blog-sufferers may recall the tale of a guy named David B. who greeted me in a music shop like a long-lost friend and regaled the staff with tales of when he used to play in my band.
At which point I set the record straight in no uncertain manner and insisted I'd never seen him before (there are always saddoes who feel a need to pretend that they were once "in a band" with "X", although "X" is usually someone famous and not me, but I do get them from time to time).
It was only a few months later - when David turned up at Chris and Jann's studio for a party - that they confirmed he had indeed played with us and Chris dug up a bunch of photos of us on stage together.
Apparently we had played together for around six months, but that was back in the mid-nineties, around the time that my previous life became a high-speed train wreck and I crashed and burned big time.
Several years of memories have been erased from my mind so totally by the trauma of that time that - although we have sat around looking at the pictures and the others have described gigs and sessions and parties and goodness knows what else that we got up to - I still have no recollection whatsoever of any of it and as far as my mind is concerned the first time I met David was in that music shop.
So it has been somewhat strange and not a little alarming viewing all of this "previously unseen footage" as it leaps out of the depths of my subconscious and gatecrashes my mind, where it seems to be enjoying a drunken party in the front room.
Who the fuck ARE all these people?
Sheesh! It's going to take ages to get all the crumbs and beer out of the carpet.
Anyhoo …
Quite a lot of these old film clips feature Ron; someone with a mind so addled that it makes mine look as new as if it's still got the cellophane packaging wrapped round it and the instruction booklet (in every language other than my own) tucked down the side of my cranium.
Parts of Ron can be seen in the accompanying photo to "Let's Make A Racket IV" should you feel the need to visualise him.
Ron was my drummer in one working band, three sanity bands and a strange assortment of recording sessions and it became a given in the band that there was a right way to do something and there was a Ron way.
Ron - bless him - is a bear of little brain … and not just in that special way that all drummers are; Ron went several steps further and actually Destroyed His Own Brain.
Back in the early sixties he was playing the same Hamburg bars and strip-joints as The Beatles and Ringo's band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
They would play three or four gigs a night, seven nights a week, staying awake for days at a time, ripped to the tits on amphetamines and who knows what else, playing until six in the morning and then boozing and smoking dope all day to come down.
Ron did this for most of the sixties and then dived enthusiastically into the acid scene.
We found him, years later, wild-eyed, manic and twitchy but an excellent drummer.
On stage, his "Ron-ness" stayed (mercifully) mostly in its box.
Very occasionally he would kick his drum kit all over the stage in the middle of a song, but other than that it manifested itself in small ways, like breaking his heavy oak drumsticks over his head, regularly falling off his stool and subjecting the audience to Tourette's style swearfests and one-man "hakas" when he got excited.
Off stage, he would be happily chatting away in the dressing room and then suddenly tune out, rejoining the conversation twenty minutes later with the end of the sentence he started when his mind switched off and having no recollection of anything we'd said since.
He had also lost any sense of direction. So much so that he wouldn't leave the village unless he was in convoy with my car for fear of not finding his way home.
Many times on the way to gigs I would glance in my rear-view mirror only to see Ron peel off the motorway at some junction, and then to turn up an hour late at the sound-check saying he "just felt it was the right way to go".
And so the "Ron Way" was born.
He would dress the Ron way, too.
Having to be prepared to play anything with anybody at an hour's notice, our "band wardrobes" were huge (and fortunately tax-deductible).
A typical Ron night would see the band turn up at a fifties weekender to back a load of one-hit wonders from the rock and roll era.
We would hit the stage in powder blue jackets, black shirts and skinny ties, only to find Ron had come dressed in trad jazz drag of butcher-striped waistcoat, straw boater and bow tie, looking at us innocently and saying "What? … What?"
This morning on the train I was assailed with memories of Saturday afternoons at Ron's house, which is what started this bizarre rambling post off.
We lived in the same village - Martham - a lovely place between the Norfolk Broads and the Sea.
I didn't have a TV and Ron had just got a huge satellite dish, so I wandered round to his house to see what the fuss was all about and somewhat inexplicably got drawn in to what became a Saturday afternoon, pre-gig ritual of watching utter crap, while flaked out on his sofa eating junk food.
If you ever need an argument for throwing your TV out the window, try watching what we watched every Saturday for a whole summer.
It horrifies me now just thinking of it, but our afternoons consisted of a diet of Airwolf (remember that crappy theme tune?), Knight Rider (The Hoff!), Baywatch (Eek!) and WWF wrestling (WTF, more like).
It seems that having destroyed his brain with drugs, Ron was administering a coup de grace with his TV.
My favourite Ron memories are of him falling off his stool and continuing to play drums with his feet, and of his turning up to a gig with a massive gong, which he proudly placed behind him on stage.
His drum solos often saw him leaving his drum kit behind and playing his way across our amps and the dancefloor, jumping up on the bar and soloing on the pumps, glasses and bottles, but this time he had a gong!
At the climax of his solo (having abandoned his drumstool) he executed a lovely pirouette, sweeping up a massive "Rank Cinema" style mallet and taking an elegant swing at the gong …
… only for the leather straps holding it to its frame to snap and the thing to drop to the floor with a dull "DUNGGGGGGGGG" and roll slowly off the stage to massive applause.
I still bump into him from time to time.
The last time I saw him he was playing percussion in a North African Rai band.
He seemed as confused and happy as ever.
So … That was Ron.
My head this week has been filled with people like him, some of whom I remember and some of whom I don't.
Life, eh?
It's been a long, strange trip.
If not, look away now.
If you do, then brew up a coffee, pull up a chair and listen to me talk bollocks for a bit.
Since last week's startling archæological discovery of hundreds of tapes of Dive's musical prehistory that I was convinced I'd lost decades ago, an hallucinogenic mélange of random memories is assaulting my consciousness in a quite alarming manner.
Chunks of mislaid time, long imprisoned behind decayed synapses have escaped and are running amok in my brain.
Like a thousand unruly two-year-olds, high on illicit food-colourings, the gibbering faces of people I've not seen in many a decade loom at me from the darkness, as scary as clowns; inexplicable and long-forgotten encounters leap suddenly to the front of my mind, rudely elbowing my current train of thought into the gutter … which is a bummer when I'm trying to talk to the boss.
I feel I am watching "Life Of Dive - the Special Edition DVD" with hundreds of hours of "previously unseen footage".
A part of me attempts to acknowledge that I must have been present during the filming, but I honestly don't know which are memories and which are madness.
Lost time is nothing new to me …
My long-time blog-sufferers may recall the tale of a guy named David B. who greeted me in a music shop like a long-lost friend and regaled the staff with tales of when he used to play in my band.
At which point I set the record straight in no uncertain manner and insisted I'd never seen him before (there are always saddoes who feel a need to pretend that they were once "in a band" with "X", although "X" is usually someone famous and not me, but I do get them from time to time).
It was only a few months later - when David turned up at Chris and Jann's studio for a party - that they confirmed he had indeed played with us and Chris dug up a bunch of photos of us on stage together.
Apparently we had played together for around six months, but that was back in the mid-nineties, around the time that my previous life became a high-speed train wreck and I crashed and burned big time.
Several years of memories have been erased from my mind so totally by the trauma of that time that - although we have sat around looking at the pictures and the others have described gigs and sessions and parties and goodness knows what else that we got up to - I still have no recollection whatsoever of any of it and as far as my mind is concerned the first time I met David was in that music shop.
So it has been somewhat strange and not a little alarming viewing all of this "previously unseen footage" as it leaps out of the depths of my subconscious and gatecrashes my mind, where it seems to be enjoying a drunken party in the front room.
Who the fuck ARE all these people?
Sheesh! It's going to take ages to get all the crumbs and beer out of the carpet.
Anyhoo …
Quite a lot of these old film clips feature Ron; someone with a mind so addled that it makes mine look as new as if it's still got the cellophane packaging wrapped round it and the instruction booklet (in every language other than my own) tucked down the side of my cranium.
Parts of Ron can be seen in the accompanying photo to "Let's Make A Racket IV" should you feel the need to visualise him.
Ron was my drummer in one working band, three sanity bands and a strange assortment of recording sessions and it became a given in the band that there was a right way to do something and there was a Ron way.
Ron - bless him - is a bear of little brain … and not just in that special way that all drummers are; Ron went several steps further and actually Destroyed His Own Brain.
Back in the early sixties he was playing the same Hamburg bars and strip-joints as The Beatles and Ringo's band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
They would play three or four gigs a night, seven nights a week, staying awake for days at a time, ripped to the tits on amphetamines and who knows what else, playing until six in the morning and then boozing and smoking dope all day to come down.
Ron did this for most of the sixties and then dived enthusiastically into the acid scene.
We found him, years later, wild-eyed, manic and twitchy but an excellent drummer.
On stage, his "Ron-ness" stayed (mercifully) mostly in its box.
Very occasionally he would kick his drum kit all over the stage in the middle of a song, but other than that it manifested itself in small ways, like breaking his heavy oak drumsticks over his head, regularly falling off his stool and subjecting the audience to Tourette's style swearfests and one-man "hakas" when he got excited.
Off stage, he would be happily chatting away in the dressing room and then suddenly tune out, rejoining the conversation twenty minutes later with the end of the sentence he started when his mind switched off and having no recollection of anything we'd said since.
He had also lost any sense of direction. So much so that he wouldn't leave the village unless he was in convoy with my car for fear of not finding his way home.
Many times on the way to gigs I would glance in my rear-view mirror only to see Ron peel off the motorway at some junction, and then to turn up an hour late at the sound-check saying he "just felt it was the right way to go".
And so the "Ron Way" was born.
He would dress the Ron way, too.
Having to be prepared to play anything with anybody at an hour's notice, our "band wardrobes" were huge (and fortunately tax-deductible).
A typical Ron night would see the band turn up at a fifties weekender to back a load of one-hit wonders from the rock and roll era.
We would hit the stage in powder blue jackets, black shirts and skinny ties, only to find Ron had come dressed in trad jazz drag of butcher-striped waistcoat, straw boater and bow tie, looking at us innocently and saying "What? … What?"
This morning on the train I was assailed with memories of Saturday afternoons at Ron's house, which is what started this bizarre rambling post off.
We lived in the same village - Martham - a lovely place between the Norfolk Broads and the Sea.
I didn't have a TV and Ron had just got a huge satellite dish, so I wandered round to his house to see what the fuss was all about and somewhat inexplicably got drawn in to what became a Saturday afternoon, pre-gig ritual of watching utter crap, while flaked out on his sofa eating junk food.
If you ever need an argument for throwing your TV out the window, try watching what we watched every Saturday for a whole summer.
It horrifies me now just thinking of it, but our afternoons consisted of a diet of Airwolf (remember that crappy theme tune?), Knight Rider (The Hoff!), Baywatch (Eek!) and WWF wrestling (WTF, more like).
It seems that having destroyed his brain with drugs, Ron was administering a coup de grace with his TV.
My favourite Ron memories are of him falling off his stool and continuing to play drums with his feet, and of his turning up to a gig with a massive gong, which he proudly placed behind him on stage.
His drum solos often saw him leaving his drum kit behind and playing his way across our amps and the dancefloor, jumping up on the bar and soloing on the pumps, glasses and bottles, but this time he had a gong!
At the climax of his solo (having abandoned his drumstool) he executed a lovely pirouette, sweeping up a massive "Rank Cinema" style mallet and taking an elegant swing at the gong …
… only for the leather straps holding it to its frame to snap and the thing to drop to the floor with a dull "DUNGGGGGGGGG" and roll slowly off the stage to massive applause.
I still bump into him from time to time.
The last time I saw him he was playing percussion in a North African Rai band.
He seemed as confused and happy as ever.
So … That was Ron.
My head this week has been filled with people like him, some of whom I remember and some of whom I don't.
Life, eh?
It's been a long, strange trip.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Let's Make A Racket - IX
A break from the blues.
Much as I love the blues, posting stuff from our blues club nights every week gets a little samey, so here's a track from the wilderness years.
The wilderness years were that awful, desolate decade after punk when synthesisers ruled the earth.
Brrr …
I shudder to think back on it.
Suddenly nobody wanted a guitar player on their session or in their band.
Suddenly girls who used to go out specifically to bag themselves a lead guitarist would grimace at you and say "Eww! Guitar is dead! I only date synth players".
Boy, what a crap decade that was!
As if to rub salt into the wounds, the only forms of music where virtuoso guitar playing was welcome were Country and Western and Heavy Metal, the inbred, bastard, trailer-trash dregs at the bottom of the musical barrel.
I served four year sentences in each of those awful prisons before being released back into society when the asteroid of common sense and decency hit the planet and killed off the dinosaurs of synth-pop.
I am still bitter and resentful.
The peak of my musical life spent amongst yee-haws and headbangers.
We formed a prison band.
A sanity band.
We played complex jazz-rock of our own devising and mixed it up with some smooth, jazzy pop so we could get gigs.
This was the band where "Dive" was born as a stage name.
It was great fun, but where Country and Western payed top dollar (for which - let me confess - I was very grateful), our sanity band had to play for peanuts … supporting synth bands at the UEA and playing country hotels on Sunday afternoons.
But it kept me sane (ish) musically.
You can thank mum for this recording.
She was good enough to stump up the readies for a couple of days studio time (expensive … this was in the days before we had home studios) so we recorded a bunch of songs for her and this is one of them.
There's no lead guitar on it but it's a nice tune.
The only photo I have of that session is this old Polaroid, taken by Angie, the singer.
That's John Tuttle on sax and me playing Old Les, running through the sax and guitar riff from one of our own songs (Apart From The Fall, which might get posted sometime in the future).
Please forgive the awful sweater. It was bloody cold. The date of the session was 10th and 11th October, 1982.
Anyhoo … Here's the song. I think it was a Randy Crawford tune but correct me if I'm wrong: Rio de Janeiro Blues (yeah; he says "a break from the blues" and the song has blues in the title. Live with it).
Much as I love the blues, posting stuff from our blues club nights every week gets a little samey, so here's a track from the wilderness years.
The wilderness years were that awful, desolate decade after punk when synthesisers ruled the earth.
Brrr …
I shudder to think back on it.
Suddenly nobody wanted a guitar player on their session or in their band.
Suddenly girls who used to go out specifically to bag themselves a lead guitarist would grimace at you and say "Eww! Guitar is dead! I only date synth players".
Boy, what a crap decade that was!
As if to rub salt into the wounds, the only forms of music where virtuoso guitar playing was welcome were Country and Western and Heavy Metal, the inbred, bastard, trailer-trash dregs at the bottom of the musical barrel.
I served four year sentences in each of those awful prisons before being released back into society when the asteroid of common sense and decency hit the planet and killed off the dinosaurs of synth-pop.
I am still bitter and resentful.
The peak of my musical life spent amongst yee-haws and headbangers.
We formed a prison band.
A sanity band.
We played complex jazz-rock of our own devising and mixed it up with some smooth, jazzy pop so we could get gigs.
This was the band where "Dive" was born as a stage name.
It was great fun, but where Country and Western payed top dollar (for which - let me confess - I was very grateful), our sanity band had to play for peanuts … supporting synth bands at the UEA and playing country hotels on Sunday afternoons.
But it kept me sane (ish) musically.
You can thank mum for this recording.
She was good enough to stump up the readies for a couple of days studio time (expensive … this was in the days before we had home studios) so we recorded a bunch of songs for her and this is one of them.
There's no lead guitar on it but it's a nice tune.
The only photo I have of that session is this old Polaroid, taken by Angie, the singer.
That's John Tuttle on sax and me playing Old Les, running through the sax and guitar riff from one of our own songs (Apart From The Fall, which might get posted sometime in the future).Please forgive the awful sweater. It was bloody cold. The date of the session was 10th and 11th October, 1982.
Anyhoo … Here's the song. I think it was a Randy Crawford tune but correct me if I'm wrong: Rio de Janeiro Blues (yeah; he says "a break from the blues" and the song has blues in the title. Live with it).
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Meme-ette
Huge thanks once again to Savannah for this compact and bijou meme-ette.
Were it not for this you would have suffered more crap about boring guitars or moaning about trains.
This meme had lots of rules - or at least it did before it got here, where those things go straight in the bin.
Basically, it's "fess up about six unspectacular quirks of yours."
Easy peasy, I thought. I am probably the least spectacular person on the planet so unspectacular things follow me around like Pigpen's dust cloud.
It's quirks that are the problem.
I'm not the least bit quirky.
I am perfectly normal.
It's the rest of you who are quirky.
In fact some of you are downright weird (I say that in the knowledge than none of you are close enough to punch me).
I mean, I'm a bit anal with my books and I iron my boxer shorts, but that's not quirky; I just like to be able to find what I want to read and to do it in non-wrinkly underwear.
Having spent the whole train journey trying to think of quirky behaviour and coming up empty I shall have to scrape the barrel.
Shit. Where do I start?
Hokay …
1. I never wear any jewellery. No rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings or any of that crap. Just lately I've stopped wearing a watch, too. It always told me things I didn't want to know.
No tats or piercings, either; just the odd scar.
2. As I really can't think of much else I suppose I'll have to include my obsession with lovely straight towels, every piece of cutlery in the correct place (and the right way round) in the cutlery drawer, and if anyone moves something in my house so it's not quite square they're dead meat.
3. I regard this as perfectly normal behaviour but some oddballs amongst you might not:
I hate telephones. I absolutely loathe the fuckers.
For years I wouldn't have one in the house and now I only allow it under sufferance as it's the only way I can get online and work from home.
It stays on mute unless I'm expecting a call from the office, so don't try ringing the smegging thing (I'm not in the directory anyway).
As for fucking mobiles … well, you know my views.
It's bad enough having a fixed telephone at home (it lives at the bottom of the vegetable rack in the kitchen, underneath a cushion in case you're curious); the thought of one that actually follows me around gives me the screaming horrors.
I seem to remember when they first came out, everyone (and this means you; don't deny it) saying "Oh, I'll only use it for emergencies. What if my car breaks down?"
Yeah, right.
"Hi! I'm on the train!"
Bastard! I'll give you a fucking emergency!
4. I'm a pretentious twat with shelves full of lovely, stinky, leather-bound editions of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe, all the classics, plus Dickens and lots of good, turgid Russian literature, yet I still read comic books.
I am a huge fan of Love and Rockets.
I've collected it since it started in the early eighties and I regard it as great literature.
5. I loathe television.
Face it; it's crap.
For fifteen years I had a life instead of a television.
Now I have one but only to watch old black and white movies and to play Grand Theft Auto on the PS2 and PS3.
I can watch movies on my Mac so as soon as they come up with a monitor for the PS3 that isn't a television I'll ditch the fucking thing again.
6. I can do "this" with my thumbs.
Cool, huh?
I don't have a video camera so you'll just have to take my word for it.
Whew! That was really difficult. I simply don't have quirks. I am the quintessence of normality (NEVER "normalcy")!
Anyhoo … have a go if you feel like it, you quirky people, you.
Were it not for this you would have suffered more crap about boring guitars or moaning about trains.
This meme had lots of rules - or at least it did before it got here, where those things go straight in the bin.
Basically, it's "fess up about six unspectacular quirks of yours."
Easy peasy, I thought. I am probably the least spectacular person on the planet so unspectacular things follow me around like Pigpen's dust cloud.
It's quirks that are the problem.
I'm not the least bit quirky.
I am perfectly normal.
It's the rest of you who are quirky.
In fact some of you are downright weird (I say that in the knowledge than none of you are close enough to punch me).
I mean, I'm a bit anal with my books and I iron my boxer shorts, but that's not quirky; I just like to be able to find what I want to read and to do it in non-wrinkly underwear.
Having spent the whole train journey trying to think of quirky behaviour and coming up empty I shall have to scrape the barrel.
Shit. Where do I start?
Hokay …
1. I never wear any jewellery. No rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings or any of that crap. Just lately I've stopped wearing a watch, too. It always told me things I didn't want to know.
No tats or piercings, either; just the odd scar.
2. As I really can't think of much else I suppose I'll have to include my obsession with lovely straight towels, every piece of cutlery in the correct place (and the right way round) in the cutlery drawer, and if anyone moves something in my house so it's not quite square they're dead meat.
3. I regard this as perfectly normal behaviour but some oddballs amongst you might not:
I hate telephones. I absolutely loathe the fuckers.
For years I wouldn't have one in the house and now I only allow it under sufferance as it's the only way I can get online and work from home.
It stays on mute unless I'm expecting a call from the office, so don't try ringing the smegging thing (I'm not in the directory anyway).
As for fucking mobiles … well, you know my views.
It's bad enough having a fixed telephone at home (it lives at the bottom of the vegetable rack in the kitchen, underneath a cushion in case you're curious); the thought of one that actually follows me around gives me the screaming horrors.
I seem to remember when they first came out, everyone (and this means you; don't deny it) saying "Oh, I'll only use it for emergencies. What if my car breaks down?"
Yeah, right.
"Hi! I'm on the train!"
Bastard! I'll give you a fucking emergency!
4. I'm a pretentious twat with shelves full of lovely, stinky, leather-bound editions of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe, all the classics, plus Dickens and lots of good, turgid Russian literature, yet I still read comic books.
I am a huge fan of Love and Rockets.
I've collected it since it started in the early eighties and I regard it as great literature.
5. I loathe television.
Face it; it's crap.
For fifteen years I had a life instead of a television.
Now I have one but only to watch old black and white movies and to play Grand Theft Auto on the PS2 and PS3.
I can watch movies on my Mac so as soon as they come up with a monitor for the PS3 that isn't a television I'll ditch the fucking thing again.
6. I can do "this" with my thumbs.
Cool, huh?
I don't have a video camera so you'll just have to take my word for it.
Whew! That was really difficult. I simply don't have quirks. I am the quintessence of normality (NEVER "normalcy")!
Anyhoo … have a go if you feel like it, you quirky people, you.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
See Dereham And Die
I can't remember if I've written about this before and frankly, I can't be arsed to check back and find out, so if you've heard this already just ignore it.
Since I found that box of old tapes the memories have been piling up like a … well … like a huge pile of crap, I suppose.
I tried to remember the first gig I ever played but my brain is so riddled with decay that it eludes me (unless it's the one I wrote about in yesterday's comments).
I won't write about the really great gigs because they're boring to read about ("It was fucking amaaaazing, man! Twenty-five thousand people going apeshit!" … etc. blah, blah, blah) and similarly, the bad gigs are simply too depressing to recount.
But the weird gigs … Ah! There's a subject!
When I say weird, I don't mean the usual sort of weird, like turning up with my heavy metal band to find we'd been booked into a country and western club (yes, it was just like Bob's Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers movie and we played a great country set in our ripped jeans and long hair and huge Marshall stacks).
That's just another day as a jobbing musician; if we're talking genuinely weird, then we're talking The Dereham Death Gigs.
Sheesh!
Picture a big old theatre. Using the Blues Brothers again it was very like the Palace Hotel Ballroom only taller.
Big balconies and boxes and the main floor cleared for dancing.
Nice room.
Nice people, too.
We were playing a big charity "do" for research into a particularly nasty illness (I feel awful about this but I can't remember what it was).
The soundcheck went fine and coach-loads of people started coming in from all over the country.
We kicked back in the dressing room and sorted out set lists.
Then came a knock on the door and a couple came in with a really pretty teenage girl on crutches.
No … This isn't one of THOSE tales (and wouldn't you just love to hear THOSE?)!
They introduced her and then slapped the news on us that she had a week or less to live and that this gig would be her last treat.
Fucking what?
I mean what the hell are you supposed to say to that?
Talk about a burden of responsibility.
This poor girl was going straight back to the hospital after the gig and then she would die.
So we decided we would try our hardest to give her the best night of her short life (well, musically, anyway).
She was so pitifully glad to see us and we hugged and chatted and tried to make as happy small talk as we could, then when they led her out to the auditorium we just sat back stunned into silence for a minute or two before suddenly leaping up and shouting "Holy shit! Get the set lists and take out EVERY song with a reference to death in it!"
This was a covers band, hired to play hits from the fifties to the eighties (when the gig took place) and you would not BELIEVE how many songs have death hidden in them!
Anyhoo; twenty minutes of frantic weeding later and the dressing room was littered with discarded lyric sheets and we had a "safe" set list.
Time to hit the stage.
House lights down …
Curtain up …
Slam into the first number as the stage lights blind you …
That's always one of my favourite moments.
And the place was rocking.
The gig was going really well …
… right up until we started in on the list of requests the young girl's parents had given us.
Which started with "Oh, Carol" …
Classic old songs can be busked.
Everybody knows them and you don't need sheet music or lyrics.
It was only when we were halfway through the first verse that our eyes (wide with horror) met and sheer panic set in.
And so it happened …
You all know the line I mean.
The one where the band stops for four beats to add emphasis to THAT word.
The line "I will surely DIE!" (two … three … four …).
One unaccompanied word … "DIE" and three beats of silence before the band kicks in again.
My God, those were the longest beats I've ever counted.
And there was the little girl in her wheelchair, happily singing along as if she didn't have a care in the world.
Boy, did we feel like shit.
So …
The gig actually went great. Everybody loved us and the little girl was so happy and we had lots of hugs and kisses and tears afterwards and then waved them off in their coach and started the laborious task of packing everything up; made even more laborious by being totally emotionally fucked.
Two days later, the father called and booked us for an anniversary gig the following year.
The girl had died the next day.
He was insistent that she had the most wonderful time at the gig and that everyone wanted there to be a remembrance gig on the anniversary.
Hey ho.
Of course we agreed. How could we not?
So …
One year later, we turn up at the theatre, set up the gear and soundcheck and the coaches start rolling in.
Then a phone call comes in that the coach from Ipswich won't be there because one of them died on the way to the gig.
Holy crap!
After a conflab, they insisted that the gig go ahead to celebrate the little girl's life and the life of the poor guy who'd died trying to get there.
And once again it was a great night.
They asked us back the next year but bollocks to that. We could only take so much!
Whenever I have to drive past Dereham I shudder.
Brr …
Since I found that box of old tapes the memories have been piling up like a … well … like a huge pile of crap, I suppose.
I tried to remember the first gig I ever played but my brain is so riddled with decay that it eludes me (unless it's the one I wrote about in yesterday's comments).
I won't write about the really great gigs because they're boring to read about ("It was fucking amaaaazing, man! Twenty-five thousand people going apeshit!" … etc. blah, blah, blah) and similarly, the bad gigs are simply too depressing to recount.
But the weird gigs … Ah! There's a subject!
When I say weird, I don't mean the usual sort of weird, like turning up with my heavy metal band to find we'd been booked into a country and western club (yes, it was just like Bob's Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers movie and we played a great country set in our ripped jeans and long hair and huge Marshall stacks).
That's just another day as a jobbing musician; if we're talking genuinely weird, then we're talking The Dereham Death Gigs.
Sheesh!
Picture a big old theatre. Using the Blues Brothers again it was very like the Palace Hotel Ballroom only taller.
Big balconies and boxes and the main floor cleared for dancing.
Nice room.
Nice people, too.
We were playing a big charity "do" for research into a particularly nasty illness (I feel awful about this but I can't remember what it was).
The soundcheck went fine and coach-loads of people started coming in from all over the country.
We kicked back in the dressing room and sorted out set lists.
Then came a knock on the door and a couple came in with a really pretty teenage girl on crutches.
No … This isn't one of THOSE tales (and wouldn't you just love to hear THOSE?)!
They introduced her and then slapped the news on us that she had a week or less to live and that this gig would be her last treat.
Fucking what?
I mean what the hell are you supposed to say to that?
Talk about a burden of responsibility.
This poor girl was going straight back to the hospital after the gig and then she would die.
So we decided we would try our hardest to give her the best night of her short life (well, musically, anyway).
She was so pitifully glad to see us and we hugged and chatted and tried to make as happy small talk as we could, then when they led her out to the auditorium we just sat back stunned into silence for a minute or two before suddenly leaping up and shouting "Holy shit! Get the set lists and take out EVERY song with a reference to death in it!"
This was a covers band, hired to play hits from the fifties to the eighties (when the gig took place) and you would not BELIEVE how many songs have death hidden in them!
Anyhoo; twenty minutes of frantic weeding later and the dressing room was littered with discarded lyric sheets and we had a "safe" set list.
Time to hit the stage.
House lights down …
Curtain up …
Slam into the first number as the stage lights blind you …
That's always one of my favourite moments.
And the place was rocking.
The gig was going really well …
… right up until we started in on the list of requests the young girl's parents had given us.
Which started with "Oh, Carol" …
Classic old songs can be busked.
Everybody knows them and you don't need sheet music or lyrics.
It was only when we were halfway through the first verse that our eyes (wide with horror) met and sheer panic set in.
And so it happened …
You all know the line I mean.
The one where the band stops for four beats to add emphasis to THAT word.
The line "I will surely DIE!" (two … three … four …).
One unaccompanied word … "DIE" and three beats of silence before the band kicks in again.
My God, those were the longest beats I've ever counted.
And there was the little girl in her wheelchair, happily singing along as if she didn't have a care in the world.
Boy, did we feel like shit.
So …
The gig actually went great. Everybody loved us and the little girl was so happy and we had lots of hugs and kisses and tears afterwards and then waved them off in their coach and started the laborious task of packing everything up; made even more laborious by being totally emotionally fucked.
Two days later, the father called and booked us for an anniversary gig the following year.
The girl had died the next day.
He was insistent that she had the most wonderful time at the gig and that everyone wanted there to be a remembrance gig on the anniversary.
Hey ho.
Of course we agreed. How could we not?
So …
One year later, we turn up at the theatre, set up the gear and soundcheck and the coaches start rolling in.
Then a phone call comes in that the coach from Ipswich won't be there because one of them died on the way to the gig.
Holy crap!
After a conflab, they insisted that the gig go ahead to celebrate the little girl's life and the life of the poor guy who'd died trying to get there.
And once again it was a great night.
They asked us back the next year but bollocks to that. We could only take so much!
Whenever I have to drive past Dereham I shudder.
Brr …
Monday, May 26, 2008
Historical Document
Or perhaps that should be "hysterical document".
Er …
I wasn't going to post any of this stuff but I've been having such fun this weekend transferring tapes of myself that must be getting on for forty years old onto CD.
This is probably the earliest piece of Dive that exists on tape.
It is myself as a kid, playing a cheapo electric guitar through a borrowed 15W bass amp and my friend Mike Igoe playing my acoustic guitar.
Picture two spotty, snotty kids in glasses, barely into our teens, sitting on my crappy little bed in a room that measured eight by six feet, playing into a primitive and very early cassette player.
Mike and I went on to form my first sanity band (I was already a seasoned dinner/dance band player, though we couldn't play in pubs because we were too young to go in them).
Our sanity band didn't play dance music, we played Yes and Focus and Mahavishnu Orchestra numbers; all widdly guitar and mad drums.
We got fuck-all work but we had a great time.
Even before that, back when we were about thirteen - as you're about to hear - we were precocious little bastards.
In those benighted days of prehistory, guitars were not allowed in school. They were "not a proper instrument".
Nobody gave guitar lessons, you had to sit and figure the thing out for yourself.
Bert Weedon's "Play In A Day" book taught you how to pick out the tune to Good King Wenceslas, but if you wanted to play "flash" you had to play along to records until your fingers bled.
It's different these days. Kids get taught this crap in school. They can even get a sodding qualification! Jeez!
Where's the rebellion in playing guitar these days? Where's the cool?
Sadly long gone …
Sigh …
Anyhoo … Here's two snotty little kids learning the hard way, just sitting and jamming and trying to figure out what sounds good.
I have no idea which of us makes the stupid noise at the end.
This is the first couple of minutes of a whole hour of this crap.
Sorry about the quality - and indeed the playing - but this is the prehistory of Dive.
And sorry about the photo. It's the only one I have of the two of us, taken when we were eighteen, long after this recording.
Yes, I confess; that's my Afghan coat.
Er …
I wasn't going to post any of this stuff but I've been having such fun this weekend transferring tapes of myself that must be getting on for forty years old onto CD.
This is probably the earliest piece of Dive that exists on tape.
It is myself as a kid, playing a cheapo electric guitar through a borrowed 15W bass amp and my friend Mike Igoe playing my acoustic guitar.
Picture two spotty, snotty kids in glasses, barely into our teens, sitting on my crappy little bed in a room that measured eight by six feet, playing into a primitive and very early cassette player.
Mike and I went on to form my first sanity band (I was already a seasoned dinner/dance band player, though we couldn't play in pubs because we were too young to go in them).
Our sanity band didn't play dance music, we played Yes and Focus and Mahavishnu Orchestra numbers; all widdly guitar and mad drums.
We got fuck-all work but we had a great time.
Even before that, back when we were about thirteen - as you're about to hear - we were precocious little bastards.
In those benighted days of prehistory, guitars were not allowed in school. They were "not a proper instrument".
Nobody gave guitar lessons, you had to sit and figure the thing out for yourself.
Bert Weedon's "Play In A Day" book taught you how to pick out the tune to Good King Wenceslas, but if you wanted to play "flash" you had to play along to records until your fingers bled.
It's different these days. Kids get taught this crap in school. They can even get a sodding qualification! Jeez!
Where's the rebellion in playing guitar these days? Where's the cool?
Sadly long gone …
Sigh …
Anyhoo … Here's two snotty little kids learning the hard way, just sitting and jamming and trying to figure out what sounds good.
I have no idea which of us makes the stupid noise at the end.
This is the first couple of minutes of a whole hour of this crap.
Sorry about the quality - and indeed the playing - but this is the prehistory of Dive.
And sorry about the photo. It's the only one I have of the two of us, taken when we were eighteen, long after this recording.
Yes, I confess; that's my Afghan coat.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Don't Go In The Attic
Holy Crap!
Cheese, Louise, that was a mistake.
Not because of the spiders … As any really long term blogpals will know, there are no spiders in my attic because somewhere out there in the dark forest of rafters lurks The Thing That Eats Spiders.
I have never met The Thing That Eats Spiders but I hear it sometimes.
And even during harvest time when the rest of the house is overrun by the bloody things there are never any spiders in the attic, so I know it's still creeping around up there on however many legs it has, snuffling and crunching things-arachnid in the gloom.
No, the thing that I found in the attic was in one of many boxes that have remained taped shut for decades, moved from house to house and put up in attics with the faded and enigmatic legend "STUFF … DO NOT THROW OUT!" scrawled across the top.
Rainy weekends occasionally lead me up into the warm darkness (scuttling, snuffles and crunching sounds notwithstanding) to explore these time capsules.
And in this one I found a boxful of cassette tapes.
I've said it once, but it bears repeating: Holy Crap!
Recorded on one of the very first crappy little hand-held portable cassette machines are tapes of my kiddie rock band from the early seventies playing Yes and Focus songs, tapes of sanity bands through the centuries, four and eight track masters, country bands, heavy metal bands, jazz-rock bands, a snapshot of the decades that Dive forgot!
So …
I lugged the big old monster mastering machine from the studio down to the dining room, plus several more shiny black boxes with flashing lights and lots of knobs.
I hunted through cases of leads to find ones with the right connections.
And I started the painstaking task of digitising my past …
Don't get excited; this job will take at least a year (I'm not kidding) and the sound quality of the early stuff is execrable at best.
Through a wall of hiss, static, tape-wobble, flutter and general sonic crap I can just make out our eleven-year-old drummer going apeshit while kiddie Dive wails solos all over the place.
The things were recorded in St.Luke's Church in Beccles, Suffolk by a twelve-year-old kid who I can hear between songs trying to chat up the singer's girlfriend. Let's just say that he would not be going on to a career in the recording industry.
Those tapes are never going to be restorable enough for public listening, but they got me all nostalgic.
Where on earth are those people now?
Other than the bass player - who is something high-ranking in the Royal Navy and was last heard of living in the Caribbean, the bastard - I've not seen nor heard from any of them since around 1974.
Sheesh!
Anyhoo, there's loads more crap in there. Some of which - if I'm feeling particularly masochistic - may well end up on a Thursday Racket.
Most of today has been spent either sighing wistfully, shouting sudden expletives or laughing like a loon. It's been fun and I've only done three cassettes so far (there are hundreds).
I'm currently digitising a heavy rock gig from 1984. The quality is crap - a cassette recorder plonked on the floor at the side of the stage, so far from the monitors that all you can hear is the backline and a very, VERY faint vocal reflected back from the hall but it's got me grinning like a loon and dancing round the room.
I even started headbanging and playing air guitar until I came to my senses and picked up a real guitar to headbang with.
Fuck me, this is fun!
I thought this stuff had been thrown away decades ago. Considering the skipfuls of crap that I throw out every time I move house it's a miracle these have survived.
So … I don't know what you're doing with your weekends but I hope you're having as much fun as I am.
Woohoo!
With a side order of Yaay!
Cheese, Louise, that was a mistake.
Not because of the spiders … As any really long term blogpals will know, there are no spiders in my attic because somewhere out there in the dark forest of rafters lurks The Thing That Eats Spiders.
I have never met The Thing That Eats Spiders but I hear it sometimes.
And even during harvest time when the rest of the house is overrun by the bloody things there are never any spiders in the attic, so I know it's still creeping around up there on however many legs it has, snuffling and crunching things-arachnid in the gloom.
No, the thing that I found in the attic was in one of many boxes that have remained taped shut for decades, moved from house to house and put up in attics with the faded and enigmatic legend "STUFF … DO NOT THROW OUT!" scrawled across the top.
Rainy weekends occasionally lead me up into the warm darkness (scuttling, snuffles and crunching sounds notwithstanding) to explore these time capsules.
And in this one I found a boxful of cassette tapes.
I've said it once, but it bears repeating: Holy Crap!
Recorded on one of the very first crappy little hand-held portable cassette machines are tapes of my kiddie rock band from the early seventies playing Yes and Focus songs, tapes of sanity bands through the centuries, four and eight track masters, country bands, heavy metal bands, jazz-rock bands, a snapshot of the decades that Dive forgot!
So …
I lugged the big old monster mastering machine from the studio down to the dining room, plus several more shiny black boxes with flashing lights and lots of knobs.
I hunted through cases of leads to find ones with the right connections.
And I started the painstaking task of digitising my past …
Don't get excited; this job will take at least a year (I'm not kidding) and the sound quality of the early stuff is execrable at best.
Through a wall of hiss, static, tape-wobble, flutter and general sonic crap I can just make out our eleven-year-old drummer going apeshit while kiddie Dive wails solos all over the place.
The things were recorded in St.Luke's Church in Beccles, Suffolk by a twelve-year-old kid who I can hear between songs trying to chat up the singer's girlfriend. Let's just say that he would not be going on to a career in the recording industry.
Those tapes are never going to be restorable enough for public listening, but they got me all nostalgic.
Where on earth are those people now?
Other than the bass player - who is something high-ranking in the Royal Navy and was last heard of living in the Caribbean, the bastard - I've not seen nor heard from any of them since around 1974.
Sheesh!
Anyhoo, there's loads more crap in there. Some of which - if I'm feeling particularly masochistic - may well end up on a Thursday Racket.
Most of today has been spent either sighing wistfully, shouting sudden expletives or laughing like a loon. It's been fun and I've only done three cassettes so far (there are hundreds).
I'm currently digitising a heavy rock gig from 1984. The quality is crap - a cassette recorder plonked on the floor at the side of the stage, so far from the monitors that all you can hear is the backline and a very, VERY faint vocal reflected back from the hall but it's got me grinning like a loon and dancing round the room.
I even started headbanging and playing air guitar until I came to my senses and picked up a real guitar to headbang with.
Fuck me, this is fun!
I thought this stuff had been thrown away decades ago. Considering the skipfuls of crap that I throw out every time I move house it's a miracle these have survived.
So … I don't know what you're doing with your weekends but I hope you're having as much fun as I am.
Woohoo!
With a side order of Yaay!
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Let's Make A Racket - VIII
Hippie Picking.
Bollocks to politics and religion.
After the last couple of posts and comment-frenzies I need a rest.
Plus I ran into someone from my distant past today (hi, Lucy) and I need to sit for a while and feel old, so while I chill out on the sofa with a green tea here's a bonus music track for you.
This is from a pre-gig run-through with the Dave Thomas Band (from last Thursday's Racket).
The tune is John Martyn's "Ballad Of An Elder Woman".
As you can tell, this was the first song we played together and it's all a little tentative, but this style of extremely laid-back, fingerstyle guitar playing (I call it hippie-picking) is one that I particularly enjoy as it reminds me of the west coast self-indulgent noodlings of bands I enjoyed back in the late sixties.
So here's to all of my lovely blogpals of the female and no-longer-teenaged persuasion.
Beauty grows with age.
Take a few minutes rest and relax to "Ballad Of An Elder Woman" …
Bollocks to politics and religion.
After the last couple of posts and comment-frenzies I need a rest.
Plus I ran into someone from my distant past today (hi, Lucy) and I need to sit for a while and feel old, so while I chill out on the sofa with a green tea here's a bonus music track for you.
This is from a pre-gig run-through with the Dave Thomas Band (from last Thursday's Racket).
The tune is John Martyn's "Ballad Of An Elder Woman".
As you can tell, this was the first song we played together and it's all a little tentative, but this style of extremely laid-back, fingerstyle guitar playing (I call it hippie-picking) is one that I particularly enjoy as it reminds me of the west coast self-indulgent noodlings of bands I enjoyed back in the late sixties.
So here's to all of my lovely blogpals of the female and no-longer-teenaged persuasion.
Beauty grows with age.
Take a few minutes rest and relax to "Ballad Of An Elder Woman" …
Friday, May 23, 2008
On The Necessity Of Extremism
I'm just home from work and Holy fuck!
What the hell just splattered all over my comments box?
Woohoo!
I love it when that happens!
I post a nice little piece thanking Katie for recommending a funny radio show and pointing any Americans who might fancy a giggle at our own, English version of it.
And suddenly the comments explode into a debate about political bias on the radio.
And Robyn (yes, ROBYN!!) calls Rush Limbaugh a douche-bag!
Phreeeow!
That's gotta be my finest blog moment of the year!
Then when I turn my back to take the train home it all goes nuclear and Old Dive finds himself once again defending Islam against The Great Satan!
Gosh, I can't leave you kids alone for a minute …
So Yaay!
This is more fun than a busload of monkeys let loose in a nunnery.
I love my blogpals.
You are such a glorious cross-section of the insanity that is humanity.
Group hug!!!!!
Right!
Here goes!
Please don't anyone get offended by this:
First off: Left and right.
I'm a Marxist. Lifelong and committed.
If you want to pigeonhole me, I'm just a smidgeon to the left of Anarcho-Syndicalism.
That's about as far left as you can get without falling off the edge.
But …
I often find myself agreeing with the extreme right and would far rather sit and talk politics over a few beers on Prudence's patio than listen to one word of wishy-washy, beige, insipid, compromised tosh from the muddy pit of ignorance that is "the centre".
I believe in the necessity of extremism.
Let me clarify that a little.
In politics - as in art and music and indeed religion - everything worthwhile and interesting happens out on the edges.
It takes a while before the sharp edges get worn down and bits begin to spiral down toward the plughole in the middle.
Left.
Right.
It matters not a jot.
It is the radical ideas that drive politics and society forward.
Those ideas in the raw will scare the crap out of the general electorate but they get dulled and denuded over time and eventually reach close enough to the centre to become policy.
Give me a radical rightist over a "liberal" any day.
Now …
Islam.
You all know by now that I will accept criticism of Islam.
But only from someone who has read and understood the Qur'an and the Life of The Prophet and has learned about Islamic prayer, visited mosques and discussed Islam with Muslims.
I have said this so many times, people:
Study the source material. Do NOT simply listen to what somebody says about it (including me). They will have applied their own spin/agenda to their comments.
Read the source material and make up your own damn minds. It's what your brain is there for.
I will NOT allow criticism of a certain colour by a blind person.
Islam means Surrender To God's Will.
The same God of Abraham that is worshipped by Jewish and Christian communities.
Islam is a tolerant religion.
"There is no compulsion in religion" states The Prophet in Sura 2 of The Qur'an.
Islamic prayer (as opposed to "greedy" Christian prayer that actually presumes to ask God for favours) is simply praise and thanks to God for His creation.
Here we return to extremism.
As I have said, I believe in the necessity of extremism.
However … and this is a big however …
We extremists should never, EVER be allowed to assume power.
A single, extreme ideology in power gave us Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and gives us General Tanh Shwe, the Taleban, Robert Mugabe, the Janjouid in Darfur and the Lord's Resistance Army in The Congo.
I equate any extremist religious group (and yes I'm afraid, Shan, that includes American Christian fundamentalists) as necessary but potentially dangerous.
Islamic extremists (a tiny minority) have gained control in some parts of the world with disastrous consequences.
I dread the rise in power of US Christian fundamentalism (what I have termed the American "Christian Taleban") as I see its growing influence on government eroding individual freedoms at an alarming rate in the same way that the Taleban did in Afghanistan when they were still a minor group of religious scholars.
In conclusion, what we need is BALANCE, not COMPROMISE.
Unfortunately we all too often get a fudged compromise on important issues.
The idea of a balance between Prudence's Republican ideals and my own Socialist ones stimulates me far more than the political mush of centrist compromise that is our de facto western political system.
A balance between the three major Abrahamic monotheistic religions is desperately needed in the world right now.
Please do not let what should be informed debate degenerate into mere petty mudslinging.
A balance of extremes is far healthier than a compromise.
A compromise will never solve the issues and will leave those on the edges embittered.
This seems to be where we are at this moment of the world.
Sorry if that's offended anyone, but hey; I'm an opinionated bastard and I like to have a shout, too.
This was written in the heat of the moment, coming home to find a comment riot in my inbox, so please forgive any rantiness.
I still love all of you.
Keep commenting.
Love and kisses.
Lefty Dive.
xox
My Bible and my Qur'an say "Hi".
In my house they are friends.
What the hell just splattered all over my comments box?
Woohoo!
I love it when that happens!
I post a nice little piece thanking Katie for recommending a funny radio show and pointing any Americans who might fancy a giggle at our own, English version of it.
And suddenly the comments explode into a debate about political bias on the radio.
And Robyn (yes, ROBYN!!) calls Rush Limbaugh a douche-bag!
Phreeeow!
That's gotta be my finest blog moment of the year!
Then when I turn my back to take the train home it all goes nuclear and Old Dive finds himself once again defending Islam against The Great Satan!
Gosh, I can't leave you kids alone for a minute …
So Yaay!
This is more fun than a busload of monkeys let loose in a nunnery.
I love my blogpals.
You are such a glorious cross-section of the insanity that is humanity.
Group hug!!!!!
Right!
Here goes!
Please don't anyone get offended by this:
First off: Left and right.
I'm a Marxist. Lifelong and committed.
If you want to pigeonhole me, I'm just a smidgeon to the left of Anarcho-Syndicalism.
That's about as far left as you can get without falling off the edge.
But …
I often find myself agreeing with the extreme right and would far rather sit and talk politics over a few beers on Prudence's patio than listen to one word of wishy-washy, beige, insipid, compromised tosh from the muddy pit of ignorance that is "the centre".
I believe in the necessity of extremism.
Let me clarify that a little.
In politics - as in art and music and indeed religion - everything worthwhile and interesting happens out on the edges.
It takes a while before the sharp edges get worn down and bits begin to spiral down toward the plughole in the middle.
Left.
Right.
It matters not a jot.
It is the radical ideas that drive politics and society forward.
Those ideas in the raw will scare the crap out of the general electorate but they get dulled and denuded over time and eventually reach close enough to the centre to become policy.
Give me a radical rightist over a "liberal" any day.
Now …
Islam.
You all know by now that I will accept criticism of Islam.
But only from someone who has read and understood the Qur'an and the Life of The Prophet and has learned about Islamic prayer, visited mosques and discussed Islam with Muslims.
I have said this so many times, people:
Study the source material. Do NOT simply listen to what somebody says about it (including me). They will have applied their own spin/agenda to their comments.
Read the source material and make up your own damn minds. It's what your brain is there for.
I will NOT allow criticism of a certain colour by a blind person.
Islam means Surrender To God's Will.
The same God of Abraham that is worshipped by Jewish and Christian communities.
Islam is a tolerant religion.
"There is no compulsion in religion" states The Prophet in Sura 2 of The Qur'an.
Islamic prayer (as opposed to "greedy" Christian prayer that actually presumes to ask God for favours) is simply praise and thanks to God for His creation.
Here we return to extremism.
As I have said, I believe in the necessity of extremism.
However … and this is a big however …
We extremists should never, EVER be allowed to assume power.
A single, extreme ideology in power gave us Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and gives us General Tanh Shwe, the Taleban, Robert Mugabe, the Janjouid in Darfur and the Lord's Resistance Army in The Congo.
I equate any extremist religious group (and yes I'm afraid, Shan, that includes American Christian fundamentalists) as necessary but potentially dangerous.
Islamic extremists (a tiny minority) have gained control in some parts of the world with disastrous consequences.
I dread the rise in power of US Christian fundamentalism (what I have termed the American "Christian Taleban") as I see its growing influence on government eroding individual freedoms at an alarming rate in the same way that the Taleban did in Afghanistan when they were still a minor group of religious scholars.
In conclusion, what we need is BALANCE, not COMPROMISE.
Unfortunately we all too often get a fudged compromise on important issues.
The idea of a balance between Prudence's Republican ideals and my own Socialist ones stimulates me far more than the political mush of centrist compromise that is our de facto western political system.
A balance between the three major Abrahamic monotheistic religions is desperately needed in the world right now.
Please do not let what should be informed debate degenerate into mere petty mudslinging.
A balance of extremes is far healthier than a compromise.
A compromise will never solve the issues and will leave those on the edges embittered.
This seems to be where we are at this moment of the world.
Sorry if that's offended anyone, but hey; I'm an opinionated bastard and I like to have a shout, too.
This was written in the heat of the moment, coming home to find a comment riot in my inbox, so please forgive any rantiness.
I still love all of you.
Keep commenting.
Love and kisses.
Lefty Dive.
xox
My Bible and my Qur'an say "Hi".In my house they are friends.
Four Things About Minnesota
Here's a strange one:
Where do you go for your holidays if you live in beautiful, sunny San Francisco?
The answer - if you're Katie - appears to be Minnesota.
Minnesota?
Weird or what?
I only know four things about Minnesota.
1) Lake Wobegon isn't there.
2) Bob Dylan isn't there.
3) The Minnesota accent is cute.
4) Winters there suck ass big time.
I can't afford air conditioning so I watch Fargo in the summer to keep nicely chilled.
Brrr …
Anyhoo … If any of you were awake you might remember me chuntering on about Radio 3's "The Verb" a few days back.
I confessed to liking some Colonial wireless programmes, too; namely:
News From Lake Wobegon;
Car Talk;
This American Life;
all of which I get as podcasts from NPR with all the annoying ads taken out.
I asked for any more recommendations and Katie gave me a splendid NPR list:
Fresh Air;
Humankind;
On the Media;
Wait Wait Don't Tell Me;
To the Best of Our Knowledge.
Check 'em out.
I've been listening to Fresh Air and To The Best Of Our Knowledge, but mostly I must confess I've been enjoying a raucous chortle at "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me", NPR's gigglesome version of our own beloved "News Quiz".
In particular I snorted my lunch out through my nose at Jessie Ventura being interrogated about the minutiæ of international mini-golf tournaments and some hilarious Karl Rove and Dick Cheney jokes the week before.
So …
The point of today's little post:
In reply to Katie and to any other Colonials who share my preference for the crystal set over the idiot box, here are some Beeb links worthy of perusal.
First up, here's a link to Radio 3's website.
You can pick and choose from Dive regulars like "The Verb", "Jazz on 3" and "Late Junction" and the incomparably splendid yet appallingly titled "Hear and Now" (all the latest noises from the klinky-klanky-land of Dive's favourite avant-garde classical music) and listen to each programme for up to a week after broadcast.
Or if - like me with my interminable train journeys - you prefer podcasts, head on over to Radio 3 and Radio 4's podcast sites (or you can get 'em on iTunes) and subscribe to whatever you like.
I heartily recommend Radio 4's "The News Quiz", especially last Friday's episode where they tore Cherie Blair apart mercilessly and stomped all over her bloody remains.
Now that our Humph has gone to play his celestial trumpet in Jazz Heaven it is the funniest thing on radio.
God bless miniature lesbian Sandi Toksvig and all who sail in her.
My other favourite poddie is "In Our Time" with good old Melvyn Bragg, which is aired while I'm in my Japanese class and I hate to miss it.
Sorry to be so boring but I really do recommend ditching your televisions (they look great when you hurl them off really tall buildings) and exploring the world of the wireless.
Download Van Morrison's "In The Days Before Rock'n'Roll" from iTunes (if they've got it … they're crap with rarities) if you want more reasons why radio rules.
I love that song.
It reminds me of when I was a kid, staying awake all night under the blanket with an old Bush wireless set, listening to pirate radio and constantly having to retune the interference whine to the same pitch as the song.
Sigh …
Happy days.
And what the hell is Hibbing? How precisely does one hib?
Where do you go for your holidays if you live in beautiful, sunny San Francisco?
The answer - if you're Katie - appears to be Minnesota.
Minnesota?
Weird or what?
I only know four things about Minnesota.
1) Lake Wobegon isn't there.
2) Bob Dylan isn't there.
3) The Minnesota accent is cute.
4) Winters there suck ass big time.
I can't afford air conditioning so I watch Fargo in the summer to keep nicely chilled.
Brrr …
Anyhoo … If any of you were awake you might remember me chuntering on about Radio 3's "The Verb" a few days back.
I confessed to liking some Colonial wireless programmes, too; namely:
News From Lake Wobegon;
Car Talk;
This American Life;
all of which I get as podcasts from NPR with all the annoying ads taken out.
I asked for any more recommendations and Katie gave me a splendid NPR list:
Fresh Air;
Humankind;
On the Media;
Wait Wait Don't Tell Me;
To the Best of Our Knowledge.
Check 'em out.
I've been listening to Fresh Air and To The Best Of Our Knowledge, but mostly I must confess I've been enjoying a raucous chortle at "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me", NPR's gigglesome version of our own beloved "News Quiz".
In particular I snorted my lunch out through my nose at Jessie Ventura being interrogated about the minutiæ of international mini-golf tournaments and some hilarious Karl Rove and Dick Cheney jokes the week before.
So …
The point of today's little post:
In reply to Katie and to any other Colonials who share my preference for the crystal set over the idiot box, here are some Beeb links worthy of perusal.
First up, here's a link to Radio 3's website.
You can pick and choose from Dive regulars like "The Verb", "Jazz on 3" and "Late Junction" and the incomparably splendid yet appallingly titled "Hear and Now" (all the latest noises from the klinky-klanky-land of Dive's favourite avant-garde classical music) and listen to each programme for up to a week after broadcast.
Or if - like me with my interminable train journeys - you prefer podcasts, head on over to Radio 3 and Radio 4's podcast sites (or you can get 'em on iTunes) and subscribe to whatever you like.
I heartily recommend Radio 4's "The News Quiz", especially last Friday's episode where they tore Cherie Blair apart mercilessly and stomped all over her bloody remains.
Now that our Humph has gone to play his celestial trumpet in Jazz Heaven it is the funniest thing on radio.
God bless miniature lesbian Sandi Toksvig and all who sail in her.
My other favourite poddie is "In Our Time" with good old Melvyn Bragg, which is aired while I'm in my Japanese class and I hate to miss it.
Sorry to be so boring but I really do recommend ditching your televisions (they look great when you hurl them off really tall buildings) and exploring the world of the wireless.
Download Van Morrison's "In The Days Before Rock'n'Roll" from iTunes (if they've got it … they're crap with rarities) if you want more reasons why radio rules.
I love that song.
It reminds me of when I was a kid, staying awake all night under the blanket with an old Bush wireless set, listening to pirate radio and constantly having to retune the interference whine to the same pitch as the song.
Sigh …
Happy days.
And what the hell is Hibbing? How precisely does one hib?
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Let's Make A Racket - VII
Strat and Les.
Or to folk of the non-Istvanski persuasion: the difference in sound between a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul guitar.
Please forgive me for posting a kind of filler racket today.
A little while back I spent a geological era importing eighteen CDs of my crap into iTunes, laboriously typing in all the information about each of hundreds of songs.
When I went to prepare today's post I found (after a bout of head-scratching followed by a bout of swearing, threats and imprecations toward Apple staff) that the latest update of iTunes defaults to importing m4a (Mpeg) files rather than mp3s, and inevitably IVO (the little gadget that plays the songs on my blog) only supports mp3s.
Until I can find the iTunes developer who did that and kick seven shades of crap out of them, I've had to post a fairly ordinary Chicago blues shuffle that I had on mp3 as I really can't face importing all that crap again right now.
To make matters worse, IVO is having one of its regular downtimes at the moment so if the player doesn't appear at the bottom of the post, try again later.
They seem to be out of commission ("We are sorry, but IVO for Sharing is currently unavailable") at least a couple of times a week.
Hey! IVO! Kindly form a circle around your office and spend a couple of minutes kicking one another's arses really hard. That would make your subscribers feel a little happier.
Thank you.
So anyhoo … Back to the racket.
This was from a gig I played as guest guitar player with the London-based Dave Thomas Blues Band.
Dave is a fine guitar player - if a little obsessed with Chicago - and since he guested at our Sunday Blues club one night, has regularly invited Old Dive to sit in with his band.
This was the opening number of a gig in some dingy club somewhere. The song is an old Chicago standard: Sessie Mae.
Dave is on the left channel, Dive on the right.
Dave is playing his vintage pink Fender Stratocaster …
(I'm afraid I don't have any photos so here's my own custom Strat, which you'll have to imagine in pink with a garish US flag strap and a fat gut in a tight-stretched "B.B.King's Blues Club" teeshirt behind it), through a Fender Twin Reverb amp. He does the intro and takes a little solo in the middle.
I'm playing Old Les (my soulmate for the past thirty-nine years of stage and studio work), through a ProAmps VSQ65, and I hog most of the solos.
You'll notice the Strat has a kind of thin, hollow sound, while the Les has more of a fat, brown sound.
Play only one of them and you don't notice it too much, but put 'em together and it leaps out.
The difference comes from the construction and the electronics.
The Strat has a lightweight body, usually basswood or alder, with a bolted-on maple neck which gives a sharper edge to the sound. Together with single coil pick-ups and a floating bridge this gives it the distinctive "Strat" sound.
The Les Paul has a mahogany body, capped with maple and a mahogany neck glued-in. This gives a much rounder sound, which - combined with twin-coil, "humbucking" pickups (the two coils are reversed to cancel hum picked up from stage lighting and other leaky sources) gives us the Les Paul sound.
Both amps in this case are well-used old valve jobs. Glorious, if notoriously unreliable.
Hey ho.
So … Sessie Mae.
Or not … If the player doesn't appear, try again later.
OVI is a Nokia company, so blame them.
Or to folk of the non-Istvanski persuasion: the difference in sound between a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul guitar.
Please forgive me for posting a kind of filler racket today.
A little while back I spent a geological era importing eighteen CDs of my crap into iTunes, laboriously typing in all the information about each of hundreds of songs.
When I went to prepare today's post I found (after a bout of head-scratching followed by a bout of swearing, threats and imprecations toward Apple staff) that the latest update of iTunes defaults to importing m4a (Mpeg) files rather than mp3s, and inevitably IVO (the little gadget that plays the songs on my blog) only supports mp3s.
Until I can find the iTunes developer who did that and kick seven shades of crap out of them, I've had to post a fairly ordinary Chicago blues shuffle that I had on mp3 as I really can't face importing all that crap again right now.
To make matters worse, IVO is having one of its regular downtimes at the moment so if the player doesn't appear at the bottom of the post, try again later.
They seem to be out of commission ("We are sorry, but IVO for Sharing is currently unavailable") at least a couple of times a week.
Hey! IVO! Kindly form a circle around your office and spend a couple of minutes kicking one another's arses really hard. That would make your subscribers feel a little happier.
Thank you.
So anyhoo … Back to the racket.
This was from a gig I played as guest guitar player with the London-based Dave Thomas Blues Band.
Dave is a fine guitar player - if a little obsessed with Chicago - and since he guested at our Sunday Blues club one night, has regularly invited Old Dive to sit in with his band.
This was the opening number of a gig in some dingy club somewhere. The song is an old Chicago standard: Sessie Mae.
Dave is on the left channel, Dive on the right.
Dave is playing his vintage pink Fender Stratocaster …
(I'm afraid I don't have any photos so here's my own custom Strat, which you'll have to imagine in pink with a garish US flag strap and a fat gut in a tight-stretched "B.B.King's Blues Club" teeshirt behind it), through a Fender Twin Reverb amp. He does the intro and takes a little solo in the middle.
I'm playing Old Les (my soulmate for the past thirty-nine years of stage and studio work), through a ProAmps VSQ65, and I hog most of the solos.You'll notice the Strat has a kind of thin, hollow sound, while the Les has more of a fat, brown sound.
Play only one of them and you don't notice it too much, but put 'em together and it leaps out.
The difference comes from the construction and the electronics.
The Strat has a lightweight body, usually basswood or alder, with a bolted-on maple neck which gives a sharper edge to the sound. Together with single coil pick-ups and a floating bridge this gives it the distinctive "Strat" sound.
The Les Paul has a mahogany body, capped with maple and a mahogany neck glued-in. This gives a much rounder sound, which - combined with twin-coil, "humbucking" pickups (the two coils are reversed to cancel hum picked up from stage lighting and other leaky sources) gives us the Les Paul sound.
Both amps in this case are well-used old valve jobs. Glorious, if notoriously unreliable.
Hey ho.
So … Sessie Mae.
Or not … If the player doesn't appear, try again later.
OVI is a Nokia company, so blame them.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Short, Filler Meme
As Maria is taking a - hopefully very short - blogging break and she is my usual mine of memes, I am grateful to Savannah for leaping to my aid and coming up with this one:
5 Things in my bag:
My iPod, without which I could never survive long-distance commuting.
My Macbook Pro; the widescreen 17-incher for watching DVDs … er … I mean working … on the train.
A shoehorn.
An old woolly scarf I roll up as a headrest on the train (seven hours a day is a long time to sit up straight in a crappy seat built for a midget).
Pens … Lots of pens. The little buggers seem to breed in there.
5 Favourite things in my bedroom:
Old Les. Nuff said.
My bed, with clean, fresh linen and gloriously yummy goose-down pillows. Sigh.
My Bose radio.
My exercise bike. It's set up by the window so I get a nice breeze when I'm pedalling away.
The fifth favourite would be a toss up between an old lava lamp in the shape of a spaceship and a big old retro, forties-style chrome fan; I'll plump for the lamp in the winter and the fan in the summer.
5 Things I have always wanted to do:
Be a spaceman.
Travel the world and look at stuff.
Er … I think I've done everything else I wanted to do, so let's add the three I'd like to do next:
Have sex with girls.
Be happy.
Die.
I think I'll manage one out of three.
5 Things I'm currently into:
Learning Japanese. As I'm kinda just filling in time, waiting for death, I thought I'd better find something pleasantly futile to do to use up all those hours. And then I really got into it. Hey ho.
Playing guitar.
Trying to get a date.
Making it through each day without screaming too much.
I suppose I've got sucked into blogging, too.
5 People to tag:
You know I don't tag.
5 Things in my bag:
My iPod, without which I could never survive long-distance commuting.
My Macbook Pro; the widescreen 17-incher for watching DVDs … er … I mean working … on the train.
A shoehorn.
An old woolly scarf I roll up as a headrest on the train (seven hours a day is a long time to sit up straight in a crappy seat built for a midget).
Pens … Lots of pens. The little buggers seem to breed in there.
5 Favourite things in my bedroom:
Old Les. Nuff said.
My bed, with clean, fresh linen and gloriously yummy goose-down pillows. Sigh.
My Bose radio.
My exercise bike. It's set up by the window so I get a nice breeze when I'm pedalling away.
The fifth favourite would be a toss up between an old lava lamp in the shape of a spaceship and a big old retro, forties-style chrome fan; I'll plump for the lamp in the winter and the fan in the summer.
5 Things I have always wanted to do:
Be a spaceman.
Travel the world and look at stuff.
Er … I think I've done everything else I wanted to do, so let's add the three I'd like to do next:
Have sex with girls.
Be happy.
Die.
I think I'll manage one out of three.
5 Things I'm currently into:
Learning Japanese. As I'm kinda just filling in time, waiting for death, I thought I'd better find something pleasantly futile to do to use up all those hours. And then I really got into it. Hey ho.
Playing guitar.
Trying to get a date.
Making it through each day without screaming too much.
I suppose I've got sucked into blogging, too.
5 People to tag:
You know I don't tag.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Blather
I'm sure I've not missed it …
In fact I'm convinced I know Dante well enough to be certain that re-reading Purgatorio word by word I will still not find it.
Yet somewhere on that dreadful mount midst Heaven and Hell there must lay hidden a door leading - via seldom trod tunnels - to a pitiful circle of Purgatory unnoticed by Dante, wherein dwell those desolate lost souls whose only path to Grace lies in numberless years of miserable earthbound penance … presenting seminars.
I spent most of yesterday stuck in a seminar with two of these poor, benighted and utterly wretched bastards.
What an awful penance they have to suffer.
Trapped in a room with twenty or so grouchy people who are only here because we need to log the hours as "Continuing Professional Development" and all we really want from them is lunch and any goodies they've brought along to bribe us into attendance.
The look on their faces as the day slowly wears away would evoke pity from Beelzebub himself. These are faces with no hope left save through a lifetime of soul-destroying seminars.
Day after dreary day, week after weary week, they can see their lives stretching away hopelessly before them; forced to endure decade after decade in a desolate emotional wasteland of dull, grey boardrooms with chilly air-conditioning and the bored, blank faces of their audiences.
The seminar … semen-hour we call it as it's usually a bunch of wank … is an utterly pointless waste of time and life; spending an hour (or sometimes a whole day) watching these poor, bereft wretches trying to wring something new and interesting from a crappy Powerpoint presentation (has that ever been possible?) and endlessly reciting their tired lines in hollow, dead voices, long-drained of emotion.
Luckily for us, we have our own entertainment in the form of our elderly and confused deputy leader, the Jedi Master of inscrutable incomprehensibility, Chris B.
Chris leads a daredevil life, playing the shawm and the serpent in a mediæval music ensemble and he is also an enthusiastic Morris dancer. Donning clogs and bells he lays about his pals with a hanky and a pig's bladder on a stick.
He is very good at it. His troupe perform at the Lord Mayor's show in London every year and are slated for a part in the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics.
The remainder of his life, however, is sadly devoid of excitement and he has spent the whole of the presentation rapt with attention, scribbling copious notes.
At last we reach the bit of the semen hour where we all perk up, the bit where the hapless saps ask if there are any questions.
As one, all heads swivel to stare at our Chris.
He raises a hand and clears his throat and the poor seminarians look at him with pathetic hope dawning in their eyes; the forlorn hope of an interesting and relevant question to justify their wretched existence; a hope that will be cruelly and terribly dashed as it gradually dawns on them that this man is not their salvation but their tormentor, a dæmon (albeit a slightly fusty one in an egg-stained bow tie and tweeds) sent from Hell to drag them back down to their doom.
And now he starts …
A small fit of coughing prefaces a confused tumbling of half-words and phrases, gradually building into an avalanche of bumbling obfuscation.
"What I … erm … I suppose what I'm trying to put across here is …"
And he's off again.
A couple of minutes of this and some of the more alert among us (or at least the more awake) begin to discern the faintest vestige of a question forming.
But that fleeting glimpse of comprehension is swept away by an unstoppable tsunami of tosh as Chris gets a tad over-excited and completely loses any connection with reality.
He will not be gainsaid, however devoid of meaning his blathering may be.
Try to anticipate his question and start to answer and he will angrily shout you down.
There is now no escape for the poor lost souls and I settle back in my chair to enjoy the show.
Chris's voice leaps randomly from dreary baritone drone to alarming high-pitched squeaks and outbursts of raging incoherence but he starts off soft and reassuring, like an elderly and flatulent labrador draped saggily over a sofa, only gradually burbling and sputtering into life.
Once he gets into his stride, however, he is awesome to behold.
He wheedles and whines; he spuffles and blusters; he wibbles and dribbles; he harangues; he declaims … He would make a wonderful orator if only he - or anybody else - knew what on earth he was talking about.
He has never been known to finish a sentence.
His face the mask of a startled and somewhat resentful lungfish, he launches forth with a blistering attack of stuttering dead-ends, incoherent mumbling, pish, rhubarb and balderdash, harumphs, blathering, poppycock and piffle.
I watch with glee as yesterday's two victims turn to one another in complete confusion and dawning horror.
Like a drunken butterfly Chris can flutter around a subject for hours without ever quite alighting on anything so dangerous as the merest scintilla of meaning, let alone a fully formed intelligible notion.
Managing to string more than four complete words together (or at least words that have some relevance to one another) is a foreign and apparently alarming concept to him.
To accompany and perhaps to emphasise the complete incomprehensibility of the meaningless gibberish he is spouting, wielding his pen aloft he performs a series of wild, flailing gesticulations, frenzied stabbing movements and inexplicable hand-flappings.
He looks for all the world like a semaphore signaller suffering prolonged electrocution …
or perhaps - given his facial expressions - being surprised with a sudden enema.
The look on the faces of his victims is even more satisfying.
And he stays long after the seminars have finished, sometimes for hours on end, trapping his hapless victims by debating trivial minutiæ while they desperately edge toward the door, only for Chris to say something so quiet that they are tricked into taking a couple of steps back toward him, their faces contorted in pained realisation.
He is a master torturer and I love watching him at work.
So, girls and boys …
Be good and you might go to Heaven; be bad and you'll probably go to Hell, but whatever you do, don't ever be boring or you may wind up in Purgatory, presenting seminars.
Truly a fate worse than death.
In fact I'm convinced I know Dante well enough to be certain that re-reading Purgatorio word by word I will still not find it.
Yet somewhere on that dreadful mount midst Heaven and Hell there must lay hidden a door leading - via seldom trod tunnels - to a pitiful circle of Purgatory unnoticed by Dante, wherein dwell those desolate lost souls whose only path to Grace lies in numberless years of miserable earthbound penance … presenting seminars.
I spent most of yesterday stuck in a seminar with two of these poor, benighted and utterly wretched bastards.
What an awful penance they have to suffer.
Trapped in a room with twenty or so grouchy people who are only here because we need to log the hours as "Continuing Professional Development" and all we really want from them is lunch and any goodies they've brought along to bribe us into attendance.
The look on their faces as the day slowly wears away would evoke pity from Beelzebub himself. These are faces with no hope left save through a lifetime of soul-destroying seminars.
Day after dreary day, week after weary week, they can see their lives stretching away hopelessly before them; forced to endure decade after decade in a desolate emotional wasteland of dull, grey boardrooms with chilly air-conditioning and the bored, blank faces of their audiences.
The seminar … semen-hour we call it as it's usually a bunch of wank … is an utterly pointless waste of time and life; spending an hour (or sometimes a whole day) watching these poor, bereft wretches trying to wring something new and interesting from a crappy Powerpoint presentation (has that ever been possible?) and endlessly reciting their tired lines in hollow, dead voices, long-drained of emotion.
Luckily for us, we have our own entertainment in the form of our elderly and confused deputy leader, the Jedi Master of inscrutable incomprehensibility, Chris B.
Chris leads a daredevil life, playing the shawm and the serpent in a mediæval music ensemble and he is also an enthusiastic Morris dancer. Donning clogs and bells he lays about his pals with a hanky and a pig's bladder on a stick.
He is very good at it. His troupe perform at the Lord Mayor's show in London every year and are slated for a part in the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics.
The remainder of his life, however, is sadly devoid of excitement and he has spent the whole of the presentation rapt with attention, scribbling copious notes.
At last we reach the bit of the semen hour where we all perk up, the bit where the hapless saps ask if there are any questions.
As one, all heads swivel to stare at our Chris.
He raises a hand and clears his throat and the poor seminarians look at him with pathetic hope dawning in their eyes; the forlorn hope of an interesting and relevant question to justify their wretched existence; a hope that will be cruelly and terribly dashed as it gradually dawns on them that this man is not their salvation but their tormentor, a dæmon (albeit a slightly fusty one in an egg-stained bow tie and tweeds) sent from Hell to drag them back down to their doom.
And now he starts …
A small fit of coughing prefaces a confused tumbling of half-words and phrases, gradually building into an avalanche of bumbling obfuscation.
"What I … erm … I suppose what I'm trying to put across here is …"
And he's off again.
A couple of minutes of this and some of the more alert among us (or at least the more awake) begin to discern the faintest vestige of a question forming.
But that fleeting glimpse of comprehension is swept away by an unstoppable tsunami of tosh as Chris gets a tad over-excited and completely loses any connection with reality.
He will not be gainsaid, however devoid of meaning his blathering may be.
Try to anticipate his question and start to answer and he will angrily shout you down.
There is now no escape for the poor lost souls and I settle back in my chair to enjoy the show.
Chris's voice leaps randomly from dreary baritone drone to alarming high-pitched squeaks and outbursts of raging incoherence but he starts off soft and reassuring, like an elderly and flatulent labrador draped saggily over a sofa, only gradually burbling and sputtering into life.
Once he gets into his stride, however, he is awesome to behold.
He wheedles and whines; he spuffles and blusters; he wibbles and dribbles; he harangues; he declaims … He would make a wonderful orator if only he - or anybody else - knew what on earth he was talking about.
He has never been known to finish a sentence.
His face the mask of a startled and somewhat resentful lungfish, he launches forth with a blistering attack of stuttering dead-ends, incoherent mumbling, pish, rhubarb and balderdash, harumphs, blathering, poppycock and piffle.
I watch with glee as yesterday's two victims turn to one another in complete confusion and dawning horror.
Like a drunken butterfly Chris can flutter around a subject for hours without ever quite alighting on anything so dangerous as the merest scintilla of meaning, let alone a fully formed intelligible notion.
Managing to string more than four complete words together (or at least words that have some relevance to one another) is a foreign and apparently alarming concept to him.
To accompany and perhaps to emphasise the complete incomprehensibility of the meaningless gibberish he is spouting, wielding his pen aloft he performs a series of wild, flailing gesticulations, frenzied stabbing movements and inexplicable hand-flappings.
He looks for all the world like a semaphore signaller suffering prolonged electrocution …
or perhaps - given his facial expressions - being surprised with a sudden enema.
The look on the faces of his victims is even more satisfying.
And he stays long after the seminars have finished, sometimes for hours on end, trapping his hapless victims by debating trivial minutiæ while they desperately edge toward the door, only for Chris to say something so quiet that they are tricked into taking a couple of steps back toward him, their faces contorted in pained realisation.
He is a master torturer and I love watching him at work.
So, girls and boys …
Be good and you might go to Heaven; be bad and you'll probably go to Hell, but whatever you do, don't ever be boring or you may wind up in Purgatory, presenting seminars.
Truly a fate worse than death.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Defining Deliciary
In the comments to yesterday's post Shan reveals that she also uses the Dive neologism "deliciary" and ponders whether I use it in noun form.
Indeed I do.
To define "deliciary", kindly take my arm (don crinolines if you must) and let us meander through the serpentine mediæval streets to the quaint Edwardian portal of Digby's Of Holt.
Digby's is a hand-made confectionary emporium nestled within the Royal Arcade in Norwich. It is where I go to purchase my regular fix of their frankly astonishing under-the-counter liquorice fudge (they don't have it on display as the place would get mobbed).
It is the kind of place where people walk in and stand gazing, open-mouthed with wonder at the cornucopia of delights set before them; where beautiful girls in black with little white bibs and white cotton gloves minister to one's most sensual, chocolatey desires; their snake-like eyes and flickering smiles betraying an inner gloating at their power over us mere mortals.
It is a place where whatever fevered imaginings haunt your weirdest dreams you are bound to find them lovingly recreated in chocolate.
A place redolent of dark magic, where a tiny, child-size spiral staircase in the corner leads one's eye down into a stygian gloom, wherein one imagines enslaved children in rags working the dark seams of a chocolate mine and wyrd sisters cackling over cauldrons of bubbling, sugary opiates, more addictive than crack.
A place of sinuous, sensual allure.
Temptation in solid form.
Digby's of Holt is for me the definitive deliciary; a glittering cornucopia of delicious desires, such that the senses are overwhelmed; The Verb (see yesterday's post) is its linguistic equivalent.
Dammit!
Now I fancy chocolate.
Indeed I do.
To define "deliciary", kindly take my arm (don crinolines if you must) and let us meander through the serpentine mediæval streets to the quaint Edwardian portal of Digby's Of Holt.
Digby's is a hand-made confectionary emporium nestled within the Royal Arcade in Norwich. It is where I go to purchase my regular fix of their frankly astonishing under-the-counter liquorice fudge (they don't have it on display as the place would get mobbed).
It is the kind of place where people walk in and stand gazing, open-mouthed with wonder at the cornucopia of delights set before them; where beautiful girls in black with little white bibs and white cotton gloves minister to one's most sensual, chocolatey desires; their snake-like eyes and flickering smiles betraying an inner gloating at their power over us mere mortals.
It is a place where whatever fevered imaginings haunt your weirdest dreams you are bound to find them lovingly recreated in chocolate.
A place redolent of dark magic, where a tiny, child-size spiral staircase in the corner leads one's eye down into a stygian gloom, wherein one imagines enslaved children in rags working the dark seams of a chocolate mine and wyrd sisters cackling over cauldrons of bubbling, sugary opiates, more addictive than crack.
A place of sinuous, sensual allure.
Temptation in solid form.
Digby's of Holt is for me the definitive deliciary; a glittering cornucopia of delicious desires, such that the senses are overwhelmed; The Verb (see yesterday's post) is its linguistic equivalent.
Dammit!
Now I fancy chocolate.
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