Fishbicycle Update

Rosy Hues in the Evening Sky

A few minutes ago, I looked out of the window. It's dusk. Night is on its way, and I see this colourful rosy cloud.  What, you may wonder, is so special about that?

Well, it's sunset, or, to be a little more accurate, almost a quarter hour after sunset. And the sun sets in the west, doesn't it?

Well, the clouds in question are to the north-north-east. Usually the sunset is on the other side of the house.

And to the west? not much in the way of  sunset at all.

Five minutes after I took the last picture, all the colour was gone, and now, twenty minutes later, the outside world is dark.
I liked the candy-floss colours.

Might not go to an Australian Technical College After All

A Guitar is a Thief in the Night.

A guitar is a thief in the night
That robs you of sleep through the wall
 A guitar is a thin box of light
Throwing reflections that rise and fall
It reminds you of Memphis or maybe Majorca
Big Bill Broonzy or Garcia Lorca
A truck going north or a cab to the Festival Hall

And the man who plays the guitar for life
Tests his thumbs on a slender knife
Forever caresses a frigid wife
His fingers travel on strings and frets
Like a gambler's moving to cover bets
Remembering what his brain forgets
While his brain remembers the fears and debts

Long fingernails that tap a brittle rhythm on a glass
Around his neck a ribbon with a little silver hook
Like some military order second class
You can read him like an open book
From the hands that spend their lives creating tension
From the wrists that have a lean and hungry
Eyes that have a mean and angry look

A guitar is a thief in the night
That robs you of sleep through the wall
A guitar is a thin box of light
Throwing reflections that rise and fall
A guitar reminds you of death and taxes
Charlie Christian outplaying the saxes
The beginners' call
And the very last call of all




On the midsummer fairground alive with the sound
And the lights of the Wurlitzer merry-go-round
The midway was crowded and I was the man
Who coughed up a quid in the dark caravan
To the gypsy who warned him of danger
"Beware of the beautiful stranger"

"You got that for nothing"
I said with a sigh
As the queen's head went up to her critical eye
"The lady in question is known to me now
And I'd like to beware but the problem is how
Do you think I was born in a manger?
I'm in love with the beautiful stranger"

 The gypsy (called Lee as all soothsayers are)
Bent low to her globular fragment of star
"This woman will utterly screw up your life
She will tempt you from home, from your children and wife
She's a devil and nothing will change her
Get away from the beautiful stranger"

"That ball needs a re-gun" I said, shelling out
"The future you see there has all come about
Does it show you the girl as she happens to be
A Venus made flesh in a shell full of sea?
Does it show you the shape of my danger?
Can you show me the beautiful stranger?

 "I don't run a cinema here, little man
But lean over close and tune in if you can
You breathe on the glass, give a rub with your sleeve
Slip me your wallet, sit tight and believe
And the powers-that-be will arrange a
Pre-release of the beautiful stranger"

In the heart of the glass I saw galaxies born
The eye of the storm and the light of the dawn
And then with a click came a form and a face
That stunned me not only through candour and grace
But because she was really a stranger
A total and beautiful stranger

"Hello there" she said with her hand to her brow
I'm the one you'll meet after the one you know now
There's no room inside here to show you us all
But behind me the queue stretches right down the hall
For the damned there is always a stranger
There is always a beautiful stranger

"That's your lot" said Miss Lee as she turned on the light
"These earrings are hell and I'm through for the night
If they'd put up a booster not far from this pitch
I could screen you your life to the very last twitch
But I can't even get the Lone Ranger
One last word from the beautiful stranger"

"You live in a dream and the dream is a cage"
Said the girl "And the bars nestle closer with age
Your shadow burned white by invisible fire
You will learn how it rankles to die of desire
As you long for the beautiful stranger" Said the vanishing beautiful stranger

"Here's a wallet for you and five nicker for me"
 Said the gypsy "And also here's something for free
Watch your step on my foldaway stairs getting down
And go slow on the flyover back into town
There's a slight but considerable danger
Give my love to the beautiful stranger"

Pete Atkin, and lyrics by Clive James.

To My Valentine

XXXXXX!

Oh go through the walls, if you must.

"Oh go through the walls, if you must, walk on the ledges. 
Of roofs, of oceans; cover yourself with light;  
Use menace, use prayer…  
My sleepers will flee toward another America."

(Jean Genet), though he wrote in french, and I'm endlessly suspicious of what, exactly, happens in a translated poem. But that's a debate for another day.  Actually the poem from which these words are lifted was not in the least to my taste.
But these words seemed... luminous? the first time I ever read them, I was in the little yellow house, on an island somewhere in the middle of the Baltic sea, and Harry had just come back from a weekend in Stockholm.
He'd bought some records.
Oh yes. Records. not downloads to an ipod, kids, back in the day, music was analogue and glorious.
Album sleeves were art.
Records were big rigid discs of mostly black vinyl. On the surface was a texture, which on closer examination, with a microscope, perhaps, would resolve into one, just one.. line. A groove. A wavy, wiggly groove. A groove that wrapped and spiralled hundreds, nay, thousands of times on the circular black disc, from the edge toward the centre.
What witchcraft is this? the tiny groove, the texture, is a code.
We set the disc spinning, at a precise 33 and a third revolutions per minute.
And we unlock the code with a needle. It seems so unlikely. But a needle, or more likely, the needle's descendant, the point of a sapphire crystal, set in an arm which transforms its movements into modulations in a tiny electrical current, which we feed into an amplifier, and thence to coils of copper, glued to cones of paper, over a heavy magnet. As the needle of sapphire vibrates in the groove on the revolving disc, so those vibrations are induced in the paper cone, as the coil is attracted and released by the magnet's field, as it is fed with varying energy.

Without thinking at all about the strangeness of the mode of coding, we played the record, Patti Smith, Wave.
I read Genet's words.
Listened to Patti's.

Have Kids?

This is a man who found something his daughter wrote on facebook, it was addressed "to my parents", but... hidden from them, she thought he'd never see it.

He was not exactly impressed.

Here's a father's reply.

Yes!