Friday, 24 December 2010
Thursday, 23 December 2010
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Gaudete
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Tempus adest gratiae, hoe quod optabamus;
carmina laetitiae devote reddamus.
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Deus homo factus est, natura mirante;
mundus renovatus est a Christo regnante.
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Ezecaelis orta clausa per transistur;
unde lux est orta, salus invenitur.
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Ergo nostra contio psallat iam in lustro;
Benedicat Domino; salus regi nostro.
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
Gaudete! gaudete!
Christus est natus ex Maria virgine,
gaudete!
From the 1972 album, "Below the Salt" by Steeleye Span... actually the first song I heard by Steeleye Span was an a capella cover of Buddy Holly's "Rave on", complete with crackles and jumping needle line repeats.
I also misheard their name.
I was looking in the record shop for "The Steel-Ice Band" Anyway, somehow I came home with "Please to See the King", their second album. And was hugely disappointed when I discovered it wasn't quirky rock'n'roll spoofery, but a set of boring old folk songs. All that finger-in-one-ear dronery....
Then I listened again.
Then again.
And again...
And I was addicted.
Here, have another one, from that first album I bought....
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Captain Beefheart Is Gone!
Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, (January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010), died of "complications caused by multiple sclerosis".
By the painter and poet once known as Captain Beefheart,
Who deserves more recognition as a poet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Beefheart
It's no secret that Soubriquet has been a fan, somewhat, of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band since he first heard the scratchy voice and manic dark boogie, back one late night, listening to John Peel's radio show in 1969. Yes, 1969.
Forward a few years, to 1973, and moving on to higher education, after a year of working... Ha! a gap year!
Anyway, here I was, a quiet, sensitive, shy (yes, shy, i really was shy), bookreading arty geek, and on arrival at college, and being allocated accommodation, I learned that i was expected to share a room. AAAAAARGH! Nobody'd mentioned that before! With a stranger! And me a very happy to be solitary person, the cat who walked alone?
I was shown to the room, I remember it well. CC3, it was.
A square room, two beds, two desks, built-in cabinets and a washbasin, stunning panoramic view from the windows.
And a large mound of a human. Bearded, lying on one bed, covered with a duffel coat, moaning about a headache. Oh god. Rugby boots! I've been put in with a sports creature. Me? I was a sports avoider. Muddy oafs kicking leather orbs were not my sort of people.
Later in the day, after I'd had a wander around the campus, I returned to the room and the creature stirred. I'd put my cassette player on the window ledge, and the bearded man-mountain asked what music I had.
I replied "You probably won't like it", and put on a cassette of Captain Beefheart, "Mirror Man".
Forward a few years, to 1973, and moving on to higher education, after a year of working... Ha! a gap year!
Anyway, here I was, a quiet, sensitive, shy (yes, shy, i really was shy), bookreading arty geek, and on arrival at college, and being allocated accommodation, I learned that i was expected to share a room. AAAAAARGH! Nobody'd mentioned that before! With a stranger! And me a very happy to be solitary person, the cat who walked alone?
I was shown to the room, I remember it well. CC3, it was.
A square room, two beds, two desks, built-in cabinets and a washbasin, stunning panoramic view from the windows.
And a large mound of a human. Bearded, lying on one bed, covered with a duffel coat, moaning about a headache. Oh god. Rugby boots! I've been put in with a sports creature. Me? I was a sports avoider. Muddy oafs kicking leather orbs were not my sort of people.
Later in the day, after I'd had a wander around the campus, I returned to the room and the creature stirred. I'd put my cassette player on the window ledge, and the bearded man-mountain asked what music I had.
I replied "You probably won't like it", and put on a cassette of Captain Beefheart, "Mirror Man".
That was the moment that broke the ice. Duncan pulled a couple of bottles of beer out of his bag, I revealed a bottle of twelve-year-old Glenfiddich.
Dunc was a Beefheart fan too, (and a glenfiddich fan), in fact we shared a lot of similar musical tastes, and became an unlikely seeming pair of best friends.
We're still friends now. There was a little awkwardness when I married his girlfriend, but hey, she's long gone and our friendship remains.
So Captain Beefheart,
Dunc was a Beefheart fan too, (and a glenfiddich fan), in fact we shared a lot of similar musical tastes, and became an unlikely seeming pair of best friends.
We're still friends now. There was a little awkwardness when I married his girlfriend, but hey, she's long gone and our friendship remains.
So Captain Beefheart,
Saw him live in 1972, Leeds University, '73 oxford polytechnic, '74, New Theatre Oxford.
Dead.
Gone.
No more.
Sad.
Gone.
No more.
Sad.
Seam Crooked Sam
The mule kicked off a new one
and the stockings ran up Seam Crooked Sam
bandana frock stuffed with smoke
and ears out flopped like bowlin' pins
hog troughs hocked and wallered in cool mud bins
and patent leather hooves
split in twos
rooms for rent down t' Ben's
Frendsa danced in a frenzy
choked a juke bird with froth glass ferns
and turpentine urns her sawdust daily keep
and whiskey creeps down her neck naked front
and red leatherette
peen button set where her fanny sweat
raised her wrist-a-fan and a mouse coughed cotton
through a screen door cracked sand
rooms rent only to friends
Hat Rack Hotel
architecture tincture of red Arkies pinched the southern belle
and splayed his cracked nail hand
grey fedora - snappy band
and the camel walls yelluh like damp dead chickens
beak down the hard wood floor
and the music - O the music
harp man blew his best lung white shirt
his feet worked like a monkey out the door
and Dora robbed a baby through a dark bebop
licorice lenses fogged in hot sorrow
through the floorboards at the general store
yuh foods still in the hot hand oven
apple pie cooked through a seed bruised stem eye
sticky in the window of Momma Frame Broke
rope bell dinglin'
"Children, I won't call yuh once more."
The mule kicked off a new one
and the stockings ran up Seam Crooked Sam
bandana frock stuffed with smoke
and ears out flopped like bowlin' pins
hog troughs hocked and wallered in cool mud bins
and patent leather hooves
split in twos
rooms for rent down t' Ben's
Frendsa danced in a frenzy
choked a juke bird with froth glass ferns
and turpentine urns her sawdust daily keep
and whiskey creeps down her neck naked front
and red leatherette
peen button set where her fanny sweat
raised her wrist-a-fan and a mouse coughed cotton
through a screen door cracked sand
rooms rent only to friends
Hat Rack Hotel
architecture tincture of red Arkies pinched the southern belle
and splayed his cracked nail hand
grey fedora - snappy band
and the camel walls yelluh like damp dead chickens
beak down the hard wood floor
and the music - O the music
harp man blew his best lung white shirt
his feet worked like a monkey out the door
and Dora robbed a baby through a dark bebop
licorice lenses fogged in hot sorrow
through the floorboards at the general store
yuh foods still in the hot hand oven
apple pie cooked through a seed bruised stem eye
sticky in the window of Momma Frame Broke
rope bell dinglin'
"Children, I won't call yuh once more."
By the painter and poet once known as Captain Beefheart,
Who deserves more recognition as a poet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Beefheart
12 May 2009
12 May 2009
Ah Feel Like Ahcid Got a letter uh, this morning how do you reckon it read?Red blue and green whoooo all through my headlicked the stamps saw a movie dropped the stampi ain't got no blues no more I saidput me up thinkin' a postman's ...
09 Jun 2007
09 Jun 2007
Electricity (Don Vliet / Herb Bermann) Singin through you to me; thunderbolts caught easily. Shouts the truth peacefully Eeeeeee-lec-tri-ci-teeeeeeee. High voltage man kisses night to bring the light to those who need ...
12 May 2008
12 May 2008
Distant cousins, there's a limited supply. And we're down to the dozens, and this is why: Big Eyed Beans from Venus! Oh my, oh my. Boys and girls, Earth people around the circle, Mixtures of man alive. Big eyed beans from Venus, ...
02 Feb 2007
02 Feb 2007
apple pie cooked through a seed bruised stem eye sticky in the window of Momma Frame Broke rope bell dinglin' "Children, I won't call yuh once more." By the painter and poet once known as Captain Beefheart, ...
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
The New Shockwave Rider
Back in my teenage years I devoured books even faster than I do now. It's a mystery to me how I managed to have a life outside books as well. I read anything and everything, I used to have a rule that if I started something, I must read it to the end.
That rule, I have now discarded. If I read a book whose stupidity severely offends me, I launch it into oblivion. Books that were monumentally stupid and offensive, I have, in the past, used as food for the fire. No, it's not a book-burning as such, just a bit of darwinian pruning. A book that has won the opposite of my approval might need to be stopped in its tracks before it can waste another minute of anyone else's life. And if being so stopped, it helps to heat my bathwater, then it's done one good deed in its life.
I used to read a lot of science-fiction, which is a genre full of opportunity for social comment and speculation. Most non-sf readers seem to think it's all rocket-ship men with blasters fighting evil green-skinned aliens. No. And it's not Star Wars, either. Many science fiction writers have been scientists, and hugely well respected ones too. Isaac Asimov, for one. Another was Arthur C. Clarke.
Clarke wrote 2001, A Space Odyssey, a great book, and a beautiful, baffling, prescient film.
Clarke invented the geostationary (Staying always above the same point on the globe. orbiting at the same speed as the planet rotates) telecommunications satellite. His books had them before Telstar first beeped and crackled transatlantic television into life.
Know what the name for a geostationary orbit is?
"Clarke Orbit".
Another writer whose works were full of philosophy and future prediction, was John Brunner. Way back, in 1975, he wrote a book set in a future where a huge computer network holds our data, banks our money, builds our cars, dispatches our bombers, runs our industry, even runs our jails.
Back in 1975, Brunner saw something very akin to our internet. He invented a character, who had worked creating the Net, but had decided to opt out. Our hero uses his coding skills to hide from the net, he erases traces of himself, with portions of self replicating code, which search through the net for references to him and erase them.
The authorities are chasing him, because his knowledge is a threat to them if used against them.
The title is a reference to Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock", published in 1970. Brunner's character is the Shockwave Rider, surfing the wave, the shockwave that is the future.
The more he tries to live off the grid, below the radar, the more the authorities seek to locate him.
He changes identity and appearance regularly, and, as I said, he writes protective code... He calls his code fragments "tapeworms", because they burrow into the web and self replicate.
One of his worms has a job of keeping him alive and safe, which it does by constantly checking he is alive, safe, and free. If it is not reassured that he is safe, it will, from multiple locations, unstoppably, release all manner of embarrassing revelations, government data, secret files, etcetera.
Seems vaguely familiar? Oh yes. Julian Assange's insurance against being 'disappeared' by the U.S. government is just the same.
If he is silenced, assassinated, disappeared, extra-ordinarily rendered, 'terminated with extreme prejudice', If he dies of a mystery sickness, if his car runs off the road and into a concrete bridge-pillar, then, all around the world, torrents of secret files will be unlocked, everywhere, unstoppable.
Assange is a modern shockwave-rider.
How do I view him?
Is he a spy or a traitor or a rapist?
No.
I don't think he is.
Whilst he's referred to as all of these by some U.S. politicians, firstly, the allegations of 'rape' are not quite that. It seems the main misdemeanour is that during consensual sex, a condom split, and he failed to stop.
The woman in question apparently has withdrawn her co-operation with swedish prosecutors, and left the country. In any normal scenario, it would seem the prosecutors would not feel the need to extradite a person on such evidence. My opinion, and a common one too, is that the allegations are being used to get him sent back to Sweden, where he'd be handed over to U.S hands, bundled aboard a CIA chartered jet, to an unknown destination, Guantanamo? no, somewhere even more deniable, where methods of torture forbidden under U.S. and international law would be used upon him, until his sources were all exposed, and wikileaks silenced forever.
I hope the shockwave rider's insurance policy protects him. No, I'm not blindly defending a spy, I'm defending a man who was brave enough to show us a little of how we're being lied to.
That rule, I have now discarded. If I read a book whose stupidity severely offends me, I launch it into oblivion. Books that were monumentally stupid and offensive, I have, in the past, used as food for the fire. No, it's not a book-burning as such, just a bit of darwinian pruning. A book that has won the opposite of my approval might need to be stopped in its tracks before it can waste another minute of anyone else's life. And if being so stopped, it helps to heat my bathwater, then it's done one good deed in its life.
I used to read a lot of science-fiction, which is a genre full of opportunity for social comment and speculation. Most non-sf readers seem to think it's all rocket-ship men with blasters fighting evil green-skinned aliens. No. And it's not Star Wars, either. Many science fiction writers have been scientists, and hugely well respected ones too. Isaac Asimov, for one. Another was Arthur C. Clarke.
Clarke wrote 2001, A Space Odyssey, a great book, and a beautiful, baffling, prescient film.
Clarke invented the geostationary (Staying always above the same point on the globe. orbiting at the same speed as the planet rotates) telecommunications satellite. His books had them before Telstar first beeped and crackled transatlantic television into life.
Know what the name for a geostationary orbit is?
"Clarke Orbit".
Another writer whose works were full of philosophy and future prediction, was John Brunner. Way back, in 1975, he wrote a book set in a future where a huge computer network holds our data, banks our money, builds our cars, dispatches our bombers, runs our industry, even runs our jails.
Back in 1975, Brunner saw something very akin to our internet. He invented a character, who had worked creating the Net, but had decided to opt out. Our hero uses his coding skills to hide from the net, he erases traces of himself, with portions of self replicating code, which search through the net for references to him and erase them.
The authorities are chasing him, because his knowledge is a threat to them if used against them.
The title is a reference to Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock", published in 1970. Brunner's character is the Shockwave Rider, surfing the wave, the shockwave that is the future.
The more he tries to live off the grid, below the radar, the more the authorities seek to locate him.
He changes identity and appearance regularly, and, as I said, he writes protective code... He calls his code fragments "tapeworms", because they burrow into the web and self replicate.
One of his worms has a job of keeping him alive and safe, which it does by constantly checking he is alive, safe, and free. If it is not reassured that he is safe, it will, from multiple locations, unstoppably, release all manner of embarrassing revelations, government data, secret files, etcetera.
Seems vaguely familiar? Oh yes. Julian Assange's insurance against being 'disappeared' by the U.S. government is just the same.
If he is silenced, assassinated, disappeared, extra-ordinarily rendered, 'terminated with extreme prejudice', If he dies of a mystery sickness, if his car runs off the road and into a concrete bridge-pillar, then, all around the world, torrents of secret files will be unlocked, everywhere, unstoppable.
Assange is a modern shockwave-rider.
How do I view him?
Is he a spy or a traitor or a rapist?
No.
I don't think he is.
Whilst he's referred to as all of these by some U.S. politicians, firstly, the allegations of 'rape' are not quite that. It seems the main misdemeanour is that during consensual sex, a condom split, and he failed to stop.
The woman in question apparently has withdrawn her co-operation with swedish prosecutors, and left the country. In any normal scenario, it would seem the prosecutors would not feel the need to extradite a person on such evidence. My opinion, and a common one too, is that the allegations are being used to get him sent back to Sweden, where he'd be handed over to U.S hands, bundled aboard a CIA chartered jet, to an unknown destination, Guantanamo? no, somewhere even more deniable, where methods of torture forbidden under U.S. and international law would be used upon him, until his sources were all exposed, and wikileaks silenced forever.
I hope the shockwave rider's insurance policy protects him. No, I'm not blindly defending a spy, I'm defending a man who was brave enough to show us a little of how we're being lied to.
Sunday, 12 December 2010
On Value
I wrote recently about the perception of value.
We live in a world that thrives on disposable artifacts that we value very little. We see blemishes as reason enough to discard all manner of items. Things, all manner of things, are cheap and easy to acquire. Yes, we moan about how much everything costs, but in reality we are rich beyond the dreams of our forebears.
Nobody forces us down the mines as tiny children. We don't grow up malnourished, our bones bent from rickets, humble peasants like myself can travel to foreign lands, I even have my own horseless carriage.
In an earlier time, goods were made to last, furniture was handed down for generations. I wonder how many of today's "designer" artifacts will survive into the next century. Will your grandchildren squabble over possession of your antique ikea bedstead?
The picture below is not a good one, I took it in low light, with reflections, I'm sure a google search would find a better example, but for my purposes, I prefer it as it is.
Here we have a Chinese bowl. I can't be a hundred percent sure, I'd say Sung dynasty, and at some point it was dropped and broken. Someone valued it so highly, that the shards were gathered up, and a repairer was summoned to reassemble it, drilling and joining the pieces with wire staples, maybe gold, maybe bronze, from below, and filling the crack-lines with urushi lacquer, (made from tree-sap), mixed with powdered gold. This was a slow, painstaking repair, an art of itself.
Where, to us, cracks imply worthlessness, the gold-filled cracks in this pot tell us a story of how someone loved it, how it was nursed back to health, treated with gold, and restored to its position as a treasured possession.
The gold, apart from being in itself a decoration and a statement of wealth, serves another very real purpose. It shields the lacquer from the destructive effects of ultraviolet light in sunlight, and also strengthens it. Perhaps it protects somewhat against heat too.
Record Breaking
How did that happen?
I was just idly thinking of tidying up the sidebar when I noticed that I'd posted 22o times this year.
7 posts in 2006, (but I only started on the 26th December),
218 in 2007
132 in 2008
177 in 2009
220 so far, in 2010
This is, for some undisciplined reason, the most blogposty year so far.
Yet when I looked, I thought I'd been neglecting the blog this year, came very close, a couple of times to ditching it.
And I still don't know what it's about, or how I'd describe it if I had to categorise.
'Blog', it is said, is a contraction of web-log. Maybe once upon a time there were navigators, navigatrices of the interweb, who kept a log "Captain's log, stardate:****. At three-bells in the forenoon watch there was a voltage spike that caused the screen to flicker.
Noonday sights threw up a '404 not found' error. Connectivity good, but graphics loading slowly. Have sent a party to resplice the optic cabling near the street nexus.
All well...........
Argh!!! crew has gone berserk and is hammering on my door..... I will defend myself with the fire-axe, as best I can... if I do not return, pray for me...."
Should I quit?
I was just idly thinking of tidying up the sidebar when I noticed that I'd posted 22o times this year.
7 posts in 2006, (but I only started on the 26th December),
218 in 2007
132 in 2008
177 in 2009
220 so far, in 2010
This is, for some undisciplined reason, the most blogposty year so far.
Yet when I looked, I thought I'd been neglecting the blog this year, came very close, a couple of times to ditching it.
And I still don't know what it's about, or how I'd describe it if I had to categorise.
'Blog', it is said, is a contraction of web-log. Maybe once upon a time there were navigators, navigatrices of the interweb, who kept a log "Captain's log, stardate:****. At three-bells in the forenoon watch there was a voltage spike that caused the screen to flicker.
Noonday sights threw up a '404 not found' error. Connectivity good, but graphics loading slowly. Have sent a party to resplice the optic cabling near the street nexus.
All well...........
Argh!!! crew has gone berserk and is hammering on my door..... I will defend myself with the fire-axe, as best I can... if I do not return, pray for me...."
Should I quit?
Saturday, 11 December 2010
We Had a Break-In
The office was unoccupied, and nothing was stolen.
What they missed was the carpet. It's value, according to auctioneers who sold some furniture from those offices, is over £1200. About $1900.
We've moved it out of there now.
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