A Space Warning from Sun Ra

Found this in an old magazine recently. Apparent the earth is on the note of G currently. Well I never...

Overheard on the train

Middle-aged woman 1:- "What does he know that we don't know?"
Middle-aged woman 2:- "Well, you just don't know, do you?"

Indeed.

Gerbil-jazz and other thought experiments

Plucked from the ether using a theremin made of jam...

Sun Ra: You make lots of noise?
John Cage: Yeah, pretty much.
Sun Ra: What are you doing on Thursday afternoon?
John Cage: Well, I have to swing by the ironmongers to pick up some prepared pianos, but I can make it at 3.
Sun Ra: Excellent. How does the key of ecce-ptang strike you?
John cage: My favourite!

(Later...)
Sun Ra: I've made a new instrument out of my own mind.
John Cage: Does it sound anything like this?

(Silence for three days).

Sun Ra: Yeah... yeah it does.
John Cage: I like the way you think.
Sun Ra: Press record will you, my dear fellow.
John Cage: Let's not get too conventional here. I've invented a new recording process using gerbils and muscle memory.
Sun Ra: Wow! Did you know that the ancient Egyptians worshipped gerbils as the bringers of wisdom?
John Cage: Yes.
Sun Ra: Ok, so which end do I blow into? And which one's the alto?

(Musical interlude while Sun Ra blows a complicated series of triplets that spell "smug git" in Assyrian).

John Cage: Can I wear your hat?

(The hat is handed over with much mumbling of chakras).

Sun Ra: Why did the road cross the chicken?
John Cage: For the same reason that makes you wear the robes, i guess.
Sun Ra: Can i have my hat back please?
John Cage: Just another five minutes and twenty three and a half seconds, i promise.
Sun Ra: Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
John Cage: I liked the aeolian cadences in the third movement.
Sun Ra: Give me my hat back.
John Cage: Oh, sorry. I've sewn it to the cheeks of 3 of the gerbils. Let's see how they decide to notate that.


Jon gets half the blame, incidentally. Mod far out.

I hate Mancunians

I'm watching a late-night music show on channel 4 about some chancers from Manchester called the Courteneers. Rainy-day Arctic Monkeys with Oasis haircuts. Seemed inoffensive enough, but then the main man said "I'd never write anything I didn't think was brilliant..."

Oh for fuck's sake. How low are his standards? Take some acid and spend some time with Martin Carr's record collection you idiot.

Amazing the prejudices Ian Rush has installed in me.

The Sun Ra Quilt of Joy

Featuring...

and...

and who could forget...

That last one's a doozy. Can you imagine the racket they'd make?!

Mod out on the 12.53 Interstellar Spaceways local to Giza.

Top tunes of 2007

Off the top of my head of an evening...

1. Rhinestone Cowboy - MF Doom. "A lot of bitches think he's overly chauvinistic" and other gems.
2. Candylion - Gruff Rhys. Nutter.
3. Rocksteady - Aretha Franklin. An alternate mix I found with souped up bass that takes it from being a pop song into a serious piece of proto-funk. (Or summat like that).
4. White Chalk - PJ Harvey. Comforting bedtime nightmares from scary aunty Polly.
5. Like a Summer Thursday - Townes Van Zandt. I've still got a long way to go before I know even half his stuff, but this is just perfect.

As for 2008, where are you Roots Manuva?

I knew it

Tony Blair's a wanker,
Tony Blair's a wanker,
la la la la
la la la laaa.

Tony Blair's a wanker,
Tony Blair's a wanker,
la la la la
la la la laaa.........

Or Tony "I'd love to suck Jesus' cock" Bliar to give him his full title. Can't believe I ever voted for him.

Galaxies, sir, thousands of them

No way are we alone in this universe.

Paul Simon singing Brian Wilson

Ignore the annoying announcer bloke. This is just lovely...

Yep

(From the Gibson forum).

"Whaddaya gonna do?"

RIP Sopranos. Best. TV. Ever. (Even though the last series was a bit pants). Better swearing than the West Wing, better haircuts than the Wire, and less Lovejoy actors than Deadwood. Some of my random favourite things about it:-

1. Sil. The hair. The suits. The terrible Al Pacino impressions.
2. Paulie. Again with the hair. He loved his mum, the big cuddly psychopath. And the fact that he survived is kind of sweet.
3. Steve Buscemi. Turned an already genius series into the best goddam weekly fix that you've ever experienced.
4. The swearing. For me, the best swearing was one time when Tony was pulled over by a black cop for speeding. He tries to bribe him, but gets nowhere and a ticket anyway. As he pulls away and passes the cop he mutters "Affirmative action cocksucker". Not big, not clever, but it doesn't half trip off the tongue.
5. The music. The closing credits invariably had the perfect tune to come down off an episode with. If fucking Channel 4 hadn't trailed Big Brother and other shite over it that would have been perfect. Thanks, you idiots.
6. Lauren Bacall getting punched in the face. What other show could write that?!

And probably lots more. It got out just in time, the last series had a lot of padding but it picked up enough in the end to make me miss it now it's gone. Cheers Tony you fat fuck.

In praise of gambling

Hurrah for the boks. For all the media hype about England's brave band of crocked old men, the best team in the tournament won it. I watched it with a friend who loves to gamble on sports. He's way more interested in it than I could ever be and has developed an approach that's left him significantly up after several years. Not enough to buy a yacht, but it's certainly kept him in beers. Rule number one is don't bet on horses, with baseball a close second, apparently.

The South African win last night was a triple whammy for him, and it's interesting to note what his winning bets were. He had a tenner on the boks from the beginning of the tournament at 9-1, which is fair enough, and then two other bets on last night's game, neither of which I'd have ever considered but both of which make perfect sense. Firstly England to not score a try (nice one, Mark Cueto's little toe), and then the total points scored to be under 38. Both no-brainers, really, when you look at the form. So, beers on him, then.

Any doubts I had about whether I'd soften my usual anti-England stance and support them even a little bit evaporated the first time they showed the princes. Fucking leeches. And what was with Gordon Brown, the French rightwing bloke and Thabo "AIDS isn't a big deal" Mbeki all up on the podium? Just weird. Surely Catherine Deneuve would've sufficed?

Is it just me?

Front of the Observer Music Magazine today, Paul McCartney and Pete Doherty. Jesus. I don't know who to be more angry at. The Observer for printing this rubbish, Macca for being a publicity whore, or the smackhead for being a talentless, well, smackhead. What's the point? Who cares? When did this become worthy of an exclusive splash?

Ok, so the paper know people will buy it whatever they do. I do. But then I buy it for the crossword, and the sport. Macca knows it'll make him seem just a little less like a pensioner who spends too much on hair dye. And smackhead must just be a lunatic if he believes the hype.

Now, I admit, I never heard the Libertines. But they looked good, and made the right people make the right noises and fair enough. But since then what has he done? Where did he cross the line from tosser who's done a bit of music to troubadour in the lineage of Blake and Rimbaud? It's that bloody Kate Moss, that's who. The media now believe he farts Booker Prize winners. I wish he'd just overdose and put an end to it, frankly. Although that would lead to people calling it "the ultimate show of artistic self-expression" and putting him up with all the other corpses who punch below their weight, Morrison and Curtis and Cobain and so on. And that would that. The orthodoxy of iconography. And that would piss me off too. So I don't know. But he can fuck off whatever.

Enter the Thirty Twix Chambers

No wonder Raekwon always looks a little chubby.

Don't Believe the Tripe

This is what happens when you spend too much of your time down the pub discussing food-related hip hop puns. It could happen to any of us, I'm sure you'll agree.

Mr. Aesthetic Archetype

So this bloke. Any ideas? He's probably northern European, he undoubtedly owns an Audi and has a thing for rimless spectacles and propelling pencils. He occasionally smiles to put small children at ease. He's old enough to think that black polo-necks are elegant and doesn't get out much on account of all the thinking he does. All his classical LP's are in date order.

The clue's in the picture, actually. He's Erno Rubik, inventor of the Rubik's cube, and doesn't he just look exactly like you'd imagine him? "Hmm, yes, if I put colours on the side of a cube I will create a most stimulating puzzle" he thought, tidying the paperclip drawer in his mountainside Bauhaus retreat, and the rest was history. He would definitely not approve of this cake.

The 25th World Championships was won by a Japanese kid in 13 seconds, incidentally. Bastard.

I think we should be told

I've been bothered by a couple of resemblences for a while now. I wonder if they are by any chance related etc etc. First up, Mancunian drunk Mark E. Smith and wood engraver David Jones...

And secondly, rubbish painter Francis Bacon and Claudius the God...

So there you go. The first picture there is taken from the most pretentiously drammy picture I have ever seen. Kenneth Branagh on his own is quite annoying, but look at this. It's firing squad time...

Or maybe Claudius is idly wondering which wild animals will be tearing Branagh apart come Saturday down the Colosseum. It's a nice thought.

Season of pissed-up mellow fruiters

It's damson gin time again. Four glass jars, about 5 litres of shit Lidl gin, lots of sugar and 2 carrier bags full of damsons. The liquid has turned purple already. Which is what passes for excitement round here.

In other news, the Guardian have been printing these little booklets of interviews with various famous types the last couple of weeks. This morning's was with Margaret Thatcher and of course it was in the bin before the end of the street. But yesterday's was with Hitler, whose rantings I was content to carry around in my bad all day. Now, it's not that I'm saying that I think Thatcher's as bad as a genocidal maniac, but one has to have some standards, eh.

Serves him right

Today I have been mostly musing on how cross it would've made General Sherman, above, to learn that his name is mostly known as a euphemism for masturbation. Look at him. He'd be furious!

Would that all the gun-toting idiots in the world could be ridiculed in the same way, eh.

Reason to be cheerful no. 4,076

Thelonious Monk playing table tennis...