So after seeing the advert several times, I thought "fuck this, I'm signing up right now" and clicked the link.
AmputeeDate is a dating site for amputees, ex-wannabes, need-to-bes, devotees, wannabes, pretenders and admirers looking for true love, friendship or any kind of relationship with amputees.
Rightaway I was struck that I had been had by obviously-false advertising. Jane (pictured) has her two original legs, but a prosthetic-arm.
But between you and I, I'm not that upset about it. Who knew that I would find a dating site devoted to my fetish? I'm gonna register as a devotee, a pretender, an admirer, and a need-to-be -- and I'm expecting to find a love-match within days.
The other day I was listening to the Pressure Sounds website -- you can do that -- listen to the Pressure Sounds site, I mean -- when you go there it starts streaming a hand-picked selection of choice reggae and dub cuts right to your desktop -- and normally I hate that sort of thing, but the tracks coming off of the Pressure Sounds site are so damn good that you have to smile and love it -- and so anyway I was browsing around and the sun was streaming through the window and warming my back and and I'd actually finished surfing their site and I was lying on my bed in the sun like a torpid cat and the tunes were washing over me and then I heard something that quite literally made my jaw drop.
Keith Hudson -- aka the "Dark Prince of Reggae" -- has long, long, long time been one of my favourite reggae/dub music producers, and I've got -- or at least heard -- most of his recorded output.
The track is from his album Nuh Skin Up Dub, from 1982. A huge, spacious production along with sparse snippets of Keith's brooding, darkside vocals and some fresh instrumental approaches give this music a unique aura. Like I said, my jaw dropped. This is an essential disc for lovers of the deep.
And good news: Pressure Sounds have reissued the album on vinyl and CD. They're selling it for an almost-ludicrously low price, too.
Four years on and they're still going strong, true to their mission to "support, promote and preserve innovative audio culture in NZ". What's even better is that they've recently relaunched with a new a vastly superior website.
Check out the seht page; there's audio and everything. I am committed to regularly uploading new tunes and sketches on an ongoing basis. Sweet.
I was fairly chuffed to discover, via a search from Poland, that Drinks-After-Work is the third-ranked Google result for "music martinis misanthropy download blog".
The night after the fog, everything was back to normal. Five second exposures at f2.8, looking west:
... and north:
The green light looks great on these long burns.. of course it's not green to the naked eye, but you can only really successfully "white balance" for one kind of white light at a time, right? Unless you wanna go "automatic", which I didn't.
At the bus station, they have powerful spotlights set into the ground and which point upwards, illuminating things with their powerful powerfulness. When it's late at night and you're waiting for a bus and you're very bored, you can play about with them; for example, you can block them partially with your feet and pull faces:
You can also photograph yourself doing this, to the loud amusement of the attendant deros.
o o o
Thom Yorke out of Radiohead put out an album a couple of years ago. It's called Eraser. I really really like it, although -- notoriously (want a better link? Try Google) -- not all Radiohead fans feel as I do. Atoms For Peace is one of my favourite tracks from the album.
Thom Yorke - Atoms For Peace (3.58 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)
... but possibly only because it's fun to make your cat talk to you when they are waiting for you to open the door for them and they are very very very hungry.
Last night I was walking home across Newtown about 1am and boy, it was foggy. Not exactly a pea-souper or anything -- I could quite easily see where I was going and whatnot -- but it was doing that weird and neat acoustical thing where the slightest sounds are amplified out of all proportion. Was having a lot of fun strolling down Lawrence Street while sounding like the BFG or something tromping along.
The cell-phone camera really didn't do the business, though -- it's really quite shit in the dark:
When I got home I set about taking some photos with my digital camera -- improvised tripod (stack of books on the window-ledge, anyone?) and all. This is looking west with a 5-second exposure at f2.8:
It's not a completely accurate representation of the scene, but it's as close as I could get. I tried to stop the shutter down but the field depth was too great and the resultant image not as effective.
One thing which alarmed me somewhat was that the flashing red lights on the cranes at the new hospital building site were completely invisible in the fog -- to the naked eye, anyway. "So," I thought, "let's try burning-in a loooooooong exposure to see if the camera can pick them up". This is a 30 second exposure looking north, using f2.8 again -- this time to get as much light as possible:
"Hells bells," thinks I -- "not a smidgeon of a trace of the warning lights. What happens if a plane comes flying down the valley and smacks right into the cranes, or worse still -- one of the hospital buildings!? It'd be like a re-enactment of the bloody Erebus disaster in my back yard!"
I zoomed in to 3x optical (Carl Zeiss lens, thanks for asking) and tried another 30 second exposure:
Wait a minute... did you see that?
Ho ho ho etc. Actually, of course the reason that the warning lights on the cranes were not visible is that construction of the super-structure of the new hospital is complete and the cranes were taken down some weeks ago.
I'm getting kinda tired of the whole killer-guy-from-Twin Peaks-look schtick. It's been a number of months since my project reached fruition and I've done nothing about it and I'm now thinking of something new. In fact, after a comment from a friend a few weeks ago likening me to Allen Ginsberg (R.I.P.) and then seeing the brilliant fantasy scene featuring Ginsberg and Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, I think I will look in that direction.
Of course that's David Cross playing Ginsberg in the film, not the man himself. I probably can't manage that degree of hirsuteness; I may have to go for a more senior Ginsberg a la his 1985 self-portrait (right, via the Village Voice).
I feel I will also have to lose a bit of weight to get there.
o o o
It's Saturday today. Last night at a Mexican restaurant I realised that there is still a lot of very nice tequila about that I haven't yet had the pleasure of drinking. I immediately resolved to rectify this situation. Hopefully this pursuit does not turn out to be mutually exclusive with the Ginsberg project. More soon...
o o o
New album out recently from Wiley. It's called Grime Wave.
Wiley - Local Lad (1.84 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)
I quite like the idea of karaoke, but the reality never quiet matches up to the glory of the fantasy. One of the main problems I have is finding something that I actually would like to sing.
If it were up to me, I would have a karaoke room painted in the blackest black, with a rock-band lighting rig, and blacklights, and minimalist black vinyl and chrome accoutrements, and a karaoke machine stuffed full of my best and favourite music. Like Iggy's The Endless Sea, which I have been walking around singing at the top of my lungs for days now.
Iggy Pop - The Endless Sea (3.29 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)
The Endless Sea is off New Values, which I wrote about the other day. What a song. Sometimes I even sing the backing vocals as well as Iggy's main part. And what is up with that keyboard part? Not the tweetily-synths (which are super-awesome in their own right), but the comping: it sounds like a Fender Rhodes run through a laptop running some sort of glitchtronicagranulation software -- none of which AFAIK was available in 1979 (aside from the Rhodes). And who would ever have thought that baritone saxes doing an "oompah" part in the bridge would be so powerful.
I'll let you know if I ever get my karaoke room built, 'k?
o o o
I keep finding graffiti around Newtown that I myself must -- but without any recollection of doing so -- have executed.
That is the only feasible explanation, right? No two people can actually come up with the same ideas at the same time completely independently, can they? Can they really? Hmm....
This morning I got all testy on The Wellingtonista about a shitty logo and some awful copy which got up my nose. About 20 minutes earlier I had also noticed this:
Yup, that's the logo for the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind. Cute, I guess, that it's in the shape of an eye and depicts impediments to seeing clearly; awful awful awful that the impediment looks like... a blind. WTF, RNZFB?
Awful, awful, awful. Hence today was Logo WTF x 2 day.
I spotted another pair of Love Field Deviations; these ones are notable because they appear to have been infected by an alien virus:
This raises the issue of whether or not the infected vexed local Love Field Deviations should've been administered with inoculations and vaccinations against said virus -- or an alien so viral... living spaceapes creatures covered smothered in writhing tentacles stimulate your audio nerve directly... no-one conflicts with me... hallucinating senses individually insiduously or in any combination rhythmically shifting gears focusing intensity... no-one conflicts with me... mind starts slipping from familiar tracks bending warping interfering with the facts sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying... we are hostile aliens immune from dying...
In Nelson, my favourite tree is the persimmon tree in the back yard:
It looks a lot less lovely when it is covered in big green leaves, and the air is not perfectly still, crisp and there's still a surprising amount of warmth in the sunlight even though there's snow on the mountains just over there. And the lure of the persimmon is so great that it turns the eighty-yr old woman next door into a kleptomaniac; under cover of darkness, their number is regularly diminished. The only trace of human activity is a set of mobility-scooter tracks leading up the neighbour's driveway.
My new seht CDdead bees ((the((quiet)earth))suite) has been out for a couple of months, and I've finally scared up a review! Gayle Brogan, a Scot of note and who runs the Boa Melody Bar music shop/distribution, said:
It's a while since we've had anything from Stephen Clover and this new album delivers with an opening monolithic drone masterpiece. It begins with an ebbing and flowing synth drone with ominous undertow; as the piece progressed the undertow starts to win out and it feels like the dark waves are overwhelming you. The second track is not quite drone-based but is a utterly focussed repetition of some jerky cinema-organ notes until they are submerged in an icy hiss. No-one else does this quite like Seht.
Yeah, yeah I know, one review and a small one at that -- whoop-de-shit. But that's just the way that it goes sometimes. I always enjoy reading what Gayle thinks of my stuff, though. In time, this page is where you'll be able to read other stuff about the album. And, you can still hear a sample from the album here.
Iggy Pop - Don't Look Down (3.3 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)
[*] That's not to in any way diminish the excellence of Tell Me A Story, Girls, I'm Bored and the title track; it's just that they're in a different league.
[**] Is it weird that there's no word which means "the good quality of the song-writing" in the same way that 'lyricism' somehow means "the good quality of the words of the song"? Or is this just Vocabulary FAIL.
Evidently the Strathmore 44 aren't aware of at least one of the two World's Worst FAILblunders -- never get involved in a turf war in South Wellington [citation required].
o o o
Notice the real estate sign on top of Leo's "Superb Seafood"? I wonder if that means the building is being sold/scheduled for demolition/otherwise gonna disappear? Hope so. That way I won't have to write a really nasty post about how fucken awful their fare is.
In case you can't read the slogan on the licence plate, it says
SEXY BITCHES DRIVE RED CARS
Now, I've not seen anyone driving the pictured automobile, but rest assured that if I do catch a bitch in or in the vicinity of the red Toyota Celica, I will try to determine the voracity of their alleged sexiness. In the interests of science. And art.
If you read some of the comments on YouTube regarding the version of My Little Red Bookposted yesterday, there's some conflicting opinions as to who did the best version:
A Burt Bacharach song recorded by Manfred Mann and later murdered by Love.
I'm a Love fanatic, but I do think this version (and the film version) captures the essence of Bacharach much better.
this is the definitve [sic] version. reminds me of my childhood growing up in swinging london.
etc.
Say what?
That was horrible.
GrigoriSom (1 month ago):
Manfred Mann never did the definitive version of anything... including The Mighty Quinn.
Over at MOG you can listen to Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach performing the song in a style more in keeping with the original intention, you might say -- as in, it's not all Nuggets '66 West Coast garage punk rock.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that I am in control of the weather.
I know that sounds mental, like I am having a psychotic episode or something, but the evidence is beginning to stack up. Have a look at the following timeline:
It was a lovely sunny Saturday (A) so I washed two loads of washing and hung them out. That evening a rainstorm arrived. The rainstorm persisted for a week (B), while I doggedly resisted the offers of a friend to dry my washing at her house -- preferring to run out of socks and underwear.
On a stormy Saturday morning (C) I relented, and carted my washing to her house and dried it. The weather cleared up that afternoon and a period of golden weather ensued (D), ending only on the Thursday (E) that I reckoned was a great day to wash my bedding. I hung the sheets and duvet cover out and a couple of hours later it began to piss down.
This time I was determined I was going to see it out, and get my bedding dry the natural way. It continued to piss down. After almost a week (F) I took everything to my long-suffering friend's house (G) and dried it in her machine.
Thence followed a delightful few days (H) of Indian-summer style weather. Yesterday (I), I reckoned that I should run another quick load through the machine and get it dry. It seemed only moments after I hung everything out that the downpour started.
And on and on it goes.
It's clear that in order to stop the weather turning bad, I must not wash my clothes, and/or hang them out on the line out the back of the house. It's not so clear what is required to turn the current bad weather (X marks today) to the good again. Must I always prevail upon the kindnesses of others? Purchase a dryer? Dry the clothes some other way -- hot-water cupboard, heater, clothes-rack? I'm sorry about this. Until I figure it out, you're going to keep being cold and getting your feet wet. I can only hope the effect is localised.
This high-camp cover of Bob Dylan's Hard Rain...got to #10 in the UK singles charts in 1973 or so. British people are sometimes quite weird like that (cf Benny Hill, the Laughing Policemen, early David Bowie etc).
Open umm.. opens The Cure's 1992 album Wish, which is much more maligned that it deserves to be. Sure it contains a couple of 'novelty' tracks such as Friday I'm In Love, but for the most part it stands alongside bands like Spiritualised and My Bloody Valentine and Bailter Space and so on as far as downer disassociative isolationist oppressive head-fuck multitracked melanges of guitars and noise goes.
I wanted to tag this post misanthropy, but I decided it wasn't really that hateful. I wonder if I should start (another) new tag: cautiously hopeful?
I just saw a mouse in my room. It looked a bit like this:
Actually to be more accurate, it was just leaving my room. And crawling under the door, not fiddling with a steering wheel boat-thing.
The funny thing is I had just put on a Magma album (1978's Attahk, since you asked) so I can only assume the mouse is not a fan of mental 70s French prog-opera. Did I drive it from my room? If so, to my mind that quite clearly makes it: mouse 0, Magma 1.
I suppose it is beholden to me to try to exterminate this mouse. I am not particularly anti-mouse -- though I gotta wonder what the fucken cat has been doing -- but I am hoping that if I can kill the mouse, I will spontaneously cause the entire Disney empire past, present and future to vanish leaving no trace. Except for Vanessa Hudgens, she's a real keeper.
[1] I like Newtown. There are crazy people who wander around and they often have amusing slogans on their clothes. So do I. So am I, for that matter. I'm right at home! [2] I wish that a lot of them were being taken better care of than I suspect they are. I also wish I took better care of myself, as well. [3] I Am A Soldier In Christ's Army is, well, a pretty full-on thing to be walking around proclaiming, especially to anyone who's read some of the more obscure, extreme passages in the bible. [4] Some other interesting slogans to wear on one's shirt might be :
I Am A Soldier In Allah's (or Muhammed's) Army: this could potentially cause the wearer to be the target of everything from fear to disgust and even attract the attention of people like police and airport security.
I Wish I Was A Stormtrooper In Hitler's Elite Schutzstaffel Units: you see these guys around occasionally. Usually they look like the sort of knuckle-draggers that would've been gang-raped and then killed by the real SS. And why do they shave their heads? They should grow it out, dye it flaxen-blonde and style it into really sharp haircuts using brylcreem or something.
I Am A Veteran Of The New Zealand Army's Presence in Vietnam 1967-75: quite a topical one.
I Am A Slave In the Nike Army: you see this sort of thing a lot, though not so much the slogan, just the icon. Also, for Nike substitute any sweat-shop child-labour exploiting global clothing franchise.
Tonight there was quite definitely the sound of a cicada coming from the bush under the sign by the carpark outside the Newtown Sportsbar and liquor store.
My 
German freak-psych-rockers 
It looked a bit like this:
You can often get a really accurate idea of if I'm having a little period of out-of-control moodswings by whether or not I