Botánica Tomo II

Posted on January 25, 2012 by admin

This is the 2nd Chilean post in the micromuseum section. For the first one go here. A couple of weeks ago I included a drawing which pointed an accusatory finger towards this micromuseocosmic instance. That was here. The monkeys illustration was from a Chilean textbook from 1927 that my father had when he was at school there. It must have been shortly before he was sent to boarding school in England.

Here’s the front of one of the other books.

And now some illustrations from this book. Firstly this is what I take to be a baobab tree and I’m not even checking to find out whether I’m right or not. The drawing suggests to me a tree that reproduces by spreading itself out rather than dropping seeds. It’s a typical ploy by a lot of plants that come from a tropical latitude.

The 2nd illustration has something that is reminiscent of a painter I mentioned recently which is Magritte. The cabbage and roots suspended in the air has a somewhat surrealistic feel to it. It’s interesting that photomontage was a favourite device of many of that movement’s artists. Ernst in particular immediately springs to mind.

And here’s a rare colour picture. That must have been pretty exciting back in 1927.

Finally my pièce de résistance. This one would make a lovely tea towel or tray design, maybe even an apron. I intend to earn a fortune selling it via National Trust outlets.

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Wintersol

Posted on January 14, 2012 by admin

Here’s a bit more about Eric Thacker and Anthony Earnshaw’s under-appreciated Musrum books.

Unlike most love stories the lovers in Wintersol never really meet. If you can call them lovers. There are 2 protagonists, Christmas and Bella. They inhabit a series of interlocking spaces within the musroid world, i.e. the world devised in Musrum.

The musroid world is a headstrong replica of the world we know constructed on the principle that all conceivable and inconceivable things persist within reality, and that myth is the true history of this or any other world.

Christmas and Bella don’t need each other except as a reflection of themselves and their solitude is generally inevitable – intimacy is just a dream. For a short period they exchange letters which is the closest they come to the dream, but you can’t help feeling that anticipation is more quintessential than consummation.

‘Rotabella, my pretty silver wheel,’ wrote Christmas, ‘I want you to spin the fortunes of my journeys, and carry me hither and thither with the speed of starlight. There are so many places to go, so many sights to see!’

‘Warden of the Snow, Rubicotta,’ responded Bella, ‘I feel already the blizzard of your beard. Red-garbed, white-haired, wooly-mittened, jack-booted, sack-bearing, chimney-creeping, kindly burglar, you are my Garibaldi sprung from the grave.’

‘The laggard postman is no friend of lovers,’ wrote Christmas. ‘Enough of paltry scribblings! I shall dispatch myself, a living letter, for you to open and read. Be ready!’

‘Fly down, gaudy robin, and perch on my finger,’ implored Bella. ‘Sing me the thin song of winter. If you want me to believe in you, do not disappoint me or disregard my final request.’

Eventually Christmas descends the chimney, but the bed is empty, Bella plays a trick and disappears.

On one level the book is a joke which proposes an alternative origin to the Santa Claus tradition, but of course it is mainly a procession of surrealist nonsense with ingenious and skillful illustrations. The book was first published in 1971. Here is the frontispiece

here an excerpt from Christmas’s diary

and this one’s not for children of a nervous disposition

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Christmas 2011

Posted on January 3, 2012 by admin

It’s been a particularly dark, dismal and wet end of December start of new year, but I have managed to do a couple of things. Firstly here is a piece of music with words that I have called Pineapple Crumble. Not that I’ve eaten any pineapple crumble, but now I’m determined to make some sometime in 2012. The music part was recorded on Christmas Day and the words I used were a couple of things I wrote in August and September 2011. Here’s the text of the August one with some bespoke illustrations,

freestyle thursday 11th august 2011 00:56

here we are with this unrelated scion
tress dispossessed
umbilical
satirical
certain to be dropped
wherever cantilevered
and outmanouevred
treading in traction
for only a fraction
of the expenditure
we counted it earlier
then we spent it
frantically
hysterically
like monkeys up a tree

gibbering
deliberating
which is frustrating
when you’re delusioned
that’s an illusion
that implies wit
like a gong that’s hit

upstairs at night
to announce prayers
Dorothy L. Sayers
had it with Wimsey
that’s hardly flimsy
just points to pieces
therapeutic diseases
cured at Lourdes
by the people who toured
constructed pavilions
with mosaics of vermilion
if that’s not too flowery
like a bell chiming hourly
at the top there’s the steeple
inside all the people
circling surely
poisoned not purely
relaxed and tradition
subtle rendition
the ladder to tumble
the corner to crumble

Pineapple Crumble

And another thing I managed to do was to complete a music video to go with a version of my song Children of the Sea using footage taken by my friend Simon Williams.

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happy new year

Posted on January 2, 2012 by admin

I haven’t been involved with the Occupy movement although I’ve been an observer since it’s start in Bristol as I was working in the building in front of which the protest was held. I’m sympathetic as most thinking people are to the aims of the movement but there seemed to be something a bit half-baked about the protest. Ultimately it’s good that there are people prepared to get out there and propagate and defend their beliefs. Earlier this evening (30th December 2011 – in the dark) I managed to do my bit by contributing to a gathering where we got together by the side of the camp and sang a few songs. It was organised by my friend Jo Harris and was aimed principally to promote the ideas of the Positive Money organisation.

Personally I look to Chomsky to give me guidance in the sphere of global development. I believe that he is the godfather of all this Occupy-type stuff. For me he sits astride the 20th-21st century socio-political world as Marx did in the 19th century, but whereas Marx developed a political system which would replace capitalism, Chomsky has just given us a critique of the current global political situation, there is no alternative system presented. Perhaps this is the best way.

My problem is that I look at history to provide antecedents. There’s always been a lot of shit happening and I find it hard to believe that that’s going to stop being the case. The rest is messianism.

Anyway here are a few quotations from Chomsky from an interview by Corporate Watch from May 1998,

Computers were created at public expense and public initiative. In the 1950s when they were being developed, it was about 100% public expense. The same is true of the Internet. The ideas, the initiatives, the software, the hardware — these were created for about 30 years at public initiative and expense, and it’s just now being handed over to guys like Bill Gates.

…that’s the whole point of corporatization — to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run — which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything — are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power.

If you go back to around 1970, international capital flows were about 90% related to the real economy, like trade and investment. By now, at most a few percent are related to the real economy. Most have to do with financial manipulations, speculations against currencies, things which are really destructive to the economy. And that is a change that wasn’t true, not only wasn’t true 100 years ago, it wasn’t true 40 years ago.

So the first thing that has to be done is to create for ourselves, for the population, systems of interchange, interaction, and so on. Like Corporate Watch, Public Citizen, other popular groupings, which provide to the public the kinds of information and understanding, that they won’t otherwise have. After that they have to struggle against it, in lots of ways which are open to them. It can be done right through pressure on Congress, or demonstrations, or creation of alternative institutions. And it should aim, in my opinion, not just at narrow questions, like preventing monopoly, but also at deeper questions, like why do private tyrannies have rights altogether?

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granite mix 1

Posted on December 20, 2011 by admin

A few years ago I put some mixes up on the web and each one took quite a lot of preparation. For a start the music was on vinyl and I had to digitise it. Then I researched each artist and wrote a little bit about them. And also scanned cover art and then loaded it all up and used html (nothing too complicated). Now I’ve worked out this easier way which even takes away the need for me to make any choices…or hardly any. I have this Brennan box that a friend gave me and I’ve loaded up a lot of music onto it. Like most things you can randomise it and it does a neat little segue between tracks. I know everyone does this sort of thing all the time anyway. Which means that I’m not exactly sure of the value of putting this up. In the end it’s like a radio show and I suppose those are still popular enough. I wanted to use some sort of name to associate with this process and hit on granite – not sure why exactly although if pressed I’m sure I could think of some reasons

Here’s the mix

And here’s the tracklist

Granite Mix 1
Artist Title Album
John Surman Druid’s Circle A Biography of the Rev Absalom Dawe
Jeru the Damaja Me or the Paper Wrath of the Math
Carla Bley End of Animals Escalator over the Hill
Wayne Shorter Night Dreamer Night Dreamer
Willie Walker Dupree Blues Ragtime Blues Guitar
Cannonball Adderley & Bill Evans Who Cares You Know What I Mean
The Cramps Love Me Off The Bone
Gang Starr Work Moment of Truth
Sheppard A Solis Ortus Cardine n/a (radio broadcast)
Kronos Quartet & Asha Boshle Piya Tu Ab To Aaja You’ve Stolen My Heart
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as regards tintin street

Posted on December 2, 2011 by admin

At last I have managed to finish the demo I started a while ago. It gives me a chance to put up a couple more bits of Hergé artwork in an unassuming manner. I can’t see the harm in it myself. I’ve called it RV Marche RG which is pronounced as if you were speaking French to give it an English quasi-phonetic spelling it would be ‘ervay marsh erjay’ or something like that but really you need to get that guttural French R to give it it’s most satisfying rendition. Really I know that properly my initials should be reversed and be ‘vayeur’ rather than ‘ervay’ but the thing is I’ve never reversed my initials – yeh sure I’ve reversed the letters of the name because that makes Trebor Yesav which could easily be a Georgian sculptor or a Macedonian boat-builder – but Georges Remi did reverse his initials which gave him his distinctive pen-name.

The song stems from a street near where I live which for some reason I call Tintin Street. Quite often when I’m coming home late at night I pause for a while on this street (which is quite a steep hill) and reflect. I’ve thought a lot about why I call it Tintin Street but I can’t quite pin it down. It was sort of an instinctive thing. I’ve looked through the various books trying to find some point of reference but with no success so far. Here follow some street and house images from the cartoons.

My Tintin Street is very different from the actual street that Tintin lived on. We just get glimpses of that. Here seen from a vantage point slightly higher than the 2nd floor window suspended in the air outside the building.

And here from the middle of the road outside. It’s quite a busy street in the middle of town. As you can see the glimpses of the street usually coincide with a dramatic incident – abduction in both these cases. Firstly Bunji Kuraki of the Yokohama police force and secondly Tintin himself.

So what is the reference point? The madeleine in the tisane? Is it the balconied window?

Or maybe just the shutters?

It could be the long, high concrete wall that I refer to in the 3rd verse of the song. Plain walls are popular with cartoonists for obvious reasons.

Or possibly it’s all a mistake and I was thinking of another famous Belgian.

[René Magritte L'Empire des Lumières (detail)]

Anyway here’s the track.

RV Marche RG

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december 3rd MMXIce

Posted on November 12, 2011 by admin

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What will be and what’s gone past

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin

This is just an interim post to jot down a few things that may be coming and a few that may not. A few follow-ups and advertisements where the 3rd syllable sounds like eyes and is stressed accordingly.

There will be a Neureille gig at the Kingsdown Vaults in Bristol on Saturday 3rd December. Proposed line-up will be Paul Wigens on drums & percussion (small kit), Everton Hartley on bass guitar & guitar as well sometimes probably, Tom Ranby on whichever saxophone he fancies that night. I will be playing my Spanish guitar rather than my Strat. Laura Lambell might make it too to do some vocals. We will be playing songs from the 2 albums, disparue & amanogawa plus possibly doing some other things. And I hope to have a few guests to do some cameo appearances plus some sets. I will provide more details when I’ve worked that out. Unfortunately Ant Noel won’t be able to make it as he’s playing a solo gig that night.

But I will be doing a couple of things with Ant over the next couple of weeks – Sunday 13th November at the Somerset House in Clifton Village and Tuesday 22nd November at the Merchant’s Arms in Hotwells. I’m not sure exactly what sort of thing the session on the 13th will be, but I’ve done a couple of the Tuesday night sessions already with Ant and my contribution has been as a quartet with Everton and myself on guitar, Ant on mandoline and James Stallwood on clarinet as we did at the event I described in an earlier post. It’s a great line-up. We’ve only played 4 songs so far but we could easily do a 45 minute set at the drop of a hat because there’s a lot of freedom and improvisational possiblities there.

I’m a bit behind at posting things here, but I’m working on a demo of a new song which will make a nice post with some more artwork from The Adventures of Tintin. Too much day-work right now is slowing me down, but that is due to finish at the beginning of December. Other posts I have promised are

  • Wintersol – sequel to Musrum (another one for the Nonsense category)
  • Edward Gorey Part II (again Nonsense)

One that I promised which I decided not to do was on the wreck of the Medusa. I found that this had been covered pretty extensively in a work by Julian Barnes. There’s something a bit plagiaristic I find about that sort of thing. Borges was able to do it ok and Umberto Eco also does it in a way I find acceptable, though I must admit I can’t call myself a huge fan of either of those writers. In other words, I think covering the Medusa raft story is ok for a blog post but to me it shows a lack of inventiveness to rewrite the narrative in a novel, however nice a style you have. So sorry about that.

To conclude the Fool’s Gold saga I will be putting up the track that I recorded back in 1983 or so which uses random snippets from the text. This easily ties in again with Nonsense as does another post which I’ve been meaning to write based on the work of NF Simpson who died earlier this year.

I’ve mentioned Kafka in the last two posts and so I’ve just made that a run of 3, but at the moment I’m simultaneously re-reading The Complete Short Stories and also The Diaries. After that I’ll re-read the Walter Benjamin essays and then maybe write further on the writer who I feel in many ways made me write the way I do. All this takes time and creative energy so may not happen until next year.

On the micromuseum front I should like to do another postage stamp set + I took some photos of some strange Chilean artefacts which need to be manipulated and I also need to think what possibly I can write about them, for they are mysterious and very difficult to research. Other micromuseum things I planned were a post on Alfred Wainwright’s book, Fellwanderer, some of John S Goodall’s illustrated small books and probably some other things, but now it is late – gone 3am and I must be up soon after 7.

I couldn’t be bothered to put the usual links I put in, in this post. Occasional sloppiness can only lead to perpetual sloppiness, but the excuses are there.

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Archive Footage

Posted on October 19, 2011 by admin

Over the last little while or thereabouts I have been posting archive bbc footage on my youtube channel. This all comes from a programme I recorded on vhs back probably in the late eighties. I think I first bought a vhs recorder sometime after 1985 and most likely early on after that I recorded a compendium of bbc recordings which were generally from the late 60s. It was introduced by George Melly and for the first time in the most recent clip (Pasolini & Callas – see below) there is a fragment of his commentary added to the original fragment. In the past I have always managed to decently edit out any of his contributions (apart from the Heinz Edelmann clip where he is central, as a younger self). Not that I’ve got anything against the guy, but because I wanted to be true as possible to the original recordings. But this comment is right in the middle of the clip and trying to edit it out would be a real pain. I think he must have felt that as a singer he was allowed to comment about Callas but sadly I must regret that he felt it was necessary to add anything as Maria is so beautiful and so poignant in her words that there scarcely is need of aught else. Ah well, such is life, you can always edit the film yourself. Download it from youtube, it’s not that difficult, and edit it. But sadly you can’t bring her back to life. Anyway as I usually say, here’s the youtube clip

And just to show what I was talking about earlier on here are the other youtube clips from the programme that I have already posted. Sometimes I wonder if the bbc has lost the original footage that these clips were taken from. I would be happy to take this stuff down if I felt that it was available somehow commercially, but until that happens I will carry on posting it for the world to see. And if sometimes I feel like Kafka‘s Warden of the Tomb maybe that’s my destiny. There are some gems still to be unearthed. In the mean time here are the other segments…

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Epistle from Patera

Posted on October 7, 2011 by admin

Once upon a time if I wrote a new song I would fairly quickly record a demo of it, but for the last year or so I haven’t been bothered. I’m not sure why that is, probably to a certain degree some sort of boredom with the recording process. I think the only new song I’ve recorded is one I recorded live (vocals overdubbed), little crusader.

What spurred me to actually record one of them was the idea of giving Tom (Ranby) some mp3s of new songs because when we played together I wanted to add some of the new songs to the repertoire rather than just play the stuff we already know. Well the first recording’s done now and it wasn’t that bad. It was mostly done a couple of weeks ago but I finished it off yesterday by recording the cameo flute part. I didn’t practise playing flute much over the 2 weeks, there was probably 10 minutes of playing in total, in short 30-60 second bursts – in fact I could have worked at it a bit harder and done it all on the same day. Thanks to my sister, Helen, for giving me the flute some many years ago.

The song I chose to record was written about a year ago and it’s called die andere seite. I think that’s the 2nd song I’ve got with a German title. The 1st one was called sonntag but all I have for that is the words, maybe the slight remnant of a tune in my head. Die Andere Seite is the title of a book by the man better known as an artist than writer, Alfred Kubin. Obviously I’ve provided a link but to put it simply for those of you who can’t be bothered to spend a few minutes perusing the biography works influence bibliography external links of an interesting 20th century character, he was an artist, a member of the Blaue Reiter group who became principally known for his work as an illustrator. Apparently at some point he found it impossible to do any drawing and so, over a 12 week period, he wrote his novel. It sorted of demanded to be written in effect. It was published in 1905.

It could be said to predate Kafka, but pretty much they were both writing at the same time, it’s just that a lot of Kafka’s stuff wasn’t published until after his death. Kafka and Kubin knew each other and in a diary entry of 1911 Kafka describes him

Kubin himself: very strong, but somewhat monotonous facial expression, he describes the most varied things with the same movement of muscles. Looks different in age, size, and strength according to whether he is sitting, standing,wearing just a suit, or an overcoat.

and in the same entry for September 26th Kafka relates

He met Hamsun at Langen. He (Hamsun) grins mockingly for no reason. During the conversation, without interrupting it, he put one foot on his neck, took a large pair of paper-shears from the table, and trimmed the frayed edges of his trousers. Shabbily dressed, with one, or so rather expensive details, his tie, for example.

I was unaware of this until I started researching to write this, but funnily enough Knut Hamsun is also referenced in this song. Do I want to throw any more revolutionary (I don’t mean in a political way) writers of the late 19th early 20th century into the mix? Actually yes, though this is one that I didn’t realise as I wrote the song. Can that be possible? Well I must think so or I wouldn’t be writing about it. In an earlier post I touched on the significance of the French writer, Alfred Jarry and the research I did towards writing that persuaded me to buy a copy of Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, which I had never read.
It is in this work that the concept of ‘Pataphysics is introduced. In Roger Shattuck‘s excellent introduction to the Exact Change edition of the work he tries to encapsulate the concept thus

Beneath the double talk and ellipsis, its formal definition seems to mean that the virtual or imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized and lived as real. This is the ultimate form of “authentic enactment”.

I will try to write further on this later. It needs more distillation right now.

Well that’s the words sorted out, as for the music, it’s got a bit of bluesy, swampy feel but as usual I’ve used (or possibly misused) reggae drum loops which disguise that to a certain extent. It’s a very simple ABABABABAB format where the 4th AB is instrumental and the 5th is a repeat of the 1st (lyrically that is). I could have stuck a C on the end for the coda but that is too short to warrant it. The Bs are in effect choruses but they have no vocals. They’re just trademark flattened interval chords thrown in to show who I am.

And finally…

the other side

+ a few links to be added later

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