German cinema

The original soundtrack.

In a curious twist, caught in a spiral of slinky manoeuvres and non-mechanical skids, that old devil called Karma once again has dealt us an odd and unexpected hand. Our marvelous and free to air music is going to feature in a film documentary currently being put together in Germany, more details to follow. Did I ever tell you how much I love German cinema? See you at the Oscars (foreign language section).

Today the cat's discovered rotisserie chicken. They went mad, the civil war and diplomatic cat crisis came to a sudden and swift end as they shared a common goal, to get a piece of that hot and tasty chicken. Every cat has his or her price.

The day I downloaded myself

A day much like any other...

It’s a peculiar life being a minor musician or a songwriter in these digital times. The market is flooded with home made, self penned, desk top designed and published up material that each hopeful musician sees as his or her finest work. Most of it remains out there, undiscovered on the web, in dusty CD piles or trotted out occasionally for a live performance in the back room of some good humoured pub or community centre. Once in a while there will be a solitary sale, some feedback or a blog comment before the continued pursuit of vigorous anonymity resumes. If, as we are, you are content with this fate then really it’s ok, your small mark has been made, your time bomb has been planted and the fevered act of creation has now cooled into something substantial and complete though naturally now framed in obscurity. So if you want more how do you console yourself, how do you justify the effort, possible expenditure and the slow realisation that your works in a long queue to be heard and discovered? The still, small voice tells you that the odds of them being heard or appreciated by any kind of reasonable audience are lottery sized or worse.

One answer is to give it away, forget the prices, the costs, the penny a play sites and the rip-off merchants who charge you $100 to be stigmatized on some compilation that may or may not make the earshot of some mobile phone advertising exec. Just give it away, again and again. Life is too short to wait on the ting of the cash register and the lengthy delays from third party provider payouts or for some drunken punter to argue over £3 for a CD - and you don’t really need that pointless anxiety. In the last few months we’ve had over 3000 free listens and 100 free downloads compared to no CD sales, 1 itunes sale and a few cents of streaming money. Relax and give it away and enjoy the vicarious pleasure of having multitudes of unseen, singleton listeners – and even if things get tough you'll never ever feel you need to explain or justify another CD spectacle to friends or family.

Drivel from the fifth estate

So the relentless documentation of the trivial, the pointless and the terminally annoying goes on proving the deep truth that fiction is often more interesting than facts and that inspired fiction is often better than fact - and more accurate. Fellow members of the Fifth Estate (which you are if you are reading this) I salute you, half hearted as ever.

Today started badly thanks to a deep depression of ghostly fog that descended like fluffy frozen cheese over everything and most notably on my car, a classic Monday morning start, getting angry at frost. Weather anger is neither useful nor able to be channeled in a positive direction so it remains inside, pent up and throbbing on the twenty minute drive to work. In fog you cant help but notice that all drivers who have their hi-vis lights on in normal weather leave them switched off in fog as if in some perverse tribute. Some poor souls decided that to drive across the Forth Bridge in thick fog with no lights was a good idea, clearly these people are having a worse morning than me.

Coffee is a killer, please do not be fooled by the hype and step away from the Starbucks. It's bitter, powdered, milky crap hoovered up like wild cocaine from exploited farmers and served to irresponsible members of the public who cant understand the rules of engagement for their car's fog lights. It also makes you pee worse than cold German Lager with one cup resulting in at least a litres worth of foggy urine. Then when the warm, coffee rich urine hits the coastal sewage farm sprays and atomisers after its long journey from the city in cold weather...

Video games suck but I wish I had the basic skills and span of attention and concentration to play and complete one. Maybe it's more coffee I need.

Fray Bentos pie memory

Missie the cat looks down from her lofty fortress in the high basket country. (105 known mouse kills)

Anna, the new (old) kit in town. (1 known mouse kill)

Missie the cat woke be this morning with her muddy paws and a presentation pack containing a recently deceased mouse, nothing unusual there then. One thing did however arouse my slowly waking senses and that was the distinct aroma of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie that seemed to be hanging in the air around the still warm mouse cadaver.

I've a lot of happy memories associated with the old FB pies, once a staple part of my diet, so for a few moments I ignored the actual mouse and drifted back to those FB days (mid 70s I'd say). It goes like this: after a long shift in Paisley Gas works it was home to the cosy log cabin in Pollockshields for an FB pie, hot from the black black oven (no other superfluous foods were added) and a "screw tap" of Whitbread Pale Ale. This was followed by a fag and a relaxing listen to Little Feat's "Sailing Shoes" or possibly "The Grand Wazoo" by Frank V Zappa. Then down to the pub with Sheba the Alsatian for a tussle with the locals and some fairly spaced conversations. (Sheba didn't add much intellectual quality to the conversation but neither did I).

For a while I thought that Fray Bentos meant from "Bentos", then after staring into some school atlas I discovered that there was no actual "Bentos" but there was a Fray Bentos, stuck at the edge of the rain forest full of pie and corned beef factories, or so I imagined, there far away on the dreamy Brazilian coast or in the jungles of Uruguay - I can' remember. A place well worthy of a visit for any self respecting carnivore.

At this point the mist lifted from my eyes and I picked up the dead mouse in a tissue and disposed of it by flipping it over the hedge - funny about that pie-mouse smell though. It's left me wondering could I, would I ever eat another FB pie? It's been 35 long years...

Barclay Jnr scored a proper hat trick today (3 solo crackers in 15 minutes) against the best of Pittenweem. The reward? £5 cash up front, a large McD's vanilla shake and two salmon and cream cheese bagels (ex-Ali's kitchen).

Soccer Am in the afternoon

What a drag it is getting old. My first long lie in in a month and I couldn't hack it - there was a cat staring down at me from the top of the wardrobe. No sleep till Broxburn and I'm on the couch dozing through Soccer AM, the crossbar challenge and showboating. I feel like I'm staring at goats sometimes, trying to move from room to room, couch to couch and eating sausage sandwiches to the tune of Saturday morning TV.

Hopefully few of the garden birds suffer from nut allergies. There are now five dispensers of various nutty and warming products, all of which will produce warm feathers and bright eyes, pretty much one feeder for each little bird. God bless them these winter months, I hope they take advantage of the offer.

We hovered around the great Herris fence that is Edinburgh town centre, only for long enough to undertake essential transfers of currency and odd items from the great halls of Jenners and Co. Christmas is coming it seems but you can forget the trees. The bright lights of Morningside float past and light up a hundred interesting shops and restaurants, most of which we will never visit. Today I was a passenger.

20000 people standing in a field

The multitudes...

...are amazed by the pagan spectacle.

It's nice to get out and socialize once in a while, meet a few folks, compromise personal space and gasp at burning chemicals fizzing far above your head. So by the light of our faithful torches we crossed the fields to the gardens of Hopetoun and for about an hour stared into the burning sky. Phone pictures do not of course capture very much of the detail at all. For a few short moments it seemed as if the world was ending in a flash of bangs and in bangs of flashes, then there was some generous applause and we all trudged home (or back to your car if you were unfortunate enough to have brought one).

Ordinary things

Today I ate an upside down steak pie while standing up, quite normally but I may have been sitting at the time. Two Muller corners were consumed earlier in a bid to remove a small cloud of cold germs that were hovering close by. It was all rather ordinary but I admired the overall geometry and the general tick-over.

Tomorrow the huge bonfire at Hopetoun House has summoned us to it's fiery interior. We will make a rare and shadowy appearance in the winter darkness. Effigies will be burned, trees scorched and the cold earth made warm once again.

If you are feeling sinister

Now is the winter of our general, seasonal driven discontent and mood swings. The weather is playing havoc with football arrangements, sandbagging, buying petrol, driving conditions and generating nasty little drafts. We are keeping our heads down, enjoyed free bonfire tickets and living frugally on salad, seafood and cauliflower cheese as is the custom round these parts. I've also watched some strange movies, the best bits being falling asleep during chunks of the Exorcist. Not a patch on the Fantastic Mr Fox - go and see him today.

The cult of Lego frees a man from fear

Bow down, genuflect, worship at the firm and snappy temple to the Lego god we have made from..err...Lego. A veritable archangel thunderbird of acute angles, round bits and colours the names of which none dare speak. We are absorbed, self absorbed and ridiculously faithfully calm within our humble Lego shrine.

And so, at age 54 or thereabouts I now find myself better fed and probably better off than at any time since I was 53. I ask myself "when will all this riotous and uncontrolled progress come to and end?" Or I might say "is it that my life is spinning forward and onwards to some unreachable vanishing point masquerading within the curved/linear perspective that I suspect drives the universe along." As far as the idle and in my case detached viewer is concerned that could be a correct assumption anyway.

It's the one hearty meal a day that is creating this unusual situation and like most things it is not sustainable, which as I reflect on the fish, chicken and pasta, the green, green salads and the luxurious fulfilment of my basic needs is indeed fair enough.

Mr Cougar is looking fine and sitting square on the road sporting new suspension things, most likely they are called bushes, branches or arms or some other adopted natural name. I'd love to say that I notice the difference and that all my motoring moments are like sliding along a silk road on a sunny day but the fact is I've still got the same two slow punctures in the back that I first noticed in June. It thankfully passed the MoT mind you and all I need is the odd 20p to spend on free air and the steely will to avoid doing 140 on the motorway. Easy enough really.

Mostly listening to chill out stuff.

Bits of Abbey Road and Frightened Rabbit.

October

Artist's impression of grandchild No5 or a very primitive scan.

Fish playing in Aberdeen.

A bush surrounded by other bushes and growing things in Dunfermline or thereabouts.

A sunny view of the bridges from the rather rundown and shabby beachfront at St David's Bay. More facilities management funding please.

How not to cook

How not to cook cookbook.

By Aleksandra Mir for the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2009.

While the typical cookbook format gives you a recipe for obvious success it does not take into account the many ways in which its execution can fail due to the cook's lack of experience. Based on Aleksandra's personal history of cooking disasters, the project invites 1000 people from all around the world to give their advice of how NOT to cook. With this volume, any reader will be more than well equipped to avoid making the same mistakes in their kitchen.

Aleksandra is interested in how we are taught or teach ourselves through trial and error. By making our guilty failures public we may even be creating an original and subversive form of art, rather than simply be aspiring to obvious and repetitive results.

Kate Gray, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh

Strangely enough I find that I'm in this nice book (my name is on the credits!), I just can't remember the bit I contributed.

All roads lead...

The road and the miles to Glenrothes. A popular folk song round these parts.

Food: After resolving a brief misunderstanding with the trouser buttons on a new suit purchased for work I realised that an emergency diet was not now required. I celebrated with an apple, beer battered chips and some chicken nuggets and two episodes of the Simpsons.

Songwriting: Having a real piano in one room and a drum machine in the other both playing loudly may seem like an odd combination for instrumental locations but it seems to work. We tried it last night, the drums thundering at a stately 86 BPM in the dining room and the piano plunking away in the lounge, strange chords and melodies arose while I sat in the middle gently strumming on a dobro. In the end some good music was created and will be completed and recorded one fine day.

Priorities: These are things that tell you what you should be doing next but can never quite get round to, often people, time and cash dependant and subject to short notice changes and unplanned adjustment. It's nice when diet is less of a priority that piano plinking.

Dead pedals: Wasted two hours yesterday trying to figure a power failure in the pedal board - all it takes is one cable round the wrong way...blame in on the slow but steady expiring of various cherished brain cells.

South Queensferry daily photo

Business is booming as the good people of SQ flock to the local commercial sector.

The cultural and financial centre of the 'Ferry, part of the great Co-op Scotmid empire flanked by a Chinese restaurant, curry shop and peculiar clothing retailer. I always feel guilty about not using the apparently unloved Co-op, set in it's dreary car park and flanked by nothing in particular. It is compromised by being half a mile away from the larger Tesco that sells everything cheaper and is generally much busier, leaving the poor old Co-op forlorn and abandoned looking - but it does contain a proper post office. The trouble is you can never quite get the stuff you want in the Co-op, the TV ads portray nice green and ethical ranges but when you get in it's just miles of Irn-Bru promotions, stale looking cakes and very tired out and pale vegetables. I just have to learn to live with the guilt of regularly going elsewhere.

We watched "Burn after reading" last night, a fine portrayal of mid-life crisis, greed and paranoia with a lot of added laughs. Watch it and see numerous car crash situations come alive before your very eyes and then spontaneously combust. The names were no doubt changed to protect the innocent.

I uploaded three random tracks onto Amie Street last night, less than 24 hours later the money has already started rolling in, well almost. It's such fun being part of the modern, dynamic and completely unpredictable music industry.

Packaging and octaves

Some packaging we have been working on recently - no hazards here you would think.

Halfords White Spirit: Bought from this reputable store to clean paint brushes, easy enough to use you would think. It should all be so simple except for one basic problem. The two reasonably fit and sane adults in this household couldn't open the "safe and secure system" i.e. the bottle cap. I had no choice other than to breach numerous health and safety guidelines by attacking the bottle with a Swiss Army knife - it seemed like the easiest way to gain access to the precious contents, by now desperately needed to save the life of a quickly hardening paintbrush. Then the remaining spirit had to be decanted into a leftover Lenor bottle creating obvious comic possibilities and more potential for accidents. The list of things I can't easily open grows, these are the current Top 5 problem packs I'm struggling with:

1. (New at No1) Halfords White Spirit - you'll stink and the sink will be spattered.
2. Rice Crispies Breakfast Bars (all flavours) - finger gym workout needed before tackling these bad boys early in the morning.
3. Cellophane on CDs - want to hear a tune? You'll need a sharp knife first.
4. Tinned mackerel - try to get the lid open without spattering yourself with a fine selection of Omega 3 enriched oils.
5. Tesco Bread - sealed with a tiny bit of tape and a weird tab that the Incredible Hulk couldn't open.

P.S. Just noticed this on a Toilet Duck Brush pack, "If accidently swallowed, seek medical advice", once you've done that (swallowing a toilet brush) you can also sign up for a lucrative circus career I'd imagine.

50s style Les Paul bridge: Carefully adjust the Allen Key so that the string length allows clear fretting and that the octaves are accurate - maybe.

There is nothing more annoying than some twat tuning and fiddling with guitar strings, plinking and plonking around. This weekend it was my turn to re-tension the truss rod, file the frets, adjust the bridge and chase octaves up and down the neck. In the end I'd made no significant improvements but I hadn't broken anything either - something of a triumph I'd say.

and the tramp

Jonathan Meades eating a crab and making people crabbit.

A She-Hulk picture that I like but is not relevant to tramp and lady themes.

I woke up this morning (as has been said many times) with "the lady is a tramp" running around in my head (the song, not wide-eyed cartoon dogs). I realised, as my version of the lyrics replayed within the great grey place of thinking, that I didn't understand quite what the song is/was about at all. That same deep lack of knowledge applies to a load of other songs, aka the big pile of misunderstood or not understood songs and lyrics, not even my friends at Wikiland can help out. I remain as ever an ignorant and useless lyrical correspondent.

Some people were upset, angry or possibly spitting out their pies over Jonathan Meades' "Football Pools Towns" docu-babble on BBC4. "Negative and ill-informed and unbalanced" some said. Not me however, it's tone was a kick in the footballs for Fifers like me (we become used to that) but in other bits, particularly on council house architecture, the decline of community and the aftermath of the Scottish industrial decline it hit the penalty spot. Truth is sometimes best served up by itinerant strangers and then left with us, like an unexpected present or time bomb. After an appropriate period of reflection it may all make sense...

"She gets too angry for Corrie at eight, she likes the bingo, puts the sugar on the slate, she never bothers to clean out the grate, that's why the lady is a tramp."

Blog could do better

I'd forgotten what we'd left in the garage.

October at last with nineteen long days to unfold before one of my more regular birthdays occur, every year they come around, just like clockwork. Because of this and nothing else really I regard October with some more affection than any of the rest, it's my birthday month so it must be better than the other eleven sorry segments. I think my car needs MoT'd this month, a probe will be gingerly placed up it's exhaust pipe and the tyres kicked I'd imagine, but I'm staying in denial of this until I have to pick up the phone and book a test then hear the bad news that is due to break.

To celebrate the first day of my birthday month (after an irritating day at work, the kind where you realise you seldom ever get things right and your vocabulary is far too small for an adult) I bowled into the local Tesco in the vain hope of finding some tasty teatime bargain in the stacked and crowded shelves. As I joined the shuffling, shopping masses mortal indecision quickly set in robbing me of free will and the ability to choose. Ten minutes later the fruit of my labours was two bags full of nothing in particular and I'm £18.50 lighter only to realise that what I really wanted was an Indian take away. I came home to be presented with a useful free sample sachet of toothpaste in the mail and two dead mice curled up like Inca mummies on the door mat - I ate a pork pie and an overpriced Cumberland sausage and returned to the happy place near the back of my brain, happy MoT and birthday when it comes.

Isle of Wight in the distance

"Like Icarus ascending over beautiful sewage farms, I tell Amelia it was just a false alarm" - Mis-heard Joni Mitchell lyrics, no. 23 in an infinite series. Isle of Wight in the far distance.

A unusually pleasant start to the day, some of it spent flying over the Isle of Wight, shimmering in the early morning sunshine and appearing quite unexpectedly through a gap in the cloudland blue. After that it was back to earth and a nice cooked breakfast in Southampton airport, not five star but adequate and a rare opportunity to scan today's Times, sip coffee and people watch.

When I got home a double disc special bells and whistles edition of "Magnolia" was waiting for me, a snip a £3.00 on Amazulu. I suppose I should insert the numerous discs one by one into the DVD player but I cant be bothered right now. I'm too excited about "It might get loud" magically manifesting itself soon to concentrate on any thing else at all. It's likely that bitter disappointment looms but who cares, living in wild expectation is great.

It may well become noisy

Death of a lifelong Socialist

It seems that the now completely delusional Mr Brown began his key-note speech by telling Labour members they were "the fighters and believers who change the world - we have changed the world before and we are going to do it again". I pity any sane person who paid money to attend this conference and listen to this rubbish, they deserve their money back. More free flowing pish followed:

Mr Brown announced a string of new policies, including:

• Ten hours of free childcare a week for 250,000 two-year-olds from families "on modest or middle incomes" - paid for by scrapping tax relief for better-off families
• A plan to house 16 and 17-year-old single parents in state-run shared houses rather than council flats
• A £1bn "innovation fund" to boost industry
• A new National Care Service to "provide security for pensioners for generations to come"
• A commitment, enshrined in law, that allocates 0.7% of GDP to international aid.

Nothing like fiddling in the margins whilst the country goes down the tubes. How about:

• Ten hours of free childcare during the stupidly planned "in-service days " that compromise the lives of every parent with schoolkids.
  
• A plan to house 16 and 17-year-old single parents in supportive family environments.
• A £1bn "innovation fund" to invest in some much needed public sector projects - filling up bloody potholes in the roads.
  
• A new National Care Service to "provide the offer of a £75k grant (paid at age 65) to those who volunteer for euthanasia at 75."
• A commitment, enshrined in law, that allocates 0.7% of GDP to UK based charities and not corrupt despotic African governments.
• Getting some adult level of responsibility, honour and accountability back into politics and banking for crying out loud! (I sneaked this extra one in).
  

I find it hard to stomach the car crash that is the current Labour Government, ill fitting, talentless and ill informed and sadly led to the edge of this sorry precipice by a Scotsman - that's the part that hurts the most. It should've run to a completely different script but it hasn't, come next June we'll be plucked from the drab despair of Labour into the eager and waiting arms of the glib, inexperienced and arrogant Conservatives: Abandon hope here and as for the Liberal Democrats, their naivety and their stupid policies are even harder to take, a vote for Mussolini would seem more relevant and worthwhile albeit he never did get the trains to run on time. Time for revolution methinks.

The perfect scone

A walk across the rooftops c/w the blue Forth (not the Nile).

We spent some time yesterday on the roof of Hopetoun House, looking across at Fife and the bridges and fine selection of period chimney pots. Despite staying in this area for years it was the first time we've actually been up there or inside the great house and it is well worth a visit. Once we'd fallen back to earth it was into the old stables, now a tea room: The scone score was 5/10 from Ali and 7/10 from me. The kids declined to mark the Brownie and ice cream but managed to force it all down just the same. Turns out that they make all the stuff on the premises so no white vans and pre-packaging, in the light of this information and a brief tour of the kitchens (I was chatting to the waitress) I revised my score to 8/10. The problem with that being I'm not sure what a 10/10 scone would be like or if I ever will find one, it could however mark the start of a new purpose and mission for me as the twilight years of pension and coffin dodging approach.

In the evening it was home for a huge meal back here at the ranch with Fraser and Karen followed by a jam session and impromptu concert featuring Fraser's shiny new saxophone. The material being a lively mixture of both of our songs conveniently extended, this was followed by some decent conspiracy theories were being well and truly explored. Despite these fresh new sources of worry I slept well - with a cat under my feet for some reason.

Giant sleeping (underfoot) cat face from earlier this morning.