Understanding Zappa

Still life with soup but minus peach.

"I think that being a cynic is the only rational stance to take in a contemporary society. I would find it quite a compliment to be called an arch-cynic; that sounds almost important."

I'm not so slow a reader that it shows but it's taken me nearly three months to wade through Zappa's biography, only now, as we (that's me and my guardian angel) reach the eighties is it becoming an enjoyable read, bearable in some form or in a strange way uplifting. He's not a likable guy but he is remarkably normal and honest. Can't think of anybody (living) in the current mess of modern music who compares. I do like the view that, as most people are dumb (there is proof) then if we're made in God's own sweet image, then he must be pretty dumb. Worshiping him might be not so good an idea. It does make an uncomfortable kind of sense, it also applies to aliens, politicians and time travelling tourists from the future.

Drove my 6th Chevrolet type vehicle today but who is really counting? This one was an Orlando, a bizarre piece of convoluted design that looks like something out of Transformers meeting something out of Flash Gordon in a piece of Korean artwork. Big, lurching, unattractive and gas-guzzling - I might just want one.

nIcE,bRiGhT,wAsTeD tImE

Nice, bright, wasted time. The frozen wastes shine in the floating January sun. Everything stuck together by the rare pure ice of 2012. A tiny glacier eats up gardens, hedges and fences, make sculptures from cardboard and twigs, pebbles and tyre tracks, piled up and collapsing in icy avalanches, refusing to move. Cars and doors are stiff, the early morning resistance of white windows and fused locks, ice to the fingertips and words stuck to solid breath. Traffic warnings and winter terms are scattered across the airwaves. Jack-knives, collisions, black ice and skid risks. Every part of life becomes more risky and over reported. Coffee seems hotter, more welcome, less boring, steamy.

Cats refuse to move, hide in blankets and dodge the still, chill drafts. Reluctantly ,moving slowly and deliberately under protest and under our feet, as if their fur coats had stopped working. We don't stop working, we journey out, tense in the shock of the low temperature, hurrying to get back indoors or basking as the car heater finally yields some of it's precious heat. I make a pot of hot chilli, let it steam and challenge the season, hold it in a bowl and breath it in, drive away the evil spirit, kill the imagined germs. The Winter spirit that ranges across the land, for the time being, like a cold steel guitar, a long note blows over Central Scotland, the peculiar Celtic blues play and sing out across the silver landscapes. Nice, bright, loud, wasted time.

Look through any window...

...an unfinished project. Today was cold and crisp, the light was bright and fragile, the breakfast was bacon, eggs and toasted rolls, the day was today. A day in the life. Look through any window.

Scotland: Cut down in it's prime

698 Gregorian years since a victory over the English, that's history etc. So why keep on keeping the score? Alex Salmond is someone who can only be described as indescribable. I've watched his antics this week and been appalled and embarrassed in equal measure. His crowing cackle, bulging eyes and whining voice, his warped self belief and his evangelical sense of purpose and artificial empowerment are staggering and irritating. Worthy of a bad Orson Welles character portrayal and in some ways asking for an assassination bid from the lunatic fringe of lunatics out there somewhere. I know that I'm seriously temped to throw any convenient heavy object at our under perfoming HD TV whenever his smug mug appears. Conveniently and as I was working on the south coast of a place called England this week I was quizzed by some bemused local inhabitants about the SNP's plans and purposes. Nobody down there gets it other than seeing it as a back door plot to have two future proofed Tory governments operating between Scotland and England – a cunning, subterranean plan to wrestle power from dimwitted leftish wingers forever, connected by a mixture of high speed and low speed railway systems.  

The Stilton Diaries - Day 4

The continued consumption of Stilton in some haphazard pursuit of hallucinations via dreams continues. My first observation being that the crackers don't really work but the additional spicy lentil soup does when used as a medium to transport the cheese effect from the tongue to the centre of the brain does, almost. There also was the added effect of a laboriously slow news day being strung out on Reporting Scotland. As a result I slept for all of twenty five minutes on the couch and dreamed of...err, nothing in particular. The remaining cheese crumbs on the chopping board were however very much appreciated as a primitive sort of desert. More wine might help.

Sometimes I even dream about rare European cars emerging from grey clouds and the subsequent happy years of ownership. Then there are new levels of mechanical reliability to be experienced and many fine examples of enduring build quality to be enjoyed. Late night cheese help this fantasy move along. All the answers can be found on eBay.

Urinal dislocation

At times a man may wonder just how many urinals he has used and blankly peered into (as well as peed into). Which one was the best, the worst, the most bizarre? Then he realizes that actually he cant really remember much about them or their details or anything else. So he then ponders on how the brain may retain some impression, like a pencil sketch, but quickly he sees that there is very little of this information held for any length of time. A strange eraser is at work, beyond all human control. A feeble mind mapped photograph is taken but it rapidly becomes fuzzy and vague to the point that nothing can be recalled at all.

Life is lived and then, for the most part it's immediately forgotten.

When the Stilton kicks in

Day two of the mind altering Stilton based experimentation process found me seeing some quite strange animals ranging across the garden, as if in Bible times. I'd always suspected that the game keeper had a hidden agenda and there was something unearthly about his midnight whistling, that and the break of dawn cooing and crowing episode, just below the living room window sill. After a while I drifted into a deep sleep and almost drowned. The main problem was that I'd left a suitcase in the boot of a hired car, a compact European model, the car however was normal sized. I was about to check in for the flight home but my dear wife was becoming more and more frantic about the lost case, fortunately the ground staff carried out an exhaustive search, stopping any passing vehicle but the suitcase refused to respond. It was then that I found myself trapped in a series of revolving doors, none of which I could escape from but from the corner of my eye I could almost swear I saw somebody with my suitcase. In fact every other person I saw was carrying it or at least an exact replica. When I finally made it to the check in (or was it the check out?) I was informed that the 20 minute late flight was now 40 minutes late in being early. The compliant and beaten passengers filed back into the lounge, there was a tangible air of disappointment but the colours were brighter than anything I'd ever seen in any airport. Just then Ali found the diamond earring, in a safe place, where it should have been all along. What a relief and a long paragraph.

I still blame the Stilton for this unforgivable episode.

Can white men sing the blue Stilton?

How different the world would been had Aldous Huxley laid off the Californian mescaline and just gone straight for the Stilton. The (disappointingly thin and weedy) Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell would have had more volumes than a Song of Ice and Fire and a generation to hairy twerps would have found cheese based drugs instead of the other less tasty South American kinds. Dairy farmers would be millionaires (and therefore no longer dairy farmers) so itinerant townies would have moved in and made poorer quality Stilton for the masses and the Poundland dump bins. A sharp, short, badly economic crisis would then follow and the rest as they say is a bad Monday headline in the Sun. Whatever the outcome dreams would have been sweeter, more colourful and even more brighter and bizarre. Such is the power of the Big S, Stilton to you sir

I scored a mighty, reduced price, ex-Christmas slab at an out of town supermarket the other day, it was 50p and about to expire according to the many health warnings on the label, I paid no heed to this however. A third of it has now gone and funnily enough so have about a third of my brain cells, but oh! how we laughed. Even today's stupid news stories about the SNP failing to see that independence might actually affect other neighbouring  countries and the Tory Cabinet touring the future Olympic slums almost made sense to me. Such is the power of cheese when applied straight and undiluted to the forehead. Last night was just a blur apart from an appearance of Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother and a wee glass of Port that was floating about six inches in front of my eye line. Luckily I was found fit to drive today but was then marked down as completely unfit for shoplifting. Bugger that, I'll just grate a little more cheese then. To sleep, perchance to travel in time and get locked in a shower.

Radio Sucks

Our real radio on a Friday afternoon in January.

Well actually it doesn't, I'm almost enjoying the eclectic output of Radio 6. There I've finally said it.

The Demented Waving Brothers...

...would cry out "fried eggs!" just before giving that final, fateful wave. I've no idea why but it must have had some significance. It was also a suggested chant in Om's list of "good things to shout at people". Anyway here are two I prepared earlier.

Lost Les Paul

Lost: 1957 Les Paul Guitar c/w Bigsby. Black. No serial number. Last seen in Toronto Airport, 17th June 1970. As per the above photo.

Response via comments below please. Reward.

Rob Brydon's jumper?

In the picture: Rob Brydon can be seen here not only with Steve Coogan but also wearing  my jumper. A jumper which I believed to be in the bottom of the washing basket when all the time it was away spending a week of fine dining, lounging in posh hotels and footering across the North of England with somebody else - a Welsh comic actor in fact. A fundamental piece of the jumper/wearer relationship has been broken between my jumper and I. I'm not sure that I can ever trust it again.

I talk to the trees but they are busy talking to themselves: Today we went to Linlithgow to try to find a wool shop. Thankfully there was one (albeit I was disappointed to find that it wasn't actually made of wool) and it had the green wool required for my daughter's latest art project. Shops are brilliant really. On the way back I became aware of the conversations taking place between the trees that had survived the recent gales. They were all pretty relieved (many complaining of back and elbow injuries) but obviously more upset over their many friends and colleagues who had fallen, never to rise again. Seeing them being cut up into small pieces with chainsaws doesn't help either. A sad and cruel end for those wooden hearted stalwarts of the forest. I didn't realise how unpopular cyclists were with trees either.

Dingleberry Pie Rescue

Sadly this little bird failed to make it through the stormy week we've just experienced, a cat (who I refuse to name) is of course to blame. The bird expired upstairs in the bathroom, for some reason that's where cats take their victims.

The original Dingleberry Pie rescued from various awful fates and wheelie bins.  Part of the  post storm clear up and freezer emptying exercise. Tasty and with a spongy texture but also producing Pac-Man memories strangely enough.

Fantasy v reality...

...on this corner they meet, at the top of the street, not every single day but pretty much most, if don't see them there, I can only assume you're a little bit lost (or have very poor eyesight).

Doing everything they can

Collapsed trees block local roads...

...and cut vital services.

Battery powered: And so it came to pass that my unfortunate prediction unfortunately came true, a few brief seconds after releasing the Monkey thing to the blog sphere the power did indeed cave in and my world fell into sudden chilly darkness. 101mph winds were sweeping across Scotland brining a familiar pattern of chaos, angry dog walkers complained the MSPs and radio chat shows (all about this sort of thing and why was there no red warning?). Scotland seems to be located in the wrong place at the moment. Bugger all you can do really, as far as I can see. So as the storm raged in our small part of the universe dozens of brave trees fell over in that strange way they do, emitting loud, fatal snapping noises, then as if by some higher purpose landing across roads and bumping into telegraph poles - and so we were cut off. I immediately took a hot bath and reflected on the best toe nail cutting methods, shame I don't have a best toe nail. Then the Christmas decorations were boxed up for another year. Thereafter a deeper gloom descended as the brutal truth became clear, torches were located, candles set up like sentries, a gas burner located and guitars tuned – the power free siege and standoff had begun. I did venture out to photograph the wooden road block, buy whisky and marvel at the many dead traffic lights, as it's a public holiday nobody in their right mind will fix anything, it's not in the contract apparently.

I had also discovered that our extensive radio collection was mainly mains powered and each set stubbornly refused to accept the multiple battery requirements I offered. Why things are designed to be awkward beats me and why middle aged men are also designed to be victims of these awkward designs beats be twice. Eight batteries are needed to power up a sleeping radio, (where are they kept?) hardly economical but now I can connect with modern society without just sitting in the car running the engine for company. Thankfully Radio Scotland stopped playing accordion music for a few hours and settled for broadcasting long lists of closed roads, dead trains as they played more Mull Historical Society (every bloody day it seems), REM, Bob Dylan and Adele, pity about the obvious tyranny of the populist playlist. Three days into 2012 , one power cut, Hurricane Bawbag II and I'm already missing Radio 6's sweet vinyl sounds, never thought that would happen.

The power outage outstayed it's welcome. As evening broke upon us a great coal carrying exercise began. Two huge fires were started in a vain attempt to kill the cold and dark in a heated pincer movement, this was working fine until I realised that with no electrical pump operating the hot water system, it was in danger of over heating, the consequences would be bad I imagined. A extended period of washing dishes in scalding water in an OCD manner followed while Ali massaged salmon and fresh bread into an edible format. Meanwhile in the background a ticking time bomb was not really ticking, just melting, my precious mixed curry, hash brown and stir fry vegetable collection, housed in a now dead a slowly warming freezer. Ugh. The good news is that red wine seems to be impervious to these mild domestic emergencies, indeed it appears to taste better the deeper the crisis, particularly in the studied glow of slowly failing candles. Good to know.

After 36 hours the power is back on. What a relief.

Blog Monkey

A wall painting from the mythical island of Madeira.

The potential for a power cut: Waking up this morning to winds blowing around the house sounding like tortured Jumbo Jets, the cats are frantically purring up their own storm, determined to create an island of peace in some cosy corner were their fur wont get ruffled. Outside people are failing to light their first precious cigarette, read newspapers at bus stops or cycle in a westerly direction as the storm passes over. The radio waves will be full of information packets about routes and bridges being closed to high sided vehicles and so on. It's a dismal Tuesday in January in the UK, what do you expect? I've a clear path set before me; apart from some real work that's hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles, some real ironing that's hanging on coat hangers and some necessary hanging around just to get life on track in this brave new January. I must not get distracted by stupid Twitter feeds, my holiday weight as opposed to my true weight, the pile of left overs in the fridge, the dead mouse out of reach in the airing cupboard, the perpetually leaking windscreen or the many communication failures that dog me. At least I've got the blogging monkey PI down from my back and it's only 0815.

Possible resolutions and a poor choice of font

As it's a new year and stuff like that we decided to redecorate the lounge, it was a big job but a lot of fun, nearly there then. It took three fried eggs and three slices of toast to prompt my recovery. Along the way we considered possible resolutions that might fit with our new environment:


Make people smile.
Write more songs.
Earn enough to give someone a job helping me with things I don't do well.
Do good things.
Do everything the best I can.
Do my best not to do bad things.
Not beat myself up if I do bad things or fail to do good things.
Not beat myself up about feeling good about the good things
Stay alive and healthy.
Have the guts to stand up for what I believe is right, even if that is sometimes scary/crazy.


(All the above stolen with gratitude from Woodstock Taylor who stole them from Woody Guthrie who stole them from...)

2k12

Topical Saltire type picture taken on our recent holiday, this in no way means I'm sympathetic to the cause of the SNP, just a nice photo and a way to wish a happy new year to one and all etc. So now that the different year has begun we can finally all calm down and use that extra leap year day to go out and do something interesting or at least delusional.

If only God had written the Bible

It's the end of the year, I'm at work and I need pepped up by something. As, generally speaking and subject to modern lyrical confirmation the drugs don't work I settle for some cola and a Kit Kat. Strangely my mind can't settle on much other than marvelling and focusing on the deserving misery of others, not a worthy theme for the demise of 2011 or good for the soul, but these things happen. You can at times be overcome by uncontrollable and often laughable thought patterns that add no value or bring home the Brownie Points. The blurred line between acceptable and guilty pleasure is becoming clearer and I must make that crossing. Perhaps this schadenfreude will leave me as I meditate on the wise words of Obadiah 1:12, but no, that would never work. Middle Eastern claptrap from the dawn of so-called civilisation can't help, I'm far too European now. So seeing or hearing about the smug and self righteous hitting some temporary lifetime reef is rather good and I prefer, despite all my higher, better, (whatever you categorise them as ) feelings to savour the moment. I know fine will it wont last either way but when an inferior snake oil salesman buys a tanker full of somebody else's even worse snake oil you have to laugh.

The Black Keys – El Camino, a late but welcome Christmas present: In heaven there will only be guitars, bass, drums, odd and meaningful vocals and pinches of well placed keyboards. I'm glad I've sorted that out for myself. Maybe one day all music will sound like this, only enhanced by the vocals of Lulu, the production of Rick Rubin and far away in the distance and almost lost in the final mix but discernible just the same the faint growl of a wah wah pedal. I plan to die happy.

Average weather

Back home from a brief sojourn to Madeira only to find that average weather prevails and that soot mostly travels downwards when trapped in a chimney. As I am typing this without the benefit of spectacles or a safety harness it could go in any direction and bouts of bad spelling and terminal malaise will follow. I could try to review 2011 in these odd moments I have captured for my own personal use and reflection but I wont, the past being the strange place it always was and one inevitably distorted by poor memory, creative imaginings and distorted perception. Anyway there still are a few more days to go, garlic pasta to eat, red wine to drink and outside, seasonal adjusted but nonetheless completely average weather to enjoy. I did have a climate graph I wanted to post here that showed the problems we face here in West Lothian but I gave up due to the amount of HTML distortion it created and what's the point in moaning about what you can't change. I'm off to buy an enormous ham joint thing and I've no idea quite what to do with it apart from painting it with honey and stuffing it into a hot oven. After that it'll be a long period of stretched  improvisation in food preparation and home made music - life goes on.