The Ascent of Man

Dear 21st century people, do you think you know a lot about art and design? Perhaps a bit more than your parents or grandparents? Things do move on. Here's some detail from the magnificent panel of sixteen lions at Chauvet Cave in France, created by our ancestors more than 30,000 years ago. That puts these pieces of work well outside of any bolted on biblical timeline*. The drawings are not done using rattle cans or Sharpies either. Take a short tour here.

*It's all been said, many times, many ways ... Merry Christmas ...  etc. By my reckoning we've got a fairly good handle on the last couple of hundred years of history. Moving backwards the past becomes increasingly unknown apart from royal families, academics and the lives of churchmen and the like. Common people's histories are more or less unwritten or assumed. They pass through time with little or no record of their deeds. There are dark facts.

Beyond that we hit the realms of dark speculation, interpretation of found objects and scattered artworks, ruins, fables, legends and tales. Then the salvaged translations of religious writings and the stone carvings and cave paintings, some clear, some opaque, some fictional, never fully understood or explained. It's all very easy to find or choose to believe something that fits your views and completely misunderstand it's meaning and context and of course the victors always compose a narrative that suits them. As for actual historians, if you assume that people can actually be known, maybe their work is not in vain.

Where You're Coming From

   Vikings, Celts, Anglo Saxons.

Journey to the Centre of Nowhere

We loaded up the instructional words directly from the Book of the Gatekeeper: 

"All I'll ever ask is the honest answering of these three simple questions."

1. Are you human enough to take a first step through the ever shifting doorways on this incredible journey? 

2. Is it important to you to remain fully dust free or is a modicum of dust on your cuffs or lapels something you can tolerate? 

3. Do you suffer at all from travel or motion sickness if you are restrained by a device of some sort?

Bake Off Legacy

Four Pollywood crusty rolls, £1 from Tesco, a review: These were not as good as they might have been but neither were they as bad as they could've been. We actually managed to accidentally grill them at 220 degrees in contravention of the clearly written instructions. Swift action was required to save the day/breakfast. The bacon, also cooking in the same oven but being grilled unbeknownst to us, also suffered some carbon damage and was blackened. We just ate the lot anyway. No PH handshakes were earned however. Next season maybe.

Tesla Bubbles

I reckon I'd probably be able to afford a 2019 Tesla in 2029. Not sure how solid a purchase one might be by then. Who would want a ten year old iPhone with bunged up software? The same marketing and engineering principles apply to both of these consumer items so no purchase of this type is ever in any sense future proof. Maybe I should revise my goals. Having said that I'm lucky enough to own two of the marques listed on the right, neither of which I regret buying but a Tesla, for whatever reasons always seems like some bright, shiny (but poorly constructed), tantalizing and elusive thing. 

Maybe a few more of them need to gravitate to taxi use and so lower their aspirational image a bit, as happened to the Prius (a once desirable car nobody really wants anymore). A local driving school already has a Tesla, the rot may be slowly setting in. In any event I'll just sit here and watch what happens - but who really needs a Tesla when you have a free bus pass anyway?

Ovation and the Frippian Arm Position

I live in the hope of a better world so I just felt that these paragraphs and notably the "Frippian Arm Position" needs to be read and understood by as many folks as possible.

While it was produced, Ovation's super-shallow 1867 Legend was the recommended guitar in Robert Fripp's Guitar Class as the acoustic 1867 Legend has "a gently rounded super-shallow body design that may be about as close to the shape and depth of an electric guitar as is possible without an intolerable loss of tone quality." 

Fripp liked the way the Ovation 1867 fitted against his body, which made it possible for him to assume the right-arm picking position he had developed using electric guitars over the years on deeper-bodied guitars. The Frippian arm position is impossible without uncomfortable contortions*.

Intolerable loss of tone quality becomes a thing of the past.

No more uncomfortable contortions* either.

*I may well compose a scathing article about this whole thing when I get some time to myself.

World's Smallest Fridge

A large picture of the world's smallest fridge. In the future we plan to consume a lot less, mostly for altruistic and economic reasons. Large, vulgar fridges (you know the ghastly American style wardrobe sized type that could swallow a Tesco van loaded with perishables) are a thing of the past and not cool (?). The future will be fashionably tiny as will be the enhanced food and drink - and the people and their minds.

Not Christmas, Just November

Unseen eyes, uneyed scenes. There are eyes everywhere. The eyes have it. The non-eyes have not. And our little light flickers bravely in the dark for the time being. Everybody needs to know their place in the food chain and act accordingly. Did I say food chain? I meant life in general. Though you will be eaten, regardless of what you say or do. Those racked with unhealthy seasonal guilt may not taste particularly good, it sours the blood apparently.

Strange night time events are commonplace around here; Liberal Democrats smashing the Police Station windows, English tourists flocking to the sewage outfall, young fascists driving recklessly on Chinese electric mopeds, drunks shouting at invisible dogs, bus (stop) wankers and the odd alien abduction from the Co-op car park.

But as it's the season of lights, the Council have erected Christmas flickering things all across the way. The prime contractor was a firm aptly named Marx Bros. A festooning of temporary traffic lights, redundant street furniture and assorted pavement trip hazards are awaiting all the regular and unsuspecting funeral attendees. All as a practical means of spreading joy and reducing crime as we bask in the wind generated glow of flashing neon that scares both demons and folks prone to epilepsy.

Old Masters in the World of Glue

I imagine that the Egyptians and Romans knew a thing or two about glue, mixing it up using the boiled bones of horses, dead relatives and added honey for viscosity. It worked well enough on the pyramids and the various aqueducts and temples that have all passed the test of time and violent conflict. Who can ever forget their first sight of the robustly constructed wooden bicycle and straw helicopter they found in the garage by Tutankamun's tomb?

Modern glues are a bit less exotic, cooked up with mysterious chemicals that you dare not inhale and with a potency that will stick your flesh to zips, pockets and any passing cats quite without warning. "Great care is required" or words to that effect are there on the container's impossibly small print you've now obscured with the equally sticky paint from your dirty thumb print. The pain of DIY multi-tasking.

My technical secret, once the glue is applied and I'm unstuck from whatever I've stuck myself to, is to utilize handy nearby objects to complete the task and accelerate the drying process. As illustrated above.

Subterranean Lyrics

Words, spaces, more words, some words missed out, some misspelled. You can read them backwards, bottom to top, right to left.  You may be homesick, you may be blue. It's up to you. If you're young enough to remember the 60s then you're clearly not dead yet.

Black Monday

Black Friday deals on a Monday: I clicked on a Black Friday offer email from one of the main online guitar retailers just to see what they were offering - as you do. I know full well it's just click bait of a sort but I considered it to be worthwhile research. The promising selection button said that there were 31 "guitar deals" running. Wow! 

I was somewhat disappointed to discover that 26 of the 31 guitars on offer were in fact ukuleles. Clearly the precise definition of "guitar" has been changed by market forces one rainy afternoon, as I lay sleeping on the couch no doubt. Thankfully I've caught up with the revised terminology now and somehow resisted the serious temptation (?) to spend £49.99 on one of these tidy but tiny guitar shaped objects.

Fibonacci Mushroom Cloud

I'm a slow learner, whether it's PI, the Golden Ratio, Fibonacci or Calculus, I'm bound to struggle with squiggles. One of my grandsons was riffing comfortably on maths, adding cubed numbers to cubed numbers as we watched endless episodes of "Young Sheldon". I was catching up and nodding uncomfortably with the series and the emerging digits. Numbers are the centre of everything but to me sometimes they are just like blinking lights or strange anagrams without any letters. 

Perhaps I suffer from an undiagnosed condition; a bizarre mixture of lack of attention, self pity and generational ignorance? It's quite the fashion these days and it often excuses you from all kinds of socially tricky situations where happy chat and vacuous smiling are required. I'm no Einstein but I am just about as crazy as he was.

Now that I'm over 66 and finding myself in fairly regular contact with medics and the like I could just throw myself on their mercy and ask for an assessment of my brain's processing power. Then as the results appear and the fickle finger points, my whole life will make sense and they'll prescribe a course of non-nuclear statins, some dietary moderation and one of those Zen colouring books.

McDonald and Giles

Bandwagon jumping: Today's picture is the hard to find CD copy of McDonald and Giles from 1970, remastered in the same way everything else has been by now (kitchen safety dagger inserted for scale). It's always a labour of love on someone's part. They were all the rage back then too. Well no they weren't but they make an interesting footnote in the sprawling King Crimson landscape, not a piece of territory I'm wholly familiar with either. Too complicated in every sense. I was just a lad at the time and didn't know any better. And there they are, McDonald and Giles, all hair, ties and girl friends.

It's odd listening to this ancient album without any actual contemporary memory or references to go with it.  Like digging up a stranger's time capsule. A magazine with no photos (that's called a book). There's nothing to hang it all onto, no events or pain or a friend's half baked opinions. Progressive rock happened in a bubble that has no ending. It floats on it's own unexplored sea as if it had never existed until I heard it today. If it didn't then there's only a philosophical paradox of sorts to either cling to or run from. So would I have liked it at time? I'll never know.

P.S. Despite the criminal retrospection that plagues this blog I'm fortunate enough to have grandchildren who keep me posted on current music and, as is the family tradition, a lot of what they listen to isn't just the mainstream pap, it's actually pretty good.

Toblerold

Recurring but ancient pub conversations: I may be covering familiar ground here but just to confirm, for what may be the final time (as boredom sets in), that there is indeed a bear on every Toblerone box/packet. It's not well hidden either.

This may be the last time these pipes are seen, for a while I hope. After a few small failures with my design brief I've successfully fabricated the main parts required to box in the underbelly of the boiler. Next stages are to slap on a second coat of paint and the actual gluey installation. All being well you'll hear no more on this other than some mild swearing on my part.

Dodgy Skip/Cosmic Debris

Another day, another badly loaded skip. At some point in the near future I will face the righteous anger of the skip-motor driver as he refuses (quite rightly) to uplift this small but poorly put together collection of building debris. I am to all the world innocent in this matter but clearly guilty by association. The great injustices of the universe strike again and my head hangs in sorrow. Inside my triggered consciousness a faraway, determined, ghostly Frank Zappa voice is quietly chanting: 

"But I said, look here brother who you jivin' with that Cosmik Debris? Now who you jivin' with that Cosmik Debris? Look here brother, don't you waste your time on me."

Permission from the Ghost King

"The days of the Ghost King may be numbered. The numbering system used may however be one you are unfamiliar with. You can't just assume that any normal measures or ways of being might apply here. This is no place like any other, in fact this is no place. Kings can be cruel, they can be charitable, they just might be ghosts. What would you want to be dealing with here? The power, the holding on to power, the  wielding of the weapons of war? Supernatural conflict is not for the faint hearted and this is not some kind of written warning or a set of simple instructions. No. It's just my ramble, my ragged account as I ponder my up and coming encounter with the King and my eventual fate. It may all happen as I would wish, should he grant me his permission."

I read the note again, mouthing the words. I thought I recognized the hand. From a time past (though that is hardly an adequate explanation) and I could not quite be sure when. A lot of time had passed too quickly for me to provide a clear account of any kind. It was like being swept away in some river or flood. For some it was still happening, for others it was over a long time ago, for me it was just about to strike and I don't mind saying that I was afraid.

The crunched up parchment began to tear it at the edges. Open, ragged lines up and down appeared as I ripped across the page and squeezed it in my fist till it was like a dull grey cricket ball. I imagined any good ghost would still be able to read it, even now, and still read the signature.

Across the courtyard there was the main gate and entrance to the site. Two guards stood on either side, up on the walkway. I could see them pointing out into the distance as I waited. There was someone approaching and they became animated by the sight. They signaled the guard house for assistance, or so I thought. The gate opened and the riders were met with no challenge.

The whole thing was a trap ... but not for me. They rode past me without a nod or word of recognition. They were pale, tired but determined looking. Hardy types dressed in the style of the East. The five horsemen heading into the heart of the complex were after a far higher quarry than me. I could only assume that it was the Ghost King himself. How do you kill a ghost?

Randoms From the Desktop

A battered shop front in Charlotte Street, Edinburgh. Naturally I accidentally read the first name as Bedlam but then realized I'd got it completely wrong. The story in my head fizzled out at that point.

Part of a French style breakfast and hangover cure that my daughter in Aberdeen kindly put together for us. A happy memory.

A strange piece of Gerald Scarfe memorabilia from a 1974 Usher Hall gig/tour that I attended.

My desktop tends to be littered with "useful" images and docs that I fully intend to explore or utilize some fine day. In my head these are harvested and stored away in the hope that they will "really come to mean something". These are a few examples.

No Law Against Love

Quite pleased with this simple video version of "no law" that we cobbled together recently. Been trying, with limited resources, to put together a video to go with the song for a while (last Tuesday). Done it at last.

Food Coffee Cake

The overarching high level set of food contains within it the subsets of both coffee and cake who both contain various other subsets. This is not quite as it's shown on this sign (nearby to our billet)  - or is it? Perhaps they are all equals in the opinion of the proprietor but I doubt that. It may just be the lack of punctuation or the use of a regular font suggests a certain order or not. The sign's job is of course to attract customers with some basic, bright information. It does that. I doubt it bothers anyone.

P.S. Until quite recently I thought local anaesthetic was an anaesthetic using local "ingredients". Maybe just sourced locally by some larger medical supply chain. Seems reasonable.

Early Onset Serenity

Peace of mind and the achievement of total serenity is often defined by academics as the simple pleasure of gaining easy access to a handy private portaloo in a convenient location set in your own garden grounds. We, as of today, may well have reached peak serenity by having now taken ownership of this pristine shrine to all things personal. Life is truly complete albeit in a kind of fractured way.