More pyromania

No work today so killing the time day dreaming and attempting to recover from a stinking cold. There can be no better remedy than getting some pungent wood burning fumes up into your nose and sinus cavities from a little guitar based pyromania. I'm not so sure that many medical professionals would recommend this as a method of treatment but it seems to hold back some symptoms and I'm none the worse...cough! I'll regret this in twenty five years time when I'm in the middle of some legal wrangle over compensation for self induced suffering. Please note this guitar body has yet to be sanded, finished, oiled etc. etc.

Abandoned Cities of the Heart

There are not enough Chinese people to fill the many cities they have built. So they sit there, empty and clearly in the wrong place. I have to admire the strange and unrealistic optimism. If you build it you may well find that they just don't bother coming. Of course the beautiful part of this is that you have at least built something even if it is ugly. Some day their day will come.

Just checking

A good way to check pyrography is to take some photos and stand well back. Bear in mind this guitar still needs cleaned up, sanded and the wood has to be treated with oils.

Who needs friends?

With influential friends like these: Trust Uncle Frank to get it right. Trouble is that he's dead and all these other people are mostly alive or at least appear to be. Oh and his house is now up for sale for about $6m Dollars or thereabouts. 

Sad to see that Keith Emerson took his life. ELP were always a love/hate outfit and over time I failed miserably to stay with them; too much keyboards and not enough guitar (and expensive rugs and daft ideas), pretty obvious for somebody like me but I retained a soft spot for their first album. A must have for most kids in my year at secondary school... one of these days I'll rediscover it along with my hearing.

Cat roll

Above: The cat from down the street rolling about on top of our cupboard without a care in the world. He's been there most of the day, dozing and watching. He really doesn't give a flying fig. Eventually we persuaded him to leave and head back home to where he belongs (something he's not clear about). This was not easy requiring a number of special tools and devices, patience and cunning on our part. I'm glad to say that no animals were injured in the creation of this blog post.

Third eye

Many years ago I was invited to a religious meeting in St Hellier Jersey where I was told "my third eye could be opened". I felt a bit queasy at the thought but went along to the meeting, of course nothing really happened apart from an Asian gentleman playing a harmonium and chanting. It was a bit like a Nico gig in some ways. I saw this photo on Fuzzbook the other day and the memories came flooding back...well slowly returned and they were all rather blurry.

Have a break

By some clever calculation and devious deduction I've realised that I may only have somewhere between 14.5 and 11.5 working days left in my current employment. I'm suffering a kind of "ground rush". Something I'd heard of but was unlikely to experience as I've managed  to spend all of my life quite successfully avoiding parachute jumping. Alas there are other more subtle forms of ground rush it appears. Things appearing larger in the mirror than they seem to be and so on. No need to panic or be morbid or desperate about it, once this current state of employment is over I'll simply find another. Maybe better, maybe self employment or just open for general business. That is how I believe it works and so the world turns every day and twice a year the clocks change for no good reason.

Saint George

 

Sad to hear of the death of George Martin though at 90 after a full and incredibly creative life; sad isn't really the correct term nor a useful word. So time to reflect. I should probably sit down and listen to Abbey Road or Sergeant Pepper or anything else on a long list of production credits, Flanders and Swan even. I wont though, I have memories and of course as the week progresses the songs and voices and anecdotes and tributes will tumble out of every spare TV and radio moment until we move onto the next big death. These defining sounds, tunes and effects we grew up with, puzzled expressions, puzzled parents as the loose cannons fired volley after volley across the lives of a spoiled generation. Stereo was a wonderful, magical black vinyl thing and headphones were the ultimate trip and somebody could make Ringo's drums sound really cool. We just didn't realise what was really going on at the time but we did read the credits over and over again.

Scared Twitless

Just reflecting on my recent lack of tweeting anything, either rubbish, funny or meaningfully profound. Possibly seasonal, possibly mental. Sometimes there's just nothing formed up and ready to say at the time you could and should be saying something. So eventually I picked up two other tweet worthy things; CBQ's latest eclectic selection and the worthy world women's day of international things in general. Both occurrences are pretty much unrelated and on different scales but significant. If only I'd had my intelligent head on earlier in the day when it all seemed to mean much more. In life timing is pretty much everything.

No Northern Light Photos

A latte with smart water served down south.

So at the moment I'm definitely not here (there) enjoying coffee, I'm home alone missing the Northern Lights because I keep looking south and existing, like a penguin, mostly on fish. Downstairs a camera now monitors the cat flap because of the stray can refugee stand off we find ourselves in. Borders and boundaries make life complicated everywhere, even at this micro level. So right now I can't type anything else as another non-stray cat is insisting on lying across my keyboard.

This morning

Ben Lomond tries very hard but somehow fails to touch the early morning sky. Some other time perhaps.

Unsettled

Despite the fact that we have 999 TV channels and a smart TV that provides connections with all sorts or weird, wonderful and mediocre providers sometimes there's nothing much on TV. Strange but true. That tends to disturb the cats a bit, they like us there on the couch, staring like zombies into the great, humming silver screen and not moving too much. This tends to provide them with a feeling of calm and well being that's unavailable elsewhere (unless we're fully asleep).  Better recheck the schedules and the unwatched box-sets.

Golden Slumbers

OK I know that the sun sets everywhere, that's a common thing. We see it most days assuming there's no fog or low cloud or grey and murky weather. Here when that everyday thing happens the trees facing west into the fading light are bathed for a short time in a warm, ethereal glow that lasts only a few moments. Is there a name for it? I've no idea. These photos don't really do justice to the effect either.

Snowdrops

No snow but some real hail and a biting cold wind. Not a great afternoon for venturing out too far. I did however decide to refill the bird feeders and thought I'd better catch a shot of the scattered and fragile clumps of snowdrops before they disappear. 

Lookin' in the wrong place

Lyrics:

You say you want a love that's pure

You'll find her, heart right, you're sure

But not so much when you're face to face

Maybe you're just lookin' in the wrong place.

You're searching for a cause to believe in

Feel strong about, kick their teeth in,

See the solidarity trapped in a wider space

Maybe you're just lookin' in the wrong place

"Here comes the sun" done as modern jazz

John Coltrane's shadow on a piece of glass

You fall in love then you fall from grace

Maybe you're just lookin' in the wrong place.

Lookin' in the wrong place, twenty twenty vision sees the easy mistakes

When everybody moves in their happy ways but you're still lookin' in the wrong place.

Lookin' in the wrong place.

Still hibernating

As I walked out one March morning: well I forgot my phone and the weather was a bit iffy and there were dogs and birds and other walkers and things and then the weather turned so I turned and returned and eventually ate a late and very welcome lunch. Turns out that despite the date, media speculation, bulbs sprouting and the great portents in the night sky, Spring is still busy hibernating (as above) and who can blame her.

The breaking of the day

Today's extra and quite pretty dawn, captured from the bus to work by the wonderful Ms AG.

You have to wonder why the mystics, timekeepers and clever people from the past chose to add an extra day in February of all months. Why not July or August when we could all enjoy an extra day out hopefully in fine(r) weather. but it was not to be  for sound reasons of propaganda, stupidity and control. Any political party worth it's salt should shove that one in their manifesto, do away with the occasional 29th and add in the 32nd of July. Vote winner surely. Also an extra day to blog when my head's full of soup and cold chicken and there's a cat lying across the laptop.

Bad design

Note: no grizzly away fans, just a blaze of winter sun on row upon row of empty seats.

When they (?) orientated East End Park man years ago they failed to take into account the position of the sun in the sky relative to the assembled multitudes watching the game. As a result the home support spends eleven months of the year sat on the dark side of the moon, devoid of heat and light, freezing, chittering and buying hot, poisoned Bovril that's murky and grim enough to stun a beaver. Meanwhile the away fans, no matter how badly behaved, bask in the radiant warmth of the best of the Fife climate should any of them bother to turn up. Groan. Anyway and observations aside, we won the game in fine style, 6 goals to 1. If only every match was like that (apart from the searing cold).

Cameras roll

This film (LIFE) is about the photographer Dennis Stock's early work featuring James Dean. Slow and unsteady, introspective and disturbing. Dean is enigmatic, volatile and vulnerable, Stock is driven and self centred. Neither man knows his life and what to make of it. They stumble in the dark while the cameras roll and casualties pile up around them. 1950s USA looks grim and cold and the film industry is a great, careless, chewing, spitting juggernaut. Having said that it's a watchable film in a bleak, car crash kind of way and the photographs that came from the sessions live on in the strange, black and white afterlife of remembered popular culture.

A short period of artificial serenity

The Superwoman of Rock? This is complete nonsense and what's more everybody knows that Dr Strange and Captain America were always Fender guys. Not sure about the drummer either.

For some reason preparing and cooking up a pot of vegetable soup gives me a peaceful, easy feeling. I can't explain it. and it's nothing to do with the Eagles. I don't actually get much of a peaceful feeling serving it up or when eating it either. It just happens. Then there's the eternal quest to get down to the bottom of the dirty laundry basket and get everything clean again. No real peace here I'm afraid just a sense of perpetual churn. What about mixing up the smooth, decaf and regular coffees into different jars and not letting on? Hmm, just breeds and uncomfortable guilt and mischievous self doubt. Extracting a trapped mustard seed from the dark void of a worn molar without drawing blood? First remorse over eating that kind of mustard and then some low level of satisfaction once the errant seed is removed and spat out into the sink. Ugh. Winning an item on eBay. That's OK but there's usually a catch, a delay or a quality issue of some sort. Feeding the birds? A short spell of serenity then rampant anxiety as the cats eye them up. Frying three eggs and not breaking any of the yolks; nice.

Instant protien

Keeping up my strength, fortifying my resistance to ebola and stimulating my vigour with a regular can of cheap, slimy, oily fish. It's almost working and I'm feeling younger every day. The main bodily joints work more easily, times passes more quickly and I suffer fewer corner of the eye flashbacks than before. My ideas are less politically bankrupt and my beliefs are less stressful and more believable (but less achievable). My sense of humour is darker and deeper and my feet less itchy. My trousers fit and my shirts need less ironing. Comfortable shoes remain a problem however. You are what you eat it seems. In other news I'm turning my back on bananas, you can't get a decent one anywhere these days.

Detrimental

Large artistic beanbag has detrimental impact on pony.

#Fiscal Framework. What appears to be a good result for La Bella Scotia somewhat marred by the lovely Nicola's overuse of the words detriment and detrimental. Clearly help  is required in the speech writing office in the SNP. HQ The offending words appeared in various awkward forms 87 times during her regaling of the "Toon Cooncil" this afternoon. So we've a few bawbees for the next five years and "nothing detrimental" to report apart from the Tories being in charge of the Treasury and the collapse of the oil industry.

"Move along, move along, nothing detrimental to see here."

Scully's Song

They said you'd come home

But things have moved on

They said you'd come home

Nothing's moved on

It wasn't the stress of the job

Causing offence

It was bound to come true 

Glorious chaos

Ripping my sense

It was bound to come true

So it rained for five days

Hunting and fishing

I was rusting from the inside

Justice asleep but somewhere

She was not sleeping

The programmes don't help

The links

The YCL girls

The sauna

The doctors

The drugs

Missionaries

The punters 

The habits

Community men

They said you'd come home

But things have moved on

They said you'd come home

Nothing's moved on

Songwriting with Robert Mitchum

Any source of justifiable inspiration is a good source of usable inspiration. Black,white, film noir, moody, grim, rain, Blade Runner, X-Files. This has been a busy 24 hours, eating, occasionally sleeping and a fairly intense period of collaborative songwriting where we realise that we have nothing to say but that nothing is in itself meaningful and worth saying. So thanks to long gone movie star heavy weight Robert Mitchum for some blurry but useful inspiration in the wee small hours. Everything is currently running through the mincing machine as if it were mince but it isn't. Meanwhile in the kitchen real mince is cooking, Italian style. Robert M would've approved.

Stock footage of cats

Unsurprisingly some stock photos of cats in the "so you're back home from work, well we've been doing absolutely nothing but lazing on this bed all day" mode.  Also featured is a post haircut, half hearted, hatted selfie cleverly taken in a mirror and presented quite poorly even after some (all of 5 seconds worth of) editorial trickery on iPhoto. Alas things around are not always so serene, earlier this morning the cats staged an impromptu fight i.e. squawking and ranting at another slightly more hostile cat that happened to be outside on the roof staring into a window in a bid to gain territory. Just as well we humans don't try that sort of thing. 

Day off

A few hero types here.

Unusually I spent today not at work. I still made a few phone calls and sort of thought about things. That's all part of being off but not quite being switched off. I also walked during a brief spell of early spring (optimistic) sunshine. That took place just before the daily deluge. Then it was administration, a primitive sort of sorting, laundry and guitar and drum machine twiddling. I also fed a random selection of British wild birds, none of which showed any obvious gratitude. They just seem to scatter it all across the lawn as if it were some free food avian carnival day. Don't these birds realise the high cost of scientifically engineered, non-organic, long life bird food?  There was also a spot of cat shepherding and the essential routine of laundry pursuits was also followed. After that I chewed on some sardines as the rain came down. Back to work tomorrow. Hurrah!

One of those days

This picture is worthy of serious study and possibly a short story or even a novel. No motor accidents today, oh no. Then in some songwriting way just thinking about Egypt and Hawaii for some reason. Seeking inspiration and not finding it. Also listening to the radio for the randomness of it all. Then there's eBay.

Indestructable

I don't know why it is that so many drivers, at speed, in the dark and in the rain, consider themselves to be indestructible. Is it some horrible, ageing, creepy thing I'm now feeling? That desire not to drive as fast as possible, despite the conditions and not to stay in the outside lane all the time. To be a bit later because it really makes no difference. To be wary of standing water and blinding spray and just to be sensible enough to know that it has to be best to take it easy when the weather and visibility are poor.  With increasing years comes maturity that gradually gives way to avoiding anything reckless and I guess it all slowly solidifies into a new kind fear. Not sure I'm liking this new experience.

Cake of the Year

A pretty strong contender for Cake of the Year and it's only 15th February. Having said that I was not aware that there was a Cake of the Year until a few moments ago.

Dragon face

Still messing about trying to get the right name and mark or motif as a user / business name for the various guitars I'm building. Dragon parts, eyes, tails and scales all figure and I usually google for ideas and simple designs to transfer, anyway this somewhat natural dragon head came up on my Twitter feed today. It may well come in useful when I get down to doing some actual concentration and focus in on the subject properly.

Elsewhere in the universe

This would explain almost everything if I could understand it.

Nice sharply cold but sunny Valentine's Sunday morning, early breakfast in F&Bs and a toddle around the shops and then home for bird feeding and catching up on odd domestic tasks. Meanwhile as we sit here doing this kind of stuff whilst pointing various kinds of highly dangerous nuclear weapons at ourselves bigger things are taking place elsewhere in the universe.  The problem with that is that we can't quite understand them. Heads slowly fill with treacle when the boffins talk and we of little imagination and patience stare blankly for a while, slack jawed and then return to our lattes and phones to study cats jumping into boxes or digital sprites flickering away on some pointless and noisy task. Of course I'm still puzzled by the modern conundrums offered up in car park designs and how to find your way out; no hidden galaxy quest for me it seems. Creatives still struggle on as a minority as a lost audience of confused enthusiasts listens to highly compressed music or watches action movies that contain no real action, elsewhere people are starving, drowning or being bombed.  I'd like to think that out there amongst the hidden galaxies some universal sense of common sense is prevailing and that they are either totally ignoring us (for good reasons) or about to invade the fuck out of us in order to set us straight. 

Mike up a piano

Firstly get yourself a suitable piano and somebody who can play it. Then get somebody else along who knows how to mike it up (thanks JF and FT) and set up the necessary equipment. Then do some recording. Then sit back with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee whilst all that happens. It's really as simple as that.

Cat in the Bathroom

Cats can make themselves comfortable in strange and uncomfortable places. I guess that's how they survived on the long road out of Egypt, various treks to the North Pole and how they managed to cross the vast Pacific Ocean to quietly colonise New Zealand. It was probably during journeys of this type that they developed the "psychotic stare" and the "jumping franticly when somebody gets near" routines. Presumably the "randomly sitting on the laptop keyboard" move came a little later in their history.

Wrath of the call centre

Never a good experience to hear via voicemail that your credit card has been hacked. It's followed of course by a long phone call where you are passed between handlers, all punctuated with irritating music whilst you forget and fumble through various versions of passwords and personal facts. I always remember nothing and the cat invariably sits across all the vital documents during most of the critical conversations. Thankfully the would be fraudster got none of my cash or credit (not much cash, much more credit of course) and I walk away feeling like an innocent man, even though I've done nothing wrong. So another brightly coloured credit card goes into the plectrum making machine, on-line shopping stops for a while and I re-register new versions of myself here and there. Groan.