Monday seems like Tuesday

Things we didn't enjoy tonight; various TV shows and films such as University Challenge, The Kennedys, Under the Skin, Neil Oliver blethering about the Celts, the John Peel Lecture with Brian Eno, the weather forecast, some weird dragon film on the Sci-Fi Channel, Alaskan Goldrush and not finding series 5 of Homeland (because it doesn't begin until next week). These things, it would seem are sent to try us, like chocolate. We seek entertainment and meaning here, there and nowhere in particular and are thwarted by a lack of proper choice and our own unrealistic expectations. We're not bored really, we're active but we're still looking for something that we can't quite describe or define. We're hardworking and tired, we move around and find meaning in...meaning something. We like macaroni cheese and sausages but there are other foods. We like Mondays but on a Monday Tuesday can seem to be a better bet.

The Martian Chronicled

So is there a word for that feeling you get when you get to the end of the big film, the titles are rolling, the music is swelling up around you and slowly everybody leaves their seats, kind of stumbles along to the steps and with coats and bags and stuff and heads down the stairs in the flickering film light to the flat front of house and then out into through the two sets of double doors to the main corridor that gets you back to the foyer and daylight? Your head is in in odd place and it's tough to strike up conversation. Things like "wow" or "that sucked" might be going through your head but how you really are feeling can be difficult to express. It must be a common experience and situation but I don't quite have a good, appropriate word for it. I bet the Germans do.

This random thought was sparked by an unusual early Sunday afternoon visit to the cinema to watch "the Martian" in wonderful 3D. It was fine really, I'd mark it at an 80% as a good piece of  Sci-fi entertainment, there's some minor plot holes and a bit of miscasting here and there but well worth the watch.

Vinyl black hole

Still on this erratic voyage of rediscovery. This week's chosen item of pleasure / torture being "Then Play On". A suicidal and enigmatic offering that sees the doomed guitar stars, Danny Kirwan and Peter Green burn themselves out as they question existence and meaning via the neck of a Les Paul. The therapy didn't work and the band collapsed shortly thereafter as M Fleetwood, J McVie and the mischievous J Spencer, all clearly sidelined from the beginning of this project looked on aghast and sought out their own kinds of personal salvation. That led to a mixture of tragedy and multi-million dollar sales and earnings. None of that seemed likely in 1972 to this puzzled listener.

So after 40+ years what are we left with? As an album it's not aged well, Kirwan's songs are trite and annoying, Green's troubled work masquerades as deep and spiritual but is saved by that guitar tone and finger light technique. His mental health is certainly stretched out in the lyrics but back then who knew anything of the dark side of the mind? It's a bizarre and mixed album. Maybe best forgotten but, if like me you first heard it as a vinyl scraping and head booming experience when a teenager then the angst and the questioning probably disturbed you. It scarred you just enough for you to remember it with fondness and if nothing else respect for the unpolluted, undistorted studio sound of a real band. Best track? Rattlesnake Shake, it has everything; mad drums, big guitar sound, humour and ritualistic and comical masturbation. Next!

VW reboot

I'm intrigued by the VW car doctoring scandal. A squillion vehicles need to be recalled or at least rewired all across the world because they've been fitted with cheating software. What is the problem and what is the best solution? Firstly, changing the software on the car's engine management system will not alter how it runs, it won't be any more or less green,  so I doubt that it's in anyone's interest, innocent VW owners and innocent VW dealers to try to cowboy these cars back into compliant shape; way too much effort and trouble there. The answer, as far as this low grade ex-coder is concerned is simple. You don't fix the cars, you already know that they are designed to lie and you know the parameters of the lie, you (well VW) know what they coded in to fix the figures so you have a baseline.

The solution is really to do nothing, leave the cars alone and let them run till they need a check or MoT or whatever. What needs to change is the equipment that tests the emissions. It needs a patch that counteracts and adjusts the actual readings to take into account the false figures. Once that is recalculated you will have numbers that are meaningful. The software is still lying but the reader knows the extent of the lie and adjusts for the lie to provide the true result. Of course that needs to be rolled out to all the test equipment but that's a lot less work that bringing the cars in prematurely and screwing with them, in my humble opinion. There you go, just saved VW £££s and their unfortunate owners and garages a whole lot of time.

#Facebookdown

Apparently it happens from time to time, the experts know these things. I hadn't noticed until it started trending on Twitter. So time to print out those photographs, superglue the thermometer, tidy up a bit, remove superglue from the fingers, look at pictures of various super moons, super skies, super sizes, superannuation and Martian salty water. Then there's the freezing of the surplus mince, the cat checking and the odd sock sorting and maybe even picking up and playing some random musical instrument, gentle tooth picking sessions and mulling over the poor answer quotient achieved in tonight's University Challenge. Then a cup of tea and just for a laugh switch the router off and on again. You never know.

Freedom Graffiti

http://loves.domusweb.it/freedom-graffiti/

Syrian artist Tammam Azzam and his personal version of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” on a war-torn building in Syria. 

Pleasant Blood Moon Sunday

All seems fine but death walks behind you.

It has been a pleasant day here and I've nothing to moan about for a change. We've been here and there, we ate Moroccan soup, sipped wine, overtook tractors, found plants, talked the talk, sat in the sun, took photographs and caught up and reminisced. Then we made plans for waking up early and a dancing in the garden in the dim and strange light cast by a blood moon while an imagined ring of fire blazed around the world. We will make vivid and elaborate wishes. We shall see...

The End

 A great photograph captures the end of the the big  chimneys at Cockenzie Power Station near Edinburgh earlier today. Gone. A coal fired power station as obsolete as...well you tell me. We live in a post industrial Scotland, we don't make things anymore and worse than that we've forgotten how to. We are impotent. It's  called skills fade, nobody talks about it but it's a bigger blight than cancer. Cheap labour in far away and unstable economies do all the manufacturing for us as we sit back drinking shit coffee with all our blank faced service providers and our facilities management people silently importing container loads of things we can't afford to make anymore. We are powered by wind, a legacy of fear and false promises and one fine day it will all collapse around us.

The daily fridge photo

Fridges: Lucky enough to have a full fridge in a hungry world. Don't take that for granted, ever. By the way the apple crumble from yesterday  turned out well apart from the completely carbonised raisins. They were sitting innocently atop the crumble and duly burned to a blackened crisp during the high temperature baking. A cruel fate, so we live and learn. 

Airport body scanners: These things are of course set to beep randomly and so push you into the search zone just for the hell of it and the amusement of the staff industriously processing you to be ready for the flight. My most recent frisking showed me as having something odd on my shoulder. On the screen there were two yellow rectangles on my left side. Of course the body tapping search revealed nothing and I was duly moved on, no explanation. I'm just left with the knowledge that there's some kind of shape drawing WordArt thing going on in my body that can only be seen by these scanners and nothing else. There they are, sitting like geometric tumours, invisible and painless but real enough to be picked up by the machinery which I presume was designed and programmed by the Volkswagen school of configuration and engineering. Blah, next time take the train.

Dull in Bristol

It was dull in Bristol the other day.

Fruit on Friday

Most days we eat fairly healthy stuff; above is today's stockpile of fruit and an apple (from the garden) and nut and dried fruit ensemble topped with crumble. Before that gets dished up it'll be a warm and greasy chicken Korma with nan and pakora. 

Forever Autumn

Perfect: Carole King's demo of Pleasant Valley Sunday is about as musically and lyrically perfect as any pop song could ever be. As a dry, observant and slightly caustic piece of social commentary and with (just a little bit of) hope it ticks all the right boxes. The Monkee's version is fine also but this has a powerful haunting, empty quality about it.

Autumnal Equinox: Today is the first day of autumn here in the UK. The day and the night are the same length making some kind of nox type of day. I quite like the sense of balance and spreading out of time that that implies. The whole day sliced squarely down the middle with equal amounts of light and dark. In a differently proportioned universe that might be the case all the time and if it was we'd probably be riding around on a geometrically correct but unseasonal and dead planet. Four seasons in one year is about right.

Songwriting

If you've not really broken through and written any decent songs for a while...this is how it feels.

Favourite Painting

Today's favourite painting may well not be tomorrow's. Way too long and big for the blog page to do justice to it but I thought I'd put this up rather than anything else today (Cordelia's farewell from King Lear). I'm staying away from commenting on politics, scandal, lies and pigs. I'm avoiding mentioning the BBC, Trump or the Liberal Democrats. Music, diet, Volkswagen and rugby, they can all fly away. SNP v labour, oil and gas prices and Chinese atomic scientists, fast food, bad food and over indulgence leading to diabetes. I'm opting out and in to myself for a quiet life here inside my own head where I can make my own healthy space. Soup and apple juice, gallons of it. That's my plan.

My latest novel

Actually when printing goes wrong this is the kind of thing that happens and you may get anything up to 37 pages. So much for AI taking over the world. They'll look like they are up for domination until the upgrades start to download. Then it's all headed in one direction and unstoppable. Perhaps that's the secret of Dr Who's sonic screwdriver, it just sends out a pulse of the latest upgrades and patches and...boom. Dear fellow humans you have nothing to fear, go and plan your future in peace and serenity (unless it's an Apple operating system within the AI beast).

The secret life of apples

After yesterday's apple picking extravaganza today it was time to process the fruit.  Here are some artistic photos. Processing involves a kind of mechanised, ritualistic peeling ceremony, boiling and gathering, draining and straining and then stuffing them colostomy style into freezer bags for freezing. Thankfully no blood was spilled and the entire operation was approved by SEPA as environmentally sound and generally good for the planet. Don't ask me anything about the whole chemical and biological requirements thing, it's really tricky and frankly is all done to some secret recipe known only in this closeted part of Fife. Tomorrow we'll get fighting drunk on the new wild apple wine and have a crumble and pie festival running on until the early hours with loud music and wanton gluttony and dancing. We might even stick a spare apple into the mouth of a pig to see what happens. Just another ordinary Sunday round here then.

Harvest

Up and down ladders, stretching, grabbing and catching, throwing away the bad apples and bagging the good ones. Now to find something creative, worthwhile and wholesome to do with them. Of course winter is coming and as we are apprentice doomsday preppers we must fill the freezer and the larder. If only we had a larder and some decent barricades and sandbags. 

Naked and Afraid XL

At first I thought that it was about some kind of spreadsheet fetish but no, it's worse. It's a TV show where neurotic, white, middle class Californians who all have some kind of "survival skill" try to survive on what looks like a Colombian waste tip but without the waste or the rest of the population. Everybody preaches to themselves and the persistent camera while keeping the fire going, moaning and revealing their tattoo collection. It's on the Discovery Channel of course. Like Jesus they are trapped for 40 days and 40 nights but there's no revelation, just lizards and electric eel on the menu as they test themselves and their ideals. It's like a grumpy cocktail party where everybody is way too tired to have sex, admire their clothes or talk sense. Nobody ever goes to the toilet and there's always clean water and I imagine some big reality TV director is hiding in the long grass drinking beer and smoking cigars. It's OK to say fuck but nipples are pixelled out. Compelling TV? Bizarrely yes and obviously no but the season finale is on next week so it could go either way.

The Palace of Westminster

Here's  a fine piece of comic artwork. We live in an eternally stupid and  perpetual age of renaissance, mind control and civil war with only science fiction and games technology to save us. There is no believable god and no credible government, at least that I can find on the Internet and Google through these very pages is sucking out our consciousness and replacing it with slices of watermelon. If you don't believe me then take a good long look inside your own head. Today's despairing but optimistic rant has been brought to you by more Captain Beefheart (than is good for you), Fast n' Loud, a tin of sardines, instant porridge and various text and Facebook messages. Thank you all.

Ex_Machina

"Dates from ancient Greek times, where "deus ex machina" ("god from the machine") in a play referred to the act of lowering a god on stage using a cable device (therefore, a god from a machine) to decide in a dilemma and give fate a nudge, so to say. These days, deus ex machina has the negative connotation of an utterly improbable, illogical or baseless plot twist that drastically alters the situation, as if the "deus ex machina" came down to give fate that little push."

Another evening spent anticipating the potential problems of allowing any kind of AI other than a Hoover to enter your life or worse your kitchen where sharp knives may be freely available. Films do sometimes affect me. I thought that the first law of robotics was don't ever point a pointed sharp pointy thing at the soft and fleshy body of a nearby human. I was wrong, that's been missed out in the code. These clever people always make basic mistakes. I guess that's why scientists and doctors can't cook. Strange when so many other things have been coded in, like sexual energy, flirting and having a nice soft voice etc.  So what's the point of being rich if all you do is spend your time building robots and drinking beer? Maybe that's it really. Eventually I fell asleep but my pattern was disturbed...doctor.

HOBBIT Gif

Some say genius

Anyway, how does anyone every know. Here's Captain Don with a vacuum cleaner that could be mistaken for a rocket or Flash Gordon's ray gun. I'm not sure if he's getting a bad and grizzly tune out of it. He did sell vacuum cleaners door to door at one time, Kirbys I presume. A possible source of inspiration? At one point in my existence I sold eggs and potatoes door to door. It was about that time that CB was recording Safe as Milk in California or some other unimagined sunny and crazy place. Ry Cooder was 20 and had already been playing guitar for 16 years. Of course I had no idea that anything like this was going on until I shook off the school bullies and sexual predators and headed for a new life in third year at Dunfermline High. It was the first time I truly really realised that the sun was hot and that music could be interesting and that most sport was dull. Life as it turned out could also be unfair and black and white, who knew? I still have the horrific memories and the bruises but I now find that few people care about the past and it's recurring nightmares, particularly me so let's just not talk about it.

Glasgow, jazz and elsewhere

Glasgow street scene; feeding pigeons alone and unnoticed.

A truly wonderful lump of a building somewhere in Glasgow in the rain.

In the past few days I've been to Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bristol, Dundee and Glasgow...and a few choice places in between.  These journeys have been enhanced and augmented by the rediscovery of Captain Beefheart, Matt Monroe and the Lovin' Spoonful's sweet and ugly sounds. It seems that as I travel forwards in time my listening taste continues to travel backwards. Is there a beautiful equation anywhere, scrawled upon a blackboard in chalk dust that describes this? Then again all music is from the past; except jazz. They just make that stuff up as they go along. As for the future? I've seen it, don't worry, the politicians and the comedians all got it wrong.

Still not sorry

 

I saw those washed out, lost, tearful and stupefied faces of the Labour old guard on TV today, those career politicians, those toads who've failed both in opposition and in power...I'm not sorry for them. As for JC, what's he like? An ill formed and uneven politician if there ever was one but I wish him well, he's better than that lot and though I'll probably never vote for him I hope he actually opposes and does some damage to the current crass, insensitive and incompetent team we have in charge. Meanwhile back in Scotland we remain confused, convicted and will proudly continue with our tribal sleepwalking traditions.

Pineapple Head

What is new in the world? Chaos, confusion and stupidly prevail. Tesco have run right out of 10p bags and are stocking Christmas gifts...September 11th.  Here's to flat sausage on a roll that turns out to be three round sausages, but they were tasty enough. Then reverse parking and getting 10 out of 10. Carrying a suitcase up four flights of stairs. Drinking tea and fighting the cold. Life in the fast lane but moving slowly. Stir fry. Sticky petrol pump filling frustration and relief. The hot ironing of six cold shirts and no more flights or travel or hotels or anything...till tomorrow.

Modern Dogs and Amazing Spaces

Modern, plastic dogs set in an amazing space at Bristol Airport.

Tea was an unremarkable toasted bun, salad and sardine ensemble. The plate turned out to be too small but I improvised. It was a poor foodie construction that had both a crusty and slimy consistency. Formed up it challenged the senses in ocean smell and salty, oily taste. There was mayo and badly sprinkled seasoning and one of those hard tomatoes that will never ever go soft sliced thinly and always falling from the edges of the sandwich. Did I say sandwich? There were of course two but each one identical as to itself in a pair. I supped on a milk bomb between bites as the warm bread cooled and the salad and fish squished together. On the TV there was a second hand episode of Fast n' Loud, a Discovery Turbo rerun with bikini girl contest and the usual car auction. The cats looked at me, sheepishly and catishly hoping for a handout of Dreamies and chicken. These came along eventually, just a little bit before George Clark's Amazing Spaces turned up on More 4 and sure enough it was full of spaces filled with things and all on a tight or pretty eccentric budget of some sort. It was that kind of evening more or less.

Unrecorded history

Lovely pic from ELH.

There's a lot of it about, down by the byways, away from the highways and bridges are homes and empty fridges and journeys and pointless conversations, thanking the bus driver, thinking someone's a skiver, listening to a tune or looking at the moon, seeing a bird fly past, a flag at half mast, litter on the road and gravy stains on clothes and unlaced shoes and making up a twelve bar blues, having ideas and forgetting them, passing on a smile or a thoughtless word, musing over the absurd and abstract, laughing at cats and facts that may not be facts but lies or opinions, twisted and needy, placed there by the greedy and powerful, those we never see who, despite all the things we might do, ultimately write the official version of our history...and that includes twitter. Are you going to let them away with that?

Quiet life

A slow return to civilisation after a birthday (not mine) weekend of guitar playing, eating, drinking and blethering marathons. The sun shone and the midges bit those with certain types of attractive blood and it was all rather nice most of the time - marmalade sausages and wine mostly. Now I'm tired, as tried any man of my advancing years would be but I seem to have had a good time and so far am avoiding leading too quiet a life. Nights in bunkhouses don't come around so often and they can take their toll on weak human flesh. Back to the grind tomorrow with an early Easyjet set.

Go North

Flags fly across Loch Long in a suitably patriotic style as the sun sinks slowly.

The clear white light at the end of the car wash.

We're going north, just one of numerous other directions that we travel in from time to time. Come to think of it and to be properly precise we're going more of a north westerly direction. Then we'll return in a neat south easterly move and once we've got our bearings and established our whereabouts we should be back where we started. So as it's Saturday I'm going to switch off and for a few hours not think about governments, international stupidly and greed in all their evil forms, football or the weather. These things and the issues they create are well and truly parked. I'll also do a spot of Zen ironing.

Retrospective

A large part of life seems to be spent looking back, wistfully you might say. Exploring the past on a regular basis to try to find meaning and almost ignoring all the good, contemporary stuff that surrounds (Or am I kidding myself, there must be some of that somewhere.). Anyway my challenge is to reflect upon music from the past and find value there, mostly it's from the early 70s though. Last week it was the Stones, Grateful Dead and Steely Dan - an album at a time. The Stones and the  Dead had something musical going on but their producers clearly had cloth ears and dodgy equipment or they were stoned. Strangely Steely Dan fared the worst, over produced, over blown, tampered with and patchy. Whole albums (the Royal Scam) just don't work and listening to all those funked up jazz washes was an effort...or am I too lazy a listener now? So this week; the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Captain Beefheart and Nick Drake. I will try my best.

Photogenic cat.

Technology

Yeah, it makes us all fecking fat, lazy and totally indifferent to the actual change process and potential benefits. Somebody please read this in the future and share the cry for help so that some time travelling tourists can break free from their contractual restrictions and maybe try to sort us out with a quick word or a self destruction short cut - or have they already done that and I missed it? Hmm.

What makes this interesting?

Well nothing really; pointless, everyday trivia. The car wash forecourt just happens to be getting resurfaced whilst the ritual motor washing ceremony carries on regardless and within inches of heavy plant reversing and workmen busy working. The plus side is that I got a good car wash and some odd miscalculated discount presumably as a pay-off for not grassing or as extra danger money. In other parts of life the day was spent struggling to upload tunes to Amazon (which has serious limitations), shopping for the future (just around the corner), laundry (in the future there will just be Google-pants) and renting property in the USA (well making tentative moves). Oh and there was another dead mouse in the bath; no suspicious circumstances however. Interesting? Not particularly.

One dead tree

Some say that this already dead tree does not deserve to live and should be cut down and removed. I'm confused by this.

That was my tea that was: Today's tea was brisket from M&S and vegetable rice. I'm not sure quite what brisket is other than a meaty piece of meat that seems to stick in your teeth for an unpleasantly long amount of time once you've eaten it. Perhaps meat is murder (for your teeth) after all. Try as I might my tongue can't quite prise the stuff out of the cavern like cavities that have opened up and expressed their new found sensitivity and irritation by making me want to claw them out of my mouth. Gin and orange may dull the thing that's not truly a pain but could best be described as "having your teeth on edge"...Ugh!

Lost and found

Saw these lost / found keys in Edinburgh today. There in the late summer sun, on a street, the name of which I can't recall. Without their lock they mean nothing but still somehow hanging, forlorn on a wrought iron railing they mean something. Many passed by but few noticed, such is the pace and indifference of modern life. Then it was off to the BOOK FESTIVAL for books, blethers and a little bit of clay modeling.

Random Cat Portraits

After two hours of sonic immersion in the Rolling Stones during that "just past their best but not quite rubbish yet" stage of their career I've had enough of everything except gin and macaroni & cheese so all I can do to numb the mystery pain is to share a few cat portraits from the other evening. The cat is not called Random either.

Music to punch clocks by

Music: On a lengthy commute the wit, wisdom and puerile journalism of Radio Scotland can wear thin. So thin that it becomes inaudible to the brain and assumes a grey and mumbling kind of sound shape. So I've reverted to type; back to listening to the Grateful Dead and despite only wanting to like them actually starting to enjoy them. Strange audio feasts of badly sung and corny songs that are full of energetic and busy, shrill guitar parts and a great concrete bass and drum bottoming. Eventually the earworm in the song gets you, like some illegal legal high and time passes magically on. A lifetime can be lived in a day some say. With this positive experience now imbedded in my mind's slow system of learning and acquiring thought patterns I'm moving onto Exile on Main Street tomorrow just to cement me into my own personal driving oblivion.

Words: A fox invites the stork to eat with him and provides soup in a bowl, which the fox can lap up easily; however, the stork cannot drink it with its beak. The stork then invites the fox to a meal, which is served in a narrow-necked vessel. It is easy for the stork to access but impossible for the fox. The moral drawn is that the trickster must expect trickery in return and that the golden rule of conduct is for one to do to others what one would wish for oneself. There, that's today's fable for you.

Early Morning Clarity

The best thoughts arrive in your head like a eagerly anticipated power breakfast early in the morning. Shower thoughts and songs, strange word combinations and tricks, tunes and rhythms, white space suddenly and annoyingly easily filled up. The flow of the newly regenerated creative mind seems to know no bounds. There is a thirst for knowledge and a real possibility of gaining it. Colours are brighter, grass is greener and there is some tangible electricity in the air, in the ground, in the trees and circling in the brain just behind the eyes. These are the moments I like best (when they happen, it's not every day) but they only last five minutes or so before the familiar daily fog descends and blots them out with some caffeine and concern shaped blanket. Of course I'm not overly affected by this, it just happens and tomorrow is always another day.

Anyone who had a heart

Anyone who has ever performed knows this feeling...an audience of one, if you're lucky. The show must of course go on.

Instagram

Now I've got an Instagram account. I've yet to use it in anger. Maybe my phone screen isn't quite big enough or maybe I've just not found the right thing to share. Perhaps now my life is headed in some new direction; no coffee, connected fully into social media, in a set pattern of haircuts, waking up early, eating porridge, feeding stray cats and taking regular showers. I didn't take the photo below either.