smashed blocked

"Hangover" by A. Monaghan

2011-11-20T22:47:00.000+13:00

Am I surfacing,
becoming lighter, slow
and still drink sodden.
Coming up for air,
rising, rising, dizzy,
everything spinning
in the dimness,
a diver with the bends,
a bestial, filthy wretched thing,
face stuck to carpet,
in three day drunk
tortured clothes.

Pure, black pain
everywhere, no
prayers or tears will
save me. A victim
of myself, beaten
by my own hand,
bruised and battered,
broken and mad.

No amount of water
can wash away this thirst.
Everything is dried
and petrified.
Horror piles upon horror,
delirium Tremens!

I swat imaginary
flies and they
dissapear, nothing
left, but they
keep coming and
buzzing all night,
visions and voices.

This room is dark
but I can't get it
dark enough to ease
the pain in my skull,
in my soul. I need
to dissolve into
the night, into oblivion.

Shaking, and shocked,
solidly I try to breath,
with a huge, humming
sound in my ears
and I sweat and sweat
and still sweat.

My brain feels like
a day old turd,
floating in a bowl of piss,
and I drop and vomit,
my lungs emptied out
crushed and breathless,
and I faint momentarily,
my legs have gone, knees
buckled and useless.

I come around
freezing cold but cleansed
and pure, if only
for a moment,
like the saints,
all their names
charging through
my brain finishing
with Francis, the
great sufferer,
and his prayer...

"Lord make me a vessel,
off thy peace..."
that's all I can
remember, and I laugh stupidly
with my head resting
on my hand, slowly
sliding to the floor.

And a tiny flower floats
down from the open
window, but with no
breeze behind it.
It is purple
and yellow and I
hold it, and it
seems like it is
enough to help me
through this terrible,
endless night.

I tear off my angry,
soaking, slept in clothes
and fall on the bed.
It is too hot and too cold
and those awful words, raging
in my head, with guilt,
and fear and madness...
never again! never again!
but I'm really saying
never enough...

I know I am destined,
doomed to repeat this
insanity and repeat
it again and again
and it will BE me
and it will be my hell.

My most treasured piece of vinyl

2011-11-19T09:52:00.002+13:00

My 1966 , gold Parlophone label, mono pressing of Revolver by The Beatles (of course).
It still plays without a jump, bit scratchy though. Finest!

"Battleships" by A. Monaghan

2011-11-15T17:35:00.001+13:00

We were lying on our stomachs face to face
playing a game of battleships.

It was America versus the Japs, he was America
and I was the Japs (as always when it came to the
Pacific campaign).

As I went to place a dud,
white peg on my attack radar board,
he asked, "How did you get those purple scars
on your arms dad, was it in a war?"

He's past seven years old now, a tricky age.
I had read in a parenting book, that at this
age with boys, honesty was always the best
road to go down. I decided to be honest.

"I did those scars myself, when I was crazy
and sad. You where very young then," I explained.

"How?" he asked.

"Well, you know that sharp sharp knife that you
aren't allowed to use unless a grown up is helping
you? Well that's how."

"Why? he asked.

"Because I was crazy and sad at the time. I cut myself
to stop being crazy and sad."

"Do all grown ups make scars, will I make scars?" he asked.

"I don't know." I replied. "Maybe other grown ups do other things
when they are crazy and sad, but I don't think you will do it."

"Did it hurt dad?" he asked.

"No, not at the time, but it did hurt later," I replied.

"Does it still hurt?" he asked.

"Yep, but in a different way than when I actually cut myself, it hurts
more inside than outside," I tried to explain.

"Can I kiss it better, like when you kiss it better when I hurt
myself playing?" he asked.

"Sure thing," I replied. "That would help."

As he leaned over the two opposing battleship boards,
he took a long good look at my fleet.

He kissed the dark red scar on my bi-cep and returned to his side
of the game.

Two moves later he sank my destroyer!

Kids are much sharper than we give them credit for...he won the game.

"This Dark Star" by A. Monaghan

2011-11-08T07:03:00.002+13:00

This dark star is all sadness, all sorrow.
It is blinding, deafening and unforgiving,
offers no light, no sound and no relief,
to the one caught in it's orbit.
Like a door of thick, heavy glass.
Frosted and warped, distorting all reality,
it reduces the entire cosmos into
a single dot of pure black pain...an atom of despair.
a black hole that sucks everything into
an eternal and endless night,
shooting cold shards of ice
to pierce the heart and freeze the soul.
This dark star is always present,
it has no future and no past.
It is the weight of the whole of creation
pressing and diminishing everything
into a drowned nothing,
in a soulless and drowned world.

Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

2011-11-07T19:09:00.001+13:00

Malcolm Lowry, writer. 28 July 1909 – 26 June 1957

"My secrets are of the grave, and must be kept, and this is how I sometimes think of myself...as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world. But the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course, but in the heart..." Extract from "Under The Volcano".

Malcolm Lowry was born near Liverpool, Cheshire, England in 1909 and educated at The Leys School and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He came from a family of four boys all of whom described their mother as cold and distant, something Lowry would carry with him for the rest of his adult life.

Between school and university at the age of 17, Lowry enrolled as a deckhand and sailed to the far east. This experience provided the material for his first novel Ultramarine which was published in 1933. It is the story of a privileged young man and his need to be accepted, by his shipmates. The story takes place during 48-hours on board a tramp steamer, the Oedipus Tyrannus, “outward bound for Hell.” The ship is caught in a furious tempest and the experience of the terrified animals aboard ship, being transported to western Zoo's from the far East brings to life for the first time Lowry's extraordinary prose and his relationship with subjects of death and the descent to hell. Like most of Lowry’s work it is a semi - autobiographical work, and contains themes he would later develop in "Under the Volcano"(1947).

By the time Lowry came to start work on "Under The Volcano" he was 27, living in Mexico, separated from his first wife, and already an alcoholic on the slow hellish slide that would end with his suicide at the age of 48 from an overdose of gin and barbiturate sleeping tablets.

"Under The Volcano" was published in 1947 after many rejections and re-writes, and at the time was hailed as the successor to James Joyces "Ulysees". Lowry was described as a genius, but all of this merely added to his unabated alcoholism and mental instability. He re-married and moved to British Colombia, settling in a lakeside cabin which eventually burnt down. Lowry was a haunted man and it was this interior, hellish landscape that he couldn't escape from no matter where he settled.

Despite the agonies of his addiction to alcohol, Lowry wrote and worked nearly constantly. In many ways, the only other artist to compare Lowry to, in his self destruction and constant seeking for salvation from himself, is the painter Jackson Pollock. The difference being that it is regarded Pollock created his best work during a long period of abstinence from alcohol, where as alcohol fueled and fired Lowry's writing. Indeed it has been said of "Under The Volcano", that no other book captures the life of the alcoholic quite as acutely and in such raw and unnerving detail.

Of Lowry's other work, the novella "Lunar Caustic" really brings home the true cost of Lowry's alcoholism. It’s the story of Bill Plantagenet who, after a long night’s drinking, awakens to find himself in New York’s notorious Bellevue psychiatric hospital (based on events taken from Lowry's earlier life in New York) surrounded by the truly dispossessed and insane. The story is as much about Lowry as it is about the “anxieties of the age he lived in.” Early versions were published in literary magazines, and Lowry eventually created a novella he thought too painful to publish in his own lifetime.

Malcolm Lowry seems to have slipped into obscurity when compared to other writer's of his generation, perhaps owing to his short life and relatively small amount of printed work, but it is undeniable that "Under The Volcano" is indeed a work of genius, to be read and re-read, and that no other work exists like it to this day.

In 1976, Malcolm Lowry's life and his greatest work were the subject of an Oscar nominated documentary, Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. It is a brilliantly paced and unflinching look at the man, his life, his work and the demons that possessed and drove him. With readings from the late Richard Burton and interviews with family members, colleagues, friends and his second wife Marjorie Bonner, the film brings Lowry's pain and neurosis to life in vivid and unsettling detail. To truly understand the work and life off this great writer, and his 'dark night of the soul', read "Under The Volcano", then read it again.

"The Critic" by A. Monaghan

2011-11-05T16:03:00.002+13:00

He stands at the mirror and doesn't like what he sees, hates it and turns away. After a few minutes he drops his shoulders and turns back and faces himself, looks himself in those grey green eyes for a long time and sees nothing.

He rubs his coarse chin, picks up the toothbrush and starts to clean his teeth. The water brings a sharp pain to the broken tooth, the decaying tooth, a thought passes through his mind "You deserve this pain, this decay. You deserve THIS".

He begins the routine, washing his hands. The icy water is a shock, he starts to turn on the hot water tap but turns it off again. "You don't deserve hot water, You don't deserve warmth or comfort. You're a bastard, you're a drunk, you're a waste. You don't deserve anything"!

He washes his face in the cold water and as he rinses he sees his sons tiny toothbrush in the cup on the edge of the sink, "You're a bad father, you're a failure, a shit, a selfish, impatient asshole, not a man, not a person, you're nothing"

He rubs his face dry and feels a familiar wave of heavy remorse settle on his chest. He sighs loudly, turns off the light and moves towards the bedroom. Their is a weight now in his stomach, a ball of pure black hate. Hate for this bed, hate for this night, hate for this body, hate for this life. "You are unlovable, you are ugly, unbearable. You'll be alone forever, live alone, die alone and it's all you deserve".

"Stop...stop"! he says out loud, and then, "Just stop" in a quiet, defeated voice. He turns out the light and gets into bed, staring into the darkness and the silence for a long time. Finally he closes his eyes and allows himself to sleep.

"When Rock Goes Acoustic" Documentary

2011-10-11T20:07:00.003+13:00

From the title it's pretty obvious what it's about. Take a stroll down 'rock's' many highways and discover the role of the acoustic guitar in the making of modern music. Everyone from Donovan to Albert Lee to Ray Davies have their say. Excellent documentary, and as Johnny Marr says, "If you can't play acoustic, you're not a guitarist!

part one...

Sylvia Robinson Remebered

2011-10-09T01:42:00.006+13:00

Nik Cohn’s written the best pop books ever. I Am The Greatest, Says Johnny Angelo, Awopbopaloobop, Today There Are No Gentlemen, and so on. That’s not news. What did surprise people though was his 2005 book, Triksta, on life and death and New Orleans rap. It was an unexpected treat, and it worked ridiculously well.

There’s a lovely bit in Triksta where Cohn describes hearing the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ for the first time on a cool, bright morning in 1979 – “I thought it was inspired the freshest thing I’d heard in years and started rocking to that ‘Good Times’ beat in front of the Planter’s Peanut shop.” His girlfriend is appalled, and by the end of the day is no longer his girl, but Nik’s got a new love.

Now in many ways the person to blame for all this is Sylvia Robinson. There’s a lot of stories out there about this, but the best one explains how sometime in 1979 at a family birthday party at a Bronx disco Sylvia witnessed the kids rocking to DJs chatting over records, and decided there might be something in this. She put together her own rap group, called them the Sugarhill Gang, put together a label Sugarhill with her husband, got a single called ‘Rapper’s Delight’ recorded, stuck it out on a 12”, and it sold like hot cakes. Rap and hip hop never looked back.

Sylvia Robinson is one of the great pop figures. She would still be one of the great pop figures if the only thing she’d been involved in was the ‘Love Is Strange’ hit for Mickey & Sylvia back in the r’n’r ‘50s. What a song! One of the great moments of cinema history is Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen on the run in Badlands, dancing away to ‘Love Is Strange’. The guitar wheedles and needles, and the singers vamp it up, with Sylvia coolly coquettish. And like Barry Gifford wrote about the film Badlands, “it meanders but it’s meaningful as hell”.

After a string of great pop-light Bo Diddley-esque hits as part of Mickey & Sylvia, we’d next see Sylvia again in the late ‘60s when with her husband Joe Robinson she started the All Platinum group of labels, releasing a fantastic flurry of soul/disco records for years to come. There were hugely successful and highly influential compilations of All Platinum singles, that contained absolute classics like ‘Hypertension’ by Calender, ‘I Dig Your Act’ by the Whatnauts, Brother to Brother’s cover of ‘In The Bottle’, and the phenomenal deep soul of Linda Jones’ ‘Your Precious Love’.
Many of the All Platinum hits were written by Sylvia. Maybe her finest moment as a writer was the contagious ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’ by Shirley & Company (and incidentally Shirley too was an r’n’r survivor being the Shirley of ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ fame). But her closest association was with the close harmony soul group, the Moments, for whom Shirley wrote many gems before their fantastic populist-disco hits like ‘Girls’, ‘Jack In The Box’, and ‘Dolly My Love’. Sylvia herself would score a string of hits with what can best be described in the words of one of these as Soul ‘Je T’Aime’s.

So Sugarhill took off in a way that could not have been expected. Hip hop scholars will no doubt explain how what Sylvia put out initially on Sugarhill was not exactly cutting edge, was indeed shamelessly stolen, and that they did not go about their business in an upright and admirable way, but the fact remains she had the vision to get on and do something. And there’s no disputing the fact that the great Sugarhill releases stand the test of time, and indeed have grown more charming, in the same way the rawest of rockabilly or garage punk records have.

The most famous of the early rap releases are probably those of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and the holy trinity of ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster on the Wheels of Steel’, ‘The Message’, and ‘White Lines’. ‘The Message’ still has the power to shock. As Nik Cohn rightly writes: “For rap, all roads lead back to this. In the course of its three minutes and ten seconds, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, with Melle Mel on the mic, mapped out the hip hop universe. Everything that’s come since can be measured against the vistas it opened up, the promises it implied. More than party music, here was a world. ‘The Message’ was lived, every grimy, suffering bar of it”. This, after all, was what punk was supposed to be.

But Sugarhill was about more than rap, and the early days of hip hop. Sylvia maintained her connections with soul traditions, and the label issued many sides that could have been on All Platinum too. These included recordings by the great soul singer Candi Staton, in one of the several stages of a great career that has broached deep country soul, glorious disco, straight gospel, through her regular reappearances in the charts with the magical ‘You’ve Got The Love’, to her renaissance with Honest Jons in 2006.
Another soul singer who also found her voice at Sugarhill was Angie Stone, then a member of the femme-rap trio Sequence. Sugarhill also provided a temporary home for Washington go-go outfit Trouble Funk, and took advantage of hip hop’s diversion into electro experimentation, courtesy of her son’s involvement in the West Street Mob.

Should anyone be brave enough to look down on the populism of Sugarhill they should be reminded that the label’s house band would continue to send ripples through the most adventurous outreaches of music for years to come. The musicians on many a Sugarhill release included Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbush, and Skip McDonald, who would go on to work most importantly with Adrian Sherwood as part of Tackhead, and on many of the On-U Sounds recordings. The three would also play together as the Mafia, backing Mark Stewart on his post-Pop Group recordings.

Mark Stewart still talks excitedly how he was lucky enough to spend time in New York as the ‘70s became the ‘80s, rubbing shoulders with No Wavers like DNA and James Chance and the Contortions, and the hip hop pioneers like the Sugarhill crew and Afrika Bambaataa, and the areas where these cultures collided as captured in the Jean Michel Basquiat film Downtown 81. You could cite Grandmaster Flash’s ungracious but highly effective appropriation of Liquid Liquid’s ‘Cavern’ for the (ahem) phenomenal ‘White Lines’, but that may lead into discussion of the more unpleasant business practices of Sugarhill, and indeed the legal dispute over the use of the ‘Cavern’ rhythm led to the demise of the great New York underground 99 label.

There at the end of Downtown 81 there is ‘Beat Bop’ by Rammelzee vs K Rob, a taste of the future, described in the liner notes to the Depth Charge compilation Beat Classic by David Toop as a “unique immersion into a cyberian echozone of 808 beatbox, latin percussion, slow funk bass and guitar, soaring droning violin and Rammelzee’s streaming unconscious word cutting, swooping in and out of reverb, in and out of perfect nonsense and street reality”. Within a short space of time Sugarhill was overtaken in the hip hop stakes, and Sylvia decided the fun was gone. But the echoes resonate still. (Text source "Caught by the River")

Sylvia Robinson, March 6, 1936 – September 29, 2011

Where it all began.."Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia

"Mallard Duck and Raymond Carver" by A. Monaghan

2011-09-26T23:45:00.004+13:00

You are a well fed, bold and barking Mallard duck,
and you approach at an alarming speed.
I give you bread, I give you banana,
and that's all I have to offer.
You gobble up the bread,
and hesitantly eat the banana from my hand,
lightly nipping my finger, snapping your beak for more.
That is all I have to give you Mallard,
so, I read to you from a book of poetry by Raymond Carver.
You "quack quack" and turn away.
"Harsh critic", I say, as you waddle to the next customer.
Poetry will never feed a duck.

"Hey Jude" The Beatles on The David Frost Show

2011-09-25T11:03:00.005+13:00

They were the best, they still are the best and always will be the best. The Beatles on The David Frost show in 1968. David's a bit lost as John chants David Frost at him while the rest of the boys generally do what they like. This footage is priceless, the song itself, the crowd singalong, Paul's vocals, Ringo's lime green suit, George's Fender 6, the old guy in the uniform and the girl in the white dress standing beside Paul, the eye contact between John and Paul and John's obvious enthusiasm as he sings a strums along...timeless and utterly joyous.

"The Big Three"

2011-09-23T18:29:00.008+12:00

Pablo Picasso.
"I am art".

Jackson Pollock.
"It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement"

Andy Warhol.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide wether it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it and while they're deciding, make even more art"

"4:01 AM" by A. Monaghan

2011-09-21T00:09:00.005+12:00

It's 4:01 AM

I'm wide awake, it's the rats in the attic.

I curse, take a piss, dress,

and step outside.

It's a clear moonlit night.

I'm bent out of shape.

I want to wake the whole

Goddamn sleeping world,

so I walk.

The cold air on my face.

The first blackbirds.

A large ginger and white cat,

on the gleaming wet street.

He stops and sprays ,

looks at me, and walks of.

The cigarette tastes good

and walking calms my jangled nerves.

The outline of a cabbage tree against

the darkness of the sky.

I stop and breath the beginning of dawn.

I feel foolish living this life,

and walk home.

I rub my face hard,

and smell the smoke on my fingers.

I drink some tea

and wait for the day to come up.

It's 4:30 AM

"Global Haywire" The Movie by Bruce Petty

2011-09-20T12:04:00.006+12:00

Basically the story of how European colonialism fucked the world and got us in the state we're in today politically, financially and sociologically.

Told using brilliantly simple animation a rye sense of absurd, surreal humour and narrated by Tom Baker. If you watch one film this week, make it "Global Haywire".

Written, directed and animated by Bruce Petty, Global Haywire goes a long way to make sense of a senseless and insane world. Rent it, buy it, steal it, download it...do whatever, but watch it.

You think you know about this place called Earth? Think again. Five stars.

"She Moved Through The Fair" Instrumental

2011-09-20T10:59:00.000+12:00

Original instrumental arrangement of the traditional folk song "She Moved Through The Fair". Dropped D tuning. Influenced in part by Davy Graham's version, and although it's nothing like his version, his gave me the idea to do an instrumental arrangement.

"Blue Heaven" by A.Monaghan

2011-09-18T23:00:00.005+12:00

Sparks of blue heaven
release seas of tranquility.

The sense memory of childhood,
blooms to an overwhelming innocence.

It carries me on the shoulders
of a huge and calm, rolling wave.

The Nazz - "Open My Eyes"

2011-09-18T14:52:00.002+12:00

Pop psych freakout from The Nazz, featuring a very young Todd Rundgren on magnificent form, playing a beautiful "Gibson Flying V". Featured on "The Nazz" and the first Nuggett's L.P. You have to go to YouTube to watch it for copyright reasons...

Joni Mitchell In Concert 1970

2011-09-16T13:17:00.008+12:00

Joni Mitchell on the "BBC In Concert" programme in 1970 at the peak of her singer songwriter period. Her voice is perfection and her playing is effortless and peerless, showcasing her unique guitar style and piano playing. She even plays a dulcimer on the song "California". Is there anything Joni can't do?

The show was recorded on the 9th March 1970 and aired on 10 September of the same year. The In Concert series also featured performances by most of the singer song writers of the day including, Neil Young, James Taylor, Carole King, Cat Stevens and Elton John.

"We Fall Into Love and We Fall Out Of Love" by A. Monaghan

2011-09-15T23:16:00.011+12:00

In moments...
I remember falling in love.
Watching you walk across a room
from a distance for the first time.
Seeing you in shadow, outlined by the sun,
a hand on your hip,
a dark blue strap,
slipping from your pale shoulder.
Watching you swim and
kissing your dark wet hair.
In moments...
I remember loving you.
Holidays, laughter, reading books out loud together,
wedding rings, markets, moving houses, adopting a cat,
buying a bed...the bed where we made love and babies.
Holding your head in the pains off labour,
with a child, our child!
Watching that new life
spilling from your heavy body.
In moments...
I remember love losing it's way
in uncertainty, confusion and dread.
You still look so young, I feel so old and we fade.
Shared photos become pictures off strangers,
and we wake and find nothing between us,
no love, no laughter, no more life.
A love, once clear becomes blurred and glassy.
Silence replaces words, we become two
different things, and in the end,
it's not the loss that is hardest to bear,
but the slow creep off change,
that gradually tears the heart into a million shreds.
The night arrives, the last night at home,
and then the first night alone,
then nothing.

"The Family Goat" by A. Monaghan

2011-09-15T16:23:00.006+12:00

“I step across the little brook to feed the family goat,
And, am grateful this small waterway, does not require a boat.

I often sit and contemplate him standing in his field,
And marvel at the produce that this little goat can yield.

He must be very happy in his little bit of pasture,
For, the milk & cheese he has offered up, is twice as much as last year.”

Written in tribute to and in the the style off William McConagall.

*William Topaz McGonagall (10 March 1825 – 29 September 1902)
Scottish weaver and amateur poet and actor. He won notoriety as a singularly bad poet who exhibited no recognition or concern of his peers’ opinions of his work. He wrote some 200 poems, including the infamous “Tay Bridge Disaster”, which are widely regarded as some of the worst in British history. His influence has been sighted by Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Billy Connolly, among others.

"Clean Up This God Damn Room Already". by A.M. Monaghan

2011-09-12T10:26:00.007+12:00

An earplug

Tissues

Crumbs (toast)

Sleeping Pills

Paper

A crack pipe

Clock radio

Empty wine bottles

Pain killers

Red numbers

Posters

A reading lamp (that reminds me of you)

A bed too big

Striped pajamas

Odd socks

Tortured sheets

Blood

Hot pillows

A dark blue blanket

Yellow fly swat

Heat

Chipped tea cup

Chocolate wrappers

A French water glass

Dust

Two novels

A notebook

Cobwebs

Head noises

Pens

A roach

Blue cigarette lighter

Notes

Skin

Newspaper clippings

Scissors

Glue

Ash

Tears

Is it any wonder I can't sleep with all this noise going on around me!

"Nobody But You" by Charles Bukowski

2011-09-11T20:37:00.010+12:00

nobody can save you but  yourself. 
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible  situations. 
they will attempt again and again 
through subterfuge, guise and 
force
to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly
inside.

nobody can save you but 
yourself 
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them. 
listen to them.
do you want to be like that? 
a faceless, mindless, heartless 
being? 
do you want to experience 
death before death?

nobody can save you but 
yourself 
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.

think about it.
think about saving your self. 
your spiritual self. 
your gut self. 
your singing magical self and 
your beautiful self. 
save it. 
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.

maintain your self 
with humor and grace 
and finally 
if necessary 
wager your self as you struggle, 
damn the odds, damn 
the price.

only you can save your self.

do it! do it!

then you’ll know exactly what I am talking about.

September 11th/12th 2001

2011-09-11T17:52:00.008+12:00

If my calculations and the time difference is right, the attacks on The World Trade Centre that occurred on September 11th 2001 actually occurred on 12th September in my part of the world, Wellington, New Zealand.

I remember my wife at the time waking me up with the radio playing, to say something about a plane crashing into The World Trade Centre in New York. The news had little effect on me. I was waking up to another day as a nurse aide at Wellington hospital, general ward 14.

As we didn't have a television, we weren't privy to the visceral images of the planes plunging into the buildings against that clear blue sky the buildings collapsing or the ghostly looking people coated in fine dust or the plumes of wreckage pouring down the New York streets and avenues, so the news that came over the radio was tame compared to what was being witnessed all around the globe.

I was on an early shift, 8AM to 3.30PM. I got up, showered, ate breakfast and went to work. Once there it was straight into the never ending list of things to be done. As per usual there were nurses busy changing shift, meetings, briefings, patient reports, laundry, new admissions, releases, beds to be stripped and made, breakfast to hand out, tea and coffee to be made, shit to clean up.

Slowly the news would filter through in snippets. What started as an occasional remark built, as the day progressed and more and more became thee topic of the day. Still, it had little effect on me, I barely gave it a second thought, something else bad was happening in another part of the world, I had work to do, always too much work to do.

My lasting memories of the talk during that normal working day are two separate statements made by people who had seen the news footage and were following the updates on the television situated in the visitor room. I remember an English nurse describing it as "a work of art" which left me bemused, and a patient saying that "They (presumably the American people) had it coming".

I finished work, tired as usual, but by now the talk was off little else. Thousands dead, buildings collapsing, the Pentagon bombed, America under attack from the air, all kinds of rumour and speculation. I signed my time sheet and left work, not once thinking about the fact that I had spent the day on the top floor of the highest building in Wellington Hospital.

When I got home, my wife asked me if I had heard any more news and I probably said something along the lines of yes, but thinking no. I imagine we talked about it. I hadn't seen any footage so it's impact on me was lessened than that of the millions watching from around the globe.

I tuned into The World Service and the talk was off what had unfolded. I was shocked to discover that yes, it had been an deliberate terrorist attack, and that another hijacked plane had crashed in a field and that the bombing off The Pentagon was in fact yet another hijacked plane, but soon I grew weary of the barrage of opinion and rhetoric, and turned the radio off, turned on some music, ate, read and went to sleep without thinking much more about it. That was September 12th. 2001, Wellington, New Zealand.

I had been in New York only two years earlier. Had seen the 'twin towers' from all angles, but they had left no lasting impression on me, unlike say, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler building, the Guggenheim or the Dakota Buildings where John Lennon had been murdered...no, the twin towers didn't really fit with my overall memory of that great city, not until much later. Not in fact until I saw the space left from where they once stood, the void remaining. It was the lack of them that made more of an impression than the buildings themselves.

The next day I bought a paper, a "commemorative" issue of The Wellington Post, and I thought about other commemoratives, and I imagine these things came to mind...the 1977 Queen's Silver Jubilee, the Northern Ireland hunger strikers, the first space shuttle blast off, the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London, the Hillsborough disaster, the Enniskillen remembrance Sunday bombing. On reading, the enormity of what had occurred on that day started to sink in. "Would the world ever be the same again"? "New York's Pearl Harbour", the headlines read.

Some time later I found a tourist map of Manhattan, a keep sake from my time in New York, and there on the cover, shot from an amateurish angle were those huge towers. Looking at a photograph of me and my wife taken on the Brooklyn bridge, there they were again. A shot from the Staten Island ferry and they're dead centre. In movies and documentaries with scenes shot in New York, they always featuerd.

I've watched only two related documentaries since that time. Jules Naudet's film "9/11", shot by him and his brother who by chance, happened to be making a documentary at the time about a New York Firehouse...what ogreish serendipity. The other was a poetic film by Henry Singer and Richard Numeroff called "The Falling Man" about the identity of a man who jumped or fell from one of the towers, caught in a series off still images by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. That for me was enough. I have no need to see any associated images or footage again. They are seared into my memory.

What happened in the aftermath is history. The invasion of Iraq, the overthrow and demise of Saddam Hussein, the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan and of course most recently the killing of the man widely blamed as the mastermind and financial backer of the attacks ten years ago, Osama Bin Laden.

But that's not what this is about. September 11th. 2001 will forever be a, "where were you when you heard" day, this is simply my memory and my experience of that day. Run of the mill, unremarkable, mundane, tiring, work a day, ordinary and safe, in my own part off the world and my own place in the world.

"The First Time That Ever I Saw Your Face"

2011-09-10T05:08:00.007+12:00

Instrumental version of the famous Ewan Maccoll tune, father of the English folk revival, during the 1960's. The song was adapted by Bert Jansch. My guitar is tuned to DADGAD. Played on a nylon string acoustic for a softer feel and sound. While Bert's reinterpretation strays from the original tune, it's a fitting tribute. My version is more or less a copy of Bert's.

"Untitled" by A.M. Monaghan

2011-09-09T17:50:00.025+12:00

What a life this is,
what a dream,
what an awakening,
what tears of joy,
what laughter.

From our first breathe to our last,
man, woman and child.
And with what pain, anger and beauty
we enter this world, dumb, innocent and blameless,
no reason, but to be.

How similar we are, and how different,
together and alone we live
and with great sadness we die,
all our expectations turned to the wind
and to dust,

and to time,

and to eternity.

"Midnight Dance of the Silverfish"

2011-09-04T22:10:00.001+12:00

Short, original, fingerpicking guitar instrumental inspired by John Fahey, Bert jansch, Nick Drake etc..

John Fante – American Author

2011-09-03T11:40:00.002+12:00

From "Ask the Dust" by John Fante

"The good days, the fat days, page upon page of manuscript; prosperous days, something to say...and the pages mounted up. Fabulous days, the rent paid, still fifty dollars in my wallet, nothing to do all day and night but write and think of writing: ah such sweet days, to see it grow, to worry for it, myself, my book, my words, maybe important, maybe timeless, but mine nevertheless, the indomitable Arturo Bandini, already deep into his first novel.
So an evening comes and what to do with it, my soul so cool from the bath of words, my feet so solid upon the Earth, and what are the others doing, the rest of the people of the world?"

John Fante was born in Denver, Colorado in 1909. He attended various Catholic schools in and around Boulder Colorado, before enrolling at the University of Colorado. He dropped out of college and moved to Southern California to focus on his writing. He began writing in 1929 and published his first short story, "Altar Boy" in 1932, in the literary magazine, The American Mercury.

His first novel "Wait Until Spring" was published in 1938, and was to become the first in his Arturo Bandini series of novels, the others being, "The Road to Los Angeles", "AskThe Dust" and "Dreams From Bunker Hill".

Arturo Bandini served as Fante's alter ego, his novels being largely biographical and made up of his own life experiences. The main themes in Fante's work are poverty, love, the common man, everyday life and it's trials, Catholicism, family life, American identity, sports, and the writing life itself.

His most famous novel by far is "Ask The Dust" (originally titled "Ask The Dust on The Road"). It has been described as a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth – century American Novel. It tells the story of a young struggling author, living in Bunker Hill, Los Angeles and his doomed love for Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez. As he tirelessly works his trade, skirting poverty, his writing career starts to take off with the publication of a number of short stories and finally his first novel. Eventually Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears into the Mojave desert after pursuing her true love, ex waiter Sam. In the end Bandini loses Camilla and rejects the writers life he had fought so hard to attain.

Fante's writing has been described as having a clear voice, vivid characters, shoot-from-the-hip style, and painful, emotional honesty blended with humor and scrupulous self-criticism.

Fante was diagnosed with diabetes in 1955 eventually leading to blindness in 1978 and the amputation of both legs within the next two years. He continued to write however, dictating his work to his wife Joyce, publishing his final novel "Dreams From Bunker Hill" in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy four.

Fante's literary admirers included Charles Bukowski who was quoted as saying "Fante was my God", and openly admitted borrowing Fante's style and voice for his own writing style. The two writers became friends shortly before Fante's death. Bukowski went on to write the poem "Fante" in honour of his literary hero.

John Fante 1909 – 1983

"Two Rosellas in a Silver Birch Tree" by A. Monaghan

2011-08-30T23:56:00.023+12:00

A fat grey house cat

with sharp golden eyes.
Sitting dumb, behind a window pane,
his face reflected in the glass
furiously watching...

A pair of Eastern Rosellas,
noisy, riotous, rude and overflowing
with colour.
Bold and brazen,
bouncing among the branches
off an adjacent Silver Birch tree,
out of the cat's reach.

I laugh at the cat's frustration, and walk on.
"Mister tigger", I say,

"you aint the king of the jungle today"!

"Surprise Partie" Paris, 12-31-68 French T.V. Special

2011-08-30T14:52:00.009+12:00

"Surprise Partie" was a French T.V. special, recorded on New Years Eve 1968 in Paris. The full line up was as follows...Davy Jones, Marie Laforet, The Troggs, Jacques Dutronc, Joe Cocker, Françoise Hardy, Aphrodite's Child, Antoine, Johnny Hallyday, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Hugues Auffray, The Small Faces, Herbert Leonard, P.P. Arnold, Booker T & The MGs, Eric Charden, Freddy, Nicoletta, The Irresistibles, The Equals, and Les Variations. Quite a surprise party indeed. Hopefully it's available out there on DVD somewhere...Below are some of the clips available on YouTube, but there may be more out there.

The Who – "I Can See For Miles"

Fleetwood Mac – "Homework"

Fleetwood Mac – "Dust My Broom"

Joe Cocker and The Grease Band – "I shall Be Released" & "With a Little Help From My Friends".

The Small Faces – "Song of a Baker"

The Equals – "Equality"

P.P. Arnold – "If You Think You're Groovy"

Hugues Auffray – "Et si moi je ne veux pas"

It seems that Fleetwood Mac, The Equals (featuring a very young Eddie Grant, complete with dyed blonde hair!), Joe Cocker & The Grease Band and Hugues Auffray were the only performers that played live (it's hard to tell as it's all a bit chaotic), the rest either lip synched (The Small Faces barely!) or like P.P. Arnold, sang over a backing tape.

I'm not sure why the Joe Cocker clips are in a different room, but as far as I can tell they were recorded on the same night, at the same event, but maybe not. Still I thought it worth including for the intimate and powerful rendition of "With a Little Help From My Friends".

Hugues Auffray does well to tame a very merry Keith Moon and Pete Towhshend who also pop up as last minute roadies for the slightly worse for wear Stevie Marriott.

The footage is a great document of the times...and what a backstage party there must've been afterward, and what a start to 1969!! Enjoy responsibly.

"The Black Cat Davy" by A. M. Monaghan

2011-08-29T13:00:00.003+12:00

"The Black Cat Davy"

I am the black cat Davy... and I am crime!
An inky, murky shadow on the sleeping cities grime.
I'm the feline midnight stalker, the terror off the streets,
I steal the breath from babies as their nursing mothers sleep.

A coal black, steel eyed rambler, a glimpse of flashing claw,
As the governor of the underworld I live outside the law.
I creep in open windows, exit boldly on the street,
I jump the highest rooftops always landing on my feet.

I am the black cat Davy... and I am crime!
My midnight, full-moon screech will send a shiver up your spine.
Lock up your precious puss-kin, when Davy is in town,
Your little kitty's honour is at risk when I'm around.

I rule the midnight underworld, I'm the dusk to dawn crime chief,
If something goes down on my watch, I always get my piece.
And if you ever cross me on a dark and moonless night,
You better have your claws out, and be ready for the fight!

I am the black cat Davy...and I am crime!
This shrouded , shady criminal has mischief on his mind.
And if your mangy carcass stops, or wanders through my patch,
You'd best beware, I'll carve you up, with more than just a scratch.

But...when the night is closing and the dawn is coming on
You'll find the black cat Davy like a puff off smoke is gone.
I jump and run and leap and dash, to my masters cozy den,
And the sinful, fiendish Davy becomes a pussy cat again.

Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller Tribute by Bob Stanley

2011-08-27T13:15:00.002+12:00

Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller

Bob Stanley pays tribute:
The Abbey Road medley is often cited as the perfect career closer: “And in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take” sums up the warmth, generosity and unbroken circle of the Beatles’ story. Mind you, a pair of furrow-browed, smirking, razor-sharp writers called Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller might have raised an eyebrow at the notion – “Yeah, yeah” they’d sneer, proving there is such a thing as a double positive: “So you haven’t you heard Is That All There Is?”

Leiber and Stoller wrote songs that were as indebted to Vaudeville as they were to their beloved R&B, and in the process they created a catalogue that nailed the recklessness, teendom and irreverent giddy joy of classic Rock’n'Roll. They were born just six weeks apart in 1933, grew up on the east coast, and finally met in 1950 when both their families relocated almost simultaneously to LA. It was fate. They were soulmates, they clicked, and began writing songs together immediately. But they were quite different people. While Mike Stoller was a beatnik, very laid back, with a penchant for classical music (the strings on the Drifters’ game-changing There Goes My Baby were his idea), Jerry Leiber was a motormouth. He wasn’t interested in any music that you couldn’t dance to. He had wild red hair and, like David Bowie, he had one brown eye and one blue: his passport listed his eye colour as “assorted”.

Doing deliveries for his mum’s grocery store in Baltimore, he had come across blues and boogie woogie on black customers’ radios, “music I never heard anywhere else”. In LA he developed a taste for “jazz and pigs’ feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean.” He and Mike “used to argue which one of us was the blackest.” Who won the arguments? “*We* did!” They would write five songs a day and, by the time Big Mama Thornton cut their Hound Dog in 1952, had their schtick down pat. Nothing was taken too seriously; their songs were skits – Love Potion No.9, Yakety Yak, Smokey Joe’s Cafe – that were smart and funny and snorted at sentimentality. They were a blast.

Leiber/Stoller were maybe the first names I noticed cropping up over and over in brackets under the titles of songs I loved, on Elvis’s 40 Greatest and The Very Best Of The Drifters. They started the Brill Building pop machine almost singlehandedly, moving there in 1958 when it was still the province of Irving Berlin and pre-rock publishers. They became godfathers of the scene, the hugest inspiration to Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, and especially Greenwich and Barry. As a team Laura Barton compared them in the Guardian to Morecambe and Wise, but I see them more like Statler and Waldorf, cynical birds bouncing one-liners off each other who would sniff at ‘pop’ acts one minute, then be drawn in and end up writing a classic for them: this is how they ended writing such unlikely but great songs as Tommy Roe’s The Gunfighter and Jackson for Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood.

Elvis was the ultimate case in point. Once Hound Dog had made them rich Jerry and Mike were asked to write something new for him. They didn’t like what he’d done to Hound Dog, thought it too fast and nervy sounding, so they came up with the (in their eyes) mewling, sarcastic Love Me. Of course, Elvis turned it into a sensual classic – listen to what he does with “I would beg and steal, just to feel, your heart beating close to mine” – that Leiber and Stoller had never thought possible. After that, with new-found respect, they gave him the valley-deep Don’t and large chunks of the King Creole and Jailhouse Rock soundtracks: Leiber/Stoller/Presley, the perfect R&R combination. Unsurprisingly, they stand up as Elvis’s best movies.

They knew how to make records, but never quite worked out how to sell them. Hooking up with inveterate gambler but proven record company stalwart George Goldner in 1964, they formed Red Bird records and its more soulful subsidiary Blue Cat. Straight away they scored a number one with the Dixie Cups’ Chapel Of Love: “I hated the fucking record!” sulked Jerry. Red Bird put out a higher percentage of mindsnappers than maybe any label before or since, but Jerry Leiber stayed in the back room most of the time. Once in a while he chipped in with a floorfiller like the Shangri La’s’ Bull Dog. When Red Bird folded, under the weight of Goldner’s personal debts in 1966, Leiber and Stoller pretty much bowed out of pop. They loved Rock’n'Roll, pure and dirty and true, and they weren’t built for the solemnity of the psychedelic era. When Peggy Lee cut Is That All There Is in 1969, it was the perfect curtain to fall on their career: death, destruction, busted
marriages… so what?! It won them a Grammy. It’s also the perfect funeral song.

Leiber and Stoller were inseparable – they wrote together, produced together, even had three marriages each. And apparently they were writing a biography together – I can’t think of another joint autobiography that isn’t by a married couple. Let’s hope Mike Stoller can finish it on his own.

The list of their achievements could (and hopefully will) fill a book, but just for starters… Stand By Me, King Creole, I Who Have Nothing, Searchin’, There Goes My Baby, Poison Ivy, Lucky Lips, Where’s The Girl, Some Other Guy, Drip Drop, Spanish Harlem, Bossa Nova Baby, Kansas City, Trouble, Tricky Dicky… I feel a party coming on. It’s the best way to pay tribute to Jerry Leiber.

He’s gone, but don’t be a blue cat.

Jerry Leiber, 1933 – 2011

"Danny" by Anthony Monaghan

2011-08-27T10:54:00.005+12:00

Tune I wrote for my son. Influenced by John Fahey, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake etc...

Onan – Patron Saint of Masturbation

2011-08-23T14:36:00.006+12:00

The story of Onan as illustrated by Robert Crumb

Onanism: noun formal,
1. masturbation.
2. coitus interruptus.
The story of Onan is one of those dark, and often forgotten biblical side roads which deserves illumination.
While his story may not be as heroic as say that off John the Baptist and Salome, it's impact on teenage boys and grown up teenage boys has long been felt down the ages, no pun or double entendre intended.

So, who was Onan? Well, according to the Book of Genesis, Chapter 38, he was the second son of Judah, and the brother of Er. Now Er upset the God's and was sentenced to death by Yahweh for the sin of wickedness. After Er's death, Judah asked Onan to fulfill his duty as a brother-in-law to Tamar, Er's widow. As was the custom of the time, the brother of the deceased would provide offspring to the childless widow to preserve the family line.

Well, Onan had a bit of problem with this. He didn't like the idea of a child being born that would not legally be his heir, so he committed the mortal sin of spilling his seed (shooting his load, spitting his mustard etc) onto the ground. Now, Onan obviously had the hots for Tamar because he did this a number of times, but his fate had been sealed and like his brother before him he was sentenced to death by Yaweh for his wickedness. As time went by, the sin of 'wasting one's seed' became known as Onan's curse, although I would see it more of a blessing myself, but not for poor Onan.

Onan's curse developed into a widespread fear of masturbation, primarily in the 1700s and 1800s. At times it was believed by doctors of theology and medicine (who of course never once tickled their own trouser snake) to lead to mental and general health illnesses, vomiting, nausea, indigestion (that must explain the cause of my never ending acid reflux problem), epilepsy, pimples, blindness and even insanity, not to mention hairs growing on the palms of your hands,"But wouldn't they just get rubbed off again doctor"?

I'll leave the last word to Author Christopher Moore, and a quote from his book 'Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal'.

""The sin of Onan. Spilling the old seed on the ground. Cuffing the camel. Dusting the donkey. Flogging the Pharisee. Onanism, a sin that requires hundreds of hours of practice to get right, or at least that's what I told myself."

Charles Bukowski – "If You are Going to Try..."

2011-08-21T13:52:00.000+12:00

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

Charles 'Hank' Bukowski. August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994

Dalton Trumbo – American Iconoclast

2011-08-15T17:07:00.002+12:00

In April 1970, Dalton Trumbo was awarded the Laurel Award from The Writers Guild of America. During his acceptance speech he spoke of the 277 members of the guild who went to War during the 1940's. He spoke of a number who lost there lives and then went on to mention that a mere 6 years later, 43 of these writers would be denounced, stripped of their names and have their passports confiscated. Dalton Trumbo was one of those 43.

Trumbo's ambition after leaving the University of Colorado was to become a writer, and by the early 1930s his articles and stories appeared in Saturday Evening Post, McCall's Magazine, Vanity Fair and the film magazine, the Hollywood Spectator. In 1935 Trumbo published his first novel, Eclipse, a satire about a self-made businessman. Trumbo's most popular novel, Johnny Got His Gun, an anti war novel about a disfigured British officer in the First World War, won a National Book Award in 1939. However, the book was withdrawn during the Second World War. Republished in 1971, it gained a large following amongst the generation being sent to fight in Vietnam. After the war, Trumbo had moved on to writing screen plays and by 1945 was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood.

In 1947 House of Un-American Activities Committee, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry, and in particular it's screen writers. McCarthy seemed obsessed with exposing and spotlighting "subversive elements". The HUAC interviewed 41 people working in Hollywood. These people became known as "friendly witnesses", and during their interviews they named several people who they accused of holding left-wing views. Trumbo was one of those named. When asked to attend the hearings and answer questions about his political affiliations, Trumbo, sighting the first amendment to The Constitution, refused to confirm or deny that he had ever been a member of the Communist party. Of course he had been a member like a lot of artists and intellectuals of the time. Many joined as a direct result of the rise of fascism throughout Europe. He believed that a man's political convictions were a private matter and "nobody's bloody business".

Alongside Trumbo, nine other screen writers followed the same course and they collectively became known as "The Hollywood Ten". Trumbo believed this to be a fundamental freedom of speech issue (this explains why he cited the first amendment, "The right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference", rather than the fifth amendment, "The right not to be incriminated"). After the hearings, at a meeting at The Waldorf Hotel, Eric Johnston, the President of The Motion Pictures Association of America went on to say that although the MPAA didn't believe in black listing the Hollywood Ten, they would not employ anyone who had anything to do with communism and no compensation would be payed to the writers. The Hollywood Ten were out of work, banned and banished from Hollywood. On leaving the hearings Trumbo was famously heard to say, "This is the beginning of an American concentration camp for writers", he would later be proved right.

In 1950, two of the ten, Jack Lawson and Trumbo himself were tried and found guilty of contempt of Congress and all ten were sentenced to ten months in prison. During their incarceration, the "Emergency Detention Act" was passed. Camps that had been used as internment centres for Japanese Americans during WW2 were turned into concentration camps for American radicals. On there release from jail in 1951, Trumbo and four friends, Ring Lardner Jr., Hugo Butler and Ian Hunter decided the only course of action was to go on the run and resettle in Mexico, taking with them what little belongings they had left and their families.

For the first year in Mexico, Trumbo and his fellow writers soaked up the Mexican culture, drank a lot and did little work. What work they did do across the border in the U.S.A. they rarely got payed for. By their second year, and after a failed attempt at breaking into the Mexican film industry as screen writers, Trumbo and his family were completely broke and were forced to move back North. Trumbo was torn with regret and failure and realized the only thing he could do was start all over again, from the bottom, writing screen plays and scripts under assumed names. At the time he described himself has, "Broke as a bankrupts bastard". In the first 18 months since his return he wrote 12 scripts working himself to the bone, but still found himself having to borrow from friends and family to support his family.

The effect on Trumbo's family was that it unified them into a tightly bonded unit, however, wherever they went trouble dogged them. Even his children were vilified by teachers and PTA parents alike, being forced to move from one school to another.

At this time, The House of Un-American Activities gave people in the movie industry the choice of working if they agreed to name the names of those involved with Communist party. Many like Elia Kazan and Walt disney did just this, but Dalton Trumbo refused, instead continuing to work under assumed names. In 1957, Trumbo wrote the screen play for the film "The Brave One" using the name of a friend called Robert Rich. The film won an oscar for best screen play but in the meantime Robert Rich had died, so people naturally wanted to know who this 'Robert Rich' was. The oscar went unclaimed, but speculation was rife and Trumbo was interviewed and asked if he was the rightful winner. He neither admitted nor denied it, but it became obvious that he had written the screen play. This, in a way was the beginning of the end of the Hollywood blacklist.

In 1960, Kirk Douglas asked Dalton Trumbo to write the screen play for the Stanley Kubrick film "Spartacus". The famous scene where the slaves are offered their freedom so long as Spartacus reveals himself, seems now an allegory for those dark times of McCarthyism and black listings.

In 1971, Dalton Trumbo directed his only motion picture, his version of his novel "Johnny Got His Gun", featuring Jason Robards and Sam Bottoms, and two years later he wrote "Executive Action", which dealt with an alleged conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy.

When asked about the blacklist after receiving his Laurel Award, Trumbo was quoted as saying, "The blacklist was a time of evil...no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil...(Looking) back on this time...it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims."
Dalton Trumbo. 5th December, 1905 – 10th September, 1976.

Robert Crumb Arena Documentary

2011-08-15T00:23:00.000+12:00

I just discovered viddler...full length high quality documentaries and movies. A new obsession looming, starting with this great appraisal of Robert Crumbs life and work and deep dark fantasies...

"Springtime Birdsong"

2011-08-14T14:31:00.000+12:00

A tune I wrote to celebrate the springtime birdsong, though it was recorded in autumn...

"Young Man" by Mose Allison

2011-08-14T13:19:00.000+12:00

A film I put together to go with Mose Allison's great song "Young Man", cause I'm a young man, sort of. Is 41 still young?

Apocalypse Over Hiroshima...

2011-08-13T15:21:00.005+12:00

Hiroshima Watch stopped at the moment of the atomic bomb blast

66 years ago, on the 6th. August 1945 at 8:15 AM, America exploded the first Atomic bomb, the first recorded use of a weapon of mass destruction, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Those nearest the blast vanished instantly, vaporized or turned to carbon. The estimated death toll from the original blast was 70,000 men women and children, 30% of the cities population. Hiroshima city itself was mostly annihilated. Turned to dust, disappeared. The only buildings that survived were those that had been reinforced against earthquake.

Those further away from the epicenter of the blast reported a noiseless flash off pure white light. The flash was so intense, the pattern of women's summer dresses where burned onto their skin, macabre tattoos. The burns sustained were horrifying beyond belief, skin burned black and sloughed off. People reported seeing dead butterflies floating to earth in flames and the outlines of bodies scorched onto paving stones.

After the initial blast a second wave of destruction spread from the epicenter destroying almost everything in it's path, this was followed by a devastating fire storm. Black rain fell from the sky, composed of ash and smoke sucked up into the huge mushroom cloud. People, desperate for water drank this radioactive rain. Days later many died as a direct result of drinking this poison rain.

Soon after the initial bombing, people started to display symptoms of radiation sickness; hair loss, vomiting, massive internal hemorrhaging, necrosis, profuse bleeding from wounds, that could not be abated and eventually death.

The American's chose Hiroshima for a reason. It had been left intact, unlike 67 other Japanese cities that had been fire bombed into ashes, and so would serve as a living laboratory, a chance to study the effects of the Atom bomb on buildings and people. The people of Hiroshima would serve as the guinea pigs in this experiment in mass destruction. Even the American scientists were not prepared for the utter devastation not only of the blast itself but of the radiation sickness that followed. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists that worked on the A - Bomb project was quoted as saying later, "Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds". He would go on to campaign against the use of Atomic weapons and against the post war escalation of nuclear weapons.

The reasons given for the use of the Atomic bomb were said to avoid an inevitable invasion of the Japanese mainland by the allied forces. True, the Japanese leaders seemed hell bent on self sacrifice rather than surrender, expecting every man woman and child to die defending the honour of the Japanese nation. But would this really have happened? Japan was a nation on the brink of starvation, some reported not having had white rive in over a year. It's people were tired and and broken by an un-winnable war. Germany, Japan's main ally had already surrendered, Russia had declared war on Japan and were preparing for an invasion. It's impossible to say what the outcome of an invasion of the Japanese would have wrought, but the estimate at the time of millions of allied troops being killed in hindsight sounds like an over exaggeration, and so the debate continues on the reason for the use of the A-Bomb. After the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese high command refused to the terms of surrender proposed by the allies, and on August the 9th. a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Although the devastation was nothing like that off the Hiroshima bombing, 50,000 people still lost their lives.

The final death total is estimated in the region of a quarter of a million people, most of them civilians. For this alone, the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain a reminder of the real cost of war. Memorials remind us of the suffering and inevitable futility of war in all it's guises, for in war there are no victors.

For further reading, go to John Hersey's book "Hiroshima"

Self Harm/Cutting/Scarification...

2011-08-12T23:43:00.001+12:00

On the surface of it, to any sane and normal person, the thought of taking a knife, or a heated piece of metal and mutilating one's own body must seem like madness. Let me assure it is quite the opposite, the very opposite off madness. Madness denotes something that is out of ones own control, being out of control, out of ones mind, other, away from oneself. Self harm/cutting/branding etc is about control and is, in my own experience carried out by people not only in their right mind, but by people controlling not only there minds but their bodies and at times their very lives, for often the other option is suicide, which in itself is also the ultimate act of control over ones own life and body. Let me make a point here, and let me make it clear...I am not in any way glorifying self mutilation, for want of a better term, psychiatrists are still trying to come up with some nicer academic term....and there is nothing heroic or admirable about taking a knife and slicing your own skin, your own muscle, but it is a reality and often it is survival. Like Anorexics who try to control their minds and bodies by controlling the amount of food they will or wont allow themselves to abide, people who self harm control their emotions and their world by the amount of pain they inflict upon themselves. Pain becomes a way of regulating emotions. Anxiety (that pathetic term for what in reality is living hell), deep depression, suicidal thoughts, all these are stroked away and dispelled with a swift self inflicted wound. It sounds insane, but it makes perfect sense to the person doing it. It is a private, guilty, desperate act...but often it is the one thing that makes the world make sense.

So who does this 'awful' thing. Sad, self pitying Goths? Attention seeking spoiled teenagers (more of this later), anorexic type body conscious want to be skinny models, angry youths, lonely housewives in an out of control world, spoiled rock stars, high flying execs bored of sex and cocaine, normal men and women who have no other outlet for their emotions, priests, nurses, teachers, bus drivers, shop assistants, hard men, soft men, closeted homosexuals, religious fanatics...all of these and more of course. In short normal folk like you and me.

You would be surprised. A word about attention seeking behaviour...after spending a whole weekend cutting myself repeatedly and trying to dress and clean the wounds for the next week, in order that no one else would find out about what I had done to myself, and after my arm had swollen to twice it's size and was obviously badly infected, I reluctantly went to my G.P. for help. I had a fever, was out of my mind with pain and of course was sent to A and E...After a doctor had cleaned and dressed my wounds, and set me aside for "Psychiatric Assessment", a young nurse came to ask some questions...one of the first things she said to me was "Attention seeking at your age....etc" I had nothing to say in reply, I wanted to leave but wasn't allowed as I was deemed a danger to myself. I can see why, but that nurses words were the most damaging thing in the whole episode....

So where does this leave us? Obviously self harm, like any extremes of behaviour needs to be addressed and dealt with. There is lots of help out there and reaching out is always the first step...but like a lot of things in this life, there's more to it than meets the eye, and I wonder about all those 'normal' folks out there who cover themselves in tattoo's and piercings. Is there that much off a difference between all these kinds of behaviours?
We make sense of our lives and emotions in many varied and individual ways. To judge one against the other, the normal as opposed the abnormal? I believe that takes us into the realm of prejudice, ignorance and alienation. I hope that anyone who reads this who is struggling with any kind of emotional dilemma finds the strength to reach out and get the help they deserve. This is not meant to shock in anyway, it's life, and life is sometimes raw and complicated, but that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful and simple in the end...

Oz Covers at Felix Dennis

2011-07-19T23:42:00.000+12:00

This truly magnificent collection of OZ magazine covers is a must for the discerning '60's chic radical. They would make great christmas, birthday, christening, bereavement, invitation etc...cards. Send them to your local police constable today and brighten up their day, or just look at them and marvel at the sheer creativity that went into much loved paper of yore...click the link and enjoy the revolution... http://www.felixdennis.com/gallery/oz-covers/

Talking Pictures...It's a kind of Bonzo Dog Band Documentary

2011-07-19T13:03:00.001+12:00

Dazzling, surreal, audacious, brave, stupendous, hilarious, frightening, bizarre, goonish, catchy, childish, handsome, ugly, technicolour DADA...a few words to put in a sentence about The Bonzo Dog Band for your English homework. Still Britain's second greatest pop band off all time, and you can take that to the bank, but they wont give you money for it. Don't believe me, watch this rarefied collection of true British eccentricity in full speed ahead action painting, action man, action lights, action cameras, action music... Action. They are The Beatles on laughing gas, I think.

Sweet Essence of Giraffe...Viv Stanshall at 68

2011-03-20T20:55:00.009+13:00

Victor Anthony Stanshall, known as Viv or Vivian for most of his adult life, was born in Shillingford, Oxford on March 21st 1943. The story goes that after his birth the nurse brought three babies into his mothers room, two with small, neat heads and one with a huge head wearing a shock of wild ginger hair. His mother tried for one of the other babies, but there was no getting away from Vivian.

Viv and his mother lived in Shillingford while her husband, Victor (1909–1990) (a name he had adopted in preference to his own christened name of Vivian), served in the RAF. Vivian wolud later tell his wife, that this was the happiest time of his life. When the war ended, his father returned, and with him the happiness came to an end.The family moved back to Walthamstow. The return of Victor Stanshall was a turning point in the young Vivian's life. With only him and his mother, life was ideal. With the addition of a stern, pretentious father, Stanshall's life took a serious downturn, followed by a further shock at the arrival of a new brother, Mark Stanshall, born in 1949. They were six years apart, an age difference that apparently put a certain amount of emotional distance in their relationship that was never resolved.

As a teenager, Stanshall secretly joined a gang of teddy boys, attracted both by the rock'n'roll and the clothing. Even among such dandies, though, he was a bit of an oddball. About this time, the Stanshall family moved to the Essex coastal town of Leigh-on-Sea. To put aside enough money to get himself through art school (his father having refused to fund such goings-on), Stanshall spent a year in the merchant navy, where he made a very bad waiter, but a great teller of tall tales. He enrolled at the Central School of Art in London. Here, Stanshall and his fellow students, including Rodney Slater, Roger Ruskin Spear and Neil Innes, who was studying art at Goldsmiths College, came together to form a band.

The Bonzo Dog Dooh-Dah Band
The name of the band came from a word game which Stanshall played with art school peer and future Bonzo member Rodney Slater, involving cutting up sentences and juxtaposing the fragments to form new ones. One of the combinations that came out of this exercise was "Bonzo Dog/Dada". The band initially performed under this name, but soon grew tired of explaining what Dada meant. Thus they became the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band — later abbreviated to The Bonzo Dog Band, or just The Bonzos.

In these early days they were a very loose assemblage, consisting of the core members mentioned above, plus just about anyone else who felt like joining in. At times there were as many as 30 of them, with gigs often featuring more people on stage than in the audience. Their act at this time consisted of anarchic re-workings of old British novelty songs, found on 78 rpm records bought from flea markets, spiced with improvisation and a variety of bizarre machines assembled from junk, with at least one explosion per gig.

The Bonzos might have continued in this way, probably disappearing into obscurity, had it not been for a nasty shock: the 1966 chart success of a winsomely arch number called Winchester Cathedral by The New Vaudeville Band — a band comprising session musicians created by songwriter Geoff Stephens, whose musical style was uncannily like the Bonzos' own. As soon as the record became a hit, Stephens and his record company needed a band to present themselves as The New Vaudeville Band. Bob Kerr, a Bonzo member, was asked by his friend Stephens to become the band, and he tried convincing the others that they change their name to achieve greater commercial success, but the advice was rejected...at this point Kerr left the band. Several weeks later, the band appeared on Top Of The Pops performing the songs in clothes exactly like the Bonzos. An emergency meeting was called and the band decided to wear whatever they wanted. The Bonzos realized that if they were to make a mark for themselves, they would have to forge a new path.

According to the band's manager Gerry Bron (brother of the actress Eleanor Bron), Vivian Stanshall was given several weeks to produce songs for the new professional Bonzo Dog Band. When people arrived at his studio they found he had not written a single thing, focusing instead on building a variety of rabbit hutches.

"Canyons of Your Mind" on Colour Me Pop

From here on, they started writing their own material and dropping it into the act alongside the old novelty numbers. With Stanshall now liberated from his original role as tuba player and firmly established as the front man, the act became more sophisticated, more daring, satirical, and original. For a while the band existed as a semi-pro outfit playing the college circuit, but it wasn't long before they acquired a manager, went full time, and found themselves booked on the working men's club circuit mainly in the north of England. The band dominated their lives, traveling to low-paying gigs in an old van crammed with any number of musical instruments, an assortment of props, and prop robots.

In 1967, they appeared in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour television special playing Vivian's song "Death Cab for Cutie" during the strip club scene, and this was followed by a slot as the house band on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a weekly TV revue show essentially for children, also notable for early appearances by David Jason and various future Monty Pythons.

The Bonzos on "Do Not Adjust Your Set"

In 1968 the Bonzos scored a surprise top ten hit with a number called "I'm the Urban Spaceman" (produced by Apollo C. Vermouth aka Paul McCartney), after management wanted them to "play the game" as Innes put it, to try for a hit single. The band toured incessantly and recorded several albums, which led to a tour of the United States. This was so successful that they were booked for another US tour soon after. Neil Innes remembers that the band were reportedly stopped by a local U.S. sheriff and asked if they were carrying any firearms or drugs. When they denied both, the officer asked how they were going to defend themselves. Vivian piped up from the back of the minibus, "With good manners!"

Between the tours, however, something brought about a change in Stanshall's personality. There were rumours of a bad acid trip in the States, but Vivian never confirmed nor denied this, instead explaining it as a panic on stage which destroyed his confidence and inevitably his life. None of his fellow Bonzos claims to know just what happened, but by the start of the second tour he was taking very large doses of tranquillizers prescribed by a private doctor ostensibly to treat stage-fright, which in reality was crippling agoraphobia and panic disorder. This led also to Vivians increasingly large in take of alcohol in order to self medicate himself for the symptoms of his illness. Nevertheless, the workload never let up. The band had a punishing schedule, often playing more than one gig per evening. The band got sick of the whole touring scene, and decided to split still as friends. In 1970, after six years of mounting exhaustion, they broke up.

Post Bonzos and the Emergence of Sir Henry Rawlinson...

Stanshall went on to form various short-lived groups including The Sean Head Showband, Bonzo Dog Freaks (featuring the guitar talents of the rotund Bubs White) and BiG GrunT. At one point, he even went into teaching art and drama at a boys' secondary modern school in Surrey. By now, his life was dogged by alcoholism and panic attacks, which he tried to control with Valium; he would have these problems for the rest of his life. He had several spells in hospitals in attempts to stop or control his drinking, but they never worked. He was also still being prescribed larger and larger doses of Valium, which, he later reported, made things worse by adding another addiction. Even so, he continued to write music and tour.

The Rawlinson family had been populating Stanshall's imagination for quite a while, their first appearance (in name, at least) being on the Bonzos' 1967 number The Intro & The Outro: "Great to hear the Rawlinsons on trombone".

An LP, "Sir Henry at Rawlinson End", which reworked some of the material from the Peel sessions, appeared in 1978. A sepia-tinted black and white film version, starring Trevor Howard as Sir Henry, and Stanshall as Hubert, followed in 1980. It was also based on the Peel recordings, with many variations from the LP. Some of the film's music was provided by Stanshall's friend Steve Winwood. A book of the same title by Stanshall, illustrated with stills from the film, was published by Eel Pie Publishing in 1980. Nominally a film novelisation, it was distilled from all the various versions of the story, including a good deal of material that was not used in the film.

A second Rawlinson album, "Sir Henry at Ndidi's Kraal" (1983), recounts Sir Henry's disastrous African expedition, but omits the rest of the Rawlinson clan. According to Ki Longfellow-Stanshall, his widow, he regarded this recording as sub-standard and it was released without his knowledge and against his wishes. He was ill when making it, and the record company issued it as quickly as possible. Stanshall was often drunk and/or depressed during production, which took place on The Searchlight, a house boat he bought from Moody Blues and Wings' Denny Laine and moored between Shepperton and Chertsey on the River Thames. He lived on it from 1977 to 1983. Converted from a Second World War era submarine-chaser, it was forever taking on water and sank with all his possessions aboard. Almost all of them were retrieved, some the worse for water damage.

After Sir Henry and So To The Big Sleep...

Stanshall collaborated on numerous projects including Robert Calvert's Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells where he is the Master of Ceremonies, breathily announcing the buildup of instruments in the finale of the first side of the album, appeared with Grimms and The Rutles, as well as occasionally working with The Alberts and The Temperance Seven.

While living on the Searchlight, Stanshall composed and recorded Teddy Boys Don't Knit, and wrote and recorded Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. There, he also wrote and filmed the film of the same name for Tony Stratton-Smith's Charisma Records company. At the same time, he co-wrote with Steve Winwood the songs for Winwood's Arc of a Diver and wrote some of the songs he later used for Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera, the musical comedy he wrote with his second wife Ki Longfellow.

After the Searchlight, the Stanshall family lived and worked on the Thekla, a Baltic Trader, which was sailed 732 nautical miles (1,356 km) from the east coast of England to be moored in the Bristol docks. Ki had bought the Thekla in Sunderland, and converted her into a floating theatre called The Old Profanity Showboat. Vivian joined her when the doors opened to the public for the first time in May 1983. In December 1985, the ship saw the debut of their production, Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera.

Stanshall wrote 27 original songs for Stinkfoot, sharing book and lyric writing with his wife. The show involved bizarre characters that they imagined living under a seaside pier as well as characters taken from Longfellow's early tale for children called Stinkfoot. It proved a success, with people coming from all over Europe and even the Americas to see it. It was revived in London some years later with Peter Moss as musical director, but was not a critical success.

"Vivian Stanshall's Week" Documentary

There is also a 28-minute film of Stanshall currently inside the BBC vault: One Man's Week, dated 1975, looks at a week in his life and includes footage of him at The Manor Studio recording studio playing music with Gaspar Lawal, Mongezi Feza, Anthony White and Derek Quinn. This film also shows him talking about his turtles and playing his 'Phonofiddle'.

Stanshall's voice won him several commercial voice-overs, including a campaign for Cadbury's Mini Eggs which involved a reworking of the Bonzos' song Mister Slater's Parrot, under the title of Mister Cadbury's Parrot.

Vivian was married twice: in 1968 to fellow art student Monica Peiser (they had a son, Rupert, that year, and were divorced in 1975); and on 9 September 1980, to novelist Pamela "Ki" Longfellow. They had a daughter, Silky, born on 16 August 1979, named after a racehorse called Silky Sullivan, her mother's childhood favourite.
In late 1988, after Fish had left Marillion, the band considered using lyrics Stanshall had written, but in the end decided to hire John Helmer instead.

In 1989, his short interview with John Wesley Harding was released on Harding's God Made Me Do It: the Christmas EP.

In 1991, Stanshall made a 15-minute autobiographical piece called Vivian Stanshall: The Early Years, aka Crank, for BBC2's The Late Show, in which he confessed to having been terrified of his father, who had always disapproved of him.

A later programme for BBC Radio 4, Vivian Stanshall: Essex Teenager to Renaissance Man (1994) included an interview with his mother in which she insisted that his father had loved him, but Stanshall was mortified that his father had never shown it, not even on his deathbed.

Death

Stanshall was found dead on 6 March 1995, after a fire at his Muswell Hill (north London) flat; coincidentally, this was one hundred years to the day after the death of (the original) Sir Henry Rawlinson. Stanshall often smoked and drank in bed and even set fire to his long ginger beard, to the frequent concern of his wife and friends, however the fire was later attributed to faulty electric wiring.

Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World

2011-03-17T21:54:00.002+13:00

I can't say enough good stuff about the online PBS website and especially their American Experience series of documentaries. They cover everything from the first white settlers and the impact they had on Native Americans, to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to The Dustbowl and on and on.

My fascination with the American whaling industry started a few years ago after watching the movie "Moby Dick" with Gregory Peck in his greatest role as Captain Ahab, and continued with me reading the novel (one of the greatest American novels ever in my humble) of the same name. It's a pity Starbucks had to tarnish this great novel by stealing the name of Ahab's right hand man for their awful chain of rubbish coffee shops. Nothings sacred.

This documentary brings it all home in stunning detail. While I find whaling abhorrent to say the least, this was a different time. I make no case for or against the whalers of this historical period, but their endeavors shaped America for good or ill.

I couldn't embed the documentary, but follow this link and you should be right.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1485863181

Bikers & Hippies...1960's grimy documentary about modern day outlaw

2011-02-17T17:10:00.001+13:00

"As tough as they look, not one of these cat's can cut in modern day society...and they like it like that" So says the verging on the crazed voice over to the intro to this bizarre documentary about the menace that was BIKERS & HIPPIES!!

Bikers, Hippies from Django's Ghost on Vimeo.

If you want it...The Badfinger Story

2011-02-13T12:38:00.004+13:00

They were poised to be the 70's answer to the fab four. Their first hit was a Macca original, they penned the huge pop balled "Without You" later taken to the top by Harry Nillson and Mariah Carey. George Martin, Todd Rungren and George Harrison produced some of their finest work, they had the power pop world at their feet. So you may ask...what happened? The story is stranger and more tragic than you can begin to imagine. Dressed up here in the "Behind the Music" gloss, the story of Badfinger is gripping and poignant none the less...all this and they were Welsh!!

Money/Flying

"Here Cones the Sun". Pete Ham and George Harrison perform at the Concert for Bangladesh..really lovely version...

a conference of birds

2011-01-31T22:30:00.001+13:00

A tune i wrote influenced by John Fahey and other country blues musicians. Open tuning G. Bit scratchy but close enough...

Time

2011-01-27T03:18:00.001+13:00

Short film featuring my son with a kite on a beach in winter. Music inspired by Simon & Garfunkel, remixed by me...

Tuli Kupferberg, Bohemian, Musician, Fug and Saint , Dies at 86

2011-01-27T00:50:00.000+13:00

From The New York Times...Tuli Kupferberg, a poet and singer who went from being a noted Beat to becoming, in his words, “the world’s oldest rock star” when he helped found the Fugs, the bawdy and politically pugnacious rock group, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86 and lived in Manhattan. The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.” They were also perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the graduate seminar (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem by William Blake); all were played with a ramshackle glee that anticipated punk rock.

With songs like “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs also established themselves as aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist theater. The band became “the U.S.O. of the left,” Mr. Kupferberg once said, and it played innumerable peace rallies, including the “exorcism” of the Pentagon in 1967 that Norman Mailer chronicled in his book “The Armies of the Night.” (The band took its name from a usage in Mailer’s “Naked and the Dead.”)

The Fugs was formed in 1964 in Mr. Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, a former kosher meat store on East 10th Street in Manhattan. By then Mr. Kupferberg, already in his 40s, was something of a Beatnik celebrity. He was an anthologized poet and had published underground literary magazines with titles like Birth and Yeah.

He had also found notoriety as the inspiration for a character in Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” As Ginsberg and Mr. Kupferberg acknowledged, he was the one who “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten,” a reference to a 1945 suicide attempt (off the Manhattan Bridge, not Brooklyn) that had been precipitated by what he called a nervous breakdown.

The fame that episode earned him caused Mr. Kupferberg a lifetime of chagrin and embarrassment. “Throughout the years,” he later said, “I have been annoyed many times by, ‘Oh, did you really jump off the Brooklyn Bridge?,’ as if it was a great accomplishment.”

The Fugs’ first album, “The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction,” was released in 1965. The band became a staple of underground galleries and theaters, as well as antiwar rallies. In concert Mr. Kupferberg was often the group’s mascot or harlequin, acting out satirical pantomimes — an American soldier who turns into a Nazi, for example — or sometimes not singing at all.

On subsequent albums the band changed its lineup many times and acquired a more professional sound, though its scatological themes got it kicked off at least one major record label.

With his bushy beard and wild hair, Mr. Kupferberg embodied the hippie aesthetic. But the term he preferred was bohemian, which to him signified a commitment to art as well as a rejection of restrictive bourgeois values, and as a scholar of the counterculture he traced the term back to an early use by students at the University of Paris. Among his books were “1,001 Ways to Live Without Working” — and for decades he was a frequent sight in Lower Manhattan, selling his cartoons on the street and serving as a grandfather figure for generations of nonconformists.

Beneath Mr. Kupferberg’s antics, however, was a keen poetic and musical intelligence that drew on his Jewish and Eastern European roots. He specialized in what he called “parasongs,” which adapted and sometimes satirized old songs with new words. And some of his Fugs songs, like the gentle “Morning, Morning,” had their origins in Jewish religious melodies.

Naphtali Kupferberg was born in New York on Sept. 28, 1923. He grew up on the Lower East Side and became a jazz fan and leftist activist while still a teenager. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1944 and got a job as a medical librarian.

“I had intended to be a doctor at one point, like any good Jewish boy,” he recalled to Mr. Sanders in an audio interview in 2003. Instead he began to write topical poems and humor pieces, contributing to The Village Voice and other publications.

After the Fugs broke up, in 1969, Mr. Kupferberg performed with two groups, the Revolting Theater and the Fuxxons, and continued writing. The Fugs reunited periodically, first in 1984. Recently, Mr. Sanders said, Mr. Kupferberg had completed his parts for a new album, “Be Free: The Fugs Final CD (Part Two),” and had also been posting ribald “perverbs” — brief videos punning on well-known aphorisms — on YouTube.

Mr. Kupferberg is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp; three children, Joseph Sacks, Noah Kupferberg and Samara Kupferberg; and three grandchildren.

Born to Boogie...

2011-01-22T03:36:00.000+13:00

Watch Born to Boogie.... in Music | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Pint Sized White Man With Huge Black Voice...

2011-01-19T20:26:00.000+13:00

Steve Marriott and Humble Pie. Revelation! Peter Frampton really spanks the six string and isn't actually a rubbish MOR star after all, and what a voice Stevie, say no more...

Black Coffee..

Natural Born...

Sad Bag of of Shaky Jake...

The Jesus Trip...(1971)

2011-01-16T18:02:00.008+13:00

The Jesus Trip is an early 70's (though it's look is pure late 1960's) exploitation biker movie, loosely based around the same synopsis as Easy Rider, only with a nun falling in love with a biker! When the police discover that their motorcycles are concealing heroin, Waco (Robert Porter) and his motorcycle gang hides out in a desert convent. A highway patrolman (Billy 'Green' Bush) hunts down the gang after they kidnap a nun, Sister Anna (Tippy Walker) and flee the convent. Soon Waco and the young nun fall in love and she is forced to decide whether or not to leave the church for him. And so it goes

The Jesus Trip original trailer (1971).

The film is famous for the line about 'The Jesus & Mary Chain', inspiring the Glasgow band to use the name. The Jesus & Mary Chain also went on to use a still from the film as the image for the 'April Skies' single cover.

"April Skies" video...

Jesus & Mary Chain - April Skies
Uploaded by jesus_lizard. - Explore more music videos.

Captain Beefheart – January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010.

2011-01-11T16:06:00.004+13:00

Beefheart is an utter original if not some kind of genius...(R. Christgau).

Beefheart design: A. Monaghan

Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, who has died aged 69 of complications from multiple sclerosis, was one of the most influential American musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. His status was always cult rather than commercial, and for most of his career he was broke.

Yet he remained a hero to most of the musical avant garde: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Mothers of Invention in America; Roxy Music, Hawkwind, Jethro Tull, Family and Edgar Broughton in Britain. He was one of John Peel's favourite artists, and the DJ did much to promote Beefheart by playing his records when no other radio programme would touch them.

In 1964 Beefheart formed the Magic Band, the first of many lineups under the name. They sounded pretty discordant, but due to Beefheart's mesmeric presence, a four-and-a-half octave vocal range, his eccentric ability with lyrics and his inexplicable one-liners to interviewers, the band was unforgettable.

Beefheart once described his thing to an uncomprehending radio interviewer as "music to dematerialise the catatonia". His style was rhythm and blues-based but completely unorthodox in its approach to structure, rhythm and key. Magic Band musicians had names such as Winged Eel Fingerling, Zoot Horn Rollo, the Mascara Snake and Rockette Morton. They wore a ragbag of cloaks and the Captain wore a hat, usually a topper, which became his trademark.

Van Vliet was born in Glendale, California, an only child who showed artistic talent. He claimed he was producing respected sculpture at the age of five. When he was 13, his family moved to the Mojave desert, an atmosphere that was to have an enormous influence on him, and particularly his painting, and a place where he lived on and off all his life.

In 1959 he was offered a place at Antelope Valley junior college as an art major, but instead he hung out at home with his schoolfriend Frank Zappa, listening to old r'n'b records and planning various projects. One was dreamed up sitting stoned in a car ("Not Zappa," recalled Beefheart, "Frank never turned on") in the desert in 1962, to shoot a film called Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People. The film was never made, but the name stuck.

From their early teens, Beefheart and Zappa developed a love-hate relationship which became lifelong, mainly based on Beefheart's resentment of Zappa's success. Despite briefly moving to Cucamonga in California in the early 1960s to be with Zappa, intending to form a band called the Soots, Beefheart remained in the desert while Frank, an astute businessman, moved to Los Angeles and founded the Mothers of Invention.

Beefheart's early albums remain the most original: Safe as Milk (produced by Bob Krasnow and Richard Perry, 1967); Strictly Personal (completed in a week, produced by Krasnow, 1968) and two albums for Zappa's Straight label: Trout Mask Replica (1969) and Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970). For Trout Mask Replica, Beefheart locked the Magic Band in a house in Woodland Hills for eight months, continually rehearsing the songs. Virtually broke, they often had nothing but bread to eat, but when they finally got into the studio they recorded the double album in four and a half hours.

Although they admired him, other musicians found Beefheart exasperating. The guitarist Ry Cooder played on the first album and was due to appear at the Monterey festival in 1967 with the band, but left in a temper after Beefheart had a panic attack during rehearsal and walked off the back of the stage, landing on top of his manager.

It was Beefheart's stubborn refusal to conform that invariably lost him the big bucks. And he was not indifferent to money. He loved fast cars and owned variously a Hudson, Corvette and Jaguar, drank brandy alexanders, and always wore the best shoes he could afford.

In 1974 Beefheart was signed to Virgin Records. Richard Branson also desperately wanted to sign Zappa, but it was during one of Beefheart's hate-Frank periods. Despite being warned never to mention the name, virtually the first words Branson uttered to Beefheart were about how great it would be when he had also got Zappa on to the label. It was a fateful and uneasy start. Yet when, as invariably happened with Beefheart, the relationship between artist and record company soured, it was Zappa who rescued Beefheart and took him on tour. Beefheart responded by filling a series of huge sketchbooks with angry drawings of Zappa.

Despite having no formal training in art, Beefheart drew and painted throughout his music career. His first exhibition was in Liverpool at the Bluecoat Gallery in 1972, while he was touring in Britain. He executed 15 black and white paintings in situ. In 1982, on the advice of the New York art dealer Michael Werner that he would never be taken seriously as a painter unless he gave up music, Beefheart turned to art and gained a reasonable reputation.

He married his wife Jan in 1970. She cared for him through his debilitating multiple sclerosis until the end.

• Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), musician and artist, born 15 January 1941; died 17 December 2010

For a great re-assesment of his work go to...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/dec/22/captain-beefheart-back-catalogue?intcmp=239

Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane & All You Need is Love...

2011-01-10T15:55:00.006+13:00

Years from now, when we are all dust, these clips will still be three of the strangest bit's of music put to film, although All You Need is Love isn't really music put to film as they sang live in the studio, but it's still very odd.

There something so unreal about The Beatles at this time, that they were so huge globally, universally even, yet their music and themselves seem so personal and familiar, like they are singing and playing to us, each and everyone individually.

The movie clips themselves are noteworthy for their very oddness, strangeness and at times down right sinister quality. You have the fab four wandering around some God forsaken autumnal moor or heath, in balaclavas and furs, jumping from an impressive height, walking around backwards, drip painting and deconstructing some kind of butchered piano and all under a very witchy looking tree that I for one wouldn't hang around under after dark ..very strange.

John Lennon striding against the human traffic on a Liverpudlian high street and then the four of them meeting like some street gang, then even odder, The Beatles on horse back in some street which cuts to a decrepit ruin in the country, the four beatles decked out in red hunting jackets ride cryptically past a stage set up with drums and amps to a table where they are waited on by what look like four footmen before John Lennon upends the whole thing.

And the last clip...The Beatles elevated above a crowd made up of their musical peers including Keith Richards, Donovan, Marianne Faithful and Keith Moon, demi Gods in their own domain, Dons to the whole 60's pop gangster family, gazing down upon their minions and postulating about love and other weirdness while Mick Jagger sings and claps along looking like a sheepish schoolboy...what were these people on?

Strawberry Fields

Penny Lane

All You Need is Love

Gerry Rafferty...

2011-01-06T19:03:00.013+13:00

I used to confuse Gerry Rafferty with Al Stewart, and admit I know little about both, but Baker Street? Well we all know Baker Street don't we?

When I used to get the National Express coach from Scotland down to London, as it pulled into Baker Street on it's way to Victoria Station I couldn't resist whistling that sax intro. I even got a cheer once for my efforts. Once, while travelling with a friend and fellow band mate at the time I started the usual whistling mainly out of habit by now. Said comrade hissed at me to stop!! Not cool you see, couldn't see the joke...well I always thought that Baker Street was very cool and as it turns out was actually no joke at all.

The song matter and lyrics are dark. It goes from 'I used to think that it was so easy' to 'life being trying' to 'you're cryin now' within three lines. Subjects such as break ups, break downs, settling down, one night stands, restlessness, new mornings and alcoholic struggle all hang on a flawless MOR production complete with up front congas. On a purely musical note, it must be one of the only songs ever to have a sax solo as a chorus instead of, well a sung chorus.

Rafferty had a great, natural singing voice and delivered the songs gloomy lyrics with a great sense of weight, sadness and weariness. It also has a nearly killer guitar solo, but I doubt most people remember the song for that, no it's all about the sax in the end, for most punters.

Investigating sixties folk through the re-issued Trans Atlantic back catalogue I was surprised to see Rafferty (which incidentally was also my grand mother's maiden name) pop up alongside Billy Connolly in a group called The Humblebums, and later I, like thousands of others, discovered another more sardonic side to Rafferty by way of Quentin Tarantino and his Reservoir Dogs "ear cutting scene". The wonderful "Stuck in the Middle with you" made Rafferty cool overnight to a whole new generation of music lovers.

It seems Gerry's life went tits up along time ago due to his love hate relationship with the bottle. Always sad to here of another long forgotten musicians lonely and slow demise into madness and death due to the demon drink, but then we all make our own lot in this life, and that's kind of reflected in his most famous song. I'm still none the wiser about Al Stewart though, Year of the Cat, that was him wasn't it? And so to that saxophone...

• Gerald Rafferty, musician, born 16 April 1947; died 4 January 2011

and to Stealers Wheels with Joe Egan on vocals singing "Stuck in the Middle With You" which he co wrote with Gerry Rafferty. Rafferty isn't featured in this clip, by this time he had left to pursue his solo career.

Another great music blog...

2011-01-05T22:21:00.000+13:00

Check out the link for a world of unhinged fun...http://32rpm.blogspot.com/

Reefer Madness?

2011-01-05T22:13:00.018+13:00

So what's it all about? Hypocrisy!! That's what it's all about brothers and sisters, and it is truly madness that Marijuana is still an illegal substance anywhere on this beautiful green planet and I will go to the grave saying the same thing, PROHIBITION OF POT DOES NOT, HAS NOT, AND NEVER WILL WORK...and that's the double truth Ruth! But you don't have to watch this great documentary to know this already, do you?

Whether you smoke or not, whether you've ever inhaled or not is not the issue here, the issue here is government control and political insanity, and of course big business and the pursuit of the corporate dollar.

My own experiences...In 2004 I spent three weeks in a detoxification unit coming off benzodiazepines, valium...it eventually took me over a year to get clean of benzo's. I've been through two alcohol detoxifications to stop using alcohol, I've been admitted to A&E over five times due to alcohol and drug overdoses. I've been through a twelve week rehabilitation programme to help me come to terms with my alcohol and methamphetamine use, I've withdrawn myself from opiates twice after being addicted to both heroin and morphine, I could go on.

Marijuana...I've used it on and off and on and off stopped started with absolutely no problems or ill effects whatsoever. I've smoked it 1,000's of times with nothing but good effects. Even now I smoke marijuana to help me sleep in favour of using sleeping pills (more dangerous addictive prescription drugs) to help treat chronic insomnia and anxiety. Two years ago I was busted for less than five dollars worth of marijuana, and now have a criminal record...Why? Because I broke a law that I believe is unjust, outdated, unrealistic and just plain dumb!

I think the evidence in this documentary for and against is evenly and shall I say soberly laid out in a way that even the most fervent Ronald Reagan loving, whiskey swilling, cigar smoking bigot would find it hard, nigh on impossible to argue the case for prohibition, and whether he or she ever takes up the habit or not isn't the issue, oops I've already said that haven't I? Side effects?

Logo-logy

2010-12-11T22:00:00.000+13:00

If you are into logo's or graphic design in general then this site is definately worth spending a day or two to explore...http://www.logoinn.net/

Just one of the many logo's explored at logology

Saint John...1940 – 1980

2010-12-08T17:17:00.002+13:00

I remember the news like it was just 30 years ago. God bless ya Johnny, thanks for all the good times past present and to come...

Sandy Denny solo live performance from 1971

2010-11-20T21:38:00.000+13:00

Sandy Denny was not only a great great singer, but an inspired songwriter and performer. This footage was filmed around the time she released her first solo album, "The North Star Grassman and the Raven". Say no more really. Here she is at the height of her powers...

Reno Nevada - Fairport Convention, 1968

2010-11-20T21:28:00.000+13:00

The original line up with the under rated Judy Dibble on vocals take on Richard and Mimi Farina's spooky folk classic "Reno Nevada" on French television from the late '60's. Richard Thompson's guitar is sublime and nice to see tiger on bass.

What is this...? A convention!!

2010-11-13T16:44:00.002+13:00

Phil Spector, pre porridge duty, Boyce and Heart and on drums, backing vocals and cello Genie on an episode of I dream of Genie. Where's Hagman? American T.V. doesn't get stranger or cooler than this...

More Music...

2010-11-12T18:20:00.001+13:00

Philip K Dick – Science FIction Visionary

2010-11-10T10:34:00.003+13:00

Philip K Dick 1928 - 1982

Since his untimely death at age 53, there has been an extraordinary growth of interest in his writings, which during his lifetime were largely ignored by serious mainstream critics and readers. Such is no longer the case, and the novels of Philip K. Dick frequently appear on university curricula devoted to modern American literature. But that is only the beginning of the transformation. Since 1982, when Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (based on Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) made its debut, eight feature films based on Dick's fiction have appeared, the other seven being Total Recall, The Minority Report, Screamers, Impostor, the French film Confessions d'un Barjo (based on Dick's mainstream novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist), Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly and the upcoming Next (April 2007). That's an average of roughly one movie every three years since Dick's passing - a rate of cinematic adaptation exceeded only by Stephen King. And there are other big-money film options currently held by Hollywood studios.

Philip K. Dick has done more than arrive. He has become a looming and illuminating presence not merely in American but in world culture, with his works translated into major European and Asian languages. There is even a bastard adjective - "phildickian "- that makes its way into print now and then to describe the baffling twists and turns of our times. An understanding of the basic facts of Dick's life not only casts light on the themes that predominate in his writings, but also brings to view a fascinating story in its own right.

The Early Years

He was born prematurely, along with his twin sister Jane, in Chicago on December 16, 1928. His father was Edgar Dick, his mother Dorothy Kindred - from her maiden name came Dick's middle initial. Jane died six weeks after her birth, a loss that Phil felt deeply throughout his life. As time went on, Phil came, with whatever justice, to blame his mother for Jane's death. His relationship with both of his parents was decidedly difficult, and made only more so when they divorced when he was five years old.

Sister Jane, his mother, and his father served as models for many of the characters who would populate Dick's fictional universes in the decades to come. In particular, the death of Jane - and Phil's traumatic sense of separation from her, an experience common to many twins who have lost their sibling - contributed to the dualist (twin-poled) dilemmas that dominated his creative work - science fiction (SF)/mainstream, real/fake, human/android. It was out of these pressing dualities that the two vast questions emerged which Dick often cited as encompassing his writing: What is Real? and What is Human?

Mother Dorothy retained custody over her son, and they eventually settled in Berkeley, where Dick grew up, graduated from high school, and briefly attended the University of California in 1949 before dropping out.

Starting in seventh grade, however, Dick began suffering from bouts of extreme vertigo; the vertigo recurred with special intensity during his brief undergraduate stint. In his late teens, Dick later recalled, he was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia - a label that terrified him. Other psychotherapists and psychiatrists in later years would offer other diagnoses, including the one that Dick was quite sane.

Leaving aside medical terminology, there is no question that Dick felt himself, throughout his life, to suffer from bouts of psychological anguish that he frequently referred to as "nervous breakdowns." His experience of these was transmuted into fictional portraits, most notably of "ex-schizophrenic" Jack Bohlen in Martian Time-Slip (1964).

A Genre of Ideas

In a 1968 "Self Portrait" he recalled the moment of discovery of the genre that would ultimately set him free to write of the complex realities of his own personal experience:

"I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine…it was called Stirring Science Stories and ran, I think, four issues….I came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking for Popular Science. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz books - this magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science…In any case my view became magic equals science…and science (of the future) equals magic."

This is not to say that Dick read only SF during his coming of age years. On the contrary, he was an omnivorous and devouring reader, taking in Xenophon's Anabasis, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the French realists such as Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant - all this and much more by his early twenties. Dick gave credit to the American Depression-era writer James T. Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan, for helping Dick see how to construct the SF stories that he sold in such numbers to the SF pulps in the early 1950s.

And even though Dick never lost his yearning to be accepted by the literary mainstream, he always regarded it as a kind of treason to deprecate the SF genre he grew up on and flourished in. As he wrote in 1980, two years before his death:

"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."

An Author Finds His Voice

From age fifteen to his early twenties, Dick was employed in two Berkeley shops, University Radio and Art Music, owned by Herb Hollis, a salt-of-the-earth American small businessman who became a kind of father-figure for Dick and served as an inspiration for a number of his later fictional characters, most notably Leo Bulero in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), who, in the memo to his employees that serves as the frontispiece to that novel, gruffly affirms the human spirit:

"I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?"

Three Stigmata, which deals with a terrifying Gnostic-style demiurgic invasion of earth by means of the eerily permeating hallucinogen "Chew-Z," so fascinated Beatle John Lennon that he considered making a film of it.

In the early 1950s, with the helpful mentorship of SF editor and Berkeley resident Anthony Boucher, Dick began to publish stories in the SF pulps of the era at an astonishing rate - seven of his stories appeared in June 1953 alone. He soon gave up his employment in the Hollis shops to pursue the economically insecure career of an SF writer.

In 1954, Dick later recalled with humor, he met one of his SF idols, A. E. Van Vogt, at an SF convention, where Van Vogt proceeded to convince the neophyte writer that there was more money to be made in novels than in stories. Henceforward, Dick's rate of production of SF novels was as remarkable as his story output had been. At his creative peak, he published sixteen SF novels between 1959 and 1964. During this same period, he also wrote mainstream novels that went unpublished, much to his anguish. To this day, it is his SF work for which Dick is best remembered, and justly so.

After a very brief failed first marriage in 1948, remarried four times - to Kleo Apostolides in 1950, to Anne Williams Rubenstein in 1959, to Nancy Hackett in 1966, and to Tessa Busby in 1973. There was one child born in each of the latter three marriages -respectively, his daughters Laura and Isa and son Christopher. During his lifetime, Dick was regarded with respect by SF fans and fellow writers, though his sales never came close to matching those of the most popular SF writers of his era such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert.

Dick received the Hugo Award in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, which tells of a post-World War II world in which Japan and Germany are the victors and the continental United States is roughly divided between them. In devising the plot, Dick employed the I Ching on several occasions and also integrated that divinatory text into the narrative itself - marking its debut in American fiction.

A Life-Changing Experience

In February and March 1974, Dick experienced a series of visions and auditions including an information-rich "pink light" beam that transmitted directly into his consciousness. A year after the events, in March 1975, Dick summarized the 2-3-74 experiences that would pervade his writing for the final eight years of his life:

"I speak of The Restorer of What Was Lost The Mender of What Was Broken."

"March 16, 1974: It appeared - in vivid fire, with shining colors and balanced patterns - and released me from every thrall, inner and outer.

"March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world did not compute, that I - and it - had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, 'This cannot exist; it cannot exist.'

"March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing."

There are those who are eager to create a "Saint Phil" who emerged from this experience. In that regard, it is wise to remember that Dick himself always bore in mind what he called the "minimum hypothesis" -that is, the possibility that all that he had undergone was merely self-delusion.

On the other hand, there are those who regard Dick as a charlatan who foisted upon his readers a pseudo-mystical revelation fueled by mental disorder. But surely a charlatan is one who insists on the seriousness and accuracy of his claims. This Dick never did. One has only to go and read VALIS (1981) to find a piercingly knowing humor in Dick's portrayal of himself as Horselover Fat:

"…Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked."

Those who insist on the "truth" or "falsehood" of Dick's experience of 2-3-74 are missing the central point: that those experiences provided him with the means to explore, with integrity, insight, and humility, the difficulties of making sense of any spiritual path in a relentlessly secular and cynical Western culture in which even apparent revelations can be instantly repackaged as popular entertainment.

On the Edge of Eternity

Dick died on March 2, 1982, the result of a combination of recurrent strokes accompanied by heart failure. In a 1981 entry in his Exegesis (an extensive journal he kept to explore the ramifications of 2-3-74) Dick wrote as focused a self-assessment of his aims and talents as a writer as can be found in any of his journals, letters, essays, and interviews:

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."

One can readily imagine this passage having been written by Franz Kafka in his diary. And it is among the great fictionalizing philosophers of the twentieth century - Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Rene Daumal, Flann O'Brien - that Dick's place in literary history lies. His uniqueness in this lineage is all the greater for his ability to have created great works in the broadly popular SF form. Dick remains compulsively, convulsingly readable. He is the master of the psychological pratfall, the metaphysical freefall, the political conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He is - as much as any contemporary writer we have - an astute guide to the shifting realities of the twenty-first century.

More Unseen Hell's Angel Images...

2010-10-18T11:04:00.003+13:00

These images were taken by LIFE photographer Bill Ray back in 1965, for an article on the outlaw biker gang the Hell's Angels, written by Joe Bride.

One of the images from the 1965 LIFE magazine article.

Rolling Thunder
From Jesse James to Tony Soprano, outlaws have always held a singular if ambiguous place in America's popular imagination: we fear and loathe their appetite for violence, yet we envy and covet their freedom. In early 1965, LIFE photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of our schizoid relationship with the rebel: the Hells Angels. Here, in a gallery of never-published photographs, Ray and Bride recall their days and nights with Buzzard, Hambone, Big D, and other Angels (and their "old ladies") at a time when the roar of Harleys and the sight of long-haired bikers was still new, alien, and for the average, law-abiding citizen, simply terrifying. Above: Hells Angels, 1965 -- the one previously published image in this gallery. None of the pictures that follow have ever been seen before.
To see the full set of images follow this link:
http://www.life.com/image/ugc1129811/in-gallery/47471/never-seen-hells-angels-1965

Tim Buckley...

2010-10-17T12:14:00.004+13:00

A brief over view of Tim' life and work. Words from Mojo on line article...

TIM BUCKLEY IS OFTEN SEEN as the last of Elektra's great "folk" signings in the connecting line from Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Fred Neil and Phil Ochs. He appears to bridge the era of acoustic folk and the influence of rock from Los Angeles, but really he never belonged in either camp.
Born in Washington, DC, on Valentine's Day 1947, Buckley was raised in New York. His family moved to Orange County, California, when he was ten years old and at 17 he joined a Country & Western outfit, Princess Ramona & The Cherokee Riders. But his musical spirit would never be so easily channelled and two groups he formed with friends from Buena Vista High School - the pop-flavoured Bohemians and the more esoteric Harlequin 3 - pointed the way forward. Buckley, drummer Larry Beckett and bass player Jim Fielder played the LA clubs, where the Mothers Of Invention's Jimmy Carl Black brought them to the attention of Herb Cohen, who arranged an audition at the Crescendo, on the Strip.
"The band did a set of five or six songs," said Cohen, who died in March this year. "Tim was phenomenal. He looked great, and the voice was special even then. But Larry was not really a drummer, and Jim Fielder was nowhere near as good a musician as he would become. I brought Tim to Elektra."

Elektra boss Jac Holzman was smitten by Buckley's otherworldly voice after hearing a six-song demo. "There was a mysterious, almost ephemeral quality about Tim," he says today. Holzman signed him during the summer of 1966, and the debut album, Tim Buckley - recorded in LA by Paul Rothchild - was released in December that year, beating out the first Doors album by a month.
Holzman felt the album, as interesting as it was, served merely as an introduction to Buckley's talent. "It was an exercise in learning the studio and introducing Tim to its possibilities. The first album was training wheels for what followed. Some songs are really good - Wings, Song Of The Magician, perhaps Grief In My Soul - and there were moments of daring."
Buckley worked hard to promote his album, playing festivals, concerts, clubs, and campuses. Holzman: "Live, he was cotton candy for the girls. His songs reveal a sensitivity that women pick up on earlier than men, but they were the first [fans] he would lose later with his more ambiguous work."

Buckley's most obvious USP was that voice, which New York Times critic Robert Shelton described as "not quite a counter-tenor, but a tenor to counter with". However, within a year of his tantalising debut, Buckley was preparing something more challenging and sophisticated. He and Larry Beckett, now writing poetic lyrics, had a solid notion of how they wanted to shape Buckley's second album, Goodbye And Hello. Folk maven Jerry Yester - soon to join The Lovin' Spoonful - was assigned as producer.
"The first time I met Tim," recalls Yester, "was at Herbie Cohen's house. He played for Judy Henske, Fred Neil, and me. He sang with Jim Fielder on bass. Right out of high school, Tim was wearing a suit, a maroon tie, and his hair was slicked back. He was painfully shy. Fred Neil was his god, and I'm sure he dreamed his voice could have dropped an octave to sing like Fred. He emulated Fred's tragic side, too."
Yester fondly recalls a simpatico relationship with Buckley and Beckett.
"They just tickled me. They weren't about to let anyone screw them over. Firm in their ideals, they had that album all worked out, even down to the track sequencing. I would make suggestions - some they would take, others they wouldn't, but they were open-minded. My role was to bring Tim out, his uniqueness and the clarity of his vision."
At its best, such as the dramatic, impassioned Pleasant Street or the mood-shifting Hallucinations, Goodbye And Hello scores high, justifying Holzman's belief that the album was "a fully realised gem, a miracle." Buckley appears most at ease on the two mellower, more laidback songs: Morning Glory, with its wonderful understated arrangement, and the simple, dreamy Once I Was, inspired by Fred Neil after Buckley visited the sessions for Neil's recording of The Dolphins.
The album marked a turning point for its author. "It was very hard for me to write songs after Goodbye And Hello because most of the bases were touched," Buckley said in 1974. "That was the end of my apprenticeship for writing songs. Whatever I wrote after that wasn't adolescent, which means it wasn't easy to write after that, because you can't repeat yourself. The way Jac had it set up, you were supposed to move on artistically, but the way the business is, you're not. You're supposed to repeat what you do, so there's a dichotomy there."
Buckley guitarist Lee Underwood observed the dichotomy that the singer had identified. "Tim's approach was very much at odds with the laidback troubadour image. That image fit him during the early days, when he was a teenage folkie, but quickly became irrelevant and inappropriate as he matured."
Bruce Botnick, who was the engineer on the first three Buckley albums for Elektra, saw him change before his eyes. "You couldn't contain Tim Buckley's talent - a reflection of all the different sides of his personality. There were quantum leaps between his albums and an intellectual growth that's the mark of a great artist. It's never really conscious with someone like Tim Buckley or Bob Dylan - these people don't slice themselves up into pieces, it's all very instinctive, they have a vision."
Buckley toured Goodbye And Hello with a pool of musicians who were now exploring jazz roots rather than folk. It was this intimate group of players - featuring Buckley's own 12-string, Lee Underwood on lead guitar, and Carter C.C. Collins on congas, plus acoustic bass and vibes - who entered the studios to record what became Happy Sad.

Simply letting the tape roll, the musicians improvised minimalist tapestries around six of Buckley's new songs, of which two stretched beyond ten minutes. Elaborate poetic metaphors and intricate arrangements were out, and experimentation replaced the blithe romanticism of Goodbye And Hello. It would prove to be Buckley's defining album and his highest-charting, even if it only made 81, and it remained in the charts for three months after its release in April 1969.
Yet Jerry Yester has less than fond memories. He was in the middle of an album with Pat Boone when Buckley asked him to produce Happy Sad. Yester was now working in a production team with Zal Yanovsky, who had left the Lovin' Spoonful (and whom Yester would replace). Buckley's musicians ridiculed them for working with the straight-laced Boone but there was one bizarre consequence. The Pat Boone album Yester was producing - Departure - includes the first ever released version of one of Tim Buckley's most renowned compositions: Song To The Siren, unrecorded by Buckley till Starsailor two years later.
"After the rewarding and enjoyable experience with Goodbye And Hello, this was oil and water," says Yester. "Not so much with Tim, but with the band. He really didn't need any input from me on arrangements. The band was leading him at times, and I was there to help make it sound as good as possible."
Buckley had a different recollection. "I really loved doing that album. It was really a break-out time for me musically, and we had a ball doing that. The trick of writing is to make it sound like it's all happening for the first time. It took a long time for me to write that album, and then to teach the people in the band, but they were all great people so it was really a labour of love - the way it should be."
The music always came first for Buckley, as Holzman knew from the start. "He never felt any desire to be famous. He was purely musical and he wanted people around him who could facilitate his music. He was motivated only by a need for self-expression. When Happy Sad made the shift from Goodbye And Hello, the audience he had acquired began to drift away. You go to Lorca and Starsailor, and that process escalates - and he wasn't adding any new audience to compensate for the loss. Tim never cared about the numbers. Just the music.

"Happy Sad disappointed me at first," continues Holzman, "because I expect things to take off and go up, not to take off and go nowhere. In retrospect, that was tough for me to understand. Tim was drifting into a looser style, much jazzier, but there are fine, fine songs: Buzzin' Fly, and Love From Room 109 At The Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway) are compelling. It was something I didn't expect, and I realise more now that it was also very, very good. I did not see the perspective then; I do now."
Herb Cohen, who would continue to manage Buckley into the '70s, was just as rueful: "Tim committed artistic suicide in a way - certainly commercial suicide. Of course he did some stuff that was really good, strange as it was, but he wanted to develop something, and I don't know that he really knew what that was or whether he felt he had ever got there. There was no way that people could relate to albums like Lorca and Starsailor. People do now, and they try and figure out what that music was and where it was going, but the world at the time wasn't prepared for that. People would come to see him because of what they heard from the first two albums and they couldn't understand what he was doing any more. And they would stop coming."

During the autumn of 1969, Buckley recorded the near-instrumental Lorca - his final record for Elektra - and what became Blue Afternoon, plus part of his sixth album, Starsailor. Holzman gave Buckley his release, knowing he already had a potential new home with Herb Cohen's DiscReet label. Holzman hadn't heard Lorca in 40 years, but returned to it recently and realized "I totally blew it with Lorca. Even for me, so into evolution in music, I was not ready to accept Tim's streams of self-expression and the lack of modality on Lorca. Nobody Walkin' astonishes me in the way Tim uses his voice. If that's the last song he recorded for Elektra, he went out in flaming glory. How he got those voices on that album I can't imagine. Hearing it in 2010, I'm proud it is on Elektra. And it is on Elektra through no credit to me."

Those Strange Victorians and Their Unusual Hobbies...

2010-10-13T14:00:00.001+13:00

This is quite unlike anything I have ever seen before. My favourite is "The Lower Five's drinking den being raided by the police". Them rats sure do look like the're having a good time of it...

From The Telegraph Newspaper.
A bizarre collection of stuffed animals that was broken up and sold around the world seven years ago has been reassembled for a one-off exhibition. The eccentric works of Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter, in which stuffed animals mimic human life, were sold for more than £500,000 in 2003. Celebrities including comedian Harry Hill, photographer David Bailey and artist Peter Blake snapped up pieces from the 10,000-item collection in Mr Potter's eerie Museum of Curiosities. For more images go to:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/8059876/Walter-Potters-Museum-of-Curiosities-bizarre-Victorian-collection-of-stuffed-animals-goes-on-show-again.html

The Kittens wedding from Walter Potters Collection.

The great fashion crimes of the Irish Republic...

2010-10-12T11:01:00.003+13:00

Back in 1975, when Northern Ireland was up to it's eyeballs in blood and thunder, it seems the fellas in the Irish Republic were fighting their own heroic struggle, only their fight was with the twin evils of prog rock and glam fashion!!! Looks like the bass player has lost his particular battle...it's The Horslips of ...course. The snakes were obviously frightened out off Ireland by the flute players trousers and platform shoe combination! A nice piece off music and all that...

The La's

2010-08-29T12:14:00.003+12:00

The La's only official release

The La's were a group from Liverpool, England. Noel Gallagher was once famous for saying that Oasis, or rather he was going to finish what The La's started (or words to that effect). Sadly the Mancunian mouth doesn't even come close. I'm not knocking Mr. Gallagher here, don't get me wrong, the guy's written some nice tunes, but Lee Mavers and his scouse mates were always in a different league, musicaly, melodically, lyrically and philosophically.

The La's released one self titled album in 1990, which every home should have, a handful off brilliant singles, some BBC sessions and since their demise, a hodgepodge of compilations, lost recordings, rarities, alternate takes and live stuff.
Lee Mavers has become somewhat of a living legend, a sort of scouse Brian Wilson, reclusive, mad cap, inconsistent and always seemingly on the verge of a brilliant come back with threats of a new and even better LA's long player. But unlike Wilson he has yet to deliver. That doesn't take anything away from the perfection of the first album.
The LA's were also a great live band. I saw them twice in their touring heady in the late 1980's and on both occasions were brilliant. I wish the same could be said for the likes of The Stone Roses who somehow eclipsed the LA's as the great saviours of British guitar music back in 1989.

"Room Full off Mirrors" Jimi Hendrix Experience...

2010-08-24T11:11:00.001+12:00

Not the widely known version from the Rainbow Bridge soundtrack. This version, which to my mind is far superior, is a lot darker with a real sense of brooding and malevolence. Jimi's vocal are on top form, and the guitar break is searing and concise. Hope you enjoy this one from the vaults. The film was made as a tribute to the great man, and in honour of the 40th anniversary of his parting with this life.

"Chelsea Girl" – Nico

2010-08-19T11:25:00.001+12:00

"Chelsea Girl" released in 1967

Angi by Davy Graham

2010-08-13T16:50:00.008+12:00

This tune by Davy Graham is considered the well spring for all other 'folk blues' tunes that came after it. Every guitar player who ever wandered down the road of finger picking, folk guitar has mastered his own version.
Bert Jansch famously recorded it after Davy Graham's version, twisting it and turning it into his own tune. Paul Simon was so taken by the tune that he not only recorded it himself, but borrowed the majority of the tune's structure and turned it into "We've got a groovy thing going Baby" for Simon and Garfunkel. And now my attempt. I'm more or less influenced by both Davy and Bert's versions, taking elements of both to turn out my own version of this classic, ageless tune.
The film I made to accompany it is largely culled from the Peter Whitehead film, "Tonight let's all make love in London". I've chopped it up a bit and added some of my own footage. I want to convey the feeling of urban movement that the song conjures up. Buildings, bridges, traffic and human traffic. A city at night, a city on the move, people going places, anonymity in the crowd. The heartbeat of a city.

Davy Graham

How to Record an Album With a Blown Mind...

2010-08-11T00:22:00.051+12:00

The majesty of Alexander 'Skip' Spence's late 60's ragged folk/ psych masterpiece "Oar".

Oar by Alexander 'Skip' Spence.

Before 'Oar'
The road to 'Oar' for Skip had been exciting, joyous, manic, unpredictable, dangerous, dark and eventually plain old insane.
Skip's first brush with fame came in the original line up of San Francisco psychedelic stalwarts Jefferson Airplane. Skip not only played drums but co-wrote some of the best early airplane songs including the gloomy psych folk hit "Blues From an Airplane" and wrote "My Best Friend" released on the groups "Surrealistic Pillow" L.P. He was fired by the autocratic Marty Balin for missing an Airplane gig.

After leaving Jefferson Airplane, Skip joined Moby Grape, the greatest almost-rans of the late 60's West Coast scene. During the recording of the groups second album "Wow" in New York, Spence, who had always been fond of altered states, seems to have gone right out of his mind and flipped over to the dark-side. After putting a fire axe through his band mate Don Stevenson's door, he headed downtown to the studio where the rest of the band were working, in his pajamas, axe in hand seemingly to finish the job he had started. After being apprehended, Skip was arrested, booked and shipped off for a six month stay at New York's notorious Bellevue Hospital.

It's here where the story of 'Oar' really commences. Skip was released from Bellevue with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a head full of songs, however he was still under contract to Columbia records. After being given a guitar by Fender, and playing his songs to record producer David Rubinson, Skip bought a chopper with an advance from Columbia and headed to Nashville where he wanted to record his record, presumably away from anyone he might run into from his not too distant past, and, so it was that Skip arrived in early December 1968.

Skip during his time with Moby Grape.

'Oar'

Skip recorded 28 pieces of music in six days between December 3 and 12 and by the 16th was back on his chopper and gone, West to California and oblivion. He alone handled all the vocals, played bass, drums and acoustic and electric guitar; and produced the finished album with the help of Mike Figlio, a Columbia staff engineer.

The simple instrumentation upon which Skip hung his transcendent and ghostly vocals, was partly due to the constraints of recording on an old three track machine at Columbia, and partly due to Skips one man recording band ethos. And it's these factors along with Skips extraordinary songs that combined to make Oar sound like nothing else at the time and almost nothing since. Writing for Rolling Stone in 1968, Greil Marcus described the L.P. thus, "Much of Oar sounds like the sort of haphazard folk music that might have been made around campfires after the California gold rush burned itself out – sad, clumsy tunes that seem to laugh at themselves as Spence takes the listener on a tour through his six or seven voices..." He goes on to compare Spence, somewhat erroneously to Wildman Fischer and the album to Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes".

"Little Hands"

The original album, opens with a gentle strum of acoustic guitar followed by a stab of electric guitar against marching band drums, liquid bass and the glorious, folk gospel off "Little Hands". Skips snake guitar wraps around his strange, shimmering vocal.
"Cripple Creek"

The dark and eerie "Cripple Creek", written about a cripple in his wheelchair and sung in a baritone equal parts Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, fizzes with Spence's rattling acoustic rhythm and pretty, flamenco like flourishes.
"Diana"

"Diana" is both sung and growled by Skip in an otherworldly, broken and pained voice, hung on rattling disjointed acoustics, fractured drumming and faraway soaring electric fills. It's a spooky unnerving song, not a million miles from Arthur Lee & Love.
"Margaret – Tiger Rug"

This odd song is held together by a disjointed, clanking bass and more military drums with a strange lyric influenced it seems by his time in Bellevue. Skips vocals are delivered in a half sung, half spoken, off key, almost jokingly shambolic manner. Childlike would be the accurate word. The song staggers to it's conclusion before cutting dead.
"Weighted Down (The Prison Song)"

Skip's soul laid bare and accompanied by that beautiful, mournful baritone and his lightly strummed acoustic. The feeling is dread, doped and heavy, but also a weary kind of comfort and release. Skip's words come to us like some old time spiritual salvation hymn. The weight of the delivery saturates the listener and pulls us into Skips broken down world.
"War in Peace"

Skip guides us from the depths of his soul to the heavens with the gloriously stumbling and tripped out "War in Peace". Skip's delivery is a high pitched whistle of a whisper, heavily delayed and reminiscent of some of the late Syd Barratt's solo work. Full 'band' here with Skip taking the song to task with double lead guitar, chugging rhythm and great bass and drum interplay. All topped off with Skip's strange bird whistles and ethereal whispers. He finishes off with a nod to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love' in the closing guitar run.
"Broken Heart"

"Broken Heart" comes on like some lost Hank Williams hymn from the mid 50's. But Hank never wrote lyrics as off the wall as this.
"All Come to Meet Her"

This is Skip at his most fragile and most beautiful. Soaring wordless harmonies that morph into lyrics. Skip's elastic twang of guitar echoes the vocals throughout, all set against the bony, skeleton bare rattle of Skips drums. Unnerving but gorgeous, heart warming as some ancient and lost gospel hymn.
"Books of Moses"

This cracked biblical epic is seeped in the same kind of fear and dread conjured up by the murder ballads of Robert Johnson and Leadbelly. With it's strained, demented vocal and dark twanging acoustic guitar set against a radiophonic workshop of rain, thunderstorms and howling wind, it's a 50's B Horror Movie set to music. The results are chilling, until it segues straight into the up beat and comedic "Dixie Peach Promenade (Yin for Yang)". It echo's the Moby Grape track "Just Like Gene Autry (A Fox-trot)". This however, would be it's slightly deranged, sex starved, hillbilly cousin after too much moonshine and not enough beaver!
"Lawrence of Euphoria"

The strangeness continues to grow with the jocular, bouncy and defiantly unhinged "Lawrence of Euphoria". Skips great, thumping, strummed bass carries the song along against a willfully, out of tune yet triumphantly strident one chord guitar accompaniment. Again, Skips vocals are half sung half leered into the microphone.

"Grey/Afro"
The albums closer is the meditative, prayer like "Grey/Afro". Skip is in strange, swampy and alien waters, swimming in a heavily phased and swelling mix of strummed bass and splashing drum fills. It's hypnotic, spoken in tongues atmosphere comes on like a lost ship at sea being tossed around in a tempest of sound. Skips voice comes and goes like the wind, a lost soul crying out from beneath the stormy, boiling sea of sound.

After 'Oar'

Oar, unsurprisingly sold little on it's initial release, and was resigned to the lost classic bin. Skip headed West and continued to play throughout his downward spiral into schizophrenia. He joined various line ups of a reformed Moby Grape over the yeas. He contributed a track to the 1996 X-Files album, recorded with old friend Jack Cassidy. The track was never used, deemed to weird for the sci-fi programme.

30 years after it's release a tribute album was releasedt. It featured among others, Robert Plant (who'd always been a champion of both Skip and Moby Grape), Beck, Wilco and Robyn Hitchcock.

Sundazed released Oar in an expanded edition which included the lost second half of "Grey/Afro" titled "The Time has Come". And a further nine tracks, some incomplete from the original Oar sessions.

Skip passed away on 16th. April 1999 after living for some years with his girlfriend in a trailer park in Santa Cruz, California. Keep on clapping, little hands, and shine on, shine on, shine on.

All authors own work.

Thelonius Monk...

2010-08-09T23:58:00.008+12:00

I can't really say enough or get enough really, of this great, great musician who was born in North Carolina in 1917, but will forever be associated with New York, The Five Spot, Bop and of course the piano.

Thelonius was an outsider, an on the edge artist, Thelonius was underground! and way ahead of his time and his peers. No one looked like Monk, no one played like Monk and he was largely ignored for the early part of his career. After losing his licence to play, due to him having the notorius Bud Powell in his motor vehicle and getting busted for possession of narcotics, and after a residency at the Five Spot, a small restaurant in New York City, Thelonius finally started to get the recognition his talent was due. Through it all Monk seemed oblivious, always dancing (quite literally) to a different drum. The man lived to play.

And his playing was lyrical, full off air but totally on the edge, as if at any moment he may fall off and crash land, but never did. Monk was a true individual, and a great artist.

I sometimes think, you know, where did these guys come from, I mean what dimension!! Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Ornette Coleman? All very different and all individually brilliant. What was it in the early part of 20th Century American history that produced these men and their music, these magicians, these shamen of sound? Well I don't rightly know, but the evidence of that magic, that 'altered musical reality' is here in spades in this great documentary. Mo Monk please...

Glengarry Glen Ross Speech...

2010-08-07T09:25:00.003+12:00

Alec Baldwin's great speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross". Coffee's for closers!!

coloured balloons

2010-08-04T22:32:00.000+12:00

Happy Birthday Penguin Books...

2010-08-03T11:01:00.000+12:00

1970's Penguin Design

Penguin books is, are 75 years old ( BBC World Service). The world wide publishing company was founded in 1935 by the late (Sir) Allen Lane, 1902 – 1970.

His mission was to provide high quality, paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Essentially this meant that the great unwashed could buy and own books of their own. Literature, poetry, non – fiction and plays were emancipated from the classroom, the library and the University and the man in the street had the chance to educate himself. The books were a great success, so much so that by March 1936, ten months after the company's launch on 30 July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed.

History
From the outset, design was essential to the success of the Penguin brand. Eschewing the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour coded according to which series the title belonged to; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Eric Gill's sans serif and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books".

The initial design was created by the then twenty-one-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of the Penguin logo. The colour schemes included: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime fiction, cerise and white for travel and adventure, dark blue and white for biographies, yellow and white for miscellaneous, red and white for drama; and the rarer purple and white for essays and belles lettres and grey and white for world affairs.

Between 1947 and 1949, the great German typographer Jan Tschichold redesigned 500 Penguin books, and left Penguin with a set of influential rules of design principles brought together as the Penguin Composition Rules. Tschichold's work included the woodcut illustrated covers of the classics series (also known as the medallion series), and with Hans Schmoller, his eventual successor at Penguin, the vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin fiction throughout the 1950s.

New techniques such as phototypesetting and offset-litho printing dramatically reduced cost and permitted the printing of images and text on the same paper stock. In May 1960, Tony Godwin was appointed as editorial adviser, he sought to broaden the range of Penguin's list and keep up with new developments in graphic design. To this end, he hired Germano Facetti in January 1961, who was to decisively alter the appearance of the Penguin brand. Beginning with the crime series, Facetti canvassed the opinion of a number of designers including Romek Marber for a new look to the Penguin cover. It was Marber's suggestion of what came to be called the Marber grid along with the retention of traditional Penguin colour coding that was to replace the previous three horizontal bars design and set the pattern for the design of the company's paperbacks for the next twenty years.

By the end of the 1960s, Penguin was in financial trouble. Ultimately, the company was bought out by Pearson Longman in August 1970, some six weeks after the death of Allen Lane. A new emphasis on profitability emerged and, with the departure of Facetti in 1972, the defining era of Penguin book design came to an end.

Controversy
Just as Lane well judged the public's appetite for paperbacks in the 1930s, his decision to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence in 1960 boosted Penguin's notoriety. The novel was at the time unpublished in the United Kingdom and the predicted obscenity trial not only marked Penguin as a fearless publisher, it also helped drive the sale of at least 3.5 million copies. Penguin's victory in the case heralded the end to the censorship of books in the UK. In the same tradition of courting controversy, Penguin published Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust which accused David Irving of Holocaust denial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in a widely publicised trial.

Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005
More recently, the design element of the Penguin paperback, was celebrated in the 2005 publication "Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935 – 2005". The book looks back at seventy years of Penguin paperbacks, and charts the development of British publishing, book cover design and the role of artists and designers in creating and defining the Penguin look.

Judy. By John Renbourn

2010-07-29T13:51:00.001+12:00

Ken Russell 3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011

2010-07-29T13:49:00.009+12:00

Original Film Poster

Ken Russell's adaptation of Aldous Huxley's "The Devil's of Loudon", is in my mind one of the greatest English film's ever made. The director, who died this week dared to take it where no one else dared to go. Not only is the film itself a masterpiece in film making, but also, the set design, casting, musical score and screenplay work together in such a way as to create a dizzying phantasmagorical and utterly compelling account of this infamous chapter in the history of the Catholic church in France. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave give the performances of their careers, and the film was banned in Italy by the Catholic church. Well, that's the least you can expect from Ken!

For a full obituary and short film about his work follow this link to The Guardians obituary of this film making force of nature. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/28/ken-russell-cinema-dies

He was larger than life in every way, and this was always reflected in nearly everything he was involved in.Ken Russell, film maker, documentary maker, writer and larger than life individual, 3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011.

Fairport Covention Maidstone 1970...

2010-07-25T18:38:00.003+12:00

At last the whole concert has been uploaded to YouTube, all be it in frustrating 4min segments?!! Brilliant musicianship and songwriting from the strongest Fairport line up post Sandy Denny. Once Sandy had gone, you really had to think of them as a different band. The dynamics changed considerably with the mercurial Dave Swarbrick stepping into the fore to almost become the band leader. The material changed too once Sandy had left to join Fotheringay. The band started to delve more and more into the traditional folk song genre which had started with the classic "Liege and Leaf" album. The highlight for me is the live 9min version of "Now Be Thankful". The rest as they say is musical history. What puzzles me is all the hype around Bumford and Sons, or whatever they're called. It's been sitting ready to be listened to in the shape of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and all for the past 40 years!!

"Now be Thankful" Maidstone 1970

Blackwaterside

2010-07-25T18:08:00.004+12:00

Taught to Bert Jansch by Anne Briggs, who wrote the original song, but the tune was probably influenced by a traditional English folk tune, stolen by Jimmy page and presented to the world on Led Zeppelin's 1st album as Black Mountainside complete with sitar and finally to me by way of Bert Jansch's version. Drop 'D' tuning, capo 2nd fret.

11 Moustachioed Daughters...Viv Stanshall and The Big Grunt

2010-07-25T12:51:00.002+12:00

This from 1970 I think, The Marty Feldman something or other. If this isn't on of the most disturbing pieces of television, then I don't know what it is. Brilliantly insane, Roger Ruskin Spears inventions, Viv Stanshall's eye's and who the hell is that little fat guy on the guitar, and more to the point where did Viv find him? Good God the seventies were a strange time...

billy childish - sunday painter

2010-07-23T22:12:00.004+12:00

Documentary look at the world of the multi talented Billy Childish...Let the film and the man speak for themselves. Far too prolific to sum up at this time of night...

Billy Childish Documentary...

Oliver Postgate and the story of Small Films...

2010-07-23T21:16:00.005+12:00

Oliver Postgate was and will always be a giant of children's television/animation/film and fantasy. He created hundreds of hours of food for young minds in the shape of the various projects, programmes and characters under the Small Films umberella, and what's even more amazing is that he did it with the help of only a handful of like minded enthusiasts in his tiny studio come barn.

They didn't call it Small Films for nothing. The company consisted of Postgate and Peter Firmin, and between them they cooked up among others, Ivor The Engine, The Clangers, Bagpuss, Noggin The Nog and The Pogles.

Oliver Postgate wrote the scripts, narrated most of the voices, did the sound effects, created the characters and took care of all the animation filming and sound production, while Peter Firmin drew and built the characters, made costumes and scenery and painted the sets. So, with cardboard cut out characters, often coloured by their children, elastic bands, string, sellotape, blue tack, cotton wool and other odds and ends they conjured up the magical worlds of Ivor, Noggin and all the other wonderful characters that transformed the lives of legions of school children, for five minutes each weekday evening during the 1970's before the boring world of grown ups and the six o'clock news.

Behind the scenes, Oliver Postgate called in Anthony Jackson to help with some of the voices. Peter Firmin's own daughter played the role of Emily in the unbeatable 'Bagpuss', while the characters where brought to life with the aid of Meccano, brass tacks, magnets, fuse wire and the timeless magic of stop start animation.

Simpler times, in a simpler world. Watch this affectionate documentary and re-live the magic that was Oliver Postgate and Small Films. Ivor the Engine of course is back in all new episodes made for BBC Wales, and even though most of the animation is now created using computers, none of the magic is lost. Thanks Oliver for enriching and shaping my childhood and my imagination.

Pelagicus...Mike, Neil & Mark Pearson's family wildlife album

2010-07-23T15:12:00.000+12:00

All kinds of critters and creatures and a profusion of birdlife abound in this excellent nature/wildlife/travel/photography blog from Yorkshires answer to The Three Amigos. In their own words... "After their great Floridian adventure, the 3 members of the Pearson clan returned to their respective homes. Mark, being drastically short of money, took up a post as personal trainer to Bruce Forsyth, to prepare him for the forthcoming series of "Come Dancing". Neil, is taking a short rest in Providence before setting off for Chile in order to research his next book - The Frogs of the Atacama Desert. Mike has returned to the UK where he spends all his time watching Coronation Street". GoTo: http://pelagicus.blogspot.com/

Large Emerald...