Festive Fifty Six

Thanks to dodgy MP3 downloads I'm certainly more aware of recent releases than I have been for years, and there's still plenty of stuff I haven't got hold of yet. Best of the bunch: Ys, Espers II and Cat Power, but I do need more listening time (soon come).

Bells On Bob Tails Ring

Whistle stop pre-Xmas family tour condensed to 23 seconds for your viewing pleasure.

Look At Mother Nature On The Run...

Acutely observed seventies miserablism. Heavy on the Ellroy influences, but the grimy staccato authenticity works better than the Clough (auto)bio. Very timely with the Suffolk strangler currently at large. I did feel the need to obtain an evidence board of my own though so I could try and track who did what to who from the sordid cast of corrupt politicians, bent coppers and barking local property developers.

Family Twig #2

The question is which of the charming stories on the cover of this delightful periodical ('Life, Death & Prizes' - I really can't believe the crassness of that tag-line) features a family member? 4, 8, 10,12, 22, 38 or 45?

Quick Marcham

Went to see The Marcham Payers at the weekend performing three one act plays:
What Shall We Do With The Body
What Brutes Men Are
Open Secrets
Billie had a filthy cold, and the plays were being performed in an unheated church, so we only managed the first two. Jenny was in the second one though, and was very good, projected much better than her fellow thesps I thought.

I'd Rather Go Blind

Without doubt my worst performance by far, It took me over four hours to win my first hand, and that consisted of just the blinds (60p), and I only won one more hand (two quid or so) before we quit at 01:00 am. I just couldn't get anything on the flop, I saw as many as I could but if I had high cards, then low ones would flop, and if I had low cards, then picture cards would flop. I had one pocket pair (two's) all night, which I foolishly took to the river and lost with to a pair of eights. I wasn't being reckless just getting very poor cards. I guess statistically that has to happen occasionally.

Tired And Emotionless

The Troubadour is such a poorly laid out space, that unless you race in as soon as the doors open and grab one of the handful of seated tables, you have to stand in the crowded area by the door. I did that for the first half, but then luckily nabbed a spare pew for the second half. First up was Davey himself delivering twenty minutes of slurred ballads. He seemed totally pissed to me, unable to hold a tune, or remember the words, and his between song banter was unintelligble gibberish. I have a feeling that this is a fairly standard performance these days though. He looked the part, still a very solid six feet plus, dressed in DJ with straggly wooly tie, with a thick wiry head of greying ginger hair, and just the faintest hint of a ponytail. Does he ask the barber to leave this suggestion of a whispy whiff at the nape of the neck? Why?

Next up was Emma Tricca, last seen at the Green Man, she seemed more confident there, and had a second guitar player, here she was timid and easily ignorable. She only did three numbers, and was then followed by another quiet female guitarist called Jen something (too quiet to hear her name properly). she was accompanied by a violin player and started well with a French chanson, but then gradully petered out.

That was it for the first half, but act II produced the highlight in a very young guitar player called Jamie Carmichael. He only played four songs but they were all totally different, and displayed a casual but assured mastery of the geetar. He was followed by an old American codger called Duck Baker, who ran through a number of jazzy/bluesy guitar instrumentals, but really shouldn't have followed the new kid on the acoustic block.

Finally Davey Graham returned to the stage to turn in an equally inept instrumental set. Even his fingers looked pissed, as they rummaged around the guiter neck, trying to find a tune hidden somewhere in a skip full of twangy garbage. The fact that he could manage to play at all was incredible, though his presence as kind of twatted Spike Milligan/Viv Stanshall was endearing in a car-crash kind of way.

Dreamtime #9

I came downstairs to find that the cats had been fighting. They were both bleeding really badly, and each of them had torn off one of the others ears. I scrambled around madly packing the cats ears in ice so I could take them to the vet to have them sewn back on.

Family Twig #1

Lilian, Grandma Reid, Nancy, Albert, Evelyn, Kath, Rose (Circa 1962)

Last Friday I went to my Auntie Nancy's funeral in Risca. The service was held in the local Methodist Chapel, and riled me considerably. My religious intolerance is getting out of control nowadays, I found the sing-song manner of the vicar's delivery really irritating, he sounded like he was reading something on Jackanory, which just emphasised the fairy tale nature of the scriptures even more. As if they needed to be made more fantastical. I didn't like the potted history he gave either, this kind of thing has no real relation to the life lived, and verges on being insulting. There were refreshments afterwards at the local bowls club. This was much more fitting, a tiny little bowls pavillion, with meat paste sandwiches, sausages on sticks, battenburg cake, and cheap beer on tap. There were honours boards on the walls recording the annual local bowls champions back to 1926, and there was a genuine sense of community, which I haven't felt in London, ever. There was history too, as the womens honour board only started in 1978, proof if required that feminism even infiltrated valleys life.

I thought I might start some kind of family tree type thing, while there are still folk around to re-call the potential participants. Julian mentioned that when the sisters have finally made their way from this world, these family events will cease to exist. Indeed there were only two sisters in attendance, the other two being too sick.

Get On The Bus Gus

At times I thought this could be just another multi-stranded, relationship based, Noo York tragi-comedy, albeit with knobs on, but it managed to be a whole lot more. Plotted and written by the cast during impro sessions and directed by John Cameron Mitchell, it tackled the complex issues of desire, and the tangled web of dealing intimately with other people in a genuinely unique way. The explicit scenes never really threatened to overwhelm the sensitive and intelligent emotional character development, and maybe in ten years time all serious films that deal with physicality will look like this. It was a 'feel-good' movie in the best sense, in that there were no conventional happy endings for the characters, but neither were they cast into a well of desperate despair. Like real life it was a recognisably bewildering mix of both, often at the same time, and with a great soundtrack too.

Before And After Science

The ICA hosted a conversation between Steven Johnson and Brian Eno last night, taking as a starting point Johnson's new book The Ghost Map. This details the events surrounding a cholera epidemic in London in 1854, and its eventual diagnosis by a local doctor, this was posited by Johnson as a crucial event in allowing the continued urbanisation of the growing population. All in all it was a fascinating event, with the discussion tangenting off all over the gaff. Apparently by next year half of the worlds population will live in cities, with over half a billion of those folk being Chinese. Eno is part of something called the Long Now Foundation who promote thinking into
ideas around the sustainability of humanity over the next 10,000 years. Subjects touched on included the interface between the virtual world in Second Life, and the various spin-off financial interactions in the real world, the absorption of slum dwellings into urban centres in the third world, the voting patterns in the US elections (apparently urban centres are 70:30 in favour of Democrats).

Some members of the audience felt that Johnson and Eno were divorcing themselves from the real financial decision making process taken by governments (and the US in particular), and indulging in elitist intellectual pontification, but the level of response didn't allow the debate to deteriorate into the same old Political entrenchment, but genuinely tried to open people up to ideas of how socio-cultural systems develop independent of government intervention.

There was a signing afterwards, and on my way home I wish I'd asked Eno to sign a Christmas card, he was standing next to me in the lobby at the end, and chatting (in a rather stuck up way I thought) about where they were going to go and eat, when Ekow Eshun walked past after clocking off as director, without even noticing Eno as he shot by.