lost civilisations

Here’s a lovely short trailer for an inspiring and engrossing documentary called Bluegrass Roots. Watch those kids kick out!

Watch here.

Filmed in Madison County, North Carolina, this made-for-tv documentary features 82 year old singer, picker, dancer, and founder of the Asheville Mountain Music and Dance Festival, Bascom Lamar Lunsford visiting and making music with his friends.
Presented here are some of the most extraordinary singers, players and dancers the Bluegrass Mountains had to offer. Many later became famous. Some were never heard from again. Most of the songs are classics, including Lunsford’s own tune, ‘Mountain Dew’.

Fine versions of Blackjack Davey and a goosebumpy murder ballad called Lie Down which I cannot find anywhere. It may be a rewrite of the old King Henry.

YouTube of course has a five minute section from the beginning of the film.

Quite honestly Bluegrass Roots is the best arts documentary I have watched since Memories of Berlin which as well as being presented by Christopher Isherwood had an animated interview with Louise Brooks in her later years.

in the early 80s

“That city is doomed, more surely than Sodom ever was. Those people don’t even realize how low they have sunk. Evil doesn’t know itself there. The most terrible of all devil rules, the devil without a face.”
–Christopher Isherwood

take your partners…

Scotland march on winning 2-1 against Georgia in the Euro Championship qualifying group.

get in there!

Meanwhile, The Scottish Nationalist Party declare that a referendum on Independence would take place four years into a Scottish parliament led by them if they win the election. They believe they have to prove their credibility to the Scottish Electorate.

..the Oxford English Dictionary cites The Complaynt of Scotland as the earliest source for numerous words, including: axis, barbarian, buffoon, cabinet, crackling, decadence, excrement, heroic, humid, imbecile, moo, parallel, robust, suffocation, superb, timid and water-lily.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complaynt_of_Scotland

BBC Radio Scotland is running a wonderful series called Scotland’s Music. Today’s episode The Dancing Is Done made reference to the monastic singing on the Isle of Inchcolm in The River Forth not far from us here in Edinburgh. Theres a sort of urban legend that James VI of Scotland believed that isolating children on the island with no oral teaching would result in them speaking Gods tongue of Hebrew. The experiment ended when the children began grunting like animals. As I listened to the radio programme I was reminded of those radio documentaries of the late 1950s produced by Ewan McColl, The Radio Ballads.

Recitation and historical text overlaid and undercut the musical quotations with timely fade ins and fade outs. The Complaynt of Scotland supposedly written by Wedderburn in Torphichen was quoted today with its listing of lost dances, dances which were to fade against the Reformation.

..in the fyrst, thai dancit al cristyn mennis dance, the northt of scotland, huntis vp, the comount entray, lang plat fut of garian, Robene hude, thom of lyn, freris al, ennyrness, the loch of slene, the gosseps dance, leuis grene, makky, the speyde, the flail, the lammes vynde, soutra, cum kyttil me neykyt vantounly, schayke leg, fut befor gossep, Rank at the rute, baglap and al, ihonne ermistrangis dance, the alman haye, the bace of voragon, dangeir, the beye, the dede dance, the dance of kylrynne, the vod and the val, schaik a trot.

It concluded with a rousing Victory dance, The Batell of Pavie set be William Kinloche: Celebrations of Victory: Dance ‘la Guerra’. I sat in the car park of the superstore with the windows down blaring that one out. Buzzing crumhorns always get to me.

Torphichen Preceptory

not just a football post

Odd sort of week. Odd times.

The weekend last was Hibernian. St Patricks Day and then Hibernian winning some soccer silverware on Mother’s Day. The team manager John Collins (JC) dedicated the win to his late father who passed away a few months ago. His somber reflection at the final whistle as he reflected upon this and the presence of his ailing mother in the crowd was moving. He had spent the night before with Benji, Hibs Moroccan marksman. I feel Benji is special and JC took him to his room before the game to contact something in their hearts. Benji said JC showed him a DVD of the Moroccan’s performances. They discussed skill and confidence and Benji said there was “good” Scottish music playing. It roused something in him.
When Benji scored his two goals in the final they came at moments that totally settled my anxieties. His knowledge of place and movement showed no fear. It was a mature performance. He and JC were visibly thanking higher powers.

I speak of this because last year in March my father passed away and Hibernian FC were almost near to glory playing rivals Hearts in the semi final of the Scottish Cup. Three days before Dad’s funeral we were crushed 4-0 by our city rivals.

My mother was admitted to hospital on Monday with a chest infection and it may be a longish stay. Her avoidance of Day Centre Care has been superceded by necessity. I will have to give up sole caring duties and let others become involved in a larger support network.

I feel things shifting. The house is so quiet now here on my own. I don’t know what to do sometimes, so set in a routine I have become. My open ear and eye will not rest yet. I still hear things. I am finding I must renegotiate myself and my needs in the same way I have sensed this in the giving up of the nicotine addiction. I have to find myself again, get to know myself. Its more than cigarettes I am giving up.

Edinburgh – Craigleith Quarry – The stone was used to build the New Town

I am also walking different paths to the hospital. Old places I haunted as a kid revealed again. Our area has even been moved into a whole new upmarket voting ward. Suddenly we are posh middle class retired homeowner belt. I said to my aunt as we walked home, every day is different, it doesnt need foreign travel to introduce the new and the exotic. Every second the weather changes. The walk I was taking with my aunt was one I would not normally take myself. Unexpected sights and events took place and revealed themselves.

Long term astrology charts said two years ago I was moving into a long phase of being almost trapped in a relationship with an almost unhealthy relationship with a lover. What happened is I had to give up my home and live with my mother as a carer. So, in a sense the chart is not entirely wrong if all men are really seeking to resolve their mother relationship when they take lovers.

When my father died I knew we were one. But I am not him and it is quite spooky when my mother calls me by his name.

Today as I waited for a friend to arrive whose father is also ill I found myself warming in a suntrap as the washing hung to dry. I blew on my hot tea and trails of steam vapour came from the surface like the exhalation of a cigarette. I was slowing down, perhaps in response to the Brian Eno 77 Million paintings application I had running on my PC. Going for the Long Game.

http://www.77millionpaintings.com/

I tuned in to the traffic sounds on the nearby main road. Initial thoughts were “this place is not perfect, its too dense , listen to that traffic problem” then I found myself accepting it. It was there but it just blended in. I started to become aware of the energies and heaviness and lightness of things as I followed the vapour trail into creaking trees and sparkling dews.

My friend arrived and asked how I was. I said, “OK, just sitting here tripping out”. And you know, I was.

nicotine cues

“I put this moment…here…” Kate Bush – Jig Of Life

For all attempting to stop smoking and quit altogether I have found some answers to many questions here: http://whyquit.com/whyquit/LinksAAddiction.html

I went to this site looking at how nicotine craving works. Four months in and my inner chatter takes advantage of the conditioned cue moments to ask if I am in denial. What I read was revealing about how nicotine chemically rearranges the brain’s dopamine and receptors. As a result ones emotional life and patterns of behaviour are also altered. Lifestyle issues. Every one of these will suffer and feel empty without the pilot of nicotine.

Now, this in itself can be seen as a classic addictive nicotine cue. Reading about smoking and thinking about smoking when nicotine free is one of the classic psychological craving crisis moments.

There are figures stating that 12 x 3 minutes will be your extent of craving episodes. 36 minutes of challenge in your day to day life. Of course the time may appear distorted and caffeine apparently heightens the state. This is where being a stubborn bastard helps. Whatever happens don’t have any form of nicotine. The whole brain state will need time to encounter and overcome its addictive sensitivities cues and processing.

If this doesn’t make you think you are fighting the good fight against really corrupt corporate business and control systems then nothing will.

The reward apart from non addiction and better health is a discovery of a rejuvenated self. A self that one has had to work and fight to nurse back to “feeling itself again”.
Cold Turkey as I thought is the best and possibly only real option. 10% odds of success.
You better love that underdog. Just think an opportunity to really get to know yourself and your motivations.

A non smoker once told me when I quit previously five years ago that to him on the outside it looked like smoking was just a breathing issue. If breathing is essential to living and smoking is a way of accentuating one’s sensation of inhalation and exhalation, then cut out the middle man and get back to living.

Right I am off to put smoking in a box in a little room, a good journey away, somewhere abroad where I can’t quite remember the route….

raised to the power of space

They put a hotwire to my head
‘cuz of the things I did and said.
A model citizen in every way
Your time has come your second skin.
PiL – Rise

Ha you know you are getting old (or getting on as we sometimes say) when Science Fiction writers who were far out when you were younger make perfect sense. And you don’t have to have 3 or 4 pipes of Afghani Black to get it.

At this point in the novel, Joe Chip is sitting in his elegant hotel room which were hung with “great hand-printed drapes of a neo-silkscreen sort that depicted man’s ascent from the unicellular organisms of the Cambrian period to the first heavier-than-air flight at the beginning of the twentieth century.”

In a corner of the large room a chime sounded and a tinkling mechanical voice called, “I’m your free homeopape machine, a service supplied exclusively by all the fine Rootes hotels throughout Earth and the colonies. Simply dial the classification of news that you wish, and in a matter of seconds I’ll speedily provide you with a fresh, up-to-the-minute homeopape tailored to your individual requirements; and, let me repeat, at no cost to you!”

From Ubik, by Philip K. Dick.
1969

Here is another short quote from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:

In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on the outskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate breakfast indifferently while, with something greater than indifference, he glanced over the morning homeopape’s weather syndrome readings of the previous day.

from http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=637

What really gets me about this piece of Dickiana is the references to indifference. “Something greater than indifference”. I wouldn’t mind that silkscreen by the way.

I stumbled upon this article after reading Ballardian’s appraisal of Baudrillard. Now is there an anagram in there or what? Ballardian decided to quote Baudrillard’s review of the novel Crash.
An immensely seductive read. http://www.ballardian.com/rip-jean-baudrillard/

Witness, for example, this two-room apartment with kitchen and bath launched into orbit with the last Moon capsule (raised to the power of space, one might say); the perceived ordinariness of a terrestrial habitat then assumes the values of the cosmic and its hypostasis in Space, the satellization of the real in the transcendence of Space—it is the end of metaphysics, the end of fantasy, the end of SF. The era of hyperreality has begun.
…
In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality—a kind of hyperreality has abolished both… After Borges, but in a totally different register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on: a non-symbolic universe but one which, by a kind of reversal of its mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, cars, mechanical eroticism), seems truly saturated with an intense initiatory power.”

I used to joke that critical journalists like Paul Morley and Ian Penman and others who wrote for the NME in late 70s early 80s – the so called post punk writers – were schooled in this kind of thinking, they were “taking off” into the hyper real with an interview or a review as a vehicle, an excuse to wander off into something seductively unexpected.

I remember trying to read Heidegger when younger. At times I would stop and wonder where the hell he had taken me now. Some text just makes you wonder what kind of a stupor had descended upon you for the last 3 pages as you fail to recall any of it but remember all the imaginings and distractions that lured your concentration away from the technical incantations. Heidegger seemed to deliberately invoke this feeling as if hyperlinking into the marginalia.

Or was it someone else reviewing Heidegger, like Eric Mottram’s Algebra of Need being at times almost more entertaining a read than any William Burroughs?
For that moment.

The Conspiracy of Art

One old curmudgeon less…a punk who played the game…Jean Baudrillard dies in Paris.

Image sourced from jahsonic

‘Jean Baudrillard is a social theorist who has made his living explaining the emergence of mass culture and the increasing importance of social images as commodities — very much in the vein of the Situationists. To get a feel for the Baudrillardian “social-image-as-a-commodity,” consider the term “spin doctor,” listen to Michael Jackson’s lawyers, or examine the difference between a television commercial and a PBS “pledge break.” Baudrillard talks about the regression of simulacra, the media hall-of- mirrors in which any reference to the actual disappears. Mick Jagger talked about the same thing 20 years ago in the film Performance, only he was in a bubble bath with the still-attractive Anita Pallenberg and an underage androgynous French Girl. Baudrillard isn’t that much fun, though he’s the most popular Trendy Frenchman with the college crowd.’ — A User’s Guide to Trendy French Intellectuals by R.U. Sirius, 1994, Wired magazine

From an interview with Jean Baudrillard about the Matrix

N. O. – Striking too is how present American marketing success, ranging from The Matrix to Madonna last album, explicitly present themselves as critics of a system wich promote them massively…

J. B. – That is indeed which makes our times quite difficult to stand. This system produces a trompe-l’œil negation, which in turn is becoming a part of the entertainment industry, the same way obsolescence is a part of the industry as a whole. Moreover, it is the most efficient way to forbid any true alternative. No more there is an external omega point for apprehending this world, no more any antagonistic function, only a fascinated adherence. Nevertheless, the more a system is coming close to perfection, the more it is coming close to destruction. View it as an objective irony; nothing is never settled. September 11 was a part of it, of course. Terrorism is not an alternate power, it is only the metaphor of this almost suicidal turn-around of the occidental power against itself. This is what I said at that time, but it was not accepted. No reason to be nihilistic or pessimistic anyway. The system, the virtual, the Matrix, everything may go back to the scrap heap of History. Reversibility, challenge, seduction are indestructibles.

The first poems I ever attempted to write were basically seduction tools.
Seduction is indestructible.

as Johnny Rotten once said:
“Why would I want to destroy the establishment? It’s doing a bloody good job of it itself” Then he became a TV star.

always crashing in the same LJ

Maybe after all this punk contemplation its time to have a good look at the term “Indie”.

A fair representation of the soundtrack at Haymarket circa 1984.
Try playing them all together for some chaos.

Why did I give this away?

no future

Evening pop pickers!

Aren’t the conditions ripe for some kind of cultural reckoning akin to “punk” in ’76?

Let me define punk in my own terms. Its a hypercritical honesty. Confess that the majority of stuff around you is trash going nowhere and then create from the essentialist vacuum which is left from jettisoning the unnecessary and the downright dangerous.

We were a demanding lot back then. Everything was so bad that finding something good became a private secret. If everyone got it it would become bland and a sell out. The number one priority was not to be like anything else.

“Wish everybody would leave me alone…”

Would this be impossible today? Everything is mass marketed as soon as there is a sniff of interest, as if to kill something’s power by diluting it.
Is it also too much of a financial risk to be honest these days? If one said how bad things were no one would buy it. It would not be fashionable or would at least be deeply unpopular.
Or.. it would be caricatured in a media friendly way to eliminate the danger.

Perhaps the attitude of a movement is too much to ask for in this atomised time.
The incendiary blew up back then , this is the fables of the reconstruction.

Yet, the “attitude” has never left me and some others. Perhaps “punk” just encapsulated what a lot of various psychedelic fallout tribes were expressing. Lemmy of Motorhead said that long haired chap up top used to deal acid at Hawkwind gigs from his great coat. Then again, Hawkwind for a time were real “Underground”. So dangerous they had police raids and were under surveillance.

Quite honestly if I was a kid today I would be champing at the bit for revolutions, seeking out the true mavericks playing dangerous games of cultural brinkmanship. Not Robbie Williams with a sigil on his finger. But then I never had video games and clever techy toys and such ease of access to drugs in a culture of consumption and psychic slavery.

I ranted on the phone tonight about this with another old punk from the Lou Reed twilight. Maybe Robert Elms was right, Punk started with Young Americans. Thats when guys uptown got dyed wedge hair cuts and earrings.

Speaking of old curmudgeons it was interesting to see the Murdoch controlled Sky had withdrawn it’s 4 “basic” cable tv channels from Richard Branson’s Virgin Media package (formally Telewest/NTL).

Channel 602 on Virgin, formerly the home of Sky News, was renamed on the programme guide as “Sky Snooze try BBC” while Sky Sports News became “Old Sky Sports Snooze”

Branson while respecting his media competitor has

made clear his views about the media mogul’s role in British public life. Pointing out Mr Murdoch’s ownership of four national newspapers and controlling stake in Sky, Sir Richard said: “If you tag on ITV to that as well, basically you’ve got rid of democracy in this country and we might as well just let Murdoch decide who is going to be our prime minister.”

So what are Sky up to next?

Sky will today attempt to bolster its position with two posters carrying the slogans “Don’t Lose Lost” and “Get Jack Back” – references to the fact it is the only channel offering the current series of Lost and 24.

Dark They Were and Golden Eyed

Oh I’d like to think that Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye To Berlin” was the first book I read but my attention would struggle. The Penguin edition had a great cover and Bowie had mentioned Isherwood in some interview. Plus, it really impressed my German teacher who I was out to impress. So, I was often seen struggling with its prose.

“S is for Space (1966) is a collection of science fiction short stories written by Ray Bradbury. It was compiled for the Young Adult sections of libraries.”

No, here’s the opening of the story that really introduced me to reading when it was presented to us in school. It also showed the potential of storytelling and writing to one for whom comics were literature.
To this day I still recall it at odd moments.

The Pedestrian
Ray Bradbury

To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of A.D. 2053, or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar.
Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb-like building was still open…..

Looking forward to this.