Morrissey & Eno record the theme tune for a remake of Bladerunner set in Milton Keynes...
.....perhaps???
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Friday, 27 April 2007
Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Hungry Like The Wolff...
After a hart morning lecturing on zer vunders off Biometical Encheneering to zer hantfool off i-pod vearing kits mit der attention spanische von der FLEA!!, Ich liebe nussing more zan to vander across to zer REFECTORY, YA! und treat myzelf to a liberally heapt platter vuller off....
.......YELLOW PILLAU RICE MIT DER PICALILLEE-SCHER SAUSEN??? Vot iss ziss Scheizen gebrotische???? I fought two verld Vars und presented zer Greatische Eggensplatz Race .......fur *ZIS*???????
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Tuesday, 24 April 2007
Spun...
I spent most of yesterday's web-time attempting to befriend people in Tehran. Having read an inspiring and instructive article in Sunday's Observer Music Monthly about the underground music scene in Iran and the lengths that many musicians have to go to in order to do their thang, it seemed the least I could do as a fellow musician and lover of music. For once, the word 'underground is pretty much a literal description as music that hasn't been state approved is, to all intents and purposes, illegal in the Islamic Republic. Needless to say, it is still listened to and played.
I also figured that this would be a great opportunity to get a different perspective on what it's like to live in that vast, enigmatic and conflicted place. After all, if you want to get behind the propaganda (our perceptions of Iran, of course, are beset by waves of that from both inside and out), to see beyond the official lines and stock responses, you can usually do worse than sticking a pin in a list of bloggers and seeing what comes up. That's perhaps the single best thing about the web (providing, of course, you're privileged enough to live somewhere where any restrictions on one's surfing are relatively light...)
So, in that context, to hear of the imminent retirement of perhaps my favourite homegrown blogger, Spinsterella, was the blogging equivalent of finding out that the BBC had been shut down. I'm sure all my readers (well, both of you) will join me in wishing her health, happiness and success in whatever other endeavours she chooses to turn her hand to.
And thank you Spinny for all those wonderful posts. For once, it was a pleasure being spun...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
I also figured that this would be a great opportunity to get a different perspective on what it's like to live in that vast, enigmatic and conflicted place. After all, if you want to get behind the propaganda (our perceptions of Iran, of course, are beset by waves of that from both inside and out), to see beyond the official lines and stock responses, you can usually do worse than sticking a pin in a list of bloggers and seeing what comes up. That's perhaps the single best thing about the web (providing, of course, you're privileged enough to live somewhere where any restrictions on one's surfing are relatively light...)
So, in that context, to hear of the imminent retirement of perhaps my favourite homegrown blogger, Spinsterella, was the blogging equivalent of finding out that the BBC had been shut down. I'm sure all my readers (well, both of you) will join me in wishing her health, happiness and success in whatever other endeavours she chooses to turn her hand to.
And thank you Spinny for all those wonderful posts. For once, it was a pleasure being spun...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Monday, 23 April 2007
Polski Delikatesy...
I've posted three new tracks up here from what I hope to be another album worth of songs.
This time around, inspired very much by the last chapter of Tim's book (for which, many Thanks btw...) there will be a loose theme to the collection (the various effects of globalization), and Polski Delikatesy seems to have the right mix of mundane exoticism and daftness to be the title of such a hideously overblown conceit! (It also sounds like an old prog rock band name, which can only help...). So, that's the plan and I've sketched out quite a few lyrics and have (again) loose ideas for subjects to write on, which is often half the battle.
The three tracks are already quite varied. The most accessible is probably "England in the Rain". It's another very old song that's been resucitated and amended thanks to the inspiration cited above. The lyric takes the form of a letter from an expat Englander stationed in Bangkok pining for an ex- back in Blighty. I hope that the musical nod to a very familiar piece from the late 70s provides a suitably romantic backdrop to what, I hope, is a quite touching little piece. I was initially thinking of a sort of inversion of the old colonial 'white man's burden' thing - white guy forced by economics to scratch a living thousands of miles from home - but I hope, in the end, it transcends that rather reductive initial design and is just a song of separated and rued lost love.
"(Would You Love Me) If I was Real" is a Madcap discard. It seemed too long and bleak for that collection, but I'm hoping it may be more at home on these more exotically stacked shelves. It fits better here thematically, I hope, because of it's subject matter - the way that we become lonelier, more fragmented selves as technology supposedly brings us closer together.
Finally, "Polski Delikatesy" is just, well, weird shit...
Hope you like them.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
This time around, inspired very much by the last chapter of Tim's book (for which, many Thanks btw...) there will be a loose theme to the collection (the various effects of globalization), and Polski Delikatesy seems to have the right mix of mundane exoticism and daftness to be the title of such a hideously overblown conceit! (It also sounds like an old prog rock band name, which can only help...). So, that's the plan and I've sketched out quite a few lyrics and have (again) loose ideas for subjects to write on, which is often half the battle.
The three tracks are already quite varied. The most accessible is probably "England in the Rain". It's another very old song that's been resucitated and amended thanks to the inspiration cited above. The lyric takes the form of a letter from an expat Englander stationed in Bangkok pining for an ex- back in Blighty. I hope that the musical nod to a very familiar piece from the late 70s provides a suitably romantic backdrop to what, I hope, is a quite touching little piece. I was initially thinking of a sort of inversion of the old colonial 'white man's burden' thing - white guy forced by economics to scratch a living thousands of miles from home - but I hope, in the end, it transcends that rather reductive initial design and is just a song of separated and rued lost love.
"(Would You Love Me) If I was Real" is a Madcap discard. It seemed too long and bleak for that collection, but I'm hoping it may be more at home on these more exotically stacked shelves. It fits better here thematically, I hope, because of it's subject matter - the way that we become lonelier, more fragmented selves as technology supposedly brings us closer together.
Finally, "Polski Delikatesy" is just, well, weird shit...
Hope you like them.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Thursday, 19 April 2007
Move Over Girl With a Copy Of One Trick Pony...
Bored and listless and worried about a family friend, I do what I always do when I need cheering up and scoot over to everyone's favourite outed blog superstar, GWAOTM. If nothing else, it always kills a few moments totting up the notches on the bedpost, picturing her there, legs akimbo being juddered into a pool of senseless mushiness by some long-tooled Best-Boy or obliging Key Grip; pausing to wonder if she actually does mouth the words as she types them the way I always imagine her to...
But, quelle horreur!! I've come away from today's visit *doubly* despondent. Firstly, seems our heroine has been a bit off coleur [no, I don't know why I'm doing the French accent, either...] Never one to wallow in self-pity ("I’ve felt like I was a walking zombie, barely functioning. I tried to justify all this to myself with different reasons – the changes in my life, post-‘outing’; the constant, draining, book-related promotion; no longer having my film-industry job with which to be energised over; extended influenza; suffering a personal loss..."), our sassy cineastic saucepot can't put her finger on what it could be that's making her useless for anything but the customary prolonged post-book signing sexathon with an accomodating Waterstone's ex-employee of the month. But a quick visit to the Quack puts all our minds at rest. Seems she's gone all Hypothyroid on uz asses. Poor thing's barely been able to lift her knees behind her ears, so weak and listless has she been. So, problem duly diagnosed, hopefully she'll be back in full blogtastic form asap.
And then, still reeling from the troubles and woes of the UK's foremost sex bloggeur (zut alors, what is with all the French??) I come across Gwaotm's link to this - the fantastic work of imaginative wordplay that is everybody's *new* favourite bird-has-sex-a-lot-and-blogs-it-all-up-for-us-to-whack-one-off-to-site - Bitchy Jones's Diary. As Gwaotm says, not only does "she [write] beautifully, but besides being articulate, incredibly funny, and interesting to read, she is also - to [Gwaotm's] mind - a feminist, which makes her even more worthy of attention."
And there' shitloads of bonking too, apparently
I've only had a quick look, but, seriously - cynicism aside - Gwaotm's literary ear does not deceive her. A merest snippet of the prosody on offer:
Anyway, I started writing this post and it turned more into a sort of how-I-have-sex thing. And I thought that would still be a cool thing to post. You know, educational. I had to be careful writing I though, because lots of times I found myself not writing about what actually happens and just trying to make it sound hot. Not that I don’t think this is hot, obviously, if I didn’t it would be a pretty ridiculous way to spend my time. But I didn’t just want to write a wank post. There are plenty of posts on the internet about how kinky sex is all whee and shiny and woah, just look at me go!
Eliot described writing as being a series of "raids on the inarticulate". He would, I'm sure have approved.
So, what are you waiting for?? Get over there. What could be better than art you can wank to?? They should think of a name for it...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Wednesday, 18 April 2007
Bobcast #35...
Available to download and listen to at Jellycast.com... Now!!
"Err-eee-errr-errrr..."
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
"Err-eee-errr-errrr..."
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Roger Whitaker...
I was privileged to attend a private opening of Mr. Whitaker's new exhibition of odd socks at the Condor-Nazi Oildrums for Peace Exhibition Centre, Crouch End. Sadly, and wrongly in this reviewer's opinion, spurned by the critical establishment, Whitaker has ploughed his own furrow regardless, producing a consistent body of work that blends his own distictive style with the rhythms and textures learned in the early childhood he spent in Kenya. Whitaker is not an *easy* artist. There's a an air of
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
The Usual Suspects...
...an occasional quiz series.
You can tell I'm bored at work. When I start doing things like this. Or paranoid. Take two: you can always tell when I'm bored and paranoid at work, because I start doing things like this:
Chaucer's Bitch:
Annie Rhiannon
Da Nator
Dave
Finger-farting
First Nations
Frobisher
Great She Elephant
Hannah
Heather
Hendrix Cat
Here Be Monsters
Homo escapeons
LC
Michael
Oye! Billy!
Patroclus
Realdoc
Ruggybabs
Slurker
Spinsterella
Tim Footman
Timorous Beastie
Grammar Puss:
Bearded Ladies
Blue Cat
A Congregation of Vapours
Cultural Snow
The Department of Me
D-Flat Chime Bar
Easily Led
Glitter for Brains
Great She Elephant
Green Wing Series 2 blog
Inside My Head
Jewdas
Jo's Journal
Life is an Elaborate Metaphor for Cricket
Life is a Glorious Cycle of Song
Let's be Sensible
Menke's Kinky Hair
Moosifer Jones Grouch
Normblog
Oye Billy!
Pigsaw
Pink Windmill
PooterGeek
Quinquireme
Rafael Behr
RickB
Sex, Money & html
Shoot the Messenger
Slaminsky
Spinsterella
Tea and Biscuits
Tickets, Money, Passport
Urban Chick
wongaBlog
Wyndham the Triffid
Great She-Elephant:
Google News
15 Minute Lunch
Bowleserised
Broke in Berlin
Chaucer's Bitch
Citizen of Woking
D-flat Chime Bar
Dilbert Blog
Easily Led
Ertblog
First Nations
Frangelita
Gastronomy Domine
Grammar Puss
Hormones and Handbags
James and the Blue Cat
Mother Hen
Life is an elaborate metaphor for cricket
Lorna
Oye Billy
President's Intern
Quinquireme
Realdoc
Rockmother
Seldom Nice Nowadays
Sex, Money and HTML
Slaminsky
Slap of the Day
Slurker
Smirking Chimp
Spinsterella
Stellblog
The Ill Man
The Whales
Urban Chick
Wyndham the Triffid
Patroclus:
(Meatspace Blogroll:)
Albert's Escape Hatch
Bearded Ladies
Blog They're Making Me Write
Blue Cat
Congregation of Vapours
Cultural Snow
Grammar Puss
Great She Elephant
Liars and Lunatics
Llewtrah
Materialist
Menke's Kinky Hair
Miss-Cellany
My Name Is Aimee
Not 4'33"
Oye Billy!
Sean
Slaminsky
Spinsterella
Taiga The Fox
Warning: Rants Likely...
Wyndham The Triffid
(Cyberspace Blogroll)
Annie Rhiannon
Bend To Squares
Betty's Utility Room
Blonde Moments
Broke In Berlin
Caballito Del Diablo
Ceridwen Devi
D-Flat Chime Bar
Delrico Bandito
Easily Lead
Elaborate Metaphor For Cricket
Extemporanea
Fat Roland
Geoff's Telly Blog
In The Mirror Of Ultimate Wonder
Kaliyuga Kronicles
Latigo Flint
Longcat
Lost In A Common Language
Mental Excrement
Mr Bloom's Dental Windows
My Solecisms
On Grub Street
Pigeon Weather Blog
Prolix
Rafael Behr
Scroobious Scrivener
Shoot The Messenger
Slagging Off Stuff
Tea And Biscuits
Troubled Diva
Urban Chick
Welcome To Melancholy
Urban Chick:
(Real life friends:)
Mark's Friendship Blog
The Plate Invigilator
(Bloggers in Da 'Burgh:)
A Humdrum Existence
A Scandal and a Disgrace
Blonde Moments
Gamma Mamma
Naked Blog
This Edinburgh Life
Mighty Blighty bloggers:
Betty's Utility Room
D Flat Chime Bar
Down By The River
Geoff's Dream Blog
Grammar Puss
Hormones and Handbags
Inside my head
JonnyB's Private Secret Diary
Little Red Boat
Menke's Kinky Hair
O Poor Robinson Crusoe
Pictures Speak Quietly
Quinquireme
Shoot The Messenger
Slap of the Day
Sloth Blog
Spinsterella
The All New Adventures of Wyndham
The Great She Elephant
The sounds of North America:
Beauty Addict
Blogdorf Goodman
Catbird Journal
C'est Chic
Dooce
Jonniker
Manolo's Shoe Blog
Mother Hen's Place
Seldom Nice Nowadays
Triticum Turgidum
Lovable Antipodeans:
L'eggs up and laughing
Make Tea Not War
Ramblings of a Yidchick
Ruth's Reflections
Short and Sweet
Wanda Harland
The best of the rest:
A Congregation of Vapours
Jutsa Blog
Materialism
The Weekly Ramble From Malawi
Wyndham the Triffid:
Aginoth's Ramblings
Between The Hammer And The Anvil
Bowleserised
Broke In Berlin
Cakesniffers Beware
A Congregation Of Vapours
Contains Mild Peril
Cultural Snow
Devil's Kitchen
First Nations
Gordon Mclean
Grammar Puss
The Great She Elephant
Hormones And Handbags
Inexplicable DeVice
Infomaniac
Inside My Head
James And The Blue Cat
Joanna's Diary
JutsaBlog
Kaliyuga Kronicles
little.red.boat
Lost In A Common Language
Mother Hen's Place
Murphmeister
Musings Of A Juggling Mother
Onan Online
Oye Billy
Palace Fan
Quinquireme
Realdoc
Slaminsky
Sloth Blog
Spinsterella
Surly Girl
Too Early To Tell
Toxicsoup
Urban Chick
The Vinyl Word
The Voyage Of Richard Headley
Youngest Pensioner
Blue Cat:
Bearded Ladies
The Big Side Order
Cornish Rambler
Fat Roland
Grammar Puss
Horticultural
Iridesce Sent
Great She Elephant
Hamilton's Brain
jonnyB
Kalista
Emma Kennedy
Little Red boat
Surly Girl
Maus Congeniality
Orbyn
Patroclus
PEANUT
Rafael
Random Acts of Violets
Realdoc
Spinsterella
Wyndham The Triffid
Music Blogs
Slaminsky:
Audrey Hepburn
Ava Gardner
Boris Karloff
Brigitte Bardot
Bruce Lee
Camerashake
Cary Grant
Clara Bow
Clark Gable
Clint Eastwood
David Niven
Dirk Bogarde
Errol Flynn
Gabriel Byrne
Gene Hackman
Gene Kelly
Greta Garbo
Hedy Lamarr
Humphrey Bogart
Jack Palance
James Cagney
James Dean
James Mason
James Stewart
Jean Harlow
Jean Reno
Jean Seberg
Julie Christie
Katherine Hepburn
Mae West
Marilyn Monroe
Marlene Dietrich
Natalie Wood
No Flash Photography
Omar Sharif
Peter Lorre
Rita Hayworth
Robert de Niro
Samuel L Jackson
Sean Connery
Sofia Loren
Veronica Lake
Warren Beatty
WC Fields
What links these blogrolls?
And Why?
A barely used copy of Radiohead: Welcome to the Machine - OK Computer & the Death of the Classic Album to the person who can come up with the most deeply personalised and inslulting [to me] explanation(s). A signed and barely-used copy* of Radiohead: Welcome to the Machine - OK Computer & the Death of the Classic Album to anyone prepared to act them out.
*signed by me, not Tim, obviously...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
You can tell I'm bored at work. When I start doing things like this. Or paranoid. Take two: you can always tell when I'm bored and paranoid at work, because I start doing things like this:
Chaucer's Bitch:
Annie Rhiannon
Da Nator
Dave
Finger-farting
First Nations
Frobisher
Great She Elephant
Hannah
Heather
Hendrix Cat
Here Be Monsters
Homo escapeons
LC
Michael
Oye! Billy!
Patroclus
Realdoc
Ruggybabs
Slurker
Spinsterella
Tim Footman
Timorous Beastie
Grammar Puss:
Bearded Ladies
Blue Cat
A Congregation of Vapours
Cultural Snow
The Department of Me
D-Flat Chime Bar
Easily Led
Glitter for Brains
Great She Elephant
Green Wing Series 2 blog
Inside My Head
Jewdas
Jo's Journal
Life is an Elaborate Metaphor for Cricket
Life is a Glorious Cycle of Song
Let's be Sensible
Menke's Kinky Hair
Moosifer Jones Grouch
Normblog
Oye Billy!
Pigsaw
Pink Windmill
PooterGeek
Quinquireme
Rafael Behr
RickB
Sex, Money & html
Shoot the Messenger
Slaminsky
Spinsterella
Tea and Biscuits
Tickets, Money, Passport
Urban Chick
wongaBlog
Wyndham the Triffid
Great She-Elephant:
Google News
15 Minute Lunch
Bowleserised
Broke in Berlin
Chaucer's Bitch
Citizen of Woking
D-flat Chime Bar
Dilbert Blog
Easily Led
Ertblog
First Nations
Frangelita
Gastronomy Domine
Grammar Puss
Hormones and Handbags
James and the Blue Cat
Mother Hen
Life is an elaborate metaphor for cricket
Lorna
Oye Billy
President's Intern
Quinquireme
Realdoc
Rockmother
Seldom Nice Nowadays
Sex, Money and HTML
Slaminsky
Slap of the Day
Slurker
Smirking Chimp
Spinsterella
Stellblog
The Ill Man
The Whales
Urban Chick
Wyndham the Triffid
Patroclus:
(Meatspace Blogroll:)
Albert's Escape Hatch
Bearded Ladies
Blog They're Making Me Write
Blue Cat
Congregation of Vapours
Cultural Snow
Grammar Puss
Great She Elephant
Liars and Lunatics
Llewtrah
Materialist
Menke's Kinky Hair
Miss-Cellany
My Name Is Aimee
Not 4'33"
Oye Billy!
Sean
Slaminsky
Spinsterella
Taiga The Fox
Warning: Rants Likely...
Wyndham The Triffid
(Cyberspace Blogroll)
Annie Rhiannon
Bend To Squares
Betty's Utility Room
Blonde Moments
Broke In Berlin
Caballito Del Diablo
Ceridwen Devi
D-Flat Chime Bar
Delrico Bandito
Easily Lead
Elaborate Metaphor For Cricket
Extemporanea
Fat Roland
Geoff's Telly Blog
In The Mirror Of Ultimate Wonder
Kaliyuga Kronicles
Latigo Flint
Longcat
Lost In A Common Language
Mental Excrement
Mr Bloom's Dental Windows
My Solecisms
On Grub Street
Pigeon Weather Blog
Prolix
Rafael Behr
Scroobious Scrivener
Shoot The Messenger
Slagging Off Stuff
Tea And Biscuits
Troubled Diva
Urban Chick
Welcome To Melancholy
Urban Chick:
(Real life friends:)
Mark's Friendship Blog
The Plate Invigilator
(Bloggers in Da 'Burgh:)
A Humdrum Existence
A Scandal and a Disgrace
Blonde Moments
Gamma Mamma
Naked Blog
This Edinburgh Life
Mighty Blighty bloggers:
Betty's Utility Room
D Flat Chime Bar
Down By The River
Geoff's Dream Blog
Grammar Puss
Hormones and Handbags
Inside my head
JonnyB's Private Secret Diary
Little Red Boat
Menke's Kinky Hair
O Poor Robinson Crusoe
Pictures Speak Quietly
Quinquireme
Shoot The Messenger
Slap of the Day
Sloth Blog
Spinsterella
The All New Adventures of Wyndham
The Great She Elephant
The sounds of North America:
Beauty Addict
Blogdorf Goodman
Catbird Journal
C'est Chic
Dooce
Jonniker
Manolo's Shoe Blog
Mother Hen's Place
Seldom Nice Nowadays
Triticum Turgidum
Lovable Antipodeans:
L'eggs up and laughing
Make Tea Not War
Ramblings of a Yidchick
Ruth's Reflections
Short and Sweet
Wanda Harland
The best of the rest:
A Congregation of Vapours
Jutsa Blog
Materialism
The Weekly Ramble From Malawi
Wyndham the Triffid:
Aginoth's Ramblings
Between The Hammer And The Anvil
Bowleserised
Broke In Berlin
Cakesniffers Beware
A Congregation Of Vapours
Contains Mild Peril
Cultural Snow
Devil's Kitchen
First Nations
Gordon Mclean
Grammar Puss
The Great She Elephant
Hormones And Handbags
Inexplicable DeVice
Infomaniac
Inside My Head
James And The Blue Cat
Joanna's Diary
JutsaBlog
Kaliyuga Kronicles
little.red.boat
Lost In A Common Language
Mother Hen's Place
Murphmeister
Musings Of A Juggling Mother
Onan Online
Oye Billy
Palace Fan
Quinquireme
Realdoc
Slaminsky
Sloth Blog
Spinsterella
Surly Girl
Too Early To Tell
Toxicsoup
Urban Chick
The Vinyl Word
The Voyage Of Richard Headley
Youngest Pensioner
Blue Cat:
Bearded Ladies
The Big Side Order
Cornish Rambler
Fat Roland
Grammar Puss
Horticultural
Iridesce Sent
Great She Elephant
Hamilton's Brain
jonnyB
Kalista
Emma Kennedy
Little Red boat
Surly Girl
Maus Congeniality
Orbyn
Patroclus
PEANUT
Rafael
Random Acts of Violets
Realdoc
Spinsterella
Wyndham The Triffid
Music Blogs
Slaminsky:
Audrey Hepburn
Ava Gardner
Boris Karloff
Brigitte Bardot
Bruce Lee
Camerashake
Cary Grant
Clara Bow
Clark Gable
Clint Eastwood
David Niven
Dirk Bogarde
Errol Flynn
Gabriel Byrne
Gene Hackman
Gene Kelly
Greta Garbo
Hedy Lamarr
Humphrey Bogart
Jack Palance
James Cagney
James Dean
James Mason
James Stewart
Jean Harlow
Jean Reno
Jean Seberg
Julie Christie
Katherine Hepburn
Mae West
Marilyn Monroe
Marlene Dietrich
Natalie Wood
No Flash Photography
Omar Sharif
Peter Lorre
Rita Hayworth
Robert de Niro
Samuel L Jackson
Sean Connery
Sofia Loren
Veronica Lake
Warren Beatty
WC Fields
What links these blogrolls?
And Why?
A barely used copy of Radiohead: Welcome to the Machine - OK Computer & the Death of the Classic Album to the person who can come up with the most deeply personalised and inslulting [to me] explanation(s). A signed and barely-used copy* of Radiohead: Welcome to the Machine - OK Computer & the Death of the Classic Album to anyone prepared to act them out.
*signed by me, not Tim, obviously...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
The [Lost His/Her] Marble[s] Index[er]...
The good news: I get a copy of Tim's immensely readable Radiohead book for my birthday.
The bad news: it's been indexed by a total retard. Either that or a thoroughly malicious spirit who is in store for a hefty, non-PC, Gene Hunt-style going over from the Karma Police (or, if you're reading in Glasgow, that's the Karma Polis.)
Oh sure, the guy/gal starts off OK.
A
Aberfeldy 243
AC/DC 121,278
[...]
Anka, Paul 191, 278
Annis, Francesca 69
[..that's the *page* number btw, not the position, unfortunately. Trust me, I checked...]
But then we get to
B
..and the first entry is...
B.S. Johnson 258
[...?]
So you can imagine, my delight and surprise when I came to this entry:
Spin 15, 27, 39, 81, 110, 111, 123, 154, 184, 185, 209, 222, 244, 282
"Streuth, bugger me, she gets about" I thought. "A bit of romantic interest - at bloody last!" Well, I looked and looked and could I find a *single* reference to our beloved Spinster (Bristols, Parish of)??
Mind you, G (..."even *I* didn't shag Thom [Yorke]") sounds like a game sort....
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Monday, 16 April 2007
Bobcast #35...
...Music for flightpaths???
Listen to it right now by not doing anything, or click here to download it...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Podcasts
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Listen to it right now by not doing anything, or click here to download it...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Podcasts
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Friday, 13 April 2007
Albert Goldman's "The Lives of John Lennon"...
[For once, a tenuously topical post...]
I picked this up at the British Heart Foundation shop for four quid - a second print-run American edition hardback, barely marked, from 1988. I remember the ballyhoo surrounding the original publication and, perhaps unduly swayed by that hyperbole, have steered clear of it until now. Having been a Lennon fan since childbirth, I thought I'd breeze through it, but I'm just over halfway through what is a very dense read indeed - 700 plus pages of close print foolscap format text. In reading terms, if not in subject matter, it makes the 270 pages I've just read on Stalin's rule of terror - famine, torture, political murder, 20 million dead etc. - seem like a stroll in the park.
On the evidence of what I've read so far, despite some really well researched and evocative material (in particular that concerning the doomed marriage of Lennon's parents and their subsequent and highly traumatic tug of love over the young John), it's hard not to feel that Goldman's book does in large part live up (or down?) to the claims of its many detractors that it is little more than an ill-intentioned (malicious, even) hatchet job. At times, the author's glee *is* almost palpable as he winds up to unleash the coups de smear of his trump allegations - or maybe insinuations would be more accurate. For instance, he cites Stuart Sutcliffe's post-mortem which revealed a sharp indent on the deceased's skull consistent with being kicked by sharply pointed footwear. John Lennon often wore cowboy boots - draw your own conclusions...That sort of thing.
So, Lennon variously beats up Sutcliffe, German sailors in Hamburg, British sailors in Liverpool, Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler at Paul's 21st Birthday bash (proposing a wife swap to Rory and Mrs. Storm almost as soon as his fists have ceased pummeling, if Mr. Goldman is to be believed - *some* party Macca!), Yoko (allegedly causing her at one stage to miscarry). In between the violence, he whacks Brian Epstein one off/gets mouth relief from B.E. in a Barca bedroom, gets Cynthia, German girlfriend Bettina and (one wouldn't be surprised, given that he seems to have shagged most of them) half of the civilised world up the duffer in between consuming almost every known chemical substances in elephant-felling quantities - oh, and in between the sex and drugs and violence he somehow contrives to co-write and record the greatest body of popular song in the canon and tour with the most famous pop group there has ever been. And we're only up to page 311...
But, if you can filter out the more blatant sensationalising, there's a lot of good stuff here too. Indeed, given the time that's elapsed since the original publication date (a mere 8 years after Lennon's sad and shocking death, but nearly twenty years since the book came out) one should perhaps sit back and relish rather than upbraid the skillful sophistry with which Goldman goes about his craft. Heaping supposition on top of innuendo upon wild speculation, Goldman establishes the tenuous conjecture that rather than the hand job Lennon freely admitted to bezzy mate Pete Shotton that he'd given Brian Epstein in that Barcelona hotel room, it's more likely that Eppy gave Johnny a blowy...
Also, as Goldman himself points out in a spirited defence of his extensively researched tome occasioned by a pummeling-in-print administered to it/its author in a Rolling Stone review, there's plenty of humour there too (the fact that Goldman was also the author of a positive and much-lauded biog. of comic legend Lenny Bruce has been somewhat overlooked in the wake of his exceedingly controversial books on Presley and Lennon). As would befit a book about the caustically witty Lennon, I've laughed out loud often and imagined Lennon doing likewise from the other side, particularly at one LSD-fuelled encounter with a member of the public. Lennon, who'd just left a hastily convened board meeting of the Beatles and their inner circle at which he'd announced his sincere belief that he was no less than the Second Coming of Christ incarnate - a fact his Beatle buddies took in their stride with admirable aplomb, incidentally - was recognised in a restaurant by a fellow diner. "'Ere, don't I know you?" asked the m. of the p., evidently furrowing a brow whilst trying to place this famous face. "I'm Jesus Christ" drawled the stoned and ego-fragmented Lennon, in deadly earnest. "Oh", said the other fellow, scales evidently having fallen, "I thought your last record was very nice". There's also a great description of John's indomitable Auntie Mimi's first meeting with Yoko - "who's the poison dwarf, John?"
But the overall problem with the book, especially given the anally retentive nature of many Beatlemaniacs and the much-trumpeted research undertaken by the author, is always going to be in the details. And here there are fatal flaws. Lennon bought a big mock-Tudor house, Kenwood, on the St. George's Hill Estate near Weybridge, Surrey because his "foolish finacial advisors" told him to buy a large house for tax purposes. They recommend Sussex. A typo, I thought, initially. But no, there it is again, a few hundred pages later - Lennon's Sussex mansion. There are silly, easily avoided goofs as well that would (and will) have even the most casual acquaintance of the Beatles' discography apoplectic. He refers to George Harrison's "four-record" All Things Must Pass LP. It was a triple album. This succession of minor but avoidable inaccuracies builds up and you begin to wonder - if he's wrong about stuff like that - exactly what *is* kosher.
And then there are the parts where Goldman, presumably tripping over himself to wield that hatchet, gets his vices all in a muddle. We're told (and Lennon himself attested to this, as do other witnesses) that between late 1965 and 1967 he took 'thousands' of LSD trips, virtually eating the stuff, to the extent that apparently Goldman couldn't get any technical info on what the effects of so prodigious an intake would be (you're meant to leave a few days between trips in order to get the hulucinatory effects, apparently). The effect of all this on his sex life, according to friend and fellow imbiber John* Dunbar was that Lennon became 'monastic'. Or, put crudely, impotent. And yet, so anxious is Goldman to utilise revelations from Lennon's chaufeur that had been at it in the back of the Roller a mere three weeks after they first met, thus skewering the romance of their "we made love at dawn after recording Two Virgins" schtick.
It is a nasty book in places, but with the increasing acceptance among all but the most one-eyed Beatle fanatics that Lennon really does firmly belong in the deeply flawed category of genius, perhaps that has to be the case. What is sad is that you can't help feeling that Goldman's book is, in its own way, just as distorting of the man as those accounts which would prefer not to dwell so long on the man's many and evident flaws. Still, if you watch and listen carefully, the man's own documentation of his life (not withstanding his Estate's ongoing attempts to massage and manipulate it for public consumption) tells pretty much the same story. Lennon may have been more dissembling and (as Goldman asserts) a fantasist in other areas of his life, but usually he was nothing if not honest in in his art. And soon, you'll be able to download it all.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
* not Andrew Dunbar, as I initially posted. Many thanks to Dickster for the spot...
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
I picked this up at the British Heart Foundation shop for four quid - a second print-run American edition hardback, barely marked, from 1988. I remember the ballyhoo surrounding the original publication and, perhaps unduly swayed by that hyperbole, have steered clear of it until now. Having been a Lennon fan since childbirth, I thought I'd breeze through it, but I'm just over halfway through what is a very dense read indeed - 700 plus pages of close print foolscap format text. In reading terms, if not in subject matter, it makes the 270 pages I've just read on Stalin's rule of terror - famine, torture, political murder, 20 million dead etc. - seem like a stroll in the park.
On the evidence of what I've read so far, despite some really well researched and evocative material (in particular that concerning the doomed marriage of Lennon's parents and their subsequent and highly traumatic tug of love over the young John), it's hard not to feel that Goldman's book does in large part live up (or down?) to the claims of its many detractors that it is little more than an ill-intentioned (malicious, even) hatchet job. At times, the author's glee *is* almost palpable as he winds up to unleash the coups de smear of his trump allegations - or maybe insinuations would be more accurate. For instance, he cites Stuart Sutcliffe's post-mortem which revealed a sharp indent on the deceased's skull consistent with being kicked by sharply pointed footwear. John Lennon often wore cowboy boots - draw your own conclusions...That sort of thing.
So, Lennon variously beats up Sutcliffe, German sailors in Hamburg, British sailors in Liverpool, Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler at Paul's 21st Birthday bash (proposing a wife swap to Rory and Mrs. Storm almost as soon as his fists have ceased pummeling, if Mr. Goldman is to be believed - *some* party Macca!), Yoko (allegedly causing her at one stage to miscarry). In between the violence, he whacks Brian Epstein one off/gets mouth relief from B.E. in a Barca bedroom, gets Cynthia, German girlfriend Bettina and (one wouldn't be surprised, given that he seems to have shagged most of them) half of the civilised world up the duffer in between consuming almost every known chemical substances in elephant-felling quantities - oh, and in between the sex and drugs and violence he somehow contrives to co-write and record the greatest body of popular song in the canon and tour with the most famous pop group there has ever been. And we're only up to page 311...
But, if you can filter out the more blatant sensationalising, there's a lot of good stuff here too. Indeed, given the time that's elapsed since the original publication date (a mere 8 years after Lennon's sad and shocking death, but nearly twenty years since the book came out) one should perhaps sit back and relish rather than upbraid the skillful sophistry with which Goldman goes about his craft. Heaping supposition on top of innuendo upon wild speculation, Goldman establishes the tenuous conjecture that rather than the hand job Lennon freely admitted to bezzy mate Pete Shotton that he'd given Brian Epstein in that Barcelona hotel room, it's more likely that Eppy gave Johnny a blowy...
Also, as Goldman himself points out in a spirited defence of his extensively researched tome occasioned by a pummeling-in-print administered to it/its author in a Rolling Stone review, there's plenty of humour there too (the fact that Goldman was also the author of a positive and much-lauded biog. of comic legend Lenny Bruce has been somewhat overlooked in the wake of his exceedingly controversial books on Presley and Lennon). As would befit a book about the caustically witty Lennon, I've laughed out loud often and imagined Lennon doing likewise from the other side, particularly at one LSD-fuelled encounter with a member of the public. Lennon, who'd just left a hastily convened board meeting of the Beatles and their inner circle at which he'd announced his sincere belief that he was no less than the Second Coming of Christ incarnate - a fact his Beatle buddies took in their stride with admirable aplomb, incidentally - was recognised in a restaurant by a fellow diner. "'Ere, don't I know you?" asked the m. of the p., evidently furrowing a brow whilst trying to place this famous face. "I'm Jesus Christ" drawled the stoned and ego-fragmented Lennon, in deadly earnest. "Oh", said the other fellow, scales evidently having fallen, "I thought your last record was very nice". There's also a great description of John's indomitable Auntie Mimi's first meeting with Yoko - "who's the poison dwarf, John?"
But the overall problem with the book, especially given the anally retentive nature of many Beatlemaniacs and the much-trumpeted research undertaken by the author, is always going to be in the details. And here there are fatal flaws. Lennon bought a big mock-Tudor house, Kenwood, on the St. George's Hill Estate near Weybridge, Surrey because his "foolish finacial advisors" told him to buy a large house for tax purposes. They recommend Sussex. A typo, I thought, initially. But no, there it is again, a few hundred pages later - Lennon's Sussex mansion. There are silly, easily avoided goofs as well that would (and will) have even the most casual acquaintance of the Beatles' discography apoplectic. He refers to George Harrison's "four-record" All Things Must Pass LP. It was a triple album. This succession of minor but avoidable inaccuracies builds up and you begin to wonder - if he's wrong about stuff like that - exactly what *is* kosher.
And then there are the parts where Goldman, presumably tripping over himself to wield that hatchet, gets his vices all in a muddle. We're told (and Lennon himself attested to this, as do other witnesses) that between late 1965 and 1967 he took 'thousands' of LSD trips, virtually eating the stuff, to the extent that apparently Goldman couldn't get any technical info on what the effects of so prodigious an intake would be (you're meant to leave a few days between trips in order to get the hulucinatory effects, apparently). The effect of all this on his sex life, according to friend and fellow imbiber John* Dunbar was that Lennon became 'monastic'. Or, put crudely, impotent. And yet, so anxious is Goldman to utilise revelations from Lennon's chaufeur that had been at it in the back of the Roller a mere three weeks after they first met, thus skewering the romance of their "we made love at dawn after recording Two Virgins" schtick.
It is a nasty book in places, but with the increasing acceptance among all but the most one-eyed Beatle fanatics that Lennon really does firmly belong in the deeply flawed category of genius, perhaps that has to be the case. What is sad is that you can't help feeling that Goldman's book is, in its own way, just as distorting of the man as those accounts which would prefer not to dwell so long on the man's many and evident flaws. Still, if you watch and listen carefully, the man's own documentation of his life (not withstanding his Estate's ongoing attempts to massage and manipulate it for public consumption) tells pretty much the same story. Lennon may have been more dissembling and (as Goldman asserts) a fantasist in other areas of his life, but usually he was nothing if not honest in in his art. And soon, you'll be able to download it all.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
* not Andrew Dunbar, as I initially posted. Many thanks to Dickster for the spot...
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Blogs Should Contain Health Warnings, Says New Draft Code Of Conduct
Blogs using bad language should display a health warning. according to a new draft code of conduct.
Fuck that for a game of soldiers.
Who the fucking hell do these tossers think they are??
*Cunts*...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Fuck that for a game of soldiers.
Who the fucking hell do these tossers think they are??
*Cunts*...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Thursday, 12 April 2007
Albert Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon...
[For once, a tenuously topical post...]
I picked this up at the British Heart Foundation shop for four quid - a second print-run American edition hardback, barely marked, from 1988. I remember the ballyhoo surrounding the original publication and, perhaps unduly swayed by that hyperbole, have steered clear of it until now. Having been a Lennon fan since childbirth, I thought I'd breeze through it, but I'm just over halfway through what is a very dense read indeed - 700 plus pages of close print foolscap format text. In reading terms, if not in subject matter, it makes the 270 pages I've just read on Stalin's rule of terror - famine, torture, political murder, 20 million dead etc. - seem like a stroll in the park.
On the evidence of what I've read so far, despite some really well researched and evocative material (in particular that concerning the doomed marriage of Lennon's parents and their subsequent and highly traumatic tug of love over the young John), it's hard not to feel that Goldman's book does in large part live up (or down?) to the claims of its many detractors that it is little more than an ill-intentioned (malicious, even) hatchet job. At times, the author's glee *is* almost palpable as he winds up to unleash the coups de smear of his trump allegations - or maybe insinuations would be more accurate. For instance, he cites Stuart Sutcliffe's post-mortem which revealed a sharp indent on the deceased's skull consistent with being kicked by sharply pointed footwear. John Lennon often wore cowboy boots - draw your own conclusions...That sort of thing.
So, Lennon variously beats up Sutcliffe, German sailors in Hamburg, British sailors in Liverpool, Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler at Paul's 21st Birthday bash (proposing a wife swap to Rory and Mrs. Storm almost as soon as his fists have ceased pummeling, if Mr. Goldman is to be believed - *some* party Macca!), Yoko (allegedly causing her at one stage to miscarry). In between the violence, he whacks Brian Epstein one off/gets mouth relief from B.E. in a Barca bedroom, gets Cynthia, German girlfriend Bettina and (one wouldn't be surprised, given that he seems to have shagged most of them) half of the civilised world up the duffer in between consuming almost every known chemical substances in elephant-felling quantities - oh, and in between the sex and drugs and violence ge somehow contrives to co-writye and record the greatest body of popular song in the canon and tour with the most famous pop group there has ever been. And we're only up to page 311...
But, if you can filter out the more blatant sensationalising, there's a lot of good stuff here too. Indeed, given the time that's elapsed since the original publication date (a mere 8 years after Lennon's sad and shocking death, but nearly twenty years since the book came out) one should perhaps sit back and relish rather than upbraid the skillful sophistry with which Goldman goes about his craft. Heaping supposition on top of innuendo upon wild speculation, Goldman establishes the tenuous conjecture that rather than the hand job Lennon freely admitted to bezzy mate Pete Shotton that he'd given Brian Epstein in that Barcelona hotel room, it's more likely that Eppy gave Johnny a blowy...
Also, as Goldman himself points out in a spirited defence of his extensively researched tome occassioned by a pummeling-in-print administered to it/its author in a Rolling Stone review, there's plenty of humour there too (the fact that Goldman was also the author of a positive and much-lauded biog. of comic legend Lenny Bruce has been somewhat overlooked in the wake of his exceedingly controversial books on Presley and Lennon). As would befit a book about the caustically witty Lennon, I've laughed out loud often and imagined Lennon doing likewise from the other side, particularly at one LSD-fuelled encounter with a member of the public. Lennon, who'd just left a hastily convened board meeting of the Beatles and their inner circle at which he'd announced his sincere belief that he was no less than the Second Coming of Christ incarnate - a fact his Beatle buddies took in their stride with admirable aplomb, incidentally - was recognised in a restaurant by a fellow diner. "'Ere, don't I know you?" asked the m. of the p., evidently furrowing a brow whilst trying to place this famous face. "I'm Jesus Christ" drawled the stoned and ego-fragmented Lennon, in deadly earnest. "Oh", said the other fellow, scales evidently having fallen, "I thought your last record was very nice".
But the overall problem with the book, especially given the anally retentive nature of many Beatlemaniacs and the much-trumpeted research undertaken by the author, is always going to be in the details. And here there are fatal flaws. Lennon bought a big mock-Tudor house, Kenwood, on the St. George's Hill Estate near Weybridge, Surrey because his "foolish finacial advisors" told him to buy a large house for tax purposes. They recommend Sussex. A typo, I thought, initially. But no, there it is again, a few hunderd pages later - Lennon's Sussex mansion. There are silly, easily avoided goofs as well that would (and will) have even the most casual acquaintance of the Beatles' discography apoplectic. He refers to George Harrison's "four-record" All Things Must Pass LP. It was a triple album. And then there are the parts where Goldman, presumably tripping over himself to wield that hatchet, gets his vices all in a muddle. We're told (and Lennon himself attested to this, as do other witnesses) that between late 1965 and 1967 he took 'thousands' of LSD trips, virtually eating the stuff, to the extent that apparently Goldman couldn't get any technical info on what the effects of so prodigious an intake would be (you're meant to leave a few days between trips in order to get the hulucinatory effects, apparently). The effect of all this on his sex life, according to friend and fellow imbiber Andrew Dunbar was that Lennon became 'monastic'. Or, put crudely, impotent. And yet, so anxious is Goldman to utilise revelations from Lennon's chaufeur that had been at it in the back of the Roller a mere three weeks after they first met, thus skewering the romance of their "we made love at dawn after recording Two Virgins" schtick.
There's a great description of John's indomitable Auntie Mimi's first meeting with Yoko - "
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/misc/rbgoldm2-94.php
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
I picked this up at the British Heart Foundation shop for four quid - a second print-run American edition hardback, barely marked, from 1988. I remember the ballyhoo surrounding the original publication and, perhaps unduly swayed by that hyperbole, have steered clear of it until now. Having been a Lennon fan since childbirth, I thought I'd breeze through it, but I'm just over halfway through what is a very dense read indeed - 700 plus pages of close print foolscap format text. In reading terms, if not in subject matter, it makes the 270 pages I've just read on Stalin's rule of terror - famine, torture, political murder, 20 million dead etc. - seem like a stroll in the park.
On the evidence of what I've read so far, despite some really well researched and evocative material (in particular that concerning the doomed marriage of Lennon's parents and their subsequent and highly traumatic tug of love over the young John), it's hard not to feel that Goldman's book does in large part live up (or down?) to the claims of its many detractors that it is little more than an ill-intentioned (malicious, even) hatchet job. At times, the author's glee *is* almost palpable as he winds up to unleash the coups de smear of his trump allegations - or maybe insinuations would be more accurate. For instance, he cites Stuart Sutcliffe's post-mortem which revealed a sharp indent on the deceased's skull consistent with being kicked by sharply pointed footwear. John Lennon often wore cowboy boots - draw your own conclusions...That sort of thing.
So, Lennon variously beats up Sutcliffe, German sailors in Hamburg, British sailors in Liverpool, Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler at Paul's 21st Birthday bash (proposing a wife swap to Rory and Mrs. Storm almost as soon as his fists have ceased pummeling, if Mr. Goldman is to be believed - *some* party Macca!), Yoko (allegedly causing her at one stage to miscarry). In between the violence, he whacks Brian Epstein one off/gets mouth relief from B.E. in a Barca bedroom, gets Cynthia, German girlfriend Bettina and (one wouldn't be surprised, given that he seems to have shagged most of them) half of the civilised world up the duffer in between consuming almost every known chemical substances in elephant-felling quantities - oh, and in between the sex and drugs and violence ge somehow contrives to co-writye and record the greatest body of popular song in the canon and tour with the most famous pop group there has ever been. And we're only up to page 311...
But, if you can filter out the more blatant sensationalising, there's a lot of good stuff here too. Indeed, given the time that's elapsed since the original publication date (a mere 8 years after Lennon's sad and shocking death, but nearly twenty years since the book came out) one should perhaps sit back and relish rather than upbraid the skillful sophistry with which Goldman goes about his craft. Heaping supposition on top of innuendo upon wild speculation, Goldman establishes the tenuous conjecture that rather than the hand job Lennon freely admitted to bezzy mate Pete Shotton that he'd given Brian Epstein in that Barcelona hotel room, it's more likely that Eppy gave Johnny a blowy...
Also, as Goldman himself points out in a spirited defence of his extensively researched tome occassioned by a pummeling-in-print administered to it/its author in a Rolling Stone review, there's plenty of humour there too (the fact that Goldman was also the author of a positive and much-lauded biog. of comic legend Lenny Bruce has been somewhat overlooked in the wake of his exceedingly controversial books on Presley and Lennon). As would befit a book about the caustically witty Lennon, I've laughed out loud often and imagined Lennon doing likewise from the other side, particularly at one LSD-fuelled encounter with a member of the public. Lennon, who'd just left a hastily convened board meeting of the Beatles and their inner circle at which he'd announced his sincere belief that he was no less than the Second Coming of Christ incarnate - a fact his Beatle buddies took in their stride with admirable aplomb, incidentally - was recognised in a restaurant by a fellow diner. "'Ere, don't I know you?" asked the m. of the p., evidently furrowing a brow whilst trying to place this famous face. "I'm Jesus Christ" drawled the stoned and ego-fragmented Lennon, in deadly earnest. "Oh", said the other fellow, scales evidently having fallen, "I thought your last record was very nice".
But the overall problem with the book, especially given the anally retentive nature of many Beatlemaniacs and the much-trumpeted research undertaken by the author, is always going to be in the details. And here there are fatal flaws. Lennon bought a big mock-Tudor house, Kenwood, on the St. George's Hill Estate near Weybridge, Surrey because his "foolish finacial advisors" told him to buy a large house for tax purposes. They recommend Sussex. A typo, I thought, initially. But no, there it is again, a few hunderd pages later - Lennon's Sussex mansion. There are silly, easily avoided goofs as well that would (and will) have even the most casual acquaintance of the Beatles' discography apoplectic. He refers to George Harrison's "four-record" All Things Must Pass LP. It was a triple album. And then there are the parts where Goldman, presumably tripping over himself to wield that hatchet, gets his vices all in a muddle. We're told (and Lennon himself attested to this, as do other witnesses) that between late 1965 and 1967 he took 'thousands' of LSD trips, virtually eating the stuff, to the extent that apparently Goldman couldn't get any technical info on what the effects of so prodigious an intake would be (you're meant to leave a few days between trips in order to get the hulucinatory effects, apparently). The effect of all this on his sex life, according to friend and fellow imbiber Andrew Dunbar was that Lennon became 'monastic'. Or, put crudely, impotent. And yet, so anxious is Goldman to utilise revelations from Lennon's chaufeur that had been at it in the back of the Roller a mere three weeks after they first met, thus skewering the romance of their "we made love at dawn after recording Two Virgins" schtick.
There's a great description of John's indomitable Auntie Mimi's first meeting with Yoko - "
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/misc/rbgoldm2-94.php
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
Two Unusual Things That Happened Today...
Firstly, this morning, on the way to work, just by Blow Up (not, unfortunately as interesting an emporium as it sounds - they're a Reprographics firm...) I see, dried up and slightly shrivelled, two frogs conjoined. The smaller (I'm guessing) male sits in mid-hump atop the larger (presumably) female (although, it would be folly to rule out an accomodating and like-minded fellow male of the species, given the unusual nature of their whole flagrante delicto situation) - unless, of course, he's trying quite literally in this case to leapfrog his partner (or not, as the case may be) in order to escape whatever instant and ferocious drying agent has frozen them in their apparent union like this.
I'm reminded of the Martin Amis story I read over the weekend. Straight Fiction is set in a parallel-universe New York City in which to be gay is the norm. The marginalised and barely tolerated straights live in their crowded, child-infested Christopher Street ghetto. To cut to the chase, there's a comic diversion which cites an article in the NYT concerning tests on insects that have been conducted to find out more about 'the straight gene'. "Ahh, they're even called fruit flies.." sighs the gay protagonist, Cleve...
Then, later, at work as I pretend to be doing something vaguely constructive with a trolley-full of books, Michelle accosts me. How to describe Michelle? About 5' 11'', long floral skirt, sandally shoes, blouse, ear-rings, long ash-blonde wig, fully made up face - pancake, rouge, lippy, maybe-it's Maybeline lashes, the works - that if it had to be that of any celebrity lookalikey, living or dead, would not be a disgraceful simulacrum for comedy legend Bernie Winters. "Got you doing a jigsaw puzzle have they young man?" she asks of me - as I sprawl like a retard among a tottering pile of play bricks - in that husky baritone of hers that makes no pretence whatsoever to belong to anything other than a man.
How strange.
No one's called me 'young man' for a long time....
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
I'm reminded of the Martin Amis story I read over the weekend. Straight Fiction is set in a parallel-universe New York City in which to be gay is the norm. The marginalised and barely tolerated straights live in their crowded, child-infested Christopher Street ghetto. To cut to the chase, there's a comic diversion which cites an article in the NYT concerning tests on insects that have been conducted to find out more about 'the straight gene'. "Ahh, they're even called fruit flies.." sighs the gay protagonist, Cleve...
Then, later, at work as I pretend to be doing something vaguely constructive with a trolley-full of books, Michelle accosts me. How to describe Michelle? About 5' 11'', long floral skirt, sandally shoes, blouse, ear-rings, long ash-blonde wig, fully made up face - pancake, rouge, lippy, maybe-it's Maybeline lashes, the works - that if it had to be that of any celebrity lookalikey, living or dead, would not be a disgraceful simulacrum for comedy legend Bernie Winters. "Got you doing a jigsaw puzzle have they young man?" she asks of me - as I sprawl like a retard among a tottering pile of play bricks - in that husky baritone of hers that makes no pretence whatsoever to belong to anything other than a man.
How strange.
No one's called me 'young man' for a long time....
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Monday, 9 April 2007
Keen, but not Peachy...
Idly flicking through Saturday's Grauniad - well, it's so *slow* the print media, isn't it? Does it *really* matter if you're a couple of days late dropping it in the recycling bin?? - I come across an article commemorating the 10th anniversary of blogging. Yes, apparently, the first entry on Scripting News was posted just over a decade ago and since then, as the piece affirms, "blogging has gone from an unnammed or even nebulous concept [so *they've* read GWAOTM too!] to helping form a nascent community and then to the fundamental evolution of the social web." No, I didn't understand a word of it either, but happy birthday anyway Blogosphere - and, if you're in on the old Gore Vidal joke, a meretricious to you too!
But to be serious for a nano second. In time-honoured, balanced journalism, two sides to every coin, "we are not a home to sanctimonious, self-important ranting here" Old Media style fairness, the Graniad [sic - it was a typo, but I think it fits the bill as we're talking about *old* Me-Jah here...] feels compelled to show that all is not sweetness and light in the whizzing cyber world of the ones and noughts. To whit, they wheel out Andrew Keen - author of CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE, (apologies for shouting, but that's *exactly* how he types it up on his *own* blog [some of you are *way* ahead of me here, but the rest of you will doubtless see the irony of that statement shortly] who says that "although it is enticing to believe that online diaries are empowering, the hype is dangerous." Yep, I can live with that. But then Keen by name, but less so by nature, he goes on:
It's seductive in the sense that it convinces people to think that they have more to say and are more interesting than they really are. The real issue is whether it adds any more to our culture. Most of it is just so transient and ephemeral.
Ah, now I get it. Before the days of the internet, when I thought I had more to say than I did and was more interesting than I really was, I was just a deluded, self-aggrandising moron. *Now* my "digital narcissism" is a threat to culture itself! Thanks for the tip off Andy - I'll buy a faster computer!
Anyway, purely in the interests of extending this over-opinionated, nowhere-near-as-interesting-as-I-like-to-think-it-is rant, I decided to find out a little bit more about Mr. Keen. First stop, AfterTV where we find not only a lovely picture of him (ahh, not a *smitch* of narcissim...) but also the following blurb:
Born in North London... attended London University ... First Class Honours degree in History....British Council Scholar... University of Sarajevo....Yugoslavia during the mid Eighties ... graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley.... fellow at the Macarthur funded Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet International Behaviour... lectured about politics, history and modern culture ... number of New England schools including Tufts, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts...
The boy done good.
So, we read on:
A second confession: I am a media, culture and technology junkie. I have written extensively about music, cinema and politics for many magazines and newspapers in both America and Europe. My own media obsessions include the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, the music of Bono and U2 and the books of W.G. Sebald. My three most cherished pieces of media all happen to be called Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Sebald’s Vertigo (1999) and U2/Bono’s “Vertigo” (2004). Beyond Vertigo, I like to read other people’s anti utopian visions -- particularly those of Franz Kafka, Edmund Burke, William Gibson, George Orwell and Jorge Luis Borges. What particularly interests me about all these dystopian writers is the way that their work exposes the great seduction of their particular age.
Ahh a Vertigo stalker...I've heard of them...Anti-Utopias? Yes, a valid and interesting area of research. But U Bloody 2?!?!?
Anyway, each to their own. Then, next stop is his The Great Seduction site where we find, eventually once we've accustomed our eyes to the glare of all the plugs for CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE (I wish he wouldn't keep shouting like that...) a link to a recent interview (plugging - you guessed it - CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE, naturally). And when I say plugging, I *mean* plugging - this guy is *good* (...and coming from me, that's high praise indeed) I counted *seven* *UPPER* *CASE* plugs for his newest book, The CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE in this six question interview alone. He seems to have been given quite an easy time by blogger (?) Strumpette (which has, incidentally, always been my favourite style of pasta...) - the blog's legend reads: A Naked Journal of the PR Industry. Wow - nudity *and* PR; could there *be* any more vices in there?
All well and good - there's clearly a lot in this "digital narcissism" thing. But these are just a couple of the things he has to say that leaped out at me from the interview - the typos have been left [democratically] uncorrected (bloody bloggers, eh?):
As I demonstrate in CULT OF THE AMATEUR, the blogosphere has no formal editorial checks ot [sic] balances and is thus structurally corrupt and corrupting.
So all those comments people leave at the bottom - they're just....[..tails off..]Nevermind. But then, it transpires that Andy hasn't written this book, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE for us "Web 2.0 radicals". No, we will probably disagree with him and make mincemeat of his theories in an ordered debate. So *this* one goes out to,
parents, business people and educators -- who are troubled by the more extreme cultural and economic consequences of the hyper democratic internet. I expose the dangers not only of "citizen media" like blogging and wikis, but also of online pornography, gambling and identity theft.
Quite so - that's the thing about this democracy lark isn't it. Like infaltion - it's OK until it goes hyper. Then you get all the peaceniks and alternative lifestyle lot out in force and next thing you know...
[... gentle clip-clop, accompanied by a lazily plucked gee-tar...]
"Ours was a peaceful town 'til those Blog rustlers turned up here with their scantily-clad goth girls splattered in feck blood and their fancy Teddy Sheringham's 666 poker nights..."(North London, eh? - I wonder, I wonder....)
But, fear not, pardners, because...
... CULT OF THE AMATEUR [yes, we get the idea by now Andy....] addresses many ordinary people's concerns about the way that the digital revolution is undermining the core tenets of American culture.
You mean there are *non* *ordinary* people out there trying to undermine our *ordinary* ambitions to be able to occupy and firebomb Middle Eastern cities without these atrocities reaching the attention of the people who not only bankroll them, but in whose collective name they are perpetrated.
Well, looky there.
So, please Andrew, tell us more. Specifically what you'd say to the bloggers in places like Iran and China who live under regimes who have more in common with that described in the post below than our own and who are fed up with being told by puny little bureaucrats and ideologues what they can and can't look at. Or say. Or think.
I think you'll find, when you can tear yourself away from The Unforgettable Fire that if you remove the hyper- what you have left tends no longer to be describable as democracy.
And one last thing - the blog thing. Alright for you, but not for the rest of us? Bono sang the following:
And I must be an acrobat
To talk like this
And act like that...
Yes, an acrobat for sure. Or, in plain language, a hypocrite.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
But to be serious for a nano second. In time-honoured, balanced journalism, two sides to every coin, "we are not a home to sanctimonious, self-important ranting here" Old Media style fairness, the Graniad [sic - it was a typo, but I think it fits the bill as we're talking about *old* Me-Jah here...] feels compelled to show that all is not sweetness and light in the whizzing cyber world of the ones and noughts. To whit, they wheel out Andrew Keen - author of CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE, (apologies for shouting, but that's *exactly* how he types it up on his *own* blog [some of you are *way* ahead of me here, but the rest of you will doubtless see the irony of that statement shortly] who says that "although it is enticing to believe that online diaries are empowering, the hype is dangerous." Yep, I can live with that. But then Keen by name, but less so by nature, he goes on:
It's seductive in the sense that it convinces people to think that they have more to say and are more interesting than they really are. The real issue is whether it adds any more to our culture. Most of it is just so transient and ephemeral.
Ah, now I get it. Before the days of the internet, when I thought I had more to say than I did and was more interesting than I really was, I was just a deluded, self-aggrandising moron. *Now* my "digital narcissism" is a threat to culture itself! Thanks for the tip off Andy - I'll buy a faster computer!
Anyway, purely in the interests of extending this over-opinionated, nowhere-near-as-interesting-as-I-like-to-think-it-is rant, I decided to find out a little bit more about Mr. Keen. First stop, AfterTV where we find not only a lovely picture of him (ahh, not a *smitch* of narcissim...) but also the following blurb:
Born in North London... attended London University ... First Class Honours degree in History....British Council Scholar... University of Sarajevo....Yugoslavia during the mid Eighties ... graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley.... fellow at the Macarthur funded Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet International Behaviour... lectured about politics, history and modern culture ... number of New England schools including Tufts, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts...
The boy done good.
So, we read on:
A second confession: I am a media, culture and technology junkie. I have written extensively about music, cinema and politics for many magazines and newspapers in both America and Europe. My own media obsessions include the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, the music of Bono and U2 and the books of W.G. Sebald. My three most cherished pieces of media all happen to be called Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Sebald’s Vertigo (1999) and U2/Bono’s “Vertigo” (2004). Beyond Vertigo, I like to read other people’s anti utopian visions -- particularly those of Franz Kafka, Edmund Burke, William Gibson, George Orwell and Jorge Luis Borges. What particularly interests me about all these dystopian writers is the way that their work exposes the great seduction of their particular age.
Ahh a Vertigo stalker...I've heard of them...Anti-Utopias? Yes, a valid and interesting area of research. But U Bloody 2?!?!?
Anyway, each to their own. Then, next stop is his The Great Seduction site where we find, eventually once we've accustomed our eyes to the glare of all the plugs for CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE (I wish he wouldn't keep shouting like that...) a link to a recent interview (plugging - you guessed it - CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE, naturally). And when I say plugging, I *mean* plugging - this guy is *good* (...and coming from me, that's high praise indeed) I counted *seven* *UPPER* *CASE* plugs for his newest book, The CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE in this six question interview alone. He seems to have been given quite an easy time by blogger (?) Strumpette (which has, incidentally, always been my favourite style of pasta...) - the blog's legend reads: A Naked Journal of the PR Industry. Wow - nudity *and* PR; could there *be* any more vices in there?
All well and good - there's clearly a lot in this "digital narcissism" thing. But these are just a couple of the things he has to say that leaped out at me from the interview - the typos have been left [democratically] uncorrected (bloody bloggers, eh?):
As I demonstrate in CULT OF THE AMATEUR, the blogosphere has no formal editorial checks ot [sic] balances and is thus structurally corrupt and corrupting.
So all those comments people leave at the bottom - they're just....[..tails off..]Nevermind. But then, it transpires that Andy hasn't written this book, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE for us "Web 2.0 radicals". No, we will probably disagree with him and make mincemeat of his theories in an ordered debate. So *this* one goes out to,
parents, business people and educators -- who are troubled by the more extreme cultural and economic consequences of the hyper democratic internet. I expose the dangers not only of "citizen media" like blogging and wikis, but also of online pornography, gambling and identity theft.
Quite so - that's the thing about this democracy lark isn't it. Like infaltion - it's OK until it goes hyper. Then you get all the peaceniks and alternative lifestyle lot out in force and next thing you know...
[... gentle clip-clop, accompanied by a lazily plucked gee-tar...]
"Ours was a peaceful town 'til those Blog rustlers turned up here with their scantily-clad goth girls splattered in feck blood and their fancy Teddy Sheringham's 666 poker nights..."(North London, eh? - I wonder, I wonder....)
But, fear not, pardners, because...
... CULT OF THE AMATEUR [yes, we get the idea by now Andy....] addresses many ordinary people's concerns about the way that the digital revolution is undermining the core tenets of American culture.
You mean there are *non* *ordinary* people out there trying to undermine our *ordinary* ambitions to be able to occupy and firebomb Middle Eastern cities without these atrocities reaching the attention of the people who not only bankroll them, but in whose collective name they are perpetrated.
Well, looky there.
So, please Andrew, tell us more. Specifically what you'd say to the bloggers in places like Iran and China who live under regimes who have more in common with that described in the post below than our own and who are fed up with being told by puny little bureaucrats and ideologues what they can and can't look at. Or say. Or think.
I think you'll find, when you can tear yourself away from The Unforgettable Fire that if you remove the hyper- what you have left tends no longer to be describable as democracy.
And one last thing - the blog thing. Alright for you, but not for the rest of us? Bono sang the following:
And I must be an acrobat
To talk like this
And act like that...
Yes, an acrobat for sure. Or, in plain language, a hypocrite.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
The Old Man's Back Again...
I finally get around to reading "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million". [A big thank you, incidentally, to Gentleman Mike for procurement services...]
It starts like this:
"Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectization and the Terror-Famine:
We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.
That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long."
The first part of Amis' book is titled "The Collapse of the Value of Human Life" and that, for the most part of the next 260 or so pages, is pretty much what we are asked to bear witness to. Amis quotes Conquest's reply to his publisher when asked to supply a new title to the revised edition of his book, The Great Terror: "How about, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?"
It's hard not to squirm oneself when recalling all those dutifully composed "well, I suppose so, in the long run, kind of - yeah....on balance.....whatever..."-type essays one coughed out to order in answer to all those GCE and A-Level questions along the lines of The Five Year Plans: Did the Ends Justify the Means? The answer to all such questions is here, and it is is unequivocally, "No". Indeed, the one sliver of justification we callow, would-be leftist examinees could cling to in it all was that Russian industrialisation, without which no Russian re-armament, had been decisive in defeating Hitler.
It was indeed. But as Amis points out, had it not been for Stalin's (by then) delusional belief that Hitler (whose Mein Kampf, remember, could almost have been subtitled Why I Will Invade Russia in 1941, such was its anti-Bolshevism) could be trusted and would honour the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Russia's subsequent repulsion of the Wehrmacht, despite multiple self- (or rather, Stalin-) inflicted hinderances (e.g. general unpreparedness for war, the mildly inconveniencing pre-(and mid-) war purging of its best officers, the ongoing resettlements of 'troublesome' ethnic groups and a return of the notorious blocking crews first used in the Civil War - if you attempted to retreat from the aggressor, the blocking crews would shoot you anyway...) suggests that a properly prepared and disciplined Red Army could have defeated Hitler in *very* short order. The impact such an event would have had on the century's other mass extermination campaign almost doesn't bear thinking about.
As Amis points out in one of two astonishing letters with which the book concludes, this to his friend and erstwhile Trotskist, (or is it -ite? I can never remember...) Christopher Hitchens:
the gravamen ('essence, worst part, of accusation')* runs as follows: under Bolshevism the value of human life collapsed.
As page after page attests. And yet, pursuant of Koba's subtitle: Laughter and the Twenty Milion, there is a humour - black, discordant, perhaps - that persists in discussion of this savage, terrible, inept and deceitful regime whereas the very thought of the comedic is deemed entirely inappropriate when considering Hitler's National Socialism and the Holocaust. And there *is* humour - logic-defying, Kafka-esque, Gumby-esque humour - in the absurdity of Stalinism's "Negative Perfection". To quote one example:
Increasingly, as the Terror-Famine gripped, peasants stole grain to stay alive. A new law politicized this crime...all such pilferers were to be treated as enemies of the people and would receive the 'tenner' or 'super' [tenner = ten years in the gulag....]... Using the word 'famine' carried the same penalty...In essence, people were being killed, quickly, for the capital crime of saying that they were being killed slowly.
Perhaps only a novelist - a *comic* novelist, at that - could make the following observation so telling and deeply instructive as this one of Amis's on Lenin is:
...I groaned with deep recognition when I learned that he couldn't pronounce his r's: not a good start, I think, for a Russian revolutionary...
So, 260 or so pages that give a hint at the extent of the barbarity, 'the weight of Russia' under Stalin and bear out, it would seem, his assertion that "one death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic".
And then this, the Afterword: Letter to My Father's Ghost:
Dearest Dad,
I experimented with 'Dearest Kingsley', in recognition of your changed status; but I spend a lot of time in your mental company - and why break the habit of a half lifetime?
If you could so much as glance at the dedication page of my last book you would know at once that the thing you greatly feared is come upon you, and that which you were afraid of is come unto you. The Dedication page reads:
To Kingsley
and Sally
For these are my Amis dead.
After 270 pages of Koba, it took these two paragraphs to make me cry - I welled re-typing this, if truth be told. On the surface, you could take this as an affirmation of that dreaded Stalinism: "One death is a tragedy..." "But pity and self-pity can sometimes be the selfsame thing. Death does that. Don't you find?" Amis goes on,
...while every death is a tragedy...the second half of the aphorism is of course wholly false: a million deaths are, at the very least, a million tragedies....In fact, every life is a tragedy too. Every life cleaves to the tragic curve.
One death reminds us of all deaths.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
*It's heartening to see that he doesn't expect his mates to understand all the big words he uses either...
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Wednesday, 4 April 2007
Bobcast #34...
...bully for you.....chilly for me....
Gotta get a raincheck on...
Download it here....
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Gotta get a raincheck on...
Download it here....
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Tuesday, 3 April 2007
Jolly Coppers on Parade...
Last night we watched David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's excellent documentary, The U.S. vs. John Lennon.
Leaf I only know from his excellent and thorough sleevenotes for the Beach Boys back-catalogue CD reissues (he's written a book on the Wilsons et al too, I believe), so seeing his writing/directorial credit at the end came as something of a surprise. I know I beat this drum frequently, but anyone with a sympathy for the radicalism of the 60s and 70s who watches U.S. v. J.L. will probably come away from it with the same feelings of indignation and shame that I did. The indignation - if one buys the supposition, heavily reinforced - indeed, tacitly assumed - by the film, that Lennon really was the victim of a CIA sponsored assassination - is probably obvious and widely felt. The shame perhaps less so.
Well, I'm probably out on a limb here, but part of the huge emotional impact of the film comes from the (quite shocking, at times) disparity between the contemporary reaction and that of our forbears to a US administration so similar to the current one. I prefer my Lennon less saintly than he's become in years since his untimely death - especially the younger incarnation who pissed on a group of nuns from a Hamburg and would regularly incite the screaming hordes of Beatlemaniacs to clap their hands and stamp their feet like a person with cerebral palsy. But you had to admire the bravery of the man - foolhardy though he often seemed - for wearing his heart on his sleeve so splendidly. The way he commandeered peak-viewing time to campaign for the release of imprisoned stoner peacenik John Sinclair, for instance, simply beggars belief now - a bit like Chris Martin going on the Jonathan Ross Show and pleading on behalf of Abu Hamza today. Indeed, the chat show clips have more of the air of the student dorm than the TV studio about them, as Lennon used his celebrity to bring an assortment of revolutionaries and Black Panther leaders into the spotlight. Between 1971-73, Lennon became a charismatic, walking, talking, all-singing, all-dancing one man Che Guevara t-shirt. If he *was* bumped off, you can almost sympathise with the scarified establishment. Until, that is, one recalls the probable lead up to the dispatch: a badly disturbed individual, whisked off to Cuba, his brain further addled by the cow scarers before being packed off with a copy of Catcher in the Rye and a shotgun to do someone else's dirty work for them. As cowardly and shitty a business as most of Lennon's life was creative and brave.
The usual suspects are wheeled out to vouch for Lennon's radical credentials - Gore Vidal (looking like a pumped up pigeon on heat), Tariq Ali (Omar Sharif), Chomsky ("...if you think that you've heard this one before...") but almost as eloquent is former spook G. Gordon Liddy (Mike Myers doing the baldy thing in Austin Powers whilst auditioning for the Village People), who (unwittingly) reveals a surprising subtext to the disdain with which Lennon was held by 'straight' society. As if the long hair and the oriental wife wasn't bad enough - he was a freakin' *limey* too. The footage of Lennon himself speaks volumes too - even with cynical, post-collapse of the wall bullshit detector on full, you invariably *trust* him. There's a lovely delicate and moving slo-mo clip, accompanied by a wistful Ono commentary, in which we see these two obsessive peace and love proponents sharing an all-too-brief moment of both those precious things.
Walking to work this morning, and apropos of nothing, I listen to Lonely at the Top, a Randy Newman best of. Just as the drum beat of war so easily drowns out the calls for peace, some of its subtleties are lost in the traffic's monotonous drone. But the songs still raise an occasional smile and, more often, a shiver. 'Political Science' has, if anything, become more pertinent than ever.
A couple that I didn't know so well leaped out at me, possibly in light of the Lennon doc. 'In Germany, Before the War' is a wonderfully subtle (and perfectly apt metaphoric) narration of a brief carnal interlude that took place in 1934 by (it transpires) a paedophile. "I'm looking at the river, but I'm thinking of the sea", Newman croons against an arrangement that is reminiscent of Tom Waits' Weimar-influenced material, only stripped of the bulk of its sturm (and most of the drang, for that matter). But more pertinent to this piece is 'Jolly Coppers on Parade'. I suppose we are all kept as innocent and powerless as the rapt voice from a remembered childhood who narrates as he watches the 'mad parade':
They're comin' down the street
They're comin' right down the middle
Look how they keep the beat
Why they're as blue as the ocean
How the sun shines down
How their feet hardly touch the ground
Jolly Coppers On Parade
Here come the black and whites
Here come the motorcycles
Listen to those engines roar
Now they're doin' tricks for the children
Oh they look so nice
Looks like angels have come down from Paradise
Jolly Coppers On Parade
Oh, mama
That's the life for me
When I'm grown
That's what I'm gonna be
They're comin' down the street
They're comin' right down the middle
Look how they keep the beat
Why they're as blue as the ocean
Oh, it's all so nice
Looks like angels have come down from Paradise
Jolly Coppers On Parade
And they have, I suppose. Until you feel the truncheon on your back.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
Leaf I only know from his excellent and thorough sleevenotes for the Beach Boys back-catalogue CD reissues (he's written a book on the Wilsons et al too, I believe), so seeing his writing/directorial credit at the end came as something of a surprise. I know I beat this drum frequently, but anyone with a sympathy for the radicalism of the 60s and 70s who watches U.S. v. J.L. will probably come away from it with the same feelings of indignation and shame that I did. The indignation - if one buys the supposition, heavily reinforced - indeed, tacitly assumed - by the film, that Lennon really was the victim of a CIA sponsored assassination - is probably obvious and widely felt. The shame perhaps less so.
Well, I'm probably out on a limb here, but part of the huge emotional impact of the film comes from the (quite shocking, at times) disparity between the contemporary reaction and that of our forbears to a US administration so similar to the current one. I prefer my Lennon less saintly than he's become in years since his untimely death - especially the younger incarnation who pissed on a group of nuns from a Hamburg and would regularly incite the screaming hordes of Beatlemaniacs to clap their hands and stamp their feet like a person with cerebral palsy. But you had to admire the bravery of the man - foolhardy though he often seemed - for wearing his heart on his sleeve so splendidly. The way he commandeered peak-viewing time to campaign for the release of imprisoned stoner peacenik John Sinclair, for instance, simply beggars belief now - a bit like Chris Martin going on the Jonathan Ross Show and pleading on behalf of Abu Hamza today. Indeed, the chat show clips have more of the air of the student dorm than the TV studio about them, as Lennon used his celebrity to bring an assortment of revolutionaries and Black Panther leaders into the spotlight. Between 1971-73, Lennon became a charismatic, walking, talking, all-singing, all-dancing one man Che Guevara t-shirt. If he *was* bumped off, you can almost sympathise with the scarified establishment. Until, that is, one recalls the probable lead up to the dispatch: a badly disturbed individual, whisked off to Cuba, his brain further addled by the cow scarers before being packed off with a copy of Catcher in the Rye and a shotgun to do someone else's dirty work for them. As cowardly and shitty a business as most of Lennon's life was creative and brave.
The usual suspects are wheeled out to vouch for Lennon's radical credentials - Gore Vidal (looking like a pumped up pigeon on heat), Tariq Ali (Omar Sharif), Chomsky ("...if you think that you've heard this one before...") but almost as eloquent is former spook G. Gordon Liddy (Mike Myers doing the baldy thing in Austin Powers whilst auditioning for the Village People), who (unwittingly) reveals a surprising subtext to the disdain with which Lennon was held by 'straight' society. As if the long hair and the oriental wife wasn't bad enough - he was a freakin' *limey* too. The footage of Lennon himself speaks volumes too - even with cynical, post-collapse of the wall bullshit detector on full, you invariably *trust* him. There's a lovely delicate and moving slo-mo clip, accompanied by a wistful Ono commentary, in which we see these two obsessive peace and love proponents sharing an all-too-brief moment of both those precious things.
Walking to work this morning, and apropos of nothing, I listen to Lonely at the Top, a Randy Newman best of. Just as the drum beat of war so easily drowns out the calls for peace, some of its subtleties are lost in the traffic's monotonous drone. But the songs still raise an occasional smile and, more often, a shiver. 'Political Science' has, if anything, become more pertinent than ever.
A couple that I didn't know so well leaped out at me, possibly in light of the Lennon doc. 'In Germany, Before the War' is a wonderfully subtle (and perfectly apt metaphoric) narration of a brief carnal interlude that took place in 1934 by (it transpires) a paedophile. "I'm looking at the river, but I'm thinking of the sea", Newman croons against an arrangement that is reminiscent of Tom Waits' Weimar-influenced material, only stripped of the bulk of its sturm (and most of the drang, for that matter). But more pertinent to this piece is 'Jolly Coppers on Parade'. I suppose we are all kept as innocent and powerless as the rapt voice from a remembered childhood who narrates as he watches the 'mad parade':
They're comin' down the street
They're comin' right down the middle
Look how they keep the beat
Why they're as blue as the ocean
How the sun shines down
How their feet hardly touch the ground
Jolly Coppers On Parade
Here come the black and whites
Here come the motorcycles
Listen to those engines roar
Now they're doin' tricks for the children
Oh they look so nice
Looks like angels have come down from Paradise
Jolly Coppers On Parade
Oh, mama
That's the life for me
When I'm grown
That's what I'm gonna be
They're comin' down the street
They're comin' right down the middle
Look how they keep the beat
Why they're as blue as the ocean
Oh, it's all so nice
Looks like angels have come down from Paradise
Jolly Coppers On Parade
And they have, I suppose. Until you feel the truncheon on your back.
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!
Watch Bob's promos on Youtube
Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!
Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!
Listen to Bobcasts here!
© 2007 Swipe Enterprises
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