Yesterday I drove up to Leeds and bought myself a beautiful shiny Boosey & Hawkes 400 series 3/4 double bass. The drive, three hours each way, and fuel cost, of about £50, were well worth the effort and expense. I’m absolutely delighted with this gorgeous looking and sounding instrument.
On getting home, after taking Chester for his daily constitutional in the back garden, I immediately set about getting intimate with this curvaceous dusky maiden. Woefully out of tune out of the bag, thanks to an handy iPhone app I was able to swiftly get her singing much more melodiously/accurately.
To my great delight, some of the licks and riffs I used to play started coming back to me, so I made a little video. Mostly excited chatter, with a good dose of itchy nose fiddling and talking to Chester, who’s off camera mewing plaintively (wants to get outside again). Showing my ineptitude publicly like this is, perhaps, rather fool hardy. But hey… who cares!?
Why my iPhone wants to film video in a misty soft-focus – and I’ve cleaned the lens numerous times – I really don’t know. Photos come out perfectly clear and sharp. Weird! I’m thinking of naming my bass, with Brigitte and Fran as top contenders. Mind you, Valerie, or Leonie, for Valerie Leon also appeal. Mind you, I absolutely hate that total musical non-entity of a track Valerie, by Amy Greenhouse, so that’s out, methinks.
Fran is for Fran Jeffries, and, based on sheer sexiness, is my favourite. But Brigitte sounds as cool and sexy as the bass looks. Hmmm… bit of a poser, eh!? Or should I say conundrum (or even Conan-drum?)?
So, should it be Brigitte (left), Fran (centre), or Val/Valerie/Leonie (right)?
And sticking with the utter sexiness of this bass. The back is very feminine. Put me in mind of Ingre’s Bain Turc. But then, when I see the painting, I think the bass is actually sexier. The painting, by comparison, is less subtle or sophisticated, more harem as meat-market!
Can Stanley Hill afford the bill for his titular tattoo?
Sheesh, on the evidence of countless movies like this, Americans sure are dumb fuckers. This ridiculous porridge of run of the mill clichés is just – and only just -bearable watching*.
It’s like most entertainment these days: throw enough dollars at it, cast enough himbo/bimbo stars, and it might just work. It’s another aspect of what I call ‘the sliced white life’: employ skilled professionals to put it together, it might just stand up. It looks like bread… so surely it must be bread!? But don’t be fooled, it contains nothing of substance.
The plot driving bull is just your run of the mill McGuffin; corrupt politicians with cops ‘n’ hoods on their payroll murder the mrs of ‘the wrong guy’. You know, that former black ops dude, now just your average blue-collar unemployed guy, with the ninja killing skills. Oh, and his kill-kit, still stashed in a wall at his home.
But what is it with these heroically meat-headed dumbos? Why is it they can’t go after those serious hard-ass crims without first securing the safety of their family? Even after they’ve already killed his wife! He has the foresight to stash his kill kit. But not to relocate his family before going on a vengeful rampage. Dude, your priorities are shot!
Gun chums home on the range.
Replete with ridiculous hairpiece, and undergoing a religious crisis of faith (like any upright American, he loves to kill, but that’s fine, like any upright American, he’s a Christian), Revolta’s Stanley Hill character goes all Arnie. He even looks like kind of like Da Dermïnadorrr! Working with an old buddy – I reckon they’re lovers; near the end buddy-boy says ‘I shaved your ass!’ (at least that’s what I heard) – they merrily butcher whole swathes of baddies, wisecracking their way to seriously psychotic serial-killer status.
Like Rambo, Last Blood, movies of this ilk, whilst mildly diverting in a sickeningly desensitised way, feed into that zombie-like consciousness (or lack thereof) necessary for a nation to be dumb enough to elect someone like Trump. Endlessly grunting and bleating about their individual rights to be better armed than a third-world dictators’ entire private army, all the while clinging to a personal pot-pourri of pre-medieval religious bollocks, mixed with toxically postmodern levels of cynical truth-is-relative poison. And to cap it all off, everything is marinaded in the ever more pervasive ‘everyone other than me is part of a corrupt conspiracy whose testicles, er… sorry, tentacles, reach into every part of society’ type paranoia, so beloved of the great unwashed.
Hill and his chum merrily widow and orphan hundreds of people**, from druggy street scum to the entire security team of the governer (but that’s ok, he’s corrupt), causing collateral damage that in real world terms would include large numbers of innocent bystanders at numerous locations.
In more ‘up close and personal’ terms, in addition to his wife, the dead also include Hills’ daughter’s au pair. But no sweat, Hill and his lover wind up sipping cocktails in Sao Paolo, whilst his daughter’s family emerge, miraculously free of any physical or mental trauma, despite the loss of their mother (dead), father (on the lam), au pair (dead), a bullet in the shoulder for the son-in-law, and all the terror normally associated with bereavement, drive-by-shootings and home-invasions, etc.
Travolta, looking pretty Arnie, at the tat’ shop.
As a moral parable this is utterly vile. As a piece of cinematic work it’s competently run of the mill. Travolta is, thanks to his undoubted charisma, okay in the role, as morally bankrupt and nonsensical as it may be. Indeed, many of the cast are decent actors, doing their best with unbelievably banal and tasteless material. Amazingly, in spite of the vacuity, or worse yet the moronic mish-mash of half-baked ideas and totally addled morality, this remains reasonably diverting entertainment.
I think that this is a sad reflection on our times. Surely we all deserve better than this? I want to say ‘it’s ok’ when, frankly, it isn’t. Mass-produced pap like this elbows aside and takes up the space other better stuff might occupy. Indeed, most better stuff will never even get made, whilst dross of this ilk is produced in abundance.
I think actors like Revolta ought to have sufficient principles to turn down dumb-ass junk like this. But in the current marketplace such high principles would see most of Hollywood’s current talent forced into jobs in the kind of malls movies like this will call home.
*This sort of stuff – what one might formerly have called celluloid dreck – is also, thankfully, instantly forgettable.
**By the twisted MAGA type logic of such films the hero’s bloody antics would beget countless copycat offspring, as the angered relatives of the folks he butchers set out in their turn, looking for their own violent retribution. All of this ought to give the execs who produce this tripe rock hard boners; the possibilities for endless sequels being literally exponential.
‘The islanders have always been a mongrel race and we are the stronger for it.’
NB: I originally wrote this review around 2012, when I was sent the book to review as part of the Amazon Vine program. But, in the light of Brexit, I wanted to re-post the review here on my blog.
Wow! This book is a fascinating and exciting compendium of diverse facts, beautifully illustrated, telling the most incredible story.
Cunliffe writes with great clarity and engaging straightforwardness, weaving together various strands of scientific deduction sufficient to put Sherlock in the shade. What science there is here is, on the whole, easy enough to follow. Certainly this isn’t too drily technical a read. Indeed, throughout the book we often touch upon moments connecting us with our forebears, a very early and poignant instance of this being the discovery of Mesolithic footprints in the littoral muds of Formby point.
Covering 11,000 years, from the retreat of the ice around 10,000 BC (when these lands were still connected to the European continent), to the arrival of the Normans in 1066, Cunliffe tells how the people of these islands grew from bands of a few hundred hunter-gatherers to a mixed population of around two million. Before embarking on this epic tale he sets out what we used to tell ourselves was our history, from the first mentions of these lands in ancient Greek and Roman texts, through to indigenous writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth, examining how myth and fact interwove, before beginning on the journey to the more complex and nuanced understanding we have now.
More than half of the book is given over to the period prior to these islands entering into the written record, which Cunliffe describes as formerly belonging to ‘shadowy pseudo-history’. It’s quite moving reading Geoffrey of Monmouth, who belongs to this earlier semi-mythical phase, saying ‘Britain, the best of islands… provides in unfailing plenty everything that is suited to the use of human beings’, and then having Cunliffe, the modern post-enlightenment scholar concur, stating that indeed, ‘The British Isles … occupy a very favoured position in the world’, and explaining why this is so (geology & climate).
Barry Cunliffe
At around 500 pages, with a very substantial ‘further reading’ section at the back, this is a serious book. But despite the books size, as Cunliffe concedes, his scope is so huge that it remains a very general and brisk overview of a huge subject. Chapters often conclude with summarising statements, which is helpful, and there are three ‘interlude’ chapters, dealing with such topics as language and religion. As he says in his preface, ‘An archaeologist writing of the past must be constantly aware that the past is, in truth, unknowable. The best we can do is to offer approximations based on the fragments of hard evidence that we have to hand, ever conscious that we are interpreters. Like the myth-makers of the distant past, we are creating stories about our origins and our ancestors conditioned by the world in which we live’.
Unsurprisingly the nearest lands have been those to most consistently stock our genetic banks, with arrivals coming from land masses we now know as Spain, France, the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia, and in the Roman period an even wider ranging area. The first 9,000 years of this story are couched more in terms of generalities and theories, drawing primarily on the longer standing practice of antiquarianism, or what evolved into archaeology as we now know it, but also other associated areas, some of which, like our growing knowledge of genetics, are much more modern developments. The parts dealing with the last millennia become more like the kind of history many of us will know from school or general reading, with tales of kings and queens, war and invasion.
The ‘innate mobility of humankind … inherent in our genetic makeup’ is a continuing theme throughout, existing in constant tension with the domesticating aspect of human culture, as waves of invaders and colonists seek first to find new territories and then to live in them. Throughout this continual ebb and flow human and material traffic continues, leaving behind trails of artefacts and monuments, from grand buildings to everyday waste. Rather like the amazing detective work of Darwin, this is a tale concerned with origins, and it’s amazing what we can deduce from a close examination of the world around us, and how much that world can still tell us of our past.
As a generally interested reader of history I found this an extraordinary, fascinating, and very compelling read, fabulously supplemented by a rich array of graphic material. Loved it!
Major panic this morning, as I declare my new(-ish) iPhone lost.
A week or two back I got an iPhone 6S off a local FB seller, with a broken screen and very, very cheap – already up there in the idiot stakes. I then poured more money into fixing it: new screen and new touch sensor dingus, installed by local techy/phone place.
The iPhone finally worked, looked fine, and was still, all in, considerably cheaper than via other means.
Then last night I dashed out, about 7.30-8 ‘ish, to buy another FB local seller cheapie item. And this morning, when we couldn’t find my iPhone, I assumed it’d fallen out whilst collecting the latter.
Much stress, searching and driving around later, I remember that I completed Teresa and my census on it, about 11pm last night, and fell asleep listening to From The Oast House, by my hero and role model, Alan Gordon Parsnip.
The one place Teresa and I didn’t tear apart prior to the pre-work taxi-run was right beside the bed.
BTW, the accompanying pic of Trump, apparently doing a particularly eggy ‘trump’, seemed suitably idiotic to express my delusional ineptitude…
Nearing mid-March, ‘21, and I’m taking a(nother) break from the greenhouse build.
All that’s left now is the roof. That’s a pretty major final step. I’m hoping I’ll get at least the timber framing aspect of this done in the Easter break, which is about a fortnight away.
In the meantime, focus has shifted to a new shed, which I’ll post about separately.
After a prolonged period of virtual inactivity, a near enough winter hibernation, we’re getting back out in the garden.
As mentioned in a previous post, work on the jazz greenhouse is on hold again. An urgent need, both in house and garden is more and better storage space. We’re getting accustomed to living amidst levels of clutter I find discombobulating!
Doing anything at all in shed #1, which is the shed we inherited from Clive, who we bought the house from, is nigh on impossible. The clutter/mess is Biblical, and there’s simply neither enough nor the right kinds of storage to remedy the problem.
I built shed #2, which I call ‘the sentry box’, on account of its size and shape, for garden stuff: lawn mower, gardening tools, etc. That too is full to overflowing.
Shed #3 also needs to have a small footprint, as we need veg’ growing space, and we plan to build both an art studio and a ‘Hobbit hole’ guest accommodation further down our long narrow garden.
The flagstone base.
The base is 12 paving stones I got from our neighbour at no. 66, Ben, arranged 3×4. 45cm-square, these give a base approx six foot long by 4 foot wide.
I dug over and raked the soil flat, removing a certain amount of weeds and rubble, before compacting and smoothing. The slabs had ‘dot and dab’ patterns in concrete, like the #5 on a dice, on their undersides. Removing these was hard and painful work, but ultimately worth it.
I’m happy with the resulting ‘foundation’ slab.
I’ve tried to spend as little as poss on materials. Ideally it would be entirely built with free/reclaimed stuff. But in the end I’ve had to buy certain bits, such as some of the framing and cladding timber, and some paint to protect the OSB3 against rain, etc.
Front panel framing.
The most recent bout of work has been the framing of the front and rear panels. The front will have windows, and the rear needs fully assembling and painting before being secured in situ. Once in place it’ll be too close to our neighbours fence to be accessible to work on.
Over Friday and yesterday, Saturday, I both attached the OSB cladding to the rear framing, creating the back panel, and painted the first undercoat. Very satisfying! Today I’m hoping we’ll paint a second undercoat, and then one, poss’ even two top coats.
It’d be great if we could get the back wall up and secured, which entails attaching it to both some form of anchors and the framing of the sides/front. This would, in turn, facilitate further framing of the side walls, inc. adding a door.
Cladding the taller rear frame with OSB3.
Rear panel (on its side), painting.
Exactly what will wind up in this storage shed is moot. But the old Freecycle kiln is definitely going in, along with, we hope, our two (as yet unused) bikes, the butler sink (destined for our kitchen rebuild), the garden gates/posts (for the front garden/driveway), and, I very much hope, the detachable MX5 hard-top.
Also shifting all the electronics and speaker related stuff I got from dad, and as much sundry timber as we can manage to squeeze in, would all help free up workshop space in shed #1.
Since I first drafted and published this post, I’ve got the rear panel in position, thanks to help from our neighbour, Ken Cole. Thanks buddy! That allowed me to attach the front and rear panel with batons at the bottom, and temporary struts at the top and elsewhere.
Some more cross beams have been added, to the front panel, at a level suitable for window-framing, should I go that route. And yesterday and today – 17th-18th March – I clad the right hand end in shiplap, and put the door in position, hinges and all.
I’m really happy with how this is coming along!
The roofing and other walls, and finishing clad the wall over the door, all remain to be done. And then comes time to shift a load of stuff inside, such as our as yet unused kiln (another restoration project!).
Yesterday a ‘we missed you’ type card plopped through our letterbox. Despite my being in, and there being a note taped to our front door with my number on it.
Queuing in the drizzle outside the Tesco Metro today wasn’t prepping me for elation, either. Initial anger at the postie not calling yesterday, and me therefore not getting the package, gave way to delight today, when I eventually picked up the mystery item.
Perhaps the delays and inclement weather made the ultimate unwrapping that bit more joyful?
Anyway, a while back I posted the tiniest of posts, here on my blog (it’s actually the previous post, just five days back!), and poss’ also on FB, simply saying that I didst covet the Johnny Trunk/Four Corners book, The Art of Small Films.
Imagine then, if you will, my delight at opening the large card box this came in, to discover that that very book was now in my hands. And with it a cute enamelled Four Corners badge, and a bookmark.
The book itself is a medium/large square-ish art-book style hardback. The textual content is minimal and light: after opening encomiums from Stewart Lee and Sr Trunk, much of the remainder is quotes from Firmin or Postgate, with very small editorial interjections to add context or continuity.
Whilst the stories of Small films and its two chief dynamoes are fascinating in and of themselves, the real attractions here are the images, which capture both the creative processes, the end results of same, and much, much more. Somewhere in the hinterlands of memory and imagination, in the spaces between the text and imagery, the chief appeal is the enchanting whimsy of it all.
Perhaps ironically, that will o’ the wisp like elusive quality, that Postgate and Firmin distilled so well and so often, is built on an endearingly Heath Robinson meets the Wombles practicality: wool, old Meccano, junk and odds and ends, some precious, some throw-away, all combine, with vivid free-flying imagination and grounded practical artistic talent, to create enchanting worlds a great many of will remember with great fondness.
As Lee and Trunk note, gone are the days and the ways that saw this sort of stuff wind up on our TVs. And the world’s the poorer for that. But it’s the richer for their work, and this very handsome celebration of their art.
It took about an hour to read the entire text. But there’s a lifetimes’ worth of fecund imaginings and their shoestring realisation in here. The beautiful images – and interestingly rural England figures more than one might’ve expected – are to be dipped into repeatedly. Whether that be for pure nostalgic indulgence, or in search of inspiration… Treat yourself, lose yourself in the worlds that Small Films created.
I love Brazilian samba, bossa, jazz, and all sorts of the offspring of such styles, since the 1950-60s, when the rhythms of Brazil and post WWII north-American jazz began to blend. Some of the resulting music is amongst the best the world has enjoyed, in my view.
Edison Machado is credited, on Wikipedia, as being a founding father of jazz samba/bossa syle beats – ‘Through his creation of the samba no prato (samba on the cymbals) and his early recordings, he helped shape Brazilian samba and bossa nova’. As a fan and student of such music, I thought I ought to get some of his recordings. I already have some stuff he did as a sideman, such as The Composer of Desafinado Plays, by Jobim.
Just as that’s not my favourite Jobim album, nor very remarkable for the drumming, I find this album somewhat disappointing. He may well have been an innovator, but this sounds like loads of other similar samba jazz of the era. So if, as I have done, you come to this after hearing tons of other similar stuff, it’s not that exciing or original sounding.
Nevertheless, as an album done under Machado’s own name and leadership, the drums are much more prominent and active than on some of his dates as a sideman. And I’m sure as I listen to it more, and attempt to play along, etc, I’ll most likely come to like it more, and certainly to respect Machado’s drumming skills: Brazilian jazz, with it’s samba based beats, is not for the faint-hearted, drumming wise!
The music is mostly mid and uptempo, the tracks quite short, and sounding almost like a big band: lots of brass/horns, etc, and quite heavily arranged. None of the track titles jump out as familiar classics. I think four stars is rather generous, whilst just three is rather mean. Here on my blog I give it three and a half. Whereas on Amazon’s website it’s whole stars only, so I erred towards the more critical, and scored it just three there.
Far from essential but possibly worth having if you’re really into Brazilian samba jazz, etc, or you’re studying Brazilian drum rhythms, as I continue to do.
