Seb Palmer

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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 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.

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.

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.

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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!).

Oh, frabjous day!

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.

Oh how I want this lovely book!

https://www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk/books/the-art-of-smallfilms/

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.

I love England, and I love being British.

Of course nowadays I can’t say something like that without needing to explain that I’m not a jingoistic nut.

I haven’t travelled that much, compared with a lot of folk I know. But nevertheless, I became most acutely aware of both of these facts -I love England, and I love being British – when I was abroad, whether I was in Canada, or the various parts of Europe to which I’ve had the pleasure and good fortune to go.

I love the places I visited, and, for the most (just as here at ‘home’) the people and their cultures, etc. Given that I’m writing this during Covid restrictions, I can’t wait to have the freedom to travel more widely again.

And to reiterate… my love of home, which became so much more apparent when I wasn’t there, was never even remotely jingoistic. It was and still is really just about simple familiarity, for the most part; recognising my rootedness in where I came from.

I mention this as a preface to saying how appalled I am by the current public face of Britain. Or Toryland, as I now frequently call it. Bojo, aided and abetted by his circus of appalling crony clowns, is convinced he’s the caped crusader of Capitalism. That’s not me indulging in satire, he’s actually said as much, in front of cameras!

Brexit, his terrible mishandling of Covid, and now this Yemen stuff. Friends were posting about this latter issue on FB when I drafted this. And indeed it’s the latter that prompted me to make this post. A Tory MP, talking in Parliament, has the brass to say Britain cares about the crisis unfolding there, having just approved a massive arms deal to Saudi, the aggressor, whilst simultaneously halving our aid to the Yemen!

By their works ye shall know them, eh? Not in Toryland. There it’s by their words ye shall give them the benefit of the doubt (tugs forelock). Tory confidence in their propaganda disinformation system is truly Goebbels-esque! They couldnt gove a sh*t that ‘the chattering classes’ might know what they’re up to. As long as the hoi polloi buy the the lines peddled in the Mail/Sun, etc, they’ll continue get away with murder. Literally.

Tory hypocrisy is so totally out of control. It beggars, or rather, I prefer to say it buggers, belief. (Remember all those peers creaming their loons over that word some years back?) It makes a mockery of the adage that actions speak louder than words. Apparently not if you have enough of the media working as your unofficial propaganda dept  

And all this nakedly contemptuous piracy flows, like stinking pus, from the same septic poisonous ‘philosophy’. Unfettered Capitalist greed trumps (how horribly apt) every other value. It’s truly and deeply sickening.

And with enough of the UK population seemingly in the grip of media dominated by right wing tycoons, will the ‘decent ordinary folk’ of Britain ever wake up? Indeed, to what extent do they even exist any more?

Have they really been replaced by xenophobic brainwashed little Englanders? So dumb they’ll give away their own rights to piratical freebooters? The proverbial turkeys voting for Christmas. Willing to throw everything that was once good about the UK on to the pyre of deregulation that the right is relentlessly stoking? And all for the benefit a tiny super-rich clique?

The whole procurement thing that’s been going on around Covid, for example, with huge sums given to cronies with no due process, reveals this to be as far from ‘trickle down’ capitalism as you can get. It’s ‘tidal waves up’ capitalism, in which massive amounts of public money gushes from the many to the few.

And all of this at what cost? What further austerity and butchery of the Commons are we to look forward to, in the wake of nosediving off a cliff with Brexit, and completely fucking up our collective response to Covid?

Where will we wind up? These are crazy times, and the immediate prospect doesn’t look too good.

A mate of mine has had most of these albums on vinyl for years, and I recall listening to them many, many moons ago. It’s not that I didn’t like them then. But sometimes you only really get into something when the time is right for you. I think I needed a set like this to arrive, so I could easily get into Ian Carr and his Nucleus band.

The boxed set is a nice clamshell affair, with five CDs in card covers that cover nine albums. There are some very detailed and knowledgeable reviews of this set elsewhere on’t interweb (I’ll link to the best one when I get a round tuit).

So I’ll confine myself to a more personal response, here. Ian carr was – as is very obvious when you hear this music – a major Miles Davis fan. And in this music he takes ‘late’ electric Miles as a starting point.

Miles himself did relatively little in this vein, in the context of his entire and very prolific career, before semi-retiring. And some of this stuff, whilst interesting, isn’t the easiest to appreciate, especially where it crosses – mostly thanks to his musical cohorts – into ‘free jazz’ type territory.

Ian Carr and Nucleus take the Miles type influences, along with many others of the times, and combine them in such a way that it’s both very similar, and the influence is very obvious, and yet the music itself is actually more focussed and, in all honesty, palatable.

Nor is it so derivative as to be redundant. Indeed, it’s basically someone taking up the musical torch and carrying it on and into further territory. So I don’t really want to (but probably already have!) overstate the whole Miles thing.

What this is, is great early ’70s fusion, blending jazz, funk, rock, even a bit of folk and prog, into a heady blend, both typical of its time, and yet pretty unique in its exact flavour combinations.

An excellent set, filled with great music. If you like music that goes its own way, and at the same time celebrates and venerates its inspirations, and you love the sounds of this period, as I do, this is an essential listen.

The Peddlers are fascinating: superb Hammond organ trio jazz, mostly with vocals, and – much to my delight – bass. They are in a strange hinterland of their era, part easy-listening, part hipster jazz-bos, but all round totally cool! The album title is naff, granted. But actually, in this instance, it’s also fair enough.

The material ranges from exactly what you’d expect of a showbiz group working the circuit, gigging regularly in clubs of the time, ranging from things like Comin’ Home, Baby, and pop hits of the day, such as Nine Miles High, to jazz standards – this comp’ starts with Time After Time, which Teresa and i love from the Chet Baker version – and even a few originals, e.g. the moody after-hours Empty Club Blues.

Jazz style organ trios often made do without bassists, the keys player taking that job over, via pedals. Unless this is done by an absolute master – and don’t get me wrong, The Peddlers keys man is a master – I prefer to have an actual dedicated bassist, looking after the bottom end.

The Peddlers had Tab Martin, who played his electric bass held upright in his lap, almost as if he were playing an upright acoustic bass. At the organ, and singing, was Roy Phillips, a cat so hep it hurts. His voice is superb, if rather of its time. And his instrumental skills are absolutely top-notch.

As a drummer, however, it was a drummer pal – thanks, Ian Croft! – sharing a YouTube video clip of these guys playing live, in which drummer Trevor Morais absolutely slays an uptempo jazz number, bringing an unbelievable energy to proceedings, that brought me back to The Peddlers (I already had the Suite album, which is them plus the London Philharmonic).

And I’m soooo glad! This collection isn’t complete, but gathers together 42 tracks, 21 per disc, into one very nice set. From the slow blues shuffle of Little Red Rooster, to the unusual Where Have All The Flowers Gone (unusual for morphing from a full-on trio instrumental  into a mellow song, with Phillips’ vocal accompanied mostly by gentle acoustic guitar!), girlie b-vocs on That’s Life, and lush strings and more on Girl Talk, this is an incredibly rich and diverse collection, capturing a terrific trio in full and majestic flight, and a bygone era of music, whose genre-bending breadth is a real freath of bresh air, so to speak.

Phew… What a film! Not for the faint-hearted. To say I really enjoyed this film doesn’t feel quite right. The story it depicts is, for the most part, appallingly awful.

And yet I did enjoy Come And See, as well as finding it a whole range of things: sometimes beautiful (the Belorussian landscapes are often almost magically so), sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, traumatic even. There are moments of innocence, and even romance. Sometimes it veers towards the surreal. But the main theme is, as most who have heard of this film will doubtless know, the barbarism of war.

The story of the central character, Florya, played by Aleksei Kravchenko, demands a stupendous performance. He’s a funny looking kid, and does quite a lot of gurning. But with more than adequate reason. Sometimes. although admittedly not always, I like a film that really hits me hard, and really stays with. Come And See did both. It’s definitely got a very bloody axe to grind. But it never feels heavy-handed.

All things considered, and despite the surreal moments, it felt very real. Horribly and unflinchingly real. I’m someone who – it’s hard to know how to put it – kind of loves war, inasmuch as I agree with Thomas Hardy that it makes for ‘rattling good’ reading/watching, whilst peace-time history could be considered, perhaps, as rather dull in comparison. This film, however, serves as a tonic reminder of how ugly, twisted and senseless human conflict can actually be.

The main narrative arc of the film, telling the Florya’s story, is fantastic in itself. But the way it ends adds an incredibly powerful coda, which I won’t give away here. My response to it all is as much visceral and emotional as considered or thoughtful; I just think it’s absolutely brilliant. Both very beautiful and very ugly. And entirely superb.

A longer and more heavily illustrated review can be read on my mini-military hobby blog, here: https://aquestionofscale.blogspot.com/search?q=come+and+see