inconsequential truths

I. The hazelnut doesn't do much for me. It's taste is vaguely reminiscent of the end of a pencil, and I don't expect it has as much nutritional clout. In order of preference in my daily nut mix;

• Brazil nuts - generally uncultivated, mostly gathered from the rainforest floor. A satisfying bite with plenty of flesh.
• Walnut - Californian (though I don't know why they couldn't be English). Slight resemblance to ossified brains of small critters so may improve mental health or the ability to climb trees. A difficult nut to extract (though in this case I didn't have to).
• Almond - a taste sensation, though thin on flesh.
• Hazelnut - mere ballast.

II. Buddhism is a religion least likely to be practiced by aspiring time-travellers. However, for actual time-travellers it could be the most likely followed.

choosing the right device

I was thinking about time machines this morning. There appears to be three options going; a) the machine, as in HG Wells, Doctor Who etc., b) the gadget; wristband, belt and so forth, or c) the portal.

I have to be honest, I'm not keen on the portal. I'd prefer something tangible; when moving across the fourth dimension, you want to keep a good grip on the other three.

Of the remaining two, I can see pros and cons with both. The gadget is more discreet, arousing less curiousity, but offers no protection whilst travelling nor sanctuary on arrival, and if you put it down anywhen you might lose it forever. The machine, on the other hand, is too obvious, too cumbersome. When you get there, should it have wheels so you can move it around with you - not exactly practical all the time - or do you leave it parked up somewhere? So, how could you make the machine not look too out-of-time, out-of-place?

It's obvious when you think about it.

piccadilly and the corned beef salad sandwich

Apologies for typing this with my mouth full but you know how it is when you come through the other side of a fever you have a ravenous appetite. I'm finishing off the last morsel of a corned beef, coleslaw and fresh salad sandwich made with home-baked bread, still warm; the dog, who disapproves of humans eating unaided, shows her objection by resting her drooling jowls on the closed lid of my laptop; in a short while she would ensure there's enough dog saliva to endanger life and laptop either by short-circuiting or fatal electric shock; I would have to put down my plate and remove my laptop from my lap thus giving her an opportunity to remove the sandwich. It doesn't work. I'm feeling right as ninepence after being far too unwell to eat a thing and now I'm far too hungry to play dogs' games.

Yesterday, I viewed the BFI playlist, The Big Smoke: London on Film. I've a soft spot for any old films showing ordinary goings on, especially up and down streets. London has a particular interest as it's where I'm from. The first clip, Old London Street Scene, 1903, I found truly incredible. Just how many horses were there in London at that time, and what did they do with all the shit? There's none to be seen in the film yet it only takes a couple of girls trotting by on ponies up our way and there's shit for miles! (I did a bit of reckless Googling and estimated over 100,000 public and privately registered nags by 1900 - and it was a much smaller place than now. When the oil finally runs out, and they find there's not enough minerals to make batteries for everyone to have a G-whizz, we'll be in the shit, again.

Moving on, I found this one interesting. It threw up some more questions. I liked the way the colour changes with the scenes, sepia for the interior of the Limehouse boozer, cyan for the street outside, but how would this have been done in 1920s; in the processing, post-process coating of the frames in each scene, or by coloured filters during projection? I don't know why I'm curious, I just am. I'll bet it's the middle one.

It's only an extract from a longer film, and I wouldn't mind watching the whole thing. It's a strong subject, racism, which with all isms isn't going away fast enough, and soon there'll be horseism and shittism to boot, mark my words.

speaking of...

...chills and fever.



Young Tom Jones, (he's 70, you know?) ripping it up with his first band, The Senators. (Which, by coincidence, was the name of a different band that John Bonham, later of Led Zeppelin, first recorded with.) Remarkable sound, I think, considering the age. Especially the way the bass comes over. I believe the bassist is Vernon Mills Hopkins, a name that sounds as if it should belong to a Victorian industrialist rather than a 60s rock and roller. ah, well...

...back to the time machine.

...finally

If you though the sound of vuvuzela was something recent, here's evidence to the contrary. A British invention, apparently; seen in this film from 1939, rehearsing somewhere in the north of England, the Three Lions Junior Supporters Club Vuvuzela Marching Jazz Band, sadly unaware that British teams were excluded from entering the World Cup until 1950...



..oh well.

why milkmen whistle

In my world I find myself troubled by the lack of recreational whistling these days. I arrived at this, as always, through a circuitous route beginning with the song, The Milkman of Human Kindness, inexplicably coming to mind, and continuing around and around in my head for days. This song, performed on TOGWT, was the first time I’d noticed Billy Bragg and the lasting impression was how well the loneliness of the performance matched the pathos of the song. I think it was the use of electric guitar that helped in this: most one-man performers, I thought then, used an acoustic, the electric was for bands.

The very long serving milkman we had when I was a lad could have easily been nominated for the milkman of human kindness had such an honour existed. A youthful presence, though probably 30-ish, well-filled out yet short on being fat, with an open, round face, and hair my mum would have described as having been cut with a knife and fork. He carried a withered leather satchel on his front from which he often produced a flip-flap wallet which looked homemade of cardboard and criss-crossed elastic ribbon, and which, by magic and slight of hand, flip-flapped and entrapped your ten-bob or quid note beneath the elastic ribbons. And then he whistled. That’s the point, the whole point. You can get milk from the grocers around the corner, but you can’t get an early morning whistler come all weathers.

On his first day on the job, on our round, he came around our corner with an almighty crash. He asked my mum if she had a broom he could borrow. And a cardboard box for the broken glass. I miss the low sound of bottles hitting the doorstep and the high sound of bottles returning to the crate. He called you Sunshine, or Missus, or Squire, and he left an extra pint.

Billy Bragg had to appear a second time on TOGWT before I got him. The song, Levi Stubbs Tears. The circular working of the lyrics is wonderful, the story unfolds and eventually answers the intriguing question arising from the opening line. But most of all, he isn’t alone. The horn coming at the end simply sold it for me. I suppose he could have whistled it, like Lennon on Jealous Guy, or Redding on Dock of the Bay. I’m glad he didn’t. He went for the horn.

perspectives

Illustration friday's topic this week is Perspective. Here's a strip I did for Moleskine Exchange. The height of a tree is inversely proportional to the distance the observer is from the top. This is exactly the same law that governs time travel: the closer the observer is to their youth, the longer things are. I was reminded of this when I remembered reading Brave New World at college; I must have been eighteen. Yet I knew before I was sixteen I hadn't started reading anything significant. At the time, I clearly remember I was sure I had wasted half my life to illiteracy yet now I realise it was barely two years....

The Three Trees: an allegory of the three worlds?

(I don't know)

click for a bigger view

time out

Hey, I watched this great documentary on jazz; 1959, The Year That Changed Jazz. Sorry, but you've missed it (and I only just caught it thanks to BBC's 7 day Play It Again feature). I only mention it now because if it ever comes around again be sure to see it. Apart from the beautiful music and its history, the programme contains some wonderful footage and photos of 50s America. When the time machine is working again this period will be my first call.

I've cottoned on to the pleasures of jazz only recently - pretty late actually. Of the four records spotlighted, I already enjoy three; Kind Of Blue, Time Out, and Mingus Ah Um. The fourth which I don't own, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, scares me a little. It's still sounds somewhere else despite its age. I'll have to think a bit more about that one...

Don't forget to look out for the programme.

remembering fountains

''Parents aren't stupid.''

Are they not? That's a relief. Remember, children, don't be stupid; have kids!

I don't know much but surely someone has to be responsible for the mess we're in: 60 billion and rising. I saw a middle-aged man in a suit waiting for train, drinking a can of ''Red Bull''. His fly was undone. Not that I'm in the habit of observing a man's crotch but on this occasion it was all too obvious: part of his blue shirt was clearly poking through the hole. By chance I had notice him leaving the gents before entering the station shop. Despite his open disclosure, there wasn't sufficient evidence he'd fathered children but why wouldn't he?

I remember drinking fountains in parks - and in school playgrounds. They were refreshing. Especially during long summer days, I remember how cold like brass the water sometimes was. We learnt the knack of sucking from the vertical spurt without letting it dribble down our chin. In parks, there was even a little trough near the ground for dogs.

Things appeared more civilised then. Now, evidently, we prefer Coca-cola, Red Bull (I don't even know what that is), and much worse. Consumerism. Choice. Stupid, we are.

a case for time travel (part five)

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."

Thanks to Shuba Shetty, who now follows me on twitter, for this fine quote attributed to Einstein. I'm really only a fan of quotations which encapsulate the whole context of the quote within itself, like this one does.

Also, she points twitters to this clock made from people in uncomfortable looking positions, a perfect allegory for the effects artificial linear time has had on humanity.

a case for time travel (part four)

Once, in Italy - it was either a town in Tuscany or Veneto, I can't remember details - I stood on the fringe of a street market while the family shopped for shoes. All of a sudden I was aware of the savoury fragrance of roast chicken coming from a vendor's van and I was immediately transported mind and soul to a childhood, London suburban, early Sunday afternoon. Make no mistake, this was not a mere memory; this was the real thing. Only my eyes were transmitting incorrect messages to my brain; all else was functioning properly, sometime around, possibly, 1969.

It only lasted, ooh, a couple of seconds in clock time but, as we know, time is relative - it might have been the whole afternoon. As we lose the memory of dreams soon after waking, so it is with travelling in time.

I get this a lot now, ever since the routine of employment has been suspended. It's milder than the Italian experience but, nevertheless, easily noticeable. Usually I'm walking down the road, say to the allotment, and I'm no longer walking that way but along a different street to another destination quite clearly from my past. The sensations are intense, and real, but sadly too quickly over - I think it's the realisation of dual reality that the process can't cope with. That's the theory I'm working on. Again these aren't memories: I have no recollection of events just sensations of a very familiar environment. Any way, think on; perception, time and place, it's all relative, see. What's not possible?

a case for time travel (part three)

Technologists should avoid making predictions about life. Sure, they can speculate on what will be possible technologically, but not about what our future selves will value. We all remember predictions of everyone owning jet-packs and flying cars. And more leisure time - I remember that one well - due to a plethora of labour-saving gadgetry. Besides, this civilization is, probably, coming to its natural end.

Tim Berners-Lee - fine fellow: invented the world-wide-web (not to be confused with the internet) and gave it away, free - is here predicting pixels will become so cheap we'll have entire rooms walled with the things. Information will then be so widespread and available, some bod might discover a way to stop climate change, or even cure male pattern baldness, perhaps. Maybe. Anything's possible, even a technological prediction.

My personal WWW has been shrinking over the last year. I no longer find it exciting or, dare I say it, worthwhile. My bookmark page is as big as it was purely because I can't be bothered to par it down to the six or seven sites I want to visit. There was a time I used to surf with incredible ease; now more often I sigh and get on with something more real.

a case for time travel (part two)

Around the time of my birth a lot of exciting and good music was being made and recorded. By the time I knew how to tune a radio or put a record on, most of this music had been relegated to the bin of history: it was the age of hippies and rock, soon to be ''prog. rock'', and, in less than a decade's time, punk rock and the rest, as they say, is history, and history is bunk. With forward on hold, and sideways not looking too clever, there's only going back.

I've just arrived at the end of a little sojourn into late 50s jazz. I started, naturally, with Miles Davis, followed through with Coltrane, Adderley, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Sonny Clark, Dexter Gordon, Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Oliver Nelson, Grant Green, and Kenny Burrell... This final CD I'm listening to is Charles Mingus, Ah Um, and I have to say I've obviously inadvertently kept the best to last. Superb.

a case for time travel (part one)

There's an apocryphal tale that when 70s band, Free, signed to Island Records, its owner, Chris Blackwell, asked them to consider changing their name. I think he was afraid of putting Free on the album covers and having punters believe they were gratis. Bassist Andy Frazer, who must have been only 15 at the time, stoically told Blackwell the band was called Free and he could take it or leave it. Of course, this implies a certain degree of irony on Blackwell's part, or maybe irony was lost on him, I don't know: they were Free, not The Free.

Forty years on it's causing a problem no one at the time could have been aware of. Try Googling for the band. Even Wiki's disambiguation has them way down towards the bottom of the page. For youTube, it's best to go for Paul Rodgers or one of the other band members, and take it from there. It's worth it, you forget how good a band they were. And so young. When they started making records not one of them was over 18. I suppose that doesn't sound like a big deal today when we have Britain's Got Talent, X-Factor, etc., but it was; there wasn't so much instant fame. Yet singer Rodgers was just 17 and had one of the best soul voices in Britain. He still does - I checked it out - but he looks more like Tom Jones these days. Even the roguish looking broken tooth is capped. More is less, dear boy.
~

Further thoughts on bands and the definite article. There was the case of Eurythmics being constantly introduced as The Eurythmics. The Rolling Stones became Rolling Stones for a while (at the same time as Keith Richards became Keith Richard - after a while it was said he wasn't sure which it was), and then back to The Rolling Stones. Them could never have been The Them, and The Who has to be The Who, of course, even though the question mark was dropped. But The Guess Who? Surely not. (That's my question mark btw - they don't even have that.)