[Shards Fragments and Totems]
Ace electro here!
Well it’s not really electro, it’s more subtle breaks-ish tech-house — in other words it;s dark, groovy and warm with skittering beats that aren’t too off kilter. I like it a lot. It’s from the man like Marc Dauncey and I would happily dance to it, especially with a few subtle ragga samples over the top.
Advertorialisation
One of the great joys of using a free blogging service is that one’s own artfully created and meticulously authored content is randomly recontextualised by whatever eye-wateringly awful adware is sprayed willy nilly across the top of the screen by the good people at blogspot (henceforth known as google).
So far so inevitable, and anyway as Camille Paglia once said “adverts are the best thing on television” — well they have the highest per-second costs anyway, which must mean something — or other — and at the very least it means that someone professional has been involved in making this blog page.
But it has been pointed out to me — several times, and at great length, by John Eden — that these blinking pixellated commercials are not random. Not at all, at all. Which means that the ad server looks at what you’re writing about, checks the word-hits against the list associated with their advertisers (I presume this is a meta tag forwarded by Double-Click, but who knows? Maybe it’s hand typed by Tibetan monks), and serves up a delightfully, nay refreshingly, targeted set of commercial messages to a doubtless grateful readership.
So on the one hand, blissblog is saturated with ads for music websites, record stores, and magazines aimed at “a certain type of not quite so young man”, therefore confirming Reybolds’ position as an arbiter of taste among the 30-something wannabe music nerd market (market? I suspect it’s actually a condition, given my personal experience, but we’ll let that pass). In contrast, my own modest excuse for a blog seems to promote little but minor hotels dedicated to the landscape alignments and earth mysteries massive, which is great, I feel like we’re collectively rendering a service to circle spotters.
Meanwhile, I am perturbed to note that John Eden’s site is surrounded by advertisements for sexual prosthetics, vacuum pumps and the bafflingly titled “corrective cosmetic surgery” — I assume this is not a new service offered by Angel Stern but rather a refuge for theover-enthusiastically pierced. Of course, it’s always possible Eden’s been on the blower pimping his own tight little blog, commercial whirlwind that he is.
Nevertheless, I do wonder what you could do with some creative meta-, or perhaps that should be under-, tagging, achieved through adjusting the content of your blog. Let’s try:
RUSH LIMBAUGH
OLLY NORTH
GUNS’N’AMMO
GEORGE GILDER
combined with
SATAN’S SLAVES
EVIL MOTHERS
INVESTMENT PLAN
I will be watching my banner with interest…
So, I went out on Saturday night, and…
Went to see the first night of the Moloko tour on Saturday night and
they were fucking ace. Roisin’s an absolute star, fabulous singer,
immense, relaxed, smart stage presence and the band were super tight —
Moloko live are like a highly evolved funk band that regularly step it
up to house tempo. They were a treat cos they have fantastic melodies
combined with two things that make them particularly ace: first, and
most important, they have that twisted, weird Sheffield edge, it’s music
for freaks dressed up for the charts. Second, they go completely mental
while retaining their sharp sophistication.
All the songs worked real good but there were two moments of genius —
they did a dead slow cover of Chaka Khan’s I Feel For You that morphed
into The Time Is Now, and the finale, a huge version of Sing It Back
that started off with three minutes of (I think) Masters At Work’s
Bangin’ done in the most pounding manner imaginable, slowly bringing
bits of the song in. Unbelievable.
Live house music done properly with a drummer and everything, could it
be the next big thing?
Hipness quotient
Reynolds (http://blissout.blogspot.com/) updates his 94 piece from Lizard where he makes judgement on a long list of muso-cultural icons and gets it dead right by putting the Velvet Underground in the passe thru ovedr-use camp. However he then fucks it by putting the glory of Funkadelic alongside middle-brow crap like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Christ. The JAMC were cool for about five minutes and then got very dull, unlike, say, Big Black, or even Phantom Tollbooth. Their problem was not that they were derivative shit, but they were boring derivative shit. In contrast, Funkadelic is… well… some of the Greatest Music Ever Made.
Of course, if he were making some subtle point about Parliament being being better than Funkadelic, then he’d be on stronger ground. But as it is, well… pissed on chips I’m afraid Si. Some groups are beyond criticism — at least when you’re putting the Rolling Stones in the hardy perrenials of hipness camp.
Matthew Ingram in contrast has managed to soil himself in public by calling the Velvet Underground “the greatest band ever”. Isn’t it sad to see a great mind begin to collapse in on itself? Now, I’ve done my share of teenage garage punk covers of the Velvets — frankly they’re a lot more fun to play than they are to listen to — but I’ve always been mysitifed by their deification. Good art scene and all that but lets face it the fucking Doors were better than the Velvets despite the poetry, and The Stooges piss all over them.
Anyway, both pieces deserve an extended response, and they might get one.
How the FUCK do you do paragraphs in this stuff?
I coulda sworn I used to!
there’s a professor of archaeoastronomy! cool!
Clive Ruggles and Frank Prendergast who’s an Irish archaeoastronomer.
Here’s the reading list from Ruggles’ homepage — looks good but weighty — and expensive!
http://www.le.ac.uk/archaeology/rug/AR3015/booklist.html
So all of a sudden archaeologists are looking at cosmic calendars of ancient peoples — very Hamlet’s Mill! (Though it’s not on the reading list.)
They reckon that lots of stone circles AREN’T connected with the stars. Probably with lines on the landscape, innit.
But they do mention that archaeologists didn’t take alignments seriously until Thom in the 60s — bang on — and that there was (effectively) a paradigmatic struggle.
Oooh — apparently Brunel liked to build his tunnels so they were aligned with sunrise on his birthday!
3000bc on you get almost all sites oriented in particular directions relating to movements of the skies — but different from place to place.
Apparently clusters of burial tombs were more important than being “just cemetaries”. Exactly what they don’t explain.
But they admit that there MAY HAVE BEEN equinoctial alignments — which immediately means massively sophisticated science beyond
Apparently passage tombs were aligned with summer solstice, but stone rows with the moon.
But aligning sites with stars is too difficult — or rather too easy to tell you much.
All from a BBC Radio 4 programme, might still be archived.
http://www.oxbowbooks.com/feature.cfm?&FeatureID=27&Location=Oxbow&CFID=2372916&CFTOKEN=25079596
Speaking of ragga, if anyone can recommend anything by Action, I’d be grateful. I’ve searched the usual suspects and can'[t find ‘owt by him.