… apropos of nothing, i do adore that phrase! Howard Jones!! sure there are some fans of early 80’s soft electro synth pop out there (mbe 1)… with bonus mime artiste? i was picking up mum from heathrow very early this morning, popped to the loo and this song was billowing about the bogs there was a dubious haunting air to the tune, sounded like it was being played on a casio tone? which led me to suspect that actually it was live Howard Jones has been stuck in the khazi at the airport since mid 83? hence explaining his complete disappearance from the face of the planet
audio of bog text
commenting on my own comment… ancient anecdote… i am reminded of once upon a time hitch hiking through Deutschland, somewhere near Bayreuth, Wagner Götterdämmerung! i was stuck overnight at a motorway service station, zilch lifts, going nowhere… it was freezing cold, so i had to traipse inside, ended up trying to kip sitting on one of the toilets bland piped pop music all night long, bleaggh, woken from my semi slumbers, by the thunderous farts of germanic truck drivers in the cubicle next door, all accompanied by Wham cheerfully warbling ‘Wake me up before you go go go’
R.I.P Rest In Pieces. Macklemore the Sycamore I killed a tree this morning, not said with bravado and aplomb… and despite the obvious comedy (it’s Facebook)… a fair amount of remorse and guilt broadly it’s a small backyard, he would have grown far far too large, wrong tree/wrong place if i’d left it a few more weeks, the leaves would have come out and it would have been impossible I should imagine the time to chop a tree is autumn when the sap is falling? spring is a terrible season, but at least if you squint you can pretend its still a half dead stick stuck in the ground as penance i hand sawed him into small chunks, will season for a year or so then find a suitable wood burner. anyone need some lumber for a viking ship burial? Should imagine the stump will grow back, but, sigh, will deal with that then I had a good ponder before i began and gave him a fare thee well hug Not wishing to be too sentimental, I appreciate that my mere existence on the planet in this society will have decimated i don’t know… a small copse? an area of the Amazonian Rain Forest one thousandth of the size of Wales? (one Wales is the standard unit of measurement for amazonia, plus its St Davids day!) in younger days i also personally hacked many a wilderness in my folks garden but the point is, Macklemores decimation was all so unnecessary! as a good mawkish victorian moralist, i know the time to chop him was the first year uprooting a teensy sapling is nothing, chopping down a 5 or 6 year old tree, a much harsher deal but of course the first few years i took the Romantic Poetic approach, ‘look how can a tree grow there?’ the next couple of seasons it was sloth, depression and busy-ness… and the last 2 years its been ‘oh no i have to kill a tree’ basically, framed as a bellocian cautionary tale deal with your stuff before it gets too big… otherwise ‘James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree’ oh not him you know the the one who wandered into a lion cage and died from eating bits of string?? Carpe Diem… I can never remember does that mean ‘sieze the nettle’ or ‘snog a trout’? both. do it. now
gawd, yet another suspiciously glorious day, here at the usual dreg end of February, wishing ya all well on it! i’m bizarrely compelled to post yet more snaps! apols, not imagining they’re particularly fantastic, will return to 1000 stanza gobbledy gook poems, else slomach back into the bliss of silence soon, ha think i’ve taken more pics over the last few days than i did in my first 30 years… which is an utter shame like most peeps i’m profoundly ambivalent about technology, but having a camera on a smart phone, that’s fun and engrossing on with stuff!
aw that bloke from talk talk has gone and died my brov was a big fan, and indeed, i too am rather partial to a bit of synth harmonica 80’s groove, thanks for the tunes
i just listened to ‘colour of spring’ whilst washing up on reflection we were reasonably fortunate with the music around when we were at uni (lots of dross too inevitably!) seldom play any of it now, it’s all indie folk, bhajans, obvious Reggae and cooking dahl to womad-esque vibes around our house 80’s bands that repeat their name twice? a miniscule genre… always loved this one x
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ha… suggest he plays sun blushed buffalo mozzarella pizza on his turn tables? the sound of squelch? and the smell of cheese my kids have abysmal musical taste as i sometimes inform them x
pink man in pink larder… paints… green man in green larder everyday dalliance with dali… so easy surrealism! nary finished yet, but thinking so glorious the sunshine, i should go to the beach for a little bit
did make it down the beach for a swim, 4th of the year (5 inc christmas) not that often, but always a thrill the secret is to choose a day when theres little wind as its when you get out that it eats you the sun was astonishingly, almost worryingly, warm… i dried off in plein air, just a woolly bobble hat and unsoggy skimpies, sunbathing promptly fell asleep as for sorting the larder… i started off just looking for the fresh coffee, couldn’t find it… got carried away astonishing how much stubborn crap accumulates… found stuff buried deep deep i hadn’t seen in 8 years… had been wondering where the jewell encrusted mask of tutankhumun had gone too!
Celsius 233.77… Bonfire of the Vanities* A dowdy cloudy pleasant Devon day, birds tweetle twerping in the trees above, with anticipation of the spring, so i got on with the hugely satisfying task of burning ALL of my old Morning Pages Thats about 7 or 8 years worth, written in long hand, with an ink pen, usually florid but scratchy purple ink… I don’t do them every day, that’d be daft(!), i mean i have far too many healthy / time consuming morning practices, but still its usually about once or twice a week… burnt them all the way right up to todays squib. hurrah!! i was thinking have i only completed 12 volumes? but still at heart being a geek boy i did the maths: 80 pages each book is 160 sides x 12… 1920 sides, 3 a day so thats 640 days worth… 1 day takes me about 20 mins, so 213.333 hours of writing = 8.88888 F***ing days!! So if i started now and wrote for 8.88888 days non stop, well my ink splotted finger would ache…but THAT is how much deeply engrained almost etched effort i burnt, ha! and gosh it sounds like a hugely fortuitous number, presume it would be popular in china?… also think i might well apply to join the KLF? they done burn stuff good! Oh just to clarify Morning Pages aren’t anything exciting like sordid gossip strewn diaries, sadly not, they’re a practice from the Artists Way just write any old crap, splurge, get it out, get it out the way, loosen up, Art is process… let it flow! mine are usually a pastiche of Morissey and Alan Bennet, but, yeah, blander!… ‘Why does nobody love me, forlorn, forsooth, my tea cup rattleth, why do i love nobody, is that the postman delivering letters to next door?… but never to me’ … etc for 8.888 days Aw in truth away from the absurd lurid-o-delic falsehood world of facebook: better i burn them than leave them for the kids to do so one day… i did do a small serious ritual to the elements, let things go, eh, gotta be good x …………. hmm not often you get footnotes in a facebook post! bonus *fahrenheit 451 (obvs!) ** Savonarola! i’m thinking Apocalyptic Medici Florence … not Tom Wolfe… far too much of an intellectual snob, tho i did love Elctric Kool Aid Acid Test when a youthful hippy!
hey mr influencer… profound apols couldn’t resist creating this monstrosity… when alan partridge meets the kardashians x
them be all the notebooks i burnt, beautiful gaudiness… aw i don’t know how to change my profile pic x
oh and just from genuine curiosity, if anyone who does morning pages ever meanders past here… what do you do with your old volumes? burning would seem to be the most poetic response?
