Happy 40th, Glam Rock! - Electric Warrior to be re-released.

It's 2012, which means it has been forty years since Glam Rock.

This hit me last night, when I was watching Flashbacks of a Fool, of which maybe more later. The foolish flashback, which is oddly divorced from both space and time, is of a young teen invited back to a teenage girl's place to listen to Roxy Music's first album. Adding up the dates of the albums shown with the supposed age of the adults caused my brane to fale, but succeeded in reminding me that 1971 to 1972 was my own musical uh... sprouting or something. ('Awakening' sounds far too pretentious for the discovery of "my" popular music, since everybody has one, like an uvula.)

 T. Rex's Electric Warrior was just about the first album I knew about before its release, and anticipated buying. It was released in December 1971, and was number #1 in the British charts until February 19th, 1972 (minus a week when it slipped down, only to rise again). I still have two vinyl copies - the British one I originally bought, and a gatefold-sleeve American one with a tip-on inside showing Marc Bolan lounging in a chair with Mickey Finn reading a paper behind him (Headline: T-Riffic!).

 When I bought the American one a few years ago, the picture sent me right back to 1971, when She magazine printed a long article on Mr. Bolan - something that I can't prove as it seems to be one of the few articles I failed to keep.


 

(This shot by Spud Murphy, in fact. But on the album sleeve it's cropped to keep poor
Bill and Steve literally out of the picture.)

Commerce being commerce, Electric Warrior is being released in April for its fortieth point five anniversary. The package looks great and of course I will buy it again, although the little plastic discs it contains can't possibly sound like the vinyl. Here's the skinny on the Boppin' Elf from Universal Music's store:


 

Electric Warrior topped the UK album charts twice, from December 18th 1971 to January 29th 1972 and again from February 5th to February 19th 1972. This new Limited Super Deluxe Edition is crammed with previously unreleased demos and out-takes.

It is housed in a lavish box set which is foil blocked and de-bossed and will contain the two CDs plus a DVD of rare and unreleased TV performances and promos by the group, and contains a wealth of additional items – alongside a 32-page hardback book featuring a brand new essay from Bolan biographer Mark Paytress (including new interviews with those who were close to Marc). The box also includes reproductions of rare photos and memorabilia: a poster including a timeline, three photographs, a coaster and a vintage press release.

The centrepiece is original producer Tony Visconti’s re-mastered version of Electric Warrior, which is presented with four bonus tracks – the non-album single, “Hot Love” (No. 1 in February 1971) plus the B-sides “There Was A Time / Raw Ramp”, “King Of The Mountain Cometh” and “Woodland Rock”. The second disc in the Deluxe and Super-Deluxe editions opens with Marc Bolan reciting a previously unreleased poem titled “The Electric Warrior” which was recorded for a US Radio promo that is featured in full at the end of the album.

The DVD includes the only two surviving Top of the Pops performances from the BBC archive of T Rex’s Electric Warrior-era hits – “Hot Love” and “Get It On”, the latter featuring Elton John. The DVD also includes the previously unseen Blue Screen versions of “Jeepster” and “Life’s A Gas” from Germany’s Beat Club plus the actual broadcast versions of “Jeepster” and “Life’s A Gas”. The rarely seen official promo videos for “Get It On” and “Jeepster” are also included, plus live performances of “Girl” and “Cosmic Dancer” which were recorded at the performance of T. Rex’s historic Wembley Empire Pool concerts on March 18th 1972. These were not included in the concert film Born To Boogie which used none of the matinée concert footage.

This year is the 40th Anniversary of Glam Rock, or Glamiversary as some have christened it. Electric Warrior was T. Rex’s second album, released in September 1971. It was T. Rex’s No. 1 single “Hot Love” which sparked a movement that gathered pace throughout 1971 to become a fully-fledged phenomenon in 1972. 1971 was the year Marc Bolan broke big, and thanks to a touch of glitter under his eye when performing “Hot Love” on the March 10th edition of Top Of The Pops, he was to herald a new pop era, Glam or Glitter Rock. By the end of 1971 Bolan and Rexmania was as close as anyone had come to Beatlemania since 1963.

TRACKLISTING:

DISC ONE – ORIGINAL ALBUM PLUS SINGLE A & B SIDES
01: Mambo Sun
02: Cosmic Dancer
03: Jeepster
04: Monolith
05: Lean Woman Blues
06: Get It On
07: Planet Queen
08: Girl
09: The Motivator
10: Life’s A Gas
11: Rip Off

Bonus Tracks:
12: There Was A Time / Raw Ramp – B-side
13: Hot Love – A-side
14: King Of The Mountain Cometh – B-side
15: Woodland Rock – B-side

DISC TWO – DEMOS & OUT-TAKES
01: Electric Warrior Poem – Rare US Radio promo *
02: Mambo Sun – Instrumental edit *
03: Cosmic Dancer – single-vocal version *
04: Jeepster – single-vocal version *
05: Monolith – no backing vocals version *
06: Lean Woman Blues – single-guitar track – Work in Progress *
07: Get It On – Full Length version *
08: Planet Queen – acoustic version *
09: Girl – New York demo *
10: The Motivator – Work in Progress *
11: Life’s A Gas – Studio out-take *
12: Rip Off – Instrumental *
13: Raw Ramp – London demo version
14: Electric Boogie – London demo version *
15: Honey Don’t – Studio out-take / Work in Progress *
16: Planet Queen – Acoustic solo / London demo version *
17: Girl – Acoustic solo / London demo version *
18: Jeepster – Electric home demo version *
19: Get It On – Acoustic home demo version *
20: Untitled instrumental – studio out-take *
21: Electric Warrior Poem and radio advert. US Radio promo *
Previously Unreleased *

DISC THREE – DVD
01: Hot Love from Top of the Pops, 24th March 1971. First time on DVD
02: Get It On from Top of the Pops, 20th December 1971 featuring Elton John
03: Jeepster from Beat Club, Germany. Previously Unseen Blue Screen Version
04: Life’s A Gas from Beat Club, Germany. Previously Unseen Blue Screen Version
05: Girl, Live at the Empire Pool Wembley, 18th March 1972
06: Cosmic Dancer, Live at the Empire Pool Wembley, 18th March 1972
07: Get It On, Official Promo
08: Jeepster, Official Promo
09: Jeepster from Beat Club, Germany. Broadcast version
10: Life’s A Gas from Beat Club, Germany. Broadcast version

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Cherchez La Femme! #1

Cherchez La Femme #1.

An incidental and occasional series on How To Blame Women for everything.

LA Times, 02/26/2012 Travel section, article on jetlag:

What's the culprit in jet lag?

....It could be genetics (thanks mom!)....

What about thanks, dad? Or doesn't the writer know who his or her father is?

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Who is invited to discuss the future of the NHS with the government?

Color me less than surprised.

Science Blogger Ben Goldacre says,

I've put the main players into a table, to see if the invitation list it tells a story. Let me know if you think it does: I'm still not sure what statistical methods would be best to analyse this data, and extract the signal from the noise?

I can't work it out Ben. Are you seeing something in this data that is supposed to tell us something?

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I read Scalzi on the shortcomings of people who eat Butter Chicken today. I'd never heard of Butter Chicken, so I looked it up and apparently it's Murgh Makhani, and got its English name from the dollop of butter that's melted onto it just before it's served.  I'm half-way through cooking it, and I have to say it appears to be Chicken Tikka Masala, except without tikka-ing the chicken first.  Oh, and the butter thing.

But that's not what's important right now.  What's important is, I went out to buy 'boneless skinless chicken thighs' since that was the recommended meat - in order to save me, I suppose, cutting a chicken into 8 parts with a sharp knife, something I'm quite capable of doing but why should I, if it costs slightly less per pound to have the boning and skinning done for me?

Anyway,  this is what a boneless, skinless chicken thigh looked like, straight from the package. 

Have you ever seen such a thing?  The fat is hanging down off every muscle group like congealed candle wax. I'm not blaming this particular brand, either. It's been like this for years.  And these chickens really are chickens, not hens. They are SIX WEEKS OLD. In six weeks they've managed to put on so much fat that the meat is half hidden.

I remember a few years ago - probably more than ten years, now - reading Muscle and Fitness Magazine. It was an article about the nutrient value of various foods. The foods were described as 'with all visible fat removed', and M&F reminded us readers that they meant it. They have technicians wielding scalpels removing all the fat before the calories are determined. It's the only way to be sure that two cuts of meat are properly compared, since one steak might have a half-inch of fat on the outside and one a quarter inch. Every bit is removed.

I don't have a scalpel, but I always trim chicken thighs so as not to eat the great stalagmite fountains of saturated fat that cascade down their outsides and infiltrate pockets between muscle groups on the insides.  The above picture is of the same thigh trimmed of fat (with scissors!) and the resulting pile of waste.  Fat's lighter than meat, so the pile may be a third the size of the meat, but it's only about a quarter of the weight.

What do they feed these poor creatures on? I hear that they often expire as the weight of their breast muscle breaks their legs as they grow - and they put on fat as well! I've started buying cage-free eggs, and I think I'm going to have to move to free range chickens also - for my health as well as theirs.

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We are the business

Boing Boing has a post on one of those police undercover operations. You know, the ones that go on so long that the people they are socializing with fall in love with them. In this case, it didn't go so far as the policemen fathering the women's babies. Good thing too, since the people being spied upon were high school kids.

The original is a sound broadcast, at This American Life, and I don't know about you, but I don't have time to listen to something unfold at playback speed, so I'm going to crib from Boing Boing, who got it from Alternet.

The undercover cops went to classes, became Facebook friends and flirted with the other students. One 18-year-old honor student named Justin fell in love with an attractive 25-year-old undercover cop after spending weeks sharing stories about their lives, texting and flirting with each other. 

One day she asked Justin if he smoked pot. Even though he didn't smoke marijuana, the love-struck teen promised to help find some for her. Every couple of days she would text him asking if he had the marijuana. Finally, Justin was able to get it to her. She tried to give him $25 for the marijuana and he said he didn't want the money -- he got it for her as a present. 

She insisted on paying him for it.

That's his side of the story, anyway. He is now facing felony charges for selling pot.  So this is where some of those billions of dollars go in the War on Some Drugs - paying pretty young policethings to hang out with students for weeks, begging for dope until the students give in, at which point the youths go to jail, lose pretty much any chance of getting a decent career and lose the right to vote?

That's not money well spent. But.

I think it's more sinister than that. I don't think this is about the kid at all. The police run operations like this so they show up on news sites (and boing boing). Every other kid reading these articles learns it might not be a good idea to trust their peers. And as their mutual trust erodes, their society fragments. "Divide and conquer" is the oldest trick in the book. Well, apart from the "sending round a beautiful person of favored gender to tempt someone" trick, so I guess this operation had both the oldest tricks in the book...

"Why," you may ask, "do cops want society in pieces when they have to live in that society?" The simple answer is they don't live in our society. To their gang, our society is merely a criminal-generating device. Ideally, it should be strong enough to produce sufficient criminals to justify their funding but weak enough not to be able to produce winning criminals. Cops live in their own society. As Bryant said in Blade Runner, " You know the score, pal! You're not cop, you're 'little people.'" Anything that undermines the cohesiveness of society weakens us and provides great benefits to those who live off us - cops and the rich elites alike.

I would have left this as a comment on Boing Boing, but oh man, Disqus. I just can't use you...

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Food photography

The food photographer Brock Davis, the man who did the broccoli treehouse and the Gummi bearskin rug, has a series of famous explosions done in cauliflower. Here's Led Zeppelin I, I mean the Hindenburg disaster.

 
(Picture (c) Brock Davis)

At the link is Nagasaki and the Space Shuttle Disaster, and many more of his older food fotos.

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Quote of the day

It brakes my heart to give up on a book. - Lilith.

That may be a profounder statement than she thought she was going to make.

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Gotcha!

The last time I saw PC Plod, he was having a Scanner Darkly moment. Guided by a CCTV dispatcher, he was chasing himself around the streets of a town in Sussex.  Every time the operator told him the suspect was round a corner, he ran round it to find it - empty! Because, you know, laws of physics.

Today Constabule Plod has redeemed himself, by raiding the offices of The Sun, a Murdoch rag which although it is pretty insignificant in the overall Murdoch empire, owning as he does Fox and Sky, is the tenth biggest selling paper in the world. It's roundly hated by me and by many people like me. It's what I cut my hating teeth on. It was always a dull paper, largely designed to appeal to the working classes while attempting to gently ease us into stupidity in some Orwellian language-based fashion. After Murdoch bought it in 1969, it became a propaganda machine and entrapped more readers by the use of the famous Page 3 Girls,  topless models, sometimes photographed as young as legally possible - on their sixteenth birthday - draped over what passed for news reporting.



Two weeks ago, four senior staff  at the Sun were arrested on corruption charges. The Daily Mail reports that the deputy editor, the picture editor and several others were arrested yesterday and released on bail. And the paper says that the investigation has "widened" suggesting that there is a suspicion of other kinds of corruption. The DM has a handy timeline of events in the investigations of Murdoch journalists, which has been dragging on since 2007. Possibly this indicates that "agents of the crown" who are bought, stay bought. At least for about five years.

The journos seem to think this is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - or in newspaper parlance, breaking a butterfly on a wheel - and it probably is. But since it's the Super Soaraway Sun we're talking about here, I can't help smiling.

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Gonks Go Beat (DVD, 1965)

Tonight's Netflix: Gonks Go Beat.

Youths from Beat Land and youths from Ballad Isle hate each other and hold a yearly contest for best song, overseen by an A&R man-from-Oz. Our galactic policeman is sent to Earth to reconcile Beat Land and Ballad Isle, on pain of being exiled to the world of gonks if he fails. He succeeds by deliberately re-creating Romeo and Juliet with two renegades and rigging the contest to give them the only "HIT".

Alas, the hybrid beat-ballad song is 99.999997% ballad and distinctly wimpy. (You can tell which island I would have lived on, can't you?)

It was a terrible movie for its time, but like many terrible movies it's a shiny gem now. How can one dislike seeing arch-Thelemite Graham Bond grooving on the organ in a movie that features still pictures of rotund cuddly toys as the emblem of eternal punishment?And Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, and a drum battle that features 7 drummers (Baker and Jimmy Page-level session drummer Bobby Graham included) arranged by Mike Leander? I mean, Mike Leander!

Also, Lulu. And the Nashville Teens. And far fewer gonks than you might imagine.

Good times.

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Mushroom

Well, my mushrooms are growing!



I bought a box of growing oyster mushrooms about three months ago, which gave an acceptable pair of crops, as advertised.

After that, I obtained a couple of days worth of my work's coffee grounds (we drink a lot). I broke up the remaining mycelium-impregnated medium from the box and stirred it in to the coffee grounds. The mycelium regrew for about three weeks and has just started putting up mushrooms. No idea how long the fruiting will last, and you can't continuously take bits of mycelium and throw it into new medium. At some point you have to get a new fungus by sprouting mushroom spores on agar gel, letting them cross and then transplanting the new mycelium to growing medium. Not sure I want to go through all of that, particularly as I discovered after the original box fruited that I don't actually like oyster mushrooms. They're a bit fungussy for me.

But I'm proud of the new mushrooms. I didn't even have to case them - the pressure of the medium against the enclosing plastic bag seems to have set them off growing by themselves. The thing that looks like molten lava in the middle of the bag is just a coffee filter that got in there by accident.

After they're finished and the mushrooms thrown tidily away, the remaining used coffee grounds will make a nice mulch for the yard.

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Newt's Spider Sense

I learned a little more about Newt Gingrich over the weekend. Gingrich famously ripped into would-be President Mittens after Romney said, "I'm not concerned about the very poor -- we have a safety net there."

Hearing this, Gingrich rode into the fray as a white knight. According to the LA Times he 'hammered' Romney by saying, "If you're a genuine conservative, first of all, you don't say that you don't care about the poor."

At which I went into the kitchen and built a large, overloaded bacon sandwich, merely in order to drop it in shock.

Luckily for my kitchen floor, Gingrich quickly explained this unlikely outburst by going on to add, "We think it is the left which has abandoned the poor because its safety net is actually a spider web and it traps people into dependency."

For a moment I thought Gingrich might have some sort of pseudo-humanity, but then he went on to say it's not lack of care about the poor that's the problem, it's the presence of the safety net that's a problem.

Glad we got that cleared up, and I'm looking forward to increased opportunities to live in a cardboard box under a bridge during a Gingrich administration.

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The roads must roll

When a state is unable to service the infrastructure under its purview, it means the state is decadent. We've known for a couple of years that California is broke, but for California to explicitly say it's not going to look after some roads...that's the beginning of the end. 

Here, we learn that difficult roads are toast, so to speak. 

In a standoff with federal forest officials, Caltrans is proposing to abandon a popular, cliff-hanging highway in the San Gabriel Mountains because it is too expensive to maintain.
Caltrans' proposal to walk away from California Highway 39, enjoyed by an estimated 3 million people a year, comes as the state struggles to close a $9.2-billion budget shortfall.

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Auto play turntables and coitus interruptus

A couple of weeks ago, John Scalzi posted a video of his 13 year old daughter reacting to her first sight of a vinyl record.  She did not believe that anything so primitive could possibly have existed.




It caused a bit of a fuss, as a lot of people assumed it was staged or rehearsed.  So much so that Scalzi disabled comments on the video and put up a rebuttal, here, which MIGHT be staged.

It is hard to believe that she lived for 13 years in a house with LPs and never opened one before, I admit. Then again, some years ago I came home after Cleaner Monthly Visit Day and found the record player was on, with the stylus gouging a deep groove into the rubber mat. I thought that it was possible to hit the "auto play" button by accident, though, so I bought a new stylus and gave them the benefit of the doubt. A few years later, it happened again. I phoned the cleaners' firm and tried to describe what had happened, and the owner said, "You can't possibly expect the cleaning crew to know what a record player is!"

I retorted that a crew who rubbed cleaning cloths across buttons on equipment ought to be aware that "on" buttons activate things, and he agreed to come out and watch the record player in use. He grudgingly admitted that  there was enough clicking, arm movement and subsequent loud noise that maybe someone should have known that they had pressed a button, even though he clearly felt that no normal person had ever seen a turntable in action and couldn't be expected to recognize one.

Scalzi junior's rebuttal was an interesting development for me today, of all days, as my biggest news this fine day - and probably biggest news all month - is that renowned vinylphile Jack White announced he is releasing his first solo album.  It will be available, on vinyl of course, on 23rd April. The single is available for download (equally of course) tonight, but the vinyl single will be on sale on February 7th. The album is called Blunderbuss and the single (on vinyl!) is called Love Interruption. The b-side, in the classic way of vinyl, is not on the forthcoming album, and is called Machine Gun Silhouette. Rob Jones is said to be involved.

The single is streaming at Jack White's new website www.jackwhiteIII.com at this very moment.

Enjoy, assuming your daughter and/or your cleaning crew have left you with a workable stylus!

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How Thick Is Your Bubble? Not Provided Score » 11 out of 20  (55% ) Result   On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 9 and 12. In other words, even if you're part of the new upper class, you've had a lot of exposure to the rest of America. Quiz School Take this quiz & get your score

How Thick Is Your Bubble? » Quiz Make

It's a quiz, so I took it. Since I was born in Britain to parents who strived mightily for middle class but began and ended up working class, and am naturally socialist, it's inevitable that I have a window in the bubble. And some of the questions I disagree with anyway. But YMMV.

Charles Murray is responsible for "The Bell Curve", so I'm not sure I want to read his book.

Also it took me about a week to fix their terrible HTML for the "certificate" so it would display.

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Fashion news

Disney is selling a Mickey Mouse Joy Division t shirt.



This may mean that the Mayan apocalypse really is round the corner. Mickey Mouse and Joy Division? Disney knows the origin of the band's name, right? They know the lead singer committed suicide? They have like, listened to Joy Division? And also, FWIW,  have they considered whether the waves really could form a face and ears?

Actually, I like the shirt. Except the model's ultra-pc 'pick any three races from five' look is a bit off-putting, as is his banana-bent face.

Via Pitchfork, who are frothing at the mouth. 

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