ElectricNick: No Direction Home by Nick Butt (Kindle book review)

The Kindle-only ElectrickNick: No Direction Home by Nick Butt is the fascinating story of a young man who appeared fated to sink rapidly into homelessness and addiction after leaving his dysfunctional family, but escaped and ran through London’s Swinging Sixties and early seventies like a hippy Zelig. Everyone you could possibly think to appear in the book does so. Nevertheless, Nick manages not to come across as a name-dropper; he (and his co-writer Richard Marris) simply recount, in an unadorned and workmanlike fashion, the things that happened around him, and it turns out to be everything worth happening.

The closest memoir I can think of is Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles, but Nick’s story lacks the air of glamour and the inevitability of success that peppers Boyd’s gallivant through the upper echelons of the Hippie Establishment.

Indeed, Nick writes, without mentioning any names, “In hindsight, many of the leading figures of those times were at best self-serving and at worst exploitative and sexually predatory. Their voices and endlessly self-promoting stories dominate the history of our British version of the counterculture, while people with fresh angles and insights take them to the grave.” This comes just after a mention of his (then) recent meeting with one of the London scene ladies, where she says she now “views a lot of what she experienced in her early teens as paedophilia, somehow justified as a form of self-expression.”

But the book is in no way explicit, nor salacious, nor judgmental. It merely describes Nick’s journey, which takes him from Middle Earth (the London Club of that name), Notting Hill, through Pacific Island paradises, via clapped out hippy bus-rides through the Middle East and non-airworthy planes to Bali, to Australian communes and back. What lifted him out of the quicksand of poverty that overtook so many at the time – the traps laid for troubadours who got killed before they reached Bombay – is his uncanny affinity with the mechanical and electrical. Every time the money ran out, he met someone who needed an engine repair, a recording studio built or a demon-possessed transistor radio exorcising. And in the counter-culture territories of New South Wales, everyone needed solar panels.

Thrill to what happened to the enameled pot that came in handy initially because he had dysentery and needed to bail stuff out of the window! Find out how to explain to the highway patrol why the handbrake of your faltering vehicle is lying on the seat! Have fun with adventures like the following, which almost unbelievably happened in London, not the New Hebrides:

“One Sunday afternoon a few months later we were putting on a benefit for a group called The Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom when we were raided aggressively by the Bow Street constabulary. As they left they told the market traders that we were burning a child at the stake, which goaded them into smashing up the whole club with axes and grappling hooks.”

Delight in anecdotes such as this, which is also incredibly set in England:

“Septimus had bought it [a contraption apparently composed of batteries and CRTs] for £5 from a local farmer who maintained it was a UFO he had seen crash land in one of his fields. We later learned that a local eccentric, who claimed to be Mick Jagger's uncle, had produced it as a prototype for a spaceship. Maybe he built the real thing because he disappeared one day, leaving all his belongings behind and was never heard of again. I bought the vessel for £7 as a conversation piece but before I could collect it a chap named Scorpio smashed it up with an axe 'because it was evil'.”

Or this:

“We had dropped acid on the ferry and all seemed normal until we were confronted by the 50 or so clocks in Gabe's parents' living room and by the time we sat down for tea my sausages were breathing. My efforts to force them down weren't helped by Gabe's mum, who'd had part of her gullet removed, pulling a tube and funnel out of her cardigan and pouring pieces of bacon and egg into it.”

And did you know:

“The French were testing nuclear bombs at Mururoa Atoll, 3,559 miles of nothing but sea away and the electro-magnetic pulses from the detonations fried transistors all around the South Pacific.”

I’m not using up all the best tales here, because there are literally hundreds of them. Every page has something incredible happen, or someone incredible met. Much is funny. The first half has the 60's rock royalty. The latter half, where he and his lady build a home and garden from scratch in the Australian eucalyptus forests, is equally gripping. The middle, island-hopping tales in the Pacific, are like Heart of Darkness meets Trobriand Cricket.

Nick and his co-writer seems to have been working from diaries, because they seem sure of dates, names and number of appearances. Which is interesting, because Mick Farren told me the Deviants had never played with Led Zeppelin (only with the Band of Joy) but Nick says they did, and describes the event. I guess that’s the advantage of keeping good records.

An excellent companion book to more famous memoirs by people who may have had an interest in whitewashing their sixties exploits.



Edit: Nick provided the proof!

What's Upside Down, Tiger Lily?

When I was a lass, What's Up Tiger Lily was the epitome of this sort of thing. Wait, not the epitome - the only example. Taking a whole visual text, and re-imagining it with a new, absurdist, soundtrack

Nowadays the kids - in this case, Bad Lip Reading - hit it out of the park on a regular basis.

This one takes Stranger Things and makes it suffer a sea change into Something Richer and Stranger Things. It takes on a new life, with new characters, new motivations and faint echoes of meaning.



A surrealist riot.

The songs are:

Glitter Job's Ice God of Hungary



And Seagulls' Stop It Now



Both of which are Bad Lip Reading again, just doing to songs what they do to movies.

Killing in my home town

Great, now the Sheriff's deputies are killing people in my home town of San Juan Capistrano - in fact, just after the person ran out my favorite breakfast nook, Mollie's Cafe. I saw a lot of police lights there on Monday evening but had no idea someone had died.

NBC4's official write up here, with their video.

Bystander video (not graphic):

Verizon Throttled Fire Department's "unlimited" Data During California Wildfire

So many news items these days read like sarcastic dystopian stage plays. To me at my age, Spike Milligan (e.g. the Bedsitting Room) always comes to mind but I'm sure people still write them.

This item isn't about "net neutrality" per se, it's about throttling data when you go over an arbitrary limit on your "unlimited" plan, i.e. for we the people, the amount of data you can download is unlimited, but after a while it downloads so slowly that there is a de facto limit on how much data you can download...Catch 22. 

For the fire department, who were not simply trying to stream a bootleg of Crazy Rich Asians, but trying to coordinate ops to stop the whole state burning, it became an emergency during an emergency. 

But Verizon doesn't have an emergency department, just their offshored procrastination service. Can you imagine being a firefighter in full gear next to an all-consuming blaze, hanging around on hold with the 'supervisor' (the guy in the next cubicle who is brought over when you ask for the first guy's supervisor) going through these hoops:

"Verizon representatives confirmed the throttling, but rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the Department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan."

(On the one hand maybe you shouldn't buy your mega-ops-truck just one phone line, but on the other hand maybe ten people from Verizon should be selected as enemies of the state and executed, pour encourager les autres.)

Jack White, August 18th 2018, Rabobank Theater Bakersfield

I am, shock horror, not an OG White Stripes fan. I gave up on rock music by the late eighties, and although I moved to the US at around the same time, where I could be expected to ride the grunge wave, I didn't. Ending up close to LA, where the scene was pay-to-play Sunset Strip hair metal, I wasn't persuaded that things were any better. (I didn't have a lot of exposure to Orange County punk, otherwise things might have been different.) So, from 1990 to 2008 I was just listening to hip-hop and EDM and that's it. About then, late oughties, I asked a friend from a legacy Led Zeppelin group, newly energized by the 02 reunion, if there was anything equally exciting in the world today, and that's how I heard about the Raconteurs.

I really dug the Racs. They had the power-pop sensibilities to write the hooks and melodies and yet had the attack of a hard rock band. By the time I was turned on to them, it was already too late for new music from them, but when the Dead Weather formed in 2009 I was all over it. I forget how many times I saw them - 6 or 8 - and I unambiguously loved them. In some ways, I thought of them as LARPing heavy rock music, but in an affectionate and very accurate way. The Raconteurs were vastly different with their Tin Pan Alley hooks, but equally effective. The common denominator was Jack...so I bought all the White Stripes albums. I liked them but they've never been on my heavy rotation playlist.

Although I bought the subsequent Jack White solo albums they haven't, to me, alway had that savage attack and hard edge I prefer in music. For every High Ball Stepper there's a plaintive ballad. For that reason, I hadn't gone to any solo shows, until yesterday.

But, it was a sojourn. Bakersfield is a long drive for us. It was enlivened by a truck full of tyrannosaurs racing us from Irvine to LA in heavy traffic.

Once through LA and the byzantine single-lane mazes the I5 takes, it was straight sailing up the Tejon Pass and through the Meth Desert to Oildrillerville, stopping only to briefly get lost in Valencia, home of Six Flags Magic Mountain.

(That picture of Six Flags wasn't taken yesterday - it's from December, taken by a colleague at one of my previous work places in Valencia. The hills were on fire at the time.)

The hotel we'd chosen actually attaches to the Rabobank Theater. So, although it was 106F out, the rest of the evening was the most civilized experience I've ever had at a gig. There were Yondr people there to intercept and redirect the foolhardy who did not have a paper ticket and could have locked their phones in their Yondr bag prior to getting in. The will-call people were polite and organized. We had seats. There were ushers with flashlights to get us to our seats. The beer queue was manageable. You could drink beer in the seats. (You were specifically enjoined not to bring in "cans or other projectiles" but apparently cans bought inside the venue are not potential projectiles.) The lights went down at almost at the advertised time.

The pre-show music was all hip-hop, which was fine by me. Toes were tapped. The lights went down and the man in front of me, who I swear was Jerry Garcia, lit up a joint. How he did it without an open flame I'll never know, but there it was. (Folks, he bogarted his joint. Maybe it wasn't really Jerry.) The support act was William Tyler and I'm sorry but no. The music - unaccompanied guitar - was pretty good and would be stellar on the player if you're painting a room or having a nice garden party or something, but as a warm up act for Jack, it just cooled me down. I'm convinced he played Led Zeppelin's Going To California eleven times, sometimes on acoustic, sometimes on electric and once in a slightly ragtime way. He was a very polite, humble southern gentleman and did not overstay his welcome.

He cleared off and a large number of what I've called Homepride Flour Men

arrived, prompting STB to wonder out loud what Jack's trilby budget is for the tour. A few minutes later, the screen behind the stage started showing the countdown clock. Every now and again the silhouette of Jack would turn up and wind the clock back or move it forward. This clock is great - nothing is as engaging as a counter, as anyone who has written or seen one of those movie scenes where "it's a race against time!" can attest. As soon as anything is "on the clock", whether it's disarming a bomb or getting to the hospital while in labor, a timer automatically generates interest and excitement. I nominate Countdown Clock for support act of the year.

Then the band arrived and started jamming, leaving us in suspense for a minute or two before Jack White appeared. I was prepared for the band to know the new, solo music inside out. To be perfectly rehearsed and yet able to jam. To follow the bandleader's cues and yet be loose enough to shine. And they did all that perfectly. I wasn't prepared for them to accompany Jack as he did some of the hardest, quietest, rawest and most emotional of his tracks, old and new. He sung his heart out with You've Got Her in Your Pocket and I'm a Martyr for my Love for You. The band stayed out of the way while still supporting Black Math and I Think I Smell a Rat. The gentle Humoresque was a jaw-dropping experience. Jack seems so vulnerable singing some of these songs that it often seems he's lonely even with all these people behind him and all the audience in front of him. The White Stripes songs that seemed abstract to me on the old albums came alive - I could finally see what the long time fans see in them.  I don't ever recall going to another show where the artist seemed so open and truthful. And rocking and banging and heavy, and light and ethereal.

Because I'm me, I'm going to catalog some irritants. The LED blue lights are too blue. It's overwhelming. If you pay good money, you expect to have the whole spectrum or at least cyan, magenta and yellow.

Second, the stage set up. The semi-circular enclosure that lifts the other musicians above him bothered me. It looks much steeper and deeper than in the official photograph (above) from my Section E Row OO. At first, I spent several songs thinking it privileged him over the other musicians, which might not be surprising given he's the headliner, but separating the band members is not rock'n'roll. It's odd to see the guitarist literally on another level from his band and I kept thinking it made him look like a diva, a Shirley Bassey or Beyonce, divorced from his backing band.

After a while, I thought it disprivileged him. It made him look like he was the slave in the arena in the coliseum, left to battle lions alone while the freemen and nobility sat in the tiers above, absolved from responsibility to fight.

Thirdly, the picture of the coliseum floor looks universally blue in the photo. It doesn't look like that in real life. In the moment, you can see that the fretcloth of the antique amplifiers is not blue, but a greyish beige, a faded 60's color. The LED blue surrounding it emphasizes the workmanlike mid-century look of the little pile of amplification inside the curve of the band's risers. It looks like a museum piece, a diorama featuring a critically endangered Homo rockus in his natural habitat. That bothered the hell out of me. I'd prefer the amps to be behind, where they're supposed to be, rather than showcased with Jack. They're superannuated, and even if they're essential for the sound there's no reason to foreground them in 2018. The White Stripes are, genuinely, over.

It did occur to me that the steps up to the band only exist because Jack has so much energy that he'd boil and blow up like a steam locomotive if he didn't have flywheel steps to run up and down at critical moments.

Up there with the greats. 12/10 would go again.

Disease cheese

The tomb of Ptahmes, a 13th century BC mayor of Memphis, Egypt, contains the world's oldest cheese.

University of Catania and Cairo University

It's lucky the archaeologists didn't eat it, as scientists found it was made with sheep or goat mixed with cow's milk that contained traces of Brucellosis.  They found this by chemical analysis, so scientists are all agog to see what DNA sequencing might tell them about the evolution of the bacterium over the years. (It's still a concern in cowherds.)

The rest of us are just happy to make jokes about Sarcophagus Juice pairing well with Egyptian Tomb Disease Cheese.

Edit: More on the cheese (which apparently isn't the world's oldest) here at Buzzfeed, including a very informative answer in the comments.

A website that will draw your dreams

This website houses an AI which will draw pictures based on your description. You just write a caption and it draws as you go.

It's not as accurate as, say, Jim'll Paint It, but it does some lovely images. Here are my suggestions to it.

That link again: http://t2i.cvalenzuelab.com/

The elephant of Celebes

Europe After the Rain

Nude Descending a Staircase

The Persistence of Memory with a soft clock

More information on how it works at AI Weirdness.

Old People Read New SF - Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar (review)

I'm one of the old people, and this is a new sf.  My review, among all the other old people's is here, at James Nicoll's site.

I had to cut down as my  initial review was way outside the guidelines.

What do you think about modernizing fairy stories? Does it work?

More Koningrooibekkie in SJC

Here are a couple of better pictures of a San Juan Capistrano Koningrooibekkie taken last week in my yard. 

 

Astonishing little thing, it appears at sunrise and then makes itself scarce.
(previously)

Video tour of Tower House, with Jimmy Page

Channel 4 has screened a wonderful tour of the epic Tower House, Jimmy Page's home since 1972, designed by William Burges as a showcase of his architectural and decorative talents.

Jimmy points out a crack in the plaster

London is currently undergoing an epidemic of basement-building, or "undergrounding", as rich people with limited property sizes and listed facades dig deep under their houses in order to expand. Page's neighbor Robbie Williams is digging such a basement and the vibration and possible soil movement is threatening to damage Tower House. The neighbor on the other side is also having soil work done. Page is a very private man and I'm positive he wouldn't invite cameras in otherwise, but this is the third or fourth piece I've seen on his attempt to stop the possibly damaging "improvements" going on around him.

For us it's a rare opportunity to see this intricate and ornate castle-sized artwork. It's disheartening that we might be seeing it for the first and last time if the threats materialize. I can't imagine what it's like to live here. Page must not be able to smoke, or cook or do anything that will damage the more than a century old paint. I know he can't play music there, as the vibrations can crack the mouldings and carvings.

I can't embed the video, but it can be played on Channel 4's website, here and is definitely worth the click.

RIP Laurie Collins (The Collins Kids)

Nikki Kreuzer via Third Man Records reports that Laurie Collins, sister of Larry Collins and member of rockabilly group the Collins Kids has passed away at 76.

Grandis Day Gecko shedding

For those who have not seen this miracle of nature, Mr Fatty the Day Gecko is shedding. Geckos shed their skin in more-or-less one piece. They can't just shrug it off like a snake, because they've got legs (and they know how to use them), but they let the old, dry skin split and get as much off in one piece as they can. Fatty's a bit old and sluggish nowadays and sometimes gets a bit of stuck shed we have to work on together the next day. Generally speaking though, he goes from dull green to white to bright green in a few hours like a proper lizard.

The head skin peels back first, presumably because that ensures they can breathe and see for the duration.  The rest of the skin is loose from the body but doesn't spring away like the head. It peels away more slowly, and in the case of the tail end (and sometimes the femoral pores and toes) the lizard needs to chew the last bits away.

ThThe



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Yes, his substrate's brown. It's just compost tea from the organic soil in his planties. Ignore it.