April 23rd will be International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day - so declared by writer Jo Walton in honor of SFWA vice-president Howard Hendrix's recent online outburst in which he called a large number of his constit-uents "scabs" for posting their work online - gasp!- for free! Decrying those "who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch," he told his members he would prefer to chop wood than use any online social networking tools. So he won't be reading this.
Anyway, Jo Walton has declared April 23rd to be a day when SFWA members, or indeed any professional standard writer, can post some of their work online (on their own website) for free, linking in to a thread on her blog so that the rest of us can read it. I personally doubt if it will result in the collapse of SF writing as we know it, so it seems to be a safe bet.
There are days when I'm glad I live in the future, and days when it sucks. A recent news item gave a glimpse of quite how much it sucks, but I'm quite happy with it, because I no longer live in Britain, previously the country of No Future, but where they now appear to having more future than most.
Britain seems to be run by people who think Nineteen Eighty-Four not only depicts a utopia, but is also a handy do-it-yourself manual. The same people appear to have had their chromosomes warped by in-utero exposure to The Goons, with the result that zany and horrifying Spike Milligan sketch-style initiatives embed themselves into British external reality with dreadful regularity.
A recent example of this was Middlesborough's recent proposal to install video cameras in public places personned by professional busybodies who will detect when someone is doing something anti-social (such as littering). But that's not all! The cameras will then harangue the hapless British subject in a child's voice. I'll say that again. The cameras will call the person out in public, using the voice of a child.
This might have been jaw-dropping in THX 1138, or remarkable in the underground dystopia of A Boy and His Dog, but this is reality. Luckily for me, I escaped the whole sorry country and I have the distance to think it's funny.
What's even funnier was the first news story about a case of mistaken identity, a woman shouted at by for an offence she did not commit. In this case, as far as I can tell, she was yelled at by faceless bureaucrats at City Hall, rather than a recorded child. That would be even more chilling, if I lived there.
Her comments are priceless, and very British.
"Ms Brewster said yesterday: "We were in the town centre and I'd got some chips atMcDonald's for my daughter Ellie, but they were hot so I tipped them into a box and crumpled the packet up." "I put it on the bottom of Ellie's pram to take home but then heard this voice say: 'Please place the rubbish in the bin provided'." "I still think the cameras are a good idea, but I have to say when you haven't done anything wrong it's annoying to appear like this."
The Sky News article includes comments from readers. Here's one of them. "For the small minded people…….YOU are already being monitored everyday be it through store cards, credit cards, loyalty card transactions, telephone conversations e-mails text messages etc. You are being watched anyway so what does it matter if speakers are attached to a Camara. Does it affect you if you are not understaking a criminal activity. I think NOT."
Well, that's enough evidence for me. If the Illiterati are in favor of them, u shud b 2!!eleven1
In the meantime, here's a Spike Milligan sketch that I predict is next on the list for the British Government to implement.
The sixties were the natural home of teenage car crash songs. One, a deliberately (as opposed to inadvertently) funny one, seems to have one foot in the sobbing teen era from which it came and the other boldly poised to tread on something in the hard-nosed seventies. It's the Bonzos singing Death Cab for Cutie, with a twist.
Actually, it's with a strip, not a twist. The Beatles' movie Magical Mystery Tour aired over Christmas 1967 on both British and American TV. It was first shown in black and white on BBC1 and repeated a few days later on BBC2 in color, which must have been a treat for all six people with a color set and the ability to recieve that station at the time. Magical Mystery Tour is a one-hour unscripted movie by the Fab Four featuring themselves and a couple of dozen characters taking a day-trip "mystery tour" by charabanc. Watching it, I had a vague memory of having been on a mystery tour in a coach myself as a kid, but it may just have been a horrible cheese-before-bedtime dream. Certainly the anxious, over-eating auntie, bad tempered cousin, all-round-strange old geezer Buster Bloodvessel (played by Ivor Cutler), the classy dolly-bird tour guide and some of the other characters seemed familiar. The Beatles' bus tour takes in several spots where the lovable moptops sing their own beat tunes. The piece-de-yellowmattercustard is the famous performance of I Am The Walrus, of course. Most of the bus's stops, however, are for the set pieces, which are mainly post-Goon sub-Monty Python japes (or possibly hijinx, I can never tell those two apart).
One stop is very different. For a start, it's set in Paul Raymond's RevueBar, a famous and long-lived strip club in Soho just a few hundred yards from the major London music clubs of the time. Secondly, the band performing at this stop are not the Beatles. Ivor Cutler, the ex-leather-clad rockers responsible for the movie and various others file in to sit at the variety-club style tables. Through the curtain jumps The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. They play one of their more mainstream hits, Death Cab For Cutie.
Death Cab For Cutie is a honkin'-saxed pseudo-Elvis tune featuring many yards of gold lame, sequins, brothel creepers and teddy-boy moves. It is, as you might guess, about a car-crash death. Cutie and her beau are warned that if she carries on this way, one day she "will have to pay [her] fare", a common warning to teen girls of the era. And indeed, she's doomed; the driver fails to notice that that lights have changed. (A rather Beatley motif, that.) Rather than make the song a horrorific sob-fest, as were the songs of its parent genre, the teen-death-crash pop single, Viv Stanshall sings Death Cab For Cutie with an amused twinkle in his eye and a hip-gyration for Elvis to envy. So far, so ordinary Bonzos - it's a familiar pastiche. This set-up for Death Cab For Cutie was even shown on children's television at the time it came out, and was widely regarded as an amusing trifle by mums and hepcats alike.
But The Magical Mystery Tour version diverges from the standard performance. After a verse or so, one of the Paul Raymond Revue Bar strippers comes onto the stage with the band. She's wearing a very nice classical mid-sixties buttoned twinset in pale orange, lovely back-combed hair and fetching devil-girl make-up that would put Meyer's Faster Pussycat Kill Kill girls to shame. And a pink feather boa. She strips as Stanshall wiggles his hips at her and sings, "Don't you know, baby, curves can kill?"
The images that accompany the line about death are rather . . . telling. By contrast, the images edited around the last few lines, where a normal (if that's the right word) teen-death-crash song explains how the teenager had it coming because they're, you know, nubile, those images are tame in comparison. The death is the money-shot in the piece. Stanshall clearly knows exactly what he is doing, and what he is doing is a pre-Ballard ode to smash-ups. Very, very much a product of 1967-70 art with a capital A.
It got broadcast on Auntie Beeb before it was totally outdated, too. What a strange year 1967 must have been.
Watch out forStanshall missing a cue, laughing and getting slapped with Jan's feather boa for his mistake. He's a one.
"Around one in five adults are obese and more than half either obese or overweight - almost 24 million people." "By 2010 a third of all men and 28% of women in England will be obese, according to figures from the Department of Health."
Horrors! How can this be?
"Obesity could all be in the genes, scientists have discovered. "
"A gene variant found in 16% of the population is thought to be responsible for exploding rates of obesity." "People who carry two of the gene variants are 70% more likely to be obese - and are likely to be 3kgs heavier on average."
OK. 16% of the population carry the gene variant. (Sky means that 16% of the population carries 2 copies of the variant, not 16% are carriers. Or so I assume.) So 16% are 70% more likely to be obese. And 20% of the population, 28% within three years, is obese. How is that "all in the genes"? And how does it explain the exploding? Are these genes detaching themselves and spreading through the air or something?
I recently found SteveAudio's blog. Politics and music from one who was, and indeed still is, there. Have a read, you'll like it.
I'll put it in the permalinks section also.
Nothing, apparently. It's back on, 40 years later.
The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was an event staged in London on the 29th of April 1967 that was widely regarded as the first flowering of freakdom in the United Kingdom. Pink Floyd headlined; The Pretty Things and Arthur Brown also starred. I'm not sure I've ever read a good write up about it on teh intarwebs (even Wikipedia is terse on this one), but there's a fine write up in Mick Farren's Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, and a there's a few Pink Floydpages which describe it.
For good or for ill, the ICA has decided to re-stage it on its 4oth anniversary. I have mixed feelings about a recreated be-in. I still have my Summer of Love 1988 T-shirt, and I'm not sure I'm ready for another 20th anniversary so soon. On the other hand, I'd love to see the movies that are promised. What a drawback to no longer living in London - I never thought all of them would be in the same place!
According to Hugh Dellar, one of the 40th anniversary organizers, quoted in the Independent, above: "The more I learned about it, the more interested I became because it contained all the elements of what had come before it and all the seeds for what would come after. In many ways it was the pinnacle of British youth culture. The people who were involved in it went on to be key figures in other areas."
I love the sixties and seventies, you know me. But if I were today's British youth culture (who he?) I'd be sorely tempted right about now to prove Hugh Dellar wrong about those seeds.
Nice, n'est ce pas? This is Io and Europa taken by New Horizons, as it heads out of the solar system, its cameras pointing back towards us. The beautiful radiant blue dome isn't where the aliens live, it's actually a volcano venting. Which is almost as cool.
Oh, and stuff about the origin of Cylons and the mystery of Earth. There's a sample of his blog hidden below. Mouse over to view.
I happened to catch Ron Moore in the hallway at Universal and, in a brief conversation, got everything I needed to know. I learned that the idea was not that Bob Dylan necessarily exists in the characters' universe, but that an artist on one of the colonies may have recorded a song with the exact same melody and lyrics. Perhaps this unknown performer and Dylan pulled inspiration from a common, ethereal source. Therefore, I was told to make no musical references to any "Earthly" versions, Hendrix, Dylan or any others. The arrangement needed to sound like a pop song that belonged in the Galactica universe, not our own.
My first love was the blues. Oh, okay, that's a complete lie. My first love was Marc Bolan. But my second or third love was the blues. Or so. Anyway, it was in there somewhere. So I'm a slut, sue me.
Due to my age, I missed out on the first flowering of British Blues, and had to catch up by working my way back using as a starting point the Immediate Anthology of British Blues (that's the URL for the only volume I can find on Amazon, vaguely similar to the old vinyl volume II I have at home) and Pete Frame's Rock Family Trees as clues to chase down the remnants of the not-long vanished culture. I doubt if I discovered anything amazing you couldn't discover yourself. In fact, today I actually wanted to point out something I didn't discover at the time.
I only found out about early Fleetwood Mac a few years ago.
I was inoculated against Fleetwood Mac by my unadulterated hatred of the work they were producing by the time I started searching out older records. I thought that any band which was multi-platinum and featured floaty, soft-focus women in even more floaty gauzy dresses couldn't possibly have developed from a prior stage that was more to my liking. I was wrong about that. Like many bands of the period, FM started out as a pure blues band. In its line up it featured one of the three or four best British blues guitar players, Peter Green. Together with Danny Kirwan he produced twin-lead guitar that is, as they didn't say in those days, to die for.
I've still never bought a Fleetwood Mac album, for fear that it might have a Vaseline-lensed female lurking somewhere inside the cover, but I have caught up with a few tracks here and there, and some of those are now on available for your vidding pleasure on YouTube.
I'll lead off with a gem, a short (and unhappily truncated version) of Fleetwood Mac playing live at the Playboy Mansion for Hugh Hefner and his bunnies. Peter Green, who must have had all of his marbles at the time, chose to play Rattlesnake Shake, a song about an activity strongly associated with Playboy magazine and I don't mean Golf or even single malt drinking. The track also features an outstandingly pretentious intro by Heff himself that marks him out as a complete practitioner of the art discussed supra.
Rattlesnake Shake
That's cool and ironic and stuff, but if you want to feel the emotional charge of Peter Green's playing, try this one, World Keeps Turning. Danny Kirwan's broken a string and to fill the gap, PG rips out a solo number that just blows me away. BB King once said Peter Green made him sweat – with this one, you can see why. Watch his right hand (no, he isn't doing the rattlesnake shake).
World Keeps Turning
Here's my personal favorite. Oh Well. Watch Peter Green crack up after a flub. It's great to see him smile. Then, Shake Your Moneymaker (this one is slow to load; give it a chance.) A clip from the Peter Green Story. And to round it off, the famous Albatross. I normally hate songs about seabirds, but I give this one a pass. Barely.
PS – YouTube videos come and go like spring flowers. If the links die, in this message or any other, give me a holler and I'll try to refind one. If you want to do it yourself, or explore YouTube, double-click on the embedded video and it will take you straight to their website and you can search.
"If lorry drivers can tear their eyes away from the satellite navigation system while approaching the village of Exton, they could well save themselves hours of trouble. There at the side of the road are the first signs in the country specifically warning them to ignore the satnav. Owing to a fault in the electronic information system, many drivers are sent through the Hampshire hamlet only to find the lane narrows to 6ft and they get stuck."
Binary systems are at least as likely to have planets as single-sun systems like our own, NASA scientists said yesterday. The group, working with the Spitzer space telescope, have an article published in the April edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
This means that the probable number of planets in the galaxy is more than doubled. And to me, that means the probability that there's life out there is more than doubled, too. Interesting stuff. I volunteer to go visit one as soon as NASA send a ship. Are you listening, NASA?
Not everyone's thrilled. M John Harrison, the writer, on his blog says that it is "culturally a total disaster because it encourages even respectable science journalists to make the obvious reference. Trilling’s team would have been better keeping their discovery secret until humanity could handle it." I puzzled over what the hell Mike meant for about five minutes. I eventually concluded that the universe, by having more than half of its planetary systems over-shone by binary systems, was displaying a distressingly white, middle-class, conservative notion of parenthood. When kids are involved, the universe itself comes down on the side of heterosexual two-parent families!!111!!Eleventy!11
It seemed like a blindingly stupid thing to say, but I couldn't say that in a comment on Mike's blog as it only accepts registered users. A couple of hours later, by dint of the Rosetta Stone of comments that had been posted under his pronouncement, I worked out that this wasn't what Mike meant at all. Apparently the discovery is "culturally a total disaster" because it will encourage people to see Star Wars as a Good Film, what with its lyrical twin sunsets over Tatooine as Luke pines for the fjords or whatever it is he's doing in A New Hope. Seeing Star Wars as a Good Film is apparently a Bad Thing in the Mike Harrisoniverse.
Suns setting on Tatooine (Lucasfilm).
I love Star Wars, so I'm going to pretend he really did mean the first thing. At least it shows imagination.
Much more funny, up to date and culturally important than the clip below, this is the only surviving clip of the Beatles singing Ticket To Ride on Top of the Tops in 1965. The BBC wiped all the tapes of early TOTP during one of its many frugal but stupid moments. This fragment survived because it was shown during a broadcast of Dr Who as a glimpse of the distant past seen through some sort of device in the Tardis.
So it's a glimpse of the distant past showing up as a fictional glimpse of the distant past in a long gone TV show, on the show's internal TV. That's very meta. Deep.
Or just watch the first Doctor and his companions demonstrate how to groove to a Beat Combo in authentic fashion. But wait, they're actors, not real fans. They are faking their authenticity, despite being of the correct non-Austin Powers time period! That's deep too! I need a drink.
Can I just say that at least in the last two clips I've put on the blog, I haven't said anyone is hot? I think that's progress.
This video features Carl Rove, proudly acting even more like a tool than usual and boasting about ripping the heads off animals. Or off of animals, as he puts it.
Do they think it's funny? See how the news ticker below them displays something about death camps. Some days I love to live here, in the future. Today isn't one of them.
I can't think of a sensible comment so I'm going to go with the old standby "Pass the sick bag, Alice."
I sometimes mention a product on this blog, and I give a URL to Amazon or similar sites. Just to reassure you, I don't get paid to advertise anything here and I don't get any money from your clicks. Everything I say here is because I feel like saying it.
April 23rd will be International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day - so declared by writer Jo Walton in honor of SFWA vice-president Howard Hendrix's recent online outburst in which he called a large number of his constit-uents "scabs" for posting their work online - gasp!- for free! Decrying those "who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch," he told his members he would prefer to chop wood than use any online social networking tools. So he won't be reading this.
Oh, wait, that's actually Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain Jack Sparrow's dad. Close enough. 
