Stuffo & Beth Alphett, “BLD2” track 7 (2006).
(4’23”, 4.03 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
No Comments »
The Canterbury Block
Sunday 23 September 2007
With larger increases in temperature and increases in rainfall pasture production increased by 2030 in the north, but not in the south, and results were not as positive by 2070.
As it turns out, the “Old Europe” is prepared to serve in the relatively peaceful northern parts of Afghanistan, but not in the south, where active combat is the norm.
Over fifty years after the practice was first defined, the Canterbury Block is still thriving.
The constitution contained many present-day Dutch political institutions; however, their functions and composition have changed greatly over the years. The constitution was accepted in the North, but not in the South.
Dry season adults were consistently larger than wet season adults in the tropical north, but not in the south.
From agriculture to international relations, biology to constitutional politics, there is no field of endeavour to which the Canterbury Block can be applied without immediately enhancing and expanding upon the sum of expert knowledge.
In the North Fore, but not in the South, the corpse was buried for several days, then exhumed and eaten when the flesh had “ripened” and the maggots could be cooked as a separate delicacy.
In Ghana, female headship was associated with poverty in the north but not in the south.
A quick search on Google finds choice examples of the Canterbury Block bolstering opinions around the world, informed and uninformed, in a variety of languages. I am beginning to suspect that if there is a grand unified theory of everything, then one of the fundamental building blocks will be the Canterbury Block.
Sinn Féin will probably gain some ground but are not likely to make it into a governing coalition due to a curious double standard that sees the party as fit for government in the North, an increasingly foreign and alien place, but not in the South.
Time is running, but not in the South.
(Crossposted at Sarsaparilla.)
Filed under: Journalism by Ben.H
No Comments »
I, for one, welcome Blogger’s new German overlords
Thursday 20 September 2007
Filed under: Self-promotion, Stupidity by Ben.H
No Comments »
The New New Magic Online Survey
Thursday 20 September 2007
If you’ve taken the Magic Listener Advisory Group survey as I suggested, you might want to go back and take it again. The preliminary questions are all the same, but they’ve updated the list of songs to give you something completely different. Better still, this time they’ve thoughtfully uploaded audio samples of each song in case you don’t recognise the title.
Once again, its a clever mix of solid gold classics and the unexpected esoteric: highlights include “Chattanooga Choo Choo” by Harpers Bizarre (which I have’t heard Magic play, although they do seem to like band’s cover of “Anything Goes” an awful lot), Vicki Lawrence’s “He Did With Me”, the “wrong” Gibb brother, the non-ironic-quotes-wrong version of “Jolene” (Olivia Newton-John?), some Freddy Fender, Johnny Crawford’s “Petite Chanson”, back-to-back versions of “Puppy Love” for your analysis and comparison (Paul Anka and Little Donnie Osmond*)… and if Magic has to pick a Supremes hit, well, it has to be “The Happening”.
As with the last time, there’s also one song so odious that it must be given the thumbs-down, and it’s not the Kevin Johnson track.
* Yes, that’s how they list him on the survey.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
I suppose this is the world’s way of telling me I should buy my own turntable
Wednesday 19 September 2007
This was supposed to be a post recommending you go look at the videos posted to Youtube by a guy or girl called Spoonfedcornbread. SFCB had a strong, clear vision: point the camera at the record player turntable, put on an old single, drop the needle, and watch the record go round while the music played. Eight hundred and fifty times.
If you’ve ever played lots of little pieces of vinyl in succession I don’t need to tell you what a beguiling experience this can be, listening to the music while the record spins and the tone arm gradually draws in towards the centre. In a way it emphasised the little self-contained world the 7-inch single created. SFCB’s virtual recreation of this phenomenon was strikingly vicarious.
The music was good too, being a collection of over 800 singles from the late 50s to the early 70s – all A-sides, from what I could see. There was a Magic-like variety, ranging from R&B to easy listening, from the more obvious Beatles and Stones to people like Keith (a Magic favourite), or Liz Damon’s Orient Express.
Sadly, Spoonfedcornbread’s account has been suspended by the forces sworn to make the world a meaner, sadder place; but not before some 20,000 people got to watch and hear “Some Velvet Morning” whirling round – more than twice the number of viewings of the second-most popular video.
In the meantime, try Office Naps for your old 7-inch fix. Sadly, no streaming video of the records going round. Yet.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
2 Comments »
RANDOM RERUN: Hope I die before I look old
Tuesday 18 September 2007
To die of the cigarettes, that is a misfortune, no? But to have one’s skin look not so young before one’s time, that is the real tragedy.
The French have their priorities straight. The real mystery here is that this photo was taken in Estavar, where a 5-minute drive into the next village will see you over the border into Spain, where a packet of Camels will set you back only €2.50.
(First posted 26 October 2005.)
Filed under: Travel by Ben.H
No Comments »
Please Mister Please
Sunday 16 September 2007
Laughing Clowns, “Every Dog Has Its Day” (1982).
(3’50”, 3.80 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
No Comments »
On Friday evening he stood around on the bank of the Thames for an hour. Then he went to the pub.
Sunday 16 September 2007
I went to see/hear Alvin Curran’s Maritime Rites on the river out front of Tate Modern, expecting to be slightly underwhelmed. I was either a real enthusiast or a slow learner, so it took me at least five years of regularly going to to events like this which combine:
- public, outdoor locations
- spatialised performances
- amateur scratch orchestras
- composition mixed with improvisation, and
- acoustic instruments and electronics
are more likely than not to be pretty bad. After it had finished I wondered if it was my lowered expectations that made me like it so much.
The piece made use of the brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra on a stage on the bank, Curran himself on piano with a group of improvisers on a barge in the middle of the Thames, and an orchestra of volunteers assembled along the Millennium Bridge. These first two ensembles were heavily amplified to carry across the water, also effectively drowning out the musicians on the bridge and any surrounding ambient sounds, which was supposed to be one of the features of the music. Mind you, any distinctive sounds made by the Thames around Waterloo get lost in the regular city noise.
Yes, the music tended to ramble, but it did so in a nicely discursive way, apparently getting caught up in one piece of shtick after another, from freeform antiphonal honking back and forth across the river, to passages of Handel pastiche, to long sax solos by Evan Parker out on the barge, disrupted by confusing outbursts of digital DJing.
More than the arrangement of musicians around the river, the most interesting spatial aspect of the music was the way the sound would echo, with only some sounds and frequencies travelling along the water, bouncing off the distant buildings in unpredictable ways. All the way through the live music was ghosted by transformed shadows of sound hovering in different parts of the air amongst the evening commuters, joggers, tourists, and drinkers on the riverbank while the sun set.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
The top ten photos in my Flickr account
Wednesday 12 September 2007
It took a while for me to notice that Flickr provides an analysis of how many times your photos have been looked at. I’ve never expected any of my stuff to have broad appeal, but it’s intriguing to see what people seem to be interested in.
With one exception, this is the fairly stable order of popularity amongst my pictures.
10! I still haven’t seen Patrick Keiller’s London again, so I still don’t know how close I got to guessing the particular location of the forgotten corner of the city that briefly appears in the film. Instead, I relied on Iain Sinclair’s description of finding the same place some years later, somewhere near St Andrew By The Wardrobe.
9! Trainspotters ahoy! The Tube’s inexplicable allure adds a cachet to even the most mundane snapshots.
8! Heh heh, I said ‘faggots’. I’m amazed this one isn’t the most viewed in the entire set, because half of my website traffic consists of kids on MySpace linking to the smaller version on this blog.
7! The promise of violence. Because people like violence. Especially when it’s close enough to enjoy but you’re safely out of the way.
6! The tastefully understated Colloseum photograph. One of very few taken on my holiday in Italy. I can’t help feeling people are mildly disappointed when their searches turn up my photos.
5! See? This is exactly what I mean. This a security guard outside the Sagrada Familia and is tagged accordingly, so I hope people turning up this one are more interested in handcuffs than Gaudi.
4! The only thing more exciting than an old Tube station is a derelict Tube station. Aldwych station, once briefly known as Strand station, is now a ghost station and frequent stand-in for real Underground stations on film and TV.
3! Now here’s the anomaly. A blurry shot at a graduate art show off Brick Lane, which has suddenly rocketed up the charts in only the past week. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s been discovered by a cabal of Ballardian fetishists who like to pretend this is Rosanna Arquette.
2! A street stall of nested dolls for the tourists in Riga. There’s nothing like Harry Potter, Stalin, and Osama Bin Laden tags to boost the hit rate, although I guess this photo must have disappointed many feverish authors hopefully searching for illustrations for their slash fiction.
1! Ah, the inanimate carbon rod of my photo set! These soothing wood tones and rich timber grain have brightened the desktops of geeks around the world. A pinnacle of repose and tranquility, which I thought had an unassailable lead over the others until the James Spader wannabes turned up.
Filed under: Art, Self-promotion by Ben.H
No Comments »
Anything you can do, I can do better
Tuesday 11 September 2007
There’s a broken portable CD player under the bottom drawer of the kitchen dresser which isn’t doing anything, so I’ve decided to publicly launch the defunct device as my very own iPod Killer.
I figure all I need to do now is issue a press release announcing that this useless piece of technology is the first serious competitor to Apple’s portable music device and see if I can attract any investment capital. As I see it, my iPod Killer has the advantage over previous contenders by having no effort or expense put into the technical development or business model whatsoever, and yet being just as doomed as every previous iPod Killer.
Although my bold, innovative plan is already condemned to failure, I can unequivocally state that the past five minutes have been a great journey for me and my plucky little startup. Despite the completely forseen pitfalls along the way, it’s been a real learning experience which will immensely benefit me when going forward with my future doomed e-commerce strategies and worthless online business solutions.
As for the rest of you, I wish you nothing but success in developing your own DOA iPod Killers.
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
1 Comment »
Please Mister Please (special bonus edition)
Sunday 9 September 2007
Ingram Marshall, “Fog Tropes” (1979/82). Brass of the Orchestra of St Luke’s /John Adams.
(10’04”, 7.67 MB, mp3)
(By special request from people who guessed where the Morton Feldman piece came from.)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
1 Comment »
It’s all harmless British eccentricity until someone loses an eye
Saturday 8 September 2007
Tonight I’ve been editing music while the girlfriend watched The Last Night of the Proms on TV. When the “Land of Hope and Glory” bit of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 kicked in, someone in a house up the street started setting off fireworks.
Filed under: London, Television by Ben.H
No Comments »
The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Saturday 8 September 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
No Comments »
Please Mister Please
Thursday 6 September 2007
Morton Feldman, “Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety” (1970). Orchestra of St Luke’s /John Adams.
(4’16”, 3.17 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
4 Comments »
The secret history of the twentieth century, continued
Tuesday 4 September 2007
Of course Firbank was “the” great formal innovator. He invented modernism, more so than Joyce really.
Harry Mathews, interviewed by John Ash.
He developed lung disease and died in Rome in 1926, discouraging friends from visiting him in his last weeks because of the poor quality of his wallpaper.
Author blurb, The Complete Ronald Firbank.
