I’ve been listening to this album a lot in 2011. Dennis Wilson’s voice is considerably different to earlier recordings he did with the Beach Boys, mainly because he spent most of the time between 1968 and 1977 drinking, smoking and doing drugs. This album, Pacific Ocean Blue, is soulful and rhythmic and doesn’t sound much like anything else that I know. River Song is the opening track.
Oh, and here’s a bonus track: Mexico
I’ve imported relevant posts from ‘theotherplace’, stuff about music and films and books and travel and food and the like. My current thinking is that I should keep these places as separate as possible.
From this month’s The Believer, “HOW TO EXPLORE LIKE A REAL VICTORIAN ADVENTURER“
Victorian adventurers rarely took a step into the wild without hauling a small library of how-to-explore books with them. Among the volumes Burton carried into East Africa was a heavily annotated copy of Francis Galton’s The Art of Travel: or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries. Originally conceived as a handbook for explorers, and sponsored by En-gland’s Royal Geographical Society, the book was required reading for any self-respecting Victorian traveler. Before rolling up his sleeves and getting down to the hard business of exploring, he could turn to page 134 to learn the best way to do exactly that:When you have occasion to tuck up your shirt-sleeves, recollect that the way of doing so is, not to begin by turning the cuffs inside-out, but outside-in—the sleeves must be rolled up inwards, towards the arm, and not the reverse way. In the one case, the sleeves will remain tucked up for hours without being touched; in the other, they become loose every five minutes.
The amiably neurotic Galton left nothing to chance. His index is studded with gems like “bones as fuel” and “savages, management of.” If Burton couldn’t find the advice he was looking for in Galton, he could always consult one of the other books in his trunk that were written with explorers in mind.
I’m really into this stuff at the moment. As Trevor at Kalebeul has pointed out a million times, there is a ton of material like this to read over at Google Books.
See also: this Salon review of Wilfred Thesiger’s ‘Arabian Sands’ which is on my reading list RIGHT NOW. I’ll write more about exploration and travel soon.
We listened to this track a lot during our August holiday in Menorca. Its mainstream big band sound is highly atypical of Bird but somehow that doesn’t matter. While Temptation was used in several films Charlie Parker’s version, I believe, never has been. This was recorded in a 1952 session.
Another song I’ve been listening to recently. It’s basic a pocket history of garage/grime in London. Click through to the video to see a list of the songs sampled. This is classic.
Various Artists – Vintage Caribbean Music
L’Orchestra Antillais – Serpent Maigre
[Both links require Spotify. feel free to comment with a better way of sharing music, as I'll be doing that a bit from now on]
I’ve been listening to a lot of jazz recently. Particularly pre-1950s. And as part of this, I’ve stumbled upon biguine, a type of jazz that originated in Martinique. It influenced Now Orleans jazz and sounds somewhat similar though with a lot more eerie fiddle. Listen to Serpent Maigre (link above) and look for Quand Meme on the VA album too. Great stuff.
One of the best things about the modern holiday is disconnection. Many of us spend our work days and nights tethered one way or another. So the holiday provides us with an old-fashioned life: we cook with gas, we suffer the small refrigerator (we still waste food, weirdly), we get our news from the papers or the radio, like in olden days.
This summer we spent a week in Brittany in July and a fortnight in Menorca in August. Neither house has television or internet.
The area around Josselin in Brittany is perfect for lazy cycling: the Nantes-Brest canal has lovely towpaths: I saw an otter on one bike ride, and only about two metres away too. We stayed in a village in the middle of nowhere, without street lights or other light pollution sources. We had two cloudless nights and had as good a view of the Milky Way as we’d had in ages. Loads of shooting stars too.
The three of us sat in the car bound for La Rochelle, but still in Brittany. Our car has a cassette deck for which we have a flimsy shop-bought device that also plugs into an iPod. Said device (the 4th we’ve bought) failed as soon as we departed. What this meant is that we discovered FIP radio. A radio station that plays Bach, then Gillespie, then JAE, then some country, then some funky shit, then tons more jazz. It took me hours back home to work out what station we’d been listening to.
FIP was a revelation. It still is. I know that tons of other people knew about it (particularly in Brighton) and this might seem like saying “I’ve discovered that I like air!”. Like it ought to, FIP provides good archives of its playlist. Which is mostly great. I’m working on having the station play permanently on this site. I think it’s only fair that I inflict this on as many people as possible.
In Menorca, we connected an Android phone to some speakers we bought and listened to FIP online. I listened to the World Service as I read my le Carré. We also listened to some Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. I like jazz, but don’t really know enough about it. I always love Coltrane, Davis, Bird, Ornette, and I adore the old-timey stuff you can find on Spotify.
We also listened to a fair bit of Magnetic Fields, tons of Talking Heads, and the odd Stones or Royal Trux song when in need of rock.
Some of the stuff I’ve been reading/doing recently:
“Article is all wrong” – the Vietnam War remains a controversial topic for some, as this Wikipedia discussion illustrates
Babylon Falling – 60s counterculture, 90s hiphop, underground press – one of the best Tumblr sites I’ve seen in ages
Diaspora – this is the new Facebook, so they say. It’s early days, and I have no friends on there, but it has potential
A Visit From The Goon Squad – Pulitzer prizewinner, entertaining novel by Jennifer Egan. It’s about punk and time
Iran And The Bomb – by Seymour Hersh. The real enemy is Saudi Arabia
Menorca apartment reviews – summer vacation beckons
I had the chance to spend a little time in the protest camp in Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona today. I’m no good at estimating the size of crowds but there were many more people around today than there were yesterday. Here are some snaps I took with my phone.
A couple of days ago, I read what in retrospect was a fortuitously timed article on CNN.com. After detailing Osama bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora, Tim Lister ended by noting that OBL probably wasn’t hiding in the ‘tribal’ area on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border at all. He reckoned that the fugitive might be holed-up in the wilds of Kunar, a remote zone that includes places where “no man has set foot”. Lister was, as we know today, only half right. Osama bin Laden was actually hiding near Islamabad in what seems to have been relative comfort. He was shot dead last night by US special forces.
So the era of bin Laden at #1 on the FBI’s most wanted list (he was already there when the September 11th 2001 attacks happened), is over. I can’t help but feel that it makes little difference now. Because America has already accepted mortal head wounds as ‘justice’, permanent internment camps as ‘security’, and permanent war as normality.
Adam Curtis’s film “The Power of Nightmares” dealt with the twin forces of militant Islamism and neo-conservatism that ended up shaping much of the current geopolitical landscape. Together (and they must always be taken together, for they needed each other desperately), they succeeded in causing probably over a million deaths, most of which occurred in the middle-east. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend that you try to get hold of a copy. UPDATE: As Erik points out in the comments below, the film is available to watch or download for free at the Internet Archive.
If all this is making you nostalgic for the days of “Get this!” Iberian Notes, check out this online novel which features a familiar-sounding character. It’s eerie.
More national policy soon. Until then, sleep well: they haven’t invented their new nightmare yet.
