I often dream of trains

Lomography.

Last of the current set. Features lack of focus due to mixing beer and patent cold-cures, disturbing yet naturalistic pictures of drunk people, scaffolding and the end of the world (telecoms version).

Lomography.

Wisconsin head trip.

Lomography.

Documents this.

Largely pictures of green and pleasant land.

I'm still struggling with the notion that since there is no Peel and my disposable income is generally disposed on tiresome things, discovering that this sort of thing is going on well after all the cool kids have moved on to bus-stop house, trouser metal or spastikk-lawnmoWer is sadly normal.

Marvellous racket(s), mind. It's also well worth digging out the strangely-tagged material on that there youtubes.

I am also about halfway through 'The girl with the dragon tattoo' and it is being utterly excellent. A bit too info-dumpy to begin with, but it is splendidly Swedish and spending great wedges of a weekend reading the thing while The Chemicals and early Sevs & Kraftwerk burble away in the background is something I should do more of. Yes. There are certain books where you get an adrenaline rush when the plot decides to kick off. Selected Banksies are the ones that spring most immediately to mind. This one's not like that (yet?), but one can certainly feel that the narrative has lumpy cams and a furtled wastegate.

Rule 34? It made sense at the time.

21st of this month, which is a Saturday.

http://bathfilmfestival.org.uk/sonver-the-alchemy-of-man.html

The review from the last time: http://hirez.livejournal.com/295109.html

Lomography.

Testing out a new chemist.

Contains people, places and things in a confusing order. Also the usual shoddy composition and wilful camera-shake.

The Swansea demons want more money and a fresh picture, presumably so they can create more work, have more databases and sell off more bloody registration plates to more silly buggers who've not worked out that a personalised plate does not read '5exi' but 'I have no life and I am a crap shag all I can talk about is executive breakfast bars and alloy option packs my partner left me for a plant psychologist shoot me now'.

However, cars would need to be much wider and the ANPR kit would be run by the Samaritans.

All of which led me to poke about on a ten-year-old HD partition and find this:

( click click smile smile )

Those of you with long memories of the Sluts list will know the answer, but which one ended up on my about-to-expire driving licence?

(You know what's really odd? That old HD is still running, and has stuff on it from when I was mad enough not to leave the house for six months.)

Someone's already written the satire/po-faced Randian homage (It's hard to tell the difference) where a tolerably long-lived corporatist, um, thing (state's wrong) embiggens itself by finding planets and uplifting a random species so they can be sold firearms and cheeseburgers, right?

Grim. I rather thought I might like those Stieg Larssons, too.

Poll #1476306 Phaedra grey
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 27

In the light of Synth Britannia and/or the Krautrock programme on BBC4:

Personally, I am very much digging more or less anything Michael Rother has had a hand in. The first (two) Kraftwerk LP(s) now have a lot more context, for instance.

http://residentialaliens.blogspot.com/2009/10/future-bristol-from-colin-harvey.html

(Yeah, I'm shameless. What can I say? I rather like the validation.)

I don't remember how I found this one. Only that I could stand to read about three pages before the urge to put my head in the oven too strong to resist.

Luckily (or not, depending on mood) we have an electric oven, so it all got a bit Neil The Hippy.

In the main, the recent trend of 'customer is always wrong','bitter waitress','texts from last night','postsecret' and the like are good for ten minutes while something compiles. Windows onto different worlds, if you will.

I'm also all for a bit of dark humour.

That thing though? Pretty much everything that's wrong with people in handy paragraphs. Not in a 'oh noes lol drawmah' sense, but something unexpectedly soul-deadening.

There's a new Treewave, um, thing.

It's very good if you like lo-fi dreampop made on 8-bit kit and dot matrix printers that sounds like Wire, Eno and MBV all at once.

If you don't like that sort of thing, then you'll be convinced it's a terrible racket, Just Not Music there's no tune you can whistle and the singers all look like girls.



(I'm sure I used the phrase 'MBV cover band that only plays 'Map reference...' the last time I mentioned them.)

While watching the compact and bijou Synth Britannia programme on that there tellybox the other even, I was struck with an odd thought: 'I didn't know that thingy out of Heaven 17 was related to Compo Simmonite.'

Apart from that, it was correct in all dimensions.

The URL gives it away a bit.

Apparently, the slightly wet chap is Famous On The Intarbets And TV and should probably be forgiven for not wearing a red shirt and black tie before boshing out a version of 'Metal on metal' and/or 'Abzug'. (Or, for serious circular reference, a version of 'He's a whore'.)

Looks like a fine toy, mind.

The splendid orogeny, who put up with a nervous and jetlagged stranger on the drive up from Newark to, um, Woods Hole some three year ago, has sold a story to Strange Horizons. It's bloody good stuff. Go read the thing.

http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles/X0052_Recent_Launchings_of.html
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/ears/soundz/10HOLE_HYMNS/X0003_Drs.Info.html

The concept of Doktorbands has lived in my head since, um, oh-fuck-i-dont-know, probably the mid 80s when I read something about them in a random zine. Probably. I don't really remember and I like it better that way. The next time I came across this malarkey was when I found Compendium in Camden in 1989.

There was a bloke outside Camden tube, busking a passable Hawkwind impersonation and playing a SH101 with his feet. I think.

I came home with a copy of 'Three-fisted tales of 'Bob'', which surprised precisely none of the people I was living and working with at the time.

That's a whole other story in itself.

Don't go looking on YouTube for Doktorbands because the beer-crate video can never match the reality in your own head. (Somewhere between 'Hotrod' period Ministry, Lynyrd Skynyrd, MBV and PiL)

I don't recall the last time I was party to a Sunday lunch of that size or scope. Stupefying. Yes.