Norman Collins…

an excellent re-rub of a classic yarn from the Gr8 Wen, with a fab intro from the one & only Ed Glinert_

the possibilities are endless_

Rocker – Anarcho-Syndicalism Theory and Practice

entropy, eh_

hands off snakey, eh_

from the topdraw_

via 1867 Portland Road and Princedale Road spoons robbery raids court proceedings. Tom Vague.

you should know…

an Orrisdale man crossing the mountains at night heard faery music which took his fancy; he memorised it, the Air is now known as the ‘Bollan Bane’_

 

women of the future…1902_

Commedia dell’arte & Jerry Cornelius_

The good airship Lady Charlotte Lever chugged over what was probably Transcarpathia. Una Persson was stopping over in London to see her lover Catherine. Makhno’s anarchists held Ontario. Toronto was about to fall. The Americans were agitated. It was 1948 and a second World War was about to break out. Major Nye hoped not. He remembered the Great War and Geneva in 1910. Jerry Cornelius was left behind in a New Hampshire barn. While in Lionel Himmler’s Blue Spot Club, Miss Brunner ordered jugged hare as Bartok played on the jukebox…kinda reminds one of the teeming world of Shakespeare’s  London, from the enigmatic spy Kit Marlowe to the self-aggrandising Ben Jonson, from the actor Richard Burbage to the fab Thomas Middleton..much to do about nothing, eh_

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but there’s a child vampire in the house_

burn, baby burn_

While most recollections of 1968 concern events in Paris, Germany, the US and South America, there was also a minor uprising in London. That is being commemorated with a suitably bijou single-room exhibition at the Tate Britain, and also a new publication in Four Corners’ Irregular series – about which I first wrote here. […]

via King Mob, the Camden Poster Workshop and revolutionary London in 1968 — The Great Wen

Who owns St George’s Hill, birthplace of the Diggers?

Who owns England?

Image: Still from the film Winstanley, 1975.

In April 1649, Gerrard Winstanley and a rag-tag band calling themselves ‘Diggers’ set up camp on St George’s Hill in Surrey, and made history.

There is a widespread misconception that the Diggers had chosen to cultivate common land. In fact, St George’s Hill was probably Crown Land – which, following the execution of Charles I, had become of uncertain ownership. The Diggers were one amongst various millennarian cults of the post-monarchy era who were convinced that with the death of the king, a new era had dawned.

For Winstanley, that new era heralded the end of private property and a chance to throw off the ‘Norman yoke’ of elite landownership that had enslaved the common people of England since 1066. “The earth is a common treasury for all”, he proclaimed, “both rich and poor, that every one that is born in the…

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Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the dog’s bollocks

Strong Language

Soon after Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary was published in 1755, so the story goes, he was approached by a pair of prudish readers who commended him for omitting ‘improper’ words. Johnson, according to one account, replied to the women: ‘What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?’

Today you can find improper words in any good dictionary – but only the main set. Fuck is there, but not fuckish, fuckfaced, fuck-nutty, fuck my old boots!, or fuck the dog and sell the pups. You’ll see shit in the usual sources, but good luck finding shit-breath, shit factory, shit-squirting, shit out, or shit on the dining room table.* Regular dictionaries just don’t cover the remarkable range of taboo vocabulary, nor should they.

For this we turn to specialist slang dictionaries. These do not shy from obscenity but embrace it in…

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Tbilisi, 1902

Excavated Shellac

It was winter in the South Caucasus, and an American recording engineer in his mid-20s named William Sinkler Darby was on the road.

Darby was already a pioneer in that fledgling industry, having worked in Emile Berliner’s studio in Washington, DC, in the mid-1890s. After arriving in London in 1899 to meet his former colleague at Berliner, Fred Gaisberg, and to help establish the soon-to-be massive Gramophone Company, Darby would begin an itinerant lifestyle that would take him across multiple continents in just a few years – rarely, it seems, with the time to look back. The market for sound recordings was beginning to explode.

He began traveling long distances by rail as Gaisberg’s steadfast companion and assistant, demonstrating the new gramophone and recording artists across Europe. Within a short time, they’d recorded in Leipzig, Budapest, Vienna, Milan, Paris, Madrid, Valencia, Glasgow, Belfast, and Cardiff. By 1901, Darby started to…

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Forgotten buildings: the tower at the top of the hill

the Napoleon of Notting Hill, eh_

The Library Time Machine

For the Victorians the movement of water around London whether for drinking, bathing or washing sewage away was much more than a simple utilitarian process. It was one of the pinnacles of new technology, and an essential part of the growth of civilisation. The mastery of flowing water was one of the great skills of urban living. So the buildings and structures associated with it whether below or above ground were subject to the same aesthetic principles as any other grand public building. Hence the impressive Italianate tower above which stood at the peak of Campden Hill and dominated the local skyline for more than a hundred years. You saw it first in the Towers of Kensington post but as I looked deeper I found quite a few pictures illustrating the tower’s rise and fall.

The Grand Junction Water Works Company acquired the site in 1843 in order to build…

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The Points Interview: J. J. Binder

Source: The Points Interview: J. J. Binder

bad mofo_

A Crime is Afoot: July 2017 Leisure Reading

Source: A Crime is Afoot: July 2017 Leisure Reading

Guest Blog: Riding Shotgun and Other American Cruelties by Andy Rausch

Source: Guest Blog: Riding Shotgun and Other American Cruelties by Andy Rausch

He Didn’t Even Say Goodbye. He Didn’t Take The Time To Lie.

Source: He Didn’t Even Say Goodbye. He Didn’t Take The Time To Lie.

“The world’s the same, there’s just less in it.”

“We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?”   Martin Stone has moved on. The tip-tapping man of many pockets, drainpipe legs and dangling Gauloises has succumbed to a grim an…

Source: “The world’s the same, there’s just less in it.”

“The world’s the same, there’s just less in it.”

remembering Martin Stone..book hound_

Bibliodeviancy

“We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?”

Martin Stone; patron saint of lost books and booksellers. (photographer unknown, but it’s a great jacket)

Martin Stone has moved on. The tip-tapping man of many pockets, drainpipe legs and dangling Gauloises has succumbed to a grim and irresistible disease. The flea markets of Paris and the stalls of Portobello should, by rights, be islands of silence.

Not for too long though, Martin wouldn’t like that, just a minute or two of quiet, slightly damp, reflection followed by a shrug and a return to bustling commerce.

His kind of memorial would involve a knowing nod and the production of some specially secreted oddity from under a stall; a sly grin and a “I thought you might come by. Take a look at this.”

Stop all the clocks, shut the bloody dog up, all that stuff. He dealt…

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musicology #0736

themusicologist

Nubag #5 (a year in the life)

El Bang Bang – Jackie Mittoo

(Sir Coxson) Downbeat marrow trembler courtesy of the majestic Jackie Mittoo, (the backbone of Studio 1 throughout the golden years), and the brentford road massive aka the Skatalites, the soul brothers, Sound Dimension the Brentford road all stars/disco set at the top of the game. released in 1966, (as the Ska slid into the Rock Steady) on Downbeat’s genre defining Studio 1/Supreme Label.

Regulars on themusicologist know how strongly the ‘Keyboard King’ has been representing over the years due to his credentials as one of the greats of the music that I love. Jackie is/was and will always be the KING of Studio 1 for me

there are rare tunes and there are BOSS tunes..no doubt which category this STANDS in.

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humbug

For many years I dismissed David Bowie as a shallow opportunist. What was he doing that Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, conceptually and musically, hadn’t done with more wit and originality? I saw him at the Greyhound in Croydon in the summer of 1972, supported by Roxy Music in a pub room that can’t have held more than 200 people. He did the Ziggy Stardust thing, he and the band in full costume, and I didn’t care for it much.

Those particular songs still don’t do anything for me, but time sometimes dissolves prejudices and now I can see that what I took to be shallowness and opportunism were aspects of what we call the pop process: the way things evolve through mimesis and metamorphosis, adapting to their time. And the response to the sudden news of his death leaves no doubt of the profound impact he had on people whose lives were then in the process of being formed.

It wasn’t until the time of the Berlin trilogy that I started to take him seriously, but then he lost me again. I went to see him again at Wembley Arena in the early ’80s, and he looked to me like a man who’d run dry. But I liked the records he made with Nile Rodgers — if you’ve seen Frances Ha, you’ll know the wonderful sequence in which Greta Gerwig’s character skips through the streets of New York to the sound of “Modern Love” and the whole cinema seems to lift about a foot off the ground.

This morning I found myself going into Soho to buy his new album, queuing behind a bunch of people doing exactly the same thing. I could tell you that I was going to buy it today in any case, and it would be true: the idea of Bowie working with jazz musicians sounded intriguing, if not necessarily guaranteed to work.

I’m listening to blackstar now, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that Bowie knew exactly what he was doing when he scheduled its release. It sounds like the supremely elegant farewell of an artist standing squarely on the platform of his past achievements in order to reach still further, one last time. It’s worthy of the famous line fromMacbeth: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.”

It isn’t jazz, of course, or anything like it. The skills of the musicians are put to a different purpose. In the mesh of textures created from the available palette, in the brilliant settings of his allusive lyrics, in the masterful sense of pacing (listen to the closing of “Lazarus”), in the aching poignancy of “Dollar Days” (“If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to/It’s nothing to me/It’s nothing to see”), in the purposeful channeling of energy and the constant sense of newness from start to finish, this sounds like Bowie music at its most fully realised and powerfully affecting. What a way to say goodbye.

Frestonia: the past is another country

nicked _

The Library Time Machine

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away (the past) a brave person of restricted growth and his staunch companions threw off the bonds of oppression and created their own magical land…….

Well, perhaps that’s not the way to tell it. North Kensington, once called by Michael Moorcock “the most delicious slum in Europe” was once a hotbed of community activism. Barricades were built, protests were made, community newspapers were published, councillors were locked in meeting halls. In the days before social media and citizen journalism, people made theselves heard with all the means at their disposal. One of those means was the creation of the Free Republic of Frestonia.

The building of the Westway cut through North Kensington leaving some parts of it a bit stranded. Latimer Road was truncated, Walmer Road was bisected (see this post, which has many interesting comments from former residents) and…

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The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson: A New Film By Julien Temple

Source: The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson: A New Film By Julien Temple

Bob Dylan and Paul Clayton

Bring You Chickens

One of Bob Dylan’s greatest songs is “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (1962). Apparently, Dylan learned the tune from Paul Clayton’s song “Who’s Goin’ to Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone?” (1960). And Clayton seems to have gotten at least the lyrical idea for his song from an older song called “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone.”

Here’s a passage from Spitz’s biography of Dylan:

A more delicate wrinkle arose of the authorship of “Don’t Think Twice.” No one complained about the lyric; it was so damn original that folksingers admitted losing sleep over it. But the melody had a familiar ring to it. Word began to spread that Bob had lifted it almost note for note from Paul Clayton’s ballad, “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Ribbon Saw.” That in itself wasn’t a contemptible offense. By definition, folk music encouraged an element of borrowing from sources to preserve…

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Now In Stock: Leeds & Catlin / American Record Co. – Hawthorne & Sheble – International Record Co. Discographies

78-RPM RECORDS • THE MAINSPRING FREE STREAMING SITE

Save When Your Order Both Books as a Set

Our long-awaited “rogue record company” discographies are here. Each book features discographical details never before compiled in a modern work — along with illustrated, fully documented histories of these companies, and the people behind them, that are the most comprehensive accounts published to date.

List price is $45 per book, with free U.S. shipping — but for a limited time, we’re offering  $11 off* when you order the set of two. For more information and secure online or mail-in ordering, please visit the Mainspring Press website.

*On U.S. orders. Comparable discounts are also offered on foreign orders — see website for foreign pricing.

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WISE BROTHERS FLOG KING MOB ARCHIVE TO TATE BRITAIN!

Ian Bone

Oh what fun it is to see –  the situationists flogging their back catalogue to Tate Britain. From viewing the Tate’s magazine you can see wannabee situationist/angry brigader HARI KUNZRU enthusing over Tate Britain’s acquisitionof the Wise Brothers KING MOB archive…..www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue13/kingmob

Front cover of a King Mob anti-culture publication
Courtesy Tate Archive © Tate. Photo: Rod Tidnam

The gap here should be taken up with a King Mob cover picture – but its now Tate copywrite!

Now I’ve never met either Dave or Stuart Wise and they’ve always been a bit too clever by half sniffy about Class War but what the fuck – they’ve produced some of the most exciting and radical projects and writing from the 60s onwards – and still do at their website www.revoltagainstplenty.com with the top meditation on pub closures’Last Orders for the local’. The there was KING MOB ECHO/UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKER/SUMMER OF A 1,00 JULYS/ONCE UPON…

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The Nyckelharpa

Excavated Shellac

From the Great Steppe, we now travel to the middle of Sweden, to a small village about five miles outside the city of Örebro called Tysslinge. In the previous entry we focused on the morin khuur of Mongolia, and now we’ll pause for a little rumination on one of the most dignified and fascinating stringed instruments of Europe, the nyckelharpa.

Without a doubt, the nyckelharpa, sometimes described as the bowed hurdy-gurdy, is positively medieval. Its origins date back to at least the middle of the 14th century, and documentation of its use and existence under various names and slight iterations appear in church paintings, early books on music, and relief sculptures, for several hundred years, until the modern era. The nyckelharpa is a “keyed fiddle,” and quite large. Played with a bow and held with a strap around the neck, the instrument today has 16 strings and 37 keys…

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This Day in Jazz – The greatest photograph in the history of Jazz

thejazzword

Photographer Art Kane took the most wonderful photograph in jazz history – remarkable for many reasons. In features 57 of the best jazz musicians and the image has come to be called, ‘A Great Day In Harlem’.

Kane, a freelance photographer was on assignment for Esquire magazine, and took the picture at around 10 a.m. on 12 August 1958 at 17 East 126th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenue in Harlem. Esquire published the photo in its January 1959 issue. In 1994 a TV documentary was made as to how this incredible photo came to be taken, one that Quincy Jones calls, “An astonishing photograph.”

What makes this photo so extraordinary is that it was Art Kane’s first photo shoot; he was an art director for various New York magazines. He was given the chance and it was Kane’s idea to take the photo in Harlem, a risk on many…

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The Adventures of Tintin in the Opium Empire

Antia Berber..an every day lady_enjoy

Hermanos Hernández – Eugenia

Excavated Shellac

Two posts today. I couldn’t decide, and I like variety.

If you only consulted discographies or cursory sources on the web, you might think that this lively string band that recorded several dozen discs for Victor and Bluebird in 1928, 1929, and again in 1936, was Mexican. Even some of their records plainly say “Mexican” on them. Despite this, a look at their repertoire more closely, as well as sources in Spanish, reveal that they were in fact from Colombia.

Gonzalo, Héctor, and Francisco “Pacho” Hernández were virtuoso instrumentalists from Bogotá who played guitar, Colombian tiple, and bandola (similar to the mandolin). In the early 1920s, after touring locally, in Venezuela, and in the Caribbean, they toured the US, Canada, Europe, and even Africa. Their repertoire and recorded output was wide enough to include a host of local bambucos and pasillos, but also waltzes, corridos, paso dobles, and even classical…

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Shelley at Oxford pt3 ~

quote of the year ~

there’s no way you could ever  hate me half as much as I don’t care _

Sacred Cow

The Missionary Position ~

This book details another side of the Catholic Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta.  Anyone with that long a title must surely be most beneficial to the existence of mankind.  Right?

From an interview with Mother Theresa:

Q:  ”So you wouldn’t agree with people who say there are too many children in India?”

A:  ”I do not agree because God always provides.  He provides for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world that he has created.   And those little children are his life.  There can never be enough.”

Perhaps there is another opinion:

God obviously does not provide for every animal and plant.  Nor every person.  Species go extinct.  Animals starve to death from competition in the wild.  Plants whither and die in drought.  People suffer and starve.  This woman dedicated her life to helping the poor.  Her help included spreading religion and an anti-birth control message.  She may have fed the poor but also helped to create more poverty.

Our society has brought us unprecedented wealth through our growth in technology.  It has also wrought great poverty in underdeveloped societies.  Charity is a temporary fix to a growing problem.  It is the basic human rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that should be granted to all people.  Instead, billions of people are unable to pursue these goals because they don’t have their basic needs met.  They don’t have food, shelter, drinking water, medicine, or sanitation.  I therefore urge you to give whatever you can in charity, but I also urge you more importantly to promote the development of mankind worldwide so that people can have not just the opportunity to survive, but to thrive.

the abbot of Unreason..the feast of fools

Even our most excellent and guileless prophets, the unmistakable representatives of God, who when unhindered in their work are our faithful ministers, are treated with insolence.” For the soldiers, they spend all their wages in riot and loose women, see plays perhaps, “for they learn vulgarity and the practices of actors”. Their military discipline is relaxed and slackened. They make sport of the laws and the government of which they have been appointed guardians. For they ridicule and insult the august government. They mount a chariot as though upon a stage; they appoint pretended lictors and publicly act like buffoons. This is the nobler part of their ribaldry. But their other doings, how can one mention them? Does not the champion, the lion-hearted man, the man who when armed is the admiration of his friends and the terror of his foes, loose his tunic to his ankles, twine a girdle about his breast, use a woman’s sandal, put a roll of hair on his head in feminine fashion, and ply the distaff full of wool, and with that right hand which once bore the trophy, draw out the thread, and changing the tone of his voice utter his words in the sharper feminine treble?

merry crimbo ~

Enjoy your day my little porkers ..may all wishes come tru’

The BoN CluB ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW5abat5NEU

 

double trouble ~

strange dazes

Eva Rausing ~ Junkie

let the dead bury the dead…

any chance of a quickie

STEAL ~

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 jam yesterday…jam tomorrow but never jam today ~ click here for a little blood _ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDpnjE1LUvE

Lady Tampax..??

fame makes the ugly beautiful & the beautiful into icons of exaggerated perfection,

so the war is over..god save the new queen..click here for Mickael Moorcock  _http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu3RARqBCdI&list=FL1vI7YGVzp5iXoDX4eR9pKg&index=7&feature=plcphttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu3RARqBCdI&list=FL1vI7YGVzp5iXoDX4eR9pKg&index=7&feature=plcp

monkey on ya back ~

as I went out walking one day,

I met Uncle Tricky on the way ~

shit happens…