Screw your wig on tight!

Went to the library this evening to begin work on my final essay; however, I was very tired and pretty much ended up just watching this video over and over again, as I think it might be one of the most mesmerising  performances I've ever seen.

Kaleidoscopic

If hip hop seems to be the genre with the worst album covers (except maybe obscure folk), then I think jazz might have some of the coolest, as evidenced by Don Cherry's Symphony for Improvisers.

Here's a number of some of my other favourite covers (in every case, the quality of the cover seems to reflect the quality of the music, so give them a listen):

















As you can probably tell, I'm on a bit of a jazz kick at the moment. It's a huge and confusing world of great music, and it's really enjoyable to search through it, try and recognise the different genres and sub-genres (I'll admit, at first, a lot of jazz sounded the same to me, but I'm getting there), and discover loads of amazing artists who are described on wikipedia as "one of the greatest musicians of the 2oth century", or "instrumental in the formation of bebop" or whatever, but who I have never even heard of before.

Last night I got a fair bit of work done on my dissertation, and it's almost finished. For my library session I bought 40 Mingus tracks off iTunes for £2.49! Insane. I was there about 3 hours listening to that one compilation and I don't think I heard the same song twice.

Today was my last ever undergraduate class at Dundee, for my Bob Dylan module, and it was as infuriating as ever; there was six people there, of which only I and one other loudmouth talked (the other loudmouth, however, didn't seem to have a clue what he was talking about, whereas I hope I displayed at least a scrap of intelligence in the points I made).

It'll be good to leave Dundee, and I'm sort of hoping I'll be able to go to Durham, although it depends how much money the AHRC offer me, if they offer anything at all. The recent student elections were pretty much the last straw; I got emotionally involved, because one of my friends was running (and he actually had great policies, bar one about a bus to Kirkcaldy which I wasn't so sure about), and he didn't get elected, whereas a hideous girl, whom I hate with a massive and unhealthy passion, got voted in to another position, despite having no real ideas and having a terrible series of massive personality flaws. So pretty much lose/lose for me. I actually had the optimism to believe my friend would win, but I suppose I put too much belief in it being a fair contest, rather than the popularity competition I knew it to be (call me bitter).

While the whole ridiculous affair was fairly upsetting (dodging canvassers was also very irritating), it was quite amusing to have prior and current candidates googling for their names along with my blog to see if I was bad mouthing them again.

Anyway, it'll be nice to move on to somewhere else, unless I get offered so much money that it would be stupid to go somewhere else. I guess we'll see.

Jazz jumper

I posted some bad album covers a while back, here's one that I found which is great, and it's from an awesome album:



If I could play like Don Cherry (or at all), I'd be a very satisfied man. If I had a jumper like this one, I'd be an ecstatically happy man. Not sure why he looks so confused/lost, if I had that jumper I wouldn't care where I was.

Barbara Peppers

I enjoyed a day of cheap retail therapy today. Last night we were faced with the unfortunate discovery that we had booked our flight out to Berlin in April on the wrong day, so we had to pay 50 bucks to change it; this meant that the pipe dream of buying some new junk before leaving was fading fast. However, I was able to find a pair of really decent 20 quid black jeans in H&M, a place usually devoid of any decent clothing. I also picked up a new razor, and, as Head was closing down, a large stack of CDs on the cheap. For about £18, I purchased:

Bobby Digital - Digi Snaks,

Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life,

Yacht - I Believe in You. Your Magic is Real,

El Guincho - Alegranza,

Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends,

Popular Workshop - We're Alive and We're Not Alone,

Aids Wolf - Cities of Glass,

Outkast - Aquemini,

Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,

White Denim - Workout Holiday,

Grampall Jookabox - Ropechain,

Abe Vigoda - Skeleton.

Pretty amazing, right? This means I'll be able to completely overhaul my rather stale iPod before our trip. I have to be sure to take my time over these though; I missed out on 36 Chambers for the longest time when I got it cheap from the Woolworths close-down sale, because I simply overlooked it and put it to one side, having only paid about 20p for it.

It's amazing, the place was just full of great CDs that they'd only just put out for sale; the staff obviously weren't interested in any of this great music, and they probably figured that the general public wouldn't be, and I guess they were pretty much right. It's nice to take when CDs are cheap enough to take a few chances, and buy things that you love but have listened to so much that you probably wouldn't bother buying on CD.

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago

I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that
In a sailor's suit and cap
Away from the big city
Where a man can not be free
Of all of the evils of this town
And of himself, and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know.

William Hodges - A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits (New Zealand) with Waterspout, 1776.

Stop the violence

I feel kinda funny doing this, because I think Michael might have posted the second of these videos not that long ago and it might seem like I'm just bitin' his style. However, as you can see from these two videos, sometimes it's for the greater good to all to emulate others:

Snake charming

Dissertation seems to going pretty well. Obviously I don't know right now if I'm actually writing a load of shite, but the word count is on a steady rise, and that's good enough for me at the moment.

Anyways, I'm amazed that this even happened, never mind that I found it:



I know, it's too short.

I guess it shows how little I actually know about jazz, when two of my favourite musicians played together quite extensively and I didn't even know about it. Dolphy's last tour was with Mingus; there are a couple of stories about his death, one of which is that he collapsed on stage and was taken to hospital in a diabetic coma. The hospital attendants, thinking that he was probably just drugged out of his mind like most jazz musicians, left him alone to allow whatever was in his system to work it's way out again, and he died.

That's the difference between us

Why's everybody always pickin' on me?

A couple of little puzzles have been solved for me recently. The first was the song "I Like to Eat Eat Eat Apples and Bananas", a song which I felt sure a boy (now man, if someone my age can be considered a man) from my school named Graham Brameld invented, but which I now know, thanks to the school I work at, is actually an old children's song. Here's a Barney version:



Irritating, I know, and that was the least irritating one I could find.

The other thing was the phrase "why's everybody always picking on me?", said in a deep south accent, which I started saying to Heather when she would complain that I was bullying her, but without knowing where it came from. I haven't ever heard this song, to my knowledge, but I guess at some point someone must have sung it to me. I actually found it because I was looking for a specific Charlie Brown strip, and there was a link to it on another blog:



So there we go, two small problems solved.

In Heaven

Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat, college.

OK, it's been a while since I've posted anything other than just a video or a comic strip, but there a few things which have come to my attention (unfortunately for them, me and you), so I thought I'd make this a lengthy post to make up for the lack of chatter coming from my side in the past few weeks (or months).

Let's start with this: I've watched three interesting films in the last three days, all interesting for different reasons. One musical and two comedies. The first of these was Gigi:



I admit, I didn't watch all of this trailer, because I couldn't subject myself to any more of this nonsense, but I watched enough to tell you that the trailer misrepresents the movie (surprise surprise). It gives the impression that Gigi is interested in finding a man, when in fact, the clip which shows her asking her great aunt rather sardonically about whether her family marries, is immediately followed in the film by a song about how she doesn't understand why Parisians are so obsessed by love.

In fact, this one of the longest sequences in which we actually see Gigi. Practically all of the rest of the time she is just an incredibly young piece of meat that gets handed around between her grandmother, great aunt and (by the end of the film) fiance, a rich spoiled twat who sings that everything "is a bore!" all the way through the film. I know it's the fifties, but Jesus, this film is incredibly sexist and borderline perverted, what with the opening song (sung by a very old, leery dude who is the only person to bother with a French accent in the film) being "Thank Heaven For Little Girls", the tone of which seems to be "Oh, I know we shouldn't really think about young girls sexually... but just look at them! And besides, one day they'll be old enough, so it's good to get in early and take advantage when their young and stupid, then you can shag them and dump them when they get too wrinkly/naggy/clingy/dependent." The dude who sings this is seriously scary, and everyone refers to him as being young at heart, when in fact he appears to simply be an old perv who uses money and his ridiculously shiny teeth to take advantage of young women. At one point you think he's going to settle down with Gigi's grandmother, as they have a romantic sing song, but no, after that scene, in which they appear to be quite close, you never hear of their relationship again.

As for Gigi herself, she drifts around in the background, with her incredibly obnoxious great aunt taking up loads of screen time, until suddenly the "it's a bore!" guy decides he's in love with her, and pretty much offers to buy her from her grandmother. Gigi, far from seeing anything wrong with this, objects because she'll be too much in the public eye, because "it's a bore!" is super fucking rich. However, five minutes later she comes round and decides to go out with him, they go out to dinner, he gets embarrassed for some reason, drags her home, leaves her house, comes back, proposes, she accepts even though she just got humiliated and carried home like a child, the end.

9 fucking Oscars. Kind of casts in to light what a bunch of crap we'll probably be thinking the current Oscar winners in 50 years.

The other two were The Lady Killers and Annie Hall; I won't get in to too much detail, I've wasted enough time slagging of Gigi, as it's a lot more fun to trash something than praise it, but both were pretty excellent, Annie Hall being the better of the two, or at least my personal favourite. Woody Allen is a strange guy; I found myself both repulsed and attracted to his whiny complaining and constant wisecracking throughout the film. I guess he reminded me of me a little bit, as I'm pretty cynical, but not as intelligent or funny. Here's the opening, it pretty much sums up the film, in tone, but also because it's full of these interesting moments where the fourth wall is broken and Woody directly addresses the audience:



The other things that have been bothering me around to do with the university. Now I know I said I'd stay away from politics, especially student politics, but the nominations for the 2010 student executive elections are on the DUSA website, and I can't help but notice that our old friend Craig Kelly (who, in the past, kindly and anonymously said my blog was arrogant, along with some other such things, before posting a lovely and welcoming invitation to his office under his real name, I guess so as to have a dig at me while appearing above all such nasty, naughty name calling at the same time), is unopposed as President. That means he'll walk into a paid position of "authority and power" without even having to run. I don't envy him the position, but I do envy him the pay package, which will come practically work free if the actions of the last two presidents is anything to go by, as they don't seem to have done very much (allegedly).

I guess this might have put people off from running as president:

"Nomination forms can be picked up from Anne Marie Bottoms, Executive Support, 4^th Floor, DUSA during office hours of: 10:30 am – 1:30 pm. Should Anne Marie be unavailable at the time of pick up, leave her a message at extension: 81085 or e-mail her at: abottoms@dusa.co.uk"

Miss Bottom's email address would appear to be a joke one. No offence, Miss A. Bottoms.

Anyway, the other thing, which has been repeatedly rammed in my face this last week, is that the the humanities department is getting rid of one of their modules, Renaissance literature. Shock horror. There's a facebook campaign to save it, which makes it deadly serious of course, because it's so rare for someone to implement facebook as a way of expressing any minor annoyance they might have that once it happens, you know shit's about to hit the fan (/sarcasm). Both my tutors have made pleas (one in an email to everyone, one in my class today) asking people to calm down and stop being silly, as Renaissance literature will continue to be taught, and in fact will be extended, in first year modules (in fact, even if I wanted to or cared, it would be a be a bit hypocritical of me to join the campaign, since I avoided doing Renaissance in third year and only got the basic stuff in first and second year - but hey, it's done me alright). The problem for them, Aidan Day and Chris Murray, is that they are both running contentious, if, in my opinion, completely valid and excellent modules; British comic writers and Bob Dylan's song poetry. Now, some close minded nincompoops have attacked these modules, saying "duh... um... Shakespeares are important, comics ain't important, they're for kids, Bob Dylan sings songs and isn't proper england, up the Shakespeare" or whatever, which completely goes against the idea of opening new areas of research, but also displays a real ignorance about the topics in question.

So it's a bit annoying for me, because I thought I couldn't care less, but now I do, because there's a possibility that this half baked campaign about something uninteresting happening to a module I didn't even take and won't miss will actually effect modules I did take, loved and will miss. I find it easy to imagine the amount of shit Aidan and Chris get as it is for wanting to do something interesting and different, without people getting their axes ready to chop comics and Dylan to save Shakespeare, who is still going to be taught anyway (in fact, while level three Renaissance is optional, there's no dodging it in first year, so if they make it more extensive as a result of chopping the third year module, it'll probably be better for everyone).

Anyway, Heather's coming home soon and I need to go and make the tea. If Craig Kelly even bothers to run (why the hell would he?), I'll see if his campaign material is worth a cheap laugh or two and post it when it appears.

Toodle pip!

Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat, college.

Good morning blues