2 cool music blogs

Here are links to a couple of fellow bloggers´sites which I've posted messages on.
Fellow Englishman in Spain, Heavy Usker. Lots of sunny beats on these podcasts.
http://radiomadrid.blogspot.com/
'Psych-folk'. Every track sublime.
http://www.brownsounds.blogspot.com/
Respect due.

My favourite poem

Girl In A Miniskirt Reading The Bible Outside My Window – Charles Bukowski

Sunday,
I am eating a
grapefruit,
church is over at the Russian Orthadox to the
west.

she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down.

a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rythmic dance
reading the Bible. . .

long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it's a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long yellow legs warm in the sun. . .

there is no escaping her being
there is no desire to. . .

my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hear
but her movements coincide exactly
to the rythms of the
symphony. . .

she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God.

I am God.

First blood

Here's what's come thru on Emule since I got it up n' runnin'.
Need to get onto Soulseek though for more obscurities...

The Sopranos Series 6 Episodes1 & 2
Broken Flowers

Santana & Mahavishnu Orchestra - Live In Chicago 1973
Chet Baker & Art Pepper - The Route
Cut Copy - Bright Like Neon Love
DJ Dangermouse - The GreyAlbum
Color Strip - Jimmy Edgar
Broken Flowers soundtrack
Yusef Lateef - The Blue Yusef Lateef

By the way, we don't have the right programs installed to play any of this shit yet... So it could all be LA gay boys entering each other (what we got when my girlfriend tried to download the Hung Up video last year... Hilarious.)
She's got more files through than me, though she's been searching for less.
Who'd have thought James Blunt and Green Day were easier to find than Paris Soul by Ben & The Platano Group (1971)? I mean, really, who?

Podcasts & mp3 blogs

I've discovered free music on the Internet. I have tonnes of stuff. This is before I even start with peer to peer programs like Emule and Soulseek.

Here's some podcast tips for anyone who stumbles onto my page in RandomBlogLand...

Quincy Essential Music
http://quincyessentialmusic.libsyn.com/

Bending Corners
http://www.bendingcorners.com/

Paris DJs
http://parisdjs.libsyn.com/index.php?post_year=2006&post_month=03

Broken Beat Radio
http://www.brokenbeatradio.com/shows/bbradio-031306.html

Avolta Jr
http://www.thepodcasters.com/

Ropeadope
http://www.ropeadope.com/

Soul sociedad
http://www.soulsociedad.com/sessions2005.htm

Straight No Chaser
http://straightnochaserjazz.blogspot.com/

I Dream Of Boj

I had a dream a couple of nights ago. Someone rang my mobile in my old living room and said 'Hello there you young old speccy four eyes. I was just looking at your blog and I just wanted to tell you it seems you have a lot of interestingness in your life right now.' I said who's this? and got the reply 'Boj'.

I Dream Of Matisse

Cold blue canvas
In a warm room
Somewhere.
Mocking words,
Insufficient
In these combinations.

Mascleta!

Today I went to my first mascleta which is a series of explosions for five minutes. The Plaza d'Ayuntamiento was packed out. Its addictive, I'm looking forward to seeing it again - they have it everyday til the end of fallas - 19th March. My girlfriend told me to keep my mouth open because its so loud it can burst your eardrums. A woman in front of us fainted and had to be carried out. If I can compare it to anything it would be the strange compulsion of popping bubblewrap but on a much larger, louder scale.

OCD

Have a headache from downloading image files from the Adam Baumgold gallery http://www.adambaumgoldgallery.com/inventory.htm. Lots of interesting artists I've never heard of here.
Sigh. My art teacher discouraged me from painting because I couldn't draw in 3D and create realistic pictures of ropes and apples. Seeing some of this makes me want to get back in the saddle though, along with my novel writing (going slowly, avid Wooodenelephant fans). I used to do lots of cartoons. Maybe one day I'll scan them up here. Watch this space! For probably quite a long time! So art, literature... What about music? Can't get my head round the technology. Maybe I should give it another try...

Art brut

I went to an exhibition here in Valencia called 'El fuego bajo las cenizas' featuring pieces by Picasso and Basquiat. I wasn't much of a gallery visitor in London but I returned to this exhibition at the IVAM three times in August before it ended at the end of the month.
The IVAM also had a terrific photography exhibition (many styles represented) - including a 1960 collage by Antonio Saura, Richard Hamilton's My Marilyn and Wim Wenders' widescreen shot of the Road To Damascus (so good seeing this dawn(?) shot in a huge print.
But the 'El fuego' exhibition was the big draw and from it I discovered Jean Dubuffet, seen as the godfather of art brut / naive art / tribal art. I'm having trouble finding reproductions on the 'net of the Dubuffets exhibited in Valencia last year (such as 'Comments') but my liking for him has lead me to discover other exponents of art brut such as Darger, Wolfifi, Walla, Carlo, Guillame Pujolle (all institutionalised with the exception of recluse Darger - an innovative bio-film is out which I'd love to see). There's also Sanfourche whose jolly simplistic colourful smiling men recall what attracted me to the Dubuffets - and whose work I'd like to see a lot more of.
A link on all the mad art brutists is http://rawvision.com/abcd/abcdframes_def.html

Discourse on the Internet experience

I don't know. 40 Euros a month. Is it worth it? With some music file sharing into the bargain I guess it would be.
I like photos, arts, cartoons so I'm quite addicted to flickr, the lambiek comiclopedia and a couple of art sites which have a lot of good downloadable reproductions. Working my way through a couple of links pages. Found a couple of good photoblogs - chromasia and genestho. There must be tons out there though, huh?

Junk For Code

Now that's a good blog.

Harmony Korine

Was just reading about Korine's unfinished Fight Harm project.
What a loon!

Words I didn't know from David Mamet's Wilson : The First 12

While reading Mamet's latest I kept a notebook of some of the words I didn't know and have been checking out AskOxford.com for some definitions...

orthography - the conventional spelling system of a language

philology - the study of the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages

chimera - something hoped for but illusory or impossible to achieve

nascent - just coming into existence and beginning to develop

arcane - understood by few; mysterious

abstruse - difficult to understand; obscure

doggerel - comic or badly written verse

acrostic - a poem or puzzle in which certain letters in each line form a word or words

picayune - petty; worthless

bathos - (in literature) an unintentional change in mood from the important and serious to the trivial or ridiculous

analgesic - relieving pain / a pain-relieving drug

apotheosis - the culmination or highest point: science is the apotheosis of the intellect

More to come soon!
Stay tuned!
Tell all your friends!

Corporation:Blend splits up

Got in touch with an old pal in London where I used to live and he told me another old pal's band had gone their separate ways.
Got me musing (again) about how nice it would be to be in a band, especially one with longevity like REM, RHCP or personal old faves Teenage Fanclub. To hang out with the same dudes for a decade or two, seeing all those changes in your lives and expressing them with music.
And last night, out walking my girlfriend's dog, I heard the sound of some people jamming, an acoustic guitar strumming, a Brazilian vibe. I looked at the lighted window and sighed with that special nostalgia reserved for another's life glimpsed.
As it turned out, the music was coming from a nearby car radio, but you know what I mean.

Jean Baudrillard on television

"It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation ... Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its messages indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared)," (America 49-50).

Bran Van 3000

I was looking for free music downloads today.
I found a site called epitonic and i've been listening to tunes i downloaded earlier all afternoon.
Astounded by Bran Van 3000 just came up. Pretty good. Singer sounds a lot like Curtis Mayfield. I was reading how the band was formed after a guy walked into a music store with ten thousand dollars he'd just earned shooting a music video. Their big hit I remember was Drinking In LA and it was on a beer advert. This is the problem with devoting all your free time to the consumption of media - you find out about all these people with more fun lives than you.

First post

Just got the Internet in my flat a couple of days ago. Told myself I'd use it to research things and write a novel.
So far this hasn't happened.