International House of Penis Songs

imomus

11:56 pm - Hecuba, Singh, Osaka

I'm in Osaka, jet-lagged but happy, eating sashimi and about to go soak in a sento.



The sequence of views from my Airbus window this morning was fascinating. First Mongolia, snowy moonlit high plains in the grey of dawn, looking like the surface of the moon. Then China, flat and vast. The rivers and quays around Beijing are shaped by man, and the ground sparkles with new, silvery industrial buildings. Smoke stacks throw plumes.

Then there's the extraordinary promontory of Dalian, with crinkly red mountains and affluent cities; the last part of China before the Yellow Sea and North Korea. Our route, as the crow flies, should take us through North Korea, but we fly carefully around it. We don't want to be mistaken for spies.

South Korea is amazingly slender, and Seoul ( on the seatback route map) surprisingly close to the DPRK border, and not far from Pyong Yang. Through little fluffy white clouds I see Seoul's high, boxy apartment blocks. I've been watching a Korean TV show on the plane entertainment system; tidy mother and messy mother swap apartments. The Korean flats shown are in exactly these big boxes, much larger than Japanese living spaces, with gigantic sofas and hypertrophic plasma TVs with Dolby cine-surround speaker systems. The rooms are all lit with overhead fluorescent light. The tables are low, like Japanese ones, but the colours are completely different from Japanese colours.

There's a little turbulence over the Sea of Japan, but soon we're descending over Fukuoka. Japan looks like an enchanted land, so different from the lugubrious, hostile and vast landscapes the plane has traversed so far. Suddenly there are wooded mountains with little clouds nestled in nooks and temples poised on top. There are the sandy-beached islands of the Seto Inland Sea, which we'll be investigating in January. There are shiny new bridges linking the echanted Pacific isles to each other. There are sudden cities (that's Shikuoka, and here comes Osaka) poured into the plains between forested mountains. This whole thing shouldn't really be here: the archipelago has pushed a series of volcanic heads out of the sea, but they remain dreamlike and somehow enchanted.

Soon we land on the artificial island which is Kansai International airport, and I'm marveling at... Well, I'm grumbling at the fact that striking Finnish baggage handlers have ensured that our luggage wasn't on the flight. But apart from that I'm struck by the super-niceness of all the Japanese employees I deal with, and the deep sense of superlegitimacy with which they do their jobs. Complete conviction, religious (but secular) devotion.

The luggage claim girl smiles sweetly, the currency exchange man fans and flick-counts my yen like a magician, and on the train to Tennoji a trainee steward is being choreographed by a supervisor through her duties, and making white-gloved gestures as precise and attentive as those of the man who guided our airbus to its docking bay, then bowed deeply to the Finnish plane.

The speckless cleanliness of everything, the escalator animated by a Shinto kami in the form of a voice telling you to take care, the extra-schoolgirlness of the schoolgirls, the strange medieval aspect of peasants tending microscopic fields, everything confirms my feeling that Japan is a religious society posing as a secular one, and that it's poetry compared with the prose of all other societies I've known. And yet somehow this "poetry" is deeply effective; as I've been reading in my complimentary copy of the Financial Times, Japan is still vastly powerful: the four dominant blocks of our time, says the paper, are the US, Japan, Europe and China, with India and Brazil far behind. So this island that just pops out of the sea like a volcanic afterthought to continental Asia somehow continues to pack enormous civilisational clout.

Anyway, I didn't intend to string my first impressions out quite so far. I was going to say "here, jet-lagged, happy" then point you to two articles of mine which have just appeared: Discovering a new band in real time, a piece in Playground investigating a Californian band called Hecuba (photo above), and 800 Words with Alexandre Singh, my conversation with a young British lectures-based artist living in New York, published by Art in America.

08:00 am - To Go Online, Or Not.

http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=12052009

trahari

09:02 pm - TWIT TAR

• 09:12 Guys it's pretty foggy out. Kinda cool. #seattle phodroid.com/09/12/mvdtcd #
• 19:31 Tonight, Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire will meet his maker. I guess that would be the game engine, incl. Gamebryo, Scaleform? #fb #

van_beckman

11:20 pm - Van Twitters

• 14:59 @lizpurcell Come on, hope is so 2008. Stop "drinking the kool-aid" already! #sarcasm #
• 20:00 @jeanineomatic Use the Force! #
• 21:01 The apocalypse (like most things) comes late to Worland: waiting for 2012 to open in a few minutes. Tin foil hat ON. #

12:04 am - In Which I Test Posterous

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/in-which-i-test-posterous.html

I'm testing http://posterous.com out, as a way of posting to Blogger from my phone, using email. So this is a test posting...

I'm attaching the "mass market" paperback cover for Fragile Things, which will be released in the US in February. It shows someone who looks like me with jam, or dreams, or ideas, squidging out of a book and all over him.

I finished a short story - technically, I suppose, a novelette, as it's 10,000 words - that I've been working on for much of the year. For most of that time, even through to the end of the first draft, a couple of weeks ago, I was convinced it was never going to work, would be a stunted, crippled little thing that was doomed to disappoint me. I knew it was missing something. What that something was occurred to me last week, exhausted after a yoga session in Boston, as my mind blanked, and later I wrote two short paragraphs in my notebook. Those paragraphs percolated and began to breathe, and I put them in and the story shifted, subtly, around them. The second draft took wing, and I found I was clear enough in my mind about what the story was that taking out things that weren't part of the story and putting in things that were was now easy, and the more I did it the better the story got, and now I'm happier with it than I've been with anything I've written for well over a year. It's called "The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains..." and it is not exactly a happy story.

Right...

Dear Neil,

Patrick Rothfuss is making the world a better place in a very tangible way with his charity run Worldbuilders 2009. (http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/blog/2009/12/worldbuilders-2009.html) My sphere of influence in this world is rather small, but you could, just by mentioning it in your blog, raise a lot of awareness and thus help a Very Good Cause. It would mean a lot to me, and no doubt a helluva lot more to Pat and the people that receive Heifer's help. Many thanks and much love,

a fan of Wonderful People,
Gaetan Verhegge

Consider it plugged enthusiastically. I sent Patrick a signed copy of the incredibly beautiful STARDUST Advanced Reader's Copy when he did this last year, and it got to him a little late, so he has that along with many other amazing and beautiful books to give to people who donate. Check it out.

Hi Neil,

Hmm. Okay. I'll email this in, now. Not sure how I can do the blogger labels, though. Let's see if it works.

Posted via email from Neil's posterous

11:00 pm - Tuesday 4 December 1666

http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1666/12/04/

Up, and to the office, where we sat all the morning. At noon dined at home. After dinner presently to my office, and there late and then home to even my Journall and accounts, and then to supper much eased in mind, and last night's good news, which is more and more confirmed with particulars to very good purpose, and so to bed.

secretspice

02:36 pm - The emotional rollercoaster that is my job.

Some days I am beside myself hopeful. We're a tiny non-profit that got hit by Madoff in one of the worst economies in the country, and we're expanding! We got selected for some super competitive grants recently to provide a lot of really fantastic services. We're making real policy changes - finally - on the state level, and we're at the forefront on national criminal justice issues too. There is a lot to be excited about!

But goddamn, some days. We get probably 15 people in here every week who need a job with the worst kind of desperation. We screen and screen and screen and test and test and test and make them jump through hoops and hoops. And then we maybe find a sympathetic employer who's willing to give it a shot. And maybe he hires some of our guys - the good ones, the dedicated, persistent, excellent ones - and maybe they have great attitudes that first day. But you wouldn't believe how many of them fuck it up. Even after everything, fuck it up.

They usually have a reason. A job interview for a better job, getting lost, couldn't get childcare, thrown back in prison for some bullshit bureaucratic reason, a relapse, whatever... But for every guy we place, probably 25% of them find a way to mess it up right off the bat. Sometimes it feels like as many as 50% do.

You try and sell a program like that to an employer when you know that's the case. I talk to my housemate, who's a manager at a restaurant, and hear what she ends up firing people for. Taking cigarette breaks when they aren't supposed to, general insubordination, etc. And I get it. I used to be a manager, too. I look at our guys, at the shit they pull, and sit here in awe that anyone in their right mind would work with us or this population. Ever. Let alone give us another chance to recommend someone for a job.

Some days you really feel like you're lying when you say all people need is the chance.

And it's not really their faults. A job is such a tiny little piece of what people need. As my co-worker says - it's like these guys need a reset button. On their whole lives.

I guess it's just like. The weight of it all just gets to you after awhile. So you wait for the next bright young face to come along, and hope that this one won't disappoint.

maps_or_guitars

11:17 am - A lyric I'm working on and don't want to forget

Weird. I recorded a rough of this to tape this morning before I left the house, and for the life of me I can't remember the chords or melody. I mean, at all. I'm really looking forward to hearing it.

maybe you're right
i called
i wait to see
if it's right to be lonely
and maybe you took
the day
alone to feel
if you needed to be alone

some barrier lifted
and you ran out into the night without me

(needs another verse here)

this calendar's wasted
it's empty and spent
blank page after page
don't you know what these
empty spaces mean to me

Current Mood: brainfarty

08:53 am - Friday Walrus-Blogging: Thief of Yesterday Edition

http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/friday-walrus-blogging-thief-of.html

phantastes

11:20 pm

First proper snowfall of the year last night, not counting all those that made this October the snowiest on record, as they were miserable and unseasonable, while this was lovely and transformative as it ought to be, leaving one ready for Christmas trees and candles in Advent wreaths.

Feeling in a mood to type, but having nothing else in particular to write about, I'll perhaps mention a few pleasing musical discoveries I've made of late:
I could easily imagine myself getting a bit obsessed with the folks at Ghost Box Records (stumbled upon after having my curiosity piqued by a review of an album whose title involves investigation of “Witch Cults of the Radio Age”). I'm not at all certain I'd be all that captivated by the music if heard out of context, but on the whole it's pleasing enough and the whole package, with references to Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and even the considerably less hip CS Lewis, the tourist brochures for an invented small English town, paperback-novel-style graphic design, owls and ghosts and BBC Radiophonic Workshop Doctor Who soundtrack-style sound effects, radio jingles and fake educational films teaching about mathematics and folklore, is as utterly charming as can be; I've had a lovely time poking around their world for the last evening or two.

In a somewhat similar vein, but a bit more musically satisfying, I'd like to mention that the latest album by the Clientele is pretty damn near perfect, the first set of songs of theirs that's actually as good start to finish as I always thought they ought to be (as well as their first album that manages to be engaging without - all very much of a piece and wonderfully hazy, evocative, and a bit mysterious, but never dull or noodly as they can have a tendency to be on occaision- the faster songs and horn flourishes working quite as well as the slower and more typical reverb-and-tremelo guitar arpeggio-led ones (with all the parts interlocking beautifully like the branches of newly bare trees in late fall). It succeeds in capturing a certain mood (which is also a time of year, and cast of light- a kind of melancholy/nostalgic/pastoral ghost story- representative sample lyric: “Late October, sunlight in the wood/nothing here quite moves the way it should” ) almost perfectly- if any album could be accurately said to cast a spell, this is one. Suffice it to say, I like it quite a bit. You should have a listen if you get a chance.

van_beckman

11:20 pm - Van Twitters

• 13:20 Attention tweeps (not sure why this is necessary, but apparently the Twit-gods deem it so): My new username is 'higesceal'. Note it duly. #
• 13:26 Do tweeps know that the site 'americantownsdotcom' caches yr tweets if yr profile gives yr location? I didn't. Sure glad I found out though #
• 17:19 Feeling a bit too much like a cog today for my liking. #
• 17:41 I get the distinct sense like I'm being set up. Someone set me up the bomb, I said they set me up the bomb #
• 18:09 Discovering I really value deadlines, in a grudging sort of way. #

imomus

01:33 am - Saison Culture

Today I'm flying Finnair to Japan. It's been a couple of years, but that's okay; I like to leave long enough between trips for Japan's unfamiliarity and difference to gather afresh. Even if it's just for a few precious hours, I want to feel like a Japan virgin again.



If every time feels a little like the first time, what did the first time feel like? Well, I landed in Japan in 1992 and 1993 into a very particular time, place and culture. Anthropologists of 20th century Japanese subculture call the thing I encountered "Parco-Saison Culture". Press them for more precision and they'll distinguish those terms: the Parco Culture period actually lasted from 1975 to 1985, and the Saison period from 1983 to 1993. So technically, I arrived in "late Saison Japan". All the artifacts I saw and bought (Poison Girlfriend CDs, Sony Walkmans, copies of CUTiE magazine) are technically Late Saison Japan artifacts, bought from late Saison stores (Wave Records, Libro books). Even unrelated phenomena -- the Animal of Airs shop Hibiki Tokiwa kept in Aoyama, the Nadiff bookstore -- had close family ties to the Saison empire. Nadiff, for instance, was started by the manager of the Libro bookshop inside the Ikebukuro branch of Parco. In British terms, that's as if Magma had started life as a spin-off from Selfridges.

The Japan I witnessed in the early 90s consisted of a small hill between Shibuya Station and Yoyogi Park. Here was my hotel, the Tobu. Here was chic department store Parco, and the club where I played my concerts, the Quattro, located (it seemed bizarre at the time) atop a department store and reached by escalators which traversed the deserted sales floors after closing time. Here also were LOFT and OIOI, the Parco art gallery, the record store Wave, and the arty basement bookshop Libro (Saison Culture loves Italian names, clearly). Not far off was Muji, another specialty store owned by Seibu.



I didn't know it at the time, but my first Japan visit was circumscribed almost entirely by a world conceived and invented by one man, Seiji Tsutsumi. A novelist, award-winning poet, and one-time member of the Japanese communist party, the young Seiji inherited the department store business from his father. Yasujiro Tsutsumi founded the Seibu empire in 1912. Typically for Japan, it consisted of a department store (Seibu) and a railway line to bring people to it (the Seibu line). Seiji's half-brother Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, a much tougher cookie, inherited ten times as much as Seiji did when the old man died in 1964, and by 1990 Yoshiaki was estimated by Forbes magazine to be the richest man in the world, thanks to property and transport holdings in bubble-era Tokyo. But Seiji was the artistic one. He retired in 1991, but the Japan I first encountered bore his mark the way quattrocento Florence bore the imprint of the renaissance princes. (Like the princes, these magnates were financially corrupt, allied to the mafia, and autocratic, but that's another story, and one Seiji was well out of by the time the prison sentences were being handed down.)



While his half-brother (and rival) did business the way businessmen all over the world do, refined and cultivated Seiji got to work creating something rather more poetic; a cultural environment in Shibuya, a blend of art and commerce. A department store doesn't need an excellent art bookstore in the basement, its own culture magazine (Bikkuri House, which published 130 issues between 1974 and 1985, and whose readers were called "housers"), a concert venue, or a well-curated gallery. It doesn't need to commission arty postmodern posters and adverts from the likes of Eiko Ishioka, or music from Sakamoto and Hosono. But Seiji wanted Parco-Saison culture to have these facilities, and he had the power to make it happen. It's something we still see today -- look at the way Soichiro Fukutake, CEO of the Benesse Corporation, is revitalising the islands of the Seto Inland Sea with cultural patronage, art tourism, museums by international architects, and a series of commissions.



Seiji Tsutsumi left such a mark on shoppers that one blog account measures the separate impacts he had on a succession of Japanese generations, from the Baby Boomers and the Apathetics to the Juniors and the Blanks, and across a succession of cities (Parco brought Saison Culture to Sapporo in 1990, so the capital of Hokkaido lived its Saison a little later than Tokyo).

The YouTube clips reveal Parco's interest in sophisticated visual culture. I saw some of these commercials on my hotel TV during my first trips to Tokyo, but I didn't catch the earliest, purest phase of them. Art director Eiko Ishioka, for instance, was headhunted to make posters and TV spots for Parco in the late 70s after working for Shiseido. According to The Postmodern Arts by Nigel Wheale (Routledge, 1995): "In 1978 she directed a one-minute TV commercial to promote Parco, a new Japanese department store. The ad showed Faye Dunaway wearing a black dress against a black background, peeling and eating a hard-boiled egg. The department store name was faded up for the last few seconds of the action, and a low-key voice-over uttered a sentence in broken English: "This is film for Parco." The ad was highly successful, and Eiko rationalized its effects in terms of performance art: eating an egg was a totally "global act" done by rich and poor, advanced and developing peoples."



Much later, in 2001, I signed a deal with the Parco label Quattro (located directly across the road from the Loft store on the same Shibuya hill) and made a record for them with Emi Necozawa. It was deeply uncommercial, and sold almost nothing, but the label didn't seem to care. Perhaps that huge empire -- "Saison Culture" -- gave them a certain stability, even if it was achieved by sleight of hand. Four years later the police raided Seibu, and accusations of insider dealing and falsification of share ownership flew. The company was acquired by the owners of 7-Eleven. But Parco still stands on top of that hill in Shibuya. And although the money this time comes from a British University rather than Quattro-Parco concerts, the credit card that paid for my plane tickets carries the Saison logo.

11:00 pm - Monday 3 December 1666

http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1666/12/03/

Up, and, among a great many people that come to speak with me, one was my Lord Peterborough's gentleman, who comes to me to dun me to get some money advanced for my Lord; and I demanding what newes, he tells me that at Court they begin to fear the business of Scotland more and more; and that the Duke of York intends to go to the North to raise an army, and that the King would have some of the Nobility and others to go and assist; but they were so served the last year, among others his Lord, in raising forces at their own charge, for fear of the French invading us, that they will not be got out now, without money advanced to them by the King, and this is like to be the King's case for certain, if ever he comes to have need of any army. He and others gone, I by water to Westminster, and there to the Exchequer, and put my tallys in a way of doing for the last quarter. But my not following it the last week has occasioned the clerks some trouble, which I am sorry for, and they are mad at. Thence at noon home, and there find Kate Joyce, who dined with me: Her husband and she are weary of their new life of being an Innkeeper, and will leave it, and would fain get some office; but I know none the foole is fit for, but would be glad to help them, if I could, though they have enough to live on, God be thanked! though their loss hath been to the value of 3000l. W. Joyce now has all the trade, she says, the trade being come to that end of the towne. She dined with me, my wife being ill of her months in bed. I left her with my wife, and away myself to Westminster Hall by appointment and there found out Burroughs, and I took her by coach as far as the Lord Treasurer's and called at the cake house by Hales's, and there in the coach eat and drank and then carried her home ... So having set her down in the palace I to the Swan, and there did the first time 'baiser' the little sister of Sarah that is come into her place, and so away by coach home, where to my vyall and supper and then to bed, being weary of the following of my pleasure and sorry for my omitting (though with a true salvo to my vowes) the stating my last month's accounts in time, as I should, but resolve to settle, and clear all my business before me this month, that I may begin afresh the next yeare, and enjoy some little pleasure freely at Christmasse. So to bed, and with more cheerfulness than I have done a good while, to hear that for certain the Scott rebells are all routed; they having been so bold as to come within three miles of Edinburgh, and there given two or three repulses to the King's forces, but at last were mastered. Three or four hundred killed or taken, among which their leader, one Wallis, and seven ministers, they having all taken the Covenant a few days before, and sworn to live and die in it, as they did; and so all is likely to be there quiet again. There is also the very good newes come of four New-England ships come home safe to Falmouth with masts for the King; which is a blessing mighty unexpected, and without which, if for nothing else, we must have failed the next year. But God be praised for thus much good fortune, and send us the continuance of his favour in other things! So to bed.

08:00 am - Part Two.

http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=12032009

kelvinator

12:38 pm - A rainy day in London Town, early December.

Yep - just what it says on the tin. I've been working a lot in the last 6-8 weeks - so much so that I've kind of lost track of when I wasn't working a lot - and that means being home sick (but not homesick (okay, a little bit)) is oddly lobotomizing. I've tried to eat my med'cines(thank the lawd for Lemsip), finished reading Kate Atkinson's Case Histories which Morag lent me (excellent book, recommended and highly instructive) and am now sitting at home with a sore throat and general inside-of-head-filled-with-mucus-type lurghy. So what's going on in my life, I hear you ask in a silent way?

Well.

The book is finished and in the process of being read by my agent. Early returns are encouraging, which leaves me predictably worried as to whether the ending will work or not. In the end there may be a need for some rewriting, but a finished product may be close-ish.

I am also applying for creative, entertainment-related work for a large company, which would mean leaving teaching behind. Through no fault of my own, dependable work has diminished steadily over the last two years (What's that, Snorri? Fewer wealthy Icelanders in London? No. Surely not. What gives?) so I now no longer have a definite salary to cover bills, rent et cetera. I have a metric fuckton of work - I get an awful lot of supply work, which is quite all right - but it's not steady. Which means that ultimately it's neither useful, happiness-inducing nor career-furthering. My current status with said large company seems to be relatively positive, but the state of the thing (and the nature of the potential work) is, shall we say, somewhat opaque. We'll see what transpires.

Gigs happen - few to go this year. 35 out of the first 150 days of next year are already booked, with more to come. I have recently finished my second consecutive year of 100+ gigs, which is (believe it or not) somewhere between 'average' and 'respectable' among gigging comedians. At the top end of that scale, my good friend Imran Yusuf (bender of space/time and all round gig hog) got in 275 gigs last year. But still - I do my stuff, I'm slowly getting better at the whole comedy malarkey and I may even do a gig in Iceland over christmas. We'll see how that goes. I performed in front of some big shots recently and am deviously trying to turn that into a novice bottom rung joke writer gig. We'll see how that goes, also.

Health is relatively all right, present situation nonwithstanding; weight seems to have plateaued at 106-7ish (but I actually remain blissfully ignorant, having not stepped on scales in 3 months). Generally, practical things are quite decent.

I wrote down some goals for this year in August-ish, and while I may have to substitute 'finish B.A. thesis' for 'write small, cutesy children's book' and deal with the fact that I am only 11kg (rather than 18kg) lighter than I'd intended to be by year's end, I am quite contented to sit down and look back as 1.1.10 approaches and confirm that I've had one hell of a good year.

Current Mood: cheerful

imomus

12:02 pm - My noughties 5: Ocky Milk, or getting your back scratched by a vampire

Planning for Ocky Milk -- codenamed, at that point, The Friendly Album -- begins in March 2005. I've just got back to Berlin Friedrichshain (and Hisae, and the rabbit) after two months as a sound artist in residence at the Future University in Hokkaido. Japanese ideas infuse the record's concept: "I want to make something as static, as friendly, as consensual, as self-effacing, as Japan itself. It will be a feminine record and a friendly record... The values of pleasure and friendliness, modesty and elegance seem more important than ever to me right now..."



By March 22nd I'm saying the album will be "a warm record all about social connectedness, with the sprightly, breezy gait of Charles Trenet, wearing a straw boater, singing Boum. It's an Asian-sounding record, a Brazilian-sounding record, it's pentatonic enka ticky-tocky dubbed by the 1970s King Tubby. And it sounds a bit like Misora Hibari." An art show in New York with Mai Ueda interrupts things, and in September I'm still cogitating. By now the concept has become to make "random thin bucolic selfish sociable pentatonic torch" music. At the end of September I announce that I'm flying New York producer Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, Black Dice, Boredoms) to Berlin in November to work on the record with me. I lay down some Dogme-like rules of chastity which are forgotten as soon as we get to work. The record is inspired by Ozu, Caetano Veloso's experimental Araça Azul album, Webern and Harry Partch, but mostly by the sensation of having your back scratched.



With Rusty hunched behind his laptop or cross-miking his Sennheisers, we soon get some songs in the bag. By the end of November 2005 Devil Mask, Buddha Mind, Dr Cat, Moop Bears, Bonsai Tree, Pleasantness, 7000 BC, Permagasm and Ex-Erotomane have been recorded (in that order). They're odd, stilted, experimental. Rusty returns to New York and I negotiate my first novel in Paris and announce that I'll spend three months of 2006 in New York, appearing at the Whitney Biennial. By the end of December I'm heading off to Osaka (Hisae has been temporarily barred from Germany), where I'll finish the album with a mic and a laptop running Garageband. At this point I'm a bit iffy: "Some days I think what I've done so far is utterly wonderful, other days I think it's rubbish." But Hisae's deportation has given me the record's most emotional songs: Hang Low, Zanzibar and Nervous Heartbeat.



In Osaka, slightly anxious about the lack of strong conventional pop songs on the record, I record Frilly Military and Dialtone (reworkings of songs I wrote for Kahimi Karie and Emi Necozawa), The Birdcatcher (an unrecorded song written in the mid-90s) and Count Ossie In China. Finally I add I Refuse To Die, an outtake from the Otto Spooky sessions. The record is done. James Goggin's sleeve -- a saga in itself -- gets finished in June, and the record comes out in October 2006.

So how does Ocky Milk sound to me now?

( Let's listen track by track... )

My overall feeling about Ocky Milk now is that it's a murky, peculiar, sensual album. I don't think it achieves the friendliness that I started out hoping to capture, and if it aimed to scratch your back, well, the person doing the scratching is some kind of schizoid vampire with a personality composed mostly of scrambled, obscure cultural references and poor web translation. The album's evasion of coherence at every turn reminds me of Captain Beefheart's prayer: "Oh Lord, please fuck my mind for good!" But with the mind fucked by editing, by randomising, by google poetry, and by spontaneous improvisation, emotions can take over. And Ocky Milk is surprisingly coherent emotionally. What emerges is a mysterious new form of half-lit tenderness. Tenderness in another world, which is a beautiful one (laced with terror, but "what's beauty but terror we're still just able to bear?").

You can hear pop music defiantly edging its way back through the sound experimentation -- a development that will lead to the blippy-boppy Joemus, the next Momus album, and the decade's last.

08:46 am - Chilly and Statuesque

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/chilly-and-statuesque.html

van_beckman

11:20 pm - Van Twitters

• 12:22 Sometimes throwing caution to the breeze is the best course... As long as you're not aiming upwind. #
• 13:16 Sticky bun FTW #
• 14:02 My igniter/motivator is in desperate need of a retrofitting. Or I need more sleep. #
• 15:04 Again with the drilling and the nailguns. The universe refuses to let me be productive this week #
• 15:24 Oh. Crap. Just overheard my supervisor say he got a Twitter account. I'm doomed. #
• 15:43 Hello new screen name! :) #
• 16:51 WTF Twitter? You won't let me change anything? #
• 17:18 Apparently I've fallen victim to a common split-server issue. Let's see if this one sticks. #
• 18:26 It would seem that I have two usernames now. At least neither is the old one (at least I think not). #
• 19:52 @lizpurcell Yeah with my 23 followers, hah. Actually it's all Twitter's fault. Was forced to change it twice, but both new ones work now #
• 20:05 Hm, my engrams are running high... My thetan must need auditing. #lolscientology #
• 21:20 @tulman211 Haha yeah, so you heard. I just emailed you #
• 22:04 Thermostat is cranked up to 75 and feet are still cold. NOT AWESOME. #
• 22:18 LOL. "Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented! Oh the irony!" - jon stewart #
• 22:40 @lizpurcell Actually came close to buying one today. It was one of the cheap knock-offs, though #

11:00 pm - Sunday 2 December 1666

http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1666/12/02/

(Lord's day). Up, and to church, and after church home to dinner, where I met Betty Michell and her husband, very merry at dinner, and after dinner, having borrowed Sir W. Pen's coach, we to Westminster, they two and my wife and I to Mr. Martin's, where find the company almost all come to the christening of Mrs. Martin's child, a girl. A great deal of good plain company. After sitting long, till the church was done, the Parson comes, and then we to christen the child. I was Godfather, and Mrs. Holder (her husband, a good man, I know well), and a pretty lady, that waits, it seems, on my Lady Bath, at White Hall, her name, Mrs. Noble, were Godmothers. After the christening comes in the wine and the sweetmeats, and then to prate and tattle, and then very good company they were, and I among them. Here was old Mrs. Michell and Howlett, and several married women of the Hall, whom I knew mayds. Here was also Mrs. Burroughs and Mrs. Bales, the young widow, whom I led home, and having staid till the moon was up, I took my pretty gossip to White Hall with us, and I saw her in her lodging, and then my owne company again took coach, and no sooner in the coach but something broke, that we were fain there to stay till a smith could be fetched, which was above an hour, and then it costing me 6s. to mend. Away round by the wall and Cow Lane, for fear it should break again; and in pain about the coach all the way. But to ease myself therein Betty Michell did sit at the same end with me ... Being very much pleased with this, we at last come home, and so to supper, and then sent them by boat home, and we to bed. When I come home I went to Sir W. Batten's, and there I hear more ill newes still: that all our New England fleete, which went out lately, are put back a third time by foul weather, and dispersed, some to one port and some to another; and their convoys also to Plymouth; and whether any of them be lost or not, we do not know. This, added to all the rest, do lay us flat in our hopes and courages, every body prophesying destruction to the nation.

driftingfocus

07:15 pm - Quick-Disconnects For The Battery?

Now that it’s cold, we have found that Smutyanka’s batteries get depleted pretty fast from sitting outside, so we’re considering installing some quick-disconnects on the lines.  We’re not all that familiar with electronic work and don’t even really know where to start with this.  Can any of you folks perhaps point us in the right direction?

Originally published at Travels with Smutka. You can comment here or there.