elementary my dear Watson

Yesterday became a day for an extended pub lunch followed by a trip to the movies. We decided to see Sherlock Holmes, which did show some quite good scenes of 'London Town' during the time that Tower Bridge was being constructed.

The trailers were for various new monster movies with lots of CGI, but I actually thought some of the gryphons and so on looked rather wooden, despite the finest animation of 2010.

By comparison, the more understated mattes and composites in Sherlock Holmes created a rather more realistic impression of late 1800s London.

There was generally a good sense of 'place' in the movie, until near the end, when they left the Houses of Parliament and ran to the top of the Tower Bridge construction for the grand denouement. Quite a hike really, just to have the fight on the top of the box girders.

There's a similar moment in Bridget Jones, when she follows Mr Darcy through a snowstorm from the Globe in Borough Market to the place where he buys the diary., which looks like its by the Royal Exchange (maybe the Mont Blanc shop?).

I know its the movies, but these would both be Oyster card moments in today's world.

Maybe I'll write a song about it.

La dama puliendo el paso, por todo la calle real

A sort of ballad today, after being enticed by the Halfpenny Orchestra’s Mexican Loteria Challenge.

They dealt me the 3: La Dama - The lady.

So I'm finding myself in Mexico.

La dama

Sitting here in this Mexican dustbowl
Where every breath tastes of sand
A wild dog barks at nothing
Small bottle of cerveza in my hand.

She walks across the main street
Tight clothes and dark tanned skin
Small flash from her brown eyes
Feel the warm gaze reel me in.

Theres a rattle in the distance
Leather boots jump a broken wheel
I see him walking towards her
Desert cape and the click of steel

She’s walked across that main street
Puliendo el paso, por todo la calle real
She’s seen me with those brown eyes
la Dama tries to show me how she feels

He’s got a switchblade out his pocket
His eyes cut through the glare
His boot’s pace quickens
On la Dama he’s locked his stare

She’s running now on that main street
Heels crack and kick up dust
Her hair flows free behind her
As towards me her die is cast

My empty cerveza bottle
I grip tightly in my hand
No match for steely violence
No grace in this scorpion land

She’s run across behind me
Perfumed musk as her skin brushes past
A crash as he reaches the cantina
Then time slows down as he moves fast

La Dama has crossed that main street
First elegance then speed
Her lover is back in Durango
Full “Te quiero mucho” need

Sipping coffee here in this dustbowl
Where every breath tastes of sand
Another wild dog barks at nothing
Before I ride out of this desert land.

I suppose some Spanish guitar could work here.

Update : warning, I tried a mix for this one, complete with one-take faux American vocals. here. Oh dear.

Special Offer : collaborate : here's the tune and you have the lyrics - so sing the vocals - it can't be that difficult to do better than me...

fawm shop

Worryingly, I am thinking about recording some of them.

In the meantime, here's the old homage track created by the Christina Nott (bass!), Mel (keys) and rashbre (stuff) collaboration quite some time ago under the original band name of 'The Mad'.

Hmm : Fire, desire, Alright.

Asylum music with limited lyrics and overly loud guitar solos.

or click here to listen

...and I've just had another couple of titles come to me:

"Memory Effect" and

"You can be my vampire, if I can be your werewolf" which might include:

"I don't understand the pecking order
its gnawing at my heart.
A moonlit kiss is all it takes
no blood keeps us apart."

as a part of a chorus. It could be really bad. Wooo.

one card at a time

Alongside my diffident lyric writing attempts, I feel the need to praise maximum bob who is not only writing the lyrics (which are quite decent in any case) but then also getting them to the level of a published song.

Some are broadly accompanied on bass, keys and even a spot of background percussion, whilst others feature plain guitar. If you don't have time to listen through the entire set, then try songs 3 and 4 for an interesting sample.

Last year I also enjoyed Kim Boekbinder's January equivalent, which resulted in the little enjoyable album called "31" and right now Kim is raising money for a next album as theimpossiblegirl. Check her blog although the current marshmallow post is a tough one to read.

Meantime, I'm still a'scribbin'...

One card at a time

Drank champagne and tasted high life
Needed ways to be so bold
With sixteen year Jane we ran away
That rainy night, so cold.

First time in big city
Fell in with rackets, dips and screens,
Slept by bars in doorways
Cardboard home and limited means

So deal a card my brother
A royal from the pack
Flip it over gentle
Drink some bourbon from the sack

We consorted with the devil
Crooked streets you shouldn't go
Where knives and blood stripe on the cracks
Where only cheap wines flow

So deal a card my sister
A royal from the pack
Turn it over gentle
Drink some whisky from the sack

The last time it was good here
The full moon streaked the sky
We drew a line and danced alone
Said we’d make another try

So deal a card my lover
A royal from the pack
Turn me over gentle
Drink some bourbon from the sack

But you can’t step for ever on that devil’s tail
without him looking around
He’ll catch your eye ; you cannot blink
Then kiss you without a sound.

So deal a card my lover
A royal from the pack
Flip it on me gentle
Before you leave me in this sack

Nyah - and jukebox John - I'll need your help with this one for the Ribot guitar.

french kiss-off

Another evening on the tiles, finishing (oops) on Friday so I've had to back post this.

I'll tell more of that later, but my quick inspiration for tonight's dodgy song is also from the last Being Human episode that I watched, where the recently converted werewolf fled leaving a note for another.

I thought it would be better to move the action to a little town in France, and have a proper silent bust-up, where she just leaves in her little Citroen without any explanation.

Don’t expect much sense from me
My heart’s broken in two
She left without a warning
Like a swallow out she flew

No letter on the table
No lipstick mirrored cry
No bitter final argument
Couldn’t tell what made her fly

Her crazy little auto
It even had a name
No longer parked in front of here
She’s gone and it’s my shame.

No letter on the table
No lipstick mirrored why
No bitter final reasoning
Couldn’t tell what made her fly

The cobbled street we lived on
Had pretty tales to tell
But now it only reminds me
Of loneliness and hell.

Since I’m lost and brokenhearted
The world has flipped to grey
So everything tastes sour
On this broken breakup day.

The world has lost its meaning
My life is filled with pain
Can’t be sure I’ll ever trust now
My loss is all her gain

No letter on the table
No lipstick mirrored cry
No bitter final answers here
Couldn’t tell what made her fly.

So I’m lost without direction
My heart’s been torn in two
There’s a coldness creeping over me
Since the moment that she flew

No letter on the table
No lipstick mirrored cry
No bitter final answers here
Couldn’t tell what made her fly

I think this one needs a Bminor somewhere.
Elle a rompu avec lui, and maybe I need a break from this songwriting lark.

EST

I need to break this habit.

Bad songwriting.

This is day three.

I'm getting jitters. Yesterday, I wrote the song on my iPhone, whilst in bed after an oval-tabled dinner with a few colleagues.

Tonight I was supposed to be at another dinner, but it was cancelled, so I headed home and watched a couple of episodes of the excellent and twisty supernatural 'Being Human'.

I was doing fine for two episodes, but to avoid getting sucked into the next one I had to resist the brilliant trailer. The storyline had a gothic edge and plenty of hospital scenes.

Before I could stop myself, my next ten-minute cascade of ill formed words were dripping from my fingers.

You’ve always been high-voltage
You know how to rock the room
When you shimmy or eat sashimi
The boys around will swoon

We were a lot together
Your pink hair and green eyes
The clothes you wore you’d make your own
made every fashion a surprise.

Don’t turn yourself low voltage
Don’t let those bright lights dim
You’re better as conductor
Make new sparks not with him.

How he drove you to those aspirins
Doesn’t make me feel so strong
Gotta try to understand you now
What has happened, what went wrong?

So the ambulance attended
Paramedics did their thing
Could clean you but not fix you
Couldn’t fix a broken wing

So they’ve put you in this place now
With its white and wipe clean walls
They’re gonna put you thru high voltage
They say they’ll stop your anguished fall.

So you’ve always been high voltage
Know how to rock the place
I wanna see you be conductor now
Again your smiling face.

(EST = Electric Shock Therapy)
(when you shimmy or eat sashimi ...what was I thinking?)
A, D, E.

Triple A proportions

I thought I'd do another FAWM post in the form of a song, also related to some of today's news.
This one uses Em G and A and an occasional D (mainly).

Don't wanna be elected
Don't wanna be found out
The politicos just change their face
And make up rules to flout

It's disproportionate proportional
Triple A rated hot air
They all say anything they like
Self serving, they don't care

Forty-four thou-sand years
Repay a deficit reduction plan
So let's all adopt the position
Whilst we all go down the pan

It's disproportionate proportional
Triple A rated hot air
They all say anything they like
Opportunist, they don't care

So two months to election
Fill agenda up with noise
No-one's really listening now
Just more jobs for the boys

We're seeing the last embers
From a system crashed in flame
The parliament has run it's course
Looking for someone else to blame

It's disproportionate proportional
Triple A rated hot air
They all say anything they like
Forget truth they don't care

Sent from my iPhone

no more moonbase alpha

I was going to write a post about Obama cancelling investment in the Space Station on the Moon, but I wanted to have a go at that FAWM February Album Writing Month write a song a day thing as well and realised I didn't have time for both.

So I've combined them.

Useful chords for this are C, F and G.

No more moonbase alpha
No visits to the stars
No more walks on the milky way
No parking lots on Mars

I see twinkles in your eyes, babe
And the moonbeams in your hair
As you ride the sky to infinity
Make the universe so fair

But the bankers took the money
Politicians took the rope
They wrapped it up in a message
But it couldn’t give us hope

So the twinkles in your eyes, babe
And the starlight in your face
As you jet on to tomorrow
Fill the universe with grace.

Now I’m stranded here on Earthside
SInce they made that final call
No more rocket ships to outer space
Program terminated, fail.

P-P-P-P-Program
T-T-T-Terminated
Fail.

So the twinkles in your eyes, babe
You still speed across the sky
Make trails of silver star dust
Whilst I’m here unable to fly.

So the twinkles in your eyes, babe
And the moonbeams in your hair
You ride the sky to infinity
Make the heavens, oh so fair.


Perchance too much moonshine in the production of this?

seduced and abandoned

There are a few bands whose music I'll buy on trust.

The Magnetic Fields is one such entity. Unlike most bands, they don't evolve the style, its a kind of hard slam of the dials into whichever genre.

Take 69 Love Songs. Literally, sixty nine tracks of poppy-styled songs, with a level of houseoftomorrow Stephin Merritt's clever lyric writing and story telling.

Then Distortion. Every track blasted with extra effects pedals and general fuzz as an experiment into the form.

And now, the new one.

Realism.

A kind of counterpoint to the last one and a certain folksy crafting to the songs, which have identifiable and unscrambled instruments. Nothing that needs to be connected to anything else. Unplugged acoustic. Flugelhorn, tuba, cello, piano, tablas, cajon, leaves, accordion, violin, banjo, cuatro, sitar.

I've heard it said that its supposed to be a kind of second part of the previous album. Distortion and Realism. The album covers do match.

One of the tracks is called Seduced and Abandoned. Maybe it's their next coupling?

Anyway, worth the long wait for this second half of what could have been a double album.

Meantime, some banjo distortion from California.

beta testing the future

I've been reading some of the commentary about the Apple iPad over the last few days. First speculation about it, then quasi leaked pictures, then product announcements and then people giving it a kicking. I'll admit the branding was perhaps a little suspect, but that's an amusing blip.

I usually refrain from blogging more than minor discussion on information technology, but I don't really count iPad in the IT domain. Its a game changer, like the OS/X based Mac, iPod and iTunes were.

Before I used a mac at all, I was fully reared on Windows. I could proudly install device drivers, edit the registry and knew the secret commands to bypass the complex updates when the old Windows image had mysteriously failed during an 'upgrade'.

Then, somewhere in the pre-Vista era I bought my first Mac.

It just worked. I didn't even need any extra software for ages, apart from the brilliant Yellow Mug utilities. I realised I could spend time editing video, writing, attempting bad music, categorising photographs and similar without also having to spend almost equivalent time mending things.

Consequently, as other PCs around rashbre central collapsed, they transitioned to Mac. When I've subsequently updated them with new versions of OS/X, the machines get faster, or use less resources. Even my oldest pre-Intel Mac laptop machine was fully capable of editing video 'out of the box'. It still works.

Apple seems to understand how to build infrastructure. Maybe its partly locked down, but it stops people tinkering around the edges, unbolting important structural elements, which is a malaise of some parts of the Windows world.

I don't need 100 variations of a word processor. I just need one that works and doesn't get in the way.

As an example, I guess I'm like many people using Windows Excel in a commercial environment.

How we all loved the changes to the interface with the last cosmetic update. Let's hide the print functionality, let's move all of the formatting around. Let's make it more difficult to insert blocks of copied columns or rows. Let's make saving become a multiple choice test, where every option seems to remove or reformat something.

I don't think I'm being reactionary here, I'm all for progress. I embrace progress, but progress should move things forward.

My current queries include: Why does my brand new work Windows laptop freak out at least twice a day when I use it with a mouse? Why does Excel forget that its just loaded a new spreadsheet unless I minimise and maximise it? Why does it still refuse to link to the latest high speed wi-fi when I use it at home?

If this was an old hacked image I might understand it, but this is a two month old machine running a standard image. I know it's not just me though, because colleagues complain of similar phenomena.

The problem is that we all got used to it. Either learning to fix it or knowing someone who could do all the clever stuff. A sort of technician.

Possibly these same technicians make the first pronouncements about the new technology. The new iPad doesn't multi task. It only has 64GB of storage, the OS won't support Flash. It doesn't have camera.

C'mon.

They miss the point about what I call 'quiet technology'. Like the Apple slogan, 'it just works'. I don't want to have to fiddle about with printer drivers, IEEE 802.11n 54Mb wi-fi configurations and remembering the context switching key combination for when a background program fails.

Nah.

Quiet technology should be a gateway to what you really want to do. To read articles, to write to someone, to watch a television show, to listen to music. I suspect the portability of a compact personal black slate that just works will provide another game changing moment.

We'd better get used to it.

Thursday Thirteen (V47) on Saturday

I've been on the road this week, and blogging has been somewhat rushed.

Giving away trade secrets, I sometimes have a post or two pre-written for emergencies and if I know I'll be busy I might preschedule one or two to appear.

That also means that anything more elaborate like this Thursday Thirteen gets bounced to when I have more time to complete the links. But here goes..

1) It feels strange that its already Saturday again. This week has sped past. Usually if I'm away on a Sunday evening it makes the week seem longer.
2) My breakfast meeting at the Royal Exchange during the week caused me to speculate on the alleged changes to the economy.

With the Exchange literally across the road from the Bank of England and the old site of the London Stock Exchange, you'd expect to see early signs of returning busy power breakfasts. If I'm honest, it was still relatively quiet.

3) I've also been flying around during the week, so another working breakfast in the surroundings of Terminal Five. A few of us have an uncrowded meeting spot in the BA lounge, which we refer to as 'the usual spot'. I secretly wonder if this is a good thing?

4) When I had to change flights at one point in the week, the lady at the ticketing desk inadvertently put me back onto the same flight. Luckily, I checked the ticket whilst chatting over a drink. When I rushed to find a desk to get it changed the second time, they said they'd been 'waiting for me and would have put out a call'. A good line, in any case.

5) There's also been staccato responses from me to other bloggers' posts this week, as I browse from iPhone. I'm particularly intrigued by maximum bob's plan to write music. If writing a daily blogpost is difficult enough, writing 14+ songs in February is off the scale. Dial 11.

6) I can think of at least one other poetry-inspired person who should try that FAWM challenge.

7) Although it's interesting that the idea of 'album' now seems to imply circa 14 tracks. Someone sent me an old CD album called 'Anthem of the Sun' during the week. A full vinyl running length but just 5 tracks.

Then in late breaking news, two more surprise CDs arrived this morning. @AVG(10 + 17) = 13.5 tracks. OK I give in. (They are revision ahead of an upcoming Tindersticks concert)

8) No alarm this morning, and I was surprised that it was full sunny daylight when I awoke. Makes a change from owl spotting although it has left a dent in the day.

9) To my surprise, a hardback version of 'The Triangle' is up on Amazon, although I've never seen a copy.

10) Of course, eBooks are probably going to become a major trend over the next couple of years, particulalry if the *ahem* small, lightweight and slim iPad has its way. Steve Job's reaction to that scene has also been uploaded.


11) Above joking aside, I suspect rashbre central will acquire one of these iPad devices; it's at least an intriguing blogging, emailing, viewing and reading platform.

Having used the eReader, the wireless connectivity of an iPad should be a major plus point.

12) Meantime, I'll continue to read thin paperbacks when travelling. I sometimes wonder how much impact the "packability" has on my literary knowledge.

13) And now for coffee. Hand ground. It sort of completes the loop from last Sunday morning.

Gotta run.

nul points and then a curry

Another hectic day of meetings, both face to face and virtual, including one where a few of us quipped that it was a little like the Eurovision Song Contest as we linked the various sites together by video.

Instead of traditional videoconferencing suite we were using a coin sized camera clipped to the end of a pencil, which worked surprisingly well.

Admittedly the audio was on a separate phone circuit, but somehow everything seemed to work and we were all relatively composed up to the point where the people in the Dutch office started reading out scores.

Luckily our line was on mute at the time.

Tonight its pub and curry.