Phoebe and Panda Bear

Been haunted by the images and the track in this video ever since seeing it. First thing I load when I find internet at the moment. And if you want to learn something amazing check out this.

If I may and if I might...

The Farthest Place

Just found this blog. Worth following up.

For a few posts more

Too Backer

To Back Her

Au revoir

Terrarium

Sounds like honey dribbling into a time warp.

Gombrich's Nuggets

Currently reading Art and Illusion by EH Gombrich. Some great finds:



Riccio's box in the shape of a crab, 16th Century

Made of bronze.
Source: http://italianrenaissanceresources.com/units/unit-4/sub-page-02/

The Sacrifice Of Isaac, 3rd century AD

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Dura_Synagogue_ciborium.jpg


Durer's "Dresden Sketchbook" and other work on human proportion

Source: http://arttattler.com/Images/NorthAmerica/NewYork/Morgan%20Library/Albrecht%20Durer/Durer_04.jpg
Misc.
"It is safer to be naughty on paper than in real life."
"Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing survives like survival."
"A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life."- Lucian Freud
The idea of constellations as "the first rorschach"

Estuary fishing

I met a man in the pub on Tuesday who invited me seine fishing with his crew. This is them. It's too soon for me to really assess how surreal and great the whole thing was- a few cheery handshakes and then ushered atop a mound of netting in the back of a creaky rowboat as the other five men got in and pushed off...witnessing the rivalry between the crews (best line: "Go fuck a plough!"),
... walking the mudbank holding a side of the net and keeping pace with the boat on the far bank....A lot of floating and waiting around hearing the skipper's stories and oaths as our two prize flatfish splashed around my ankles. Ken the skipper is on his sixty-sixth fishing season, having started at the age of fifteen. A pleasure to work with and learn from all of them.

Your Heart On Your Sleeve

From "Everyone Alive Wants Answers" by Colleen.

Swimming track

His soundcloud is bulging at the moment. EDIT: No, it's been wiped apparently, well still a lot on this one.

Hope you're baked.

Great sleepy album.

Matthew Herbert- Berlin

May have been on here before. Lovely track.

Feed your reverence. Pin your faith on the dew.

"Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time."
This is an exceptionally beautiful book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind,_Sand_and_Stars

Misc. to remember:
"It is into the game and not the park that we have lost the ability to enter."
"Do you think its me I'm bawling about?"
"I lay on my back, sucking my orange and counting the shooting stars. Here I was, for one minute infinitely happy."
"In the desert a man is always free."
"One man in misery can disrupt the peace of a city."
"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step but you have to take it."
"Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living."

The Song Of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

-W.B. Yeats

Basel-Peckham (1000ish km)

I'm dedicating this post to Ule whom I met when I left Basel. The friendly skating guitarist hitcher who tried to get us both a lift to Berlin before I told him to abandon me and take the seat that was offered him. He emailed to say he made it to Norway with the help of a sushi delivery van so all's well ends well.
EDIT: Also I realise my first driver didn't make the cut. Milaim, I hope your sister lends you that audi again. Sun sun sun on the autobahn, the music of Kosovo and the blur of cars. I think perhaps you had to drive that fast in order for us to break the membrane of regular reality and re-enter the luck rhizome. It definitely worked and I am forever grateful.

 Sleeping in the trees in a black forest service station. Hearing the night people (mice? birds?) run around the bushes, waking up to a cool dappled morning and snail slime on my jumper. Packed up the sleeping bag, rollmat, tarp and my cardboard mattress made of tomorrow's signs.

Dropped off there the night before by a Czech cycling trainer on his way back from a competition, van full of bikes and good stories about divorce and medals as we wended through the evening's hills. Gave him a wooden spoon and hopped the fence for some sleep.

Despite the early vantage point it took a while to get out of the black forest but I managed it with 'smokeshow' Udo, a man whose car was ominously painted with clouds of smoke. This omen was to be safely disregarded and we had a good three hour journey together, talking about the state of cargo shipping, typewriter repair and how owning a car is like owning a barrel without a bung.

Two hours in Köln where the truckers were lunching. Eventually a lift from a Romanian driver on his way to France via Belgium. Nice lift and a good chat about language learning and how his young son refuses to leave him for even a moment when they're together. Even if he goes to the toilet for a minute the boy starts crying apparently. Frustratingly this truck didn't have a passenger seatbelt, didn't bother me at first but as we got into one of the most monitored (and also accident-ridden) stretches of the road I recalled both the price of the fine and the nagging feeling that it was an unnecessary level of risk. 

Sure it's only perception-based, I was once travelling with an ex-paramedic German truck driver who doesn't wear his seatbelt because he's been to too many truck crashes where the driver was left crushed and in a state of life he personally didn't wish to survive. I'm inclined to agree with his position, but he was stopped and fined that day (by two policemen, one was checking him and the other was confiding to me about his disappointment at the state of English fish and chips). Anyway, this seatbelt thing obviously seems to be a nagging point with me still, but I went with my gut, thanked the driver and got dropped off in some tiny little toilet stop.

Not remembering where I was exactly, I wrote a mix of English and German in order to get a lift to the next petrol station. Siegbert the Austrian engineer came through for me and told me about his son's job in Warwick, working in a factory with a process to get the air bubbles out of glass.

Dropped at a big petrol station somewhere in Flanders, instantly met by a tall, thin, bristled and smiling French hitchhiker with whom I swapped few words but a lot of good will and cardboard for his next sign. I saw him again 5 minutes later waving and grinning furiously as he passed in the passenger seat of a white car rejoining the motorway. I was picked up by Jean Francis, who lived in Belgium but worked in a prison in France as a tutor for school exams. Great music and slow roads, and a hopeful conversation about growing public awareness of the correlations between literacy, dyslexia and the prison system. He intended to get me to a famous petrol station for hitchhikers called Courtrijk. I arrived there with a sense of deja vu and found my name on a lamppost. Good to put a name to the place, last year I got to Dover from the same spot in one lift.
Brief and funny interaction with an energetic and helpful man, bald, moustache, thick gold hoop earrings, purple silk shirt and gesticulating wildly with a sandwich. He tried at first to speak to me in Belgian, but then broke into English.
 "Good luck, but to be honest why don't you wait closer to the entrance than the exit? Why not be rational? Haha!"
I thanked him for the suggestion and with a roll of his eyes and a broad smile he replied:"Oh that's just me, I help anyone I can!" I followed his instructions and after a 5 second introduction to a newly arrived French hitcher I was off with Kenneth the lifeguard towards Dunquerque (him and a friend had a creepy lift going through Poland, involved them jumping off the back of a tractor in the middle of the night on some country road). Dropped in a service station next to two ducks, an approaching storm and a man cleaning out a car with a UK licence plate. The ducks were waddling towards Belgium so I asked the English guy instead.
A lot of hitchers swear by approaching people and directly asking for lifts but this is something I've never done before*. I said as much to Chris and he kindly said "Well yeah, my plan is to sleep in my car tonight but if you can fit in you can have the front seats, better than being out in this storm."
He was meant to be off to the UK the following day but decided he was up for trying to get an earlier ferry so we drove off to Dunquerque, getting a bit lost on the way. It was a fortuitous meeting given we both seem to have sprawled our lives across Europe a bit. Chris had been working in Austria, was about to go back, had just bought an old French house in creaky disrepair and had to go and see some family in the UK. If over-organisation precipitates entropy (as someone said) than I hope the opposite holds true and Chris'll go on for a few hundred years as haphazard and affable as he is now. He couldn't change his ticket at the ferry port, and I couldn't get a foot passenger ticket, so we slept in the car and in the morning he insisted on driving me to the foot-passenger ferry port in Calais, a good few km away. I think the reason I'm dwelling on Chris is it just made me think of the balance met between tight schedules and random acts of kindness. No conclusions to draw as so many examples contradict each other (I remember gasping open mouthed when a speeding ford screeched to a halt, the driver barked at me to get in or he'd miss his ferry, and I was sped down the road by a friendly fisherman who'd previously made an oath never to drive past a hitchhiker) but there's some sort of fulcrum in there.
At the ferry port I gave Chris a wooden spoon and promptly bumped into and broke bread with a man hitching back to Bradford from Belarus, carrying a big brass begging bowl and a lot of weariness....gave him a wooden spoon too actually.
Ferry uneventful except for loud announcements about binge drinking from the guys running the cafe. Lift out of Dover with a GP trying to alleviate the burden of the elderly on the NHS (in his words), got me to Folkestone services where I waited 5 hours last year. 5 minutes this time and had a lift with an HGV driver with a dirty laugh and tons of good hitching and travelling stories about the UK and Mexico in the 90's. Last drop at a service station near Heathrow, where I was driven into Peckham by a young couple on their way back from the airport in a gleaming mercedes (they had it on courtesy after their car packed in the week before). Greg runs an adventure travel business and Ann is an academic working in Media and Middle Eastern studies. That lift was one of the smoothest homecomings so far, riding around in a mercedes discussing media saturation, universities as employers, the value of long distance walking, desert festivals...we got onto Marxism and then Greg reminded us what we were driving and we put our heads down in shame.
Jumped out in sunny Peckham, folded and binned my 'London' and ran off into a very dreamlike week of a much-meandering mental pollen reconnaisance.



*This is a point of ongoing debate. I think I understand the pros of asking people for lifts but for me personally I prefer to stand around looking like a patient and friendly hyperlink. Just different ways really. For me the paradox has been that if you look patient you can end up getting offered lifts much faster than if you're trying to get a lift to be on time, and I'd consider asking people something that happens more when you're short of time (although it might not be).
The other factor is that the time spent standing at the roadside waiting and smiling is some of the richest thinking time I know. Perhaps the closest socially widespread version of it is the appreciation people have of fishing as a leisure activity (regardless of the catch). It also overlays well with the idea of creative activity as a form of mental or spiritual fishing. If there's not much to see outside you try inside and vice versa, and whatever else happens you are contributing to the stockpile of accumulated time in strange places and a wordless sense of pattern about these talking mammals who fill metal boxes with anaerobic dino-slime and invite you to share their world for a couple of hours.

Found in an old diary 3

For I thought that you'd regain it and you'd keep upon the pathway, but the melancauliflower you brought along.
You shall wait here in the darkness, you shall wait here proud and lonely, whilst the sparrows in the sunlight sing your song.
And the twin is here your brethren and he keeps you to your rhythm, you would thank him if you could and yet you know,
That obsession and compulsion at the price of isolation is a place we're both ashamed to make you go.

But you still sit here stern and smiling and inside your toes are tapping whilst the world that moves beyond you shakes its head,
Will you take that to be rhythm? Will you try to dance together? Will you finally get the fuck out of your bed?

Found in an old diary 2

That Norwegian fisher boy who genuflected before taking and after passing a joint.
Ingrained respect, humour and a nod to the fear in the roof.
Discussions of rhythm. Stoic duties on water and off.
Tearing fish from the sea. Tearing the bass guitar from a friend being electrocuted.
His back injured, he potters about that island singing, drumming, smoking, saving, talking and laughing.
He'll have keyhole surgery for his lower spine and return to chasing fish.

Found in an old diary 1

We hoped this kind of orbit wouldn't faze you
For 'time' and 'man' both rarely pass the same.

But the leaves we grew came pushing through your glasses
and you crawl across the library floor in shame.

Your body on the staircase will not suit you,
the eyelids and the trousers  never match.

But yours is ours, so let us all smile weakly,
and hope there comes a fisher for the catch.

That shift.

Today's stuff is coming off Global Sampler #10 on the Global Groove site. That blog is beyond. Do the right thing.

" The almost final words of the British novelist, Roald Dahl, were “You know, I’m not frightened. It’s just that I will miss you all so much” to his family. After appearing to fall unconscious the nurse then injected him with morphine to ease his passing and he said his actual last words: “Ow, fuck!” "

Crank this one till the walls fall off.

Veg in the field and a great album.

 

 

Thankyou tobacconist.

If you liked this try this (in fact try the whole album):

Jean Knight

"Rome falls nine times an hour and your job is to notice."

Always worth a repost.

This just in

Thank you SouptheHoop.

Peter Doig (Untitled)

 

Guess the blues are taking us back to the garden, for we always find the one who grows leaves.

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Someone's touching gold again...

Oh wait...sorry Donna. Four Tops caning it.

Donna Summer blowing out the cobwebs (that means you, Dumbledore!)

Blessed Chiseller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi

Production

King Midas on the dials.

Deathtrap who?

Because you can't not

Might be a repost but its necessary.

Yes yes

The world is so full of surprises:

"The drummer pounds gamely to the call of a different muse, as if she had to guess which song they were playing - and missed every time."- Debra Rae Cohen in Rolling Stone.

Karen flooring it

The word for 'god' is Road.

Suggestion from a mouse-defying friend

Jazz organ. Mmm.

Open Source Desalination

Desalinate the rising sea levels, and make the technology to do so open source.


http://www.phibetaiota.net/2015/05/robert-steele-reflections-on-desalination/#more-111596

Waitin' For A Superman

EDIT: Actually not really a fan of the video. Great track though.

"Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours.
Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce.
Headlines mean street sales.
It takes emotion to move merchandise.
And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press."- Marshall McLuhan

Christ.

It's a duty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Kurosawa

Terry Callier

Rupture Of Plane

Parsed it.

Always another.

It is the tuning between two frequencies of inhabited space.

Soul Sisters

Salif Keita and Co.

Salif had to vent another goldrush.

Dindi

Strange place.

Haunting voice.

Kowloon Quantum Processor

Kowloon Walled City in 1987. 33,000 people in 210 by 210 metres. Most densely populated place on earth at the time. (Macau now the densest.)

Good documentary about KWC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lby9P3ms11w

Mayday In Little Tibet (Campo Imperatore)

Desperation brings profound change.

Jeff AP doing it right.

I Cry In The Morning

No-one likes or dislikes zeroes.

More John Hartford:

A holy ghost.

Man On Road

This version of Toubaka I dedicate to an honest man on road. Good luck and good weather Kiarash.

For my cat Jeoffry

Jeoffry milking it.

Isaac Hayes laying it down.

Gobsmacked by this almighty rendition. Such breaks.

Unbelievable Gluttons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery

When I lose it all to Wölfli will you visit me in Bern,
To pick apart the nuance of the joke I tried to learn?
The ever turning fractals and the vaccuum's absent ghost,
banished by kazooed request from our much hallowed host.
When Portugal finds peace again the system shall disband,
and trail these tired neurons round the borders we have planned.
You'll find me there on paper and I'll meet you in the garden,
or the both in every facet of this complicated carbon.

Reptile in a raincoat.

Inspiration for anyone who wanted to set their freak flag flying. Lyrics by Leonard Cohen.

 

"Cooter schooled me to the game, now I know my duty.

Stay humble, stay low, blow like Hooty."

First of the fabled scorps

I'll try and find a live one next time.

Toubaka

To me this sounds like an afterlife, and I can't work out why.


EDIT: This might be why:

"Touba ka literally means “a man from Touba”. He is the symbol of trust and he loves to travel. Anytime he arrives in a village it is an occasion to celebrate. But the village members are also eager to know when the Touba Ka will leave so that they can give him messages to bring to family members living far away."

(Source: https://oldtimeparty.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/toubaka/ )

Inadvertent Camera Obscura

Side effect of a hole in the wooden shutters.

"It seems a good place to ask him exactly how he first got interested in spiders and their webs. He laughs and turns the question around. "The strange thing to me," he says, "was always the question of why scientists were not more interested in them. I mean, here is a creature which, according to its size, can build from its own body a structure on the scale of a football pitch overnight, every night, and can catch the equivalent of an aeroplane in it. Why would you not want to study how it did that?""

"Never lose sight of the fact that you don't know much."- Dennis McKenna

The hope that if we keep blindly knitting Ariadne's line there'll be something stylish to walk out of the labyrinth in.

A Base Plate For Odysseus

"I think we should let Odysseus stay for a while."
"This isn't a hotel. He's so slovenly...look at his boot straps."
"I know, I know, but he needs a base...or at least a base plate."
"What's a base plate?"
"You know, a spring board. Some assumptions. Some conceptual fixed point? An amputation of enquiry?...A fact, if you will. Something to launch off of."
"Oh bloody hell, he's always launching off. He's like a fucking transcendental system.. and I don't care if you say its just his nature, he's going to trip over and knock his teeth out if he keeps on yanking his laces like that."

Machado About Something

“Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea:
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.” 

 

Jah Stitch- Black Harmony Killer

daaaaamn

"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill."- Robert Anton Wilson

The monograph on Wölfli written in 1921 by his psychiatrist, Dr Walter Morgenthaler, enthralled Rilke, who saw in Wölfli the antithesis between creativity and ‘the total collapse within a human being’.

-Wikipedia page for Adolf Wölfli.

“If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane it's paranoia.”

Don't take it personally, my friend,
It's not your fins or tail we scorn,
and not your cage or other bones,
but knowing we can't go alone.

It terrifies and sends us out
to here upon the myriad waves
that mount their own affairs on us.

And now we chase you round and round
in admiration, lust and fright,
to pick apart your memories
and learn from you to thrive in night.

-Tög

"This is a mad and wild adventure at the fractal edge of life and death and space and time.

Just where we love to be, right, shipmates?"

- Terence McKenna

We seem to form a nested set,
With each the last one's marionette,
Who if you asked him, would insist
That he's the last ventriloquist.

-Theodore Melnechuk