the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
thanks to this entry on Wulf’s blog, I found the London Bloggers website, where blogs are listed by nearest tube station, so you can find out who’s blogging in your corner of London!
Here’s the listing for Southgate tube – if you’re in London, head over there and add your listing!
So I’m back in Edinburgh, and it hardly feels like I’ve been away! Back with the lovely Rev G and Jane. Bizarrely, having stayed here for over two weeks in august, tonight was the first time I’ve actually had a meal here with G and J!! the madness of the festival meant that TSP and I were eating out each evening, and though we took the lovely G and J out to Henderson’s, we didn’t get to have a meal in with them at all. How nuts is that?
Anyway, I’m back to buy the Rev G’s car off him – after me slightly facetiously blogging about my car needs, I get an MSN message from everyone’s favourite sweary clergyman saying that they are getting rid of their cars and getting a new one, and did I want the old one? Much haggling ensued, with TSP and I wanting to pay more than G and J wanted to receive for the car (ah, trying to out-nice eachother is such a fun problem to have), but we settled on a figure, and I’m here to pick it up.
i’m also getting to meet up with Duncan and Rise from the Greenbelt gig while i’m here, to catch up and hopefully talk about some gig opportunities – all being well, I’ll have Rise playing in London for John Peel Day on October the 13th (you heard it here first, peoples!) I’ll confirm that on Thursday!
Riding the train through Berwick Upon Tweed, the sun is shining, Rosie Thomas is on the headphones, I’m reading Margaret Attwood.
Why does anyone drive anywhere? Why aren’t trains cheaper? It’s such a civilized way to travel, and if trains were always full, it’d surely take some strain off the roads, and hopefully pull people away from the ozone-munching exploits of the cheap airlines…
anyway, life on-board the GNER east coast mainline train from London to Edinburgh is good, if expensive. Maybe free WiFi on board would make me feel it was better VFM…
soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’; Peter Gabriel, ‘Up’; Prefab Sprout, ‘Steve McQueen’; Renaud Garcia Fons, ‘Entremundo’; Seth Lakeman, ‘Kitty Jay’.
There’s an ad campaign running at the moment on the London Underground, for Reebok, the sports clothing manufacturers. The slogan across all of them is ‘I Am What I Am’, and various loser celebs are spouting nonsense about their free spirited approach to life, grabbing life by the nads etc… All rubbish.
What’s particularly odious is the Jamelia ad – TSP came in the other day fuming about it, which piqued my interest – The Small Person is v. intelligent and a fine culture watcher and observer of gross inconsistencies in celeb behaviour – so next time I was on the tube, I looked out for said ad.
Here it is –
and this is the close up of the text –
it reads, “I’ll speak out against violence whenever I can. in interviews, in songs, in my life. If you stay silent you’re part of the problem”
However, surely staying silent is preferable to becoming the poster-puppet of a company with a seriously dubious human rights record, helping them to green-wash their reputation, and gloss over the human rights abuses that the factories where Reebok stuff is made have been guilty of. Hey, Jamelia, I got your violence, RIGHT HERE!
If you are reading this, Jam (don’t mind if I call you Jam, do you?), I’d suggest having a nose around Corporation Watch website before you agree to stick your well intentioned by deeply crass and misplaced anti-violence waffle on the posters of a company like Reebok again.
If you want more info, here’s one article you might like to read – a very enlightening read in light of your stance on ‘violence’.
And if you want to know more, here’s a link to a search of the corpwatch site for mentioned of Reebok. I think you’ll find quite a lot of them, dear girl.
you can click here for some crass greenwash from the Reebok Human Rights Award – which is up there with the News Of The World ‘truth in journalism award’ and the McDonalds ‘animal rights activist of the year award’. the only difference being that these other two laughably crass notions don’t actually exist.
Here’s a quote from the ‘non-acceptance speech’ of one of the people Reebok attempted to award their greenwash award to, Dita Sari, a campaigner for Independent Trade Unions in Indonesia –
“I have taken this award into a very deep consideration. We finally decide not to accept this…. In Indonesia, there are five Reebok companies; 80% of the workers are women. All companies are subcontracted, often by South Korean companies…. Since the workers can only get around $1.50 a day, they then have to live in a slum area, surrounded by poor and unhealthy conditions, especially for their children. At the same time, Reebok collected millions of dollars of profit every year, directly contributed by these workers. The low pay and exploitation of the workers of Indonesia, Mexico and Vietnam are the main reasons why we will not accept this award.”
Now, Jamelia, do the decent thing, recant, and do some ads for No Sweat trainers or Ethical Threads clothing.
TAGS – Jamelia, Reebok, Sweat Shops, Corporate Watch, London Underground, Dita Sari.
In an idea nicked from a library in Sweden, Almelo library in Holland has set up a ‘living library’ – yes, you can actually book time with “gay men and women, “non-criminal” drug addicts, disabled people, asylum seekers or Gypsies.”
The idea is to allow conversations with people that are often misunderstood, victimised or marginalised, to spead understanding and tolerance.
What a fantastic idea! I love it. However, the best bits are a couple of the quotes in the article –
“We want to help people learn about all sorts of minority groups,” Mr Krol said. “We even have a politician people can borrow.”
The most popular request the library is currently receiving receives at the moment is for a gay Turkish man, but Mr Krol emphatically denies running a covert dating agency.
But read the whole article is great. The Dutch and the Scandinavians are often branded with the stereotype that they are PC to the point of lunacy, but I think this scheme really is marvellous. I’d love to go and book conversational time with interesting people I don’t understand at my local library. Maybe Mosques in London could just set it up as a way of letting the rest of Londoners understand a little more about muslims. I’m sure it’d be popular (though sadly I’m also sure that security would have to be fairly tight, as it’s the kind of scheme that parts of London’s scumbag populus would like to disrupt).
Anyway, for now I’ll keep hiring myself out for interesting conversations about bass guitar, with demonstrations thrown in, for just £25 an hour, or £40 for a two hour sesh!
So, London Underground have banned an ad featuring Jerry Hall holding 12 men on leashes.
LU said it “breaches our advertising code relating to the depiction of men, women and children as sexual objects.”
Which is quite clearly bollocks. Ads all over the underground depict women as sexual objects. At certain times of the year, depending on what kind of products are being advertised at the time, most women in ads are depicted as sex objects. There’s a huge double standard at work here. I have no desire to defend crass reality TV shows that have Jerry Hall ‘training’ men – it’ll be unwatchable shit anyway – but I do get really annoyed when advertising standards people pretend that women being sexually objectified hasn’t become the norm in advertising. Ads where it doesn’t happen are pretty rare. Yes, the occasional bloke gets in there too, but for the most part, men are portrayed as aspirational symbols to other men (equally destructive in its own way, given that their airbrushed adonis bodies are utterly unobtainable to 99% of blokes, in the same way that the huge-boobs-tiny-waist look is impossible for all but a handful of women, and for celebs is pretty much always airbrush enhanced).
Advertising is an almost entirely morally bankrupt area, and it’d be great to see LU – who own an enourmous amount of ad space – take a sensible stand on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. This time, they’ve missed the mark by miles.
Soundtrack – Andy Thornton, ‘The Healing Darkness’ (a great bunch of songs, that I first heard in their infancy months and months ago (maybe years ago, even!) – I’m not on this one, more’s the pity, but it’s still fantastic, and well worth getting)
There were loads of shows that I really wanted to see at Edinburgh this year, but didn’t get to see. One of them was Rob Newman – a standup comic, who used to be in the Mary Whitehouse experience, and was the funny one in Newman And Baddiel.
These days he’s a very political standup and author, and I’ve heard wonderful things about his show. None, however, quite as wonderful as this five star review of his show in The Scotsman – any review that finishes with the line “If this world could be saved by a superhero whose superpower was comedy, that hero would be Robert Newman.” has to be good! It’s the kind of review that will be quoted on his press material for the rest of his career.
And what’s more, it makes me desperate to see his show – let’s hope he brings it to London after the festival… a quick glance at his website shows that he’s on tour for the rest of the year with fellow political comedy genius, Mark Thomas – now THAT’S an unmissable double bill!
One of the best things about Edinburgh is meeting up with other performers. Sometimes it’s a fleeting yet encouraging chat outside a venue (I met Alan Carr outside the Assembly Rooms where he was performing, and had a lovely chat and swapped encouragement for the fest) and other times it’s people who become top chums and you stay in touch with.
Amy Kohn is a friend of JazzShark‘s, who was playing up at Edinburgh, and who stepped into the role of Echoplex footpedal on Fringe Sunday and jammed along on accordian, on Amo Amatis Amare. She was down in London this weekend playing a couple of gigs so we went along. First up she was at The 12 Bar – an acoustic venue in central London, playing at an accordion night (oh yes, it’s not just bassists who get together for a geek-out once in a while!). Obviously for this gig she was just playing accordion and singing, but was fab. She writes very quirky songs, with lots of really odd harmony in them, and it takes a while to get drawn into Amy-world, but when you catch up with her, it’s beguiling stuff.
Monday’s gig was at Ray’s Jazz in Foyles – just a half hour in-store. But they had a piano, so I went along to see what Amy was like with piano instead of accordion. Damn, she’s a fantastic piano player! Scary stuff indeed. The Accordion is a great live tool, in that it gives her freedom to move around, it’s pretty original for a left-field singer/songwriter and is just makes a nice change, but Amy’s piano playing is on a whole other level. There are nods towards Tori and Kate Bush, but that’s just a tiny part of what Amy does. She’s as much Charles Ives as she is Tori Amos, and her background in musical theatre definitely creeps in there too… I picked up copies of both her albums, and have listened to the brand new so-new-it’s-only-an-advance-copy one, which is marvellous. Really really original and lovely. Top stuff.
Today’s been a day of two halves – the first half was spent shopping in Enfield with my auntie Babs. Well, she’s actually my third cousin Babs, but has always been auntie Babs… (maternal grandmother’s cousin). Anyway, I think I’ve probably blogged about Babs before – she’s 80 (I think), but looks about 20 years younger, has a more active social life than most people half her age, a great sense of humour, and is much fun to go out for lunch with. Today she needed the batteries in her smoke alarms changing, so that was a fine excuse for us to go out for lunch before heroic me shimmying up a ladder to swap said batteries over.
And now I’m listening to and playing through the songs for Duncan’s greenbelt gig. Lucky me – what a charmed life. 🙂
With Jeff Kaiser still in town, tonight was the last chance to head out for a curry. When Jeff first came to a gig of mine in Ventura (a clinic at Instrumental Music), we went for curry afterwards, so it was time to return the favour.
I made a couple of phone calls this afternoon to find an indian restaurant in town that would cater for vegans, and one of the places I called was the Malabar Junction on Great Russell Street – just chosen at random.
So after we met up in Ray’s Jazz Store, we headed over there to check it out. Good guess, Stevie! It’s got to be one of the nicest indian restaurants I’ve ever been in – gorgeous interior, massively helpful staff, and fantastic food. What’s not to love?
Along for the evening also was trumpeter Ian Smith – one of the founders of the London Improvisors Orchestra – a very nice bloke indeed. Evenings spent talking bollocks with musicians have to rank on my favourite nights out. From curry house to Bar Italia and home again. All in all, a fine way to spend an evening.
Despite being exhausted, the promise of a chance to play a set with Orphy and a couple of friends from the States last night at the Red Rose was too tempting, so I headed off out again.
I took a much scaled down rig with me, as I knew I was only going to be playing for about 10 minutes, and really couldn’t be arsed to take the whole lot out again after setting it up and packing it down 12 days in a row at Edinburgh!
the Americans in question are Jeff Kaiser and Andrew Pask playing trumpet (jeff), sax and clarinet (andrew) through lots of delicious electronic processing (Andrew works for Cycling 74, so has written some glorious loop algorythms for Max/MSP).
They did about 25 minutes, and then Orphy and I joined them for a 10 minute improv thingie, which sounded lovely from where I was sat.
The rest of the evening was fun too – a solo trombone set from Alan Tomlinson was a mindblowing mixture of virtuosic free improv and clowning. Very funny indeed.
Then Evan Parker and John Coxon did a lovely guitar/sax duet, which ran the gamut from outnoisemadness to a bluesy mellow jazz bit in the middle and back to freakoutland. Very fine stuff.
And finally a quintet of Tony Bevan (bass sax), Mark Saunders (drums), John Edwards (bass), Ashley Wales (electronics) and Orphy (percussion etc.) finished off the night with more craziness.
And what’s more there was a huge crowd in – by far the biggest I’ve ever seen at the Red Rose, which was great especially for Jeff and Andrew, coming all this way. It was lovely to catch up with Jeff – he came to one of my gigs a couple of years ago in Ventura County, California, and loved it and we’ve been in touch ever since, so it was great to finally get to see him play live.
The London Improv scene is fascinating – it’s got a pretty unique sound to it, and a fairly broad spread of contributors. There are elements to it that come across as over-zealous in their rejection of all things tonal, and other players who seem to embrace just about anything and everything. It’s not a scene I could inhabit all year round – I’d start to feel guilty about playing so much inside music, and that’s insane – but it’s one that I feel enriched and inspired by whenever I get a chance to see those guys play. The time and energy and focus that players like John Edwards and Tony Bevan have put into exploring the outer reaches of what’s possible with their instruments is awe inspiring.
And now I’m exhausted. Today I’m going to have to tidy up the mess from Edinburgh – my office looks like the stock room at a badly organised high-end bass shop, so I need to whip it into shape before teaching tonight.
Soundtrack – Avishai Cohen, ‘Lyla’ (a pressie to educate me from JazzShark – and a fabulous album it is too!)