Mountain*7 - for the person with nothing better to do

Albert Hoffman

Albert Hoffman the man who first synthesized LSD has died aged 102.

You can read his book, LSD - My Problem Child online

Posted by poacher at 13:04 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

'The pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway' (image by Simon Sellars)

Simon Sellars over at the ever fabulous Ballardian has posted a brilliant piece on Shepperton, the Surrey suburb that has been Ballard's home for the best part of 50 years. In it Sellars takes a walk through the area and, as he puts it, takes 'photographs of the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing.' And as such, it's a piece that charts the incongruity that sits at the heart of this statement, that comes to terms with the shock of just how ordinary and banal Shepperton is. In truth, and this is the same with any writer's sacred geography, the 'arena' of Shepperton is a mythic one, not only in terms of Ballard's recreation of it and adumbrations within it - evident in Simon's totemic guidebook, The Unlimited Dream Company - but also in the magical creative gap between a personal lifetime's reading and meditation, and the dulled bricks of the real. Sellars is obviously well aware that this incongruity must exist but it's still fascinating to watch him drift through the landscape and remap this mental space as he goes, seeking out the lush meadows around the River Ash, the frozen scream of the M3 and of course the squatting reliquary of memories that is the Shepperton Studios. I wonder if he found the psychic hub of the place not in the studios themselves but in the edgelands around them - in the discarded sets that fan out into the wasteland around the tributaries of the Ash and in the housing estate that butts up against the fencing around the hulking warehouses of the outer lots where the artificial dreams of one world and the collective dreamlife of another bleed together, coalescing into some viscous churning emanation... Bring on part 2.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 16:29 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

London, Shite

I’ve been meaning to put together a few thoughts on the deluge of free newspapers that flood a London commute, but K-punk’s musings on the (paper)waste land of London Bridge convinced me that it has already been done in ways that I could never surpass:

“Look around the carriage, snapshot of a MySpaced city: diversity without difference, homogeneity without communality - bodies reduced to claustrophobic zombie meat fighting for space, background hum of mutual hostility simmering, yet everyone is reading the same thing...”

Posted by whispering dave in place, nature, landscape at 12:45 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless

Hemingway, speaking of F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast

Posted by poacher in books at 17:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Trees, Scotland

A great gallery of tree photographs from the camera of Stuart Franklin, taken over the last 10 years.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 09:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

So said Matty, rapper from the Credit To The Nation to a sun soaked crowd at the NME stage, Glastonbury 1994. I know he said this as I was there, & his set was a highlight of mine from my first Glastonbury festival. I may have enjoyed Cypress Hill that year too. Or was it 1995? I recall spilling cider everywhere whilst moving to the bass lines of Adam F. And I would have darted between the sets of Orbital & Elvis Costello as I couldn’t make up my mind which to see. The memories of those Glastonbury Festivals in the mid 90’s will remain with me forever, all gloriously blurred & rolled into one.

The attraction of the festival was the diversity in the performing artists. And I’m glad it still is. So why is so much fuss being made over Jay-Z performing? Why has this caused so much vitriol amongst so many of the kids. And Noel Gallagher? Glastonbury is for guitars he says. No it isn’t Noel.

This whole furore has stemmed from the inability to sell all their tickets straight away. This has been correlated with the booking of a hip-hop act as one of the headline acts. Almost certainly this is a very lazy & incorrect correlation. But what has bothered me is the backlash from the likes of Gallagher & certain comments I have read in the media & web. Some of it is almost sinister. I would not want to be part of a festival in which many of its participants were so abhorred by the thought of a hip-hop act headlining.

I think the Glastonbury organisers should be commended for booking Jay-Z. And if the festival is to retain its significant cultural status it has attained, musical plurality is a must. I didn’t listen to much hip-hop when I was 18 years old attending my first Glastonbury. And I certainly hadn’t seen any live. Seeing Credit To The Nation changed that, and I’m grateful.

Posted by dragon chaser in music at 11:47 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Chernobyl, Pluto's Realm

Photographs of the landscape around Chernobyl.

My favourite are roads that haven't been ridden for years. Sometimes, I leave a log on the road to see if someone else will travel here. When I return in a year or two, seeing my log has not been moved suggests that I still have no followers

Also: two more series' of photographs on the same subject: 1986-2006, and nuclear nightmares by Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 09:56 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Posted by poacher in poetry at 20:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Mogwai (image by sadmafioso)

There's been various stories floating around about the new Mogwai record, apparently called The Hawk Is Howling and due out sometime this year. There's also the double disc Young Team reissue on the cards, with a mouthwatering 8 unreleased tracks included... The band have also got a new track on a Rock Action sampler given away free with this month's Plan B Magazine. The track is called 'Dracula Family' (another in a long list of great titles) and from what I can make out will be on the new album when it appears. In sound it's probably close to the glowing steel of 'Kids Will Be Skeletons' from Happy Songs... and it has a real bright tone to it, and an unusual step to the drum pattern. Check it out.

Download: Mogwai - Dracula Family

Listen:

There is also a new and free Frightened Rabbit track available over at Stereogum - 'Soon Go' a b-side to their forthcoming 7" (which simply must to be 'The Modern Leper' surely?) You can also read Scott Hutchison giving a track by track rundown of The Midnight Organ Fight over at Ragged Words.

Posted by poacher in music at 14:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Some reading for the evening - Christopher Ricks, renowned academic and Dylan obsessive is interviewed by Eurozine

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them.

To some extent, Dylan thinks – as Tolstoy did – that you should value the art of the calypso singer more than the art of the high priest of learning and sophistication and high culture. But it is clear to him that Eliot is a genius and The Waste Land keeps coming into things that he writes. It is clear that he knows Eliot very well.

(via 3 Quarks Daily)

Posted by poacher in music articles at 17:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)