RosieBell

Militant Cyclists' Anthem

This is brilliant.  Like the man said, it should go viral.  That swift kick to the motorist on his mobile and opening his car door - the myopic, self-absorbed bastard - is a commuting cyclist's fantasy.

 

I rise in the morning, and greet the day
pull out the bike and I’m on my way
The transportation shows I care
Every turn of the pedal – cleans the air
Greener than green, I’m saving the planet
just like my friends Daryl, Sean, Toby and Janet
no greenhouse gas, a tiny carbon footprint up your ass
I’m on a motherfucking bike

Sharing my aggression is what that I do
Every day I’m riding the ‘Tour de Fuck You’
Banging on hoods and kicking in fenders
a right-of-way-aholic on a permanent bender

continues. .

The Culture Pulpers

I have to blog one piece about this assault on the culture - the culture that I know best - the poetry reading or small gig in the pub, the singers with their guitars playing in the corner, the modest little festival for local talent - the cultural equivalent of the blog.  This is DIY culture, as necessary to the comeliness of the nation as the millions of gardeners planting bulbs and putting up hanging baskets who know they will not be entries into the Chelsea Flower Show but who make the streets bright and pleasant. 

Here's a good piece on it:-

“Farcical.” That was how a leader column in this morning’s Scotsman described a new law forcing small, free events to apply for expensive entertainment licences.

Shortly afterwards, news broke that Highland Council was planning to charge a community group £153 to have an easter egg hunt. So will children be breaking the law if they roll Easter eggs this year without a licence? Yup, farcical is the word.

What next? A silly season’s worth of similar stories, potentially, if this daft, clumsy piece of legislation - part of the 2010 Criminal Justice and Licensing Act - goes ahead. One strategy being discussed by campaigners against the law (whose numbers are increasing by the day) is to flood councils with licence applications for hundreds of absurd events, such as “putting purple glitter all over the billboard outside the old social security building while my pals watch/take photos/ignore/drink beer”. In Edinburgh a day of artistic April Foolery is being considered for 1 April, the day the law comes into force.

There has been much serious, necessary discussion about the troubling implications of this law. For Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman last week, it is a warning sign that Britain is “drifting towards new forms of an authoritarianism that once seemed in permanent retreat”.

For art historian and critic Neil Mulholland, writing in Bella Caledonia, the law is an assault on human rights that could “undermine the very idea that all Scottish citizens can and should freely participate in the production and consumption of culture”. This is not, in other words, about money - it’s about democracy and civility.

Read the rest - it covers the issues very well.

Made it to Seventy

Born 2 March 1942.

Surprisingly Lou Reed's still alive.

From The Velvet Underground & Nico

 

From Berlin

 

As a contrast to the mood of those two songs, I have to post Perfect Day.  It's an urban love song - the lovers spend the weekend together going to the park, the zoo, the movies.   Then comes the lines:-

You made me forget myself
I thought I was someone else,
Someone good.

which is one of the effects of happy romantic love - that you feel wonderfully virtuous, ready for heaven in fact.

Lou Reed's singing voice is flat and untuneful so I thought I'd see if someone else had covered it.  It's a very popular song, but I couldn't find one pleasing version of it.

There's Susan Boyle - they have souped up the strings and given it full orchestral treatment with a choir in the chorus.  I can't have that.

 

Mind you, Lou's badly used face behind Boyle's smiling nice lady who does the flowers in church is something worth looking at.

Coldplay (look for it yourself) - that's with guitars.  It needs a piano accompaniment.

Bono - not so much singing as half speaking.  Adds nothing to it.  Why all those different voices, jumping up and down the register?  Far too staccato as well.

Kirsty MaColl - I thought this was a real find since I really like her voice but I don't think it's right.  She's duetting with Evan Dando and it's a little expressionless and bland.

 

I googled "Perfect Day Best Version" and found some unknown on YouTube had used "Best Version" as bait to his own terrible rendering. 

There's the BBC Children in Need one where twenty or so artists do a line each.  It's excruciating - some poor belter like Tom Jones is cut off before he's got even into half a stride. 

I couldn't find any version that I liked.  Why doesn't k d lang do it?  She can put across a song and she doesn't overdo the orchestration.  Here, for instance, she does a marvellous version of Joni Mitchell's A Case of You - she gets the emotion but doesn't rant, every word is clear and she sounds so relaxed and easy. 

 

So nothing else but to hear the man himself do it. 

 

Happy Pedant

Spring, and I was out in the garden planting seeds and clearing winter debris while listening to Radio 4's Saturday afternoon play An American Rose.  This slot is usually good, the play often based on some event in  history or an actual person.  Today's was about Rosemary Kennedy, the Kennedy daughter who had mental problems and was lobotomised, and her lively sister Kathleen, a war widow, who was killed in a flying accident.   It was well written and well acted, but I was happy to find two anachronisms.

Rose Kennedy scolds her daughters for lying on their beds wearing "designer gowns".  This is the 1930s - was "designer" used as an adjective then?  Wouldn't she have said "haute couture" or just "couture"?

Someone is described as a "commitmentphobe".   They certainly had the thing then, but the word?  That is very recent - appearing in the last 20 or 30 years I would have said.

Kathleen Kennedy

When I say I was "happy" to find two anachronisms, I'm remembering Hazlitt's remark:- "He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.' 

The bloke next door said I must be pleased to be gardening again since I missed last year, having been absent from my flat because of its half destruction by pipes bursting upstairs on Boxing Day 2010.  He cheered me up by saying last year had been a terrible gardening year.  It rained a good deal and courgettes rotted.

Now from Weegieland

I have to say I'm amazed at the amount of coverage Fritz has been getting.  Here's another obituary, this one from the Glasgow Herald, showing him as a child of the punk era, with its 'zines, noisy bands,  gigs in scruffy venues and opportunities for the creative:-

Flushed with the sense of reinvention the punk era inspired, [Fritz] took his diabolic nom de plume from Dracula's vampire-slaying nemesis usually played by Peter Cushing in Hammer's increasingly camp restyling of Bram Stoker's original Gothic novel. Van Helsing took on the very of-its-time pen-name of Lou Kemia for his excitable scrawls in Wrong Time, but kept the eventually legally acquired Van Helsing name to the end, his former pre-teen identity a closely guarded secret.

Where others of his generation moved on to more respectable outlets, Van Helsing kept the faith throughout the next two decades, be it through his zines Asylum and Full Moon, or playing drums in equally wilful bands including FRAK and Nicotine Fingers. In 2000, with two friends Van Helsing began the Full Moon Club in the suitably labyrinthine confines of Bannerman's, the former folk pub in Edinburgh's Cowgate. For seven years on the last Thursday of each month, the Full Moon operated an anything-goes speakeasy policy that could see solo troubadours on the same bill as stand-up poets and punk guitar duos in an off-radar cabaret that attracted a loyal fan-base without ever attempting to curry favour with the rest of the city's music scene.

[I don't know if we started the Full Moon Club in Bannermans, though we were there for part of the time  We held it in The Maltings, the Canonsgait and a huge, rather grand place down in Leith, where our FRAK video was recorded.  My memory is of lugging amplifiers up steep stairs from pub basements.  There were some great gigs - and some terrible ones.]

Evening News Obituary

Another piece on Fritz here:-

Mr Van Helsing was born in Inverness, where he attended Millburn secondary school. He moved with his family to the Oxgangs area of Edinburgh when he was 16.

The name Fritz Van Helsing was adopted by the musician, who was a huge fan of Hammer horror movies. Family and friends remembered him as a creative, eccentric individual.

Sam Barber, 28, a member of the band FRAK with Mr Van Helsing from 2003 to 2004, said: “He had a habit of putting duct tape on the surface of his drum kit.

“It sounded horrendous but he insisted that was the sound he wanted. As if he wanted it to sound really cheap and nasty.

“Most people you speak to in the Edinburgh music world will tell you that he did a lot for the scene.

“In terms of living the rock and roll life on a minimal budget, he took it about as far as you can. He was a punk first and foremost – it was his whole life."

Fritz was a great enabler of other people's talents.  It's a talent in itself.