The Booth Museum in Dyke Road, Brighton (UK)
There's storm clouds amassing over in the West...
And then a strange purple light crept out of the vent...
It was a long shot, but...
What went on?
This mix is a transitional one I think. I don't really know what I was doing, and I don't think this really works as a mixtape, or makes for a particularly enjoyable listening experience for sharing. It's more like a does of personal therapy, or an exorcism. It's all a bit stop-start. Still buried in cold winter.
I find it incredibly sad actually. I just don't know what I'm looking for here.
Still, as John Hiatt says, have a little faith in me.
A side
Download the whole thing as mp3s, in two parts again:
- A side (55mb) here http://www.savefile.com/files/2001173
- B side (48mb) here http://www.savefile.com/files/2001218
Once again, after 100 downloads it's gone.
A new mix CD. Free for the first 100 downloads and then it's gone. God bless you all.
This mix wasn't supposed to happen like this. I was making a list of songs from randomised playing on my MP3 player, but then the hard drive on my office computer broke, and while it's fixable I can't be bothered right now, so moved over to my laptop and had to start again from the tracks on there, and I wasn't really sure what I was putting together here but when it was finished it felt totally right and has its own stories. You can work them out for yourself.
This is a sociable mix, for playing in clubs I think, but the kind of clubs where people sit and talk rather than dance. A slow wintery start, with lots of old soul, and some fresh young Brighton sounds amongst other things. Aidan Moffat cuts it in half like a knife.
Take it in two bites, each being 60 megabyte downloads.
Partly inspired by an excellent night of readings at Sam and Jay's Tight Lip on Friday, I went searching for some old stories and poems I wrote about a decade and a half ago. These were printed up in a limited edition xeroxed book, of which probably no more than a dozen copies are in circulation (I still have a box of them somewhere). It received a nice review in Factsheet Five; and was later placed on the web, on a site which has now closed down, hence why I went searching.
Anyway, I thought for a while this stuff was tired and jaded, but I've decided to like it again, so thought I'd make some of it available here. If you want a copy of the rest, drop me an email with your address.
These three short stories were based around a theme of alienation from modern life, and were written as pseudo film-scripts for short films that were never intended to be filmed. I guess they work as visual poems rather than stories in the traditional sense.
The stories, and some accompanying music...
story 1 - women are
mp3 Cat Power - Be a good woman (live radio session)
mp3 Magnolia Electric Company - How to love a man
mp3 Okkervil River - Our life is not a movie or maybe (radio session)
A light bulb vibrant and glowing yellow, almost purest white. Then a field of trees, burning, flames roaring free and singeing the clouds. A church steeple, the cross, purest white and in the sky, down to a wall, the sodden earth, a marble floor.
A woman with a young girl holding on to her left hand, looking timid. The woman in a loose wrap-around skirt, dirt brown like the soil, a scarf wound turban-like around her head, her face, clean and white, a small baby held in her free arm, clutched tightly against her breast, its face staring blankly out into the world, not knowing why it is hanging there. Not yet self-conscious in any way.
Then another marble floor, the same woman is still barefooted, and we see a bracelet around one ankle and a small tattoo of a bird on the other. She is staring, blankly, tired, frozen and daunted at the bottom of an underground escalator. I am at the top of the escalator, smoking, dust blowing into my eyes in a gust of wind so strong that I cannot suck on my cigarette and taste the tobacco. I step out into the street where there is no movement except for the warm night air.The cigarette finished and dropped, a shoe treads the stub into the pavement, a black Doctor Martin boot, a scarlet-stockinged leg, a short skirt, crewcut jumper and short jacket, a bright, heated face with blazing red lipstick, wildly gazing about her - alien, scaled, alive and beautiful.A tramp passes by muttering a stream of incomprehensible phrases, ending in a crystal clear "I didne steal it" and takes out the bottle of whisky concealed in his overcoat. The lights are colourful and fuzzy, cars speed by, in the night, unrecognisable in the formless dark. A neon light, flashes 'ComeOn!ComeIn!' A red traffic light turns amber.
Indoors: A short woman with long blonde curly hair is leaning her back against the radiator, standing and staring down at the palms of her hands. A man's shadow is cast over her. She looks towards him and begins to speak: "I was reading a book about palmistry," she says.
I have a clear picture of the wrinkles on the palms of her hands upturned, laid out in front of her accusingly. "My mother must have left it in the flat. I don't know how it got there."
Her right forefinger runs along the major curved line of her left hand down to the wrist. "Look, it is so thin and weak. And there are so many lines crossing it."
The picture is frozen, engraved on my memory. She is frowning, her eyebrows edge closer together. A man, it is I, sips at a white plastic cup half full with a warm brown liquid. The woman continues to speak:
"The lines say I must be weak and indecisive."
I look at her, slowly, thoroughly, without expression. I put the cup down, turn my hands over and open my palms. "Your lines are so strong and certain," she says. Just so, there are no crossing lines, only firm blotchy pink flesh.
"It's true," I say, "I have direction," smiling, only half joking. The woman is still looking down at her hands now, smiling a worried smile.
The same woman is alone, walking up a barren communal stairwell, in a reasonably plush block of flats. She puts a key in a door, opens it, and steps inside a flat which is large and has a decor significant for its security, its apparent wealth, its feel of otherness that is not her own: a clean kitchen, a big double bed, no curtains in the windows, and an array of ornaments. She puts a disc in the hifi, something quietly spacious and ethereal like PaulBley's Open To Love.The man is in another place. It is clearly shabby and barren. He is huddled over an old wooden table, unvarnished and cracking: he is making a list of his certainties. Writing in a blackbiro:
A bed of roses in a park. It is a warm sunny day in Spring. A drake is chasing a duck across a patch of grass over hung by an old oak tree, something solid. The female duck runs just enough to separate them, and then she stops, to allow the male to close in, and then she starts again. Infatuated. 1. I am permanently homeless. I change my address once every three months, I share essential facilities with people who are not of my choosing.
2. I am badly paid, my work is unregulated and temporary, it holds no future nor any meaning.
3. I am a man. I am alone.
The man is crouching by a pond in the park. More ducks are floating on the water, the sky is clearest blue. There are flowers, and people are walking along the footpath on the other side of the water. Our gaze focuses on a couple, a man and a woman, their arms around eachother, smiling. Patches of cloud emerge in the blue of the sky.
A woman is sitting with glasses, on a bench, well-dressed like a businesswoman, reading a newspaper. Another, perfectly formed, is lying on the grass in a pair of cream shorts and a white vest, dark glasses, staring at the sky.
Then a line of people at a bus stop. A large black woman in a large black dress with lace trimming. An over-weight middle-aged white woman with two over flowing bags of shopping either side of her. A man in a suit, holding nothing. An old woman with a handbag big enough to devour the whole world, her face haggard and drawn. Looking up the road, people and shops, a dreary autumn day now, grey in texture as if the city's smog had seeped into the lens of the camera.
Our lives are not drawn like random lots, they are made. But we all have a hand in their making. Karl Marx. Roll credits and
