annastatsea: intricate ambient for the middle of a quiet night.

Singer and campaigner Bob Geldof has dubbed himself “Mr Bloody Africa” for his role as a reluctant spokesman on issues concerning the continent. “(Visiting Africa) bores me profoundly…”

A lick of paint could help a spacecraft powered by a solar sail get from Earth to Mars in just one month, seven times faster than the craft that took the rovers Spirit and Opportunity to the Red Planet.

Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine, and his brother James, who runs aerospace research firm Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California, envisage beaming microwave energy up from Earth to boil off volatile molecules from a specially formulated paint applied to the sail. The recoil of the molecules as they streamed off the sail would give it a significant kick that would help the craft on its way. “It’s a different way of thinking about propulsion,” Gregory Benford says. “We leave the engine on the ground.”

In a forthcoming issue of the journal Acta Astronautica, the Benfords explain how a sail covered with a paint designed to emit gas when it is heated might propel a spacecraft to Mars in just a month. A rocket would take the craft to low-Earth orbit, 300 kilometres up. After the craft unfurls a solar sail 100 metres across, a transmitter on Earth would fire microwaves at it to heat it up. The Benfords calculate a one-hour burst of microwaves could accelerate the craft to 60 kilometres per second, faster than any interplanetary spacecraft to date…

Here:

Jennifer Caban: the style reminds me of Bryan Talbot via Aubrey Beardsley, an English aesthetic taken international by a New York City girl.

Melissa Gira, whose spoken-word you may have listened to on Telepathine, is now podcasting at

http://feeds.feedburner.com/whorecast

And currently being archived via this link.

Three mp3s here, and the one I really recommend is “Dark,” which is fucking brilliant. It prowls and spits like early Velvet Underground, with a raw-voiced, pissed-off female vocalist.

“I Lost The Lost Moon” by Tara Vanflower is the mp3 download at the top of the page that link takes you to: distanced and dissonant, fucked and abandoned.

“Soft Liquid Sister” by Rad Ho: after-midnight beat-ambient, like slumping under the stars on the edge of a city that never sleeps. Good writing music.

Even Ghana’s director of tourism may have to admit that Accra has its work cut out competing with other tourist destinations in Africa. Yet just outside the capital, is the suburb of Teshi and it is here that tourists are coming to look at a relatively new tradition – the fantasy coffin makers.

Drive slowly down the main high street in Teshi, Eastern Accra, and you would probably glance at showrooms and wonder why anyone would want to exhibit a large red fish, or an oversized hammer.

It is as if you have arrived at some strange storage area for a local drama group or even film set. But, further into town, you will see another couple of “film set” workshops, and another, and goodness, is that really an aeroplane?

On closer inspection each of these objects turns out to be a wooden casket highly crafted and lovingly finished to transport the newly deceased on their journey to the afterlife.

Isaac Adjetey Sowah is the manager of the family business his grandfather started. And at only 22 he has seen it all and he has made it all. Coffins crafted as hammers, fish, cars, mobile phones, hens, roosters, leopards, lions, canoes, cocoa beans and several elephants. It seems there is nothing Isaac’s company would not consider…

I remember you all.

Nicola Jane in Hyde Park summer, all in white, long blonde mane and pale blue eyes, every inch reflecting light, laughing at me dressed all in black. We didn’t look right together, but we were. Waiting for you at night outside the stage door. I think that’s when I started living at night. You got brighter and I got darker.

The world got darker.

Guitars clanging like fire alarms inside the club as Tara B and I clung to each other in the back doorway, the night no bigger than me and she. My hand on her dancer’s thigh in the dark, all wrapped in nylon. Her eyes on me as she sang in working-men’s clubs. Bending her over the dressing-room table while they were still applauding in the bar. Running my fingertips over the scars on her wrists at five in the morning.

Alice the taxi driver gasping as I licked her tattoo, the first time anyone had done that. The menagerie of rats in her tiny room watching from their cages as she arched and spasmed against my lips.

Darker and darker. Time passing in a million little breaths.

I remember you all, I really do. I remember Ann-Marie’s dirtily infectious giggle as I went down on my knees in front of her and told her it was her turn to be sucked off. I remember Jenny’s wild pealing laughter as I got down on my knees at the taxi rank and asked her to marry me, to mad cheering from the bar full of people behind us.

The same taxi rank I met Alice at. Love makes you stupid. Love kills us all.

They found Alice in the back of her taxi not long after. I had a friend in the police service who said the look on her face was one of total surprise.

After a while, it was like I never saw the sun at all.

Tara B, floating in the canal like a junkyard Ophelia, burger boxes and used condoms drifting around her. Nicola Jane, slumped outside the stage door, hands over her crimson heart like she was trying to stop it breaking.

I went west, chased by permanent night. Porcelain Larissa in New York hotel rooms. Sex was a psychedelic for her. It took her places no-one else ever saw. Convulsing like an electroshock patient as I held her throat with one hand and spanked her with the other. She’d say “thank you” after each apocalyptic sequence of orgasms, looking up at me with complete devotion. Hotels would complain about the screaming.

I think perhaps they were relieved when the screaming stopped, and I sat there alone again, with night coming hard.

I ran from it. For a while, there was sun on my skin in San Francisco. And at night there was Augusta, still in her leather corset and black Victorian cape, taking control of me, telling me it would be like this forever.

But it wasn’t. The one thing I have learned in all this time is that nothing is forever. Everybody leaves.

Larissa left me in a ghetto park. From a little distance, it looked like she was wearing a red choker, and that her hands were tied by red ribbons.

People called me vain because the first thing I always bought for every new home was a mirror. But it was only so I could see another face when the night got too dark for everyone else to stand.

And here I lay now, in a country whose name I don’t even know, and night is falling, my darlings. Night is falling and I can’t run away this time.

I remember you all. And I lay here dying now. I can see it coming, feel the shape of it. All my strength is falling from me like October leaves. I have in me just enough to be able to hold your hands.

But none of you are here.

((c) Warren Ellis 2003. Old one original posted on diepunyhumans. Just moving it over here and showing it the light one more time.)

Drawn from music I’ve recently listened to and (often) talked about here. Songs made freely available for download on the internet by the artists, put into a single file and released as a podcast mixtape. Go here to get the free iPodder podcast-catching program. The Superburst podcast’s permanent location is

http://rizzn.net/Scripts/podcast/rss/warrenellis.xml

Matt Webb:

Product idea of the day: iPod circuitry printed onto adhesive paper which you peel off its backing and stick round your belly, and specially constructed pills of complex organic compounds that you swallow, and as your liver breaks the chemicals down, they set up transient electromagnetic fields that are picked up by the iPod and played as songs.

My friend the artist/photographer/writer Chad Michael Ward is selling off a pile of his books and prints on the cheap. Twenty bucks is an absolute steal for his art and photography prints. Grab one.

And as Mr Radishes from the market garden stalks his rows with a urine-stained cricket bat, beating his grotesque testosterone-sprayed crops into unconsciousness for the night… the light grows low and the sky bleeds pink like the naked albino with two and a half penises that Miss Underdunn slashed to death in the women’s changing rooms with her inter-uterine device, at the end of that awful summer of dangly terror at the Public Baths…

…and the sun goes down over the Vale Of Tears, twilight’s last gleaming shining in the cracked glass eyes of Inspector Kriegfick of the local constabulary as he commences his nightly stalk of the village, blind as a bat but guided by the unmistakable musk of Crime. Not for him the transfixing, blood-flecked beauty of a Vale sunset. For him, there is only the spoor of livestock-fiddlers, wife-covetors and the murky pheremonal fog of furtive masturbators and their night manipulations…

And the sun slips under the unwashed blanket of Night, pulling the woollen covers up to its round little chin, as the men of the village drink fresh beer, the justly famous Vale Ale, from the skulls of Taxmen and Young Folk… and the landlady of the Vale’s single pub, Mrs Horrobin of the Womb And Coathanger, wriggles on the age-smooth seat of the barnacled and innard-streaked staff toilet, drinking water and making more Vale Ale for her hated, hated customers…

And the sun sinks down into the sea of black like the vicar the townsfolk caught sniffing old ladies’ bicycle seats… the only moment of true dignity the man ever had, they say, lowering manfully into Tearstain Lake with a car tied around his neck. Though he did start screaming when the Colonel’s ducks got him. The Colonel’s programme of eugenically weaponising common wildlife was the glory, awe and unutterable private shame of the county.

And the sun goes down on the Vale Of Tears, and the were-men in the forest turn themselves into ferrets and hungrily shove themselves up the back passages of the unwary, and the vegetables sing laments of the days when their mothers and fathers were uprooted and used as sex toys in dodgy videos shot in the Community Centre, and a strange, brittle and frightened peace falls across the land… and this little piece of green and pleasant England slept the kind of sleep known only to the perverted and the doomed.

Good night, children.

Good night.

((c) Warren Ellis 2004. I wrote a few of these “Vale Of Tears” pieces, and only in this last one did I nail the tone I was after to my satisfaction. Many many years ago, I’d listened to a “Lake Woebegon” piece that had this elegaic, end-of-the-day feel to it, and I was trying to glue that together with a very English kind of ugly surreality.)