1. pumpkintime, 2. pahbo pahbo pahbo, 3. IMG_8878, 4. Grey Seal at Bull Island, Dublin, 5. Love my Obama shirt, 6. At SF Obama HQ, packed with phone bankers Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

* Eliza Gauger’s "Flee" now available at her Etsy store:

* This photo of Zoetica by Lou O’Bedlam reminds me so strongly of the fields I spend the ages of 5 to 7 in, I was seriously misty-eyed for a while after she showed it to me. Six years old and walking home from school in the summer; the path home looked so much like this, light and all, that I was struck dumb for a minute.

*Siege:

* Kelly Sue DeConnick interviewed.

* Jamais Cascio on the Googlephone.

* Also by Jamais: a helpful guide to Wil Wheaton’s performance in last week’s CRIMINAL MINDS:

* Bryan O’Malley publicly declares opposal to Rock Band, gets sent Rock Band by the developers gratis, loves it. NOTE TO ALL: I HATE WHISKY. ALSO BEER, DIAMONDS, GOLD, NEW DESKTOP COMPUTERS.

Normal posting will resume shortly. I appear to have woken up nine-parts dead. Activity here may be shambolic.

• I am a Kamura – London, UK – Other / Folk / Alternative – www.myspace.com/iamakamura
  Atsuko Kamura from the Frank Chickens, if anyone (but me) remembers them… beautiful stuff.
  (tags:music )

I was about to go to bed when Wil Wheaton made me look at this.

LOOK AT THIS.

I will never sleep again, for fear of an ex-wizard materialising over my bed to forcibly fashion me a uterus out of Jesus.

There are, of course, many things to love about Germany, including but not limited to the beer, Kraftwerk, the food, Roedelius, a particularly fine hotel in Hamburg that I’m very fond of, and the sainted Nina Hagen, here covering Rammstein’s "Seemann" with Apocalyptica:

The beautiful redhead on the far right is of course my friend Lenora Claire. It would seem that she and a friend of hers were… I don’t know… visiting the LA wing of Hell?

UPDATE:
From: Lenora Claire
Subject: Warren Ellis makes a Boom Boom
Body: I’m sure he’s going to kill me for that bulletin title and I really should know better than to sass Internet Jesus but he just posted this on his blog which has me cracking up. For the record I was at club Shits & Giggles to dump pudding down my friend Boom Boom’s underpants. Now…doesn’t that make a bit more sense.

I think STIMMUNG was the first piece of Stockhausen I ever heard. I’ve rarely been without a copy since, because I hear something new in the same recordings every time. Written in the year of my birth, STIMMUNG is a composition for six voices with six microphones, a complex system of rhythmic, cycling polyphonies. This excerpt from a recent performance of the work is set in a reservoir outside Darmstadt in Germany, which would put it not too far from Castle Frankenstein.

From liner notes to a 1986 recording:

In each section a new overtone melody or ’model’ is introduced and repeated several times. Each female voice leads a new section eight times, and each male voice, nine times. Some of the other singers gradually have to transform their own material until they have come into ’identity’ with the lead singer of the section . . . by adopting the same . . . tempo, rhythm and dynamics. When the lead singer feels that ’identity’ has been reached, he or she makes a gesture to another singer who leads the next section. Each model is a set of rhythmic phonetic patterns, often with actual words used as their basis, such as ’Hallelujah’ or ’Saturday’.

I guess it must’ve been around 1994. Marie Javins had been telling me about this guy she knew from her Texas days, who seemed to spend a lot of time in and out of the nuthatch, and may possibly have been institutionalised for pushing an old lady through a window while attempting to exorcise her. Details are hazy. And she put together a mixtape of this guy’s music, which she’d collected from him over the years.

What I love about the search for new music is hearing that which you never heard before. Most things sound a bit like something else. Only every couple of years, if you’re very lucky, do you turn up something that is really seriously unlike anything you heard before.

And so I played the tape of recordings by Daniel Johnston. And have been fascinated ever since.

The really odd thing about Johnston is the classic pop structure underlying his stuff. Check out M Ward’s arrangement of Johnston’s "To Go Home" sometime. And it’s not hard to pick out the old blues figures in "Don’t Play Cards With Satan." This version isn’t as deranged as the one on that tape — by three and a half minutes in he was giving it a throat-shredding shriek — but it’s close. Watching him sing it, though, is probably harder, in an odd way.

4chan awe, terrify and sicken me: http://zip.4chan.org/co/res/6340037.html

I do like those people.

Also, I like their belief that I have more than one cock.

Also, pedotards stay away from my daughter or I’ll smear your tiny dicks off with the sole of my boot.

But mostly I like those people.

(link sent by Twitter user i_am_iron_man_d, thanks)

There are certain constants in life that come to form the invisible pillars of the world. I had one of mine knocked down the other day. Not an important one, but one you take so for granted that everything seems trembling and scary afterwards. It is this: German pop music is crap. German pop music has always been crap. (The exception that proves the rule, by the way, is Trio — I can’t conceive of Nina Hagen as a pop star. And Nena were crap.) Germany is the source of very many wonderful things in life, but pop music? Not one of them.

And then, this week, I dropped in on Ectomo to find them talking about a new song by Peter Fox, vocalist with the awful faux-reggae band Seeed. I mean, these people are so bland you can listen to an entire album and simply not notice. Seeed never quite grasped the difference between "chilled" and "actually fucking dead." So I didn’t have great hopes for Fox — who looks like some laboratory cross between Ben Templesmith and a young Ron Perlman — as a solo artist, but decided to make with the clicky anyway.

I’ve found myself listening to it every bloody day this week.

You’ll note that Peter Fox moves like a German pop star. Can’t dance, vestigial sense of rhythm, gurns at the camera (his other videos as a solo artist attempt to invoke the one thing Germans shouldn’t be allowed to essay beyond their own borders — comedy). The monkey masks are, shall we say… questionable.

But something about the combination of the circling strings, that threaten at any moment to burst out into the refrain of "The Big Country" (or its detournment for "The Only Rhyme That Bites"), and the clattering precision of the Cold Steel Drumline (stick out the video past 3.30 to see them fucking around)…

God help me, I know it’s German pop, but I can’t help listening to it.

If you don’t like L’Orchestre Folklorique Tout Puissant Konono No 1, then you are just dead inside.  They’re like the ultimate version of every chiming jumping Zimbabwean guitar band Peel and Andy Kershaw played in the 80s — their supremacy being down to that sound, that plangent blown-out sound, those fucked-up electrified thumbpianos being blasted through ancient tannoy horns.  CONGOTRONICS went everywhere with me for about a year. Just a taste:

Yes, I’m just wandering around YouTube in between bits of work. And tripped over this. The Sundays, "Can’t Be Sure," 1989. The full stop to a decade of indiepop. In one song, they just said and did it all, summed up that jangly breathy awkward sweet naive genre that was only ever heard either at clubs full of people wearing cardigans or on ghostly John Peel latenight wavelengths. "Can’t Be Sure" encapsulates and largely perfects the whole thing. After it, there was nothing to be done. Took some people a few years to get the memo, of course.

Their work done, The Sundays should have just ceased to exist immediately after recording. The people renting them the studio should have discovered that the cheque came from an account that didn’t exist, and that the band members’ names were on no system anywhere. Their houses empty, as if never lived in, and no record of anyone having met them…

(But they made three albums and then had kids.)

I’m tired, and I just feel like posting music today. This isn’t the full version of My Bloody Valentine’s "Soon," just the cut-down music-video version. But it remains a fair approximation of a record that, in its time, changed a lot of things.

The Guardian, this morning:

More and more questions emerge over the horrible story of the McCain campaign worker who says she was attacked in the street in Pittsburgh by a black man who carved the letter ’B’ on her face and told her: "You are going to be a Barack supporter." Police now plan to administer a lie-detector test over contradictions in her account. "If the incident turns out to be a hoax," writes a senior Fox News executive, "Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting."

KDKA, a little while ago:

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Meredith Yayanos:

This footage was recorded 10/23/08 in Oakland, CA, on a public street corner near Lake Merritt. I was on my way home from the Lakeshore district when I encountered this group of supporters of Prop 8 (proposition to ban gay marriage). After turning my vidphone on, I was screamed at, physically intimidated and eventually attacked by one of the sign-wavers.

The Face of Proposition 8 from Theremina on Vimeo.

Perhaps a good place to start if you’ve never read it before?

My daughter is now 13. You can tell this by the way she presents herself for dinner at a restaurant wearing red and black striped fingerless gloves, a black puffball skirt and tights, a t-shirt that’s the dilute 2008 iteration of an idea Vivienne Westwood scrawled on the back of a fag packet in 1976, and a pair of boots that appear to have been fashioned from the hollowed-out legs of a particularly unfortunate black bear. Also, by the way I’ve gone from being called “daddy” to being called “shut up, Ellis.” She bitches that she can only hold something like 500 texts (three days’ worth of use, it would seem) on her hideous KRZR phone, and bitches that it’s “not fair” that my Nokia has eight gigs onboard. I’m faring better than her mother, who is incapable of even comprehending the previous sentence (her phone is so old that it’s essentially a Morse tapper). When she actually places a phone call, she goes out into the garden, so we can’t hear her Secret And Important Conversations. Which mostly sound like “yeah… cool… yeah… creepy… yeah.” She wears her mp3 player in the car so she doesn’t have to listen to “old, creepy” bands on the CD player. And then berates me for not listening to “dad music” in the office. Which is also often termed “creepy.” Most things are either “cool” or “creepy.” Having accounts on social network services is evidently “sad.” She’s forgotten her email password and messages her friends through game and fashion sites. She uses YouTube to listen to music. Nouns have seemingly become optional: “I need to thing about thing with thing and thing.” Her mother understands every word. I do not. This may be why her mother is “cool” and I am “creepy.”

I’m loving every minute of it.

Also, due to some fluke in their protection, her school’s web connection can access this website. (Yeah. I know, right?) So, one day soon, Lili or her friends will find this post.

Lili, you are an annoying toad with a mutant power for belching loud enough to set off car alarms in the next street.

I love you, little angel.

Her life will be HELL when they find this…

* Wil Wheaton’s on CRIMINAL MINDS tonight on CBS in America, playing a man who sodomises frat boys with violin bows or something. (Hey, that was an actual plotline on LAW AND ORDER: CHILD RAPE CAVALCADE or whatever that thing’s called.)

* Amused to note that Publishers Weekly, of all places, is asking when a Warren Ellis/Molly Crabapple webcomic can be expected.

* Siege says: “Criticism is always useful. When it’s constructive it tells me about my work. When it’s destructive it tells me about the critic.”

* Matt Jones: The Bond Villain of the Long Now.

Someone’s slung Julian Cope’s BBC documentary THE MODERN ANTIQUARIAN, produced following the success of his book of the same name (which is bloody wonderful) up on YouTube. I don’t think this piece ever made it to DVD, so I’m delighted to find it again. For those coming to Cope fresh, treat him (especially in the opening) with good humour — he doesn’t take himself too seriously, after all. This is a man who titled one of his albums DROOLIAN, and another CHARLOTTE ANN. Click through for the other five parts of the video.

(if anyone needs this removed from my site, let me know at degaussing at googlemail com.)