Sunday, April 29, 2007

Of bees and men...

Playlist
Ars Nova – Fear and Anxiety
Mingo Lewis – Flight Never Ending
Nektar – Journey to the Centre of the Eye
Tangerine Dream – Live at Sheffield City Hall 29/10/74
The League of Gentlemen – Better in the Dark (Live 4/5/80)
La Dusseldorf - La Dusseldorf
John McLaughlin – Industrial Zen
Allan Holdsworth – Touching On
Anekdoten – Nucleus
Godspeed You Black Emperor – F#A# Infinity [EP]
Godspeed You Black Emperor – Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada [EP]
Rush – Snakes and Arrows
Rush – 18 (CD-R)
Deep Purple – Anthology
Porcupine Tree – Fear of a Blank Planet
Billy Cobham's Glass Menagerie - Stratus

Up early again and I’m drawn once more to the download sites...

An album I was looking at yesterday and which turns out to be a bit of a jazz fusion masterpiece is Mingo Lewis’s “Flight Never Ending”. Master percussionist Mr Lewis played with Al Di Meola for a while before turning up in one of my all-time favourite bands, The Tubes (which is how I know of him)...



I also found a concert from Tangerine Dream’s halcyon days in 1974, part of which was used in their album “Ricochet”...



As we breakfasted we listened to La Dusseldorf’s debut album while watching some cookery show with the sound down – it seems you can’t switch on the telly these days without a cookery show playing on one channel or another...



After breakfast, I washed up the dishes (and last night's) whilst listening to a CD from Allan Holdsworth, the existence of which I was unaware of until yesterday...



Then I took some time to sort out some CDs which have been lying around for a while in no particular order, having been relegated from the “Latest 100” shelf in the living room to the back bedroom...

Then I burned a couple of discs – Rush and Godspeed You Black Emperor, the latter failing to work on any of my CD players for some reason – poetic justice perhaps...




Apparently, according to Einstein "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man"...


This gem turned up on David Byrne’s blog entry of 24 April – which is weird because John from Impossible Songs mentioned the exact same thing last Saturday as we were dining chez Crispycat...


C’mon the bees!!


Doesn’t look good though - more than a quarter of the honeybees in the U.S. have vanished according to the New York Times while German magazine Der Spiegel reports that beekeepers on the east coast of the United States have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent...


Mr Byrne puts forward the theory that it may be a conspiracy involving the producers of Genetically Modified Food...


While I mucked about on the PC, compiling a new 18 track Rush compilation (one song from each of their studio albums from 1974-2007) and read various things, including this about the bees, it occurred to me how hopeless I am and how pathetically worthless my life and everything I do is....

Reading Mr Byrne's blog, I couldn't help thinking that I can't remember the last time I had an original thought...


And I spend almost every free moment I have either listening to other people’s music or creating music which no-one else will ever hear...

Anyway, not to worry - after all, we're all just waiting to die...

While I was, ahem, "busy" doing all this, Hearts, in turn, were busy thrashing Celtic 3-1 at the potato bowl and justice was done at last - I'm tired of Celtic winning ugly and the very, very annoying little gnaff who manages the team...

Unfortunately, the thrashing didn’t seem to ruin the ‘Tic’s celebrations as they collected the SPL Championship Trophy...

We cooked together tonight for the first time in a while – a fairly simple pasta bake with salami – and we grooved in the kitchen to the strains of Deep Purple, fuelled by a nice drop of Chianti...



Two episodes each of “Everybody Hates Chris” and “Joey” were followed by “Coronation Street” before I retired upstairs to do some background on a trip to Ireland soon – Limerick and Cork beckon – and to write this up...



The new albums by Rush (above) and Porcupine Tree (below) entertained me as I surfed, cut, pasted, typed and printed...




In normal Sunday fashion, “Match of the Day 2” finished off the day...

Highlight of the Day : Groovin’ and Cookin’

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