My entries to Blogger Takeover have been dwindling over the past 3 or so months.
Now OK, work has been busy, my mind often elsewhere, and for the last 6 weeks the house has been in pieces as some much welcomed re-decoration is taking place.
As part of this clearance, the stereo was removed, so therefore was all “normal” listening. Spotify moments and YouTube selections (usually of “stuff” I already know) has become the new normal, and whilst 6Music is still perma-tuned station of choice in the car I find I’m no longer enjoying it as much as I once did
(this could of course be down to a recent re-brand/re-shuffle/re-centring of the target market – which I am probably no longer part of)
Once decoration was finished, and as a birthday present to myself, I bought a new stereo and eagerly and gleefully set it up. And then stood for about 10 minutes staring at the CD shelves trying to find some inspiration – none came!
And it’s still not coming … culturally, I’m at a low
Music – see above. Stacked CD shelves, Amazon Wish Lists, and 6Music not giving any magic (was in that London last week, and despite being given free rein to enter a couple of record shops, I just didn’t have the urge
Books – the “to read” pile is getting higher, the current book on the go has not been opened for about a month, and even the last Mojo has only been flicked through
TV / Film – “there’s nothing on the telly!”, at least nothing I really want to sit down and watch. I’ve got Amazon Prime and Netflix, and spend more time scanning through search screens and recommendations, than I do actually watching stuff.
This too shall pass … I’m sure it will, but I just can’t seem to break the barrier
In the meantime, I’m off to Blogger Takeover to make a list of recommendations which might, just might, return me to my old curmudgeonly self.
more is less, innit? we’ve all got so much, and have access to even more, and it becomes stultifying (but wonderful). Until you get it back to normal, maybe enjoy limitations. I was away last week,m and had a book and my phone – mostly read the book. Need to detox from the internet and social media, too. that also gives one the ennui.
Re: “new stereo” – what did you get?
Denon DM41 – nowt fancy, but glorious package and great sound. Just going through negotiations to keep the turntable attached.
Negotiations?
Re: “re-decoration” – how satisfied are you with the new kitchen?
Whenever I have been feeling like I might have heard it all, I have been to a pub gig and discovered a support band I have never heard of before. Firestations and Sunday Driver being the most recent examples.
Rest assured the malaise will pass.
My malaise is nearly two years old now. There’s just too bloody much, I have the attention span of a butterfly, the odd new release excites me for a day or two, I play some old stuff now and then (currently The Beat) but I listen less to music since, I don’t know, I was eight years old?
I only come here to play Wordle and hurl insults at Gary ….
“You can gauge the righteousness of your cause by the ugliness of the abuse it provokes.”
Winston Churchill said that.
He also said “underidoderidoderiododeridoo”.
6music in the week has gone down the toilet.
Still love Cerys, RadMac and Guy Garvey on a Sunday and Giles Peterson on a Saturday but not a shadow on what it was
My postings on blogger takeover have also dropped but plan to rectify that this month.
I think the way forward is to not go for new new, but ‘new to you’. This is how
found myself listening to a collection of Alma Cogan and Anthony Newley this week. Followed by a burst of French ye-ye from the early 60s, none of which are generally my thing. I enjoyed it. Going back to Louis Jordan and Prima, and Ray Charles also never fails to raise my appetite for music
A man after my own heart. A little Anthony Newley goes a long way in my opinion, but now that everything ever recorded is available at the touch of a button, I love poking around among artistes I would have gnawed my leg off rather than listen to back in the day.
Have a taste of a recent rediscovery, Harry “The Hipster” Gibson.
Precisely. The joy in this compared to the cynicism of the latest ‘product’ tells us what we should be listening to.
Been enjoying the early sixties instrumental jazz that came along when the post-boppers first started to get funky and then later in the decade when black consciousness, psychedelia and spirituality made inroads. Stanley Turrentine’s ’60s albums are great examples of that funkiness coming into jazz. “Sugar” is a good example.
As for an example of rock and psychedelia coming into things, have a listen to guitarist Phil Upchurch’s “Upchurch”.
Everybody that knows a bit about jazz will have heard of Oliver Nelson’s “The Blues And The Abstract Truth” and it’s a really great album. Also worth a listen, in my opinion is “Afro/American Sketches” by The Oliver Nelson Orchestra. A denser sound but if you can stand modernist big-band music, this one’s really worth a listen.
Completely outside of my jazz obsession, I chanced upon a great female singer/songwriter/guitarist called Ella Clayton, playing support to Hattie Whitehead in a little basement place in Dalston. I’m an admirer of Hattie Whitehead, but I think on the night Ella was better. Have a listen to her album “Murmurations”.
I was laid low for about a week with a rotten case of flu (or was it Covid?) at the beginning of the month. Possibly caught at The Lexington watching The Primevals with Stewart Lee supporting. Now that was a great night and I got beyond seeing The Primevals as a palate-cleansing antidote to my ongoing jazz fixation and I think I finally really “got” what they are about. They were on particularly good form that night.
Missed out on a couple of planned gigs due to the flu/Covid debacle but was back in action by the latter half of the month. Made my usual Sunday evening pilgrimage to the Elephant Inn in Finchley to catch John Crawford and band, who were good and was back there again on the Friday to see my pal Dex and his funk & soul band there. The following Sunday I was at another Finchley venue, The B3 Lounge at The Bohemia for guitarist Sam Dunn with Liam Dunachie on the lounge’s Hammond B3 organ, tenor saxophonist Dave O’Higgins and an interesting (and excellent) drummer Dave Ohm, who had a pretty unusual fairly minimal setup. He had a really long wooden-rimmed bass drum, snare, hi-hat, splash and crash cymbals and two wooden-rimmed toms, no floor tom and the larger of the two toms was not played at all in the entire gig. Looks like he had it there merely as a surface to keep his sticks and brushes on.
Watched a bit of TV but nothing to get excited about. “The Jetty” and “A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder” on the BBC iPlayer. Interesting plot twist at the end of “The Jetty” but not otherwise very remarkable.
I’m sort of becalmed in my reading currently. I started on Olivia Manning’s “The Balkan Trilogy” but I just can’t get interested in continuing with it. Also have a few Private Eye issues that I’ve barely looked at, so I think I’m just not in the mood for reading.
I’ve got a £100 speeding fine to pay (46mph in a 40 limit) that I incurred while driving over to my sister’s one day in the middle of June. A stupid lapse of attention on a stretch of road where I know of old that the 3 cameras each way are always active. 3 points on my license too.
My finances got pretty low in June/July. Trying to build them up again, slowly but surely.
Most of this rubbish should probably have been put in the “blogger takeover” thread, but it’s here now.
Didn’t they offer you the alternative of a speed awareness course? No fine, no points – and you can do it on Zoom now.
They should try and catch some bleeding criminals for a change. I have also been on speeding awareness – some years back, i was done three times in a week going at 36 mph or so through a 30 mph zone in East Farndon. The delivery men and taxi drivers in the speeding awareness course welcomed me as one of their own. I finally knew what it was like to be one of the hard kids at the back of the class scorning “the man” at the front.
Almost like you were trying to prove a point there…were you telling The Man he could put his speed limits where the sun don’t shine?
I was probably seeing a clear road, thinking about work, and listening to an early Budgie album.
Or just drive slower. I used to hate speed cameras. Where I live there are hardly any (a few near schools) and everybody speeds. It has become pretty dangerous to be on the roads here. So I want more cameras these days, there are police, but they can only be bothered if you are 30 or 40km above the speed limit it seems.
Where I live they’ve put up these new-fangled ultra-modern speed signs (though they’ve probably been put up everywhere else on the planet first as we don’t tend to be at the forefront of technological development here). They tell you exactly what speed you’re going, in red with SLOW DOWN even if it’s the tiniest bit over the limit and green with THANKYOU if it’s not. I like them. They make me very aware of how fast I’m going plus I find them very polite. Friendly, even.
Yes we have those. Many ignore them though as in Canada’s it seems to go 20km/hr above the speed limit is a right.
Jon Ronson had an essay on that very subject in one of his books. They can be effective in a certain cohort of the driving public who feel good about being thanked for driving responsibly – me included.
Normally I’m careful to keep to speed limits in town, especially 30mph limits on urban streets, where pedestrians can wander out in front of you and cars can emerge unexpectedly from side turnings and driveways.
I was on an undulating stretch of road through sparse woodland, between two busy small towns. Not much traffic on it except at peak times and this was early afternoon.
I feel a bit stupid getting done speeding on that stretch of road. because I’ve driven it often over the years, always keeping within the limit, because as I said above, I’ve known for years that the cameras along there are always active, unlike quite a lot of other roads hereabouts.
There’s a few villages around here but mostly I’ve seen this over the border in Catalonia – “Why has the sleepy little place got three sets of traffic lights and why are they all red?”
“Because, thicko, stick to the speed limit and they’re always green, a few K over and they all go red”.
Never make that mistake again
All the traffic lights on the main road through Slough used to be timed so that if you drove at a steady 30mph or just below you went through them all on green.
The Marylebone Road, going past Baker St station and Madame Tussaud’s used to be the same, the cabbies called it The Green Mile
Agreed. I’ve just got used to driving slowly. If the road is fairly open I always put the cruise control on so I just float along at the speed limit.
No, because I’ve already done one (on Zoom) 2½ years ago, (36mph in a 30 zone) and you can’t do a second one within 3 years, so I wasn’t eligible.
@Mike_H
I came back from a sort break in the UK about 10 days ago and have been struggling with something very similar. Mrs J came down with it, too, and has it even worse. Both done several Covid tests, all of them negative
There’s loads of it around. Snotty, achy, nauseous. Hangs around for ages, difficult to shift and it keeps coming back. And yes, tested and negative.
I’m a doctor, let me through!
You just need a big dose of The Lemon Twigs.
A friend had to stay overnight in hospital a couple of months ago, having his pacemaker/defibrillator checked and tuned. He was wide awake late at night when the duty doctor came around and noticed he was awake. She was probably bored so she got chatting to him and he mentioned that a few weeks before he’d had what he thought was flu, because he took a Covid swab test and it was negative. She said “Ah, I have a theory about that”. She said she reckoned there’s a new strain of Covid that doesn’t show up in the nasal swab tests. It seems she was right because it’s been reported by lots of people. I don’t think it’s been officially confimed that the swab tests often don’t detect it though.
A dose of the Lemon Twigs does indeed blow some cobwebs.
However, my completest gene goes into overdrive and I must stop myself loading 5 albums into the Amazon basket
(Mrs D just wouldn’t understand).
Best starting point?
A Dream is All I Know – the latest one. Joyous!
It’s ok to feel like this. Sit and have a good old think, that’s often more entertaining than you expect. Not all entertainment is external.
SFWIC would have the final proof that I’ve turned into my dad if I did that…
(Arms crossed for extra effect)
No matter how you yourself may feel about your dwindling contributions due to lack of cultural inspiration Rig, your posts are always ones that I look forward to and enjoy reading.
That is good to hear, especially as I thought most of ,y comments were second rate know gags
Seconded.
As for culture fatigue, try a genre you’ve never bothered with before. I recommend Beethoven
piano concertos or Sibelius symphonies, Coltrane’s great quarter of electronic Miles, Curtis Mayfield or Donny Hathaway, King Tubby or The Upsetters, etc.
New genres: alluded to above, and am currently medicating on Isaac Hayes
(damn right!)
Nick Cave on the menu sometime in the near future (a stack piled next to the stereo in preparation)
You seem to have cracked the age old riddle of how to schedule spontaneity. Well done, you!
I can’t remember when I last contributed to the Blogger Takeover. I read it every month and jump down the rabbit holes. It’s a marvellous thing.
My monthly cultural fixes seem dull and obvious so I don’t see any need to write them up
I love YouTube and can spend evening after evening chasing a dopamine hit. Late 60s and early 70’s funk guitar is the current thing.
Here’s Boogaloo Joe Jones. Who if nothing else has the coolest jazz name ever.
Here’s one you might like, if funky guitar’s your thing.
A fine choice from Mr_H
What you need is some Japanese post rock……