Author: kevinrevell

Blogging that is in imminent danger of disappearing into its own middle aged, middle class, middle England hole...

Mind the gap

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A short observation based on a delightful train journey last weekend, in which we travelled first class from Norwich to Edinburgh for next to nothing, fuelled constantly by smiling rail staff wielding teas and coffees at each stop. lounging back in comfortable seats and enjoying a spot of free wi-fi. I’m not being sarcastic – it was fab.

Anyway, when visiting the train toilet, which was one of those strange Tardis constructions when you’re never really clear whether you’re locked in or not, I noticed that all of the signs were in English and Braille. This was the case for the flush, the tap, the soap…and the baby changing unit.

Now, I don’t quite understand these things, and I’m sure needs must, but under what circumstances on a high speed train would you expect a blind person to use this ?

One of us is Lying

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Waiting in an office for a meeting on Thursday, I noticed copies of The Daily Mail and The Times.

Having been in London the previous day, and having managed to avoid the protest marches, I was interested in how they’d turned out. Unsurprisingly, the focus was very much on the disruption and violence accompanying the marches, and the following photo and caption was on the front page of the Mail:

Interestingly, inside the Times, there was a similar picture, probably taken just a few seconds before or after. In fact, I might even guess that they were taken by the same photographer. In the Times picture, however, there are a couple of subtle differences. The protestor is backing off, and holding his arm up for protection. The second policemen from the left has his riot stick raised. And, well I never, it looks like the protestor is wearing a jacket, that’s been removed by the time the picture above is taken. Incidentally, I also read in the article that there was a lot of red paint being thrown about, which made everything much more dramatic.

Now, far be it from me to suggest compromise in the fourth estate, let alone go off on an anti Daily Mail rant. But I can’t help feeling that we’ve been a bit set up here.

And if we’re being set up on something as important as the right to protest against financial meltdown and climate change, that doesn’t feel terribly good. By the by, this also feeds into my blog which I really must write down, on Why Telling People What They Already Believe Is Bad. But that’s for another time.

It’s Good To Be Back (not)

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I’m not absolutely sure how this current stream of consciousness will end, but a funny thing happened to me while walking through Prague last weekend with Mrs Emu.

I heard a song I couldn’t quite place. Then, the horrible dawning that it was Gary Glitter singing, rather ironically, about wanting me to be in his gang.

So a number of things struck me, all in a very short space of time:
– for a fleeting moment, just before I realised what the song was, I enjoyed it, thinking ‘I’ve not heard this for a while’…
– then very quickly chastised myself for enjoying the work of someone who, let’s face it, is a pretty despicable individual…
– then felt slightly miffed that the person in the shop with the music on hadn’t realised that civilised people just don’t listen to GG any more for very good reason….
– then began to wonder the degree to which we should separate or integrate what we think of people with their artistic output…

Which is where I got a bit stuck. So we just don’t hear anything by the Glitter Band any more , which is kind of understandable, up to the point at which we deny people the pleasure of listening to some fantastic glam rock self-deprecation.

At the other extreme, we listen innocently enough to music that, for all we know, might be being played by Nazi sympathisers, Paedophiles, or…well, actually most other things are pretty ok in Rock n Roll.

Sometimes a terrible dawning hits you like a brick after you’ve been enjoying the music, then you feel obliged to discard, or end up listening to it with an apologetic grimace. To my knowledge, this has happened to me three times in my listening career (Herbert von Karajan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, seeing as you ask), and I genuinely find it difficult to listen to those artists any more without thinking of their political or moral views. But I’m probably enjoying listening to output produced by even more extreme individuals without knowing it.

So maybe we should just completely separate the political from the music. But then we wouldn’t have Bessie Smith, Woody Guthrie or Billy Bragg, and the world would be a worse place for that.

So, as I say, I’m stuck in this stream. I rather fear that the answer will be that we should always have an eye on the alignment of the artist’s views, but there’s probably a degree of forgiveness along the madness/genius axis. Which still doesn’t help your correspondant, who ironically has just found himself tapping his feet along to Rockin’ Robin by Michael Jackson…which is a fantastic song that I’d really like to recommend, but…

The luxury of airline travel

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Here is a list of personalities I would rather not sit next to on a packed plane:

1. The horrendously overweight. I have nothing against fat people (actually, that’s a lie, but let’s not digress for now), but I really don’t want to be wedged between them and the window, or have them mould themselves into me in a confined space.

2. People with a colds. I know that you can’t really help having a cold when you have to travel…but you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be passing it on to at least one of your fellow passengers, particularly now that air con & air flow seems to be a thing of the past on aeroplanes.

3. Members of a hilarious stag party who have decided that fancy dress would be a great way to ingratiate themselves into the Czech Republic.

4. As above, but having decided to start drinking at breakfast.

5. As above, but liberally distributed around the plane on account of being late out of the bar, so keen to keep up their merry/abusive/misogynistic stag party banter across a dozen seat rows.

On my last Sleazyjet flight, I managed to get 5 out of 5. Flying can be a truly unpleasant experience.

More irony

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Greetings from Prague, where it seems that the world of irony has many many forms. Here are two:

1. The Museum of Communism, although well worth a visit for the footage of the velvet revolution alone, is run down and staffed by pretty miserable individuals…and situated directly over a McDonalds

2. One of the most important parts of Prague’s history is the Jewish cemetery. You have to pay to get in.

Two ironic things

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Thing One:

There is no ironic content in Alanis Morrisette’s song ‘Ironic’.

This is a) useful to know, and b) a potential intro to the wonderful world of graphjam.com, which I heartily recommend to you all

Thing Two:

We are currently on holiday in (very) rural France. The two things we had to buy today were toothpaste and onions. So we went to the very very small Tabac in the very very small village nearby. No onions to be found, but we did get some toothpaste.

A blues primer

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MusicPosted by kevin Mon, February 16, 2009 23:04:56

So, I get an email from a friend….

‘I know its strange to email you at this time but sitting in a blues bar in Chicago and thought of you – fantastic I have a new appreciation’

And these, gentle reader, is a fantastic email to get, as it gives me a very easy excuse for a blog, and a chance to write about probably the most under-valued and misunderstood music around these days.

Almost 30 years ago, I wandered into a record shop in Edinburgh, all new wave attitude and stupid haircut, and heard some music that just completely blew me away. I had a related discussion with Mrs Emu about this a few nights ago; where she claimed that there was something about sound systems in record shops that makes music sound great, whereas I believe that there are just sussed people in charge of the music. Whatever, this was fantastic – it was ‘Boom Boom Boom’ by John Lee Hooker, and I did something that I’ve only ever done that once – I went up to the counter and asked for a copy of whatever was playing. Now, slightly unfortunately this was the ‘Blues Brothers’ soundtrack, so my next few years were spent trying to backtrack from that to the source of this fantastic music, and that in turn meant some pretty challenged purchases, but it was a reasonably entertaining journey.

Years later, and a bit more up to speed on what was what in the Blues canon, I ordered an Elmore James album from my local HMV. I happened to know the manager there, and when I went in to pick it up, I asked if I could play a couple of tracks through the sound system. (Thereby, incidentally, proving both mine & Mrs E’s theories to be correct.) Now, Elmore James is an artist who you just have to listen to. I could go on about why he is so fantastic at some length, and I may well do just that in a future blog, so to hear him thumping out throughout the shop was something pretty special. But not nearly as special as the woman who rushed up to the desk….”That music – I’ve never heard anything like it before – where can I get a copy?”.

And so it is with some sorts of music. It’s a pretty good feeling to be able to share it with people, so, in the style of Hi Fidelity, here’s a top 5 blues artists you really, really ought to own. Note that this concentrates on Chicago blues, we could go down to the delta, but that will have to wait for now…

  1. Muddy Waters – has an astonishing history – the Father of the Blues, kept Chess records alive, inspired the British Blues revival in the 60’s, worked with Sunnyland Slim, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Bill Broonzy, gave Chuck Berry his first break…so he was a pretty influential sort of fellow. And in 1977 he recorded ‘Hard Again’, with James Cotton and Johnny Winter. Recorded it in 2 days indeed. And, in my opinion, you’ll never hear a harder, more perfect blues album. If you don’t own it, buy it. If you do own it, take it down to your local record shop and get them to play it back to you and see what happens.
  2. Elmore James – could play the slide guitar like no-one else before or since. His technical genius owed a lot to Hawaiian influences, and in addition the two great complimenting factors were his screaming, almost falsetto voice, and his band – the Broomdusters. You’ll be hard pressed to find a tighter backing band, and it’s a huge shame that EJ and the Broomdusters never found the fame they deserved in the early 60’s. So track down what you can – if you can find a copy of the Charly album ‘One Way Out’, fantastic, otherwise try to get a recording with ‘The Sky Is Crying’, ‘One Way Out’ and ‘Dust My Blues’. You should find yourself crying or dancing, and ideally both.
  3. Sonny Boy Williamson (2). There were two SBW’s, but the one you want to listen to initially is SBW (II), aka Rice Miller. Mad as a bucket of frogs, but you can’t fault his influence. I saw some footage of him on a recording of ‘Ready, Steady, Go’, dressed in a ‘city gent’ suit, and wearing a bowler hat – I think he was trying to fit in with the English audience. He once et fire to a hotel room by trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator. Anyway, the point about SBW is that he was playing straight Chicago Blues that people just felt they had to reference, or in some cases, downright plagiarise. There was something about the way that he approached his music that made it instantly accessible, which given that he was taking often fairly sinister songs from the delta, hopping up to Chicago, and then travelling to play to audiences in Europe, is no mean achievement. You really ought to listen to ‘Help Me’, Eyesight to the Blind’ and ‘Checkin’ Up On My Baby’ to understand what I mean here.
  4. Koko Taylor – Not a big name outside blues afficianados, but her stuff is pretty easy to get hold of, and you could do worse than go to one of the Alligator compilations. Try to get something that uses the big Chicago sound with lots of horns, like she has on ‘Wang Dang Doodle’. The inspiring thing about Koko Taylor is the ease with which she can move towards a gospel sound while still sounding completely genuine.
  5. Howling Wolf – another huge influence on the British Blues scene in the 60’s, and his ‘The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions’ album, is worth buying just to hear him make mincemeat of the trendy blues wannabees. He sometimes comes across as pretty scary, which is all part of the package, and he must come pretty close to Willie Dixon in the output he’s produced over the years. Have a listen to the anthology album (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Howlin-Wolf-Anthology/dp/B000NIWITA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1234824783&sr=1-2) if you need an introduction.

And no time for BB King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells and all the rest. But this was just to get started, so maybe another time, another club and another blog.

Happy listening!

A brief history of the internet (part one)

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Well, not really.

This is a story about how attitudes to technology and sharing across the internet have changed, seen through a very personal lens (mine). All I really want to do in this blog is to use a couple of experiences to gauge how far away we’ve got from the original objectives of the internet.

And, in order to do so, it would be good to examine these objectives…which of course, don’t really exist. However, let’s look to the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, for inspiration, and look at the names rejected before settling on world wide web. These included The Information Mesh and The Information Mine. Incidentally, both were turned down as they abbreviated to TIM, and TB-L is a modest sort of a fellow. Anyway, these say an awful lot more than WWW. The object of putting the web on top of the internet in the first place was to allow users to mine for information in a way that, until that point had only been possible in slow time with huge physical libraries of information at your disposal.

Which brings me to coming across the web for the first time. In its early days, the internet made its mark through Joe Public (who needed a networked connection into some other host capability) accessing what we now refer to as bulletin boards or user groups. If you knew an address, then you could type this in to some sort of emulator, and see what the dudes on alt.gaffatape.hamster were talking about. It wasn’t really until the web and web browsers were laid on top of this that any ‘browsing’ could take place, and even that was a bit rudimentary. But what the browsers did do, was open up a whole lot of relatively rich content.

So, my first story involves setting up these browsers at work on an internet connected network for the first time. I had a rudimentary networking knowledge, and we chose a browser called Netscape a) because it got the best reviews and b) because it wasn’t a Microsoft product. We’d read up a good deal on the potential for sharing information, how we were going to see encyclopaedic knowledge shared throughout the world, although of course the number of sites providing this data was a fraction of a fraction compared to the web today. So, we dutifully installed the browser on the MD’s computer, and configured it to connect to the net while isolated from our internal network. We solemnly placed the cursor on the address line and awaited instructions from the MD, who had just come into the office with the marketing director.

“Right”, the authoritative voice called out, “Where’s the porn?”

To be continued…

No cortisone, leglift, talk or whine

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Tony Cascarino was a journeyman footballer, occasional Irishman and writer of the excellent ‘Full Time’ – one of the few readable footballing biographies around. In Full Time, he describes the process of going to training, towards the end of his career. He struggles to get out of bed, finds his legs completely seized up, hopes against hope that the next cortisone injection will free up his frozen joints, and all the time tries to keep his team-mates and coach in the dark. I remember reading this a few years ago, and thinking how I never wanted this decrepidness to happen to me…

So, I woke up on Sunday to go for the traditional long slow run. Running to my training partner’s house (about 3 miles), then an hour with him, then another 3 home. No problem at all, until I tried to get out of bed. A small pixie with a good supply of drawing pins had installed himself inside my right achilles, and every time I tried to move my foot, in went another pin. Managed to get downstairs to put the kettle on. Despite the early hour, Mrs Emu would be needing tea. Hobbled back up the stairs, and about half way up, my right knee locked, so had to travel the rest of the way on all fours. Finally got out the door, and slowly made my way along the ring road to Glen’s house. After a mile, I figured that it would be more hassle turn back than to carry on, so I carried on, although it felt like a shuffle more than a run, as my legs just didn’t seem to be responding. And so went the rest of the run, which was conducted largely in silence – Glen seemed to be suffering just as much after 2 weeks out with a virus.

So, between the silences, the conversation you’d expect would be a series of whines and complaints, but that’s not what happened. And I put this down to the fact that I read books about Glenn Cunningham, and my training partner reads books about Ranulph Fiennes. Now, most people know about Fiennes – 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 days, regularly leaving bits of his body behind on arctic explorations, fretsawing his fingertips off in the garden shed because he was annoyed by the pain of frostbite, that sort of thing. And as a result, Glen never complains about the cold, or the length of time we have to spend dragging our sorry carcasses around the Norfolk countryside.

You may be less familiar with Glenn Cunningham though. You can read more about him on the net, and I really recommend his autobiography, appropriately titled ‘Never Quit’. The summary of his story : Cunningham used to run with his older brother, Floyd, to their one-room schoolhouse in Kansas. Floyd’s responsibilities included getting the kerosene stove started in the morning to heat the school for class. When Glenn was eight years old, a delivery truck inadvertently left petrol rather than kerosene at the building. Consequently, the stove exploded into flames, killed Floyd and left the younger Cunningham in critical condition for six weeks. His injuries were horrendous – he’d lost all the flesh on his lower legs, lost all the toes on his left foot, and his left foot arch was destroyed. Doctors were planning to amputate both legs and, after deciding not to, concluded that he would never be able to walk normally again.

The rest of his story reads like a Hollywood screenplay. In the film, Cunningham would probably be played by an overweight Michael Douglas (ever seen the film ‘Marathon’?). So far as I know, there’s never been such a film, but the key parts of the story are about Cunningham teaching himself to walk, then to run, to run competitively, and, astonishingly, to compete twice in the Olympics, and each time with the support of his parents, who would spend hours massaging his legs just so that he would be pain-free enough to put one foot in front of the other. There’s a lot more to this story than I can do justice to here, but suffice to say, it’s an absolute inspiration.

And my personal lesson out of all of this, is that it’s an excellent story to think about when your legs are getting a bit tired or your knees start misbehaving. We can’t all have the talent, the perseverance and the pain threshold of Glen Cunningham, but maybe we could all use a bit of ‘Never Quit’ now and again.