In 275 Miles Turn Left

Got a GPS this week and joined the SatNav generation. We are travelling to Virginia to visit friends soon and I didn’t want to end up in The Bronx on the way south.

It’s funny how my perception of distance and time has changed since moving to the US. In the UK you can travel across the country in 5 hours. Towns and cities that are twenty minutes apart can be radically different culturally, with completely different accents and customs. Here in the US any trip under ten hours is considered a local visit, my Texan friend informs me that he thought nothing of driving for fourteen hours from Austin to see a band!

I still get jittery at the thought of an eight hour trip, which is the Virginia run. But this country is so big that a change of perception is a necessity. You can fly of course, but apart from the ridiculous price of internal flights, the wait at the airport each end can result in eight or nine hours travel anyway. Then there’s the travel to and parking at the airport to consider.

So it’ll be on with the Garmin and a blast of Bruce as we cross New Jersey. Even now I get a twinge of excitement travelling to and through places that were only in movies and songs when I was growing up.

What did Delaware? Why, her New Jersey of course.

W1

Out of pointless curiosity I was browsing properties for rent in West London. The first place I looked at was a mere £25,000 per week, YES, WEEK!

I should imagine that this would make a nice little shack for an oil magnet or over pampered rock or movie star. But even if you wanted to lay out the silly sum of 25K per week, how could you sleep there? I mean, knowing that this was probably one of the debauched dens frequented by Keith Richards during his opiate singed frazzle fests in the late 60’s. This place is probably the site of the (in)famous Marianne Faithful incident, and I’m sure that in one of the pictures you can see truncheon marks on a door that London’s finest lads in blue had burst open.

Seriously though, £25,000 per week? This is a year salary for most British folk and an extravagance that should have died out with the God forsaken Thatcher years. I suppose the land on New Labour isn’t so radically different to the land of Neo Conservatism after all.

Now, where’s that letting agencies telephone number?

Tearing Down the Walls

I have been remodeling the spare bedroom in our house. We are expecting a second addition to our family in February, and also the room had water damage due to a chimney leak.

The remodel involves taking out the horse hair plaster and slats that make up the wall (our house is a hundred years old), this is a very unpleasant and dirty process. So, we hired a dumpster (Br-Eng Skip) and I proceeded to demolish. Four days and a ton of materiel later the room was stripped to the studs ready for re-build.

I am in the process of insulating and should start getting the walls up this weekend. I am against the clock, winter and a new baby are on the way. More to come.....

Most animals are trained young, some of us never lie down

The Liberty of Norton Folgate by Madness is a joy. This record is released when the band have been performing for thirty years or more. Simply put this is the record of the year, as well as being the bands album of their career.

I came to this record late, after hearing the odd comment here and there about the quality. I’m always weary of hype, which is what drew me to this, the lack of hype. It’s a quiet masterpiece, which passes my biggest quality test, that after the first listen you feel that you’ve known these songs all your life.

I suppose it’s a concept album, something that has become somewhat less embarrassing to admit than when I was a teenager. Jim Bob’s albums these days seem to be concept albums too. The difference with these, as opposed to the self indulgent pap of the 1970’s, is that a point is being made and not pushed. Madness clearly love London, and when Suggs sings “We Are London” he’s right.

Madness have succeeded in producing something that is hard to produce these days, an entire album. Radiohead (who I love) seem to have given up on this medium.

Thom Yorke stated after the recent free download release of Harry Patch (In Memory Of) that albums have just become a “drag” for the band. I assume that he means they would rather record and release songs as and when they feel like it via the web. This is fine by me; I would download a recording of Radiohead burping God Save The Queeen, but is it the same as a complete album, or LP as I still like to think of it?

An album to me is a collection of songs (usually a mix of good, not so good, and awful) that captures a band / artist at a moment in time. OK Computer is a perfect example of this, I listened to it again recently and overall it’s not as good as most people remember it to be. But it does capture Radiohead at that time.

An odd song here and there may actually produce a higher quality output, but all sense of time and space is lost. The big thing about getting a record home was sitting down for the first time and listening to it all the way through. This is a dead concept, something not lost on most of todays artists, it’s all about the quick hit. Thankfully Madness have rejected this premise and and made a classic. God bless ‘em!