Inspiration

I was listening to ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by the Electric Light Orchestra today; they’re not a band I’m normally a fan of, but it’s such a catchy song. I’ve concluded that that song is one they wrote because, by some oversight, neither the Beatles nor Wings ever got round to writing it. I’m not saying that it might be derivative, it’s not a copy of a Beatles song, it’s just like a song that they missed out. If you see what I mean.

I remember reading an interview with Jimmy Page (I think) a few years back where he was asked, as he often is, whether there is any truth to the urban legend that he was the man who played the roaring, mad guitar solo in ‘you really got me’ by the Kinks. I can’t recall his response exactly but as I remember it he started by explaining that no, he hadn’t played that solo, but he really wished he had - that he envied the kinks because, as he put it, there was a whole group of bands at the time who knew that that song was out there somewhere, and wanted to be the ones who wrote it.

I know that it’s utterly irrational but I often find myself thinking along similar lines to Mr Page; that there are certain ideas, whether they are songs or concepts, that have some kind of existence independent of their creators – that want to be made. You just have to look at the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci to see an illustration of this - he drew pictures of helicopters, tanks, steam engines, etc., at a time when there wasn’t even a glimmer of most the technology that would make these ideas feasible.

With things like planes these recurring ideas not particularly interesting, people have always wanted to fly, but when you look at something like this it becomes really striking.

The central four devices are portable transistor radios made in the early 60’s. The outer four are first generation iPods. The radios were a flop, very few were made and little attention was ever paid to them. The thing is that everyone at apple swears that they’d never seen them before. It could be that the iPod just wanted to be, way before the hard-drive or the LCD display.

Terry Pratchett, British fantasy writer and generally funny man, has written a great deal on that idea. In his strange, pseudo-renaissance alternate world ‘Discworld’ technology and ideas that are familiar to us keep appearing, in garbled form in his world. The reason for this, he explains is that the inspiration for these ideas whizzes thought the firmament looking for a receptive head.

Or, I suppose, it’s actually just that shit happens and coincidences can be as implausible as they want to be.*

- Ben

*take, for example, the name 'napoleon dynamite' - when a bunch of young film makers invented a character with this name they had no idea that Elvis Costello made up the same name to use as a pseudonym on a couple of tracks he produced for other people in the 80's

Oooh

Shazam!

Now I know that this is hardly the most exciting news story you'll see this week, but look closely at the accompanying picture.

You spot it?

Yes that's right, it's taken long enough (judging from what 60's Sci-Fi told us, we're still at least 10 years behind schedule) but we, as a culture, appear to be finally moving into the future. And not the boring future - you know, the one that involves astonishing medical advances, mobile phones, the internet, etc. - but the proper retro-future where there are jetpacks for all, robot butlers in every home, and skin-tight lycra jumpsuits for everyone.

Huzzah

-Ben

Suicide Songs

I’ve been listening to a lot of music tonight, marvelling at the number of songwriters who write about suicide, and how, despite their bleak and depressing subject matter, these songs aren’t necessarily bleak and depressing in themselves.

‘Better off Dead’ by Bill Withers is a good example of this kind of song; it’s funky, catchy, and has lyrics about alcoholism and death – Like a Raymond Carver story put to music by Curtis Mayfield. It opens with the lines "she couldn’t stand me anymore/ so she just took the kids and went/ you see I’ve got a drinking problem/ all the money that we had, I spent," ends with the lines "she’s better off without me / and I’m better off dead…" followed by the crack of a gun going off, and isn’t much happier in between. Nonetheless it is a really good song - you find yourself singing along with the despairing, suicidal chorus with the same enthusiasm you’d give an old favourite.

I'm not sure if this is just me, but I find that that song reinforces my belief that it's not possible to take in melody and poetry at the same time. You can appreciate both, in the same song even, but not at the same time. How many times, for example, can you remember listening to a song and then, afterwards, thinking about the profundity or relevance of the lyrics. The first time I heard Eliza Carthy's version of 'Worcester City' I didn't register the slightest hint of what the story was about, just how good the song was.

‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ by The Police (I can’t remember whether it’s a Sting or Stewart Copeland song) is another example of an insanely catchy song about suicide, although it is different in its angle on the subject. This isn’t the monologue of a crushed alcoholic; it’s the angry posturing of a petulant kid, trying to make people pity him, caught up in the romantic idea of killing himself over love without ever really considering it.

To flex literary for a moment, the protagonist of ‘can’t stand losing you’ is like wossername* in Northanger Abbey – a personality created by the narrative format they imagine themselves in: in her case, the gothic novel. In this case: the self-pitying suicide song.

I suppose the thing that is interesting isn’t really the fact that catchy songs have been written about killing yourself, but the fact that so many songs get written about suicide all the time. I mean, I’ve got two examples here, but I expect that the Stereophonics alone have probably written about 6 more of the conventional dreary kind. Why this is baffles me a bit - I’m pretty sure that Kelly Jones can’t be writing from personal experience – I don’t doubt that living in Wales is bleak, but I don’t think it’s bleak enough for him to know a half dozen corpses by the time he wrote his second album. I suppose it’s just that Romeo and Juliet thing again, conjuring this image in people’s minds of suicide as something beautiful, rather than just the grotesque and painful end to the life of some poor bugger who’s been in and out of institutions their whole life.

Er, well, on that jolly note, I’m off to bed.

-Ben

*hey, it is 12:30 at night, don’t expect scholarly accuracy.

Science

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm currently working at a publishing firm, sorting and storing their massive archive of strange books. For the first few weeks I was there I was Mr Self-Control. I never caved to temptation and delved in the pile of books bound for the skip. My resolve was broken, however, when I found a children's science activity book (not one made by the firm I work for, I hasten to add) with the most amazing cover illustration.

(clicky on images for embiggening)



Good isn't it, quite the most astonishingly bad picture ever. I didn't open it for a week or two, because I was worried that perhaps what was inside would spoil the perfection of the cover, might explain what it meant and ruin it. But I was not to worry; when I eventually opened it up I found that the illustration in the cover was, if anything, actually one of the better examples from inside the book.

Look at this -



Or this -



By now I was convinced that I was dealing with a master artist, a latter day michaelangelo. But I still worried, perhaps the writing would be incisive, intelligent and educational - making it slightly less wonderfully absurd.

no need to worry on that front, most of the experiments described are bizarre to an almost surrealist extent.




So there you go, further evidence that Look Around You really isn't that far from how science is taught in the UK.

-Ben

Yes, it has occurred to me that these images are probably copyright of someone, but I figure that in order to hand me a copyright violation notice they'll have to admit that the art is theirs first.

and who would do that.

The blagosphere

The internet has many personalities - most commonly seen are the really obscene and seedy sex trafficker, the prejudiced moron, and the opinionated teenage boy. My personal favourite, however, is the strangely creative, subversive, counterculture type. Who, armed with a really bizarre sense of humour, goes about mocking all the sincere idiots and blowhards. It is the internet that glues captions to cats, that worships the flying spaghetti monster and names endangered whales 'Mr Splashy Pants'

Greenpeace have been tracking an endangered humpback whale for a while now, and recently decided to allow the masses of the internet to give it a name. The internet pondered, looked at the 'beautiful' names - and the usual hippy crap - and decided that the best name for a Humpback whale was 'Mr Splashy Pants', well, 73% of the internet did, anyway.

This all suits Greenpeace just fine. It may be a stupid name, but it has made them the talk of the interblag and motivated the righteous, sincere types to start a crusade to counter the massed facetiousness of the internet - thus generating them even more publicity in circles likely to give them more money.

I'm not going to link the poll, because I'd rather not be a direct part of the interblag meme fest, but the business end of the campaign is here - it's about trying to stop the japanese 'research' whaling fleets - who, by all accounts, don't do a great deal of research

-Ben

Face Plumbing

I have a really bad cold at the moment - one of those 'just short of making you throw up everywhere and declare it flu' sort of colds. I know that this isn't particularly interesting; in fact, I'd normally refrain from mentioning any illness I have to anyone, especially women - because generally the phrase 'man-flu' is said, and then the red mist descends - leaving me standing in the middle of a room full of poked eyes and tweaked nipples*

I thought I'd bring this matter up because, whilst I don't really have anything interesting to say, I do have something slightly disgusting to say - and that's nearly as good, right?

I've mentioned before how my body appears to be like a Škoda - It's perfectly sound when it comes to essential functions (I'm reasonably healthy, have no nasty diseases and don't get sick very often) however, when it comes to the less important things, it sort of falls down.

I have a brain that used to give me occasional seizures, knees and back that click and twinge all the time and, as I rediscovered today - some really shitty in-head plumbing.

I was blowing my nose, for about the 15th time today (I was just getting into london bridge station on my way to work). I blew hard, and snot came out, as I'd expected.

but it came out of my eye.

seriously.

my left eye, to be precise.

...

Which is quite possibly the most gross thing that's happened to me since I last drank Carling.

In other news, the Onion's informative world Map is very funny, and should be looked at. hard.

I'm off to oxford tomorrow, to hang with lucy and the edster. huzzah.

-Ben

*Yeah, I know, even when I'm in a berserker rage I still fight like a 10 year old girl

Nella Last

Mr Ben Reads - Nella Last's War

The edited real-life diaries of a 50 year old woman living in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire during the Second World War. She wrote about being scared, being tired, getting old, getting bombed, and all the other many and various things that went through her head over the course of any day.

It was written for a scheme called the ‘mass observation project’ which was an attempt, started by some thinkers and anthropologists, to find out about how the war’s hardships affected the average citizen. Despite sounding scary to our post-Orwell ears, it was actually a pretty harmless and fascinating project - a social experiment in which people volunteered to have their daily reflections recorded. Obviously it wasn’t a very accurate cross section of the British public, the contributors were a self-selecting group with some reason to want to write for them – whether they saw it as a soapbox, a place to whinge, or a place to judge the actions of those they didn’t like – Nella Last wrote hers because she’d always fancied herself as a writer but had been sidetracked by circumstance, and life in general.

The book is interesting for two reasons, for one, it tells you all sorts of details about life during the war that mainstream historians don’t seem to bother mentioning. Like, for example, the fact that unmarried women were conscripted as well as men – for ‘essential’ work, auxiliary service and all the jobs left vacant by the soldiers. Or that unwanted pregnancies, with the unfathered children and backstreet abortions that came with them, were far more common than many would like people to believe.

The main reason why it’s so interesting, however, isn’t particularly the events she describes, but the feelings and opinions she voices in her more introspective or reflective moments. She is essentially a one-woman microcosm of all the changes in women’s perceptions of their role in society which, we are told, took place on a larger scale during the war. At the beginning of the war she writes little daily litanies, techniques and tricks, everyday domestic details - after a few years she writes in the same way, but occasionally vents her feelings like this:

I want to shout loudly to all mothers, and tell them how important they are, how much more they matter than all the preaching, talking men, who think only in terms of ‘organisation’. Look at the Hitler youth, and Mussolini’s poor moppets… …Let’s give them background, teach them simple rules of life, mentally and spiritually, love them a lot and then stand aside. Why, we would make a new world in two short generations and wipe out the bitter memories, make racial hatreds perish – and better than no man or men ever could

It’s been a good counterpoint to the endless military history books I’ve been sorting and sifting at work – countless tomes on tactics and strategy which have an odd dispassionate tone which I find slightly sickening. It wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t for the fact that these books sell so well. I mean, commanders need to learn from examples and incidents, but I’m grateful that I don’t. Why the average middle class bloke wants to feel involved with the whole ugly business baffles me.

-Ben

Something

It's funny the way that working all day makes me tired. It's not tired in a physical way exactly; I generally go out running or do some kind of exercise in the evenings. It's more a kind of, erm, weariness really, an unwillingness to do small things like go and find a cable, or carry my guitar up from the living room where it has been for nearly a week. I can motivate myself to do big things, but I need to build up a certain amount of momentum to do anything, and small things don't seem worth it somehow.

One particular result of this is the fact that I've not updated my blog in a week. This is partly because I've been feeling generally a bit brain-dead and sleepy, but also because of the aforementioned inertness. I went on a walk in the countryside with various extended family this sunday and saw many very pretty things. some of which I managed to take photos of.

Unfortunately, the camera I took the pictures with is one that requires a special lead - which I haven't been able to summon the desire to find. After writing all this (which has just kinda come out in a big burst) I think I'll actually make the effort and find the cable.

Right after this song

yep. mmmhm.

Aha. I've actually done it now, I persevered even when I realised that, in order to get it, I was going to have to rummage in my mum's school bag, past the snarling and ravenous creatures that have evolved from old, forgotten sandwiches.

The walk started pretty normalwise, there was greenery, (although it was mostly gold, orange and brown) mud, and animals. Things started getting interesting when we noticed the Emus



Although now, looking at the Emu in sarah's photos I'm guessing that this is in fact, an ostrich. Which would fit in better with rest of the birds kept, which seem to identify the owner as someone with a taste for esoteric eggs - the little round birds in the background are quails. There were also pheasants, peacocks and various hues of chicken.

and then got followed across a field by a friendly shire horse.



The highlight of the day though was probably Scotney Castle.



Scotney castle is an old medieval fortified manor, which was a partial ruin by the the 19th century; when a new house was built further up the hill. The owners of the new house decided that, whilst a pretty ruin, it wasn't quite romantic or ruinous enough, and exercised a little artistic licence with the remaining structures to make something very pretty. if not hugely medieval.







So there you go, I triumphed over work-induced laziness, huzzah.

-Ben

The Tube (continued)

Another thing that I noticed whilst travelling by train is the astonishing collision detection that people in general, but commuters especially, have. At london bridge station there is a sort of concourse section underground where about six different pathways meet - people are walking across it, at speed, in every direction.

but they almost never hit each other, or even have to break their stride. I don't think it's conscious - it isn't for me anyway - they just know: weaving between the streams, anticipating the next move of the confused tourist, steering around the determined businessman - never having to stop or slow down.

It's quite beautiful in a strange sort of way, it'd be even more so if I could get a decent vantage point to observe from, and the time in which to do it.

-Ben

I was going to post something about the awesome play I saw tonight, in a church designed by Inigo Jones, but I'm really tired. I'll write about it tomorrow.

The Tube

Imagine, if you will, game of twister. One in which all the pads are rails on the ceiling.

A game of twister in which all the participants are strangers, and many of them don’t speak English. Where everyone involved is fully clothed – wearing big coats and scarves. Some of them are fat, some of them are sweaty, and a lot of them have bags - some very large bags. Picture this unlikely game of twister taking place underground in a very small enclosed space. That shakes and jerks around a lot.

...

The weird part is that I really don’t mind tube travel, it gets me where I’m going and it’s quicker and warmer than walking. I suppose it might be because I got so isolated at home that I appreciate any human contact, even if it is just being squished. It is a bit astonishing though - the way that people keep piling into tube trains until there isn’t any air between any part of your body and the bodies of the people around you – especially when you consider that at peak times the trains go through the station at the rate of about one every 2-3 minutes. Surely people aren’t afraid of being two minutes late?

It’s at times like that that I’m so very glad that I’m above average height for a bloke… I get the privilege of breathing air that isn’t filtered through someone else’s clothing.

Something else I’ve noticed is the way that commuters move in such rigid patterns. For example, the trains always stop in the exact same place and the hardened commuters just walk down the stairs and wait on the platform exactly where they know that the doors will be. I personally like taking a different route through London bridge underground station every day, I mean, you really should show your love for its multiple tunnelled craziness.

...

I’m pretty sure I saw Hugo Chavez on a train yesterday and another man who was stripping off and covering himself in lubricant in preparation for the next train.

I may have made the second one up… and I’m pretty sure Hugo Chavez doesn’t really take public transport… and even if he did then he’d be very lost if he was getting on the northern line at moorgate.

Everyone knows that it’s the District that goes to Venezuela… bloody tourists.

-Ben

Bad Folk

I have a fairly high tolerance for discomfort; my patience can stretch a very long way when circumstances require it to – I can sit around in an awkward situation for hours with barely a grimace, or I can endure a great deal of pain if there’s nothing I can do about it. If physical and social discomfort are mixed, however, my patience snaps like a glass twig. It manifests like a phobic reaction, I just freak out. I get a pervading, nightmarish feeling of being trapped, and have to immediately leave. In the past this has caused me to leave my friends behind at a party (arseholes + migrane) or flee an art gallery (crippling boredom + broken toe).

Tonight I fled from the local folk night due to a similar double whammy of unpleasantness. On the walk over there my knee made an unsettling clicking noise coupled with yelp-inducing pain, I suspect that this was caused by standing on tube trains today being jiggled around everywhichway – although I expect my running 2-3 miles everyday for a month is also a factor. After that I got stuck right at the front watching a band, (guest act, which meant I didn’t get to play) who were an amazing distillation of everything I can’t stand about folk music.

When I say “everything I can’t stand about folk music” I don’t mean that I don’t like folk music, no more than I dislike any musical scene. It’s just that there are clichés, tics and traits of every musical style which I find really grating. Little pet hates, you know, but whether it’s pinch harmonics in rock, misogyny in rap, or self-indulgence in jazz – in small numbers I can generally ignore them and still enjoy the music*. Every now and then, though, you get a band with enough of them to just push me over the edge. I can overlook one or two but a whole set, no. Acts like Metallica, 50 Cent, or ----** set my teeth on edge.

…Anyway, as I was saying these people were amazing in that regard:

Firstly there was their musical delivery: The group consisted of three singers; a woman (alto), a man (tenor) and another man (bass) with no accompaniment. They sang in close following harmony, all singing identical parts, just at different pitches - which, given the idiosyncratic ‘folk’ style of singing they all had (which isn’t a bad thing in itself), made for a very unpleasant sound. Worst of all was the voice of the bass, which I can only describe as like what would happen if you hooked up a talk box to a farting drainpipe.

Secondly there was their choice of songs, they chose teeth gratingly ‘jolly’ songs of the sort beloved by your hardened folkie. These songs are generally dirty, in a vaudevillian, sleazy sort of way and contain ‘rousing’ choruses or refrains, which the audience are expected to join in on, in a fit of tankard-waving enthusiasm. The refrains are often complete gibberish, seemingly inserted to illicit that compulsion some folk audiences have to sing along with anything that gets repeated frequently in a song.

Lastly there was the general haranguing of the audience, which is something that I find completely unforgivable in a band – if the crowd are bored by your set, telling them to be more enthusiastic is just going to make them pissed off at you. If you want an audience to really get into your music, then write better music.

-Ben


*Well, except for pinch harmonics, Don’t even get me started on pinch harmonics… ugh.

**Insert the name of any free-jazz musician you’d care to mention

Classical Sounds

I went to a performance of Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem tonight, it was being performed by a local community orchestra and the choir that my mum sings with. There were a few pieces of Mozart and suchlike, performed by the orchestra alone in the first half followed by the full on 'choir Vs Orchestra' showdown in the second (the choir won, fact fans).

Now I know that this is a little out of character but hey, I didn't pay for my ticket so I figured it was worth a listen. Apart from wanting to hear my mum and her choir sing, I was also curious to see if I found classical music any more interesting when performed live. The short answer is, I think, probably no. I liked it, and the choir were really impressive, but none of it really caught my attention - I had to concentrate on all the orchestral parts otherwise I just glazed over and stopped hearing it. I have no idea what it is about classical compositions, but I've just never been able to get into them. Judging from the average age of the audience I think that appreciation of that sort of thing comes later in life (or after it, seeing as some of the old folks there really weren't moving much). I wonder if it'll be like developing a taste for coffee, perhaps one day, when I'm balding a little, I'll suddenly get an urge to listen to Wagner.

Tomorrow I'm playing at a jazz night (giving the fretless bass an airing) so I should be able to get all these classical cooties out of my system.

-Ben

Pedantry

I found a strange subculture on the internet today - that of a small, besieged group of pedants, desperately railing against the massed armies of the illiterate internet/world in general. There is a blog out there for all manner of grammarian pet peeves, be it misuse of the word 'literally', Abuse of the humble apostrophe or strangely incorrectly applied "Quotation Marks!"

I've tried to explain my attitude to pedantry before (yes the hostility of the last paragraph is genuine - I was in a bad mood and generally sick of being corrected by everyone) with a reasonable degree of success so I won't bother repeating myself here.

On that note, I really should get round to tagging all of my old posts - I did sometimes write things worth reading, although I also wrote a lot of crap.

-Ben

Notes

(Click on the image to get a properly readable version. I apologise for the blurriness but I really can't be bothered to go through all the hassle of firing up the scanner)

I do enjoy finding things like this when I get up in the morning - little tokens of the chaos that accompanies my family preparing for work or school. It seems that today my little sister's voice has gone and Django (the cat) was being particularly vocal about not having been fed yet.

If you feel your note space isn't filled, then I recommend moseying on over to Passive-aggressive notes, it's funny, although I find it a little emotionally draining after a while - too much anger.

-Ben

Portal

Looks like a mighty neato game. All brainthinky and not deathtacular, which makes for a pleasant change. It's doing things with modern game physics that are actually innovative and original.

Halloween

I have a very uneasy relationship with halloween, I’m never quite sure what to make of it. Much as I dislike being put on the same side of the argument as moralising Christians, I really don’t much care for the whole trick or treat, dressing up thing.

My reasons are of course different from those of the bible waving fraternity. I dislike Halloween, not because it’s nasty and pagan but because it’s a travesty of all the cool aspects of nasty pagan festivals. Britain has no shortage of pre-christian celebrations and traditions and yet, on this most pagan of pagan days, we increasingly choose to follow not our own traditional practices and traditions but a sort of mangled, commercialised version of them. I’m not arguing that we should celebrate Samhain again, no, I'm not a wiccan ponce. ...and we do that on Guy Fawkes’ night anyway – lighting bonfires and scaring off the darkness with loud noises, you didn't think that was really about a gunpowder plot did you?

Modern Halloween, it seems to me, is not be a night of deference to the folk superstitions which the Christians find so offensive, but a night in which we mock those superstitions, ones which seem so childish in the glow of fluorescent bulbs. We stand there, in our brightly lit streets, dressed as plastic goblins, and then congratulate ourselves on not being afraid.

All Hallow’s Eve was traditionally a night when the faerie folk, banshees, goblins and other pre-Christian beasties prowled the earth; when the souls of the lost, restless spirits, were especially active. It was a night when you sat around the fire with your family telling stories, and left lit candles in the windows to help guide the lost spirits. A good example of how scary it was is a story like the legend of the Celtic Folk-Hero Nera. Nera was the only warrior brave enough to rise to the challenge of his king: to leave the hall on the eve of Samhain, to walk alone through the darkness to the Gallows on a nearby hill, and tie a white band around the ankle of one of the hanged men decaying there. Going out on Halloween was not something that children could do, nor even most grown men.

It was, in most parts of England (even more so in Scotland), quite specifically NOT a night when you went out. Because if you went out the faeries would get you, and there is nothing whimsical about the fairies in folk stories: they stole husbands and wives, murdered children, killed livestock. I’ve been thumbing through my big book of folklore* trying to find a story that I remember reading, but I’ve forgotten the title and this book is huge.

As I remember it, the story it was about a man who was sitting with his wife on all Hallow’s eve, keeping warm and out of trouble. For some reason she insisted on going out after dark and was taken by the queen of the fairies. Exactly one year later the man’s brothers came to sit with him through the night. Sure enough the fairy folk came back, they stood by his door and called to him, entreated him to come out and join his wife. He heard her voice, she pleaded with him too, and he forgot when he had been told about staying inside. His brothers, however, were mindful of the stories of the fairies, held him down and refused to let him go out. The next morning, at dawn, the noises stopped and the brothers went out to see what had happened outside. They found the door and the doorstep covered with blood, and his wife was never seen again.

A traditional Halloween should be spent sitting in a candlelit house, surrounded by impenetrable darkness and cold, terrified of what might be waiting outside. These days, the closest anyone gets to that is hiding from trick or treaters.

I'm going to go and read some M R James stories and scare myself up good...

-Ben

*Briggs, Katherine M. A Dictionary of British Folk Tales in the English Language. Routledge : London : 1991

Daylight Savings

Say what you like about London's pollution, it certainly makes for pretty sunsets.

I just watched the sun go down, it was gorgeous, and that made me happy. It is only 4:40pm, however, and that makes me unhappy. The clocks went back over the weekend (causing an all-night party I was at to get really confusing) and now I appear to be living in a land of perpetual night. I think they do it so that it is lighter earlier in the mornings, but this doesn’t really help me, I’m not generally awake early in the morning.

Other than stare at the sunset I've really not done much of note, I sent off another job application last night, and I've been ordering prospectuseseses from various institutions today - although I feel like I'm flailing wildly in the dark in that regard, I need to find some sort of big postgraduate guide to help me.

-Ben

Mr Ben Digs

Just the one band today, but they are very good.



The song is called 'Elephant Gun'

They are called Beirut and, as far as I can tell, they are basically the brainchild of a 19 year old from Santa Fe. Yes, young and talented. "Bastard!" I hear you shout? Well, that's as maybe, but he writes good songs.

-Ben

Sinister music

This is a little question for my readers (I'm not sure, but I think that you are at least three in number) - Do you know of any songs that could be called 'sinister' 'creepy' or 'scary'?

I don't mean scary like Boy Bands, or sinister like Gary Glitter - but you know - stuff that's actually creepy. I'm playing a folk night with my dad on Halloween and we were trying to think of some more appropriate songs. So far, we've got 'Paranoid' by Black Sabbath (in an Eastern European stylee - it works, really well), 'Watching the Detectives' by Elvis Costello (more because it's a good song than because it's particularly creepy, although it is pretty odd and unsettling), and either 'St James Infirmary Blues' or 'Death Letter' (old blues songs, included because they are really macabre).

Obviously there's no shortage of grim and scary folk songs, but we are looking to do some more modern stuff. Any suggestions?

-Ben

A clarification

I was out delivering letters for my mum’s school today – it passes the time – and I feel like I should clarify something about which there seems to be some confusion.

This is a Bear Trap:


This is a Letterbox:


All clear? good. That is all.

-Ben