Live Barn Owl Nest Cam

The most exciting thing on the internet right now. Even when she is asleep and sitting on her babies.

via india

Cool stuff made by my friends, #2: Vacuum Tree Head, Thirteen

Last year, I sang some vocals on an album by a band called Vacuum Tree Head, aka Jason Berry and a loose collective of musicians based in San Francisco and New York. They have been making music for some time, and their latest album is the first time I have sung with them. The album has recently been released and is called Thirteen. It's brilliant and intense, a tightly packed twenty minutes of joyful artrock mayhem. This video features the vocals of the other singer on the record, Sylvia Gordon:


VACUUM TREE HEAD - HINDI KO ALAM

vacuum tree head

You can hear a selection of their stuff on their myspace, but right now the only place online you can hear the songs I sang on is CD Baby, where they are snippetised. I sang in strange tongues on "Djinn 2", "Neck Talkers", "Backlit Epiphany" and "Nights of Horseback Salad".

Tommy Cooper

Tommy Cooper, interviewed by Michael Parkinson in the seventies.

Robin Hood tax

Richard Curtis has launched a campaign for the Tobin tax. It's pretty good.

Amongst the responses from leading economists is the opinion that this will probably not fly unless it is also broadly accepted by the large European countries (ie France and Germany) and the US. And the US, they say, will never accept it.

Also posted at Clusterflock.

Just have to have more of that

Janis on Dick Cavett, some time later. Got to love a chatshow host that has a lighter on standby on the desk. And the refreshingness of the conversation! And nobody has to hold up the record because everybody who needs to know about the record knows about the record. Goddammit.

They laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state, man

So I'm goin' home.

Ah, Janis. This is beautiful.

Oh god this is so great

Janis Joplin and Gloria Swanson meet on Dick Cavett. Hilarity ensues inside a minute.

Jimi Hendrix on Dick Cavett

Well it really was 1969. I think this is the first interview I have ever seen with him.

Shackleton's southern voyage, 1914 - 1917

I've just watched this documentary. It's brilliant and thrilling.

Down under, at night

One of my favourite things: the London Underground. Getting worked on.

"The hit song is hard to come by these days..."

Do you sometimes write poems? Do you harbour a secret desire to one day hear them set to music, sung by a silky smooth crooner, or just someone who can sing? Well, for the small price of $99, you can have somebody spend 48 minutes 15 seconds with your song on Protools and have a real genuine actual CD made of your song-poem.

It's an industry, and though one of the operators in this documentary is quite young and is making a living from it, it's got to be a dying business these days. This is a 54 minute documentary I discovered on clicker. If you're interested in the lives of people who oneday wandered down a cul-de-sac of some faraway part of life, met some other people there, commerce was traded and nobody ever returned, then you will probably find something terribly compelling about this documentary.

Watch out for the writer of the song, "The Thing". His face upon listening to the work of the studio guy is priceless. These guys have skills, no question. You can see the onetime Grammy winning, Elvis backup singer sighing in sheer desperation, but it is entirely inaudible on the recording. That's gifted.

Also viewable larger, here.

UPDATE: I've just been looking through old archives, and look what I found. Think this might be a candidate for the song-poem industry makeover?

Joe Stiglitz talking sense

From the New Yorker.

The passion of his life

via cosmic variance

Wild mothers

In yet another example of how callous mothers often are in the wild, a koala mother has flung one of her newly born twin babies out of her pouch, to be delightedly hand raised by a human in a Crocodile Dundee hat who has thought fully provided a koala soft toy for it to climb on, instead of a pouch. We are so judgmental about our own species' examples of indifferent mothering, when cute furry creatures seem to abandon or eat their own young as a matter of course.

The Unfit Koala Mother was last seen climbing a tree, serenely, with the remaining twin secure in her pouch. There are thus far no indications that other koalas are going to prosecute. A nursing mother koala at a nearby zoo was asked for her opinion, and she just shrugged.

So here is the moment you've been waiting for: video of the koala baby getting bottle fed, with a feast of other wildlife video snippets on the page.

Leaving New York, from the sky

A few interesting Michael Jackson links

Ok, well if you're looking for some way beneath the MJ myth, you might want to start with this. Oh, love of Lisa Simpson has revealed some of the finest humanity in many human hearts, and this is very sweet indeed.



MJ wrote "Do the Bartman"! because he loved Bart Simpson so much. Well I feel Michael Jackson's heart here. This is lovely.

A journalist who knew MJ personally for years, talks.

Lisa Marie Presley is having a unique experience of MJ's death. (via LA Times)

This is pretty mesmerising. I wondered on facebook how MJ might have looked if he hadn't been interfered with, and Tabitha came up with this and this. Wow. How open and plain human those possible versions of himself look. The Mail version looks the most plausible to me. That kind of fame does not lead a person to looking like a binman. It has its own sheen, its own patina.

It all went arseways after Thriller. A generally good wnyc Soundcheck show, looking at Thriller, and the impact it had on MJ's career. Specifically, the crippling effects of success. He never made another great album again. It's such a pity. He clearly had it in him, still. The man was a phenomenon.

An article about the album he had (partly?) recorded when he died.

Man, his affairs are so messy. So much debt, and motherless children. There is some talk that Debbie Rowe will probably reclaim the two children of hers, and she is likely to get custody, being their natural mother. So what of the third child? Is the family to be split up? Isn't the whole situation bad enough? It's a mess.

So. He sold over 800 million records in his lifetime. His appeal spans generations of childhoods. Off the Wall and Thriller are such profoundly groovy records. I mean, they just groove.

But I don't know what he was trying to pull off with the London gigs. I think his whole relationship with fame was so deeply enmeshed with his own sense of self worth and existence, that it was just folly all the way down. How can a man of 50 try to recreate the kind of spectacle that he was famed for 25 years previously? It is a pity he could not just start with what he actually was, rather than endlessly clawing for the next thing that could kick his fame into what it had been. That time is gone, probably forever, for everybody.

Because deep inside all that crazyshit that Michael Jackson had become, there was this:

A train journey, revisited

A lovely interlude, as Laura Barton revisits Philip Larkin's 1964 train journey that resulted in his poetic meditation on England: The Whitsun Weddings.

Oh yes and listen to the audio on the Poetry Archive page. Just listen to this poem. As you fall asleep...

Play him off, Keyboard cat!

You can get more here.

How do they hold up? How do they survive?

Baby pandas milk it. Except for the general tone of playful friendliness, these guys remind me of Cartman.

Cat Friday

A short expose of the truth of cat.



This seems to me to be a kind of parable about the dangers and responsibilities inherent in getting everything you've ever wanted.



And in every cat friday there's got to be a dash of sheer dog truth. Because they are the other side.



Now stop purring all over me and go clean up your litter tray.