Friends

I find myself wanting to be close to the earth these days: outside in the garden, inside with the hula hoop. I don't think my days of flying are behind me completely, though.

My dear friend Allison and I are co-teaching a toddler's trapeze class this summer, and we can both bring our boys and watch them take to the air with pure joy. It's amazing: put down a trapeze, and a child needs know instructions. The child knows what to do.

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So, someone (can't remember who, and can't find the post again) recently posted a crochet celery, and I thought it was so brilliant, I had to attempt my own.  It's about three inches high, and made out of fingering-weight cotton.  It's kinda spiffy, but I'd like to make another that, well, looks better.  Ideas? 

( There's a pic under the cut... )

Last post featured a brown-and-blue "pinstripe" yarn . . . but Bluesuit!Doc deserves love, too, so I give you this additional project:

( Pics and comments under the cut . . . )

Sometimes I start comics that are supposed to be a whole page, but are only a half page.

On a related note, I have so many David Bowie drawings now, so many Ziggys.

(store!)

X-word, by Brummie : 28/28.

Two 7"s :
# 2009/299 : Kenneth Williams : Pardon Me Sir Francis/ All Together (Decca F. 12562)
# 2009/300 : Michael Hurley : National Weed Growers Association/ Slippery Rag (numerous labels/numbers - W.C.T.C.H.C., Carnage Press, Father Yod, Amphinomics, Egon, Shagrat. Numbers : WDTCHC 2/2; CP-716; FYP-S01; F + M 998; E-04; and ORC 002) - in silkscreened sleeve, with tiny comic book. http://www.discogs.com/Michael-Hurley-National-Weed-Growers-AssociationSlippery-Rag/release/1679616

Listen list :
- Art Of Field Recording - 50 Years Of Traditional Music Documented By Art Rosenbaum - Sampler CD (Dust-To-Digital, CD)
- Kazuko Hohki Chante Brigitte Bardot (Chabada, CD)
- Ocean Of Sound (Virgin, 2CD) -disc 1 (part of)

DJed at The Sanctuary, for Alistair Strachan's Willkommen event (http://www.willkommenrecords.co.uk/willkommen-present-the-hand-ichi). Pleasingly, Al paid me an unexpected £20, my second this week.
An unbilled Jo Burke (who plays with Mary Hampton) did a short set too. The very entertaining Ichi (http://www.myspace.com/ichijapan) came on on stilts wearing a big black false moustache and blowing a harmonica, after playing steel drum on a number with The Hand(http://www.myspace.com/thehandand).
My set :
1) Bismillah Khan & Party (His Master's Voice 7EPE. 60, side A)
2) Tom Dissevelt/ Kid Baltan : Whirling (Philips)
3) Clubfoot Orchestra : Innocent (Ralph)
4) Tom Lehrer : Masochism Tango (Decca)
5) Gliss Anders : Toy Piano Bossa Nova (Ember)
6) Walton (Peter Pears) : Tarantella (Decca)
7) Penguin Cafe Orchestra : Music For A Found Harmonium (Editions EG)
8) Gouro Group, Yassua Tribe : Ensemble De Trompes (Ocora) - Cote d'Ivoire
9) Frank Chickens : Blue Canary (Kaz)
10) Perihane Zejneli/ Aferdita Muharremi : Sme Le Nëni A Të Dal Na Dëre (Ocora) - from Yougoslavie 2
11) John Mayer's I-J-7 : Acka Raga (Columbia)
12) The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet : Stalin Wasn't Stallin' (CBS)
13) IBM 7090 Computer : Bicycle Built For Two (Brunswick)
14) Lol Coxhill : Discodementia (UMYU)
15) Leonard Emanuel : The Whale Swallowed Jonah (Rounder)
16) Rahsaan Roland Kirk : Black Root (Atlantic)
17) The Amazing Music Of The Electronic Arp Synthesizer : Yellow Submarine (RCA Victor)
18) Frank Perera : Anu Ka Makani (Rounder)
19) Ivor Cutler Trio : The Great Grey Grasshopper (Parlophone)
20) Le Bal Chez Le Ministre (His Master's Voice) - from compilation of sounds of clocks and musical boxes
21) Gerhard Kammerlander : Trumpet Imitation (BBC)
22) Andrew Cyrille : Pioneering (BYG Actuel)
23) Portsmouth Sinfonia : William Tell Overture (Transatlantic)

X-word, by Paul : 17/28.

Found I'd won a Robert Wyatt 7" from the '80s I'd no idea existed - The Red Flag and The Internationale. A test pressing - did it ever get a proper release ? Number is PLUTO 1 - anything to do with radical publisher Pluto Press, I wonder ? Was it due to be part of Wyatt's Rough Trade series of cover version singles ?

Gave Jeanette a birthday 'phone call. Got her a copy of All Platinum Girlls; the second Women In Lounge CD; and the Destroy That Boy compilation; and made her a card of an old Shirley Collins concert poster.

Listen list :
- South African Trade Union Worker Choirs (Rounder, L.P.)
- Vintage Hawaiian Music - Steel Guitar Masters 1928 - 1934 (Rounder, L.P.)

I just found this community and I am super excited about it. A few months ago I got bored and made a felt Tardis bookmark that I embroidered the phone box details on it, sans the lettering because it was too tiny for me to do it and make it look good. Tell me what you think.

( Tardis Bookmark )
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I had fun drawing teens for that last comic, and was looking up dangerous teen fashions from the earlier part of the century. I think the Teddy Boys were my favorite.

Too bad I was a teen in the late 90s/early 00's and there was absolutely nothing remarkable about that time! Except regrets and frosted tips (same thing).

You probably want to hear this record.

Hi all!  I posted earlier asking for help with suggestions for a Doctor Who Silence in the Library-themed surprise going-away party for my very bestest friend.  :D  I was wondering if anyone knew of any tutorials for making River Song's TARDIS Journal, or if anyone knew where I could buy one for an affordable price?  Thank you so much for all your help!!, and thank you to the people who commented on my last post with their suggestions!, I loved 'em!!  :D  :D

Poll #1424339 one person's opinion
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What do you think?

Originally published at the scowl. You can comment here or there.

Since its founding in 2006, the Michigan-based press Dzanc Books has released a number of worthwhile reads, including Roy Kesey’s All Over and Kyle Minor’s In the Devil’s Territory. In the years since then, they’ve also acted as distributor for a number of other presses and journals (including Monkeybicycle and OV Books) and, more recently, announced the creation of an online journal called The Collagist, to be edited by writer and previous Agitation interviewee Matt Bell. Dzanc founder Steven Gillis is also the author of three novels, most recently Temporary People, a novel about a sort of meta-revolution that occurs on an island nation off the coast of Europe. (It also, it should be said, made for a fine back-to-back read with China Miéville’s The City & The City — politically resonant novels set in painstakingly created countries.) Temporary People and The Collagist were among the topics Gillis and I discussed via email for this interview.

Temporary People is subtitled “a fable”. I’ll admit that, initially, this threw me; given the extent to which you’ve created a distinct country and given it a visible, viable history– a degree of realism I don’t generally associate with fables. Did you know from the start that you’d be using this terminology? And if not, at what point did the book shift from Temporary People: a novel to Temporary People: a fable?
The idea to actually call Temporary People a fable came very late in the game, though the sense that what I was writing was indeed exactly that seemed to resonate within me for some time. I purposely called TP a fable as, to me, it is precisely that, though as you note, not in the traditional way people think of a fable. For me, TP has a moral center, it is a wild story of the quixotic turned on its head, with characters large and small, and I wanted there to be this sense of telling a tale. I could, of course, have left the fable reference off, but I like the association, the idea that here is a tale, modernly set yes, with factual and historical references, and yet completely separate and timeless like – well – a fable.

How much of the history of Bamerita had you worked out before you began writing the novel?
Again, like my use of the word ‘fable’ the idea of having Bamerita be this unique floating space in the world was there from the start, but the actual historical context evolved as the novel went through its many drafts.

Was Bamerita specifically based on any countries? Given its dictator’s obsession with films and filmmaking, I found myself thinking of North Korea more than once while reading the novel.
Not one specific country, no, though my vision has always been a Latin/Central American flavor, a bit of Marquez’s vision, and then with traces of Spain under Franco thrown in. There are so many countries today with madmen and despots at the helm, and as I read obsessively about all of them, Bamerita became a composite.

The novel’s treatment of revolution kept anticipating my comments on it: you’d mention popular music in the context of the novel’s revolution, I’d think “Czechoslovakia”, and within a few pages, you’d mention the unrest there in 1968; the same was true in the discussion of general strikes, which both called to mind and explicitly referenced Poland in the early 1980s. The events of Temporary People, then, seem like a kind of meta-revolution. To what extent have you found that revolutions tend to (or don’t tend to) build on what has come before?
If you mean the repetition in a single country as happens in Bamerita, the cycle is almost unavoidable because it becomes part of the culture, the fabric of the nation, sadly enough. If you mean revolutions in general, certainly there are aspects of revolution that are endemic to the process, regardless of where they take place. The eternal push and shove between powers, the internal struggle as it comes to a head, and then those cast to the outside after a revolution, begin to seed the same process again and again.

On the Dzanc side, you’ve recently announced the launch of online literary journal The Collagist. What prompted this? Do you consider it a part of Dzanc, or something distinct?
The Collagist is most definitely a part of Dzanc. We – Dan Wickett and myself – had discussed doing a journal for a while, and when we landed Matt Bell as our editor, we decided to take the jump. We simply want to use our platform to continue to bring the best writing to a large audience. The Collagist will have fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, novel excerpts, editorials and feature some of the best new and established writers working today. Our first issue will be out Aug 15 and when you see the material we have lined up, and the writers, I think you will be blown away.

I apologize in advance to the moderators if this post is not allowed  :(

My very bestest friend is leaving in August for Israel and is going to be gone for 4 months with the IBEX program.  :'(    She threw me a really awesome Doctor Who surprise birthday party last year, and I want to throw her a Doctor Who surprise going-away party before she leaves.  Her favorite Doctor Who episode is Silence in the Library, from Season 4, and I want to do a party themed around that episode for her.

I need help thinking of some decorations and what-have-you that would work with that theme.  Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!!!!  Thank you so much!!  :D

[edit]:  THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYBODY WHO'S COMMENTED SO FAR, THESE ARE AWESOME IDEAS!!!!!!  :D  :D  :D

St Vincent. Absurdly talented, a terrific musician and songwriter, who can go from a quirky and deceptively sweet-sounding ballad like "Marry Me" to rocking out on "Actor Out of Work". Also, she confuses the male critics at Pitchfork. She has some of the strangest-sounding pop arrangements I've ever heard, and she sold out Mohawk last week.

David Byrne. Twenty-first century Renaissance man who, with his band, will rock "Burning Down the House" while wearing fluffy white tutus. You definitely want to read his commentary on the city of Houston, in all its humid glory.

Patrick Wolf: Because almost no one else in his generation is opening a concert by walking out on stage wearing a fantastically designed leather cape, which is then removed to reveal a jumpsuit with a kind of black-white-grey Union Jack design, which slowly gets unzipped further and further as the concert progresses. He was also covered in so much glitter that you could see it spray in the light when he shook his head. I'm too young to have seen Bowie live as Ziggy Stardust, but Wolf gives you an idea of what it must have been like. boy was amazing. And he was also having a lot of fun.

Originally published at the scowl. You can comment here or there.

One: I recently finished reading Brian Evenson’s unsettling collection Fugue State. It was my first interaction — after a number of recommendations — with Evenson’s fiction, but I doubt it will be my last. Presently, I’m making my way through Blake Butler’s series of essays on the stories of Fugue State. Fine stuff…

Two: At io9, the esteemed Graeme McMillan talks comics and genre with Grant Morrison.

An obituary for Archie Green, who died way back in March without me realising : http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/01/obituary-archie-green-folklorist. I'm a big fan of his Work's Many Voices compilations on JEMF.

X-word, by Brendan : 17/26.

Two L.P.s :
# 2009/297 : South African Trade Union Worker Choirs (Rounder 5020)
# 2009/298 : Vintage Hawaiian Steel Guitar Masters 1928 - 1934 (Rounder 1052)

A paperback from Sandpiper : Surf Movie Tonite ! - Surf Movie Poster Art, 1957 - 2004. Could have done without the more recent examples, really...

In Mojo, very little. Jonny Trunk on John Rydgren's Silhouette Segments, as well as a full-page piece by him on Goblin.

Listen list :
- Steve Reich : Phases - A Nonesuch retrospective (Nonesuch, 5CD boxed set) - discs 1,2,3 and 4
- Michael Nyman interview (Front Row, Radio 4)