from the garden. a relatively crappy ‘harvest’ but still delicious. that melon was super sweet and juicy and that monster tomato has a larger diameter than a runty CD. Tastes better too probably due to its greater dynamic range.
Sent to me recently by an old college chum–taken at a college kegger circa 1986:
I have sprained every muscle I own and I’m not even through the second side. I may never come back–here comes The Ocean…
V/A
The Wild Angels
OK here’s one I had high hopes for. And it does have some high points, namely Davie Allan and the Arrows who do some instrumental surf tunes. Actually, I’m on the hunt for a Davie Allan and the Arrows LP since their tracks are killer reverb heavy grungy surf music. With bongos and motorcyle engines! But The Hands of Time feature a bad Elvis impersonator and The Visitors featuring Barbara sound just like their name does.
But for a few bucks, the cover makes up for all that (smile).
Naw, I don’t have this LP (why not?) but I couldn’t resist.
It was something on Elements that got me wondering what Corey Greenberg was up to nowadays. Last I heard he was pissing everyone at NBC off. A quick google got me here and from there I moused over to Shaveblog. I was intrigued, I still had the old old safety razor my dad gave me when I was like 4 (the little silver one with the blue handle in the pic). I’d shave with him in the mornings (sans razor blade, of course), just plowing the cream off my face. I felt very mature. I’d kept it all these years just as a memory holder, but I’ve still never used the razor with a blade loaded. Corey makes point quite convincingly that a safety razor is a far better shaving device than one of those shitty little plastic multi-blade rip-off machines. Fifteen bucks for a pack of 9 blades (including the one free one!). Gimme a fucking break. How about fifteen bucks for one hundred double sided blades?
Another fifteen bucks on eBay plus shipping got me the lovely Gillette Adjustable in the above pic. I boiled it in alcohol for half an hour or so and it’s mint. (it already looked perfect, but it is a 30 some-odd-year-old razor after all). It came with a free blade and I was utterly hooked. Never again will I overpay for those inferior little toys.
V/A
Life is a Problem
…But where there is life, there is hope.
Oh man. Mississippi Records is on a roll. First Washington Phillips now this! Foot stomping, can I get an A-men, sing along, shout along hollerin’ churchrockin guitar-driven gospel blues. Recordings from 1946 to 1976. Beautiful, raw (at times nearly insane) and powerful.
…shave safely (and listen to vinyl)
Tired of buying those crappy overpriced Fusion blades I went all retro and bought myself a new razor. After consulting with JD (I must have recalled seeing his safety razor when bunking at CES) I decided to pick up a new razor while keeping my eye out for a nice vintage adjustable Gillette (a few have recently gone for > $30 on eBay). After some research including following JDs link to Corey Greenberg’s shaveblog, I picked the $34 Merkur HD (Heavy Duty MK34C1010).
My first shave with the included Merkur blade was nick free and amazingly smooth. Amazingly. Compared to the 5-blade Fusion, there was 0 drag, nearly no need for multi-direction scraping and therefore no irritation. Once again, ‘modern’ technology trumped by a classic. There’s some nice Israeli-made super+ blades (100 for $15! edit: as JD pointed out they’re double sided blades so its really the equivanet of 200 blades!!) on the way along with shave cream from the 50+ year old Italian brand Proraso ($10/150ml tube).
During summers at my grandparents at the beach, besides playing the ukulele on rainy days, I’d shave with my grandfather’s safety razor. And in a funny way similar to my return to vinyl, I wonder what the hell I was thinking all these years living with a crappy, utilitarian experience when I could have been enjoying a great shave. Live and unlearn.
my grandfather at the beach
Robert Pete Williams
Goodbye Slim Harpo / Viet Nam Blues
A wonderful 45 of Robert Pete Williams singing about the loss of his friend Slim Harpo and a bigger loss. Gut-wrenching simple music.
heaviness
Boris Smile
Wooden Shjips Vol. 1
Grails Interpretations of Three Psychedelic Rock Songs From Around The World
Kawabata Makoto We Don’t Know Where We Came From
This is from a music review in the September 2008 issue of the The Wire written by Simon Reynolds on Warner Jepson’s Totentanz and Other Electronic Works 1958 – 1973. I liked it so much I thought I’d share. A salve for so much of the nonsense found on forums (feel free to subsitute hifi for music)…
Music obsession is a bottomless pit: the deeper you climb in, the more you lose perspective. The genre might be 1960s garage punk or 70s Afro-pop, peak-era dub ‘n’ roots or cassette-only second wave Industrial, but the syndrome is the same: a mania for completism takes over. Like the prisoner in solitary confinement entranced by the different grain of bricks in the cell wall, you start to perceive and cherish minute differences between iterations that seem utterly generic to the non-enthusiast’s ear. All this is a preamble to an admission. I don’t honestly know how crucial Warner Jepson’s work is in the grand scheme of things. All I can say is that it rocks my world, a world bent out of shape by an ever expanding passion for post Second World War musique concrete/analog electronic, further slanted towards maverick, marginal and minor.
:zoviet*france
Gris
I finally got a copy of Gris. I waited a long time to get this one – a 10″ favorite wrapped in a hand-screened roofing tile from ’85. The music is their minimal industrial drone with that vague hint at melodic sense that I find compelling in all their music. Much softer than Blixa and Neubauten but with a similar emptiness. Only sweeter.
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