Welcome to the monkey house...

Went for a walk on Sunday to get the SST and noticed that the old 50's kitsch sign welcoming people to Carterton at the Railway Station has been replaced by a trendy rust job that looks had it when its brand new!
Its a well know fact that when arrivisitas come to the country looking for the good life the first thing they do is try and get their mitts on the civic strings and try a makeover that suits them.
You know.
Drag all the bumpkins up to their level.
We so hip because we come from wellington.
hahahahaha fucking ha.
It has nothing to do with what is good but what they think is good for people who have lived there all there lives.
I went to the meeting. I told them that  Carterton is a Cow town. You can smell milk in the early morning drifitng in over the town from milking sheds and you can see beef everywhere.
The sign should have been horizontal in Western letterng instead of some faux hip arty farty extension of courtenay place te papa vertical symbolism aspiration blab.
dig?
and they complain about  stuff they dont like they see from their cars.
well get out and walk and do something about the dog shit around the town on the footpaths.

anyway its great to see a breath of fresh air in the CEO's office at the Masterton District Council.
a real life full blown no nonsense academic.
At the moment the wairarapa is pregnant with potential.
anyone who has read the BERL report knows that farming and services is what keeps the place going an anything else is an optional extra.
Its time to draw all or some of the disparate strands together and create something real and vital.
break down walls and forge institutions that are not private bailiwicks but self sustaining contributors to the greater commonweal.
Think the Scottish enlightenment and that is just a start.
OK? 

top ten artefacts of the twentieth century

Star Trek IV

This movie is everything that mankind could be or what mankind could do to themselves if they try hard enough.
Like A Rolling Stone
Bob Dylan summarises all poetry, all music and his own personal journey into 6minutes of vinyl perfection while the great Mike Bloomfield plays the ultimate sideman.
Welcome To The Monkey House
Kurt Vonnegut puts together a series of short stories that analyses and encapsulates the human condition as no other writer quite managed managed to do before or since.
Lockheed F104
This aircraft was the acme of aeronautical design in the 1960's as the insights and technology gave men the ability to produce a whole new generation of devices to kill each other.
The Simulacra
Philip K Dicks magnum opus where he brought together philosophy, psychotherapy and the future of the world into one novel that defies any literary pigeonhole.
The Wild Bunch
This movie marks the transition of the world economy from the horse to the car and how some men confront their mortality and their place in the scheme of things.
Greenmantle
john Buchan aka Lords Tweedsmuir produced a style of writing that was copied by all and that is no exaggeration, all the others. Read him and then Hemingway, Chandler, Steinbeck and Louis L'Amour.
The String Band Project

On this vinyl album a whole bunch of city bred music enthusiasts succeed in recreating the music of Appalachia and the string band tradition and show the way for others to learn to play their own music in a world dominated by a monolithic Music Industry. This is home made music at its very best.

From Dawn To Decadence

Jacques Barzuns Take on how mankind has elevated itself from little more than educated animals to jaded sophisticates and how they have have put the very existence of the world at risk by the demands of insatiable greedy people who have control of the productive apparatus.

Freud Rediscovered

New York journalist Lucy Freeman has captured the essence of Sigmund Freud's discoveries that are mankinds only hope but as truth is unlimited supply but very limited demand she is largely ignored but the time will come when his insights will be necessary for the continued existence of all humanity.

.

the three kings...

"I'm not Son House. I aint never been shit on, kicked, or pissed on. My dad is a multi millionaire". Michael Bloomfield at the 1962 Newport Folk Festival. It didn't matter. The chauffeur would deliver Mike to the southside of Chicago and carry his amp in and Muddy Waters would beam and say welcome to his boy and let him play. Mike was the best of all the white boys and his dath was a tragedy. Never mind we stil lhave the music and that is what counts. BTW when yu get a coffee from a Bloomfield machine thats the family business still going.

Son House

first there is a mountain...

What a day yesterday.

Found a copy of dont look back in the Warehouse.

$9.99

and

The Rolling Stones 17 clips

and Down the Tracks

and

Battle Hymn (the movie)

all cheap as.

Thank YOu The Warehouse.

Back to town and there in Hedleys was the latest issue of Mojo Magazine with a feature on the Small Faces.

Could not resist that.

And inside were items on personal reminiscences of the Everly Brothers and a review of Al Koopers Michael Bloomfield Compilation of 3cd's and a dvd.

Died and went to heaven kiddies.

Later I Watched the Late Show where Strypes performed their song.

I had to compare them to the Rolling Stones at similar ages. Strypes were not syncopated and the guitarist seemed to have a limited ability.

However I wish them well. They were doing it but they need to learn all the Chuck Berry riffs they can immediately.

Watched the Stones at the T.A.M.I. show and they had the gurls in the palm of their hands with dynamism and energy.

You could feel the sparks flying.

Otherwise Strypes you will just be a flash in the pan when you could go all the way.

Back to Down the Tracks.

I put it on this morning and had to forgo Kimmy.

(Nick Agar gives me a pain anyway. overgrown juvenile with no experience.)

Down the tracks was a great journey through an America that is rapidly disappearing. We look back on the good old days and hope they might come again but they gone allrighty and they never coming back.

The necessary and sufficient conditions for the efflorescence of music in the 60's is gone too.

Its all museum stuff now. 

Ya get that.

In the meantime I use what spare money I have collecting artefacts from the 60's and reliving the past and plunking away on my guitar and wishing I was Woody Guthrie but I Ain't and thats that but there is a wonderful sense of achievement getting a Carter Family  of Jimmie Rodgers or Hank Williams song under the belt.

There is nothing better.

and

"I dont like transcending and progressing...

I like Sitting and smoking".

Jack Gallo.

Thats nuthin. Just something I learned over in England.

visons of paradise...

Woke up feeling just a little bit pretentious this morning.
It was either music from the soundtrack of the movie More by pink fluid or In Search Of The Lost Chord by the magnificent moody blues.
guess who won?
hehehehehehehe.
And tonight its Rambo First Blood Part Two which is in a different vein to the first (part one sic) but just as good.
and this arvo I might just watch Terminator 2 which I got the other day on vhs from the thrift shop for 50c.
A real bargain.
All round its thrills and spills and lookout.

get im boy...

find em.

get well soon dood.

kathrun ryun sindrum....

Wah wah wah. I wanna be different. I wanna make make my mark without doing anything. I know.Start pronouncing my words differently to everyone else. I'm in the meedja I can do whatever I like. Its called the the cult of meee sindrum. Howrever you cut it its infantile.
A bit like Steve Marshall in Australia. Just as well the rest of the international meedja don't see his items where he mangles his words that are not so much malapropisms but just plain ignorance masquerading as meaning. If his peers could see it they would laugh their f*cking tits off.
Is this what it has come down to now. Just make it up as you go and say what you like because no one least of all the editor in chief has any ability either to say you nay?
anyway.
Just read an obit for Jacques Barzun in a last years Time magazine.
He gave up on the noo noo heads too.
Like in the the New Scientist which seems to have become a journal shot through with speculative nonsense from scholars who have no idea of the history of their subject.
Now we have philosophers like Patricia Churchland who are supposed experts in the philosophy of neuroscience which attempts to clarify neuroscientific methods and results using the conceptual rigour and methods of the philosophy of science which is so much claptrap. There is no rigour in the philosophy of science.
Its just individuals pushing their own barrows. Philosophers are not scientists. Scientists hate philosophers because they arrive and say this looks easy. Maybe I can make a discovery in this field too because I am  just as clever as these guys. But they cant.
anyway Churchalnd for all her much vaunted reputation cant even make the connection between time and consciousness. They are both illusions. If you had a machine that had five senses plus speech, language, memory and cognitive function and ratiocination then it would believe that it was conscious too.
They also have a very unfortunate tendency to believe that behaviour is connected to phsyiology and chemistry.
They cant even remember John Locke.
Or maybe they dont want to.
They are so busy trying to make a new discovery that they cant see that the discovery is really into what and  why people think what they do rather than how they do it.
Barzuns scholarship was not innate.
He had to learn it but for todays manques thats too hard. They dont want to put any effort in.