Tuesday 30 November 2010

Oh! Look Over There.

See now, here's the problem.
If you live in any one place for any length of time that place will slowly become invisible to you.
The aspects of the location that first caught your attention will become prosaic and meaningless.
Although you still have the gift of sight you are blind.

It's time to venture out and find the next level.


Saturday 27 November 2010

Beheld 'lite' (feat: Mystic Roger & Dolittle) Play 'Beheld'

An impromptu performance of 'Beheld'.
Girl on Wire wanted me to hear the glockenspiel part she had come up with.
We are ably assisted by Mystic Roger on guitar and Dolittle on backing vocal.
We suffer from the absence of St. Anley's Concertina and my getting the words to my own song wrong.

Linda's (Beheld's official film maker) film style is getting better but I do miss her 'cut away to shoes'.

Thursday 25 November 2010

My 'Track Of The Week': Purple Haze (as performed by Svetlyo Zhilev)


'scuse while eye kiz dis guy....

Monday 15 November 2010

My 'Band Of The Week' : Hatebeak.


A death metal band with an African Grey Parrot on vocals?
What's not to like?
Go here for more: Hatebeak

Saturday 6 November 2010

All I Want For The 'C' Word.

Mr. Key has announced the launch of his new collection of stories under the snappy title
"Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories".

So, my Christmas 'get' list now reads:

  • Leatherman Squirt ES4 (a multi-tool)
  • HexBug Crab (a small novelty robot thing)
  • 12v Rechargeable Battery (a large rechargeable battery)
  • Inpugned By A Peasant And Other Stories (the new book by Frank Key)

Modest or what?

Linda tells me she wants a Nintendo Wii (something she will interact with between watching Emmerdale and Corrrie)

Another Cardboard Sign.

I haven't 'dropped' one of my cardboard signs for sometime now and feel it's about time I intervened in other people's reality again.
Here's my latest effort:

I gave it to The Girl On Wire and told her to place it in a strategic position in the town of Petworth.

So Long To "Big Fish".

Big Fish has been ill for about three days.
This morning he/she/it succumbed to the trumpet call and turned belly up.
This means that Little Fish gains promotion to the position of Big Fish.
Linda has been dispatched to the aquarium centre to recruit a candidate for the vacant position of Little Fish (it will probably be a shabumpkin.)

Last week we bought a couple of 'sucky' type fish in the hope that they might keep the tank a little cleaner but as soon as they were introduced into the tank they disappeared behind the filter and we haven't seen them since.

Friday 5 November 2010

Beheld's First Attempt At Playing 'You And Me'.

I wrote 'You And Me' some time ago (couple of years I think).
I've performed it many times in different places and it always gets a reaction.
Usually questioning the gender perspective.
"It's not really a 'man' song is it?"
Why not I wonder?
Aren't men supposed to have the kind of sentiments expressed in the song?
At face value it describes that awkward period in a relationship where both parties know it's all over but neither can bring themselves to admit it.
I have a different take on what the song's actually about.

The Girl On A Wire asked if she could have a go at singing it and, in my opinion, she's made it her own.

This is a recording of the first time we've played it as an ensemble which accounts for Prof Dogsbody's somewhat tentative concertina. If I was a fair man I'd have let him know what the key and chords were before I turned on the recording equipment:
  You And Me. by Outa_Spaceman

From Earth To The Moon And A Trip Around It. Pt.V

At that moment, at six o'clock, the lunar pole appeared.  The disc only presented to the travellers' gaze one half brilliantly lit up, whilst the other disappeared in the darkness.  Suddenly the projectile passed the line of demarcation between intense light and absolute darkness, and was plunged in profound night !

For three hundred and fifty-four hours and a half, nearly fifteen days, the three adventurers were doomed to ride through the wilderness of interplanetary space in pitch darkness, although, fortunately, they were able to light up their cabin artificially.  The face of the moon above which they were now floating was never visible from the earth.

Why hadn't the Columbiad been drawn by the gravitational pull of the moon down on to it's surface?  That was the puzzle that teased Barbicane's scientific mind.  No more than twenty-five miles had separated it from the lunar disc, so it must have come strongly within the moon's influence.

It its speed had been enormous, he could have understood that the fall would not have taken place; but, with a relatively moderate speed, that resistance to the moon's attraction could not be explained.  Was the projectile under some foreign influence ?  Did some kind of body retain it in the ether ?  It was quite evident that it could never reach any point of the moon.  Whither was it going?  Was it going farther from, or nearing the disc ?  Was it being borne in that profound darkness through the infinity of space ?  How could they learn, how calculate, in the midst of this night ?  All these questions made Barbicane uneasy, but he could not solve them.

Certainly, the invisible orb was there, perhaps only some few miles off; but neither he nor his companions could not see it.  If there was any noise on its surface, they could not hear it.  Air, that medium of sound, was wanting to transmit the groanings of that moon which the Arabic legends call "a man already half granite, and still breathing."

One must allow that that was enough to aggravate the most patient observers.  It was just that unknown hemisphere which was stealing from their sight.  That face which fifteen days sooner, or fifteen days later, had been, or would be, splendidly illuminated by the solar rays, was being lost in utter darkness. In fifteen days where would the projectile be ?  Who could say ?  Where would the chances of conflicting attractions have drawn it to ?  The disappointment of the travellers in the midst of this utter darkness may be imagined.  All observation of the lunar disc was impossible.  The splendour of the starry world drew them to the windows of their moving ship.

Long did the travellers stand mute, watching the constellated firmament, upon which the moon, like a vast screen, made an enormous black hole.  But at length a painful sensation drew them from their watchings.  This was intense cold, which soon covered the inside of the glass of the scuttles with a thick coating of ice.  The sun was no longer warming the projectile with its direct rays,  and thus it was losing the heat stored up in its walls by degrees.  This heat was rapidly evaporating into space by radiation, and a considerably lower temperature was the result.  The humidity of the interior was changed into ice upon contact with the glass, preventing all observations.

"Well !" observed Michel, "we cannot reasonably complain of the monotony of our journey !  What variety we have had, at least in temperature.  Now we are blinded with light and saturated with heat, like the Indians of the Pampas !  now plunged into profound darkness, amidst the cold like the Esquimaux of the north pole.  No, indeed !  we have no right to complain;  nature does wonders in our honour."

Experimenting  and note-taking with all the calmness of men who foresaw a future safe landing on their parent Earth, Barbicane, Nicholl and Ardan sailed on round the moon without power to guide or alter the course of their spaceship, which was at the mercy of elements they could not account for, let alone control.

The vast disc of the moon hung below them at an unknown distance "like an enormous black screen upon the firmament."  Barbicane and Nicholl both agreed that whether the Columbiad was following a parabola or a hyperbola, it was certainly following an "open curve" into infinite space, and that it  "would never again meet either the earth of the moon."

What it did meet very soon, however, was a meteor, and this gave them some of the most terrible moments of suspense that they had experienced since being launched on their hazardous journey into unknown space.

Suddenly, in the midst of the ether, in the profound darkness an enormous mass appeared.  It was like a moon, but an incandescent moon, whose brilliancy was all the more intolerable as it cut sharply on the frightful darkness of space.  This mass, of a circular form, threw a light that filled the projectile.  The forms of Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Arden, bathed in its white sheets, assumed that livid spectral appearance which physicians produce with the fictitious light of alcohol impregnated with salt.

"By Jove !" cried Michel Arden.  "We are hideous. What is that ill-conditioned moon ?"
"A meteor," replied Barbicane.
"A meteor burning in space?"
"Yes."
This shooting globe, suddenly appearing in shadow at a distance of at most 200 miles, ought, according to Barbicane, to have a diameter of 2,000 yards.  It advanced at a speed of about one mile and a half per second.  It cut the projectile's path, and must reach it in some minutes.  As it approached it grew to enormous proportions.

Imagine, if possible, the situation of the travellers !  It is impossible to describe it.  In spite of their courage, their sang-froid, their carelessness of danger, they were mute, motionless with stiffened limbs, a prey to frightful terror.  Their projectile, the course of which they could not alter, was rushing straight on this ignited mass, more intense than the open mouth of an oven.  It seemed as though they were being precipitated towards an abyss of fire.

Barbicane had seized the hands of his two companions, and all three looked through their half-open eyelids upon that asteroid heated to a white heat.  If thought was not destroyed within them, if their brains still worked amidst all this awe, they must have given themselves up for lost.