Beastie Boys Book

I've been digesting the Beastie Boys Book for the last month or so.  It's amazing, disjointed and brilliant just like the band.  I've been listening to the audiobook due to my lack of free reading time.  It's one of the best audiobooks I've ever encountered.  They have invited a stellar cast of narrators including Snoop Doggy Dogg, Kim Gordon, Chuck D, Will Ferrell, Bette Midler and Steve Buscemi as well as many many others.

The narrative jumps about from their childhood, through early punk adventures, Bad Brains and Black Flag concerts, New York Discos, career low-points (Def Jam), clothing labels, recording with Lee Scratch Perry and lists of equipment, recipes and mix tapes.  Everything is in this book.

Much of the book is a tribute to Adam Yauch, MCA, who died in 2012 from parotid cancer.  His fellow Beastie Boys clearly and understandably miss him.  In some ways he appears to have been a pathfinder for the band and is credited as being the Beastie who made things happen.

The physical release is beautifully illustrated with photos and comics strips reminiscent of the old Grand Royale magazine from the 90s.  It's a thing of beauty but the audiobook is worth your time too.

A fitting legacy for a great band.  Sadly, I never saw them and I deeply regret it.  I am glad I had their music (and their music videos).

2019

This blog partially serves as a diary or a journal.  I started writing on here in 2005.  Hard to believe.

Welcome to the new year.

As 2018 slips away, 2019 is sneaking up on us

It's the last day of the year.  I spent nearly 10 hours in work today.  For the most part it was a good productive day.  When I got home we cooked dinner and had a glass of wine.  We are now watching Royal Pains on the TV and falling asleep in the sitting room.  The first New Year in our house.

I intend to be asleep by the bells.  I may watch Only An Excuse before I head to bed.  Tomorrow morning we plan to head to the local park and bounce a basketball around for a bit.

2018 has been mainly good on a personal level even if there has been some dodgy geopolitical stuff going down.

Hopefully 2019 will be better in every possible way!

Happy new year!

The lunatics have taken over the asylum

The UK is in a sad place.  Our country is being run into the ground by warring factions of the elite Tory party claiming they represent the 'will of the people', egged on by an incompetent Labour party. This time, next year we will have been stripped of our european citizenship, making us poorer both financially and culturally.  We are going to lose a lot because of some posh arseholes playing games with democracy.

The rest of the world is laughing at Britain.  Fintan O'Toole has just written a great book about it.  Watching from the sidelines, the ego-death of a faded imperial empire is pretty funny.  Much was made of the British stiff-upper-lip and the 'keep calm and carry on' meme and this has all been exposed as patent bullshit.  Britain flaps around like a headless chicken or a dying animal, demented and brain damaged, just wanting to be put out of it's misery.  The country is full of angry, angry red faced people, shouting, unhappy with their lot, looking with someone to blame and settling on the EU which they can't quite conceptualise.  They just know it is foreign and stopping Britannia from ruling the waves.

The EU has protected many of us from unfair employment practices, protected us from working too many hours and giving us benefits like maternity or paternity leave.  In America, you get fuck all in terms of holidays or maternity benefits.  Or health care.

The NHS will go after Brexit, another unintended consequence of the will of the people.  If we want a trade deal with the USA, the health care monopoly of the NHS will have to go.  I fear for the future some times.

In recent days the government have started putting out adverts about the need to apply for settled status in the UK.  This even affects children born here to European parents.  This will hurt some of my friends and colleagues.  It's a jingoistic disgrace, bringing to mind Germany in the 1930s.

Fuck me, our country is in a mess.  All we can do is vote but in Scotland your vote and your voice mean little.  Scotland is impotent in the UK.

I'm lucky in so many ways and hopefully I will be cushioned from much of what happens over the next few years but I meet many people who will be directly impacted.  I'm sad for them.

Spider-man - Into the Spider-verse

I first got to know Spider-man through the old cartoons on UK television in the early eighties.  They were a good gateway to the character and Marvel comics.  Over the decades more cartoons have been made, more comic books and also some pretty good live action films.

Into the Spider-verse, is, as far as I can recall, the first animated Spider-man film to make it to UK cinemas.  It's a great film and the cinema is a perfect place to see it.

Spider-verse is knowing and entertaining.  It tells the story of Miles Morales, a Spider-man for the 21st century as well as paying tribute to multiple other versions of Spider-man who have appeared in the past 55 years.  Peter Porker, the spectacular Spider-Ham makes a welcome appearance.

The animation is electric, jumping from style to style.  Kingpin is portrayed in the style of Bill Sienkiewicz, massive with a tiny head and almost photorealistic features, like the Daredevil Love and War graphic novel from the late eighties.  Another character, the Prowler, looks more like a Todd McFarlane drawing.  It's a lively jump cut ride.

There have been a lot of films inspired by Marvel comics over the last decade and Into the Spider-verse is one of the freshest and best.  Worth seeing, even if you would't normally go for a cartoon.  There is also a lovely Stan Lee cameo which provoked a wry smile from me.

I went to see this film with a friend who has been having a difficult time recently and he loved it too.  Marvel characters can certainly brighten up your day sometimes.

Thanks again Stan and Steve.

first Christmas in new house

It's the run up to Christmas in our house.  We finally have curtains in the dining room.  The house is warm.  We have neighbours and we have exchanged Christmas cards with them.  We are planning Christmas dinner.  We are adults. The world is a funny place.

We had a bit of snow last week, not much, just a bit.  It was raining today, heavily.  It's nice seeing the house in the different seasons, seeing how things change.  The summer heat was intense, hopefully it will be cooler next year.  We have a warm house which is comfortable but anywhere can be uncomfortable if it gets too warm,

We need to decide where to put all the Christmas cards and maybe set up a CD player in the dining room so we can listen to some tunes.  We were using my record player a couple of weeks ago, listening to Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Tracey Chapman and Nenah Cherry.  We have lots of decent restaurants around us and some great parks.

Earlier today I watched Bad Santa 2 to help me get into the seasonal spirit.  It's not as good as the first film although I might just be a bit older.  There was a decent Christmas episode of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix last week too.

The world is a wonderful place in many ways and my life is really good.

One friend on Facebook has been having a bad time recently.  I'll try and get to the cinema with him in the next few weeks, see how he's doing, grab a coffee.  Make some time.

It's important to always make time to live.  Life is short and precious.  We all work too hard and stress too much.  It's important to do good stuff for yourself.  A lot of people have difficult lives.  Remember them and help if you can.  Be kind.

Stan Lee - RIP

I never met Stan Lee.  I never had a chance.  He did come to Forbidden Planet in Glasgow but somehow I never knew.  Stan Lee did have an impact on my life in many ways.  I've spent a lot of time reading Marvel Comics in the last 40 or so years and Stan Lee was responsible for many of them.

The first american comic that I read/owned was issue number 3 of Super-villain Team Up featuring Namor, the Submariner and Dr Doom fighting some even more evil fish people.  It was a bit crap.  It came from a neighbours house and I read it from cover to cover many, many times.  I still have it somewhere.  I remember all the strange American adverts from the seventies and the slightly yellow paper.  It wasn't brilliant but it was my first comic presented by Stan Lee.

I had probably seen some Spiderman reprints by then.  I was certainly reading the Marvel UK weekly Star Wars comic as a very young child in the early 80s.  The old sixties Marvel cartoons were broadcast as part of Glen Michaels Cartoon Cavalcade in Scotland with Captain america, Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Spider-Man.  We also had the seventies Spiderman cartoon as well as Spiderman and his Amazing Friends and the Hulk.

Stan Lee infected every part of our culture.  He reached Scotland from New York and taught us about heroes and trying to be good.  His personality shone through in his Bullpen Bulletin. He had a heart and he tried to do the right thing.  He was cheesy and a bit of a self-promoter.  He didn't give his collaborators enough talent but he changed the dreams of lots of kids.  Like me, those kids are often successful adults and we live in a world that has seen both the Black Panther and Guardians of the Galaxy on the big screen.  Back in the early eighties this was unimaginable.

My fiancé's niece can name most of the marvel superheroes on a poster in our house and she is 3.  Stan continues to shape young minds.  His imagination lives on in all of us.

RIP

Finding Joseph I: The HR From Bad Brains Documentary

The Bad Brains were co-headlining the second proper gig I saw, playing with Fishbone at the Glasgow Barrowlands in 1993.  Sadly H.R. was not with them that night with vocals from Israel Joseph instead.  It was still mind-blowing but I would have loved to see them with H.R. at their peak.

Bad Brains made amazing music but they were troubled at times.  H.R. was an amazing frontman but, as this film makes clear, he had problems.  His story is told by his brother, friends, bandmates, colleagues and fans. Humorous anecdotes eventually become sadder and the reality of the situation becomes clear.  At times H.R. (or Joseph as he is sometimes called) is homeless and making bad decisions.  He hears voices.  Onstage he can be seen visibly hallucinating and interacting with voices.  Eventually his wife manages to get him proper medical attention and anti-psychotic medications.  He gets better after that.

I learned stuff about HR that I didn't know through this film.  I heard some of his non-Bad Brains music (although I've had a few of his post-Bad Brains SST solo records for decades).  It compiles some great live footage.

Enlightening and sad, it ends on a positive note.

Berlin

I visited Berlin for work reasons this week.  I had never visited before so I was interested in seeing as much of the place as I could.  Work kept me busy but I was able to see a bit of the place.

I was seeing beside the zoo.  During the second world war there was a large anti-aircraft gun in the zoo and it was heavily bombed.  Around 80 animals survived but were then promptly eaten after the Russians arrived in the city.  The zoo has subsequently been developed into one of the best in the world.  It is visited by millions of people every year and houses more than 1300 species.

Berlin has a population over 3.7 million people but seems fairly quiet.  The streets are not as busy as London, Birmingham, Edinburgh or Glasgow.  I was getting the S-Bahn every day and it was not crowded.  One morning the train was filled with children communicating in sign language.  The area around Zoo Station was busy but again not as busy as many other large cities.

I tried a currywurst from one of the vendors beside Zoo Station.  It's a grilled sausage with a ketchup and curry sauce, served with chips.  I heard that this local delicacy only came into existence after the war when the only ingredients available were tomato ketchup and curry powder.  I enjoyed the experience but I wouldn't make it a regular feature in my diet.

I took the S-Bahn over the the east of the city to visit the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag.  The area was full of tourists but again not overcrowded.  I then spent some time walking along Friedrichstrasse and looking around a rather nice German music and book shop.  We don't really have shops like this in the UK as much now.

One evening we were taken for dinner in a restaurant on Gendarmenmarkt.  It was lit up for a festival of lights in the city and I took some photos of the French church, the German church and the Konzerthaus.  I didn't get time to explore further.

I walked down Kurfurstendamm  or K-Dam a couple of times, window shopping with the Happy Mondays song Kuff Dam stuck in my head.  To block it out I listened to the new Cypress Hill record on my iPod.  It's a big, wide street.  It reminded me of streets in Poland.  I didn't buy anything but I sat and had a beer with a colleague outside a bar on the avenue and I ate a nice meal in a restaurant on the street.  They do beef well in Berlin.

With another colleague and his wife we stood and admired the remains of the Kaiser Wilhelm church beside Budapester Strasse.  It was well lit and it still has bullet holes from the war.  It was badly damaged by bombing in 1943.  The square around the church now has crash barriers everywhere after the actions of a nutter with a truck two years ago.

I didn't see much of the city and I would have liked the chance to explore more.  Sadly that is not always and option due to work commitments.  I may return at some point but there are a lot of other places to see and sadly time is not always available.

The Second World War by Anthony Beevor

Men of my fathers' generation spent a lot of time thinking about the second world war.  My dad was born a few days after the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed almost 200,000 people.  His father saw service only as part of the home guard but a cousin died on the River Kwai in Burma, a victim of the Japanese.  The war loomed large in my dads perception of the world.

As a child I read the Battle comic and the Commando comics that were prevalent in the UK.  I saw the war films which old of a heroic war, where we got rid of nasty Mr Hitler and his Nazi chums and the 'cruel' Japanese.  As a child my dad took me to the old battlefields where ruined tanks still lay.  He also took me to visit Dachau.  War is not fun.

This book, by Anthony Beevor is a detailed account of the conflict that covered most of the world for about six years and resulted in the death of at least 60 million people.  A lot of bad things were done.  Human lives were discarded like used tissues, people were exposed to unbelievable cruelty and murdered.  War crimes and genocide were widespread. Caniballism, most notably by Japanese soldiers, was not uncommon.  Rape was used as a weapon of war.

The Second World War was not a good war.  It was one of the worst things that humanity has ever done to itself.  Sadly, many people in the UK, who did not live through this era seem to regard it with rose-tinted glasses.  It seems to be used as an excuse for Brexit, among many others.  The war is a warning from history, a warning against racism and fascism.  The war is a warning about 'strong men' leaders like Hitler.  It is a warning that too many of us ignore.

This book is long but worth reading.  Something to reflect upon.