Month: May 2024

  • Rock Bottom, Robert Wyatt

    My attention in music recently has shifted again towards the early 1970s to the post-psychedelic stuff produced by musicians loosely grouped as the Canterbury Scene. My tastes in pyschedelia have always been in the slightly-folksy English pastoral strain which has brought me via Soft Machine and Matching Mole to Robert Wyatt’s stunning 1974 album, Rock Bottom.

    Once you know a little about Wyatt’s life and that, in 1973 at the age of 28 he fell out of a window drunk and broke his back leaving him permanently paralysed from the waist down, it’s difficult to listen to Rock Bottom without hearing the album as issuing from that life-altering moment (although much of it had been composed before the accident).

    It’s both incredibly beautiful and awfully saddening. Dave Gilmour said of Wyatt: “He has one of those voices which just tear at your soul. He really does have a voice which endears itself to you and tugs at the heartstrings.” And, indeed, I find Rock Bottom a sobering listen one that seems find some kind of resolution in despair. The opening track, Sea Song is a haunting as a song can get.

    Rock Bottom seems to me to be about loss and hope. It really is a wonderful album.

    [su_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/Y1Wss9RHi_Q”]

  • Who and Hobbit

    In other news, I went looking in local charity shops for a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, a novel I’ve read twice but don’t have a physical copy. No luck on that front but I did find a delightful hardback of The Hobbit (I have the paperback version so this is an upgrade). Plus I found a pile of old Target Doctor Who novelisations and picked out the adaptation of the first encounter with the Daleks. Yes, this is the one that alters the story from what was broadcast and omits the Tribe of Gum adventure entirely, skipping straight to Skaro. I’ll add it to my ever-increasing tsundoku with the intention of writing about it on Legion of Impossibilities.

  • Oblivion (2006)

    Found a copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for PS3 in a secondhand shop for £1. It was released in 2006 (and 2007 for Pas3) and is often included in lists of greatest videogames. I remember my eldest son playing it back then on 360 but I’m pretty sure I didn’t at the time (the opening, in which your character escapes from a prison cell through sewers seems pretty familiar though).

    Having just played a few hours of the game (which supposedly takes anywhere from 30 to 100 hours to complete) I have to declare that it’s delightful – certainly for a nearly 20 year-old game. Once outside the sewers, the open environments are BotW-like gorgeous and I’ve certainly enjoyed exploring the terrain.

    What also strikes me is how little this sort of RPG has evolved. Don’t get me wrong, current generation games of this type have much better graphics and gameplay – but, essentially, aren’t that much more developed than what’s happening here with Oblivion.

  • Dual-booting Noble Numbat

    Installed the 24.04 LTS release of Ubuntu, Noble Numbat, on Macbook so it dual boots with Sonoma (itś actually a 10 year-old Macbook Pro using OCLP to enable latest version of OSX to run). The only part of getting Ubuntu to dual boot was the actual dual booting itself. All the resizing of partitions and installation of Ubuntu worked great but it just wouldn´t let me choose which OS when the Macboot started up… until I found this post on Tinker Different that gave pointers about how to get OCLP to play nicely with the Ubuntu EFI.

    And it works.

    My long-term plan is to move completely to Linux on the desktop (and to an Android phone) and beginning to use Noble Numbat as my main OS ongoing (well, Iĺl give it a month). Iḿ already impressed by how speedy the Macbook is running Linux and how good the Ubuntu UI is. Iǘe played with Linux distros before but never was able to get into them.

     

  • English: “ill-thought-through changes”

    Brief – but valid – Guardian editorial calling for changes to English teaching. “Too much of what is valuable about studying English was lost in the educational reforms of the past 14 years,” the paper says and that “ill-thought-through changes, which imposed a model more suited to science and maths learning on to the quite different disciplines of language and literature.” The editorial lingers on the effect that the changes have caused on A-level take-up of English and the consequent difficulties in recruiting English teachers.

    One thing that the editorial mentions is Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking’s The Balancing Act, which argues that children’s growing dislike of reading comes not only from modern technology but that evidence from the teaching of English (in primary schools) bears a share of the blame: “They believe a more flexible approach in classrooms, making more use of literature (initially children’s stories and novels) and less focused on grammar, would ultimately produce stronger talkers, readers and writers. The erosion of teachers’ autonomy should also be reversed, if enjoyment in language and ideas is to be strengthened.”

     

  • Tom Tom Club, 1981

    I’ve been listening to a LOT of Talking Heads lately and – while I was listening to Genius of Love performed on the live album of Stop Making Sense – realised that I’ve never really listened to the Chis Frantz and Tina Weymouth side-project, Tom Tom Club. Got to say that the first eponymously-titled first album is great. It has a joyous, uplifting vibe that I’ve absolutely enjoyed over the last few days. And it’s from 1981! These sort of things don’t seem 40+ years old to me.

    [FIFU]

    Tom Tom Club album cover