F*CK ART... LET'S DANCE!!!

CD-SHOP   ¬    Courtney Love on MUSIC   ¬    MGCK Music   ¬   UK Copyright Advice  ¬  The World

JANUARY 2007  -  Notes from Under the Bridge

New Year's Resolution: Do Something That MATTERS

Last Day of the month, Wed 31 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Take your pick of the rest!..

Be a Hero, Write to your Congressman (MP if you're in the UK), Complete a Labour of Love,  Become an Eco-Warrior, Turn Your Lights (TV, computers, DVD's, all things on stand-by) OFF!!!!!, Nourish and encourage a child (mentally, emotionally and nutritiously), Nourish and encourage an adult the same way, Reduce your Consumption, Reduce your production of waste, Recycle, Cycle instead of drive, Adopt a Child, Adopt an Abandoned Animal, Adopt-A-Highway, Expand your consciousness, THINK and STOP before making more babies, Give 5% of your income to charity, March when it matters, Extinguish your 'negativity vampire', Regularly re-evaluate your values, Question everything you haven't seen with your own eyes, that parades as the truth. 

Mon 29 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Ride a bike!..

For charity, environment (better than taking a bus or a car)... or just fun..  Cycling in Golden Gate Park yesterday... just beautiful.  

A heads up to visit my man RAY on MySpace.  A San Francisco 'psychaedelia plus' music maker/producer I met in a roundabout way.. And this message for Ms Hope Eternal, (if she searches her name and reads this)... Look up 'Lisa Lampinelli' .. see if you can get a DVD.. hysterically funny 'insult' comedienne.  Apart from that.. just groovin' along.  Watched the SAG Awards last night (an award show every week.. this one from the Screen Actors' Guild).. and noticed that almost everyone I meet in California has their SAG and Equity cards; works in Music, Movies, Television, 'Design', Real Estate or Technology.  Has worked on or been an extra or had a bit part in this film or that film that went to Sundance.  Other careers... maybe psychic, meth-cooker, fruit-picker, grass-grower, bicycle and roller skates renter, lots of jobs in the sex trade,.  Lots of possibilities.

Fri 26 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Sort yer heed oot!..

Did something a little different last night... went to a 'self-hypnosis' seminar.. 2 hours of what was pretty much a 'one on one' (I guess not that many people want to sort their heeds oot) and discovered some fascinating truths.  Whatever your 'problem' might be.. whether it's a f*cked up way you think, a fact of habit, an uncomfortable addiction, a lack of confidence, a stress-trigger... whatever that thing is.. it probably 'began' with a specific event.  Something happened at some time that took you 'into' a situation.. you have to backtrack to that point and take yourself back OUT of it again.  'Suggestion' while in a hypnotic state is one way... of course, you should identify the moment the problem began before you begin trying to solve it.   I pin-pointed a really BIG ONE... the day me and Ian Jones signed our lousy publishing deal.  That was the day it all began for us.. the good AND the bad. 

Thurs 25 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Re-write the book!...

Dennis Hopper dune-buggies down an isolated beach, pulls up to the camera and declares: 'The Baby-Boomer generation is re-writing the book on retirement.... You won't be playing Bingo on Saturday night.. You want more out of life!"  Well.. I happen to LIKE bingo..  I played it for the first time when I was 15 and won, so a very favourable 'bingo' memory is mine.  But apart from the new nature of retirement, apparently baby-boomers (the new retirees) enjoy 'gettin' high' as much as they did when they were in college.  According to Reuters, the ubiquitous Baby Boomers, i.e. those in their late 50's through late 60's - have never stopped gettin' high on illegal substances.  The motto, 'If it feels good DO IT!!' has been a benchmark of their long lives, surprising all the sociologists, who suppose a 'mature' adult would, 'eventually', naturally, STOP GETTIN' HIGH!  Well Ha Ha on that!!!!  Life's too long to go unstoned into that dark night.... But what actually happens DURING that dark night?????

I've been reading a book by the ever-astonishing Norman Mailer - 'Ancient Evenings' - which puts a whole new spin on what might happen post-death.. well not a new spin, an 'ancient' spin... Beliefs re the after-life and the journey of the soul shared by everyone from the Egyptians to the Tibetans to Carlos Castaneda's 'Don Juan'... The journey of your soul after you breath your last is, apparently, more epic than the brief journey of your flesh whilst on this mortal coil, so whatever you do... don't let them just tip you into a dumpster.  Make sure you've put aside the dosh for an embalmer and a few dozen arcane priests to aid your Ka and Ku and all other of the seven bits, on their long long journey.. during the last part of which, your Ka must swim a river of human excrement; the 'Duad' where all unresolved passions, unexercised hopes and unrealised dreams have fallen.

  [My advice: Make the crossing less of a trial, by resolving your passions, exercising your hopes and REALISING YOUR DREAMS while alive.]

Re: life in the here and now... movies and sunsets.. Saw 'THE PAINTED VEIL' which has renewed an interest in the writings of W Somerset Maugham, as has another of his great stories now on film, 'THE GOOD SHEPHERD', which we saw twice!!! it was that good!!.. or maybe it just explained what my dad got up to as a Yale frat boy.  Tuesday night's 'State of The Union Address' from another Yale frat boy, George Dubya, has us all shaking in our boots.. If the planet doesn't get fried into a glutinous, toxic, globally cooked, sea of nuclear dust any time soon... I intend to read more books, watch more sunsets and go to more movies as I work out precisely how I'm going to ensure my soul's safe journey.

Fri 19 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Be 'Relevant'...

The new buzzword in hi-tech... not, "Are you talented?  Are you good at what you do?  Have you got ideas, are you employable???".. but simply
"Are You 'Relevant'?"  

Does what you have to offer as a 'professional' and an individual actually matter in the current climate of change?

Thurs 18 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Make a GREAT movie...

Saw 'BOBBY' last night.   A film written and directed by Emilio Estevez which maybe should have beat Babel for Best Picture @ The Golden Globes and maybe should win a few Oscars.  I left the cinema absolutely moved and somewhat shocked at the depth, structure, detail and seamless passages of the screenplay.  Every actor in the ensemble was superb.  Even Demi Moore delivering a 5-star performance as the drunken 'Connie Frances' style singer.  And Sharon Stone, fearlessly exploiting her aged distance from her own ingenue.  All of them, Martin Sheen, Helen Hunt, Bill Macy, Ashton Kuchner (sp?) as the acid-pushing dope-dealer to the stars and campaign canvassers...  Emilio Estevez (not only behind the camera but in front of it) playing Demi Moore's tormented hubby, Christian Slater, Lawrence Fishburn, Heather Graham and a passel of newcomers.. particularly the young actor playing the hispanic bus-boy in the hotel who actually held the fallen Kennedy in his arms.  Every vignette was coherent and deep and sewn together like a modern and relevant 'GRAND HOTEL'  and of course, the REEL footage from the last day of Bobby Kennedy's life as he approached his final walk to what should have been a glorious night celebrating a victory, but was just a date with a bullet.  

Watch Electra's 'DEEP SIX ' video on YouTube

Wed 17 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Create 'A World Where This Works'...

Finally last night: attended The SF360 Short Films @ The Mezzanine.. Some were so funny, i.e "The Pity Card", others taking the smallest idea and turning it into a creative moment; i.e. John C Reilly polling passers-by with "Are you anybody's favourite person?"  The film-maker who borrowed a deep-sea mini-submarine and took off into the depths of Monterey Bay to prove 'Squids are wonderful mothers!' (and boy are they! I'll never eat squid again!)... and the final film offering of the night - 'NEDJMIA'  - was just a killer.  A  mini-doc about a precocious and fully self-aware 13-year old girl in the Yemeni town of Sanaa.  Even though still a child, Nedjmia knows Sanaa is too small, too confining for the future she envisions for herself and she boldly tells everyone she meets that this is so!!!  She swaggers the streets like an alpha boy, wearing the pants, straddling bicycles and just (quite miraculously from money earned showing tourists the sights) buys herself a motorbike!  She plays brilliant football, cracks jokes and puts anyone smack in-their-place with stunning one-liners when they suggest she should 'take the veil' and act like a 'proper young lady'.  Everything the young ''Nedjmia' does would see her hung from a goal-post under a Taliban regime.  The hooded eyes of the men watching this child, breathe MURDER.  To the camera they slyly smile and say, 'her father should beat her'... 'if she was my sister I would string her up by her feet and beat her...'  .. 'she's unnatural."  Watching the film gave me the eerie sense I was witnessing a forensic team, piecing together the pre-death scenes of a murder; this girl's inevitable murder. 

 The sympathetic film-maker, also a young woman originally from Sanaa in Yemen (who remarkably escaped the veil and the confines of that traditional life by emigrating with her family to California), warns us time and time again that Nedjmia's personality and fire may not be enough to keep her safe for much longer.   The film ends with a post-script: 7 months after completion, Nedjmia was forced by her family to take the veil.  The film-maker travelled back to Yemen and petitioned the government with the supplication that her brightness, intelligence, imagination and fire were too good to waste.  Apparently, Nedjmia is being sent on for further education through special channels.  We all breathed a sigh of relief.  Which brings me to....

"A World Where This Works!": Steve Elliott's (the compere of the SF360 night) phrase describing the purpose of creativity and expressionism, not just in film and documentary making.. but bravely in all media.. to create 'a world where this works'.. where you can effect a change.  Where daring and imaginative ideas create a solution to common problems.  A world where this works.. He said that's the kind of world he wants to live in.  That thought has stayed with me.  That what may appear to be silly or pointless exercises can evoke magickal effects.  He says he wants to go through life as if they do.. it's a state of mind that creates an eventuality.  Speaking of which, in this long passage... I did the quick math of my financial situation and decided that in a world where 'this works'.. I.. uh.. needed to!  Miraculously, a job appeared.. post M*CW*RLD Expo and a giant computer magazine publisher needs all hands on deck for a PR exercise.  Craig's LIst is just incredible.  You can find a job for a day, a week, a month.. for the rest of your life.. and it's all kind of fun, wacky and interesting.. so that's me this week..  three days of calling people up and asking how they liked M*CW*RLD and trying to sell them some future advertising space.  So 'consumer'.. but so California.  You have to do these things while you're here.  Still, nothing beats the old ways:

Last words on different things... there's one special moment that makes all other moments pale into insignificance.. it's that moment when you're at the head of the line in some 'art-house' waiting for the popcorn in the popcorn machine to pop.. there's a hundred people impatiently fidgeting behind you and one absolutely mind-blowingly adorable guy (obviously a film-maker too), who impertinently, repeatedly and with a big smile and some cute flirtatious bubbles of conversation bumps up against you (over and over and over again) as he checks the progress of the buttered gruel in it's tin pot!  Chemistry.  Simple chemistry makes even the magick of movies pale to momentary insignificance.

Tues 16 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Be inspired...

The Leo horoscope for the week suggests: "Ignore practicalities, seek out that which inspires you."

With that directive in mind, I head once again to the beach and up around the Cliff House walk to watch another perfect Steely Dan sunset.  The love affair between the Pacific Ocean and the setting sun is a never-ending source of complete joy and inspiration for me.  But what about later?

A quick spin through the SF Weekly music guide sends no shivers of desire up OR down my spine.  Live music in SF has always been a plentiful catch-as-catch-can potluck of styles, talents and desperations.  Some people do it for love.  Some people do it for fun.  Some people do it for free.  And some people do it because it's just what they've always done.  ..  So.. oK... a movie.  Two must sees on the list: 'Bobby' and 'Letters From Iwo Jima', or I can accept an invitation to The Mezzanine Club on Jessie Street (off 5th, bet Market & Mission), for a showing of short films courtesy of SF360.  A mini warm-up and taster of things to come for the 50th San Francisco Film Festival this Spring and SF's immediate answer to the Sundance Film Festival which kicked off with much fanfare (and many email incitements from 'Shooters' to check out their films..) 

While I'm pondering the incredible blue of the ocean and the other incredible blue of the sky I'm also pondering last night's Golden Globe Awards.  'Babel' won Best Picture.  Helen Mirren won for 'The Queen'.  Marty Scorcese for 'The Departed'.  No surprises there.  But this passage is about tonight???  Maybe the horoscope is wrong and I SHOULD FOCUS on practicalities.. maybe stay in and do some accounting.. some nifty number-crunching with receipts and bank-balances.  Now that sounds like practical fun... maybe find out where all the money's gone.

Accounting it is.  After I finish being inspired by the incredible Pacific and her love affair with the setting sun.

Mon 15 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Walk in beauty...

Walked the mile or so around the coastal trail at Lincoln Park (Northwest tip of San Francisco) last night at Sunset and wondered, how did I ever leave this place before??... and would I be able to leave it again??... California I mean.

Saw 'THE FOUNTAIN' - Thought-provoking about life and death.  Shame about the end.  Hugh Jackman convinced me right up to the end..  My take on it.. his wife betrays him by dying, making him feel impotent that he couldn't save her and increasing his terror of death.  He gets the opportunity and becomes addicted to life.  Lots of groovy visuals and some interesting ideas.

AND Join the Stampede... to SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL.  The emails are flying in from film-makers telling me to see this film and that film at Sundance... sorry kids.. I may be here, but I'm not there.

Fri/Sat 12-13 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Learn Something New

Attended a Final Cut Pro seminar (w/Alavala), as an adjunct to the MACWORLD Expo.  A room full of MEN all on a high about their creativity and film/documentary/video production.  The example used to teach us the broad spectrum of the software's editing abilities, was soon to be released film 'ZODIAC' which apparently used Final Cut Pro and thus can view/edit/delete/re-colour all the scenes and shots as they are being filmed.  Sorry to be so simplistic.. but the closest I've come to film-making was writing a screenplay and a couple of treatments and dragging them around to producers in Australia and LA [i.e The Sydney Saga!].  I never learned the nuts and bolts of life behind the lens, so a LOT of this seminar went straight over my head.. but also delivered the message... CALIFORNIA is HOT for PRODUCT!!!!  Everybody here is making something.. music, movies, animation.. you name it.  America's number one export (apart from Cannabis, which is listed as the 'largest American cash crop' at $35 billion - beating out wheat, rice and corn) is entertainment and the software to facilitate the making of same. 

Saw the French film 'BACKSTAGE'.... which was pretty remarkable in that Emanuelle Seigneur (sp?) plays a Debby Harry doppelganger of a 40-something French pop-icon, with such riveting non-ce-plus; iced-style and phoenix burning ego, that at the end I wanted to run out and buy her records.  There's something about that French dead-pan delivery and lyrics that make no sense, but all sense.  

Thurs 11 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Honour a Great Man!!!

Also Thurs 11 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Bring your wallet...

Yesterday: Wandered over to the MACWORLD Conference & Expo @ The Moscone Center from 8-12 Jan.  Of course, I missed Steve Jobs keynote speech on Monday or Tuesday, launching the Expo and it's discombobulatingly 'new' yet (for me) not new enough products...  But I met Steve Jobs years ago when I managed the Vorpal Gallery and Muldoon was trying to sell him some prints.  He didn't buy them then, but he's sure selling now.

I strolled into the Moscone Center and followed the herd down a massive escalator.. got to the bottom and tried to freely flow with the neo-enlightened crowd into the Expo.  Either my shape-shifting skills are failing or I'm just not invisible enough.  A security person signalled to me, 'Where's your Pass?'  I signalled that I didn't know I needed one.. he sent me back upstairs.  I checked out the registration fee:  For all events for the week around $1,400.  The least pricey event was a demonstration of MAC TV which would only cost you $350 to get in and be amazed.

So.. . I left.

And crossed the street outside passing a 'Chinese Workers against Apple' protest and a couple of other complainants.  Apparently the once-again computer giant is abusing their cachet in other parts of the world.. , forcing terms, using slave labour... etc.. all the usual.

I remember in June 1997 when Apple hit rock bottom and their stock was $14 a share.  I wanted my mother to purchase a thousand and she fobbed me off.  It would have been a smart move.  Occasionally, I bet on the right horse, but always with someone else's money.

Wed 10 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Go see 'Babel'...

Yes... ''BABEL'' is a good place to start the new year. A terrifically complex and terrifyingly believable epic about what happens when brutal and in-e-vi-ta-ble reality pierces your precious little bubble.  A cross-cultural pageant, staged on the 'threshold of tragedy'.  Kept us pinned to our seats, squirming but fascinated.  Yet, Brad Pitt does NOT deserve a Golden Globe or Oscar for his performance.  He's hardly in the damned film.  But the supporting cast are incredible.  The deaf-mute nymphomaniacally distressed Japanese teenager, the tormented hispanic child-carer 'Amelia'.  The desperate people living on the edge everywhere. The 'rifle' which as the trans-global centre-piece, sparked the entire story of gross misinformation, misinterpretation, miscommunication and misunderstanding.   Begs the question, do we ever understand each other at all?  And if we did, what would we really know?

Other films seen recently: "LITTLE CHILDREN" (5 *****, would be 10 if you could have 10 stars.  GREAT film) and 'NOTES ON A SCANDAL' which for all the extraordinary acting by Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett was a completely UN-BELIEVABLE soup served up with a brilliantly dialogued screenplay.  The latest GREAT EPIC from Zhang Yimou, 'CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER' with Gong Li, who is, as usual, indescribably epic herself.  The film was absolutely visually stunning with the classic twist in the plot we relate to all of Zhang's story-lines... i.e. HERO and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS.

Also saw 'THE HOLIDAY' - yeah... romantic fact-ion or a fiction based on how women really do see the world.  Women can be such impossibly self-delusional creatures.

Speaking of good, bad and indifferent films: new German internet video site YOOMEE.TV has requested a DEEP SIX video to air.  They forwarded a broadcast contract, so I guess, yes, we'll send them a copy.

and Tonight 10 Jan and next Tues 17 Jan: DJ Hope Eternal is playing Electra's 'DEEP SIX' and 'Electra-vocalled DONTCHUMAKMELAFF' on internet radio ERROR.FM - Actually.. I don't know what 'tonight' means in terms of global timescales.  I'm in PST and Hope Eternal is in GMT so... it's probably already happened or is happening right now.. i.e. early afternoon California time...

Tues 9 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       The end of good times... the beginning of other times..

I can't believe the trip is over.  Someday, life itself will be over.

Ok.. it's a new year.. and you know what that means... the shit self-study known as 'evaluation'... evaluating your life, your plans, your ingredients, your thoughts, your hopes, your partner(s), your social circle(s), your aspirations and YOUR FLAWS!!!!!!!!  The effed up business of no more champagne cocktails, no more evasion, no more distractions, i.e. travel, parties, family and friends... just the cold hard stare in the mirror of a 'new' year and all it's attendant horrors... you know what they are... we don't have to list them here.

I've been reading a rather simplistic but accurate tome entitled, 'You Can't Afford The Luxury of a Negative Thought'.. so the above paragraph, telegraphing my fears, concerns and 'end-of-bubble' worries, will be my last self-eviscerating passage of 2007.  We have landed with a 'thump'... but I'm famous for my buoyancy.  Like a turd in a swimming pool... I float.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

9-10 JANUARY - INCUBUS @ The Warfield, Market Street, San Francisco.  Guess I gotta get a ticket.

8 January 07:  No such luck.

[Shock horror, but completely unsurprising... INCUBUS are completely SOLD OUT!!!  You've gotta book a long time in advance to see these bands and they are so worth it.  Sharp, smart, aware and with a 'message' worth receiving.]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sun 7 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       Back to life... back to reality...

uh... back to the Hot Tub!  Back in San Francisco... not much to say, except the road is addictive and all of life seems very stale and dull without it's endlessly beckoning horizon.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mon-Tues-Wed- 1- 2 - 3 Jan 2007 -  MGCK Music       First Days of 2007 - Cross that desert

Arizona to Mojave land: I should thank god for the motor vehicle and WiFi.  I don't know how they did it in a wagon train.   But the real issue is how much of the planet is going to look like this if we keep driving SUV's, buying cheap mass-produced products from China that tear all the remaining resources out of the earth and off the backs of living animals; flying wherever and whenever we feel like it and just pumping up our consumer lifestyles. Probably your back yard and every other currently 'green', wild, space is going to look like this.  And what's going to happen to the creatures big and small and magnificent???

We've been listening to 'radio Evangelists' during the over 3000 miles drive we clocked through California and Arizona since JM arrived.  I can't say I want to join them... but they've got a point.  We just may be living in the 'end of days' and people really are kind of completely crazy. Conspicuous consumption is the super-value that rules over all logic and life. Nuthin's got a chance out there.  Absolutely nuthin.

[all photos © E. C. Smith Dec06/Jan 07]

FIRST DAYS of a NEW YEAR: STILL WISHING IT WAS THE OLD YEAR... 

***But, here, safely away from reality, in my own warm american 'car' bubble, driving all the way back to San Francisco.. I forgot about the destruction of the world around me and luxuriously pondered my own self-importance; the fact I made no New Year's Resolutions and the question: 'What exactly had I achieved in 2006?'  The results weren't that bad:

• Won a lawsuit (and the CASH that goes with it,!) single-handed, i.e. 'pro se' (from the most hideous, evil, gruesomely greedy bastards you can imagine!  Believe me when I say 'Right is Might!!!'

• Started leaving the old North UK homestead and moving out across the world, to check out where I might next want to call 'home'

• Did a couple of REALLY stunningly good gigs in stunning locations with ALTRES 

• Signed the CYCLOPS Records deal for the release of the Twelfth Night Album 'Voices in The Night' to be released Early 2007

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yessss!!! a late contender for a New Year's Resolution:

DO SOMETHING THAT MATTERS IN 2007

Horoscope for January: ????????

If you're looking for LAST MONTH's stuff : go to Last month's blog: December 06

Still smokin'!!!!

=========================================================

  BE THERE...... or BE SOMEWHERE ELSE!  If you don't know how.. take lessons on COUNTERCULTURE.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SPACE: The FINAL FRONTIER! Always an eyeful: The Universe Today

Sites worth a visit and support are: http://www.adbusters.org and Be an 'Antipreneur' - anti-corporate - self-motivated activist: http://adbusters.org/metas/politico/antipreneur/

http://www.indymedia.org.uk

as always www.clearchannelsucks.net  (note: this site WAS closed down in a court battle with the Media Giant who got awarded the rights to the website name.. but it has sprung up again in an Appeal.. gripping stuff..

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MGCK Music                                  

MySpace for Electra: www.myspace.com/electrasong or www.myspace.com/electramagick (we can't log in to upload or change anything as we've forgotten the frickin password!)

MySpace for Deep (and meaningful) Six: www.myspace.com/deepsixxxxxx 

MySpace for Jimmy Miller 1: www.myspace.com/anonandon

MySpace for Jimmy Miller 2: www.myspace.com/jimmymilleredinburgh

MySpace for MAGICK 101: www.myspace.com/magick101

MySpace for Diamond Kitty: www.myspace.com/dkinfo

MySpace for DEAD EASY: www.myspace.com/deadeasy