This Is This

This is a response to Sam who posted this after I posted this.

Dear you,

In light of in a lot of personal areas that require considerable headspace, so I’m going to have to have a break.

This site takes stuff out of me that I’m not sure I’ve got to give but something has to. The fact that I’m not sure that makes sense speaks for itself. The way that the sun is shining and I’ve barely noticed says a lot too. And also the notion that I’m living alone amid people who want only the best for me.

I put a lot into this as I hope you can tell from the amount I vest in it, but if there’s a web equivalent of a little white dot fading to black*, then that’s what this site is going to have for a bit. (*That’s what TVs used to do when you turned them off, kids.)

No, that’s a little dramatic. It’s on standby. The little green light has turned to red and the remote’s somewhere down the back of the sofa and I can’t be bothered to get up and just turn it on.

Actually, that’s closer to the truth than I’m comfortable with and while it has never stopped me before, it should now. It’s a sign that I have too much going on, and if I’m not careful then something’s going to make a strange noise and a ping and then a snap and they won’t be able to get the parts in because they probably don’t make them any more. Or if they do they’ll probably not be the right ones.

Or something.

See? So negative.

Couple of weeks maybe?

Yours,

Me

Here’s a thing that uncompromising blogger par excellence Sam Burnett did over on A Little Bit Of Wisdom In Every Box. A great name for a blog, though I would have called it Look! Ack! In Bangor.

What you do is stick “(YOUR NAME) likes to…” is the old googleator machine, press the doohickey and first you cut the results and then you want to paste the results.

Simple. Classic. Genius.

What doesn’t help is that I have a famous namesake and there aren’t too many famous Cliffs around, so even before doing this I’m expecting to see “Cliff likes to sing at tennis matches when it’s raining and everyone’s waiting around because they’ve spent hundred of pound on their tickets and plus we’re live on the BBC”, but that’s where the similarity ends, I’m afraid.

But I’m a sucker for a meme, so what can a guy do. I’m ready. Are you? Well all right.

1. Cliff likes to likes to stay slim (he is a mere slip of a thing, albeit a tanned and groomed slip of a thing).

2. Cliff likes to be hands on at his vineyard.

3. Cliff likes to visit the theatre and is an avid follower of Hull RLFC.

4. Cliff likes to cook. Not content with merely cooking, Cliff also likes to discover food’s origins.

5. Cliff likes to pick out questions that may be on the minds of lots of students.

6. Cliff likes to try cases. His readiness to do so is as evident in mediation as it is in the courtroom.

7. Once his tomatoes are in the ground, Cliff likes to mulch them with red plastic, also known as Tomato Booster Mulch.

8. That is exactly where Cliff likes to be — at sea.

9. Cliff likes to spend time sailing and skiing and other things that start with “S”.

10. Also, he’s stolen the curtain that Cliff likes to hang out in front of, and he’s playing the bass without actually holding the bass.

11. Cliff likes to say: Pure. Comedy. Gold.

12. Cliff likes to be more adventureous.

13. Cliff likes to have fun

14. One thing that Cliff likes to emphasize is that our customers need to be comfortable while they are shopping

15. Python, as Cliff likes to refer to it (12-inch bull snake), chases old Cliffy across the road, over the bank and out through the woods.

16. I’ve seen that Cliff likes to eat puppies. Maybe you could work out some sort of deal.

17. Cliff likes to dazzle customers.

18. cliff likes to have good times with good peoples, also known as friends( yeah thats right, im talking about myself in third person, so what) …

19. Cliff likes to hide in closets for years!!! XXX Love You XXX …

20. Apart from the above mentioned styles, Cliff likes to work in what he describes as his own contempory style, where the painting lacks the heavy shadow

I promise I did not see the “Pure. Comedy. Gold.” Before I typed “Simple. Classic. Genius.” It’s just how things worked out.

I am better than Alanis Morissette because she has a song called Weekend Song, but when you google it, you are directed here above references to her tune.

Before all the lyrics sites and everything, I win out over the confessional Canadian breakthrough soloist every time.

Seriously. Google it.

See?

Do it again.

You see what happens? BANG.

Sorry Alanis – Ha ha. In your toothy face, sister.

Oh dear. It’s like rain on your wedding day.

She used to be a fella, you know. Seriously. Alan Morris.

The posts this week have had a common theme of dropping the attitude, something I should do a lot more of, and I’ve learned that perceptions aren’t always the better part of character.

So in that frame, the weekend song’s going fusion. No, not Cajun ice-cream in a raspberry coulis, I mean jazz rock.

Speaking of coulis, it just sounds unappetizing. Like jus. Who would eat something in a jus. It’s festooned again. Festooned in jus.

I mean fusion as in jazz-rock. Yeah, baby. Pompous raw talent and joy, but then so is Bach. And if fusion was good enough for Miles Davis, it’s good enough for all of us.

So we’ve got the aptly-named little Steps Ahead with a saxophone sweeter than molasses and four times as fast. Michael Brecker was a brilliant jazz sax player, better known for his session work. You’ll have heard him on Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight by James Taylor and Still Crazy After All These Years by Paul Simon. And Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, John Lennon, Carole King, Elton John, Billy Joel, Steely Dan, Parliament, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Dire Straits, Chic, and Frank Zappa, not to mention such jazz legends as Horace Silver, Charles Mingus, Herbie Mann, Chet Baker, Don Cherry, Dave Brubeck, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Chick Corea, and Jaco Pastorius.

But here he is with his own band with a beautiful sax solo, which he plays after a stint on the EWI. The EWI is an Electronic Wind Instrument which is a wind operated thing that looks like a Tupperware clarinet and with the same fingering as a saxophone.

It goes through a MIDI interface, and even though it is a synth, it responds to the player’s performance. I’ve played one; it’s amazing. If you blow harder, it plays louder, you can tongue notes, slur them, do pitch bends just like you can with a normal sax. They are also very fun to play because you can cover twelve octaves instead the normal two and a half you can with a regular horn.

Michael Brecker’s got that sweet East Coast rock tone that David Sandborn has. It sounds so New York - he was the house sax player in the Saturday Night Live band for years and he fucking wails. Laura by Scissor Sisters has the same sound at the end, and they always fade that bit out on the radio, but it sounds great.

He owned a bunch of saxophones, and on this he plays an aged Selmer Mark 6, an instrument with which he became so familiar he once said: “It’s as if I own every molecule of the instrument.”

You’d know the Selmer sound, too. It sounds dense and less tinny. You’d notice it if you knew what to listen for. Even if you don’t have a great ear, you’d hear it, as sure as you’d recognise the sound of your own car door closing.

His ownership of the horn really shows on here and I love the solo in this because it carries the song around. A lot of sax solos are breaks, showcases – this is part of the song and it totally makes it. If you don’t like the cheesy keyboards at the beginning, stick it out for a couple of minutes to get to that bit. You can always use the time to pretend you’re the opening credits of a 1980’s TV cop show.

A bit of jazz/rock for you, anyway. I don’t always give you what you want, but at least it’s always what you get.

Listen: Trains

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Related pages
Weekend Song archive

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are going to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term “lesbian”.

This strikes me as weird, seeing as that’s where the term came from - the poet Sappho was a native Lesbian and possibly a lesbian who expressed her love for other women during the seven century BC.

But Dimitris Lambrou, the man spearheading the case against the use of the term, argues that not only did she have a family, but she committed suicide over the love of a man.

I think he doesn’t have a case. It’s a term. Get over it. You’re a Lesbian, she’s a lesbian. Stop complaining. It’s only because you think lesbian is a derogatory term that you have an objection, you fucking bigot.

I don’t hear you complaining about other Greek derivatives, like democracy. Or hexagon. Or homophobic.

The term stays. People will associate it with the gay community. Live with it. Same with Mardi Gras. It’s safe to say that if you go to a Lesbian Mardi Gras, you’re not going to encounter a load of Greek islanders eating pancakes.

Did the people of Sparta didn’t complain that their collective noun became an adjective for boldness and bravery? Did they fuck. And I’m sure some of them were pussies.

Man, the searches I’m going to get now (cocks an eye towards google).

Apologies about the language today. I worry about being too rude on my site. I may have really offended some people today. My dad reads this. What if he’s a lesbian? Actually, dad, don’t answer that. I’d really rather not know.

I’m so very sorry. Unless you laughed, in which case YAY!

Have a great weekend, everyone. Cocks!

Click picture for bigger version. 

 
My bone. GRRRRRR!!!!

 
A little privacy here?

Keyboards ‘dirtier than a toilet’

Especially the keyboards at the beginning of Superstition by Steve Wonder.

Filthy.

Technology is cool. I was talking to my friend Adam online last night as I was listening to the Chelsea Liverpool match radio Five Live through my television. Adam is in Australia and he was watching it on television.

He’s a Chelsea fan so it was good to share it with him, plus I wanted Liverpool to lose. Not that I dislike Liverpool, but being an Everton fan, they are our local rivals. But if they were the only English team in the Champion’s League, I would have wanted them to win – it’s not like I always want them to lose.

It was apparent from the commentary and the timing of our reactions that there was no delay in his broadcast, my radio reception and our connection online.

Even that’s amazing, because twenty years ago when you’d have to get everyone in the room to shut up when you called made a transatlantic phone call and you’d get echo on the line and someone would stand in the background with a stopwatch to time the call which probably cost a arm for the first two minutes and a leg for every thirty seconds thereafter* (*minimum cost: one arm).

I still don’t think that technology has changed that much in the last thirty years, not compared with the jump from the 40’s to the 70’s. I think what we had has improved, but I don’t think we’re flying around on jetpacks getting holojobs just yet.

When I was a kid and my dad explained his world to me, he may as well have landed from another planet that spoke the same language. But when I talk to my son, I talk about the day I remembered being able to control our radio without leaving my chair.

It sounds silly sometimes. “News?” I say to him. “When I was a kid and you wanted to know what was going on in the world you had to wait for a man to come on the television and tell you what was happening.”

Of course, now they have the news on tap, you have a mobile, you have your PC, there is television with live news on three channels and if you don’t want to watch one of those, I can check the news in a little window on the same screen while someone else watches something else.

And if that’s too much of an imposition I can walk over to one of my other televisions and check on there, or go to one of the news channels on my radio, although there I’ll have to wait for someone to tell me the news, but that’ll probably change in the next year or so.

But even before news on demand, you the news thirty years ago was still gathered, if not delivered with the help of satellites. That’s space to you and me.

There’s nothing I like setting myself up for more than a fall.

As any blogger will tell you, we aim to please. Sometimes my sights are off, some days I’m just not feeling it at, there are times when there’s not much to tell, and occasionally I just feel like the face people make when they’re walking in light rain.

But there’s a responsibility that comes with writing and it’s a commitment and a pleasure and I enjoy the responsibilty of doing a challenge.

OK, example. Hannah Bridgeman, 1985 – about fourteen years old, 11 o’clock on a Springtime morning. We were in Mr Lill’s gym class and I noticed the date on her watch was wrong. I pointed this out, thinking that she might be impressed at someone whose attention to the details of others spilled over to a willingness to assist them in their lack thereof. Right? No?

Anyway, I pointed this out and she grumbled that the date was wrong for half the day and then at lunchtime it changed to the right one.

Now you don’t have to be a genius, or even me, to know that her date switcheroobob thought that twelve noon was really twelve midnight.

“Oh, I know why,” I said with a confident nod, but giving nothing away, implying an essential and mysterious understanding of modern timepieces.

“Can you fix it?”

“I think so. Can I have a look?”

She took off the watch and handed it to me. God, she had great thumbs.

I looked at the watch. “Yeah, there’s your problem,” I said.

“I can leave it with you if you want,” she said hopefully.

“I’ll fix it tonight and bring it back tomorrow.”

“Really? Thanks!”

Fact is I could have changed it there and then by winding the time on twelve hours and resetting the date, but I make it seem like a big deal that I could fix because I was excellent.

Stupid isn’t it? I made it seem like a big deal that I had no problem with, all because but I was so eager to be helpful and impress her.

We didn’t, by the way.