Glowing in the darkest night

Oh my, oh my. I need to get hold of this album.

Ah wowee. You can download them for free, or a donation, over at his site.

http://prettylightsmusic.com/#/downloads

You caught me drifting

Saltillo - I Hate You

The Pancake Repairman's channel over on Youtube is worth a little peek if you enjoy watching snippets of old films cut to ambient post-rocky type music. 

Aspidistrafly - Porcelain Sky Wink

Lead me astray, eh

I am very much liking Frenic this evening. 

Thursday looms

Múm - Now there's that fear again

Cities rise and fall

Continuing the 'space is comfortingly vast' theme. 

Gas - Microscopic (Ambient Electronic Space)

The inverted ending is nice. We are so very small, but we are vast too! if you change your perspective.

Take me 240 miles above the glittering cities

German set designer and video artist Michael Konig has made this time-lapse video using three months worth of footage shot from the International Space Station. It's ever so soothing to forget the horrors of the world for a moment, and watch this quiet, rhythmic spectacle of light. 

The station drifts far above the earth's atmosphere. The planet spins below. Storms flash, creating their own explosive light-percussion. Green silky trails of aurora spread, mist-like. Clusters of yellow city light trace a filigree map over the dark.

I am very, very small. There are beautiful things I have not seen nor even imagined.
I like to be reminded of this.


Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König.

Your name, lying just where you left it

A sky as white as clay stretches ahead for miles. The trees have been razored to the ground. A film of floodwater lies smooth and undisturbed, a sheet of mirror to the creeping, clay-white sky.

Pick up your name. Brush off the grime. Hold it in your fist and take great gliding strides. Make for the horizon.

 

Bersarin Quartett - Mehr Als Alles Andere

Company for the insomniac

Worry needles into your sleep until you snap awake, restless.

You peep behind heavy, psychedelic curtains to guess at the time from the shade of the sky.  The air is a quiet, icy chill, tickled by the skitter of an eight-legged critter that skids across glass brushed with the dappled stain of past dirty rains.

A spindly silhouette.

It dances, it dances just for you.

Listen, listen,  from dream to daylight 

People of Peckham

I watch a woman with a grey beehive towering unsteadily on her head. It bobs with every movement. She stands swamped in a beige anorak that might as well be a duvet, and wide jogging bottoms that flap in nervous spasms around her swollen ankles.  She sways in the wind and sucks slowly on a cigarette. Her eyes narrow and she scans the traffic with suspicion, her eyebrows slicked into a villainous frown -two black slugs that shape her face into an arrow. The arrow points towards a distant flash of red that might just be a bus. But it's not a bus. She sucks back on the cigarette and squints some more. She picks at her purple claws.

A few metres away, leaning against a billboard, is a lycra-suited body. A yellow and turqoise geometric pattern stretches and swells over disproportionately tiny legs and hulking shoulders and breasts. The unbalanced figure balances solidly on pinprick heels, her skin dripping with gold jewellery and false eyelashes. She smiles privately at her phone, it's a dazzling smile.

Traffic grunts.
Shopfronts are dusted with dirt.
Racks of vegetable lie wilting in the wake of car fumes.

And suddenly a giant of a man is bearing down on me. He ploughs along the pavement with a clumsily attached backpack. He lurches sideways with each step and makes ear-splitting, inhuman noises. Half shout, half growl. Like a malfunctioning robot. I step out of his way and squeeze between the path of two speeding prams.

I slip down a sidestreet and breathe. In a few steps the street unfurls into leafy, bird-chirping quiet. Two worlds, so close.

The books

Are so wonderful.
And they have some of the best videos. Official ones, fan-made ones.. Oh they are brilliant and relaxing. Why not while away an afternoon watching them?

 

  Who knew golf could be this entertaining

PS. Read eat sleep. 

Moth-eaten hopes and dreams

I would like to make a play with this humming through the speakers, so loud that the floor hums and your knees rattle.

The audience would duck and crawl and climb through a blacked-out labyrinth of ramps and ladders, trapdoors and shrouded, cave-like rooms. Lights will glow and pulse and seep stealthy shadows through the maze. There will be apprehension and curiosity hanging about the dark corners.

Outside, beyond thick walls, is a futuristic, authoritarian state. We are treading through an illicit drinking den, sniffing at the cloying, sweaty stench of desperation and disease. The characters are mad with fear and rebellion. The play will spin above and below and all about you. It will be sordid, tumultuous, grotesque.

The actors brush past people, pin them against the walls, curse and rant and whisper. They will drag them into the story, get them lost and bewildered in the burrows and attempt to knock them senseless with whiskey.

I will never make this. I'm just pondering and stealing ideas. Seeing an inane show five times in a day leaves you itching for some imagination, and boy am I glad there are a few passionate people actually following up their daydreams and making some frighteningly different plays.

Treadmill theatre wants your money, not your heart. Don't feed it your coins. Ignore the big bucks marketing. Seek out the stuff that cares enough to want to rip your heart out.

We rest.

Take my hand, save what you're doing for tomorrow.

You won't take any more information in tonight.
Your eyes are glazing.

Kill all the electrical things.

Take your clothes off.

Grip the sink.
Brush.
Spit.
Rinse.
Wipe the grime from your face.
Grimace back at the mirror. 

Set your alarm clock
Beyond looming dates,
Beyond a heart that lurches
Like a snapping dog.

Sleep for a week. 

 Click off the light, drop
Your head onto the pillow.

It'll take the weight. 

 

Take me to Portland Bill

So I can breathe freely and stand at the sharp edge of things. I could s-t-r-i-d-e along the cliffs, in yellow galoshes.

I'd fill a house with fossils and crustaceans and big chunks of boats. I'd nail dead birds to the rickety roof to keep out the wind. I'd boil up a muddy slug and seaweed brew, knit jumpers out of crab nets and make shoes out of dried eels (they'll sell like hot cakes)

I'd build a boat out of tourists' crumpled umbrellas and go late-night mackerel fishing. I'd spend time with rogues and fishermen. We'd belt out sea shanties, with mugs of dark rum that sloshes over fingers and sticks to wind-tangled beards.

Photo by Tony Hawkins 

  

Farewell Sunday

Lunch is a feast that I have not had time to build an appetite for. I chew slowly.
Then i'm tidying and stacking and folding. I load grey clothes into the washing machine, I rub jellied grease and porridge skins off the pans. Things shine amidst the mess, and I am satisfied that it all looks okay for that one guilt-free minute before I turn my back and layers of hectic dirt begins to slyly settle again..

I am free until tomorrow. I bike bike bike. I fly through concrete and scrubby patches of greenery until my legs ache and then I keep on pedaling until I forget the aching. I stop to pick up a lost pound coin. I sit by the weed-tangled lake and read the last few pages of my book, wherein the protagonist slips past her jailer (lost in gin-soaked dreams), and sets alight to the house..
An ant crawls up my arm. A dog buries it's nose in my bag of bread rolls. Then the clouds sneak in and a chill hits my skin.
I pick up my bike, we leave the park and I loop round the city to home. As I ride I watch the sky darken, red-purple flames lick about the jagged edges of buildings. Streetlamps glow orange. Headlights blind me over and over again, and like a moth I never learn..
I climb the last hill, wheel on into the house and kick off my shoes.

Inside it seems dim and stale. I search for some wine and chocolate and drop down into an enormous chair. I zone out on a forgettable film. Some man gets punched a lot and then goes and shoots people he's told to shoot.

There was something else I needed to do. Something still undone..
Where do I want to get to? Who do I want? What for?
I don't remember.
It'll come back.

Duffel coat memories

Each year three dates come up in March. They are all strangely muted.
I remember your duffel coat, hanging infront of a window, with the sun blazing behind it. The seasons had changed, and it still hung there defiantly, empty, ready for your quick escape. But you never made it back outside.

Today also marks the Vernal Equinox, meaning the night and day are approximately equal in length. 

Things begin to bud and bloom. Hello spring.

Be calm; sleep

Tomorrow I must awake with the birds. And put everything right. Things are awry.

Please, surrender

It's 3am and my fingers type requests into the internet. Feed me with visual inspiration. Give me music to dream to. Help me build a blueprint for my tomorrows. I am hopeful all of a sudden, that things will get exciting again.

Keep me company whilst those around me shift in their sleep. I will not join them, just yet. I have plans to make.