IkoStar

This is Bat from Bat for Lashes.

Who I love. Apparently she comes from Brighton, which I’d take with a pinch of salt, because I’m from Brighton and I’ve never seen her… but as far as I can gather, a lot more people have seen her than seen me, so maybe I should start taking myself with a pinch of salt… maybe… even more of a pinch of salt than I’m already taking myself… and that’s already quite a lot of salt.

Anyway, she’s almost exactly like my 3rd girlfriend - Nat… which rhymes with Bat, so there’s another similarity. Nat was a bit less peacocky perhaps. Just a bit mind. Nat was unbelievably beautiful. Why the fuck did I split up with her? I must have been off my fucking rocker.

Back to Bat. This is a song she does:

Which is excellent.

She’s a perfect incarnation/manifestation of Batty English Female Genius… a join-the-dots thread from Mary Shelley (who ran away with a radical poet and wrote the original Frankenstein when she was 18) to Kate Bush to… Bjork maybe - although she isn’t strictly speaking English, but then again neither is Bat entirely, though she sounds English, and does (so she claims, but I’ve never seen her) come from Brighton, which is in England, albeit only just, on account of it being on the edge.

Here’s a gratuitous Kate Bush track… which has been stuck over the top of a montage of about 3 photos, which makes it the least irritating one:

I mean have you ever tried writing a song? I have. It’s easy. It’s easy to write songs that sound like everyone else - but listen to the melody of this… where the fuck did that come from? How do you do that? It’s as random as Frankenstein - and Bat is even better because she isn’t as squeaky, which can grate on your nerves after a while.

I was never that into Kate Bush though to be honest - though various guys in my band were - and we took Magic Mushrooms and listened to The Hounds of Love once, and the other guitar guy sat there clutching a chocolate brazil nut, pissing himself with laughter for about four hours… so he was left with a chocolatey hand and a brazil nut, not really remembering how it got there… and it sounded good then.

And then there was this other time when we came into the studio during the day and the guy who wrote everything was sitting upside down in an armchair, in total darkness having smoked a hell of a lot of something, listening (and singing along to) this 2 hour loop of the same 10 seconds of a Kate Bush song. That was cool. Of such thing are legends born.

–

I couldn’t carry on. It had become untenable, several times over. And now I can’t go back… but I miss my life.

There was this one time I was in a shopping mall just outside Rio…. not sure how I got there, or what I was doing there, and at a bit of a loose end generally so I decided I’d better get coffee etc.

So I go to the coffee making place and say to the coffee chick, “Bonjour. Avez vous une latte si vous plais?”. “It’s ok, I’m not from Australia”.

She said something I couldn’t quite make out and looked at her friend. I said “Un latte. Il est un cup du drinky stuff”

She seem to take that on board, so I went and got a seat etc. A bit later she brought out this tiny thimble sized thing of milk, placed it in front of me and left without saying a word. It was like one of those taking-the-piss hobbit sized ones that they have on airoplanes sometimes. WTF?

Now ordinarily I would have said “Mais, Non… il ne pas un latte, il est un little thimbly thing du lait. Je wantez un coffee avec a load of lait in it… Vous comprende, un latte”

Trouble is, all the Brazillian coffee chicks look a bit like this:

Especially this one (this being an actual photo of her which I later randomly found on the internet etc), and this can complicate the coffee purchasing-process. All sorts of other variables are introduced which can cause the whole thing to become unbalanced and spin out of control.

So I smiled and sat there drinking this tiny pot of milk, pretending that’s what I wanted all the time. When I left I left a tip with money I didn’t entirely understand, but have now know to be in the region of about £300, which wasn’t entirely what I had in mind either, but there you go. What’s done is done.

I wonder if she’s still there? She was quite good looking in retrospect. The milk thing is a bit of a show-stopper though. I wonder if she was taking the piss? It’s hard to tell with some people.

This is cool:

You can control what you’re looking at with the mouse etc. Bit small at the moment, but eventually there will be big ones. There’s got to be something useful you can do with this. Not sure what though.

Anyway, Billy Joel once did an Album called 52nd street… which is sort of similar to 42nd Street (tenuous link there) and there was this song not on it (making the link even more tenuous), but on another one… and it’s got a good piano whistley bit at the beginning. The rest of it I can take or leave, but the whistley bit is great… and whistley bits are usually terrible. Don’t do them. Not even in jest.

If I did have to listen to one all the way through, it would be this one :

I’m not sure why I got onto that actually. I haven’t listened to Billy Joel in about 20 years. I heard an interview he did once - funny as fuck. Very funny guy.

Still whatever. Bit vague today. Here’s a load of demos for the 360 degree movie thing. Some of them are underwater ones.

It was the heatwave of 2006 - not the 2003 one which killed about 35,000 people in Europe, but the one which… well, I don’t know how many people it killed but Greece was on fire, Australia was on fire and England was dissolving, congealing, melting and running down the gutters. It was hot.

So I got on a plane, and went to Prague.

And Prague was even hotter than England. Holy fuck. Tourists were everywhere, too blinded and disorientated to seek shade, wandering instead in aimless circles until they fell over and died. I kept my wits about me… first seeking shade, and then a high place where there would at least be some sort of breeze - up the tower of St Nicholas’s Cathedral (which was probably named after me). At the bottom of the tower is a roof-garden which is kindof designed like a giant solar oven, and an utter death trap.


if you click on it you get a massive one

Here it is on Paul Neave’s flashearth thing (which is cool) if you think I’m making it up or hallucinating etc. If you could zoom in a bit closer you’d see that it’s filled with the corpses of birds, cats and old people who have strayed there by mistake etc.

Anyway, it was at this point that I noticed that loads of the religious encrustments in Prague don’t have crosses like normal churches but have instead the eye in the pyramid thing that’s on American money.

See - this one’s on the top of St Nick’s Cathedral (which is the vague equiv of St Paul’s in London)… and inside there’s this massive baroque/manga statue of St Nick himself who’s got a great big Gandalf staff with one on as well.

There are others dotted about the place….

This isn’t actually the one I meant, but you get the idea.

So obviously the only thing left for any reasonable person to do was to get as drunk as possible. So I did.

Apparently 20% of weekend crime in Prague is committed by drunk English people… but I alas am not possessed of a suitably criminal disposition so my participation in the week-endly crime-wave was limited to filling the wee hours with song… this one in fact:

Under the arches under Kafka’s Castle… “on and on and on…”, only the bit that does go “on and on and on…” is made up of notes too high for me to hit, which must have been frustrating for everyone listening because that’s like, the best bit.

Everything calmed down after that. The heatwave passed. I returned to England. Older. Wiser.

I saw this guy in a furniture shop in Portobello Rd once.

Which was cool.

He was a bit older than he is in this vid, and he was looking at furniture. I was looking at Dave Gilmour (and I wasn’t on drugs) who was looking at furniture, on account of it being a furniture shop and him being in it, and it seemed like a reasonable sort of thing to being doing - given the location etc. Which was a furniture shop. I wonder if it’s still there.

It was kindof opposite the blue door where Hugh Grant (who people keep hassling me that I look like, and I fucking don’t) lived in that Notting Hill. It was kindof trendy and ethnic etc, and I wasn’t on drugs and I can prove it.

Anyway, I wasn’t stalking him or anything - although the only reason I was in the shop as well, is because I saw him through the window… so I guess I may have kindof stalked him into the shop etc, but that was as far as it went. There was nothing weird or obsessive about it… just casually going into the same shop as the guy who did the greatest guitar solo of all time etc. To look at furniture.

Anyway. We shared a companianable silence for a few moments - although I doubt he realised I was there etc, as I was over the other side of the shop pretending to look at some rugs etc. All in all, it went very well. I’ve still got the rug.

See

I met Jimmy Page once as well.

I know I’ve only been awake for like, an hour or whatever, but this is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen all day:

If you click here, you can go to the actual page

Her eyes follow your mouse around etc… in a whole-face-attention giving sort of way. Clever as fuck really… for comedic effect you can make your mouse buzz bee-like over her face. For some reason this gives me the creeps big time, but I just can’t stop myself from doing it.

Which just goes to show doesn’t it. The grammar of facial expression is probably even harder to do convincingly than written communication. Your eyes (if not windows on the soul exactly) are kindof windows onto your brain. If you think of something you’ve seen they go one way, if you think of something you’d like to see they go another… as if they were kindof looking into corners of your brain for clues.

So while it’s possible to create the facsimile of an expression to the extent that we know what the machine is trying to say… improving it to the point where we can’t tell that it’s not human, is probably going to be pretty tricky… and even trying to do it is probably an answer to what is ultimately the wrong question.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe what we want is exaggerated reality rather than reality itself… or a dynamic equilibrium between the two. Art (according to one Sri Ramachandra) is exaggerated reality - a reflection of reality with the parts that resonate with the human condition amped up… and I think pornography is probably the same thing.

NSFW

This for example (NSFW) is an example of an entire genre of pornography where the barbification of the models is pushed to the point of lunacy. It’s a step on a continuum - but has made the leap across the void from ruthless exfoliation and photoshop-smoothing, to abandoning the pretence that the models are human at all. And it doesn’t matter. People are still paying to wank over it.

So anyway. There you go. To get away from porn and sleaziness, back towards things more wholesome, decent and well… funny, check out the expressions on the two people in the photo below.

One of these people is actually a cat, and can do the facial expression thing as convincingly as an human I’ve seen, and proof that a cat will be a much better friend to you than a load of pixels, even if it does hate you.