Over the past few days I’ve been listening almost incessantly to the album Lullabies to Paralyze by Queens of the Stone Age. Since Chuffy introduced them to me several years ago I have been enamoured both of Joshua Homme’s angelic voice and Nick Soltieri’s looks (although the latter and the band parted company after Songs For The Deaf). Homme’s singing reminds me of the Hollow Man: its angelic perfection used so demoniacally.

Lullabies is another of those albums that I didn’t like much at first and yet now I can’t get enough of it. It’s Van Leeuwen’s lap steel that does it. I’ve never heard such a mournful wail. The exquisite, pure cry — put to especially good use on the tracks Long Slow Goodbye and The Blood Is Love — is a beautiful counterpoint to Homme’s choirboy vocals. It’s an aching note that slices through the structure of the background: a cold wind searing through a landscape of dense, blocky architecture.

The synaesthesia has become more complex and intense over the years, perhaps because I’ve learned to pay more attention to it and appreciate the vast realms of sensory possibility it provides. Every so often I come across a sensory stimulus that does more than add an extra dimension to sight and sound: it engenders entire worlds. The first time this happened I was about 8 years old, and the track was The Whale by ELO. I didn’t see a whale: I saw an entire futuristic city with town planning and infrastructure and airships and monorails. I was much, much older and had come to realise how much of my perception arises from the complex interaction of synaesthesia with overactive imagination and parallel processors when I recognised that early evocation as a synaesthetic response to musical structure. Back then it was mainly architecture and climate, bizarrely. Now it’s not just architecture and climate but culture and people.

Lullabies has become particularly special to me because the album as a whole is evocative of Ben, just as Fakevox, by Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, is evocative of Frood.

And, of course, Joshua’s Homme’s voice is the essence of the Hollow Man: spawned in Heaven, blossomed in Hell.

I think he might be right.

My thanks to southlaker for that one.

Posted by jibi to C+.

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Blogger just “upgraded”.

They fucked up my RSS feed.

I fixed it, but now it has reposted everything from the last couple of months instead of just fixing it.

To those of you reading this on a feed: I am so, so sorry. If it’s any consolation, it has screwed up my LJ friends page as well. If it carries on doing this I will take the RSS feed off until I’ve moved the blog to something that works. Like WordPress.

Now that Blogger has gone the way of making things more difficult in order to make things easier — I was quite happy when I had to alter the code to make changes, but now they’ve put in a wyswig template editor that is just a pain — I am going to have to do some revision to the site. Admittedly it’s kinda groovy that I can have labels and trackbacks and comments and whatnot, but I made this blog back in the dark ages of 2000, when to achieve the hoopy effects that have been wowing people ever since I had to use server side includes.

Now the question is whether I ignore the features that the blogger boys have given me; port the whole thing over to php (we have that now, I just don’t know how it works); make my multiple blogs work using the

All of which takes time and effort and I can’t be arsed. Not today, anyway. Today I have to install a firewire card so that Frood can connect his video camera, and that’s quite enough geekery for one day.

Who else would I be?

Actually, it was the difference of one answer as to whether I came out as this or Apocalypse.

Your results:
You are Mystique

Mystique 82% Poison Ivy 78% Apocalypse 71% Mr. Freeze 67% Venom 65% Catwoman 64% Dark Phoenix 64% Magneto 58% Juggernaut 58% The Joker 56% Dr. Doom 56% Riddler 53% Green Goblin 38% Lex Luthor 36% Two-Face 22% Kingpin 21%

Sometimes motherly, sometimes a beautiful companion, but most of the time a deceiving vixen.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

I was just directed to a gallery of photographs of the Ghost Bikes that are found in New York. Each of these machines marks the spot where a cyclist was killed by a car.

Over here we have flowers at death trees. Poignant in their own way, but somehow lacking the simple humanity of these riderless steeds sadly sitting on flaccid tubes, cranks forever now motionless and transmissions rusting into seizure. They remind me of Greyfriar’s Bobby. Their riders gone they are left without purpose except to mark the spot where yet another non-motorist lost his life to the cult of the car.

After spending some time stripping the salad off Fingal, I decided to take Peregrine to the race on Monday. That’s what he’s for, after all.

Peregrine, being my baby pride and joy, doesn’t come out between the months of October and May, usually. The roads are too filthy for such a beautiful machine. I just took him out for a quick spin to make sure the brakes were fine and the gears were shifting and everything was running because he hasn’t been out in a few months.

Why oh why oh why was I ever considering riding another bike in a race? Gods that thing is fast. Put the power down and he just jumps forwards. I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a bike as responsive as that one — not even the Pompino.

On Christmas Day we all went for a walk down to the beach — me, Frood, Mum and Dad. As we wandered down the farmtrack, away in the distance I could hear engine noise.

Now, it might be the rose-tinted binoculars of nostalgia, which make everything from one’s childhood seem larger, sunnier and somehow happier than it probably was, but I’m sure that there were times of the year when I was a child when that engine noise wasn’t there. There were days, particularly Christmas, when people had better things to be doing than driving. Christmas, especially, I’m sure I remember the roads being utterly deserted, to the point where we used to ride our sleds down the hill past the school.

What has happened? What has happened to us that we have to be driving somewhere or the other every day of the year? What happened to us that we couldn’t just stay home for a couple of days and enjoy the peace and quiet?

Do we even know what silence is any more? Can anyone sit and imagine what the world would be like without that steady infra-sound grumble of discontented traffic, clogging up the roads of the country like arterial plaques, their behaviour much like the cholesterol settling in the arteries of the growingly obese people sat behind their wheels?

As above so below. The old magical principle. Chicken and egg. If the king is the land and the land is the king, and we are each king in our own territories, then we’re all responsible for the choking congestion. We know about the detrimental effects on air quality before we start even to consider and contemplate the more esoteric potential effects of all-pervasive infra-sound.

I long for one day a year when there is blessed, blissful silence. There has to be one day a year when everyone can stay where they are, surely. And why not Christmas Day? Everything is closed, there are families to enjoy and the weather is rotten for driving anyway.