1 robert fripp love cannot bear
2 twitchy eye
3 ashbory bass
4 nookie bear
5 fripp love cannot bear
6 love cannot bear
7 erotic ironing
8 kate bush
9 ashbory strings
10 ashbory
11 bill mccormick phil manzanera
12 cocksucker blues mp3
13 malcolm xerxes
14 psp umd region code hack
15 fission trip
16 love cannot bear fripp
17 robert fripp – love cannot bear
18 darren lock
19 doctor darren lock
20 emperor dalek
Last month Robert Fripp dominated the search string chart with 5 separate entries, knocking the chart mainstay Nookie Bear from the dominating position. Well done, Mr Fripp. Also making a good impression on the chart is ashbory bass and Kate Bush. Search entries for me could only limp in at the bottom of the chart, which is most disappointing.
Now this month’s Google Mindfuck is:
I’m a Celebrity’s Jenny Frost in lesbian gangbang with Carol Thatcher and Jilly Goolden with Sid Owen sitting on Bobby Ball’s face with the ghost of George Best being fellated by the woman who had the first face transplant.
That should really generate some big, big traffic.
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Not a bad day at all. The black toner cartridge finally arrived for my laser printer so I set about printing all 248 pages of my novel. It’s in a folder now and I am lovingly stroking it. I would have posted a picture but who wants to see a bundle of paper? Just got to sit down and decide who I am going to approach first. Not that many publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts these days, so I have my work cut out for me. Anyhow, I have already prepared myself for rejection. I am a useless worthless cunt and my novel is insipid, boring and borders the line of trash fiction. Using this as a foundation of my writing persona, I can take on just about anything. I remember sending novels off before, when I was a younger man. I did have a pile of rejection slips somewhere; trophies with which to remember each failure. Failure is nothing to be afraid of. To try and fail is an achievement in itself than not trying at all. Or something. I don’t know what I am talking about. 🙂
The other good thing was that I checked by payments schedule from CDBABY and the quarterly payments for digital downloads have come in. Whoo-hoo! I netted myself an incredible $45 in downloads…and for each track downloaded or played I get something between 90 cents and 10 cents, so you do the math. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be able to give up my day job as a professional dreamer? I jest, of course. I think this rise in payments has come about because more and more digital download companies are affiliated to CDBABY and more people are downloading my stuff by mistake. Poor fools. Will they ever learn?
In the post: A NIght at the Opera 30th Anniversary Edition. Always a big fan of this album. Queen were my first favourite band when I was about 12 years old. We audited the DVD audio disc in 5.1 Dolby surround and it is rather spiffy. So much so, that I am planning on penning a review. For £10.99 this is one reissue well worth having.
Recently, I’ve been able to download two illicit DVD-quality recordings of the Van der Graaf Generator concerts that happened earlier in the year. I attended one, but gave the second one a miss because it occured the day after the tube bombings and I wasn’t in the mood to get pumped up for it and engage with the music. Seeing the two performances, I can see that the second show was a lot more muted – a lot of the energy displayed at the first show seemed to have disappeared. Anyway here’s a clip for all you fans of Sleepwalkers being performed at the Royal Festival Hall. The funny thing is that when I burn these DVDs and watch them on my big TV, I immediately want to throw up because of the “shakicam” effect. However, on a smaller screen, on my PC, they look fine.
Had to remove the video clip because of bandwidth restrictions…sorry!
Also, someone contacted me today singing the praises of my music. It’s nice when these words plop into my inbox. I think I get one virtual pat on the back a year for my musical noodlings. Here’s an extract:
“Was checking out more of your music at cdbaby. I am not too free with compliments, and a lot of today’s new music and a lot of today’s new artists and musicians don’t impress me whatsoever. But I have to say your music is really incredible! I did not realize you were that good!”
That was nice. I like that. It gives me the energy to approach my guitar again. And for those stray readers who might have missed it the first time, you can download a whole CD of music from this site and even print your own CD sleeves. Just visit:
http://www.darrenlock.com/mt/archives/2005/10/easy_listening.html
Talking of making music, last night I was noodling around with my guitar and I leant forward to make some adjustments to one of my effects units. As I leant back again, my chair moved from out of me, sliding backwards (because it is an office style chair with castors) and I was caught off balance. I crashed to the floor, cracking my shoulder on the wheelbase of the chair. As I plummeted, my instinct was to protect my new, expensive, snazzy guitar – so I held it aloft. I lay there for a moment, breathless, slightly winded and wincing in pain. Luckily there was no major injury or damage to the guitar, but boy do I have a sore left shoulder today. Yowser!
With the novel “done”, I am feeling at a loose end. I guess now I’ve got to concentrate on my real work. The last couple of months have been fun because I had something to concentrate on. It’s good to have a project going and giving it your total attention.
I’ve been thinking that I should be recording some more music now, but my muse just isn’t with me. I just can’t find a way back into that at the moment, which is a terrible shame as I have this fantastic new guitar. The Godin XTSA really is the guitar of my dreams. It does everything I want and has enough quirks to make you re-think your playing. For example, the marker dots on the neck are positioned so that you can’t see them clearly. With the neck scale being slightly shorter (I think) than my regular guitar and the fret markers off-centre, out of eye-line, I finding that I am making more mistakes when I play. I think this is good because it is making me refocus my mind slightly and pay more attention to my instrument, rather than just playing on auto-pilot.
I might even do a review of the instrument to put in my gear section. It truly is a wonderful instrument and I realise I should have bought a Godin a long, long time ago. I’ve also been thinking about doing another podcast, but I can’t think of a topic. The closest I came was to do a broadcast about looping and some of the techniques you can use to create ambient noodlings. I don’t know if this would be interesting enough though.
Of an evening, we managed to create a new game using the two dogs. The Missus goes ahead with my mother’s dog, Cappy, and me and Alex the Wonderdog give them a head start. Alex then bombs after them following the scent. Alex is not the best walker in the world, in fact he’d rather just lie on the sofa all day (yes, all day…that’s why we call him the Wonderdog because we wonder how he can be so lazy) and now Alex has found new vim and vigour chasing his tiny rival. Oh well, it passes the time.
Here’s a joke that we often tell about Alex the Wonderdog: if he had his own reality TV show it would be called Bone Idol. Think about it. 😉
Gratuitous Alex the Wonderdog shot because I know his cute looks always elicit a comment.
So after a gargantuan, nay Herculean, effort I managed to get “Dead Rock Star” to 70,000 words. Oh well, I was aiming for 77,000 but what can you do about it. The story had been told; anymore wordage would be padding. So now I’ve written my introductory letter, the synopsis of my novel and gone through “The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook” getting the details of publishers and agents.
So last night, I sits down to start printing out all 248 pages of this carefully constructed, double-spaced magnum opus and horror of horrors, my laser printer informs me that I need a new black toner cartridge. Fuck and bugger. So after spending another £40 I simply can’t afford, I order a new toner cartridge. Printing will have to wait for now and my campaign to upset publishers and agents will have to wait. While moaning and complaining to The Missus about how shit modern technology, I remarked about my trust old Brother M-1109 printer that I bought in 1987 and which used to print my very first short stories all those years ago. Moan, moan, moan…
Anyway, it’s only when you write a synopsis of your novel that you realise just how crap and preposterous it all is. This is shit, you think. This is so fucking shit. Who’s going to want to publish this? Who’s going to want to read it? Oooooooh why did I bother? Why didn’t I just throw myself under the train when I had the chance, etc? This is part of the process, I guess. Then there’s the upset when the postman delivers rejection letters and unread copies of your manuscript.
In the post: five years of bank statements from the Abbey. Not sure why, but they sent me all of this information, but it is virtually useless as none of the entries actually feature the year, only the date and month. Why o why? I guess this must relate to my account being “reactivated” by the bank last month, despite the fact that I had been successfully using it for the past five years. Banks and money leaves me confused and bewildered.
Alex the Wonderdog got so excited about barking at the neighbour’s meals-on-wheels delivery that he actually became aroused (not bad for a dog with no knackers), something that only usually happens when he starts begging for his dinner.
What a wonderful life I’ve got.
I like to think I have a way with dogs (probably the musty odour I give off or something). Anyway, yesterday Caplin the Yorkie posed no problem to me whilst I was going mano-o-doggo with him in the bath. He had plenty of opportunity to biite me and show me who’s boss, but he didn’t. However, once he was dried and handed over to my mother, the problems began. He became the anti-christ of Yorkies, nipping and biting and growling and generally being a little hairy bastard. Even my mother said to me on the telephone: “At this stage, I prefer Alex the Wonderdog”. Strong words indeed.
So it was late last night and the dog was still giving my mother and her partner grief (he had been bitten four times, she once or twice). After walking Alex, I went over and offered to take the Yorkie for a long walk, the idea being to wear him down physically. If you break them physically, their aggression soon diminishes. So I walked him for about 30 minutes and this dog (for an eight-year-old) goes like a rocket and I was literally running to keep up. It was like having a rat on a string.
Anyway, I took him back and hoped that this was the end of it but ten minutes later my mother called to tell me that he had struck again, biting when they attempted to remove his little leather harness. Oh dear…I gave her some training advice, but I don’t think they are tough or disciplined enough to carry it through. With rescue dogs, you really do have to give them a bit of tough love to whip them into shape. I can’t see anything good coming out of this unless they both get tough with him.
On a separate note, I heard a sad story about a dog that went missing locally. The dog, called Buffy, was a miniature Schnauser and I knew this dog from the early days of getting Alex. It had escaped from its home and followed me and Alex up the road. Eventually, I worked out where it lived and a neighbour took it in. I remarked to The Missus that no good would come of that dog. My bugbear is people who let their dogs roam or don’t take sufficient precautions when leaving their animal alone. If you can’t keep an animal safe or from escaping, you shouldn’t have one, says I.
Anyway a couple of months ago, the local newspaper (or “rag” as I call it) had a story about Buffy going missing again. Homemade posters also appeared in the neighbourhood, precariously sellotaped to lamposts. Initially it was thought that maybe the dog had escaped and got picked up by someone else. It was a very friendly animal and anyone could have easily rehoused it without problem. Alas, the news was worse than that.
It appears that when the dog escaped, it had somehow found its way into a neighbour’s garden several houses away and fell into the swimming pool and drowned. Very sad. Not sure who to feel sorry for: the dog or the person that found a large dead animal in their swimming pool. Very sad indeed.
Busy day for a Saturday. My eBay auctions ended today and my worldly possessions are off to new homes. While I made losses on some items, I made a healthy profit on two of the guitars. What you lose in chips, you gain in peas, as a wise man once said.
In the afternoon, we collected Caplin the Yorkie from the dog’s home. For an eight-year-old dog he is a lively little fellow, sprinting off down the road with my breathless mother in hot pursuit. I gave him a bath to wash away the filth, muck and detritus collected at the dog sanctuary. The first wash resulted in a healthy dog soup. Again, the dog is so lively, I had to keep one hand on him to prevent him leaping out of the bath. Such energy I have not seen in a dog for a long time.
Alex was curtailed in another part of the complex and was very upset when finally released after Caplin had gone. He sniffed around looking for this phantom menace, but couldn’t locate his new canine rival on the block.Oh well, I hope my mother enjoys her Christmas present. I know someone who is going to need a lot of walkies… 🙂