domdavis.com

OK, Korn is being delayed again in favour of a heart warming tale of a boy and his iPhone. I was on the train the other day and all of a sudden the tail end of a sample from one of the songs on my iPhone jumped into my mind. This made me want to listen to the song but I couldn’t for the life of me remember which one it was. Not to worry, I plonked the bit of the sample I could remember into Google and was greeted with a page from wikipedia. The full sample is:

My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes

Which I always thought was from a film, but turns out to be a joke by Reagan during a sound check (read the article, it’s moderately interesting). Anyway, at the end of the article was a list of songs that had used the sample including “Interrogation Leash” by Grendel. I was able to find the song on my phone and listen to it, thus scratching the itch whilst learning something new. Isn’t technology great

So, my walls are now bedecked with individual peices of art, most of which was commissioned by me or taken by me, peppered with holes (I really shouldn’t be allowed to do DIY) and in dire need of repainting, but that’s a different story. Here we have a long post with lots of very high res images (click on the thumbnails to see them) of the stuff I’ve been buying over the past year, plus the two peices that started me off. Are we sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin:

The first peices of art I bought were from my masseur who was primarily a modern artist and did massage in his spare time. Ordinarily I’m not into modern art and there is some abstract stuff I like. Henry was doing paintings on massive peices of aluminium that were done by using very thin oil based paints which were then spread on the metal. He would photograph the steps (a total of 10 shots) and have those transferred to smaller aluminium sheets  which he would then sell for substantially less that the many thousand he charged for the origonal work. I have two from a series of 10 which I bought some years ago and until recently they were the most expensive pieces I owned. These two hang on the wall above my bed.

There was then a rather long hiatus on any serious artwork until the beginning of the year when I saw a tryptich done for my best friend by his mother, who is also a very good friend of mine. I rather liked the style and asked if I could have a picture in a similar style for my birthday. My wish was granted and shortly afterwards I received this picture which hangs in my bedroom:

I was so enamoured with the picture I went and commisioned 5 more, one tryptich and a pair of pictures each with very specific meaning to me which I wont go into here. The pictures in the tryptich are Serenity, Harmony and Destiny.

And closeup:

The pair of picures are called Lost and Found (Lost being the one on the right) and are quite large, each being about 60cm wide.

The other pieces on my walls are photographs taken at a session 8 weeks ago with my dad and step mum. I’ve wanted some descent photos of me for a while and there are also no good ones with me and my dad together. The picture of the two of us is going to him and isn’t on here, but the others are. The first two are pictures of him. They asked us to bring items that ‘described us’ and since he has been an egineer for many years he brought along his old slide rule.

And here in closeup:

I was only going to get one of my dad but I liked them both so much I decided to get both of them. These both hang on my bedroom wall, one above the other:

Me being me I bought things you could wave about, notibly glowing things and ruddy great big shiny sharp things. Photos of me waving these about were then compiled into a montage in a frame 27″ square so it’s nice and imposing but the pictures themselves aren’t too large. You’ll have to excuse the quality of these shots, the reflections are quite bad.

This hangs above my sword in the bedroom. Closeups:

Next up an arty closeup with me an sword. the frame on this one is 20″ square with the picture being about 10″ square so it’s quite large. This hangs in the spare room along with Lost, Found, a characature and the 12″ square canvas prints of my stuff.

And finally the one that makes me look very scary. This is a 32″ long photo which lives on the back wall of the living room opposite two bloody huge canvas prints of my photos. Originally there was going to be a sodding huge (we’re talking over a meter in length) canvas print of a jaguar going on this wall but I liked the photo of me so much I ended up being it and sticking that there instead. The picture is me inspecting my live blade and is the closest thing to how I see myself in my head

So there you go. The photos made my original art purchases look cheap, but I like them. Not to everyones taste I know, but it’s my flat and I’ve got it pretty much the way I want it now. Anyone fancy repainting it?

Just exactly how do you loose an entire beach? I mean it’s pretty bloody remiss of a country to loose an entire geographical feature but, ok, with storms and stuff sometimes they dissapear but you can point at the reason. Oh look, we’ve had a sodding great big storm, now there is no beech. But having it stolen, and not knowing who by? That’s careless.

… this is a real life horror story that will give small children bad dreams

OK, so this wasn’t going to be a song of the week (that was actually going to be Korn, but we’ll do that next week), this was inspired by the above photo that I picked up this afternoon. I look scary (better copies of the pics, and the other ones in a later post).

Anyhoos, the quote is from the opening sample [I think, might just be a spoken line rather than sampled from anything, it's hard to tell sometimes] of Telltale Crime from the Brainchild project on an album called Mindwarp .

Lets take you back… 13 years. I was at university and a friend of my then girlfriend came round to visit. In those days I was just moving out of listening to thrash metal and moving towards industrial (Ministry, NiN and the like). This friend was seriously into Coldwave industrial (yes, it’s a sub genre of a sub genre that lasted about 2 years, so shoot me) and played me a tape of some stuff he thought I’d like. I got as far as the second track when I grabbed a C90 (remember those?) slammed it in the second deck, rewound his tape, hit high speed dubbing and told him he wasn’t allowed to leave until I had the whole album. That tape got labeled ‘loud industrial’ as I had asked what the album was when I started copying it but then promptly forgot when it came to labeling it. By then he’d gone. For one reason or another I never saw him again and never found out what the album was called, but despite the poor sound quality it was my favorite album of all time for a very long time.

Fast forward 11 years and the internetwebz has got to a stage where there is so much crap on there that anyone with a little bit of Google-fu can find pretty much anything. I plugged in lyrics, samples, everything I could think of until: Bingo! I found it. The album was called Mindwarp, it was done by a project called Brainchild… or was it… I also found reference to a porject called Circle of Dust and an album called Brainchild. Similar track listing, almost identical cover (apart from the album and band name), similar times on the songs. The damn thing had been released twice and there was absolutely no way of telling which one I had. Worse still both CDs were out of print and the label had gone bust. I could find a few copies of Mindwarp in Christian music shops (of all places) but my attempts at buying them failed.

Finally I learned of a limited edition re-release of Mindwarp in the states. 1000 CDs. Not wanting to miss out I spanked the cash and imported it from the states. At the same time I also found a brand new copy of Brainchild on amazon.com with a silly price attached. I grabbed it. $many and about 3 weeks later I found out I what I had been listening to all those years was Brainchild, Mindwarp. The sound quality is still quite poor (the Circle of Dust version is a much better studio recording, but the remixes aren’t as good and I far prefer Mindwarp) but at least I can now listen to it on my iPhone whenever I want Annoyingly in researching this post I’ve discovered there are sill copies of the limited edition release available for $11.95 with bugger all P&P and that Amazon.com have the Circle of Dust CD for less than $7. With P&P I could probably have the pair for less than $25 today. C’est la vie, I’d rather spend the money and have the CDs than wait and have missed out.

ZOMG! Its on youtube - well isn’t the internetweb full of surprises these days, the second track is good too

So something I saw on Twitter the other day reminded me of a little bugbear I have. The tweet was asking how something can be new and improved. My complaint is with the advertising (and I may have complained about this before but it’s worth a second rant if I have). Brand X spends 6 months showing how their washing powder cleans clothes better than anything else in the world. Lots of demonstrations of how carefully applied stains can be removed in ice cold water whereas everything else leaves a stain, requires boiling water and leaves the planet a dried up hulk. Great.

Then comes New and Improved and More Expensive with some miracle technology that leaves the next best product standing. Que the shots of stains bring removed by the new product and the next best one not working.

Let’s think about this shall we? You said last week that your old stuff was the best thing on the planet, so surely that’s the next best product and last week it could clean that stain.

What’s that you say? It’s the next best competitors product? Well if it’s so inferior how come you need to develop the new and improved stuff? And how come their adverts are telling me that their product leaves clothes clean and little elves repaint the threads at a sub atomic level to bring back the colour and that, ooh look, the next best product they can find leaves clothes dirty and covered in dog poo. Someone, somewhere is lying.

The only thing I can be sure of is that whatever the results for any product are on TV the reality is going to be vastly different.

You want to know how I choose my washing product? Well I want the in drum stuff cos I’m lazy and the persil liquitabs are small and squishy and feel odd in my hand so I use ariel which are large and plump and firm (or the other way round, I know what they look like, couldn’t give a toss who makes them). Yup, not based on any kind of logic or sanity. Take that advertisers!

So the photographs I bought a couple of months ago are ready for collection. Picking them up is going to be a pain as they’re large so I’ll probably have to get a taxi to wait outside while they’re loaded. Which is nice. Quite excited to see them.

My final two peices of commisioned art are also ready for collection so I shall be going to get them Sunday.

Once all those photos are up my house will have a full compliment of art ‘pon the walls. It’s all very exciting Photos later when I have them.

My laptop was found and is now back with me. There was a £20 handling charge to pay, but it’s better than a £shedloads replacement charge to pay, plus worrying about lost passwords and data, etc, etc, etc. The laptop is now a lot more annoying to use but a lot less likely to give away any information should it be lost again and I’m not doing a bit of research into software that could remotely cause the machine to wipe itself if I ever lost it. Fun fun fun

I left my laptop on the fucking train this morning. I’m so annoyed with myself, it’s a sodding expensive machine and now I need to go change my passwords for… well… bloody everything. I’ve contacted lost property but I’m thinking my chances of finding it are small to none.  ARSE!

Yes, I know it’s Wednesday but I’ve only just got to writing this up Having just spent the best part of 5 months swanning around doing very little and listening to people telling me I’d get bored (I didn’t) I was very surprised come about 2:30pm on Sunday to find I was bored out of my tiny and couldn’t find anything to do. I had plans for 4:30ish onwards but the intervining couple of hours just became dead time and my motivation to start anything was deminished by the fact that I had work the next day and I wouldn’t be able to return to it for a week. In the end I just watched TV (something I do very little of these days, even when I was off). It’s funny how your perception of things is skewed by having to go to work. My weekends are now special and I suppose I feel I shouldn’t be wasting them just watching the goggle box whereas catching up on my sky+ recordings while I was off didn’t matter as I had tomorrow to do more constructive stuff. There is, of course, an easy solution to all this, I just need to find a way to become independently wealthy and stop working