Saturday, October 23, 2010

My Hand

I have always written on the back of my hand, all the time: layers and layers of writing, especially when I am busy and over-stimulated.
I then transfer the contents to scraps of paper, which then kick about on my desk until I do something about them- transferring them to a notebook, acting on them, or simply throwing them away (my favourite).
Here are what today's handy scribblings are about:

Rob, the MD of Voiceprint, promised to drop off some Poetry and Rhyme CDs yesterday. I hadn't got any left to sell at gigs. He texted to say he might be late, and suggested he should drop them off later in the week instead.
I told Offsprog 2 not to worry about answering the door, and went to bed. Next morning, there was a pile of CDs and a half-box full in the house. Apparently he'd started posting them through the letterbox one by one very late at night when she was watching the late film on TV so she'd opened the door and taken them in from him!

The scan of The Lost Women of Rock Music has arrived. This reminded me that the subject librarian at the University of the East told me on Thursday that the University Library copy has been stolen. How mean!
There are three copies in the University bookshop. Will anyone be able to afford them?

I am trying to find out the name of the girl group who made tracks using the iPhone app Multimedia Groovemaker. Who were they?

There is a cosmetic dentist in New Barnet called Mona Lisa Smile. Do their patients realise that Mona Lisa smiled like that because her teeth were in an appalling state and she needed to keep her mouth closed? Is this what they are promising to their unsuspecting clients?

I heard that years ago, the band Madness used to go to see Brighton band the Piranhas regularly in London and beg their manager for a support gig, which he would never allow them to do. If you listen to the Piranhas early material and Madness's early output, you can hear a definite similarity and influence there.

Are London's bendy buses the equivalent of stretch limos but for poor people?

And so on, and so on....

2 comments:

  1. I never heard about Madness wanting to support The Piranhas, because my manager never spoke to me unless he had something insulting to say.
    I do remember a guy introducing himself to me as their sax-player, in The Hope and Anchor I think, and asking to come up and play a song with us. And because it was so well put, I remember I said "No, find your own stage". Not being mean, but to me that was the point of it... invent your own thing. Which he did, and ended up on much bigger stages. Perhaps we had a nice chat about horns and reeds, as sax-players tend to do, but I don't remember that.
    Zoot, Piranhas' sax-player, as of 30 years ago and last Sunday!

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  2. Re stolen book: As someone who's worked in libraries for 8 years, university libraries for nearly 5, I can safely assure you that having your book nicked from a library is a perverse type of compliment. When I was writing my chapter for the Riot Grrrl book in 2007, every single library copy of Simon Reynolds 'Rip it up and start again' in the whole of Greater Manchester had been nicked, which pissed me off because I then had to buy it despite not liking it very much. You could always ask your students to inter library loan it, but that usually doesn't go down well... though it is obviously cheaper than buying it.

    Conversely, the most stolen or hidden books at my particular university are Foucault books, Kumar and Clarke's Clinical Medicine, and certain chapters from certain law textbooks which are ripped out before replacing the book on the shelf...

    I believe, bookshop wise, the most nicked authors are Terry Pratchett and Irvine Welsh, particularly 'Trainspotting'.

    Hope this is consolation...

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