Kthaahthikha

Who Should Paint You: Roy Lichtenstein

Larger than life, your personality overshadows everyone in the room A painter would tend to portray you with a bit of added flair!

See?

The guys over at the Truth and Beauty Bombs forum are doing mix exchanges, both virtual and disk-shaped. They are doing this here.

Naturally, I have done one also, and would like to think that it is pretty good. Track #9 does not work, owever, and must be uploaded seperately here. It is a pretty great song by Dappled Cities Fly, and I recommend that even if you don't download my mix, you down load that single. They have other songs available on their site, as do a lot of the bands which I've listed.

As listing, part of that virtual mix thread involves etailing the how and why of your selections. So here that is:

1. Hyperballad – Big heavy Stuff

– Like A Version is basically one of the best things to happen in ages, and this Bjork cover is one of the best things to come out of it, winning points for managing to sound new and interesting whilst also remaining true to the original. Doing bosa covers of Motorhead tracks is only funny for so long.

2. Arabian Gothic – Dead Can Dance

– What isn’t to like about this song? It’s the kind of music that I’d like to have playing as I go out to fight to the death against a minotaur warrior in the decrepit arena of a lost jungle fortress with the perfume of flowers in the air beneath the light of a three-quarter moon.

3. The Fairest of the Seasons – Nico

– The album Chelsea Girl is just so warm and cuddly in production, though not always in lyrics, especially compared to the album I picked-up after it, which left me lying shivering splintered on the bedroom floor, and this song is one of the most fun to listen to, although I would have put “It was a pleasure then”, had it fit the CD, and this is rather melancholy. But Nico is all about the melancholy.

4. Incidental Backcloth – Pivot –

The sound of walking through the suburban hills at night segueing into going for a drive down into the city after all the shops are closed and running around the park until you get bored and go to a loud pub.

5. The Ghost of Corporate Future – Regina Spektor

– Such a happy, whimsical, irregular song, and Spektor’s voice is gorgeously up-beat. It has a nice message, too. Coffee is the devil.

6. Cast of Thousands – Darren Hanlon

– Such a sweet, sad, gentle song; which is what Hanlon is often about. I don’t know who he has singing on this, but she sounds lovely. I like it best because it’s an amicable break-up song.

7. The Unknown Bosa

- The first few seconds of this track sound like their setting-up something cheeky by Herb Alpert. What we have instead is a smooth, quiet, smoky little number perfect for cocktails or a turn around the dance floor with a woman sporting bangs and Capri pants.

8. Poughkeepsie’s Always Proud – Soltero

– Embittered, sarcastic vitriol from a screwed-over friend. I chose this song for its combination of lyrics and catchiness, one of which Soltero seem to sometimes skimp on.

9. My Head’s Queen Ant – Dappled Cities Fly

– I mostly love this song for the title. But the exuberant “Hey!”s and the couple of seconds of cosmic roiling before the chuh-chuh-chuhs combine to make this one damned fun song. It is like hanging-out in a wind-tunnel of music.

10. Doin’ the Ganglion – Lederhosen Lucil

– 60s girl-group-aping catchiness about wrist cists! Every one of her songs that I’ve heard is fun, but this is fun in a vial.

11. Voo Doo Doll – April March

– This is an “End Credits” song, something to be played over the names of the technical staff at the end of a screwball comedy. I am writing a film where it coincides with a zombie attack. The vocals are in a silly 60s nasal pop vein, and the lyrics are frequently grammatical nonsense, but I wouldn’t like to get on Ms March’s wrong side.

12. The Gypsy’s Wedding Day – Unknown

– A fun little folk number about a pretty young gypsy with a mercenary approach to marriage, the woman’s voice is delightful in a clear, straightforward way that not enough people employ. Also, accordion - vs. - fiddle death match.

13. La Certitude – Françoiz Breut

– The backing guitar is just so headlong and exciting and powered, enabling one to rock-out whilst Breut sings along with a gentle lilt like a butterfly in a hurricane.

14. Moby Octopad – Yo La Tengo

– I used to listen to this coming home every night on the train. It has one of the best balances of vocals and instruments on I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, and is very much a late-night track. It sounds just like Spencer Street Station at 11pm looks.

15. Chewing Gum – Annie

– So damned danceable! Even though I don’t dance! Everything about this song is great. It’s got a clever pun, interesting timing, and vocals designed using an advanced algorithmic computer geared towards isolating the sixteen principle elements that comprise the sonic alloy fun (fn). Those little “wee!”s are adorable!

16. Counting Sheep – Sarah Blasko

– For my money Blasko is one of the best songstresses out there right now. Her tracks are comprised of careful combinations of many little patterns, and her vocals are gorgeous. She always comes across with an absolute earnestness, no matter the material, but never sombre or self-important. The best thing is that this is also exactly how she sounds live.

17. Biological – Air

– A ghostly, funny and sweet love song, taking probably the least romantic approach to romance you can conjure whilst keeping it rated G. The final two minutes, with the repeating pattern of guitar, synths and minimal percussion, is one of the loveliest loops the group has managed to come-up with.

18. Hypnotique – Martin Denny

– Martin Denny can often be saccharine and annoying, but since he was making pop in the 50s you can forgive him. Hypnotique is not annoying, it is gorgeous. It’s not silly like “The Quiet Village”, just beautiful and exotic and sweeping. It is music to dance with sexy spies to or have playing on the soundtrack as you romance white women in brown-face named Fatima.

19. Danarfregnir – Sigur Rós

– The guys at Sigur Rós like metal, and this is pretty clear on this track. It is an epic tune of power, appropriate for steampunk warfare and fighting dragons using only you iron sword and iron thews, but in an artsy manner on top of a glacier. Also, maybe underwater exploring in a rusty bathysphere, with icebergs threatening the cutter that’s lowering you and some kind of kraken giving you the stink-eye.

20. Johnny Cash – The Sons and Daughters

– Gritty Scots rock-out with their metronomic drums and dancing guitars! Exciting vocals! Not as much fun as “Dance Me In”, but more appropriate and pretty damned cool.

Despite working primarily in the field of naughtiness, Fernado Caretta is a damned fine artist with an extremely elastic approach to line and figures. He is probably riping someone off (like that guy they payed tribute to with Rhapsody In Blue in Fantasia 2000), though, so please point towards the victim if you know. There's some very obvious Disney in there, though.

Unfortunately, most of his really good stuff is not in his gallery, and too saucy for me to feel comfortable posting on a family blog.

In roaming the internet someone linked me to this, an absolutely sublime blond joke.

The Greatest Story never Told:

Starring:

Petra Statton

PLOT:

A young research scientist (Statton) opens a wormhole in space-time and accidentally allows ingress to a giant cyborg ant whose mission is to assassinate the prime-minister of a small African rogue state guilty of selling its illicit conflict diamonds to a mad scientist who intends to use them to build a giant laser and destroy the moon. The moon at this point in time houses a joint UN/ESA secret base set-up to communicate with extraterrestrials, the Yoongians, who are secretly plotting to take-over the Earth. In fact, the shape-shifting radioactive cyborg ant is from a future/dimension in which the Yoongians succeed, and must prevent the mad scientist from destroying the moon, and thus the front door to Earth.

Petra is the only hope to save the world from extra-terrestrial domination, and must do so by convincing the UN that the aliens are up to no good. She uses her wormhole to travel to the future and collect condemnatory evidence of this grim possibility, which she then takes with her to Geneva to show to the UN.

But en-route the plane carrying Petra is overcome by a mysterious

criminal being shipped to the Hague, who killed Petra's highschool headmaster and ken-jutsu instructor. After a tense battle, Petra dispatches the criminal and must land the plane herself whilst her ex-boyfriend (a former Navy Seal and astronaut-come-air traffic controller at the Geneva International Airport) must talk her through it amidst much unpacked emotional baggage.

At Geneva, the UN Security Council and heads of the ESA agree to see Petra's evidence. The robo-ant is now pursuing Petra, however, having dispatched the PM but finding still more to be done to ensure success. He plans to kill her and take her place, and does so to her ex-ex in order to get close to her. But during a romantic interlude the night prior to her presentation of conclusive evidence to the UN security council in a well-conceived Flash display, the ex-boyfriend Navy Seal arrives and battles the shape-shifting robo-ant assassin as it readies to murder Petra and sabotage her sabotage. The robo-ant (or 'Formicator') is knocked from a twelfth-story building and run-over by a Doctor Scholl truck.

Now the UN must race to stop the mad scientist from blowing the moon to bits, and Petra succeeds in convincing him to join the war against the Yoongians. The Yoongians have recently seized control of the Spanish civil-service, and loose hordes of primitive robo-ants against Europe from a secret the base in the Pyrenees.

Petra's ex-ex, being a Navy Seal astronaut passenger-liner pilot air-traffic controller, is chosen to lead the assault against alien hosts whilst the mad scientist and Petra develop an awesome Deus-Ex-Machinihilator to destroy the Yoongian mothership that was previously-thought to be Phobos, moon of Mars, and neutralise the deadly robo-ants and cyber-gnats.

They develop an EMP cannon as a salve to the problem of the mecha-bugs, then set to the larger problem. Petra and the mad scientist manage to create a wormhole, only in space and not in time (because due to the nature of parallel universes and timelines, even if they went back in time this timeline would be the same, although others would benefit), and Petra takes a crack squad of commandos (including ex-ex X. Allante) through the wormhole to the Yoongian home world.

They manage to destroy the Yoongian sub-ether power projectors which supply energy to the entire Yoongian inter-stellar battle-fleet, and discover that the Yoongians are in the midst of a war of attrition with the dreaded Phroit, and so seeking to escape to Earth.

All the commandos are killed trying to escape back through the wormhole to Earth, as is Ex-ex as he sacrifices himself to save Petra. But it is all for naught, the wormhole collapsing due to the vast distance it had to span. Also, due to the inaccurate nature of the wormhole across long distances, it will probably never reform any closer than ten thousand miles to the original spot.

And so Petra is marooned upon a hostile world, and finds herself the saviour of humanity but hemmed-in and threatened on all sides by vast and menacing sequels.

THE END.

The man who lives in my refrigerator has been hissing at me again. He slips about with eyes like two bright points of fire, skittering across the tiles at night when I’m trying to fall asleep. His teeth, being long like sticks of chewing gum, catch the glow from my bedside lamp when he sits at the entrance to my room. I can only ever see his silhouette for the most part, a squat, narrow figure with those two bright eyes and the hissing. Long, drawn-out, like air escaping from an untied balloon.

I’m not frightened of the man in my refrigerator. I go to hunt him down from time to time, but mostly just for the quiet, and not because he scares me. But he’s always hidden away into a corner of the piping, slipping through the coolant fluids making little chitt-chitt-chitt noises and then staring at me with a harsh expression from beneath the lid of the Tupperware container.

I got tired of the man in the refrigerator eventually, and so I bought a monster to get rid of him. The man at the store assured me that it was the best of its kind, very efficient and powerfully-muscled despite its lean frame. I took it home in a shoe-box with holes in the lid that it kept poking its little fingers through like soft black worms.

The monster was very long and slippery. It was folded up neatly in the shoebox like a new business shirt, and I had to carefully unravel it as though it were Christmas time all over and the lights for the tree were tangled. The monster scuttled away into a corner of the rookery and began to play solitaire quietly, watching the clock on the wall tick by and keeping a careful count of the various noises that manages to come through the sides of the walls. I didn’t see much of it from them on. From time to time I heard scuffles and skitters in the crawl space, and what sounded like my ex-wife’s hair brushing against the inside of a garbage bag. Mostly it kept to itself.

One day I found the monster folded into a careful cube, sat amidst the clean washing which I had yet to remove from the dryer. When I attempted to disentangle it, it proved meshed and viscous like crackling on a baking tray. I flushed the monster down the toilet and in despair I asked the undine that swims through the storm drains for some advice about the man in my refrigerator.

The undine slipped about and came at me with avarice in her eyes. Streaked with silt and flecks of caramel wrappings, her white flesh was veined with little blue lines that had always suggested her to be an octopus. This was confirmed when I finally succumbed to her advances and was bastardised by her numerous tentacles. Her form wrapped about me like heavy bedclothes after a nightmare, she whispered a single word of advice before carrying me down into the sewers – Take solace in the careful explanations of the book.

When I climbed from my kitchen sink I was unsure of what she had meant. I dried myself and stayed well clear of the refrigerator – for I though I had never thought him capable of it the man had proven himself something of a killer. I took to carrying my pewter knives in my pockets and a special adze that was known for having ended the life of one of the forgotten Queens of China.

In the attic, amidst a jumble of old collage memorabilia, I found a nest constructed of torn bibles and science magazines in which a small gryphon was lying, curled about a deep black book. The gryphon refused to yield it to me, and I was forced to slit my finger and allow a drop of the anaemic to dribble down upon its beak. The creature slithered off amidst poorly-maintained tiki statues and was heard to metamorphose into a pupil being with seven eyes and an anus-like, jag-toothed jaw. It began to eat the furniture and rapidly gestate, arms reaching out of its back as a woman bearing a resemblance to a young Martine Beswick collapsed trembling upon the floor. Her feral gold eyes forewarned against rape – I took the book and retreated down into my study, when the fire djinni kept me warm.

The book I held was fashioned after the manner of a basilisk egg, being accessible only by caressing the spine and applying pressure to several points around the southern pole. The book broke wide, its numerous cilla wriggling about and following the gesture of my hands as they turned the page.

It was on the seven hundred and first passage of the eighteenth chapter that I uncovered the secret of the man who lives in my refrigerator’s secret. I made my way to the control centre that rests beside my selection of Chinese classics, removing the fuse that supplies outlets in my galley kitchen. In my haste to preserve pineapples and delicately-flavoured Devon I had failed to remember to preserve myself.