Journal Entries

Objects

Good grief.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/gallery_game.shtml?select=11

I'm famous!

(Ish.)

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Latest reply: Oct 11, 2004

Comic Relief

I have raised £567 for Comic relief with the aid of a wig.

http://www.fluffhouse.org.uk/andrewwyld/rnd/

here's how.

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Latest reply: Mar 19, 2003

Musical Chairs

So, I've been away for a very long time, and during that very long time I have written a large number of songs and drawn some strange pictures.

By the way, I have bad memories of mods blocking a link I'd posted because my site "requires" the webfont player. I'troth, it only offers you the webfont player (and I heartily recommend you take it) but it's perfectly possible to view the site without it.  I've done my best to make it HTML 4 compliant, too, which means it *ought* to work on Braille readers ... I often wonder if H2G2 does!

http://www.fluffhouse.org.uk/andrewwyld/songs/

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Latest reply: Feb 28, 2003

The perfectibility of the 1960s

I am listening to SMiLE by The Beach Boys. This album is interesting for two reasons.

Firstly, Brian Wilson took the opportunity to continue the work he had begun in Pet Sounds (considered by many to be the first concept album) to produce something unequivocally ground-breaking and revolutionary.

Secondly, it was never released.

Pet Sounds heralded a revolution in production values and the making of pop albums as something more than collections of singles. SMiLE would have cemented that revolution. As it was, Sergeant Pepper was left to do that.

But SMiLE is a work of genius.

How, since it was never released, can I be listening to it?

The answer is simple. All the tracks were released on collections, later albums, or bootlegs. An enthusiast, Ryna Guidry (who can explain himself better than I would at http://users2.ev1.net/~bigrynz/) reconstructed the album from these recordings, known historical details from the time, and a great deal of love and effort.

The emotion this album has apparently evoked in most beach Boys discographers and music fans has basically consisted of a sense of privilege at being allowed to hear something lost combined with a heavy dose of "what might have been".

What might have been if this had been released in 1967 (as opposed to never)? What might have been if The Who hadn't had all their food spiked with acid at Woodstock and Roger Daltrey hadn't started hallucinating at dawn? What might have been if we had made love, not war?

This is a potential world, and, thanks to the likes of Guidry et al, I am lucky enough to be permitted to live there. Here's to the summer of love, as it should have been.

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Latest reply: Sep 13, 2002

You

As I walk toward my place of work this morning the sun shines brightly on the tarmac, and crossing the road I am briefly blinded by rays saturating my glasses, face, clothes, bleaching the world a glaring, ghostly white. In a moment I feel as though disembodied, floating along disconnected from the ground, a spirit only. The moment passes as I reach the other side, but I feel as though I have understood what it might feel like not to exist.

I meet you. Moved by a desire to rejoin humanity and feel solid once again, I ask you how you are, and you reply in the standard polite form reserved for such casual questioning. This is not enough. I need closer contact. I ask you about some intimate particular of your life, one known to me. You reply non-commitally.

Then, as you turn from me briefly, you yourself are transfixed suddenly by the sun's glare. This transfiguration leads you, too, to question the solidity of objects, but as you turn toward me again it is I, and not you, who am disembodied. I am not real. I have never been real. I am a creation of your imagination caused by words written on a page.

You continue your way.

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Latest reply: Sep 11, 2002


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Andrew Wyld [kt:'Burning Pestle', kp:'Mutamems, Ideodiversity', Zaph.]

Researcher U196900

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