All Just Cosmic Soup

Another chance to say the obvious. So what.

I heard someone on Instagram talking about artists who don’t fit. Bands that won’t sit still inside a genre. They slide past the names we give things. That sounded right. Most artists would choose that, if they could. To float. To stay loose. To drift in the cosmic soup.

So what is a genre? It’s a way of sorting things. Music. Books. Sounds. It’s a box with a label on it. Some artists don’t belong in any box except their own. Zappa. Beefheart. The Velvet Underground. The Fall. Primus. Tool. The Cure. You can argue with that. I won’t stop you. This is only how it looks to me.

Do genres matter? They still do. But not the way they used to. They matter as much as you want them to. Enough for a pub argument. Enough for a look. Enough to feel right for a night.

Genres are useful. They’re a shared code. A language everyone half understands. Artists. Listeners. Shops. Anyone who’s worked behind a record counter knows this. It keeps things moving.

They set expectations. You hear “jazz” or “metal” or “folk” and you brace yourself. You expect a sound. A mood. A posture. It helps you step inside quickly. Or walk away just as fast. "Free jazz is rubbish. Dad rock is hopeless. Boy bands are beyond saving". You know where your bias comes from. Or you think you do. Try to exercise your self awareness muscles, just a little.

They carry history. Blues from hard lives and a broken gospel. Punk from anger and refusal. Country from fields, roads, and loss. You get a shortcut to why the music sounds the way it does. What it’s pushing against. What it’s holding onto. Sometimes that shortcut lies to you. Sometimes it doesn’t.

They build tribes. People don’t just listen. They commit. Scenes form. Clothes. Haircuts. Attitudes. Tattoos. T-shirts. Obsession. The kind that frightens people who don’t feel it.

There’s the practical side too. Playlists. Radio slots. Festivals. Shops. Marketing. It all needs labels. Even when the labels don’t quite fit.

But genres fail too. Modern music is scattered. Fractured. Often tired. Bedrooms replace studios. Experiments pile up. AI makes noise without any blood in it. Everything runs through its lifespan and fades.

The lines blur. Rap meets rock. Folk meets electronics. Jazz meets hip-hop. The old names start to wobble. They feel thin. Outdated.

Now machines sort music by feeling in playlists. They do the heavy lifting for you. By use. Chill. Focus. Workout. Sad. It’s less about where music came from and more about what it’s for. Emotion as product. Convenience as king.

Artists borrow from everywhere now. Traditions cross oceans. A single label can’t hold all that weight. Some people care about that. Some don’t.

Some artists reject genres on purpose. They make a point of it. They see it as freedom. Or identity. Or importance. Often they still fit just fine. Flesh and bone wrapped in ego.

Do genres help us understand what any of this means? Probably. I don’t have much more to say on that right now.

They try to explain the hidden language. The intention. The tradition. The rebellion. How we ended up here, awkward and loud and still listening.

So kick out the jams - if you can.

That’s enough for now

January 2nd

I stood looking into the same old void that always waits after the first rumblings of a new year. It was the second of January. We agreed it was time to take the Christmas things down. We said we would do it carefully. Without panic. Without pain. When the urge comes, it is best to act. Waiting never improves it.

The great season of excess and indulgence had passed. It had been loud and soft at the same time. Full and empty. Meaningful and meaningless in equal measure. It showed, perfectly, how lost we are, though not in any new way. There is no going back from it. So we buried it where it belonged. It wasn’t a bad Christmas. It was ordinary. A fair measure of the familiar things our small world always manages to produce.

With the right frame of mind, the hard work does not feel hard. We treated it like a task worth doing well. The lifting. The folding. The careful removal of tinsel and ornaments. Outside, the tide came in and erased our tracks and foot prints. The pale winter sun sat low and tried its best. It almost warmed us. Almost was just enough.

We breathed in, slowly.

We sang a Joan Baez organising song, softly and without irony.

We stopped and thought about things, then let them go.

I climbed a step ladder and felt better, in every sense.

We exchanged observations that did not need answers.

We untangled the cables. We did it patiently.

We breathed out longer than we breathed in.

We noticed there was less to pack away than last year and felt a quiet victory in that.

We freed the real tree from its stand and carried it back to the real garden, into the real cold. Everything felt unusually solid and true. As if the world, for once, was not pretending.

We spread brandy butter on baked things and ate them without ceremony.

I ate the blue cheese, though it had gone a little too far.

I used the dustpan instead of the hoover. 

Silence mattered.

I wore plimsolls.

We kept the room calm. We kept ourselves calm.

When the boxes were full of wires and gnomes, paper and stars, baubles and switches, we sealed them and sent them away to wherever such things wait. They will not return until around the thirteenth of December, 2026. I thought that sounded like a long time. I thought, briefly, that I might join them there.

Apropos of Nothing

Apropos of nothing: here's the AIS screen snapshots of the position indicators belonging to a large number of vessels moored or moving around St Barths (Saint Barthélemy, officially the Collectivité territoriale de Saint-Barthélemy, also known as St. Barts and St. Barths or St. Barth an overseas collectivity of France in the Caribbean), today Dec 31st 2025. St Barths is really just a tiny spec on the map.

The thing is that many of the vessels (luxury private yachts) that have come together here belong to some of the very richest people in the world. I'm sure you have a rough idea who I might mean ... funnily enough it's not too far away from another island that once belonged to a certain Mr J Epstein. 

Anyway Happy New Year everyone! Don't expect much of a difference in 2026 though.

This Is Not A Drill

Everyone Pays

"You either take the cookie policy or you refuse it and pay. That is the deal. Welcome to journalism and information access now. Nothing is free. Everyone pays."

I love everybody, well most of the time: My generation had the Beatles. That is what I thought. I thought it was normal. There was nothing strange about them. They were just there. They had always been there. I was eight when I noticed them, and at eight you do not know what you are missing. I did not know the rest of the world was noticing them too. They were everywhere; records, television, films, newspapers. That was how life was.

Later they called it a Boomer thing. At eight, the word meant nothing. I knew about the War and the Space Race. I knew Elvis and Hollywood and the Cold War. I knew the radio shows and the children’s programmes. The Beatles fitted into all of it. Black and white. Scratchy records. Radios that glowed and buzzed. They were part of life. Like Bible stories at Sunday School. Like sweets. You did not question them.

The adults did not like them. They said the songs were noise. They said the hair was wrong and long. They said Liverpool produced nothing good. That was what they said. We did not listen. We argued about the Beatles or the Stones and hurt each other to prove it. We knew the Beatles were better, but the Stones looked dangerous, and danger counted for something. The adults said it would pass. They were wrong, and they knew it.

In time we learned the truth. Our gods were men. They failed. They broke. They told us this from the start, but belief is easier than understanding. Understanding takes work.

By my sixteenth year it was finished. The breakups came. The scandals followed. Others tried to take their place. Sure they could play and write and sing, but it was never the same. They followed the tracks already made. You cannot walk that way twice. What was lost could only be copied, and the copies were weaker. The world kept turning.

Now machines remake the past. They bring back faces and sounds without weight or soul. You can look at it, but you cannot taste it. It is empty. We watch it happen and know where it leads. History repeats, but it never heals. Time does damage. The Devil is in the small things, and he stays there, happy.

You tell your story anyway. It may matter. Few will believe it or take note. Then people grow old and die, and the story plays again on a screen in a universal loop. The world does not need more shows. It needs care. It needs honest hands. Once there was a chance but humans are a stupid race. The machines took it and trashed it. What comes next is earned. It did not have to be this way.

impossible songs: Now ... and Then

impossible songs: Now ... and Then: Photo above by LB, Koln 2025. As above, farewell for the time being. P.S. Not this year but in case anybody forgot ...

Attack of the Furries.

Your very own Cheddar Ploughman's sandwich. It's from Urban Eat but they're not the one's to blame. The vendor has a problem, perhaps it was lost at the back of the fridge or the display. We'll never know for sure. It should have been eaten by 19th November - the sad sandwich was at it's best before that date. Now it's had a bad attack of the furries. No surprise that nobody wants to eat it. Nobody ever wants to eat furry sandwiches for their ploughman's lunch.

Perhaps We're All Dead

If consciousness is not bound by space or time, then it is possible we are already on the other side and do not know it. We go on as if this is the beginning, or the middle, when it may be something else entirely.

Many physicists say that time, as we feel it, is not real. It is a way the mind keeps order, like a man marking days on a wall while the seasons move without asking him. If consciousness is not fixed to one place, then past, present, and future may all exist at once.

In that case, we may already be dead. The body moves. The days continue. But awareness stays tied to this narrow moment, convinced it is the whole of things.

Some Eastern traditions say that life is a dream. They call it Maya. You live inside it, believe it, suffer in it, and wake from it only when the dream breaks. Death, then, is not an ending. It is waking up.

That idea sits close to what physics now suggests. Consciousness may not belong to the body at all. It may be part of something wider and older than time. Something that does not begin or end.

If that is true, then nothing important is lost. We are only passing through one version of the dream, still unaware that the waking world may already be waiting.

Or,

They may call it the block universe theory now. It says that the world is not moving forward the way we think it is. It says everything that has happened and everything that will happen is already there, laid out whole.

Time does not pass. There are only moments. Each one exists, steady and complete, like points on a long road. You stand in one of them and feel it moving because you cannot see the rest.

If this is true, then somewhere in that road you are already dead. It is not a threat. It is only a fact, the way the end of a journey is already marked on a map before you ever begin to walk.

But death, then, is a thin thing. An idea more than an ending.

Einstein once wrote to the family of a friend who had died. He told them that the difference between past, present, and future was only a stubborn illusion. His friend was not gone. He was simply in another part of the whole.

You can think of it like a man fishing a river. The water keeps moving, but the bends of the river do not. The fish he caught yesterday is still caught there. The fish he will catch tomorrow is already waiting. The river does not care which one he remembers.

So yes, in one place in the universe, you have finished. In another, you are just beginning.

And here, in this narrow stretch you can feel, you are alive. Your lungs fill. Your heart works. The day is still yours.

That is enough for now.

Incorporate

Your task: Incorporate elements of electronic equipment, automotive styling and functionality in a colourful but standard photographic design. Keep it simple, well composed and ensure all the source material is recognizable. Any suggestion of a deeper meaning or message is unimportant to the project so no need to consider any of that. You have 24 hours starting from now. Failure is not an option. (10 Marks).

What gave you your edge?

How did it happen? How did I get this edge? This edgy feeling, this bristle, the persona of some salty old dog. I never was at sea. Not very wise either. Thinks to much but doesn't do anything with it. Shame really. 

In the dark mornings it is hard to find the floor. There are pale shadows running down like they spent their career in dampness prevention. I screw on the tap and plug the kettle in. I open the jar and check the milk. Nobody has Ovaltine first thing in the morning. Nobody who knows anything.

Rain is on the windows. The wind comes and goes and rattles the chimney flue. There are ashes in the fireplace. I will clean it later and bring in more firewood. They say they might outlaw log burners soon and push heat pumps onto us. The common good requires it. I feel I am too far down the road for that.

They do not understand the insulation problems in most Scottish houses, the way they were built back then. Heat pumps are not enough. Understanding a problem before acting is not a skill much valued now. It is better to do something that sounds right and makes a good line. Usually it is the first thing that comes to mind, or to the mind of an adviser with a degree in Australian style cookery. The BBC will carry it.

I breathe out and drop the part I was playing. Enough of that. I say it quietly to the shadows. I take my time and watch them fade into the wall, or wherever shadows go when they are finished.

Outside the light is dim. I fill the feeders so the birds can eat early. There is still some quiet satisfaction to be found there. Outside with the cold rain on your face. Improperly dressed I suppose. A strong silence beats the thunder of a vacuum.

impossible songs: Points Mean Prizes

impossible songs: Points Mean Prizes: Pink Floyd: I've no idea what I'm doing here, there's a number  generator  they say. Also something else  it seems, perhaps I...

Economic Gossip

They tried to illustrate the debt of various nations by stacking up biscuits. That worked for me but there are other stories to spin. Secrets and lies. Made me wonder about the bend that reality has taken over economics. Crash landings and no accountability. History is a harsh mistress when nobody can admit the hunger they have and the mistakes they made along the way. 

The huge amounts of thinking, writing and talking about dirty economics and the complete lack of real control over economies and the practices that are revealed - slowly. We only see that we are being played. Too many hard men out there, all too easy to bully the weak and to rattle the markets. All the beans and bean counters with their good intentions that only get obliterated - but then they only bring plastic knives to real gunfights. Now AI wants to run the show and they'll let it.