the sid

blogmate sid smith cosily ensconsed in whitley bay up on the north east coast of england recently wrote to tell me that he had "tagged" me.

as one feature of my "avoid all necessary and non negotiable tasks that must be done to maintain the equilibrium of the home and family this weekend", i'm going to see if i can return the favour. the tagging involves rules, one of which is that the tagger posts the rules. here then, are the rules!

(of which there are six:)

rule the one. link to the person who tagged you.
rule the second. post the rules on your blog.
rule the third. write six random things about yourself.
rule the four. tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.

those are the rules i feel comfortable with. the following two are problematic for me. so with all due respect to sid and the well-meaning designer of this idea, i'm going to up the links to six worthy blogs and bloggers right here but i won't be tagging them formally. that pretty much kicks me out of the tagging game i guess but it does provide the opportunity to say good things about good people and to prattle on about my own inconsequential self under the guise of "randomness".

so the two rules that i am not abiding by are . . .

rule the fifth. let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
and the final rule being the sixth. let the tagger know when your entry is up.

so... rule’s one and two are done and here comes my attempt at addressing rule number three.

1. i was born to be an artist, a writer, and a musician and have had brief inglorious stints in each of those three areas. none paid enough to allow me to overcome the shortcomings of the lifestyles attached to each. i hope to embrace them all in retirement and become a highly sought after creative force!!!! ha!!

2. at the height of my being a robert fripp fan (before i simply accepted his music without him attached to it) i travelled to england and walked one day from cranborne youth hostel in dorset to wimborne minster in the hope of meeting the great robert. when i arrived in wimborne i went into shops asking if anyone knew where he lived. i was gobsmacked to discover that most people i spoke with didn't know who he was. i finally met a tailor who not only knew robert but had created clothing for him and directed me to the building that he shared with a number of other businesses. (i was pleased to see that robert recently posted a photo of this building on his diary). here 'tis i wandered over to the building as directed and could see no outward sign that this was indeed where his studio/office was but someone in the building said that a band named "the martian schoolgirls" had been using it as a rehearsal space. i had taken a watercolour painting to give to robert when the imagined and highly fantasized meeting took place. not seeing any hope of a direct exchange of pleasantries, i chucked the painting in a bag with a hastily penned note attached into an area near a side door. i imagine that at this point in its history, that painting is slowly decaying under the weight of other rubbish in the wimborne town dump!!!!

3. i have a special appreciation for river pebbles. it amazes me that something as hard as rock can be worn smooth by something as soft as water. i have a large grasses bed by my swimming pool that is filled with river pebbles and if you wander through this house you'll see other examples of soft, lovely-to-handle, multi-coloured river pebbles.

4. if i get a chance to come back to this place i think i'd like to come back as a girl. no special reason other than i like the way they relate to most of everything. it's much more direct and insightful and they seem to have the opportunity to have less rubbish to wade through in order to simply be. (i expect my comments bin will be ravaged by female readers who will provide salutory and perspective-adjusting commentary after what i just said!!!!)

5. the first major turning point in my life that awakened me to life beyond what i thought of as "life" to that point, was a gift given to me by my aunt margaret in my early teen years. herman hesse's siddhartha. it wasn't so much the story itself as all that it signified. a story that dealt with all the major themes a person could expect to be confronted with in the course of their life including the key one being how to transcend the distractions of life while living right inside it. "in this world, but not of it". you can read it here.

6. in the course of writing this blog entry i listened to the entire discography of kraftwerk, here's a recent pic of the boys rockin' out . . . drank two mugs of organic fair trade coffee, stopped to read two newspapers, visited the bbc website, dgm website, the weather channel, spent a fair bit of time gazing dreamily at the sky, listened for signs of life from the sleepover princesses and my dawsonboy, waved goodbye to my wife as she drove off to a skating competition in ottawa, moved on to listen to my favourite albert mangelsdorff disc "trombirds", here's albert chasing down the mellifluous overtones on the tubular beast . . . , prepared two batches of apple cinnamon pancakes - the first batch burnt because i wasn't paying attention(!!!) and continued my concerted effort to ignore the little heap of yellow stickies directing me through this actually very busy day.

alright that takes care of rule the third.

now for rule the fourth. here are six worthy sites. i trust that visitors here will see the value of the links and have the time and inclination to visit them!!!

1. goldenrod. a very real and insightful person with lovely wisdom, insights, smarts and a sense of humour.

2. loren webster. an astonishingly talented photographer and writer with a vast knowledge of poetry and poets.

3. luke ramsay. a hugely creative artist carving a creative / business niche for himself and other artists that is worthy of emulation.

4. luke storms. a deeply reflective work unfolding.

5. a longing for the impossible. deep inside the moment.

6. fiona robyn's teeny tiny moments within the moment.

meanwhile, i was telling you about sid!

you'll see sid's link on the sidebar of this blog if you can't wait. sid is (among many other things), the official biographer for king crimson. he is the author of by far-and-away the most detailed, honest and fascinating book on king crimson. an interview with sid around the time the book was released can be read here. his sense of the music and band members and history of that band has been invaluable to me as i have unravelled their music and that of their english guitarist robert fripp and most especially some of the purpose and context of that music in my life.

he is also an astonishingly talented music reviewer who sees things in the way i wish i could when it comes to music: sid writes with a rich sense of history, emotion, and the sort of insight that comes with a broad and deep knowledge of music but without the usual self-righteous cleverness that i see in the music mags. when i read his reviews and observations, i have to go out and either buy or listen to whomever he has recommended even if they are a complete mystery to me or if my previous opinion wasn't congruent with his.

sid is also a talented photographer. his subject matter favours his homeplace - whitley bay - and i exaggerate not one little bit when i tell you that his early morning scenes of that seaside town are often breathtaking. sid also shares stories of his family which readers have been fortunate to follow through his sometimes funny and always proud observations of the goings on in and out of his home.

i highly recomend sid's blog - it has a massive history, so searching inside for specific subjects is a good idea but take a cruise through regardless.