Katie and Hector

A bit of blue sky was trying to break through over the morning dog walk but it soon settled back into a more familiar slate-grey without me getting a decent photo of it. By the time I got home from work it had gone dark so Katie and I tried our hand at another portrait shoot (with a little help from Hector) with the usual mixed results - this was the one that Katie liked best.

I thought I'd better check out Karl Bartos' new solo album today after hearing him chatting on Radcliffe and Maconie's Radio 6 show one lunchtime last week. What a nice chap; chatty, erudite, learned, enthusiastic and very, very German. The album's pretty good too, if a little Moroder at times for my tastes. You can't argue with this though, even if it sounds like it was commissioned by a particularly crazed representative of the Belgian Tourist Board: it turns out that the vocals are inspired by tour-guide-speak, and the rhythmic attack by Stravinsky (the whole lot together, of course, still sounds pretty Kraftwerk.) I like the cover photo of Bartos' robot, 'Herr Karl', too - apparently, as the album is based on a lot of old note-book tunes and ideas, KB saw it as something of an autobiographical "conversation" between himself now and the younger 'Herr Karl' persona. Interesting stuff.

Reading-wise, I'm also enjoying 'The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris 1957-1963' by Barry Miles. I'm not sure why I've never read it before, as I've enjoyed both Miles' Burroughs and, particularly, Ginsberg biographies in the past (his Ginsberg is probably the definitive, whilst Ted Morgan's massive 'Literary Outlaw' overshadows him somewhat on the Burroughs front.) 'Beat Hotel' is more of an entertainment, gossipy and homourous; a pretty vivid recreation of a particular place and time. A good read.