Help Me Find This Jacket

I love jackets. Specifically, leather jackets. Unfortunately, none of the sort of jackets I’m into are standard issue Wilson’s Leather sort of things.

What I want is the Ninth Doctor’s jacket.

Chris Eccleston as Dr. Who, and his jacket

The image above is from a lovely site in the UK called thebadwolf.com where they will make you one of these jackets to spec. Unfortunately, the (perfectly reasonable) price they charge for one — £475 — is prohibitively expensive for me, thanks to the wretched value of the American dollar right now.

However, the site very helpfully informs me that this is a “first pattern German Kreigsmarine U-Boat Commander/Captain’s deck coat. Dating from circa 1938/1939, this and subsequent variants of the pattern continued to be made for Commanding Officers throughout the Second World War.” Apparently, it’s also what German police jackets are based on.

Yeah. Trust me to slaver over a Nazi coat. Anyway, anybody know where I can get a less expensive, non-tailored version of this jacket in, oh, let’s say, American XXL size?

I’ll be in Frankfurt in a couple of weeks, so if anybody knows of any stores there where I could purchase one of these (unlikely) or a police jacket (slightly more likely) in my size, please let me know.

Scatterlings + Refugees: Digital Single

Go here. Download freely. Feel free to use the ‘Donate’ button — I’m asking for 99 cents, but it’s definitely optional.

And please, please, please: if you like it, link to it. Link to it everywhere. Digg it. Reddit it. Facebook it. MySpace it. Blog it. Everywhere you can.

I want people to hear this. I had three people tonight tell me it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and one person tell me it made them cry, and if that’s true, it needs to be out there in the world.

Twitter is my mook

I had an idea for an application a while back, inspired by something from one Bruce Sterling novel or another. The Mook was going to be a chatbot that you could install, which would pretend — in a very limited fashion — to be you if you didn’t want to / couldn’t IM but wanted people to be able to get certain information. The Mook would tell people where you were, what you were doing, and — if they were on a certain list — your contact info.

Now we have Twitter. Which obviates the need for such a thing.

Scatterlings And Refugees: The Production (Woot!)

Mixing “Scatterlings And Refugees”, which has — almost but not quite inexplicably — turned into South African township jive. (I say “not quite” because this song always wanted to be Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child”, and if you know the other song, you’ll really hear it when I make this available.) It’s all big drumlines and shuffling, almost Johnny Cash-esque acoustic guitar and layered vocals. No bass yet — I need to figure out what I’m going to do there. I think probably extremely simple, long notes, rather than anything too showy. And I need to add some organ and maybe an accordion.

It’s so goddamn pretty, though. Hopeful and beautiful and faster than the demo. It’s closest to the kind of thing I really want to do, a kind of numinous, transcendent music that’s savage without being hardcore. It doesn’t sound electronic and it doesn’t sound acoustic — I don’t know what it sounds like, really — but I really like it.

Also finally chords for the Vegas song I came up with in the car driving back from LA a year or so ago. It might be the last song on the album — it’s a short, slow piano song about this city and the hideous fuckers who come here to party and behave like assholes. Yes, you, dude. Also pretty, but very cruel.

Pilot of plane that dropped A-bomb dies – Yahoo! News

Pilot of plane that dropped A-bomb dies – Yahoo! News

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died Thursday. He was 92 and insisted for six decades after the war that he had no regrets about the mission and slept just fine at night.

Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview : Rolling Stone

Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview : Rolling Stone

A remarkable interview with Bono. I really don’t get why some people hate him so much — if they’d bother to listen to what he’s saying, he’s incredibly bright and incredibly committed to these goals he’s set for himself. He’s one of the people I admire most in the world. So what if he’s a rock star? When was the last time you got to talk to the various leaders of the free world about ending poverty?

UNKLE @ Vegoose

…was fucking incredible. I caught five minutes of Muse. Eh. Alright. Not great. But UNKLE was amazing. Eight piece — drummer, keyboardist, DJ, bassist, two guitarists at any time, Gavin Clark on vocals and James Lavelle mixing and singing. The Thom Yorke, Ian Astbury and Josh Homme tracks were prerecorded vocals, but Gavin and James did a really amazing version of Psyence Fiction‘s “Lonely Soul”, originally sung by Richard Ashcroft, which was definitely the high point of the show. But the whole thing was really amazing. The bassist, in particular, rocked the house.

It gave me some serious ideas for live electronic performance as well.

Then I got stuck and walked most of the way home. So my feet look like big nasty lobsters. But I’m doing the arrangements for a couple of songs tonight before I go to bed. The arrangement for “Scatterlings And Refugees” in particular, sounds amazing — all Rhythm Of The Saints tribal drumlines and cool organ parts.

And Let Me Just Say It, Since Nobody Else Seems To Want To

New Orleans, 2005: a festering football stadium with corpses left to rot in place, shit and urine on the floor, and no water. For days. And the National Guard will shoot your black ass if you try to leave.

San Diego, 2007: clowns for the kids, massage therapy and acupuncture during your lovely stay in Qualcomm Stadium. Latte, anyone?

Yeah. Fuck you, America.