Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Bug Banquet makes a unique culinary experience

Bug Banquet makes a unique culinary experience

By Paul Schattenberg
Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service
An Australian man made national news recently and was dubbed "Ant Man" after surviving for almost a week in the unforgiving outback by eating ants - something he had seen survival expert Bear Grylls do on television.
 
While such a tale seems odd to Americans, entomophagy or the eating of insects for food goes back tens of thousands of years and continues today, said Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service entomologist Molly Keck for Bexar County.
 
"People in the United States and in other Western cultures usually find the idea of eating insects unappealing, but bugs are a normal part of the diet in many countries of the world," Keck said.
 
Keck recently hosted a unique entomophagy dinner event at a private residence near San Antonio. More than 70 people paid $35 each to attend the Bug Banquet she coordinated to educate people on insects as a food source and to serve them unique foods prepared with insect ingredients.
 
Dinner was prepared by chef Jose Cervantes and Bexar County 4-H Food Challenge team members, with assistance from other area 4-H members and employees of the AgriLife Extension office for Bexar County. Members of the 4-H Entomology Team greeted attendees at the door and helped serve the meal.
 
The menu included fire ant queso dip, candied pear salad greens with roasted mealworms, goat cheese quesadillas with tortillas made with cricket flour, and baked apples with cricket granola. Drinks included a cocktail made with honey produced by bees provided by AgriLife Extension to the San Antonio Food Bank to help increase pollination of the Food Bank Farm and for agency vegetable and fruit trials there.
 
Vegetables used in the evening's dishes were harvested from the Children's Vegetable Garden, a joint youth horticulture program of AgriLife Extension and the San Antonio Botanical Garden.
 
Reece Moffitt, a violinist who won recognition in the musical instrument competition in the statewide 4-H Roundup, provided entertainment for the event.
 
"Diners had the opportunity to eat an expertly prepared four-course meal made with delectable insects paired with an appropriate cocktail, beer or wine," she said. "Our goal was to give them an enjoyable and unusual dining experience while introducing them to a new way of thinking about their food."
 
One of Keck's youth entomology program participants, Ian Kusch, was given an opportunity to speak to the diners about his interest in entomology and entomophagy.
 
"My interest in entomophagy began while I was preparing for a science fair," said Kusch, who has been an entomology program participant for the past six years. "I've always been interested in insects, but then I learned about how people in many countries eat them and how they are a good source of nutrition."
 
Keck also spoke to the attendees, explaining how insects can be a viable "agricultural product" and alternative or supplemental food source for an ever-growing world population.
 
Gary Saathoff of Devine was one of the Bug Banquet diners, but this was not his first experience with entomophagy.
 
"I've actually eaten insects before, but that was mainly during military survival training and while teaching wilderness survival skills to Boy Scouts as an adult leader," Saathoff said. "Of course, they were raw and didn't taste very good."
 
He said this "bug-eating" experience was far more enjoyable.
 
"The mealworms in the salad added a buttery and nutty flavor," he said. "I couldn't really taste the fire ants in the queso, so they didn't affect the flavor and I know they provided extra protein."
 
Another diner, Patrice Cole of Adkins, whose family is involved in beekeeping, said she was hesitant when she first heard about the event.
 
"But when I got here and saw how the food was being prepared and how good the menu looked, I wasn't squeamish," Cole said. "You couldn't really taste the insects in some of the dishes. And in the ones where you could taste them, they added an interesting flavor that balanced the other flavors. Everything was really nice and the food was presented really well."
 
Keck said she thought the event was both a culinary and educational success.
 
"Based on what I heard at the Bug Banquet and after it, everyone had a good time and people were pleased with the menu and the quality and taste of the food," she said. "It was also a good opportunity to let people know that insects are a viable agricultural product and can be part of the solution toward ensuring the future food security of the planet."

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Play For Today - The Long Distance Piano Player (in ten parts) starring Ray Davies and Lois Dane

October 15, 1970--BBC-1 broadcasts as part of its Play For Today series, the television play "The Long Distance Piano Player," starring Ray Davies and Lois Dane… (via Frank Lima)

Play for Today Writer: Alan Sharp;Director: Philip Saville; Producer: Irene Shubik



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeGfxQ3xM4A

A dingy municipal hall in a nondescript northern town plays host to Pete (Ray Davies) a phenomenon, a true one-off of Herculean proportions - at least, according to his loudmouth, cod-American manager Jack Burnshaw (Norman Rossington). Over the next few days, as Jack barks at nonplussed townsfolk through a megaphone while his gofer Alf (James 'Red Shift' Hazeldine) bangs resignedly on a drum, Pete will be attempting to break the record for non-stop piano playing. Why, apart from the 'uniqueness' of the achievement, no-one can be quite sure, least of all Pete's long-suffering wife Ruth (Lois Daine) holed up in a makeshift bedroom for the duration, within earshot of the relentless drone of Pete's playing. Locals seem none to bothered either - two old duffers dusting down the snooker tables in the hall chat idly about him because - well, he's being talked about, apparently.
Info from TV Cream.

C. BBC Television 1970.




























The first of the BBC Play For Today series. It replaced the Wednesday Play and the title was changed because it appeared on the BBC on various days of the week. Ray Davies (lead singer of the Kinks) plays a piano player who attempts to do a 4 day non stop piano playing marathon. Norman Rossington plays his manager who organises the event and theres an early appearnce by James Hazeldine (Londons Burning) as ALF a simple lad who acts as a gofer for Ray Davies character. The play builds up from the initial early hours of the marathon when there is little interest in his record breaking attempt right through till the end with the press getting involved and beginning to show an interest. There is a side story involving his wife who begins to grow detatched from him whilst he attempts the record. Does he do it? Watch and find out.............if you can find a copy. Recommended viewing and a good snapshot of how life was in the early seventies great britain. -- IMDb



image via: THE LONG DISTANCE PIANO PLAYER (1970) BY JOHN WHEATCROFT




Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Soft Machine's 1967 St Tropez sojourn: [whatevershebringswesing] Do You Know The Way To St Tropez? (by Steve Foster)


Re-posted  from the WHATEVERSHEBRINGSWESING yahoo group:
I'm really grateful to Steve Foster for researching this excellent piece on the Soft Machine's 1967 St Tropez sojourn. Both Steve and I have tried posting it to the group complete with photos, but Yahoo's not having it. So here is the unillustrated, but still illuminating report in the words of Bananababa Steve...

Details of The Soft Machine's sojourn in St Tropez in the summer of 1967 have always seemed a bit sketchy to me. The various chronologies never seem to quite match up and all the versions I've read leave me wanting to know just a little bit more. Almost inadvertently I found myself in the vicinity of St Tropez in September. I'd left my other half to make the arrangements for the first part of our holidays so that I could concentrate on the arrangements for the second part - a walking holiday in the Pyrenees. She arranged for us to go camping on the Cote d'Azur with her sister and brother-in-law. We'd done something similar about 20 years previously. It hadn't been a great success. Very hot and very busy that August and pitching the tent full in the sun hadn't helped this pink, prickly Brit relax and enjoy his holiday. From memory, I think I lasted three days. I wasn't that keen on a repeat but it was too late to back pedal. This time around it was September; much less crowded, the temperature several notches below blast furnace and we were in a caravan in a shady pine grove. Best of all, as we pitched up, I realised that the campsite was half way between Sainte Maxime and Port Grimaud, and that I could see Saint Tropez almost diametrically opposite across the bay, 20 minutes by Bateaux Verts shuttle or an 8 km jog along shady cycle paths. In spite of the heat I soon had my anorak on, Google whirring away, paper and pen at the ready. 
I could find itemized chronologies of what Soft Machine were doing throughout the years, and where they were doing it, online, on the Pink Floyd Archives, Calyx and Planet Gong, but the St Tropez episode hung somewhere rather nebulously between the realms of myth and fantasy. Planet Gong isn't of much help and freely admits to being 'almost a blank canvas' for that whole year. For July and August 1967 it is limited to:

'Thursday 24/08 - Daevid refused entry to the UK at Dover under 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act
Friday 25/08 - Daevid sent back to Boulogne, France on The Maid of Kent' (1)

And the other two sources don't always correlate. As per the Pink Floyd Archive, Soft Machine played a gig in an underground car park, late June, on the Avenue Foch in Paris. Presumably on the way down to the French Riviera. This, along with the dates of Daevid Allen's refused re-entry into the UK at least helps to bookend the time frame of the episode: late June to 24th August 1967. Marking the first of several  dénouéments in the Soft Machine story but also the beginning of another story, that of Gong.

At home I had accounts in three published books. Gong Dreaming 1, the first part of the autobiography of Daevid Allen, one of our four protagonists.Different Every Time, the authorised biography by Marcus O'Dair of Robert Wyatt, another of the protagonists. Out-Bloody-Rageous, a history of The Soft Machine by Graham Bennett. The latter two are particularly well researched and informative. The former, a highly entertaining, though very personalised account of the period 1966 to 1975. As Pip Pyle said of Gong Dreaming 2, which it is true covered a later period; 'some details, I remember a bit differently'. If Graham Bennett and Marcus O'Dair are the Mark and the 'Q' of the Soft Machine gospel, then Daevid Allen must be the John, although of course, Daevid really was there.

Online there is also a Wikipedia entry for Soft Machine with a brief paragraph on the period and, as I was to discover, a very enlightening article/interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel. Lebel it was, who staged Picasso's Le Dé sir Attrapé Par La Queue at the Festival de la Libre Expression in St Tropez in the summer of 1967 and who had chanced upon the Soft Machine on the beach at Sainte Maxime a few days previously.

Can't say I've read or seen Picasso's play but it's an interesting story in itself. Written by Picasso in Paris during the Occupation. It had a read through shortly after the war with Camus directing, Sartre and de Beauvoir, amongst others, reading parts. Jean-Jacques Lebel came across the text in 1966 and premiered the play as a fully staged production in 1967 in the St Tropez area. Here's the Wikipedia entry:


Bernard Frechtman, who translated the work from the original French, had this to say in his Foreword. 'It says nothing of human destiny or of the human condition. In an age which has discovered man with a capital M, it is gratifying to advise the reader that Picasso has nothing to say of man, nor of the universe. This in itself is a considerable achievement.'

But back to our chronology. Gorgio Gomelsky, the producer and impresario had 'planned' a number of 'gigs' for Soft Machine on the French Riviera. Alternatively he had just planned a residency in a 'pop-up' discotheque on the beach at St Aygulf. Its hard to tell. The Discothèque Interplay took place within some sort of a dome or igloo (Wikipedia calls it 'a flat-pack Fun Palace') erected by Keith (father of Damon) Albarn.

01-05 July - Discothèque Interplay in St Aygulf.

Depending on who you read, the band only played the first night, they played all five nights or something in between (three according to Daevid Allen), before they got the bullet. And they were either playing as part of a beer festival or in parallel to said beer festival. Which ever was the case, clearly Soft Machine didn't go down well with beer drinkers. Lack of interest by paying customers as someone put it, a reaction to 'noise pollution' as Daevid Allen has it or even the objections of the other clubs in St Aygulf put pay to them. And the band didn't get paid. What is even stranger is that the tour then came to an abrupt end. What happened to the rest of the Riviera gigs that Gomelski had organised? Had he organized much else apart from this residency? Was it hoped that other gigs would organically follow? It appears the band now had no money for the return journey. Soft Machine seem to have been left to their own devises. As per Kevin Ayers: 'We were sort of abandoned in the South of France with no money, we had all the gear and stuff with us though'.

Jean-Jacques Lebel, who was staying with friends in Sainte Maxime: 'We could hear people singing on the beach and we thought that amazing. They were English hippies, sleeping on the beach in their sleeping bags. To eat, they busked and passed the hat around. They explained that they were interested in William Burroughs and that they were called Soft Machine. At the time they were unknown, and hadn't yet recorded an album. I suggested to them that they come and perform during the play as musicians and actors. They accepted straight away, they didn't know where to sleep. They therefore hitched and caught up with us in St Tropez and it is maybe what set them on their world trajectory. They were excellent.' And later in the same article: 'Soft Machine, it was my wife who spotted them on the beach at Sainte Maxime; and so we went to see them. They slept on the beach, they busked and passed the hat around... I invited them to come and play in exchange of which they slept under the big top, and we tried, with the few tickets we sold, to feed ourselves, of course the vast majority of people did not pay, they were coming from all over Europe, those that were being called hippies, stoned, nomads; so we all lived there together, under what has now sadly become a myth: the sexual revolution...'

'The promoter of this play by Picasso thought it would be a good idea to have us as the first part of the show to make more of an evening of it, it worked very well. So we were hired, sort of for nothing, peanuts, but we had a great time, it was very good.' Kevin Ayers (Calyx).

Sainte Maxime is a short hop down the coast from St Aygulf heading towards St Tropez. St Tropez had already created its own legend by the 50s and may well have been a destination for the band anyway. July and August in St Tropez was probably as hip as it got, certainly in Europe. When did this meeting on the beach with Jean-Jacques Lebel occur? Before or after the 14th July? Had Soft Machine already been to St Tropez? As the crow flies Sainte Maxime and Saint Tropez are probably no more than 5km from each other across the bay and some 15 kilometres around the bay. What strikes me as bizarre is the hitching. Soft Machine had instruments, amplifiers as well as a cast of at least 7 other people as per Graham Bennett (2). Daevid Allen refers to the tour being undertaken in a 'shiny new yellow bandwagon. Following the St Aygulf cancellation had Keith Albarn, 'flat-pack Fun Palace' and tour bus returned to the UK?

The next date in any of the chronologies is 14th July in St Tropez, where by common accord, except in Daevid Allen's account where this is down as the 4th July, Soft Machine played in the town square. I take this to be Place des Lices. There are undated entries indicating that the band then played Le Café des Arts sometime in July. Café des Arts also happens to be on the Place des Lices and unless the café has moved or been much reduced in size since 1967, I can't see how an electric band could play inside the café - it is much too small. Since the Café des Arts is right on the Place des Lices, it is possible that the band were on the Place des Lices itself and playing to an audience sat on and around the terrace of the café. Could this gig have been one and the same as the 14th July gig? Perhaps sponsored/paid for/simply just outside the Café des Arts?

By the 24th July Le Désir Attrapé Par La Queue would appear to have begun its three week run with Soft Machine playing either before or after (possibly both) the play, under instructions from Jean-Jacques Lebel to produce 'transmissions hallucinatoires'. The play was to have been staged in St Tropez at the Papagayo night club under canvas in the internal courtyard. The Gaullist maire, a member of the paramilitary Service d'Action Civique (SAC) to boot, caught cold feet when he heard of the contents of the play and had it banned. Needless to say, the socialist maire of the neighbouring commune of Gassin was only too pleased to take up the relay. The tent was pitched in an area of rough ground, where the circus came to town, in Gassin. Jean-Jacques Lebel claims in his interview that the play ran for two and a half months, seven days a week, to full houses every night. That may well have been the case, but Soft Machine's involvement would appear to have been for no more than 3 weeks. However long the run, the SAC couldn't let the opportunity pass without getting involved and machine gunned the generator. I've read somewhere that Robert Wyatt's drum kit took a bullet. 

'The play had enormous worldly success, press and TV..... People came from all over Europe, hitching or in 2CVs. People who had no idea where they were going to sleep, they had seen this on TV in Denmark, in Italy... They slept every night under the big top. They had no dosh for food. So when we had tuppence-halfpenny, and the money from a few sold tickets - most entered free - we'd make pasta for everyone at the interval. They passed their joints around. It's true everyone was wrecked, and I would never state that there were things, more or less collective, going on that bourgeois moral would approve of. It was banal at the time. So there was this little wordly success vis-a-vis St Tropez society who came along to mix with the riff-raff but what interested me more was this nation-less, European, youth culture, coming from everywhere and nowhere, which found itself there. And it was they who made Soft Machine's success. This population of young people who wanted another life-style and for whom this new art made sense.'

Kevin Ayers in Graham Bennett: 'In fact what made Soft Machine was an article in Le Nouvel Observateur. We got written up, I think, because Mike (Ratledge) was fucking the journalist. So we got a good review and that was it. Suddenly France just opened up. We were the darlings of the literary scene there.' (3)

Daevid Allen in Gong Dreaming 1: 'Suddenly we were the avant garde of intelligent rock. Within three months Soft Machine would be the third most popular band behind the Beatles and the Stones. We were soon invited to stay in luxurious beachfront houses, with the best food, wine, hash and cocaine.'

Certainly Soft Machine appeared twice on French TV the following October, though by then they were a trio. As Marcus O'Dair writes they 'had lost their Christopher Robin'; Daevid Allen. On En Parlera (3rd October) and Dim Dam Dom (8th October). Sometime in mid-October they filmed for the Guy Beart Show (4), although this wasn't broadcast until 25th August 1968 (Calyx).

'It was extraordinary. Firstly there were musicians who were actors and who acted....one could improvise and surprise one another. Taylor Mead was magnificent. He was homosexual. He brought his lovers on stage..... he was amazing when he arrived on stage dressed as a dog, on all fours with his long tail and pointed ears, everyone just burst out laughing..... He has a comic genius, that just doesn't come through very well in Warhol's films...... One day he brought along a young guy he had picked up on the beach. This guy had a camel and he would make a few bob taking photos of the holiday-makers on the camel. He brought him from a long way, some ten, fifteen kilometres, he was late but he got on stage.... He arrived as a dog leading the camel, the Soft Machine got playing and danced around the camel. But the camel got scared and started to shit enormous turds. People were screaming with laughter. We'd planned none of this but the great thing is improvisation, to allow people freedom, not to impose anything. The problem was to get the camel off stage. It was impossible and it spent the night on the stage. We managed to get it down the following morning. Every night we improvised with something new, it was absolutely fabulous.' (5)

The Pink Floyd Archive has the play being performed in Cogolin for two weeks in August. Cogolin is the next village/commune west of Gassin and has perhaps been confused with Jean-Jacques Lebel's one-off Sun Love happening in Cogolin, where Soft Machine performed naked around a swimming pool. As per Jean Jacques Lebel: 'The Picasso part lasted an hour, that depended on the Soft Machine, and afterwards there were happenings, concerts... An American actor told us 'come back to my place, I've got a swimming pool', so we went and we created a happening which took the piss out of the faux-mystics, and we made a pseudo ritual to the rising sun, we took the piss out those people who were taking the piss out of the hippies, it was Sun Love... in my 16 mm films one won't hear the Soft Machine but one will see them... it wasn't recorded.'

'Jean-Jacques Lebel had us playing one of his happenings, around a swimming pool at night. And the only rule was that everybody had to be undressed, including the band. Completely. If you weren't, you had to stay indoors. It was a very nice feeling, on a warm, breezy, Saint-Tropez evening, to be playing without clothes. That's when I realised you could do it. And being behind a drumkit protected what they call your modesty'. Wyatt's bare torso would become intrinsic to his image as a drummer, occasionally embellished with shirt and tie drawn onto his flesh in crayon (Marcus O'Dair).

The Pink Floyd Archive also has the band playing private parties for Barclay Records and Caroll Baker in July and the Café des Arts early in August. I suspect that the Barclay Records do was Eddie Barclay's La Nuit Psychédélique at L'Epi Plage on the 13th August as per Graham Bennett and others. There is also mention of Soft Machine opening the Voom Voom Club in St Tropez. Strangely, for such a verifiable event, there is no date, other than what we have to assume is pre-13 August. Soft Machine may well have played the Voom Voom Club but the club seems to have been open for business from 1966 as far as I can make out.

At some point, at one of the parties in St Tropez, Brigitte Bardot was in attendance, though I can find no evidence that Bardot herself threw the party. La Nuit Psychédélique, perhaps? Daevid Allen is reported in Marcus O'Dair as saying that this was 'the best concert Soft Machine ever played. Kevin Ayers later recalled the event in his track Clarence In Wonderland: Let's go to my chateau/We could have a good time/Drinking lots of sky wine'. See below for a photo of La Madrague (aka 'My Chateau') with its wall to keep paparazzi and rubber neckers at a distance.

It was in St Tropez and at the party that Brigitte Bardot attended that Soft Machine performed their now near legendary rendition of We Did It Again, repeating their version of the The Kinks You Really Got Me riff non-stop for between 40 minutes and an hour. 'By taking the ostinato technique to its extreme, Kevin was actually making a serious artistic statement.' As per Mike Ratledge, again in Graham Bennett 'It was his idea that if you find something boring - a basic Zen concept - then in the end you will find it interesting. And there is something in that: if you listen to something repeated in the same way, your mind changes the structure of it each time..... Kevin saw it halfway between the spiritual liberation thing and showing off how hip we were.' And to lift more from Graham Bennett: Kevin says that he 'pinched the idea from the Sufi thing of Dervish dances, the repetition of a straight rhythmic figure which promotes release from all the things that one finds difficult in releasing normally'. Kevin is adamant that it 'was the nearest I got to doing what I wanted with that song. Since then it's become sort of orchestrated. We've split it up into bits and got away from the point.' Daevid remembers with undisguised glee the profound effect the performance had on their audience: 'This bout of Terry Riley-inspired minimalism was enough to make us the toast of the new Parisian fashion season.' In Gong Dreaming 1, he has this to say; 'To amuse ourselves we decided to perform a live loop of the louee-loui riff with a repetitive chorus of: WE DID IT AGAIN. We played it for forty minutes to an ecstatic 'in' crowd who instantly decided that we were to be the fashionable flavour of the month on their return to Paris.' Louis Louis or You Really Got Me? Daevid also has this down as being at a party given by Bridget (sic) Bardot following the performance on the town square of the 4th July. Essence over detail, et alors?

Somewhere out there is a quote of Kevin Ayers' answer to an interviewer pressing him on what Brigitte Bardot thought of the We Did It Again piece. 'She probably said: Get the w*****s off.' Whatever she thought of the music she had an eye on the bass player. Ayers and Bardot. I certainly hadn't jogged over to St Tropez to try and substantiate the rumour. For me it has been fact for some time. Ever since I had it on good authority, by someone who had asked Kevin Ayers. Ayers answered something along the lines of: Yes, it's true but not the rumours about Bianca Jagger.

Here's an early version of Clarence In Wonderland recorded for French TV on 3rd October 1967 and incorporating a brief reprise of We Did It Again. Note the extended and rather disturbing lyric.


The programme, I suspect is On En Parlera rather than Camera III, as per Calyx. I would imagine that Camera III was a cue to the director?

And this is what Brigitte Bardot looked like at the time. Well a couple of months later when performing Harley-Davidson written for her by her latest paramour, Serge Gainsbourg.


As it happened, within a day or two of our arrival in the St Tropez area, a small gang of Harley-Davidson bikers descended on our campsite. They were from Breda in The Netherlands. Inevitably, we immediately referred to them as The Breda Reaktors (6), not least because they were a quintet. One of them, it must have been Hannes (at least three of them were called Hannes) told me he had Soft Machine I and Soft Machine II on his I-Pod. Just like me, he couldn't see much further than those first two albums. We had a memorable, what bikers may call a hoedown, that evening. Photo of Breda Reaktors below.

But back to Bardot. Only recently have I been made aware that the follow up to Bardot's Harley-Davidson was to have been Serge Gainsbourg's Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus. Gunter Sachs had turned a blind eye to his wife's  libertinage but putting them down, literally, on record was too much even for him. Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus was to appear a year later as a Gainsbourg duet with Jane Birkin. Personally I've never understood the fuss around the Jane Birkin version. Here's the Bardot version, which only came to light some 20 years later.


We presume that Clarence In Wonderland was inspired by Brigitte Bardot. But what might Kevin Ayers have written for Bardot à la Gainsbourg? Could the Jolie Madame duet, recorded with Bridget St John in 1971 have had its genesis in St Tropez? 

We don't quite know when the band left St Tropez (16th August as per The Pink Floyd Archives) but we do know that they caught a ferry to Dover on 24th August (7).

I can find few photographs of this whole episode, in spite of there being a dedicated photographer amongst the party - Mark Ellidge. There's one photo in Gong Dreaming 1 of Daevid Allen busking with a recorder labelled 'le busking en st tropez' and photos of  Le Désir Attrapé Par La Queue can be found on the Internet, though none feature any of the members of Soft Machine. Gong Dreaming 1 also features an all too small reproduction of the poster for the Discothèque Interplay at St Aygulf. 'Dansez! Freak Out! avec la meilleur formation psych éélique de Londres, à partir de 23 heures 45, les fantastiques SOFT MACHINE leur dernier disque LOVE MAKES SWEET MUSIC sur Barclay' it proclaims. Rather than their latest record Love Makes Sweet Music was their one and only record to date. That it appeared on Barclay Records may have something to do with the band playing at Eddie Barclay's La Nuit Psychédélique the following month. Out-Bloody-Rageous has a photo of the band (Daevid Allen and Kevin Ayers) performing at the Discothèque Interplay in St Aygulf.

Nor do we know, apart from We Did It Again, what pieces Soft Machine played. I can only assume that their repertoire was likely made up of the pieces recorded three months previously for the Gomelsky Tapes/Jet Propelled Photograph, Love Makes Sweet Music and perhaps Daevid Allen's Fred The Fish (8).

I've lifted whole chunks from Graham Bennett's Soft Machine Out-Bloody-Rageous (pages 107-112), Marcus O'Dair's Different Every Time (pages 77-80) and Daevid Allen's Gong Dreaming 1 (pages 60-62) and referred extensively to Calyx, the Pink Floyd Archive and Jean Jacques Lebel's article/interview. Translations of the latter are mine, I've tried to convey the spirit rather than to be word for word accurate. Facts, dates and quotes are all their's. All errors and interpretations are entirely a figment of my over-ripe banana imagination. It is really the Nicaean omissions that interest me now, any Mediterranean Sea Scrolls that have yet to be revealed and of course the gospel according to Kevin Ayers. There's a lot more to be said about this trip to the South of France, I am certain. I'd be interested to know more. It is sad, though a fact of life, that at least five of those who made up the Soft Machine party in the summer 1967 are no longer in the room. I've written to Les Archives Municipales in St Tropez for any articles (there's mention of an article in Le Figaro, and the local paper must have reviewed these events) or any photos that they may have. I intend to make a return visit to St Tropez in the summer of 2017 to 'Do It Again', perhaps I'll get my other half to make arrangements to Take Me To Tahiti (Plage).


(1) Daevid Allen was an Australian citizen with an Australian passport.
(2) Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt (Soft Machine musicians), Ted Bing (roadie and old school friend), Mark Boyle (light show), Ian Knight ('on behalf of management'), Gilli Smith (Daevid's girlfriend), Mark Ellidge (Robert's half-brother and tour photographer), Michael Chapman and Keith Albarn.
(3) Yvette Romi's short but effusive article which appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur in September 1967 is reproduced in Graham Bennett's Out-Bloody-Rageous.
(4) Guy Beart died just recently (16th September) aged 85.
(5) This paragraph is a synopsis rather than a strict translation.
(6) Breda Reactor is the title of a Soft Machine bootleg recorded in Breda in 1970. I think I'm right in saying that it didn't get an official release until 2005. An interesting footnote: I'm told that Breda Reactor features one of the few (two?) examples of a post-Ayers era version of We Did It Again.
(7) I'm rarely on the side of officialdom. But hats off to that over diligent immigration official. Without him there might not have been a Gong. Unable to return to the UK, Daevid Allen went to found Gong in Paris.

(8) That's How Much I Need You, Save Yourself, I Should Have Known, Jet-Propelled Photograph/Shooting At The Moon, When I Don't Want You, Memories, You Don't Remember, She's Gone, I'd Rather Be With You. Fred The Fish was never released and presumed lost. What I imagine is a very different version appeared on Daevid Allen's Bananamoon album in 1971.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

The 82 (purported) Commandments of Gurdjieff

Image from Geoff Olson 

The 82 (purported) Commandments of Gurdjieff 
(via Reyna d’Assia as reported from Alejandro Jodorowsky)

1. Ground your attention on yourself. Be conscious at every moment of what you are thinking, sensing, feeling, desiring, and doing.

2. Always finish what you have begun.

3. Whatever you are doing, do it as well as possible.

4. Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time. 

5. Develop your generosity ‒ but secretly.

6. Treat everyone as if he or she was a close relative.

7. Organize what you have disorganized. 

8. Learn to receive and give thanks for every gift.

9. Stop defining yourself. 

10. Do not lie or steal, for you lie to yourself and steal from yourself.

11. Help your neighbor, but do not make him dependent. 

12. Do not encourage others to imitate you. 

13. Make work plans and accomplish them. 

14. Do not take up too much space.

15. Make no useless movements or sounds.

16. If you lack faith, pretend to have it. 

17. Do not allow yourself to be impressed by strong personalities.

18. Do not regard anyone or anything as your possession.

19. Share fairly.

20. Do not seduce.

21. Sleep and eat only as much as necessary.

22. Do not speak of your personal problems.

23. Do not express judgment or criticism when you are ignorant of most of the factors involved.

24. Do not establish useless friendships.

25. Do not follow fashions.

26. Do not sell yourself.

27. Respect contracts you have signed.

28. Be on time.

29. Never envy the luck or success of anyone.

30. Say no more than necessary.

31. Do not think of the profits your work will engender.

32. Never threaten anyone.

33. Keep your promises.

34. In any discussion, put yourself in the other person’s place.

35. Admit that someone else may be superior to you.

36. Do not eliminate, but transmute.

37. Conquer your fears, for each of them represents a camouflaged desire. 

38. Help others to help themselves.

39. Conquer your aversions and come closer to those who inspire rejection in you.

40. Do not react to what others say about you, whether praise or blame.

41. Transform your pride into dignity.

42. Transform your anger into creativity.

43. Transform your greed into respect for beauty.

44. Transform your envy into admiration for the values of the other.

45. Transform your hate into charity. 

46. Neither praise nor insult yourself.

47. Regard what does not belong to you as if it did belong to you.

48. Do not complain.

49. Develop your imagination.

50. Never give orders to gain the satisfaction of being obeyed.

51. Pay for services performed for you. 

52. Do not proselytize your work or ideas. 

53. Do not try to make others feel for you emotions such as pity, admiration, sympathy, or complicity. 

54. Do not try to distinguish yourself by your appearance.

55. Never contradict; instead, be silent.

56. Do not contract debts; acquire and pay immediately.

57. If you offend someone, ask his or her pardon; if you have offended a person publicly, apologize publicly.

58. When you realize you have said something that is mistaken, do not persist in error through pride; instead, immediately retract it.

59. Never defend your old ideas simply because you are the one who expressed them.

60. Do not keep useless objects.

61. Do not adorn yourself with exotic ideas.

62. Do not have your photograph taken with famous people.

63. Justify yourself to no one, and keep your own counsel.

64. Never define yourself by what you possess. 

65. Never speak of yourself without considering that you might change. 

66. Accept that nothing belongs to you. 

67. When someone asks your opinion about something or someone, speak only of his or her qualities.

68. When you become ill, regard your illness as your teacher, not as something to be hated.

69. Look directly, and do not hide yourself.

70. Do not forget your dead, but accord them a limited place and do not allow them to invade your life.

71. Wherever you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred. 

72. When you perform a service, make your effort inconspicuous. 

73. If you decide to work to help others, do it with pleasure. 

74. If you are hesitating between doing and not doing, take the risk of doing. 

75. Do not try to be everything to your spouse; accept that there are things that you cannot give him or her but which others can.

76. When someone is speaking to an interested audience, do not contradict that person and steal his or her audience.

77. Live on money you have earned. 

78. Never brag about amorous adventures
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79. Never glorify your weaknesses. 

80. Never visit someone only to pass the time.

81. Obtain things in order to share them.

82. If you are meditating and a devil appears, make the devil meditate too.