[1]
Electric cars, phooey! Just not buying
this shit. If a full sized car is going to be electric, let it have four wheels
drive as standard. Four WHEELS drive, not wheel? Yes, no central motor, or even
one unit per axel. Each wheel hub should constitute its own armature. A wheel
doesn’t NEED a motor when it IS one. Any electric car that even looks like it’s
pretending to be an internal combustion driven thing is not worth bothering
with.
Having said TV at, smaller electric cars
should be three-wheelers as standard, configured with two wheels at the front
and one at the rear, giving greater stability than those in the current
tricycle mode. OK, they might look a tad like the old Morgan Sports car (as my dad
had in the Mid-Thirties), but style is no drawback. They won’t need a leather
strap across the bonnet to keep the engine in! They won’t have an engine, just a
low c-of-g battery.
Talking of where to sling your batteries,
why don’t electric cars simply change their cells instead of wasting time having
to top up with fuel? With a proper, standard modular system, a battery change
shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. And they could have two, three,
four or fourteen more cells… depending
on the load. Battery technology could then evolve without requiring major
upgrades to the car.
Actually, it’s a petrol/diesel head
mentality that’s driving this race to electrify the roads. No thought is being
given to such pedestrian concerns as parking and manoeuvrability in restricted
spaces. By including rear- as well as front-wheel steering control, true
electric cars will save on parking space as well as carbon emissions. Instead
of starting with a clean drawing board, designers are falling over each other
in the race to combine classic car lines with plastic tech looks. A glance at the
LRVs used to drive on the Moon during the Apollo missions would
give them an idea of what to do. Functionality needs to be the well-spring of
invention not an afterthought.
Finally, there is cost. A basic, electric powered buggy with two seats and a baggage rack, with a good enough range for commuting and shopping trips, can be imported from China for twenty-five hundred Zealots. So, why are all the entry level electric cars costing twenty times that? Phooey!
[2]
talking straight bananas
yeller as the day is long
air guitars no cool
stick it up your billabong
on the point of getting booed
do another song
cut the cookie change of mood
cross the Aussie Rubicon
call me Corporal Mudd
stage a flipping Carry-on
Glasgow Empire sniffing blood
belt & braces thin
line between us understood
sitting on a drawing pin
smile as all is good
give ‘em like another ring
[3]
Art Technology & Fame
In a slightly altered version of pop music
history, McCartney & Lennon don’t meet up but still, Paul goes on to enjoy
a successful career as a songwriter and performer. So, what then becomes of a
particular song, one he started writing long before the McCartney-Lennon brand
would appear… When I’m Sixty-four?
Though it’s probably not going to end up
on the first globally successful, truly psychedelic pop album (Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band), the tune of When I’m Sixty-four is so good and its lyrics
are so amusing, the song is bound to make it somehow. Though not as Beat or Rock’n’roll
music. It’s really a novelty piece, closer to The Teddy Bears’ Picnic or Nellie
The Elephant than… say… She Was Just Seventeen (Y’know what I mean). So, I
imagine some smart producer, maybe even yer man George Martin himself, picking it
up and getting Clive Dunn to spiel-sing it (Dunn was the Senior Citizen
Impersonator who created Jonsie The Butcher in Dad’s Army). When I’m 64
actually goes to Number One, say Christmas, 1967. Take McCartney out of the
Beatles and you’ve still got a hugely popular tunesmith under the hood. It’s
just that he can’t make it so big without the whole Beatlemachine’s Yeah-Yeahs behind
him. As a singer, Paul might have filled a niche somewhere between Tommy Steele
and Cliff, and he would have been known for some of his own songs, Blackbird
Singing in the Dead of Night, for inst. But numbers as diverse as Let It Be and Martha My Dear would have been sold to the highest
bidder. The Show Band as an Art Form that the Beatles became was the sum of
many elements, and McCartney himself has more than most other Pop Stars.
What brought the crucial elements of
popular music culture together in the 1960s? Technology, for one thing, Fame
for another. A huge feature of 60s numbers is how they were produced on the
spur of the moment. Get Off My Cloud by the Rolling Stones, written by Richard
& Jagger in a hotel room between gigs. Help written by Lennon when the
Beatles were desperate for a hit to finish their latest film with. Audiences
wanted songs that told the story of their group’s fame. The availability of portable
tape machines and the sublimest form of demand – popular acclaim - drove those
cats to creative extremes. Take fame and technology away from the artists in
the Beatles’ & the Stones’ machines and suddenly a great slew of their
songs is erased. There is no Midnight Rambler, no Hey Jude or Imagine. Tell me
the last time you heard a street pianist at a railway station playing their unknown rock anthems and people
are going like where do I know that tune from?
Isn’t that Mick Jagger covering Sinatra numbers wearing a WH Auden mask?
Imelda, get your diamond encrusted skates on, Yer Man is gonna do One Last Song!
When does the Music become the Musical?
It’s this: you get yourself a
Beatlemachine and you can write out your own winning lottery ticket. You are there with your Tardis-in-a-pen; scan here and paste it there, produced, edited
and with extra scenes by customising AI bots. Sure. You’re the rich kid at
school. Celebrity Chef? Take whatever you like from the shelves! In fact, nuts
to the cops and the press, we’ll pay YOU to shoplift here in future. Turn just
about anything into product: Ringo's nail clippings, anyone? Putting it coyly.
 |
Still Not Closed On Sundays! |
