Alf too blogs

In "Who Are You" she writes:

I don’t feel comfortable with happiness.
It is a strange bed fellow.
I must address this immediately.
My favourite hen has gone missing. I fear the fox has eaten her.

Just sticking my head it to say allo and howdy-do.

Stumbled onto Alison's blog today and, you know, she's just like us. Blogging about happiness, chunky knit sweaters, her being labeled as an "80s singer", her holiday in France and apparently, a favorite pet hen. It's a good read as any blog and you can comment too. I must confess that beyond "Alf" in which a cassette tape release is my only possession of her solo material - I have not yet ventured onto anything more. And I should. I'm a grown-up now and the phases are over. Let's put them all in a pot and taste the brilliance. Music! Yum! And her voice has always been one of soulful and beautiful. By the way, don't try and google "Yaz", you will be disappointed.

Alison's blog.

Website Proper.

ATC for Inspire Me Thursday

OK, here's my try at Inspire Me Thursday's "Artist's Trading Cards." I had recently bought some Prismacolar fine line markers and wanted to try them out already. They're a little too fine, but I guess great for details. Trading cards make me think of super heroes so I drew one. The other is sort of a design much like the post-it doodles that I sometimes make. Hope you like.

Astrona

The Astrona blog is a great place to see some fantastic space art (if you're into that sort of thing.) I myself love it, like this picture painted by Andrew C. Stewart. There are some great works of art depicting scenes of space, planets, planetary landscapes, spaceships, alien civilizations, space colonies, robots and more. Some are old, some are new and most seem to be done digitally. But they're all fantastic and I'm glad someone is devoting a blog to this genre of art. Check it out. Thank you.

SC - Collector Personality

I used to collect Tarot cards. I don't anymore. But I still have all the decks that I have collected from over the years. I acquired them mostly by going to those metaphysics shops and looking at the large array of cards and picking out the ones that appealed to me. Some were gotten from book stores and some were even bought from the Internet.

I did use them. At first to read the future and then as a tool for understanding myself and solve problems I may be having at a given moment.

Now that I'm more of a skeptic, the mystical appeal of these cards have been lost to me. I still do treasure them and still think they are fascinating. So many artists have rendered their own imaginations and given them their own personal depictions of these cards. Which is why they were so collectible to me.

I had been so fascinated by the cards that I had also bought just about every book on the subject. Including a two volume set of - I would say - more than 500 pages each of its history. These were like bedtime stories for me.

It took quite a while to get it down and memorize the meaning behind all 78 cards and use them in readings. But through practice upon practice, I was able to do it without looking through the books for reference. I had even written my own small volume on its meanings and reading methods. Now lost to me. I've been out of practice and would have to pretty much start all over again if I was to do a reading.

It actually all began when we took a trip out to Salem Mass. It was one of those high school trips you take with your class and teacher. While hitting the many stores in the area, I saw a beginner's tarot pack of cards. It wasn't a full deck. It only contained the 22 major arcana cards. But that was my first purchase in the Tarot card world. I think I was 17 at the time. It was compulsory after that whenever I took a trip to a bookstore or visited one of those shops to purchase a deck.

I had written about this before on another blog sometime ago, but since I've never really collected any other thing with a passion before (well, maybe comics) I decided to revisit it for Sunday Scribblings.

Thanks to for reading.

Post-It Doodle No. 6

Just a little doodle to break the silence.

I call this "Anxiety"

My Kingdom for a Swan

I'm eagerly waiting for the new Siouxsie & The Banshee's release of Mantaray. You can hear snippets from the new album on the official Mantaray website. V V good!

Dave Gahan's new album Hourglass sounds promising, after hearing Kingdom. Could very easily fit into Mode's Playing The Angel. Hear a snippet of Kingdom at DG's myspace thingy. Surprisingly good.

Secession - Touch

80's Synth-Pop band Secession performing "Touch" on BBC's Oxford Road Show.

You could call them the one-hit wonder with this song. It became popular enough to be covered by another singer, which I can't recall at the moment. From what I remember it wasn't close to being good as the original. With a couple of 12" records released and only one album titled "A Dark Enchantment," they disappeared and went into 80s synth-pop heaven never to be heard from again.

I had been on the lookout for this album on CD for quite sometime and never found it. I gave up on it eventually until a thoughtful popster-blogger friend pointed me to the right direction and then I was in nostalgia heaven. So I looked to see if they had any videos out and this was the only thing out there.



You don't get to see the members much other than the vocalist. But this is more for the sound rather than the vision.