PayPal credit card facility available now!

In the beginning there was The Party Machine..

Mike's Pith & Wind - Culture
I’ve been reviewing my early catalogue lately for reasons that will become apparent in the next few weeks and I suppose it must be this exercise which has conjured up consideration of the context in which this stuff was naively produced in the first place - that and the odd retrospective show on the telly like the Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words series produced by BBC Four.
In Their Own Words observes amongst other things that the pop music revolution that I and my fellow musicians were cheerfully imitating in the farthest reaches of the Commonwealth was part of the unravelling of the elitist social system that had held sway so effectively in Britain and the colonies – until the advent of the swinging sixties that is.
In Culture Wars, the third and final pisode of In Their Own Words, much time and effort was devoted to the redefining the word ‘culture’ itself. Even after the Second World War it had a very narrow definition with only elitist connotations from which the working classes were consciously and conscientiously excluded.
In fact, culture in those times simply meant The Arts, and what qualified as The Arts was defined by art experts who were without exception unashamedly elitist, even if, like the most rabid elitist of the era, FR Neavis, (whom I’d not heard of before), they weren’t born into the upper class..
Part of the process of reinventing Western democracies after the war was the democratisation of.. read more

You wanna learn guitar or buy a classic piece of equipment? Check the classifieds

Dick's Toolbox - Eats roots and leaves
The book ‘Eats, Roots and Leaves’ – an open minded approach to grammar - is an apt description of the wombat, as wombats are obtuse nocturnal animals with the mentality and demeanour of diminutive bulldozers. They also are oblivious to the demands of punctuation but are unusual in that their droppings are square. At a distance they have a certain fuzzy likeability and the distance I prefer is, at the moment, far off. However as we do actually live in the suburban bush and native fauna is quite common, one wombat decided that living under our house would be a good idea. Not a particularly difficult operation as the front of the house is nearly two metres off the ground and that access was temporarily easy as the ember screening had been partially removed whilst I built new decks. The wombat ignored the fact that, whilst no doubt easier than actually burrowing in clay out in the wind and rain, there were already residents above and central heating ducting below that were.. read more