Here’s a neat little oddity if you like Proggy-Folky-Acidy Rock. From the YT poster:
Here is a copy of the very limited issue of `Carol Of Harvest` on the German `Brutkasten` label (ST 850004), this shows the original issue of which only 200 copies were pressed (there was a later 90`s repress Cat number K850004 same label but this can be identified by the cat number on the run out groove), a copy sold in 2013 for £2923, classified as Folk Prog Rock it sounds very similar in style to `Mellow Candle` & early `Renaissance`. Definitely worth looking out for and the music is great too.
Why not subscribe as I post rarities regularly!
Side 1 1. Put on Your Nightcap (titled `Close To The Edge` on the sleeve) 0:00 2. You & Me 16:04
Side 2 1. Somewhere (titled `Somewhere at the End of Our Rainbow` on the sleeve) 18:45 2. Dreary Eyes (titled `Teary Eyes` on the sleeve) 25:16 3. Try a Little Bit 29:33
Founded in Cadolzburg, Bayern, Germany in 1978 by Alex Schmierer. One of the many German bands to release a single album on a private label and watch it grow into a collector’s dream. Carol of Harvest played a dreamy blend of Progressive Rock and Folk with female vocals that might be compared with Mellow Candle and early Clannad mixed with Jane, Pentangle and Renaissance. The music has the added edge of long arrangements with Moog synth and acid guitar solos, and in reality has little to do with Krautrock. Information on the band members is very hard to find, helping to shroud this hard to find album with an air of mystery.
Rare albums aren’t all that hard to find, but good rare albums sure are–and this one is actually good and I’m honestly kind of bummed that this group didn’t get more attention or anything because they’re, like, good???
I’ve realised that it’s not just the thottiness of Guillermo’s season 3 Bodyguard/Slayer outfit that makes it great, it’s also the fuck-off levels of defiance it embodies.
The major blood vessels in a human body – i.e. the place a vampire would go for – are in the neck, wrists, and inner thighs. All Guillermo’s wardrobe choices show how aware of this he is: his standard “uniform” covers him from neck to feet, he infiltrates the wellness cult in a long-sleeved, tight-necked hoodie and leggings under his shorts, and even at Celeste’s he never takes off the turtleneck. He’s constantly keeping the most vulnerable parts of himself out of sight, presumably as a placebo of protection akin to hiding under the duvet so the boogeyman can’t get you.
Then his slayer outfit comes along with it’s rolled sleeves and open collar and throws all that out of the window – suddenly he’s hanging around whole crowds of vampires (notably not just the one’s he trusts) with his wrists and/or neck exposed. This on it’s own would convey a come-get-me kinda vibe (which it still does, in vampire terms it’s slutty as hell and we love that for him) but then you add in the arsenal of lethal weapons he adds to the ensemble and suddenly this unassuming little familiar is both the bait and the trap all at once. This outfit speaks volumes, and what it’s saying to every vampire in his radius is fuck around and find out.
Guillermo has power over these predators now, and he wants them to know it.
The other day someone posted a question for her followers: If you could only pick one, what would you say is your favorite song? I had to give it some thought, and went through a lot of songs and artists in my head. But then I rephrased the question to myself this way: If I was only going to get to hear one song, one last time, and then no songs forever after that, what would it be? And then I knew the answer: “Family Life” by The Blue Nile.
I don’t think it’s a choice that many people will recognize. The Blue Nile was kind of obscure, and Peace at Last (the album the song is from) didn’t do well commercially.
But the song resonates with me emotionally in a way that’s hard to explain. It relates to my experience as a child, living through my parents’ multiple divorces and remarriages, my elder siblings leaving, growing up isolated and bereft. And then as an adult, building my own family, but surrounded by the spectre of other marriages and families that broke apart, dads moving out to depressing apartments, living through holidays that, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, became less a celebration of family and more a painful reminder of its absence.
It’s a song without much hope. It looks backward rather than forward. But it’s an honest song, one that helps connect me to experiences that have defined who I am and that I don’t want to forget.
like. im serious. when was the last time you read a book and paid attention to every word and actually tried to absorb what you were reading. when was the last time you saw a piece of art and considered the hours it took to bring it into fruition. when was the last time you closed your eyes when listening to an album for a first time and kept them closed until the final song ended. have you gone to the park lately just to watch the birds fly from perch to perch? have you stopped to count your blessings?
I used to be a grader and an occasional substitute prof for an introductory astronomy lab. That means that the majority of the people in this lab are only taking it because it’s a requirement and about half of them think it’s an astrology class.
I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”
I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.
And there was another boy who, during a lab in our observatory where we would look at certain things in the sky, asked where the sun was. At 10pm in November. After some questioning it was revealed that he thought the moon and the sun were the same thing.
My friend, whom I love dearly, found out that the moon orbits the earth as a 20-year-old in an upper-level political science class, and was utterly and completely flabbergasted. When questioned, her defense was that she doesn’t have anything to do with the moon, so why would she have needed to know?
i was once talking to a friend of mine about how at that point in time you could see mars, jupiter, and venus at the same time, which was pretty cool, and she said “where’s pluto? wait, it was destroyed” and that’s how i found out that my friend, who is in her third year of a medical degree, thought that pluto stopped being a planet because it was eaten by a black hole.
When i was in physics class my sophomore year of high school, the teacher drew a simplified diagram of a person standing on the planet earth as part of the explanation for how it was initially discovered that the earth was round. And one girl sitting in the class said “wait… we live on the OUTSIDE???” she had spent her whole life thinking that the earth was a hollow sphere and that we lived on the inner walls of it
i had a coworker in his early twenties who, when i mentioned seeing admiring how bright mars was that morning on the drive to work, laughed and said ‘mars? like the planet?’ and i was like ‘yeah mars the planet. it looks like a very bright star, it was supposed to be extra bright and close lately.’ and he got quiet and oddly worried and he said, quietly, carefully, ’…are planets… real?’ like he was checking to see if i was completely insane.
i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back ’yes. planets are real. did you…. think they weren’t real?’ and he looked even more disturbed and said, ‘no. they’re just made up for movies and shit, right?’ and i was totally horrified by this point and said ‘planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.’
he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, ‘how do you know planets are real?’
i said, ‘i’ve seen them. i’ve seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.’
he said, muttering now, ‘well, maybe that’s just what you think.’
the conversation did not get any better from there.
I am a biologist, and what’s more, in theory I am the kind of biologist who studies wild animals in their natural contexts. I had an ecology component on my qualifying exams. I did my undergraduate work on a process that can lead to speciation. The department I got my PhD in used to be Zoology, before they renamed themselves to sound more up to date.
Some years ago, at a party, I mentioned narwhals and a labmate and colleague told me that what I’d intended to be a fairly serious statement was a funny joke. I was confused, so I asked him some questions.
As it turned out, he thought narwhals, like unicorns, were mythical beings.
The party was a party of other biologists from the department. I… don’t think there is necessarily a worse time to discover that narwhals are very, very real than when you’re surrounded by drunken ecologists who know very well that you, yourself, are halfway through your own dissertation. (In his case, that dissertation was very neurological, but. well. for reference, narwhals are very real.)
I was a child (maybe 6 years old) and my dad pointed out an especially bright star and said “That’s Venus. It’s actually a planet, not a star.” And I said “Do people live there too?” And he said “No, people don’t live there.”
My very young brain interpreted this as “People don’t live there anymore” and for a few years there I thought that there were Greek and Roman-style ruins all over the surface of Venus and that the weather was always cloudy but with a sort of evening golden color all over and a few breaks in the clouds.
(Don’t worry, I learned better, but I still remember what I imagined at the time because, honestly, it was beautiful.)
Noting for the record:
* I read this whole thing in a state of delighted wonder
* part-way through I began to wonder about the possibility that as with all such folklore, the real events were being embellished/misremembered in ways that served the narrative
* this led me to wish that the post would accumulate additions in which we didn’t just have reports of having been present at someone else manifesting this degree of astronomical ignorance, but confessions of having been personally possessed of such a belief, which the reporter subsequently learned to be false
* the last item in the list was from an esteemed person I follow who did just that
Tonight’s the night! The Local Haunt, an original pilot by @seanpersaud & @sineadpersaud inspired by their time working in museums in Salem, Massachusetts while growing up, and workshopped during the 2018 Sundance New Voices Writer’s Lab.
Featuring Jaime Lyn Beatty, Parvesh Cheena, Julia Cho, Tom DeTrinis, @hartgracesarah, Jason Huber, Tara Perry, @seanpersaud, @sineadpersaud, William Joseph Stribling, @marykatewiles, & Jimmy Wong. Art by Sarah Kieley, original theme by Dylan Glatthorn, & sound design by Lizzie Goldsmith.
