Bon Jovi, Heartbreak Eyes.

This apparently is a lost demo from the first Bon Jovi album. The user who posted it has a ton of similar outtakes, demos and so on (man, gonna be here all night!), but Bon Jovi has a particular place in my heart, so this is something a little special for me.

Cos... one of the fucked up things, for me, about the invention of sound and video capture technology is that even while it gives us chance to have the past at our fingertips, it really rams home the fact that you can't have it all, ever. There's more material already on record than any one person could ever sift for everything they wanted to hear, and much of it locked in vaults or forgotten in attics where you couldn't get to it anyway; and that's before you start asking for the stuff that wasn't caught on the magic reels, the one-nights-only that nobody taped, the old episodes that the BBC threw out. The rehearsals where someone achieved that one perfect riff while the deck wasn't running.

And even what we do capture and get to general release, is never the same as being there. This is why I love eighties hair metal videos and watch them with tears in my eyes; they're like tiny perfect splinters, sent shattering to the winds when the nineties put a sledgehammer through my sonic birthright and sent the pieces flying through time on the precarious wings of VH1 Classic and fans' old tape collections. And somehow, miraculously, they survived until now, twenty years later, they can embed themselves under my skin and dump their small cargos of preserved light and sound and beauty into my veins. I'm staring through a Youtube-sized, pixellated window into an age that doesn't exist any more and probably never did outside the daydreams of a pack of fluffy-haired adolescents in tight trousers, and it hurts so much to know that it was broken before I ever got there - but I can never stop hunting for more pieces.

...maybe some part of me still does believe that one day I'll find them all and be able to put it back together. *soft smile*

Rath

Hello everybody...

First, I'd like to just direct anyone who doesn't read my Livejournal ((lj)faithinfire) over there briefly to this post featuring a photo of my NEW TATTOO! ^____^ Mostly I posted this as a thank you to everyone who's donated to the Rath Tattoo Fund over the last couple of years - so if that's you, please go and see!

Meanwhile, in other news, I am having terminally bad luck with matters musical today. A moment of silence, please, for a fallen trooper - the half-dead ghettoblaster in our kitchen saw fit to irretrievably chew up my old cassette copy of the Last Action Hero soundtrack. :( It's not that I can't replace it, but that tape was one of my old tapes, from when I was a teenager; one of the ones I picked up for cheap in one of the tiny, dusty old record stores in Bradford that I haunted on Friday afternoons when I'd sneaked out of school. Those tapes, the ones I bought with stashed dinner money back before I was even old enough to go to gigs on my own, are practically like horcruxes or something - there's a piece of my soul in every one, and to have one of them die such a sorry death is more gutting than it has any right to be. "Farewell my friend, you will be missed!" :(

And in the meantime, I also just discovered I've lost my copy of The Rasmus's Dead Letters, which is really annoying because I've had the gorgeous "F-F-F-Falling" stuck in my head for a day and a half now and really want to play it again on something other than YouTube. Did I lend that CD to anyone, by any chance? *peers forlornly into the abyss*

Laters,
Rath

Just saw a Youtube video for Sonata Arctica's The Worlds Forgotten, The Words Forbidden. However there was an unfortunate grocer's apostrophe inserted, so as to make my initial mental parsing come out as:

"Sonata Arctica: The world's forgotten the words."

Much as laughing at that cheered me up, I still feel that the poster deserves the Captain America icon for it. And to all the people saying we should let the misplaced apostrophe pass as "correct" and simply call it a change in usage - this sort of thing is why I disagree with you.

In other news, I finally cracked and subscribed myself to several wrestling fan comms over on LJ. I'd been trying to avoid this as I hate doing the thing where I drift in and out of fandoms and pick up a whole long tail of comms on my friendslist in the process, but it sat on my head until I didn't have a choice. Sigh. Still, maybe I'll make some new friends. ^_^

Finally, after sorting out my situation as much as I can - bad news, folks. I can't afford to keep the Lyndon any more, and this time I'm serious, there is no way out of it and I'm not getting my money's worth out of her anyway. :( So if anyone is interested in, or knows anyone who'd be interested in, buying a part-renovated, late-seventies 25' GRP river cruiser (working engine, safety certificate for the next couple of years, perfectly functional and usable but cosmetically in need of some more work), please do get in touch! Given the current economic climate, price is "make me an offer" - though for the record I paid £6,000 for her and would be very grateful to recoup that at least.

I don't want to do this but I'm going to be grownup about it, dammit. She deserves someone who can take better care of her than I can. :/

Laters,
The Navigator