1. Dusk over Hindukush, Romboor , 2. Obama, 3. Left, left, left - right - left, 4. An Old one., 5. we are the future, 6. Eye

Last week I had to walk a couple of miles of it for the first time, arcing from the White Horse cut into the chalk hill at Uffington down along the Ridgeway to reach Wayland’s Smithy.

Did you ever walk a road that’s five thousand years old? People have been crossing the country on The Ridgeway since Neolithic times. In some context: when the Ridgeway first came into use, the average lifespan was around 35 years. And those people were in the grip of massively disruptive conceptual revolution: the revolution of farming. The Ridgeway was the connective tissue between these new things, settlements, forming on the dry chalk hills. And with the advent of the continuity of a generation or two in the same place for the first time came the first inkling of history. The Ridgeway predates the White Horse, and Wayland’s Smithy, and very probably Avebury and Stonehenge. This is the path people walked when they first thought about how to talk to time.

I’ve read that it used to run longer — that it used to run down from the west to the southern coast of Dorset, and east all the way to the sea at Norfolk. A diagonal cut across the country from sea to sea.

Funny thing: walking the Ridgeway, everyone who passed gave a smile and a sunny "Good afternoon!" or "Hello!". Everyone, in other words, suddenly became terribly English.

My dad was a sailor for a while: he always said he simply couldn’t resist the idea of being paid to see the world. And, as far as I know, he served chiefly on the Oriana. I think it may have been the first passenger liner of its type to have a swimming pool — he was certainly under the impression it was. His career as a sailor seems to have been as fraught as his career in the Queen’s Lifeguards (where he was once complicit in giving the Queen a horse with the shits for a public appearance), the high point probably being his missing the ship entirely during shoretime on Fiji and being "imprisoned" for jumping ship in what was basically a hut he was politely asked to return to at nights.

He was in his early twenties when he sent this postcard — presumably nicked out of the ship’s shop — to my grandma. I’m not sure which direction the Oriana would have been steaming in, at this point. Research tells me that she was off Long Beach in March 1962, getting a gash cut in her side by an aircraft carrier. Dad never mentioned it. He never talked a lot about those years, because it bugged my mother, who had never gotten to travel and somehow resented my dad for his experiences. So I never got many details: just the sense that travel was worth doing, and that my dad believed he’d been made a better man by it.

I didn’t get to New Zealand and Australia until my early thirties. But I got there. It’s a weird thing, I suppose, to see the path of your father’s footsteps curling around the entire world. But I like it.

I also like that the silly bastard’s pen ran out during that unintelligible squiggle at the end and he just had to get a pencil to explain that.

* Ordering the people on Whitechapel who want to make comics to reveal themselves.

* The audio of Willow Bl00’s most recent Seattle Transhuman Salon

* The provisional list of comics singles and graphic novels on release this week (already corrected by Jonathan Hickman)

* More new mixes posted by the Whitechapel DJ community

* And The Weekly Listening Thread

The T-Stick is "a gestural musical controller designed and built by Joseph Malloch. The T-Stick can sense where and how much of it is touched, tapping, twisting, tilting, squeezing, and shaking."

And at Mapping The T-Stick, there is a sequence of videos showing the thing being played.

Vanessa says "I recommend playing all the videos at once, personally. The sound is
more fun that way." And it is kind of weird. She adds: "Joe is already in the middle of the next version of this thing, and this time it is made out of bamboo with sensors on the inside and it is looking very cool."

Thor at Highpoint describes it as "weird psychogeography themed around Dalston, drones, guitars, electronic noises and movies, and also nice beers," which works well enough for me that I’m hoping to make it there. Details are at the link, and you can investigate the four acts involved right here at Highpoint’s site.

Remember: if you see a big pissed bloke with no hair slumped in the corner, that’s not actually a drummer. That’s me.

The podcast feed for The 4am is: http://warrenellis.com/?feed=podcast

15: Janglenauts

Parlovr - “Pen To The Paper” (4:38)

Hot Pink Zer0 - “Edie Edie Edie” (3:33)

BlackMath - “Reading Mysteries” (1:39)

Ancient Pistol - “Massive” (3:26)

Shiverdrain & The You And What Army Faction - “Quarantine” (3:54)

Not much in the way of notes this time, as I’m pretty exhausted from a week’s holiday (funny how it always works like that).

Parlovr live in Mile End in the middle of Montreal, and have an album forthcoming this October. And they make that chiming sound I love so much. Just like the way Hot Pink Zer0 invoke Edie, thereby evoking that Sixties/Factory-obsessed period of my youth. “Reading Mysteries” is, I think, the shortest track from the demo they sent me, which I mention because they have a huge amount of stuff for you to seek out.

Ancient Pistol’s Mike Feeney notes ” Also am the principle of Questionable Priorities Records, a label for AP releases and under construction. I figured truth-in-advertising was the best path and frankly defense.” Shiverdrain & The You And What Army Faction plainly have the best band name since Lothar & The Hand People — I was actually surprised to find their piece to be an evening tide of minimal electroacoustics, and a fine way to play out the programme.

It’s harder than you thought, walking from the battle at the end of time and
down a street that reeks of entropy and fire and spilled lives. Your eyes aren’t
dry. Neither is the alien sky.

* Also, we have discussion threads open for ANNA MERCURY #3, this week’s comics releases, and, of course, yesterday’s FREAKANGELS.

Learn to love the taste of water rats, America. Because John McCain did during the 18 years he was floating upside down in a flooded Vietnamese paddy field, and in November that’s what you poor bastards are getting for dinner.

* slugline to an issue of comics anthology BUZZ, many years ago