Don Jooan

Music - La Roque 'n' Roll - The Baltimore Consort

The text of Une nimphe jolie get as racy as anything Diego Riviera could make up but because it is in French it somehow seems less tacky. The link here only gives you the first verse so imagine the rest. Do you think you get French people putting on English accents to appear more romantic?

Stopped again. I get ten minutes into my lunch hour and if I cannot write anything, I feel like the time is wasted. Sometimes I might drag myself offline to write a poem and indeed I did that this morning. I have stopped posting as many poems because I am trying to make them a bit more constructed rather than the written live things. That may remove some of the immediacy of them but then again I can pay attention to the structure. I used to think that poetry had a mysterious structure at all times, something that I could never really know. Well there are indeed rules to certain forms of verse but in all the rules are the ultimate "There to be broken"s to such an extent that poetry almost never has a rule. Do what you feel like doing. I tried a sonnet the other day and dutifully looked up the form and came up with this.

Falling 31/08/2003

When, in the town, I find myself awake,
or hungry wanting tales of quality,
my mind would wander, spill or break
my thoughts like fish in this still sea.
and with my love, a princess of temerity,
I would jump to earth from some higher place
where our gods live in their quiet serenity
and watch my heart in sacred, summer race,
beat alone and shining brightly in the evening trace.
as we would kiss and meet our gentle end,
together and with our spirits’ sense of grace,
while in the breeze, like trees my love would bend,
severe, unsmiling with the rights of poetry
to end its story with a rhyme of gravity.

It sounds forced to me but I did do it over a lunchtime again. Practice I suppose. The again if you don't follow any rules you end up with this. I did try one in this style and will post it if I can find it.

How about a poem starting off like ee cummings and gradually becoming more structured. And then segueing into prose. It would be like the slide from a complicated time signature to a more conventional one like in Blue rondo a la Turk. Actually, thinking about it, it would be more like the slide from the simple time to the fussy rhythm. Poetry is prose with a rigid rhythm and all in between. It seems that my idea about the rules being broken has gone too far in some cases. Another idea coming in from the outfield here. The first things I wrote for the Midi control in VB was a random note/interval program which just chose random notes from all 12 (along all octaves) and played them at random intervals. You may think this sounds horrible but after a while it became a sort of high-tension sound track. I changed it by making the time intervals regular and then selecting the notes from a particular scale rather than all 12 so that the music sounded a bit more structured. I was basically teaching the program how to play music in an accepted form. With the Steve Reich simulator I have built in rules for which notes sound good together. Maybe I could create a program that started out with a completely random idea of which notes to play and which time intervals to use and gradually "learned" to play musically. Watch this space. I need another hour in the evening.

There is just so much to keep us interested so why does everyone just talk about football. The usual dichotomy of what is and is not real news comes in here. Why does one footballer missing a drug test become the main news story? Maybe my attention span is not long enough. The worst thing which happened to white people since World War II - Srebrenica - if you want to start measuring using the numbers involved. Our perceptions of the world are all wrong. We are carrying out the greatest cover-up ever on the state of the world today. Do we do so because we would go mad if we did not? Or because the effort involved in making it better is just too much for us. The effort involved in making it better is nothing to the amount spent on Hair-Dressing or "Cheap" TV or any number of trivial, passionless things which we involve ourselves with. Mark Steel was ranting on about the lack of passion in society. His final tirade on the Byron program last night was how the music business is fake and engineered and yet they go ahead and show the process which proves this on TV and we WATCH it and still buy the drivel they put out. He said it was like playing "Find the Lady" with the cards face up.

Lack of passion in Music a problem for you? Then buy the new improved "Must I Paint You a Picture?". For all you passion requirements.