Everything's Gone Blue

White Chalk sounds so familiar - it could be no one but PJ Harvey but it is so different from anything else she has done. There must be a sort of idiolect that runs through all her songs that defines her regardless of what she sings. If you are not into 'bleak' then maybe don't get this one. It reminds me so much of my internal images for Victorian Schools - all threat and religion though there is nothing overtly religious about this album other than the tinkling upright piano and the white flouncy dresses. Modern words they are and it does not really matter what they say or even what they mean - that idiolect maintains the importance of the songs without them having to engage you with plot at all. But then isn't that the way with most supposedly intellectual songs. Listen to some of your favourite songs from 16-18 and you'll find that they say nowt and mean less.

The media player has just rolled over into a Wire Tapper CD sampler which has left echoes of White Chalk floating around in my head. It's all so very dreamlike. Something is stealing my ideas, however bad they are.

Holy Cow - I've Gone All Arty.

Listening to White Chalk by PJ Harvey

A good long Interview with Ms Harvey in the pub here.

This CD arrived along with So Percussion's version of Drumming and strangely the two albums convey quite a lot of the same emotions. Drumming always make me think of unpopulated towns in a snowstorm. It has a weird deep level of emotion despite being so scored that there is little scope for adding anything personal to a performance - you have to play it pretty much as it is written. The continuously evolving sequences over the 73 minutes of this version seem to drip sadness in my mind, far more than most songs with lyrics. Quite an achievement for a man who has not exactly had a hard life. He feels for people. What exactly has to be in a tune to make it emotional? Technology is all very well but the ever-moving-forward advances that fill studios with boxes and racks and mixers seem to suck out all the actual point of most music. I know my wife thinks that Steve Reich produces repetitive, emotionless drones but I think they contain some of the deepest meanings possible in music.

My wife and I differ on White Chalk as well. She says that it sounds like a poor night-club singer. I think it probably needs a few listens for me to be able to write anything more about it but the lyrics seem to convey the same sense of mystery that Drumming has always given to me.

Solutions and Mega Noise

Listening to How to Play Your Internal Organs Overnight by Stereolab

I was "offsite" this week - a long way away, North of the Lakes which meant a pleasant and surprisingly short drive. I came back alongside Lake Windermere and was quite shocked to find it busier than when I was last there in the height of summer. I suppose it does rain sometimes which keeps a few people inside. There seemed to be a lot of people wearing face masks - like Doctors wear - not the Halloween/bank robber type. I would assume that it was against traffic fumes rather than any form of Cumbrian Flu. I didn't stop but just driving alongside the lake was nice in a very low-level sort of way. I was tempted to stop at the Dante Rediscovered exhibition in Grasmere but I think maybe I would have been pushing the definition of Company Time. I was once nearly persuaded to visit Alton Towers on the way home from a meeting in Nottingham but reality got the better of us both and we turned back. Oh well. And I still cross out any Alcohol from the receipts I submit for expenses. Sad I am.

Catching Stars.

Listening to 10 by Kate Rusby

I was back with Godel, Escher, Bach last night. This has been neglected for sometime while we plough through various DVDs one of which is the Box Set of Peep Show. However, as a result of watching the latter I can now only hear Mitchell and Webb as Achilles and the Tortoise. I just can’t get away from the required irony that the dialogues have. It didn’t help that last night’s discussion needed absolute concentration. I kept expecting the Tortoise to say “Isn’t that right Supper Hans?” The question now is which is Mitchell and Which is Webb. From appearances Mitchell would be The Tortoise and Webb does have the touch of Greek Hero about him.

I don’t often talk about work stuff but I have to mention something that got me spooked yesterday. I am trying to do some ftp stuff in .net and prior to discovering that my ftp client dll already had a nicely structured put and get I was trying some low-level stuff involving byte arrays about which I have come to the conclusion that they are the .net equivalent of the badly-behaved trucks in the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. Despite clearing the array after it’s definition, it would display the bytes I had previously loaded into it. I shut down the environment and whenever I came back the newly defined buffer had the same bytes in it. I suppose I might be showing my lack of knowledge of the low level behaviour of bytes and bits but I am a simple soul and if there is a high-level way of doing something I will do it. It was a bit like And the Cat Came Back.

... If It Works at all

We once ordered a copy of The Ladybird book - How It Works ... The Computer (all the pages are here) and I was going to send it to one of our PM's as he sure needed it. However, I actually learnt something from it myself so we kept it. I may have mentioned this before along with my absolute devotion to the unreal world of the The Ladybird book of the weather which unfortunately seems to have vanished from the Internet. However, my search for it has come up with this site about design which has made me me read something about Bad PowerPoint. I don't actually use PowerPoint very often (at all) but No more than six words per slide seems Spartan indeed. I can agree with no dissolves as they always infuriate me and they infuriate me on the web as well. I love design - I'm just rubbish at it. When I was at college we had no software to allow us to do any design. Sometimes we might get let loose on graphics software but then it was simply for technical stuff like 3d models. I once went out and took measurements of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, stuffed them into a pascal program and actually got out a rotatable wire frame model. I had to cycle half-way across the city to find a site with a plotter to allow me to get a hard copy. First geek-points to me there.

Super Hedges

Listening to World Service by Man Jumping

Try getting hold of this one!

Geograph is an attempt to get at least one photo from every Ordnance Survey Grid Square in the country. This inevitably means that all the interesting ones already have many photographs taken in them but I don’t think that stops you putting more up. Of course if you live in some remote cottage in the mountains of Lewis then feel free to push them towards completeness.

This photo shows the house at Llandanwg we used to stay in for holidays. This was usually October Half-term which means the weather was sometimes pretty appalling but we liked it. The sound of the sea was always present and we had the whole of the northern part of the bay to look at with Criccieth twinkling in the distance.

Moleskinning

Try here for things we can never match up to.

And planner seen – one of them should be, out of its paper case and in the sunlight and air so that it may decay as all paper is designed to. This acid-free life is just killing everything with longevity. 17 Clips on the heavy duty, designed to keep everything together like all this technology cannot. And half-way through everything today is then point of no return – the day, my life if I don’t have anything to do with it, I might make it that far – like my Grandfather or the Marathon woman or every parent throughout the world horrified by everything they read and everything their children tell them. How clever is this to shout down those who think you the cleverest? A drone for backing with history and humid light.

Thanks to Lily Briscoe



Who is thinking of that tip-tap sound that toe-caps make? I hate that sound. It makes me think of stuffy rooms and over-dressing, of over-confidence and arrogance. Never stop around for that will you. Hypothetical questions abound in this arena. Can they see me watching them and analysing? My thoughts might be their thoughts, poetic aspersions as to what they are thinking behind those common, familial eyes. Like cuckoos in the rough trees of this night. I imagine this wood we walk through when none of us are here, silent I think in my interpretation of the old philosophical question because of course the sounds are only sounds when they hit the grey stuff up here behind my own inherited ghosts and empties that will be some time. The rest of the time they are just movements of air in an empty space.

First is Victoria, green haired in these unrevolutionary times, trying to be different and yet attached to some distant past like she will fall off thew world should she let go of her precious records and strange time-stretch that stops her leaving the last decade she felt comfortable in. I can't even work out if she was even born in this decade and did the other things or maybe I just can't be bothered to make that simple addition for after all it it nothing beyond the simple maths of the Kindergarten.

Time passes, sometime with a war in it, a brief explosion of something more horrific that we have ever known, unfilmable because all those who died before, in those wars of horse and arrow and cannon, did so just as terribly but somehow in a place separate from the world - they leave with banners and with flags and either come back with same or just as memory in a piece of paper or maybe never. I hear dreams and folk tales of men gone off to war 700 years ago and just vanished into the tight alleyways of those dusty cities. And each one is a cause and effect made different in the way of this world, a complete reverse of history, of a leaching out if the many worlds. Her Grandfather loses a leg to one of his own guns, a repeater exploding in his trench. It only scrapes him but infection gets him and now back there in memory, she sees him limping heavily on the same prosthetic they gave him back home before shocking him into some sort of sanity. He was no officer though I see this family as from that background. He loved his men and his commanding officer loved him. And now his peace belongs to Victoria, loving him a peaceful man in a peaceful family who loves her despite the green hair and the strange outlook as he sees it.

He left under banners with all his mates and they saw glory in the acres of mud that gradually took over there world as they slowly came to it, on trains and boats and more trains and slow marches to sit down with tea until the time came to either sleep or die. This is war in a muddy garden, pointless and pained, slow and irrelevant against the quick sweep of troops that came later. All they did was create a 20-year-long lull until the horrors of what my grandfathers called "The last lot". And it was the last we hope depite the trenched that still exist around this world. It seems to no longer to matter to us as long as it doesn't happen here. We cannot foil all of our enemies because we created them and they remain in our head until we die at their hands or ours. Maybe we are still in a lull she thinks --- or I think for maybe her thoughts are mine and she is who I wished to be all those years ago, silent while they watched their precious and trashy television and I sat back, bored and yawning until they would talk again, excited about blues or jazz or maybe the drugs they said they took but which I never saw. Sister of the blessed is Lily, jazzy and beautiful, from this age without war and suffering. Even, unwaged, she lives happily and without needs other than envy and laughter. Yes - Sister of the blessed she is.

Chilled Frankincense

In Eyeless sand and heat,
the trashy faith of blinded zeal,
is pressed to immobility,
to give us unplanned words,
that tell of devolution.

The Barefoot Doctor Who

Listening to Uh Huh Her by PJ Harvey



I am obviously not able to wait for White Chalk and will be using my new-found confidence to develop a time machine. Of course it will only be used for retrieving future releases of music and DVD. One of the first sci-fi stories I read was an Asimov tale about the development of a time machine which suggested that people would not use such a device for the big stuff but rather for petty point-scoring, checking up on spouses alibis and that sort of thing. Sad but true. talk of Time Travel reminds me that we eventually got around to listening to the reading of The Stone Rose - it came free with the radio Times. Even the youngest was rapt in the car and David Tennant was great at separating the various characters; it must be difficult to switch between the different voices.

Reading Joy Division Stuff in the Guardian, and Regeneration by Pat Barker.