Oh ****, not another phylum

Apologies for the lack of text on the page I am about to link you to but the pictures are worth it I promise. The Strange World of 1984 - from Life magazine. These images give a strange quality which somehow seems to be exactly in keeping with the book. There was a programme on BBC 4 (TV) yesterday about the real room 101 which complemented the Chris Langham Forrest Gumpesque programme about Orwell the other week. It wasn't particularly in depth but as it concentrated on the sources for the room of worst nightmares, it did give a fresh slant on the whole Orwell mania that seems to be about at the moment (to which I am adding of course). It was particularly good to hear John Hurt (Winston Smith in 1984's ... er ... nineteen-eighty-four), talking about the rats which ran straight up to him, looked him in the eye and then turned tail, farting in his face as they did so - never work with children or animals dear boy ... or Michael Winner obviously. As they played the bit from the Black and White TV version with Peter Cushing, where Winston betrays Julia - "Do it to Julia - not me.", my wife said that she couldn't work out why he caved in so easily. Must be a long time since she read it. The depth of the indoctrination is enough for Winston to genuinely believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother says so; betraying the one person left alive who you love(d) to avoid your worst nightmare would be easy. I spent some time trying to work out what my room 101 experience would be but I couldn't come up with any one thing, just a succession of various middling worries. Of course BB would know what it really was even if I didn't. What if your room 101 fear was the fear of the result of being placed in room 101 - ie being broken by the experience. Would that be a win for BB or for you? I can still do self-reference when I want to. When I was younger it was difficult to work out where Orwell was coming from; but now I know that you don't have to believe that nineteen-eighty has any one message other than isn't BB horrible. You can spend all day looking for parallels between the USSR and Animal farm or for signs of Britain's descent into Totalitarianism in nineteen-eighty-four, but the bottom line is watch out and don't let this happen. As Orwell himself says - "Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious"

I have just noticed that Winston Smith in the Life magazine cartoons looks like John Hurt which is quite strange but is probably because I am looking for similarities rather than differences. Wonderul painting of John Hurt here. I now have Quentin Crisp's voice bouncing around in my head. Today is not going to go well. My aunt seems to remember meeting him in London during the last war. My aunt is in a photograph on the cover of one of the VE day celebration magazines. I have been trying to find the picture on the web but I suspect I will have to scan it if she lets me. Actually, this picture may just be it. If it is, then she is one of the young ladies on the bonnet of the lorry.

Faith! Not Wanting to know what is true. - Nietzsche
The penalty good people pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by people WORSE! than themselves. - Plato
I can feel his mind decaying, only inches away from me. - Gary Numan ( Friday Joke)

I am sure every sixth former has noticed this but it has only just occurred to me that almost half of the name Nietzsche is the Russian word for "no". Too many letters, thats his problem.

Why would anyone want to kill Veronica Guerin?

I want to write down music - not the notes - just to be able to type away and evoke whatever the music moves within me. From the following can you guess what I am listening to?

Little high sounds, the distant empty people walk like you and me but miss the point. We are not them and never will be. The sound of souls avoiding exits from the world with blankness and desire for oblivion. We are not paranoid. We never now the sadness because men have stolen all emotion from us with their plans for one whole mind. We celebrate diversity and then must beat it out again with weapons made from what we call the truth. We do not let the people carry guns and yet we must have them for out protection. Victims are all paid by the hour. We are America and is it legal for us to burn the symbols of any country. When does a man who burns the flag of a country become a terrorist? Define terrorist. Write only on one side of the paper. We put the evil men with victims and they all fight. They only burnt a flag. You burnt families. Thinking is dangerous for anyone; someone might actually have a good idea and then where would we be? We can't have everybody thinking of things to make things better because then the people who actually get paid to think of things would have nothing to do. They could invent teapots which don't drip or a safe birth control (instead of getting some ****** to roam the moon). Go and count paper clips and see where that gets us. The Government needs an inventory of paper clips. Because of course they still need paper in the restrooms don't they. The world belongs to Alice in Wonderland. Well Alice was the only sane one so maybe the world belongs to the Duchess - she was the maddest of the lot. Little pigs, little pigs, let me in. Lets send him to the moon. It must have been years. Rock and roll with save the world if it ever saves itself.

Piggies and Piggies.

Falling for the world.

Sole Survivor of Cloud Eight

Soundtrack - Treasure - Cocteau Twins

Find your own link Script Kiddies.

There is some debate on whether this blog by an MP is hip and cool or just plain annoying. He says that all the kids who read it 'get the joke' (See the BBC article). Well I am a Guardian reader (on occasions), over 30 and I think it is a sad attempt to keep up with whatever is supposed to cool. Ali G is pretty sad anyway so trying to sound like him is going to be doubly annoying. Yes I know I overuse the word 'cool' but that particular adjective has survived for many years as opposed to things like 'phat' (huh?) and 'tubular' so I have an excuse to a certain extent. Is 'cool' cool? I don't know but whatever your decision I will not stop using it. I am sure my daughter will find plenty of amusement in my use of it when she gets older but that is her problem, not mine.

Weapons of Mass Destruction and please read the page that results, whatever it looks like.

My colleague has just pointed the above link out to me. That sounds like the old "Why did you bring that book which I didn't want to be read to out of up for?" but of course that is something up with which I will not put. I can find lots more of this sort of thing on the web so I will resist putting any links in. Find your own - like I said before. As Mil Millington said, call me; I'll come round and scroll for you.

Purple Skies and Vapour Trails

Soundtrack Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow Bay - Cocteau Twins

The titles on this must be the chapters from a book about Moths and Butterflies.

This is not supposed to be one of their best collections but I like it as much as anything off Treasure. Victorialand is of course the best Cocteau Twins album and could be the music behind Knoxxy Eugenia's journey home from school. I wish I had brought more Cocteau Twins stuff with me today as this one is about to end and leave me empty for the rest of the day.

Without wanting to sound like a certain diminutive and nameless US rock star, the sky is so purple today though at this spot it is quite sunny. The horizon is lines with thick purple clouds which seem to be threatening some sort of storm which we desperately need. Come to think of it, the roil on those clouds looks very much like the cover of a Cocteau Twins album (any one - just take your pick - but this one is probably what I have in mind). I had to look up the word roil there as I was worried I had just created a portmanteau word from Boil and Oil - well sort of portmanteau but it does mean in a state of turbulence or agitation. All this from looking out of the window while listening to The Cocteau Twins.

Fill all those empty spaces and keep banging the rocks together guys.

Sunday Afternoon Guitars

Soundtrack - True Crime Motel - Cath Carroll

Not her best album - that is of course England Made Me but the second track on this one - into day - is a doozy.

Canberras

In the middle of an empty week
away from school and other darker things,
we walked a causeway to the sea
and watched the planes land feet away,
bright yellow diamonds in the sky,
with engines deep enough to hurt;
and make our insides buzz and bleed.
We saw them first at limits, the horizon
beckoning them to earth and home.
And then in instants never realised,
they passed over us like ghosts
with screams and safety markings.
"No Step" "Emergency" "walk here".
So loud they broke the bounds of senses,
overflowing from our ears to eyes,
to make our vision faulty in the mind.

And in the quiet of a sandy afternoon,
we found a dead one, burnt and empty,
a practice for the firemen and foam,
blackened, deconstructed by the wind,
inside the fence, a hundred feet across
the dunes, in grass and watched we thought.
To my blind eyes my brother added terror
as he climbed the wire and ran, a soldier,
a thief of aeroplanes and black insignia.
I saw him silhouetted, shaded by the mountains
as he wrenched metal from this whale
and brought it back to me, the coward,
blind and deaf and gibbering and waiting
for the gunshots from the towers.
His enemies were mine and this plane
crashed and died for us to see this day.

Beware the Dresden Codex


Soundtrack - Geek the Girl - Lisa Germano

Not the album that the blonde skinhead wouldn't sell me in Probe records but one by the same woman. My wife once saw Pete Burns coming out of Probe Records (When they had a proper shop in the centre of Liverpool rather than the industrial unit they have now) dressed in a nappy. I have to admit that I just had to ask for the name (I was going to put Pete Shelley but I knew that must be wrong.)

We have a very strange sky here at the moment. Come to think of it, the sky has been weird since this morning. It looks just like that painting of the Battle of Britain. Hold on while I try to find it. ... Can't find it. I will just have to describe it. Lots of sky and contrails but no actual aircraft. It suggests very intense combat without actually showing any of the hardware you would expect. My mind just wandered off having seen a plane flying very low over the city. You begin to worry about what it is doing there and then start with a whole flood of anxiety about where it might end up. There was an ancient biplane doing aerobatics over Crosby on Saturday. I couldn't tell exactly what type it was though it might have been a Swordfish but I wouldn't think that a Swordfish could actually do an outside loop which this one did albeit with a struggling engine. The microlight which sometime flys over the city was almost swept out of the sky. Even my wife commented about the sound from inside the house and wondered if it might be going to hit us.

The sum of all human activity is me, right now or that is the way it seems. It must be that for everybody.

De Historia Piscium

Soundtrack - Different Trains - Steve Reich

Nice day today. No black mood and no worries. Alertness Index at 8.6. Specified annoyances 0.34. Albedo 0.39.

Sorry. Just had a Bridget Jones moment there. Yes. I have read it though how did anyone think that you could compare it with Pride and Prejudice? I wanted Pride and Prejudice to win and I haven't read it yet. My wife dug a copy out for me but I am working my way through Feynman's collections and Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. No tea has actually come out of my nose yet but that is because I haven't actually drunk any tea while reading it yet. There is a point only a few pages into this book when the size of the Universe becomes all too apparent but I also found at the same point that I couldn't stop reading. Bill Bryson has a very uncanny knack of writing heavily intellectual material in a light-hearted prose style and so gets across very powerful ideas while seeming to entertain. This must always be the gift of a good teacher. Even the cynicism which he occasionally puts in, seems entirely justified. He is not afraid of pointing out toes of clay. Newton (who you would think was one step down from a god) is shown up for the cantankerous old weirdo he actually was. Exactly my sort of person. Still he does seem to have done Robert Hooke an Injustice. Now the question is would Newton have been able to understand Relativity or even accept it. Would Newton have been to Relativity what Einstein was to Quantum theory?

I thought about something related to an old rant about how much an entity creating a artifically intelligent mind would have to maintain in order to convince that mind that it existed in a Universe of the creator's own invention. I think I said that it would be relatively easy to maintain this Universe as you would only need to maintain a sphere of influence around the mind. It would be difficult to maintain the consistency of this Universe what with international travel and communication. Would all the phone numbers in the International directory actually connect to different people or would it not matter until they were actually called by the artifical intelligence? My thought was deep and meaningful and said something about the whole Universe whether or not we are real or a creation of God and annoyingly I can't remember what it was at all. In fact as I wrote those words, I had another thought and even that has gone fuzzy. That thought actually had something to do with the physical creation of our Universe, whether out of nothing from the Big Bang (sorry Fred) or from the collision of two "Branes", and was that it is still entirely possible that this creation has a cause. There was all that stuff about Starglider in The Fountains of Paradise about the Universe being just there and that Ockham's Razor stated that the most simple solution is always the probable one but intellectually for people untrained in the deep issues of cosmology, the intuitive next step to such answers as "There was nothing, no space, no matter and no time before the Big Bang" is "But what caused the Big Bang?" Even if you now accept that the Branes caused the Big Bang, what is outside this. Mathematics cannot solve the answer to the nothing before the Universe was created because it is entirely possible that the maths we use is peculiar to this Universe just as the angles of a triangle are peculiar to the surface it is formed on. In another Universe the square root of 2 may not be 1.414213... but some other number entirely but then again 2 would then be difficult to define. I don't think you can carry on this argument. It is like trying to imagine four spacial dimensions with a brain that only copes with three in reality. It is possible to imagine it but you can't provide any practical examples because they will not work in our world. Where was I before that digression? A creator of the Universe. Any artifical intelligence which we might create would necessarily have a limited Universe to work in though I have just thought that you could create an infinite randomness. Fractals (and I am thinking of the Mandelbrot set here) have infinite complexity where the limits are infinity. You could use a fractal to define a universal complexity; al you would have to do is feed in numbers and get the patterns out. All this is still digression which is just to help me forget that I thought of something rather wonderful and as usual have forgotton it. I then thought that, if the Universe is a creation of asomeone, then they should really have a filter to ensure that their creations do not think about this and whenever a thought which gets close to defining what is really going on, then it would be filtered out to ensure that the system does not think about itself. Of course in our world, many people think about what created us and everything else, either through religion or science which has just made me realise that at a deep level they are just different manifestations of mankind's desire to know where he comes from. Of course a lot of religion stops reasoned enquiry with the question of faith which is where this enquiry, reasoned or otherwise, must stop because we are, to use the Classical imagery of Dante, required to be back on our heads.

Some interesting stuff here but do monks really play Croquet? I would have though Rugby would have been much more their game.

White Dielectric Material

Finding the radiation that signalled the Big Bang. Now that would be a wonderful. I built a very simple radio at the weekend (using a cheap electric experiment kit) and it worked even though I could understand all the components and how they fitted together. Nothing more than a transistor and a coil in essence. It struck me then how much radio wave energy must be passing through the air all around. The station I could hear was a Spanish one, though not surprisingly, Radio Moscow got in on the act as well. If there is life out there (and I am not exactly convinced 100% that there is) and it is broadcasting, then the very signals are passing just in front of your nose right now, even it is just the odd photon here and there. Think of that; something has just been stopped by this very desk which originated in a star billions of light years away. The Universe is wonderful enough without trying to "mystify" it. Just the thoughts in your head are more complex than any designed mythology of prediction. The memories you store in your mind today will contain more information than any book you might want to read.

PS. Don't actually think about all that Universe and space all around you. I just did and the thought was quite crushing for an instant. It is like my thoughts on the Fish at the bottom of the Ocean on the other side of the planet, just a lot bigger. Don't think about it. You aren't thinking about it are you? Good!

Keep this frequency clear.

Thomas The Rhymer


With Glamour and with Meadowsweet

The Seely Court are out to play tonight;
the Vandals and the Visigoths in violence
are bound to them with love of dancing
and the bloody poetry of moonlight.

In the dark they see by their own lights,
the silver mantles at their pretty edges,
and show the way to human lovers
with glamour and with Meadowsweet.

And in the bowers of the fields and verges,
we hear them in our restless sleep, in mirth.
And like some monster, loved by gliding beauty,
the farm boys see the white sheets shaking.

Out for revolution, on our way to school,
we find them, dead and smiling, bloodless,
drained like sheep upon the hook,
with glamour and with Meadowsweet.

And gleefully we bear them home like furniture
we found, discarded in the forest.
The witches in this village bless them
with their misguided animistic spirit.

We bury them with songs and dancing,
and warn ourselves off night time wandering,
where tall, lighted women tempt us to death
with glamour and with Meadowsweet.

The best use of "da dee da dee da da" in a pop song.

Soundtrack was until a few minutes ago - Dots and Loops by Stereolab and that is lots of "da dee da dee da da"; I kept thinking of Richard Feynman's time in Brasil. He was teaching Physics (I think on a sabbatical from his University) and yet he got involved in the Samba Schools just like Evelyn Glennie did when she was there (in Rio like Feynman). I remember seeing Evelyn Glennie on TV before she has even started at the Royal Academy of Music. I think she was showing her parents round her flat in London and demonstrating how she had to put towels over here drum-kit to keep the noise down for the neighbours. And then, only a few years later there she was with James Blades (a regular on Blue Peter into his eighties) and dressing up with the Samba Schools in Rio. I saw her twice at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool and percussion has never been so cool. I have just found out that James Blades recorded the "da da da dum" sound for the broadcasts from the BBC to the resistance during WWII (and yet his deaths never got a mention on the BBC news site) and of course the Gong sound for the Rank Studios ident, not that it was him in the picture. I seem to remember that the gong was actually made of plaster and if you really did hit it, it would shatter. That would have been good for their last film. Rank Stupidity not to I would say. I always say I prefer oriental percussion but the Samba stuff is really infectious. You can see how it would be asy to get swept away by it all. The difference between a good and a bad rhythm can be just one extra beat - or one less. No machine will ever be able to simulate a real samba beat. It may be easy for a rock beat or even Jazz but Samba relies on the little extras and twiddles and plain human feel. I once read an interview with Depeche Mode in one of the Music Technology magazines. It was a special about drum machines and they kept going on about how tight their chosen beat box was. They knew it was spot on the beat because they had put an oscilloscope on it. Even at the time, when I was into techno and such stuff, I though that sounded sad and stupid especially when you consider that Depeche Mode actually do sing songs rather than just making synthesiser music. Gary Numan's music is always thought of as synthesiser based but on the first few albums there is a real organic feel behind all the technology. Now modern music, that is another story ......

O Americano, Outra Vez!

How did OMD go from the synthesiser equivalent of Joy Division and turn into the backing band for Pop Stars? The soundtrack for today is Sugar Tax and while there are a couple of songs on it worthy of note (Neon Lights but that was written by Kraftwerk and their version was much better; and Big Town) the rest are totally forgettable. I don't know why I bought it. The last good OMD single was Tesla Girls but Talking Loud and Clear was the last one I bought. That has Julia's Song on the B Side which is brilliant. The picture sleeve is a wallpaper design by William Morris (the background on this website is a design of his as well and similiar to the OMD sleeve). Compare all those moody black and white photographs of the band in the late 70s with how they looked just ten years later, all black leather jackets and attitude. They looked like some pub covers band. And now - Atomic Kitten! What are they thinking. They wrote songs about a phone box, the plane which dropped the atomic bomb and the pop-song equivalent of a Vaughan-Williams piece. (Red Frame, White Light; Enola Gay and Talking Loud and Clear). How did it come to Pandora's Box?

When we moved to this house a couple of years ago, the first person I saw walk along the pavement outside was a teenage girl with a large book under her arm, a book of William Morris designs. She was dressed as if she should have been carrying a skateboard and I know the book was probably homework but it did make me feel quite happy about our move.

How come Beckham and Chelsea are the top headlines at the moment. It seems that the BBC news teams are all football fans and are letting that colour how they report things. I bet they would have screened the Beckham medical if the Real Madrid had decided to film it. It obviously wasn't going to be shining a light in one ear to make sure it didn't come out the other side (always a worry for quite a few footballers) but it was three hours long and some saddo would watch every minute. "This is Raourie McTavish reporting live from inside David Beckhams Knee. And now we all have heard about that obscure bit of bone; it's called Victoria." Get some real news please. Or is the BBC trying to remove all the bad news so we all feel happy and hence avoid campaigns of Civil Disobedience.

MOR

I had to get the train and bus to work today and just near the site I took a short cut across the four lane highway and had to walk for a few metres down the central reservation (Something I always thought was an American word). It suddenly struck me as to how different everything looked from that point of view. It was quite disconcerting to see somewhere you have walked by or driven by for most of the past 17 years in a completely different way. I don't want to read anything into this, just to draw attention to the phenomena (though that seems to be promoting the experience beyond what it deserves). Try looking at a familiar room in a mirror. Just the act of reflection can really change the way you feel about a place. Try it in the horizontal plane as well and you get a "living on the ceiling" effect. I know! I am back to hanging upside down and imagining the clouds as islands. Still, I can tell you have not tried it yet so off to the park. Maybe not! We don't want any injuries.

It was a lovely atmosphere though even in the middle of the road; trees dripping and the air not too hot and not too cold. Summer in this country can be nice but it can be horrible. That is glib statement number 1 or a series of several hundred - like the lost consonants, they will go on forever. Actually more like ordering a series of books from Time-Life; they never tell you when the last one will come out so you do not know how much it is going to cost.

Martin (yes! he is still here and still misanthropic in the extreme has found a wonderful site by Mil Millington who also writes in the Guardian though never in the Mail on Sunday (what is the Internet sign for crossed fingers?). I now need a long time to read all of it but my colleagues are wondering what all the sniggering is about which I suppose makes a change from the Quasimodo-style dribbling which they normally have to put up with.

On Heads. Now!