Staring at Infinity



As you can see, I have been uploading images. I still find it amazing that this image is created from a simple equation and it really is simple; just a few lines of actual code in the program. The real work is turning it into a zoomable image. I should really put all the location and zoom information up here but as my program does not yet print that out, you will have to forgive me. You should also imagine some form of Julian Cope style soundtrack though at the moment I am actually listening to Kraftwerk.

I've just been reading some of the Modern Antiquarian site (Link to the book version here). I tried to find the Mousa Broch but there was no entry. I visited it in 1973 or 4 when we were attacked by the Skuas nesting near it. I hope Shetland is as it was. So many places have been ruined by the Heritage business recently. No amount of reconstruction can bring to life anything other than the most recent events. The current crop of middle to late 20th Century "Period Dramas", all re-evaluate the past through a filter of modern day attitudes. All the "Good" people are shown as non-sexist, non-racist etc. All very laudable in the modern age (and there is no irony in that comment) but when it comes to history it jars with me. It's almost as if we have taken the best of the "Liberal Elite" that the Daily Mail is always talking about and sent them back to make the world a better place. Some of the Re-construction shows such as "The 1900 House" or "The 1940s House", got it a bit better but you can't re-construct Typhoid or Blitzkrieg. There is a program on at the moment called "Lad's Army" which re-creates the experience of National Service. I have not watched all of it but it seems to be a hard vision of what the basic training was actually like. I wonder if my dad has been watching? It struck me that I am quite like my dad but that I didn't go through either the National Service initial training or the actual war situation which he did. Would he be more like me if he hadn't and vice versa. A plug for his old Corps - The Royal Engineers all of which makes me sound like a raving Telegraph reader.

I am off the track of what I wanted to talk about today so a pause is required. I am going to bravely split this infinitive whether you like it or not. Pedantry of this sort is something up with which I will not put. (or shall not put?). Winston was always good for a laugh; remember Bessie Braddock? ( This does NOT have that quote which is quite right being as all Bessie Braddock is remembered for is that straight line to Churchill rather than her good works. My old boss used to live in the same road as Bessie Braddock though not at the same time so I don't really know why I bothered to tell you that.

Enough for this morning.

Just one more plug - Love Circus by Lisa Germano.

Bye

Visual Scrapbook No. 1



The scrap of paper has bugged me for some time. I want to know which book it is from and I have tried searching for the phrases on the internet for some time. If anyone can identify the book then email me at RdeWeyden@hotmail.com. This was an early attempt to create a digital version of the scrapbooks. I used real objects scanned on the platten rather than flat images and it came out rather bland.

Short and Random

Excessive-use? You bet!! We are carrying out an interrogation. We want to know what books you have read; all of them since you first joined up a few letters to make a word. I read Peter-Pan when I was 3 but only the "little people" version. We don't have to be excessive about this. Call us anything you like but the end will never get any nearer. Goodbye for now. Friday is really the Random day. Wait for it and be amazed.

Rekyavik - R - Room - What number?

We are expecting Thunder and Rain today. It has not arrived but it is widely anticipated. I can't wait.

Since watching Amelie, I have been looking by any photo booths for discarded photos but there never are any. I haver been trying to think of something discarded to collect but the only thing I could come up with was shopping lists. I have just remembered that one of my scrap-books actually has a strip of found negatives. They are of a group of people who I (obviously) do not know and I have no interest in finding out. Here is a site of Found Photos.

Maybe my scrapbooks will just have to do. I am trying to find the name of the author if the diary/scrapbook which Kristin Hersh used for some her Album Covers. He was Japanese but I can't find his name listed on either the 4AD or Kristin Hersh websites. I will obviously have to look it up on the Album covers. No - I have found it on the V23 website - his name is Shinro Ohtake. His scrapbooks are far beyond aything I could hope to do. I realise that mine always have a meaning even I try to create a random link based purely on the "rightness" of the image. I suppose his own links are so far removed from mine (Culturally and Personally) that any meaning I could get from them is lost. That goes for poetry as well doesn't it. A lot of poetry is so personal to the poet, that no-one will ever get the full meaning (a lot of E.E. Cummings). Having said that, I have just read "anyone lived in a pretty how town" and it sounds like what you imagine a lot of The Cocteau Twins would if only you could hear the words.

The number is 101 (Film - Airship - nineteen-eighty-four)

Lords of Cottonopolis

Soundtrack - Velvet Underground & Nico and Thunder

We didn't find another internet Cafe which is why I have not posted for sometime. I am rather bored with both Football and The Jubliee which is probably enough to have this site banned under some form of Blasphemy law but I don't care. Blind Faith in either reduces again, any intellectual component which might exist in our society. I would consider any further comment on these as a waste of good typing time.

Something much more relevant is Simon Schama's History of Britain. He is now concentrating on the reformers alongside the monarchs. As one reviewer commented, this is because the documentation is only around for later minor characters. His last program about Victoria's reign brought my era of horror (The Great reform act - repeal of the Corn Laws etc) brilliantly to life. It showed what the Corn Laws actually meant which strangely was not obvious during my O-Level History. Get a grip on what is important, or should we make Simon Cowell the next PM?

I have a weird sense of unreality. I suppose it relates to my ideas about things changing while you are not looking at them. We all want things to carry on exactly as they are. I have just read "Trouble with Lichen" by John Wyndham in which an extract of the eponymous symbiote is found to retard normal metabolism and therefore produce an increase in the age to which a person can be expected to live. It is a very measured book with the heroes and heroines being absolutely set on the correctness of science ( An increase in average life expectancy will also lead to an increase in the expected mortality through accident or illness). This is a dilemma for those of us wanting to live longer as the very existence of such an "Anti-Gerone" will, while maintaining a human's youth for longer, also lead to huge changes in society. Things do not change on a Micro level but change vastly on the macro level.
I did get the feeling I was reading something by Fay Weldon rather than John Wyndham but I think his science is a bit more rigorous. Fay Weldon just likes to explore the social implications of science. She is certainly not a Heretic which she seems to imply with the title of her Autobiography - "Auto Da Fay" . I have not read it and I don't intend to though the picture on the front is very good - like a cross between a Paula Rego and a Stanley Spencer or one of those other 20th Century British Artists. (I know Paula Rego is not British but she does live and work in London).

Things not to talk about or watch this week :-

Jubilee
Football
Big Brother (Especially not Big Brother)
Countdown (but only because I am no good at it)

Looking for the Beast of Bodmin

I am currently at the Post Office in The Minions which is high up on Bodmin Moor close to The Hurlers standing stones. We are going to walk to them in minute though the wind is blowing quite strongly. If there are no more posts then I have been caught by the jetstream and am probably somewhere over Albania.

For all things mysterious and possible related to The Beast of Bodmin visit here.

We are staying at Boscastle right next to Tintagel so with this page you get loads of postcards instead of just one. Martin is probably calling me a cheapskate for using the Internet in place of the Post Office but you may get a real postcard when I can locate a pen.

We visited the Eden Project the other day - it was pouring with rain. The bubbles are very impressive in a sort of large scale McAlpine engineering sort of a way but I couldn't help thinking it was a corporate vision of Environmental Friendliness. My daughter liked it and keeps going on about the bubbles but it was far too crowded to get any real sense of what it was like. What it must be like in the middle of high season I can't imagine.

Time to finish now. A walk up to the standing stones beckons.

Music for Airports

All possible collages exist here. All possible musics will never exist. I want to teach machines to read. It can't be that difficult, after all some machines I have known have a nicer personality and higher IQ than some people I have met. This page, today is for all possible ideas starting with the first thing which comes into my head. At ..... this moment, that is what do the pedals ona piano do? They extend the note, so extending this idea and those of Michael Brook ("Cobalt Blue"), you get the infinite piano. Of course the sampler makes this totally possible. In one ear, from one channel goes medieval lute music and in the other goes the sound of a fan. I am not ill but is this not the rebirth of Ambient music? Stephen Dedalus is not alive but his head is open to all of us. Stately and plump I think, descending a stair but this is not him. Did his father, his author scream "This is Dublin Calling"? or was that another Joyce? the reader of the statistics in nineteen-eighty-four; the chocolate ration has been altered but no-one knows whether it is up or down. It will bear no relation to the actual amount you receive anyway. Tokyo Rose - there was another one - a traitor; but she was Japanese wasn't she? How can you be a traitor in your own country supporting your own Government. Ah! but she was American. Where do we go when we are asleep? I am not aware of my own existence but I am still here and this paragraph is more like a dream than anything else I experience. Back to samplers. Infinite Collage - sound pictures and bad references - we are the KLF. Why bother with a link to the KLF? They will not exist in a few days. Maybe they never existed. Maybe they burnt themselves out of existence on an island somewhere along with their bank-account. Did that really happen? Madness. Maybe they burned play-money and sent the real stuff to something useful - like me. I should check my bank-account. What about that man who destroyed ALL of his possessions? Michael Landy's Breakdown. Michael Landy's Breakdown. Two links for two articles. A brave man. I cannot throw out a rail ticket without feeling anxious. The absence of something as art is probably not a new idea. I will destroy all my thoughts and by having an empty mind I will be the ultimate art work. I have done this bit before. Nothing here is real. What do you think? Oh for breakfast in that pub, a pint of porter and then crack with The Third Policeman. This is my copy - or at least a copy of my copy. The other version is not a copy of my copy and therefore is not the same book. I suspect some of the words are actually different but I am becoming one with my copy and it is very difficult to tell where the book ends and I start. Same with Ulysses I imagine. Old Ulysses turned up in the Divine Comdey I think but I am not supposed to know anything about that before I read it so I will stop there. I don't know anything about that. It just happens when I hit the keyboard. Automatic Typing you could call it. I was going to put a link, but they are all kooks who do this. Don't believe a word they say. It is all rubbish. Klee, Kandinski and Chagall. Now they knew how to do things automatically. Kandinski was a fellow. All perfect, every one. Not a brushstroke wrong. Beautiful. Andrew Wyeth might paint real things but he knows how to add a surreal note. What exactly is Christina doing? I know that she has a slight disability. Does that change the picture for you? Not for me. She must be so happy in that field but is something bad going on in the house or is she just being called in for dinner. Grits? You only have those for breakfast surely. Re-invent the past and we cannot say anything. Christina's World is our world after all. Too much Football. Too much of everything. I have to go home now because my head is full. I can never emtpy out everything. The Grid - Pruitt-Igoe - one bad building made by the same man who made two good buildings. He did not live to see the two good buildings destroyed. Maybe I have the wrong man, but the right buildings. Sentience is a privilege that only humans know. Find all the links on this page and you must be me. It is nice to see you again after all these years. "My God! It's full of stars". The ending of that film is like now. When in time are we and can we light the whole world? Re-invent a tense and define time-travel. We have no visitors from the future so they must be returning to other possible universes. Or maybe they are not returning at all because we never will be able to. Spin a mass the size of a black hole at nearly the speed of light and you might manage it but only with anti-matter. An·ni·hi·la·tion - thats the thing. (I couldn't be bothered to take out the dots and I couldn't spell it without looking it up). Create a lot of anti-matter and the Universe becomes your Lobster or maybe Turtle. Alll the way down they are - right to the big bang. That is the end of everything in one direction. Time has no direction you see but we do so the end for us is just one boundary. Maybe time has three dimensions and there is another end of time perpendicular to us. It is not here. There is plenty of time left in all directions.

Something to do when it rains or Experiments in vertical takeoff

Oblique Strategies must have been used to write "Red Frame, White Light". As you may have guessed, I located the OMD Peel Sessions and this is the currently playing track. I can only despair at the fact that OMD did not continue with these off-the-wall songs. When you name a band (VCLXI) after the number on a valve on the sleeve for Radioactivity by Kraftwerk, you have a serious outlook on music - or a very sad life - maybe both.

Ideas Collage

I have added an additional media to my list of all possible collages. Ideas. How do you record an idea as part of an artwork? A collection of Memes could just be a book, but does the book have to be true? Could it be a list of completely fictitious ideas like a collection of pretend film music ("Passengers") or the life of a non-existent artist (Nat Tate). or a website of made-up recollections and ideas(TRVDWCP and others). Chaos will build up a completely separate world that seems to exist but is simply a version of our own. Quantum Theory will choose a single alternative reality and we will experience real life as the interference patterns between the real world and our made up version of it. This is beginning to sound like the rubbish that all those early 90s French Philosophers were criticised for. Genuine scientists were getting annoyed at the pseudo-scientific claptrap which supposed intellectuals were writing about. eg "The real world is a sort of artifical pomegranate where life is the soft juicy pith and we are the seeds embedded within it" - yuk. The whole of France was taken in by these charlatans. I am not having a go at the likes of Sartre or Mrs Jean-Paul Sartre, just the fact that what we see through as rubbish in most cases seems to have made it to main-stream acceptability. Never forget that all Science was once seen as "Natural Philosophy" so why should Philosophy be outside normal scientific method (even if you have to apply scientific method to concepts such as existence, the nature of thought or reality or religion. Blind Faith is worth little.

Leonard Bernstein doing the vacuuming with the lights off.

I need a picture to keep things interesting.



From http://www.steroelab.co.uk

Currently listening to Emperor Tomato Ketchup which is true space jazz. I meant to bring the John Peel session recordings of OMD but it has got lost somewhere in the house. I listened to it last night. OMD have become the beacon of my early eighties existence. "Souvenir" makes me cry because of the memories associated with it - a very apt name as well? And Julia's song. It all brings back half-remembered images of rain and college and bedsit blues. I watched all my schoolmates go through fetishes for a progression of various bands from Led Zeppelin to Spandau Ballet via the Sex Pistols but the Kraftwerky electronic New wave was my thing. Julian Cope - go there. Which reminds me - "The Modern Antiquarian" - go there too. The book is a beautiful object - a vital and academic tome. We visited Callanish one summer. We went during the day first and it was very busy, though even then we found it quite spiritual. That maybe just the internal feelings created by the thought of the distance in time between it being built and you actually seeing it but it was there nonetheless. Of course, I wanted to photograph it without all the people there and attempted to take all the pictures when people were hidden behind the stones. In the end I got fed up and we decided to come back very early one morning (we were staying about 20 miles away) and we got there on one of the few overcast days of our entire holiday. I took loads of black and white photos trying very hard to get the exposures correct. I was happy. When we got home and had the pictures developed we had about three films worth of Callanish and spookily, not one of them had any people in them; I had managed to avoid everyone. Maybe that detracts from the real purpose, obviously I thought that loads of 20th century people would not be cool enough for such an ancient monument.

Here is one of the pictures I took. (A Join-up as you can see)





From - http://www.bbc.co.uk/homeground/the_village_in_the_stones.shtm

I watched a program about Avebury called "The Village in The Stones". I knew that some of the stones had been re-constructed but I didn't realise the extent to which the whole village had been re-modelled in order to set the stones in an environment like that when they were erected. Some of the Villagers who were moved just before and after the war are still quite bitter about what Alexander Keiller and, after him, the National Trust did to Avebury.

Just look at the difference between Julian Cope's website and The National Trust's. I support the National Trust - sometimes - but they are a bit old-fashioned. History is about the people who lived in houses - not the houses and definitely NOT rows of supposedly genuine jars of Lavender Oil and Olde Worlde Fudge. Of course, the Elizabethans had nothing better to do than bath with Lavender Oil and eat Fudge. Having said that, "Treats from the Edwardian House" with Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall looks good tonight, though why a firm of solicitors has decided to make a film about early 20th century food is beyond me.

Belle et La Vie

Can you find Llandanwg Church?

To Llanbedr

This is a virtual tour of quite a large slice of North Wales though I know it because we used to spend holidays in a cottage called Hedd in LLandanwg which is just down the coast from Harlech. I have started off up by the end of the road up to the Roman Steps above Cym Bychan. If you get here and there are not many people, this place is so quiet it is scary. Even with a few people there, any loud conversation seems to swallowed up. We went there once when we were the only people and we got caught up in some surreal sheep drive. A huge flock of sheep seemed to appear from nowhere and every one stood there just watching us; swivelling their heads as we walked in a small amount of panic back to the car.

The poem "National Theatre of Wales" which I posted some while back was written about the Small Theatre outside Harlech which you may be able to find if you get to Harlech. Directions - down into Llanbedr - turn right onto the road to Harlech - just before you reach Harlech turn down the road towards Porthmadog and the theatre is on your left. I know it's not the National Theatre of Wales but that is poetic Licence - literally. They have a virtual tour as well which is linked from the main tour. I went to see a puppet version of "Hiawatha" there. when I was about fourteen but the poem is really just about the general atmosphere of those holidays. The house we stayed in was a white clapboard house and creaked in the wind. We were told that in the very worst weather, the waves broke over the dunes and splashed the windows. From the dining table we could see a great swathe of the beach and the top of the Lleyn Peninsula. At night we could see the lights of Criccieth which sparkled as the wind moved water vapour about in the bay; my brother and I used to call it "twinkle town". Once a small sailing boat was driven onto the rocks right opposite the house and the family on board had to climb to the safety of the beach. I don't remember what happened to the boat but we found various bits equipment on the beach later. I think my dad found a Stanley Knife which he probably still has. We found a distress flare which we aimed to let off but bottled out when we realised that the Royal Aircraft Establishment across the river at the entrance to the small harbour would probably scramble some sort of rescue craft. We eventually and very foolishly fired the flare into a sand dune. This reminds me that may brother actually climbed through the fence of the Air Station to steal a piece of a crashed Canberra aircraft about 100 yards inside the perimeter. (He once also pinched a small piece of a Jaguar fighter which crashed near Malvern while the RAF team were still digging it up.) I have just found out that the very Canberra is listed here so on the web I have found out that my brother has a piece of either WH887 or WK145. The road to the beach on the other side of the harbour entrance goes across a causeway the middle of which lies at the end of the Air station runway. We once stood right under a Canberra coming into land not quite like Wayne and Garth on the bonnet at the end of the runway but close. It was bright yellow which I thought at the time would make it a very easy target.

There was a debate recently about a Canberra pilot who raised the undercarriage of his aircraft while still on the runway as a protest against the British and French Invasion or Eygpt in 1956. My dad was in Suez. He did his National Service in the Royal Engineers. I used to say that the Army taught him how to blow up bridges and that the council taught him how to build them. I seem to remember him saying that he passed by the Statue of De-Lesseps just before it was blown up. I will have to ask him. Anyway for a description of said event by the man who set the charges, go here.

Disappearing in a puff of Logic

From the "Talking Point" on the BBC News website

From looking at the anti-euthanasia postings in this forum, it seems that most of the arguments are based on quite flimsy logic. Thus platitudes like; 'the sanctity of life', or abstract concepts such as 'mother Nature taking its course' are too easily bandied around. What does "Mother Nature taking its course" actually mean? Surely humans have the ability to intervene in any number of moral and ethical issues purely by virtue of their sentience? Surely if Mother Nature were to take her course more often then there'd be no room for life prolonging procedures such as transplants and resuscitation in A and E departments. Surely the way forward with such a contentious issue is to keep an open mind, engage in dialogue & be pro choice?
Martin K, London, UK

I sometimes feel unable to put controversial stuff on the post but this posting sums up a very dangerous subject. As you have guessed what I really mean is that this sums up my feelings on the subject. It seems that "Sentience" in some peoples' minds is actually blind faith and fingers in the ears when other people express opinions. Arguments about God fall down now because of the awareness of other Religions. Who is right? "I am right and you are wrong" seems like a cop-out. Religion is a door to spirituality and different people use different doorways. The basic tenets of most religions (might I add even Witchcraft) are found in what have traditionally been regarded as "Morally Correct". The ADDITIONAL tenets of "my religion is the one true one" seem to be added by various bands of humans to justify their own life and culture and deny those of others. Maybe God does create the basic moral aspects of ALL the religions. It is us fallible and weak human beings who pervert them for our own ends. I remember reading about attempts by philosophers to determine what was the oldest language by bringing up infants in the absence of language, the argument being that the "right" language for humans would be the first and this is what an uncorrupted baby would develop. All rubbish of course. But extend this to finding the "True Religion" and you show up the absurdity of both.