The World has those who use i for complex numbers and those who prefer j

I got through the rest of Music in 12 Parts and then all of Music for 18 Musicians as well though I suspect some of it may have become like the true definition of Ambient. Brian Eno was on Tom Robinson’s show the other day though to call it an interview may have been wrong – more of a monologue with interjections from Mr 2468 Motorway and although the track listing shows particular pieces of music, I think they were mostly in the background, flowing in and out in the true definition of ambient. It was nice to hear the tale of the invention of ambient from the man himself and also to realise that despite the man’s Tefal image, he actually talks like the rest of us; his complexities apply to various aspects of his persona but not his speech.

Talking about Tefal men, I have become a c# convert. Although I was sent on several c courses over my years at Plessey/GPT/Marconi, I rarely used that language in anger but now I use it for everything and have managed to get over my prejudices. It may be slightly more complex to get something done the first time but afterwards it all just seems so right. Every time I get hold of a new programming environment or machine I re-write a program to display the Mandelbrot set – this is the result from the last go.



The first time was on a 286 and I used it for a company open-day display. It had to run overnight and even then looked awful. The last version takes about a minute to do the main page and then allows zooming but I have never got around how to use a full gamut of colours for the grading. Now the c# methods of getting at the graphics object seem better defined though they require an awful lot of setting up to get at them. If only they had a HSB rather than the RGB setting, all would be well. I am hoping for a 10 fold increase in speed.

Zenos, Zeno, Zen,Ze,Z

Sad to report that I was at a funeral yesterday though the minister’s address was most uplifting and I will never be nasty about Cliff Richard again. Subconsciously, I seem to have been going through a morbid accounting process which has tallied that I have now been to more funerals than I have weddings. I suppose there are family reasons for this imbalance at what I would consider an early point in my life but it is sobering.

Listening to Music in 12 Parts by Philip Glass

That last review of this piece of music is spot on – If you have guts then you will find this the most satisfying piece you have ever heard. I rarely get to listen to it all in one go- three discs – four hours – each 12th barely varying but isn’t your life like that anyway? You get up every day, do the same things but never ever do you feel like you do after listening to all of this.

MITP has just transitioned from Part 5 to Part 6 and though I can just about detect a key change and there is no change in the overall meta-rhythm, the switch over gives me a thrill that is quite unique. To be honest all of the changes are like this, small and yet shiver-inducing. One of the reviews mentioned that the writer got into Glass through North Star, a collection of shorter pieces in similar style, which may be a useful starting point for Glass Virgins. It was indeed my first Glass work and rocky in the extreme. I suspect I might have been put of minimalism for good had I bought a longer piece straight off. Like listening to Balinese music, start off with something short for the discordance with western scales in grating at first but soon becomes as thrilling as any powerful rock song. Indeed, the fast and most familiar style of Balinese music, Gamelan Gong Kebyar, is not entirely Balinese in influence being a mash-up of traditional stuff and bits introduced by Dutch and other visitors to the islands in the early 20th century. We like to think of our ethno-music as being pure and unaffected by our more materialistic influences but why should the rest of the world stick to our views of what is correct? Our world changes, though our music seems to go in great circles, guitar band, prog-rock, punk guitar-band, synth-band and back to guitar-band again. Indonesia for all its conservative outlook seems to have a great ability to mix up styles of music. Get Balinese Gamelan if you want to – the Javanese style is maybe too subtle as an introduction.

I actually have one of these. I was briefly a cash millionaire in Indonesia when I took out the money to buy it. Currently it is under the bed and needs re-stringing but I can’t find anywhere which will supply me with the thin bits of leather to hang the bars. I daren’t search the internet for “leather straps” and Madam Foner’s Surgical Appliance shop in Liverpool has been no help. It was an honest enquiry! There was no need to be so nasty. I suppose I have been ignoring the oblique strategy of using something else to string it; flat electrical flex might work but it wouldn’t seem right – the person who built the instrument probably invested it with some sort of spirit, an animist deity to look after it and all I can do with it is leave it under the bed, broken and unplayed. My standard mantra of “I will dig the photos out” is now in effect for this.

A final observation - the site that this building is on is part of an old factory complex, and while our bit is modern and kempt, the approach road is marked by occasional pieces of discarded and broken equipment. Most of it is probably old air-conditioning units but it struck me this morning that all this detritus looks like the artistically placed pieces of the plane that crashed in Lost. Not that I watch Lost – I might have been interested had I started it but now it just seems to be another show pushed beyond its original idea. I look forward to it “Jumping the shark”. Of course with Lost, this could be done literally though I suspect Henry Winkler might not be available for a reprise of his original stunt, having already done it in Arrested Development. It would be a nice touch if he did. Maybe they could end it there. The signalling of various possible solutions to the mysteries involved by the brief reference to The Third Policeman may have blown the cover though like the X-files, it maybe that the writers have no idea how to end it. I do hope that Life on Mars does not go the same way.

Sweepings

Here is the wholesome, wholegrain bobby-soxer,
Beaten into drowning by the cold-war.
She’s all flat calves and airline teeth,
A dental aerial of plastic decades,
Fins and tail pipes stretching into distance.

The rhythm soaks in us,
Beyond the drowned
With their black ends

Here the phoney, new stuff,
This panelling like mirrors,
Takes light and makes it brown,
Warm glows of ersatz history,
Steamed to tell of rain outside,
A storm which lights the walls.

Here is the body of a salt-drugged,
Sleeping shellfish man,
Downshifted long ago,
Dreaming of his crab lines,
Orange, tight into the sea,
To fight the rip
And live in three worlds

And my wife and children
With their ills and fears,
These anchors in the moor,
The cables strained against
The mile-high metal tower.

They are all broken by machine
And numbers over everything,
Making constants always beautiful.

I smell my school,
The sweet polish
And the woodblock,
Hear music in a distant laugh.
And know this day’s troubles
end with the day.

Up and Down

Some days are better than others. Some days anything is possible; not just seems possible but actually happens inside your head - great swathes of what-might-be, broken up like some mad collage of the future. And then everything flips, a giant proof of catastrophe theory made real, bringing down these psychotic castles with a breath of logic, until you want to just lie in the rubble with the covers over your head and inhale your own breath, waiting for it to make you sleepy and forget the disasters of the real world.

Maybe I wish for something to wipe the memory of the trials that bring me to this but I have been through this before; no reminiscences are worth the trouble for no time moves backwards. My daughter insisted last night that building a time machine is possible and I told her that I could travel through time but she did not believe me until I said that we all travel through time in one direction and at the same speed. I thought about explaining the paradoxes of time travel and how some people believed that it was mathematically possible to build a time machine but thought it might stop her sleeping. Not that much does. Although she remembers so much, nothing results in any regrets of embarrassment; I am responsible for taking on those burdens so she can just travel forwards without worrying about mistakes. I remember being like that, how my dad did all the worrying about the world for me so that the three-day week, the possibility of nuclear destruction, all the bad stuff around us was filtered out, leaving us with sunny afternoons and headlong rushes down the hills to the undesigned playgrounds with beautiful friends and grammar to match.

Once We Reached a High and Never Came Down

From the Guardian

Sour Mix

You will be singing this forever. http://www.myspace.com/lilymusic

Tom Robinson played it last night and said it was like a bitter sweet. Too right!

Hello! Siadwell Here!

I had a big literary idea for this morning’s post but I think I had a dream about Kevin Turvey last night and the image of the “accent and a mood from South-West Midlands” is up in front of my eyes like Esther Greenwood’s baby. Anyone for a pint of Crème-de-menthe?

I should start looking forward. My daughter pinched the free ‘One foot in the Grave” DVD last week and now goes around quoting Victor’s homily about the non-existence of the past, present and future, and though she just likes the logic of it, it makes me realise that I am worrying too much about what has happened and what might happen. None of this is under my control and the chance of my village being bombed forcing me to trek across the arid wastes of Africa with all my possessions is quite low. Reality always fails to meet expectation either negatively or positively. As you might be aware, I have a lingering wish to simplify things around me but like all the other commuters and office workers, there is a tension within me between the desire to keep things the same and the wish for an end to the routine. I am afraid the example that I have come up with is the end of the last episode of the last series of Drop the Dead Donkey, when George ends up earth-bound while the love of his life jets off to some exotic place. The fact that the shuffle on Media Player has just thrown up ‘because of’ by Leonard Cohen seems a coincidence too far.

None of this means that I am looking for a Reggie-Perrin-Style change to my life; coming home is a joy of stability in what seems like the fit-inducing buzz of the speed of life at the moment, but at risk of sounding like one of the business-speak memos which I hate, within those parameters some sort of sorting out and re-evaluation might be useful. I keep throwing up some weird examples today but I am now thinking of the 3D model of the shadow of a rotating hypercube. I once saw an animation of this on a Horizon programme about the fourth dimension and for a second I understood. Try it yourself at dogfeathers. Click the stereo button until you get two separate images and then go cross eyed. Robert Heinlein wrote a short story called “ - And He Built a Crooked House” about a building with 4D properties, a tesseract in fact though from what I saw of the bit about the universe in The Beach, Alex Garland might well have failed to understand the maths involved in his book “The Tesseract”. The Heinlein story reminds me of another tale, probably also from Omni magazine, called “The Infinite Plain” about a ball turret gunner in a Super Fortress, who is cut from his craft at some dizzying altitude and falls to what he thinks is the Earth but is in fact a mathematical construct. I won’t spoil the ending but I cannot find it or reference to it online. Anyway, you might think that today’s theme is along the line of being about the constancy of maths and the physical basis of the cosmos. This all stems from reading “The Last Three Minutes” by Paul Davies. Again, this should be a positive because we have a few years left yet though sometimes I wonder at the sunlight through the window on early mornings and wonder if the sun has gone Nova in the night. Yet another short story has come to mind, one where the sun does exactly that and the people on the night-side of the Earth have to come to terms with being fried at sunrise. Even the worst of mankind’s excesses against itself are petty playground squabbles compared to all this but obviously pointing this out to anyone seems stupid and idealistic.

Some constancy in my punctuation would be welcome as well I suppose.

Big Fleecy Surfing Dude

Listening to Fab Four Suture by Stereolab

I bought this along with the last Manic’s album which cost me less than the £1.,99 it would have commanded in the shoebox that is described as the “Music Department” at the Oxfam shop in the village. I have not actually listened to that yet but it is copied and queued up ready. My daughter has discovered the joys of Windows Media Player which I suppose could be a bit dangerous what with all the sweary bits (I am thinking of that potty-mouthed Enya woman). There was a big disagreement on Saturday when I wanted to listen to XTC and got overruled in favour of The Sweet Sound of Emma Kirkby. The boy is showing signs of a dislike of good and loud rock music as well though he knows good TV and has the current mantra of “more Doctor Goo”. He showed no signs of fear at the rather splendid werewolf in this week’s episode. He was even rather taken with the discovery that The Doctor actually comes from Balamory and not Gallifrey as we all thought. I look forward to The Doctor being assisted by Archie in a massive Dalek battle outside that pink Castle. That divinity degree should come in very useful. What’s the Story in Balamory? Well ….

Hopefully we are off to Speke Hall next weekend. There is an Elizabethan May fair with music for the girl and weapons for the boy. There are also the occasional Shakespeare plays performed by the Ilyria group, usually only about five of them doing all the roles. Much Ado About Nothing was very good despite the rain. The watch under Dogberry were played brilliantly in the style of Dad’s Army under some pressure from the planes taking off from Speke airport which meant a complete halt of the play until quiet was resumed, though the quiet salute to “our boys” by the cast seemed so perfectly timed that you could almost believe it was scripted.

Unde Lux est orta Salus invenitur.

New obsessions come and they go – Saint Catherine made to stand up against the men, dressed like a multi-coloured soldier, robed to the point of perfection, up there with Beatrice as bypassing purgatory, and straight into paradise. She has silver mantles, she comes down the stairs by the light of them, teaching us all how to be good. All this technology has issues with this foreign language, a burst of incorrectness in the true and smooth path to the future. And one day we will look on all this stuff, and shrug at it. New things every nine months just to keep up with people, the blank stares when we tell our children about all the black and silver boxes we used to keep around. They will look outside at the flowers and the computers all around them will hum to themselves, giving them what they want and all they want is a quiet life and a house away from it all, hidden from the paddling of industry which fills the rest of the planet.

The black crosses, the bombers buzz deeply, engines deep and satisfying, as they throw speeding shadows across the fields this dawn. All back today, all intact and all empty, beautiful things doing terrible things, no one missing at breakfast and all quiet, taking down the last letters from the dresser as they throw themselves into sleep. I thought they were leaving in my head, but the night seems to have vanished in a flash, a whole set of hours gone and never to be seen again. All that time, they sat up there reading their cowboy novels, staring at the dark channel and then the dark cities occasionally sparked into moonlit jewels. Catherine, invoked by some last night, has flown with them and the enemy, no word from her on whose side she is on. The pilot at the altar kneels and does not analyse the rightness of his actions; he loves simply and does the job. These days we may question the orders, get prosecuted for following them and then for not following them. A pipe in the head and all we want to do is dance. Here we are at some dark wedding, a dance and drinking long into the night, candles spitting and setting fire to the wood of this hall and put out by casually thrown drinks. Gisto Madja, Blanka blanka, sol veyan, via ey blanka blanka.

Poem for Saint Catherine of Alexandria

An event for celebration is the life of Dark Age saints,
Calling for the rights of man these days,
A risk of execution no deterrent to them
Where they stand against the fire of vandals,
Goths and other blanks, a woman lighted from within,
And gold and walking over ground untouched
With tribute to the crystal sphere of earth and all creation,
Converts and fights without that sword she totes,
But glassy in the army, waits with threat of heaven
Heavy in the air between her king and God.

Watch Out for Flying Pencils

… Your republicanism is showing.

Which I hope is a smug and clever reversal of the habit of showing petticoats in support of the executed King Charles one. I can’t find anything about this so I may have dreamed it. It is smug and clever in my world anyway. Who is Big Borther?

I have a bad habit of telling my wife things which are not true. Not things like phoning to tell her I’m working late when I’m actually in the pub. I suppose last night’s example would explain. She is currently reading The Kindness of Strangers – Kate Adie’s biography part 1 which prompted the comment that she was not aware that Bofors was a Swedish company. I launched into a tale of how they were the mainstay of British air defence during WW2 because of the guns’ ability to be loaded with any old rubbish in the face of shortages of proper shells. When she believed this I managed to persuade her that despite protests from the vanguard of the “grow your own” movement, the Army found out that the most effective projectiles were potatoes which could take out several German aircraft at once. I hadn’t expected this to be believed so I was able to extend the story. At the point when I said that a German pilot managing to return home after a Bofors vegetable assault would use the starchy shrapnel peppering his aircraft to make a celebratory and reverent slap-up meal, I got a Paddington bear hard stare and a look which could have brought down a Dornier.

It does seem to me that the Germans had most of the best looking planes. Apart from the Spitfire, the Luftwaffe got all the best designs as if the Bauhaus was in on it somewhere. Most RAF planes looked like flying sheds but of course the bottom line is how they work and not what they look like. And of course the throaty sound of a Merlin engine knocks the weedy German phutters into being so “last war”. The RAF flight has been over our house several times and each time the distant sound of the engines has me out of the house like a small boy, staring at the horizon through squinting eyes like some iconic military man on a Soviet poster. Dudley Moore’s line about Volvo’s from that film about advertising – they’re boxy but they’re good - seems to apply here. I exclude that stupid, three-engined Junkers from this analysis; it was made of corrugated iron!

It has been years since I listened to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. My original CD is somewhere in the pile in the garage, and so I feel guilty about getting the re-mastered version which through Amazon is mush easier than emptying out the rubbish. However, I have to say that for once, the re-mastering has made a clear difference to the sound of the record, a clear improvement on the top end, evident even through my memory of the original version. Maybe this is placebo in that I expect an improvement and in the face of lack of evidence have assumed that the artists and record company are telling the truth. Musically, it sounds like a recent album; admittedly one made by someone with the sensibilities of 25 years ago, but still original, still different, still with some sort of comment on the world simply by being a random collection of found speech without any virtue other than being musically ‘right’ for the track it accompanies. The sleeve notes said that Byrne and Eno wanted to go into retreat somewhere and return with this album, pretending it was a genuine ethnic collection. I’m not sure they would have been able to pull that off and maybe that is why they didn’t bother but then again, like cinema audiences were scared by the early stop-motion animation of King Kong the first, maybe the rock audiences of 25 years ago could be fooled by such a trick. However, some of MLITBOG is obviously ENO and I suspect quite a bit of it is obviously David Byrne – I have to admit that I don’t know Talking Heads or his solo work to be sure. That is like the game that was mentioned in David Lodge’s Changing Places where literary academics have to try and outdo each other by revealing classic books which they have not read.

And finally ..

… two things to really annoy you.

The US gently criticises China for not allowing free-speech and worship and all the things which let me say that our dear leader should be kicked out of office with no pension and made to live in one of those tumble-down flats near the canal – deep breath – and then they go and prosecute someone for shouting at the Chinese boss. A dangerous weapon the human voice!

AND …

The wife of our dear leader, spending £275 a DAY on hairdos AND charging it to the party.

Well they annoy me anyway.

The Sea Shall Not Have Them



Some slide guitar in the background here. There is much rain around today, a glorious grit-splashing deluge from clouds which push the sun to non-existence, a darkness which drives us all under cover to hum and talk of things we think are important. Someone immune to the soaking, whistles as they walk a path we cannot see somewhere in the distance. We are happy maybe but would not show it to anyone for fear of not fitting in. here are numbers and a blonde woman at a desk, thinking and writing words that she thinks come from God through the ether to this world. A pause to reword something has distracted her, or maybe some sound from outside, perhaps that whistle we heard but it stops here like a knock on the door. Maybe she is angry but it is impossible to tell from this blank face, for the story she tells has taken all her expression until she cannot cry at things she thinks are so bad in her life. There is the ringing note of a hammer dropped on a rail bent in the heat, out in the desert sun; it rings in the distance, clear and pure, like a tolling for some small death out there in the shadeless sweep of America. If she looked up, she might see the tiny movement of the man swinging that hammer, a black shadow with no detail, standing against the far blue, wiping the sweat from his forehead, thinking ahead to an ice-cold beer, set up on the bar in the lights and air conditioning of his small home town.

Poetry comes to her again, great gobs of meaning, broken up and remade like a butterfly comes from a caterpillar, juiced and re-formed inside its leathery cases hanging under the leaves of that scratchy tree in the yard. Here is a forest, a gang of straight-up trees, branchless into the heights and then spreading to make a cool, green cavity down here amongst the scaffold of their trunks. She thinks there might be a bear somewhere close, broken into verticals by the trees, split further by shadow and moisture, until it remains just a thought, the idea of a bear that might have been the one that broke into the car the other day. It lumbers from one side of her mind to the other and escapes before meeting the paper, to end its existence through that ringing hammer.

More whistling now! I am back in this rain, no sun and the long view of the years in front of me. Writing this should be some proof that things can change but sometimes it just makes we feel like I am trying to batter down a wall that has no thickness because its thickness never ends; I could be in a trench trying to dig myself out rather than trying to knock down the wall. And thinking of how other people are worse off just makes me think that it is not far to being that worse off and I go home to make the most of what I have there. Rain does not matter, sun does not matter; just being in this safety is enough to make me happy. I am back under the veranda of the Cricket pavilion at school, caught in the rain with others from my year, waiting for it to lessen enough to run back to the common room but not really being bothered. The red-haired girl, forever my better by miles, says things I cannot understand but still I comment and sometimes scare myself that I sound like I know what I am talking about. I thought she might have been Catholic; she talks about religion so much, but now I know the real depth of belief and this is just interest in the subject, a range so breathtaking that my later mentors pale at her feet. Maybe I wanted to kiss her but such a thought is not real; an impossibility created by the gaps in my knowledge and her twelve-out-of-tens for English. She knows everything it seems, pronouncements on politics, religion and all in between. And then there is her friend, the other pillar of that sparkling year, a girl who knows she does not like science but still works so hard that she shames all us non-arty types with perfect scores (for no mathematician would dare go beyond 100%). She knows poems of trees; she knows that bear and she knows how the trees grow and why the bear survives in the trees. She asks the stupid questions with no shame and we snigger, but thank her silently for clearing up the things we ourselves do not understand. And in those questions she has made a better world, improved the technology and found solutions to everything. Give her the time and platform to put it all to us and we will live forever; we will be at the stars like gods.

My life is in that tree up there, well all that I can remember anyway; those first meaningful thoughts started when it was planted. It is dangerous to think of it all, and yet I keep going back to it. How to make things better? It always comes down to going back and doing things differently but that would undo all that is good. I don’t want to lose what I have seen, the sweep of the rice fields, the dead under the trees of Trunyan, decaying into the scent of the forest to come back in the fertile plains of Indian Ocean Islands, the Twin-Towers rising from the dusty village that October so many years ago.

And then there is the girl whose name I forget, who I bored by telling her my entire school timetable when all she wanted to do was walk along the beach and listen to the sea. We went to the theatre that evening, quiet in the dark for something cool and funny and I loved her then. It rained as we came back to the beach, and I said nothing then, just a quick goodbye at the door and a sigh with the tide that the next day would bring in yacht to wreck it on the rocks we played on, scattering the Stanley Knife my dad still has and the distress flare that we wanted to set off but instead fired into the dunes. And the porpoises came right up to us, dizzy scurries of black, shiny things in that shifting surf. No amount of risky excitement can have the meaning of all that I have seen because it is me that has seen it. Wishing for differences is futile but doesn’t stop it happening. All poetry is wishing for differences, Saint Margaret talking to Joan of Arc, shining and colourful, obviously divine in her masculine robes, designed to make you do the right thing but she will not come to me; any voices I hear will be mad an incoherent, a sweep of irrelevant instructions, not from the trees but between my ears, telling me to jump in the river, to run in front of traffic and I will not listen to them, rational to my sighing end, wishing for what I have not got and being thankful for what I have.