Fossil Fuel

Soundtrack - Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich

(Apologies to my Wife)

I found this yesterday during yet more garage tidying, along with the first two years of Omni Magazine. Oh what promise unfulfilled. I went through it expecting to find the story about the girl with no arms or legs who was to become a starship pilot. I was sure I had it but it was not there. I did find 'A Thousand Deaths' by Orson Scott Card which is horrifying not for its detailed descriptions of executions (all of the same person) but for the fact that after this, the subject was allowed to live. That is perverse.

Omni was brilliant for two years and then it turned into a mess of New-Age rubbish. Even the adverts were good and not because they were a window on the US for us repressed and deprived brits but because they were interesting and even intellectual. There was a series by some US paper company which had various well-known authors talking about how they wrote. There was Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving and Garrision Keillor. I read books by the first two simply because they did those adverts and they were not Omni type authors. I read 'Lake Wobegon Days'because it was serialised on Radio 4 as the 15 minute story replacing 'Yesterday in Parliament' during recess and I missed most of them because I was at college. Garrison Keillor's voice is particularly good and you hear all that resonance as you read the books. I gave away my copy of 'Lake Wobegon Days's to a man called Rudi in Bali who drove me around sometimes and was after books because his daughter had got into high school.

Yesterday, I also found a copy of The British Interplanetary Society journal for sometime in 1978 I think. This had an article about Project Daedalus. I thought this was mankind's ultimate goal; to reach the stars.

Music for 18 musicians has reached an exciting bit ('How can you tell?' - J.) which makes me want to just sit here and listen for bit maybe without waving my arms about. It is like the Music for the Legong dance. Each part of the music is like parts of a tree which in turn, correspond to various parts of the bodies of the dancers. The body is the trunk swaying slowly to the underlying rhythm, the arms are the middle ranges while the high, fast fills are like the leaves of the tree, represented by the continually shaking fingers. It is the ultimate in Dance and Music and not as ancient as you would think. You may think it a shame but most of the Dance and Music we see in Bali today has been shaped by Western Visitors (Walter Spies - Beryl de Zoete see their book 'Dance and Drama in Bali') in the last century. The main dances are like Rock and Roll - fast and exhilirating. Get some Gamelan and see the how music should be.