Friday, April 28, 2006

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.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006



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

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

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.

Monday, April 24, 2006

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.

Friday, April 21, 2006

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.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

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.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Is Everything You Know Wrong?

… or the Myth of Fingerprints.

There seem to be so many fundamental truths that are turning out not to be truths at all. However, this assault on one fundamental truth is just not in the same league. Do not believe the hype.

And this article about advice for Americans on how not to behave idiotically abroad made me chuckle in the first paragraph when a visitor to these sparkling shores remarks on how easy it would be to amend all the TO LET signs to read TOILET and wonders why no one bothers to. I can remember my mother saying that she used to do exactly this when she was young. But then again she did go to Dartington Hall School which is not far behind Summerhill School in terms of promoting freedom of expression. My aunt, who also went to Dartington, remembers tea with Bertrand Russell, whose children were there at the same time. I like to think of them being tempted to amend TO LET signs as well. I am of course the weedy, downtrodden product of state education designed to keep us all just bubbling under the dissatisfaction event horizon.

All of which makes me wonder if the sudden increase in the number of schools prepared to even just mention creationism is part of some grand educational plan with this very purpose. Am I being pernickety when I find it just plain wrong when fundamentalist Christians are allowed to finance schools? And then am I taking it a step too far if I think that these same sponsors will then want a say in what is taught in those schools? And surely I am overstepping the bounds of what might be considered conspiracy theory if I speculate on how enthusiastic the dear leader seems about all this.

I suppose an enthusiastic review of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe might seem a little out of place after this rant. I enjoyed it; the book brought to life. And my must-see TV over the weekend was the trilogy of The Private Life on an Easter Masterpiece which examined Da Vinci’s Last Supper, Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross and Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. Thick father was wondering privately why they started with the last supper on Thursday when daughter said out loud that Jesus would have been having the last supper “about now” and the fact that it was the day before Good Friday hit me in the teeth. “Sunday School Pupil shames aging humanist”. Of the three, the best picture for me is Dali’s powerful crucifixion scene which has never leapt out at me before but simply due to its unusual perspective is almost overwhelming. I would love to see it for real. However, it does seem at odds with what I know about Dali and his at best ambiguous spirituality. This was said much better in the show and several of the critics dismissed the painting as a cynical act of self-promotion. I could only think of Vettriano doing something similar today but I don’t know enough about Vettriano’s beliefs to make any further comment. There was criticism too, from a former student at the Glasgow school of art who was leader of the protests against the purchase of Dali’s picture. He was pictured in a photo vaguely contemporary with the time with some of his own pictures which immediately struck me as being similar to the pictures Giles use to put into his cartoons when he wanted to suggest some poor sub-Picasso modern art. For all Dali’s cynical money-making, he certainly could paint and had his own style. “Humanist moved by Avida Dollars”.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Strong Strung String Strang Streng

Listening to Spiritchaser by dead Can Dance

The minutia of my actual work is quite interesting at the moment. I have long since put all that faffing around with frames into the trash and am now deep into dataviews and the .net equivalent of Excel pivot tables. Learning on the fly I suppose but with Music for 18 Musicians seeming to fit the actual mechanics of the stuff, all is right and the sun is shining – or “the sun am shining” as Word wants me to use - I seem to have the patois version or maybe a non-pc pc.

I tried to take a 360 panorama form the top of the British Camp at the weekend but the clouds were blowing across the sky so fast that by the time I’d come around to the start again, the image was so different that the panorama software kept complaining and wouldn’t accept that my idea of the join was correct when everything it knew said something different. So you might get an idea of how dramatic it was up there. The boy managed to walk most of the way himself despite complaints and requests for “carry” and “no walk”. My daughter ran up and was there long before us. It was windy but a walk up there is always worth it. In the bad winter of ’81 (dontcha know) I struggled up all the way to the top in drifts and -10 degrees of frost. I got home so stiff that I couldn’t lift the latch on the door. Being up there is strange; you are only 10 minutes from the car park, good coffee and a pub, there are many people on the hill on all but the worst days and yet it seems remote, like a walk across a remote moor. If instead of following the main paths up and around the hill, you go down the metalled road from the car park you will go by the reservoir (complete with its own set of dogs who will check you out) and end up on a rocky path through a very dense wood. If you manage to get through it without spraining anything or getting lost, you will emerge onto the common land where I used to live. This was the path I took that winter so in an alternative universe my bones are lying there, picked clean by foxes in the gloom. There is a roaring silence all around, all distant noise flattened to a low hum that swallows any other sound like gravity. I never appreciated it when I lived there though.

Doctor Who at the weekend – all really is right with the world though I am sure the Cybermen will want to put a stop to that.
Not my Lorna Doones!

"Dancing to this record will give you an agile body and healthy mind, but it won't be easy.” – Stewart Copeland


Getting to sleep was difficult last night. For some reason I had two mental itches that couldn’t be reached by the Backscratcher of the mind. I can find no reason for either of them, each having arrived fully-formed in that strange cache-memory that lives between the serious storage and the scratch-pad.

The first was whether there is anything that human beings have three of. I do of course mean standard models rather than those with various “issues” regarding extremity counts. I of course have slightly more than the average number of legs but I am not sure whether that means anything. I did think of cervical vertebrae but there are seven of them – an odd number it’s true but not three which in a way is a bit like the difference between 3/4 time – a common signature and reasonably easy to dance to – and 7/4 time which is only for Jazz people – nice – but not danceable at all. Let me know if you think of anything but I want proper things, not collections or sub-divisions such as “lobes of the liver”.

Second annoyance was a tune – “you’re moving out today” by Carole Bayer Sager which my sister used to play over and over almost to the point of auto-defenestration. What made it stranger than the normal repeating pop tune was the weirdness of the whole thing. The lyrics are such a mix-up of things, items that the boyfriend has and have to go with him, his strange apologies which suggest he is simple, like an animal stuck in a cage responding with repeating odd behaviour. I suspect that this was a real relationship; that all those things are the genuine detritus of the couple’s year together. It seems to have enough of a window on life as to be able to spawn a whole drama/sitcom. What also helps is the fact that Carole Bayer Sager has not got a bell-clear singing voice – she whines, making it easier to believe for some reason, that she might not be entirely blameless in all this. But he ain’t Burt Bacharach.



A Book of Trees and Weather – 1929

The world collapsed in 1988,
When all those widow-weeded,
Nineteen-year-old business women,
Danced their sneaker dance,
And fell to dust unbidden at my feet.
In that double luckless year,
Something broke or changed,
A steel horizon made itself.
I went to write in Eden,
A garden drained of spirit,
Became a simple shelter
From the cold and rain,
And all the world was deathly,
Chemical and white,
Like children’s ghosts,
For video and takeaway
Have taken everything,
And trashed it casually.

Those figures seen through water,
Are lost forever in black tides,
Stretched and danced to vapour,
And the acid cut of alcohol
Is gone, lost with every method
For the pleasures of this life.
I knew all things before this,
Spoke French and German
Enough to fail at both.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Flying Vikings

My daughter tried to carry the Lego Viking ship around to the neighbours to show her and she dropped it. Many tears there were and so I had to put it back together again last night. I stressed that there is no point crying over Lego as it always goes back together – I don’t ever remember breaking a piece of Lego. When it was finished, she said “that’s cracking - you’ve done a great job – it’s spanking” which shows a dangerous obsession with Wallace and Gromit.
ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge;

… it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

I have read this article, calmed down and started to write. Actually, I have not waited; though like the United States I am disappointed rather than outraged.

There is a dichotomy (I have been waiting for years to use that word again) between the fact that the argument against creationism can use both complexity and simplicity. Ockham’s Razor would suggest that the introduction of a sweeping outside entity as the designer of the entire cosmos is an increase in the complications – who designed the designer? We are into GOD Over Djinn territory – an acronym for itself, something which seems just too good at explaining the absurdity of the introduction of a creator. But hey – it works! The converse side of this is that the wholistic (sic) system, the result of the billions of years of interaction between entities is actually beautifully simple when looked at together. If you throw marbles into a square frame, randomly, hose them in, they will eventually form a pyramid, with no outside interaction other than that of geometry and gravity – the stable marbles become bases for the next layer – a sort of survival of the fittest. I am reminded of Volvox here. Expand that to cover the interaction of all particles and despite the seemingly infinite number of combinations, the survival of stable states becomes inevitable without the need for any design.

We come back to the infinite number of Monkeys and the script for Hamlet. This has to be clarified because an infinite number of Monkeys would come up with the script instantly because one of them (actually an infinite number as a proportion of infinity) would come up with the script on its first attempt. One Monkey shall we say? The creationist argument is that the beauty of the script is impossible to create even given geological time (not that extreme creationism believes in even that). However we have to look at smaller units of “beauty” or in the case of text, probably “meaning”. Maybe this argument is a little removed from the complexities of evolution, but the idea is that a small unit of meaning is able to “survive” better than a small unit of random text which has less meaning. As soon as some element of meaning raises itself above the common huddle of random junk, it can survive intact, it will remain. When two units of low-level meaning come together, they might form a unit with a higher level of meaning and therefore survive together. The upshot is that we are not starting over with each attempt at the script. Get the word “to” and it will survive long enough for it to come across the word “be”. And so on.

I sometimes rage against the heuristic approach while using it all the time in my testing. However, this is what nature does all the time, trying things (though “trying” suggests an intelligent selection of something to try when in actual fact it is just a random stream of things, which are tested by outside factors) to see what survives best. The end result is something of practical ability and also enough beauty to satisfy any criteria of great and good that might in the past have been used as an element of faith. Natural entities just seem “right”, even without having to examine them microscopically; they just fit with their environment. The universe achieves a balance – actually an infinite number of smaller balances, which in turn interact to create larger stable islands in the chaos of sub-atomic particles which make up everything. Overall, the universe is a mess of unorganised junk. The organised parts, with the human brain up near the top of the pyramid, do not violate any rules about the decay of matter into chaos because the amount of organised matter in the Universe is tiny compared to the soup of chaos. In a universe filled with water there will be random spots where a significant amount will boil spontaneously without the input of any outside energy.

I got half-way through an article amount Zero-point energy in water and I should finish it; but this seems to suggest that a good deal of biology is dependent on something which seems like a free lunch in terms of energy. Water is strange in that any other comparable compound would behave completely differently – freeze from the bottom up because it becomes denser when colder – and so not be able to support life. Some will see this as proof that the Universe was designed for us to live in though the anthropic principle dismisses this – the universe is the way it is not because it was designed for us to live in but because it allowed us to come into being. If it was vastly different, we would not be here to see it. This of course suggests the possibility that this Universe is just one on many where no life has developed enough to contemplate its own existence. It’s like thinking that coming from Great Britain is the best thing going and why should you be so lucky as to be here – safe from the famine and natural disasters than proliferate around the rest of the world? Apart from being pompous, this is just plain wrong. There are many arguments against this not least of which is that someone has to come from here. And then there are probably plenty of people in every country of the world who think they are truly blessed to live where they do. We of course like familiarity. Well most people do. The business arguments regarding change as being good are often just smoke-screens for the need to keep an economy going by selling us new things though being in the line I am, maybe I should not dwell on that too much.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

It is not PC for the PC to Check Your PC

We were at my parents for the weekend and we all got presents. The youngest got a self-propelled Thomas the Tank Engine which fires out plastic smoke balls from its chimney. The boy is very wary of this and walks around behind it in a suspicious crouch with an occasional smile. My daughter was given a Lego Viking boat complete with rapid-fire catapult and snaky sea-monster. This is because my dad is aware that all children in the country will be “doing” the Vikings at some point. I had to put it together last night and tipped all the bits out onto a tray. It was most daunting. Even the horns on the helmets were separate and had to be pushed into place. It took an hour and a half to finish by which time daughter had gone to bed so the complete diorama was set-up on her table. She just woke up in time to see me off this morning and was most happy. What goes around … I remember coming down early one morning to find a huge Lego suspension bridge which my dad had made the night before. It was complete with string for cables and a slender deck which without proper suspension would not have stood up. In the chaos of a visit to the grandparents I don’t often notice much but I did see him explaining pre-stressed concrete bridges to his granddaughter with the aid of … yes … more Lego. He also showed her the model of a Shaduf he had made out of twigs for her cousin AND a windmill that really worked. This reminds me of the Kon Tiki story which I must have mentioned here before. Dad made me a model of the Kon Tiki using twigs and branches we got from the Malvern Hills. It was for a competition at school but I was adamant that it should not be entered because he had made it, not me. Years later I made a model using Balsa and sandpaper of which I was very proud but it got lost in the move – I say lost but I mean in the sense of wrecked as the bits arrived at the new house. I should try again sometime.

Anyway, my present was not wrapped, just handed over in a plastic bag. My old ZX81 complete with 16K RAM pack. There are two games with it – A flight Simulator and some space shoot-em-up; I don’t think I’ve got any tape machine which I could use to load them but it will be interesting to try it for five minutes. I have no manual but it is online here so a test might be carried out tonight if I can wrestle control of the TV away from the boy who wants to watch Wallace and Gromit over and over. I was thinking about how we used to try and squeeze as much into the 1K as we could. Even with a 16K expansion pack, it would not be difficult for one person to understand what every bit and peek and poke actually did to the registers in the CPU. I even wrote a few bits of simple machine code – I had Rodney Zak’s book on Z80 programming though I went onto 6502 later. This helped with my one commercial machine-code program. Well actually it was assembler but who makes that distinction these days? I didn’t get that excited about machine-code; it seemed unnecessarily complicated when you had high-level languages which probably was fore-shadowing. Now I have unlimited space for programs, the thought of going in and doing things at the lowest possible level seems quite exciting. At college, one of the dead-end course involved real-machine code programming to the extent that we had to program using bits of wire and connections to the pin-outs of the chips. It felt like torture at the time but what I wouldn’t give to have one of those boxes now. Still, you can simulate everything on a PC these days so that might be an option … after the Change ringing simulator and Six Pianos and the Fractals and everything else. Time to go and crash this PC

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Devil Chicks



I was confronted by these charming items the other day. They are supposed to be Easter chicks for something my daughter is making. They look more like mini daemons what with all those little yellow horns.

Why does any razor need five blades?

Well I should do a proper review of Cider with Rosie so here it comes. I think listening to the tape makes this about the fifth time I have been through this book – what do you say for a listening? I didn’t read it at school like most people seem to do but instead bought it while at college as a sort of pretentious reminder that I was a country boy and not like the urban types I was thrown together with. I am not really that rural - I was born in Nottingham – but I moved to a small town when I was five and out into the country when I was 11. Cider with Rosie is about a time long before anything I have experienced though strangely the thing that made me realise that was actually a passage from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – the follow-up book – where Lee says that his walk from Slad to Southampton and London would no longer be possible. This was written in 1969 (the first book is from 1959 I think) because of the cutting up of the countryside to make way for the motor car. I was on the motorway as he read this out and it made me sad; we are just so far away from this time that it seems like something out of ancient history and yet there are still people alive who remember it. Slad as described seems like a place unchanged for two-thousand years; clothes may alter, but men still go off to war or for other adventures throughout history, the fields grow the same things and the social structure is maintained. For all the perceived decency in our society these days, we seem to have let some of the worst excesses of countryside vandalism go through unchanged. It is not only in the country that people get away with the damage. Look at the standard tourist shots of European towns and see skylines unchanged for centuries. They may be blighted with traffic fumes and all the low-level changes that have gone on but the bottom line of planning is restricted. Try and find anyplace other than a few Cotswold towns where those sort of rules are applied and you will fail. Primary colours, shouty shop-fronts, unthought-out traffic signs all go to make even the most bucolic-looking town of this country look like mini versions of Las Vegas.

Lee was clever in that he managed to avoid describing how comfortably the family actually were. I still don’t know whether they were poor or not. He mentions his mother’s scatty way with money (and everything else) and maybe they did struggle sometimes but the book sometimes seems like a middle-class reminiscence, a sort of delight in roughing it rather than a painful journal of hardship. When I first came to Liverpool I actually read Helen Forrester’s book – Twopence to Cross the Mersey, which, if true, describes a terrible life – the comedown of a middle-class family to a decayed existence in Liverpool slums. It may seem a bit Mills and Boon in a rough coat and why should it give me an insight? The Road to Wigan Pier also describes slum life though always with a detached air that Helen Forrester avoids through having lived that life for years.

Having said all this, Lee is not trying to make you see how bad his life was but how good. He is a poet and large sections are just extended verse, descriptions – what would have been described in my junior school as Creative writing. One piece which really sticks in my mind is a passage describing the sound of the tall trees that stood outside the house. I was lost to that white noise, the randomly waving branches, spotting the rooms of the house with light and shade. It was like teleport, an instant removal to that steep bank and the sound of nothing but the world. But he is not only good with place; he can handle character as well, filling out a whole person, doing the work of a good casting director with a few pencil strokes. All the people become real; the sisters with their otherworldly beauty become like guardian angels, walking out of the page until you fall in love with the simple goodness that they all have. No person is judged on the negative aspects of their personality – this is just simply how they are – no change can be made for better or worse- they just exist. He also covers his own faults without comment, letting you decide whether you like him or hate him for something and always finding that you can forgive him anything.

As I said, I was worried that the author is never the best person to read their own book but in this case, the already powerful prose is amplified by the author’s emotive voice, almost seeming like an off-the-cuff reminiscence than a retrospective reading of a well-loved classic. I have a tape of Sylvia Plath from a radio 3 programme she recorded in the early sixties. One part is a formal review of some new poems and read in her strange Boston accent seems weird and stilted. The other part involves what seems to be an extempore commentary about living in Britain which is delightful and real and completely unstrange. I don’t often get the feeling that Laurie Lee is reading his own book though he must be. There are even misheard words, phrases he mispronounces as if he’d never heard them out loud. It all makes the whole thing real, bum notes, bits too fast, bits too slow but not that you’d ever really notice or find that it detracts from the simple depth and feeling of the thing. Seven hours of beauty and real feeling. Buy it! Oh you can’t!

Monday, April 03, 2006

Dreadnowt – the Northern Battleship



As you can see, I got the bike fixed. I also finished listening to Cider With Rosie which ends so sadly but with so much promise. On to As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning. PJ Harvey has just sworn in my ear which is a nice contrast to this. I don’t believe in pathetic fallacy but maybe it has changed the mood of the day. I am feeling a bit empty at the moment despite the spring weather and comfortable surroundings. Everything seems to be just a long line of experience with no divisions. Sleep used to divide the days but sat at this desk just seems a continuation of the previous day with no separation. Several times over the weekend I wanted to write an entry here but things happened and I didn’t which probably helps keep the division between work and home which seems to be lacking in so many people’s lives.

I missed all the April Fools though I read about one which must have wound a few people up. Years ago I used to wake up at the same time as Radio 4 played their UK theme, a mixture of folk songs and sea shanties designed to represent Britain. It was a nice diversion but now the BBC have decided to drop it much to the annoyance of the Radio 4 types – strange people who believe in Ostriches in the rafters. The today programme on Saturday addressed this with the news that the replacement tune would be a collection of Euro-ditties. I imagine some overturned bowls of muesli and choking on orange juice. I suppose I would have to include myself in the description of Radio 4 Type; I would actually like the UK theme to stay not that I am awake at that time any more but that always reminds me of the company-wide email we once received which prompted a few reply-alls creating a snowball effect so that people started replying to all saying stop replying to all not realising that they had become part of the problem. Even though I knew this, it was very difficult not to click that button when the inbox got full. A colleague here was ranting about ‘breeders’ and how they got Tax benefits at the expense of young singles likes him. Much of the reply was along the lines of those kids supporting him in his dotage with their own taxes. He of course wouldn’t have that and had an attitude that bordered on no one should have kids. This of course is like a reply-all in that if no one has kids, the result will be a wasteland.

The talking point on the BBC very often has discussions of this after budgets. You’d think that we could run this country without any taxes at all. The individual comments are of course limited by being short replies and cannot hope to cover the whole subject but often they are made out of self-interest without any thought that there are people with different needs or views. I once saw someone describe Single Mothers as ‘garbage’ which is a generalisation too far. It didn’t last long. Of course the people who write to these things are often the people who can be bothered. I have so many views that I can express in single sentences but after I have I will always find myself thinking of a riposte to my own argument, a process which can echo down through all the possible components of the situation. It is best to stay out of these things because not only would I be bound to annoy someone, I would annoy myself when I realise that my own shallow comments are just as stupid as all the others. I can only wonder how tax havens work – I suppose it is a matter of scale. Anyway, taxes will always annoy someone. People just always want more than they have got. Got a thousand, you want ten thousand. Got ten thousand you want a hundred thousand. We are happy enough.