Thursday, May 27, 2010

Ran Wan Tan


Under the Ivy hits the spot indeed, written in a manner which suggests the emotion and motion of each stage in the life it describes. The hiatus between Bush signing her deal and the start of recording is slow and magical - describing the life of a young woman left to mature artistically and emotionally in a comfortable environment and yet still results in a strange and worldly-wise music. The recording is different from this being a description of the meeting of the strange and spiritual singer with the workmanlike process of making a record. It is strange that such a free-spirit should create tight little pieces with no room for improvisation. I would suggest that any live performance today (some chance of that hey?) would produce versions almost identical to those late-seventies recordings. And yet they are beautiful songs - oddly traditional in their use of instruments but taken out of the ordinary by the extraordinary voice and exceptional lyrical innovation of their creator.

For the few days I have been reading this book I have thought I really should listen to the albums as they are reached in the book and so last night I started with The Kick Inside, which from the start with its whale song to the ending of the title track, both draws you back to the optimism of the late seventies after the refreshing cleanse out of punk and seems strangely futuristic. It is still not dated because despite the novel use of sound and voice it uses a basically traditional set of instruments. Not until the later albums do we get the crazy, non-real explosions of noise that made me reboot my appreciation. And since the Hounds of Love every album has been a must-have. It culminates in the masterpiece of Aerial which actually reigns in the excesses with a return to more traditional styles of compositions. But never the subjects - the lyrics suggest that Kate's imagination is fuelled by the normality of her family life.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Act Gaga - Gag a Cat



While trying to finish the second book above, the first one arrived. I struggled to avoid rushing the end of Mr. Maconie's surprisingly deep and not-twee-at-all volume and just about managed it. The new Kate Bush biography is just about the best rock biog I have read - well-researched, well written and packed with detail without being train-spotterish. After the previous biog of Kate Bush and the travesty that was Siren Rising, I was slightly wary but this is excellent. I did of course lap up the mysterious Kate Bush book by Fred Vermorel which was very good on creating a sort of very English atmosphere of thunder and green (from the cover onwards) but was I now realise very pretentious. This is the antidote to that. Read and digest with wonder.

And in the news as well this week, the revelation of the meaning of the Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes universe. And while it was quite obvious when all was made plain, it was still satisfying and needed no point-by-point analogy to remain consistent. Questioning details would be like asking why The Meerkat speaks with a Russian accent conveniently ignoring the fact that Meerkats don't ever speak at all in the real world. There are plenty of words elsewhere about the detail of LoM and A2A and you can read them if you like. It is probably more rewarding to sit back and muse on the atmosphere and the drama without bothering too much about detail. It is enough to say that the world is created in the head of a human being and if you can say that your view of the world is consistent with reality then congratulations and here's your list of locomotives to tick off.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Take Your Picasso!



I should have been at work today but instead we snuck off to the first day of the new Picasso Exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Quite disappointed that we weren't greeted with white whine and nibbles - not even a pigeon sandwich to go with the theme of the show but of course what really mattered was the art and this was truly art - and so so much of it. The Picasso Event Horizon occurred about two thirds through when the paintings started to be Picasso's versions of previous famous works - Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, Las Meninas etc. and while obviously in his style (at risk of sounding pretentious should we say metastyle) they smacked of mass-production and loss of inspiration.

Not like The Charnel House, one of the first paintings in the exhibition, a painting similar in style to Guernica and outwardly a depiction of a specific, ruthless atrocity in Spain but of course a marker for the greater tragedy of the whole of Spain. This is a grey work - it apes a newspaper picture - and despite being the visual record of death, of the unmoving victims of some small war crime, perhaps like all Picasso's work, it moves within itself, suggesting the post-mortem accusations of the murdered family, blaming those who carried out the terrible acts and indirectly us for being part of the wider world which allows this. The whole black time from the early skirmishes in the mud of Flanders to the ultimate atrocities of the concentration camps (and beyond into our own time) are channelled out in this picture. A little event given meaning with a scream directed from the artist into canvas. It gives no solutions other than being a reminder to moderate one's own behaviour for fear that the smallest break in your vigilance will let in the evil that men do.

[Paragraph removed due to being overtly Bathetic].

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

A News Sandwich


Driving home yesterday sound tracked by a talk between the two people in the picture above yesterday's post - Kim Phuc - the Girl in the Picture - and the ITN reporter who filmed the event - Christopher Wain. As first from the gentle and measured voice, I thought that Kim's voice had been overdubbed by an actor but the fact that she was in conversation with Wain proved that is was her. It was humbling that having suffered the horrors of that explosion, she was so calm and measured. I would still be ranting and screaming as the injustices of it all. Despite this, after years of being a prisoner of "that photo" Kim has taken control and used her fame to do good works. She was instrumental in getting treatment for Ali Abbas, the Iraqi boy who lost his arms in a missile strike on his house. You can hear the whole programme here.

This was followed by Brian Cox talking to Matthew Parris after choosing Carl Sagan for the Great Lives programme. But in between was a trailer for a radio version of what must be the most sentimental story ever written and yet one which gives me a lump in the throat that matches that from "Daddy! My Daddy" in The Railway Children. This is The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico which will be on Radio 4 this Sunday at 15:00. My headmaster at Middle School once played the whole school a recording of this story read by Spike Milligan and it was excellent.

Meanwhile we wait for the details of the biggest shake-up in British Politics since 1832 and shame on you if you don't know what that was.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Thirty Eight (and Thirty) Years Ago Today



I thought I should put this happier picture up instead of the one that everyone remembers. I remember it but I don't remember when I first saw it - it just seems to have been there all the time like the associated pictures of B52s dropping tumbling sticks of bombs into the Vietnamese jungle. At this point I have to state that the Napalm which burnt Kim Phuc was actually dropped by South Vietnamese aircraft rather than US planes but it really does not matter whether it was the South Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese or whoever. What DOES matter is that apparently Richard Nixon doubted the authenticity of the photograph which I suppose means he thought it was a fake for propaganda purposes. Now in a war where the abomination that is Napalm is used did he not think that there might be some collateral damage. There was simply no need for either side to fake atrocities because so many real ones existed. Was Nixon simply making a statement knowing that a good percentage of anyone who heard of his comments would believe them.

I sometimes wonder if large numbers of people wander about with a very sketchy view of the world (in some cases of the next street) but I have had to adjust this recently to wonder how many politicians actually have similar incomplete pictures of the situations they are nominally in control of. My line of work is generally proscribed, planned, regulated and tested to the highest level and yet sometimes an unforeseen issue can mean that risks have to be taken to get things to work. This means that occasionally I find myself changing things on the fly which little planning and this bugs me. The funny thing is that most times thse flailing attempts succeed and all settles down to normality. I suspect that most Government works like this. Government is not a joke or a game for children to play: it is a serious thing with consequences for real people's lives.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Drone Poem Sequence


Listening to ... er .... this.

If you can, set to HD. I did and it was like having little people playing music on my lap. This has not yet been released as a commercial recording so this is the only way to hear it all. I would hope that it comes out with the latest SR mallet composition and the new rock-based piece - 2 x 5. There is a clip of a rehearsal of the latter but the sound is very weedy.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Free the Chiltern Hundreds! Nick - Nick - I have to go.


Luft Wellen von Kraftwerk Hören

Don't they all look so professional up there and so they should. Can't help feeling a little buoyed-up simply because of the newness of all this sudden change in the way things are done. It will do us all good to be little less cynical than normal and to just give 'em a chance. Having said that they seem to have the ground running with the cancellation of the third runway for Heathrow though (breaking my own rule from a few seconds ago) it does seem that that might mean the creation of a small airport out in sensitive estuary areas which cannot be good.

Politics has not been this exciting since my Economics and Public Affairs O-Level class was dragged along a leafy, green country road to a single-room village school to see how voting actually worked. At that time I could probably name the entire cabinet and reel off the various stages that a bill passes through in the correct order and I can't help feeling that at least some small subset of this knowledge should be part of the compulsory curriculum. I feel this because of my wife telling me how many times she has had to explain a hung parliament over the last week. This lack of understanding together with an obvious ignorance of the procedure at change of Governments seems to have resulted in some quite nasty comments regarding the outgoing PM. It's not only the notoriously vicious message boards of The Daily Mail but also those of Comment is Free over at the Guardian which seem to have sparked a large-scale resurrection of the dripping corpses of political extremism. It seems that a Government which is by default leaning from both sides towards the centre, is destined to provoke anger and bile from those prepared to shout and scream for what they believe in, all of which probably tags me as a middle wet of the highest order.

I return to an analogy which serves well in a lot of cases, that of the driver seething in a traffic jam and blaming it all on the presence on the road of the other drivers around him. You can carry out integral calculus on an election, so the result is the result and no amount of analysis changes it or shed any useful light on how you should behave afterwards. In our current system, the contact with the voters is once every few years and the only parameters are those that are made public by the party in their manifestos in one direction and the wishes of the voters to vote in a single member. Short of holding referendums on all important policies there is no other way for it to be done. We can only suggest trying to make the election process as fair as possible so that as many possible views are taken into account. For any voting system, including a mythical "fairest of them all" one, there will be flaws and no way for everyone to be satisfied all of them time. The current coalition is a perfectly legitimate end-result for the current process within the parameters of our constitution and anyone who shouts "I didn't vote for this!", although technically correct should understand that "we" did vote for it. If you do not accept it - go out and campaign for reform. But remember, the only way to keep the possibility of one of the two big parties getting an absolute majority and therefore the supposed "strong government" that so many seem to want is to keep the current system. It just happens that this time it produced a country-wide "No Overall Control". Make the best of it.

Personally I feel that as in general the Western World has become more centrist over the years, that we are more likely to get such parliaments more often in the future even without electoral reform. I also feel it will do us good. The fact that it did come out as it did shows, despite the outrageous bile about Gordon Brown which poured out, that a good number of people didn't think that. Politics should be about policies and not personalities - which is probably for the best bearing in mind that huge numbers of politicians haven't got any - personalities I mean. Though I'm not sure about policies either.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

A Large-Print Autobiography of Basil Brush



I had to venture out of the city this weekend and it was beautiful - sunny and spring-like with the world looking just like the pictures in the books up there. Of course none of these books were ever close to reality for most people. The heyday of Ladybird books with pictures like this was the sixties and early seventies and can you reconcile those decades with the dreamlike paradise that they show? This is the country that the users of the phrase "Broken Britain" want brought back. Do they really believe it existed? For me it is a construction built of the few times that life slightly resembled these idealistic scenes - just like remembering that it was always sunny and no one ever locked their doors. The truth is that over the years things have got better for everyone in this country.

This is the triumph of liberalism - the meek have indeed inherited the Earth. There has been a consequent shift in attitudes where the extremism of today was the acceptable behaviour of half a century ago. Take the dismissal of proportional representation by the two "old" main parties. They decry the possibility of a hung parliament because it leads to coalition which in turn supposedly leads to weak and stagnant Government (like the weak and stagnant Government in Germany I suppose) and worry the Office Boys with the talk of there never being a Tory/Labour majority again should PR come into force. That basically says that they don't care for the wishes of a large proportion of the population and wish to rule based on what can only be called a democratic dictatorship. No division of ideas into three or four basic ideologies can produce satisfying legislation which is approved by everyone. In our voting system it produces laws that can at best make two-thirds of the population uncomfortable and at worst be morally repugnant to a similar number.

The complication is that the sheep in the financial markets will have an automatic knee-jerk reaction to any instability without thinking about it long-term. Maybe this is why China has such a stable and growing economy - because the power and governance behind it is static and unaffected by inconveniences as elections. They just get in the way of the process of making money don't they?

PR is not flawless - it has problems with local representation I suppose but I did think that we might create something tied to a local area. We might call it something like ... Local Government ... if only we could get the slackers out to vote. Maybe we should have to quote our voting reference to be able to write to the local papers.

Saturday, May 01, 2010

Spring Break and Blog Sweep


Unrelated Picture of the Week - The Albert Dock - Liverpool.

I have been lost in IP Address Purgatory again this week hence the light blogging - (I'm not a network engineer but I play one on TV). Wednesday saw me at a minor establishment of further education and while not quite Oxbridge I would have expected to be able to buy a Guardian in the shop. Turned out that the only paper considered in any way intellectual was The Daily Mail which the shop assistant offered me from under the counter. Belying the recent three-way split in politics all that could be offered in the way of news was the polarised duo of The Sun or The Mirror. What with the Guardian's recent coming out explicitly in favour of The Liberal Democrats, (bad luck Polly), things are becoming as interesting as they were in the old days. But students today - what a load of dispassionate whingers they are.

Anyway, to articled seen this week. First up is an interview with the Liberal Democrats' Youth Affairs Advisor - 61-year-old Brian Eno though this particular piece is more about his spot as curator of the Brighton Festival.

The next link seems slightly similar in outlook and is about manifestos from various rock and pop artists. Personally I would have thought that the best approach for a serious rock band would be to write music that says it all but it's fun to point and laugh at the over-serious musician isn't it?

For proper and varied content in literary endeavours we have Simon Armitage who has a new collection out - Seeing Stars which he talks about in this article from The Times but of course be quick because I'm not sure when they start charging. Having said that, Private Eye is rumbling about the Guardian having to charge any minute now due to falling sales of the print version. I will probably go for the Guardian Weekly print version if that happens.