The Mules

I've been listening to The Mules' album, and I think you should too.

Cycling is bad for your health

They don't tell you about this sort of thing... Yesterday I had an all-day rehearsal, the first for Kensington Symphony Orchestra's 50th birthday concert (tickets available here). And to my surprise, I had enormous difficulty with my bowing - my muscles have obviously all been strained in the wrong way riding my bike and not practising over the summer, and I can't get any force into the bow at all, in fact by the end of the day I was having trouble even holding it. I hope this will rectify itself over the next few days with plenty of practice. There's a lesson for you here, kids!

This afternoon I went to see Children of Men, an excellent, visceral yet thoughtful sci-fi thriller that I heartily recommend to you.

Saturday I cycled down to the Warehouse to see a couple of the BMIC's Finnissy weekend concerts celebrating Michael Finnissy's 60th birthday. It was a great pleasure to hear his music, and to catch up with Michael, who looks very chipper, and as ever is a delight and a gentleman.

While I'm in the business of telling you what to do, if you haven't yet discovered Bryan Talbot's masterful comic The Tale of One Bad Rat, you really should do everything in your power to track down a copy of this deeply moving story, I really can't praise it enough, it's one of the most moving things you'll ever read.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned...

I'm a very, very bad man. I hid a penis in someone's leaving card.

Let me explain. First, you need to know that at the office in which I work, we've developed a tradition of making cards for birthdays, leavings etc rather than buying some crappy shop one. It's a good tradition that more offices should adopt.

Secondly, you need to know that the person who left my office today is someone I dislike. I'm not often one to dismiss anyone totally, I like to try and see the good in people on the whole, but this particular individual is an arrogant, stupid, lazy little shit.

(In my humble opinion, of course.)

The card you see above was not conceived by me, but as I'm one of those at work with a moderate sense of design and drawing ability, I often get asked to realise others' concepts. In this case, the idea was a pair of wings (symbolising the leaver's taking flight into greater things), and, as a later addition, a figure like one of those you get in old maps with an old man representing the winds.

So I cut out some wings, and drew the old man. But my evil streak took over, and I drew the wing outline in a certain way. If you've studied art beyond a very basic level, you may be familiar with the concept of negative space, where the outline of the supposed object in the picture actually conceals another. Now, look between the wings at the shape produced by them. Can you tell what it is yet?

I'm slightly disappointed, but also relieved, that apparently no-one spotted this. But fuck it, that's what I think of that little tosser, and I'm immensely glad he's gone.

Of course, once you see the cock, it raises all sorts of questions about what the bearded chap's doing. But that's another story.

fragments of other people's lives, #1

Overheard at Liverpool Street Station:

Man on phone: "So she said, y'know, I don't pay her enough attention an' that... so I started, y'know, calling her sexy an' that..."

John Drummond

John Drummond died last week. He was the man who, as Director of the Proms, commissioned Harrison Birtwistle for the Last Night, which caused quite a kerfuffle at the time. They played a bit of the piece in question, "Panic" on the Today programme to introduce their article about him, and very exciting it sounds too, brash and entirely Birtwistlian, while also showing a surprising affinity with hard bop. It's hard to imagine anyone daring to put something like that in that smug, tired occasion these days.

There's a mention of the BBC Music Library in the Telegraph's obituary that was sent to me (you can read the whole thing here), which sums up a lot of what's wrong with the BBC for me:

"The appointment proved difficult from the start. He found "an air of palpable hostility'' from some of the producers and soon found himself in conflict with Ian MacIntyre, Controller of Radio 3. He also found that the BBC governors had little interest in music. One of them asked him why the BBC needed its music library: "I thought musicians played from memory."

Sadly, such ignorance is still prevalent, we are under the rule of idiots. Unfortunately there are fewer and fewer people like Sir John prepared to stand up and attack this kind of nonsense.

Welcome to the world

James Thomas Nagle, born 12.48 a.m. 8th September 2006, 8lbs. Pity the poor little sod, he's got me as an uncle.

Diary pieces are on hiatus, as I'm preoccupied with the viola piece I'm writing, however here are a couple of things I scribbled at lunch this week, one a distorted memory of Mendelssohn, the other a little play on my new nephew's name.

Movement

Well, things are looking up, there seems to be some sort of sanity returning to life, and while it'd be exaggerating to say that everything's peachy, there does seem to be a bit more light about than there was a few weeks ago. I guess sometimes you have to hit a wall before you can move on.

No recent diary pieces to post, but for once indolence has no part to play in this... I've been working on this piece for viola, and the ideas are flowing freely for once. I have a very good feeling about it.

I went on a 3-hour bike ride yesterday. Now, I'd expect to feel sore after that, what with not having ridden a bike regularly for about 20 years and being generally out of shape, but what I didn't expect was that the tendons in my hands would be so affected. I was barely able to turn the key in my front door when I got home, and had a lot of trouble wielding a knife when cooking my tea, and even today I'm having trouble with things like writing (and typing, come to that). It must be because I've been gripping the handlebars too tight for too long. It's bloody annoying.

singing

People sing to their babies. Why do they stop? Why don't people sing to each other as adults? It seems sad that they don't.

Accentuate the positive

Well hey hey! I've been asked to write a piece for viola! And there may even be some money in it! Which would be the first time I've been paid for writing anything.

And yay! My bike's finally arrived, and I'm picking it up tomorrow!

I'm holding onto these two things as hard as I possibly can, because quite frankly, every fucking other thing in my life right now looks as bad and bleak as it could possibly be.

Top of the Pops

So, in the end TOTP bowed out with a whimper rather than a bang. Where was all the stuff I remember, Shakin' Stevens falling over drunk, Status Quo, er, falling over drunk? The Jesus and Mary Chain causing chaos?

Well, at least they had that bit of Nirvana with Kurt Cobain singing about 3 octaves lower than the record. And nice of Tony Blackburn and DLT to remind us just why it was a blessed relief when the Beeb gave them the boot.

It's a sad day for those of us who grew up during that time when the charts still mattered, but I suppose the kids of today were too busy stalking people on MySpace or playing Grand Theft Auto to notice.

My god... I'm watching the documentary about it now... they just showed Legs & Co. dancing to "Pretty Vacant". Words fail me.

Activate!

Been a busy week...

First off, I've finally gotten around to sorting out a website. It's fairly basic at the moment, but it'll develop over the coming months, I hope.

On Monday I met up with Rachel, who works at the publisher where I used to work (funnily, when we got in touch it was a while before we remembered this) and who makes excellent music both under her own name and as ninki v. She plays the theremin, which makes her both a source of admiration and envy for me. Anyway, have a look/listen, 'cos it's good stuff.

Tuesday I went with my friend Seaton to an spnm gig at Cargo, which was great and made us determined to go to more of that kind of stuff. Wednesday it was off to Koko to see Low perform their excellent record "things we lost in the fire", certainly the second best Mormon rock record ever made. It did feel strange though, hearing music which seems so perfectly designed for solitary listening in the company of many strangers in a sweaty hall.

Support came from Bat for Lashes, a female trio who came over like Bjork's little sisters. We thought their material didn't quite stretch to the time they played, but we were won over by their charm anyway and will be watching out for their debut album, which I believe is out soon.

Laurence Page R.I.P.

Laurence was an ordinary person. He worked in the BBC gramophone library, some of my colleagues had known him for 17 years. I didn't know him before the cancer got into him, but you never felt this made any difference. Through all the pain, the operations and the long, slow, painful decline, he always seemed to maintain himself despite everything. The cancer ate away at his flesh, but it never touched his soul, and he was inspiring because of it, because if he could maintain his dignity and humour going through all that, what excuse do any of us have to do otherwise through our infinitely lesser woes? It's a relief for him that he's not suffering anymore, and a terrible loss to the rest of us that he's no longer here.

The paucity of promming

So, the Proms have started, and what a disappointing programme stretches out over the next couple of months like a sonic desert. Only 6 commissions? Just about the most ordinary, box-ticking first night imaginable? High time there was a change of guard, methinks, the current lot have clearly run out of ideas.

patterns diverging

RIP Syd Barrett

Always had a soft spot for Syd, that English delivery so different from all the transatlantic drawls that surrounded him. I once lived in Terrapin Road in Tooting, where Syd's sister once lived, and the inspiration for his song "Terrapin". So here's a little thing based on a musical approximation of that word. Hope you're at peace, Syd.

one year on...

It seems hardly real now... looking outside at the sun, traveling into town earlier today everything seemed as it always did. A heavier than usual police presence, a few headlines declaring that Londoners are "defying bombers" by traveling around as usual - as if we really had any choice in the matter. Of course, thinking about it, the visible presence of police on the underground as routine is something that's very different to a year ago, part of the general slide into a quasi-police state that this government has seemed so keen to push headlong towards since the bombs went off, if not before. The degree to which they have been able to insinuate unaccountable powers for themselves over our everyday existence worries me greatly, as does the ease with which they seem to be doing it. One day we'll wake up to find that typing a sentence like that is enough to get us arrested - if that's not already the case.

Anyway, as it's now a year since the idea for this came to me, I thought I'd re-post the piece I wrote last July that started it, along with an echo of it a year later. Also a couple of other recent entries.

After a year, I still seem no closer to figuring out exactly what the purpose of this blog is, so I guess all I can do is keep on keeping on.

notes on a summer day

A glorious day, good to get some time to relax after a hectic time. And catch up on a few of these:

Time slipping through fingers like sand

How things slip by, is it really so long since I put anything up here? It's a combination of preoccupation, periods of dryness/depression, I guess. I haven't abandoned this idea though, there are a lot of things I've scribbled down that haven't made it onto here, some because I just didn't get round to it, others because they seem to belong to other projects, whether because they're songs (I seem to have an itch to write songs at the moment, maybe I'm feeling the lack of writing I've done for the human voice) or because they were written for a specific impulse - I've started thinking in terms of small, easy piano pieces where each hand spans only a fifth on the keyboard, an idea I've taken from Nielsen's "piano pieces for young and old".

Anyway, here is a selection of pieces that have been written as diary entries over the past few days, days of reflection amongst the general madness that seems to envelop life at the moment.

Evil!

You Are 62% Evil

You are very evil. And you're too evil to care. Those who love you probably also fear you. A lot.

How Evil Are You?

I am apparently this evil. I didn't think I was that bad. On the plus side, I'm very imaginative and empathetic, according to this site:

Generous Inventor

Been a bit lazy with the diary pieces lately... here's a couple of recentish ones, one from March 24, the second I foolishly forgot to date, so let's say April 1st.

Chant

I've been reading a book about Buddhism recently. It's very interesting, although I'm unsure how far I can accept it - I'm naturally inclined to scepticism, I guess. I have been experimenting with chanting though, which does help restore calm in moments of stress, I'm finding.