Life Less Literary

Favourite picks from this week’s Need To Know

• Things my girlfriend and I have argued about - had me in stitches. Pissing myself. Laughing lots. You get the idea. I can’t remember when I last saw a more amusing webpage (OK, so I’m in an easily amused state of mind at the moment, but please allow me that). Are you two sure you were made for one another?
• Must remember to check out Blue Jam’s Bar Guide next time I head into Soho - hmm, seems more like Gabriel’s type of venues though.

Thank you NTK!

Wonderful drive home - I was listening to You Know Faust and decided to start singing along. Half an hour of comical improvised noises and nonsense poetry bellowed over the shifting music. I’ve got quite a nice voice really. But then, we all think that, don’t we? A lot deeper than I remember it being - I could pass for an opera singer. Hmmm…. why have I been wasting my time trying to improvise on instruments all this time. Vocal noises & nonsense poetry from now on.

After that the Blur album came on and I sang along with the few words I know from Beetlebum and a couple of others, still having a whale of a time.

Got bored with that after a bit, so I forwarded to the next CD - Student Studies by Cecil Taylor, a series of improvisations around a theme. I had forgotten how much I liked this CD. Awesome stuff. The intellectual beauty and symmetry of classical music combined with the driving power and passion of jazz. In my (usually quite humble) opinion the most flawless piece of improvisation I have ever heard. Must dig out my other Cecil Taylor CDs.

Strange feeling, searching for info on the CD from Google, and finding one of my own pages (albeit a meaningless one) so near the top of the list. Especially after finding the top ranking for the Faust CD going to one of philz’s sites.

Sitting waiting in the Cromwell Hospital today (today? yesterday? What the hell - what difference does a little midnight make?) I overheard a man with an Australian-sounding accent (turned out to be South African - oops) talking on his mobile phone. Started off with a fairly mundane sounding call, but then the next one launched into venom & anger. “I got your message. I’m bloody angry. You don’t understand how angry I am. I want to… do something to these fuckers, they are fucking me about…” etc. etc. It caught my attention - I wanted to know more - what was going on? From what I gathered, he had been involved in a fight (either the target of an attack, or trying to break up a fight, from what I gathered - “I’m the one who’s innocent here - I didn’t lay a finger on anyone”) and was now being threatened with prosecution (”and now they’re trying to pin the blame on me for the assult”). He was clearly pretty livid about the whole thing (”It’ll mean spending a fortune defending myself, when I shouldn’t have to defend myself. They’re the ones who should be defending themselves. I’ve a good mind not to defend myself, tell them they can fuck themselves”) and considering some extreme measures (”I feel like bunging a few Rand to some black guy from Brixton to go and teach them a lesson”), though what a black guy from Brixton would want with a few Rand, unless he was planning on emigrating, I don’t know.

Not a very pleasant vibe. Almost disturbed the circle of calm that had been following me around all day.

The doctor told me I had Sebhoraic (spelling?) Eczma on my head, which means that I’m allergic to some kinda yeast that naturally forms on skin, and Atopic Eczma on my body, which means that I’m allergic to something else, probably in my clothing. All I know is it itches, but it’s getting better. Personally, I think all illness is mental, and this one is more mental than most. I had been building up a pressure-cooker’s worth of stress over the last few months, and having had a chance to relax completely, it all came out all over my skin. All be gone soon though!

Finally got my NTK Viral Marketing T-Shirt today! Yayyy! I am one happy bunny (with a cool T-Shirt). Thanks to Allan at Cybercandy for getting there in the end.

Read in this morning’s Metro about a man who had a finger transpanted on in place of his severed penis. Fascinating. Knuckles and all, apparently, with a hole bored down the middle to allow for pissing and other functions. And after taking some time to get used to it, it now works like a dream. Plus, as he has joints in his joint, he can bend it. Fascinating.

Reading on the tube into work this morning (Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels), I was struck by the usual problem - kept drifting off, too many thoughts in my head, every paragraph I read went straight over it (my head, that is). I had to go back, re-read, re-read, until the contents finally sank in. I kept trying to fight off the future and the past… got… to… concentrate on the present - the words in front of me on the page - but all to no avail (shit, what was in that last sentence again? And what was this paragraph about?). The hangover didn’t help either.

And then I started sl..o..o..o..w..ing down. Read each word at a snail’s pace. Gave it time to take on meaning before going on to the next. It worked a treat. Images started building up in my mind. The whole book took on a richer meaning. It struck me that I always seem to be rushing through books, anxious to get to the end, say “finished that”, and start reading another one, rather than savouring it. In fact, it’s not just books that I do that with. Time to sl..o..o..o..w life down a bit too, I think.

I then realised that space is so important in everything. I used to hear people say that space is important in music, but didn’t believe it at the time, as I was busy trying to learn to squeeze 500 notes of bass-madness into every spare second. Now of course I know what they mean. Likewise in painting and other art - it’s often what you leave out that makes for beauty (just ask a Japanese painter). A good designers is a respecter of white-space. And the universe itself, of course, is made up of atoms containing teeny tiny particles rattling around in a big big gap. So, space is the answer, less is more, how very zen.

Time to get off the tube. Mind the gap.

Last night we hosted hard reality and Leonardo’s Valentine’s party. I was auctioneer - we “sold” off a bunch of slaves - raised an amazing £1193 for chariteeee (British Red Cross) through the sale of 11 people. I, perhaps rather rashly, bid, and now have to pay, £210 for Fern and Jess (who came complete with two £50 vouchers for local restaurants, and the promise that they would do my filing all day - except I don’t have any filing, just a desk piled with magazines and pieces of paper that need to be filed in the bin). I only did it to protect them from Gary - he had bid £200 and, seeing the look on their faces, I couldn’t bear seeing them sold of to an old lech like him so I put the bid in to save them from a fate worse than… well, worse than being my slaves for a day.

Actually, they’re not having to do anything too slavish. We pootled off to the Cod with the first of our vouchers and enjoyed a thoroughly tasty lunch: langoustine risotto, which was completely heavenly and just the kind of warm baby-food I needed to help soak up my hangover, followed by char-grilled tuna with spinach, leek and langoustine wanton and a sauce of aubergine and something or other - sounded awesome when the waitress described it, but the tuna was a bit chewy, and my recently-detoxed palate had trouble dealing with the saltiness of the sauce and the texture of the wanton, lovely though I’m sure they were.

We spent lunch trying to make hungover conversation, bursting into laughter at our own inability to complete sentences (or even to start them properly), said that it would be nice to go to the London Aquarium and hide out in the dark, but we didn’t, we went back to the office and I gave my two slaves the rest of the day off. Shame really, as I only had ownership of them for a day. Just think of the possibilities missed…

Spent most of yesterday troubleshooting damn email problems. I had previously managed to wrestle with the problem of multi-part text/html emails, this time I had to refresh my memory and then try and get it to cope with foreign characters above ASCII 127, gems like é, ç, ü, ®, ¥, and, god bless her satanic majesty, £. Emails are bloody weird things. Invented about 50 years ago when the Internet consisted of 3 pieces of toast strung up on some fishing line, developing for email means even more pitfalls than developing for Netscape, if you can imagine that.

Solved most of my problems by cutting all the text down to 76 characters per-line (which stops ASPMail from automatically changing the encoding) and whipping my minions into replacing the errant characters in the HTML version with the correct HTML elements (which I keep telling them they should do anyway, but you know what minions are like). Didn’t find a water-tight solution in the end - I did manually change the encoding of the text-part of the email to 8-bit, which I hope will do the trick. It broke in Groupwise, but then everything breaks in bloody Groupwise.

Treated myself to my first LMC gig in yeeeeears last night, Free Love (a free concert of free music on Valentine’s day). Cycled late from work straight to Conway Hall and prepared myself for some strange and beautiful noises.

I was a little unsure of myself - ready to make a quick retreat if necessary. After all, it had been a long time. And I wasn’t sure that I still liked free improvisation that much - although I remembered moments of rapture, I also seemed to have been avoiding that part of my CD collection recently. First up was Sylvia Hallet, a tyre-less bicycle wheel slung over her shoulder which she played with a violin bow. The resultant skwawks, swoops, keenings and clangings were fed through a delay unit to create layers of rhythym and sound textures which she played and sang over. Some undoubtedly beautiful stuff there - at times my heart pulled me up and I lost myself in the music, but then my head would always pull me back down again, busy trying to analyse, intellectualise, comprehend, when I should have just gone with the flow. All the old problems of improvisation gigs came back to me - should I watch the performance, and thus distract myself from the music, or close my eyes and enjoy, and risk missing some vital moves: understanding where a particular noise came from, seeing what implement made what sound, or just dodging the person fleeing the concert who’s about to bump into me. In the end, as usual, I spent most of my time with my eyes open, but still didn’t get much idea how the musicians extracted such a wierd and wonderful array of sounds from their wierd and wonderful array of objects.

For me the night all came together at the end, with a performace by the Bohman Brothers. I was looking forward to this, having chatted to Jonathan Bohman a couple of times on the phone, and been sent a CD of his brother Adam which I really enjoyed for its humorous and musical use of speech and household implements. The performance lived up to and exceeded my expectations - the brothers came on stage with large sheets of paper from which they read short quotes, presumably pulled from newspapers, books, magazines, wherever. Words and sentences mingled, and a tape of the two brothers reading gradually merged with the live performance so that four voices were throwing up quotes, creating new sentences out of old. The theatricality of the performance really enhanced it, and had me giggling in my seat. Jonathan occasionally glanced across the stage, looking with annoyance at his brother, or ranged around kicking an old violin. During the next piece, when they bowed wine glasses and other mundane objects, Jonathan not only poured wine into the glasses, he had a good drink too (before beating the bottle about the table with a fire-brush).

Cycled home, lifted.