Life Less Literary

Why is it that whenever I’m sent something “AM delivery” it arrives, without fail, between 11.45am and midday (or 12.45 and 1pm for 1pm deliveries). And when it’s an “any time in the day” delivery, if it doesn’t again turn up during the last 15 minutes of the day then it will (more common, in fact) arrive between 3.10 and 3.20pm, when I am usually collecting the girls from school.

Well, no delivery yet today, so this time I’ve arranged for somebody else to collect the girls. Which, of course, means that delivery will be pushed back to the end of the day. Or missed out all together, and I’ll have to wait until Monday. Or mis-delivered, and I’ll have to wait until god-knows-when.
Actually, we did get a delivery first thing this morning (while I was walking the dog - the other favourite time for delivery drivers to arrive - fortunately Gill was still in to receive this one). When I got back, I spotted the parcel and thought “that looks damned small for 28 photobooks”. Opened it up and it was actually my copy of Adobe Lightroom, which I ordered over two weeks ago. I actually wrote to them yesterday to cancel the order, because they were being so bloody slow, but as with all of my customer service queries to Adobe (”…we will reply to your query within 24 hours…”) this one has been completely ignored.

By some other bizarre stroke of fate, I got two identical emails (except that one was sent “high priority”) from Adobe last night, telling my that my order had shipped. On 12th April. Muppets!

Did I mention that Adobe sucks?

From time-to-time, I’ve reported here on some of the search phrases that bring the most traffic to this site - see for example here, here and especially here. Whenever I’ve checked back recently, the top terms have been fairly static and dull, but a recent post I made has shaken up the search-charts worse than a record company-employed undercover shopper.

So here are some of this week’s new top search terms:

• naked girls
• naked spanish girls
• naked slaves
• girls in chains
• slave girls
• slave girl
• naked slave girls
• slave girls of rome
• spanish girls naked
• girls stripped naked
• naked girl dancing

Etc, etc etc.

There’s nothing quite so much fun as confounding peoples’ expectation.

Our latest fostering placement just ended, under very unfortunate circumstances.

Normally, trans-racial and cross-cultural fostering is a no-no: wherever possible, the agencies in charge will try to place a child with a family from a similar background. In practice this is often impossible: foster carers are mainly white British, and the demand for care from other groups in society is such that often compromises have to be reached. Even placing “appropriately” can often be quite inappropriate: if one of your cultural pigeonholes is labelled “Asian Muslim”, does that mean that it’s OK to place an Iraqi Sunni with an Iranian Shia family?

Cross-cultural fostering is something which Gill and I have been interested in for some time now. Last year, social services mistakenly placed a “dual heritage” (previously known as mixed race/half-caste/mulatto/…) boy with us. They were horrified: he should have been placed with a black foster family (the fact that his mum is white British apparently counts for little), and it was only because his paperwork did not mention his racial background that he accidentally ended up with us. Anyway, after some initial getting used to one another, it ended up being the most rewarding placement that we’ve had. We got a huge amount from the experience, as did he, and we were quite keen to carry on with similar placements if possible (which generally it isn’t, sadly).

However, one area where cross-cultural fostering is possible is with refugees and asylum-seekers. Many refugees arrive in this country as unaccompanied children, and there are often few, if any, foster carers from the same cultural background. Gill and I have a reasonable understanding and appreciation of various cultures, plus we are far more flexible than the majority of foster carers we meet (many are unwilling to adapt their routine or diet to suit a child’s culture, but we will very happily revert to vegetarianism, ban pork from the house, buy halal meat, make trips to the temple… whatever is required. Although I am a battle-scarred atheist, and Gill is no big fan of organised religion either, we are professional and sensitive, and do not seek to impose our views on the children placed with us, but instead respect their cultural background).

But it’s equallly important not to let “respect for another culture” slip into cultural relativism. All cultures are not equally valid in all respects and practices. We have been providing a home to somebody from a culture where it is considered acceptible to have sex with girls from the age of 12, where men can do so with relatively little fear of reprimand, but where any unmarried “woman” (i.e. 12 year-old or older) who is seen with a man risks ostracism and, were she in her own country, stoning to death.

And so it was that, because this child staying with us had been seen out with more than one man, we received news (from several quarters) that a contract had been put out on her life (some referred to it as a “fatwa”, although I think this is probably just muddled thinking). Social services and our fostering agency, while concerned by this news, did not take it very seriously at first, and she remained with us for several days. It was only once we, on our own initiative, spoke to the police and to the Refugee Council (both of whom have far more experience with this type of incident than social services or the agency) that we discovered the situation was very serious indeed, and we should certainly take the threat at face value.

She has since been moved from our house to a secure unit, and we now have a “panic button” installed in the house, which brings a reponse from the local police within approximately five minutes (we’ve been told not to let the kids or dog near it as, once pressed, the police will come and, if necessary, break down the front door, even if we phone them subsequently to tell them the button was pushed by a mistake). We sleep with a bucket of water underneath the letterbox. And we do not feel safe allowing any future foster placements into our home until this situation is resolved.

I’ve just experienced a most wonderful, most unlikely coincidence.

My mind is on fire at the moment. These last couple of nights, I’ve only managed to grab a couple of hours sleep, not - for once - because I’ve been out partying & photographing, but because my brain has been so active that after an initial hour or two’s deep sleep I find myself jolted awake, not tired in the slightest, and unable to sleep again.

So, I just walked Gizmo, and as I did so my brain was awash with ideas, plans, debates, internal conversations. One of these internal debates concerned free-improv music. During the debate, I was thinking of the Last Exit album, The Noise of Trouble. I thought how much I would like to listen to it today, but realised that would be impossible as it’s “one of those albums” which Gill would hate to listen to, and it really demands to be listened to loud through the stereo in the living room.

I thought no more of it, but when I got home, unexpectedly, Gill told me she was going out for a couple of hours. I sat down to breakfast and thought I would stick some music on. I fired up my Squeezebox and put it on “Random album” mode, as I usually do when I’m not sure what I want to listen to. Blow me down, of all the 5000+ albums in my collection, which one do you think it plumped for? That’s right, The Noise of Trouble. Suddenly my whole train of thought came back to me like a blast from Peter Brötzmann’s saxophone as I luxuriated in the joyful noise.

So… what was the train of thought that led me to think of this album? It grew out of thoughts about a comment I posted on Flickr last night. I love free-improv music (when in the right frame of mind), but I’m well aware that most people don’t share this love. Most people are either baffled by it or incredulous that anyone might want to submit themselves to the torture of listening to such rot. And, of course, most people will claim that “that’s not music!” And for this reason, I’m sometimes wary of even telling people about my band, The Tajalli Vortex, because at heart I’m a coward, afraid of the negative reactions, and I can’t even be bothered to engage in a bit of debate about something I love.

So why do I love it? And why should anyone love it? Well, it’s probably most instructive to explain how I discovered this music and grew to love it myself.

In my early 20s, I was a huge fan of the bassist Bill Laswell. It came about because I was a fan of Gong in my teens: Laswell played on the 1979 album New York Gong / About Time, and I was instantly hooked on his unique but incredibly funky style. I started buying every Laswell record I could lay my hands on (and there are a hell of a lot of them!)

Then one day I came home with a new Laswell acquisition, The Noise of Trouble. I put it on the record player… and wondered what had hit me. It was half-an-hour of meaningless noise, no discernable funky basslines, just… noise, ugly, horrible, headache-inducing noise. I was really disappointed, but also really, really puzzled. I knew this guy was an incredible musician, I had a huge amount of respect for everything else I’d heard from him… so why did he feel it necessary to put out a whole record of useless crap? Fascinated, I put the record on again. Over the next few weeks, I would listen to it intently, but without any pleasure, almost every day, sometimes two or three times in a row, trying to discern some nugget of redeeming music within its harsh melée of sound.

Then one day, something strange happened. I guess I was onto about my 20th or 25th listen, and suddenly it just clicked! And it was more beautiful, more complex, more rewarding than anything I’d ever heard before. And I’ve never looked back.

That experience taught me a very valuable lesson - that which is worthwhile is not necessarily easy. To paraphrase a famous advertising slogan, good things come to those who put some effort in. Many people believe that the most important redeeming quality for a piece of music is that it be “catchy”: if it doesn’t have an instant hook to pull you in and make you love it, then it’s somehow second-rate. Although there is an element of this prejudice in all branches of the arts, it seems to be strongest in music: few people would expect you to fall in love with a James Joyce novel or a Jackson Pollock painting without putting in a little effort, and many people recognise that the rewards that come from considering Joyce or Pollock are greater than those that come from considering Barbara Taylor Bradford or Jack Vettriano.

Free-improv is challenging music, it is music that demands your full attention in order to be appreciated, but again I think that this is a good thing. We live in an age when music is increasingly expected to serve as a backdrop to all aspects of life. Whether you’re shopping, having a bath, doing the washing up, reading a book, operating heavy machinery… people increasingly feel a need to have a stream of music babbling in the background, somewhere on the borders of consciousness. I admit to being as guilty as anyone on this charge, but I also strongly believe that it devalues music and makes us less capable of appreciating both complex music and, just as importantly, silence. Free-improv bucks the trend. Free-improv is not elevator music! It demands the devotion of 100% of your mind, and if you are able to give that (and it’s not always easy - there are still many times when I don’t have the mental strength to cope with such demanding music) then the results are incredibly beneficial for the soul.

I’ll just recount here one other fruitful experience I once had defending free-improv and noise music. The guitarist Pat Metheny is generally thought of as a purveyor of rather middle-of-the-road, easy-listening jazz guitar music. However, underneath that cuddly exterior he has an affinity for the wilder side of jazz, in particular the music of Ornette Coleman. As well as some fairly out-there collaborations with the likes of Coleman and Sheffield-born free-improv prime mover Derek Bailey, in 1994 Metheny released an album called Zero Tolerance for Silence which polarised (read: with very few exceptions, disgusted) his fans. At the time, I had recently got online and, although yet to hook up to the Internet, I was very active on CompuServe, in particular on their jazz forum. On the forum, there was an outpouring of outrage that Metheny had the temerity to insult his many fans by releasing an album of such unlistenable dross. I was one of, I think, only two people willing to defend the album, and as a result suffered ridicule and flaming from other members. But I did get probably the best imaginable reward for my forthright comments: a beautifully sweet email from Pat Metheny’s mum, thanking me for standing up for her son!

I will soon be doing another model photo-shoot. This kind of thing makes me nervous. I have too much control, and I hate having too much control, it gives me too much responsibility.

On a whim, I checked whether the domain name ishootmodels.com was available. It wasn’t. However, UKReg came up with some interesting possible alternatives:

ifiremodels.com
idischargemodels.com
ilimbmodels.com
iignitemodels.com
iboughmodels.com
ibombardmodels.com
ibranchmodel.com
iblastmodel.com

It took me a while to work out where they were coming from with the limb & branch stuff, but I got there. None of them are really suitable alternatives, but could be handy if I ever get into the model-blasting business.

I am working on a new set of photos, taken in Sheffield’s Ponderosa park. Photos are online at Flickr. Here’s a description of my thinking behind this set:

Two years ago, my friend Hugh was attacked from behind while talking on his mobile phone, late at night on Commonside.

Several months later, I found a mobile lying on the pavement close to my house. I could tell it belonged to a student (there was a message on the screen from one of the candidates taking part in the Sheffield University Student Union Elections, reminding the owner to vote). I assumed it had dropped out of his pocket during a night of drunken over-indulgence. So I searched the contacts for “mum”, and phoned her, only to be told that she was sitting in hospital next to the phone’s owner. When his girlfriend came to collect it the next day, I asked whether he was OK. In obvious distress she said “No, he’s not. He has blood on his brain. He was punched just down the road from here, fell down and hit his head on a metal grate”.

I was deeply affected by this fleeting contact with somebody else’s life.

When subsequently I found an open rucksack and a lunchbox, under a tree in the Ponderosa, I was certain that it was the discarded side-effects of another mugging. I took it to the police station, hoping it might provide some evidence. The desk clerks seemed to think the fact that I’d bothered to take it in was faintly ridiculous.

Soon after that, in exactly the same spot, I was savaged by a police dog which was being used to sniff out a stolen purse.

This accumulation of incidents showed me a different side to this pleasant student neighbourhood. The peace and seclusion of the Ponderosa, the tranquil moments I enjoy there when walking the dog, are also ideal for muggers who go there at night to divvy up their loot after jumping on drunken students or rifling through their houses. Dealing with the police had left me feeling powerless and ineffective, so instead I started to photograph the detritus, evidence, discarded and unwanted traces of night-time crime.

Technically, these pictures differ from many of my others because they are shot with a point-and-shoot camera, and not edited in any way (normally I will make some adjustments to contrast and sharpness, as well as often cropping photos, before uploading them). They are also uploaded at original camera resolution. What they have in common with the majority of my photos is that they are taken direcly as they are seen “in the wild”, nothing is posed or re-arranged to the camera.

We’ve just started rehearsals for the latest Next Best Thing Productions play - Shakespeare’s Richard III (I play Lord Buckingham, Dicky’s best mate. Or, in Will’s words “a sort of cross between Goebbels and Göring”). I realised during our last performance (when I only had a couple of paragraphs to learn) that I’m starting to discover some useful strategies and mnemonics for that bane of all actors, line-learning. Here are a few of my methods, in the hope that they may prove useful to someone somewhere.

To start with, don’t worry about the daunting task ahead of you. The first 2, 3, 4, 5 or even 6 times you read the script, you should do just that. Read through it, and try not to be put off by the fact that one day soon, you’ll have to know all of this by heart.

After a couple of reads, you should start to get phrases and sentences into your short-term memory. Read through a line, and then try to recite it back in your head without looking at the page. If you can’t manage a whole line, do it with a few words, then the next few words, then try to string together the whole sentence. But don’t get too caught up in any particular part: if you’ve gone over the same sentence ten times and the words are still eluding you, move on to the next sentence or take a break.

As you start to become more familiar with the text, try looking at it from different perspectives, and from both semantic and syntactic points of view. This is where the really effective, deep learning comes from. Don’t just think of it as a sentence in a play. Examine each word. Think of its meaning. Think of another word that could serve in its place, and/or of another thing which could be meant by the same (or similar sounding) word (I often find that doing this reveals to me a lot about the playwrite’s intentions, and why they chose one specific word over another). Then ignore the word’s meaning(s) and look at the structure of the sentence. One very good way of doing this is to just look at the first letter of each word. Say the letters, either (or both) by name (Ay, Bee, See) or phonetically (with “nursery style” a, b, c sounds). Try pronouncing the imaginary word formed by the first letters of each word in the sentence. This mnemonic is incredibly helpful towards the end of script-learning, when you have the bones of a sentence in your head but keep substituting incorrect words.

Basically, think of as many different approaches to the text as you can. Play games, have fun with it. Reverse the words in the sentence if you want to, or think of words which rhyme with them. Every different approach you use strengthens the memory of the lines in your head. On top of this, it’s a lot more fun than just reading and re-reading the same old words over and over and over again.

Context helps too: I tend to read my lines while walking the dog, for several reasons. Firstly, it removes most external distractions (apart from the obvious ones such as crossing the road safely and avoiding walking into trees). Secondly the time I spend walking the dog (about half-an-hour) seems, to me, to be about the right length of time to spend line-learning: much longer than this in one chunk and my mind starts to drift. And thirdly… well, it kills two birds with one stone Oh yeah, I think something about walking at the same time as reading is also better for mental recall than just staying sedate in a chair or bed.

When I started on the Shakespear, I had expected it to be harder work than previous plays, because of the archaic language. Actually, I find the opposite is true. The frequent use of poetic devices: rhyme, alliteration and, in particular, iambic pentameter, mean that many of the mnemonics I use for line-learning are already built into the core text.

One other thing I have learnt through studying drama: a good text just keeps on revealing new things to you, no matter how familiar you become with it. When I played the title role in Molière’s The Miser (l’Avare) many of my realisations about the character and the plot came in the week running up to the performance of the play, when I already had my lines well under my belt. This is a wonderful thing to experience, but it also makes me a little sad: often when I read a novel, I find myself wanting to read it a second time as I know that many subtleties eluded me the first time around. Very rarely do I actually find time for a second reading, but my experience with plays has made me feel that sometimes, if I were able to read the book so many times that every word became imprinted on my memory, only then would I fully appreciate the author’s craft.

Apparently you can find the number of shutter actuations on a Canon EOS 20D by opening a RAW file in a hex editor and reading off the numbers at positions 95D and 95E. I just tried it with the last photo I took last night (well, actually about 7am… it was a long night). It reads “C2 1D”. I make that 49,693 in decimal. Ouch! I knew I had taken a lot of photos, but I thought it was about 10,000 less than that.

Canon don’t publicise the expected shutter life of the 20D, but for the 30D it is 100,000 and Canon say that is “more durable than the 20D”. My camera’s first birthday is today (happy birthday dear EOS!) - one year in and it’s more than half-way through its expected life. This could turn out to be quite an expensive (though very useful) disposable camera. Of course, the shutters are replaceable, but I believe it costs about £200 a pop, and for that I’m almost better off buying a new camera when the inevitable happens. I’d planned on spending a couple more years with this one before moving up to a better model, but it may not last me that long.

There are many ways of rating “things”. Michelin will give your restaurant zero to (if you’re very lucky) three stars. All sorts of things are scored on percentage scales. On hot ot not, and elsewhere in life, you’re judged on how well you match up to being a “perfect ten”. But probably the majority of rating systems operate on a scale of from one to five stars (or… insert non-starry symbol of choice here. Or even the numbers one to five). There are very good reasons for this. A major one, I guess, is the nature of the human brain: short-term memory generally has seven plus or minus two slots for us to store information in, so if you go much over five then you risk having more discrete levels than you can actually comprehend at the same time. Also, five fits a standard scale centred around an average value, with values for good and ungood, plus extreme values for very good and very ungood. So, five is cool.

But after a few months of using iTunes and rating my songs according to their five star system, I started to run into problems. I started to want half-stars in between the stars. Or at the very least, a sixth star. (more…)

Interesting to hear that at the Liverpool Biennial there is an exhibition called Virtual Grizedale - since 1998, I’ve had the only Virtual Grizedale on the web!