Big life.
On this morning’s Desert Island Disks, the very last one of 2010, Kirsty Young asked her castaway, shoeless sixties pop soul singer, Sandy Shaw, whether she considered herself to have a healthy ego.
Sandy replied: “Oh definitely. My husband says it’s the size of a good few solar systems. But I prefer to call it my big life.”
Having finally caught up with the last ever season of bonkers science fantasy TV convolution, Lost, the night before leaving to spend new year with loved ones in Sussex, I wonder if any ponderings of my own life on a desert island – whistfully wandering barefoot along the beach when I should be fashioning something vital, probably – would turn out to be not so much black smoke and broken mirrors but a realisation that a lot of pointless running around disappointingly wound up with me simply being dead for a lot longer than I’d realised.
If so, can I state now that I’ve long had my suspicions.
Thinking of loved ones who’ve said goodbye to other loved ones this Christmas, however, quietly asks the question again: How big will your own life adventure have turned out to be?
How big will you have made it?
---
Those important figures who’ve left some people who figure pretty importantly in my own life at the end of these twelve months happened to demonstrate something of a smallness of ego, actually. Without diminishing the complexity of the stories they left behind. You don’t always have to belt out a show tune in a spotlight to grab the emotional attention. A quietness falling silent can leave a deafening emptyness.
At the end of a difficult year for countless people in as many different ways, I wonder how easy it will be to party tonight – the turning of it from an end into a beginning.
Considering 2010 here on the last day of December, I’m not sure how much the Big Society has changed modern Britain for the better yet, for example. We’re only six months into our bold coalition vision, but I think our annual dream of a Victorian-looking Christmas comes complete this year with the added realism of many of us pulling suitably austere expressions of repressed misery as we consider the workhouse and child labour and dying of something ghastly in a bitterly cold room.
Though you can take an analogy too far – the UK is currently doing all this without the backdrop of a burgeoning manufacturing base.
No, I think what we all desperately need now is a more precious comodity; a spot of sunshine. After starting and ending 2010 with blizzards and closed roads and heating bills we can’t afford, it’s surely time for some metaphorical and literal sunshine.
And I’d like to help.
---
Do you remember what happened this year in between all the freezing fun?
Go on, think. Bet you’d forgotten.
A summer. One of the best we’ve had in the UK for a decade at least. Really. We did.
Back in June I wrote that we were in the middle of:
“..a summer so hot and sunny and summery, it’s blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. ..Now? How long ago does that feel? We’ve been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There’s a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks’ takeaway Chardonnay glasses.”
Now? How long ago does that feel?
Thing is, as I end the year, I am straining to inhabit a creatively summery vibe – which I hope to be able to pass on to you soon. For I’m writing the little score to a TV show set in a part of the world I now feel astonished to have never visited – Greece.
I mean, why have I never seen this ancient heart of Europe for myself? How have I never pottered from the Parthenon to an Athenean taverna, or driven the meandering hills of the Polipanese, or dozed on the beachfront of an Agean island?
Well, musically, I sort of have now. Without leaving Southbourne. Thanks to Benny and the gang at Rampage, who’ve been making this little odyssey for an Australian production team. And I wish I could post up some of the results right away, to warm your winter blues. Try to hang on until the end of January if you can.
---
Ending the year on such a musically sunny note forces me to remember through the murk of a chilly first winter in a new home that still feels like someone else’s domus and into an anno-more-positivus-than-I-may-compos. ..Though I think I may be getting my cod ancient Greek muddled up with my cod Latin there. But run with the philosophy of the precarious segue, polit.
For I should remember that for Momo, 2010 has been significant. I confess to ending the year too pooped to party-pop, after twelve months of draining the emotional batteries a bit, beaving away in a dark room alone rather far from sunlight.
But if I can steal two seconds over the To Do list-heavy Christmas week to consider what’s happened this year, I should possibly feel nothing less than excited.
For, though my little creative life looks no bigger than it was twelve months ago, with no killer punch breakthroughs to headline a Christmas letter with, I will wake up in 2011 not where I was.
Momo:tempo – music – has filled most of my agenda since January. If not my wallet. Though it’s contributed to that too.
And the real contribution I should understand it’s made has been to the rather more valuable treasure pocket of my soul.
No one may be listening, but I am doing what my soul has told me to do all my adult life – make sweet little tunes. I’ve made a lot of them this year, as I listen to a bootleg compilation of some of the sweetest moments to my ear, as I continue to search for that musical sweet spot. I can’t quite imagine our home without so many of them that didn’t exist as we celebrated Christmas 2009. Ask me for a secret copy if you fancy.
But perhaps the thing to most treasure is that I no longer need to worry that ‘nobody is listening’ or ever say such a thing. For a handful of people who mean a great deal to me now are listening. Intently. And I’m not sure what else might matter to a creative than that; one or two of you will ask for that bootleg Momo:tempo 2010 sampler, I know you will. And I can’t say thankyou enough.
---
2011 will be another hard working one for Momo. But as we finally paint the walls and plug in the electrics of a symbolically brand new studio this week, I can’t help wondering if this new year that we’ll be hugging in tonight won’t be a big one for our household at least. One with adventures in it we can’t foretell.
As I think of those who won’t be with us this new year, and hold tight for a moment those who will be, I hope to say with spotlight off and ego sensibly compact and travel-sized, that I am looking forward to doing something partly inspired by them all which makes life as big as I know how to make it – create a little sunshine in the gloom.
I wonder if 2011 will be, in some new ways, about bringing people together to make a little sunshine.
I can’t say I’d ever wish to have romantic notions about being marooned. About being deserted inescapably. But getting washed up on a foreign beach with eachother is something quite different. The start of what the process of living life is really all about – so raise your glass to them with me:
To new adventures, gang.
x
Friday, December 31, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
Not a Christmas album.
Mid November, then, and the year is running away. It has clearly had enough. It is upstairs now, stuffing things into a case with as much hurried dignity as possible. Of course, as it rushes around the bedroom trying not to freak out completely in front of you, you might be able to stall it with some Can't We Talk About It line. Or an instinctive Baby, It Will Be Different This Time, even though you've no idea why it will be different this time. But essentially, the writing's on the calendar.
A Dear Jan, if you will. Hand delivered.
The point is, 2010 is soon to dump you. And you had such plans.
I certainly had some plans. But I didn't imagine that one of them would be to decide in mid November to write an album in time for Christmas.
---
Something has dawned on me this week with a little extra clarity. Not the fact that as the year approaches its end I am still inexplicably an idiot and not a sudden clever person. I have this written over my desk in case I should forget. Simply says: 'You're an idiot.' I find it relieves the pressure.
No, this dawning realisation was about the job of writing music, given that I've written a fair bit of it in the last eleven months.
Catching up with director Ben and nosing around the cool new offices of Rampage Studio in an impressively central bit of London town on Monday, our conversations left me with something to think about. Namely, that I'm not writing two telly scores for him – I'm writing a telly score and a fully-fledged, sun-drenched, deep-vibed chillout album.
Ah.
What's the difference?
We have two little TV shows on at once between us, to say nothing of any other work, and I marvel that Benny boy is still functioning with such customary politeness, having had about eight hours of sleep since May of last year. I'm not sure how he's able to stand. Or blink.
But in discussing the two projects, I began to see something of why he was yet to fall in love with the tunes I've been writing for the second show, a travel doc around Greece. Given that a couple of the first tunes out of the box have me smacking my lips with vain pride and foolish ideas of blowing the whole budget for bazouki and flamenco guitar on them. ..Why the 'meh'?
There is a subtle difference between the two in the way they use music. One uses it like a TV show score – snapshot atmospheres to place you in various different locations emotionally. And I have been having some loosely chaotic fun with penny whistles, mandolins, tambourines and ukuleles over the past few weeks as this first project is set in the UK. The almost dozen tunes written for that edit are finding homes fast.
The second show, however, uses music like picked tracks from existing artists. The Oh Good It's This One approach, showcasing slick shots of beautiful Aegean scenery.
The upshot realisation is this. And I think you'll find it a profound one: This second approach takes sh**loads more work.
---
Now, of course it's all work. And it's all fun. And what I've just said there isn't really true. But a very great deal of screen music has to be deceptively simple.
I mean, a very complex mix of sounds and rhythms can't half get in the way sometimes. I'm a big fan of Less Is More to picture anyway – and not just because it makes you look a lot more egotistically restrained and intellectually creative just by getting to spend a little more time in the local caff. I like this.
Very simple tunes can still have a magical effect on screen. One big riff with a beat feels fab in the cinema. One hummable string line from the orchestra repeated enough times pulls at the tear ducts in a very satisfying way.
Of course, where budgets are bigger, the composer has more work to do to create the atmosphere an audience may be expecting. As Bond composer David Arnold recounted, a sound engineer once told him he should hope not to write any more machine gun chase scenes; The orchestra has to make a very involved, big noise for minutes on end just to sound appropriately like a big budget action film, only to be almost drowned out by explosions and gunfire and metal screeches. But that's what's needed.
With budget telly, however, you're not getting to score umpteen parts for an orchestra. It's you and a box of tricks and a little sweat and half your fee going on a clever soloist of some kind that delivers. And typically, the work is in sheer numbers of cues per half hour, rather than depth of arrangement in each tune. Often, TV will bounce from one mood to another to segue through the time cheerfully – up to 40 bites of music in 22 minutes of screen time in some cases. Eesh.
When you're talking travel docs in particular, the most vital job you'll do is make sure the viewer feels very instantly like they're in Hong Kong, or Marakech. The really obvious thing to do is, in some clever way, what you do. You just do. And I find working up a local flavour like this great great fun; writing simple atmospheric tunes rather suits Momo, as you might imagine. But it's not the place for production as deep and laboured as a Momo:tempo album. All those complex beats and layers of production would just get in the way.
..Except, I may now be wrong on this. Cranking out tunes to a deadline and a budget is one thing. And I've rather loved the work that's come out of doing this all year.
But our Greece project is, it makes me realise, different. What, I dawningly realised on Monday, walking through London's chilly evening lights to the Tube, Ben wants me to do… is write a new Momo album, from which he can select tunes to showcase.
Deadline's mid December.
I am now, as you might imagine, sitting down with a layout pad and a keyboard and a gigantic pot of coffee and a prayer cushion.
What I am not doing under any circumstances is writing a Christmas album. Just an album for Christmas. One that sounds like a big bath of Greek sunshine.
Feeling the heat a bit here. But no running away; just a spot of sweat.
---
Mid November, then, and the year is running away. It has clearly had enough. It is upstairs now, stuffing things into a case with as much hurried dignity as possible. Of course, as it rushes around the bedroom trying not to freak out completely in front of you, you might be able to stall it with some Can't We Talk About It line. Or an instinctive Baby, It Will Be Different This Time, even though you've no idea why it will be different this time. But essentially, the writing's on the calendar.
A Dear Jan, if you will. Hand delivered.
The point is, 2010 is soon to dump you. And you had such plans.
I certainly had some plans. But I didn't imagine that one of them would be to decide in mid November to write an album in time for Christmas.
---
Something has dawned on me this week with a little extra clarity. Not the fact that as the year approaches its end I am still inexplicably an idiot and not a sudden clever person. I have this written over my desk in case I should forget. Simply says: 'You're an idiot.' I find it relieves the pressure.
No, this dawning realisation was about the job of writing music, given that I've written a fair bit of it in the last eleven months.
Catching up with director Ben and nosing around the cool new offices of Rampage Studio in an impressively central bit of London town on Monday, our conversations left me with something to think about. Namely, that I'm not writing two telly scores for him – I'm writing a telly score and a fully-fledged, sun-drenched, deep-vibed chillout album.
Ah.
What's the difference?
We have two little TV shows on at once between us, to say nothing of any other work, and I marvel that Benny boy is still functioning with such customary politeness, having had about eight hours of sleep since May of last year. I'm not sure how he's able to stand. Or blink.
But in discussing the two projects, I began to see something of why he was yet to fall in love with the tunes I've been writing for the second show, a travel doc around Greece. Given that a couple of the first tunes out of the box have me smacking my lips with vain pride and foolish ideas of blowing the whole budget for bazouki and flamenco guitar on them. ..Why the 'meh'?
There is a subtle difference between the two in the way they use music. One uses it like a TV show score – snapshot atmospheres to place you in various different locations emotionally. And I have been having some loosely chaotic fun with penny whistles, mandolins, tambourines and ukuleles over the past few weeks as this first project is set in the UK. The almost dozen tunes written for that edit are finding homes fast.
The second show, however, uses music like picked tracks from existing artists. The Oh Good It's This One approach, showcasing slick shots of beautiful Aegean scenery.
The upshot realisation is this. And I think you'll find it a profound one: This second approach takes sh**loads more work.
---
Now, of course it's all work. And it's all fun. And what I've just said there isn't really true. But a very great deal of screen music has to be deceptively simple.
I mean, a very complex mix of sounds and rhythms can't half get in the way sometimes. I'm a big fan of Less Is More to picture anyway – and not just because it makes you look a lot more egotistically restrained and intellectually creative just by getting to spend a little more time in the local caff. I like this.
Very simple tunes can still have a magical effect on screen. One big riff with a beat feels fab in the cinema. One hummable string line from the orchestra repeated enough times pulls at the tear ducts in a very satisfying way.
Of course, where budgets are bigger, the composer has more work to do to create the atmosphere an audience may be expecting. As Bond composer David Arnold recounted, a sound engineer once told him he should hope not to write any more machine gun chase scenes; The orchestra has to make a very involved, big noise for minutes on end just to sound appropriately like a big budget action film, only to be almost drowned out by explosions and gunfire and metal screeches. But that's what's needed.
With budget telly, however, you're not getting to score umpteen parts for an orchestra. It's you and a box of tricks and a little sweat and half your fee going on a clever soloist of some kind that delivers. And typically, the work is in sheer numbers of cues per half hour, rather than depth of arrangement in each tune. Often, TV will bounce from one mood to another to segue through the time cheerfully – up to 40 bites of music in 22 minutes of screen time in some cases. Eesh.
When you're talking travel docs in particular, the most vital job you'll do is make sure the viewer feels very instantly like they're in Hong Kong, or Marakech. The really obvious thing to do is, in some clever way, what you do. You just do. And I find working up a local flavour like this great great fun; writing simple atmospheric tunes rather suits Momo, as you might imagine. But it's not the place for production as deep and laboured as a Momo:tempo album. All those complex beats and layers of production would just get in the way.
..Except, I may now be wrong on this. Cranking out tunes to a deadline and a budget is one thing. And I've rather loved the work that's come out of doing this all year.
But our Greece project is, it makes me realise, different. What, I dawningly realised on Monday, walking through London's chilly evening lights to the Tube, Ben wants me to do… is write a new Momo album, from which he can select tunes to showcase.
Deadline's mid December.
I am now, as you might imagine, sitting down with a layout pad and a keyboard and a gigantic pot of coffee and a prayer cushion.
What I am not doing under any circumstances is writing a Christmas album. Just an album for Christmas. One that sounds like a big bath of Greek sunshine.
Feeling the heat a bit here. But no running away; just a spot of sweat.
---
Monday, November 01, 2010
The launch of a grand expedition, without the fanfare.
The launch of a grand expedition,
without the fanfare.
Well, so, here it is. Embarkation day.
Amid a flurry of... one bit of local publicity, and no oompah band on the quayside, the Momo:tempo debut LP sets sail today. Flourishing its topper to a tiny but appreciated handful of enthusiastic well-wishers.
For The Golden Age of Exploration has been released today. Into the wild.
It's out as a download initially. Physical copies are still rather rare preview animals but proper CD editions will be available in due course, most notably to be picked up at live events.
Which, speaking of, no – didn't happen this week as hoped. So we're looking towards Christmas for a local live blast of some tunes from the album, plus one or two other treats we have in mind... if we can find a ruddy venue in our own town that's suitably salubrious and happy to host a noisy horn section and an unfunny faux posh tit for forty minutes.
---
I'd like to say that I spent today doing press conferences and a glitzy launch do somewhere, or at least having coffee in a favourite civilised haunt, but I am, alas, tidying the temporary studio enough for a tech chap to find his way into it later. Bet Duke Ellington didn't let printer problems slow him down. Never mind.
I'm also doing a few less than exciting-sounding administrative things and some little jobs for Momo clients that have been piling up after a couple of weeks of laters and earliers that have left me with more character than normal around the eyes.
Still, November 1 dawns as a good day, I must say.
Sunny and bright, with exciting early progress on the development of the new studio and some very nice early cuts of things to a couple of scores for the telly I have on at the moment. Pete the string pulled a blinder on Friday in particular, getting a session back to me for a couple of cues in time to make a first full episode cut to the client. Sounds sumptuous, and I wish I could post it already.
In the spirit of Russell Cotes
Meanwhile, the very nice Pat Gough from erstwhile local publication, The Daily Echo, was kind enough to take me to coffee one morning recently, and wrote up his impressions publicly right here. Lord knows why he and his editor thought it worthy of space on the flatplan, but still.
Very kindly too, Kerry Curtis, marketing manager of the Russel Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, allowed us to do our photo shoot in there.
It's not explicit in the article but I was expressly keen for the chance to do so for two reasons – firstly because Mr and Mrs Cotes' beautiful house is such a suitably sumptuous repository of their own mementos of exploration, but also because I so love the place as an icon of Bournemouth.
..And, okay, thirdly because I've long had a soft spot for the elegantly saucy statue at the top of the grand staircase. Girls in their knickers can be art, everyone.
I shall wax lyrical about the museum more in future, but I am humbly chuffed to be associated with the place in any small way. Go there, if you haven't lately.
So. On to new adventures now? Definitely.
---
without the fanfare.
Well, so, here it is. Embarkation day.
Amid a flurry of... one bit of local publicity, and no oompah band on the quayside, the Momo:tempo debut LP sets sail today. Flourishing its topper to a tiny but appreciated handful of enthusiastic well-wishers.
For The Golden Age of Exploration has been released today. Into the wild.
It's out as a download initially. Physical copies are still rather rare preview animals but proper CD editions will be available in due course, most notably to be picked up at live events.
Which, speaking of, no – didn't happen this week as hoped. So we're looking towards Christmas for a local live blast of some tunes from the album, plus one or two other treats we have in mind... if we can find a ruddy venue in our own town that's suitably salubrious and happy to host a noisy horn section and an unfunny faux posh tit for forty minutes.
---
I'd like to say that I spent today doing press conferences and a glitzy launch do somewhere, or at least having coffee in a favourite civilised haunt, but I am, alas, tidying the temporary studio enough for a tech chap to find his way into it later. Bet Duke Ellington didn't let printer problems slow him down. Never mind.
I'm also doing a few less than exciting-sounding administrative things and some little jobs for Momo clients that have been piling up after a couple of weeks of laters and earliers that have left me with more character than normal around the eyes.
Still, November 1 dawns as a good day, I must say.
Sunny and bright, with exciting early progress on the development of the new studio and some very nice early cuts of things to a couple of scores for the telly I have on at the moment. Pete the string pulled a blinder on Friday in particular, getting a session back to me for a couple of cues in time to make a first full episode cut to the client. Sounds sumptuous, and I wish I could post it already.
In the spirit of Russell Cotes
Meanwhile, the very nice Pat Gough from erstwhile local publication, The Daily Echo, was kind enough to take me to coffee one morning recently, and wrote up his impressions publicly right here. Lord knows why he and his editor thought it worthy of space on the flatplan, but still.
Very kindly too, Kerry Curtis, marketing manager of the Russel Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, allowed us to do our photo shoot in there.
It's not explicit in the article but I was expressly keen for the chance to do so for two reasons – firstly because Mr and Mrs Cotes' beautiful house is such a suitably sumptuous repository of their own mementos of exploration, but also because I so love the place as an icon of Bournemouth.
..And, okay, thirdly because I've long had a soft spot for the elegantly saucy statue at the top of the grand staircase. Girls in their knickers can be art, everyone.
I shall wax lyrical about the museum more in future, but I am humbly chuffed to be associated with the place in any small way. Go there, if you haven't lately.
So. On to new adventures now? Definitely.
---
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Jean and Michael.
Jean and Michael.
How do you judge the impact of a person's life?
..Why not ask an impossibly broad question? I know.
I ask because it's a question that never really goes away when you work for yourself all day, doing very little to do with disaster relief say. And also because two particular people have posed the question to me anew lately. By dying.
They didn't die together. They didn't know of each other at all. And, in truth, I knew neither of them really at all either – one of them for many years, and one of them since the Wednesday before last.
---
There is a brutally efficient way to measure a life's impact. Efficient because you can simply count it – and it's the one we all feel the pressure to add to from time to time: Numbers Of Units Shifted.
You can fairly simply consider the influence of someone's life by that reckoning. Which is, presumably, why Rupert Murdock is a hero to some.
He turned a fledgling British satellite broadcast business with a handful of staff into a business empire large enough to bias the entire media political debate of the most influential country on Earth. The self-proclaimed Reasonable of America have had to rally on Washington DC this weekend to try their best to be even noticed by the US media, such has been the glare and noise of Murdock's sensationalist influence through Fox News over years.
But if that's the measure of a human life, then most of us will never flicker the scale of impact, will we?
And if it turns out that those who have seemed to shift enough units to make the impact-o-meter make a sudden oofing noise actually find the experience of shifting those units pretty empty and meaningless in the end anyway, then what's the point of that exactly?
No. If all you want to do is add to a balance sheet, you may find in the end that it's equally taken away something from another column – the one snootily marked Your Soul.
I suspect that making a meaningful impact has more to do with being prepared to stand up and be counted. As you.
---
Michael Larsen was young when he died, just over a week ago. He was 28. He grew up in Downtown Minnesota, a very ordinary city in America, and went to the local high school. But, though I had never heard of him, a lot of people in the Hip Hop community certainly had.
Under his stage name Eyedea, he'd built an impressive reputation over ten years as a freestyle rapper – a champion of underground verse. Rising up through Emcee battles and taking prizes at prestigious competitions like Scribble Jam, he showed a formidable confidence.
Young Michael could pull rhymes and thoughts out of thin air with effortless dexterity.
I heard about his premature and unexplained death from UK rapper and writer, Scroobius Pip. Pip's own credentials were there in his impassioned blog post about just how much Eyedea's talent and attitude had affected him.
I then clicked to a YouTube link of Eyedea freestyling on the influential Wake Up Show. What a watched dawned on me as something very sobering – natural talent. Undiluted, unselfconscious – if that doesn't sound ironic when describing a freestyle rap battle champ – and challenging to all pretenders. This guy didn't have to spend hours labouring over verse, he just tapped into the ether and pulled it out of the air.
It reminded me of the early days of Hip Hop that added something to my young teenage years, and how much I marveled then at how some guys could just do such things with words without chewing a pencil end and practicing.
And it was clear he'd been loved for his gift. Now, inexplicably, that gift was gone. And for many people, it was obviously leaving a big hole.
---
Jean was someone I knew through our little local church. She must have been, I should guess, somewhere nearing her 80s when she died, but for the last 20 of those at least, she was a regular supportive face at the various incarnations of the little Southbourne fellowship we so often found ourselves turning up at.
Some people seem to become old people. Any old person you don't know is just an old person when you're young, I guess. But there are some who defy the aging process in your mental image of them – perhaps because you simply know them as people and are as baffled as they are that the numbers on their clock have apparently added up so much, or perhaps by sheer force of their personality. Some people appear to get comfortable acting old, despite all the discomfort. And some people have a light in their eye that marks them out as a person, not a type of person. Some people look as if they still get it.
Jean still got it. Or at least, my impression of her when we occasionally swapped greetings was that she still got it. Whatever it was. She was funny. She had a sharpness of witty response that showed self awareness. And when someone looks like they are aware that they are in the room, usually, other people are too. I always was.
Which is why, perhaps, hearing that she was no longer in the room left a proper moment of absence in my mind. As little as I knew Jean, that twinkle of hers was the spark of life itself, and it immediately left a negative shape by going out.
I would judge that by simply being herself, Jean made quite an impact with her life. Perhaps the most crucial kind. An encouraging one.
---
One commentator on this morning's A point of view described the loss of her school art teacher. She was, to over-simplify an eloquent ten minutes of heart-felt description of this creative woman, an obvious force of nature. The sort that often finds it hard to find stability in their private life, and hard not to influence everyone they meet publically.
And perhaps a former art teacher who enthused about how to see the world in every colourful sense is the perfect person to illustrate the best way to measure a life's impact.
Inspiration.
If you can generate even a little of that in someone else, you are perhaps adding in microcosm to the greatest impact the universe has ever felt.
Life itself.
Here's to Jean and Michael. They will be missed.
---
How do you judge the impact of a person's life?
..Why not ask an impossibly broad question? I know.
I ask because it's a question that never really goes away when you work for yourself all day, doing very little to do with disaster relief say. And also because two particular people have posed the question to me anew lately. By dying.
They didn't die together. They didn't know of each other at all. And, in truth, I knew neither of them really at all either – one of them for many years, and one of them since the Wednesday before last.
---
There is a brutally efficient way to measure a life's impact. Efficient because you can simply count it – and it's the one we all feel the pressure to add to from time to time: Numbers Of Units Shifted.
You can fairly simply consider the influence of someone's life by that reckoning. Which is, presumably, why Rupert Murdock is a hero to some.
He turned a fledgling British satellite broadcast business with a handful of staff into a business empire large enough to bias the entire media political debate of the most influential country on Earth. The self-proclaimed Reasonable of America have had to rally on Washington DC this weekend to try their best to be even noticed by the US media, such has been the glare and noise of Murdock's sensationalist influence through Fox News over years.
But if that's the measure of a human life, then most of us will never flicker the scale of impact, will we?
And if it turns out that those who have seemed to shift enough units to make the impact-o-meter make a sudden oofing noise actually find the experience of shifting those units pretty empty and meaningless in the end anyway, then what's the point of that exactly?
No. If all you want to do is add to a balance sheet, you may find in the end that it's equally taken away something from another column – the one snootily marked Your Soul.
I suspect that making a meaningful impact has more to do with being prepared to stand up and be counted. As you.
---
Michael Larsen was young when he died, just over a week ago. He was 28. He grew up in Downtown Minnesota, a very ordinary city in America, and went to the local high school. But, though I had never heard of him, a lot of people in the Hip Hop community certainly had.
Under his stage name Eyedea, he'd built an impressive reputation over ten years as a freestyle rapper – a champion of underground verse. Rising up through Emcee battles and taking prizes at prestigious competitions like Scribble Jam, he showed a formidable confidence.
Young Michael could pull rhymes and thoughts out of thin air with effortless dexterity.
I heard about his premature and unexplained death from UK rapper and writer, Scroobius Pip. Pip's own credentials were there in his impassioned blog post about just how much Eyedea's talent and attitude had affected him.
I then clicked to a YouTube link of Eyedea freestyling on the influential Wake Up Show. What a watched dawned on me as something very sobering – natural talent. Undiluted, unselfconscious – if that doesn't sound ironic when describing a freestyle rap battle champ – and challenging to all pretenders. This guy didn't have to spend hours labouring over verse, he just tapped into the ether and pulled it out of the air.
It reminded me of the early days of Hip Hop that added something to my young teenage years, and how much I marveled then at how some guys could just do such things with words without chewing a pencil end and practicing.
And it was clear he'd been loved for his gift. Now, inexplicably, that gift was gone. And for many people, it was obviously leaving a big hole.
---
Jean was someone I knew through our little local church. She must have been, I should guess, somewhere nearing her 80s when she died, but for the last 20 of those at least, she was a regular supportive face at the various incarnations of the little Southbourne fellowship we so often found ourselves turning up at.
Some people seem to become old people. Any old person you don't know is just an old person when you're young, I guess. But there are some who defy the aging process in your mental image of them – perhaps because you simply know them as people and are as baffled as they are that the numbers on their clock have apparently added up so much, or perhaps by sheer force of their personality. Some people appear to get comfortable acting old, despite all the discomfort. And some people have a light in their eye that marks them out as a person, not a type of person. Some people look as if they still get it.
Jean still got it. Or at least, my impression of her when we occasionally swapped greetings was that she still got it. Whatever it was. She was funny. She had a sharpness of witty response that showed self awareness. And when someone looks like they are aware that they are in the room, usually, other people are too. I always was.
Which is why, perhaps, hearing that she was no longer in the room left a proper moment of absence in my mind. As little as I knew Jean, that twinkle of hers was the spark of life itself, and it immediately left a negative shape by going out.
I would judge that by simply being herself, Jean made quite an impact with her life. Perhaps the most crucial kind. An encouraging one.
---
One commentator on this morning's A point of view described the loss of her school art teacher. She was, to over-simplify an eloquent ten minutes of heart-felt description of this creative woman, an obvious force of nature. The sort that often finds it hard to find stability in their private life, and hard not to influence everyone they meet publically.
And perhaps a former art teacher who enthused about how to see the world in every colourful sense is the perfect person to illustrate the best way to measure a life's impact.
Inspiration.
If you can generate even a little of that in someone else, you are perhaps adding in microcosm to the greatest impact the universe has ever felt.
Life itself.
Here's to Jean and Michael. They will be missed.
---
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Renuisance.
Renuisance.
And so here it is. The last day of my thirties.
I'd like to say that I'd given this significant calendarial moment some weighty emotional consideration as I watched it march toward me out of the diary, but the truth is that I've spent so much of this year either waiting for files to upload to music websites or waiting for unforeseen problems from solicitors or waiting in queues for telecom call centre operatives that I've kind of backed into it with a little surprised yelp. This big yeti of a date.
However I'm supposed to be feeling about it, decade number five does indeed begin tomorrow.
And they're telling me it's when my whole life will begin.
This first bit doesn't count, apparently.
Thank crap for that. Because everything will be different this time, baby, I promise.
---
So how will I be reborn, d'you think? In this whole new life?
Well, it is true that I have already been radically re-cast as a house owner. Like a terrible format change to court a whole new audience. It's not realistic. The characters just wouldn't do that.
I mean. Me. Living in a whole bleedin' house. I've been a flatlander all my life and now I get to both go up to bed AND just outside to the garden. Weird. I sometimes have to go up to the bedroom just to look down at the garden before going down and out to it, just to feel normal when taking the bins out. I'll acclimatise, I'm sure.
It's true too that, though the Arnewood studio is now gone, with a must-be-admitted moistening of the eyes, the forthcoming weeks will see a less romantic-looking but worryingly proper-looking new studio take shape. Momo 2.0 is on the way, I can say. Though you can bet your life that while it will involve a spot of nice re-badging, there will be little fundamental overhaul of the basic operating system.
And, dare I consider it, I have slightly more work lined up for Momo:tempo in the coming weeks than Momo:typo, as I write. That's new.
I even have an album coming out officially. November 1st, they say. That too, is conspicuously new. Even if the tunes aren't. Or the continuing lack of launch gig venue.
But maybe, if some whole new 're-birth' is meant to kick in on Wednesday morning, I need to make it happen. By levering open the little-accessed maintenance panel that adjusts the attitude matrix.
Not that I'm not sure I want to go tinkering with any matrices. This is all very cosy, this Doesn't Really Count life so far. Wouldn't be pleased if I woke up in a blinding glare with a black Charlie Brooker leaning over me in a terrible pullover, mumbling that I've never used my eyes before and that I'd better get used to hard bunks, strip lights and hand-pumped toilets. And giant metal spiders trying to kill me with lasers.
No, maybe it's simply time again to go find out some shet.
---
Every now and then – I think it's happened once before – my personal ignorance reaches such conspicuous levels that I start to notice it. Find myself saying garish faux pas like: "Who's Justin Beiber?".
It's then that I need to Go Find Out Some Shet.
Now, anyone normal and lucky enough to live in the information age would simply flick to Wikipedia and momentarily find some made up facts about the subject in hand, easily sufficient to satiate the vain impulse of ignorance, and so move on. I do this too. But I'm wondering whether it's time for something more. Something a little more deliberate. A little more studied. Determined. Goal-minded. Something a lot more branded.
A renaissance.
I am thinking it's time I filled in some more blanks. Found out who this Justin Bieber really is. And Che Guavara. And the president of Belize. Or Belgium, come to that.
I am thinking of going so far as to use the ol' online mutterings here to post the results. A kind of selectively educative journal. But don't hold your breath. Not until I've found out exactly how long the human respiratory system can let you do that for, anyway.
Of course, the pressure to do this regularly could just be annoying.
Mean time, I need to pull some trousers over these pants and write a piece of music for a commission given to me lastnight – by lunchtime.
Not sure a convincing way to renew my whole life is with another last-minute deadline.
Creating new music for cash. How annoying.
Happy birthday.
---
PS: Some chap from the local paper's Society magazine is wanting to interview me this week, so perhaps I'll ask him as a professional journalist and news hound if he can think of any interesting and unexpected ways to start my forties. Given that my life so far apparently needs rebirthing.
I'm not sure this will start the interview in an interesting way. I may have to take some props. And some made-up facts.
And so here it is. The last day of my thirties.
I'd like to say that I'd given this significant calendarial moment some weighty emotional consideration as I watched it march toward me out of the diary, but the truth is that I've spent so much of this year either waiting for files to upload to music websites or waiting for unforeseen problems from solicitors or waiting in queues for telecom call centre operatives that I've kind of backed into it with a little surprised yelp. This big yeti of a date.
However I'm supposed to be feeling about it, decade number five does indeed begin tomorrow.
And they're telling me it's when my whole life will begin.
This first bit doesn't count, apparently.
Thank crap for that. Because everything will be different this time, baby, I promise.
---
So how will I be reborn, d'you think? In this whole new life?
Well, it is true that I have already been radically re-cast as a house owner. Like a terrible format change to court a whole new audience. It's not realistic. The characters just wouldn't do that.
I mean. Me. Living in a whole bleedin' house. I've been a flatlander all my life and now I get to both go up to bed AND just outside to the garden. Weird. I sometimes have to go up to the bedroom just to look down at the garden before going down and out to it, just to feel normal when taking the bins out. I'll acclimatise, I'm sure.
It's true too that, though the Arnewood studio is now gone, with a must-be-admitted moistening of the eyes, the forthcoming weeks will see a less romantic-looking but worryingly proper-looking new studio take shape. Momo 2.0 is on the way, I can say. Though you can bet your life that while it will involve a spot of nice re-badging, there will be little fundamental overhaul of the basic operating system.
And, dare I consider it, I have slightly more work lined up for Momo:tempo in the coming weeks than Momo:typo, as I write. That's new.
I even have an album coming out officially. November 1st, they say. That too, is conspicuously new. Even if the tunes aren't. Or the continuing lack of launch gig venue.
But maybe, if some whole new 're-birth' is meant to kick in on Wednesday morning, I need to make it happen. By levering open the little-accessed maintenance panel that adjusts the attitude matrix.
Not that I'm not sure I want to go tinkering with any matrices. This is all very cosy, this Doesn't Really Count life so far. Wouldn't be pleased if I woke up in a blinding glare with a black Charlie Brooker leaning over me in a terrible pullover, mumbling that I've never used my eyes before and that I'd better get used to hard bunks, strip lights and hand-pumped toilets. And giant metal spiders trying to kill me with lasers.
No, maybe it's simply time again to go find out some shet.
---
Every now and then – I think it's happened once before – my personal ignorance reaches such conspicuous levels that I start to notice it. Find myself saying garish faux pas like: "Who's Justin Beiber?".
It's then that I need to Go Find Out Some Shet.
Now, anyone normal and lucky enough to live in the information age would simply flick to Wikipedia and momentarily find some made up facts about the subject in hand, easily sufficient to satiate the vain impulse of ignorance, and so move on. I do this too. But I'm wondering whether it's time for something more. Something a little more deliberate. A little more studied. Determined. Goal-minded. Something a lot more branded.
A renaissance.
I am thinking it's time I filled in some more blanks. Found out who this Justin Bieber really is. And Che Guavara. And the president of Belize. Or Belgium, come to that.
I am thinking of going so far as to use the ol' online mutterings here to post the results. A kind of selectively educative journal. But don't hold your breath. Not until I've found out exactly how long the human respiratory system can let you do that for, anyway.
Of course, the pressure to do this regularly could just be annoying.
Mean time, I need to pull some trousers over these pants and write a piece of music for a commission given to me lastnight – by lunchtime.
Not sure a convincing way to renew my whole life is with another last-minute deadline.
Creating new music for cash. How annoying.
Happy birthday.
---
PS: Some chap from the local paper's Society magazine is wanting to interview me this week, so perhaps I'll ask him as a professional journalist and news hound if he can think of any interesting and unexpected ways to start my forties. Given that my life so far apparently needs rebirthing.
I'm not sure this will start the interview in an interesting way. I may have to take some props. And some made-up facts.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Last waltz.
Last waltz.
You won't have seen it. You're too young. You're too lofty. You're too intellectual and just too cool.
But my studio looks just like it.
The last episode of Blake's 7.
Budget for special effects is about right.
Surrounded as I am by boxes and packing crates, I am reminded of the little waltz around the bridge of the Scorpio that Tarrant performed in his console seat, as the ship plummeted to its destruction on Gauda Prime, showering him in a few sparks, turning the lights off and on a bit and turning his place at the apparent helm into a very low octane kind of ghost train ride.
Hit me like a slug to the chest when I was ten.
---
With all but total life support off here now, I am down to the bare essentials: an internet connection and a hi fi. And even these will not last much longer now. For I am about to bail out.
Tomorrow we move.
And to mix my low budget television metaphors horribly, I don't know whether I'm about to regenerate or just get killed off in a death dive into a squashed looking planet named after an intergalactic cheese.
---
Most things are in boxes. But still much more parcel tape gun work to do yet, be sure.
Yet, before I commit the final act and unplug the studio and switch off Momo's phones and internet connection and music, I am listening to a soundtrack that could not be more appropriate in my own mind.
The Gotan Project, La Revancha Del Tango.
Never listened to this supremely daytime, work-helping new-tango soundtrack in the evening before, but I have been saving it for now, the final moments. The last CD to get played. Just because it transports me to the optimistic early days of Momo like no other record. Not for some clever, universally obvious thematic meaning. It just so does.
One last tango in the bright orange room I have loved working in for eight years.
One final strut past the window before I shut off the machines and let this wonderful chapter of our lives – a decade of learning to fly creatively – crash into history.
For new adventures await.
Yet old memories, the fondest of them, will live on in the mental construct of this space that I will take with me and visit often. This creative home.
As the breezy, un-philosophical music spools to the end, I shall feel deeply for all the good things that have happened to us here, and how simply happy we have been in the home's comforting calm, despite the sadnesses trying to challenge it from time to time. They never quite won out.
The many instances of dad's practical handiwork around me here will probably make me pause a moment even longer tomorrow. And I hope to toast the old girl – this hundred-year-old house – with a few tears before I walk up the hill one last time and leave the keys with the agent.
For I am very grateful for those adventures had here.
But I wonder whether they will pale in comparison to the ones coming.
x
You won't have seen it. You're too young. You're too lofty. You're too intellectual and just too cool.
But my studio looks just like it.
The last episode of Blake's 7.
Budget for special effects is about right.
Surrounded as I am by boxes and packing crates, I am reminded of the little waltz around the bridge of the Scorpio that Tarrant performed in his console seat, as the ship plummeted to its destruction on Gauda Prime, showering him in a few sparks, turning the lights off and on a bit and turning his place at the apparent helm into a very low octane kind of ghost train ride.
Hit me like a slug to the chest when I was ten.
---
With all but total life support off here now, I am down to the bare essentials: an internet connection and a hi fi. And even these will not last much longer now. For I am about to bail out.
Tomorrow we move.
And to mix my low budget television metaphors horribly, I don't know whether I'm about to regenerate or just get killed off in a death dive into a squashed looking planet named after an intergalactic cheese.
---
Most things are in boxes. But still much more parcel tape gun work to do yet, be sure.
Yet, before I commit the final act and unplug the studio and switch off Momo's phones and internet connection and music, I am listening to a soundtrack that could not be more appropriate in my own mind.
The Gotan Project, La Revancha Del Tango.
Never listened to this supremely daytime, work-helping new-tango soundtrack in the evening before, but I have been saving it for now, the final moments. The last CD to get played. Just because it transports me to the optimistic early days of Momo like no other record. Not for some clever, universally obvious thematic meaning. It just so does.
One last tango in the bright orange room I have loved working in for eight years.
One final strut past the window before I shut off the machines and let this wonderful chapter of our lives – a decade of learning to fly creatively – crash into history.
For new adventures await.
Yet old memories, the fondest of them, will live on in the mental construct of this space that I will take with me and visit often. This creative home.
As the breezy, un-philosophical music spools to the end, I shall feel deeply for all the good things that have happened to us here, and how simply happy we have been in the home's comforting calm, despite the sadnesses trying to challenge it from time to time. They never quite won out.
The many instances of dad's practical handiwork around me here will probably make me pause a moment even longer tomorrow. And I hope to toast the old girl – this hundred-year-old house – with a few tears before I walk up the hill one last time and leave the keys with the agent.
For I am very grateful for those adventures had here.
But I wonder whether they will pale in comparison to the ones coming.
x
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Blitz and mortar.
Blitz and mortar.
It's a sort of cross between praying and illustrating how far you've had it up to.
The 'time-out' signal.
I've been upwardly jabbing my fingertips into a downward palm mutely for some weeks now. And no amount of stoic cups of tea could have floated me through the blitz of it: moving house.
I have yet to move house still, you understand. The actual trauma of piling all our worldly crap into a wheelbarrow and wobbling it around the block is still ahead of us and I really couldn't care less.
Drop my vintage china. Cartwheel my fridge down the stairs. Saw my sofa in half to get it through the door. Don't care.
And inevitable weeks without internet access at home, while people on the sub continent show me super-human levels of patience on the phone while simply repeating that the engineer in my area is still booked up until Christmas? Pah. No kind of trauma to me now.
Do your worst, forces of removals chaos – because the relief of finally getting solicitors to let us move our ruddy lives ON at long long last has made me so giddy I have been walking the grid of streets nearby hugging random English people to within an inch of their social conventions, tears streaming down my blood-pressure-blotched face, holding them until they too are sobbing, out of the incomparable shame of sheer cultural awkwardness.
---
The truth of English people as a society is, of course, not only do they feel uncomfortable showing un-earned emotion, they also can't abide bureaucracy. Plus they have a perverse sense of humour, delighting in things backwards.
Which is presumably why they have a housing system designed to be as bureaucratic and likely to induce significant outbursts of decidedly uncomfortable emotion in front of strangers as humanly possible.
And why they have built their entire modern economy upon this process.
---
One estate agent, a friendly client, unconnected with our sale and purchase, responded simply to my property market indigestion: "Politicians are all frustrated lawyers. Country's run by 'em."
And I heard a little penny drop.
Now, it's worth saying up front that I shall be reclining in a hot tub with a solicitor, a former solicitor and a barrister at the weekend. Each of them happens to be remarkably thoughtful and, well, human. This is in large part why they are not just friends of mine, but friends I am prepared to strip to my shorts in front of and percolate warm fluids around myself with.
But evidence like this not withstanding, the job of a solicitor is really that of a sort of vaguely ennobled engineer.
---
As I have said before, we really do rather sort of completely need engineers. I walk over bridges and under glass roofs and through under-sea tunnels because of them. If foppish daydreamers like me were professionally responsible for turning their hands to such things I tell you I would never leave the house. I would never get IN the house in the first place.
Thus we need engineers to be utterly nutterly anal about nuts, bolts, ones, twos, cantilevers, plumb lines and flat-out level-headed detail. Or just about everything will fall down.
But as I have also said before, engineers really do rather sort of completely need other people around them to point out the obvious needs of, ah, actual humans. Because squishy soft pheromone-crazed, half-baked-inspiration-prone animals do not behave like helpfully well- programmed robots.
Which is a fact that precisely incurs the need for the law. And precisely annoys the tits off your average lawyer.
---
To get its own back, the legal profession in Britain helpfully assumes the reigns of authority in all significant transactions of life, to ensure an objective engineering of all parties' responsibilities and rights and so secure fairness and equity and, effectively, harmony in society – and then sods off on holiday without telling anyone.
Now now. Everyone needs a holiday; I know all too well how much my three legal examples have earned their place in that hot tub and how much, frankly, we probably just need to hold each other and rock together gently there for a while. So I dehumanise only for a pithy moment to exact a knowing smirk from you. There it is.
If I have a point – or the strength to make one after trying to buy a house as an Englishman in his own country – it is simply that what I have learned is missing from the house buying process in the jolly ol' Green And Pleasant, is someone who actually knows what the Elgar's arse is going on.
Forgive my Anglo Saxon. But tedious frustrations from my own unremarkable little life aside, it is the thing that seems needed for my countrymen as they seek for some reason to rebuild their nation's economy on the same property market foundations it failed on last time: a role somewhere in the chain that can pull together… well, everything.
Estate agents can START everything.
Solicitors can STOP everything.
No-one seems empowered to DRIVE anything.
Which is perhaps why I should have stopped feebly making pathetic time out signs all summer and put my hands on the bloody wheel. Even if my metaphorical motor is on the back of a tow-truck.
Still. Perhaps the most remarkable thing to bear in mind when observing all this from a comfortable cultural distance is that mostly, eventually, we seem to get there. And perhaps most perversely, thanks to a lot of people trying to help each other out when things appear to turn grim. Like humans.
Like Brits in the blitz.
Jeepers we just love all this, don't we?
See you round the corner. I'll have the kettle on.
It's a sort of cross between praying and illustrating how far you've had it up to.
The 'time-out' signal.
I've been upwardly jabbing my fingertips into a downward palm mutely for some weeks now. And no amount of stoic cups of tea could have floated me through the blitz of it: moving house.
I have yet to move house still, you understand. The actual trauma of piling all our worldly crap into a wheelbarrow and wobbling it around the block is still ahead of us and I really couldn't care less.
Drop my vintage china. Cartwheel my fridge down the stairs. Saw my sofa in half to get it through the door. Don't care.
And inevitable weeks without internet access at home, while people on the sub continent show me super-human levels of patience on the phone while simply repeating that the engineer in my area is still booked up until Christmas? Pah. No kind of trauma to me now.
Do your worst, forces of removals chaos – because the relief of finally getting solicitors to let us move our ruddy lives ON at long long last has made me so giddy I have been walking the grid of streets nearby hugging random English people to within an inch of their social conventions, tears streaming down my blood-pressure-blotched face, holding them until they too are sobbing, out of the incomparable shame of sheer cultural awkwardness.
---
The truth of English people as a society is, of course, not only do they feel uncomfortable showing un-earned emotion, they also can't abide bureaucracy. Plus they have a perverse sense of humour, delighting in things backwards.
Which is presumably why they have a housing system designed to be as bureaucratic and likely to induce significant outbursts of decidedly uncomfortable emotion in front of strangers as humanly possible.
And why they have built their entire modern economy upon this process.
---
One estate agent, a friendly client, unconnected with our sale and purchase, responded simply to my property market indigestion: "Politicians are all frustrated lawyers. Country's run by 'em."
And I heard a little penny drop.
Now, it's worth saying up front that I shall be reclining in a hot tub with a solicitor, a former solicitor and a barrister at the weekend. Each of them happens to be remarkably thoughtful and, well, human. This is in large part why they are not just friends of mine, but friends I am prepared to strip to my shorts in front of and percolate warm fluids around myself with.
But evidence like this not withstanding, the job of a solicitor is really that of a sort of vaguely ennobled engineer.
---
As I have said before, we really do rather sort of completely need engineers. I walk over bridges and under glass roofs and through under-sea tunnels because of them. If foppish daydreamers like me were professionally responsible for turning their hands to such things I tell you I would never leave the house. I would never get IN the house in the first place.
Thus we need engineers to be utterly nutterly anal about nuts, bolts, ones, twos, cantilevers, plumb lines and flat-out level-headed detail. Or just about everything will fall down.
But as I have also said before, engineers really do rather sort of completely need other people around them to point out the obvious needs of, ah, actual humans. Because squishy soft pheromone-crazed, half-baked-inspiration-prone animals do not behave like helpfully well- programmed robots.
Which is a fact that precisely incurs the need for the law. And precisely annoys the tits off your average lawyer.
---
To get its own back, the legal profession in Britain helpfully assumes the reigns of authority in all significant transactions of life, to ensure an objective engineering of all parties' responsibilities and rights and so secure fairness and equity and, effectively, harmony in society – and then sods off on holiday without telling anyone.
Now now. Everyone needs a holiday; I know all too well how much my three legal examples have earned their place in that hot tub and how much, frankly, we probably just need to hold each other and rock together gently there for a while. So I dehumanise only for a pithy moment to exact a knowing smirk from you. There it is.
If I have a point – or the strength to make one after trying to buy a house as an Englishman in his own country – it is simply that what I have learned is missing from the house buying process in the jolly ol' Green And Pleasant, is someone who actually knows what the Elgar's arse is going on.
Forgive my Anglo Saxon. But tedious frustrations from my own unremarkable little life aside, it is the thing that seems needed for my countrymen as they seek for some reason to rebuild their nation's economy on the same property market foundations it failed on last time: a role somewhere in the chain that can pull together… well, everything.
Estate agents can START everything.
Solicitors can STOP everything.
No-one seems empowered to DRIVE anything.
Which is perhaps why I should have stopped feebly making pathetic time out signs all summer and put my hands on the bloody wheel. Even if my metaphorical motor is on the back of a tow-truck.
Still. Perhaps the most remarkable thing to bear in mind when observing all this from a comfortable cultural distance is that mostly, eventually, we seem to get there. And perhaps most perversely, thanks to a lot of people trying to help each other out when things appear to turn grim. Like humans.
Like Brits in the blitz.
Jeepers we just love all this, don't we?
See you round the corner. I'll have the kettle on.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Unpeeled.
Unpeeled.
Have you heard of it? Music review site, Unpeeled is, by all accounts, rather credible. Properly so. It's read, for one thing.
But it's unusual in one respect: It has reviewed Sweetseeker by that bloke from Momo:tempo.
And it appeared to like it.
---
I've had a fairly jolly morning, I should say. I spent it with one new piece of music ringing around my head on loop as I finished a mix for a radio ad for Thinking Juice. An almost daftly happy, breezy, borderline-camp affair, full of rich swooping strings – courtesy of Mr Pete Whitfield once again, who has brought the whole thing to life with his spot-on-first-time takes which I was dropping in over breakfast.
This put a huge jolly smile on my face. When you hear some version of Third Floor, Love Department posted on the Momo site, you'll know why – as Caroline deftly put it earler: "It's a sort of cross between Are you being served and Love Boat".
Well, quite.
I should feel some shame about this I suspect. But instead, of course, I think I nailed it.
Thing is, something else dropped in over breakfast which also put a huge jolly smile on my face, which the jollyness of Third Floor, Love Department seemed simply to score aptly.
It was an email. From Shane O'Leary, erstwhile proprietor of Unpeeled. Giving me the heads up on his review and pointing me to his site. I learned later, from new Head Of Music PR at Momo, Virginia, that this is something he only bothers to do if he, y'know, really likes what he's reviewed.
Yes. Likes it.
My work.
And there I am while reading his über-hip missive listening to a cross between Are you being served and Love Boat.
But let's hope the good Mr O'Leary never hears that, eh. He currently seems to be under the impression that…
[I can't bring myself to type it. It makes such little sense…]
..Momo:tempo is credible.
..!
You can see the review in action here (scroll down a bit) or read the body of it below.
Jeepers, Misses. Read those words.
And yes. I have a PR department. And so far, she's made this happen already. Fill you in a little more soon.
---
UNPEELED.NET
MOMO:TEMPO: "Sweetseeker" (Momo Creative)
RELEASED? 13th September.
SOUNDS LIKE? There are parts of London populated almost entirely by people who believe
that Nathan Barley is a drama series. These people will believe that Momo Tempo looks great, but sounds like crap. We, on the other hand know that Nathan Barley is an underrated slab of irony and that while Momo Tempo looks pretty rough, he sounds gorgeous. This is a sonic manifesto that boldly announces an intention to deceive, "I'm feeling sly" is the drawl of the micro second for the batteringly busy 'Toffee Mix' of the jazz-funk reconceived by the dancing robots of "Sweetseeker". All, you may think, very nice, but "The Golden Age Of Exploration" grinds it to dust with a cybernetic Stevie Wonder workout.
IS IT ANY GOOD? When passion, obsession and sheer, fucking naughtiness collide with tip-top clever bastard business, it's going to be great and it is.
Have you heard of it? Music review site, Unpeeled is, by all accounts, rather credible. Properly so. It's read, for one thing.
But it's unusual in one respect: It has reviewed Sweetseeker by that bloke from Momo:tempo.
And it appeared to like it.
---
I've had a fairly jolly morning, I should say. I spent it with one new piece of music ringing around my head on loop as I finished a mix for a radio ad for Thinking Juice. An almost daftly happy, breezy, borderline-camp affair, full of rich swooping strings – courtesy of Mr Pete Whitfield once again, who has brought the whole thing to life with his spot-on-first-time takes which I was dropping in over breakfast.
This put a huge jolly smile on my face. When you hear some version of Third Floor, Love Department posted on the Momo site, you'll know why – as Caroline deftly put it earler: "It's a sort of cross between Are you being served and Love Boat".
Well, quite.
I should feel some shame about this I suspect. But instead, of course, I think I nailed it.
Thing is, something else dropped in over breakfast which also put a huge jolly smile on my face, which the jollyness of Third Floor, Love Department seemed simply to score aptly.
It was an email. From Shane O'Leary, erstwhile proprietor of Unpeeled. Giving me the heads up on his review and pointing me to his site. I learned later, from new Head Of Music PR at Momo, Virginia, that this is something he only bothers to do if he, y'know, really likes what he's reviewed.
Yes. Likes it.
My work.
And there I am while reading his über-hip missive listening to a cross between Are you being served and Love Boat.
But let's hope the good Mr O'Leary never hears that, eh. He currently seems to be under the impression that…
[I can't bring myself to type it. It makes such little sense…]
..Momo:tempo is credible.
..!
You can see the review in action here (scroll down a bit) or read the body of it below.
Jeepers, Misses. Read those words.
And yes. I have a PR department. And so far, she's made this happen already. Fill you in a little more soon.
---
UNPEELED.NET
MOMO:TEMPO: "Sweetseeker" (Momo Creative)
RELEASED? 13th September.
SOUNDS LIKE? There are parts of London populated almost entirely by people who believe
that Nathan Barley is a drama series. These people will believe that Momo Tempo looks great, but sounds like crap. We, on the other hand know that Nathan Barley is an underrated slab of irony and that while Momo Tempo looks pretty rough, he sounds gorgeous. This is a sonic manifesto that boldly announces an intention to deceive, "I'm feeling sly" is the drawl of the micro second for the batteringly busy 'Toffee Mix' of the jazz-funk reconceived by the dancing robots of "Sweetseeker". All, you may think, very nice, but "The Golden Age Of Exploration" grinds it to dust with a cybernetic Stevie Wonder workout.
IS IT ANY GOOD? When passion, obsession and sheer, fucking naughtiness collide with tip-top clever bastard business, it's going to be great and it is.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Nomardy.
Nomardy.
A week in France can be very good for the heart and very bad for the arteries.
What's bad for both is attempting moving house.
Back from hols in the good Gallic countryside, in a friendly corner of extended Normandy called the Mayenne, I am facing a new week that I always knew could be a bit of a mardy / merdey one. For, in principle, this is the week we move house.
In principle, it will be the first time that Momo has ever been unplugged and relocated. In principle therefore, it is the week I say goodbye to the blessed Arnewood Studio.
Ripping the needle from the swelling Elgar as heartfelt reflections rise on this matter, I am instead facing the tiny and desperately boring matter of whether I should or should not book people to help us stand an earthly chance of moving our entire worldly life to a new space on Friday.
On FRIDAY.
And still we don't know if we can exchange.
Oh dear Lord how can something so dull be so freeeeeaking teeth-grinding?
Never mind a week of smelly Camembert and two bottles of fab French blonk a night, my heart's more likely to arrest trying to stay chilled about HOW BLOODY LONG ALL THIS IS TAKING WITHOUT US KNOWING IF WE REALLY ARE GOING TO MOVE BLOODY HOUSE OR WHETHER SOME FREAK BLOODY THING WILL STOP US AT THE LAST BLOODY MINUTE.
Readers in Pakistan may wish to send me, by return, letters and messages of perspective-giving, to help take my mind off the sickening introspection.
Meanwhile, I am apparently charged with being creative today. Retakes for a couple of score ideas and a magazine and some websites or somesuch to be looked at.
Think I might just get back in the car and keep driving.
Because if people call me back today and say we're actually completing our ruddy Vente on Vendredi, then the semaine's insanity will really begin.
It's 8.30am and I think it seems reasonable to have a drink to help my mental santé.
---
A week in France can be very good for the heart and very bad for the arteries.
What's bad for both is attempting moving house.
Back from hols in the good Gallic countryside, in a friendly corner of extended Normandy called the Mayenne, I am facing a new week that I always knew could be a bit of a mardy / merdey one. For, in principle, this is the week we move house.
In principle, it will be the first time that Momo has ever been unplugged and relocated. In principle therefore, it is the week I say goodbye to the blessed Arnewood Studio.
Ripping the needle from the swelling Elgar as heartfelt reflections rise on this matter, I am instead facing the tiny and desperately boring matter of whether I should or should not book people to help us stand an earthly chance of moving our entire worldly life to a new space on Friday.
On FRIDAY.
And still we don't know if we can exchange.
Oh dear Lord how can something so dull be so freeeeeaking teeth-grinding?
Never mind a week of smelly Camembert and two bottles of fab French blonk a night, my heart's more likely to arrest trying to stay chilled about HOW BLOODY LONG ALL THIS IS TAKING WITHOUT US KNOWING IF WE REALLY ARE GOING TO MOVE BLOODY HOUSE OR WHETHER SOME FREAK BLOODY THING WILL STOP US AT THE LAST BLOODY MINUTE.
Readers in Pakistan may wish to send me, by return, letters and messages of perspective-giving, to help take my mind off the sickening introspection.
Meanwhile, I am apparently charged with being creative today. Retakes for a couple of score ideas and a magazine and some websites or somesuch to be looked at.
Think I might just get back in the car and keep driving.
Because if people call me back today and say we're actually completing our ruddy Vente on Vendredi, then the semaine's insanity will really begin.
It's 8.30am and I think it seems reasonable to have a drink to help my mental santé.
---
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
19.
19.
So here we are. One short of a very full sounding number indeed.
An ignoble digit, you might say; how do you celebrate it? I don't think a romantic anniversary dinner for two would be enhanced by Paul Hardcastle's 1980s pop oddity about the Vietnam War. Though I think some mix of it or other was probably still in the charts when the good woman I now live with tied the knot with me that day in the summer of 1991.
For yes, today is our wedding anniversary. Bless me, but how young were we?
Not young enough to be stopped, evidently. But I still don't feel old enough to know better. It still seems like it was a really very good idea. Perhaps my last one.
I can live with that.
---
So here we are. One short of a very full sounding number indeed.
An ignoble digit, you might say; how do you celebrate it? I don't think a romantic anniversary dinner for two would be enhanced by Paul Hardcastle's 1980s pop oddity about the Vietnam War. Though I think some mix of it or other was probably still in the charts when the good woman I now live with tied the knot with me that day in the summer of 1991.
For yes, today is our wedding anniversary. Bless me, but how young were we?
Not young enough to be stopped, evidently. But I still don't feel old enough to know better. It still seems like it was a really very good idea. Perhaps my last one.
I can live with that.
---
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Bo-muda Triangle.
Bo-muda Triangle.
I think it's time to have lunch with my wife.
Not just any old limp triangles of pappy bread and filling from a corner shop, you understand. Though we might be actually eating any old limp triangles of pappy bread and filling from a corner shop. No. The ingestion isn't the point. Even if it has three. The real symbolism about this lunch will be its location.
The lovely first lady of Momo once said to me that she rather envied the fact that at the end of my working day I can often hand her, or make her read, or firmly encourage her to interact with, or basically force her to listen to an actual thing. A something. A product of some tangible kind. Whereas she, she often felt, couldn't exactly bring home a portfolio of decisions and discussions and demonstrably dreary but confidential reports for me to pin to the fridge.
I'd always point out that I loved her for her all the things she naturally brought home with her every day. Most pertinently, the wage.
But, once we are enjoying that lunch I'm thinking of, it will be churlish of me not to point out then and there that we will be actually, tangibly, most definitely making use of something that she has most certainly made. We'll be sitting IN it, in fact.
A very real thing. A very affecting thing. Rather more so than your average website.
A space.
---
I remember Day One of Year Two of my three-year degree in Graphic Design. It was, I could sense, very possibly the beginning of my redemption from a Foundationy, fantastically arty-farty first year that saw me nearly thrown off the course for blatant, balsa-wood-boring creative ineptitude. Don't judge me. I'd done a BTEC.
Salvation glimmered for me, however, that morning. Sitting there, the Veteran Lovely Chap Proper Old School Designer who then ran the course – or at least, the much neater, cleaner, second two years of it – held up a piece of A4 paper and gazed around the classroom at us in a drawn-out, expectant silence.
"What is this?" he then asked imperiously.
All barely-post-adolescent eyes flicked from him to each other, wondering how to play this obvious duffer trap in a louche, cool way.
Silence hung theatrically. The bit of A4 seemed to fill the room.
Someone cracked. "It's, ah. Well, it's a bit of A4 paper."
The tutor's eye's twinkled with the casual joy of an easy pounce. "No, it isn't."
"Yes it is." we all thought in unison.
"No it isn't," he countered intuitively, pulling a large lever to collapse the trap door underneath the cretin who gave in to blurting out the obvious, "not for you. Not if you plan to be designers."
("Yes it is. It's a bloody bit of A4 paper…" said an echoey voice through cries of bone-broken pain from somewhere beneath us.)
"This…" our wise old tutor continued mystically, waving a hand portentiously around the dimensions of the bit of A4 paper like Paul Daniels in a Saturday matinee on the pier at Great Yarmouth.
"..this is a field."
Silence fell. Noisily.
"Ah." I thought, with some dawning relief, "I may yet be alright on this course. I can do pretentiously ponsey."
"IT'S A BLOODY BIT OF A4!" shouted the voice in the pit below, but some of us were no longer listening.
---
If there's one thing I've learned, and one thing I've banged on about since my clever wife completed her training as an Urban Designer a couple of years ago, it is how universal are some principles of design.
Understanding how to make use of that space – that field – is as important to putting print on a bit of A4 as it is to putting people and buildings on an actual field. Except a bit of A4 comes ready cow-free. But you're missing the point.
Dynamics are all. How things work in the space.
---
People are funny creatures. Like cows, but sometimes nimbler and more complexedly stupid.
We most instinctively respond not to logic and wisdom and clever ideas but to feelings. And I don't just mean obvious emotional theatrics like jealousy, rage, fear, inadequacy, nausea and Jeremy Kyle – which is really all those feelings in one half-hour TV experience. I mean the sort of feelings we spend most of our day being steered by, below the radar of awareness.
Vibes.
Yes, get hippy with it, man. Vibes. You might be a pretentious boob like me and imagine yourself able to analyse your environment at every step like some artistic Terminator and so fancy you'll never be caught unawares by the subtle schemes of discomfort. Or you might just pop to the shops every now and then. But either way, you'll be responding to a thousand secret stimuli between here and the chemist. So deal with it, organic boy.
When things are blatantly awful, they raise above the threshold of subconscious and we may actually notice ourselves reacting. Bad breath. Radio One daytime presenters. Terrible road accidents – that kind of thing.
But most of the time your and my day is affected by stupid things we don't notice are attacking or adding to our wellbeing. And you'd be amazed how stupid these things are.
And how stupid are many of the decisions made by the chief catagory of human supposed to tackle these daily injustices and save us from inexplicable daily misery – designers.
---
Designers are our defenders. The guardians of space. They are the people that are hired, like a SWAT team, to go into a bad situation and basically shoot everybody.
Except they're not. They supposed to ask questions and analyse the situation and come up with a clever plan based on the evidence and brought to life with a little aesthetic flare. They just like shooting everybody.
Whether you're screwing up a flyer before it's even hit your post mat because you can see from the upstairs bathroom that it looks about as reassuringly professional as a Victorian pick-pocket trying to land an airliner, or you're walking into your work environment and suddenly thinking about jumping out of the fourth floor window despite the good night you had lastnight with Dave and all the crazy cats in marketing and the good chance that the window won't open any more anyway, design is the thing at fault. At fault by being absent.
Websites are one of the most effective, efficient and well-practiced ways to destroy large parts of your soul, for example. Try setting up a MySpace account. Now, in 2010. Try it. But do so only with a friend in the room who has sworn to never look over your shoulder and to pull you roughly from the screen when the filthy expletive count rises to one in three.
But anything in print can do the same. You might not know why you're getting a headache while reading a book, but it could be that some fancy-pants designer has set the measure too long – too many words on a line. Or it could be that you're reading a Dan Brown. Either way, your day is made rather worse and you may not know why.
And so it is true of any space at all. Even a public one. If the space isn't working well, it's your autonomic vibe detection ability that will sense it and your wellbeing that will suffer. Either because some engineers have systematically 'worked out' how the space should operate – or more likely, how it is allowed to operate – or because some designers have decided to conceptualise a bold new aesthetic for it.
Brilliant. Hooray for our brilliant space guardians.
---
Enter then, centre stage, the oil-stained, concrete joy of Bournemouth's Triangle.
Here is a part of this gently feel-good seaside resort that is almost smack-centre of town and yet spent 30 years devoid of any pedestrians other than people who got lost coming out of one of the car parks. Haunted and frightened, these creatures never stayed out in the open for long.
But here too is a south-facing open area, lined with shops on all three sides, including a design award-winning new community library, and with an established grassed area with trees in the heart of it. In, may I point out again, the middle of town.
So why were the local traders so grumpy with my lovely wife when she first walked in to their meeting 18 months ago?
Because this space – this daily definition of their working environment – just felt so wrong.
Felt so wrong, and left for so long, that they were ready to pounce on just about anyone from the council foolish enough to walk into their discussions about it.
Lastnight, however – 18 months later – when I picked up Caroline from a sort of official jolly they'd all thrown up there, she was wide-eyed with feel-good. Because all the locals were, those same local traders. Wide-eyed with feel-good and effusive with gratitude at what she'd ensured had happened to this sick space.
---
The design is not flamboyant. It's not tricksy and the team worked hard to spend a minimal amount of council tax money on it. But they focused that spend. And thought about what was wrong. And went with the simple and obvious design solution for the space – and crucially did everything to ensure, through all the very many technical and political possibilities of the process, that that simple and obvious design was not diluted.
Gone is the bus lay-up. Gone is the crumbling high wall to a green space out of reach. Gone is much of the clutter of old street furniture. In its place is another simple green triangle with three new trees on it, but accessible from all points, visible, readable, from everywhere, which accentuates the clean lines of the new library and creates a public space facing it with simple seating steps that is simply pregnant for things to happen in it.
As a result, people can now be seen in the Triangle. And some people are suddenly discovering that Bournemouth has a very nice new library, some ten years after it opened.
---
That so many people had to be involved in making it work is a given. That so many people had recognised that there was a problem beforehand is interesting too. That so many people began to see how to put it right is even more interesting. The Landscape team, Transport guys, town center management people, local traders, local politicians, external contractors and internal specialists. They all helped to realise the new space and all began to see what would work about it.
But I think that the Triangle redesign's apparent success is down to two things; indeed a vindication of them:
Good design, and good diplomacy.
---
Understanding how people ACTUALLY work is crucial to designing something well. Where will they really walk, how will they really 'read a space'? And crucial to understanding how people work is understanding our need to feel placed.
Where am I? What is this place? What am I dealing with and how should I interact with it?
It's as true of a website, or a poster, or a magazine article as it is of a car, or an apartment or a whole part of town. Or any relationship.
Does it put you at your ease? Does it make you feel comfortable? Because if it does, you'll want to hang around it. Whatever it is. At least for a while.
Lastnight, as we drove away, Caroline and her Urban Design colleague Catherine – both playing such crucial roles in co-ordinating everyone's thoughts on the Triangle project – seemed pretty alive with encouragement. Not simply from all the people who'd asked them up there to say thankyou to them quite so enthusiastically, but perhaps most by one final bit of evidence that summed up the success.
Like a scene from an unbelievable 80s movie, a group of street dancers had moved into the Triangle's new open space with a ghettoblaster and were practicing their absurdly cool moves for an hour. Without prompting, these people had walked out of an Urban Design textbook and into the space, owning it without even noticing themselves doing it.
I mean, honestly. I didn't even know Bournemouth HAD any absurdly cool street dancers.
---
The lovely first lady of Momo is not one to make a fuss. You should, and probably do, know this. She is more of an unselfconscious street dancer than a show-boater. Really, you should see her move. So she is insistent on not dwelling on kudos – especially that of a large team of individuals. Many talents renewed the Triangle for many more people.
But I am proud of her as a husband that she is so particularly good at pulling all those very different groups of people together. And I am impressed with her as a designer that she understands the way that well engineered design can change something pretty fundamental to people – their day.
She and Laura and Catherine and the other members of her team are showing some remarkable skills and aptitude between them, across the many projects they're currently working on. But I'm not sure she will pursue my suggestion that the three of them do a photoshoot for BH Life in manner of Charlie's Angels. Which is a shame.
But they certainly are in a remarkable position. As Caroline said to me lastnight over a glass of cheap red and frozen pizzas, "Who gets nights like this in their job? Who gets people saying thankyou to them like that?"
It's been a long time coming for her, you might say. The lovely first lady of Momo has served in very many places and roles that don't get seen or appreciated. But ultimately, lastnight's celebrations are really about the power of good design.
In all matters creative – everything designed for other people – you have to try to hit the sweet spot. To sense what resonates best. Because if you bring the vibe waves into phase, everyone will feel it.
While we are sitting there – there in the middle of the Triangle, in this summer's fortuitously gorgeous weather, eating our limp triangles of pap and sandwich filling, and despite whatever pitfalls and problems that lie ahead – I will point out that the splendid person beside me has certainly made something she can show people.
She has made that crucial thing that is the point of all design.
A difference.
---
I think it's time to have lunch with my wife.
Not just any old limp triangles of pappy bread and filling from a corner shop, you understand. Though we might be actually eating any old limp triangles of pappy bread and filling from a corner shop. No. The ingestion isn't the point. Even if it has three. The real symbolism about this lunch will be its location.
The lovely first lady of Momo once said to me that she rather envied the fact that at the end of my working day I can often hand her, or make her read, or firmly encourage her to interact with, or basically force her to listen to an actual thing. A something. A product of some tangible kind. Whereas she, she often felt, couldn't exactly bring home a portfolio of decisions and discussions and demonstrably dreary but confidential reports for me to pin to the fridge.
I'd always point out that I loved her for her all the things she naturally brought home with her every day. Most pertinently, the wage.
But, once we are enjoying that lunch I'm thinking of, it will be churlish of me not to point out then and there that we will be actually, tangibly, most definitely making use of something that she has most certainly made. We'll be sitting IN it, in fact.
A very real thing. A very affecting thing. Rather more so than your average website.
A space.
---
I remember Day One of Year Two of my three-year degree in Graphic Design. It was, I could sense, very possibly the beginning of my redemption from a Foundationy, fantastically arty-farty first year that saw me nearly thrown off the course for blatant, balsa-wood-boring creative ineptitude. Don't judge me. I'd done a BTEC.
Salvation glimmered for me, however, that morning. Sitting there, the Veteran Lovely Chap Proper Old School Designer who then ran the course – or at least, the much neater, cleaner, second two years of it – held up a piece of A4 paper and gazed around the classroom at us in a drawn-out, expectant silence.
"What is this?" he then asked imperiously.
All barely-post-adolescent eyes flicked from him to each other, wondering how to play this obvious duffer trap in a louche, cool way.
Silence hung theatrically. The bit of A4 seemed to fill the room.
Someone cracked. "It's, ah. Well, it's a bit of A4 paper."
The tutor's eye's twinkled with the casual joy of an easy pounce. "No, it isn't."
"Yes it is." we all thought in unison.
"No it isn't," he countered intuitively, pulling a large lever to collapse the trap door underneath the cretin who gave in to blurting out the obvious, "not for you. Not if you plan to be designers."
("Yes it is. It's a bloody bit of A4 paper…" said an echoey voice through cries of bone-broken pain from somewhere beneath us.)
"This…" our wise old tutor continued mystically, waving a hand portentiously around the dimensions of the bit of A4 paper like Paul Daniels in a Saturday matinee on the pier at Great Yarmouth.
"..this is a field."
Silence fell. Noisily.
"Ah." I thought, with some dawning relief, "I may yet be alright on this course. I can do pretentiously ponsey."
"IT'S A BLOODY BIT OF A4!" shouted the voice in the pit below, but some of us were no longer listening.
---
If there's one thing I've learned, and one thing I've banged on about since my clever wife completed her training as an Urban Designer a couple of years ago, it is how universal are some principles of design.
Understanding how to make use of that space – that field – is as important to putting print on a bit of A4 as it is to putting people and buildings on an actual field. Except a bit of A4 comes ready cow-free. But you're missing the point.
Dynamics are all. How things work in the space.
---
People are funny creatures. Like cows, but sometimes nimbler and more complexedly stupid.
We most instinctively respond not to logic and wisdom and clever ideas but to feelings. And I don't just mean obvious emotional theatrics like jealousy, rage, fear, inadequacy, nausea and Jeremy Kyle – which is really all those feelings in one half-hour TV experience. I mean the sort of feelings we spend most of our day being steered by, below the radar of awareness.
Vibes.
Yes, get hippy with it, man. Vibes. You might be a pretentious boob like me and imagine yourself able to analyse your environment at every step like some artistic Terminator and so fancy you'll never be caught unawares by the subtle schemes of discomfort. Or you might just pop to the shops every now and then. But either way, you'll be responding to a thousand secret stimuli between here and the chemist. So deal with it, organic boy.
When things are blatantly awful, they raise above the threshold of subconscious and we may actually notice ourselves reacting. Bad breath. Radio One daytime presenters. Terrible road accidents – that kind of thing.
But most of the time your and my day is affected by stupid things we don't notice are attacking or adding to our wellbeing. And you'd be amazed how stupid these things are.
And how stupid are many of the decisions made by the chief catagory of human supposed to tackle these daily injustices and save us from inexplicable daily misery – designers.
---
Designers are our defenders. The guardians of space. They are the people that are hired, like a SWAT team, to go into a bad situation and basically shoot everybody.
Except they're not. They supposed to ask questions and analyse the situation and come up with a clever plan based on the evidence and brought to life with a little aesthetic flare. They just like shooting everybody.
Whether you're screwing up a flyer before it's even hit your post mat because you can see from the upstairs bathroom that it looks about as reassuringly professional as a Victorian pick-pocket trying to land an airliner, or you're walking into your work environment and suddenly thinking about jumping out of the fourth floor window despite the good night you had lastnight with Dave and all the crazy cats in marketing and the good chance that the window won't open any more anyway, design is the thing at fault. At fault by being absent.
Websites are one of the most effective, efficient and well-practiced ways to destroy large parts of your soul, for example. Try setting up a MySpace account. Now, in 2010. Try it. But do so only with a friend in the room who has sworn to never look over your shoulder and to pull you roughly from the screen when the filthy expletive count rises to one in three.
But anything in print can do the same. You might not know why you're getting a headache while reading a book, but it could be that some fancy-pants designer has set the measure too long – too many words on a line. Or it could be that you're reading a Dan Brown. Either way, your day is made rather worse and you may not know why.
And so it is true of any space at all. Even a public one. If the space isn't working well, it's your autonomic vibe detection ability that will sense it and your wellbeing that will suffer. Either because some engineers have systematically 'worked out' how the space should operate – or more likely, how it is allowed to operate – or because some designers have decided to conceptualise a bold new aesthetic for it.
Brilliant. Hooray for our brilliant space guardians.
---
Enter then, centre stage, the oil-stained, concrete joy of Bournemouth's Triangle.
Here is a part of this gently feel-good seaside resort that is almost smack-centre of town and yet spent 30 years devoid of any pedestrians other than people who got lost coming out of one of the car parks. Haunted and frightened, these creatures never stayed out in the open for long.
But here too is a south-facing open area, lined with shops on all three sides, including a design award-winning new community library, and with an established grassed area with trees in the heart of it. In, may I point out again, the middle of town.
So why were the local traders so grumpy with my lovely wife when she first walked in to their meeting 18 months ago?
Because this space – this daily definition of their working environment – just felt so wrong.
Felt so wrong, and left for so long, that they were ready to pounce on just about anyone from the council foolish enough to walk into their discussions about it.
Lastnight, however – 18 months later – when I picked up Caroline from a sort of official jolly they'd all thrown up there, she was wide-eyed with feel-good. Because all the locals were, those same local traders. Wide-eyed with feel-good and effusive with gratitude at what she'd ensured had happened to this sick space.
---
The design is not flamboyant. It's not tricksy and the team worked hard to spend a minimal amount of council tax money on it. But they focused that spend. And thought about what was wrong. And went with the simple and obvious design solution for the space – and crucially did everything to ensure, through all the very many technical and political possibilities of the process, that that simple and obvious design was not diluted.
Gone is the bus lay-up. Gone is the crumbling high wall to a green space out of reach. Gone is much of the clutter of old street furniture. In its place is another simple green triangle with three new trees on it, but accessible from all points, visible, readable, from everywhere, which accentuates the clean lines of the new library and creates a public space facing it with simple seating steps that is simply pregnant for things to happen in it.
As a result, people can now be seen in the Triangle. And some people are suddenly discovering that Bournemouth has a very nice new library, some ten years after it opened.
---
That so many people had to be involved in making it work is a given. That so many people had recognised that there was a problem beforehand is interesting too. That so many people began to see how to put it right is even more interesting. The Landscape team, Transport guys, town center management people, local traders, local politicians, external contractors and internal specialists. They all helped to realise the new space and all began to see what would work about it.
But I think that the Triangle redesign's apparent success is down to two things; indeed a vindication of them:
Good design, and good diplomacy.
---
Understanding how people ACTUALLY work is crucial to designing something well. Where will they really walk, how will they really 'read a space'? And crucial to understanding how people work is understanding our need to feel placed.
Where am I? What is this place? What am I dealing with and how should I interact with it?
It's as true of a website, or a poster, or a magazine article as it is of a car, or an apartment or a whole part of town. Or any relationship.
Does it put you at your ease? Does it make you feel comfortable? Because if it does, you'll want to hang around it. Whatever it is. At least for a while.
Lastnight, as we drove away, Caroline and her Urban Design colleague Catherine – both playing such crucial roles in co-ordinating everyone's thoughts on the Triangle project – seemed pretty alive with encouragement. Not simply from all the people who'd asked them up there to say thankyou to them quite so enthusiastically, but perhaps most by one final bit of evidence that summed up the success.
Like a scene from an unbelievable 80s movie, a group of street dancers had moved into the Triangle's new open space with a ghettoblaster and were practicing their absurdly cool moves for an hour. Without prompting, these people had walked out of an Urban Design textbook and into the space, owning it without even noticing themselves doing it.
I mean, honestly. I didn't even know Bournemouth HAD any absurdly cool street dancers.
---
The lovely first lady of Momo is not one to make a fuss. You should, and probably do, know this. She is more of an unselfconscious street dancer than a show-boater. Really, you should see her move. So she is insistent on not dwelling on kudos – especially that of a large team of individuals. Many talents renewed the Triangle for many more people.
But I am proud of her as a husband that she is so particularly good at pulling all those very different groups of people together. And I am impressed with her as a designer that she understands the way that well engineered design can change something pretty fundamental to people – their day.
She and Laura and Catherine and the other members of her team are showing some remarkable skills and aptitude between them, across the many projects they're currently working on. But I'm not sure she will pursue my suggestion that the three of them do a photoshoot for BH Life in manner of Charlie's Angels. Which is a shame.
But they certainly are in a remarkable position. As Caroline said to me lastnight over a glass of cheap red and frozen pizzas, "Who gets nights like this in their job? Who gets people saying thankyou to them like that?"
It's been a long time coming for her, you might say. The lovely first lady of Momo has served in very many places and roles that don't get seen or appreciated. But ultimately, lastnight's celebrations are really about the power of good design.
In all matters creative – everything designed for other people – you have to try to hit the sweet spot. To sense what resonates best. Because if you bring the vibe waves into phase, everyone will feel it.
While we are sitting there – there in the middle of the Triangle, in this summer's fortuitously gorgeous weather, eating our limp triangles of pap and sandwich filling, and despite whatever pitfalls and problems that lie ahead – I will point out that the splendid person beside me has certainly made something she can show people.
She has made that crucial thing that is the point of all design.
A difference.
---
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Love the spinner, hate the spin.
Love the spinner, hate the spin.
Hands up if you're secretly sick of the media.
C'mon. Think about it.
All that shouty personal space invading – it adds up. All those pixel missiles fill up your brain like a rapid-fire Tetris. I'm getting shouted out.
Which is probably a bad sign for a person working in the Media.
Okay, so it's very definitely very loosely 'working' and it's obviously only in the provincial shires of the Media where none of your clients are names you've heard of and budgets are at least as ignominious. But still, there I am. Spinning for a living.
So, am I turning into a miserable spinster?
---
..Back from the ad break: No.
I've just had a realisation today, as I've been lounging around with the papers and French music and generally contributing nothing to the nation's economy and cultural wealth but the price of a side-bowl of olives and a slightly fnawing opinion or two on a couple of articles in the Guardian.
Namely: Making art = fun and inspiring. Promoting art = grim and demotivating.
---
Watching the Tour De France as daily as I can this year, I am as inspired as ever by the spectacle, challenge, culture, technicality, scenery and sheer theatre of it all as ever I was. I still want to drive one of the team cars or fly the TV coverage copter all over those crag-staggering Pyrenees peaks. Were I able to stream it into a womb tank I would weep with joy at it all, I'm sure.
But I can't. Never mind the room those things take up, or how hard it is to get the water to a truly neutral temperature – man.
No. It's the enthusiasm with which ITV4 has embraced its enhanced coverage that is trying very shouty pissy-offy hard to ruin it all for me. If the coverage can only be paid for by 50% of the broadcast time being given to advertising – long, frequent ad breaks and dementedly-repeated sponsor spots – then is it worth watching?
I'm really not sure.
---
I like articulating messages for my clients. I like mucking about with pixels and words trying to help them talk a bit betterer. I've always been a reasonably applied and practical creative – as much as you may snort at the idea of applying those words to me in general. Cynic.
So, with practical head on, treating me as my own client, I knew that 2010 would be very much about setting out Momo:tempo's little stall, fairly unflamboyantly. No sweat. All the business tools need putting into place if your 'art' is to be a tangible enough product for folks to grab hold of and take home to place in an intimate spot in their bedroom. Or wherever. Mantelpiece is fine. Next to the kettle wouldn't be a bad spot either when you think about it. Anyway.
My point is that I am now officially sick of uploading songs to different web portals and wondering how to get anyone 'useful' to listen to my bloody tunes.
It's all the worst aspects of the music business – the business. Sheesh.
When I talk to humans who've actually listened to something I've written, they usually seem strangely animated and upbeat about the whole experience. This is nice. Sending out jolly nice press packs to strangers who have hundreds of these things land on their mat every day and so will not respond or be moved to elation and a life-changing new viewpoint after soaking in your sound for half a day is not nice. It's depressing. And pointless.
Ah, but you never know. Do you. You have to WORK. NEVER GIVE UP. BE REALLY CLEVER.
Oh bleedin' heck. That's the bit I'm CRAP at – don't you see?
The bit I like is the whole making music thing. I'm not half bad at that. Would have spent rather more time than even I have this busy year if I hadn't been trying with tears and hot forks to WORK OUT HOW TO MAKE MY MYSPACE PAGE NOT LOOK LIKE THE DESIGN POOP OF A TOTAL RUDDY AMATEUR.
Honestly. I know anyone 'serious' needs to appear in all these places, but do you really think those wan, young, borderline-gormless young things all over every Flash web banner you've ever seen have the faintest idea about online strategies and maximising targeted market share? Of course not. They, like me, are too busy being casually groovy to give a shite. (Run with it, okay).
At last count, Momo:tempo now appears on:
Facebook.
MySpace. (*@x!!**x!!)
iTunes.
iLIke.
Twitter.
Blogspot.
Soundcloud.
E-Music. (Whuh?)
Napster. (Allegedly.)
Deezer. (Now, made up. Surely?)
Last.fm.
To say nothing of my own designed-from-the-ground-up website. And still I'm told I should be on Bandcamp. And Beatport. And I'm not even sure if I'm on Spotify or not but I know damn sure I really should be.
And never mind all the niche websites for electronic music and wotnotsuch. Yet I don't even know exactly what niche I should be IN. My own, I always thought.
This is so much easier when it's for someone else.
It is indeed, as some hitherto-unheard-of cool young thing called Brett Dennen is currently singing at me – from his obviously-successful bid to at least get on FIP's playlist – "Enough to make you go crazy." My point exactly.
---
That's when it dawned on me that when I think about all this, I get pretty deflated. Just want to read the paper and pass derisory comments at the trendy bastards in all the culture sections of the weekend papers. Give up and get a w**kacino. Sod trying to come up with targeted rich content for the fanbase. I don't have a fanbase. I don't even have a fan. I just open a window.
When, however, I consider the next creative adventure, I feel kind of oddly excited. Bless me. It's sweet. You might know it – that irrational fluttery feeling in the tummy that makes you actually bother to get out of bed and which fancifully intoxicates you to one degree or another into believing you can actually add something to the cultural human landscape. Which is the only way I know of that one can. It's clever, that feeling.
So I think I've decided. I shall now attempt very seriously to remain completely hidden from the cultural mainstream. Or sidestream. Or muddy rivulet. I shall launch a bold ad campaign consisting of this almost universally unread blog post declaiming my intention to NOT sell any records or secure any gigs in venues where actual people are likely to be or to do anything other than really rather enjoy the occasional stranger telling me to my face that they irrationally really rather enjoyed something of mine they once heard.
This seems real. Not spun. Some sort of genuine spun gold, in fact. All the finer treasure because it isn't shouty or preening or desperate to be 'somewhere nearer to all the action' as one columnist in a trendy newspaper put it today.
So excuse me while I disappear for a while. Sorry – still don't appear in the first place for a while. I shall be off enjoying myself privately. Spinning a magic tune somewhere.
----
(PS: I forgot Sonic Bids. See? Never heard of it either, have you.)
(PPS: Oh, and YouTube. Ever heard of that?)
Hands up if you're secretly sick of the media.
C'mon. Think about it.
All that shouty personal space invading – it adds up. All those pixel missiles fill up your brain like a rapid-fire Tetris. I'm getting shouted out.
Which is probably a bad sign for a person working in the Media.
Okay, so it's very definitely very loosely 'working' and it's obviously only in the provincial shires of the Media where none of your clients are names you've heard of and budgets are at least as ignominious. But still, there I am. Spinning for a living.
So, am I turning into a miserable spinster?
---
..Back from the ad break: No.
I've just had a realisation today, as I've been lounging around with the papers and French music and generally contributing nothing to the nation's economy and cultural wealth but the price of a side-bowl of olives and a slightly fnawing opinion or two on a couple of articles in the Guardian.
Namely: Making art = fun and inspiring. Promoting art = grim and demotivating.
---
Watching the Tour De France as daily as I can this year, I am as inspired as ever by the spectacle, challenge, culture, technicality, scenery and sheer theatre of it all as ever I was. I still want to drive one of the team cars or fly the TV coverage copter all over those crag-staggering Pyrenees peaks. Were I able to stream it into a womb tank I would weep with joy at it all, I'm sure.
But I can't. Never mind the room those things take up, or how hard it is to get the water to a truly neutral temperature – man.
No. It's the enthusiasm with which ITV4 has embraced its enhanced coverage that is trying very shouty pissy-offy hard to ruin it all for me. If the coverage can only be paid for by 50% of the broadcast time being given to advertising – long, frequent ad breaks and dementedly-repeated sponsor spots – then is it worth watching?
I'm really not sure.
---
I like articulating messages for my clients. I like mucking about with pixels and words trying to help them talk a bit betterer. I've always been a reasonably applied and practical creative – as much as you may snort at the idea of applying those words to me in general. Cynic.
So, with practical head on, treating me as my own client, I knew that 2010 would be very much about setting out Momo:tempo's little stall, fairly unflamboyantly. No sweat. All the business tools need putting into place if your 'art' is to be a tangible enough product for folks to grab hold of and take home to place in an intimate spot in their bedroom. Or wherever. Mantelpiece is fine. Next to the kettle wouldn't be a bad spot either when you think about it. Anyway.
My point is that I am now officially sick of uploading songs to different web portals and wondering how to get anyone 'useful' to listen to my bloody tunes.
It's all the worst aspects of the music business – the business. Sheesh.
When I talk to humans who've actually listened to something I've written, they usually seem strangely animated and upbeat about the whole experience. This is nice. Sending out jolly nice press packs to strangers who have hundreds of these things land on their mat every day and so will not respond or be moved to elation and a life-changing new viewpoint after soaking in your sound for half a day is not nice. It's depressing. And pointless.
Ah, but you never know. Do you. You have to WORK. NEVER GIVE UP. BE REALLY CLEVER.
Oh bleedin' heck. That's the bit I'm CRAP at – don't you see?
The bit I like is the whole making music thing. I'm not half bad at that. Would have spent rather more time than even I have this busy year if I hadn't been trying with tears and hot forks to WORK OUT HOW TO MAKE MY MYSPACE PAGE NOT LOOK LIKE THE DESIGN POOP OF A TOTAL RUDDY AMATEUR.
Honestly. I know anyone 'serious' needs to appear in all these places, but do you really think those wan, young, borderline-gormless young things all over every Flash web banner you've ever seen have the faintest idea about online strategies and maximising targeted market share? Of course not. They, like me, are too busy being casually groovy to give a shite. (Run with it, okay).
At last count, Momo:tempo now appears on:
Facebook.
MySpace. (*@x!!**x!!)
iTunes.
iLIke.
Twitter.
Blogspot.
Soundcloud.
E-Music. (Whuh?)
Napster. (Allegedly.)
Deezer. (Now, made up. Surely?)
Last.fm.
To say nothing of my own designed-from-the-ground-up website. And still I'm told I should be on Bandcamp. And Beatport. And I'm not even sure if I'm on Spotify or not but I know damn sure I really should be.
And never mind all the niche websites for electronic music and wotnotsuch. Yet I don't even know exactly what niche I should be IN. My own, I always thought.
This is so much easier when it's for someone else.
It is indeed, as some hitherto-unheard-of cool young thing called Brett Dennen is currently singing at me – from his obviously-successful bid to at least get on FIP's playlist – "Enough to make you go crazy." My point exactly.
---
That's when it dawned on me that when I think about all this, I get pretty deflated. Just want to read the paper and pass derisory comments at the trendy bastards in all the culture sections of the weekend papers. Give up and get a w**kacino. Sod trying to come up with targeted rich content for the fanbase. I don't have a fanbase. I don't even have a fan. I just open a window.
When, however, I consider the next creative adventure, I feel kind of oddly excited. Bless me. It's sweet. You might know it – that irrational fluttery feeling in the tummy that makes you actually bother to get out of bed and which fancifully intoxicates you to one degree or another into believing you can actually add something to the cultural human landscape. Which is the only way I know of that one can. It's clever, that feeling.
So I think I've decided. I shall now attempt very seriously to remain completely hidden from the cultural mainstream. Or sidestream. Or muddy rivulet. I shall launch a bold ad campaign consisting of this almost universally unread blog post declaiming my intention to NOT sell any records or secure any gigs in venues where actual people are likely to be or to do anything other than really rather enjoy the occasional stranger telling me to my face that they irrationally really rather enjoyed something of mine they once heard.
This seems real. Not spun. Some sort of genuine spun gold, in fact. All the finer treasure because it isn't shouty or preening or desperate to be 'somewhere nearer to all the action' as one columnist in a trendy newspaper put it today.
So excuse me while I disappear for a while. Sorry – still don't appear in the first place for a while. I shall be off enjoying myself privately. Spinning a magic tune somewhere.
----
(PS: I forgot Sonic Bids. See? Never heard of it either, have you.)
(PPS: Oh, and YouTube. Ever heard of that?)
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Momo:limbo.
Momo:limbo.
Oh, for Pete's sake. Sometimes you just can't get anything done.
I mean, how do high-flying types ever get off the ground? There's always a complete tool box of nuts and bolts to sift through before you can seem to find even two things that fit together. And anyone who ever visited their dad's garage and tried lifting that old tool box of stray nuts and bolts will know what a dead weight that is. Think I've pulled something just sitting here thinking about it.
And so there's the truth of it – I have nothing interesting to report.
I am mainly just watching the Tour de France and daydreaming about driving one of the team cars – or better still, flying the TV chopper – while responding to all manner of vaguely paid, vaguely creative work. That's about it.
None of it onerous, really. Some copywriting, some event branding, a couple of regular magaziney things, the odd emaily thing, a few advertisementy things. Plus, there are a couple of new telly-tunery things on the horizon too.
And all to a backdrop of largely very sunny stuff outside the window – and certainly where last weekend was concerned, some four days straight of driving between very jolly social engagements, seeing all manner of new and long-standing nice people.
..But oh dear. Still feels like a bit of a limbo.
Except, why do they call it a limbo? Being 'in Limbo' is surely nothing like doing a rum-induced stunt of freakish flexibility to the sound of rampant Cajun beats and a backdrop of excessively groovy people clapping and grinning rhythmically.
Languishing in the nether world is meant to be dull, isn't it?
Unless I've gotten completely the wrong end of this particular sentence of Limbo.
Jeepers, while I'm dozing into a torpor waiting around for all these stray nuts and bolts to magically screw themselves together into something brilliant, perhaps I'm actually expected to be trying to liven the place up. Mix up some cocktails, turn up some beats, chop up some coconuts, I dunno.
Well, if I had the energy and clear head to piddle about with all that, I wouldn't be DOING that, would I? I'd have my chuffing album out already and glittery showbiz launch gig in the diaries of the rich and famous. Woudn't I. Dippy.
Mind you. All this while I've been telling people that 2010 is just about Momo setting out its little musical stall in a largely empty church hall on a rickety trestle table at a poorly-advertised village jumble sale, I could have been telling people it was more like a Caribbean beach party.
Yeah, I could have done that.
Similarly low-tech metaphor. Apart from the sound system.
Way sexier.
Right. So something else to put on the interminable To Do list.
Hate the nuts and bolts of all this. I just want a nap.
Oh, for Pete's sake. Sometimes you just can't get anything done.
I mean, how do high-flying types ever get off the ground? There's always a complete tool box of nuts and bolts to sift through before you can seem to find even two things that fit together. And anyone who ever visited their dad's garage and tried lifting that old tool box of stray nuts and bolts will know what a dead weight that is. Think I've pulled something just sitting here thinking about it.
And so there's the truth of it – I have nothing interesting to report.
I am mainly just watching the Tour de France and daydreaming about driving one of the team cars – or better still, flying the TV chopper – while responding to all manner of vaguely paid, vaguely creative work. That's about it.
None of it onerous, really. Some copywriting, some event branding, a couple of regular magaziney things, the odd emaily thing, a few advertisementy things. Plus, there are a couple of new telly-tunery things on the horizon too.
And all to a backdrop of largely very sunny stuff outside the window – and certainly where last weekend was concerned, some four days straight of driving between very jolly social engagements, seeing all manner of new and long-standing nice people.
..But oh dear. Still feels like a bit of a limbo.
Except, why do they call it a limbo? Being 'in Limbo' is surely nothing like doing a rum-induced stunt of freakish flexibility to the sound of rampant Cajun beats and a backdrop of excessively groovy people clapping and grinning rhythmically.
Languishing in the nether world is meant to be dull, isn't it?
Unless I've gotten completely the wrong end of this particular sentence of Limbo.
Jeepers, while I'm dozing into a torpor waiting around for all these stray nuts and bolts to magically screw themselves together into something brilliant, perhaps I'm actually expected to be trying to liven the place up. Mix up some cocktails, turn up some beats, chop up some coconuts, I dunno.
Well, if I had the energy and clear head to piddle about with all that, I wouldn't be DOING that, would I? I'd have my chuffing album out already and glittery showbiz launch gig in the diaries of the rich and famous. Woudn't I. Dippy.
Mind you. All this while I've been telling people that 2010 is just about Momo setting out its little musical stall in a largely empty church hall on a rickety trestle table at a poorly-advertised village jumble sale, I could have been telling people it was more like a Caribbean beach party.
Yeah, I could have done that.
Similarly low-tech metaphor. Apart from the sound system.
Way sexier.
Right. So something else to put on the interminable To Do list.
Hate the nuts and bolts of all this. I just want a nap.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Sumhead.
Sumhead.
Have you known a year like this in many an English year? One where we actually get seasons?
A summer so hot and sunny and summery, it's blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. Even I was getting tired of the definite barometric work when May had a nippy wobble and made me get out my long coat again.
Now? How long ago does that feel?
We've been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There's a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks' takeaway Chardonnay glasses.
The summer's a funny thing, though. All the feelgood makes you want to down tools and say Sod It. And this year is probably exaggerating the thing.
The new chancellor's ball-punchingly painful budget has cemented the idea of a Tory outlook in Westminster, with poor people and those daft enough to be on benefits of any kind whatsoever sort of casually cuffed about the head, while bankers smugly tell us all and any hope of legislatively toe-punting their crown jewels to go do the necessary to ourselves.
Meanwhile, a decent toe-punt would have been nice to see from the desperate shower we sent to South Africa to represent us to the sporting world this month.
And did we bother to say the words: Afghanistan, or: Gulf Of Mexico? No. These too seem like gigantic, insurmountable things.
So a bit of lax summer heat is enough to make us all down tools and up tumblers.
---
So blessed indeed are the moments that restore hope. And music is so often the mysterious magician that will do it, against all the logical odds.
The Glastonbury Festival is forty this year. As will I be. And as cosmically resonant and harmonious as it would have been to see posters all over Michael Eavis' good farm this summer emblazoned with the words: MOMO:GLASTO – Tempo Takes To The Pyramid or similar, alas my interminable efforts to set out my little musical stall have not so far led me to the mainstage at the country's favourite music festival.
For some reason, they got in some soul singer. Wonder somebody? Steven Wonder?
Catching up on the iPlayer from lastnight's concluding headline set, I spent this afternoon trying to concentrate on some magazine type changes but was finding it hard not to just sit and soak in
some legendary and strangely spiritual soul music, expertly executed by a stage full of sobbingly good creative talent.
Higher Ground made me want to throw myself out of the window with funky joy. Stevie's preach before Living For The City had me cheering and looking for someone to hug like a moron in the crowd who'd not slept for three days. And to pick Human Nature from Thriller to cover as one of the most poised, pretty soul songs Jackson ever did... man. Just, man.
God has this guy on his iPod.
..God has a lot on his iPod.
I think everything, in fact.
But Wonder At Glasto Forty is on repeat, believe it.
For us, I might say that the summer is another limbo time – albeit a hazy warm one between the positive ideas of new musical experiences and possibly moving on to a new chapter.
There is a certain sadness and worry for many people over this beautiful spell of weather, and I would say that the muggy wait of it is having the same effect on us in the background too.
And there's that weird thing about too much summer – it is meant to be a limbo. A heat-haze-blurred, hammock-lulled limbo. A wait for the chill bite of change. A recharging of want. A lazy hang-around built about the understanding that eventually, however warm and splendid the present, there comes a time when sanity is almost crying out for change, for an autumn breeze.
When you are wishing you could get out of the hammock and get on with something fresh.
..All of which is something I will get to just as soon as that kicks in. Really. You'll be the first to know.
Still half hoping it's not just yet though, eh?
Top up the Gin tumbler, mother.
Have you known a year like this in many an English year? One where we actually get seasons?
A summer so hot and sunny and summery, it's blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. Even I was getting tired of the definite barometric work when May had a nippy wobble and made me get out my long coat again.
Now? How long ago does that feel?
We've been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There's a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks' takeaway Chardonnay glasses.
The summer's a funny thing, though. All the feelgood makes you want to down tools and say Sod It. And this year is probably exaggerating the thing.
The new chancellor's ball-punchingly painful budget has cemented the idea of a Tory outlook in Westminster, with poor people and those daft enough to be on benefits of any kind whatsoever sort of casually cuffed about the head, while bankers smugly tell us all and any hope of legislatively toe-punting their crown jewels to go do the necessary to ourselves.
Meanwhile, a decent toe-punt would have been nice to see from the desperate shower we sent to South Africa to represent us to the sporting world this month.
And did we bother to say the words: Afghanistan, or: Gulf Of Mexico? No. These too seem like gigantic, insurmountable things.
So a bit of lax summer heat is enough to make us all down tools and up tumblers.
---
So blessed indeed are the moments that restore hope. And music is so often the mysterious magician that will do it, against all the logical odds.
The Glastonbury Festival is forty this year. As will I be. And as cosmically resonant and harmonious as it would have been to see posters all over Michael Eavis' good farm this summer emblazoned with the words: MOMO:GLASTO – Tempo Takes To The Pyramid or similar, alas my interminable efforts to set out my little musical stall have not so far led me to the mainstage at the country's favourite music festival.
For some reason, they got in some soul singer. Wonder somebody? Steven Wonder?
Catching up on the iPlayer from lastnight's concluding headline set, I spent this afternoon trying to concentrate on some magazine type changes but was finding it hard not to just sit and soak in
some legendary and strangely spiritual soul music, expertly executed by a stage full of sobbingly good creative talent.
Higher Ground made me want to throw myself out of the window with funky joy. Stevie's preach before Living For The City had me cheering and looking for someone to hug like a moron in the crowd who'd not slept for three days. And to pick Human Nature from Thriller to cover as one of the most poised, pretty soul songs Jackson ever did... man. Just, man.
God has this guy on his iPod.
..God has a lot on his iPod.
I think everything, in fact.
But Wonder At Glasto Forty is on repeat, believe it.
For us, I might say that the summer is another limbo time – albeit a hazy warm one between the positive ideas of new musical experiences and possibly moving on to a new chapter.
There is a certain sadness and worry for many people over this beautiful spell of weather, and I would say that the muggy wait of it is having the same effect on us in the background too.
And there's that weird thing about too much summer – it is meant to be a limbo. A heat-haze-blurred, hammock-lulled limbo. A wait for the chill bite of change. A recharging of want. A lazy hang-around built about the understanding that eventually, however warm and splendid the present, there comes a time when sanity is almost crying out for change, for an autumn breeze.
When you are wishing you could get out of the hammock and get on with something fresh.
..All of which is something I will get to just as soon as that kicks in. Really. You'll be the first to know.
Still half hoping it's not just yet though, eh?
Top up the Gin tumbler, mother.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
When the last vuvuzela sounds, only the posh will survive. Apparently.
When the last vuvuzela sounds, only the posh will survive. Apparently.
Do you have any idea how much oil has been pumped into the Gulf of Mexico?
Do you? Well, I’ll tell you – I have no idea either. I can’t count past a squillion. They’re telling me it’s reached some new, invented, numeric milestone; perhaps one spillion.
Which I think simply adds up to: We Might As Well Stop Counting And Start Sobbing. Or Possibly Drinking.
Such an unimaginable quantity of toxic vomit rupturing into the environment is exactly the kind of thing that especially environmentally-minded souls have been warning us about in tones of doom for 100 years. Because it is, they say, exactly the kind of thing we would go and do – we being shaved apes shown the possibility of a dirty great supply of free bananas. We’d, y’know, go bananas. And start slipping up.
We have, as it turns out, been prat-falling through recent history in a distinctly un-funny manner since we first discovered the goopy black gold. Only this time it feels that little bit more apocalyptic. As if any oil spill doesn’t look like some dark, viscous end to part of the world.
---
With “austerity measures” very in vogue around the world at the moment, the planet is not feeling like a jolly place. At least to those foolish enough to ever turn on a broadcast reception device.
As BP’s executive, Tony Hayward, vows to “get his life back” as soon as he can, stockmarketeers have noted that the international oil giant can basically afford the odd global catastrophe, it is that wealthy. Something like one in six share dividends paid in the UK are BP’s. One in six. Of the entire FTSE. That is a truly giant business. That is mind-boggling influence.
The thing is, giant business is, we are gradually being reminded, the bedrock of the modern world. It is the wealth creator that sustains whole countries. Has been for that same century.
Only, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but giant business has a poor safety record. Giant business likes to do deals at parties with governments to avoid safety inspections, in fact.
Giant business also does rather like to borrow money to bet on things, and lend money to people who technically can’t afford it at all to create something else it can then sell and make more money on – some ingeniously sensible thing called debt assets. And with all this apparently easy money, giant business rather likes to make giant promises and get everyone all excited – about jumping into a river of wealth that gets only wider and deeper as you swim harder.
Giant business likes to encourage you to stop worrying about the details in life and instead envision a bigger better picture of life; something in a glittering future. Something better than what you have now. Which must be good indeed, given that for an ever-widening strata of middle-class earthlings life has never been so conceivably good.
---
Essentially, giant business might say, it likes to find resources of any kind and put them to good use – animal, vegetable or mineral. Build something bigger from what we have at our, ah, disposal.
Yeah. The teeeeny tiny floor in this plan is that it is built on a promise that is nicely, temptingly, beautifully simple… but unhelpfully, and fairly obviously, bollocks. Growth. Growth alone.
Only growth adds up, says big business. Only, it doesn’t. It subtracts: Check the column marked: ‘Duh’. There are only so many resources, it turns out.
If only consolidation sounded sexier to share holders. If only survival did.
Thing is, while giant business keeps implying that we should stop worrying about the details and think big, it can be easy for everyone tempted by this idea to miss a fairly crucial point that it’s really making about its most valuable resource: individual humans are mere details.
Damn right we are. And where is that Devil.
---
Simplistically cynical view of capitalism? Of course; this is a stupid blog, fuelled by latés and G&Ts bought with some of the money of the giant wealth creators. But you try talking to anyone who's worked for, say, one of the massive international banks. Ask them how valued they feel in their glass hutch.
---
Anyway, with economies teetering and whole eco-systems taking a pounding around the world, an awful lot of us are desperate for some good news. Or some immersive distraction at least. Which is why world economies are unlikely to gird their loins any time before the merciful summer distraction of the World Cup. And why most of us watching it will be doing our best to blot out the thought of the Tick-ravaged townships and fear-soaked poverty cluttered around the perimeter of Johannasburg’s glittering new international football stadium. We feel depressed and helpless enough, chaps. Now blow that vuvuzela, someone.
Y’know, it must be tempting for escatologists to flip to the back of their bibles and wag a smug finger at the rest of us. Given that people obsessed with the end of the world can find a way to crow about all the death and foolhardyness at any time, they must be whipping themselves into frothing frenzy at the moment. We are reaping what we are sowing – we are naturally greedy, vain, short-sighted creatures and the end result will imminently be a fallen world finally flipping into the abyss.
That vuvuzela is probably the last trumpet. Wouldn’t be surprised.
I have found, therefore, a weirdly deep sense of comforting distraction from a little bit of television drama that is based on just such an appaulingly bleak and human historic possibility.
It’s a television drama based on an appaulingly bleak and basically apocalyptic possibility that will, however, probably have you laughing when you first clap eyes on it. Before you realise that it, like the death virus it’s narratively built around, has gotten under your skin.
For this is a very conspicuously, amusingly old bit of TV, populated by flares-wearing Rada-trained upper-middle-class people acting their socks off in rain-sodden, un-CGIed Hertfordshire in 1975. A programme surely impossible to find seriously thought-provoking in this day and age.
A programme called Survivors.
----
It’s taken us most of the year to date, but we’ve just finished watching the final episode of this three-series BBC production and I feel two kinds of subtle grief about it. One, that it’s finally over and we’ve had to start catching up on the slightly less amiably ambling Season 7 of Spooks, and two that these plucky posh people won’t be there to turn to, when the vuvuzela of armageddon blares.
It shouldn’t be affecting. The acting is often am dram church hall stuff, driven by wooden scripts that seem only written to ram home plot points, the camera work is wobbly and uncompromisingly un-post-productioned, the fashions are absurd, the weather is awful, the budget is utterly non-existent-looking and you spend most of the time distracted by wondering what all the actors are doing now in their late nineties.
But, so help me, it IS affecting. And it’s many of the technical shortcomings that help it get into your head. Dare I even say it, your heart.
When Jenny and Pet are slopping out pigs, that uncompromising 70s VT stock and reluctance to cut away and reduce the effect of Real Time doesn’t half make it real. Un-dressed-up. In some cases, apparently unrehearsed.
The wonky dialogue and stumbled lines and goofiness of it all can just be annoying, of course. Characters appear and disappear with sometimes no reference to the fanciful concept of continuity at all, and it does seem that egos and amateurish bickering wrecked any remaining hope of production consistency, with actors, writers, directors and managers routinely fired or stropping off. Chaos.
But I just know what the recent remake of Survivors will be like. All helicopters and running and shooting and shouting and jittery action camera work and beautiful direction of photography and worthy attempts at real human dialogue and barely any screen time that isn’t orchestrally saturated. Y’know. A proper bit of production. With little chance of penetrating all that slick-hard entertainment gloss.
Meanwhile, in 1975, Terry Nation was dreaming of something properly bleak to cheer everyone up during the winter of discontent: Hideous Death Virus escapes from Chinese test lab and kills 95% of people on the planet. Which seems to have included almost anyone working class; one of the first people you see on screen is Peter Bowls, which should set the scene for you.
Fun. And added to the production sensibilities and possibilities of pre-Thatcher, pre-digital, pre-ironic British television, by jiggery is it bleak.
It’s also fast apparent what it’s motives are. It wants to teach you about survival. Like Lord Baden-bleedin’-Powell. It wants to sit you down and make you think about what the utter collapse of the modern world would really mean. From sanitation to sewing needles. In the style of your favourite 70s geography teacher.
And it’s precisely this academic premise, adhered to in every single one of it’s nearly 40 modules, that is the best bit, the reason you love it. So help you, you ARE made to think.
You’re made to think that no-one will have complete mental breakdowns at the sheer sudden torrent of incalcuable death, loss, horror, fear and psychological ripping away of fundamental context, true. Everyone gets on with stealing old Bedford vans to look for guns and tins of beans immediately, and at no time stops to think for a moment and then flee screeching into the woods tearing their own eyes out.
But Survivors does swivel its little spotlight of attention onto every implication of human annihilation it can think of, from learning to grow food and form communities, to considering eventually how to rebuild the infrastructure of society.
And perhaps, only by ambling around the countryside haphazardly with these characters can we get a sense of the empty reality of trying to actually survive under such circumstances. It is the understatement that creates the tension. And reveals the humanity. I’ll bet no-one on the new cast of Survivors has become an accomplished horseman as a result of the job. Everyone in the old series looked comfy on a shire horse by the end. Trotting around.
That’s sort of lovely. How bored would everyone one be after a single episode of that now?
---
As a result, I feel two challenges.
One, it’s obvious that if we are to survive, it will be together or not at all. Resources have to be valued and every detail of life counted like last pennies, not taken for granted. More than that, survival means understanding the invaluability of every single individual. Every skill counts. Every heart adds to the beat. A concept blurred away from your field of view by the giddy heights of teetering giant business.
And secondly, I really should be developing some practical skills of some kind. Instead of standing around watching the action and periodically blowing my own trumpet.
My one hope is that the well-enunciated posh-sounding will, in the end, be in with a chance.
Think we might all need to clean up our act, though.
Do you have any idea how much oil has been pumped into the Gulf of Mexico?
Do you? Well, I’ll tell you – I have no idea either. I can’t count past a squillion. They’re telling me it’s reached some new, invented, numeric milestone; perhaps one spillion.
Which I think simply adds up to: We Might As Well Stop Counting And Start Sobbing. Or Possibly Drinking.
Such an unimaginable quantity of toxic vomit rupturing into the environment is exactly the kind of thing that especially environmentally-minded souls have been warning us about in tones of doom for 100 years. Because it is, they say, exactly the kind of thing we would go and do – we being shaved apes shown the possibility of a dirty great supply of free bananas. We’d, y’know, go bananas. And start slipping up.
We have, as it turns out, been prat-falling through recent history in a distinctly un-funny manner since we first discovered the goopy black gold. Only this time it feels that little bit more apocalyptic. As if any oil spill doesn’t look like some dark, viscous end to part of the world.
---
With “austerity measures” very in vogue around the world at the moment, the planet is not feeling like a jolly place. At least to those foolish enough to ever turn on a broadcast reception device.
As BP’s executive, Tony Hayward, vows to “get his life back” as soon as he can, stockmarketeers have noted that the international oil giant can basically afford the odd global catastrophe, it is that wealthy. Something like one in six share dividends paid in the UK are BP’s. One in six. Of the entire FTSE. That is a truly giant business. That is mind-boggling influence.
The thing is, giant business is, we are gradually being reminded, the bedrock of the modern world. It is the wealth creator that sustains whole countries. Has been for that same century.
Only, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but giant business has a poor safety record. Giant business likes to do deals at parties with governments to avoid safety inspections, in fact.
Giant business also does rather like to borrow money to bet on things, and lend money to people who technically can’t afford it at all to create something else it can then sell and make more money on – some ingeniously sensible thing called debt assets. And with all this apparently easy money, giant business rather likes to make giant promises and get everyone all excited – about jumping into a river of wealth that gets only wider and deeper as you swim harder.
Giant business likes to encourage you to stop worrying about the details in life and instead envision a bigger better picture of life; something in a glittering future. Something better than what you have now. Which must be good indeed, given that for an ever-widening strata of middle-class earthlings life has never been so conceivably good.
---
Essentially, giant business might say, it likes to find resources of any kind and put them to good use – animal, vegetable or mineral. Build something bigger from what we have at our, ah, disposal.
Yeah. The teeeeny tiny floor in this plan is that it is built on a promise that is nicely, temptingly, beautifully simple… but unhelpfully, and fairly obviously, bollocks. Growth. Growth alone.
Only growth adds up, says big business. Only, it doesn’t. It subtracts: Check the column marked: ‘Duh’. There are only so many resources, it turns out.
If only consolidation sounded sexier to share holders. If only survival did.
Thing is, while giant business keeps implying that we should stop worrying about the details and think big, it can be easy for everyone tempted by this idea to miss a fairly crucial point that it’s really making about its most valuable resource: individual humans are mere details.
Damn right we are. And where is that Devil.
---
Simplistically cynical view of capitalism? Of course; this is a stupid blog, fuelled by latés and G&Ts bought with some of the money of the giant wealth creators. But you try talking to anyone who's worked for, say, one of the massive international banks. Ask them how valued they feel in their glass hutch.
---
Anyway, with economies teetering and whole eco-systems taking a pounding around the world, an awful lot of us are desperate for some good news. Or some immersive distraction at least. Which is why world economies are unlikely to gird their loins any time before the merciful summer distraction of the World Cup. And why most of us watching it will be doing our best to blot out the thought of the Tick-ravaged townships and fear-soaked poverty cluttered around the perimeter of Johannasburg’s glittering new international football stadium. We feel depressed and helpless enough, chaps. Now blow that vuvuzela, someone.
Y’know, it must be tempting for escatologists to flip to the back of their bibles and wag a smug finger at the rest of us. Given that people obsessed with the end of the world can find a way to crow about all the death and foolhardyness at any time, they must be whipping themselves into frothing frenzy at the moment. We are reaping what we are sowing – we are naturally greedy, vain, short-sighted creatures and the end result will imminently be a fallen world finally flipping into the abyss.
That vuvuzela is probably the last trumpet. Wouldn’t be surprised.
I have found, therefore, a weirdly deep sense of comforting distraction from a little bit of television drama that is based on just such an appaulingly bleak and human historic possibility.
It’s a television drama based on an appaulingly bleak and basically apocalyptic possibility that will, however, probably have you laughing when you first clap eyes on it. Before you realise that it, like the death virus it’s narratively built around, has gotten under your skin.
For this is a very conspicuously, amusingly old bit of TV, populated by flares-wearing Rada-trained upper-middle-class people acting their socks off in rain-sodden, un-CGIed Hertfordshire in 1975. A programme surely impossible to find seriously thought-provoking in this day and age.
A programme called Survivors.
----
It’s taken us most of the year to date, but we’ve just finished watching the final episode of this three-series BBC production and I feel two kinds of subtle grief about it. One, that it’s finally over and we’ve had to start catching up on the slightly less amiably ambling Season 7 of Spooks, and two that these plucky posh people won’t be there to turn to, when the vuvuzela of armageddon blares.
It shouldn’t be affecting. The acting is often am dram church hall stuff, driven by wooden scripts that seem only written to ram home plot points, the camera work is wobbly and uncompromisingly un-post-productioned, the fashions are absurd, the weather is awful, the budget is utterly non-existent-looking and you spend most of the time distracted by wondering what all the actors are doing now in their late nineties.
But, so help me, it IS affecting. And it’s many of the technical shortcomings that help it get into your head. Dare I even say it, your heart.
When Jenny and Pet are slopping out pigs, that uncompromising 70s VT stock and reluctance to cut away and reduce the effect of Real Time doesn’t half make it real. Un-dressed-up. In some cases, apparently unrehearsed.
The wonky dialogue and stumbled lines and goofiness of it all can just be annoying, of course. Characters appear and disappear with sometimes no reference to the fanciful concept of continuity at all, and it does seem that egos and amateurish bickering wrecked any remaining hope of production consistency, with actors, writers, directors and managers routinely fired or stropping off. Chaos.
But I just know what the recent remake of Survivors will be like. All helicopters and running and shooting and shouting and jittery action camera work and beautiful direction of photography and worthy attempts at real human dialogue and barely any screen time that isn’t orchestrally saturated. Y’know. A proper bit of production. With little chance of penetrating all that slick-hard entertainment gloss.
Meanwhile, in 1975, Terry Nation was dreaming of something properly bleak to cheer everyone up during the winter of discontent: Hideous Death Virus escapes from Chinese test lab and kills 95% of people on the planet. Which seems to have included almost anyone working class; one of the first people you see on screen is Peter Bowls, which should set the scene for you.
Fun. And added to the production sensibilities and possibilities of pre-Thatcher, pre-digital, pre-ironic British television, by jiggery is it bleak.
It’s also fast apparent what it’s motives are. It wants to teach you about survival. Like Lord Baden-bleedin’-Powell. It wants to sit you down and make you think about what the utter collapse of the modern world would really mean. From sanitation to sewing needles. In the style of your favourite 70s geography teacher.
And it’s precisely this academic premise, adhered to in every single one of it’s nearly 40 modules, that is the best bit, the reason you love it. So help you, you ARE made to think.
You’re made to think that no-one will have complete mental breakdowns at the sheer sudden torrent of incalcuable death, loss, horror, fear and psychological ripping away of fundamental context, true. Everyone gets on with stealing old Bedford vans to look for guns and tins of beans immediately, and at no time stops to think for a moment and then flee screeching into the woods tearing their own eyes out.
But Survivors does swivel its little spotlight of attention onto every implication of human annihilation it can think of, from learning to grow food and form communities, to considering eventually how to rebuild the infrastructure of society.
And perhaps, only by ambling around the countryside haphazardly with these characters can we get a sense of the empty reality of trying to actually survive under such circumstances. It is the understatement that creates the tension. And reveals the humanity. I’ll bet no-one on the new cast of Survivors has become an accomplished horseman as a result of the job. Everyone in the old series looked comfy on a shire horse by the end. Trotting around.
That’s sort of lovely. How bored would everyone one be after a single episode of that now?
---
As a result, I feel two challenges.
One, it’s obvious that if we are to survive, it will be together or not at all. Resources have to be valued and every detail of life counted like last pennies, not taken for granted. More than that, survival means understanding the invaluability of every single individual. Every skill counts. Every heart adds to the beat. A concept blurred away from your field of view by the giddy heights of teetering giant business.
And secondly, I really should be developing some practical skills of some kind. Instead of standing around watching the action and periodically blowing my own trumpet.
My one hope is that the well-enunciated posh-sounding will, in the end, be in with a chance.
Think we might all need to clean up our act, though.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Simple life.
Simple life.
I found myself watching my good friend Laura's 'pin-up vicar' again this week. Peter Owen-Jones. There is something very comforting about this chap.
It's not simply his calm, almost langourous air, it's actually something to do with his earnest kind of mis-placedness. He doesn't seem to completely fit in this world, and he half knows it. And only half knowing it seems to keep him half searching for something.
His latest three-part doc, How to lead a simple life, is a fairly mis-placed-seeming affair itself. It's almost like three hours of extras, for fans who really wanted to find out more about the charming, interesting chap who went Around the world in 80 faiths, being hardly structured narratively at all. It's almost a video diary of this Sussex C of E minister, bimbling about a little haphazzardly, having a stab at living like Francis of Assisi in the home counties. You can imagine the incongruity of this. Especially with a film crew in tow.
You could argue glibly that villages in the sumptuous Downs are actually kind of cloistered themselves – from the real bits of Britain.
Rural parts of the UK can seem like sacred spaces set apart from urban realities and the most cosy of places to attempt to give up the cloying anesthetics of money and consumer sustenance. And sure enough, Reverend O-J has to rely on the steadiness of his parishioners' incomes in order for him to hand away his wallet. They all turn out to be kindly local community members, able to spare their barmy vicar lifts, chickens, lamb, walnuts or cakes. It didn't exactly blow wide open the Vicar of Dibley myth of the countryside, or expose the poverty and hardship of many rural livelyhoods. And it wasn't attempting to.
Ultimately, it was one of the many bleedin-obvious component parts of the average 21st century life that made the wheels come off. When push came to shove, the three-parish vicar's down-at-heel Vauxhall Astra would have been towed had he not caved in at MOT time and reached for the plastic, renouncing his vow of fiscal abstinence. Dropping a few walnuts in a wheel trim were not to be enough. The experiment could not have lasted for ever.
And you can imagine the cynicism of many commentators afterwards.
Yet there it was; the comfort. Watching this ex ad-man ask fundamental questions, apparently naiive questions, about how the modern world makes us feel and think was oddly encouraging. If you were watching for it, he unearthed some simple but profound truths – about how much we need to rely on each other. Giving and sharing, needing and admitting, spending time, inspiring kindness in eachother… profound human life-givers of behaviour that seem as relevant to us as at any time that Franciscan orders have practiced austerity to highlight them.
Prophetic living, I think.
---
Don't you wish you could get off? The pressure to be obviously good at something, to keep your lifestyle in its best shape, to reach that bit further. Cliches of modern living that still seem to smother us with a subtle kind of fear.
We're looking for a new place to live at the moment, and this seems particularly relevant. On the one hand, a home is a tool – for helping others, and for recouperating yourself, to keep in shape to be of use out there somewhere. On the other, a home is a thing you can't properly afford.
---
Momo keeps me at that grindstone, even as it appears to offer me an alternative. It's not hard to feel busy or to feel fullfilled by a varied-looking itinerary in the studio. I love it. But if you are as concerned about your portfolio as I am, you can end up working very hard for little more than vanity. I don't remember renouncing money officially. But some jobs are too good to turn down, even though their budgets look decidedly Franciscan.
That portfolio might feed your soul, but it can clog it up too. Straining to do the next good thing. I'd like to give up on it and go get an easy, dull, regularly-paid job. Wouldn't you? Something with an obvious point and an obvious reward. Something simpler.
For, fitting in is the truly simple life.
And I'd quite like to.
---
The question we all have to answer periodically is: am I wasting my time? Is this thing I'm toiling at worthwhile? Because, it had better be.
I like to imagine that with some things, it's still too soon to tell. That way, you can keep having a go until someone blatantly screams at you that you're an idiot. I am still waiting for someone to do this to me, in manner of Mogatu to Derek Zoolander.
Until this happens, however, I am likely to keep going. Like the charming, comforting Rev Peter Owen-Jones. Searching and trying and looking a little lost, but still having a go.
You never know when you might suddenly, like some old prophet, barking in the wilderness, have some crumb of encouragement brought to you by the birds.
---
"Momo is shortlisted for the Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip Great Britain remix competition"
I found myself watching my good friend Laura's 'pin-up vicar' again this week. Peter Owen-Jones. There is something very comforting about this chap.
It's not simply his calm, almost langourous air, it's actually something to do with his earnest kind of mis-placedness. He doesn't seem to completely fit in this world, and he half knows it. And only half knowing it seems to keep him half searching for something.
His latest three-part doc, How to lead a simple life, is a fairly mis-placed-seeming affair itself. It's almost like three hours of extras, for fans who really wanted to find out more about the charming, interesting chap who went Around the world in 80 faiths, being hardly structured narratively at all. It's almost a video diary of this Sussex C of E minister, bimbling about a little haphazzardly, having a stab at living like Francis of Assisi in the home counties. You can imagine the incongruity of this. Especially with a film crew in tow.
You could argue glibly that villages in the sumptuous Downs are actually kind of cloistered themselves – from the real bits of Britain.
Rural parts of the UK can seem like sacred spaces set apart from urban realities and the most cosy of places to attempt to give up the cloying anesthetics of money and consumer sustenance. And sure enough, Reverend O-J has to rely on the steadiness of his parishioners' incomes in order for him to hand away his wallet. They all turn out to be kindly local community members, able to spare their barmy vicar lifts, chickens, lamb, walnuts or cakes. It didn't exactly blow wide open the Vicar of Dibley myth of the countryside, or expose the poverty and hardship of many rural livelyhoods. And it wasn't attempting to.
Ultimately, it was one of the many bleedin-obvious component parts of the average 21st century life that made the wheels come off. When push came to shove, the three-parish vicar's down-at-heel Vauxhall Astra would have been towed had he not caved in at MOT time and reached for the plastic, renouncing his vow of fiscal abstinence. Dropping a few walnuts in a wheel trim were not to be enough. The experiment could not have lasted for ever.
And you can imagine the cynicism of many commentators afterwards.
Yet there it was; the comfort. Watching this ex ad-man ask fundamental questions, apparently naiive questions, about how the modern world makes us feel and think was oddly encouraging. If you were watching for it, he unearthed some simple but profound truths – about how much we need to rely on each other. Giving and sharing, needing and admitting, spending time, inspiring kindness in eachother… profound human life-givers of behaviour that seem as relevant to us as at any time that Franciscan orders have practiced austerity to highlight them.
Prophetic living, I think.
---
Don't you wish you could get off? The pressure to be obviously good at something, to keep your lifestyle in its best shape, to reach that bit further. Cliches of modern living that still seem to smother us with a subtle kind of fear.
We're looking for a new place to live at the moment, and this seems particularly relevant. On the one hand, a home is a tool – for helping others, and for recouperating yourself, to keep in shape to be of use out there somewhere. On the other, a home is a thing you can't properly afford.
---
Momo keeps me at that grindstone, even as it appears to offer me an alternative. It's not hard to feel busy or to feel fullfilled by a varied-looking itinerary in the studio. I love it. But if you are as concerned about your portfolio as I am, you can end up working very hard for little more than vanity. I don't remember renouncing money officially. But some jobs are too good to turn down, even though their budgets look decidedly Franciscan.
That portfolio might feed your soul, but it can clog it up too. Straining to do the next good thing. I'd like to give up on it and go get an easy, dull, regularly-paid job. Wouldn't you? Something with an obvious point and an obvious reward. Something simpler.
For, fitting in is the truly simple life.
And I'd quite like to.
---
The question we all have to answer periodically is: am I wasting my time? Is this thing I'm toiling at worthwhile? Because, it had better be.
I like to imagine that with some things, it's still too soon to tell. That way, you can keep having a go until someone blatantly screams at you that you're an idiot. I am still waiting for someone to do this to me, in manner of Mogatu to Derek Zoolander.
Until this happens, however, I am likely to keep going. Like the charming, comforting Rev Peter Owen-Jones. Searching and trying and looking a little lost, but still having a go.
You never know when you might suddenly, like some old prophet, barking in the wilderness, have some crumb of encouragement brought to you by the birds.
---
"Momo is shortlisted for the Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip Great Britain remix competition"
Monday, May 10, 2010
The dark celebrity barge.
The dark celebrity barge.
There is something darkly positive about the UK election result. It actually reflects something of what's going on in the country – confusion. And dissatisfaction.
Something openly negative about the UK election result is that I have rediscovered my prejudicial, biased, reactionary old anti-Tory self. I thought it dead. De-evolved. A childish past. Turns out it might be a childish future.
I'm not proud of it. It's not pretty. I am a neanderthal Liberal after all. Hoorah to Ya Boo politics.
..And >pthllpppthllpppthllpppthllpp< to all you fat Tory swines with your snouts in the trough of the poor working man, shouting for more baby to go with your venison. Boo yeah. If you wanna be da man, prepare to have it stuck to you.
Yes. Welcome to tonight's edition of You're Not Helping.
---
Anyway, the pressure is – to understate it just a yellow smidge – on Nick Clegg.
What can he do? Electoral reform is actually on the table. Lots of tables. It's now or never, Nick. But how could he persuade the Conservatives to go near it?
Can we get a new Britain out of this exciting mess? Or just the same old long, brown, slow-moving British politics?
I think a nation of cynics knows. But for a weekend at least, this mess created a breath of fresh air.
Read Armando Iannucci's take on election night, including the symbolism of a power-less BBC barge full of celebrities.
There is something darkly positive about the UK election result. It actually reflects something of what's going on in the country – confusion. And dissatisfaction.
Something openly negative about the UK election result is that I have rediscovered my prejudicial, biased, reactionary old anti-Tory self. I thought it dead. De-evolved. A childish past. Turns out it might be a childish future.
I'm not proud of it. It's not pretty. I am a neanderthal Liberal after all. Hoorah to Ya Boo politics.
..And >pthllpppthllpppthllpppthllpp< to all you fat Tory swines with your snouts in the trough of the poor working man, shouting for more baby to go with your venison. Boo yeah. If you wanna be da man, prepare to have it stuck to you.
Yes. Welcome to tonight's edition of You're Not Helping.
---
Anyway, the pressure is – to understate it just a yellow smidge – on Nick Clegg.
What can he do? Electoral reform is actually on the table. Lots of tables. It's now or never, Nick. But how could he persuade the Conservatives to go near it?
Can we get a new Britain out of this exciting mess? Or just the same old long, brown, slow-moving British politics?
I think a nation of cynics knows. But for a weekend at least, this mess created a breath of fresh air.
Read Armando Iannucci's take on election night, including the symbolism of a power-less BBC barge full of celebrities.
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---
It was sublime musicianship and soul. And it made me want to forget about any work plans and dogged, sensible ambitions and just go write some tunes and words that no-one may ever hear without any worry about it.
Who cares? God has your tunes on his iPod, man. Including all those even you didn't realise you'd written.
And this is one of the coolest things about lots of sun: It eventually gets to your head.
---