Fish.
Breathe. Only one more daft weekend to weather before we reach the open waters of a clearer diary. I think. But this last one's proper daft. Daft with knobs on. Or barnacles.
Bestival.
Never been before. In fact, I'm not sure I've been to a festival with so much cool concentrated in one place, having never broken in to Glasto. Will they let me in?
The fancy dress theme this year is '20,000 freaks under the sea'.
Needless to say, I'm thinking the following:
1: I've only got two days or so to do a costume. Sh*t. Will think about it later.
2: I'm losing another day and a half from the schedule, to say nothing of a catch-up weekend. Sh*t. What the hell do I do for a costume?
3: George Clinton and PARLIAMENT?!! Sh*t! ..How do I find time to do a costume?
There's a fair deal of stressy swearing in there, I'll grant you. And if you know me at all, you'll know there's also a number 4: How do I get my new track played loudly by a top-name DJ? ..and do I really want to be dressed as a giant fish when I approach them?
Ah, professional challenges.
I'm in the middle of the creative for a hefty rebrand at the moment, besides the usual string of jobs, so I don't think my fish costume will be all that. But, thankfully, I have creative help on that project at least - Julian is a mercifully inventive and amusing person to be going with, even if he and Angella are even busier than we are.
Hmm...
"Hello my good festival gate keeper. Four passes... Hmm? ..Why, they may look like Somerfield baked bean boxes to you, my dear chap, but look more closely and you'll see that these tassels are obviously the tenticuli of the fearsome box jellyfi.. 'parkanywhereontheleft', right.
Help me. I'm sinking.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Goggles.
Goggles.
I'm sitting in the roomy bay window of Chris and Laura's flat. It's a jammy flat. A Lucky We Know Them flat. As Ian and Fiona's place is to outdoor hot tubs, so this place is to air displays - handy.
Right now, an RAF Lynx helicopter is twisting itself over the end of the pier, while a Gazelle, a Scout and some French thing are aviation pole-dancing further along the bay. It's been a weekend of plane porn. Sea Vixen's flashing their undercarriages and all manner of other filthy things. Bournemouth is at a drooling standstill.
..On a packed beachfront yesterday afternoon, we saw a slope-shouldered individual being trudged by police through the thonged throng in cuffs, looking sort of post-furtive. Not sure if that was to do with the planes or not.
I first kind of knew it would be yet another tricky weekend to get anything done at home at precisely 10.00am on Thursday, when I heard the first crackling screech of aero thrust - a Typhoon skidding around the sky over the cliffs, opening the Bournemouth Air Show with a flashy display of vectored oomph. I kept throwing myself at windows around the house like a rabid dog. Googling eyes pressed twitchingly against the smeered glass. Of course, a real plane bore should know that the odd flash of shapely wing between the houses is probably more exciting than a sensible seat at Farnborough, but still. By Friday lunchtime I wasn't going to be anywhere but with Chris and Laura on the deck at Aruba, bags of overnight things ready to go back to their cliff-top home for the weekend.
Yeah. I totally love planes. Get it from my mother. She's sitting on the little balcony with everyone else as I type.
----
It's turned into a stunning last day of summer today. Unexpected smell of suncream and the glitter of countless boats out in the bay. It's like another festival here. Town below us is heaving.
It's the umpteenth time I've blown up the airbed or cleaned my teeth in someone else's sink lately, and it won't be the last. My productivity is taking a pounding. I am being moved from one arsing about assignment to another, seemingly without ability to resist. Why? Why does this keep happening? What's wrong with me? As I swashbuckle the studio's schedule of pressing proper work, I'm beginning to tear my hair out in clumps at not being able to clear things.
I know. It's largely my own fault. And there's usually something tasty being served at wherever I end up, not to mention some good chums on hand, so it's hardly a convincing tale of woe, I can see that. Like a cheerleader pouting at the injustice of spots. It's not interesting. ..But here in my head, and in bed at night while my heart does something latin as I try to sleep, I'd dearly like to tick the events all off the list and get some space to think. And give my little bod some space to de-stress.
..Sorry?
I've no TIME to live in the now, you unhelpful bastard.
Actually, it's been a like this ever since we got back in July; "Hi, lovely to see you. Lovely. ..Of course, you know I'm supposed to be somewhere else..." Bed, I think. Writing lists. Working out how to charge people for meetings and be surly when I get there, while still keeping the actual work.
..Yeah, so all a bit mad. Blah. Whatever. In each case, with all the things that have happened this year, we kind of had to be wherever we found ourselves. We've had a whole year of not seeing many people. And just as it seems I should be with Mum, gawping at aircraft this afternoon, so I wouldn't have been anywhere else in the middle of my stupid schedule last weekend than with Sarah in the middle of a muddy field.
----
If you've heard of Soul Survivor, you'll know it's a kind of big church event for young people. But surprisingly groovy apparently, despite that description. Momentum is a more recent addition to the event, being a week tacked on to the other three that's aimed at a slightly older audience - young twenties. You know, that confident, cool, thin time of life.
If you've not had any real experience of church life or faith communities, this would seem a bit odd. Instead of waving their arms at a series of bands, the people who go to any one of the very many events like this throughout the UK year wave their arms at Jesus. Or at the worship band, depending on your point of view.
This is nothing I can claim as weird to me. Not officially. I've spent years exploring faith - at my own, limping kind of pace. Finding myself going to church as a teenager - the last thing I'd imagined I'd ever need at such a time of life - I found myself also going to a number of things like Soul Survivor. Though way less groovy. Really. And these events did a lot to help me frame a pretty positive view of life at a formative time, if I'm going to over-simplify it. They also did a lot to teach me about church culture and how conservative it fundamentally is on mass, despite the issues of freedom it explores.
So I understand these odd environments. And I can see that SS is a straight-talking, positive thing of its kind; I know how I benefited from the certainties I felt in the early days of my own journey. Yet going back to something like this after so many years was, I confess, a really weird feeling. It wasn't my environment. By the time I left, I was fair pining for some kitsch lounge music and Channel Four News. But I hadn't gone there for me.
On the one hand, it was an opportunity that I was grateful for to simply meet people. Talk around issues I care about - art and creativity. Hear where others find themselves and try to encourage. I'm not sure I'd get tired of debating this stuff - it matters too much. Art is about, famously, new ways of seeing. And I met some interesting people who added to the way I see things.
But, if I had an actual job over the five whole nights I was with Sarah at this particular church event, other than pretend curator, I consider it was really to be with my great creative mate.
It was a privilege. I'd have been nowhere else. And as Mark joined us and we all hung out some more, then found ourselves clearing up an art gallery together on the last morning, I just thought how strangely great it was to be on another random project with them. Normal. Despite how un-normal so many things really were.
As person after person approached us in the Art Shed and asked us about how to explore art and faith - how to ask questions and challenge life, while trying to build a safe community around some answers - I watched Sarah working with them, sharing her own experiences, and I should say honestly, I felt pretty moved. I felt pride in her and Mark. How much they've grown their creative outlook. And their family.
To create comfort when you don't have all the answers; to help people find a place to fit in when they don't try to look like everyone else - these are the marks of experience. Even wisdom. And these are the people you want around you to learn from. These are the people who help you find new ways of seeing.
This is the job of the artist. And, I think, the person of faith.
----
Sitting here now, the balmy afternoon is waning and we're all a little dopey. Mum is sitting beside me, gazing out to sea as the flotilla of little boats head west to Poole for the evening. I guess restaurants will be starting to warm up around the town.
Watching the Red Arrows at lunchtime and the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight later on, I was grateful to be watching these moving examples of teamwork with some of the gang.
And grateful too that Chris had vainly tempted me to buy a new pair of trendy-ass, wraparound sunnies. I couldn't have seen half as clearly without them.
I'm sitting in the roomy bay window of Chris and Laura's flat. It's a jammy flat. A Lucky We Know Them flat. As Ian and Fiona's place is to outdoor hot tubs, so this place is to air displays - handy.
Right now, an RAF Lynx helicopter is twisting itself over the end of the pier, while a Gazelle, a Scout and some French thing are aviation pole-dancing further along the bay. It's been a weekend of plane porn. Sea Vixen's flashing their undercarriages and all manner of other filthy things. Bournemouth is at a drooling standstill.
..On a packed beachfront yesterday afternoon, we saw a slope-shouldered individual being trudged by police through the thonged throng in cuffs, looking sort of post-furtive. Not sure if that was to do with the planes or not.
I first kind of knew it would be yet another tricky weekend to get anything done at home at precisely 10.00am on Thursday, when I heard the first crackling screech of aero thrust - a Typhoon skidding around the sky over the cliffs, opening the Bournemouth Air Show with a flashy display of vectored oomph. I kept throwing myself at windows around the house like a rabid dog. Googling eyes pressed twitchingly against the smeered glass. Of course, a real plane bore should know that the odd flash of shapely wing between the houses is probably more exciting than a sensible seat at Farnborough, but still. By Friday lunchtime I wasn't going to be anywhere but with Chris and Laura on the deck at Aruba, bags of overnight things ready to go back to their cliff-top home for the weekend.
Yeah. I totally love planes. Get it from my mother. She's sitting on the little balcony with everyone else as I type.
----
It's turned into a stunning last day of summer today. Unexpected smell of suncream and the glitter of countless boats out in the bay. It's like another festival here. Town below us is heaving.
It's the umpteenth time I've blown up the airbed or cleaned my teeth in someone else's sink lately, and it won't be the last. My productivity is taking a pounding. I am being moved from one arsing about assignment to another, seemingly without ability to resist. Why? Why does this keep happening? What's wrong with me? As I swashbuckle the studio's schedule of pressing proper work, I'm beginning to tear my hair out in clumps at not being able to clear things.
I know. It's largely my own fault. And there's usually something tasty being served at wherever I end up, not to mention some good chums on hand, so it's hardly a convincing tale of woe, I can see that. Like a cheerleader pouting at the injustice of spots. It's not interesting. ..But here in my head, and in bed at night while my heart does something latin as I try to sleep, I'd dearly like to tick the events all off the list and get some space to think. And give my little bod some space to de-stress.
..Sorry?
I've no TIME to live in the now, you unhelpful bastard.
Actually, it's been a like this ever since we got back in July; "Hi, lovely to see you. Lovely. ..Of course, you know I'm supposed to be somewhere else..." Bed, I think. Writing lists. Working out how to charge people for meetings and be surly when I get there, while still keeping the actual work.
..Yeah, so all a bit mad. Blah. Whatever. In each case, with all the things that have happened this year, we kind of had to be wherever we found ourselves. We've had a whole year of not seeing many people. And just as it seems I should be with Mum, gawping at aircraft this afternoon, so I wouldn't have been anywhere else in the middle of my stupid schedule last weekend than with Sarah in the middle of a muddy field.
----
If you've heard of Soul Survivor, you'll know it's a kind of big church event for young people. But surprisingly groovy apparently, despite that description. Momentum is a more recent addition to the event, being a week tacked on to the other three that's aimed at a slightly older audience - young twenties. You know, that confident, cool, thin time of life.
If you've not had any real experience of church life or faith communities, this would seem a bit odd. Instead of waving their arms at a series of bands, the people who go to any one of the very many events like this throughout the UK year wave their arms at Jesus. Or at the worship band, depending on your point of view.
This is nothing I can claim as weird to me. Not officially. I've spent years exploring faith - at my own, limping kind of pace. Finding myself going to church as a teenager - the last thing I'd imagined I'd ever need at such a time of life - I found myself also going to a number of things like Soul Survivor. Though way less groovy. Really. And these events did a lot to help me frame a pretty positive view of life at a formative time, if I'm going to over-simplify it. They also did a lot to teach me about church culture and how conservative it fundamentally is on mass, despite the issues of freedom it explores.
So I understand these odd environments. And I can see that SS is a straight-talking, positive thing of its kind; I know how I benefited from the certainties I felt in the early days of my own journey. Yet going back to something like this after so many years was, I confess, a really weird feeling. It wasn't my environment. By the time I left, I was fair pining for some kitsch lounge music and Channel Four News. But I hadn't gone there for me.
On the one hand, it was an opportunity that I was grateful for to simply meet people. Talk around issues I care about - art and creativity. Hear where others find themselves and try to encourage. I'm not sure I'd get tired of debating this stuff - it matters too much. Art is about, famously, new ways of seeing. And I met some interesting people who added to the way I see things.
But, if I had an actual job over the five whole nights I was with Sarah at this particular church event, other than pretend curator, I consider it was really to be with my great creative mate.
It was a privilege. I'd have been nowhere else. And as Mark joined us and we all hung out some more, then found ourselves clearing up an art gallery together on the last morning, I just thought how strangely great it was to be on another random project with them. Normal. Despite how un-normal so many things really were.
As person after person approached us in the Art Shed and asked us about how to explore art and faith - how to ask questions and challenge life, while trying to build a safe community around some answers - I watched Sarah working with them, sharing her own experiences, and I should say honestly, I felt pretty moved. I felt pride in her and Mark. How much they've grown their creative outlook. And their family.
To create comfort when you don't have all the answers; to help people find a place to fit in when they don't try to look like everyone else - these are the marks of experience. Even wisdom. And these are the people you want around you to learn from. These are the people who help you find new ways of seeing.
This is the job of the artist. And, I think, the person of faith.
----
Sitting here now, the balmy afternoon is waning and we're all a little dopey. Mum is sitting beside me, gazing out to sea as the flotilla of little boats head west to Poole for the evening. I guess restaurants will be starting to warm up around the town.
Watching the Red Arrows at lunchtime and the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight later on, I was grateful to be watching these moving examples of teamwork with some of the gang.
And grateful too that Chris had vainly tempted me to buy a new pair of trendy-ass, wraparound sunnies. I couldn't have seen half as clearly without them.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Mo-mentum.
Mo-mentum.
So, this Momo job. Yeah. ..Not a real job. I'm working in a tent for the weekend.
It's part of the zany joy of being an independent, of course; I can do odd things as part of the schedule. But I'm going to miss my Apple cinema display. And my flush toilet.
It's a thing. A festival-type, young person thing. I think. It's called Momentum. ..I think. And it's somewhere near Shepton Mallet. But I should really find out sort of where before I leave with the mobile Momo domo later this avo.
I'll be helping to promote the Art Shed on site for a few days over the bank holiday. It's a chance to encourage creativity and the debates around it. These are conversations I don't tire of having - and it's always nice to meet folk. In truth, I have no idea what to expect from the coming few days, other than mud, the smell of paling grass under canvas and hours of cursing as I try to remember how to set up our needlessly large tent. ..I thought about being efficient and cute and just taking the little two-person thing, but then I thought: 'HOW many nights? Sod all that crawling around - I'm thirty-seven and a company chuffing director... do you know who I am?'
I have these stern talks with myself sometimes. It comes from having no team to answer me back. Besides, I need the practice putting up the needlessly-large tent before Bestival in two weeks, when people will be staying with us and therefore watching us put it up.
Glancing at the long list of things to tick off over the next ten days, the thought of spending half of that time on a battered 12" G4 Powerbook isn't thrilling my hopes for productivity. But I'm taking the layout pad and the iPod and a pile of files and plan to become the Art Shed's artist in residence - having people sit infront of my easel with nervous vanity while I scritch scratch away in florid swoops, only to swivel the board with a 'ta-daah' and see their disappointment at my sketches for an electronics distributor's new logo system. At which point I'll say something clever, like: 'Art is about new ways of seeing - it's more about the journey, the thinking, than the realisation.' And while they're leaving, I'll call something pithy after them, like: 'And brands are built on behaviours, mate..' and then I'll get on again. Or go get the team another round of coffees.
But you know? Randomness. Creativity needs a bit of this, doesn't it? FInding yourself somewhere you hadn't planned can be the space where the spark hits. Or something. I have a quiet wondering about that for this weekend.
..Although, in my experience, finding yourself somewhere you hadn't planned means you're going to get to know the drinks machine in Frankfurt airport really well while you wait for the flight to re-connect you to your bags. Or it means peeing in a bush by the M4. Or it means wondering woozily what all machines these nice strangers are plugging into you do...
Of course, the pertinent reason for going to this random thing this weekend is simply that Sarah asked me to. And all schedule challenges aside, I can can't think of a more appropriate time to spend a while with this particular creative mate. I'm not sure there's anywhere I'd rather be.
Besides, I usually come away from time with her and Mark feeling an extra creative momentum. And that's my real job.
So, this Momo job. Yeah. ..Not a real job. I'm working in a tent for the weekend.
It's part of the zany joy of being an independent, of course; I can do odd things as part of the schedule. But I'm going to miss my Apple cinema display. And my flush toilet.
It's a thing. A festival-type, young person thing. I think. It's called Momentum. ..I think. And it's somewhere near Shepton Mallet. But I should really find out sort of where before I leave with the mobile Momo domo later this avo.
I'll be helping to promote the Art Shed on site for a few days over the bank holiday. It's a chance to encourage creativity and the debates around it. These are conversations I don't tire of having - and it's always nice to meet folk. In truth, I have no idea what to expect from the coming few days, other than mud, the smell of paling grass under canvas and hours of cursing as I try to remember how to set up our needlessly large tent. ..I thought about being efficient and cute and just taking the little two-person thing, but then I thought: 'HOW many nights? Sod all that crawling around - I'm thirty-seven and a company chuffing director... do you know who I am?'
I have these stern talks with myself sometimes. It comes from having no team to answer me back. Besides, I need the practice putting up the needlessly-large tent before Bestival in two weeks, when people will be staying with us and therefore watching us put it up.
Glancing at the long list of things to tick off over the next ten days, the thought of spending half of that time on a battered 12" G4 Powerbook isn't thrilling my hopes for productivity. But I'm taking the layout pad and the iPod and a pile of files and plan to become the Art Shed's artist in residence - having people sit infront of my easel with nervous vanity while I scritch scratch away in florid swoops, only to swivel the board with a 'ta-daah' and see their disappointment at my sketches for an electronics distributor's new logo system. At which point I'll say something clever, like: 'Art is about new ways of seeing - it's more about the journey, the thinking, than the realisation.' And while they're leaving, I'll call something pithy after them, like: 'And brands are built on behaviours, mate..' and then I'll get on again. Or go get the team another round of coffees.
But you know? Randomness. Creativity needs a bit of this, doesn't it? FInding yourself somewhere you hadn't planned can be the space where the spark hits. Or something. I have a quiet wondering about that for this weekend.
..Although, in my experience, finding yourself somewhere you hadn't planned means you're going to get to know the drinks machine in Frankfurt airport really well while you wait for the flight to re-connect you to your bags. Or it means peeing in a bush by the M4. Or it means wondering woozily what all machines these nice strangers are plugging into you do...
Of course, the pertinent reason for going to this random thing this weekend is simply that Sarah asked me to. And all schedule challenges aside, I can can't think of a more appropriate time to spend a while with this particular creative mate. I'm not sure there's anywhere I'd rather be.
Besides, I usually come away from time with her and Mark feeling an extra creative momentum. And that's my real job.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Drum riser.
Drum riser.
After so long in a variety of sealed human cattle devices, the week before last, I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise that I caught something. Kids and germs and fatigue and blah. Or bleugh. But I haven't had a cold in over 18 months and the first ickoo tickoo in the back of my froaty on Thursday did seem odd. Especially in August. Then it moved beyond odd to proper, raging Man Cold. So, as you can imagine, I'm lucky to be alive.
I soldiered bravely on through Friday, but fairly unproductively by tea time, and then just wiped out on Saturday. Sunday I managed to do some washing up, I recall. But spaced out like I was doped after an operation.
The boring yet vaguely stressful point here is that I started Monday morning with a stupid list of things to get through creatively. Once again, I somehow survived meetings and deadlines but by being grouchy and short-tempered. Little tip for those of you thinking of going into business for yourself: don't do this. Polite is profitable.
Still, as I prep for another ruddy day out of the studio, unable to eat into the work in front of me, I do at least have the very happy memory of sitting in a little studio in Poole lastnight, watching Mark A through the booth window bash the skins for all he was worth. His brow-beaded grins as we laid down some drum tracks for The Golden Age was infectious and uplifting after a sad, stressy, uncreative time. And, oh man, hearing him kick off to the d&b section of Disfunkshun was a golden little moment. Buff-diff, baby. Mark's hard-working enthusiasm is a lift.
A drum riser, if you will.
It's this stuff that keeps me sane. Keeps me going. It's the stuff I creatively day-dream about. And the last few weeks, I seem to have been listening to the mixes more and more.
---
I've not written about Wednesday because, truth be, I didn't feel able to do it justice. And I didn't feel sure I was fully there, looking at photos of my friend and trying to understand that - in our part of space and time - this was all we had of him now. Just three weeks before, I'd hugged him goodbye in a very casual way. Sure we'd get more time.
I couldn't take in the full emotion of the tracks he'd been listening to in his last months. But Pearl Jam's I'm still alive never seemed more meaningful.
I couldn't take in the significance of the snapshots of life, slideshowing past us from Jon's casual portfolio. But the simple views of the river, the shoreline, the mountains, never seemed so important to capture. To hold on to.
I couldn't process the sense of loss that each testimony tried to tackle. But seeing how many people were in Russel Park Baptist that afternoon in Bedford, and seeing the surreal mixture of laughter, colour and stunned incomprehension, I felt a little humbled by the effect Jon had quietly had on everyone.
..I can't process all this now. In the stupid schedule roller-coaster, I felt again like I was doing a lightning costume change and trying to hastily get into character as we drove up the M3. I felt this way for Dad's funeral. For David's. The people we've lost this year. The way we've needed eachother. The inability to ever take in their absence properly. I couldn't function in our current life if I didn't turn them all over to God fairly swiftly. Whatever it means for quiet moments in the future, right now it means the same message on each mental memory tree: 'See you soon, mate.'
I wish I could measure the thing. The losses I've witnessed in my average life over the last four years. Have I ever understood my cousin Melanie's death a few years ago? What her mum went through nursing her? The palsied loss written across the faces of her friends from Switzerland as they looked down at the wreathes outside the cemetery chapel?
How can I? How can I sum up whole lives? How can we understand the absence of our friends and family? We simply can't.
We have to close it off and pretend. Or we have to surrender to it and be washed away for a time. Or we have to pray - pray as someone who trusts, bizarrely - and get on. Certain we're on the same road. We just have a slightly different time frame to work in. I'm not sure how much we get to choose each of these options, with each individual grief.
Once again, looking around the room that day, I just wanted to hug the good number of people I seemed to know there and tell them thanks for being there. For Sarah, for Gill, for Wes, for Mark. For the bloke on the perifery, me.
We have such little time to enjoy eachother. Such little time to make eachother laugh. Make eachother see things differently. Inspire eachother to be creative.
Jon, mate - see you soon. And thanks for getting so many good people together last week.
Going to keep daydreaming about uplifting rhythms until we're next at the same party, if you don't mind, mate. It's a tiny fore-taste of then. Got a strong feeling it is.
Love you, man.
After so long in a variety of sealed human cattle devices, the week before last, I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise that I caught something. Kids and germs and fatigue and blah. Or bleugh. But I haven't had a cold in over 18 months and the first ickoo tickoo in the back of my froaty on Thursday did seem odd. Especially in August. Then it moved beyond odd to proper, raging Man Cold. So, as you can imagine, I'm lucky to be alive.
I soldiered bravely on through Friday, but fairly unproductively by tea time, and then just wiped out on Saturday. Sunday I managed to do some washing up, I recall. But spaced out like I was doped after an operation.
The boring yet vaguely stressful point here is that I started Monday morning with a stupid list of things to get through creatively. Once again, I somehow survived meetings and deadlines but by being grouchy and short-tempered. Little tip for those of you thinking of going into business for yourself: don't do this. Polite is profitable.
Still, as I prep for another ruddy day out of the studio, unable to eat into the work in front of me, I do at least have the very happy memory of sitting in a little studio in Poole lastnight, watching Mark A through the booth window bash the skins for all he was worth. His brow-beaded grins as we laid down some drum tracks for The Golden Age was infectious and uplifting after a sad, stressy, uncreative time. And, oh man, hearing him kick off to the d&b section of Disfunkshun was a golden little moment. Buff-diff, baby. Mark's hard-working enthusiasm is a lift.
A drum riser, if you will.
It's this stuff that keeps me sane. Keeps me going. It's the stuff I creatively day-dream about. And the last few weeks, I seem to have been listening to the mixes more and more.
---
I've not written about Wednesday because, truth be, I didn't feel able to do it justice. And I didn't feel sure I was fully there, looking at photos of my friend and trying to understand that - in our part of space and time - this was all we had of him now. Just three weeks before, I'd hugged him goodbye in a very casual way. Sure we'd get more time.
I couldn't take in the full emotion of the tracks he'd been listening to in his last months. But Pearl Jam's I'm still alive never seemed more meaningful.
I couldn't take in the significance of the snapshots of life, slideshowing past us from Jon's casual portfolio. But the simple views of the river, the shoreline, the mountains, never seemed so important to capture. To hold on to.
I couldn't process the sense of loss that each testimony tried to tackle. But seeing how many people were in Russel Park Baptist that afternoon in Bedford, and seeing the surreal mixture of laughter, colour and stunned incomprehension, I felt a little humbled by the effect Jon had quietly had on everyone.
..I can't process all this now. In the stupid schedule roller-coaster, I felt again like I was doing a lightning costume change and trying to hastily get into character as we drove up the M3. I felt this way for Dad's funeral. For David's. The people we've lost this year. The way we've needed eachother. The inability to ever take in their absence properly. I couldn't function in our current life if I didn't turn them all over to God fairly swiftly. Whatever it means for quiet moments in the future, right now it means the same message on each mental memory tree: 'See you soon, mate.'
I wish I could measure the thing. The losses I've witnessed in my average life over the last four years. Have I ever understood my cousin Melanie's death a few years ago? What her mum went through nursing her? The palsied loss written across the faces of her friends from Switzerland as they looked down at the wreathes outside the cemetery chapel?
How can I? How can I sum up whole lives? How can we understand the absence of our friends and family? We simply can't.
We have to close it off and pretend. Or we have to surrender to it and be washed away for a time. Or we have to pray - pray as someone who trusts, bizarrely - and get on. Certain we're on the same road. We just have a slightly different time frame to work in. I'm not sure how much we get to choose each of these options, with each individual grief.
Once again, looking around the room that day, I just wanted to hug the good number of people I seemed to know there and tell them thanks for being there. For Sarah, for Gill, for Wes, for Mark. For the bloke on the perifery, me.
We have such little time to enjoy eachother. Such little time to make eachother laugh. Make eachother see things differently. Inspire eachother to be creative.
Jon, mate - see you soon. And thanks for getting so many good people together last week.
Going to keep daydreaming about uplifting rhythms until we're next at the same party, if you don't mind, mate. It's a tiny fore-taste of then. Got a strong feeling it is.
Love you, man.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
AZERTY.
AZERTY.
We're back. I realise I've been away a week. Post, phones, mails - all piled. I've learned that my trip to the Netherlands has won me a job. And that the French have their own computer keyboards. Did you know?
Half the keys in the wrong place. Types like drunk arse in English. Requires shifts where you weren't expecting them.
So staying in touch with home online has meant a fair few words coming out a bit wrong on Rachel's dad's laptop. But, after a year, it was good to see her and Jamie. The two girls are impish, gorgeous french-looking children that, watching them run around the wide, light beach of Criel Sur Mer, made me think of an idylic 70s childhood. A happy young family. Looked after by quietly bonkers-lovely parents.
But I'm feeling the ache of so long away from the family here in Bournemouth. Not that we could do much but feel it all, had we been here. But, y'know. Our friend is gone. And our friends are hurting.
And swapping hats so bloody much when you just want to be in one place, focusing on the one real thing on your mind is, it turns out, not ideal for clear-headedness.
Still. Here's the positive. We're back tonight, for what it's worth. We're joining a large group of friends running up the motorway to Bedford tomorrow, to be together and to celebrate Jon and each other; to celebrate how Mark and Sarah are facing the road ahead.
And Caroline and I have a shit-load of French booze in when we all get back.
We're back. I realise I've been away a week. Post, phones, mails - all piled. I've learned that my trip to the Netherlands has won me a job. And that the French have their own computer keyboards. Did you know?
Half the keys in the wrong place. Types like drunk arse in English. Requires shifts where you weren't expecting them.
So staying in touch with home online has meant a fair few words coming out a bit wrong on Rachel's dad's laptop. But, after a year, it was good to see her and Jamie. The two girls are impish, gorgeous french-looking children that, watching them run around the wide, light beach of Criel Sur Mer, made me think of an idylic 70s childhood. A happy young family. Looked after by quietly bonkers-lovely parents.
But I'm feeling the ache of so long away from the family here in Bournemouth. Not that we could do much but feel it all, had we been here. But, y'know. Our friend is gone. And our friends are hurting.
And swapping hats so bloody much when you just want to be in one place, focusing on the one real thing on your mind is, it turns out, not ideal for clear-headedness.
Still. Here's the positive. We're back tonight, for what it's worth. We're joining a large group of friends running up the motorway to Bedford tomorrow, to be together and to celebrate Jon and each other; to celebrate how Mark and Sarah are facing the road ahead.
And Caroline and I have a shit-load of French booze in when we all get back.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Loss.
Loss.
The last few days have been weird. Distant as we've been from the bedside, it's coloured everything.
I'm sitting in an office in Eindhoven, somewhere on an industrial estate on a changeable Thursday afternoon, killing time before a flight back to the UK and a train ride to a ferry bound for France. And this doesn't help the weird.
I enjoy meeting people. And I enjoy discovering that Momo can help them in some way - working for yourself as a creative is a firmly cool lifestyle, even if many of the professional challenges are far from arty farty. I hope today's meeting and my madcap Presentation On A Train turns into a good little project for the studio and some helpful results for the people I've met.
But it's the people I've lost that are on my mind. Losing a friend and seeing friends lose loved ones is no respecter of the To Do list. Sitting so far from the studio, knowing I won't be back in it until the middle of next week and knowing some clients are jumping up and down about it just adds to the distance I feel about it. I just want to walk away from the schedule altogether. Do the things I most care about.
What I want to do is find a way to fill the hole that Jon has left in his family.
And, much as I love words and pictures, I need to find a way to spend more of my time making musical creative. Making tunes. Before the time or the energy for making a joyful noise is lost.
The last few days have been weird. Distant as we've been from the bedside, it's coloured everything.
I'm sitting in an office in Eindhoven, somewhere on an industrial estate on a changeable Thursday afternoon, killing time before a flight back to the UK and a train ride to a ferry bound for France. And this doesn't help the weird.
I enjoy meeting people. And I enjoy discovering that Momo can help them in some way - working for yourself as a creative is a firmly cool lifestyle, even if many of the professional challenges are far from arty farty. I hope today's meeting and my madcap Presentation On A Train turns into a good little project for the studio and some helpful results for the people I've met.
But it's the people I've lost that are on my mind. Losing a friend and seeing friends lose loved ones is no respecter of the To Do list. Sitting so far from the studio, knowing I won't be back in it until the middle of next week and knowing some clients are jumping up and down about it just adds to the distance I feel about it. I just want to walk away from the schedule altogether. Do the things I most care about.
What I want to do is find a way to fill the hole that Jon has left in his family.
And, much as I love words and pictures, I need to find a way to spend more of my time making musical creative. Making tunes. Before the time or the energy for making a joyful noise is lost.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Juxtapose.
Juxtapose.
Back from a trip to the midlands at the weekend, ahead of a week of travel and transport, I'm thinking of the word juxtapose. How randomly different things rub together to create something new. Some new effect.
Sounds academic. But the effects I've felt over the last few days haven't been intellectual, I've just felt them churning around inside.
I've come home from seeing a particular group of friends while having others on my mind hour by hour. And thinking so much of those in Bedford this weekend, while looking around the table at a family of friends that, like Mark and Sarah, also goes back to the beginning of our adult lives, I just wanted to tell them how much I loved them. How much I think we need eachother. How much I wanted to run around the garden with them in daft hats because of the many different pressures represented by all of us in Ian and Fiona's welcoming big home. And elsewhere.
Thinking back over the last twelve months, we've had to be emotionally pragmatic a fair bit. Managing our feelings on the same list of Things To Do as all the other practical challenges, as best we can. It makes the list a tricky juxtaposition of things to internalise - some brain-taxing, some physical exertion, some seismic emotional moments. It's been a lumpy gut-bag of objects to carry around. But you have to just push on and get through the list. Find a point on the horizon and make for it, hoping there'll be a small grassy spot to sit down and empty out a few things. See how they fit together. See what they make.
Part of that emotional pragmatism is, I think, an uncomfortable need to quickly change your emotional dress for different moments - even if you find a dark suit hanging from one hand, and a Robin Hood costume in the other.
You have to be where you have to be. Where you're needed. Doing what's needed.
----
Driving up from Santa Maria to Rome, as June rolled towards its end, we had finally survived the narrow-lane, close-fendered circus of Campagnia's motorway system to emerge onto the rather more cared-for traffic arteries under the Italian capital's wider influence. Three lanes. Tarmac. A few road signs. A couple of hours in, our journey had left the layby rubbish mountains of Naples and the views of Vesuvius and was cruising towards the end of our time alone, the giving back of our big-assed hire car and the big hugging of my mother at Rome airport.
It was a sunny day and the roads were clear. We had the usual dreamy Brazilian swing lulling us along as we thought about two and a half weeks of emotional recuperation slipping behind us. We were sad but grateful, contemplating the road ahead.
Then, in a calm single moment, in the haze of the afternoon warmth as the motorway slid underneath us, the car's windscreen became a panoramic cinema screen.
We happened to be in the middle lane in that moment. We had overtaken a car on the inside lane, and a Punto or similar had just overtaken us on the outside. We were approaching a large, articulated lorry, a couple of car lengths ahead of us.
It simply swerved into the two fast lanes. Like a muscle jerk. The cab pulled hard left in a blink and turned the whole length of the trailer across the motorway, tipping it over gracefully in the shimmering heat.
As the cab smashed the concrete centre wall and spilled rubble and glass across the other carriageway, momentum turned it's lumbering line like clock hands on an axis, dragging the truck's front backwards along the jagged break, tearing open a fuel drum and bringing it to rest almost pointing at us. All in a slow-motion moment. As the car in the outside lane was swallowed by it.
As I leaned on the break pedal and pulled to the inside, I simply thought: "Okay, our plans our changing today. Today, we're pulling some people out of some wreckage."
The fuel drum was spouting diesel in great glugs onto the tarmac. The other car had embedded itself under the trailer of the lorry as it had flattened on its side. Cars behind us were pulling up.
Adrenalin is a funny thing. It can make you do superhuman things when you need to. And it can make you see things very calmly. The chap in the flattened car dragged himself through the post-box window and jogged across towards us, hands bleeding from the effort. As we approached him, I looked at the cab. Someone had run from it across the other carriageway, alive. Motorists had already swarmed from their cars around the cab, pulling at the windsheild.
I spoke no Italian. Someone approached me as I stood in the road and made it clear that I could do nothing, that the police would not want us in the way. Traffic began to drive around us, streaming past the huge wreckage.
The car driver seemed oddly calm. We gave him our water. We gestured and wished we had more of the language. People joined us. I realised our car was simply in the way. We could do nothing.
So we drove on.
And we met mum at the airport. And we got on with our weekend in Rome together, helping Mum have a good time. Doing what was needed in each moment, as best we could. Grateful we had not been on the choked roads in the south when the lorry in front of us turned over.
----
Six weeks on, there was much to celebrate around the table this weekend. An imminent birth, an engagement, an anniversary. And twenty years since many of us first met. Twenty years. And still we feel a need for eachother's company. Even being prepared to weather eachother's kids to get it... And loving how the family has grown. It's never sat far away in my mind from everyone else in our family - people we've known even longer in some cases, people we see more often, people we've been through defining experiences with.
In all the different ways we connect with different enduring friendships, I marvel at how it feels to be able to turn to someone who's known you through many different chapters and is still prepared to turn to you. Sometimes.
And I also wonder how some of us will cope with the next chapter. How our different experiences will collide and create. How we will be able to help eachother. What we will be able to see together.
What we will survive together.
Back from a trip to the midlands at the weekend, ahead of a week of travel and transport, I'm thinking of the word juxtapose. How randomly different things rub together to create something new. Some new effect.
Sounds academic. But the effects I've felt over the last few days haven't been intellectual, I've just felt them churning around inside.
I've come home from seeing a particular group of friends while having others on my mind hour by hour. And thinking so much of those in Bedford this weekend, while looking around the table at a family of friends that, like Mark and Sarah, also goes back to the beginning of our adult lives, I just wanted to tell them how much I loved them. How much I think we need eachother. How much I wanted to run around the garden with them in daft hats because of the many different pressures represented by all of us in Ian and Fiona's welcoming big home. And elsewhere.
Thinking back over the last twelve months, we've had to be emotionally pragmatic a fair bit. Managing our feelings on the same list of Things To Do as all the other practical challenges, as best we can. It makes the list a tricky juxtaposition of things to internalise - some brain-taxing, some physical exertion, some seismic emotional moments. It's been a lumpy gut-bag of objects to carry around. But you have to just push on and get through the list. Find a point on the horizon and make for it, hoping there'll be a small grassy spot to sit down and empty out a few things. See how they fit together. See what they make.
Part of that emotional pragmatism is, I think, an uncomfortable need to quickly change your emotional dress for different moments - even if you find a dark suit hanging from one hand, and a Robin Hood costume in the other.
You have to be where you have to be. Where you're needed. Doing what's needed.
----
Driving up from Santa Maria to Rome, as June rolled towards its end, we had finally survived the narrow-lane, close-fendered circus of Campagnia's motorway system to emerge onto the rather more cared-for traffic arteries under the Italian capital's wider influence. Three lanes. Tarmac. A few road signs. A couple of hours in, our journey had left the layby rubbish mountains of Naples and the views of Vesuvius and was cruising towards the end of our time alone, the giving back of our big-assed hire car and the big hugging of my mother at Rome airport.
It was a sunny day and the roads were clear. We had the usual dreamy Brazilian swing lulling us along as we thought about two and a half weeks of emotional recuperation slipping behind us. We were sad but grateful, contemplating the road ahead.
Then, in a calm single moment, in the haze of the afternoon warmth as the motorway slid underneath us, the car's windscreen became a panoramic cinema screen.
We happened to be in the middle lane in that moment. We had overtaken a car on the inside lane, and a Punto or similar had just overtaken us on the outside. We were approaching a large, articulated lorry, a couple of car lengths ahead of us.
It simply swerved into the two fast lanes. Like a muscle jerk. The cab pulled hard left in a blink and turned the whole length of the trailer across the motorway, tipping it over gracefully in the shimmering heat.
As the cab smashed the concrete centre wall and spilled rubble and glass across the other carriageway, momentum turned it's lumbering line like clock hands on an axis, dragging the truck's front backwards along the jagged break, tearing open a fuel drum and bringing it to rest almost pointing at us. All in a slow-motion moment. As the car in the outside lane was swallowed by it.
As I leaned on the break pedal and pulled to the inside, I simply thought: "Okay, our plans our changing today. Today, we're pulling some people out of some wreckage."
The fuel drum was spouting diesel in great glugs onto the tarmac. The other car had embedded itself under the trailer of the lorry as it had flattened on its side. Cars behind us were pulling up.
Adrenalin is a funny thing. It can make you do superhuman things when you need to. And it can make you see things very calmly. The chap in the flattened car dragged himself through the post-box window and jogged across towards us, hands bleeding from the effort. As we approached him, I looked at the cab. Someone had run from it across the other carriageway, alive. Motorists had already swarmed from their cars around the cab, pulling at the windsheild.
I spoke no Italian. Someone approached me as I stood in the road and made it clear that I could do nothing, that the police would not want us in the way. Traffic began to drive around us, streaming past the huge wreckage.
The car driver seemed oddly calm. We gave him our water. We gestured and wished we had more of the language. People joined us. I realised our car was simply in the way. We could do nothing.
So we drove on.
And we met mum at the airport. And we got on with our weekend in Rome together, helping Mum have a good time. Doing what was needed in each moment, as best we could. Grateful we had not been on the choked roads in the south when the lorry in front of us turned over.
----
Six weeks on, there was much to celebrate around the table this weekend. An imminent birth, an engagement, an anniversary. And twenty years since many of us first met. Twenty years. And still we feel a need for eachother's company. Even being prepared to weather eachother's kids to get it... And loving how the family has grown. It's never sat far away in my mind from everyone else in our family - people we've known even longer in some cases, people we see more often, people we've been through defining experiences with.
In all the different ways we connect with different enduring friendships, I marvel at how it feels to be able to turn to someone who's known you through many different chapters and is still prepared to turn to you. Sometimes.
And I also wonder how some of us will cope with the next chapter. How our different experiences will collide and create. How we will be able to help eachother. What we will be able to see together.
What we will survive together.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Light.
Light.
Three weeks in the sunshine of Italy seems more than a month ago. It seems like some vague hallucination. Like a sick day – something my poor mother knows too much about again today. While I'm sitting here in the sort of strangely pleasant, weird light of a summer evening that's just rained, she's entombed herself under bedclothes within reach of a large plastic bowl. The place was strangely quiet and dark when I popped back just now.
It's on ill days that you must realise what it's like to be alone after thirty-five years of marriage. Except she's not. But, y'know. I think she'll be okay.
This past weekend has turned Bournemouth into an actual tourist destination. Twinkling sea and baking sands. Our annual visitor from Berlin, Anneka, said she'd never seen the beach looking like an actual beach before. She and Caroline spent a weekend afternoon on it, while I oddly left them for the music studio, middle of the blazing summer day. Like things ever change...
Truth be told, sunshine and summer or not, we've been in a bit of a daze since getting back. I'm feeling the need to winnow. What is winnowing? Don't know precisely, but the word's on my mind a bit this week. I think I mean pruning - cutting back the current crop of clients to redirect Momo a bit. It's okay to do this, apparently. You're allowed. It's called Being The Boss.
Who knew this?
Thing is, all I want to do creatively is fiddle with tunes. Finish the album. Get the damned thing right. And, beyond that, just wake up on a day with absolutely nothing to achieve. No deadline. No goal. No list of things to do. No jobs waiting round the house. No meetings. Like I always say, meetings are the easy bit. Sometimes the fun bit But while I'm swanning around finger-pistoling, there's no clever twit in the studio actually making stuff we can sell.
Well, I may be in a bit of a daze, but I climbed hard to be dangling my feet off this plateau and it's good to catch a few rays and not rush on up the climb just yet. There are too many things to think about and too many people to think about. My brain is either contemplating the very large, imponderables ("..whither and why; shall we hither and yon?...) or it is simply obSESSED with getting the mix to work between certain bars of an electro-pop tune I first wrote eight years ago and still haven't finished so that I'm happy with it. ..WHY doesn't Logic have a Make It Sound Cool button?
Sadly, most of Momo's work falls somewhere between these two scales. And that's a bit I'm not really daydreaming about. It's just kind of rolling on, giving me deadlines. Which is why I'm wondering - at the poncy 'ponderables end - whether to edit some of the sectors I'm working in. At the other end, I'm still thinking it needs some extra shouty vocals. And I have four brass parts to write and a drum session to enjoy with an infectiously excited Mark. And casual offer of 'will play sitar for coffee' from Kev. ...And does anyone know how to fix an 80-button accordion?
This much I've gotten to from all this vague, dream-like mental wandering and vaguery this summer: you've got to be in the optimum place, so far as you can get there. Find where you fit. Energies are finite, so stick 'em in the best endeavors for efforts. Prune.
It's getting dark at last. Time to switch off these screens and watch something mindless. Up in London with Gel tomorrow, so I'll need my best I Know What I'm Doing, Sure face on. And a loaded finger pistol.
But, thinking about it, am completely in the dark about why we're going to this particular meeting. Sure it'll be fun.
Three weeks in the sunshine of Italy seems more than a month ago. It seems like some vague hallucination. Like a sick day – something my poor mother knows too much about again today. While I'm sitting here in the sort of strangely pleasant, weird light of a summer evening that's just rained, she's entombed herself under bedclothes within reach of a large plastic bowl. The place was strangely quiet and dark when I popped back just now.
It's on ill days that you must realise what it's like to be alone after thirty-five years of marriage. Except she's not. But, y'know. I think she'll be okay.
This past weekend has turned Bournemouth into an actual tourist destination. Twinkling sea and baking sands. Our annual visitor from Berlin, Anneka, said she'd never seen the beach looking like an actual beach before. She and Caroline spent a weekend afternoon on it, while I oddly left them for the music studio, middle of the blazing summer day. Like things ever change...
Truth be told, sunshine and summer or not, we've been in a bit of a daze since getting back. I'm feeling the need to winnow. What is winnowing? Don't know precisely, but the word's on my mind a bit this week. I think I mean pruning - cutting back the current crop of clients to redirect Momo a bit. It's okay to do this, apparently. You're allowed. It's called Being The Boss.
Who knew this?
Thing is, all I want to do creatively is fiddle with tunes. Finish the album. Get the damned thing right. And, beyond that, just wake up on a day with absolutely nothing to achieve. No deadline. No goal. No list of things to do. No jobs waiting round the house. No meetings. Like I always say, meetings are the easy bit. Sometimes the fun bit But while I'm swanning around finger-pistoling, there's no clever twit in the studio actually making stuff we can sell.
Well, I may be in a bit of a daze, but I climbed hard to be dangling my feet off this plateau and it's good to catch a few rays and not rush on up the climb just yet. There are too many things to think about and too many people to think about. My brain is either contemplating the very large, imponderables ("..whither and why; shall we hither and yon?...) or it is simply obSESSED with getting the mix to work between certain bars of an electro-pop tune I first wrote eight years ago and still haven't finished so that I'm happy with it. ..WHY doesn't Logic have a Make It Sound Cool button?
Sadly, most of Momo's work falls somewhere between these two scales. And that's a bit I'm not really daydreaming about. It's just kind of rolling on, giving me deadlines. Which is why I'm wondering - at the poncy 'ponderables end - whether to edit some of the sectors I'm working in. At the other end, I'm still thinking it needs some extra shouty vocals. And I have four brass parts to write and a drum session to enjoy with an infectiously excited Mark. And casual offer of 'will play sitar for coffee' from Kev. ...And does anyone know how to fix an 80-button accordion?
This much I've gotten to from all this vague, dream-like mental wandering and vaguery this summer: you've got to be in the optimum place, so far as you can get there. Find where you fit. Energies are finite, so stick 'em in the best endeavors for efforts. Prune.
It's getting dark at last. Time to switch off these screens and watch something mindless. Up in London with Gel tomorrow, so I'll need my best I Know What I'm Doing, Sure face on. And a loaded finger pistol.
But, thinking about it, am completely in the dark about why we're going to this particular meeting. Sure it'll be fun.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Art.
Art.
In a city that cares so much about style and about football, lastnight wasn't pretty for Rome.
In an ideal world, the Mozart recital would have been another night and we could have dropped in on that one evening and still made it to the Italy v Spain quarter final screening in the little backstreet near the Trevi fountain. But since Mum had made such a friend with the waitress at the News Cafe on our spontaneous 'drop-in' the night before, we could hardly have not returned for the big match.
Luz took to Ma in a moment. So much so, we stayed there all evening, over salads and beers, and watched the artful Holland/Russia match right there on the street. This chirpy young Italian lass pretty much insisted Mum return and told us through many grins "Your mother is amazing." When mum thanked her for the last late of the night with a theatrical "gratze, caramia", Luz lit up with wonder and whispered to her very cool friend a reverential "belissima".
The street-full of onlookers all wanted Russia drubbed, of course. Cocky bullies. But they bashed on through a tight game and took their place in the semis, to the whooping, shrieking delight of the little Russian group round the end tavola after their second bucket of bubbly. Ah well - we thought of Mark VK and bowed our heads, picturing him alone at home, face painted orange, in orange Timmy Mallet-style curly wig and matching comedy spectacles, just staring forlornly at his orange mascot clogs...
Lastnight, the little street was heaving, in anticipation of Italy's looming jetison from Euro 08. But the footy was poor. Spain played a ratty, scrappy offensive against a shambolic Italy and it all went to dreadfully desperate penalties and, in a moment, the street was empty. But not before Luz had given mum an Italian team shirt and signed it lovingly. Mum didn't want the green white and red wiped off her face as we staggered home.
Today, we stood and gaped at the sheer scale of St Peters and the sheer artisanery of the sistene chapel and the sheer relentless tide of sweating, drifting, yawning, staring, drudging humanity, prepared to stand in the heat for hours to get in and have Italian security people shout "NO PHO-TO" robotically at everyone. And at the vast array of Religeratti. Pin Up Priests 2009 calendar, anyone?
CNN filmed in Rome today and said simply: "Man, it is HOT in Europe." The weatherman was chuffing right; we're melting. But we'll drag my poor, rapidly debilitating mother out onto the latin streets one more time and say goodbye to our three weeks off. I think she's felt as filled up as drained by coming and seeing this remarkably likable, bonkers city of culture, history and gesticulous singing for herself. And Italians LOVE the woman.
They can tell she has the art of life off to an instinctive tee. Maybe she's the best souvenir to be taking home with us.
In a city that cares so much about style and about football, lastnight wasn't pretty for Rome.
In an ideal world, the Mozart recital would have been another night and we could have dropped in on that one evening and still made it to the Italy v Spain quarter final screening in the little backstreet near the Trevi fountain. But since Mum had made such a friend with the waitress at the News Cafe on our spontaneous 'drop-in' the night before, we could hardly have not returned for the big match.
Luz took to Ma in a moment. So much so, we stayed there all evening, over salads and beers, and watched the artful Holland/Russia match right there on the street. This chirpy young Italian lass pretty much insisted Mum return and told us through many grins "Your mother is amazing." When mum thanked her for the last late of the night with a theatrical "gratze, caramia", Luz lit up with wonder and whispered to her very cool friend a reverential "belissima".
The street-full of onlookers all wanted Russia drubbed, of course. Cocky bullies. But they bashed on through a tight game and took their place in the semis, to the whooping, shrieking delight of the little Russian group round the end tavola after their second bucket of bubbly. Ah well - we thought of Mark VK and bowed our heads, picturing him alone at home, face painted orange, in orange Timmy Mallet-style curly wig and matching comedy spectacles, just staring forlornly at his orange mascot clogs...
Lastnight, the little street was heaving, in anticipation of Italy's looming jetison from Euro 08. But the footy was poor. Spain played a ratty, scrappy offensive against a shambolic Italy and it all went to dreadfully desperate penalties and, in a moment, the street was empty. But not before Luz had given mum an Italian team shirt and signed it lovingly. Mum didn't want the green white and red wiped off her face as we staggered home.
Today, we stood and gaped at the sheer scale of St Peters and the sheer artisanery of the sistene chapel and the sheer relentless tide of sweating, drifting, yawning, staring, drudging humanity, prepared to stand in the heat for hours to get in and have Italian security people shout "NO PHO-TO" robotically at everyone. And at the vast array of Religeratti. Pin Up Priests 2009 calendar, anyone?
CNN filmed in Rome today and said simply: "Man, it is HOT in Europe." The weatherman was chuffing right; we're melting. But we'll drag my poor, rapidly debilitating mother out onto the latin streets one more time and say goodbye to our three weeks off. I think she's felt as filled up as drained by coming and seeing this remarkably likable, bonkers city of culture, history and gesticulous singing for herself. And Italians LOVE the woman.
They can tell she has the art of life off to an instinctive tee. Maybe she's the best souvenir to be taking home with us.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Rubbish.
Rubbish.
There's no getting away from it. Naples is rubbish.
Really. Everywhere you drive, there are piles of festering rubbish, subsuming dumpsters and laybies and spilling into the traffic. Blowing around in the balmy breeze. I don't know what the cause of the much-laboured binmen's strike is in the famous old city, but it's causing a stink alright - no trash has been collected in weeks.
I know this only first-hand from driving around the suburbs - they're literally piling it up against the sides of Vesuvius. Of course, smug people with sat-navs would have missed this level of cultural experience after picking up their boxy hire cars from the airport and making their way smoothly out of the city. But we're not so narrow minded. When we arrived a couple fo weeks ago, we took forty minutes to actually head south on the motorway, meandering the ups and downs and round-rounds of the local backroads, marveling at the contemporary displays of municipal politics, so charmingly expressive of the region. Even knowing Italian road culture reasonably well, you still don't stand an empty dustbin's chance in Naples of getting to the right place logically. Not if you follow the roadsigns. Rookie mistake.
Still, we hardly came here for the roadsignage or the laybies. We came here for... sleep, I think actually. And we've had plenty of that.
Much as I could bang on about the casual beauty of Cilerno and Amalfi - the undulous, igneous grandeur, spilling from craggy, hairpin, hawk-eye heights into the glittering, azure glaze of sweeping mediterranean coastlines; vast amphitheatrical sunsets blazing into the horizon behind the sharp silhouette of Capri while lizards, swallows, bats and bugs frolic around the verdant hillsides and between the dancing magenta of rampant bourganvillea blooms, to the sound of crickets and flamenco guitar and to the smell of the freshest, simplest pizzas cooking al forno in old al fresco clay ovens, served by jolly, moustachio-ed restauranters and sparkling-eyed waitresses, everyone smiling and clinking bowl-sized glasses of fresh local chardonnay - I'm pretty sure you'd rather be assured about Italian telly.
We stayed a couple of nights in Maori - a nice little seaside town, a couple of clicks along the coast from the noisier, more precariously-perched Amalfi. One of the things you have to do with a half-way decent hotel room - before you empty the minibar and set fire to everything - is walk past all the nice restaurants on the way back to it one night and head instead to the local Spar, picking up a vast selection of snacks and picky food to spread across the bed in front of the local TV channels.
Now, I know it'll sound like I'm making this up. It can't still be the 1980s in Italy, can it? Oh yes, my friend - this country can be one of the friendliest, nicest, most beautiful, feel-good places to visit, make no mistake - but many things are still as you'd hope they'd be here.
As soon - as soon - as I'd switched on the little wall-mounted 17-inch, what greeted me was two 'funny looking' chaps, one with goofy hair and one with sensible hair, sitting next to each other at a desk with a funny sign over it, making goggly-eyed jests to camera and to each other, to the recorded hilarity of an apparent studio audience. All well, I thought, perching eagerly on the edge of the king-size, while Caroline took a shower.
Then appeared the never-long-out-of-shot Obligatory Unbelievably Beautiful Girls, possibly talking about cell phones, with little conviction but masses of eye lash upholstery.
Then. Then he appeared. The random bloke in a bright red, giant comedy-headed, amusingly huge-footed, big wobbly-bellied character costume waddled onto stage, 'speaking' in an amusing squeeky voice and waving his huge, red, comedy hands. To much more hilarity.
Cut to commercials.
Cut back, mindless minutes later, to the same set and funny sign and studio applause and the two Obligatory Unbelievably Beautiful Girls gyrating to disco in hot pants, shuddering gusetts at the twirling camera and removing skimpy tops down to bra-tops. And all this casual Spearmint Rhino choreography was under bright, family-viewing type studio lighting, mere feet from a completely comfortable-looking audience of very mixed ages, grinning and clapping along. The dance area of this Friday night prime time show's studio seemed to blend into the desk-top of the two hilarious hosts, and so, naturally, the two OUBGs, upon finishing their splendidly half-hearted soft porn manoeuvres, stalked over to them and perched down on either side of the shot in their heels. Like two enormous table decorations.
It's not that I have any problem with this at all, of course. They were very nice table decorations - and the dark-haired one on the right had the decency to look reasonably intelligent and so ever-so slightly aware of her role and its importance to her culture. You could see some of this in her eye. It was sweet. Then they all broke into a water balloon fight with the audience and everyone in little bra tops ended up suddenly soaking and she looked chirpier again. Then I think they read some viewers emails. And did a piece about disability access in hi-rise blocks.
As Caroline joined me and sat enraptured, we found ourselves watching the Wind Music Awards. Which was essentially a succession of short, 70s-chic-slick middle-aged men playing piano balads and being handed wobbly plastic stars on springs by Impossibly Tall Unbelievably Beautiful Girls in glittery mini skirts. All of them. Like they were bred somewhere.
This managed to keep itself and us going for so many hours we eventually thought we should call it a night. One of the glittery ladies at one point said, inexplicably but with great conviction, "Passe Wind" - and after all that cured meat and red wine, we thought we would.
-----
The rest of the time - almost two weeks now - we've been in a nice little town across the bay from Amalfi, called Santa Maria di Castelabate. The view from our hilside terrace over the town is 180° of stunningness looking out across the sea (see above). It's fab, basically. Probably all you need to know. Except that we've been drinking a healthy amount of the local vino and ignoring the sadly-obvious problems of waistline that the last year has left us with.
Only one night did I overdo it so much I woke up at six AM with an amateur's headache. It was, in fact, a throbbing head full of concrete and a wobbly stomach that made me pace the flat and the terrace for an early morning hour, threatening to roll in like bad weather from the bay, not unlike the gigantic thunder storm the night before.
It eventually led me smartly to the bathroom and gave me a dressing down, telling me I was a silly boy and I wasn't to do such a damn-fool thing again and I should count myself lucky I wasn't getting a lot worse than toilet detention and a ticking off. Then, to emphasis the point, it brought me to the brink with suddenly-watering gills, fluttery hints of lastnight's pesto in the windpipe,a nd wobbly legs, pacing me up and down the tiled floor of the loo breathing deeply and saying 'oh dear' quietly... then it just evaporated. Lifted like a storm break or an idle threat. And I went immediately to bed and mercifully conked out. Grateful to be spared, wise in my learning of lesson, and wondering if we had any nice wine in for the evening...
Sadly, we come home in a week. I couldn't have loved this place more.
There's no getting away from it. Naples is rubbish.
Really. Everywhere you drive, there are piles of festering rubbish, subsuming dumpsters and laybies and spilling into the traffic. Blowing around in the balmy breeze. I don't know what the cause of the much-laboured binmen's strike is in the famous old city, but it's causing a stink alright - no trash has been collected in weeks.
I know this only first-hand from driving around the suburbs - they're literally piling it up against the sides of Vesuvius. Of course, smug people with sat-navs would have missed this level of cultural experience after picking up their boxy hire cars from the airport and making their way smoothly out of the city. But we're not so narrow minded. When we arrived a couple fo weeks ago, we took forty minutes to actually head south on the motorway, meandering the ups and downs and round-rounds of the local backroads, marveling at the contemporary displays of municipal politics, so charmingly expressive of the region. Even knowing Italian road culture reasonably well, you still don't stand an empty dustbin's chance in Naples of getting to the right place logically. Not if you follow the roadsigns. Rookie mistake.
Still, we hardly came here for the roadsignage or the laybies. We came here for... sleep, I think actually. And we've had plenty of that.
Much as I could bang on about the casual beauty of Cilerno and Amalfi - the undulous, igneous grandeur, spilling from craggy, hairpin, hawk-eye heights into the glittering, azure glaze of sweeping mediterranean coastlines; vast amphitheatrical sunsets blazing into the horizon behind the sharp silhouette of Capri while lizards, swallows, bats and bugs frolic around the verdant hillsides and between the dancing magenta of rampant bourganvillea blooms, to the sound of crickets and flamenco guitar and to the smell of the freshest, simplest pizzas cooking al forno in old al fresco clay ovens, served by jolly, moustachio-ed restauranters and sparkling-eyed waitresses, everyone smiling and clinking bowl-sized glasses of fresh local chardonnay - I'm pretty sure you'd rather be assured about Italian telly.
We stayed a couple of nights in Maori - a nice little seaside town, a couple of clicks along the coast from the noisier, more precariously-perched Amalfi. One of the things you have to do with a half-way decent hotel room - before you empty the minibar and set fire to everything - is walk past all the nice restaurants on the way back to it one night and head instead to the local Spar, picking up a vast selection of snacks and picky food to spread across the bed in front of the local TV channels.
Now, I know it'll sound like I'm making this up. It can't still be the 1980s in Italy, can it? Oh yes, my friend - this country can be one of the friendliest, nicest, most beautiful, feel-good places to visit, make no mistake - but many things are still as you'd hope they'd be here.
As soon - as soon - as I'd switched on the little wall-mounted 17-inch, what greeted me was two 'funny looking' chaps, one with goofy hair and one with sensible hair, sitting next to each other at a desk with a funny sign over it, making goggly-eyed jests to camera and to each other, to the recorded hilarity of an apparent studio audience. All well, I thought, perching eagerly on the edge of the king-size, while Caroline took a shower.
Then appeared the never-long-out-of-shot Obligatory Unbelievably Beautiful Girls, possibly talking about cell phones, with little conviction but masses of eye lash upholstery.
Then. Then he appeared. The random bloke in a bright red, giant comedy-headed, amusingly huge-footed, big wobbly-bellied character costume waddled onto stage, 'speaking' in an amusing squeeky voice and waving his huge, red, comedy hands. To much more hilarity.
Cut to commercials.
Cut back, mindless minutes later, to the same set and funny sign and studio applause and the two Obligatory Unbelievably Beautiful Girls gyrating to disco in hot pants, shuddering gusetts at the twirling camera and removing skimpy tops down to bra-tops. And all this casual Spearmint Rhino choreography was under bright, family-viewing type studio lighting, mere feet from a completely comfortable-looking audience of very mixed ages, grinning and clapping along. The dance area of this Friday night prime time show's studio seemed to blend into the desk-top of the two hilarious hosts, and so, naturally, the two OUBGs, upon finishing their splendidly half-hearted soft porn manoeuvres, stalked over to them and perched down on either side of the shot in their heels. Like two enormous table decorations.
It's not that I have any problem with this at all, of course. They were very nice table decorations - and the dark-haired one on the right had the decency to look reasonably intelligent and so ever-so slightly aware of her role and its importance to her culture. You could see some of this in her eye. It was sweet. Then they all broke into a water balloon fight with the audience and everyone in little bra tops ended up suddenly soaking and she looked chirpier again. Then I think they read some viewers emails. And did a piece about disability access in hi-rise blocks.
As Caroline joined me and sat enraptured, we found ourselves watching the Wind Music Awards. Which was essentially a succession of short, 70s-chic-slick middle-aged men playing piano balads and being handed wobbly plastic stars on springs by Impossibly Tall Unbelievably Beautiful Girls in glittery mini skirts. All of them. Like they were bred somewhere.
This managed to keep itself and us going for so many hours we eventually thought we should call it a night. One of the glittery ladies at one point said, inexplicably but with great conviction, "Passe Wind" - and after all that cured meat and red wine, we thought we would.
-----
The rest of the time - almost two weeks now - we've been in a nice little town across the bay from Amalfi, called Santa Maria di Castelabate. The view from our hilside terrace over the town is 180° of stunningness looking out across the sea (see above). It's fab, basically. Probably all you need to know. Except that we've been drinking a healthy amount of the local vino and ignoring the sadly-obvious problems of waistline that the last year has left us with.
Only one night did I overdo it so much I woke up at six AM with an amateur's headache. It was, in fact, a throbbing head full of concrete and a wobbly stomach that made me pace the flat and the terrace for an early morning hour, threatening to roll in like bad weather from the bay, not unlike the gigantic thunder storm the night before.
It eventually led me smartly to the bathroom and gave me a dressing down, telling me I was a silly boy and I wasn't to do such a damn-fool thing again and I should count myself lucky I wasn't getting a lot worse than toilet detention and a ticking off. Then, to emphasis the point, it brought me to the brink with suddenly-watering gills, fluttery hints of lastnight's pesto in the windpipe,a nd wobbly legs, pacing me up and down the tiled floor of the loo breathing deeply and saying 'oh dear' quietly... then it just evaporated. Lifted like a storm break or an idle threat. And I went immediately to bed and mercifully conked out. Grateful to be spared, wise in my learning of lesson, and wondering if we had any nice wine in for the evening...
Sadly, we come home in a week. I couldn't have loved this place more.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Excited.
Excited.
I'm relaxing into it. Feeling excited. Three weeks away with the loved one - away being the word - is so long overdue for Momo's engine of creative sparkle, bless him. But it's disheartening when people don't get excited about the good stuff you've been doing for them.
Change is tricky for clients. More often than not, I end up getting at least a little bit of the loved up feeling that us creatives really go to work for - a client excited about the new things you've opened up for them. But sometimes, obvious as the good stuff might be, it isn't obvious to people who see things from a different angle. And that's the deal - brand development is about articulating a single vision for someone - a consensus, in internal terms. Which often means you have to negotiate one first.
Brand developement is always at least 50% about the internal delivery - taking the client's family with you in your creative thinking. And, honestly, I like this really. It's about people. It's about getting people excited or relieved that you've shown them a way forward. But it's never going to be 100% back-slapping glass clinks, is it.
Given the sheer number of things I have going to press or going live with only one official day left on the schedule, it's remarkable how cool my clients are with my prolonged absence. Been a long time coming, I guess, and most of them know it. Which is when work becomes a partnership. And all the jollier. After a tough time last year - a fight, I seem to recall it feeling like - this years been easier and I feel lucky to have the business friends around me that I do. Extremely lucky in a number of cases.
So, the glass of red beside me tells me it's all good, even if I am working tonight again. It's all good. Indiana was fun lastnight and it was good to see friends a fair bit over the last week, even if Momo's schedule has frowned on it. The ol' brain simply needs Away now...
Where more diplomacy is needed, I'll work it. Simple as that. It's the job, ma'am.
Or it will be when I come back.
After three weeks away from being creative, I suspect I'll just be starting to feel a twinge of excitement about it.
I'm relaxing into it. Feeling excited. Three weeks away with the loved one - away being the word - is so long overdue for Momo's engine of creative sparkle, bless him. But it's disheartening when people don't get excited about the good stuff you've been doing for them.
Change is tricky for clients. More often than not, I end up getting at least a little bit of the loved up feeling that us creatives really go to work for - a client excited about the new things you've opened up for them. But sometimes, obvious as the good stuff might be, it isn't obvious to people who see things from a different angle. And that's the deal - brand development is about articulating a single vision for someone - a consensus, in internal terms. Which often means you have to negotiate one first.
Brand developement is always at least 50% about the internal delivery - taking the client's family with you in your creative thinking. And, honestly, I like this really. It's about people. It's about getting people excited or relieved that you've shown them a way forward. But it's never going to be 100% back-slapping glass clinks, is it.
Given the sheer number of things I have going to press or going live with only one official day left on the schedule, it's remarkable how cool my clients are with my prolonged absence. Been a long time coming, I guess, and most of them know it. Which is when work becomes a partnership. And all the jollier. After a tough time last year - a fight, I seem to recall it feeling like - this years been easier and I feel lucky to have the business friends around me that I do. Extremely lucky in a number of cases.
So, the glass of red beside me tells me it's all good, even if I am working tonight again. It's all good. Indiana was fun lastnight and it was good to see friends a fair bit over the last week, even if Momo's schedule has frowned on it. The ol' brain simply needs Away now...
Where more diplomacy is needed, I'll work it. Simple as that. It's the job, ma'am.
Or it will be when I come back.
After three weeks away from being creative, I suspect I'll just be starting to feel a twinge of excitement about it.
Monday, May 26, 2008
San Marin-oh.
San Marin-oh.
Confession. I had never heard of San Marino before Saturday night.
I mean, who knew? A whole European state that doesn't appear to be on any maps of the famous continent. Turns out it's more of large car park on the east coast of Italy with such an elaborate keycode entry system it's allowed its own entry in the Eurovision song contest.
Now, I knew about Andorra. A pleasant high street in the Pyrenees. Though not many shops. And Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium are all similarly amusing but likeable dinky stunt states of Europe that we've all half heard of. But I do indeed have to confess to having never heard of San Marino.
But, while I'm confessing, I think of one other European micro state that's been inconceivably conspicuous by its absence in the Eurovision.
Why oh why has the Vatican never put in a tune? Eh?
Sure, whatever they sang would only get half listened to while the entire population of Europe waited to see if those suspiciously long priestly outfits really would adhere to contest custom and come off in an indoor firework key change, to reveal glitter-smeared thighs.
But think about the possibilities. Heal the world, man. If they stumped up the pontif himself, Germany would pile in their votes. And if he went into a little tap number on the bridge, I think he'd win over the UK teledial in a moment. Russia's orthodox background might well feel a large twang of high-church sympathy as the bass slapped and the rest of the latin countries would be in the bag before he even rose up on the soloist's plinth. Even Switzerland would dig those black and yellow stripy outfits on the backing chaps of course. Not sure where Turkey would stand exactly, but I think if Benedict's big number was essentially a forgettably bland soft rock affair, it would be hard for anyone from the Atlantic coast to the ancient silk routes to really argue with the airplayability of it.
..I'm saying it's an idea.
It's a little liberal, okay.
But come on. 'Mea Culpa, hasta la vista' by Papa Benny? It would steal the show and you know it.
----
But, just up the motorway from the disappointingly musically quiet sovereign state of the Catholic church, the hitherto-to-me unheard of mighty nation of San Remo were flexing their very important, gigantically-cultured socks on Saturday night - by being the first of only two nation states to give any votes at all to the UK entry.
I mean, what. What. ..Was going on.
Kind of felt Terry's call for a protest vote next year - all the more because not only had our entry been a decent, feel-good affair, but large swathes of the contest had been unnervinlgly... er, can I say it? Can I really say this?
Okay.
No, I mean large swathes of the contest had been unnervingly okay. With europop goggles firmly screwed in of course, we had a run of okay songs. Good performances. Things worth voting for in a mainstream context.
Norway was, I think, the classiest bit of songwriting that night - kind of cared about it when it came on and it's been in my head a lot. And it scored fairly, coming fifth. Israel's entry also scored okay, which I think took the biscuit for genuine emotion in a song that night - when young Boaz opened up his honest wailing you felt like it mattered somehow. Of all the glittery semi-cladness tottering around on the evening, Ani Lorak probably peaked the sauce-ometer with the gutsiest pop tune performance of the night, deserving her second place for Ukraine - even if I can't remember the song. And even the charming gentle tango quirkiness of Croatia's entry scored respectably. In fact, taking our traditional place alongside Kev and Fi for the night, we all found it alarmingly hard to take the piss for some of the time. Tricky.
The real daftness was found at either end of the scoreboard. Russia at the top was a triumph for political cynicism, blandly forgettable music, fuddled staging and amusing male hair - but an insult to the many better everythings on show that night. Le Roieux Uni at the bottom of the table was just an insult to us.
How did the dire piss-take of Spain score more than Andy Abraham's very likeable performance for the UK? Listened to on the record, Even if does a remarkably well-produced job of creating a great groove and a feel-good vibe. Obsessed as I currently am with old Herbie Hancock records, I think it still needs the expert touch of a good brass arranger to bring it right out, but underneath - a full-on likable tune. Same for the performer.
Of course. Hmm. Disco - it's a risky one.
When you love funk-influenced things, so many other types of music just feel boring. But it's not traditionally a big winner across mainstream audiences. Dance music may be huge across Europe, as electronic music always has been - but that's in niche terms. Soft rock is still the ticket. Witness Turkey's contemporary version of it - tight, acceptably cool and forgettably uncompelling - but a consistent vote-winner on the night.
Of course too - disco and dance don't always arrange well live. You have to be inside the groove to get it usually and live is a merciless reducer to bare necessities in music. But the UK entry seemed to do just what it was meant to do when it stepped up - create a colourful, feel-good vibe across the audience.
So, is Eurovision a wash-out? Should we leave?
Possibly. But we should keep watching. The point is twofold - Eurovision is a fab idea for a continent-wide media event, and the UK leads the world in musical creative. Why worry? The two obviously don't go together, bizarre as that may sound to a space alien - but does it matter?
I have to say, after so long with my head in it this week, it's a relief to leave the Eurovision world again and get back to proper music.
But I do have FIP on and I'm secretly hoping to hear Belgium's or Croatia's entries turn up on the playlist.
Confession. I had never heard of San Marino before Saturday night.
I mean, who knew? A whole European state that doesn't appear to be on any maps of the famous continent. Turns out it's more of large car park on the east coast of Italy with such an elaborate keycode entry system it's allowed its own entry in the Eurovision song contest.
Now, I knew about Andorra. A pleasant high street in the Pyrenees. Though not many shops. And Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium are all similarly amusing but likeable dinky stunt states of Europe that we've all half heard of. But I do indeed have to confess to having never heard of San Marino.
But, while I'm confessing, I think of one other European micro state that's been inconceivably conspicuous by its absence in the Eurovision.
Why oh why has the Vatican never put in a tune? Eh?
Sure, whatever they sang would only get half listened to while the entire population of Europe waited to see if those suspiciously long priestly outfits really would adhere to contest custom and come off in an indoor firework key change, to reveal glitter-smeared thighs.
But think about the possibilities. Heal the world, man. If they stumped up the pontif himself, Germany would pile in their votes. And if he went into a little tap number on the bridge, I think he'd win over the UK teledial in a moment. Russia's orthodox background might well feel a large twang of high-church sympathy as the bass slapped and the rest of the latin countries would be in the bag before he even rose up on the soloist's plinth. Even Switzerland would dig those black and yellow stripy outfits on the backing chaps of course. Not sure where Turkey would stand exactly, but I think if Benedict's big number was essentially a forgettably bland soft rock affair, it would be hard for anyone from the Atlantic coast to the ancient silk routes to really argue with the airplayability of it.
..I'm saying it's an idea.
It's a little liberal, okay.
But come on. 'Mea Culpa, hasta la vista' by Papa Benny? It would steal the show and you know it.
----
But, just up the motorway from the disappointingly musically quiet sovereign state of the Catholic church, the hitherto-to-me unheard of mighty nation of San Remo were flexing their very important, gigantically-cultured socks on Saturday night - by being the first of only two nation states to give any votes at all to the UK entry.
I mean, what. What. ..Was going on.
Kind of felt Terry's call for a protest vote next year - all the more because not only had our entry been a decent, feel-good affair, but large swathes of the contest had been unnervinlgly... er, can I say it? Can I really say this?
Okay.
No, I mean large swathes of the contest had been unnervingly okay. With europop goggles firmly screwed in of course, we had a run of okay songs. Good performances. Things worth voting for in a mainstream context.
Norway was, I think, the classiest bit of songwriting that night - kind of cared about it when it came on and it's been in my head a lot. And it scored fairly, coming fifth. Israel's entry also scored okay, which I think took the biscuit for genuine emotion in a song that night - when young Boaz opened up his honest wailing you felt like it mattered somehow. Of all the glittery semi-cladness tottering around on the evening, Ani Lorak probably peaked the sauce-ometer with the gutsiest pop tune performance of the night, deserving her second place for Ukraine - even if I can't remember the song. And even the charming gentle tango quirkiness of Croatia's entry scored respectably. In fact, taking our traditional place alongside Kev and Fi for the night, we all found it alarmingly hard to take the piss for some of the time. Tricky.
The real daftness was found at either end of the scoreboard. Russia at the top was a triumph for political cynicism, blandly forgettable music, fuddled staging and amusing male hair - but an insult to the many better everythings on show that night. Le Roieux Uni at the bottom of the table was just an insult to us.
How did the dire piss-take of Spain score more than Andy Abraham's very likeable performance for the UK? Listened to on the record, Even if does a remarkably well-produced job of creating a great groove and a feel-good vibe. Obsessed as I currently am with old Herbie Hancock records, I think it still needs the expert touch of a good brass arranger to bring it right out, but underneath - a full-on likable tune. Same for the performer.
Of course. Hmm. Disco - it's a risky one.
When you love funk-influenced things, so many other types of music just feel boring. But it's not traditionally a big winner across mainstream audiences. Dance music may be huge across Europe, as electronic music always has been - but that's in niche terms. Soft rock is still the ticket. Witness Turkey's contemporary version of it - tight, acceptably cool and forgettably uncompelling - but a consistent vote-winner on the night.
Of course too - disco and dance don't always arrange well live. You have to be inside the groove to get it usually and live is a merciless reducer to bare necessities in music. But the UK entry seemed to do just what it was meant to do when it stepped up - create a colourful, feel-good vibe across the audience.
So, is Eurovision a wash-out? Should we leave?
Possibly. But we should keep watching. The point is twofold - Eurovision is a fab idea for a continent-wide media event, and the UK leads the world in musical creative. Why worry? The two obviously don't go together, bizarre as that may sound to a space alien - but does it matter?
I have to say, after so long with my head in it this week, it's a relief to leave the Eurovision world again and get back to proper music.
But I do have FIP on and I'm secretly hoping to hear Belgium's or Croatia's entries turn up on the playlist.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Late.
Late.
Here's the truth. The bitter truth.
I'm thirty-seven, and I still regularly email Radio One. And still get really stupidly pleased when they read out my carefully composed emails.
'Annie - I think it's obvious that what the kids are really waiting for in the Last Blast is for you to drop the Erol Alkan mix of Romanca by Kraljevi Ulice and 75 Cents - Croatia's 2008 entry to the Eurovision song context. Not enough Balkan beer drinking songs on Radio 1.
Momo and Caz xx'
Bless her Friday night socks, Annie Mac refers to us as regular Can't Stoppers these days. She read out the whole convoluted thing and laughed. And I did a little dance round the studio. And then caught the pathetic figure I was cutting in the finally night-time summer window. So I picked up the empty pizza box and meekly shuffled to the kitchen to put the kettle on and to turn down the disco.
The thing is, I think I've had dozens of name checks by the very nice Irish squelchy beats lady over the years and I still email in like a ten year old girl. Think I like the little cheer from Caroline from wherever she is in the flat.
..And, in fact, the thing really is that I'm almost as regular on Fi Glover's Saturday Live program on Radio 4. Ask Lisa Basset. And this week I even got name-checked in her newsletter email...
Ohmygod.
Oh my good lord.
Someone make me go on holiday.
Here's the truth. The bitter truth.
I'm thirty-seven, and I still regularly email Radio One. And still get really stupidly pleased when they read out my carefully composed emails.
'Annie - I think it's obvious that what the kids are really waiting for in the Last Blast is for you to drop the Erol Alkan mix of Romanca by Kraljevi Ulice and 75 Cents - Croatia's 2008 entry to the Eurovision song context. Not enough Balkan beer drinking songs on Radio 1.
Momo and Caz xx'
Bless her Friday night socks, Annie Mac refers to us as regular Can't Stoppers these days. She read out the whole convoluted thing and laughed. And I did a little dance round the studio. And then caught the pathetic figure I was cutting in the finally night-time summer window. So I picked up the empty pizza box and meekly shuffled to the kitchen to put the kettle on and to turn down the disco.
The thing is, I think I've had dozens of name checks by the very nice Irish squelchy beats lady over the years and I still email in like a ten year old girl. Think I like the little cheer from Caroline from wherever she is in the flat.
..And, in fact, the thing really is that I'm almost as regular on Fi Glover's Saturday Live program on Radio 4. Ask Lisa Basset. And this week I even got name-checked in her newsletter email...
Ohmygod.
Oh my good lord.
Someone make me go on holiday.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Rai comments.
Rai comments.
I thankyou. And I'm here all week, gang - I have sunny afternoon North African music on and I might say a couple of things about it. Headline job done.
So taking a quick peek back at the ol' Lingo pages, I can see an annoyingly sunny disposition seeping through the screen pages. But on afternoons like this, it's hard not to - if you can see the sun, anyway. I concede I'm probably just getting de-mob happy leading up to time away from the studio - punchable holiday smugness seems to soak halfway across the calendar. So I apologise. ..Without being all that sorry, obviously BECAUSE I'M GOING ON SODDING HOLIDAY!!
Being irresponsible has a lot of benefits. Chief among them is the ability to walk away from your work responsibilities as a solo creative freelancer without a second thought to having any work to come back to, to help you pay off the holiday.
Well actually, the pile of work I'm putting off by typing this for five minutes would all have to go to press by the end of the month anyway, whether Momo's Creative Director was whisking away the company secretary for a dirty spin round the Amalfi coast to a 70s-chic John Barry soundtrack or not. So nice work, boss.
---
Elsewhere in Europe, the delights of a singular cultural event have put music on my mind again - though cynics might say of a less meaningful disposition than the evocative tonsil stretching of Rai. Last night was the first semi final of the Eurovision.
You know well how I/we feel about this. All I'll say in summary is that it was a relief that Norway made it through. Belgium's entry may have been so loopily creative it deserved a firm place on FIP's bonkers-eclectic playlist, but let's face it, it was never going to get voted into the final. And the singing turkey was surely only ever a piece of squawking sock-puppet comedy vandalism for a very select, and Guiness-addled audience. Class, but not to the taste of watery beer-swilling middle europeans, I had always suspected.
No, though you do quickly adjust your quality goggles when reading the worth of a Eurovision entry (so that Good only ever means Not SO Shit That Words Have Really Failed You This Time), Norway - Nil Point Norway - provided a quiet little quality blinder.
Didn't hit me between the eyes - and for that reason it wasn't inconceivable that it would escape the notice of the Baltic voters - but Hold on, be strong, performed by Maria had begun to persuade me by the end that it was possibly a little Motown classic. Really. No, I think really.
Firstly, basics. The backing singers all looked like they came as a set. They didn't look like so many Eurovision entries do, as though the lead singer had rounded up the fittest mates they could find and made them prat about behind them ill-fittingly. They matched. And they did simple little hand actions together, to reinforce the lyrics.
Secondly, the music. I can still remember it, kind of. Hum it at least. And it all seemed to belong.
So, er... I think I really rate it. In pop terms, for Eurovision. I think I might.
Norway - keep an eye on it. It will fail. But it might be the classiest thing in the final. Might be.
---
Sunshine's magic is akin to music, of course. It cleverly dulls the feel of other things. Other bad things. And bloody rotten song contests are an especially effective diversion for us all.
But yes, behind our own summery mood, there are epically difficult things in the news, across the Far East especially. Bad things beyond understanding. But I don't know how to talk about them. I can only sit and watch in silence. And thank God for the good things. For the sunshine outside my just-about-still-standing house this afternoon.
Nothing more you can say. No witty asides needed by aid agency workers. The CD's just ended.
And Caroline's just thankfully put on Kylie.
I thankyou. And I'm here all week, gang - I have sunny afternoon North African music on and I might say a couple of things about it. Headline job done.
So taking a quick peek back at the ol' Lingo pages, I can see an annoyingly sunny disposition seeping through the screen pages. But on afternoons like this, it's hard not to - if you can see the sun, anyway. I concede I'm probably just getting de-mob happy leading up to time away from the studio - punchable holiday smugness seems to soak halfway across the calendar. So I apologise. ..Without being all that sorry, obviously BECAUSE I'M GOING ON SODDING HOLIDAY!!
Being irresponsible has a lot of benefits. Chief among them is the ability to walk away from your work responsibilities as a solo creative freelancer without a second thought to having any work to come back to, to help you pay off the holiday.
Well actually, the pile of work I'm putting off by typing this for five minutes would all have to go to press by the end of the month anyway, whether Momo's Creative Director was whisking away the company secretary for a dirty spin round the Amalfi coast to a 70s-chic John Barry soundtrack or not. So nice work, boss.
---
Elsewhere in Europe, the delights of a singular cultural event have put music on my mind again - though cynics might say of a less meaningful disposition than the evocative tonsil stretching of Rai. Last night was the first semi final of the Eurovision.
You know well how I/we feel about this. All I'll say in summary is that it was a relief that Norway made it through. Belgium's entry may have been so loopily creative it deserved a firm place on FIP's bonkers-eclectic playlist, but let's face it, it was never going to get voted into the final. And the singing turkey was surely only ever a piece of squawking sock-puppet comedy vandalism for a very select, and Guiness-addled audience. Class, but not to the taste of watery beer-swilling middle europeans, I had always suspected.
No, though you do quickly adjust your quality goggles when reading the worth of a Eurovision entry (so that Good only ever means Not SO Shit That Words Have Really Failed You This Time), Norway - Nil Point Norway - provided a quiet little quality blinder.
Didn't hit me between the eyes - and for that reason it wasn't inconceivable that it would escape the notice of the Baltic voters - but Hold on, be strong, performed by Maria had begun to persuade me by the end that it was possibly a little Motown classic. Really. No, I think really.
Firstly, basics. The backing singers all looked like they came as a set. They didn't look like so many Eurovision entries do, as though the lead singer had rounded up the fittest mates they could find and made them prat about behind them ill-fittingly. They matched. And they did simple little hand actions together, to reinforce the lyrics.
Secondly, the music. I can still remember it, kind of. Hum it at least. And it all seemed to belong.
So, er... I think I really rate it. In pop terms, for Eurovision. I think I might.
Norway - keep an eye on it. It will fail. But it might be the classiest thing in the final. Might be.
---
Sunshine's magic is akin to music, of course. It cleverly dulls the feel of other things. Other bad things. And bloody rotten song contests are an especially effective diversion for us all.
But yes, behind our own summery mood, there are epically difficult things in the news, across the Far East especially. Bad things beyond understanding. But I don't know how to talk about them. I can only sit and watch in silence. And thank God for the good things. For the sunshine outside my just-about-still-standing house this afternoon.
Nothing more you can say. No witty asides needed by aid agency workers. The CD's just ended.
And Caroline's just thankfully put on Kylie.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Heat.
Heat.
Ice creams. Socked feet. Very hairy dogs. These are things that don't like heat.
I, however, am so stunned by how unusual - how genuinely weird - it feels to have had all the windows in the flat open for a week, with balmy warmth blowing through them, that I couldn't care if I melted all over the deck in the garden. And anyway, I have my socks off and my jeans rolled up, padding around the wooden studio floor like a jolly Jack Tar in a sailor's musical.
How fab is this weather? It's like a full-on, actual summer. SUMMER! Here - in the UK.
So, bliss factor is high... sort of.
Well, it's work, isn't it? Work has been more full-on since the full-on happy weather and I've had to peer out at the glorious play-time brightness from the electronic gloom of my Mac screen. Seem to have had a nasty confluence of deadlines all for about, er, now - today. But I'm still alive, even after so many late nights and work-throughs that I've had a sleep-hindering excess of adrenalin.
As Gellan said, you can kind of end up leading a double life (..triple. Triple life if you count the weekend vaudeville) - what your head's doing and what your body is doing. Momo is keeping me pretty all-round engaged and plugged in and generally enjoying the projects on the go - but body is inexplicably telling me to tone down the heat a little.
But it's all good. Hols are in the diary at last - at long last - and there are good things on all over the Momo schedule.
Had a good few meetings this morning and the monster branding work Thinking Juice and Momo are partnering on seems to be still out-working nicely. I've been nerdily developing a brand book - which is only fun if you're the particular kind of nerd that likes explaining to people why Helvetica is such a great choice for their brand comms.
Anyway, fonts, pantones, FTPs and giant EPSs aside, I've been listening to the early mixes of The Golden Age Of Exploration while my palpitating heart has been forcing me to take long walks on the beach and all this has done is get me all the more worked up and over-excited.
I'm obviously well creatively blind to the whole thing now, but I'm loving being so close to completing an album. And such a cheeky one too. ..You'll see what I mean when I force you to come to the launch party at the end of the summer.
If I don't explode in one of the many types of heat I'll be experiencing before then.
Ice creams. Socked feet. Very hairy dogs. These are things that don't like heat.
I, however, am so stunned by how unusual - how genuinely weird - it feels to have had all the windows in the flat open for a week, with balmy warmth blowing through them, that I couldn't care if I melted all over the deck in the garden. And anyway, I have my socks off and my jeans rolled up, padding around the wooden studio floor like a jolly Jack Tar in a sailor's musical.
How fab is this weather? It's like a full-on, actual summer. SUMMER! Here - in the UK.
So, bliss factor is high... sort of.
Well, it's work, isn't it? Work has been more full-on since the full-on happy weather and I've had to peer out at the glorious play-time brightness from the electronic gloom of my Mac screen. Seem to have had a nasty confluence of deadlines all for about, er, now - today. But I'm still alive, even after so many late nights and work-throughs that I've had a sleep-hindering excess of adrenalin.
As Gellan said, you can kind of end up leading a double life (..triple. Triple life if you count the weekend vaudeville) - what your head's doing and what your body is doing. Momo is keeping me pretty all-round engaged and plugged in and generally enjoying the projects on the go - but body is inexplicably telling me to tone down the heat a little.
But it's all good. Hols are in the diary at last - at long last - and there are good things on all over the Momo schedule.
Had a good few meetings this morning and the monster branding work Thinking Juice and Momo are partnering on seems to be still out-working nicely. I've been nerdily developing a brand book - which is only fun if you're the particular kind of nerd that likes explaining to people why Helvetica is such a great choice for their brand comms.
Anyway, fonts, pantones, FTPs and giant EPSs aside, I've been listening to the early mixes of The Golden Age Of Exploration while my palpitating heart has been forcing me to take long walks on the beach and all this has done is get me all the more worked up and over-excited.
I'm obviously well creatively blind to the whole thing now, but I'm loving being so close to completing an album. And such a cheeky one too. ..You'll see what I mean when I force you to come to the launch party at the end of the summer.
If I don't explode in one of the many types of heat I'll be experiencing before then.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Bonkers Bankers.
Bonkers Bankers.
No, I'm not talking about twitchy city types. I'm referring to my work/life balance and how desperately out of skew it is these days.
I'm at the Mac, listening to Annie Mac. Thing is, her groovy Radio One show is now over and it's Dave Pearce's Circuits Class Classics, or whatever he calls it... and I'm STILL here. Gone 11.00 on a bank holiday Friday evening, and I've been writing reports on websites and scamping up housing association newsletters. Actually, I feel like a guest on a magic show; I've been spinning so many project plates today, I feel dizzy.
Though some of that dizzyness might be the heady whiff of summer. 1st of May, Caroline found herself post-epic-deadline free - enough at least to plunge into the luxuriantly hirsute back garden lawn with the pitifully-armed pushy mower, to find the shed. In which, is the little table and chairs that Dad bought us last year for the decking. Summer's here officially. Thanks, Dad.
So I used it all today. Sun was out proper today and I've been on a bit of a meetings marathon this week. One quick deadline after another, with not much time to prepare Actual Stuff for them, and this morning was no exception. So, by the time I got back from somewhere up the M3 this afternoon, I was fair determined to find a bagette and a packet of Kettle Chips and a nice length of deck for twenty minutes. Well, jeepers - I may be busy, but I work for myself, for Pete's sake. And I knew, at 3.00pm, I'd be pushing on until 11.00 tonight. Woop. Lucky me - and here I am.
So I stole a few quick zeds on the deck. Have you ever stared at a blank blue sky long enough to see the sample slide bacterial weird things floating across your eyeballs? They try to float away as you focus on them, but they're there - and they do look like weird chains of microscopic life.
I love working from home.
Anyway, snoozing deck/eyeball madness aside, I have a hell of a list of things to do here beside me for May, summer or not. Great having work on, of course. But I'll be spending most of the Bank Holiday weekend at the Mac again.
Bonkers?
---
It's actually been a very jolly week, so I'm not on the moan tonight. Found myself at the Arts Institute Bournemouth twice this week, trying desperately to not look too old. It's twenty years since I studied there, which is longer than some of the students-who-didn't-know-when-to-laugh- at-my-jokes have been alive. It just doesn't make sense. But I'm not sure I did to them. Still, I awoke from a desperate snooze in the studio last Sunday afternoon to scribble down some vaguely brilliant looking diagram about creativity, hand of God style, which I inflicted on them, telling them I wasn't sure if it was, in fact, helpful brilliance, or deranged bollocks.
The point is, it was nice of Sarah to invite me in to talk to her class. I wish I'd had some chap come into one of my lessons there and say "Crikey, none of us know what the hell we're doing, don't worry. You can still have fun and just about pay the bills.."
Nice too then, of Gellan to invite back to the Enterprise Pavillion to meet some more students on Wednesday night, as they presented their design suggestions for the logo of his co-operative idea, the Dorset Design Forum. I think I may have inadvertantly been roped in to promote greater harmony across the creative industries in the sunny south. And why not - as a work-at-home deck-hugger, I've tarted around with lots of agencies in the area. Mind you, I found myself amazingly talking to local ad legend, Matt Flemming. After he diffidently mentioned Aylesworth Flemming's turnover and current business outlook, I did well to maintain my engaging professional air, but I was sweating at the thought of him asking me what Momo is currently up to.
"Emailing Radio One and kipping in the garden during working hours, mate."
Why do I imagine students can't relate to me?
No, I'm not talking about twitchy city types. I'm referring to my work/life balance and how desperately out of skew it is these days.
I'm at the Mac, listening to Annie Mac. Thing is, her groovy Radio One show is now over and it's Dave Pearce's Circuits Class Classics, or whatever he calls it... and I'm STILL here. Gone 11.00 on a bank holiday Friday evening, and I've been writing reports on websites and scamping up housing association newsletters. Actually, I feel like a guest on a magic show; I've been spinning so many project plates today, I feel dizzy.
Though some of that dizzyness might be the heady whiff of summer. 1st of May, Caroline found herself post-epic-deadline free - enough at least to plunge into the luxuriantly hirsute back garden lawn with the pitifully-armed pushy mower, to find the shed. In which, is the little table and chairs that Dad bought us last year for the decking. Summer's here officially. Thanks, Dad.
So I used it all today. Sun was out proper today and I've been on a bit of a meetings marathon this week. One quick deadline after another, with not much time to prepare Actual Stuff for them, and this morning was no exception. So, by the time I got back from somewhere up the M3 this afternoon, I was fair determined to find a bagette and a packet of Kettle Chips and a nice length of deck for twenty minutes. Well, jeepers - I may be busy, but I work for myself, for Pete's sake. And I knew, at 3.00pm, I'd be pushing on until 11.00 tonight. Woop. Lucky me - and here I am.
So I stole a few quick zeds on the deck. Have you ever stared at a blank blue sky long enough to see the sample slide bacterial weird things floating across your eyeballs? They try to float away as you focus on them, but they're there - and they do look like weird chains of microscopic life.
I love working from home.
Anyway, snoozing deck/eyeball madness aside, I have a hell of a list of things to do here beside me for May, summer or not. Great having work on, of course. But I'll be spending most of the Bank Holiday weekend at the Mac again.
Bonkers?
---
It's actually been a very jolly week, so I'm not on the moan tonight. Found myself at the Arts Institute Bournemouth twice this week, trying desperately to not look too old. It's twenty years since I studied there, which is longer than some of the students-who-didn't-know-when-to-laugh- at-my-jokes have been alive. It just doesn't make sense. But I'm not sure I did to them. Still, I awoke from a desperate snooze in the studio last Sunday afternoon to scribble down some vaguely brilliant looking diagram about creativity, hand of God style, which I inflicted on them, telling them I wasn't sure if it was, in fact, helpful brilliance, or deranged bollocks.
The point is, it was nice of Sarah to invite me in to talk to her class. I wish I'd had some chap come into one of my lessons there and say "Crikey, none of us know what the hell we're doing, don't worry. You can still have fun and just about pay the bills.."
Nice too then, of Gellan to invite back to the Enterprise Pavillion to meet some more students on Wednesday night, as they presented their design suggestions for the logo of his co-operative idea, the Dorset Design Forum. I think I may have inadvertantly been roped in to promote greater harmony across the creative industries in the sunny south. And why not - as a work-at-home deck-hugger, I've tarted around with lots of agencies in the area. Mind you, I found myself amazingly talking to local ad legend, Matt Flemming. After he diffidently mentioned Aylesworth Flemming's turnover and current business outlook, I did well to maintain my engaging professional air, but I was sweating at the thought of him asking me what Momo is currently up to.
"Emailing Radio One and kipping in the garden during working hours, mate."
Why do I imagine students can't relate to me?
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Humph.
Humph.
Sad news. On Thursday I had a little email from the BBC's audience people to say that the new series of I'm sorry, I haven't a clue, which we'd been hoping to finally make it to see, had had to be postponed, because much-loved host, Humphrey Lyttelton, had been taken into hospital. Saturday morning, it was announced that the 86-year-old had died.
He'd been hosting the self-styled antidote to panel games for some 36 years, but he'd been presenting his legendary jazz show for over forty. It was only last month, after four decades of being the UK's foremost jazz voice, he finally retired from the programme. Fundamental changes like that do seem to have a funny effect on people, which is why I'd wondered how retirement would suit him - but I suspect he'd say that the thing that really had a funny effect on him was an aortic aneurysm.
And he was funny. Obituaries are famously humourless things, so I won't try to describe him - it would sound far too respectful. Comedy is like sex, I think - describing it always sounds like you're rather missing the point. Anyone who listened to ISIHAC will have Humph's style clearly in mind - he was a dry, hilarious warmth. He kind of made it the favourite radio feature in our house. Though, to be fair, I have no idea what he was like in bed.
Weirdly, if you listen to early recordings of the show, it sounds just the same. One or two bereavements aside, it's the same cast. Listening again to an episode from 1975 a little while ago, I found it hard to believe that the intervening years had seen such fundamental changes to British society as humourless Thatcherism, Alternative Comedy and digital broadcasting; the gags were that old. Humph himself was the only thing to have noticeably aged in voice over the years - but this just made him all the funnier. The more he sounded like a venerable elder statesman, the more jolly effective were his sudden filthy double entendres.
The thing is, all this is enough to mourn the chap and when you hear friends' testimonies of him, the man was clearly a rare joy. But it's only in more recent times it's been dawning on me what a giant talent he was.
He was considered one of the greatest UK jazz musicians of all time. But he wasn't 'just' a horn player - was a prolific composer and a fantastic bandleader, performed with his group until mere weeks before he died. And as if jazz musician, composer, performer and broadcaster weren't enough accolades, he was also a writer and cartoonist. And, of course, raconteur and bon viveur.
In short, a ruddy inspiration. Funny, talented, knowledgeable and self-deprecating.
If you're interested, here's his obit at the Beeb:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3477089.stm
I wonder if Mrs Trellis will send in a card.
Sad news. On Thursday I had a little email from the BBC's audience people to say that the new series of I'm sorry, I haven't a clue, which we'd been hoping to finally make it to see, had had to be postponed, because much-loved host, Humphrey Lyttelton, had been taken into hospital. Saturday morning, it was announced that the 86-year-old had died.
He'd been hosting the self-styled antidote to panel games for some 36 years, but he'd been presenting his legendary jazz show for over forty. It was only last month, after four decades of being the UK's foremost jazz voice, he finally retired from the programme. Fundamental changes like that do seem to have a funny effect on people, which is why I'd wondered how retirement would suit him - but I suspect he'd say that the thing that really had a funny effect on him was an aortic aneurysm.
And he was funny. Obituaries are famously humourless things, so I won't try to describe him - it would sound far too respectful. Comedy is like sex, I think - describing it always sounds like you're rather missing the point. Anyone who listened to ISIHAC will have Humph's style clearly in mind - he was a dry, hilarious warmth. He kind of made it the favourite radio feature in our house. Though, to be fair, I have no idea what he was like in bed.
Weirdly, if you listen to early recordings of the show, it sounds just the same. One or two bereavements aside, it's the same cast. Listening again to an episode from 1975 a little while ago, I found it hard to believe that the intervening years had seen such fundamental changes to British society as humourless Thatcherism, Alternative Comedy and digital broadcasting; the gags were that old. Humph himself was the only thing to have noticeably aged in voice over the years - but this just made him all the funnier. The more he sounded like a venerable elder statesman, the more jolly effective were his sudden filthy double entendres.
The thing is, all this is enough to mourn the chap and when you hear friends' testimonies of him, the man was clearly a rare joy. But it's only in more recent times it's been dawning on me what a giant talent he was.
He was considered one of the greatest UK jazz musicians of all time. But he wasn't 'just' a horn player - was a prolific composer and a fantastic bandleader, performed with his group until mere weeks before he died. And as if jazz musician, composer, performer and broadcaster weren't enough accolades, he was also a writer and cartoonist. And, of course, raconteur and bon viveur.
In short, a ruddy inspiration. Funny, talented, knowledgeable and self-deprecating.
If you're interested, here's his obit at the Beeb:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3477089.stm
I wonder if Mrs Trellis will send in a card.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Cheesy.
Cheesy.
This is groovy. Had an excited email from Gellan pointing me at this:
http://www.utalkmarketing.com/pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=10122&Title=Wyke%20Farms%20ad%20wins%20People%E2%80%99s%20Choice
Thinking Juice's little TV as for Wyke Farms has won a People's Choice award, up against people with rather more budget. You can watch the ad and its rivals from the link. Nice one, G.
Why am I posting this? Rather pleasingly, Momo:timo wrote the music - a nice little tune to whistle while you're carving the Simply Gorgeous extra mature. True, it's hard to hear a note of it on YouTube, but the full thing is on the Timo website, for you dedicated cheese fans.
Doesn't help me knuckle down, this. I've spent the week trying to develop a reasonably monstrous website for one client - and now I'm at Friday morning with a half-finished website and a couple of unstarted jobs I was planning to start on Monday. And all I really want to do is get back on the album. Swing the sign round from Typo to Timo and enjoy a Friday talking silly voices through a harmoniser. Way to run a business.
But I had a slightly hefty tea-time presentation of said website lastnight, that made me miss circuits and open some wine instead - so this morning was never going to be an early starter, was it? Mind you, I had the easier time. In the same meeting, as part of the wider brand development we're partnering on for this, Gellan had to present some weighty and sometimes tricky-to-hear research. Then I got to stand up and say: 'here's your new website - as you can see, it's very pretty. Any questions?' [ finger pistol ]
Leeeetle more to it than that, obviously. But as I ponder the schedule for next week, the good thing, responsibility fans, is that Momo has an interesting spread of projects coming up.
Hopefully enough to keep us in cheese.
This is groovy. Had an excited email from Gellan pointing me at this:
Thinking Juice's little TV as for Wyke Farms has won a People's Choice award, up against people with rather more budget. You can watch the ad and its rivals from the link. Nice one, G.
Why am I posting this? Rather pleasingly, Momo:timo wrote the music - a nice little tune to whistle while you're carving the Simply Gorgeous extra mature. True, it's hard to hear a note of it on YouTube, but the full thing is on the Timo website, for you dedicated cheese fans.
Doesn't help me knuckle down, this. I've spent the week trying to develop a reasonably monstrous website for one client - and now I'm at Friday morning with a half-finished website and a couple of unstarted jobs I was planning to start on Monday. And all I really want to do is get back on the album. Swing the sign round from Typo to Timo and enjoy a Friday talking silly voices through a harmoniser. Way to run a business.
But I had a slightly hefty tea-time presentation of said website lastnight, that made me miss circuits and open some wine instead - so this morning was never going to be an early starter, was it? Mind you, I had the easier time. In the same meeting, as part of the wider brand development we're partnering on for this, Gellan had to present some weighty and sometimes tricky-to-hear research. Then I got to stand up and say: 'here's your new website - as you can see, it's very pretty. Any questions?' [ finger pistol ]
Leeeetle more to it than that, obviously. But as I ponder the schedule for next week, the good thing, responsibility fans, is that Momo has an interesting spread of projects coming up.
Hopefully enough to keep us in cheese.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Barry and George.
Barry and George.
Today is, apparently, St George's day. But my mind's on ol' Bazzer.
I may be an Englishman, but I never remember this date - 23rd April. Who knows this? And when they say that less people celebrate the nation's patron saint than celebrate Guy Fawkes night, I wonder who on earth is celebrating our basically-apocryphal dragon slayer AT ALL. And how are they doing it? We don't parade giant paper dragons down the street, or enjoy traditional dragon soup recipes, overpriced and pre-packed by Tesco, in fact we don't have ANYthing. What am I supposed to do to get all Englishy today? No one's equipped me. Who am I, someone?
And anyway, it's the big drag-on I'm thinking of. The presidential primaries in America.
So Hillers fights back again. It's a head-scratcher, isn't it? Tough bird in the one corner, gives the impression of being willing to say anything out of desperation to be nominated, but ruddy hell is tenacious. Then golden boy Obama in the other corner, all the qualifications the world is willing for a new US president, but not a sausage about how he's going to inject life into America's aimless economy. Hmm.
Lord only knows why this keeps my attention so much; I know as much about my local council elections when they come round as I do about St George's day, but the surreal race for the Democratic nomination across the Atlantic has me hooked. Or is it speared?
How did George kill the sodding dragon?
Today is, apparently, St George's day. But my mind's on ol' Bazzer.
I may be an Englishman, but I never remember this date - 23rd April. Who knows this? And when they say that less people celebrate the nation's patron saint than celebrate Guy Fawkes night, I wonder who on earth is celebrating our basically-apocryphal dragon slayer AT ALL. And how are they doing it? We don't parade giant paper dragons down the street, or enjoy traditional dragon soup recipes, overpriced and pre-packed by Tesco, in fact we don't have ANYthing. What am I supposed to do to get all Englishy today? No one's equipped me. Who am I, someone?
And anyway, it's the big drag-on I'm thinking of. The presidential primaries in America.
So Hillers fights back again. It's a head-scratcher, isn't it? Tough bird in the one corner, gives the impression of being willing to say anything out of desperation to be nominated, but ruddy hell is tenacious. Then golden boy Obama in the other corner, all the qualifications the world is willing for a new US president, but not a sausage about how he's going to inject life into America's aimless economy. Hmm.
Lord only knows why this keeps my attention so much; I know as much about my local council elections when they come round as I do about St George's day, but the surreal race for the Democratic nomination across the Atlantic has me hooked. Or is it speared?
How did George kill the sodding dragon?
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Having the horn.
Having the horn.
Oh, boy, do I.
The economy may be taking a more theatrical dive than a Premier League striker, rolling around with the kind of over-acted agony clear enough to be seen from the back tiers of Wembley, but as we all know, one of the best tonics for a flagging game is a loud bit of trumpet karaoki.
So, before my business is stretchered off indefinitely, I thought I'd stir the blood with something so exciting I could barely sit down.
I'm easily pleased, obviously. And I'm definitely in that over-excited, can't-see-it-properly stage. But there's a particular track I've had cooking for a while that reeeeally needed a horn section. Thanks to Kev putting me in touch with his good, and formerly-professional trumpet player, John... I am grinning from ear to ringing ear.
I did warn the neighbours, but it was probably just as well they were out that afternoon. A trumpet is a loud thing. A LOUD thing. But I felt it was allowed.
I may calm down when I go back to the mix and find I can't in fact stop it sounding like a school band. But right now, I SO have the horn. And so does Mark, who's practicing drums for the piece, entitled Disfunkshun.
How do I concentrate on other deadlines with the horn? The horn is all I can think about.
Ah. A cold shower of client emails. Okay. Calm now.
:o)
Oh, boy, do I.
The economy may be taking a more theatrical dive than a Premier League striker, rolling around with the kind of over-acted agony clear enough to be seen from the back tiers of Wembley, but as we all know, one of the best tonics for a flagging game is a loud bit of trumpet karaoki.
So, before my business is stretchered off indefinitely, I thought I'd stir the blood with something so exciting I could barely sit down.
I'm easily pleased, obviously. And I'm definitely in that over-excited, can't-see-it-properly stage. But there's a particular track I've had cooking for a while that reeeeally needed a horn section. Thanks to Kev putting me in touch with his good, and formerly-professional trumpet player, John... I am grinning from ear to ringing ear.
I did warn the neighbours, but it was probably just as well they were out that afternoon. A trumpet is a loud thing. A LOUD thing. But I felt it was allowed.
I may calm down when I go back to the mix and find I can't in fact stop it sounding like a school band. But right now, I SO have the horn. And so does Mark, who's practicing drums for the piece, entitled Disfunkshun.
How do I concentrate on other deadlines with the horn? The horn is all I can think about.
Ah. A cold shower of client emails. Okay. Calm now.
:o)
Monday, April 14, 2008
Crash.
Crash.
Don't know if you saw any of the interview with the parents of Indira Swann, Greg and Louise. They were giving testimony to their daughter, killed along with four other young women in a tragically simple coach crash in Ecuador.
We were stopped short by their words. The couple's dedication to encouragement in the middle of such obvious agony was a kind of wisdom too heroic for words. There was a visible pause in the Channel 4 News studio, after the tape.
Seize the day. Do the best you can with how long you've got. Don't stop learning about the world. Accidents happen.
Accidents happen. Greg seemed to wring the words out of himself. The determination of conviction.
--
Getting on for a decade ago now, two young friends of our family in Sussex were killed in a car accident in Australia. Two others with them survived. I remember the morning news waking me up with the story and I just kind of suspected it was them.
I didn't know them. Met maybe once or twice, I can't remember. But they were central to Caroline's sister's family of friends, and watching everyone in the community try to come to terms with such a pointless, recreational loss was silencing. I don't know what I'd do, if one of my adopted family didn't come home from a holiday. Build a shrine, probably.
Tonight's brief interview reminded me how you never know what life can grow out of the jagged fractures of a crash. How life likes to show up where it shouldn't be. I wonder for them. But, as Stephen Lawrence's mother, Doreen, said at the opening of the centre that fights to creatively equip young people facing poverty, bearing his name in St Johns, "I'd swap it all in a heartbeat for Stephen."
Just thinking of all five families.
Don't know if you saw any of the interview with the parents of Indira Swann, Greg and Louise. They were giving testimony to their daughter, killed along with four other young women in a tragically simple coach crash in Ecuador.
We were stopped short by their words. The couple's dedication to encouragement in the middle of such obvious agony was a kind of wisdom too heroic for words. There was a visible pause in the Channel 4 News studio, after the tape.
Seize the day. Do the best you can with how long you've got. Don't stop learning about the world. Accidents happen.
Accidents happen. Greg seemed to wring the words out of himself. The determination of conviction.
--
Getting on for a decade ago now, two young friends of our family in Sussex were killed in a car accident in Australia. Two others with them survived. I remember the morning news waking me up with the story and I just kind of suspected it was them.
I didn't know them. Met maybe once or twice, I can't remember. But they were central to Caroline's sister's family of friends, and watching everyone in the community try to come to terms with such a pointless, recreational loss was silencing. I don't know what I'd do, if one of my adopted family didn't come home from a holiday. Build a shrine, probably.
Tonight's brief interview reminded me how you never know what life can grow out of the jagged fractures of a crash. How life likes to show up where it shouldn't be. I wonder for them. But, as Stephen Lawrence's mother, Doreen, said at the opening of the centre that fights to creatively equip young people facing poverty, bearing his name in St Johns, "I'd swap it all in a heartbeat for Stephen."
Just thinking of all five families.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Allsop's Fables.
Allsop's Fables.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've had a steady, delicate stream of blossom blowing past my studio window. Some years, the local trees deposit their pink cargo in one wallop overnight - dumping a burst duvet of spring petals on the road around their roots in a gusty turn of weather. This year, it's sort of strewn gently down the road like it's welcoming important business visitors to a five-star suite in a Chinese hotel. Pretty.
So I'm in a committed mood of summery optimism. This is based entirely on short-termism of the most childish kind. I just want to go on holiday - awake, this time - and tinker with bits of music and go have coffee with chums.
Yes. You're right, I can see this isn't even a shade of a different mood to normal, at Momo. But sometimes I jest about being a lazy, arty blighter to remind myself of these cherished values while working my proverbials off and talking very sensibly to people who are paying for my professional help. A sort of reality check.
Of course, in the creative business, you are terribly prey to desperately un-creative businesses - and we are having the young mother of 'reality' checks at the moment.
Housing and money and blaaahhh. So the banks were over-ambitious and complacent in their lend-some-to-make-some strategies and now they're being reactionary and petulant and mela-dramatic. Snatching away the toys. It's not like we didn't all see this coming, is it? Just like the other millions of unqualified laypeople who said that the idea of putting western tanks into the Middle East in 2002 would be a poor piece of politics and defense strategy. Yep, we may all know nothing, but we were right. And now again - what a shocker, overnight Credit Crunch.
Although much of my sensible work is connected with the property market in different ways, the debates and dramatic language quickly bore me. Don't they you? I mean, it's all a worry. But let's listen to a bastion of common sense in such times - a comfort and a no-nonsense guide - Kirsty Allsop.
She was on Today this morning, basically telling us all to get a grip and not panic. And it made me think that Relocation Relocation - despite looking ever more like a guilty pleasure - should introduce a new feature to its weekly format, to give us all succor and good cheer in these choppy waters of sudden economic panic.
Allsop's Fables. I need not elaborate further, need I. Just matronly, green-wellies-with-skirt, 'pull your pop socks up' common sense. Sponsored by ING Direct.
-------
You never know when the weather will change. Beams of sunlight through the clouds can be a welcome relief, but they can close up just as suddenly. And lounging around on the cabin top in the warmth is certainly some of what you put to sea for, but stay there too long under your sunnies and you might find yourself in a squall in your speedos.
Well, however choppy the waters ahead, I do of course know how to make a small cabin feel like home at 45°, as you know. I'm a seasoned salty old sea dog now, famously. And my oft-clung-to kids lifering of jollyness might look stupidly inadequate at sea, but it does keep my head above water.
I can think of three or four or five or six sets of circumstances around me that feel like being pitched overboard. People and things I wish I could throw a sturdy, reassuring tether to. The best I can ever do, I've come to realise, is throw a flimsy floatation aid with an inflatable duck's head attached to it - not because things around us are only bathtime deep, but because it might make a moment of funny where there shouldn't be one. And at least help buoyancy a little.
So I'm trusting that the little Momo boat will turn into the wind and ride the swell okay. And if I sprang a leak and had to jump ship to Tesco, all other hands lost, I'd hardly be able to complain. I'd have the memories of weeks like this one, where the combination things on my list of things to do may still be ignominious, unglamorous and only subtly paid - but sounds like the lifestyle of a There's No Shame In Saying It To His Face: Jammy Bastard. Believe me, I do know. And I am enjoying it like a kid, for as long as I can get away with it. Which probably won't be all that long.
What makes up this combination of JB work at Momo? Oh, sheesh, it's just the usual stuff, really; it's nothing special. I'm just a jobbing creative and it sounds like fun when you talk about it. But I think when you get to write bonkers copy for a range of organic kids snacks, you just start to feel good about the world. I don't know what passengers would have thought, had they looked over the shoulder of the sensible-suited chap in the middle carriage of the train back from London yesterday, if they'd actually read what he was studiously penning.
SPLOT! FRRRRRAAPP! SPLOOCH! CLONK!
I went out last night, still suited and sensible looking, trying hard not to punctuate everything I said with energetic, made-up verbs.
Anyway, the point is that doing this AS WELL as designing comprehensive rebrands for property companies; presenting large website projects for social sector housing associations in the morning, and recording trumpet parts with session musicians in the afternoon... all sounds like a sodding nice time in life. One that might be little more than a short-term series of distractions from the big waves of Oh Buggery piling up astern. For sure. But I have no idea how to command the waves. And I've learned this much: there's a time to strap on your oilies and bare your teeth at the perfect storm, but you'll thinking of the blossom blowing past your window at home when the mast breaks.
..I just KNOW Kirsty would tell me to get a ruddy grip and get on with my work. So I shall.
..Tinkle of chardonnay, anyone? Let's pack up early tonight...
Over the last couple of weeks, I've had a steady, delicate stream of blossom blowing past my studio window. Some years, the local trees deposit their pink cargo in one wallop overnight - dumping a burst duvet of spring petals on the road around their roots in a gusty turn of weather. This year, it's sort of strewn gently down the road like it's welcoming important business visitors to a five-star suite in a Chinese hotel. Pretty.
So I'm in a committed mood of summery optimism. This is based entirely on short-termism of the most childish kind. I just want to go on holiday - awake, this time - and tinker with bits of music and go have coffee with chums.
Yes. You're right, I can see this isn't even a shade of a different mood to normal, at Momo. But sometimes I jest about being a lazy, arty blighter to remind myself of these cherished values while working my proverbials off and talking very sensibly to people who are paying for my professional help. A sort of reality check.
Of course, in the creative business, you are terribly prey to desperately un-creative businesses - and we are having the young mother of 'reality' checks at the moment.
Housing and money and blaaahhh. So the banks were over-ambitious and complacent in their lend-some-to-make-some strategies and now they're being reactionary and petulant and mela-dramatic. Snatching away the toys. It's not like we didn't all see this coming, is it? Just like the other millions of unqualified laypeople who said that the idea of putting western tanks into the Middle East in 2002 would be a poor piece of politics and defense strategy. Yep, we may all know nothing, but we were right. And now again - what a shocker, overnight Credit Crunch.
Although much of my sensible work is connected with the property market in different ways, the debates and dramatic language quickly bore me. Don't they you? I mean, it's all a worry. But let's listen to a bastion of common sense in such times - a comfort and a no-nonsense guide - Kirsty Allsop.
She was on Today this morning, basically telling us all to get a grip and not panic. And it made me think that Relocation Relocation - despite looking ever more like a guilty pleasure - should introduce a new feature to its weekly format, to give us all succor and good cheer in these choppy waters of sudden economic panic.
Allsop's Fables. I need not elaborate further, need I. Just matronly, green-wellies-with-skirt, 'pull your pop socks up' common sense. Sponsored by ING Direct.
-------
You never know when the weather will change. Beams of sunlight through the clouds can be a welcome relief, but they can close up just as suddenly. And lounging around on the cabin top in the warmth is certainly some of what you put to sea for, but stay there too long under your sunnies and you might find yourself in a squall in your speedos.
Well, however choppy the waters ahead, I do of course know how to make a small cabin feel like home at 45°, as you know. I'm a seasoned salty old sea dog now, famously. And my oft-clung-to kids lifering of jollyness might look stupidly inadequate at sea, but it does keep my head above water.
I can think of three or four or five or six sets of circumstances around me that feel like being pitched overboard. People and things I wish I could throw a sturdy, reassuring tether to. The best I can ever do, I've come to realise, is throw a flimsy floatation aid with an inflatable duck's head attached to it - not because things around us are only bathtime deep, but because it might make a moment of funny where there shouldn't be one. And at least help buoyancy a little.
So I'm trusting that the little Momo boat will turn into the wind and ride the swell okay. And if I sprang a leak and had to jump ship to Tesco, all other hands lost, I'd hardly be able to complain. I'd have the memories of weeks like this one, where the combination things on my list of things to do may still be ignominious, unglamorous and only subtly paid - but sounds like the lifestyle of a There's No Shame In Saying It To His Face: Jammy Bastard. Believe me, I do know. And I am enjoying it like a kid, for as long as I can get away with it. Which probably won't be all that long.
What makes up this combination of JB work at Momo? Oh, sheesh, it's just the usual stuff, really; it's nothing special. I'm just a jobbing creative and it sounds like fun when you talk about it. But I think when you get to write bonkers copy for a range of organic kids snacks, you just start to feel good about the world. I don't know what passengers would have thought, had they looked over the shoulder of the sensible-suited chap in the middle carriage of the train back from London yesterday, if they'd actually read what he was studiously penning.
SPLOT! FRRRRRAAPP! SPLOOCH! CLONK!
I went out last night, still suited and sensible looking, trying hard not to punctuate everything I said with energetic, made-up verbs.
Anyway, the point is that doing this AS WELL as designing comprehensive rebrands for property companies; presenting large website projects for social sector housing associations in the morning, and recording trumpet parts with session musicians in the afternoon... all sounds like a sodding nice time in life. One that might be little more than a short-term series of distractions from the big waves of Oh Buggery piling up astern. For sure. But I have no idea how to command the waves. And I've learned this much: there's a time to strap on your oilies and bare your teeth at the perfect storm, but you'll thinking of the blossom blowing past your window at home when the mast breaks.
..I just KNOW Kirsty would tell me to get a ruddy grip and get on with my work. So I shall.
..Tinkle of chardonnay, anyone? Let's pack up early tonight...
Monday, April 07, 2008
BST
WHAT was going on at the weekend? Drove away on Friday in balmly sunshine to a sweaty Ibiza soundtrack - woke up on Sunday to a winter blummen' wonderland with snowmen and carols. Moose in the streets. Dickensian children running with hoops. An overnight shortage on carrots.
We're in British Summer Time, aren't we?
So, er - SNOW?
WHAT was going on at the weekend? Drove away on Friday in balmly sunshine to a sweaty Ibiza soundtrack - woke up on Sunday to a winter blummen' wonderland with snowmen and carols. Moose in the streets. Dickensian children running with hoops. An overnight shortage on carrots.
We're in British Summer Time, aren't we?
So, er - SNOW?
Friday, April 04, 2008
Salt.
Salt.
I have it in my ears. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if I still do, one week on. It's another gorgeously summer-hinting morning this morning, but seven days back was a different story. In fact, that wet, windy, chilly Friday as we stood on the pontoon at Hamble Marina, we were all a little indignant that the scene was such a different story from the DAY before; Thursday last had been glorious. Still, at my sensible, can-do age you do rather look rotten weather in the teeth with a grin. Felt like a school trip.
As foolish a sense as this may turn out to be in future, it's hard to imagine putting to sea as a relative new-comer in a safer pair of hands than those of our skipper for the weekend, Steve King. Something pastoral must kick in for him at the helm - along with a competitive imperative to have the best boat and crew in the Solent, I suspect. Whatever, it works. We felt safe, and acted safe. Which, ah... turned out to be a good thing.
Now, I've not earned my sea legs. A lifetime living on the coast has put me on the water strangely few times. Stranger too is the inexplicable thing that I spent five long years of my life on the UK's biggest selling boating magazine; Valsheda may look beautiful in thirties sepier on my kitchen wall, but the kitchen floor doesn't officially move. So I did feel that the ninth member of the crew might turn out to be the good Cardinal - Chunder, I mean of course. But thankfully, he didn't actually visit - cast his shadow, but didn't bunk down with us. Despite the very best efforts of Skipper and First Mate to serve us elaborately creamy, cheesy, sea-foody, Tesco Finest entrés and luncheons washed down with beer the whole weekend, while in the odd Force 8 squall, I enjoyed my food only the once. Just.
And yes, I did say Force 8. Bit blowy for the odd moment. The thing is, we may have spent Saturday setting our faces like flint to windward, beating up the Solent from Portsmouth to Yarmouth on our ear for much of it, but the UK's favourite stretch of maritime playground is fairly forgiving in the chop department. I'm not saying we weren't all terribly manly about the whole thing, but a real salty old dog would laugh quietly at our tales and nod knowingly into his pipe. ..Which, I've come to believe quite firmly, is also the universal Experienced Skipper's sign for Oh Shit, We're Really In Trouble Now. So you never know.
Thing is, I love the especially-British will to make yourself at home wherever you are. My theory, long-cherrished, that pizza is the ultimate universal food was borne out magnificently, somewhere off Cowes at 45°. I'd kept some from the meal the night before in Portsmouth and someone suggested we distribute it among the men. So, image to take to my grave, there we were passing around flapping slices of the stone-baked blessing, ice-cold in a wet headwind, like we were at a picnic. Morning, noon, night; hot, cold, luke warm; dry or wet - there is NEVER a wrong time for pizza.
Nope, it may have been a fun bit of blowing to sail in, producing the odd bruised shin, but it wasn't proper scary. If we'd have forged out into the Channel that morning, and aimed to make for Yarmouth via the Horn of Ventnor, I think we might have had some interesting swell to contend with as well. Probably, machismo aside, the Solent's weather was baptism enough for the first weekenders. Plus, we'd not have made it into the harbour with enough time for real ale in the rustic warmth of the local pub, shining its chunky-knit cosy reassurance out through the stormy night. Or for the Five Star Michelin experience in the cabin, prepared as little short of loving art by Mr Green and Mr King. Or for hoisting Robbie up the tallest mast in the harbour to retrieve a flailing halliard, hours into the fifth bottle of oaky red...
Actually, if you could have seen us round the table on board that night - and you were a girl - you'd have laughed. Just the right music, just the right wine, just the right combinations of flavours... I tried to picture our selection of other halves in the same situation and came to the instantaneous conclusion that the scene wouldn't have been half so delicate and atmospheric. Steve was, I kid not, genuinely annoyed he'd 'left the candles in Andy's car'.
I was so proud of the boys that night.
In the event, we woke up to an unexpectedly stunning morning. Calm. Flat. Blue. Disappointed though we were to have erected a goose-wing sail configuration, with the express purpose of creaming downhill at warm nine, only to find we were more sort of adrift with a pretty work of canvas art overhead, the sunshine was a welcome warmth.
Three days wasn't long enough. It comes down to who you share these things with, of course - a boat can be a miserable place very easily, and I felt lucky to have who I had around me. But, perhaps all weird experiences - such as working on a boating magazine without getting your feet wet - lead somewhere after all. Maybe.
As soon as I got in that Sunday evening, I emailed PBO to ask about a good RYA Competent Crew course...
I have it in my ears. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if I still do, one week on. It's another gorgeously summer-hinting morning this morning, but seven days back was a different story. In fact, that wet, windy, chilly Friday as we stood on the pontoon at Hamble Marina, we were all a little indignant that the scene was such a different story from the DAY before; Thursday last had been glorious. Still, at my sensible, can-do age you do rather look rotten weather in the teeth with a grin. Felt like a school trip.
As foolish a sense as this may turn out to be in future, it's hard to imagine putting to sea as a relative new-comer in a safer pair of hands than those of our skipper for the weekend, Steve King. Something pastoral must kick in for him at the helm - along with a competitive imperative to have the best boat and crew in the Solent, I suspect. Whatever, it works. We felt safe, and acted safe. Which, ah... turned out to be a good thing.
Now, I've not earned my sea legs. A lifetime living on the coast has put me on the water strangely few times. Stranger too is the inexplicable thing that I spent five long years of my life on the UK's biggest selling boating magazine; Valsheda may look beautiful in thirties sepier on my kitchen wall, but the kitchen floor doesn't officially move. So I did feel that the ninth member of the crew might turn out to be the good Cardinal - Chunder, I mean of course. But thankfully, he didn't actually visit - cast his shadow, but didn't bunk down with us. Despite the very best efforts of Skipper and First Mate to serve us elaborately creamy, cheesy, sea-foody, Tesco Finest entrés and luncheons washed down with beer the whole weekend, while in the odd Force 8 squall, I enjoyed my food only the once. Just.
And yes, I did say Force 8. Bit blowy for the odd moment. The thing is, we may have spent Saturday setting our faces like flint to windward, beating up the Solent from Portsmouth to Yarmouth on our ear for much of it, but the UK's favourite stretch of maritime playground is fairly forgiving in the chop department. I'm not saying we weren't all terribly manly about the whole thing, but a real salty old dog would laugh quietly at our tales and nod knowingly into his pipe. ..Which, I've come to believe quite firmly, is also the universal Experienced Skipper's sign for Oh Shit, We're Really In Trouble Now. So you never know.
Thing is, I love the especially-British will to make yourself at home wherever you are. My theory, long-cherrished, that pizza is the ultimate universal food was borne out magnificently, somewhere off Cowes at 45°. I'd kept some from the meal the night before in Portsmouth and someone suggested we distribute it among the men. So, image to take to my grave, there we were passing around flapping slices of the stone-baked blessing, ice-cold in a wet headwind, like we were at a picnic. Morning, noon, night; hot, cold, luke warm; dry or wet - there is NEVER a wrong time for pizza.
Nope, it may have been a fun bit of blowing to sail in, producing the odd bruised shin, but it wasn't proper scary. If we'd have forged out into the Channel that morning, and aimed to make for Yarmouth via the Horn of Ventnor, I think we might have had some interesting swell to contend with as well. Probably, machismo aside, the Solent's weather was baptism enough for the first weekenders. Plus, we'd not have made it into the harbour with enough time for real ale in the rustic warmth of the local pub, shining its chunky-knit cosy reassurance out through the stormy night. Or for the Five Star Michelin experience in the cabin, prepared as little short of loving art by Mr Green and Mr King. Or for hoisting Robbie up the tallest mast in the harbour to retrieve a flailing halliard, hours into the fifth bottle of oaky red...
Actually, if you could have seen us round the table on board that night - and you were a girl - you'd have laughed. Just the right music, just the right wine, just the right combinations of flavours... I tried to picture our selection of other halves in the same situation and came to the instantaneous conclusion that the scene wouldn't have been half so delicate and atmospheric. Steve was, I kid not, genuinely annoyed he'd 'left the candles in Andy's car'.
I was so proud of the boys that night.
In the event, we woke up to an unexpectedly stunning morning. Calm. Flat. Blue. Disappointed though we were to have erected a goose-wing sail configuration, with the express purpose of creaming downhill at warm nine, only to find we were more sort of adrift with a pretty work of canvas art overhead, the sunshine was a welcome warmth.
Three days wasn't long enough. It comes down to who you share these things with, of course - a boat can be a miserable place very easily, and I felt lucky to have who I had around me. But, perhaps all weird experiences - such as working on a boating magazine without getting your feet wet - lead somewhere after all. Maybe.
As soon as I got in that Sunday evening, I emailed PBO to ask about a good RYA Competent Crew course...
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Rong radio.
Rong radio.
Loved this. Scooched over a precariously ambitious serving of curry after circuits tonight, cloyed sweat still matted to me like mango chutney to a naan, FourDocs played out an award-winning Three Minute Wonder. Hip poet Benjamin Zephaniah doing a sterling performance to a cam in a cab:
http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/film/film-detail.jsp?id=65565
Great stuff. We've all been listening to the Rong Radio, Benjy. We've known it for years, of course, but we don't seem to be doing much with the knowledge. In fact, I do rather think I'm getting comfortable with my status anxiety. After twenty years of idly enjoying myself, I still have no idea how to make much of a difference to anything, of course, and am still clinging to the vain hope that something, some day, will make its mind up to happen for me. So I won't have the on going agony of having to choose.
Attaboy - make a difference. It's rather beginning to seem that my values are degrading as I get older; too much rong radio. Fatness grows in the head, as well as the tee shirt, I think.
But, while I'm killing time in my thickening womb tank of apathy, if there's one immaturity I am fairly stubbornly happy to have carried from the beginning, it's weirdly introspective joy of making music and daydreaming about the Next Album Project. And, by jingo, it's happening. After six years.
Had an impromptu dinner at the revamped Spyglass the other night, to celebrate Caroline's handing in of the latest epic installment of diploma work. Mark and Sarah joined us round the table, as part of their Real Blummen' Actual Week Off celebrations and as the evening lengthened we found our table rounded by a whole number of folk.
Tim Colthup and I spent the whole night talking music. He's back into it - finishing a long-awaited album in the same freakin' apartment we locked ourselves into twenty summers ago to go music creative mad. We're both as excited now as we were then. Nothing's moved on and I couldn't have been happier than right then, jabbering with grins in the old Ocean. Why do we lose ourselves in it so?
All thirteen tracks I've decided on for my own new collection are up and spinning together here in the studio - around Actual Paid Work - and I'm just loving being in the right place again. That's just what it still feels like. However stupendously pointless that right place has always always appeared to be.
No, don't be nice. You've not heard the rubbish I'm recording yet.
It's never going to get on the radio, that's for damn sure.
Loved this. Scooched over a precariously ambitious serving of curry after circuits tonight, cloyed sweat still matted to me like mango chutney to a naan, FourDocs played out an award-winning Three Minute Wonder. Hip poet Benjamin Zephaniah doing a sterling performance to a cam in a cab:
http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/film/film-detail.jsp?id=65565
Great stuff. We've all been listening to the Rong Radio, Benjy. We've known it for years, of course, but we don't seem to be doing much with the knowledge. In fact, I do rather think I'm getting comfortable with my status anxiety. After twenty years of idly enjoying myself, I still have no idea how to make much of a difference to anything, of course, and am still clinging to the vain hope that something, some day, will make its mind up to happen for me. So I won't have the on going agony of having to choose.
Attaboy - make a difference. It's rather beginning to seem that my values are degrading as I get older; too much rong radio. Fatness grows in the head, as well as the tee shirt, I think.
But, while I'm killing time in my thickening womb tank of apathy, if there's one immaturity I am fairly stubbornly happy to have carried from the beginning, it's weirdly introspective joy of making music and daydreaming about the Next Album Project. And, by jingo, it's happening. After six years.
Had an impromptu dinner at the revamped Spyglass the other night, to celebrate Caroline's handing in of the latest epic installment of diploma work. Mark and Sarah joined us round the table, as part of their Real Blummen' Actual Week Off celebrations and as the evening lengthened we found our table rounded by a whole number of folk.
Tim Colthup and I spent the whole night talking music. He's back into it - finishing a long-awaited album in the same freakin' apartment we locked ourselves into twenty summers ago to go music creative mad. We're both as excited now as we were then. Nothing's moved on and I couldn't have been happier than right then, jabbering with grins in the old Ocean. Why do we lose ourselves in it so?
All thirteen tracks I've decided on for my own new collection are up and spinning together here in the studio - around Actual Paid Work - and I'm just loving being in the right place again. That's just what it still feels like. However stupendously pointless that right place has always always appeared to be.
No, don't be nice. You've not heard the rubbish I'm recording yet.
It's never going to get on the radio, that's for damn sure.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Gay.
Gay.
Interesting that, in a week where the word 'gay' was polled by UK teachers as by far the most used term of casual abuse in the playgrounds of Britain in 2008, I found a rather interesting comment on a BBC web article.
I couldn't sleep lastnight for some reason. Ended up getting up to write down some ideas that came to mind, unhindered by the normal daytime crap. Haven't looked back this morning to see if they will turn out to be the usual night time crap. But before the ol' bean turned to creative matters, I had been randomly thinking about this little post, left by someone called 'Sam, a Brit abroad', in answer to a piece about the Bible's attitude to homosexuality. It was a neat summation of the two views held by believers on the subject - a subject otherwise seen as absurdly moot by most people in the country.
This morning, in a not-surprising late starter for us, we were listening to the Radio 4 joy that is In Our Time and they were discussing the philosopher, Kierkegaard. And jeepers, we even understood it. More than that, it even appeared to make sense to us. But this 'father of existentialism' actually had a very personal view of Christianity... no, I'm not about to reveal he was gay. He saw the need to sometimes embrace opposing ideas if we are to attempt to understand things beyond ourselves. A necessary tension.
Trying not to behave like too much of a smug arse because, after all, I have no study to back this up at all, it did make me think how much I've thought over the years that faith is a long succession of impossible balances. That, if you feel impelled to make a declaration of faith in something - atheist or believer - the road you'll have to walk is a daily one of tension. Of holding a long series of impossible balances in tension. If you care. In simple terms, could be desire/duty. Fulfillment/sacrifice. Certainty/Open-mindedness. Hope/Reality. Responsibility/Submission to events. Trust/likelyhood. That's the high-wire act of faith. ..It rather comes down to what you're choosing to put your faith in, but when that distinctly un-impirical idea starts to make a bonkers kind of sense, you're beginning to get it. I think.
I can only measure to the end of my nose. Beyond it, I need to accept things may sometimes look contradictory in plebby human language, that aren't in the bigger cosmos. We surely have to keep measuring what we can, to enlarge the world of certainty as wisely as possible - Duh. I want to know what the hell a graviton really is, baby; we might finally get proper flying cars and stuff. But accepting that even a long-awaited Theory Of Everything, will in no way tell us everything, is just honest. What we choose to think beyond the nose ruler is another, very personal, matter... Oop - there I go again, holding my impossible philosophical tensions with casual diffidence.
..Yep, I agree. Impressively deep stuff. I think I thought a lot of other deep stuff at three AM too, about how the spectrum of sexuality is not simply about desire but identity, of course. Interesting how our desires can be our labels, outwardly and inwardly. "Hi, I'm Bob. I'm a transexual Star Trekker. That's me. What I want is who I am. And it demands a LOT of wardrobe space, let me tell you..."
I think I also came up with some clever analogy about how that sexual spectrum could be seen as a circular colour wheel - but a cylinder of brightness as well as a flat rotation of inclination.
See? Smart-sounding at three in the morning. I suspect it's as helpful to daily life as a pair of men's jeans three sizes too small - all bollocks - but there we are. Not about to devote a lifetime of study to it. But I did go back to this comment here and think, after reading the usual cartoon like responses to a religious article, this one somehow had the tone of voice of someone who in some way actually got what a God attitude might be to being gay:
"I'm 37 years old, an evangelical Christian(the kind who that believe you can "know" God personally/for real), and a struggling celibate. I knew for sure I was gay at 13. Unmistakable gay feelings etc when still a pre-pubescent junior. I became a Christian at uni, and then two very real worlds collided. No doubts about the person or reality of God. Nor of his love for me. Nor of my sexuality. My spirit (and mind)has always leaned towards my staying celibate - but my heart and emotions want what most do, a settled, loving relationship. I read the Bible several times - all of it,and as a student too - none of the points raised are new to me. Following that collision c20 yrs ago, daily I try to work through the reality of my own personal 'collateral damage'." Sam, Brit abroad.
You might have no idea where Sam is coming from here, but to my mind, there's nothing playground gay about it.
Interesting that, in a week where the word 'gay' was polled by UK teachers as by far the most used term of casual abuse in the playgrounds of Britain in 2008, I found a rather interesting comment on a BBC web article.
I couldn't sleep lastnight for some reason. Ended up getting up to write down some ideas that came to mind, unhindered by the normal daytime crap. Haven't looked back this morning to see if they will turn out to be the usual night time crap. But before the ol' bean turned to creative matters, I had been randomly thinking about this little post, left by someone called 'Sam, a Brit abroad', in answer to a piece about the Bible's attitude to homosexuality. It was a neat summation of the two views held by believers on the subject - a subject otherwise seen as absurdly moot by most people in the country.
This morning, in a not-surprising late starter for us, we were listening to the Radio 4 joy that is In Our Time and they were discussing the philosopher, Kierkegaard. And jeepers, we even understood it. More than that, it even appeared to make sense to us. But this 'father of existentialism' actually had a very personal view of Christianity... no, I'm not about to reveal he was gay. He saw the need to sometimes embrace opposing ideas if we are to attempt to understand things beyond ourselves. A necessary tension.
Trying not to behave like too much of a smug arse because, after all, I have no study to back this up at all, it did make me think how much I've thought over the years that faith is a long succession of impossible balances. That, if you feel impelled to make a declaration of faith in something - atheist or believer - the road you'll have to walk is a daily one of tension. Of holding a long series of impossible balances in tension. If you care. In simple terms, could be desire/duty. Fulfillment/sacrifice. Certainty/Open-mindedness. Hope/Reality. Responsibility/Submission to events. Trust/likelyhood. That's the high-wire act of faith. ..It rather comes down to what you're choosing to put your faith in, but when that distinctly un-impirical idea starts to make a bonkers kind of sense, you're beginning to get it. I think.
I can only measure to the end of my nose. Beyond it, I need to accept things may sometimes look contradictory in plebby human language, that aren't in the bigger cosmos. We surely have to keep measuring what we can, to enlarge the world of certainty as wisely as possible - Duh. I want to know what the hell a graviton really is, baby; we might finally get proper flying cars and stuff. But accepting that even a long-awaited Theory Of Everything, will in no way tell us everything, is just honest. What we choose to think beyond the nose ruler is another, very personal, matter... Oop - there I go again, holding my impossible philosophical tensions with casual diffidence.
..Yep, I agree. Impressively deep stuff. I think I thought a lot of other deep stuff at three AM too, about how the spectrum of sexuality is not simply about desire but identity, of course. Interesting how our desires can be our labels, outwardly and inwardly. "Hi, I'm Bob. I'm a transexual Star Trekker. That's me. What I want is who I am. And it demands a LOT of wardrobe space, let me tell you..."
I think I also came up with some clever analogy about how that sexual spectrum could be seen as a circular colour wheel - but a cylinder of brightness as well as a flat rotation of inclination.
See? Smart-sounding at three in the morning. I suspect it's as helpful to daily life as a pair of men's jeans three sizes too small - all bollocks - but there we are. Not about to devote a lifetime of study to it. But I did go back to this comment here and think, after reading the usual cartoon like responses to a religious article, this one somehow had the tone of voice of someone who in some way actually got what a God attitude might be to being gay:
"I'm 37 years old, an evangelical Christian(the kind who that believe you can "know" God personally/for real), and a struggling celibate. I knew for sure I was gay at 13. Unmistakable gay feelings etc when still a pre-pubescent junior. I became a Christian at uni, and then two very real worlds collided. No doubts about the person or reality of God. Nor of his love for me. Nor of my sexuality. My spirit (and mind)has always leaned towards my staying celibate - but my heart and emotions want what most do, a settled, loving relationship. I read the Bible several times - all of it,and as a student too - none of the points raised are new to me. Following that collision c20 yrs ago, daily I try to work through the reality of my own personal 'collateral damage'." Sam, Brit abroad.
You might have no idea where Sam is coming from here, but to my mind, there's nothing playground gay about it.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
News travels fast.
News travels fast.
So many giant things seem to vie for attention if you ever have the misfortune to turn on the news, but it's often the small things - or the individuals - that seem to really affect you. Or you feel able to respond to meaningfully.
I wanted to chew over the situation in Gaza one more time; find a way to shake the tree of it. Throttle the frigging life out of it. But somehow the will seeped out of me.
I wanted to explore why I'm so instinctively hoping for Obama - despite his conspicuously vague Actual Policies - for the indefensibly trivial, worldly, dreadfully politicianal reason that he's such a natural orator. He's black, and he's funny. Aparently. But is it enough? Why does it feel like enough? Please let it be enough.
I wanted to cry for little Shannon when they actually found her alive. But there's nothing more to say there, is there.
I wondered too about the untimely - call it early - loss of Anthony Minghella. He surely had so much creative work still ahead of him. Someone who championed British film and British creative talent - what a sudden loss. What a fabulous selection of films to leave mankind in your wake. Makes you think too.
And, considering I've just sent another shipment of artwork to Shanghai, I'm sure I could certainly be exploring the growing challenge of China - Tibet and Ten Downing Street's moral vaguery, or the world's new favourite trading buddy's backdoor to Burmese oppression. It's a tickler, isn't it?
Hey, and where would anyone even start with the state of the economy in America, or Still President Bush's declaration that the war was worth it, or... or a thousand other stories. Big and impossible.
Nope, much as you may wish higher things for yourself - a nobler application of one's self - your brain will always tell you what's really important to you. The ol' subconscious lets you know, you know? Makes clear what you're really giving a fig for.
Lastnight I dreamt I was offered a lift by Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson, on the lookout for a new presenter for... oh, shite. I'll just leave it there; you get the point.
I need to get OUT...
So many giant things seem to vie for attention if you ever have the misfortune to turn on the news, but it's often the small things - or the individuals - that seem to really affect you. Or you feel able to respond to meaningfully.
I wanted to chew over the situation in Gaza one more time; find a way to shake the tree of it. Throttle the frigging life out of it. But somehow the will seeped out of me.
I wanted to explore why I'm so instinctively hoping for Obama - despite his conspicuously vague Actual Policies - for the indefensibly trivial, worldly, dreadfully politicianal reason that he's such a natural orator. He's black, and he's funny. Aparently. But is it enough? Why does it feel like enough? Please let it be enough.
I wanted to cry for little Shannon when they actually found her alive. But there's nothing more to say there, is there.
I wondered too about the untimely - call it early - loss of Anthony Minghella. He surely had so much creative work still ahead of him. Someone who championed British film and British creative talent - what a sudden loss. What a fabulous selection of films to leave mankind in your wake. Makes you think too.
And, considering I've just sent another shipment of artwork to Shanghai, I'm sure I could certainly be exploring the growing challenge of China - Tibet and Ten Downing Street's moral vaguery, or the world's new favourite trading buddy's backdoor to Burmese oppression. It's a tickler, isn't it?
Hey, and where would anyone even start with the state of the economy in America, or Still President Bush's declaration that the war was worth it, or... or a thousand other stories. Big and impossible.
Nope, much as you may wish higher things for yourself - a nobler application of one's self - your brain will always tell you what's really important to you. The ol' subconscious lets you know, you know? Makes clear what you're really giving a fig for.
Lastnight I dreamt I was offered a lift by Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson, on the lookout for a new presenter for... oh, shite. I'll just leave it there; you get the point.
I need to get OUT...
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Beer.
Beer.
Zot. Brugge Zot - that's the stuff. Zot means 'fool' in Flemmish Dutch, apparently, so I took to it instantly. Though, I should confess straight up that I only took a couple of sips; we may have just spent the weekend in a beer Mecca of sorts, but I clung to a series of trusty stems of vino while we were there. I didn't even make myself sick on chocolates - though they are in fact currency in Bruges.
Yes, we made it. Spent the whole time wandering around cobbled streets, gazing at gables and cornices and public spaces. I think I should basically be doing Caroline's Urban Design diploma with her, I so obviously know so much. When we weren't ambling, we were sleeping the said of the undead in room.
Nothing more interesting than that to say. Everyone with a vaguely Dutch disposition seems to be unambiguously friendly and effortlessly tri-lingual. But I couldn't even be bothered to do my bad accent comedy routine.
Traveling by train is kind of cute and St Pancras is a joy, especially compared to Bruxelles Midi, which is a sort of apocalyptic bunker.
And now we're back. Planning ways to spend money we just don't have on going on holiday for the rest of the year.
Zot. Brugge Zot - that's the stuff. Zot means 'fool' in Flemmish Dutch, apparently, so I took to it instantly. Though, I should confess straight up that I only took a couple of sips; we may have just spent the weekend in a beer Mecca of sorts, but I clung to a series of trusty stems of vino while we were there. I didn't even make myself sick on chocolates - though they are in fact currency in Bruges.
Yes, we made it. Spent the whole time wandering around cobbled streets, gazing at gables and cornices and public spaces. I think I should basically be doing Caroline's Urban Design diploma with her, I so obviously know so much. When we weren't ambling, we were sleeping the said of the undead in room.
Nothing more interesting than that to say. Everyone with a vaguely Dutch disposition seems to be unambiguously friendly and effortlessly tri-lingual. But I couldn't even be bothered to do my bad accent comedy routine.
Traveling by train is kind of cute and St Pancras is a joy, especially compared to Bruxelles Midi, which is a sort of apocalyptic bunker.
And now we're back. Planning ways to spend money we just don't have on going on holiday for the rest of the year.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Bugger.
Bugger.
Won't go into it. Just won't. Silliest, most inexplicable bloody thing. But we didn't go to Belgium. Or bed.
Went to Boscombe.
(see title.)
Won't go into it. Just won't. Silliest, most inexplicable bloody thing. But we didn't go to Belgium. Or bed.
Went to Boscombe.
(see title.)
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