Russell Davies

This Week 4

I finished Convenience Store Woman this week. I really enjoyed it. It captured the satisfactions of surrendering to routine and the ways the sounds and atmospheres of a place can seep into you. It's short too. A good thing.

I also managed to finally put some musical stuff out into the world, in a tentative way.

I've long been fascinated with the improvisation of electronic music, especially as it moves beyond ambience and towards being danceable. I used to love The Bays and I remember a performance by Tim Exile at MusicTechFest in 2014 which got me thinking.

I like 'improvising' because it gets me past my habit of getting lost in the detail. Every time I try and make some music I get sucked into irrelevant fiddling spending hours moving a hi-hat around in undetectable increments. I can't do that when I'm making stuff up on the fly. I also can't worry about 'mastering' and all that, which I'm terrible at.

So I've invented a method to render myself unable to tweak. I take an audio source (often the radio, sometimes a spoken word record) I feed that into Ableton Live and I have to use that as the basis for any music I make. No additional elements. Just the rhythms of the original source (and some basic drums). I've called it 1R3C.

So I'm not inclined to fiddle after the event I don't keep any kind of 'in computer' recording. I just record to minidisc and that's the only copy.

So far there are two types of thing - 74 minute improvisations which you can literally only hear if you buy the minidisc. There's just one copy. And 30 minute things which are based on the playing of some spoken word records. You can listen to extracts of those on bandcamp. Or even buy one! Bear in mind that basically you're just buying a recording of me practising.

I think minidisc is almost the perfect way to guarantee no one will ever listen to these things, but I don't really mind, it's mostly just to make me do something. And I love minidiscs. They're the most perfectly sci-fi artefact.

I see the music stuff as a bit like blogging. I'm doing it for me, but there is some qualitative difference if there's at least a possibility that someone else might pay attention to it. 

Symmetrical names policy

I like this little detail about Nicolas Bentley. He changed the spelling of his name so it would look better.

This Week 3

This week I wrote two posts for agoodplaceforacupofteaandathink. Two!

One on the Daisy cafe in Hoxton and one about the Regent in Weston-super-Mare.

Last weekend we went to the Cromford Steam Rally. Not lots of steam but lots of goodness. This, magnificent Land Rover:

This lovely old Anglia. My Mum and Dad had one of these. They'd drive from Derby to Cornwall every summer with us three kids in the back. Blimey.

There was some steam though, look at this gorgeous thing:

Then, yesterday, I went to see Dulwich Hamlet play. I really enjoy a non-league trip. I seem to remember going to see them with Ben, years ago, at their actual ground, for Non-League Day. A good crowd. Magnificent atmosphere. They lost to the Beach Boys though (Concord Rangers from Canvey Island).

And this morning I went to see Coda, a documentary about Ryuichi Sakamoto. I really enjoyed it. It was very focused on him as an musician, you didn't find out much about his 'life', despite the filming covering a period where he was dealing with cancer. I liked that. It took him seriously as an artist. Didn't dial up the melodrama too much and showed quite a lot of his 'process'. He came across as a decent man. Likeable. And one of the the best-dressed people in the world. It all accords with the mood of this piece.

Surprise averse

I'm putting this here because it came up in a meeting and I thought it was a useful distinction.

A common question in the early days of GDS (and still a common question in lots of settings) was 'but aren't politicians very risk averse? how do you get to do risky new things?'

Francis Maude always had a good answer to that. 'We're not risk averse, we're surprise averse'.

This is worth remembering.

It explains why being pro-agile and anti-big bang launches is potentially popular with politicians and other people in positions of power.

Peter Vogel

Peter Vogel - The Sound of Shadows (2011) from Jean Martin on Vimeo.

A lovely little film - gentle, slow, full of resistors.

I'm Ben

This is the first time that my Starbucks name “Ben” has failed. pic.twitter.com/hD2ney0BQe

— Andrew Hart (@AndrewProjDent) July 17, 2018

I do this too. I didn't realise it was a common thing. Coffee shops must think there's a lot more people called Ben than there are. That'll mess with their big data.

I do it because saying 'Russell' almost always gets a 'sorry?' from the name-taker. Saying my own name is most often when my accent comes back, and since a Derby accent mostly involves muttering gloomily into your chest people are inclined to hear it as Ross or Throttle.

I've always thought Ben was fool-proof, it's always worked for me. Short. Unambiguous. But I guess it's also pretty generic and easy to swap out for another Default Man Name.

This Week 2

I seem to have written some actual blog posts this week, so I may have burned all my blog calories already. But, still, that's the point of weeknotes - persist.

Inspired by Pete Ashton I have started something on blot. I like it. I'm using it as a way of taking notes for things I might blog about, but might not. Only RSSists will be able to follow, so it's always going to have a tiny audience. Hurrah.

As you'll see from the notes on there I have a blog post brewing about energy monitoring. Maybe that'll be next week.

We went to see the public sculpture which always precedes Freize in Regents Park. Some we liked, some we didn't. We were, however, captured by the language used in the descriptions, somehow even more fruity than usual.

I'm always intrigued by the little language tricks that writers use to get this stuff flowing, to get out of the literal and into the metaphorical / nonsensical. Here it's "drawing on X, Y exposes the limits of Z"

"Alludes to..."

"Invite viewers to.."

"Explore" "Confront"

"Explores the psychological resonance"

"Investigates notions"

This sort of thing reminds me of what I think of as 'the Ackroyd Turn' - that ability to slip from talking about something being like something to talking about it actually being that thing. To go from saying the Thames is like a Mother to the Thames Is A Mother, without us noticing the shift. (And making it easy to get another 6 pages of lyrical nonsense away.)

Here's a classic example from Iain Sinclair: "But just as estate agents treat edgeland artists and warehouse communalists as pilot fish for fresh territory, so alphabet-soup quangos plot major regime change for the land beneath London. The shielding fences around the Olympic site, the giant construction projects in Shoreditch and London Bridge, are aped by the shacks knocked up to hide the scooping out of bigger and better basements."

Just as X, so Y - textbook. It lets him imply that it's somehow sinister that the fences used around construction sites are similar to the fences around other construction sites. 

Applause hammer

The stand-out moment, for me, in the History of Jazz podcast, was the little aside about the 'applause hammers' at The Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic. It just seemed so odd and inventive.

Without much hope or expectation I stuck some relevant search terms into an eBay watch and then after a year or so of waiting up popped a hammer.

Of which I am now the proud owner.

I'm not sure what to do with it, obvs. Maybe take it to Ronnie Scotts.

Whole earth fashion

I'm increasingly stuck in my own bundle of interests. Not noticing new things, but noticing connections between the old ones. I don't really know how to write about those things, so I'm going to start noting down the fragments and then maybe do some sort of cyber crazy wall essay later. This might be for a bit of wall labelled - Fashion & Authenticity

These are two moments from the splendid Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style by W. David Marx:

“IN AUGUST 1969, JUST DAYS AFTER THE WOODSTOCK MUSIC festival, illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi and Heibon Punch editor Jir Ishikawa walked into a Doubleday bookstore in New York City, where they came upon an entire wall covered with a single magazine. Its cover photograph showed a “blue marble” Earth floating above the moon in the blackest of outer space. The title read: “Whole Earth Catalog, access to tools.”

“Unbeknownst to the two men upon their first encounter, this magazine would not just shape Japanese fashion for the 1970s, but forever change the look of all Japanese magazines.”

Here's an example of that sort of thing:

Not as catalogue-y as some of them but you can see what it's like. I love these magazines. I used to buy all the US/UK mens style press but I never read the articles or looked at the photo spreads. I just loved the little pictures of things that had been deemed by someone the best example of that thing. Japanese people apparently took inspiration from the Whole Earth catalogue and made whole magazines out of those pages. And you feel like they really do their homework. They've actually chosen the best thing.

It reminds me of a William Gibson quote from You Can Find Inspiration In Everything. I can't find it now, but it's something like: if you want to know what's good about what your country makes, look at what the British and Japanese import.