Russell Davies

blog all dog-eared pages: the percussionist's art

Most of this magnificent book went straight over my head, intellectually. But it still made excellent reading because sometimes reading someone talking about something you can't do is as exciting as watching them do it.

It's the enormous amount of thought that goes into Mr Schick's work that blows me away. Not just mechanical muscle-memory repetition and technique, but hard intellectual working-out. He seems to pour an incredible amount of attentional energy into each piece - as if he has to put enough Units Of Attention into the piece upfront that everyone who ever sees it will be able to drag enough attentional value out. Or something.

Anyway, on with the dog-earing:

page 5: "But what, finally, is percussion? Of course, we all know what percussion is. Percussion is that slightly dysfunctional family of struck sounds: a barroom brawl of noises, effects, and sonic events that can be created by striking, brushing, rubbing, whacking, or crashing any and practically every available object. The most succinct definition of percussion comes from German, Schlagzeug; Schlag means "hit" and Zeug means "stuff." We percussionists are musicians who hit stuff. It is the quality of the hitting and the nature of the stuff that effectively define the basic substance of our art and apply focus to the music we make."

I gave up German as soon as I could (more to do with the teacher than the language) but I always liked the lego-brick snap-together nature of it. And HitStuff is clearly the best definition of percussion. And it's the perfect opportunity to suggest that you visit Stefan's Neologist project - where he'll craft you a new lego house of compound German word - specifically to your order.

page 23: "Every early percussion piece was a mini-universe, a kind of percussive Noah's Ark featuring a representative spectrum of every possible kind of sound and performance skill, and the counterbalancing need to make sense of it all through a globalizing compositional scheme. The sheer number of instruments used in these early pieces was tiring. Often it takes longer to arrange the instruments for a piece like Luciano Berio's Circles (1960) then it takes to perform the piece. Every piece tried to do everything and ultimately the effect was numbing. In the movie The Blues Brothers, when Jake visits Elroy's apartment near the elevated trains in Chicago, he asks how often the trains pass by. The response, "so often you won't even notice," describes with equal accuracy the loss of sensitivity that attends musical saturation. Percussive color is easily exhausted as a musical commodity, and in the end the quest for plenty led to over stimulation and the concomitant absence of distinction. It became paralyzing."

Someone should start an Analogy Matching Service. Because often you find yourself with an image or an idea that you know is a perfect analogy for something, but you're not sure what yet. That instrumentally overstuffed percussion repertoire being refined into something clearer, emptier and simpler is obviously ripe with potential metaphoric meaning. Just not sure what for yet. I also love the way that he uses the Blues Borthers quote to illustrate such high-culture stuff. That's good writing.

page 79: "The realization that expertise in percussion playing might mean nothing more than the ability to cope with an endless supply of fresh dilemmas led me back to an essay written by Stephen Jay Gould. The relevant passage comes from his book Ever Since Darwin, and in it he claims that individual members of a species living at the edges of populations evolve more rapidly and radically than do individuals positioned closer to the centres of population. The notion is that the forces of nature are more brutal at the edges of a communal population; therefore they exact a greater need on the part of the individuals on the fringe to adapt. At the edge everything is rawer and less certain: space seems larger but poorly mapped, possibilities appear greater but are only vaguely defined. I could not stop myself from making the leap. In the community of musicians, were we percussionists necessarily more adaptable because we were living at the edge of the herd?"

Again; we have an Analogy Surplus here... "expertise in X might mean nothing more than the ability to cope with an endless supply of fresh dilemmas".

There are some great performance videos featuring Mr Schick on YouTube (which really is a universal arts festival), Some of them are that kind of intense, modern percussioning that you can imagine The Fast Show would have fun with, but I like them. Because I like the spirit of HitStuff, because there's clearly some meaning in there, even if I haven't figured it out yet. And because if you can't be pretentious on your blog, where can you?

get your daily monsters

I've been wanting to write about Stefan's Daily Monster book for ages, but felt, for some reason, that I ought to wait until you could get it in actual UK bookshops first. And then, we spotted it, in the Oxford Street, Borders. And you can get it at the UK Amazon. it's a fantastic thing, even more fantastic for those of us who've followed it from the beginning, seeing the idea arrive and take off. The book is also the story of the book, if you see what I mean. It's an excellent thing, a genuine and creatively successful product of the power of organising without organisations. I hope it sells and sells.

seedy

I've talked to and about Richard Reynolds a couple of times on this blog over the years. About his t-shirts, and about Guerilla Gardening. And then, the other day, to announce the arrival of his book this packet of seeds turned up. Splendid idea. We shall be planting them soon. The book's excellent too. And here's Richard talking on Radio 3 the other week.

more action cook book

Anne alerted me to the existence of a hardback version of the Action Cook Book. It's a large handsome volume. This is the back:

I think I prefer the paperback cover, but the cook-strips are lovely and big in the hardback. Hie yourself to alibris or ebay if you'd like a copy.

blog some dog-eared pages: the rest is noise

I've been reading Alex Ross in The New Yorker for ages. And his blog, while he's been writing the book. So I was very excited when this finally arrived from Amazon. And it's brilliant. Funny, erudite, readable. I've dabbled with 20th century music before but this really made me want to dive in. And it's not just the writing about music, it's the cultural history that gets told around it. Fantastic stuff. I dog-eared far more pages than I could transcribe here, so these are the ones that might be interesting to you beyond the world of music.

Page 36 Quoting Thomas Mann, At the Prophet’s, 1904:

"Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit, lofty and spare. At the edge of large cities, where street lamps are scarce and policeman walk by twos, are houses where you mount til you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood; up into cheap studios with symbolic decorations, where solitary and rebellious artists, inwardly consumed, hungry and proud, wrestle in a fog of cigarette smoke with devastatingly ultimate ideals. Here is the end: ice, chastity, null. Here is valid no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values. Here the air is so rarefied that the mirages of life no longer exist. Here reign defiance and iron consistency, the ego supreme amid despair; here freedom, madness and death hold sway."

Quite a lot of The Rest Is Noise reminded me that many of the divisions and movements in culture and the arts are timeless. Mann could be describing Hoxton. Or Morrissey's Manchester. Or many creative departments. You see something similar here:

Page 45

The conductor Reinbert de Leeuw has written: “Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again.” The same could have been said of Debussy, who in 1901, remarked to his colleague Paul Dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex – ‘They smell of the lamp, not of the sun.” Debussy was describing the motivation for his latest work, the Nocturnes for orchestra, and in particular for the movement “Fetes”…This was the germ of an alternative modernism, one that would reach maturity in the stripped-down, folk-based, jazz-happy, machine-driven music of the twenties. In essence, two avant-gardes were forming side by side. The Parisians were moving into the brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went in the opposite direction, illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches.

Another of those eternal divisions. My version of this was to fall in love with Haircut 100 and completely not see the point of Joy Division.

Page 63

The impulse to go the brink of nothingness is central to Webern’s aesthetic: if the listener is paying insufficient attention, the shorter movements of his works may pass unnoticed. The joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato: Don’t play the note, only think it.

Iain's recently reminded me of those early Pole albums. They feel a bit this way. It'd be interesting to imagine what a website with this kind of aesthetic would be like.

Page 99

Cocteau made some notes to Satie in which he described the pseudo-America aesthetic he had in mind (for Parade)

The Titanic – “Nearer My God To Thee” – elevators – the sirens of Boulogne – submarine cables – ship-to-shore cables – Brest – tar – varnish – steamship apparatus – the New York Herald -  dynamos – airplanes – short circuits – palatial cinemas – the sheriff’s daughter – Walt Whitman – the silence of stampedes – cowboys with leather and goatskin chaps – the telegraph operator from Los Angeles who marries the detective at the end…

How evocative is that? Brilliant. The list may be the least exploited but most potent literary form. That's a good project; a list of all the great literary lists.

Page 149 (About Porgy & Bess)

In his notebooks Gershwin wrote down some rules that would have sufficed for Berg: “Melodic. Nothing neutral. Utter simplicity. Directness.”

Another good list.

Page 166

When the Fourth Symphony had its first performance, in April 1911, Finnish audiences were taken aback. “People avoided our eyes, shook their heads,” Aino Sibelius recalled. “Their smiles were embarrassed furtive or ironic. Not many people came backstage to the artists’s room to pay their respects.” This was a Skandalkonzert in Scandinavian style, a riot of silence.

That's just to entertain the Finns out there. Anyone who's worked with Nokia will understand a riot of silence.

Page 341 - Quoting John Cage

“We live in a time I think not of mainstream, but of many streams, or even, if you insist upon a river of time, that we have come to delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies.” –

Page 355

“Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” wrote the French poet Charles Peguy in 1910. Morton Feldman, the maverick modernist who loved Sibelius, applied this epigram to twentieth-century music, describing how grandiose ideas are made ordinary with the passage of time and become fodder for a power struggle among ideologues and pedants.

Again, both of these are about more than music aren't they? They explain a lot of stuff.

But perhaps the most interesting part of reading The Rest Is Noise is the way it made me think about books, and how books could be better. Almost every page had me wanting to listen to something; putting the book down and scrabbling for emusic or iTunes. Mr Ross uses links on his blogs splendidly to illustrate the book, but I kept wanting to listen while I was reading. Not be switching from one medium to another. This might have solved the problem.

And all this googling also reminded me of the wealth of performances on YouTube; it's an extraordinary place to explore classical and avant-garde music. So I've been working on a little vodpod collection of things I've found while pursuing the music of The Rest Is Noise. It takes in Glenn Gould playing Webern, some extraordinary Debussy on Russian folk instruments, some Ligeti with a visual score,  Steve Reich on the South Bank Show and, of course, the Helicopter Quartet, which you have to look at.

action cook book

For all of the Bond v Bourne debate, recently refinding this book reminded me that the spy you really want to be is Harry Palmer. Mostly because it's just about imaginable. Palmer spends most of his life in dull meetings, wrapped up in petty red tape and worrying about not being paid enough.  It's not a very glamorous life. But it's aspirational and desirable enough. It's all in the  opening titles:

ipcress titles from russelldavies on Vimeo.

It's all there isn't it? The pyjamas, the kitchen, the specs. He starts the day with grinding coffee and checking the racing form in the paper. (And we all know that he shouldn't press his coffee so soon, but we've got to get on with the film haven't we?) He doesn't even seem to bother with a shower, that unhealthy obsession with cleanliness not seeming to have crossed the Atlantic yet.

Palmer wins (and gets the girls) because he knows about food. Bond is a fussy little snob so he carefully specifies what he eats (eggs from French Marans hens, Tiptree marmalade, Norwegian Heather Honey) but it's almost always clubbable comfort food. Nothing with brio. And seemingly nothing he's ever cooked himself. So to be Bond you have to be wealthy, to be Palmer you just have to learn to cook.

Of course Palmer's love of food comes from Mr Deighton himself, who trained as a graphic designer and did these cookstrips for The Observer. (Also featured in Ou Est Le Garlic). And AceJet tells us that Mr Deighton features in The Ipcress File as the hand cracking the egg, because Michael Caine couldn't do it in the impressively single-handed way the script and the seduction demanded.

blog all dog-eared pages: here comes everybody

 

The Penguin folks were sending out some copies of this so I put my hand up and got one. Very pleased I did. I thought the best way to  post about it would be to use  Mike's blog all dog-eared pages technique so here it is. First, I should point out two things.

1. Although this is an uncorrected proof any typos below are probably the result of my bad transcribing.
2. Rod is concerned there's no mention of Mr James Joyce in here. But maybe there will be by the time it's finalised.

And I should say I really enjoyed this book. It goes beyond wild-eyed webby boosterism and points out what seems to be different about web-based communities and organisation and why it's different; the good and the bad. With useful and interesting examples, good stories and sticky theories. Very good stuff.

(I've posted quite large chunks here, I'm wondering if I've reached the limits of fair use. I hope not. I don't wish to deprive Mr Shirky of any revenue for his excellent book. If I have I'm sure someone from Penguin will let me know with all due haste.)

Page 22:

The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation; the difficulties that have kept self-assembled groups from working together are shrinking, meaning that the number and kinds of things groups can get done without financial motivation or managerial oversight are growing. The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.

This struck a big old chord with me. And I suspect there are going to be all sorts of interesting semi-commercial groups 'gathering and getting things done'. Groups that are less about  profit motive but not entirely without profit motive. And, in fact, many of the problems that large corporations need to solve might have to be broked out to these new and differently gathered groups. Because other large corporations won't be able to help.

Page 29:

We use the word “organization” to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing-“Our organization organizes the annual conference.” We use one word for both because, at a certain scale, we haven’t been able to get organization without organizations; the former seems to imply the latter. The typical organization is hierarchical, with workers answering to a manager, and that manager answering to a still-higher manager, and so on. The value of such hierarchies is obvious – it vastly simplifies communication among the employees. New employees have only one connection, to their boss, to get started. That’s much simpler than trying to have everyone talk to everyone.
Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes - every contract, every agreement, every meeting – requires it to expend some limited resource – time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure simply to keep itself viable.

This gets at the heart of what's wrong with most of the companies that people complain about. It's not that marketing companies are stupid, or agencies are stupid, or delivery businesses, or banks. It's just that large organisations are stupid. (By stupid I mean unable to be as good as a smaller, more flexible, more focused group of people tackling one tiny aspect of what the large business does.) Whenever I used to meet people from a certain large beverage company the same thing always used to strike me - this is a group of really smart people inside (and battling with) a really stupid organisation. And whenever you bump into such a company you have to adjust your expectations. Too many good ideas are wasted because they're not institutionally possible. The transaction costs in doing good, incremental things are too high.

Page 47:

Now that it has possible to achieve large-scale coordination at low cost, a third category has emerged: serious complex work, taken on without institutional direction. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure, because they lay under the Coasean floor.

The cost of all kinds of group activity – sharing, cooperating, and collective action – have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath that floor are now coming to light. We didn’t notice how many things were under that floor, because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.

I suspect that we'll also see / are seeing the emergence of a fourth alternative - the slightly-for-profit group. Distributed working for an assortment of reasons, some of them money. Doing tasks which money alone wouldn't get them to do.

Page 85:

In fact, most user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in the sense of “material designed for an audience.” Saying something to a few people we know used to be quite distinct from saying something to many people we don’t know. The distinction between communications and broadcast media was always a function of technology rather than a deep truth about human nature. Prior to the internet, when we talked about media, we were talking about two different things: broadcast media and communications media. Broadcast media, such as radio and television, but also newspapers and movies…are designed to put messages out for all to see (or in some cases, for all buyers and subscribers to see). Broadcast media are shaped, conceptually, like a megaphone, amplifying a one-way message from one sender to many receivers. Communications media, from telegrams to phone calls to faxes, are designed to facilitate two-way conversations. Conceptually, communications media are like a tube; the message put into one end is intended for a particular recipient at the other end.
…Now that our communications technology is changing, the distinctions among those patterns of communication are evaporating; what was once a short break between two styles of communicating is becoming a gradual transition.

Brilliant stuff. Of which there's more here. I think you see this the most with telly people and YouTube. They think YouTube is full of rubbish, but might be a great way of distributing their high-quality stuff. In fact almost everything on YouTube is genius - to the person who posted it and two of their friends. And because it's genius, they're not going to waste their time looking at your high-quality stuff, they're going to be making more of their genius.

Page 91:

On the Web interacting has no technological limits, but it does still have strong cognitive limts; no matter who you are, you can only read so many weblogs, can trade email with only so many people, and so on. …In the early days of weblogs (prior to 2002, roughly) there was a remarkable and loose-jointed conversation among webloggers of all stripes, any anyone with a reasonable posting tempo could count themselves on of the party. In those days weblogging was mainly an interactive pursuit, and it happened so naturally that it was easy to imagine that interactivity was a basic part of the bargain.
Then things got urban, with millions of bloggers and readers. At this point social limits kicked in. If you have a weblog, and a thousand other webloggers point to you, you cannot read what they are saying, much less react. More is different: cities are not just large towns and a big audience is not just a small one cloned many times. The limits on interaction that come with scale are hard to detect because every visible aspect of the system stays the same. Nothing about the software or the users changes, but the creep of increased population still alters the circumstances beyond your control. In this situation, no matter how assiduously someone wants to interact with their readers, the growing audience will ultimately defeat that possibility. Someone blogging alongside a handful of friends can read everything those friends write and can respond to any comments their friends make – the scale is small enough to allow for real conversation. Someone writing for thousands of people, though, or millions, has to start choosing who to respond to and who to ignore, and over time, ignore becomes the default choice.

Page 93:

Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move. Highly trafficked weblogs like Boing Boing often disable the ability for users to comment on stories, because they can’t give the resulting conversation enough attention to keep it from descending into mudslinging. Early reports of the death of traditional media portrayed the Web as a kind of anti-TV, two-way where TV is one-way, interactive where TV is passive and (implicity) good where TV is bad. Now we know that the Web is not perfect antidote to the problems of mass media, because some of those problems are human and not amenable to technological fixes.

Page 94:

As Merlin Mann, a software usability expert, describes the pattern: "Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to  do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a pebble!”

This has happened to me a little bit. This blog's stopped being part of a conversation, which it used to be, a bit, and has become broadcasting. There aren't that many comments, emails etc but with my job and everything, genuine interaction is beyond my cognitive limit. Which is my way of apologising if I owe you a response to something.

But I think it's also something those organisations thinking about 'a corporate blog' have got to worry about. If you do get yourselves 'a blog' and it's in anyway successful you'll soon reach your own cognitive limits and the conversational value of the thing will disappear again. That's why organisations need to let many blogs bloom, as Microsoft have done. That way each individual blog can remain conversation-sized and genuine discussion can happen.

Page 231

Quoting Ronald Burt in “The Social Origin of Good Ideas” (pdf)

“People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a good competitive advantage in delivering good ideas. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.”

This rings so many little bells for me that I think I need to save it for a whole other post.

This is a smart, timely, thoughtful book. You should get a copy.

blog all dog-eared pages: at large and at small

I love this book. I love the idea of the familiar essay. I love the lightness with which it's written. And I love the things it's about. I dog-eared a lot of pages, just because I wanted to re-read them, I can't blog them all or I'd copying out the whole book. So here are the bits about which I thought I had something to share.

How's this for an explanation of the Familiar Essay? from the preface:

"Familiar essay" isn't a term one hears often these days. The genre's heyday was the early nineteenth century, when Charles Lamb was dreaming up The Essays Of Elia under the influence of brandy and tobacco and William Hazlitt was dashing off Table-Talk under the influence of strong tea. The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions, he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favorite stimulants in hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover’s intimacy. 

That sounds like exactly the stuff I'd like to write. Enthusiastic, conversational, discursive, about something in the real world. It's also a description of the blogs I like best. And the writing seems so natural and smooth. I'm enjoying just copying out. Maybe if I keep doing it I'll learn something, in the same way that Hunter S. Thompson thought he'd learn something about rhythm and style from typing out every word of 'The Great Gatsby' and 'A Farewell To Arms'.

Page 38:

For thirty-three years, Lamb sat on a high stool, identical to those occupied by thirty other clerks, dipped his goose quill into two inkwells, one containing black ink and the other red (he called the latter Clerk’s Blood); and recorded the prices of tea, indigo and piece goods.

It is worth remembering that while he was adding up figures in the East India House’s stygian offices at Nos 12-21 Leadenhall Street (what name could be more appropriate?), his friends – Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Godwin, De Quincy – were rambling in the Lake Country, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, siring illegitimate children, and planning a utopian community in America (@We shall…criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo,” wrote Southey).

I love the way she does this. Those tiny interjections of telling detail (clerk's blood, leadenhall, the Southey quote) are perfect. They give you the colour you need to take something in, without slowing you down. Brilliant. I

Page 72:

During the day, I pop out of my chair a dozen times an hour. The phone rings, the fax beeps, the mailbox needs to be checked, the coffee needs to be brewed, the letter needs to be filed, the Post-its need to be rearranged – and possibly colour-coded – right this instant. How can the writer’s distractive sirens be resisted? John McPhee used to tie himself to his chair with his bathrobe sash. Schiller heightened his powers of concentration by inhaling the fumes from a cache of rotten apples he kept in a drawer.

Have rotting apples popped up in 43 Folders yet? I suffer from all these distractions and all the 2.0 ones too. If I have to write something properly I do it in writeroom but it still doesn't stop me rushing to google stuff every five minutes. I keep thinking that I'll fire up my Mac Classic and write everything on there. The only problem will be getting it off.

Page 112

“One of my unfailing minor pleasures may seem dull to more energetic souls: opening the mail….Living in an advanced industrial civilization is a kind of near-conquest over the unexpected…Such efficiency is of course admirable. It does not, however, by its very nature afford scope to that perverse human trait, still not quite eliminated, which is pleased by the accidental. Thus to many tame citizens like me the morning mail functions as the voice of the unpredictable and keeps alive for a few minutes a day the keen sense of the unplanned and the unplannable."

That's the author quoting her father. Great stuff. I don't find the mail delivers the pleasingly accidental to our house, it's mostly desperately predictable. But the web does. RSS does. Radio still does. I like that.

Page 186

By the most conservative estimates, London had five hundred coffeehouses at the turn of the eighteenth century. (If New York City were similarly equipped today, it would have nearly eight thousand.) These weren’t merely places to drink the muddy liquid that one critic likened to “syrup of soot or essence of old shoes.” In the days when public libraries were none existent and journalism was in its embryonic stages, they were a vital center of news, gossip and education – “penny universities” whose main business, in the words of a 1657 newspaper ad, was PUBLICK INTERCOURSE.

London had a coffeehouse for everyone (as long as you were male). If you were a gambler, you went to White’s. If you were a physician, you went to Garraway’s or Child’s. If you were a businessman you went to Lloyd’s, which later evolved into the great insurance house. If you were a scientist, you went to the Grecian, where Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and Hans Sloane once staged a public dissection of a dolphin that had been caught in the Thames. If you were a journalist, you went to to Burton’s where Joseph Addison had set up a ‘Reader’s Letter-box' shaped liked a lion’s head: you would post submissions to The Guardian in its mouth.

As you can probably tell by now, I don't actually have that much to add about these excerpts. They're so useful and complete in themselves. But if you get the chance to get hold of At Large And At Small I encourage you to do so. It's particularly good on the pleasures and perils of collecting, and on coffee and on ice-cream.

map all dog-eared pages: west end chronicles

I'm a big fan of books like this; books where history, geography, anecdotes and odd facts bump together into a mash of stuff you wish you remembered when you were walking about. Because then you could pass an address and say something knowledgeable, historical and amusing about it. I can only ever remember one such address: 54 Berners Street. (And if you don't know about the Berners Street Hoax - have a look, it's genius.) So, I thought that maybe building a map of these things might help:

View Larger Map

page 10 : William Douglas, fourth Duke Of Queensbury, better known as 'Old Q' who lived at the turn of the eightenth century in a large property that stood between Old Burlington Street and Saville Row...had other, more disconcerting eccentricities, like consuming a supper of roast poulet and lime punch every midnight, and then being woken at three in the morning to take a meal of veal cutlet.

page 13 : At 1 Seamore Place, later razed to extend Curzon Street west, lived the colourful Alfred de Rothschild, who liked nothing more than to stage circuses at home with himself as ringmaster, cracking a long whip. He had his servants well-trained. When a guest once asked for milk in his tea a powdered flunky responded in a flash: 'Jersey, Hereford or Shorthorn, sir?'

page 26 : The Dorchester was the first setting for Foyle's literary luncheons. In their early days these featured the novelist DH Lawrence, the actor Charlie Chaplin and the Ethiopian ruler, Haile Selassie. When Sir John Gilbey of the gin distillers spoke for one and a half hours, causing a guest to fall asleep, William Foyle, the bookstore's owner, approached the sleeping gentleman and hit him on the head with his gavel, only to be told by the awakened guest: 'hit me harder, I can still hear him'.

page 29 : In 1935 (the Grosvenor House Hotel) was the setting for a most unusual event, an aromatic dinner held by a strange new organisation - the Smell Society - founded by the eccentric lawyer Ambrose Appelbe, who later represented Mandy Rice-Davies. Applebe hoped to refresh London nostrils with sheets of paper impregnated with the smells of the seaside and create new words to describe the smell of things such as roast turkey and tar.

page 126 : The Blakes moved half a mile to Green Street (now Orange Street) by Leicester Square. And it was while living there in the summer of 1783 that Blake witnessed a rare phenomenon - a fiery blue meteorite with an orange tail that shot over the London skies. It lit up much of London and inspired a number of his paintings as well as the line in the poem 'Tyger'. 'When the stars threw down their spears/ And water'd heaven with their tears.'

page 226 : Soho, fittingly, was home to Britain's first espresso coffee bar: Moka, at 29 Frith Street. Behind the venture was a Scotsman, Maurice Ross, who bought Britain's first Gaggia machine from Pino Riservato, a travelling salesman specialising in dental equipment who was so concerned at the poor quality of coffee on offer in Britain he acquired the UK concession for the machine...
... the cult US writer William S. Burroughs, subjected the Moka to what he called 'para-psychic bombardment' - sessions of recordings and pictures. 'Now to close in on The Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there. The horrible old proprietor, his frizzy haired wife and slack jawed son, the snarling counter man. I have them and they know it.'

page 230 : In the 1960s De Hems became popular with music business people, for it was said that the bottom three places in the charts could be bought in the pub's Oyster Bar.

blog all dog-eared pages: sound art

Mike Migurski invented a very nice way of recording his reading and sharing it, in a series of posts: 'blog all dog-eared pages'. Since he seems happy for others to follow the format I thought I'd do the same. It's a handy way of recording what strikes you about a book. I dog-ear a lot. And underline and scribble in the margins. But then seldom look back at what I marked. So this might be a way of getting more out of my reading. Especially since I'm planning to try and expand beyond my usual repertoire of space opera, Dorothy L. Sayers and business books from airports. I'm trying to read about things that I think I might like if only I knew more about them. Sound Art by Alan Licht is a great example. I'm going to excerpt the dog-earings and link to the artstuff that appealed to me from pictures and descriptions. Because this is mostly new to me I don't have a lot to add to the quotes, so the things I've dog-eared are just things that struck me or that caused tangential thoughts.

I thought it was a tremendous book, serious without being weighty, gave me a sense of some interesting stuff out there, and a sense of how it fitted together. And googling Mr Licht let me find, via Dan Hill, this beautiful piece he did; A New York Minute.

Page 13:

A friend recently commented that avant-garde art is now commercially viable and extremely successful, whereas avant-garde literature, music, and film are usually uncommercial and generally unsuccessful. He's right, but that is because art doesn't have the inherent entertainment value of a narrative that those other art forms have. It doesn't have to appeal to the masses to be successful-as long as it catches one collector's (or curator's)attention, the person who created it can make a fair amount of money from it. Literature, music, and film, however, depend on popular opinion and public demand. This is because they're the primary sources of entertainment besides sports. And that is because of the potential to be engrossed by a storyline and characters, dazzled by spectacle, or have a catchy tune stuck in your head all day. If an effort in any of these disciplines fails to live up to this potential, it's largely considered to be a disappointment; in fact, it's intrinsically disappointing regardless of its actual aesthetic worth. Part of the reason "sound art" has become such a popular term is because it rescues music from this fate by aligning this kind of sound work with the aims of non-time-based plastic arts, rather than the aims of music.

I like this idea of art being viable because it can succeed through reaching a much smaller group of people. One of the things that's interesting about the fragmentation of music is the way smaller and smaller audiences can support more and more specialised artists (artistically, if not commercially).

It also chimes with something I've been thinking about for a while; the idea of commissioning technology like you commission art. There are loads of devices and things I'd like to see built, just for me. I have none of the skills to build them, and I'm not trying to prototype a product, these aren't things that millions of people are going to want and Samsung are going to want to build. These are things that I'd like for me. And it'd be great if there was a marketplace for that, like there's a marketplace if I wanted to get my picture painted on a horse. Maybe there is. I should look harder.

Max Neuhaus - Listen - 'field trips' to listen to sounds, guided by the artist

Stephen Vitiello - Fear of High Places and Natural Things

Ed Osborn - Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art - the Aural Aura Of Masterworks.

Page 39:

"It is this sense of perspective with the introduction of studio effects, particularly echo, that Brian Eno felt made "the process of making music much closer to the process of painting." David Toop has written that in the echo-heavy Jamaican reggae dub genre "the mixing board becomes a pictorial instrument" creating "depth illusion".

I'm not really sure why I dog-eared this page. Except it seems interesting and true.

Page 41:

Bill Viola has written of Gothic cathedrals: "Ancient architecture abounds with examples of remarkable acoustic design - whispering galleries where a bare murmur of a voice materializes at a point hundreds of feet away across the hall or the perfect clarity of the Greek amphitheaters where a speaker, standing at a focal point created by the surrounding walls, is heard by all members of the audience". In modern times architecture has been less preoccupied with acoustics, "sound as a medium is still lost a lot in our culture," sound artist Bill Fontana has said. "Architecture hardly thinks about it. We design space visually and don't think about the relationships between sounds that exist in space."

Modern buildings do seem to be acoustic disasters. Which makes cities even worse, and not something that urban planners seem to think about. And maybe they can't, maybe the urban environment is just too chaotic to be designed for sound. Perhaps there's salvation in the fact that we carry aural environments around with us these days, and, unless we've got really, really good headphones they don't totally blank out the city, they just sit on top of it. I'm always surprised there's not more ambient music designed for this; not for quiet rooms but for the loud environments we're forced to move through. Though Ambient Addition would still be the ultimate answer. Perhaps to everything.

Edgard Varese - listening to his Poeme electronique. That is just a great picture. Henry Miller described him as "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound". You can see a 1958 performance of Poeme electronique on YouTube.

Annea Lockwood - Southern Exposure: Piano Transplant No 4. a "defunct" piano is set up on a beach and left to sound on its own.

Page 75:

"In 1969 Stockhausen staged an outdoor concert in the Giacometti courtyard (with Joan Miro sculptures) at the museum of the Maeght Foundation at St Paul de Vence, in which musicians sat on roofs, ramps, and in the courtyard, integrating sounds from frogs, cicadas, and other animals. After three hours each musician started to to walk off, still playing, into the forest. At 2 AM there was "a twenty-minute-long dialogue with car horns. I [Stockhausen] started it but then all the people who hadn't left began making horn music with each other, and as one after the other drove off, they exchanged sounds for miles down the road."

I still listen to the Helicopter Quartet every now and then. You have to listen to it, you can't have it in the background, but if you pay attention, it rewards it. But it fits in absolutely with the image I had of Stockhausen as a rather humourless, stern fellow. None of the recent obituaries did much to undermine that and nor did his telling off of Aphex Twin, Plasticman et al for being too repetitive. But this story makes him seem rather playful and light. Maybe it's the pastoral setting. Or the image you get of little 60s cars wondering drunkenly down the road, honking.

Doug Hollis - Sound Garden - also on YouTube.

Jean Tinguely - Homage To New York "a self-destroying mechanism"

Page 145:

Cage: "A music which is like furniture...which is part of the noises of the environment, that will take them into consideration."

You see this quote a lot when people talk about Eno and ambient music. And it always make my mind wonder and stray off the point to imaginary designs for furniture - featuring built in musical instruments. In my head I have elaborate designs for an armchair with a thumb-piano built into each arm so you could sit and idly fiddle on them while watching telly. And I've always wanted to attach drum pads to the steering wheel of the car, wired into the stereo, so you can drum along more effectively. And to make a coffee table which uses marble-run style actions inside the legs and under a glass top to play a little tune. Anyway.

Page 210:

Morton Feldman, after a discussion with Brian O'Doherty concluded: "My obsession with surface is the subject of my music. In that sense my compositions are not really "compositions" at all. One might call them time canvasses in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music...I prefer to think of my work as between categories. Between time and space. Between painting and music. Between the music's construction, and its surface." Between categories is a defining characteristic of sound art, its creators historically coming to the form from different disciplines and often continuing to work in music and/or different media. But in the last decade sound art's identity between categories has intensified, particularly as the term itself has spread. Eno's ideal sound installation is "a place poised between a club, a gallery, a church, a square, and a park, and sharing aspects of all of these."

Maybe that's why I find Sound Art appealing; the idea of it, at least. And maybe why it's getting popular (and I get the sense it is, is it?) - because of the way it hangs between categories. That seems to be an increasingly modern state - finding yourself suspended between previous definitions.

Joe Jones - Mechanical Fluxorchestra. I just like the way this looks.