The building that houses the Institute of the Arts, Barcelona (which is actually a short journey down the coast in Sitges) was in a former life an Audi design centre.
It shows…
Flotsam and Jetsam
What you can carry
“Own only what you can carry with you”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Readers with long memories (and, of course, all who know me personally) will be aware that I carry at all times what is usually described – with more than a whiff of condescension – as a ‘manbag’. The much loved specimen of the genus that is currently my constant (inanimate) companion was purchased in Paris (pretentious – moi?) back in the summer of 2007. Though it has since required the repair that was the subject of this previous post, it really has done very well given the rigours to which it has been subjected.
As detailed in that aforementioned post this invaluable receptacle contains just about everything that I could possibly need to carry with me on a day to day basis – thus ensuring that I avoid the usual bulging pockets, broken gadgets (from having sat carelessly upon something delicate) or indeed that frenzied last minute search for keys, phones, credit cards etc – that seems to accompany some others’ less – um – organised egress into the world of a morning.
I say that the bag holds everything. Actually – that turns out no longer to be true…
Life changes. Things become more complex. I now find myself routinely toting around things that I would not previously have carried. I am sure that I could simplify things – strip them back – but at the moment, given the amount of traveling that I do daily, I would rather feel confident that I have all that I require to hand at all times.
I have for a long time now carried with me everywhere a spiral bound A4 notebook (for Canadians and other North Americans this equates roughly to Letter size). This is an essential for nurturing the creative impulse – for the harnessing of that lightening bolt of inspiration wherever and whenever it might strike (the spiral bound nature of the pad enables one to tear off and dispose of the evidence should one’s notion prove not to have been quite so inspirational after all!).
As of two years ago now I also have with me at all times the trusty Fuji x10, without which I would not be. Taking my first tentative steps into the world of photography has been a literally eye-opening experience – helping me to see this wonderful world in a whole new light.
Age dictates that I must now travel encumbered by a selection of optical devices. If I wear my contact lenses I must needs have with me reading glasses for computer work and for reading, and sunglasses should the weather be fine. If I leave the lenses at home I must carry glasses – reactive or lightweight (or both!) – to enable me to drive safely.
Finally I now also find myself carrying around an iThing of the ‘Pad’ variety. Yes – I know! I have not previously restrained myself from expressing staunchly my views on the evil-empire that is Apple (they are not actually any more evil than the other corporate IT behemoths, of course, merely richer!). The fact is that the School is meandering uncertainly in the direction of adopting a one-to-one tablet policy, and as head honcho in the world of things digital I feel it incumbent upon me to try to keep pace with the bright young things.
All these additional burdens seem now to accompany me everywhere – and I have thus felt it necessary to add to my impedimentiary armoury the new item to which I refered in this recent post – a rather splendid leather messenger bag (which is – in fact – actually a reporter bag – being in orientation portrait rather than landscape).
Either way – should this trend continue I will eventually find myself – like the terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc – carrying my entire estate on my back whenever I venture forth!
Information Superhighway!
“The whole digital enchilada – interactive, cable, broadband, 500-channel…”
Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age
One for the nostalgia buffs! I bet that you never thought you’d find yourself face to face with that particular rubric again…
The ever-procacious Urban Dictionary curls its lip at the moniker thus:
“Laughably outdated term for the Internet. Mostly used during the 90s by yuppies who made their own awful-looking web pages.”
…and again:
“A cheesy, ebullient, woefully outdated term from the 90’s, which means ‘Internet’. Coined when all the people were massively wowed by the sheer awesomeness of the Intertubes. Nowadays in disuse unless you use it for comedy.”
Yup – comedy! That’s the effect I was going for… How am I doin’? How ’bout now? etc, etc…
‘Holy moly!’ – you’re thinking – ‘what in the name of Al Gore is he doing raking up this sort of muck in 2014?’
Well – back in the day when it was the Information Superhighway I ordered an upgrade for our broadband connection (yes – the very same that was dead as a dodo for six weeks over Christmas!) to an all-new super-fast fibre (or fiber, as our trans-Atlantic cousins would have it) broadband circuit! And – guess what? It finally came!!!
Ok – I exaggerate the timescale slightly – for effect, you know! But by the time that we actually got to order the thing last October we had already been a target for generic flyers from the mephitic British Telecom – advertising their new fibre service – for at least a couple of years… long before it was actually available anywhere in the surrounding neighbourhood.
When our ISP eventually informed us that fibre was finally available at our local exchange I was, naturally, on the phone immediately – placing an order. The niceties observed, a date was fixed for an engineer to pay us a visit to do the necessary. Splendid!
Except – you’ll be unsurprised to hear – that it didn’t happen. It turned out that though the fibre service had been installed at the exchange it had not actually got as far as the cabinet in the street outside our domicile.
A new date for installation was set… and missed! Then another… and another…
At one point our ISP cruelly raised hopes that something was about to happen by sending us our new high-speed router. When – however – I called excitedly to check, they admitted that they had made a mistake. Bah!
In the end it was five increasingly resigned months before finally – and quite suddenly – an appointment was made and not broken… and we found ourselves on the end of an InterWebNet pipe that is actually fat enough to carry the traffic that the Kickass Canada Girl requires. For now – anyway…
This does all make me realise that we need to start checking now regarding the broadband situation on the Saanich peninsular. Having experienced a whiff of bandwidth freedom I can’t see The Girl settling in future for anything less…
A perfect palimpsest
“See me, feel me, touch me, heal me”
Pete Townshend
I suppose it is symptomatic of encroaching old-age that I am unable now to recall exactly why I found myself sitting at my computer last week, searching the InterWebNet for recorded versions of The Who’s “See Me, Feel Me“. I know that this was not what I started out looking for (though of course I can’t remember what that was either!) – neither can I now call to mind the supervenient sequence that ultimately led me to Acton’s finest.
It is a sorry business – this aging!
Though I had, naturally, been well aware of The Who throughout the late 60s I did not truly become a fan until 1971 – when I heard for the first time the mighty sound that is “Won’t Get Fooled Again“. The effect that this had on me was not dissimilar to that which I experienced on hearing – for the first time – “A Day in the Life“, “Eleanor Rigby” or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds“. I had no idea that music could be like this. In the case of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” I was astonished that a ‘pop’ song could not only have something reasonable to say, but that it could do so with such power, such brio, such… passion! “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is one of those rare tracks that sounds exactly as fresh, meaningful and powerful today as it did when heard first.
“See Me, Feel Me” is – of course – a couple of years older, originating as it does in The Who’s ground-breaking rock opera – “Tommy” (the first of a mercifully modest canon!). Through the decades since the album was released in 1969 I have endured a number of different stage productions, as well as gazing slack-jawed at Ken Russell’s flamboyantly eccentric movie version. I have to say that I find the piece as a whole to be somewhat… patchy! There are – of course – familiar highlights such as “Pinball Wizard” and the finale – “Listening to You” – which apparently later found its true niche in The Who’s live set as an act of communion between band and audience.
The opera’s one moment of genius, however, is its penultimate fragment – the aforementioned “See Me, Feel Me” – a fleetingly transcendent distillation of pure longing, which hangs upon the sudden breathless air a still small voice in the eye of the hurricane. This palimpsest crystallises somewhat unexpectedly out of the preceding number – “We’re Not Gonna Take It” – and once it’s brief existence is done bunny-hops through a crunching gear-change into “Listening to You“.
The lyric comprises but one repeated line:
“See me, feel me, touch me, heal me”
There is no more because at this point there is nothing more to be said.
Harmonically, “See Me, Feel Me” is also stripped back as far as is feasible – comprising what is essentially a repeated three chord pattern…
|Ebmaj7 |Fsus4 F|Fsus4 F|G
…which forms (apparently!) an Aeolian progression. The suspensions that initially render the phrase tonally ambiguous resolve at the end of each line in a manner that contrives to be at once final and infinite. This is one of those rare musical phrases that is so complete in and of itself that no development is possible. I imagine that Pete Townshend must have tried pretty hard to come up with a way of so doing before giving up and accepting this gift from the gods for what it was – a perfect representation of imperfection! Trapped within itself like a bug in amber this tiny fragment manages thus to express eternal longing. We might wish that it went on for ever. It cannot do so.
You may not be familiar with this orchestral version – featuring Townshend himself on vocals rather than the familiar tones of Roger Daltrey.
See Me, Feel Me: See Me, Feel Me
There are some pieces of music – just as there are some poems, some prose passages – that are so immaculate that one wonders how the author – having achieved this proximity to perfection – could face writing again, for fear of never being able to top – or even match – what had already been accomplished.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be in that position!
The Running Tide
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
John Masefield
My first full length ‘straight’ play (as distinct from the musicals on which I had to that point collaborated) was produced a little more than a decade ago at the school at which I was at that time gainfully employed (though not – it must be said – as a teacher of drama).
The piece was not – in fact – a single play at all, but a pair of linked one-act plays – designed to make up a complete evening’s entertainment.
The setting was Hebridean – the central theme ostensibly concerned the sea – much of the material was drawn from Scottish mythology and folklore. As is the nature of such things – of course – the plays’ true themes were connotative.
When first performed this brace of plays went under the imperceptibly amusing title – “Two Scottish Plays”. Being a somewhat younger and still relatively callow chap, I thought it amusing thus doubly to tempt the fates! The work was subsequently re-titled – taking its rubric from the second stanza of John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”.
Reluctant to abnegate entirely my claims to be considered a composer I wrote a score to accompany the piece – an amalgam of incidental music and songs. Once the production was over I filed everything away as usual and pretty much forgot about it.
I had thus not heard these compositions in a almost decade when I came across the sequence files in a ‘dusty’ digital archive at some point during late autumn last year.
Distance apparently does lend enchantment – which interval can seemingly be chronological as well as spatial. I found myself captivated by a score that I had – in large part – forgotten completely. It is quite startling to come across something from the (relative) mists of time and to wonder how it could possibly have been written in the first place. It may sound egotistical – but I found myself not unimpressed.
I was moved to revisit the score – thinking perhaps to re-arrange it and to re-record it using contemporary technology. My spare(!) time over the ensuing couple of months was thus duly occupied on my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) of choice – Tracktion – and a great deal of fun was had.
On the extreme off-off-off-chance that the gentle reader might feel inclined to add an auditory experience to the literary – do find herewith a couple of the incidental pieces.
The Littoral – Intertidal: The Littoral – Intertidal
Ciaran’s Jig: Ciaran’s Jig
Bits and bobs
Herewith a couple of items that came to my attention over the weekend – and that I couldn’t resist sharing…
This image – brought to our notice by our dear friends in Saanichton – is part of a strip entitled ‘Grammar Pirates‘. The full strip – which can be found here – is the work of Scott Clark and can be found on his rather wonderful blog – ‘Kind of Sketchy‘.
Those who know me well will be all too aware of why I find the notion of ‘Grammar Pirates’ totally irresistable… grammar – word-play – paronomasia (look it up!)… and pirates!! What’s not to like?!
I found this in the magazine of The Observer – my Sunday read of choice. Their regular brief interview column – ‘This much I know‘ (which is subtitled ‘Famous faces share their life lessons‘) features a selection of edifying – and frequently humorous – ‘sound-bites’ from the well known.
This week’s contributor was the Scottish actor Brian Cox – now in his late sixties. He recalled working with Olivier:
‘Sir Laurence Olivier was quite elderly and frail when I worked with him. But he was a fox – he would wrong-foot people. I remember him forgetting his lines on set and saying, “Did anybody see Michael Hordern as King Lear? He knew all his lines. But I’m still a better fucking actor than he is.”‘
Priceless!
Ooops!
Those who follow these unreliably random postings might just recall an item that appeared back in October last relating to my hitherto unconsidered decision to indulge in the cultivation of a facial inflorescence… To be precise – a beard!
The growth of which was something that I had not previously attempted and at the time of writing I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about being adorned with such an accoutrement. I quite liked the look of the thing – thinking perhaps that it made me look a little distinguished – but I wasn’t at all sure that I felt like a man who should have a beard.
I have clearly had nothing further to convey on the subject since October – a reliable indicator that there has been no change either in my appearance or in my feelings regarding the matter.
Until now…
The growth seemed to suit best when kept reasonably short and tidy and I thus found it necessary to trim it at least once a week. Compared to shaving daily this was like being on holiday and I really rather enjoyed seeing what could be done with it. All went well until last night, when I was the sorry victim of a rare shaving accident – or more properly – a ‘trimming’ accident.
The beard trimmer that I had purchased to control the beast is a reasonably fancy job which has an electronic control by which the closeness of the cut is adjusted.
Yes – you can already see where this is headed!
Somehow – I know not how and – inevitably – without noticing until it was too late – I contrived to alter the cut setting so that the length was reduced from 5mm to 0.5mm! Within seconds I had cut a swathe like a firebreak across one cheek! Even the most cursory inspection revealed the situation to be hopeless. All I could do was to whip the whole thing off and then figure out if I wanted to start over again from scratch.
Doh!
It came as a considerable shock to see my naked face staring back at me from the mirror and I’m not at all sure that I like how I now look without the facial embellishment. Even worse – I am going to have to shave again every day!
Part of me is annoyed that I didn’t get to choose if and when I shaved the thing off; part of me shrugs philosophically and considers that this is what the universe has provided.
Either way it takes some getting used to…
Getting biblical
Lord, here comes the flood
We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent in any still alive
It’ll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you’re running dry
Peter Gabriel
It is broadly held that were it not for the weather we Brits would not have two words to say to each other. This is – of course – a vicious calumny, though it cannot be denied that the subject has – of late – provided much on which to confabulate.
Those resident in this green and pleasant land (what can yet be discerned of it through the murky drab by which great swathes of it are currently concealed) will be only too aware that the weather here throughout the past two months has been truly terrible. Ceaseless rainfall – giving parts of the UK their wettest January on record – and a constant conveyor of storm fronts from the Atlantic has resulted in catastrophic flooding, downed trees, damaged property and severed railway lines. Though the recent run of storms has abated somewhat this week there is no sign of an end to the apparently perpetual precipitation, which deluge has nowhere to go – landing as it is on already sodden ground.
Concurrent with this local cataclysm eastern Canada and the US have been experiencing freezing rain, wind and snow, whilst California – conversely – basks in record warm temperatures and suffers an ever-worsening drought.
Clearly – something is up. Equally clearly – to many of us at least – that something is ‘climate change’.
It would appear that the pattern of the jet stream that controls the weather in the northern hemisphere has started to alter – slowing down and beginning to meander in a previously unheralded manner. As a result weather patterns that would once have passed by expeditiously are now becoming bogged down for extended – and dangerous – periods…
…not that you would know any of this should you rely for your information on the say of the ‘climate change deniers’!
These deniers come in two varieties. The first – and perhaps worst – breed are those who deny that there have been any climate changes at all. These disbelievers hold that there have always been extreme weather patterns – and point out that the recent disturbances are merely ‘once in a hundred year’ events. This view would hold more credence were it not for the fact that the same was said last year – and quite probably a year or so before that. In actual fact, the frequency of these ‘unprecedented’ events appears to be increasing.
The second brood of deniers are those that accept that the climate has changed, but deny that this is in any way a result of man’s activities. This would – by itself – mean little, were it not that these cynics further decree that since we did nothing to cause the change we need do nothing about it. More – that we should do nothing about it. This marvelously perverse view has its roots in the Weltanschauung that is common to all deniers… they are all at heart free-marketeers! As such their blinkered world-view extends no further than the short-term cost of anything and everything, and is informed by the belief that – given its head – the market will resolve all issues. This tenet is adhered to blindly in the face of all recent evidence to the contrary and might – quite literally – one day be the death of us all!
I need to lie down in a darkened room!
Stay dry – stay warm…
Hallelujah!
After six weeks – forty two painful days – one thousand and eight excruciating hours – we finally once again have telephone and broadband connections at home. Hoo-bloomin’-ray!
British Telecom (BT) naturally made things difficult to the last. Having informed us – after their previous no-show – that the fault lay without our apartment they subsequently changed their minds and required us to make another appointment. When – following the obligatory week’s delay – an Openreach engineer finally visited us in the flesh he informed us that a test that he had performed outside in his van before ringing the doorbell had demonstrated that the fault was – after all – out in the street. He surmised that the previous engineer assigned to the case had not correctly measured the distance from the cabinet to the break in the cable – hence his mistake and this latest delay.
This engineer was – inevitably – not equipped to fix faults outside the premises, and we had to wait for a further twenty four hours for the situation to be finally resolved.
OK. I will shortly shut up about BT (at least until they try to bill us for the service that we have not had!) but one thing I would say is that I have modified somewhat my views concerning BT’s incompetence. I certainly believe that the maintenance division – Openreach – is deeply flawed in this regard. The first meaningful information we were given was that which the visiting engineer imparted to us – nearly six weeks after the fault was reported. The inescapable subtext of his observations was that Openreach had made no serious attempt to diagnose the problem up to that point! Had they done so the fault would have been fixed in a couple of days. This is just unacceptable.
The Customer Service side of the operation – on the other hand – is clearly broken by design… which is quite simply an insult.
The BT website is explicitly designed to prevent customers from communicating in any meaningful way with real live human beings. Should one contrive – through one’s own extensive efforts – to actually discover a contact phone number, this simply (should one be (un)lucky enough to get through) connects one to BT’s call centre on the Indian subcontinent. The role of the perpetually (and unnervingly) cheerful souls who man this godforsaken outpost of the BT empire is to act as cannon fodder to the angry customer. They can do no more – since they are not equipped so to do. They have no useful information to pass on, and nothing said to them finds it’s way back to the engineers.
Once I had finally made an appointment with the Outreach engineer I was called by no less than four different call centre operatives, each wishing to inform me that an engineer was to visit. Oh really?!
After the engineer had been and gone they called again:
“An engineer will be with you this afternoon.”
“He’s already been.”
“I’ll call back later to update you.”
“No – let me update you!”
…and I filled them in on the nature of the fault. It was clearly the first time that they had heard any of this information.
BT would doubtless try to explain away this sorry excuse for a ‘service’ by pleading the sheer weight of calls with which they have to deal. Well – I have some advice… equip the operatives with useful information to disburse and the customer will not feel the need to keep calling back. I would estimate – from my own experience – that call traffic could be cut by 70-80%! This would also reduce dramatically the amount of time currently given over to listening to the angry diatribes of disillusioned customers.
Right! That’s enough…
Flame off!
Never ending story
At the risk of boring the gentle reader…
I find that I now have a terrible compulsion to continue my explication of the train-wreck that is our current contretemps with British Telecom over our broken phone line and non-existent broadband – from which I am apparently unable to avert my attention!
Sorry about that…
After Openreach’s total failure last Friday either to show up during the specified five hour period that I waited for them, or to inform me that they were not actually coming after all… nothing happened! Though they had now identified that the fault was outside the property – somewhere between the cabinet in the street and the neighbouring telegraph pole – they declined to do anything about it.
When nothing had also been done by Tuesday I felt it my grim duty to contact BT anew to demand to know why not. I tried to call the fault contact number.
BT has a fancy-pants automated answering system. I have no idea for whose benefit this is meant to be, but it clearly is not the customer’s. It works like this:
- The customer calls BT. The robot answers and asks the customer to state – in a few words – the nature of the enquiry, adding – as a helpful example – “to order a new circuit?” (note: not to ‘complain about BT’s inexcusable failure to fix a long-standing fault!’)
- The customer – who has by now been through this process a number of times – responds with a pithily sarcastic observation implying complete lack of confidence in BT’s ability to hit a barn door with a banjo!
- BT’s automated system magically interprets this correctly as a request for an update on a fault and asks the customer to type the number of the phone concerned on the keypad.
- The user does so – carefully!
- The system totally fails to recognise the number, declares that since this is not a BT number they are unable to assist, and terminates the call abruptly!!
After several attempts this particular customer decided to try an oblique approach instead. I called again, but this time answered the first question with – “I’d like to order a new circuit”. As if by magic I was connected to a real-live person who sweetly enquired how he might help. “You can connect me to someone in your faults department” – I snarled – “without forcing me through your wretched automated system!”…
The faults department operative – speaking from the far side of the planet – did not know the answer to my plaintive questions but promised to call me back. “Use my office number” – I pleaded – “as there is no mobile signal in our building”. Naturally they called the mobile instead and left a voicemail which I found later when I left the building to go home. The message informed me – brightly – that the fault had been ‘escalated’. Not fixed – of course! That would be too much to ask.
When I checked the fault log on the BT website again later I discovered that this ‘escalation’ had apparently empowered BT to push back the target fix date to next Friday – more than five weeks after the fault was first logged!
An email plopped into my inbox. It was a telephone bill – from BT. Not only do they want to charge us a line-rental fee for a connection that has not worked in more than a month, but closer inspection showed that they also want to make us pay for a number of calls to the USA that we didn’t make – from the period that our line was crossed with someone else’s!
I called the far side of the world again.
The bright young man promised that once the fault was fixed (displaying an optimism that I, for one, found hard to summon) the bill would be adjusted accordingly and that we would not be asked to pay for this absence of service.
He then – shamelessly – tried to sell me a BT Broadband service!!!
If BT reward their telesales staff for chutzpah – this young man must be raking it in…
…Our phone line still doesn’t work…