Heavy metal silence

When I was a teenager, my next door neighbour, David Steele, had a “pop” group. He played bass and sang. I loved listening to them when they practised in the scout hut. One day, the guitarist didn’t turn up, and David handed me the electric bass and got me to play a base line while he replaced the guitarist. It was sooooo exciting… I don't think I've ever recovered.

I’ve always been a groupie at heart. I’ve always encouraged any body who wants to make music – even me. I find music fits roughly into the “sacred” slot in my mindset or heartset.

Here is a picture of Dave the bass player and George Bell the guitarist.

Yesterday, my son’s heavy metal band were going to be practicing at our house and I was delighted. I don’t particularly like other people’s heavy metal music but I do enjoy the sheer energy that the boys give off when I hear them live. I had some work to do and was planning to use ear plugs but enjoy the energy, the excitement, the vibe from time to time. I would be back in the Scout hut. Continuity.

So they came and they plugged everything in and I went to my office and worked and waited for the music to start. Nuthin. I got engrossed in my work, time passed and still nothing. Eventually I used the excuse of making myself a cup of tea to go and see why they weren’t playing. But they were.

They had plugged their guitars directly into a “carte son" - sound card?

– it looked like a miniature nuclear power station – and were recording the sound and monitoring it on the computer. They seemed to have cut out the “listening” phase of the process.

“But I can’t hear you” I wailed.

“Maman, we’re not playing for YOU” retorted Billy.

So who are they playing for? In any case, the name of the game is change…

“Worry pretends to be necessary – but serves no useful purpose” – Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey – I’m listening to them in the background.

I met translator Philippe Bouquet at the book fair in Lombez recently and was struck by the title of one of the books he had translated – Stig Dagerman's “Notre besoin de consolation est impossible à rassasier” – roughly - Our need for consolation is impossible to satisfy.

I like the title a lot, it seems to work really well, impossible à rassasier means the same as “insatiable” but is somehow, well, more satisfying.

I had never heard of Stig Dagerman, and found him again shortly afterwards, in JG Le Clézio’s Nobel speech – he is the last writer he mentions.

wie ein frau has a cow – a love story

“In his early years, Gerry Rafferty earned money busking on the London Underground. Poetically, his biggest hit "Baker Street" was about busking at a tube station."

It is certainly one of the songs that signifies the seventies for me.

"Two sources have told the Guardian that 61-year-old Rafferty is "alive and sounding comparatively well". It is estimated that he makes a reasonable income each year from royalties received from his most famous track, Baker Street, which came from his solo album, City to City. ".

euphony

Agreeable sound, especially in the phonetic quality of words.[French euphonie, from Late Latin euphōnia, from Greek euphōniā, from euphōnos, sweet-voiced : eu-, eu- + phōnē, sound.]

euphonic eu·phon'ic (yū-fŏn'ĭk) adj.
euphonically eu·phon'i·cal·ly adv.

euphemism – truism – eurythmics - europe - euphoria - euphoric - utopic - empathy - elegiac - utopia- usted - ousted - yank

Out on a limn? I am always surprised when I learn a new word in English, as if speaking a language meant knowing all the words in it.

limns

limn (lm)

tr.v. limned, limn·ing (lmnng), limns

1. To describe.

2. To depict by painting or drawing.

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[Middle English limnen, to illuminate (a manuscript), probably alteration (influenced by limnour, illustrator) of luminen, from Old French luminer, from Latin l min re, to illuminate, adorn, from l men, l min-, light; see leuk- in Indo-European roots.]

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Cent titres

Watch more MySpace videos on AOL Video

The outrage of it all! My analyst hinted that my discourse could be
specious
adj.
1. Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious: a specious argument.
2. Deceptively attractive.

[Middle English, attractive, from Latin speci sus, from speci s, appearance; see spek- in Indo-European roots.]

spe cious•ly adv.
spe ci•os i•ty (-sh - s -t ), spe cious•ness (-sh s-n s) n.

but “I hate you specious to pecious!”

It seems I expend a lot of energy expressing excuses for my neurotic behaviour in a way that is pleasing to myself, instead of rolling up my sleeves to do something about it. Hey, that rings a bell – “Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it” – Karl Marx.

Marx wrote ‘all profit is theft’, but he profited from the profits of others.
Schopenhauer wasn’t nearly so miserable as someone who has just read one of his books must feel. Apparently he wrote doom and gloom and lived as a hedonist. And Virginia Woolf, who had arrived at the conclusion that for the world to become a better place, ‘one would have to give up inherited wealth’. But she didn’t give up her family purse that filled up automatically like the magic treacle jug without her having to lift a little finger. She committed suicide.

The only way it will ever change is if people stop living in contradiction with their stated principles.

“One's basic nature is totally without hope, and yet one's nervous system is made out of the optimistic stuff.” Francis Bacon



Words worth a mention: master deceiver - crystallisation - repurposed...



I saunter into the kitchen to make coffee and glance at the kitchen notice board and see PAIN and coffee.

Could it be I had never noticed that bread in French means douleur in English? Is it the douleur of the constantly renewed effort of earning our daily bread?

In any case, all these words are superfluous today, a mere pretext to show the work of two amazing artist(e)s. Painter Jan Roset and singer Etenesh Wassié. Above is a clip of Etenesh with Le Tigre, but she also has a duo with Mathieu Sourrisseau on the bass. My favourite is Sew Neutu. I don't understand a word of what she is singing, just as I haven't got a clue how Jan achieves her effect, but these are two languages I wish I could speak!

And a picture of my favourite Scottish islet - Ailsa Craig - at sunset. Taken from Dunure.

A man, a plan, a canal — Panama!

Languages and codes.

Listening to the radio, I learn of a classical composer (I believe it was Shostakovich but I couldn’t find confirmation of this) who had a piece of metal inside his head that vibrated, causing him to hear highly original music, which he immediately transcribed… The metal was shrapnel, and it moved when he tilted his head. I listen to the radio in the car, and unfortunately I arrived at my destination before I could find out if he decided to have it removed or tuned…

The same day I came across the word palindrome, which reminded me of palimpsest, and as I was finding out what it meant I uncannily came across the following example:

"Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas".

And palindromes don’t just exist in human language, they are also present in molecular biology…

Last weekend we had no electricity because of the storms, and I decided to allow myself the luxury of reading all day Saturday. I read a biography of Bjork, and then the book that jumped into my hands was Marguerite Duras' Un Barrage contre le Pacifique. I had been meaning to read this book for years. I love the title, and I love it even more because the Pacific in the title is the China Sea. Oh the enormity of it all. Duras’ mother apparently refused to call the water by its proper name.

Some time later I discovered the book has just been made into a new film with Isabelle Huppert as Duras’ mother. Excitedly I looked up the screening schedule and found that the film had been shown at our local cinema the night before the book jumped into my hand.

In other words, all this is proof that I most definitely am a part of the universe. I exist and I’m connected to everything else. There are some crossed wires and some delayed reactions in my circuits, is all.

Not only do I exist, but I am also one of the Keith Tyson 5000.

Keith Tyson did a series of paintings called the History Paintings. I happened to visit Charlotte Higgins’ blog at the Guardian on the day that…

and here is my history painting…

Apart from the irresistibility of a freebie, there is the possibility of being involved in a crowd-sourced response project – a kind of big thank you to Keith Tyson – though, so far there are only eight of us. The other 4992 seem to be playing hard to get.

This raises the passably vast questions of what I think of gambling – I have always been against gambling, finding Pascal’s gambit intellectually dishonest – and the moral discomfort this causes reminds me of Lacan’s ne pas céder sur son désir and the feeling of trahison. Betrayal. Giving way, letting your standards slip, or just plain doing something you don’t believe in or doing something you believe to be wrong…

- and what art is, or Art, whether you like your A's capital or prefer a petit a, and could the two be related, and points to the démarche theory - a/Art is what is produced by artists, artists being people who are recognised by the community as producing art – winners of art prizes…

Blue bananas

"Allons y donc, toi et moi"

I came across an old attempt to translate Prufrock into French, and started to look for an official French version online. I found one which starts “Alors allons y, toi et moi”. I prefer my version, for the rhythm. There is something elusive about foreign stress. The ambiguity, or complexity of the rules - the rules of your native language are transparent, you only feel them in transgression, but the rules of a foreign language you fear by anticipation - that weak “s” at the end of alors, you feel it should be pronounced, but you can’t, that would make the phrase “alor zallons zy” – clearly not acceptable. So the “s” is kind of swept under the carpet like a guilty secret, like an awkward person who has just arrived at a party and doesn’t know where to put itself and skulks to the walls – to become a wallflower or, as in French, “to act like wallpaper”.


Thank you Laura, for introducing me to the work of Francesca Woodward.

That uncomfortable feeling generated by the “s” on “alors” – which would not occur in isolation but only because there will soon be another one in the phrase, and which would not affect a native speaker because they would instinctively know what to do or feel entitled to feel comfortable about their version… reminds me of a similar discomfort I felt recently working on Monk’s Blues with Françoise. There is a shift, skip, change in the tempo. Half way through our second three-hour session working on this I felt I had assimilated it, was able, in a group, to reproduce it, stay on the beat, in the tempo, but it was very unsettling and made me feel giddy, as if there was a décalage between what I was doing on the outside (clapping my hands or singing) and how it felt on the inside...

This is one of the reasons I love music.

While I was searching, I was amazed to find TS Eliot reading Prufrock. Such an unexpected treat! I do appreciate it, but I found myself at times frustrated with the way he reads his own poem. Especially “If one,” line 96. That is not how it should be read, at all. Not it, at all, I thought to myself. I suppose I was comparing it to a sort of ideal reader in my head, a mixture of Richard Burton on the War of the Worlds CD and Anthony Hopkins in the Remains of the Day… Or even real life voices of men that I know, Jean-Marie who knew it off by heart, other voices of friends and acquaintances that are my reference points, defining what the male poetic voice is for me.

There is no perfection, and tant mieux. At this point in analysis I seem to have come full circle and am back at the beginning, struggling once again to accept symbolic castration and break free of the omnipotent magical infant position… I’m stuck at a crossroads…

I have just acquired a small amplifier for my microphone and we had a laugh the other day at the idea of me taking them to a psychoanalysis session… "Now listen here, you big Other, you subject supposed to know!" Seriously I am trying to learn to listen, to myself and to everybody else, and making progress thanks to Olivier Capelle’s voice workshop on a Tuesday, trying to light candles in the dark corners of the cathedral I inadvertently swallowed. (I don’t know why she swallowed a sky, perhaps she’ll fly).

On the translation front, I am working on an anechoic chamber. A fascinating concept, if ever there was one… they say that a duck’s quack does not produce an echo.
This one looks like a bunch of blue bananas.

Berry orange

Once I was supposed to take pictures of a play and they did not work out, they were all blurred. When I had the camera poised to snap Serge in his boater hat, he looked at me and I was intimidated and did not dare to take the picture. It was engraved deeply on the inner membrane that holds images. I felt that if I had just snapped the picture blithely, I would have forgotten about the image; we sometimes rely on the camera to remember for us.

Twenty five years later I surfed the web looking for Serge and lo and behold, I find him wearing his boater hat. Someone else was able to photograph him because he did not look at them.

in a blaze of glory

Hedging your bets

For at least a month now, every time I drive past this hedge I want to stop and take photographs. The day before yesterday I stopped. I love the orange berries, they are so bright.

I have tried to capture the hue before, not very successfully. This hedge has three shades of orange – pale orange, orange orange and red… I took the photos with my phone. Makes me almost want to try to acquire a real camera. It was a very bright and sunny afternoon, and you can see my shadow in some of the pictures. In this one, my shadow is right in the middle, as if it was part of the hedge.

I say almost because I don’t trust cameras. I have owned 2 cameras. One was a present from my sister; the other was a present from my mother. I don’t want to buy one because it would be just another cog in the wheel of consumerism. And also because part of my mistrust stems from the fact that I believe that sometimes you have to not take a picture to remember a scene clearly. And who do we think will look at all our precious images after we have gone, anyway?

I'm off to Scotland for Hogmanay. See you next year!