Pavement Graffiti, York Road SE1

I have no idea who spray-painted this diagram of the cables under the pavement - and how they found out - but I wonder if they were / are a graff artist in their spare time. There's a sureness of touch and sense of proportion about the lines and the colours that you just don't expect to find in a regular roadworks.

Go Ahead John: The Music of John McLaughlin

I recently finished reading Go Ahead John: The Music of John McLaughlin, by Paul Stump. Half-way through I was confirmed in what I have been afraid of saying out loud for many, many years. Before I do, I accept and agree totally that John McLaughlin is the most virtuoso plectrum guitar player who will ever live. I heard him play on Bitches Brew and thought "no-one can play that fast", and when I saw the McLaughlin-de Lucia-diAmiola Trio play on TV, I knew no-one could play that fast. I actually saw the Tony Williams Lifetime play, at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon. It was loud, it was fast, it was utterly, utterly, totally and completely unmusical.

The anti-McLaughlin is Neil Young, who is famous for, amongst other things, playing solos that consist of one note. But it's the right note, and it's played the right way, each time. That's musicality. Here's the Mahavishnu Orchestra on Meeting of The Spirits...



...and here's Hendrix on Pali Gap doing everything that McLaughlin does, but, well...



One is musical and the other isn't.

McLaughlin has his musical moments, many with Miles Davis. His playing on In A Silent Way is light, skipping and musical: technique in the service of music. His chordal playing on Jack Johnson is perfect: meaning that it's what it needs to be to make the music sound good. Mostly he lets his awesome technique run away with him. Speed, modes, odd scales, weird time-signatures: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The Art of The Fugue is in common time and D Minor, and proceeds at a measured pace.

If it was just him, it wouldn't be so bad. But many people seem to have decided that since that was the way Miles' guitarist played, they should play like that - unless they were going to be hard-boppers or Derek Bailey / Sonny Sharrock clones. So a large number of jazz guitarists play fast, noisy, often with some fuzz, almost always with an attempt to play with a rock influence, building to a string-bending climax as fake as a bored wife's orgasm. It doesn't work. Ritzy Bryan makes a splendid chaotic noise against a rock beat because she keeps it simple. Mary Halverson, John Scofield and others run all over the fretboard and just make a racket. I know they are trying to avoid jazz-lite (Pat Metheny on a bad day), or of course, sounding like Barney Kessel or Charlie Christian, but there are more ways of doing that than turning up the amplifier or doing the guitar equivalent of honking on the tenor sax.

The challenge for any artist is to work the media (instrument, musical genre) to express what you need to say, in your voice, so that other people feel what you're feeling. The goal is to play three notes and have everyone bet their house on who it is. Though each make and model of guitar has its own sound, Joni Mitchell will sound like herself no matter what axe she plays, and so will Eric Clapton: given, say, a Les Paul, each of them will work with it to get the "Les Paul" sound they can work with. It's a little bit more complicated than "tone is in the fingers", but that old saw expresses a truth.

And it is about feeling. Music is always about feeling. Except when you play so damn fast on an instrument that doesn't respond well to speed that you can't feel anything. That was what I always thought was wrong with McLaughlin's playing. Once upon a time I wanted to play that fast. That's not the deal I would make at the crossroads now: now, I would just want to play more like me.

California Dreaming at the Crossroads

The other Sunday I was about to leave Ed's Diner in Soho, after an American and vanilla shake, which was itself preceded by watching The Nim Project at the Curzon Soho, and before that a run and swim at my gym, and was to be succeeded by an expensive browse round Foyles and a drive home (that's what I call a Sunday morning), anyway, I was about to leave when on came this track...



I had to stay. I was singing the harmonies under my breath as was the lady who had ordered a milk shake without the milk earlier. I wonder...

When they listened to the playback, did they look at each other and know they had crossed the line from being a decent vocal band to the creators and performers of an immortal song? That their lives would never be the same again, and that they had a place in the world? Well, maybe not that last bit. Did they know it was a masterpiece?

There are many occasions when people cross the line from being an ordinary Joe or Susan to being Someone with a Stake. Clifford Stoll describes this process in his classic book The Cuckoo's Egg. I imagine it happened to Joe Strummer and the clash when they holed up in Chelsea for six months composing London Calling. It's like that Robert Johnson Crossroads myth: you make a commitment to something, and if it takes, it changes you.

What I want to know is, does it feel on the inside what it looks like on the outside?

The Great Paula Ostrowska Mystery

So the other day I got a random Facebook request (I'm on it to see who else is on it, and because I saw the movie and had some time spare to fill stuff out, but I'm on as my real name). It was from Paula Ostrowska. Which the last time I looked was an Eastern European name. There is a real Paul Ostrowska you can find on the Internet - she's student at the School of Social Psychology in Warsaw and she looks classically Eastern European.

This is what my "Paula Ostrowska" looks like...

Look carefully. See how long and rich her hair is? The smooth and tanned-looking complexion? Those cheekbones, and those lips, not to mention the way that green eye liner doesn't look slightly sickly, which it would on an Eastern European girl? Because this girl is Indian, with a decent probability of being born in the US or England.

So... huh? Of course the profile is private, which should ring alarm bells, and she only has 18 friends. Just maybe ol' Zuckergerg's code has assigned the wrong photograph to the account, and it really is the Polish student, who happens to be a friend of Anna who was in the blog a few entries ago, but I don't think so.

I'm assuming this is some kind of scam - for who could resist being befriended by a girl who looks like this? Well, I could, but my hormones are under reasonable control these days.

Now We've Had The News, It's Even Quieter

A couple of weeks ago I said that it was too quiet in here: no-one was talking about the upcoming re-organisation. Soon after that, we got the news. Or rather, we got our little bit of it.

The division was divided into grey and yellow positions. Grey positions were assigned - "blueprinted" is this month's word - to people; yellow positions are up for grabs by anyone within the division on the same grade as the position - "preferencing" is the word.

I have a grey position and working for the same manager as I am now (sigh of relief), but there's no place for our supervisor and that's a damn shame. About six other people are in grey jobs, everyone else has to preference.

Preferencing is where you fill out a form explaining what jobs you would like to do and why you should get one of them, and then they give you a job you never even heard of. Everyone who is bored or unhappy applies for anything as long as it's out of where they are: in the last round two years ago, everyone in my team applied to get out (except me, not because I liked where I was, but because anywhere else was even worse). Our Director carefully explained that a position and its accompanying person were grey if they matched seventy per cent or better: otherwise the job was yellow. The catch is that if the incumbent applies for their own job, they are pretty much the best-qualified, most-experienced for it, so they get it. Look at the new chart that way and you can put names to about half the positions.

The general feeling is that the re-organisation has been done to look strategy-friendly rather than practically useful. A perfectly good team of cross-brand analysts, product development and pricing people is being split into two by brand, so that there are two competing brands within the product. That reduces the support the brand teams can call on and when the people who aren't happy leave, one of those teams won't have any senior-level analytical support at all.

No-one is really talking, because everyone is competing for the same jobs, or isn't happy and doesn't want to let on that they will shortly be looking outside.

The real silence is from the rest of the organisation. I'm gathering that some areas are being cut with a blunt and bloody axe, but you wouldn't know it except from the rumour mill. Apparently the Unions were involved in this, but nothing came from them to their members, of whom we have a few. As yet, no real pattern or intention has emerged from what we've heard, no "getting rid of all the central / product / twenty plus years in the pension scheme / with red hair / from Wales / without at least one Sicilian parent / whatever" criterion. This silence is really quite spooky.

Books Waiting To Be Read (August 2011)

(This is what happens when you have Foyles and Waterstones less than two hundred yards from your office.)

A History of Illuminated Manuscripts - Christopher de Hamel
The Klee Universe - various
Photography: A Cultural History - Mary Marien
Notations 21 - Therasa Sauer
Dreamworld and Catastrophe - Susan Buck_Morris
This Book Is Broken - Stuart Berman
A Hole In Texas - Herman Wouk
Hegel's Aesthetics (Vol 2)
Hollywood Cinema - Ricahrd Maltby
The Philosophy of Money - Georg Simmel
Improvising Jazz - Jerry Coker
Totality and Infinity - Emmanuel Levinas
The Book of Symbols - various
Model Theory and Algebraic Geometry - Bouscaren (ed)
Chocolate Wars - Deborah Cadbury
The Making of the British Landscape - Francis Pryor
The Real Global Warming Disaster - Christopher Booker
Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit - Mort Rosenblum
One and Other - Anthony Gormley
Dark Matter - Gregory Sholette
How Well Do Facts Travel - Howlet & Morgan
Go Ahead John: The Music of John McLaughlin - Paul Stump
The Jazz Ear - Ben Ratliff
Text-Me-Up - Tracey Moberly

I now buy books when I think "this will be interesting" rather than "I want to start reading that tonight". I bought The Memory of Pablo Escobar about three years ago and read it recently: I'm glad I waited, because I was reading a fair amount of "True Crime" stuff at the time and would have expected that, rather than the art project it actually is. There are also books that get bought and read the same week, giving me a break from stuff that I know I need to read but is a real slog, like this.

On The Coastal Path: Fishguard

Ancient cannons defending the port of Fishguard; foxglove; that chrome yellow moss I don't know the name of but is beautiful; the view inland; turn round, the view out to sea.

It seems so long ago, but that's the effect August has on me: the year is divided into Before August and After August, and right now, I'm in the doldrums that is August.