When Was The Last Time I Went On A Date?

Depends what you call a date. I agree with Hank Moody (David Duchovny's character in Californication). A date is two adults, after seven-thirty in the evening, with the possibility of sex.

I can do the first two parts, but not the third. There is no possibility of sex. At least, none that I believe.

First, I spent too many years in a relationship where, for one reason or another, we had stopped having sex. We stuck with it through many years of bad times, so many years that by the end the good times weren't even a memory. I got very used to the idea that sex was something that didn't happen in relationship. Now I don't believe it happens at all.

Second, I have damage limitation to consider. When I have been without sensual touch (as opposed to squashed against other commuters) for an extended period of time, the slightest holding of hands sends hormones rushing round my bloodstream and turns me into an idiot. I realise what I have been missing, I notice the emotional greyness of the skies I live under. And then the come-down happens. I don't know about you, but for me disappointment is a physical feeling, doubtless caused by nasty chemicals some gland squirts into my bloodstream at that moment when I understand that what I was hoping was going to happen, isn't going to. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you have never really wanted anything enough. The aftertaste of disappointment is bitterness, often at myself and the world. When I was younger, I couldn't avoid all this and had to live with it, but at my age, I can and don't have to.

Third, who is she going to be? I have reached the point that all men eventually come to where, due to age, fading looks, slowing energy and insufficient disposal income to show a girl a good time, I want what I can't get and don't want what's left - assuming either group would want me.

I'm a man. I will go to my grave wanting the physical company of women because that's what it means to be a (heterosexual) man. Which means I have a few years of numbness-by-choice and occasional sharp jabs of regret and pain. I reserve the right to bitch and moan about this - you can exercise the right not to read to the end of the paragraph.

I would reverse this attitude tomorrow if God pushed a willing and not obviously alarming someone into my path. (And, by the way, if I thought He wasn't kidding.) But I have a limited amount of energy and I need most of it for the day job, exercise and chores. I don't have enough left over for low-expected-payoff activities like finding someone who will be kind enough to let me take them out on a date, which means, that they would also be crazy enough to find me sexually acceptable (attractive is probably asking too much).

And then there's the not-so-pretty side of all this. Which is around what I really get out of "relationships", sex and similar stuff. But I will leave that for later. Possibly much later.

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Foley and Titchfield

My walk from the office to Harley Street, where my osteopath Taj Deoora, has her clinic, takes me through that sort-of-garment district / sort-of-media-district between Oxford Street and Euston Road, and Tottenham Court Road and Great Portland Street. This corner, Foley Street and Great Tichfield Street, seems to be the local watering-hole. I've passed Sergio's at a number of different times and it is always busy, and always with people who look like they are having extended business lunches.

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.