Did June happen? My diary has things in it but I can’t recall that it was anything special or that I enjoyed it. I was tired, which was why I took a week off that didn’t really refresh me at all: no more than six hours’ sleep a night. All I want to do on a holiday is sleep. Eight hours minimum, ten for preference.
I saw Sexy Beast on Curzon At Home; Edge of Tomorrown and 3 Days To Kill at Cineworld; Fruitvale Station and Frank at the Curzon Soho. A few more episodes of the Inspector Montalbano were tucked under the belt as well. I read Big Data by Victor Meyer-Schoneberger, The Anatomy of Violence by Adrian Raine, Why Is There A Philosophy of Mathematics At All? by Ina Hacking, Love and Math by Edward Frenkel, and made a start on Peter Robb’s A Street Fight In Naples.
The family had lunch at the Ritz for Mother’s birthday on a Saturday. The food is good for a London brasserie, though not one-star, and the decor exactly as awful as you imagine. It’s way too formal for anyone to actually have, you know, fun, there. Sis and I went down the far end of the Kings Road to Medlar, which had better food and decor. Though it was mid-week, every bar and restaurant at that end was packed, and everyone looked as though they were having fun.
The Girls and I had supper in Soho mid-month and they came over to my place on the last Saturday of the month to see my new kitchen and have lunch: tilapia and salad; chicken Fiorentina; chorizo with butter bean stew. All from the Leith’s recipe book they bought me for my birthday. (Big Ahhhhhhh).
During the holiday I had a full-service medical from the GP at my gym - blood tests, urine tests, ECG, breathing, body-fat, and the bit where he checks for prostate cancer. My pulse was 60, blood pressure 122 / 82, chemicals were fine except high LDH, and my testosterone levels were middling. Not low, but not raging either. I was 95kgs for the medical and that’s too high. I need to lose about a stone, and much of that in body fat.
My exercise routine was a mess. I managed to get back up to 3x10x60kgs on the bench, which is the basic level for someone with actual testicles and an office job. I missed classes and felt uninspired.
So I’m now the possessor of a FitBit One. I am becoming a Quantified Person. More on that later.
Thursday, 3 July 2014
Monday, 30 June 2014
Frank: The Movie
I have no idea how anyone writes songs. I can extemporise instrumental music on the guitar, piano and recorder; I can write plays, have written poems and stories; I have a glimpse at what creative mathematics and philosophy are about; I take reasonable photographs and can put together a meal from whatever’s in the kitchen. But I have NO IDEA how Curt Cobain wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit.
None. Can’t fathom it. (I can pick up a guitar and "just play" something. Improvisation / extemporisation I can do: song-writing? Composing to order? Not a hope.)
The pianist in Frank could be me - except he can do social media better than I can’t at all, and gets to make hay with a girl who looks just like Maggie Gyllenhall. It has the funniest joke I’ve heard all year
“I play keyboards”
“Can you play C, F and G?”
“Yes”
“You’re in”
I rolled in the aisle.
Frank is sold as a comedy, and who knows it may even have been written and performed as one. But inside it is a portrayal of the creative process and people. The key scene, the one that tells you that Frank and his weird band are actually the real thing, is right at the end. (Spoiler alert). Robbed of his papier-mâché head, revealed as the grown-up version of the troubled child that he was, he walks into the dingy bar his band have a gig at - playing to four people who can’t hear them. Frank looks around and picks features of the room and starts to recite them, which turns into a kind of chorus, which the band pick up on and within three choruses are in full flight, at once backing and soloing over Frank’s song. And it’s good, for its genre. Jam and Lewis it ain’t, but if you’re into that stuff, you’ll know it’s good. (it’s not great, but it’s good.) It’s better than I could do.
And in the meantime, our narrator, who fell in with them by accident, promoted them through You Tube and Twitter, and fails to write a single worthwhile bar of music throughout the movie, leaves, having understood that he’s not a creative musician, but at best a guy who knows when to play C, F and G.
The process that the movie shows us is hermetic (the band don’t want to be a success, and two of them only speak French), obsessive (they take nearly a year to prepare an album that never gets released), and quirky (scenes of recording natural noises and other things). That’s one way of creating ideas and music, but it’s not the only one. At the other extreme is what the great jazz musicians did: play all the time, listen to other people when you’re not playing, and keep experimenting with changes. What happens if we do this, or that? What happens when I get three of the greatest improvising musicians in history in a church and give them some chords to work off? (Hint: Kind of Blue. We just didn’t know that Coltrane, Adderley and Evans were that good then.)
Frank suggests that creative people are odd if not actually weird, and that’s a common enough idea, but it’s an excuse. For the audience. Creativity takes knowledge, skill and application, the willingness to experiment and be wrong, and, of course, a lot of familiarity with what others are doing. It’s hard work and requires a certain amount of single-mindedness, or a lot of opportunities to experiment (as in “I thought I’d try putting prunes in the stew this time”). That’s not likely for people whose time fritters away on conference calls, meetings, making up slide decks, BS-ing in the pub, zoning out on the train and “dealing” with other peoples’ insecurities and neediness. But creative people spend more time futzing, going down blind alleys and pursuing impossible pet projects than anyone thinks.
One thing the movie is pretty darn clear about. It’s better to be the band playing doleful versions of cowboys songs in a nowhere bar than it is to be the people drinking at the bar. Or the piano player who brings the band-leader back to join them. And with that, I do not disagree.
None. Can’t fathom it. (I can pick up a guitar and "just play" something. Improvisation / extemporisation I can do: song-writing? Composing to order? Not a hope.)
The pianist in Frank could be me - except he can do social media better than I can’t at all, and gets to make hay with a girl who looks just like Maggie Gyllenhall. It has the funniest joke I’ve heard all year
“I play keyboards”
“Can you play C, F and G?”
“Yes”
“You’re in”
I rolled in the aisle.
Frank is sold as a comedy, and who knows it may even have been written and performed as one. But inside it is a portrayal of the creative process and people. The key scene, the one that tells you that Frank and his weird band are actually the real thing, is right at the end. (Spoiler alert). Robbed of his papier-mâché head, revealed as the grown-up version of the troubled child that he was, he walks into the dingy bar his band have a gig at - playing to four people who can’t hear them. Frank looks around and picks features of the room and starts to recite them, which turns into a kind of chorus, which the band pick up on and within three choruses are in full flight, at once backing and soloing over Frank’s song. And it’s good, for its genre. Jam and Lewis it ain’t, but if you’re into that stuff, you’ll know it’s good. (it’s not great, but it’s good.) It’s better than I could do.
And in the meantime, our narrator, who fell in with them by accident, promoted them through You Tube and Twitter, and fails to write a single worthwhile bar of music throughout the movie, leaves, having understood that he’s not a creative musician, but at best a guy who knows when to play C, F and G.
The process that the movie shows us is hermetic (the band don’t want to be a success, and two of them only speak French), obsessive (they take nearly a year to prepare an album that never gets released), and quirky (scenes of recording natural noises and other things). That’s one way of creating ideas and music, but it’s not the only one. At the other extreme is what the great jazz musicians did: play all the time, listen to other people when you’re not playing, and keep experimenting with changes. What happens if we do this, or that? What happens when I get three of the greatest improvising musicians in history in a church and give them some chords to work off? (Hint: Kind of Blue. We just didn’t know that Coltrane, Adderley and Evans were that good then.)
Frank suggests that creative people are odd if not actually weird, and that’s a common enough idea, but it’s an excuse. For the audience. Creativity takes knowledge, skill and application, the willingness to experiment and be wrong, and, of course, a lot of familiarity with what others are doing. It’s hard work and requires a certain amount of single-mindedness, or a lot of opportunities to experiment (as in “I thought I’d try putting prunes in the stew this time”). That’s not likely for people whose time fritters away on conference calls, meetings, making up slide decks, BS-ing in the pub, zoning out on the train and “dealing” with other peoples’ insecurities and neediness. But creative people spend more time futzing, going down blind alleys and pursuing impossible pet projects than anyone thinks.
One thing the movie is pretty darn clear about. It’s better to be the band playing doleful versions of cowboys songs in a nowhere bar than it is to be the people drinking at the bar. Or the piano player who brings the band-leader back to join them. And with that, I do not disagree.
Thursday, 26 June 2014
Four Days in the Netherlands: A Walk Round Utrecht
Utrecht has a university, where Nobel Prizewinner Gerard t’Hooft is a professor, and a number of parks and canals which make a very pleasant circular walk to pass the middle of Sunday, stopping at the Louis Hartlooper Complex for lunch and returning via the town centre.
Monday, 23 June 2014
Four Days in the Netherlands: The Amsterdam-Rhine Canal
The Netherlands is about canals. These are not cute, narrow English canals with houseboats that used to carry a few tons of china clay, salt or pottery about the place. These are wide and deep and look more like rivers and very large specialised low cargo ships with big engines and the Captain’s 4x4 on the roof and a couple of hundred tons of something bulky, proceeding at a decent clip. These are serious industrial canals for a serious industrial economy.
The top two photographs are of the same freighter. That's how big those things are.
The top two photographs are of the same freighter. That's how big those things are.
The canal is on the right of the train (going away from Amsterdam) until a few miles outside Utrecht when it turns south towards the Rhine. So that's a canal in the bottom photograph, not an actual river.
Thursday, 19 June 2014
Four Days in the Netherlands: Amsterdam
Lunch at the Cafe American on the Liedesplein, then to the Art Unlimited postcard shop on the Liedestraat, just by the bridge over the Prinsengracht, and then I forgot to take pictures. Except the one with the girls in the window. Amsterdam manages to be at once in a time warp and up-to-date and I’m not quote sure how they do it. Possibly by not allowing anyone to build anything new in the Centruum at all. Next time, I’ll know what to look for.
Monday, 16 June 2014
Four Days In The Netherlands: Rijksmuseum
The first time we tried to visit the Rijksmuseum last year, soon after it reopened, the queues were up the stairs and along the block. We passed. This time I had to wait about five minutes to buy a ticket. (I remind my readers that the National and Tate Galleries are free.) There were people taking photographs of the paintings, but you already know what all the Vermeers look like, and the Nightwatch (Rembrandt), and the Meagre Company (Hals) and the Swan and all that other stuff. So I took pictures of anything but the paintings.
Thursday, 12 June 2014
Four Days In The Netherlands: A Walk to Utrecht Station
This is what “a walk to the station” looks like on a Saturday morning in Utrecht. The station and its surrounding area are being re-built, and it’s not going to be a few years yet, so this doesn’t end as serenely Dutch as it starts. The flower market is there every Saturday, and the food market is there every day.
Two ordinary residential streets in that part of town: are you going to tell me architecture doesn't make a difference to how we feel? For some reason Die Bakkerswinkel is a girl-only bakery, but I always get cakes there for Sunday afternoon; that's a narrow canal on the right, and a chunk of the University of Utrecht on the left; the tower of Utrecht Cathederal; two shots of the flower market; the Dutch leave bicycles everywhere; three shots of the food market; building works visible from the station: the Netherlands really is made of sand; and yet more bicycles at Utrecht station.
Two ordinary residential streets in that part of town: are you going to tell me architecture doesn't make a difference to how we feel? For some reason Die Bakkerswinkel is a girl-only bakery, but I always get cakes there for Sunday afternoon; that's a narrow canal on the right, and a chunk of the University of Utrecht on the left; the tower of Utrecht Cathederal; two shots of the flower market; the Dutch leave bicycles everywhere; three shots of the food market; building works visible from the station: the Netherlands really is made of sand; and yet more bicycles at Utrecht station.
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