About 10 days ago was the occasion of the annual barbecue put on by Naomi's law firm, which takes place at a rather nice pub in a rather nice part of Winchester (called Hyde).
I've been meaning, since then, to write briefly about a few moments that I had to myself, while I sat at a picnic table in the beer garden and Naomi was going round her assembled colleagues, saying 'good night' to them while I finished off a pint.
All around me there were different conversations taking place, and as my brain struggled to allow all of them into my consciousness I quietly noticed my own feelings of wellbeing. I couldn't quite follow all of what was going on around me properly, but for a few seconds while I was held for ransom by my own senses of sight and hearing, I felt a peace that made me wonder if this is what the afterlife is like. Not being fully there, but not being concerned about it at all.
In the role of this errant observer, I found myself looking up at a man with a beard and glasses at nearby table and started singing/mumbling to myself (to the tune of Dude Looks Like a Lady) "Dude lookslike Harold Shipman".
It's a good job I don't take drugs, isn't it.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Monday, July 17, 2006
Musical Meme
I've been meme-tagged by FirstApostle (Andrew). I don't usually believe in these chainletter things (gawd knows, enough of them go round Myspace, which I ignore), but between 'proper' blogs, it seems to have slightly more point to it. I'll probably come back to this blog post at some point to put in links from the song titles to their locations on the iTunes Music Store so that you could buy them if you feel so inclined, but I'm at work now, so iTunes, along with most other internet technologies, has been disabled.
(If I tag you, please copy the instructions below and then list your songs)
"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 6 other people to see what they're listening to"
Here are the first seven I could think of, in no particular order of preference:
1. "Fishing the Sky" The Appleseed Cast
2. "Ghosts" Shellac
3. "Us" Regina Spektor
4. "Here Comes the Rumour Mill" The Young Knives
5. "Fire Back About Your New Baby's Sex" Don Caballero
6. "Little Sparkee" Q and Not U
7. "Small Apartment Party Epiphany" Make Believe
Now, for my meme tags, I choose. I'm afraid I can't muster 6 other bloggers who haven't already been tagged. Sorry and all that:
The Chocolate Monkey
Milkybar Monkey
Frogspots
(If I tag you, please copy the instructions below and then list your songs)
"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 6 other people to see what they're listening to"
Here are the first seven I could think of, in no particular order of preference:
1. "Fishing the Sky" The Appleseed Cast
2. "Ghosts" Shellac
3. "Us" Regina Spektor
4. "Here Comes the Rumour Mill" The Young Knives
5. "Fire Back About Your New Baby's Sex" Don Caballero
6. "Little Sparkee" Q and Not U
7. "Small Apartment Party Epiphany" Make Believe
Now, for my meme tags, I choose. I'm afraid I can't muster 6 other bloggers who haven't already been tagged. Sorry and all that:
The Chocolate Monkey
Milkybar Monkey
Frogspots
Friday, July 14, 2006
Pig musicology part 1
Hotly on the tail of my last post, I've remembered that I've been meaning to write more posts about one of my great loves: music.
There really are a great many topics to cover here, but for the first foray, I thought I'd write about bands and their influences. I'm always intrigued where I can hear a music figure that sounds like its player (and in the case of most bands that'll actually be the person who has written at least some of the music - quite the converse of 'classical' composition) has taken on board something else that they've listened to.
This can end up with the musical idea (or the sound/s used to execute that idea - think of guitarists playing specific guitar/pickup/amplifier/speaker combinations to achieve a certain sound) either drawing on and reinterpreting a certain style - which is where a great many of the developments of Western music have come from, versus slavishly following an existing template in a way which fails to surpass the original in any sense.
When I get excited by bands, it's usually because they fit that classic realm of sound which is *just* familiar enough to be slightly accessible, but different enough to maintain my interest in what they're doing. Sometimes this can take the form of being able to hear their influences, and how they've decided to rework them to fashion something new. You can take a band like Biffy Clyro and examine their first album, which their press info at the time said was influenced by Far and Mineral. Yes, I can hear both of those bands, but the resultant songwriting is also something reasonably individual. Fast forward to the point at which they recorded The Vertigo of Bliss and you have a far superior beast, as it's a band that's reworked itself and pushed its own development down certain lines, becoming substantially more than the sum of its parts.
There's another band called Sucioperro who hail from the same parts of Scotland as BC. We played on a lineup with them last Summer and I also watched them supporting Dive Dive quite recently at the Railway, Winchester. Try as I might, they're not a band I can enjoy, because their sound and their songwriting is pretty much identical to BC. There are whole choruses where you can overlay BC vocal lines, and that's no good if your ear is looking for something to interest you based on the music being a little different, a little familiar. I can't listen to what they're doing and enjoy it because I've heard the original and it sounds better. The same goes for a band we played with a couple of times called Cats & Cats & Cats. They were okay, but I couldn't really get into what they were doing with any enthusiasm because the songs were close to being carbon copies of Explosions in the Sky welded to Youth Movie Soundtrack Strategies. So much so, that while I was listening to them with the rest of the band, we'd get to a new section and all be saying to each other "oh, now the Explosions bit...". Both of these bands are considerably more popular than my band, so what do I know, anyway.
Coming to that, I guess I could be accused of being in a band that's fairly indebted to several other bands, but I genuinely believe that the longer we're playing together, the less we sound directly comparable to other bands that we like. I guess that, stylistically, we're within a certain bracket, but the idiosyncracies we've picked up along the way (and sometimes it'll be just one or two of us in the band that start to get into something that the rest of the band then doesn't really ever hear - take me an Dave listening to Faraquet and taking on a little of that jazziness, for instance) are what keeps it fresh and interesting to be involved with. I suppose as long as it keeps evolving off on its own little tangent, I'll still want to be making music this way.
There really are a great many topics to cover here, but for the first foray, I thought I'd write about bands and their influences. I'm always intrigued where I can hear a music figure that sounds like its player (and in the case of most bands that'll actually be the person who has written at least some of the music - quite the converse of 'classical' composition) has taken on board something else that they've listened to.
This can end up with the musical idea (or the sound/s used to execute that idea - think of guitarists playing specific guitar/pickup/amplifier/speaker combinations to achieve a certain sound) either drawing on and reinterpreting a certain style - which is where a great many of the developments of Western music have come from, versus slavishly following an existing template in a way which fails to surpass the original in any sense.
When I get excited by bands, it's usually because they fit that classic realm of sound which is *just* familiar enough to be slightly accessible, but different enough to maintain my interest in what they're doing. Sometimes this can take the form of being able to hear their influences, and how they've decided to rework them to fashion something new. You can take a band like Biffy Clyro and examine their first album, which their press info at the time said was influenced by Far and Mineral. Yes, I can hear both of those bands, but the resultant songwriting is also something reasonably individual. Fast forward to the point at which they recorded The Vertigo of Bliss and you have a far superior beast, as it's a band that's reworked itself and pushed its own development down certain lines, becoming substantially more than the sum of its parts.
There's another band called Sucioperro who hail from the same parts of Scotland as BC. We played on a lineup with them last Summer and I also watched them supporting Dive Dive quite recently at the Railway, Winchester. Try as I might, they're not a band I can enjoy, because their sound and their songwriting is pretty much identical to BC. There are whole choruses where you can overlay BC vocal lines, and that's no good if your ear is looking for something to interest you based on the music being a little different, a little familiar. I can't listen to what they're doing and enjoy it because I've heard the original and it sounds better. The same goes for a band we played with a couple of times called Cats & Cats & Cats. They were okay, but I couldn't really get into what they were doing with any enthusiasm because the songs were close to being carbon copies of Explosions in the Sky welded to Youth Movie Soundtrack Strategies. So much so, that while I was listening to them with the rest of the band, we'd get to a new section and all be saying to each other "oh, now the Explosions bit...". Both of these bands are considerably more popular than my band, so what do I know, anyway.
Coming to that, I guess I could be accused of being in a band that's fairly indebted to several other bands, but I genuinely believe that the longer we're playing together, the less we sound directly comparable to other bands that we like. I guess that, stylistically, we're within a certain bracket, but the idiosyncracies we've picked up along the way (and sometimes it'll be just one or two of us in the band that start to get into something that the rest of the band then doesn't really ever hear - take me an Dave listening to Faraquet and taking on a little of that jazziness, for instance) are what keeps it fresh and interesting to be involved with. I suppose as long as it keeps evolving off on its own little tangent, I'll still want to be making music this way.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Manners maketh man
I wrote a blog post some months ago about frequently misused phrases that I notice creeping into English usage in the UK. I thought I'd revisit this in a slightly different way and point out my annoyance at a couple of phrases that seem to have arrived over the past two years or so (or at least that's when I've noticed them).
1. "Can I get a ....". This one's arisen for people who are ordering a round of drinks, or food at a restaurant. The customer now asks "Can I get a pint of San Miguel" rather than saying "Can I have...", "I'd like..." or better "May I have...".
What's the effect of this? Well, I see it as part of the removal of manners from our everyday social transactions. Each time you say to a bartender "Can I get a...", you're fundamentally bypassing their involvement as the person who's responsible for serving you. Using the word 'get' implies to me that the customer is going to walk around the bar and serve himself a drink, as if to say "your service is rubbish and I don't feel like you're doing anything to make my experience in this pub more pleasant". I think that this reduction of etiquette may subliminally reduce the politeness between the two partners to the transaction, resulting in everyone feeling a little less satisfied at the manners contained within the exchange (and therefore the sense of mututal respect between the customer and the employee). Think about this next time you're about to use the word 'get' in that situation, and think about whether you've actually always said 'get', or whether, like me, your ears have picked this up as a new development in language usage.
2. "I want you to give me 110%". I'm absolutely fed up of hearing idiots on television saying this. Whether it's some kind of fitness trainer, or some obnoxious chef, there always seems to be someone demanding one hundred and *ten* per cent of the people under them. I'm interested in this on two levels. Firstly, who taught these people maths? When you're talking about human capacity there is a finite limit of ability to do something. That's called one hundred per cent effort. Anything more than one hundred per cent would therefore have to be the work of more than one person. Try telling that to the logic masters we watch nightly on our TVs. They're always saying that the person needs to make more effort, and the cliche figure they put on this is always "110%". So, the second thing that intrigues me is where this figure of 110% came from. Seeing as the demands are impossible to meet (remember, we have a maximum capacity of 100% here), why not just ask for two hundred or three hundred per cent. Those figures are no less absurd, when you look at it in these terms. But somewhere along the line, some exaggerator decided that 110% was a suitable figure.
People are daft.
1. "Can I get a ....". This one's arisen for people who are ordering a round of drinks, or food at a restaurant. The customer now asks "Can I get a pint of San Miguel" rather than saying "Can I have...", "I'd like..." or better "May I have...".
What's the effect of this? Well, I see it as part of the removal of manners from our everyday social transactions. Each time you say to a bartender "Can I get a...", you're fundamentally bypassing their involvement as the person who's responsible for serving you. Using the word 'get' implies to me that the customer is going to walk around the bar and serve himself a drink, as if to say "your service is rubbish and I don't feel like you're doing anything to make my experience in this pub more pleasant". I think that this reduction of etiquette may subliminally reduce the politeness between the two partners to the transaction, resulting in everyone feeling a little less satisfied at the manners contained within the exchange (and therefore the sense of mututal respect between the customer and the employee). Think about this next time you're about to use the word 'get' in that situation, and think about whether you've actually always said 'get', or whether, like me, your ears have picked this up as a new development in language usage.
2. "I want you to give me 110%". I'm absolutely fed up of hearing idiots on television saying this. Whether it's some kind of fitness trainer, or some obnoxious chef, there always seems to be someone demanding one hundred and *ten* per cent of the people under them. I'm interested in this on two levels. Firstly, who taught these people maths? When you're talking about human capacity there is a finite limit of ability to do something. That's called one hundred per cent effort. Anything more than one hundred per cent would therefore have to be the work of more than one person. Try telling that to the logic masters we watch nightly on our TVs. They're always saying that the person needs to make more effort, and the cliche figure they put on this is always "110%". So, the second thing that intrigues me is where this figure of 110% came from. Seeing as the demands are impossible to meet (remember, we have a maximum capacity of 100% here), why not just ask for two hundred or three hundred per cent. Those figures are no less absurd, when you look at it in these terms. But somewhere along the line, some exaggerator decided that 110% was a suitable figure.
People are daft.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
... and mosquito, natural enemies
It's bedtime at the Clark household, and I'm lying in bed, exhausted after the heat of the day (it's been stupidly hot today and for the last few days) and the fact that I've had quite a heavy summer cold over the last 4 days or so.
Naomi has left the window in this room open for me, and arranged the net curtain in such a way as to let some air flow in, but hopefully not too many of our insect brethren. My main concern is mosquitos, which are attracted to my blood to an alarming degree (confirmed by my blood-poisoned foot covered in 30 individual bites when I was in the caribbean a few years back). Naomi's parents are kind enough to burn citronella oil whenever we eat on the patio in their garden because they know just how troubled I am by biting insects.
I do hope I don't get bitten tonight.
The other notable result of the heatwave over the past few days has been that my Sony Ericsson k750i has malfunctioned. The screen stays white permanently. I went to the vodafone shop to see if i could get it serviced (it's under one year old), and the somewhat arrogant staff member pulled the battery out of the phone, pointed to a pink strip of plastic on the battery and told me that it'd become water damaged. I explained that it'd been nowhere near any water, which leaves the only explanation being that my body heat and any sweat in my pocket over the past few days has been enough to compromise the phone, and I now find out, my hardware guarantee. Pretty poor build quality, I'd say, however good the features. I'd love to know what operating conditions they do guarantee for this phone, because even within Europe the weather would generally be pretty hot in a number of countries, and phones are generally taken to be stored in trouser pockets as a matter of course.
Anyway, Naomi's given me her k700i to tide me over, but I'll miss some of the features of the k750i.
Naomi has left the window in this room open for me, and arranged the net curtain in such a way as to let some air flow in, but hopefully not too many of our insect brethren. My main concern is mosquitos, which are attracted to my blood to an alarming degree (confirmed by my blood-poisoned foot covered in 30 individual bites when I was in the caribbean a few years back). Naomi's parents are kind enough to burn citronella oil whenever we eat on the patio in their garden because they know just how troubled I am by biting insects.
I do hope I don't get bitten tonight.
The other notable result of the heatwave over the past few days has been that my Sony Ericsson k750i has malfunctioned. The screen stays white permanently. I went to the vodafone shop to see if i could get it serviced (it's under one year old), and the somewhat arrogant staff member pulled the battery out of the phone, pointed to a pink strip of plastic on the battery and told me that it'd become water damaged. I explained that it'd been nowhere near any water, which leaves the only explanation being that my body heat and any sweat in my pocket over the past few days has been enough to compromise the phone, and I now find out, my hardware guarantee. Pretty poor build quality, I'd say, however good the features. I'd love to know what operating conditions they do guarantee for this phone, because even within Europe the weather would generally be pretty hot in a number of countries, and phones are generally taken to be stored in trouser pockets as a matter of course.
Anyway, Naomi's given me her k700i to tide me over, but I'll miss some of the features of the k750i.
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