Monday 23 March 2009

Yesterday I dropped into Castlesound where I haven't been since recording with McFalls in January 2001. Frightened Rabbit were due to arrive soon after me, so I hope they weren't put off working there by finding my harpsichord cluttering up the otherwise immaculately tidy live room. As the harmonium and harpsichord are away, today is piano practice day, when I'm not working out the details of all the things that are to happen later this week. One of the problems of leaving the booking of travel arrangements to a third party (in this case, a party three times removed: another group's agent's travel agent) is that their interests aren't necessarily the same as yours. In this case, I've been booked on a return flight 10 hours later than intended, that arrives in the wrong city. It took me 5 minutes to find a cheap flight at the right time, and figure out how to get to the airport on Danish trains. If I can do that, why can't the professionals? DG's transatlantic flight details looked fine, until we realised that they were booked for the wrong day. 

later
We're told that flights are now booked properly. But why not just get it right the first time? 

There's a revealing sequence newly posted in Robert Fripp's diary here, here and here, in which a potentially exciting project is derailed by pointless bureaucracy. A 22-page contract is eventually reduced to two in an attempt to re-engage Fripp's enthusiasm, but as he puts it, 'we didn't begin here'. Why not begin with the appropriate, rather than having to battle towards it?  For almost all of us who work, dealing with pointless administrative hassle is a part of the job, but it is the enemy of enthusiasm. And without enthusiasm, our work suffers and so do we.