Friday 19 August 2011

My work rate shot up this week when I abandoned my desk and its numerous distractions, and took my aging Dell laptop out to the hammock in the garden, where the only thing that could stop me working was watching the blackbirds feasting on rowan berries.

It’s been interesting to read some of the many glowing mainstream press pieces about Steve Reich while he’s been in London for the Proms. My copy of the Penguin Record Guide in the 80s dismissed Drumming as music ‘that many listeners will be unable to take seriously’ and suggested it was the product of drug culture. The clearing out of the attic last week unearthed a photo taken by James Poke of me with an embarrassing student beard, playing in a rehearsal of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ in 1985 or thereabouts. It’s a great piece: listening to it now it seems to fly past at great speed with lots of things constantly changing, rather than being simply repetitive. To play it, the notes are easy but you have to count very carefully indeed.

1980s student

As a result of listening to Smell of a Friend, I now find myself humming lines like ‘In the dark, from crude compoundings, comes a white pus - phosphorescent from all its encounters with darkness’ (Milk): there can’t be many pop songs that start like that and still sound like pop songs.

In bike news … just as I was thinking that having three bikes was a pointless extravagance and I should give one away, I’ve been out on bike no.3 today, as the 1953 Humber is being pimped up by Common Wheel, and I made the catastrophically stupid error of letting the back brake blocks wear down to the metal on the Dahon, and burst a rim (and a tyre) on Wednesday.  I think if I hadn’t been so penitent in the shop, Joe at Gear Bikes would have been less inclined to agree to try and track down a 28-hole 20-inch rim on my behalf. I won’t make that mistake again: brake blocks are cheap.

And I have lots of as yet unread books with pictures in after a family visit to the Edinburgh Book Festival on Tuesday. Even in pouring rain and mud, the book festival is very cheering, as lots of mildly geeky people (me included) have a nice time in some big tents.