Graham Higgins Illustration

This has been one of those entries; it began on July 7th and has straggled over to today’s upload/publication so that The World Cup is already a nostalgic episode. Yep, well…

I’m watching football. This comes as a surprise to footie-loving friends and my football-coach son. It’s the World Cup of course. My usual vague interest extends to the also-rans, the small-nation teams who generally get weeded out in the early stages. I’d like to fly the flag for Togo or Gabon. This time of course, England was amongst those.

One of the big chuckles in the TV coverage was the brief shot of two Ingerland fans dressed as WW2 RAF pilots looking thoroughly glum as Germany pulled ahead in the 4-2 walkover. Officially that was 4-1 but Ingerland’s second goal was clearly badly disallowed. No matter, the two goal lead put paid to any argument about the better team. Given half a chance ‘we wuz robbed’ would have had another four years to mature into a vintage home-brewed whine; instead the nation is agreed that we wuz rubbish.

With any luck this will kill off constant harkings-back to 1966 and more embarrassingly, The War in any future Ingerland-Germany match. At the very least the perpetual parp of the vuvuzela has drowned out the sound of The Great Escape from the stands.

Meanwhile I was watching the African nations and I was rooting for Ghana as the last hope, no mere charity-vote but goodwill for a good team. Watching them go out because of Uruguay’s cynical goal-mouth handball, trading a certain goal for a chancy penalty-shot and a yellow card. Boo the cads!

This obliged me to watch for their come-uppance against The Netherlands and hurrah! Holland delivered the good kicking Uruguay deserved.

Also in my email-box this week a very simplified outline of an argument in a friend’s book on the ‘law of recognition’ in e-commerce. In a few paragraphs here I can’t compress his summary any further and may simplify to the point of caricature. If philosophy and some strands of science are less about finding answers than generating better questions, then this topic is either a goldmine or a minefield.

The foundation of the debate on internet content is the question of whether your monitor is a telescope to view content on a remote site, or whether it’s a device for importing that content. In either case, whose laws regulate or proscribe it?

It’s probably OK if I do a web-search for hand-grenades; iffy if I order a box (for domestic use; I’m an impatient lake-fisher); certainly suspect if I take delivery. Wherever it may be legal to be a small-arms vendor it’s definitely illegal to maintain even a small stock of small-arms here.

In some ways this problem is like the question of where a mirror-image ‘takes place’. When you look at yourself in the mirror you see a ghost-image which exactly represents you, your gestures and expression and the 3D space you inhabit, albeit reversed left-right (why not vertically?).

That image doesn’t exist on the silvered surface but ‘behind’ it. Since a mirror doesn’t actually create a projected space behind it, does it only exist on your retina? Nope, that can’t be it because your brain interprets the contingent firing of rods and cones in a region at the back of the brain. You ‘see’ your reflection in the dark interior of your skull a couple of inches above the collar-line.

Does this image exist ‘out there’ or ‘in here’?

Part of the puzzle about the internet is our need to represent it in the vocabulary of location. Does the content actually exist on a site?

The day after I started writing this, Abu Hamza was in the news, his extradition to the USA refused by a court ruling. His ‘radical Islamist’ site was hosted by an internet server in Connecticut. [ ...and by the way, how come we never refer to the IRA or the UDF as radical Christians? ]

I don’t know where this page is stored by the time you read this so I hope it’s not illegal to read it where you are. At this moment it’s a binary-code string somewhere on a hermetically sealed disc to my left. That’s about as much location as you can attach to it.

My friend has to refine and define and suggest practical measures for reaching very real-world judgements about where the internet is and what consequences might apply. His academic work involves regular recourse to statutory and case-law, precedent and House Of Lords rulings to build a proposition in much the same way as those composite images made from a mosaic of tiny photographs, though his magnification extends on occasion to the location of individual screen-dots in the print.

I’m allowed the luxury of treating this as an interesting enigma, in terms of its cultural location; this is a road much travelled but no doubt I’ll return to the hydra of our reliance on and suspicion of the authority and authenticity of information on the global hard-disk and its insidious reconstruction of ‘ownership’ in cut-and-paste culture.

The blog has been a neglected allotment for a while. Life takes up time without creating incident.

An easy distraction comes in the ‘pineapple’ shape (i.e. not waisted like a small guitar) of a new ukulele hand-made for me by Prof. Chris Reed. It was his second ukuluthiery excursion and I wonder if his is the first ukulele made by a Professor Of Law.

The lead that injects camera images into my hard-drive is still packed somewhere, so photos of the object will appear in time. Some indication of the project is this inventory of woods selected and ordered:-

“Top and neck: English Yew (“figured” Yew if you’re showing off)

Back and sides: Cherry

Nut and bridge: Laburnum

Fretboard: Tiger oak

Scale length: Ooh, thereabouts, definitely soprano-ish”

It strums a treat with a warm ringing tone, and a common initial reaction is how loud it is for such a small instrument. It’s those characteristics that have sent me into a spate of finding scales, so picking up the uke to while away five minutes can easily turn into a tuneful half -hour with no discernible tune to show for it. As so often, this has carried back to the guitar, particularly the electric.

Tunes, I guess, will emerge as a by-product. For the moment I’m happy to hear runs of notes that fit together. It seems improbable, shortsighted, lazy, dim, not to have put in time to learn my way around the frets before; now at last I discover why you’re encouraged to practise them. Like so much technique, you take the time to learn it to remove obstacles and prepare the way for intuition. Learning scales and variations extends the possibilities for useful mistakes. Creativity is rarely a lightbulb inspiration, most often a result of spotting useful accidents and keeping them. Many guitarists will have stories of accidents that stop them in their tracks and require close attention to recreate – what did I do just now that made the difference?

I was left with a tape of The Smiths’ ‘important’ album Hatful Of Hollow in the car recently and drove a good many miles listening to a band I’ve only really heard in snatches. I must have spent more time listening to fans rhapsodising about main-man Morrissey’s lyrical flair than listening to the music.

A few plays round I can easily see why Johnny Marr’s guitar lines made other guitarists halt and listen but dearie me, I’d hoped for more from the lyrics, sung in a limited, predictable scale apparently independent of the band arrangement.

Kill The OED

I own a dictionary

And in Manchester that makes you la-di-da

La-di-da-di-da

La-di-da-di-da

-Di-da-di-da-

So I sit here with my diary with its lock

Opened

Up

With my gel pens and my thoughts…

Blah-di-blah-di-blah

-di-blah-di-blah-

Some say my words don’t rhyme, but I don’t give a hoot

I haven’t got a thing to say-ee-ay, anyway-ee-ay-ee-ay

So while the band cast nets

Of chiming chrome complexity

It’s easy to forget the spotlight’s trained on little me

Singing the same song, all along

Again

And again and again and again

Oh no-oo-o!

So you can sing along.

Am I the genius they say I a-a-am?

I dunno-o-o-oh

Perhaps I am, you never know

Woe-oo-oh oo-oh

So I’ll yodel through the solo

Yippy-aye-oh oo-oh oo-oh

I’ve recently had a round of mail from my Carolina correspondent about English usage, here and there. It reminds me that it’s the things we least notice that are probably the most characteristic.

I don’t watch Eastenders yet I’m aware of the characters and the tone, more from parodies and impressions than from the series. This enquiry made me aware of how very difficult it is to pin down pronunciation using the Latin alphabet.

I’ve now lived nearly 40 years in Birmingham and in that time I’ve heard numerous attempts to imitate the Birming-gum accent misfiring slightly in various ways or reduced for comic effect to a dull nasal whine suggesting fewer pence than the shiny shilling.

Features caricatured include Brum vowels – Aye, Oeuil(FR.), Oi, Ow, Yu-ew – the roising stress in sibyllant stightments witch mike them sewnd loike questions? – a town of indignightion bised on a fürm footin-g of ignorance, might!

All literary attempts to render a character’s accent suggest lack of education. Their utterances don’t get an upgrade to business English.

I read a draft radio script once in which a renowned Professor of Sociopolitical Proctology (it was an ‘issues’ play) reminded us that he had risen to eminence from dank Scottish roots by beginning his speeches – there were lots of speeches -  with ‘Och’ and referring to his academic protegé as ‘lassie’. Goes to show; when you write thinking you are ‘subtly alluding’ the result may jar like the sporadic hammering of carpet-tacks.

Anyway…

————————

J: Have a telly opp I want to check. At any rate, I’d love to see if you can type “Cockney.” Is that what I hear, or don’t hear, on EastEnders?

G: OK. First, lose the ‘r’ from your phonetic repertoire. The London ‘r’ is so compressed that it almost collapses into a w. It’s a bit like that speech inflection when instead of the tongue funnelling the R, a corner of the lower lip brushes the upper teeth. Not as pronounced as Elmer Fudd’s stway diction, but the finely-turned American R has ta go.

The diphthong ‘ou’ as in round/sound/mound becomes ‘ah’; rahnd/sahnd/mahnd is how they say it dahn Sahf. Note this th = f at the end of words – the teef in yor mahf; there are forty fousand fevvers on a frush; a foughtful fank you, bruv. As a kid I was always drawn to the TV when Joe Brown and The Bruvvers played. He always looked as cheerful as a bloke who can’t believe his luck ought to.

The 60′s showbiz impresario Larry Parnes was nicknamed ‘Parnes, Shillings and Pence’, which embedded the street-trader manner of Parnes’ business (‘…it’s not called show art’) in the pun.

If you’re humming and hawing you may be told not to keep goin rahnd the ahses.

Locate your vocal base of operations to the back of the tongue. It flattens the vahl sahnds.

The characteristic curve on the Cockney ‘i’ was misjudged memorably by Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. He dived too far, came up with an irish ‘oi’ and remains off-key throughout. Oi’m fit to buRst to be wif you, Meery Pawpins! [...what if Joe Brown had been cast as Bert in Mary Poppins? Tommy Steele would've had first refusal and would've brought some Gene Kelly pizzazz to it, but now it's occurred to me it counts as one of those great lost opportunities.]

The key to Cockney is a slack jaw. Think of Michael Caine. M-wy-ch’l C-eye-ne, giving it some laconic.

As I typed that it occurred to me that you could transplant some of the va-awel sa-ahnds for the US Deep Sah-th into Cockney. The pronunciation patterns are almost identical if you shorten the drawl.

Ex. 1: Anywhy, I goes rahdn er ahse, an I sez to er wot-d you tyke me for, some kine-a mug or wot, you cheeky mare*?

*’Mare’ – combining a female horse with the contraction of ‘nightmare’ as in ‘I’m aving a ‘mare of a day.’

I aven’t gone into the dropped aitch because expect you take that for granted, but there’s also the glottal stop, where the t’s disappear: glo**al stop. This also serves to spring-load the exit vowel, as in ‘ this  bu**ah tystes be**ah than tha* uvver bu**ah in the refridgera*ah’.

Does this help you listen to Eastenders?

———————————

…and I don’t know if this book by William Safire is still in print. J asked if I knew of him and I was able to reply that his On Language was in its place on a shelf as I typed. It’s a collection of notes and queries and readers’ ripostes taken from his New York Times column.

A couple of days later…

———————————

At your prompt I took On Language off the shelf again and it’s become my default read, my briefcase book.

When you watch acrobats there’s some part of you that’s aware that although the performance pins you in the present you are seeing the result of hours and years of dedication to development of this one freak skill-set. On Language is thick book of pithy paragraphs and it’s easy to forget that every page represents hours of thought and active attention.

I love it that he too plays with language rather than striking a patrician pose and pronouncing.

I’m always in awe of comic timing in print. Perelman does it. Garrison Keillor does it. Alan Coren does it.

When I worked for Punch there were certain cartoonists whose line alone gave you an anticipatory wave of goodwill – oh, it’s a Mike Williams; this’ll be good! – before you read the caption. Some writers keep you in suspended chuckles on the assurance that sooner or later they’ll arrive.

Someone once described the US confidence to turn a phrase or hijack a definition as ‘English with its sleeves rolled up’. I like it that Safire insists on utility but encourages elegance.

Anyway, good call, J. Thank you.

———————————-

…and while I’m at it: those pre-broadcast warnings that the following programme contains ‘strong language’.

If only this was a routine call to prepare yourself for language to inspire or encourage or set imagination free to rise on lucid wings… Nope, it means coarse language, signifying the won’t-tidy-my-room swagger of the writer, or gritty confrontational social authenticity when TV performs the function of the Victorian Extreme Backpacker’s tour of the London Stews, viewing humanity in its feral state.

[Crivens! Thank goodness Gordon Brown didn’t make for the sanctuary of his car to have a right old swear-up, like you would when you’d just hit your thumb with a hammer. Sometimes ‘ouch!’ doesn’t suffice. Ah, see he wis black affronted and awfy huffy but he wasnae *coarse*.]

The current TV warning bids you brace yourself for the jolt of strong language and judge whether you have sufficient insulation to take it. If you are likely to be offended you are likely to be rewarded.

The announcement that the following programme features Coarse Language throughout and from the outset would shriek snobbery – Ee-ew! – and provoke hilarity.

1-5-10 La Mer

…I set up this screen-page on the 1st and would have finished it in an evening if little chunks of life and the dratted beta-blockers hadn’t by turns and in harness distracted me and diluted my motivation. My cardiac consultant has cleared me to stop the beta-blockers. Oy, enough with the Buddha-like tranquility already.

This entry was supposed to be a report from the tip of the wave of pleasure when the chords to a new song have just about become reliable enough, the lyrics familiar enough to free you to concentrate on how to sing the thing. I usually take a long time to learn lyrics and forget them too often in performance to have any ambition to be a performer. The words have to fall automatically like a domino-run. If you have to remember what comes next you’re on shaky ground under pressure.

Ten days along it’s become a musical screen-saver, a number to play when you can’t decide what to play. Wide Eyed And Legless is another that’s got a lot of play recently while I try to get the second verse lyric.

The electric guitar is set up to plug-and-play, after an almost tearful Saturday changing leads and testing connections in vain. Hearing the thin twang of unamplified strings while willing a signal to hum in the headphones is a peculiarly dispiriting exercise.

I’m a technodope. The weak link was the in-line volume control on the headphones, the solution: a one-third turn of a plastic wheel the size of a 10p. Result: happiness.

Electric guitar is so different from acoustic that it’s almost misleading to call them both guitars. I’m spending hours under the headphones trying to play what might be suitable for the sounds that emerge as I pedal through the settings on a multi-tone generator. Some of them are designed for committed metallists and sound like the flight-path for Heathrow. Turns out that you can make quite convincing doppler-shifting traffic noise. The electric plank is an array of instruments bringing their own performance-space acoustic with them.

I’m not yet decided whether it’s good to have this open sonic canvas to daub across. Like Photoshop, unless you have a pretty clear idea of what you want to achieve you can easily get waylaid by the ‘merely’ interesting and lose sight of whether the result is any good. I slightly envy Brian Eno’s cool brio about letting chance do the spadework.

No matter, for the moment the guitar – a Left-Hand Sumo Les Paul copy (Sumo? Never heard of ‘em) – is a loosely musical toy. On some of the reverb-drenched settings it feels like standing inside a sonic lava-lamp; some yelp at a touch and howl if you dare to strike the string and will only ever be of any use in lyrics including shouty references to Valhalla; there’s a faux-wah channel that can be made to sound like a voice recorded with most of the consonants missing – spent an amusing hour ‘singing’ Summertime. It reminded me of Debussy’s Golliwogs’ Cakewalk as synthesised by Tomita on Snowflakes Are Dancing.

When I first heard that track in the 70’s it was the comic turn in what seemed and still seems an astonishing set of triumphs of musicality over technology, given the painstaking process of setting up and recording synth-generated signals back then. Even then it struck me that this was a Japanese take on a historical French impression of a dance music of the African diaspora satirising the stiff refinements of the European settlers, a hybrid which is about as American as you can get.

Lawks, we stand on the threshold of a fixed five years of New Pragmatism with the Chuckle Bros. at the wheel – to you/to me… (overseas readers will have to bear with these parochial chidren’s TV references) … and I plug in the electric guitar to do the work of waggling my fingers in my ears and going la-la-la, la-la-la…

I must have been about 16 when this was taken, which makes it…1969? Who by, I wonder? It’s my room in Wilford Lane, Nottingham, before we moved to Surrey a year or so later.

I came across this in a box of random photo-wallets when I was moving my stuff from a garage to this flat, and looking through them today I’d put it aside to show my son when he drops by. Dad, young. It’s hard to imagine.

The wood-effect wall is wallpaper. The pinboard was made of cork tiles stuck to the wall. I’m wearing jeans and cufflinks; I must have briefly taken off my school tie.

I realise that almost all of these images were taken from Sunday papers’ colour supplements.

Tiny Tim; Che Guevara; John’n’Yoko; Robert Redford posing as The Sundance Kid; John Mills in a still from Oh What A Lovely War; an unknown dame with luxuriant red hair. Is that a photo of Oscar Wilde that they used in the Eleanor Rigby still from Yellow Submarine (which I never saw on a cinema screen)?

For my art college interviews I spent a furious weekend making a board-book of A Day In The Life off of Sgt. Pepper’s and used the John Mills photo for the page ‘…the English Army had just won the war’. This means I must have gathered my cut-outs to take with me when the family moved.

Three Don McCullen photos – one of an African war atrocity and pinned to it, type snipped from another magazine: ‘Black is Beautiful’. Did he also take the colour shot of the Buddhist monks at the roadside?

Under the atrocity exhibit I see the corner of a Michael Heath cartoon: it was a row of uniformly grim-faced Russian generals on the balcony over Red Square, with bombers in a fly-past overhead and the might of the Soviet Defence Capacity no doubt rolling past below. ‘Stop laughing, you’ll start me off in a minute!’

I had to enlarge this one to see what it was over my shoulder, two figures silhouetted against a window: two Glasgow boys display a machete and a sword used in local territorial disputes.

Young Duke Ellington. Really didn’t have a clue about ‘cool’ but the photo is it.

A full-page shot of a pastrami on rye – bread for us was white and sliced, brown bread was a minority taste; the wholemeal revolution was yet to come. This was exotic fare. Pinning it up made it pop art.

Her Majesty, mounted, by Gerald Scarfe.

Head close-up of a slaughtered horse in a French abbattoir. Above it, a speed-launch accelerates away with its pennant flying suspiciously flat-on, so probably from a Navy recruitment ad.

Two pictures of deer; Highland stags on a postcard from Scotland and a backlit African model with big cute Martian ears.

John Heartfield anti-Nazi photomontage; photo of Nazi officer with two glamorous molls, possibly a daring fashion-shoot.

A Victorian Greek romantic painting of the women watching the fleet departing for Troy.

My own graffiti: Don’t Revolve – Evolve. Clearly I was already seeing myself as a future shaper of the counterculture. Start on button-badges; work your way up to profound theoretical paradigm-shifts reified in the social fabric.

The orange patterned poster rolled up at the bottom right was a giant Madame Tussaud’s poster.

I’d not thought about my shifting photo gallery for these years and yet all these images are instantly familiar. This was what we did before we had the internet.

Here’s Matt and here’re OKGo! They’ve ‘gone viral’.

In old money, YouTube stars are like generations of pop musicians who converted an appearance on Top Of The Pops into pthousands of sales and maybe a year’s worth of business. I just went to look up Jeffery Daniel’s shockwave performance on Shalamar’s Night To Remember appearance on TOTP. Looking at the clip now I was surprised how much right-out mime was involved but the talk of the office next day was that bloke’s dancing. Hard to imagine, now we are post-Jackson, the impact that little demonstration made. A glance at the studio audience demonstrates the era’s typical cool moves, tinged here with shock and awe.

Currently you half expect someone to see the 3D movie potential of Matt’s global shuffle. Some ad exec ought to pick up an OKGo! track for an ad soundtrack as a pay-day and a round of applause for the band.

When I was at college there was a lecture about the role and mechanism of reputation, which introduced the idea of Expansion>Implosion cultures. The idea seemed useful at the time; briefly it was that historically an artist’s reputation spread out from his home town, transmitted in single unique canvases; word-of-mouth rippled out ahead of the works.

In Implosion culture the individual is the object of ubiquitous TV, radio, press and advertising and is informed of the events and personalities elected important by those media: what’s worrying, what demands outrage or compassion. The more the directions from which matching information comes, the more its importance is defined and reinforced. Ready-made reputations implode on us.

I’m not so sure this holds true now, when the internet has become the definitive word-of-mouth medium. Broadcast TV has lost its authority and its common audience. Internet communities may be thinly globally dispersed but quite large and cohesive. Is the bane of the spam I get a prime example of Implosion Culture or no more modern than a walk through the souk of the WordPress conurbation, where hawkers and hicks shout their wares under stall awnings or stood behind open suitcases?

Matt and OKGo! are but two examples of what must count as Expansion Culture. As word spreads punters pitch up from near and far just as Victorians took advantage of the cutting edge of steam locomotive technology to see the exotic and scientific marvels of The Great Exhibition. YouTube records the audience turnstiles.

Actually it’s quite easy to imagine the 1851 counterparts of OKGo!’s Musical Comical Illustration of Newton’s Laws Of Motion! The Forces that Govern the Stars harnessed to Highly Risible effect! *Instructive and Suitable for Little Folk*.

Matt’s Peripatetic Terpsichorian Expedition could take to the Crystal Palace stage as a succession of Ethnic Types in their Native Costume: Major Matthew Harding’s Wild World Review with musical accompaniment by the Deep Forest Consort.

This entry has taken an unusual three days’ mulling. It’s thought I can’t conclude. The theories that sounded smart in the last century depended on an assumption that media content would be a corporate commodity made available to a defined demographic sample of identifiable market sectors. Now all the relevant definitions are shifting, the old metaphors won’t work.

Does the flood of information form a Suspension Culture, where we are cultural particles whose decisions are jostled in a kind of Brownian motion caused by collisions with randomised alerts and entreaties, or maybe an Osmosis Culture…?

Anyway, this is now five days from the first paragraph. I’ve kept popping this open and realised that I’ve either painted myself into a corner or left myself in such a wide open field of speculation that I’ve barely pegged out the groundplan to begin digging the foundations of this topic.

I’ve been reluctant to join the chorus that agrees that the internet has changed the world, because so many of its functions are quite traditional in all but presentation. It’s the virtually instant global reach that makes the difference.  It was a Shakespearian fantasy that Puck could put a girdle round the Earth… in forty minutes! We haven’t yet caught up with the reality. Models of community and cultures in cyberspace are actually not helped by comparison to those describing geographic location. Maybe it’s time to adopt Kurt Vonnegut’s vocabulary and think in terms of Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons.

There’s a very simple chord shape you can move up and down the neck : E0-2-4-4-0-0e. It’s called a power-chord; it’s used a lot in rock. There’s no daintiness in it, it’s the lifting-gear to get the backing where you want it for the vocal to stand on.

Strumming around in the quiet house I was struck by the sound of it moved up to the 7th fret, E0-7-9-9-0-0e; a siren chord, open and harp-like, hovering on the brink of discord. Dropping that down two frets gave me a two-chord scaffolding for a verse and I dropped the bottom E string to a D for extra boom.

The descending chorus-chords followed, reminding me a bit of the three-chord groove of Sniff & The Tears’ ‘Driver’s Seat’.

(I note that only because it constantly surprises me to find ‘records’ stored in my memory. There’s only a ‘something about’ my chords that was enough to spark off a replay of a single from 1978. I’ve played with arrangements of it for acoustic but it would take more skill than I can bring to the Bm, A, G riff to make it worth the listen. It’s really a band-song or a showcase for a distinctive vocalist.)

I took a cue from my friend Jo, who does furious drives when she’s feeling mad at the world in general. I’ve done the same motorway therapy myself, cruising night roads to the sound of Palestrina, Janacek’s string quartets, The Fabulous Thunderbirds or Stevie Ray Vaughan. It’s a karma-wrecking selfish use of precious fossil fuel but high-speed solitude is a great healer. The silence when you pull into a Service Area car park, interrupted only by the ticking of the engine cooling after the rumble and body-boom of a drive can be profound, literally a breathing-space.

The lyric so far has settled into:-

Don’t dwell much on my transgressions

Familiarity wears me down

Breath I’ve wasted on confession

Time I’ve wasted in this town

-

That’s how it goes, pal,

No telling how the deck is stacked

That’s how it runs, kid,

The big wheels turn and the dominos fall…

-

Changing gear, acceleration

Taking me from the storm’s eye

No final destination

No lucky star to travel by

-

I’m out of explanation

Words fail when reason dies

I’ve had it with this conversation

The flim-flam farrago and the alibis

-

Wheels spin, the road unravels

In the rear-view movie and the lights ahead

Driving through the hours less travelled

From things undone and words unsaid.

-

Can’t outrun what’s in your head, son

Round and round and around it goes

Thoughts you can’t put to bed

When time hangs heavy and the clocks run slow.

I’m going to try this out tonight at The Acoustic Café, though I shall have to write out the lyrics to keep within sight. It won’t begin to become a song until the words fall into place automatically. I find that a song takes about three performances to begin to settle in.

This will be the last post for a while. Moving premises and I’ll have to sort out new broadband connection etc. The dongle-solution seems, surprise, more tricky with a Mac, so for the moment it might be as well to hold off on responses because I expect to be shovelling away a spam mountain when I drop in again.

Tuesday, my second day back at school and I stop in at a nearby convenience store for a bottle of water to refill the wiper-tank, a redundant break in my home run as it turns out. Must’ve been the morning frost that stopped the nozzles.

As I clap the bonnet shut and climb back into the car seat a young man emerges from the betting-shop: capped and bristle-headed, hands in his track-suit pants pockets, a sizable spliff bent over one ear as if by its own weight, staring up at the police helicopter I’d barely noticed curving in over the estate. I can hear the buzz overhead; he stares. His mate comes out to join him and they both stare. It’s a hybrid of blank-face and routine hostility.

There’s nothing new or uniquely contemporary about this snapshot. Mayhew or Rook would’ve recognised hooligans when they saw them. For gin read skunk, that’s about it.

In school The Usual Suspects call each other ‘dickhead’; ‘crackhead’ or ‘gay’, play at shanking (knifing) each other and discuss vendettas and feuds for which batterings are deserved or have been administered.

This is the local scene for our kids. No wonder some of them don’t ‘get’ school. They’re perfectly adapted for a feral life on the precinct and wasteground-parks where gang-life is Darwinist and full of predatory excitements.

We get that ‘come on then, teach me something’ stare in class. Our conduct is bounded by policies designed to defer sanctions such as exclusion from school (= time on the street) and allow time for reflection. That’s a laugh, and they do.

It’s a game of Prisoners and Warders. The Warders have to enforce the rules; The Prisoners simply have to ignore them or derail the routine in any petty way and they win. Self-sabotaging their education is a game they can win day after day, ‘outsmarting’ the staged procedures that we’re obliged to enact.

We’re supposed to tell the younger ones that bad behaviour makes us ‘very sad’. The result is that ‘That makes me very SAD!!’ redefines the word as a synonym for ‘angry’. Any gesture of physical restraint is high-risk, even if another kid has to endure casual slaps while we do the verbals.

All these policies designed to embody respect and irreproachable non-violent resolutions serve mostly to highlight the laughably ineffectual ‘consequences’. Nothing a blank stare can’t match.

What would happen if by some fluke we managed to convey a liking for Bach or The Pre-Raph collection in town? Who would they share it with?

There’s no shortage of decent kids and decent parents holding the line, and extra credit to them in the circumstances. The enemies of ambition don’t hover in helicopters, they live down the street.

LOVE, left on your knuckles and HATE your right

No room for indifference

Which is in your bones.

A keen of air drawn through the stained teeth of high-rise silos

Kicks about under concrete porticos, what you looking at?

Echoes in your marrow

And in those hollows, footsteps

Following closer in the dim shark-scented underpass

Through the submarine body-boom of traffic on its gumflecked rainbowslicked tarmac skin.

-

The ghosts of dead ambition

As seen on grainy grey-screen CCTV

Haunt every other jumpcut second, unwitnessed.

A neutral view of cake-shop pink and yellow slabs

In forced perspectives, narrow vanishing points.

No incidents are noted

Between statistics recorded in the Plaza.

-

Every other second

Is more time killed, laid out on waxy sofas

Dissolved on blackened spoons

In burnt-out tinfoil troughs,

Time not put aside for rainy days.

Slack-bellied binbags by the door

Heavy with empty bottles filled with vacant hours,

Spiked with punctured cans you can’t refill.

When you’ve time you’ll hoy them down the chute -

Off the balcony if you’re out of it.

-

Your frowning brow and tattooed tears

Tell me two stories I don’t want to hear.

Yesterday’s entry prompted me to take a bit of noetry – I may preserve that affectation for my writing that’s probably not poetry and clearly not prose but which I’ve at least bothered to note down* – from an email to an Appleworks file and then to a dump-folder of these pieces lodged on an external drive.

That in turn ended up in a couple of hours retrieving older ones from a format I can only open now with NeoOffice and transferring them to easy-to-get-at Appleworks notepaper. There are stacks; I’d forgotten a lot of them.

*noetry, n.:see definition above. I plant my expeditionary flag here, you heard it here first; when noetry becomes an industry standard category, OED please note.

This one was a note of an exhibition of Tiepolo sketches and cartoons in their original sense – the sketches used to prick out outlines for paintings; the throwaway preparatory work – at Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett, the gallery for a huge archive of graphic work in its broadest sense.

It stuck in my mind because in the gallery’s vitrines under carefully regulated light, the preserved drawings were plainly the functional preparation for grander altar pieces and murals, very likely to show clients.

They looked like catalogue items from which a commissioning cleric or aristo could decide whether an attendant angel in his Annunciation would spread its arms thus, or unfurl a scroll thus (‘your message here’); whether his Madonna would raise her hands in supplication or lower her palms in a benediction, press them together centrally in prayer or meekly to one side, presumably to allow for the downward glance of adoration.

There were sketches of rough hands grasping staffs – humble shepherds’ crooks or anachronistic bishops’ croziers – and several with two fingertips raised in blessing or index fingers pointed heavenwards typically involving a tricky bit of life-drawing convention, a slight twist to the wrist to indicate that the saint or angel merely draws your attention to Heaven, because of course it would be rude to point at God. Unless of course you’re Moses, in which case you return from the mountain with heavy slabs of Maker’s Instructions to discover the mass breakout of naughtiness amongst your frivolling people, when it’s perfectly acceptable to quite forcefully point out who’s watching.

There were misc. wings (adult and children’s sizes) and drapery samples – clingy wetfold-work to describe the limbs beneath and opulent robe-cloth swags – but there was something oddly familiar about this inventory of gesture that only struck me halfway round. My moment of connection was the recognition of the graphic and functional similarity to the kind of style-sheets I’d get from US comic publishers, showing the costume and proportions of characters from their respective pantheons. The Tiepolo sketches certainly aimed to draw attention to his standard of technical know-how and achievement as presiding Master and mentor to his staff, but these too were style-sheets, displaying the house-style. Your chapel diptych will look like this.

Whenever I look at finished paintings in this tradition – conventions preserved 200 years after the High Renaissance – my eye scans for hidden geometries. Circles are for perfection; single points and those pointed fingers indicate The One True…; twos, the sacred and profane, the celestial and the carnal; triangles, The Trinity of course; squares, in the words of the song, for The Gospel Makers. After that it becomes more difficult to decide whether you’re trying to imagine lines of composition in.

These geometric subtexts nowadays appear esoteric because they’ve fallen out of use, but as a gallery viewer spotting them is a throwback to the puzzle-books of my childhood: find seven rabbits concealed in the branches of this tree.

As a child I enjoyed these puzzles, in particular those that didn’t make it easy for you. Even then it struck me, I’d now say ‘as a model of learning’, that these were one-use puzzles. However long it seemed to take you to count off the concealed objects at first sight, once you’d registered them you couldn’t afterwards ‘unsee’ the bunnies in the tree, even as you flicked past to get to another page.

Anyway, this was a written snapshot from a Sunday in Berlin and a little salute to an exceptional craftsman’s some-old same-old day at his trade.

The pencil point laid down searches for the eloquent line

Its scuff of graphite, caught in the tooth of the surface

A particle-trace of a neutrino moment, a bombardment

Of moments that can last for hours. Conjuring with chaos,

You need some science on your side.

-

The Renaissance, Islam, and the Hassidim

Have much to say of pattern as a handprint:

A Voyager plaque offered to whomever would read.

Be it so simple that Tiepolo, considering

A routine cartoon of the Madonna took due care

That the forehead and the hands, spread in supplication

Were equilaterally spaced: the Trinity of course.

The palms pierced as it were, prefiguring

The Crucifixion: that final hammer-blow

To aspiration, on another axis.

The centre of the aureole, a locus

Above her head, which holds a herald beckoning -

with finger’s tip precisely twice the distance

of the apex to the base:

Heaven and Earth in equilibrium

Joined at her brow where her eyebrows steeple

For her son to be, and all the walking stillborn.

Understood, it can be said in the displacement of four

lines.

-

Classical anatomy also fortuitously betrays

Divine geometry, those other equilaterals:

Outer brow to nasal septum;

Nose to outer jaw;

Jaw to pit of neck;

Neck to nipples;

Nipples to navel;

Navel to hips

And hips to pubis.

Seven times three devolves to the Trinity immutable.

These are not mysteries but standard trade

measurements.