Just Walking

Fifi, Fafa and their Ibu & Ayah arrived at 4.00 this afternoon and we set off on a not-terribly-energetic walk up the road, round the old nice houses on the little estate off Maidstone Road, and then through the new University Town, discovering where the big Starbucks is located there. Then it was back home for muffins and two DVDs: Peter Gabriel's Secret World and Adele's Live at the Albert Hall and soon it will be nosh somewhere on Clementi Road.

Verdict: Life is good.

But don't you just want to punch the guy who broke Adele's heart?

Great Guitar Solos 1

Ever since I posted about Johnnie Mac's solo on the Mahavishnu's Orchestra's lovely Dawn - and followed up by listening to it three or four times in one day - I've had it running through my head as a kind of highly welcome ear-worm. Actually I've always been prone to ear-worms but thankfully they're nearly always snippets, or extended sections, of really fine music so it's not so much a curse as a blessing. If I tell you I once couldn't get the central segment of VW's The Lark Ascending out of my head for three months or so you'll appreciate what I'm getting at.

I suppose though I'm using the term solo in an extremely loose way here. Really I'm thinking of the whole guitar part, but with particular emphasis on the early segment around 1'25'' in when McLaughlin stops simply doubling the gorgeous violin line and starts developing increasingly, improbably faster and faster lines, until the whole shebang explodes around 2'30'' into a new descending melody for unison guitar and violin and the heart sings.

The first time I heard the track I loved the ensemble playing and the sort of soft rock segments - the closest the guys ever came to AOR - but couldn't quite grasp McLaughlin's playing. It sounded sort of wrong somehow, especially in the early part of the track, as if he were trying to blend in, but failing, the guitar line sounding slightly out in terms of the general timing. Although I was familiar with the sustain being used from Robert Fripp's playing with Crimson, which is why I suppose I keep talking about guitar lines rather than notes, I'd never encountered anything quite this spiky on music that otherwise seemed designed to be accessible. Listening now it just seems so utterly right I can't grasp why my teenage ears couldn't quite get round it all, initially at least.

Of course when McLaughlin plays fast it's astonishing in itself, but what I love about his playing is the way in which the speed is always there for a reason, is at the service of a greater cause. The sensation of sheer over-abundant joy that is created in the first half of Dawn that speed, the sense of something genuinely dawning, as it were, is extraordinary. Awesome in the real sense of that word.

Flat

Energy is eternal delight, said the wisest of the English poets.

Wish I had some. Just a bit would do.

In Control

Snippet from a dialogue today:

Speaker: Let's pretend to be in control of the situation. Then, mysteriously, it might turn out that we get control. At least we know we're not in control. That's a step forward.

Confession: Yes, gentle reader, it was me.

A Start

Had what seemed at the time (about 11.00 this morning) to be a dazzling idea for a script we might be in need of later in the year. I've definitely got a title. Now all I need is the rest of the play. Hah!

(In a few months I'll look back on today's post as either the start of something big (well, for us anyway) or evidence of distinctly delusional - or should that be deluded? - tendencies, and more than a few of them.)

Going Solo

The other day for reasons I still don't quite understand, possibly related to the wanderings of an aged mind, I found myself, whilst shaving, reflecting upon guitar solos and their place in my life. Truth to tell, they don't occupy any particularly startling spot as I've never greatly cared for them, despite emerging from a generation of musos to whom the (great) guitar solo was seen as something of significance. (Something similar might be said of the drum solo, but those I care not to think of at all, ever, and never did, though dutifully joining in with the mindless applause when one was completed, all those years ago.)

Anyway in my ruminations upon the guitar solo as a sort of sub-genre of rock music it occurred to me that I could genuinely identify five that seemed to me to be quite wonderful - in fact, five that nail me to the wall each time I hear them - and worth chewing the mental cud over. As someone who likes lists the fact I'd picked out a round five seemed of some small, very small, significance, and I felt obliged, sort of, to make note of them. So here are the guitarists in question - in no particular order of merit, as they say: John McLaughlin, Robert Fripp, Jeff Beck, Richard Thompson, and Bill Frisell.

There are no prizes for guessing the particular solos I have in mind - because you wouldn't stand a chance. But assuming I can find the energy from somewhere I might just enlighten the general public in the next few days, or so. In the meantime I've just bunged on the one by Johnnie Mac, so this is no time to do anything other than listen and luxuriate.

Watching The Detectives

I'm not much of a telly person, finding it difficult to maintain any level of concentration on the small screen beyond twenty minutes. But catching bits of Monk, Wallander and George Gently in the last few days (though not one in their entirety, due to the Toad work) has made me realise that's the one kind of programme I can watch with addictive ease - what Mum would have called a good murder. In fact, I actually watched the first series of Monk when it was originally aired here, on an episode by episode basis, something of a record for me. I stopped watching it when I became aware the commitment to doing so (which is what it felt like) was unsustainable. Oh, and they started showing it at absurd times.

I'm not quite sure what it is grips me about the genre. Certainly not solving the cases. I never do. But I never want to. It's the mystery that I like, I think.

Thinking back to Dennis Potter's superb The Singing Detective, I suppose we're all detectives trying to make sense of the final mystery of it all, and happy to accept any answers along the way. Which reminds me - whatever happened to Mr P's Pennies From Heaven? They don't seem to repeat this stuff. I suppose it must be on DVD somewhere, along with The Singing Detective. Gosh, to think you used to be able to watch such wonderful series like that on a weekly basis. Now those were the days I could find myself glued to the old goggle box.

Inception

I've been engaged in matters of a dramatic nature early this evening, at the point of inception. Which means I've spent the later part of the evening aware of plenty of ideas for what might make it to a stage floating about in the old - and I mean old - cerebrum. No, that's not quite it. The ideas have been positively whizzing around and I can't keep up with them, almost as if they're independent of the brain that thinks them up. Which is often literally true, as I pick up on suggestions from the many agile younger minds I'm blessed to have contact with.

Ninety-five percent of all that's haunting me will never achieve any degree of manifestation under the light of day, or rather the stagelights that, with good fortune will illuminate the five percent that makes it up there. But that's fine. I'm not interested in knowing exactly where I'm going when I set out. That way you can end up in far more interesting places than you ever expected to discover.

Certainties

I'll offer two (of the above):

Shakespeare, as actor, discovered what all good, or even just competent actors discover - that you genuinely start to feel the feelings you are enacting. Which led him to an oddly disconcerting corollary. Your feelings may never be something quite genuine but always have a sense of enactment about them. So all the world becomes a stage.

United for the Premiership by a comfortable margin. The noisy neighbours to choke.

(I'm working on pure intuition here, guys.)

Uncertainties

Preparing a lecture on Shakespeare, a sort of general introduction to the Bard, and struck by just how much I don't know and how fascinating it all is. What exactly was the style of acting like in 1600? How did those first audiences in the Globe behave? Just how pervasive, or otherwise, was music in performance?

I'm often puzzled by how some people really can't stand not knowing with absolute certainty. The grey areas are the places in which I seem to see most clearly.