One Day More

As the proud owner of two cheapo cheapo Casio digital watches I now find myself in a major quandary. They have both decided that today should be the first day of March. It's a measure of my peculiarly obsessive attitude towards matters relating to time that glancing down all day at a watch telling me it is WE 1 has proved very disconcerting. Noi is convinced I can remedy this by adjusting the date thingee on the watches tomorrow, but I'm not so sure. I have a horrible feeling I will end up confusing my trusty timepieces with regard to how many days there are in various of the months that lie ahead of us.

Still, time will tell. Or perhaps it won't.

Fulfilment

Here's a frightening thought: the single most fulfilling moment of my day came when I finally managed to get some pointless data loaded into a system which up to that moment had been reluctant to accept it. I actually felt something akin to genuine pleasure.

Help!

And Furthermore

Just a couple of random points to add to my posts of the last couple of days.

I forgot to mention how much I liked Diamond's word kleptocracy, used to describe those elites who convince us of their absolute necessity to our well-being such that they cream off the surpluses societies produce. I must say though, that I really don't mind if they're obviously worth it - e.g., Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs, et al.

And on a completely different note, a quick glance through Sid Smith's magisterial if toxic tome on all things Crimson rendered the info that Robert Fripp's solo on the studio cut of The Night Watch was a first take! It seems that John Wetton on a first hearing didn't regard it as anything special until the Frippster told him to listen again, really listen. And then he got it. Now that kind of talent is priceless.

Limping Along

I picked up Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel today for the first time in over a week, resuming proceedings with some fascinating insights into the differences between tribes and states and why one can become the other. The realisation that this was my first genuine reading - in terms of my reading as opposed to reading for work - came with a fair amount of gloom, but also a kind of jaded realism that this, after all, comes with the territory. The toad Work can squat disproportionally upon one's life, like it or not.

In truth, January was not so bad in this regard. I even managed to adhere to my private Learn Malay campaign with a reasonable degree of success. Alas, not so since then - in fact since 31 January to be precise. But since I've hacked out a little breathing space this weekend I'm aiming to resume said campaign in the next hour or so.

The only real reading I managed in Hong Kong, by the way, in case you're wondering, centred on The New York Review of Books and even then I completed only a couple of articles, which made all the recommending of interesting books that went on seem oddly superfluous. At times like that I feel like a kind of charlatan.

Let's hope March gives a little more room for real life to be lived, eh?

Great Guitar Solos 2

In something of an audiophilic fit this morning I listened to no fewer than four versions of King Crimson's song The Night Watch in a bid to determine which of Robert Fripp's solos was the best - to these ears, at least. As I sort of suspected, it was the one on the 'official' rendering of the song, on Starless and Bible Black, that held me most enchanted. This version of the song is the most lush of all, fairly obviously since, unlike the three live versions I listened to, it features a fair amount of multi-tracking. For example, you get Mr Fripp playing rather lovely lead lines as ornamentation around Wetton's rendering of the early verses - like the one that follows ...upon the canvas dark with age... . On the live versions here we get mellotron and gentle chordal picking on the guitar: quite lovely but sparsely so in comparison to the original. That lushness seems characteristic of the wonderful solo played after the rather duff verse-ending, ...guitar lessons for the wife. (Oh how I wish lyricist Palmer-James, to whom I never really did take, had gone for a half rhyme on wives instead, which would have made for a classier line all round. An even greater pity in that this is his one reasonably successful lyric - with the exception of this blemish - on the three albums for which he wrote.)

The solo is by no means Fripp's most striking, original or incandescent - there's a very long line of candidates fulfiling various of these qualities, with the one on the studio version of The Sailor's Tale extraordinarily managing all three - but it is surely the most beguiling solo he ever got down on vinyl. Somehow it contrives to blend into the musical canvas all about it such that it's easy to forget it is a solo. You can almost not notice it, except as something fascinating taking place within the textures on offer, but when you do give it your undivided attention you realise how peculiar it is in terms of the oddly jagged nature of its timing against the pulse of the song. I read somewhere that it sounds as if whatever was originally recorded has been played backward and, yes, that's a fair description of the initial impression you get.

It's obvious that when the band played The Night Watch live that Fripp wasn't interested in reproducing the studio version of the solo. I listened to versions from Glasgow 1973, Mainz 1974 and Pennsylvania 1974 and enjoyed the great performances of the song, and just how brilliant our guitarist's full parts in each piece were, but at no point did he get close to the spell-binding quality of what he achieved in the studio.

And that leads me to the thought that it's quite striking how often a musician who's known for his absorption in live music has delivered definitive material in the dry studio context - a testament to the discipline he so values.

Surf's Up

We had Kate and Rob staying over last night just at the end of their three month stint in New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore in search of sun, fun, broader horizons and finding themselves. Actually I don't think the last of these was on their minds, but Rob did mention some of his friends had talked about that possibility. They arrived looking like two extremely cool surfer dudes and I was, and am, of course, suffused with envy that they have crammed into their three month sojourn more than I've managed in quite a few years. But then I reckon I found myself quite a while ago. (And wasn't terribly impressed, if truth be told. Hah!)

We'll be taking them to the airport later and are now contemplating the logistical puzzle inherent in figuring out how to get Rob's surf board, I kid you not, into our little car.

The Less Deceived

Finally watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy all the way through, wide awake. The screen on the return flight to Singapore was bigger than the one on the way there, which helped, but it was the quality of the film that held me. Oldman's Smiley is excellent - somehow harder and more dangerous than the Guinness vintage, but beautifully underplayed, restrained. But every performance is excellent.

Great faces everywhere. Real ones, I mean. Raddled. Ordinary. Nice sense of period and place.

Wonderfully paced, with a genuine sense of unease in several scenes that gets under the skin. Somehow more down-to-earth than the cerebral BBC version.

Leaves you wanting to be a spy as you know you have the necessary capacity for ruthless deception.

Incongruities

It's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world I gaze upon through the window of the hotel room. I'm looking out onto the apartment blocks and hotels on the opposite side of the street and there's that jarring, incongruous mixing of styles and periods typical of the city. A glossy structure shooting up some thirty floors or so sits adjacent to a seven storey run-down old tenement block, on the top level - I suppose the roof - of which a lady is busy dealing with her laundry. Or maybe it's a business she's running there - hard to tell. Her blue plastic bucket strikes me as the most cheerful feature of the scene.

There's something very endearing about that bucket, and its presumed owner, and the general messiness of the architecture all around us.

Promise

I've been here in Hong Kong these last few days to attend a course related to my work. It's been a pleasure to have been in the company of a number of bright, articulate people, most of whom are a fair bit younger than me (and a fair bit brighter, to boot.). One young lady in particular struck me as early as the first day as someone likely to go places and do lots of good work.

And then today I suddenly remembered another such young lady, from more than thirty years ago now, on another course - one that proved very useful to me in a number of ways - who had struck me then as equally capable, and rightly so. But she died many years ago, and as far as I understand it, that wonderful youthful promise had somehow gone well before she left us.

I can see her now, in my mind's eye, more vividly than I can recall the rather striking girl who so impressed me over the last three days. And I am baffled at what went wrong for her. Sometimes we lose it, whatever small grace we have been granted - a grant not to take for granted. So I ended up this evening saying a sad prayer for the girl who died, and one for the girl who has so much to live for, and one for eveyone in that room that fate might treat them kindly.

None of this is anything of ours.

Just One Story

Watched a video today of a talk by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie. The basic idea is that of the single story, and a beautifully framed idea it is. Nothing terribly new, but something terribly true. What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.

Which leads me to realise, we can never hear enough stories - never know enough. I've always known that, but not quite so feelingly as when listening to Ms Adichie.