Observations from a Hill

Layers - Kel Harvey segmented in aerial perspective - foreground veiled in droplets, mercury-sharp and the distant and misted horizon indistinct, but known; landscape coheres into evening.

    Driving back from Valley this afternoon, I caught sight of a kestrel hovering over the opposite  carriageway of the A55. Glorious. Makes your day.

Joseph Beuys  1921–1986  photo ©Elsewhere     A brief reflection on another hero of mine, Joseph Beuys. This enigmatic and problematic artist with a self-proclaimed mythology was a member of the Fluxus Group and founder of The Free International University.     If you don't know of him or his work, it is pretty much a certainty that you won't have been to art college in the Sixties or Seventies. The strange thing is, I can't pin down exactly why I find the man significant to me. Certainly, he had an undeniable personal charisma; this leading in part to his critics deriding him as messianic and for some, fascistic. Both imputations have in recent years been confounded by revelations of theoretical work and projects of his, hitherto undiscovered, which show quite the opposite.     His work also is not easy to categorise, understand or even like in any normal, accepted aesthetic sense of the word. It challenges the observer to inter...

Lower Down, Shropshire - © Kel Harvey In Equal Measure expecting no thing accepting no thing desiring no thing, but an equal measure. no thing taken no thing disturbed no thing harmed, but equally measured; treading soft and making a path but leaving no trace, save an equal measure. marking not territory nor possession, making not procession - and, all done, leaving only an equal measure Kel Harvey

    We've missed out on an awful lot of stuff in the last three months or so, most poignantly the freedom to see friends and family at will; to host dinner parties, barbecues or simply go down to the pub for a pint and a jangle.     On the other hand, we've also potentially gained the opportunity to reset the way the world works to everone's advantage and stop the rot that's killing the planet at the same time: but as I've said before, the idiots in charge will soon have us running around like headless chickens in pursuit of goals we didn't know we had in the service of filling the offshore bank accounts of the already-too-bloody-rich. C'est la vie.     One crucial thing missing from the world at the moment - at least for those adherents, like myself, of the glory that is Cricket, is Test Match Special. As much national institution as radio programme, it has brought both ball-by-ball-commentary of some of the very finest moments of spo...

Cypress - On a Hill...Fairview 2020 - the New Reality...     God, it's been warm today. Been up the coast, working in Shotton and Buckley. Thirty-plus Celsius and humid with it. Had to resort to shorts and driving in light shoes as the temperature in the cab of the van must have hit forty degrees - even at seventy miles an hour on the way back home late afternoon, the van thermometer registered thirty-two as I passed Colwyn Bay. I'd write more but I'm fried - it's still hot & humid - I can hear the first spots of rain on the roof of the conservatory now: there's been grumbling thunder in the distance for the last hour or so - a good storm will clear the air. I've set up my mic and recorder in case we get a good storm; love a bit of thunder!

Cover of 'Flashboys' by Michael Lewis     Much water has flowed under the bridge in a very short time due to the current global situation and many people have voiced the opinion that this represents a potential tipping-point in human history, a chance to re-think the way we manage this world; a chance to reset the game.     This makes sense on so many levels that the decision seems trivial to make - do this or we all suffer, now and in the long term. We have so far managed to practically destroy not only our environment and much of near-space - this much is known - and the very nature of how we co-exist socially and economically has been thrown into question. It hasn't been revolutionary socialism that has brought the system to its knees, it has been capitalism itself. The COVID-19 pandemic has simply served to highlight the deeply entrenched systemic problems the world has built up for itself over the last forty years.     This has...

                   Marking Time                                                                      mark the hour:                                                                      quartered and segmented, ...

Image Credit: jazz3311 / Shutterstock.com It's that time of the day again. I've just prepared a pot of food; leftover lamb, mixed beans and tomatoes, spiced with Kashmiri Chilli, green chillis, cumin and cardomom, with fresh basil and dried oregano in the herb department, plenty of salt and pepper - it's just cooking out and awaits final seasoning with lemon juice. We'll have it with spiced cous-cous in a while...In the meantime, I've a glass of wine to enjoy, so here's a poem from China, from the late T'ang period. Seems somehow appropriate (well to me, anyway). Bring in the Wine - Li Ho (791-817) A glass goblet Deep-tinted amber, Crimson pearls drip from the wine-cask, Boiling dragon and roasting phoenix weep jades of fat. Silken screens and embroidered curtains close in the     scented breeze.          Blow the dragon flute,          Beat the lizard-skin drum.  ...

Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue, 1959     Referring back to the sad death of Keith Tippett last week at the age of 72, I was reading his obituary in The Guardian today. Apparently, the recording that got him into modern jazz was the album above. Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue.     The first track on the album - 'So What' - is both quintessentially of it's time and to my mind the sound of cool jazz of the period, but also a great soundtrack for life in lockdown. In musical terms, the call & response of the opening section is defined by Bill Evans' use of an E Minor Eleventh chord - the eponymous 'So What Chord' - a five-note chord consisting of three perfect fourth intervals followed by a major third: the bottom five strings of the guitar in standard Spanish Modal tuning: EADGB. The structure of the piece is modal and built around the familiar A-A-B-A song structure - in this case sixteen bars of  D-Dorian, eight bars of E-Flat-Dorian and eight bars aga...

Bryn Cader Faner July 2018 ©Kel Harvey     Y Rhinogydd - the Rhinogs in English - is a small group of not-especially tall, but particularly remote mountains between Tremadog Bay in the west and the A470 to the east. The terrain is extremely boggy during the wet seasons: the ground not drying out in some places even after a long, hot summer. It is good yomping territory for the committed, well equipped walker who can read a map - I wouldn't recommend relying solely on GPS up there, and a good pair of boots really is necessary.     Jane & I went for a walk up there a couple of years ago to find the stone circle pictured - Bryn Cader Faner - the remains of a small megalithic grave site from the second or third millenium BC, robbed in previous centuries and used in the last one by the Army for gunnery practice during WWII. What remains is still pretty enigmatic, resting so high over the surrounding area - difficult to reach now, but when it was constr...

                                                              assemble  [ əˈsɛmb(ə)l]                                                               assembly  [ əˈsɛmbli]                                   ...

Curlew - Numenius arquata - image ©Elsewhere     One of the joys of the after-work pint in The Tap in Bangor, prior to the current epidemiological mess, was rolling up and parking the car near Bangor Pier, to be met on opening the door by the song of curlews on the mud-flats and sandbanks of the Menai Strait at low tide.     The sound of these beautiful birds echoing across that flat, open space is plangent and bitter-sweet; evocative of a distilled folk memory,  timeless and forever mindful of time's passing.

Jackdaw - image ©Elsewhere Roost                                                                                                                                       Early evening and                         ...

    Following on from yesterday's post about the meditative qualities of secular rituals and seeing my two favourite found pebbles together on the shelf; the black one from Pen Lleyn and the white from Myrtos Beach in Kefalonia, I was minded of the Jewish tradition of placing pebbles on the gravestones of loved ones. A mark of respect for the dead and to show that a visit has been made. A ritual whose origins are lost in antiquity, but continues and will probably always be observed, without direct understanding but always with devotion.     One of my own secular rituals has always been the search for the 'perfect' pebble, a quest I know cannot be fulfilled. There is no 'perfect' pebble. The beauty is in the search. The two stones in the photograph are but moments in that. Together they make a beautiful object, but I keep looking, nevertheless.

Map of Wales by Paul Davies 1947-1993     I just caught a short programme on BBC Four; the channel the idiots-that-be would like to axe in favour of something more important - sorry, commercially-based - that would induce stupefied punters to not question the status quo and merely consume: anyone read Aldous Huxley?     Anyway the piece was from a series of shorts called Handmade In Mexico. This particular episode was The Tree of Life - The making of large fired-clay allegorical sculptures, hand-painted and representing mostly Christian scriptural stories: originally used to teach indigenous people the Christian faith. These have, like so many such things, taken on a life of their own. The artist featured in this edition tries to create a unique sculpture in this traditional way each day. Which made me think of my late friend and colleague, Paul Davies, who died tragically young twenty-seven years ago.     Paul was a legend in his lif...

Analogue Modular Synth - image ©Elsewhere     Synthesisers and the music they produce fit the same structural dichotomy as photography and the images it produces. Many other spheres do too, but I'll stick with these for the time being; the question being 'analogue or digital?'     Initially, all synthesisers and cameras produced their output in purely analogue form - a direct wave-for-wave correspondence between the in-and-the-out. Or wave/particle if you're feeling quantumly minded. It wasn't until 1979 that sounds could be practically synthesised purely using digital equipment, with the release of the first machines from Japan. Until then, synths were largely analogue modular beasts of basically one or the other of two types, typified by Moog (the one most people know - East Coast Subtractive Synthesis) or Buchla (West Coast Complex Waveshaping Synthesis). Both Robert Moog and Don Buchla can claim to have co-invented seperately (as with Swann & ...

Citroen 2CV © Elsewhere     Our first car was a mid-eighties 2CV Club in a similar shade of red to the above, later model. The origins of this eccentric little beauty are well-documented. Aimed squarely at a rural market and making it's debut in 1948, the 2CV was designed around the basic requirements of cheapness and adaptability in post-war France. A farmers' runabout, it could act as either a family car or as a small van, transporting a goat or a sheep,  a bale of hay or cask of ale, along rough tracks or across fields. Although the car gained some creature-comforts over the decades of it's production, the basic remit and it's abilities remained.     I can say that I still think of that little tin box as one of the greatest automotive achievements to date. Not only was it economical and great fun to drive in it's natural environment of twisty back roads and lanes - we lived on Anglesey at the time - but as a vehicle for hauling stuff around, i...

Roy Wood OK, as someone who now drives a little Citroen C1 citybug and having never owned anything remotely exotic in the past - and - as someone who would gladly trade in for an electric ride, I still maintain an unhealthy interest in The Automobile. It's a curious thing. Even though I stopped rock-climbing years ago, I can still pick up a copy of Climber or whatever is the current journal and vicariously inhabit moves I've never been actually capable of making on the rock. I suspect that in most things, that is the case for all of us. We are interested in stuff just for the sake of being interested in it - a pretty normal, human trait.     So, I still pick up magazines from the shop/garage/supermarket or whatever, that focus on things I either simply cannot afford or cannot personally achieve - that's what drives the magazine industry: curiosity and wishful-thinking. But for the most part, it's merely being interested in stuff that we aren't directly involv...

    The other day I was musing about tributes to lost friends and heroes I've embedded in various bits of software and show-control scripts, to run unseen and unbeknownst to the users/observers of said stuff. There is another side to this: yesterday, I came across the source code to a thing we were working on twenty-three or so years ago. I won't claim to have had any direct input in this code - I just initiated and supervised the project, putting in suggestions as to what direction a programmer might take; what libraries/API's etc. might be good to look at - kind of meta-coding rather than actual programming. But before I get into the meat of this, a bit of background is in order.     After our Audiovisual business started to dry up, we decided to turn our hands to software. With the company having been latterly about image and sound, and with my photographic history, imaging software was the logical place to head. Initially, we got involved with the ...

                                                                                 Mu:                                                                                  No Thing -    ...

Minor White - Black Sun 1955 - © Trustees of Princeton University     When I was at art college in the Seventies, I moved first from painting to sculpture and then to photography over the course of the three years I was there. I think the last move was motivated by the fact that I used the camera to record the large, ephemeral pieces I made that by necessity had to be dismantled shortly after construction to make space in the studio for the next piece or just to give someone else a bit of room to work - I did have a habit of 'going large' and filling whatever space I could get.     During the last half of my stay there, I got deeply absorbed in Photography as Art. The debate about it's status was still being chewed over at that time, despite the evidence of innumerable, disparate bodies of work by photographers all over the world - at the time spanning around 150 years from the 'invention' of photography. What struck me most profoundly was that very...

Roadside Poppies on Rachub High Street  In Flanders Fields - John McCrae           In Flanders fields the poppies grow           Between the crosses, row on row,             That mark our place; and in the sky             The larks, still bravely singing, fly           Scarce heard amid the guns below.           We are the Dead. Short days ago           We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,             Loved and were loved, and now we lie             In Flanders fields.            ...

    It's been a long day at work and a mixed bag of achievement. My first instinct after yesterday's posts was just to lighten up with a bit of the usual trivia. But in view of George Floyd's funeral, some of which I caught on TV, I don't think trivial is appropriate. I'm not sure anything is.

Boukaris, Corfu

Slave Trader Dumped Shame                    shame stains                    deep                    and long                    the colour of pain                    and estrangement                    the colour of not belonging                    the colour of not wanting           ...

Penrhyn Castle, East Front, from a postcard by J. Arthur Dixon Ltd.     The large and now partly water-filled crater that sits beneath Mynydd Llandegai at the other side of our valley - the site of the currently COVID-suspended Zip World attraction - was until recent years the largest open quarry excavation in Europe; it's product roofing half the world with the finest slate.     Until the early 1960's, it's owners were the Pennant family - latterly, sugar planters from Clarendon in Jamaica, trading through Liverpool. Richard Pennant, later the First Baron Penrhyn, owned six plantations, with over six-hundred slaves held in his service. A firm anti-abolishionist, the fortune he made in exploited land & labour was ploughed into the North Wales quarry that came to bear his name.     The Second Baron Penrhyn, George Sholto Gordon Douglas-Pennant, presided over Y Streic Fawr, or the Great Strike of 1900-1903, when a bitter dispute over Uni...