Observations from a Hill

  Pictured, my current work in progress: a personal variant on Eno's Oblique Strategies: the creative block unstopper created by him and the artist Peter Schmidt in the mid-late 1970's, and which is still around in many forms to this day; either the original, very rare card sets, the current edition of the that physical set, or various software and online variations on the idea for hardware platforms various. Me being me, of course, I've come up with my own minor twist on the thing, grouping the 100 deliberately obtuse and terse instructions into four differently-coloured, ring-bound sets of record cards, to add one extra dimension to the idea. A random decision in itself, with the grouping of four sets of twenty-five dictated simply by the fact that my supply of record cards only comes in the usual four colours of green, blue, yellow and pink. The colours and groupings have no intrinsic significance, but serve only to introduce a further layer to the 'random' proce

Forty thousand: an interesting number. On the one hand the words make up 66% of the title of "Forty Thousand Headmen" a song by the band Traffic, released in 1968, and which featured on one of those musical staples of the era - the sampler album [vinyl record] - "Nice Enough To Eat", released on Chris Blackwell's Island Records in 1969 at the pocket-friendly price of 15/6d [old money - look it up] here in the UK, and which is still one of my favourite listens to this day. On the other hand, forty thousand years ago or thereabouts, Homo Sapiens was finally left to its own devices as the apex of mammalian development thus far, as most of the other early human species had died out, save a possible few Neanderthal stragglers, who lasted a few thousand years longer. Anyhow, I say this to put into perspective the fate of two other rather more famous record albums, physically essentially similar in nature to Nice Enough To Eat, that are currently deep in interstellar s

Before I consider writing anything at all tonight, I must give a shout out to the great British instrumentalist Mike Dawes, who is not only technically phenomenally talented, but who also understands music and the arts of melody and harmony applied to instrumental guitar utterly instinctively. Here he is, once again interviewed and playing on Rick Beato's channel - again a shout out to one of my favourite YouTubers for producing serious and seriously entertaining material for those of us out here with an actual attention span and a love of music. Check 'em both out. On with the post... All I want to do tonight is voice how staggeringly pissed off I am about the daily, relentless, hysterical criticism of the new government; including from the natural Labour press constituency of the likes of The Guardian & The New Statesman. The bollocks spouted by the right-wing press is as predictable as it is lamentable; but I'm afraid the commentariat of The New Left [look it up] th

Car issues now thankfully resolved. I had both bottom arms replaced for the MOT test the other day [not cheap] and drove home secure in the knowledge - or so I thought -  that that would be that for the next few months. I fuelled the thing up to the brim ready to go and meet Jane at The Stretton Fox Inn just off the M56 Friday lunchtime, went home and parked up for the night. Friday morning came and I made a nice early start, intending to take my time over the journey and have a decent food break at Holywell on the way. On pulling out over the lip of our slightly sunken car park, a very unpleasant metal on metal clunk resounded throughout the vehicle. On driving down the High St towards Rachub Square - a road whose surface quality is more Greek island than North Welsh in nature - I was greeted with more grating and clanking at each hole and speed bump I encountered. So instead of heading onto the A55 East I made straight for my garage in Bangor again. Turns out that I had sheared the

Sorry to burden you with yet another - sort of - cooking post, but it's been a couple of days of getting the car sorted - still alas not quite resolved - which has involved a good deal of physical exercise on my part [not a bad thing] as while I'm waiting for the garage to get stuff done, I simply walk: a habit that I've had since childhood. While living through my youth and college days, I walked. Around Birmingham city centre, along the canals and out to the suburbs; or, as a hungover student, out as far as Dudley along the canal, to ease the pain of overindulgence with a great Madras curry and three chappati at the Shah Bagh restaurant [blog posts passim]: worshipping at one of my temples of spice and flavour and bringing salve to the ailing fool that I was. Walking. The best and least invasive and injurious form of exercise there is outside of swimming. Taking life a step at a time, at the pace most suited to appreciating the world around you. At a pace that suits intro

Done a lot of walking today, courtesy of my motor being in dock for repairs necessary to pass its MOT. I literally flâneur-ed my way around Bangor for three hours, stopping for coffee at Kyffin - my customary double-espresso - and a read of the newspaper; calling in at Greggs for a sausage roll, and buying a book on Charles Babbage from Pete the Hat, who sadly has recently lost his brother. A decent few kilometres covered in pursuit of absolutely nowt in particular: good physical exercise and a fair amount of introspection to boot. Loads of new University students milling around: doesn't seem five minutes to me since I was a fresher here myself - albeit a mature-student MA fresher - forty-four years ago. Bangor has changed so much in the interim, and mostly not to its benefit; but there are glimpses of hope that there are positive moves to revive the High Street, with a good number of property refurbishments ongoing and small businesses taking up residence again. We just need some

The consequences of mankind's ingenuity and endeavour are truly manifold: we are, after all at the apex - so far as we are aware - of the pecking order on the small blue-green marble we call home: the Earth. What we have succeeded in doing to that marble is, however far from optimal, both to the marble itself, but also to the various sentient inhabitants of said marble, at the apex of which we imagine ourselves as a species, speciously, to be [forgive the split infinitive: you know what I mean, and anyhow, I cares not a jot for the nicety itself]. That we were invested with the capacity to invent beyond ourselves and communicate and disseminate that invention amongst ourselves is of course not unique to us: plenty of other species, mammalian and otherwise do similarly. Where we have taken our ingenuity of course is writ large in the climate chaos that unfolds before us with ever-increasing ferocity. That we are constantly fighting wars of attrition with others of our species - our

I read with interest in today's i newspaper of the discovery of unseen film footage of the Thunderbirds TV series from sixty-odd years ago, which had been languishing in the shed of a former editor on the show, after his death. Also, I note the death of the actor who voiced Lady Penelope's butler and chauffeur Parker the other day: David Graham. The show aired for two years, between 1964 and 1966 and was staple weekly viewing for those of us boomers born in the mid-fifties; I remember the rush to get back into the house to see the very first episode air: all of us abandoning whatever games were playing in the street outside for the TV - 18" Black & White screen, two channels only. Those were the days, eh? That lack of choice and general noise made innocent stuff like Thunderbirds a big deal then, though: nothing was available on demand [as if!], so scheduling your week was a thing if you weren't to miss out on your favourite stuff. It focussed the mind rather, and

Taken delivery today of the October issue of Artforum magazine: a publication that I read assiduously when I was at art college back in the seventies. My subscription is to the original US edition, which is still produced in its original [ten-and-half inch] square format, unlike the European edition, which sadly shoehorns the content into A4. In my live online Artforum feed today was a reprint of a 1983 article on Eikoe Hosoe, whose death I mentioned the other day, which event must have been after the print deadline for the journal. The image which features at the head of the article is "Kamaitachi #8", 1965, as seen on the printout above. I've mentioned this image before as it was lodged in my memory from college days, but without reference: an enigma and indeed an enigmatic image in itself, dreamlike in its [un]familiarity.  The reality of its production is steeped in Japanese legend: the Kamaitachi of the series' title being a demon that haunted the rice fields. Th

Extra lazy post tonight as I got double-jabbed yesterday for 'flu and pneumonia: one in each shoulder, no less; and have been feeling decidedly sore and generally sub-par all day. So, a Sunday supper post it is, and no prizes for guessing what's on the plate. Sirloin steak, chunky chips, token bit of green stuff and my usual style of meat sauce. One thing that struck us both tonight, though, is that neither of us could finish the entire lump of meat: half of one steak each would have sufficed to sate the appetite. Makes sense though: as we age, the need for huge slabs of protein recedes; indeed, the need for large quantities of food per se is no longer present. Very nice meal all the same, and I'll probably stir-fry the leftover meat tomorrow...

Last month marked the death of Eikoh Hosoe, the Japanese photographer [blog posts passim], who departed this earth at the age of  ninety-one on September 16th. A belated acknowledgement on my part, I know, but there you go; I was preoccupied with the Arnhem anniversary at the time, and missed the news of his death until his obituary popped up in my newsfeed. I urge anyone unfamiliar with his work to delve into his output, and a good starting point would be the Könemann imprint pictured above. Check it out...

Been mulling over the idea of building a variant of the classic loudspeaker, the Klipsch La Scala: a [sort of] folded-horn speaker with short horn-loaded midrange and top-end drivers. Except that I don't possess any appropriate speakers or drivers at present and don't have the budget to support suitable purchases. So far, so bad; and one might ask, why bother, considering I already own perfectly good loudspeakers that provide - for the most part - adequately good sound reproduction to my ageing ears. Which is a good question. I think the motivation for this notion is one of nostalgia for a sound from my youth: coloured and colourful - musical in nature - rather than crystal. The irony is that the Klipsch Horn speakers were one of many designs of the post-war era designed to further the cause of what was then called "High Fidelity", the doctrinal [and, it has to be said dogmatic] approach to accurately reproducing music with what was, after all,  technically compromise

  Weirdly sad - for someone who grew up in the fifties, sixties and seventies - was the news the other day of the demise of Tupperware, or at least of the Tupperware company. Founded in 1942 by the eponymous Earl Tupper, their products were to define food storage habits for the next eighty-plus years; their airtight seals [still!] keeping crackers, biscuits, cookies and sundry other perishables fresh after opening. The offspring of Tupper's vision can be seen in countless knock-off products and food packaging the world over. His marketing genius dreamt up the idea of 'The Tupperware Party' - a kind of franchise system - where someone, pretty much always a housewife [God that sounds so archaic] would take on the rôle of host in their own home, to sell Tup's products to their friends and family over drinks nibbles and banter, in the evening, while the men were either out doing whatever 'men' did in those days, or else banished for the duration to their shed or den

Yesterday at the Post Office Scandal Inquiry, the former Chief Financial Officer,  Alasdair Cameron, gave further evidence that  Post Office Limited simply gave up trying to recover shortfalls from Sub-Postmasters and just wrote them off in the profit and loss accounts. Cameron told the inquiry: “ … [POL was] bust. It’s been bust for years. It has £700m of net liabilities and we’ve disclosed this in excruciating detail for ARA  [Annual Report and Accounts]  after ARA…you could see the scale of that very quickly through the P&L, and it had been, I think, £2m a year when I joined, it went up to £5m a year, and suddenly it was £12m a year – it was a million pounds a month!” Unpacking that: ultimately a million pounds a month was being written off, effectively as bad debt; where in reality, only a small proportion of those losses actually existed: the majority of the shortfalls having been created by the faulty software itself. Surely these “missing” funds should have shown as surplu

Pictured, some classic examples of Italian mid-twentieth-century cast aluminium design and manufacture: two Bialetti Moka Express coffee makers and a Bencini Koroll 24S camera, all constructed out of solid cast aluminium, just like the classic radiator grille of the original Alfa Romeo Spider. There's a beautiful echo of Art Deco about these designs, and the Bialetti coffee makers are still in production, decades on. The fact though, is that both designs do hail from the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini's Fascists, whose triumphal design aesthetic can be seen, writ large in railway stations of the era, such as Firenze [Florence]. Fascism and WWII notwithstanding, the thirties design aesthetic still stands proud in my eyes: a modernist, cinematic vision of the future present: Vorticism and Futurism embodied in the mundane artefacts of daily life...