Eerie and comical

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro: Part stream of (un)consciousness, part satire on the cult of art (and its futile controversies) with great dollops of regret for opportunities missed and relationships gone awry. Someone warned me never, ever to read this book but I loved its sheer weirdness and the quality of the writing.

A dream (?) lasting over five hundred pages sounds quite daunting, but for me the narrative never flags. The sheer incongruity of the events and apparent absence of logic has a ‘rightness’ about it that I found impressive.

Thinking positive

A gloomy English radio DJ (possibly as result of personal tragedy) tended to introduce songs with a comment along the lines of, “And if he hadn’t died so tragically young, he would have been x years old today.” Until he stood in for a colleague on Radio 3 and found himself saying, “And if he hadn’t died so tragically young, he would have been 250 years old today.” So says my father, anyway.

I was looking for an example to illustrate this and had no success. But I had to laugh at a quote from author Ursula Le Guin (it’s a coincidence that there’s a brief mention of her elsewhere on this blog): “To light a candle is to cast a shadow.” It doesn’t say where it’s from.

Regency Bath - duels, conservation and turnspit dogs

“You are a fool, sir. You have squandered your money, your most valued possessions and tomorrow at dawn in a duel … most likely your life.” The man at the front of the little group looked uncomfortable. He had paid like everyone else to visit No.1 Royal Crescent but the guide’s spirited recreation of the follies of gamblers in Regency Bath seemed to be directed at him personally. She concluded her talk by saying it was time for a sherry and disappeared.

We moved across the passage from the drawing room to a second guide. In her less eccentric presentation she made a throw away comment that, but for the grace of God, a motorway would have run straight through that part of the town today. There’s lots to see but the town planners of the 1960’s and 1970’s did great damage as I found on a stroll the day before. Large areas aren’t covered in the guide books for good reason and UNESCO initially condemned the enormous Western Riverside project which is due for completion next year.

Any trip leaves a vivid (and probably highly personal) impression in our minds. For a number of us it was the tale of the unfortunate turnspit dog in the kitchen. Dogs like these were in use until the middle of the 19th century as a tool to save cooks in large households the effort of turning meat on a spit by hand.

Further information on conservation at http://www.bath-preservation-trust.org.uk/

Weird music

Left Bank Two by The Noveltones as used in BBC TV's Vision On as the gallery theme.

What's great about this ... no, one of the many things that is great about this tune is that at the third statement of the theme, the rhythm section goes a bit wrong. The drummer does a little roll with the brushes and then for a second it all gets a bit hairy. These days they would just loop the first 'perfect' take, I suppose.

Real cappuccino now!

You can buy a cappuccino just about anywhere in the UK these days. Or rather you can't. Just about any specialist coffee chain, cafe, bar, pub or tea room will offer to sell you one, but put it alongside the item you would be given in Italy and there's just no comparison. Watery, weak and boiling hot, it's often a pale imitation of the real thing.

A cappuccino should be one third espresso, one third milk and one third foam. If it doesn't conform to these rules, or it's in a mug the size of a bucket, or if the foam disappears before you get to the bottom, there's something wrong.

The problem is that the staff in these shops generally don't even know the difference. Somebody should do something about it.

Holiday reading

After Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn we decided it was time for something a bit lighter and picked up copies of Cleopatra's Sister by Penelope Lively and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin - both at Barter Books in Alnwick. Great location, great stock.

Fleet Foxes at Manchester Apollo, September 11th.

Has Robin Pecknold been taking lessons from the Bob Dylan school of audience confrontation? It seemed so in the second half of the set as the front man gave increasingly mumbled introductions to songs and painstakingly retuned his guitar between numbers despite the whistles and shouts of an impatient minority of the audience.

Although the a capella sections in the early minutes of the concert seemed a little shaky in places, the band had begun to stamp its authority on the proceedings with powerful versions of Your Protector, Mykonos and Blue Ridge Mountains among others. Pecknold himself belts out the songs with real conviction and an individual sense of phrasing that slightly wrong footed anyone who tried to turn the infanticide ballad, Oliver James, into an unlikely singalong. In a live context Fleet Foxes demonstrate that they do more than make good records - one after another the strong melodies and thoughtful arrangements held the crowd spellbound.

Fleet Foxes had spent the day around Manchester and tellingly the mention of a used vinyl store near Piccadilly Station drew more cheers than a name check of locally-born musician Roy Harper. So in the second of his solo acoustic spots Pecknold took the hecklers to school. Unplugging his electro acoustic guitar and walking away from the microphone to the edge of the stage he sang a number without amplification to show any doubters at a packed Manchester Apollo that it was quite possible to hear the words, the music and the message if they were prepared to just shut up and listen.

Listen to Mykonos, He doesn't know why and White winter hymnal here