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

This is our summer

I couldn’t believe how many cars were already parked on the roadside at Seathwaite yesterday by 9am. Everyone had clearly been watching the forecast for the first good day in … months? And at the top of Great Gable everyone was on good spirits and there was more chatting to complete strangers than usual. Still, the weather’s always a safe topic.

If you’re planning to go soon, the footbridge across to the Sour Milk Gill path will be closed for repairs for three months from September 14.

Dishwashers in art

Picking up the old argument "But is it art?" surely some of the exhibits only become art when we understand the creative process. Or maybe the creative process itself is the art - not the finished result. Here's an exhibit by Christopher Williams.

Williams, we're told 'loaded a set of dishware in the colours of each brand's logo into a dishwasher and photographed it. In the process of capturing and printing the images, he used film, chemicals, and photographic paper produced by the company that the colours signified. Williams captured the corporate identity of Kodak and Fuji, but couldn't capture AGFA's. The orange would oversaturate and turn into 'a kind of red.' Ultimately, in Erratum 2000, he obtained AGFA's colour by using a combination of Fuji and Kodak products.'

Just read

A really varied and consistently interesting anthology of A. Harry Griffin's Country Diary articles from The Guardian. With so much to choose from editor Martin Wainwright has done a great job in imposing a structure on the writing. Moving final section.

The best of concerts and the worst of concerts

1. Wayne Shorter Quartet at Teatro Monumentale 'Gabriele d'Annunzio', Pescara (Italy), 2002. Constantly shifting rhythms from Perez, Patitucci and Blade unsettle parts of the crowd who leave (muttering loudly). This generates a kind of complicity amongst the rest of us who feel more closely drawn to the music. Absolutely outstanding and even more compelling than the live Footsteps recording - the set lists are very similar. *****

2. Deep Purple MKII (reformed) sometime in the eighties at the NEC. Can’t be any more precise, I’m afraid. Ian Gillan had a sore throat. Blackmore’s solos all sounded like motorbikes falling over. Disappointed doesn’t even come close. Boo! Get off and stay off! * (just)

3. REM at the NEC Arena (again) in 1989 promoting Green. The band was yet to make it Really Big so a third of the hall was curtained off. Stipey danced like a maniac throughout and (I was impressed by this) threw on his jacket with enormous flair. That’s it - I was sold. Until they signed their massive WBG contract anyway. *****

4. Blues legend Lowell Fulson comes to Leeds in 1984 (and a long-forgotten venue well away from the student district) backed by the Norman Beaker Blues Band. White boys (meaning us) were duly impressed. We met him coming out of the gents, otherwise we would have shaken his hand. Awesome.

****

5. Steve Hackett, Leeds University, 1984. All acoustic gig with his brother, John, on flute and one or two other things. Perhaps harsh economics had forced the decision on him but what a way to tour. I was learning guitar at the time and Horizons was my party piece. Lots of walk outs here too. We sat on the floor, feeling superior, while Steve reassured us we were listening to real music. ****

6. Pat Metheny at Le Naiadi, Pescara. Can’t place the year (early 90s?) as part of the Pescara Jazz festival. An epic concert in the open air that seemed to run the spectrum of jazz in two hours. Apparently he didn’t stop there that night but went on to private jazz club playing Parker and Coltrane till the sun came up. ****

7. The Musical Box performing The Lamb lies down on Broadway at the Liverpool Philharmonic in 2006. Were Genesis ever as good as this tribute band? ‘It hardly seems to matter now’ because That Man ruined them. Dry ice, double-necked guitars and bass pedals a go-go. Eat your collective hearts out, all you people who witter on about how punk saved music! PS. My brother was mugged in broad daylight on the way to the gig. Now that's hardcore. ****

8. Pentangle MkII at the Gatehouse in Stafford (possibly 1985) with Jansch, McShee, Cox, Piggott, Portman-Smith. After a number of concert experiences at the NEC this was heaven. Acoustic set, good sound, small venue - but I still couldn’t understand what chord voicings Bert Jansch was playing. ****

9. Davy Graham at Kendal Arts Centre - the master’s demise is well documented (Will Hodgkinson's Guitar Man among others) but rather than a performance in the strict sense of the word, it was like sitting in a friend’s bedroom while he ran through an impossibly large repertoire in a haphazard way. Do you know this? And this? Classical, jazz/blues, east European folk, anything you can play on acoustic guitar and some things that you can‘t. I never found out whether he played Anji at the end. **

10. Living Color, The Academy, Manchester, 1991 - my loudest ever gig from an amazing band. Think Stevie Wonder collides head-on with Black Sabbath in a crowded fallout shelter. ****

11 Kyung Wha Chung and the Halle Orchestra at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester in 1988 - Bartok violin concerto n.2. Live performance made this fascinating. The violinist was a goddess with amazing presence on stage, he gushed. Scrap your electric guitars and take up the violin, lads. The BBC recorded and broadcast this concert a few months later but it wasn’t the same. ****

12. The Boomtown Rats at Boddington Hall, Leeds, 1984. The group thought they were playing the refectory (Who - Live at Leeds and all that) but instead it was the annual ball. In their disappointment, let’s say they lads didn’t give it their all. But Geldof blamed it on our ‘penguin suits.’ **

13. Radiohead at the Lancashire Country Cricket ground, Old Trafford in 2008. Bizarre acoustic had sound ricocheting back and forth in a very confusing way. Touching crowd sing along on ‘Lucky.’ All together now … Pull mee-eeee out of the aircrash!

Thom and Jonny from Radiohead live on French TV

Radiohead live on French TV at the time of Hail to the Thief. Thom and Jonny play an hour of stuff, old and new. http://www.youtube.com/user/The1Rausch#p/c/BF77CE6074E99E4E/54/qDdjGRhkM0M