dimanche 14 octobre 2007

Monitoring my migrations ... some hot 'songbird' books This artist chart -- which gets regularly updated like my personal one below shall -- presents Last.fm's group choices of people like me. We enjoy the place's gathering on the Ectophile's Guide to Good Music, which has become one of my favourite sites. I find the skeletal background (a contribution by Last.fm user mbiscan) most appropriate to my work on the roots of music, which is well under way. One research book I'm reading, along with those about women that have mostly arrived now, goes right back to 'The Singing Neanderthals' by Steven Mithen. Humanoid bones can't get much drier than that, can they? Mithen himself can't help but sometimes be heavy going, but he's taken on a tricky task in going back as far as he does and draws on the mind sciences as well as ethnomusicology to do it. People in the past have described my own passion for music as an "obsession" if I browbeat them. This can be because I am unable to listen to it while concentrating on other things. It has to be one or the other, except when mood music really is on low at dinner parties and the like. Even then I find myself straining to hear it at the expense of others focused on the chit-chat. I have never understood why my brain needs to shut out either the music or the company if the former grabs my attention, but Mithen is among those telling me! He also puts it into an evolutionary context at a time I believe we need one, after a century of quantum physics you can't confine to the labs any more. There are people who have simply stopped doing this. While many of them are quacks and charlatans, I have been trying to find books by a few that aren't because "minds are changing", and I'm now aware of an evolutionary process that I'm often arguing elsewhere has affected very many people for at least the past four decades. An ailing world needs paradigms now that successfully reconcile science with the sacred, but without nonsense in a "spiritual" guise. I know that I need one myself, after a culmination of events this year that make no sense in a purely four-dimensional and conventional approach to the world and some of our art forms. In music, I read Mithen as a convert to his cause in advance, since I have since my teens in the late 1960s been open to notions that music is central to all our cultures. It's the most comprehensible to me of the unspoken arts, when it comes without words, though I find it hard even now to articulate exactly why that is. So I've turned to the scientists and shall later try to wrap my head round Daniel J. Levitin's 'This is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession' -- those are my italics, evidently. Chicks between the covers by my bed What I can do is follow several books at once. The ones about women to land up on the part of table that passes for a shelf or by my bunk right now are almost all by women. What with one or two comments from the stubborn sceptics among my colleagues who want to see what's in the parcels I unwrap, this leaves me feeling like a minority man within the minority female field of women in music! There are still men I work with who can't reconcile rock and a girl with a guitar. I don't think ill of those who make rude comments at names like Tori Amos and would voice many more were I to reel off scores of other names from the letter A all the way down to Zazie and Zita Swoon, a Belgian indie rock band that can sometimes grab my ear. But I feel they're missing out when it boils down to the kind of misogynist prejudice interestingly explored and turned upside down by the one man whose book is in the pile. He is Simon Reynolds, for 'The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock 'N' Roll'. I say often that there's no arguing with personal taste, but don't like it if people judge others purely by their sex or on the strength of only a tiny part of their work when countless musicians like Amos and Kate Bush have evolved if you listen to the whole body of their opus; it's a part of their changing lives, abilities and outlook. It's fairly recent news to me just how instrumental women were in the early days of the blues and other music that gives us what we've got today. Some of the misogyny might have set in both sides of the Atlantic when the record companies that are now huge majors even once paid a small handful of those no-nonsense pioneers better than the men way back when. Of the books I've begun by women, one claims to be "the definitive history of women in rock, pop and roll". It's Lucy O'Brien's 'She Bop II' and this hefty but not academically weighty tome is indeed so highly readable that I find its often anecdotal approach a good bedtime tale. O'Brien is full of fascinating biographical tidbits about her vast subject matter, weaving these into her historical narrative, and I've forsworn the science fiction usually required before I fall asleep. At about 500 pages, it may seem long, but a claim to be definitive can only be publisher's blurb, when O'Brien has to fit more than a hundred years of creative endeavour and innovation between the covers. After all, she has an eye to music worldwide and that's commendable, rather than the all too prevalent narrow approach to the popular music of the United States, Britain and, occasionally, a European periphery. No work can say it all, but 'She Bop II' is a darned good bid to sum up a complex tale with as many threads as possible, while including the record industry's side of the saga. If this raises the interest of any man, then O'Brien is a woman to dispel prejudice since she appears to have so few herself. Like me, though there's a relatively brief discography, I feel she'd be very hard put to come up with any of those absurd "best of" lists that make me mad. I find it helps to read historical surveys like this in conjunction with ... well, listening, of course, but also at the same time as I delve into the kind of work written by women like a different O'Brien -- Karen -- and Amy Raphael, whose collections of interviews with musicians dating from the mid-1990s you can now pick up from Amazon Marketplace sellers for a pittance. I mean a pittance, having found an only slightly bashed copy of Raphael's 'Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock' for a single penny! The pounds went into the postage and the bloody Frog value added tax... One of the items I'm still waiting for is widely held to be a classic in the historical genre, which was more costly, since I wanted Gillian Gaar's 'She's A Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll' new, though I could have ordered it for less than eight quid. Also new and now here is a mixture of feature articles with many superb pictures and interviews by Andrea Juno: 'Angry Women in Rock: Vol 1'. This list is far from comprehensive and since I must also consider the bulk of my CD spree done for 2007, I'm amused, rather than put off, by the Jarboe fan on that Amazon page who loves that particular singer so much, but wrote "to be honest, I have not read [Juno's] entire book since lots of the artists are beyond what you might call 'obscure.'" Well, that's as may be. I know virtually nothing of Jarboe, but do know work by half a dozen of the "obscure' singers. So my mainly 'Voices of Women' wish list at Amazon France has grown to more than 130 CDs, will probably go on getting bigger and is highly likely now I've read the part on Jarboe, to include her, even if she -- like some of the early blues women -- prefers to dress outrageously expensively. In the book she sometimes looks fond of wearing no more than tattoos and snakes. Me and some of my musical mates: latest listening All that said, I must get on with it. Exploring. As for my listening, if your browser can cope with it, this kind offering from Last.fm -- known as a "widget" -- will keep you up to date: 2:16:37 PM    your views? []

mercredi 12 juillet 2006

I truly needed some time to myself My mother was about three years old when Greta Garbo never first said, "I want to be alone," in 'Grand Hotel'. Since I recall the Hollywood star delivering the line she didn't, I was surprised to find I'd associated it with the wrong movie by taking strong images from 'Queen Christina', which I liked better, and displacing the words. Garbo, whose unforgettable looks and mysterious allure were enhanced by being filmed in black and white, was vexed by the quote. She "reportedly told friends, 'I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be left alone." There is a world of difference'" (Who2?). So there is, a whole world of difference. Such plans as I had for the summer of 2006 didn't involve very much time alone. I have few close friends, but intended to see some once holidays began if they were still in town, get out as frequently as a tight budget allows to concerts before the city stops for August, and with great luck, even meet her this year, maybe at a musical event. She is the woman I've occasionally mentioned before, though I know no more than that she is bound to share my love of music. There's England as well. I didn't go last year and saw my mother just for a day when she was briefly in France, visiting her granddaughter and my former wife. The years have notched up since I last saw my father and I'm ashamed of it. My daughter Marianne has been to York, where my parents live in separate parts of the lovely historical town, far more recently. My parents split up a few years after my arrival in Paris in 1980. For well over a week now, however, I have spent many, many hours with my parents, with my daughter's mother Catherine and with other family members, seeing almost nothing of anybody else. This has been in my head and on my own. I didn't want to be left alone. I have needed to be alone, a great deal more than when I 've needed solitude each morning for about an hour as long as I can recall. Today's morning hour began at 2:00 pm. I slept through the alarm clock set for 10:00 am, like I frequently did about three months ago during the initial stage of recovery from the nervous breakdown that became manifest when I plunged into Hell on March 14 and had to stop working when it became too much for me some days later. In the previous series of Orchard entries about the disease with which I live, I described it as manic-depression. Calling it a bipolar disorder gives an idea of the ups and downs. I set out all I believed useful about a malady that affects many people and claims numerous lives. In pieces written between April 8 and May 14, I included tales from my experience and turned what I found relevant in the work of gifted psychiatrists who have helped me into language accessible to everybody (though most of that work was already done by them). I stressed the importance of core values manic-depressives find they lose when in trouble, initially with regard to themselves -- love, trust and a sense of humour -- and then distort concerning people close to them, and I wrote about the dire effect this can have on relationships and how paranoia can set in. My writing also explored ways in which people who have a crippling and dangerous disease tend, nevertheless, to resist help from those best placed to provide it and showed how strong self-destructive factors can be at work, which may add to the great strains in relationships. The strangest story I told was how, given the seriousness of the last cycle of manic-depression I had, some higher part of me devised a strategy for splitting my personality in a way that enabled me to use healthy elements, including fictitious people who were composites of the best in myself and others I know, to tackle the disease. They gradually restored my self-love -- my sense of self-esteem -- to get me laughing again, at myself and with others. Within a few weeks, I thought I had the resources to go back to work. This "strategy" I took to be a gift from the woman therapist I saw until December 2004 (known as the Shaman-Shrinkess on the Log because of ideas we shared), combined with the insight of manic-depression patient turned great psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison (whose books I've mentioned), and also from my Inner Shaman. He put in an appearance when I later wrote of a conviction that we each seem to have a guide inside us to what's good for us and our health of mind, body and soul, if only we know how to listen. This isn't easy. We have addictions. We have behaviour patterns that are deeply ingrained in us, some going way back into childhood. People like some distractions and being taken out of themselves. Many people don't enjoy being alone -- psychiatrists say this becomes easier as we get older and see it as a merciful change given the way families alter as the children leave the home, then death one day steps in to take a partner. My current therapist went along with the strategy. I went back to work -- for all of two weeks. The truth is that what I've done so far patched me up, gave me sufficent confidence back and courage to go on for a little while longer. But that wasn't nearly enough. We're already well into July. I quit the Factory again after an initial surge of memories from the past that brought very strong emotions with it, got in the way of my work as a news editor. I should be part of a "production line" of people who bring the events in the world from places where journalists are covering them to you. But I couldn't focus on news from some African nation and concentrate on getting it into shape when what was going on in my head was overwhelming. I didn't know what was going on in my head. A nice woman working on the desk would ask if I wanted a coffee. Words like that would drag me back to the present, but it was still was far less about relief workers being denied access to some hot and hopeless refugee camp because a government had decided they were spies than wherever I was in memories. I found myself staring at Google Maps, more interested to see what satellite pictures showed of the houses I had lived in as a child, if they were still standing, than in any story waiting to be done. Memories. I feared and wanted them. Talking to colleagues, I was agreeably surprised -- more than I should have been -- by the sensitivity they showed about the bout of illness I'd been through and the amount of time it had taken me to get over it, but the work bored me and I began during the second week to lose my confidence again. I found the stories out of Africa dull, but I was slowing down too. I kept telling people that emotionally, I felt like Pinocchio must have done. Mine felt new and subtle, pastel shades with which I needed to familiarise myself rather than the extremes I'd known before. In fact, I was very confused about emotions. What I did before returning to work was to make a partial recovery, in which I pulled myself together with help. Drug treatment brought an end to a manic phase in which my thoughts were still racing wildly, while at the same time I felt deep emotional pain and distress. The chemicals levelled out massive mood-swings that at their worst became a sustained period of depression, marked by times of complete hopelessness and helplessness I have mentioned, for which the only remedy I could find was sleep. What I began to think about a few weeks ago goes beyond recovery: a recovery that is still under way from what I didn't understand at first to have been a full-fledged nervous breakdown. My "strategy" may have restored my sense of humour and self-esteem, but they proved very fragile. So I started to think that something else was wrong to render me so vulnerable and return me so quickly to a state in which I wasn't up to the job. What was really far too fast, however, was my assumption that I could do it. My doctor and therapist let me, but didn't tell me how bad things were for weeks. If they had told me while I was still manic, I wouldn't have taken it in. It is healing I've been thinking about so hard. What constitutes healing? How is it set in motion? What's the difference between recovering from a bad bout of illness and engaging on a healing process that could make it less likely to happen again? I've been really scared that it might happen again. I don't know much of the answers to the questions I've just asked, just that for me music is part of it and so is harmony and so are things that happen in our souls. Long before I got there, my doctor friend made a qualitative difference between what happened in March and previous depressions I've had, with his warning that the last one was extremely serious and should be treated to avoid a recurrence. Once he felt I was ready, he confirmed some home truths I had worked out for myself during the weekend I all but lost faith in the therapist because of the vile side-effects of a drug he kept me on for too long. I wrote about that in the one entry where I felt entitled to link my own experience together closely with music to which I'd listened: the piece on the Pretenders, a band with staying power that produces superb songs about real life with no pretending. This entry could head one of two ways now. I shall resist a temptation to go all the way down the first simply because I've already written it and doing so kept me busy in self-chosen solitude for so long. Very old memories have welled up inside me incessantly and when they haven't, I've gone in search of them, back through my 26 years in Paris, back on through the first years I held down a job in England, still back on through my teenage life, and right back all the way into everything I can recall of my childhood. While I have done this, I've kept a record of it all. It made for a long story! The second way of proceeding is simply to state that something went very wrong with me, the way it does with anybody who ends up needing therapy. It still goes wrong, every day. This is how I think it's going to be for some time to come. The therapist has taken me off work for the rest of this month and he has told me that he will be doing so in August. It's going to take as long as my doctor said it would. What might have gone wrong became apparent while I was boring myself with my life story and felt much more inclined to be out in the sun, watching the girls go by, listening to music, doing my musical homework or simply indulging in sexual fantasies. I wanted a love relationship with a woman who is interested in music and likes an uncomplicated life. But if this is to happen, my annual summer dream which doesn't really just have to be a seasonal one, I don't wish to be a complicated person myself and I want some of the mess of the mornings out of the way first. You can't write about healing manic-depression. You can write about treatment with drugs, which is one thing, and therapy that helps with issues it raises, which is another, and finding ways of living with the disease. My mother has chosen her way of living with depression, which strikes her down for four terrible months or more at a time. My mother has learned to accept being reduced to a state where she can do little more than survive from one day to the next during those awful months, waiting for them to end and then going up. When she's high, she tries to do as much as she can, seeing people and pursuing interests that are beyond her at other times. She can be exhausting both to herself and others during her highs. My mother knows this and backs off when she's aware of talking too much, warning others to tell her if she's tiring them. In her '70s, she isn't inclined to do what I did and delve into her past. I have chosen a different approach less out of arrogance, though sometimes I am, than because my past came back to haunt me and I realised that what I'm doing every single morning is the same thing as people sometimes need to do periodically in a different way, when they rebuild their lives. Every single day, I rebuild myself before I can get on with it. I put myself back together. Until I've done this, I can't face other people. If the telephone rings, I very rarely answer it, but just check out who is making the incoming call. When I know I've got to pick it up, talking is hard. And I'm a junkie. Forget cereal ads I used to hate in which cheerful families eat cheery cracking food, slopping on the milk and spooning the stuff up into ultra-brite smiles. There is no music either, because I don't want somebody else deciding what to play me. If there's been a coup in Africa during the night that's going to give me a tough day's work, I don't want to learn about it on radio news. I'll do that when I'm ready, on the Net. I'm ready once the drugs are working, the first cigarettes smoked and the Valium tablets swallowed. This was often a real pain in the butt when on holiday with the Kid. I hated keeping her waiting or suggesting that she head off for her breakfast, where I would join her once the hour was over, but that was the devil or the deep blue sea since if she stayed around she'd turn on the cartoons when there were any on a hotel television. The racket those made would drive me into bathrooms. Numerous people take Valium for anxiety -- if not always for such prolonged periods as me -- and we get hooked on it. Doctors know this. Getting off it has to be planned. Valium can do something else too, like a load of other drugs prescribed for similar reasons or to treat other problems. During a recent assault on my medicine cabinet, when I inspected the notices of things that have been in it sometimes for years, untouched, each had the same warning on them: memory troubles. I threw them away and that is where I was able to start thinking about healing, not just recovery. To recover is to get better, like healing, but can mean no more than a return to the physical or mental shape you were in before something got broken. But to heal can be to move on past that mending process to become someone more resilient and strong, less susceptible to life's blows. My life story includes memories of a series of blows, like everybody else's. That Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders helped take the lid off when she sings so personally about the blows people give and take when love relationships go off the rails is hardly surprising, but the extent to which I'd falsified the reality of how the divorce happened in 1993 and made a monstrous "thief" out of my former wife has astonished me. I was a fortunate father in our daughter's first four years, with a job that enabled me to play a much bigger part in her upbringing than is the lot of most. I knew what alcohol was doing to me; the marriage seemed unsalvageable and I rationalised myself into accepting it, but I'd done my best to steer clear of the booze when Marianne was up and about before it twisted me. The rupture with the Kid was more than I could face since my sense of failure was complete. In reality, there was no failure. We went on to develop a strong bond of love like the one that exists between me and my father, who is one of the wisest people I know. If that was strained, as it has been, this occurred relatively recently. I've had amends to make to Marianne for the lesser role I gave her in my life once she was old enough to become independent-minded and build new love relationships of her own. That's no moment to turn off any flow of contact and affection in a child's life, but I did, and as soon as I knew it, I did something about it and still am. Failures, real or otherwise, are big dents in self-esteem and everyone knows the best way to overcome the damage they do is to try again and succeed. However, doing this can make you feel pretty anxious. I've taken my morning hours to pieces while looking back. What made the least sense to me was the anxiety I feel, for real, hence the Valium, when there is often no reason for it. You can't feel anxious about nothing. Money, yes. Until a few people, including Catherine, banged a bit sense into my head so hard that it seems to have stuck, I've behaved crazily with money and written about it as well. I can't claim like Kay Jamison did to have wanted 20 "sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony." She's got quite an imagination, both in her brave account of what she thought she was doing during the spending sprees that characterise manic behaviour, and in the wonderful way she brings it to bear in her understanding of the disease in creative people. I don't have so much to show for my irrational spending, but consolidating the debt led to a lot of anxiety. So do some meetings. So does the imminent prospect of getting rid of a wisdom tooth. But all of them are quite manageable. I've never been a coward, tending rather towards foolhardiness and recklessness, including with women. No, you can't feel anxious about nothing. But what you can feel is a generalised anxiety that I'd liken, on account of the tangible way I do, to a fish in the depths of my belly swimming around and sometimes wriggling so much that it upsets me. It waits for bait in the shape of some kind of worry and once it leaps on to the hook, I've turned Valium into the club that stuns it. I didn't find my theory. Anthony Storr did in his work I have been slowly reading about 'Solitude: A Return to the Self'. In this 1988 book, Storr introduces the work of Heinz Kohut, whom he describes as "one of the most original psycho-analysts of recent years" before outlining a number of the man's ideas. Then he states: "Kohut believes that the deepest anxiety which a person can experience is what he calls 'disintegration anxiety'. The individuals whom he considers liable to this are those who, because of the immaturity of their parents' responses to them in childhood, or because of the absence of empathic parental understanding, have not built up a strong, coherent personality." That passage leapt off the page at me. I'd never heard of "disintegration anxiety" before. I turned the words around in my mind for several days, thinking about them, extremely cautious of them, and feeling them. I spent ages, cautiously, just trying them on for size. I wanted to talk about them and what I'd written with my therapist. We decided they fit. This is to say, I had decided they fit and when I talked about why and how, the man responded in like manner, but he expressed regret when I began going on about wanting a "strategy" again. I thought I wanted a strategy, but I'm sick of devising them, and when he told me it wasn't a good idea, I felt a wash of relief and said I was glad, because the prospect made me want to shit. It's a vulgar French expression that made him laugh. Storr cites two reasons given by the late Kohut (Wikipedia), who died in 1981, for the development of disintegration anxiety. I'm not sure that, in reality, my parents showed any great immaturity in bringing me up. I was a first child, they tend to get a lot of love as well as being a bit experimental. The understanding may well have been there too. But I wasn't very responsive and frequently, especially the older I got, preferred to be out of it, in homes that weren't my own. And I know for sure that I buried any true feelings for most people to respond to a long time ago and have lived a great deal of my life behind facades of different kinds. Countless times, I was told of my inability to let go of things. I know this to be true enough, less so than it used to be, but it's still one of my faults. Having to let go properly is a desire that was foisted on me this summer, at first as a great hindrance, and then very slowly as a pleasure, by my breakdown, once I understood that I'd had one. This has left me no option but to operate one day at a time. For days that became weeks, planning was out of the question. I've written of vile weeks, but said nothing of a perfect day. I've had some. One of them began with the realisation that one kindness leads to another and the wish to do one, but not to the same person, got me past a morning failure of courage and out further into Paris than I'd been for a long time. I took advantage of the excursion to drop some paperwork into AFP, acknowledged my body's request for plenty of exercise and set about walking home, which is a long way but far less smelly and hot than the Métro was that afternoon. When I got to the rue Bonaparte I found that it was open day at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, went inside and spent a good while there letting myself be opened by the works of art on display. I discovered that it's possible altogether to avoid two long main boulevards I don't like, because of the heavy traffic and what I find dull, heavy architecture, if you follow a nose with a decent sense of direction like mine and take smaller streets where you end up park-hopping. In the Jardins de Luxembourg, which are lovely at this time of year, I saw and heard a uniformed police officer out on patrol with his partner who was singing. He had a fine baritone voice. You don't hear policemen singing on duty every day, but this was a beautiful one for it and he obviously felt the same way. I do believe I am nearly done. Sometimes I feel that each morning, I'm using drugs in a ritual to get rid of the anxiety and somehow get those core values turned on so I can use them. I've told the therapist that I'd much rather dispense with the drugs and the ritual and become the kind of person who could star in a cereal advertisement. That's the plan. But I don't have a strategy. The therapist tells me I'm doing fine and I don't want to write any more about the distinction between recovery and healing, now I've drawn one in this column, because I know that the latter is happening in ways I don't understand and frequently while I'm asleep. I know a bit about what dreams do, in initially helping us file away our memories and then playing a role in sorting us out. I've had a lot of those that have taken me back as far as my writing. Occasionally, I find I can ask to dream about something and I do. If I were to say any more though, it would be about matters of faith and the soul and about music. There's room for all those on the front pages. I'm about done with the psychology and the psychiatry books, which I've found helpful. But tomorrow I want to come out again and return sometimes to the front pages. I want to be able to tell you how I feel about music and people who make it again. I hope I can get the balance right because this has been all my story. I've lost none of my appetite for different ones as told by musicians whom I've set on one side for a while. I really have needed to be alone. 11:48:57 PM    your views? []

mardi 6 juin 2006

Sounds good: space, time and music blogs A makeover for me, my wardrobe and my Mac Things have generally needed dressing up. It's making for an expensive month, overhauling both my computer and my wardrobe! I had a nasty nausea attack on realising there was no question of putting off a refit for me any longer, since it meant further spending, but the sickness wore off on remembering that my financial woes are a worry of the past if I remain wise. I can be remarkably slow on the uptake when it comes to my own good news. Worse, I've usually left such long intervals between outings to buy clothes that I forgot how when I pluck up the courage to do it, even such shopping can even be fun. That observation is perhaps for my personal edification since people say noting things down helps you remember them. But here's fact one from my experience: the average survival time of modern clothes before the holes are beyond mending is five and a half years. Fact two: either the intolerable holes appear in everything simultaneously or you see them yourself all at once. The latter might seem marginally more plausible, but there have been regular such intervals. I've always put buying clothes among things to delay and endure in sprees, but I no longer want to keep it on a list of commended long-term cyclical activities. I can precisely date the last time I went on a shopping bout that set assistants asking polite questions like "Are you getting a new wardrobe?" It was in the final days of the French franc. After December 2000, I left France to work in South Africa for a few months and on my return, we had euros. This made calculating price increases tricky during my last such expedition, but they haven't risen exponentially in the way that changes in computing have made audioblogs possible and widely popular in less time than I wear out a set of clothes. Just after my latest adventure, a woman in the newsagent's shop was buying big envelopes and complaining about the customs hassle in posting stuff to the United States inside them. François, the owner, said: "Pas d'anti-américanisme primaire!" "I'm suffering anti-American side-effects," I chipped in, because I was still miffed at having had to open a new payment card account to be able to benefit from sales prices. Everyone knows the French economy is in a dire state, yet we constantly have plastic cards foisted on us, just like people tell me it's now hard to get by without them in America. Sizing up a sound box While I've always been so silly about buying clothes that I can note personal wear-and-tear statistics and guess they're probably much the same for all of us, what gets me down is my dislike of being pushed into consumption. I became aware of that pressure in the hype surrounding my choice of a new Mac and what it can do for me musically. The biggest partition on the more energetic eMac is called "sound box". This is hardly original, but that's going to be its main job, and part of it includes handling what's on people's audioblogs with greater ease than its predecessor. Just as musicians make up new social rules as they go by mostly having their own websites and being very generous with their work, a lot of audioblogs are a healthy counter-reaction to market forces. It's hard to stay sane in a very sick society without music and a few of the analogies musicians and listeners like me are drawing from it for life when we hear what's going on around us. I've already posted a pick of "podcasts" and when I get to what's in a handful of audioblogs, that's another occasion to remind uncertain visitors what podcasts are, since they're still quite new. Quite why Kami Knake, meanwhile, drawls her opening remarks at Bands Under The Radar only to "L.A", where she happens to live, escapes me. Perhaps she doesn't she expect anybody in France to be interested in some of the music she plays, along with nasal ramblings that seem to give her a complex about talking too much? The power in a podcast I've asked Kami to turn off the default "play" option on her website, leaving a jokey observation about what it would have taken technically and financially in the 1970s to put two of her at once into the listener's sound box the way she does. Probably I'm not alone in visiting her site to check her music playlists at the same time as I listen. But I would have have to listen for nine days and nights non-stop to exhaust what's in my podcast selection on the computer, which is tiny compared everything out there. My preferred programmes already take up almost 12 gigabytes of space on an external hard drive. The recent exponential growth of data storage space bears no relation to prices. It astonishes me and has made possible things we could only fantasise about fewer than six permanent changes of my clothes ago. I'm working on an eMac that has a partition of about 144 GB and one of around four, which is there for some small tasks (with the old "classic" operating system on it). In French, by the way, that word partition isn't just a noun and a verb about dividing rooms or a computer's hard disk into separate bits; it's also the historical term everyone kept for a score, or sheet with musical notation on it. A mere decade ago, it would have taken more than three of the first beautifully designed iMacs that wooed me into a love-hate relationship with Apple just to hold those digitalised "radio shows" in my podcast library. I dare not imagine how many dozen home computers and external drives I'd have needed for the whole music library. Back in 1976, huge professional databases were needed to store the amount of music I can keep on my desk. Yet though I remember this and the excitement of working in places with such libraries, it still didn't occur to me that one new eMac would give me so many extra gigabytes on top of what I already had to be able to tell Steve, a fellow at work who asked if I'm going to have enough space: "Yes, and I've got plenty to back up data for my daughter and for friends." 'Tout va vite. Trop vite.' While this capacity exponentially to pack more and more into less room is, to my mind, one of the most welcome aspects of developing computer technology, I'm hard put to imagine how music files can now get smaller without insufferable quality loss until someone invents a way of doing it. When that happens, how many of us will be able to afford it? The music CD was a huge industrial investment, with a massive market organisation to sell it. People will long love their compact disks and vinyl like most of us cherish our old books. Still, the power of computers and the personal data space readily available to millions -- and thus already cause for competition among media moguls -- is more than a means of storing music alongside which the older ones will co-exist. What is becoming increasingly popular in uneasy times is the new way of pooling resources, alongside new incentives to musical creation that overdo the ease of it. A Log chapter in which I sought, via music, to capture the Zeitgeist of this turn of the century may have long, but it's borne out by these phenomena too. As a former musician, I welcome the apparent ability of this particular Mac to ease me back into making music again. I missed an activity that a few years ago seemed definitively halted by repetitive stress injury, but what needs stressing is the way that minor handicap for life came of trying to do too much at once. "Aujourd'hui tout va vite. Trop vite*," read, before a word fell off, the collage postcard shown, which was made by my first love, Ghyslaine, in 1980. She was so right, I am no speed freak. In recent years, that timeworn, reglued card has got a place it deserves opposite another gift on my shelf of "soul-food books". The other object is also a collage, with a small mirror in the middle. I don't know whether this was the intention and the mirror is of minimal practical use, but set amid a brightly coloured patchwork of little bits of sticky paper, it reminds me when I look at it simply to try to be myself in a patchwork world, keeping a harmonious place without too much room for introspection! Hefty music books have meanwhile all drifted into the bedroom-cum-study. Yet I still want to slow down more. This Mac is my first to come with the Garage Band programme that has given birth to a host of sites on the Net. The rediscovered teenager in me who used to make up big compositions in his head would have been overjoyed at the idea of fitting a symphony orchestra into a cardboard box the size of a thick book. But here's the freaky side of facility: "Just break open a Jam Pack," the blurb says, "and you’ll find all the talent you need -- hundreds of professional backup musicians and sound engineers at your disposal 24/7." Many Apple publicity gimmicks include "Just do this" and "Just do that", usually meaning, "Just give us a bit more of your money, and you'll be able to work miracles," but with this constant emphasis on ease. Nevertheless, the real idea in making music accessible to everyone outweighs what might be a prejudice against facility I've felt and often struggled against since the 1960s. If the Zeitgeist is truly about people searching for the deepest roots they can find, when times haven't been so tough for almost a century (in ways I described at length on May 19), then I shan't mind if Garage Band and more sophisticated programmes take me plenty of time to explore. I've also contacted Grove Music Online about a trial subscription. The learned Grove Dictionary (Wikipedia) doesn't come cheap in online form. It costs £50 (about 73 euros or 93 dollars a quarter). France adds almost a fifth of the price in the country's value added tax on cultural artefacts. That's a lot of VAT; everyone, including me, gripes about nearly 20 percent extra on anything from a computer to a blank recordable CD. We really shouldn't moan, though, if the funds thus raised are genuinely used to help pay creative people and new means of spreading their craft around from which anyone can benefit. So I want to give Grove Music Online a three-month trial as a deeper learning tool and resource, partly for me to revise my homework and better understand the women on the Log and partly for the lending library I now work with at the Factory. Old music by new means I feel better as a communicative and humanistic animal in decent clothes, there's no doubt of that, but most other recent outlay has been an investment in my creativity and reaping the harvest of those who want to share with us. All the same, some of the best things still come for free. When made by people who hold our attention, podcasts are a genial use of the exponential growth in space and above all in freedom, both personal and economic. Nearly all podcasts, which are like radio broadcasts you can keep on your portable music player, do come for free and you can use them for time-travel. If at the computer, I like listening to what's new in podcasts, as I do with the sample CDs that come with magazines while I'm focussed mainly on my own craft, because the musical side of my consciousness yells "Stop and listen properly" if something really good comes along. While I'm always saying that comparisons are odious, a striking amount of what I hear in podcasts presenting new music reminds me invariably of what musicians were already doing in the 1960s and 1970s, but they then needed resources few could afford without some sort of patronage. I was working late to some dreamy electronic sounds given the overall title 'File under Insomnia', in the most recent hour-long podcast from Rotterdam's "TC" at Spacemusic. TC says, by the way, that his next, 60th podcast is going to a "best of" before he takes a break from one of the most enterprising shows around. Given his broad beat, I'm expecting quite a trip down memory lane and wonder if TC knows it. It was odd to hear two tracks from a guy called Recue, or Riku Annala (home) and his 'Between Stations' EP, and realise that what's readily available via the musician's site and on today's "ambient" shelves is much the same kind of sound as was broadcast 30 years ago late at night on the BBC's Radio 3. When I worked there, what was previously called the Third Programme, along with what was considered "Light" (now Radio 2) and the Home Service (Radio 4), were still all we had unless you were a radio ham or young and adventurous. The BBC's popular Radio 1 was the baby of the family and snatched its presenters from pirate radio stations I've mentioned before. Most people thought that Radio 3 very highbrow, a far cry from what it is today. If you had my luck to work there that was rubbish. Some people were very scholarly as well as bright and a few had the worst kinds of closed minds about music, but most were good fun. If anybody of us knew how much the popular styles of 2006 would echo what was then being broadcast as 'Music in Our Time', I wasn't among them. We rarely bothered to speculate on the future of music and few who did imagined that the technology would make it possible, let alone popular, for people to produce and disseminate the kinds of noise people loved to hate with their personal computers. Still, the occasional hangovers from our almost nightly drinking bouts could be hell! People were too involved in the complexity of what they were doing to have an ear to the 21st century. Guests who made music very much like Recue and the others on Spacemusic 59 needed big modern studios or had to be grant students at places like France's highly rated Research Institute in Acoustics and Music. IRCAM's Multimedia Library (English-language entrance) must in 2006 be among the biggest resources of musical info packed into digital space in the world. Those who were into IRCAM in its early days crossed the Channel from England when there was no three-hour train ride but the salt spray was a good remedy for the evenings in the BBC Club. Ghyslaine gave me her collage including that bit, "Everything goes fast. Too fast," in a year when the pace of things was comparatively still sluggish! Nobody called electronic music "dub" and "ambient" usually meant "surround sound", certainly not easy listening. I imagine Recue already knows that his audiences in 1980 would have numbered in the hundreds if he was very lucky. Nearly all of them would have been fellow musicians or probably seen by most people, like I was, as eccentric intellectuals. Yet today Recue and hundreds of thousands like him have a whole planet at their fingertips. If my daughter hadn't seen the sea, maps and aircraft, I don't know what she'd think separates France and England, so she has to go into a tunnel for a good quarter of an hour. And today the Kid and me and you and everyone is, if the law so declares, a pirate. As Apple avoids saying, "Just make me a copy, please." If you were silly enough to believe Apple's advertisements, we can all be musicians too, provided we "just" did whatever they suggest. The trouble is that if you lack the craft and skills, you can't just do anything of the slightest interest to anyone but yourself: that is inevitably the downside in whatever people try to convince you is new and wonderful. My kind of culture My new computer and what it allows me to do prolonged a pause for reflection, aware also that it's been music and a desire for harmony with others and above all in myself that sent me out to buy new clothes. I had no strong external stimulus like a trip to Africa, which was the case the last two times, but maybe that patchwork mirror gave me the same view of my holes as expressed by those who said they mattered. Hence, too, the changes in the blogroll. There was a section called "my kind of culture". That has gone. Music itself does quite enough with space, time, memory and energy to be my kind of culture. The links worth keeping have moved elsewhere in the list, while the new part will go on doing what it does already, sharing the musical culture of others in all its diversity ... and making more room for the men. My subject matter obviously doesn't mean leaving my fellow man out of decisions like selecting the kind of audioblogs in which I hear the Zeitgeist at work, especially since if you were to believe some of what you read, it's still men who make most of the big moves when it comes to shaping the defining spirit of our times. That's another rather sad and silly perspective, but Lilith is doing her best to even the balance. _______ *"Today, everything goes fast. Too fast." The other line on what's left of Ghyslaine's card reads "Hope rises. Let's respect its fragility." The cartoon is by Wilhelm Schlote. 7:18:46 PM    your views? []

jeudi 1 juin 2006

In a mood for the inner shaman The weather has turned chilly, rips appeared in my remaining presentable pairs of trousers, and my Mac crashed so thoroughly and then refused to start up and show any life until the third day of fixing -- more than just a battery replacement -- that I know the computer is on borrowed time. In sum, I prefer to rejoice in a rare piece of good news, when a far-off friend mailed me to say something I'd done for her was right on the mark but "officially insane", and also I'd like to explain that being "normal" is coming rather hard to me! I think this is an entry about two sides of one coin. My mood for days has steadily been subdued and one of slight depression, with the rare dose of absurd humour. In my reading, I find most psychiatrists consider a mild depression the state of a human mind best attuned to what is commonly taken for reality: the world as we're able to share our views of it. A week ago, I published a look back over a first full year when the Log has been devoted to the 'Voices of Women' by name (though this was really only an extension of what had already happened in practice), with an ear to the future. I removed that entry, for my plans seemed premature until I know what is going on in my heart. Being a man who is held often to be good at listening to the hearts of his friends and enjoys trying to hear everything he can learn of the musicians who come up here, it struck me how rarely I've directly expressed my own mood unless it's been in the Orchard, regarding the big highs and lows of my strong bipolar cycles. In talking with other people, I've also frequently adopted the style of a sensitive outsider who can empathise with them deeply, draw conclusions and make suggestions if they are troubled from what seems like a detached viewpoint. Getting out of the emotional heat Today it appears that, in a way, I have been an outsider! Strange moods have affected me since I stopped taking a serotonin regulator my therapist contends became counter-productive at some stage in many years of treatment. I had to start adjusting to new medication for my brain chemistry, after in March entering the manic phase of a seven-month cycle just before plunging into the most crippling depression of my life. I shan't repeat what I've posted about having to learn more and fast about manic-depressive illness and devising a strategy to beat it, on being warned that a third cycle even more extreme than my past two could kill me, possibly literally, but very likely figuratively by putting me away for a long time. Yet the discovery of what I can only take for normal emotions has been very hard to endure and constantly disconcerts me, combined as often it has been with sporadic surges of mood-tinged memories up into my conscious mind at unexpected moments. These have concerned several periods in my chequered life. For a couple of nights last week, I couldn't sleep for trying to process this new data and make sense of it, and I feel there's a foot planted now on the lid of a pressurised can that's going to blow off when I let it, which I simply must do next week with the help of a bomb disposal expert. I have to be prudent in my choices of music, like when coming out of a "downer" in which I couldn't take any music at all. So given my constant tendency to explore what's new in my ever-growing library of mainly women musicians, I'm relieved that the "magic iPod finger" can usually be depended on to pick the right voice. However, my "year-ender" won't appear on the Log, because I know what other people I've been reading lately mean when they say their weblogs seem to become to-do lists. It's best instead, as Kathryn Petro showed in a typically enjoyable entry on a visit to a wildlife reserve, simply to do or even just to be. She found: "My body felt it could breathe" (A Mindful Life). But I want my mind to be able to breathe easy again. This entails telling my therapist that accepting my strategy for recovery, giving me new medication and advice about that and then saying "Good luck and get on with it!" isn't quite enough. It takes more than drugs to heal a mind The new therapist hasn't gone guite this far. But I suspect, all the same, that while his approach has been better than others I first saw but won't name and we get on well, that we're both victims of a trend in "modern society" that Kay Redfield Jamison warned against on just page three of her trailblazing book, 'Touched With Fire' (an Amazon France link this time). I prefer to be in mutually active relationships of exchange, rather than taking all the initiatives, but therapists do have a tendency to sit back and wait. After a few lines about the "fine madness" and simplistic notions of bipolar disorder in people of an artistic temperament, Kay wrote that: "labelling as manic-depressive anyone who is unusually creative, accomplished, energetic, intense, moody, or eccentric both diminishes the notion of individuality within the arts and trivializes a very serious, often deadly illness. There are other reasons for such concerns. Excesses of psycho-analytic speculation, along with other abuses of psychobiography, have invited well-deserved ridicule. Due to the extraordinary advances in genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology, much of modern psychiatric thought and practice has moved away from the earlier influences of psychoanalysis and towards a more biological perspective. Some fear that the marked swing from psychoanalysis to psychopharmacology is too much, too soon, and that there exists the risk of a similar entrenchment of ideas and perspectives." This is what nearly happened to me. I know so much about some mental disorders and getting help to inspect one's parts and put them together again that sometimes it's easy to feel that others have too much faith in my ability to come up with answers! At the same time, however, I know a part of me has a lot of the answers. It's also the bit that helps other people and there's no reason to believe it's any different for you. I'm no longer interested in the practice of psychoanalysis (apart from a soft spot for Carl Jung -- Wikipedia -- and acceptance of principles of some importance) because experience has given me an aversion as strong to people who lock themselves into "schools of thought" as musicians usually hate being classified by critics and narrowly labelled on store shelves and in magazines. I want helpful therapy. Strong empathy with the moods of others, usually in circumstances when they need to talk about these feelings and want help, hasn't given me enough tools to understand my own moods, since I've got nothing subjective with which to compare "normal". So next week, I plan to take an emotional "crash course", since I can live with the memories, on condition I can be confident what I feel never means I'm headed for an even worse cycle. Throughout this whole episode, I've heard more sense out of honest and ordinary people than from those who wrote some of the lousy books I've skimmed and from psychiatrists with rigid minds. I've been able to talk openly with cooks in the canteen at the Factory who always spoil me, colleagues who have been understanding and interested in my views on healing with music and in society rather than some institution, friends who say simple and wise things, and my down-to-earth general practitioner. I guess I've frequently been good at helping people live with emotional extremes and through periods they find hard going because those very extremes have been my habitual territory! In pressing me to become a teacher and use the music Log as my prime means of doing this, some have also called me a bit of a witch-doctor and a shaman. This I'm finally prepared also to accept, because two things have happened since March to reinforce my sense of what's in our souls. I've said very little about the second "massive spiritual experience" that accompanied a total brain burnout. The doctor didn't put it on my medical record as such this time round when I asked him to refrain. I've been thinking, too, about a talk with a friend in Africa -- not the Lauren who thinks what I do is "officially insane"! -- regarding her loneliness and dislocation and how people best deal with madness and purportedly deranged people in so-called primitive societies. What people in such traditional societies, close to nature, do not habitually do to those with disorders of the mind and the soul is put them away. In modern France, though, I encountered resistance from some health professionals and even one or two people chose to me to my determination to heal within society, which is absolute. Next week my therapist will again find himself helping out with a strategy I have taken to him: "This is the plan, will it work?" If I can listen to it, you see, a part of me knows what to do. The medicine-man inside us all I believe this bit of me is my inner shaman, my personal medicine-man, and that it's the same part that found me Sheryl Crow and Natalie Imbruglia's 'Left of the Middle' to listen to last week, the album of a spirited woman in her early 20s. She is singing about a new start in the world. Oh, I could readily identify with that desire! Natalie asks 'Leave Me Alone', rejects the second-hand opinions of others and trusts to her 'Intuition'! I had no idea she was going to title a song for it, but have used the word recently and split it into the bits that apply in what I need to do: "in-" for the inside where I went to find myself and get over the very mad month of March, and "-tuition" for the rest. Put together, that is our knowledge within. Our knowledge within. This is the essence of my second spiritual insight. It brings me no closer to using the word "God" when I can simply talk about the "Big L", love, and all its power. It would be hard to find verbal language for what I discovered in "that place" in March, when I ceased to sense my own ego again, but I know it is shared ground. The details of what I did for Lauren, as sometimes I can for people regardless of the fact they may be an ocean away and we've not been in touch for ages, are our business only, but I just knew something about her situation and mailed her to tell her so and what she might do. She wrote back: "it is officially insane that you know how to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, nick. (...) was re-reading yr long missive this ayem [...], my eyes straying only slightly but coming back to the points where you hit the nail so head on it's a wonder i don't suggest you get into spiritual carpentry (no that was not a jesus reference, just so's you know, i know you don't do that collective monotheism bandwagon thing)..." No, I don't like bandwagons, nor do I have major woodwork or building plans. The only screwdrivers and sledgehammers with which I'm well acquainted are medication for the mind, the kind of which I approve and the drugs I've known and hated because they left me feeling artificially "better" but more cut off from others and myself. I've always said I don't regret the 14 years I had to forego any sex life, but that's no longer true. I just hope never to regret certain outcomes of the decision... On seeing a musical connnection last year, I felt it was to state of the obvious about the common "languages" of the art and sexual activity, but now I know better and so appreciate encouragement I've been given to go on through that particular door into Lilith's domain. "Non, je ne regrette rien" is the brave kind of thing a woman like Edith Piaf (Wikipedia) could sing. The Log is no place for the kind of abusive psychobiography I dislike as much as Kay does, but it could fairly be said that regret is a normal emotion and Piaf had a very disturbed life. It can be courageous to claim you don't regret what you can't change. The famous song is about significant memories, with their strong emotional component. I have a new and subtle emotional palette to learn -- including grieving events and losses I haven't yet because I never could -- and strong recollections with which I need to come to terms. For the moment, I know that my life has been lived close to one or the other extremes of feeling relatively invulnerable or broken up yet again, which meant my finger found Jann Arden's 'Time of Mercy' tonight, with songs like 'Give Me Back My Heart', where she goes straight to the point! I admire people who have lived all their lives with the real vulnerability I currently feel. What I want from Azoulay is more in my "tool-kit"! A tool-kit for personal tuition This was a tool-kit I got from Kay Jamison and Azoulay's retired predecessor ... and from that inner shaman of mine. It belongs in the part of my being Lauren and everybody else who has learned anything from me has to thank for it. I need to be fairly alone with the shaman for a few days. It isn't going back to work that has had such an effect on me; it's the trappings that have surrounded it on emerging from the deepest journey inside I've ever made and probably wish to make out into a city that often shouts "artificial" and, in some respects, "officially insane" at me. But I made that trip because I was mad myself for a while. If, then, I am to use the Log to return to women musicians and teach by telling their stories and sharing their songs, I plan to do what all good teachers must in life, which is just to share with others the tools we've found, as equals. I can't deal with people otherwise now I know we all have our own inner shaman, every one of us, and I'm essentially no different from you. Like Pinocchio, I've discovered that honesty pays, while closing your mind and your heart gets you nowhere. Each day can bring surprises, if I venture to talk quite deeply but without hiding anything from others about what's happened to me, since I find it tends also to draw some of them out of their shells, no longer afraid to speak of what upsets them. I don't know how often I shall log again. In the period that starts with some medical exams on Friday, this over-stretched Mac of mine must sadly go and be replaced. It's hardly good timing now I'm more aware of the need for new clothes with fewer holes. Worse, the day I disintegrated again was my daughter's 17th birthday, so I must make up to the Kid for having turned down an invitation where I'd have felt like a ghost at the feast given the way I felt then. However, the weather forecast gets better. I've ordered a new eMac, which comes for the weekend. It may not be a brand-new model, but I like robust eMacs. It was a nice surprise to find out I can still trade in this one while there is any life in it against the price of a rather more powerful machine that can face the music. So when I'm not in emotional therapy and making sure of my inner shaman's compass bearings, I'll have to tame the Tiger too. What with all these cats for which Apple names its operating system, it's scarcely surprising that my finger found its way from Imbruglia to Arden via Massive Attack and Liz Pappademas and her piano-driven Hurts to Purr (band and debut album). For once, I'm going to be discreet about a woman I fancy, just saying I've known her for some time and her circumstances have also changed. We shall soon be having dinner and when I asked her how she had put up with me all these years, she said: "In small doses." "Well, I hope," I said, "that in future, you might be able to endure slightly bigger doses if they come on a more manageable scale." That won me a little smile and she asked me to wait until she'd sorted out some other stuff by the end of May. My experience has usually involved being madly in love, but now I know why people say "madly". Is going without feeling over-excited a normal emotion? 12:49:01 AM    your views? []

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