taliesin's log (voices of women)

lundi 26 septembre 2005

A 'confessional' in the making
Picture warning: you may want to avoid this entry at work or with kids around.

Yet another fresh start - revisited Sept. 26

Men at work Oh dear!
The sign's a statement.
I suppose I'd better post this -- with a wry acceptance of some truth in it -- having realised what I've let myself in for now.
The "Oh dear" becomes two-fold on waking up to the rest of this Monday.
People who check in to for a look -- "What's he up to?" -- need to be told why I've gone quiet before I write one or two personal replies to friends, among the "to-dos" I'm looking forward to this week.
The work warning includes notice of a sex photo, posted at the end of one of those weekends most disliked by Parisians, when after several sunny days, the sky went grey and the air chilled once it was Saturday morning.
I didn't want anyone caught off guard, now I've wrapped my mind around music and another language we often speak without words.
I'm luckier than most Parisians since there's no need for me to go to work and if any very nice weather returns I can enjoy to this special week to the full.
I should have said "other languages", plural.
While the work in progess is ambitious; thinking of Lee in Odessa Street and looking forward to meeting up this week after her blogged thesis nightmare is over, I realise there are two "theses" bubbling away in my mind.
They've been simmering for decades, adding my life experience to a couple of excellent pieces of scholarship that are "old" now but have a bearing on music as we listen to it in 2005, probably more so than when they were written.
Any hope of sharing such far-sighted thinking over a weekend in easy words, leaving out much of the scholarship that's always been a part of my musical upbringing and practice when I used to play myself, was absurd!
The two topics I'd like to take on, much strengthened in so doing by the state of the music industry today and everything I've learned of life and from women singer-songwriters, are projects to be explored carefully.

The consequences of ignorance

This week sets the new pattern for the rest of my life, at least until I retire, since the "night of unknowing" I wrote up in August, a while after that experience. It robbed me of a long-awaited summer break, perhaps, but gave me something else in return.
Since those unforgettable hours when my brain stopped working, a permanent legacy -- which at first seemed like one of several passing side-effects -- is a need to take a total break every few weeks from the news by which I earn a living.
"Doctor," I had to confess to Luc, my physician and friend of many years standing, "my violence threshold has gone right down and I'm serious.
"If faced with a daily input and output of appalling news, month in, month out, I'm unable to do it any more. I doubt there's any medicine for a journalist who can't stomach violence for too long, short of quitting."
Luc found it hard to stay polite with laughter once he understood after discussion. I didn't dare say, "What would you do if you suddenly couldn't look at a needle and give any more injections?"
It turns out a solution is acceptable to me and to my bosses, who know I wasn't kidding but won't be able to switch off the empathy I feel as an editor with reporters whose work becomes my job too, including ones in very nasty trouble-spots.
In July, when it would have been a breakdown I suffered if nothing else had happened, my aim had been straightforward ahead of the event: "Music, women, sex, all month, that's all."

Once I've done this particular entry -- interrupted by practical considerations like an appointment with an ear, nose and throat specialist, long awaited to sort me out for the winter, and a phone call from one of those rare people, an honest plumber, happy to come round later and see about giving me hot water at home for the first time in months -- more pictures should help give you ideas.

A matter of priorities

Of an increasing number of music entries I'm working on when in the mood, one has risen to the top of the pile.
So has the other. They are related, but need to be done separately and cross-linked and referenced..

I've changed the way I live since July.
The aim is to give up on thinking except when really needed and instead get plenty of exercise, along with an hour or so to meditate at the very start of every morning. That's already indispensable, a time when my consciousness switches from night to day, dreams to preparation for whatever's ahead.
It's spent in silence more than ever, with a mind untroubled by unwanted thoughts, tuning into to what my body's saying and leaving me free to let real insights come, that new kind of "knowing" I've begun to understand a little.
This morning, I felt pressured, very pressured.
"What's going on?" I thought. "The sun has come out, you've got a great week coming up and few deadlines."
Wrong!
To promise overviews of sexuality and music or the great differences in outlooks to music, and sometimes sex, as well in our "modern" western cultures and others where people have retained an approach we're in danger of losing isn't the work of just a week.
That's my old antic. Nobody else sets me a deadline, so I do!
I really should know better, take the advice of everyone with sense and go easy both on myself and on everyone else, never rush anything.
As soon as I knew this, that pressure disappeared.

Thursday, September 29:

Now I've paused to take stock of what I've been working on this week when not preferring to be well away from a computer and research both more arduous and engrossing than I'd anticipated!
What I don't want includes further analysis at the hands of professionals or medication to help me be myself in a highly artificial environment. Prescription drugs of such a kind are best-sellers in France almost as much as in the United States.
They shouldn't be.
It's an often beautiful environment, Paris, but still made mainly by people rather than a place to live where it's easy to feel natural and be aware of nature's own workings.
To say more of that particular "don't want" is to acknowledge I no longer find it acceptable to live with an "addiction" to the phamaceutical mind-benders people use to treat the symptoms of an existence they find hard, too artificial, rather than strive to heal their scars and go to the heart of the matter.

In our "developed" cultures, where access either in books and among our friends, or on the Internet itself, offers the means for those who care to look and to listen to seek out the real solutions to problems we've made for ourselves, my concern is now with those instead: not patching myself up to get by, but finding a way of living where the difficulties are less prone to arise in the first place!
What I do want, among other things, is to share the gift of being able to write about music well, with no false modesty but plenty of humility and respect, often even fellow-feeling, with those who make music, give others great pleasure, and in so doing, are among people who give us signposts to a "truer" way of being in ourselves.
If people tell me I've got such a skill, a real gift I've been able to bring back to life, then my paid job stays at work and this place gets serious in intent -- a very long-term project -- though not always in style.

Singing in the bedroom
Music can be "heavy", nothing wrong with that if it's good.
Music can be light and as fresh as a purifying wind. The article I put at the top of the pile includes singers from all over the world and their lyrics: when you put women and music together with my experience, it's obvious where priorities lie.
I won't publish until they're ready. Some lyrics I chose to illustrate points simply wouldn't get airtime on many radio stations, even today in an "open society". The musicians know exactly what they're singing, but it's direct, some would say "obscene".
I don't agree: I think the songs are about us and our lives.
Tongue Here a woman and a man are publicly engaged in a very intimate pleasure; one most people, however "broad-minded", don't care to display. But music, like other art-forms, does!
I've known for years something scarcely a musicologist -- somebody who puts music into its social context as part of a job -- considered anathema, taboo, until not so long ago; in my own lifetime, that's for sure.
But in 1957, two people published a book and dropped a huge rock into the middle of a stagnant pond of academic notions about music.
Those two were right.

In our culture, music's become a commodity like any other, widely available but often packaged like meat and bread to be sold or stolen.
But it isn't a commodity.
I don't plan to write about any more singers until I've said why making music is like making love. In a word, sex; I'll publish the entry during the week if all goes well and I'm able to tell you what I know in entertaining fashion.
The deep relationship between music and sexuality is a very complex one: so I thought, until I gave up thinking to know what I feel about these things, and how to take my time with both now I'm listening anew.
Putting the two together upset people in 1957! Some academics are still miffed, but I have little time for them.

zzz

And those words stayed for several days, unamended.
I'm sorry, they shouldn't have done. I had some trouble with Internet access, as seems to happen sometimes when I've left a mess on the log, full of typos too, and can't put it right!
Never mind.
I was wrong anyway. The computer problem came with an electrical one -- now solved --in the wake of the plumber and his mate, not entirely their fault. All in all, though they did prove to be honest and were explicit themselves about their fiddling and how things work, it cost a bomb, that and the other circuitry. "Oh dear" again!
Moreover, the "ORL" (ear, nose, throat) enjoy himself and was also only too graphic in showing me bits and pieces from inside my cavities best outside them, but better left undisplayed.
Then he said, "Didn't you see my photos? What did you think?"
"What photos?"
"They're in the waiting room!"
"I wasn't, I was using your loo while you finished doing nasty things to the last person."
The man's mad. He didn't have a "summer of unknowing". He went to the States where he seems to have visited and come back with huge poster-pics of every canyon he could find. I told him what I thought of that: "You're extraordinary. You spend your whole working days getting up noses and digging around inside people's facial cavities with relish, then when you take a holiday you go and inspect the biggest holes in the ground you can!"
"I hadn't quite thought of it that way," he said, but they were superb photos.

I haven't had time for a luxurious bath since the plumbers gave me the first hot water I've had around here since April. And that is wonderful. But I need to use more of it to clean up some other stuff before coming back to the log and getting very down and dirty.
I thought it'd be safer to warn you.

2:17:42 AM    your views? []

jeudi 22 septembre 2005

Putting Apple on the scales
I've made a decision regarding iPods, with this year's Apple Expo (Fr) coming up and Paris inescapably plastered with advertisements for the newest Nano version on the best-selling theme.

This "pencil-thin" beauty and those iPod Minis strike me as ways of burning holes in your wallet or rainbow-coloured handbag, unless you are into fashion accessories. It's not their impressive technology I contest, but the pointlessness perhaps of paying such a sum (around 200 dollars) for just two GB of storage space when you could regard what I'd call a "proper" iPod as a wiser investment and true value for money.
Yet they sell, I've seen women everywhere in minis, and some men too. So for those who insist, recently one test given the Nano by Ars Technica featured insane things like running it over and dropping it from heights. What the Ars Techies didn't say, once it gave up the ghost, was how long they expected it to last in more reasonable hands.

Testing musical times

Some Apple Europe senior personnel know I'll for now spare log readers of any details of the latest "frank discussion" I've begun with them. It regards not the good quality of iPod hardware, but the dire things that can happen to iPods, caused sometimes by the very software the company releases for iTunes.
A few will know this isn't my first run-in with the company, while specialist sites such as MacFixit go deep into what manufacturers like to call "issues" -- a euphemism for nasty problems experienced by some customers -- and I've this week sent them a summary of mine and what others have told me about their own.
We'll see how this exchange goes.
In the meantime, just be warned that iPods are terrific but you should not join the throng of people buying one and expect to keep it in good working order unless you're ready to read more than Apple explains in the small booklet that comes with it.

I stay loyal to Apple in spite of an oft-noted tendency on Cupertino's part -- that's the company HQ in California for those who don't know -- to stop "thinking different" and use you and me as guinea-pigs. My 60 GB iPod works, more or less, but has refused to synch with my eMac for months following the release of one version of iTunes for Mac (I don't know how it's been for Windows users).

Here's a reminder for newcomers to such matters of 'Tedium and laudamus ... the basics of computer basics'. The annoying iPod fix I recommended in July didn't prove reliable in the longer term, so yet another piece of my Apple hardware is going off for repair, and the golden rule, good people -- back up your music and other crucial data -- holds good.
Never imagine you're safe. That's wrong.
Apple has released a support piece, 'How to back up your music in iTunes 5. Good on them. Don't argue, do it -- not just with your sound files -- and sleep soundly.
The Apple people know I'd prefer to be writing about music for you, not about ways to get into it and things that go wrong. I also no longer plan to listen and let you in on it by means, among others, of a 60 GB iPod when a third of that prodigious amount suits me fine. The 60 gigs will stay somewhere safer.

Thursday evening update: That iPod was taken away for repair today, leaving me with its smaller new partner, aty commendable speed, within less than 48 hours of the request.
However, it's in the public interest to share the disgust voiced this afternoon by a journalist who attended the "high mass" that starts each Apple Expo and such events around the world.
There in an invited professional capacity, this colleague was sickened by aspects of Apple affairs I've touched on above: the "planted" questions, a lack of openness to thornier ones, a feeling some of the reporters present had been "bought" ahead of time.
Above all, it seems the hype was bad news indeed. For obvious reasons, my source remains unnamed.
My own mail has met with no response, which scarcely surprises me, but it's early days yet. Having said I won't go into the issues yet, that holds good. For now. The firm has had their "third time lucky" in my eyes.
If I don't get a satisfactory reply to the questions I've put to Apple Europe and the answers I want concern music-lovers, musicians and iPod users, they've had fair warning these matters should be in the public domain.

1:58:36 AM    your views? []

vendredi 16 septembre 2005

You know who you are
Before revising last night's entry, I told you how touchingly the lovely Lee logged her blues.
But that got mixed up with a music entry.
I still want to share the way the woman round a few corners moves me, just as the singers do, when she's upfront about her downs.
So I have.
But I've put it where it's not mixed up.
A small number of you mixed me up, you know, by being so kind it's almost cruel, but it wasn't.
You put your hearts into those mails -- and some direct comments -- saying it's still more than music you want.
Well, that's moved me too, a lot, and I thank you. Okay then, whatever mood I may be in, we'll make a hole in the wall and now you'll find Lee, as well as more of me, in the orchard, since that's what you ask.
The musicians stay where they want to be, but sometimes you may still have my own "secret heartbeats", for those who so wish.
Let's be clear, though.
This change of heart is and will remain purely 'For those who got personal ... and said so'.
Not everybody used words to do this, unless you had no other way, and that's something I deeply appreciate, especially when I'm blue myself.

12:07:46 AM    your views? []

jeudi 15 septembre 2005

For those who got purely personal ... and said so
Last month, indeed summer itself, seems an eternity ago.
We don't have an autumn yet, just grey after grey day, but this is a night to try to feel different from Beth Orton.

"I wish I never saw the sunshine,
An' if I never saw the sunshine bay,
Then maybe I wouldn't mind the rain."
That's on 'Central Reservation', one of the album's loveliest sad songs, but it says the opposite too, does it not?
I've been moved by my near neighbour Lee's tales. She's got a bad touch of the blues. She's straight but discreet about it, with one entry simply called 'unhappy', but there's also 'rapido' (Odessa Street) this week:
"So I think I might be living in some parallel dimension. Certainly, this can't be France we're dealing with here," she begins, but then: "Sometimes France is fucking unbelievable."
Check out her woes, when one way to put your own blues in perspective can be somebody else's. Lee writes well about it just like her bright days, she doesn't hide behind her clouds. She's also right about this side of France too.
Reducing people, including the French themselves, to near breaking point with the most maddening and implacable demands on paper (in the name of a fearful logic) remains a bureaucratic speciality.

I've got mail to write and quite a lot to take in and answer, including yet more feedback to what's going on here and a slight backlog of unexpected letters about things written in what feels like a different era. They will get answers, be sure of that, and not at excrutiating length.
The main, forthcoming change to announce here concerns the blogroll parts of the log, while finally I defer to the crazy few who take the line best expressed by someone who put it in a flattering but blunt way, informing me that to confine myself to music is like putting up a wall.
On reflection: well, yes, I have, that I've known for a while.

A deal then?
Some want lots more women singers and a handful of those have also surprised me by being kind enough to let me know, one way or another, they've seen what I'm doing and appreciate the interest and my approach.
That's great, it really is.
I've at least two more entries on the go and one won't be ready for a while: it's a big topic, the people committed to a radical overhaul of the music industry like Brazil's splendid Arts Minister Gilberto Gil (English part of his Portuguese site).
"I'm a minister and a musician but I'm a hacker at heart": Gil's declaration last January at the World Social Forum made waves. that's part of the story (for now, get Wired at Creative Commons), but just one aspect of the sharing process.

To others, who've said "We miss you," I suppose I don't miss me much, but these musicians are such food for my soul that if my enthusiasm, high esteem for them and a preference for research and review, rather than a routine critical approach, are contagious without inflicting tough musical terms on anyone, then it's best the women keep the front page.
Barriers, however, don't interest me, particularly walls.

I'm rethinking compartments, that's different.
What you've read in the past often didn't separate out work from play and affairs of the heart from those of the world as wisely as it might have done; nowadays, the moment I leave the office every night, if I can it's indispensable to put the day's news and doings behind me as well.
That's pretty hard, but of that Night of Unknowing, as now I think of the one evening that led to a summer so very different from the very carefree one sought, some have described it as a "breakdown"! Others do insist on calling it a profound "religious" experience. Whatever.

Maybe it was a breakdown, in a way, though to express it like that is to miss out on what I've got from it since and still am. It was undoubtedly a breaking point, with ways of being I don't want any more, while I've become more sparing even with humour where that's a façade.
Generosity too, such as I've thought of it in the past, needs to be dosed. Though I can no longer judge others by previous standards, seeking harmony and being in tune with them means being more discriminating and, frankly, attentive to vibes, it's that simple. When people turn me off, I no longer bother with them or fight them! If instead, I can avoid them I do.
However, I don't want to shut down my powerful emotional response and empathy with people going through tough times, whether they're close friends or those I edit stories about at the Factory: as the journalist who has to regulate his shock-horror intake far more closely.
If my colleagues can bear such a change, so can I, it's decent of them to take such an enlightened and understanding approach.

Let's say also, however, without details, that in the first half and more of this year, I found out for sure who my real friends were, along with acquaintances I'd like to keep. These include a handful of people on the blogroll who have become occasional correspondents.
Lee is one of them as well as somebody who lives quite close. Others -- regardless of the flair shown in their writing, their human qualities, their wit and their interests -- they'll just have to go! It won't be easy.
But the front page is so cluttered that it needs a clean-up as thorough as the one my flat got in July and that took a week! I don't want to live in a museum. Nor do I want this site to be an archive gallery of interests no longer among my priorities. I now use a Mac, just for instance, but am rarely a mechanic any more.
The Wikipedia and a few other reference points are so good the rest have become redundant.

I've radically cut down on "virtual time" and a cyber-life because the time's really come to devote more of my own time to real people close at hand, making an exception only for a few others I like very much.
The plan at work, to avoid a further overdose of inhumanity, is to take total breaks at regular intervals, say a week long, while telling people what I've learned from the Night of Unknowing has also been a warning that they shouldn't be as foolish as I was and push both myself and almost everybody else far too hard.
It so happens I found this out the hard way!

My first such week off is that of September 26 to October 2. Going back to the Factory was tougher than expected, though I can't say I regret a summer that was scarcely a break: there was just far too much to take in and still there is, but people usually say my feet seem to be on the ground even if my heart remains very full of dreams.
A manageable to-do list includes more changes here to reflect what's going on in my life. People who vanish from the blogroll shouldn't be offended. Many will, but all have lives of their own outside any museum of mine. Some of the headings will change too.
Gosh, if I were to list all the small, independent record company sites and other places I've been exploring, one long roll would be replaced by another, so I've got to think about all that as well.
As for the personal stuff some people still want, well then. Thanks very much for the interest, a few mails have been extremely touching. But when I do this, it'll be here, always here, in the orchard, for people like you, who've embarrassed me so much with some comments I'm sorely tempted to return the favour and list your wretched names.

Let's make a start. How much more stupid can you be than to admit that soon enough you have a birthday coming up with a rather annoying zero on the end?
Well, I do.
This means I can afford no more mistakes.
Now let's also confess that half the stuff I've logged about sex and other subjects of consuming public interest was utter rubbish. I should be more open and direct about my real feelings, tell people what I honestly want, as well as being a much better listener.
So far so good?

I should even take note of the very sensible advice about women I've received from people of both sexes down the deca -- I mean years. Instead of telling you to follow your heart and go with your intuitions, which you'll find are right though they may not make sense at the time, I should always do this myself.
Clear enough?
Now this presents me with a woman problem, doesn't it, on admitting where most of my sadness really comes from after making lots of mistakes?

I've frequently been reminded, often enough by women about whom I did make mistakes, that the world's population is extremely large, and if I were to stop talking, writing and practising variations on "casual" since I've already decided it's a bad idea to take a woman for what she isn't, I could make a discovery.
Now that would be a find I'd like to make one day without rushing it or her as has been my habit.
It could yet happen.

However, I remain stuck with high standards, which are very different from high expectations. Expecting anything of anybody is clearly unwise and wrong, but you have to know what you'd like, if it's already there and comes your way, otherwise you might miss the chance.
Does that make sense?

11:03:27 PM    your views? []