End of an Era

Always good to achieve catharsis through artistic endeavour. Go to Latest Tunes on my other site to download some more new music. By me, my guitar and some fancy production with Cubase.

New computer coming this week, especially built for music production, so expect to hear more soon.

Privyet Comrade!

So I've been to St. Petersburg in the last week and been very impressed with how much the USSR loved the old 6 sheet and obviously had some good copywriters. Some classics:

'Vodka is your enemy. Your passbook is your friend';

or 'Let's have the proletarian parks of culture and rest';

or my personal favourite:

'Smoking is expensive and dangerous for health and work'. (Who needs Nick O Teen?)

And now I'm incredibly aware of a bit of an onslaught of Russian Iconography and sloganeering in some recent advertising ideas.

Pizza Hut came out recently with their 'Seize Your Lunchtime' campaign. (I won't call it an idea ... lazy, lazy planning with no real insight, I'm afraid)

And probably more in tune with a call for a popularist uprising is Ask with their Information Revolution / Anti Google campaign. Greg has commented on this elsewhere, and I agree with his views that the execution could have been less corporate, especially on the website.

However, (unlike Pizza Hut) this feels like an idea that might actually be connected with a genuine insight - that some people have concerns about the ubiquity of Google, have a desire to be different, and are looking for an 'underground' movement to be part of. I'm looking forward to seeing if the campaign is working and how it will develop.

The challenge for Ask is that (as I've commented before elsewhere) the Internet is as close to the proles seizing the means of production anyway, and Google are at the forefront of giving the power to the people already.

My worry is that Ask will see a spike in traffic, but with a lack of genuinely different & innovative new products, those defectors will rapidly go back to the not-too-evil-ones.

If I get knocked down, I get up again

I am trying to recover from a disaster. My external hard drive has packed up, losing about a year's worth of music I've written. Yes, I know - should have done a backup.

Anyway, best thing to do is to pick yourself up and just keep going.

So I've been messing around with some guitar and synth sounds. And you can download it here if you wish. You can click on it to play in quicktime or whatever is your browser media player of choice, or you can right click and 'save target as' to get the mp3. Would welcome any comments / ideas / thoughts.

The title was inspired by a man who walks up and down the South Ealing Road punching numbers into his calculator all day.

Another fine mess

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what does an empty desk signify?

A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahmson and David H. Freedman is a fascinating, entertaining and must-read book. In this book they suggest that mess is actually a good thing. Using an informal, storytelling approach they make a convincing case for bringing mess into your life.

It seems that the investment in time for tidying is often not worth the so-called 'efficiencies' you can gain. And it also seems that too much order will restrict our abilities to make intuitive leaps, stop us connecting apparently disparate things and generally limit our creativity.

Mess gave us penicillin, The Sunflowers, and Ulysses amongst much much more. Order has given us urban planning tower block disasters and increasing levels of OCD.

I was fascinated to learn that perhaps 90% of JS Bach's work was never written down - he used to improvise all the time and make stuff up whilst playing concerts. A Jazz pioneer it seems.

Another entertaining section explored the issue of 'smell' being a generally negative, messy sensation and word with very few words in the English language knocking around to acceptably describe different smells.

A great book and highly recommended. But for some reason, I did a lot of tidying whilst reading it...