feeble apologies

... nope, apparently i am just a liar, or at least a purveyor of false promises. i did say i was going to post something - right? and at the time, i really thought, really felt as if i was about to; and then - what? it just isn't there, and my thoughts rarely return here at the moment. the proof of this, if any were needed, is the number at the right of the page which shows how few posts i have managed this year (none at all of actual substance). for some reason, things have changed since we moved; and whatever it was in me that kept this going, it seems to have deserted me and shows no signs of coming back.

the year began with such promise, too - i mean in general; but nothing really came of it. that mad rush of posting last december, which led to a slew of unreadable articles, was based around a rather complex insight which had been nagging at me for a while, and which became clearer towards the end of the "yoshithon"; clearer, that is, inasmuch as it seemed clear enough to me at the time; but my psychedelic attempts to render it in words probably didn't give a very good sense of it, and despite my saying that i was going to unpack it all, you can see for yourself that i never did. in any case, the insight in question has not been something i could really implement - at least not yet -  so the need to explicate it has diminished accordingly. basically, the past year has been dominated by a long-running (and still as-yet unresolved) dispute with my regular employer, and although the period before and after the house move (june-august) seemed hugely auspicious at the time, since then the problems at work have spilled over into everything else and have taken up far too much of my time and energy.

it's not unusual for me to have bursts of ideas, then find soon afterwards that all the inspiration has died and that the momentum has gone with it. not unusual..? it's a constant with me. what is different right now is that my ear for the music appears to have deserted me as well. last weekend i had a lot of time to myself - and predictably failed to make use of it; but more to the point, although i played quite a lot of different music, including all four discs of this set, none of it sparked the desire to write; i would not have had anything to write about, since the music came and went without leaving any vivid impressions. i don't know why this is, or how long it will last. what i do know is that the blog's seventh anniversary (which i had intended to celebrate) passed unnoticed back in october, because i had nothing to say. the fact that this is just another example of my starting something and then gradually neglecting it is not much consolation really - this blog was one part of my life where i really did try my best. do i no longer have that in me?

despite all this sombre self-reflection, i am not totally unhappy in my life; the family is well, we have a roof over our heads, my daughter is enjoying her christmas - and even work is bearable at the moment (though it is still likely that i shall have to leave pretty soon and find something else). but the pathetic lack of activity round here, and the deeper directionlessness which is revealed by it, does sometimes keep me awake at night and i felt i had to write about it. that's that really... sorry everybody. here's hoping for a change for the better, in the coming year...

the (other) meaning of this tunnel metaphor...

... i am just arriving, - and therefore still here, in other words - well, actually i haven't been around here for months (since the supposedly-auspicious house move... looooong story), but i am around anow. [apparently there is traffic from lucky's place too - possibly even human traffic - ? ;-)  .., in which case,'know, do say his if you feel like it, - i am still approachable at heart unless you have bullshit in your mouth - which i'm by now pretty sure you don't if you are still, or now, reading at this point in the timestream..! i can't say i don't bite, but i try never to bite the honest-of-intent ]

- and if/since you are (re-)reading, welcome :)))))))
...


now, it's been nothing but hardcore / punk rock, and/or post-hardcore and post-punk, for all this time since said move -

'kk (as they (seem to) say these days), this is with lucky back amongst us as well, a (belated) discovery which genuinely filled me with alas-all-too temporary joy,  back when i found out at last... but i couldn't find headspace for the music and perhaps this instantly rendered it essential the blogosphere, such as it is these days - , hardcore punk rock i say, and that actually has kept me sane, just about. but i have almost susperstitiously avoided putting on any creative/freed-spirit music this whole time (i.e. since early august) - and when i say putting in, i mean transferring files from the backup drive, onto the new (win8 - piecea shit, *) laptop... - in point of fact, this is all one extended red herring , - because i have downloaded one set of same-said music; and yet it's still back in the marshalling yard (read: the download manager) awaiting patiently (which is fine - he is on cosmic time, this mr threadgill..¬!) until such time as my ultra-finicky entrance gates allow it to slip through. hell, even the opinion-dividing zornfest that is book of angels, eighteen entries of which i had previouuly enjoyed listening to, are on there and in the music db, but not actually getting played - and the same is true of b. previte... i do declare my flag has read punk or bust, or rather hardcore or bust, all the way - yet if i am now here again,   then it must surely mean i am about to end this short and intense phase. (*)

* you know the drill

* you still know the drill -!

...

...

c x

... but that's ok 'cos apparently only posterity is reading :)

mmm... good evening :)

everyone has gone away for a bit. hardly surprising really.

ok, so... just me talking here to myself here - yet another reconstruction of the ((very much) partial *1) music database is underway. (this time it's a whole new laptop... i was so fucking down/depressed for much of the (prolonged, two-element *2) summer that i neglected even to write about what happened to the previous one.) as before, it's a colossal pain in the arse. but it's also a chance to shed some complicated and heay baggage.

somehow by the time the last itunes crashed on me, i'd got more than 300 playlists on there, with very little overlap. it's not about the number of the actual files, which wasn't that much/many in fact, only about 10,500 till the fucker packed up on me... (to be fair the laptop had threatened to die several times already and was past its expected lifespan anyway.) that many playlists is just unmanageable. may even have been nearer 350 by the end of it, but in any case, for once i am (semi-)happy with the latest change to (what remains, partly just out of habit) my computerised music-manager of choice, and in trying to get to grips with the advantages of this new(fangled) add-to-up-next malarkey, i'm finding a use which i never got out of the old on-the-go-playlist thing (which i never did use at all, indeed.). it's a useful way to navigate that many albums, many of which just blur into each other if played en suite. which is sort of what i did before, for the most part. (seemed to work ok - in the short term..!)

i'm still at the stage where i haven't added back any braxton yet.
(or any jazz or creative/improvised music at all, in fact.)

might be next up, by the feel of it.

* ...

i may actually be insane...

... although, in the considered opinion of several psychiatrists (and still further related, lesser-qualified colleagues*1), i do not even qualify as mentally ill. it is all most perplexing and frustrating.

at age 44, it strikes me repeatedly that i am effectively mentally ill anyway, because i have become so emotionally unstable after decades of being placed under extreme stress - and have never fully succeeded in finding a route away from all that. there are ways and there are ways (and more latterly ways) of dealing with this, but inherent and/or habitual personal flaws or weaknesses tend to undermine the optimal use of any remedy, sooner or later.

...

aaaaaarrrgggghhhhhhhghghghghghghgh fucking hell

...

it's been a weird fucking summer. on the plus side, we have moved house at long last (six years overdue) and the family immediately feels much better as a result. mrs c in particular is just so much happier and nicer to be around. also more tolerant of me, therefore... so it all sounds very positive, except that alas, the negatives are really stacking up at the moment, apparently i still have a lot of unpaid debts which must be cleared or at least addressed before i can straightforwardly enjoy the move. not that i ever really do anything straightforwardly, but...well, you get the idea.

[- incidentally: much to my surprise, i return to the blog tonight for the first time in several months to find plenty of page hits going on. this was certainly not the case the last time i looked. now i really have no idea whether anyone is actually reading, or whether random webcrawlers are just rutting in my undergrowth, so to speak. curiouser and curiouser.]

 right then... this one was never going to be a long drawn-out affair. done and dusted

* v. comments


Postscript (2024): this has proven to be a bizarrely "popular" post, i.e. a lot of people have read it, and apparently it still attracts (odd smatterings of) attention. I suppose this needn't be too surprising, given the alarmist nature of the post title... anyway, I never actually was insane, although at the moment I wrote this, it had just genuinely occurred to me that I might be. All I was really experiencing was near-continuous stress and mental turmoil, self-treated with (extremely strong) ganja. Small wonder that my head got a bit mangled. [And yes... as subsequent events would bear out, things were going to get worse before they got better. But they did get better..!]

birthday card

my continued lack of activity is... you know what, i'm not even going down that road right now: life is complicated, but for all that, i want to stop just for a few mins and say

many happy returns of the day!!!

- to our man. happy 69th birthday, sir :)))

check-in

hey hey - just checking-in at the end of one of my (what i have decreed will be) two-to-three-yearly flights of this'n-that... and reminding you to check in yourselves, for the return flight mining out the raw details as they emerge from the steaming hulk of the analysis-chamber's hastily-reopened engorgement capsule...

... because yes, i did say that i would do the "unwinding" from the last such flight and it genuinely is on the way, it is it is, but it had to wait in the end for the next flight before it was fully ready to be told, i.e. it's only now that i (am moving towards) fully understand(ing) it myself. and at this point, i have to say: every fucking thing looks pretty leng-style clear. how long this will last (till the d     runs out, which it pretty much has anyway) is not the point here: the point this time is that i have at last come back from flying with the fucking blueprints, basic formulas etc for all my best ideas and now FINALLY may have learned how to deploy them.

so keep wacthing and all that (*) - there really is more on the way, only what was promised (at first!) and it will be worth waiting for i promise -

in the meantime - that pic: as well as being deeply emblematic of me-qua-me, its relevance today is just a basic basic BASIC braxton statement which i have never come out and identified before, so let me do this now, here and today:

       the single greatest shift braxton makes - as it now appears (when we look back through the seventies in our collectors' inner eye library) - is from jazz, where the same song is never played the same way twice, to a setup wherein the absolute basic number-one imperative is never the same fucking set two days running and the second is is no, i mean it. let's all just stop and think about that one
















... for a minute - before we rush on with our hectic 21st-century lives...

c x

spring plucks at the sleeve

hello!

my ridiculously-protracted blogligence is finally at an end... i shall shortly be posting the promised "translation" of my own drug-induced transmissions from december, and going from there. in the meantime - here's a link to a page which some of you may find useful (as did i). scroll down through that list to the end of december, and you'll find b's recent quartet release from warsaw, 2012; scroll a little further, to october, and there is the roland dahinden concert which came out on leo late last year. please note: these are not cd rips as such, and thus are not intended as substitutes for buying the actual releases; rather they are audio captures from live radio streams, to tide one over until such time, etc etc. i found them both to be rewarding listens - but that's all i'm saying about the music, for the time being.

what i will say is that in each case, there is a bit of a question mark over the track listing. the polish release lists the (diamond curtain wall) performance as being "comp. 363b+", but this seems rather unlikely: last year, tcf released quartet (frm) 2007 vol. 1, which comprises a reading of comp. 363c. what are the chances that b. would have used subdivisions of the same opus number to include pieces from two different musical systems? not great... as a matter of fact, reference to vols. 2-4 in the same series suggests that all the opus numbers within that range were used for falling river music, so i am going to assume that the listing here is simply wrong. (comp. 323a-c was a series of dcw pieces of course; possibly it's just one of those instead.)

- the ensemble montaigne release is more likely to be accurate in its listing of primary materials, since herr dahinden worked closely with/under b., and took part in his ensembles back in the 'nineties. no, in this case it's just the order of things which gives me pause: comp. 174 is given first, but that is a piece for ten percussionists (plus environmental preparations); nothing like that occurs during this reading. again, a transposed digit thereabouts..?

[history suggests that in both cases, we are unlikely to get to the truth of the matter any time soon. in any event, what all these continuing errors tend to indicate is the undoubted difficulty, for anyone apart from the maestro himself or his close collaborators, of correctly identifying and categorising his vast body of musics. i struggle myself, i freely admit; and if a borderline-autistic detail-fascist like me has trouble with it, what chance stands the rest of humanity? :) ]

***

incidentally: i happen to know that the composer himself has yet to receive a single copy of the warsaw cd. get your finger out, serpent records!!

*cent's 2014 manifesto*

...

let's just all sit here a minute, and whatever it is you're listening to right now (*1), just drop back and slide into that, focus on every little detail of the (song or) story it's imparting to you.

...

- you know what, to be candid about it, that second night on the nine-athon finished with me six down, two to go and thinking i'd really blown the chance to go anywhere with it, had allowed to mjuch of it just to become ambient wallpaper as i lost myself in (of all things (*2)) lego; my daughter is now five very precocious and exceptionally quick-to-catch-on years old and living through some fast hard times, as are we all, life in the household being very much still centred around one room with one still point, injured whippet #1 (*3). one adult has to be on duty with him at all times to make sure he doesn't jump onto the sofa or (worse) assay an entry to the staircase. one might think this would be unbearable, but not (strangely enough) for someone who hasn't been stoned in six months but who is now almost literally "living the dream" (*4)... anyway, our lil centette has truly discovered the joys of lego friends this xmas, and since i have had to do the making-and-building heavy-lifting on those bigger jobs, i myself have rediscovered lego in a big way (*5). (*6) this proved sufficiently fascinating that a few hours of intensive online research (*7) saw the gtm relegated to a distant second or worse;

- but that was then. the next day, well - i carried on getting quietly and illicitly blasted and got some "me-time" in the afternoon while mrs c whisked the junior whirlwind out of the house to give whippet uno some peace (*8), and i had very possibly the most interesting and satisfying hot bath i have ever experienced... i emerged from that with my head absolutely ablaze with fresh(ly-reexamined) ideas - this not being a strange occurrence for me per se - yet calm, blissed-out if anything, rather than hypermanic (this being my usual default mode when in the middle of a "hot streak");

 - and later on, the last two ninetets went down as smoothly and as fierily as a brace of the subtlest cognacs or single-malt whiskies. 'cos by that point, i understood the value of the whole experiment, and saw it slotted into its [place among [everything else.

the implications - and indeed explications - of all these still-being-spun-out ruminations, meditations and cogitations are such that they themselves require a further two posts, sub-manifesti if we must, just to detail-spell and record them accurately. so that's obviously next next;

- and then next after that is non-reheated leftovers, in the shape(s) of venezia bienniale, comp. 23c-go-round and last-but-not-least reeds-n-bass pt 2. (and in due course the top end of the-rest-of-that-list, time and will and lego permitting...) this will be followed by more (un)expected, (half-)hinted work as and when it appears.

ah, but i missed one out. there was something else - ?

(*9)

lissen up, thosefuckers in the rich-and-miserable game have had it all their own way for as long as any of us on earth can crememeber and they have a hell of a lot to answer for. i'm confident that you and i can pretty much agree on that one... (*10). but what if we all went and had a really good and productive 2014 instead?

- see you in the mix,

c. x


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