Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-04-30 - 2:13 p.m.

Interim report on account of yesterday being so dreer. Met P Tebby for lunch. It transpires that his boss's boss is Cabsec Wilson. He had some interesting stuff on the cultural rev that has cut me off at the kneecaps esp in terms of Ms Hewitt's self positioning vis a vis Blair's exasperation. PT also had some really good things to say on the impact of value stream mapping on the training business - relevant to the Academy notion. I think he quite liked Plan A - but I feel I also need to work on Plan B. Plan C appears more attractive this week.

The exchanges were definitely a lift and so I decided to indulge in the dubious pleasures of city life - a Burger King Bacon and Cheeseburger and a copy of Modern Painters. On the latter the tease is - if Warhol's images are amongst the most reproduced ever why go and see the originals. Also a pic of STW in trainers giving a hare anal stimulation - implicitly can Great Art also be cruel to furry animals?

Or as Sir Joshua Reynolds asserted: The sublime in painting as in poetry so overpowers and takes possession of the mind that no room is left for attention to minute criticism.

As I waited for the bus this morning I dipped into Baudelaire on shopping:

It is not given to everyone to take a bath of multitude: enjoying the crowd is an art, and in order to indulge in a binge of vitality at the expense of the human race you need to be someone who,,,has a taste for disguise and for masques, hatred of home and a passion for travel........(Interesting reference to TSEliot's views of B as shifting sex away from "the natural cheery life- giving automatism of the modern world".)

With these thoughts in mind I drove back to base and pulled up a Fruity Loop which usefully made something of the arpeggiator and threw down some Crushed guitar onto a MD. I made an interesting mistake assuming that if you took a four note fourth chord and played it in three positions separated by a semitone you would cover all twelve notes. You in fact cover 10. Indeed you can cover 10 by taking two five note fourth chords a semitone apart, The 10 notes can be seen as a kind of minor scale. But what if you take four three note fourth chords? Triggered reflections on the search for structure and identity in creative male psyche which regretfully I will skip.

Bearing the Baud rating in mind, I read Baudrillard on Pop Art on the train to the office. The issue is where does Pop stand in relation to the Sublime. Is Sublime in Pop the impact of the TV advert that forms the buying decision? OR is it an Ironic Sublime that unmasques the status quo, shows the hollowness of vitality at the expense of the underclass and makes you resolve never to use a vibrator again? Answers on a petrol bomb please - best tossed at recalcitrant mandarinate.

previous - next