Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-06-21 - 6:20 a.m.

I sympathise with James - not being where I intended to be as well. My absence is due to pressure of diverse events. So instead I helped Vita with her German homework writing ten sentences about South Africa.

Both the Love and TV reviews have been amazingly powerful. (Tintagel was first and foremost a Love covers band - doing Stefanie and The Castle etc - in fact the Autumn of the Summer of Love.)

At work I tried to set up some leads for the LEMAN academic engineering spin off I visited in Liberec last week and I finished a revised version of my Brno presentation which I sent to interested parties. Some discussions on the rather balls-aching processes that are involved in making a proper exit from the trust-vacuum this Dept has become. I fixed a meeting with Graham for Tuesday afternoon. I really should write the conclusions of Cz visit before then.

I decided the time has come to send Paul the copy of the "work in progress" CD - I referred to it in my letter to him from Prague. I listened to it through last night and thought it was crap. This morning it sounds more interesting. I think Fifths is the best piece on it.

I tried another version on the older PC in Cubase which I downloaded to disc and loaded onto the new PC before processing it to a WAV which I am listening to now. There s a kind of development path here - get to the composition by doing this, then this then this , then this. There is a structural idea and a practical way of taking it through something that is performable/recordable. Depending on how you feel about the idea or the last realised version of it you keep going round the cycle probably adapting it. I suppose in Fifths I am beginning to see the influence of M Feldman and A Keeling.

I have been reading about Frenkl - an exitstential psychologist and Holocaust victim. The truth path is to identify and develop ones own personal "will to meaning" in a culture which tries to substitute the "will to power" and the "will to pleasure". This just has to be right - for "will to...." one could substitute "engagement in....". A quote from a review of an Anita Brookner novel "The thought that the trials of old age are as inescapable as ever, and might have to be faced alone is beginning to chafe on many people's minds. Secularism and individualism mean that neither faith nor a dutiful family can be counted on to see us through to the end ." If pleasure and power decline whta happens to meaning?

I also read some of an introduction to Jung. Parts of what he says have become features of the intellectual landscape - the tension between sensing and intuition between thinking and feeling, intraversion and extraversion: also the idea of the shadow and some opposite gender template that you project into life and focuses your energy even though it is unobtainable. I expect someone somewhere has mapped out the linkages between Hegel's "Geist" and Jung's Collective Unconcious but I am less clear about exactly where he ends up with religion.

The last Miles-Gil Evans collaboration is an oddity - not in the same league as the earlier work - but some interesting bits. Some of the pieces are static and textural in a way that has attracted critism but which is actually pretty prescient in NYC in the early 60s. Nonetheless theese recordings comes from a rather fallow period in Miles career. After the peak years when the best Gil Evans stuff was done, also Kind of Blue and some great 5tet and 6tet recordings.

Coltrane leaves to start his great 4tet and Miles seems to drift towards a MOR zone which begins to pall - he seems to be getting left behind. The key step is pulling together the young bloods which make up the next great 5tet. Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Ron Carter. They are quite an academic bunch - WS the oldest and TW is still a teenager although ironically he is the one that died first. The first recordings are without WS and with George Coleman in his place - live albums from concerts in NYC and the South of France.

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