Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-11-22 - 10:30 a.m.

I think some of the creative flow from last night�s gig may have been running this morning. I got the leadership project further under way � floating it with Dave from the DTI at his meeting with Kevin and also talking Graham, my boss, through the next phase of data gathering when the engineers go back to the Summit participants � they will ask them to pick from a set of statements which they believe they think get closest to the changes they would like to see in their managers. Graham chose the statement about being able to see the essentials and not being diverted by details. This is a cognitive ability and on the Myers Briggs map fits the S/N dimension � a move away from the immediate. It should be possible to devise a training intervention which would help people move in the right direction. I also managed to slide in the idea with Dave that the procurement project should contain some provision for accreditation � an issue Geoff Dale raised with me yesterday.

Keith and I had a discussion in advance of the meeting with KPMG tomorrow on the package for the Regional Development Agency based in Guildford. This helped clarify one of the funding routes that we can help them understand � I phoned Frances who was visiting a company in Bradford on Avon and we had a brief chat about whether he would find time to visit the Saxon church. He explained who the key person in the RDA on the funding flow would be � fortunately someone that I have been putting some time into. He also threw some light on the question of Centres of Vocational Excellence � in fact the college just down the road from my flat is the one that is designated for lean manufacturing � thus making good the claim that where I actually live is Leanington.

I arranged to have lunch with Frances next week . Keith bought in a copy of the Beautiful Mind � the book from which the film was made. Its is effectively an intellectual biography � about the elite in Princetown after the war � von Neuman and games theory.

I also managed to develop a proposition about NVQ Level 2 � at the moment the organisation doesn�t do any qualifications at this elementary level, although the majority of the skills enhancement that it delivers is around this level. One of the things that emerged from the Manchester Conference was the fact that in yerms of Government policy, Level 2 and small firms is the place where funding is most likely to be targeted � this is where the greatest market failure is seen to be and where the greatest need for Government incentive funding is required. I put down a few thoughts along these lines for Stefan.

It looks like there is a lunch engagement next Sunday which rules out the birthday party � hey ho � never mind. Maybe I ought to concentrate on getting some of John MacCartney�s bass lines down.

Peter has put up some clips of Cleveland singing on www.kwase-kwaza.org - a Broadway song, some Mozart and a spiritual. I think it sounds pretty good � see what you think.

I had another go at the third short story number 3 � it has lost the flute and I have put some Maya on � such a different guitar from the U2 � a solid wooden guitar with a longer neck and humbuckers rather than lipstick single coils. I haven�t heard from Gilbert for a bit � I haven�t had any reaction to short stories 15 , 18 and 11. So I had better hold off � in case he thinks I am on an amazingly wrong track. There are a couple of these tracks which are going in an out of focus in terms of how much I like them � how consistent they feel.

I was unpacking some of my remaining stuff in my office and I came across the Wackpack � something John Gambles discovered . It�s a set of cards that you use when you are stuck � when you want a new approach to a problem. And this made me think of Oblique Strategies which I am less familiar with even though they are here on the site. I dropped into google and found a pdf of the complete text which I printed out.

As I was driving home I heard some of Bob Harris� country programme on R2 � just at the end he played a really great couple of tracks. The first was by Linda Ronstandt with a band which included Andy Fairweather-Low and Neil Young. I thought the song must have been by Jackson Browne � it had that great mix of romanticism and cynicism � but it turned out to be a Bruce Springsteen song � about the Border. The second was a recent country hit from the USA - very few chord changes but everyone packed a punch. Then it was time for Paul Jones and he explained that the engineer and producer at Atlantic � Tom Dowd � had died and he was going to be playing a lot of tracks that he had been involved in. I wondered if this was going to include Trane�s first Atlantic recording � My Favourite Things.

I was late to discover Jackson Browne but I finally got to see the point around 1974 and for about three years I was an absolute devotee � up to Running On Empty. I always look at Zabriskie Point when its on TV � because of Death Valley � and the characters there remind me of people out of a Jackson song. Middle class Americans forced to romantic extremes � the self absorption can be a bit much � unless ones own self is absorbed in the same way. The Pretender is one of my desert island songs.- what became of the changes we waited for love to bring/ was it all a part of some greater awakening?

Dan Graham came into the art world as member of a co-operative running a Gallery in NYC at the time when Minimalism was emerging from Pop and Rauschenberg and Johns. As a gallery �owner� he met lots of artists and talked to them � he also ran early shows for most of the emerging Mins. He mentions again the interest in French culture � Godard, Barthes and also serial music. So he saw Min as a movement which inter alia was about galleries � about the interrelation between the simple object and the gallery space � I suppose you would say this was an ecological view of Min. This included the social ecology:

�Through running a gallery I learned that if a work of art wasn�t written about reproduced in a magazine it would have difficulty of attaining the status of art�

He thought about the financial flows � how magazines are partly financed by adverts for galleries and how the whole system at root is for converting the art objects into money value � but the artvalues that people buy are created in part by the critics and magazines so there are several flows and linkages. It�s a kind of systems thinking.

DG also thought there were some inconsistencies in the rhetoric of Min in relation to its practice. This shaped the direction he took when he came to create his own artpieces.

BUT could you have an ecological view of Musical Minimalism?

The social and financial ecology would be the easiest part � but what of the artistic ecology? One might look at Lamont Young hardly recording at all � because his artform could not in his view be adequately realised on a recording only in a more controlled environment � his fame mainly rests on written accounts of his achievements which to some extent he has managed � these accounts encourage people to go the trouble of actually hearing his stuff. In that way he is of a piece with the kind of art systems that Graham was reflecting on. But he also came up with the 1960 conceptual/algorithmic pieces � which maybe influenced Riley.

Riley and Reich having early records issued by Columbia which brought them attention and Riley�s piece was in a form where it could be learned and tried out by other groups relatively easily. The Columbia contracts I think arose because someone at the company belonged to the same artistic circle. In C was a robust conception � or template � say more like a jazz form � head and changes which can be utilised by many different combinations of instruments. Riley was attracted by the recording studio but this didn�t really seem to work for him so well � I think perhaps the environment was changing fast round him by the time he was sufficiently well established to be able to command chunks of studio time. His approach of a simple set of instructions that can be realised in different ways hasn�t really been taken forward that far at least I haven�t heard of much.

Reich to some extent followed Graham in writing about his works. He also was able to organise a collective to explore different versions � when I heard him speak he put a lot of stress on the incremental way in which the works evolved and the fact that he didn�t get to create scores of many of them until long after the pieces were finished,

Reading and writing this stuff has provoked a radical trope on SS3.

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