In the Wire � in the list of good things about the year, a member of Sonic Youth places Tacita Dean�s film of a former East German TV tower in Berlin between Steve Reich and Patti Smith remembering Gregory Corso in St Marks NYC. I was talking to Tricia about seeing Patti Smith and St James Picadilly today. She thinks maybe we can get it for a performance project � one of the things that came up at our meeting on Monday.

I did some stuff on AIDS in India arising out of the same meeting � I mailed the Global Business Coalition to see what they thought and also the Department for International Development. I looked into the Gates Foundation as well. Their $100m is a really big move. As they point out the number of HIV infected people in India has increased tenfold in the last ten years � it now stands at 4m. This is low in proportion to the population of India � but it is the second largest number within any country of the world � second to South Africa. Another ten years and another tenfold increase? Will the rate of increase only tale off when it reaches the kind of prevalence levels that you find in Southern Africa � say 20 � 40%? Or will some of the successful models from Uganda, Brazil, Senegal be deployed. This is not a small disjunction. Read more at www.kwase-kwaza.org

Paul Wheeler mailed � I was especially interested in what he said about his current recording project. It sounds to me unlike anything that I have ever heard before.

Laurence phoned. He is sorting out a job that seems to pay even more than his last one. We spent a long time talking about his son�s band. I had at last got time think about their music and why it was working so powerfully. L said that he was amazed at the way that the audience related to it when he was at a gig, We began to think about the antecedents starting with Nirvana � this went to Leadbelly. I said that they seemed to be working between folk and rock � not as folk rock � but as the expressive vitality of the folk singer strumming his guitar and doing a fill or a chord how he felt that very second singing that line. Except that it�s a Les Paul and a classic Marshall 100 watt � and there are only two musicians both called Ben � and they have refined the duo-ness over the years between gtr and drms.

We looked at the difference between punk in London and punk in NYC and decided maybe that they were working the points of similarity and difference. We also looked at the VU and the idea of the 1965 demos being between NYC folk and Warhol rock. Laurence says that they have secured the high ground of meaning � journos ask simple questions and get elliptical answers. I said that I had never been that close to a band that seemed to have the �it� of the time so much in the palm of their hand. There are already discussions about the Kerrang festival and Reading. When headline bands fall through promoters are offering them the position. Laurence said that the band are a million miles from the �pantomime� of heavy metal. I remembered seeing Kiss in 1975.

I once borrowed from Laurence a moderately obscure Hendrix album and spent a long time giving it back - Laurence said that when Ben was a baby that was what he played him. I mentioned that I blamed John Gambles for introducing my family to Nirvana. We decided we needed a meeting with Nick Brown on the issue of practical reasoning.

Today is the day that another Laurence � Fisher � bass player with the punk ska band Fellthru has an interview at the Guildford Academy of Contemporary Music. To hear him go to the Plundafonix mp3s on the KK site � obviously they should give him a place.

I went through some more of the material I got at DTI yesterday from Stephen Bates. Keith said he liked the way I had taken the value added fund - removing the cost of capital to look at what was available for training and R&D. I said that I thought his grip on the core financials was worth a lot.

I looked at the material which Peter Porter has just given Patricia Hewitt and called Stephen Bates about it. He sent me all the press cuttings � there�s a lot of pointing at R Gervais and The Office. Ironic that they booked him for the Sector Skills Council Conference dinner in Manchester when I backed my car into a wall. Stephen said the raw material from Porter was much sharper than the stuff in the FT.

I found a good report from a group chaired by Nick Scheele who is now CEO at Ford (Global) which is utterly in line with Porter�s recommendations. I summarised it for my boss who is flying back from Tokyo and will be in the office tomorrow. In my personal view Dearborn will always be the place where I made my US jazz debut and met the Four Tops road manager within the same 36hrs.

Of the music that I bought yesterday the first out of the box is Schoenberg�s Op 33a. The big news is that it opens with Lamont Young�s Dream Chord � absolutely no question about it � from the botton up B C F Bb � a McCoy Tyner fourth chord with a semitone underneath. The piece starts with three four note chords � the Dream Chord � then a B9 with the root stripped out � then a Hendrix chord � from the bottom G# D E G � ironic that it is actually in E like Purple Haze.

There is a photo of LmY in the same copy of the Wire. The subject of the article heard Albert Ayler and decided he wasn�t giving his painting enough.

Meanwhile in the zone of deep reflection � Laurences� preferred locale � we encounter the following trope. Peculiar. I might say � he is a peculiar fellow. When challenged I might be able to go deeper � and give an interpretation � well he gave up a classics lectureship at Trinity to do rock n roll. Or I might not. I might just say � well � have you met him � he is just WEIRD � that kind of peculiar.

Either might be the best thing to say.

Richard Wollheim � he who coined the term MINIMALISM � makes the following point. He points out that in the Brown Book Wittgenstein says that many philosophical problems arise when the �go deeper� and �that�s it� levels of meaning are scrambled. Wollheim�s point is that AESTHETIC might be in the WEIRD category. That when we take an aesthetic view � that�s what we do and there�s no more to be said.

When I wrote the Aesthetics of Improvisation, my idea was that to appreciate an improvisation we see it as an improvisation. We don�t see it as a composition that was arrived at by a weird path � we understand that we are witnessing the performance in its wholeness and immediacy and that the musician is pulling the stuff out of the aether � and that�s the bedrock of it � the improvisation is a path to the essence of the aesthetic experience and doesn�t have to justify itself as a version of something else

This is OBVIOUSLY how people reacted to Parker Coltrane Ayler and Miles. They saw the essence and commitment and expressivness and deduced from that ideas about their own practice � in poetry , novel writing, painting etc. .