I pulled together 10 tracks of Dhorn music put them down on a CD for Peter C together with some notes and mailed him to say that I would give them to him on Monday. Peter mailed back asking whether I could do a voice over from the text I�d written about the Dhorn � hmmmm � tricky but I will try. The 10 tracks are a useful collection which I hope will somehow engender a further step.

I looked at the KK stats and worked up the energy to write an editorial kicking off from the opening lines of a Joni Mitchell song. If you would like to read it, its on site under the Highveld link at the top of this page. The volumes are levelling off after a peak in the first week of December.

I listened to Red Blues on the way back to Gfd to get some simple ideas out about structure. It sounds to me like the last five songs stand apart and the middle two are separate as well. The first three hang together and that leaves the next two � twelve songs made up 3-2-2 �5 ir maybe 3, 2/2, 5. Part of my problem is that I already knew 6 of the songs in a sequence. Later I went through the previous CD, Seachanges, by way of comparison.

A few Christmas tasks got done and I got Vita some artpaper for her current project in town � and a little Taschen book on Basquiat. I took her to a party at her Selina�s and collected her about midnight. Selina�s dad has a Precision and a 1980s white Strat I remember.

James put some more time at the shopfloor at Heals which he isn�t really enjoying. He is getting very confident in his opinions about English history but I suppose that is only to be expected eg when it makes sense to talk about the existence of �classes� and when it doesn�t. I cleaned the windows as my gesture towards the domestic division of labour.

Basquiat�s is an amazing story � how he picks elements of the Absex and catches the 80s neo-Expressionist wave. Cy Twombly is one of the 50s artists who was a direct influence. People also see early Pollock and I would add Guston. Warhol became a good friend and indeed Basquiat reacted strongly to his death in 1986. Heroism is one dominant theme � especially black heroes from jazz and boxing.. And of course there�s tragedy. By all accounts no one has written much about him for the last ten years but the prices continue to rise. His is a career where the terms of post-modernism are part of the debate � whether it makes any sense to regard him as a �spontaneous� �instinctive� genius. How his productions are constructed by the surrounding artworld. There are also the Hendrix parallels.

I have been thinking a bit about Hendrix in NYC in 1965 � about the move from Haarlem down to the Village and Caf� Wha. About the influx of very electric music from the UK especially the Who and the Yardbirds. I glanced at an article in a guitarmag where R Fripp observes that it is Hendrix� vision that counts not his flawed technique. The vision was formed at the same time as Dylan went electric and the Velvet Underground came together.

NYC acted as a crucible of electric music fed on the one side by an engagement with blues myths , beatniks and hobo poetry and on the other by New York�s belief in its own position at the leading edge an the free jazz explosion going on all around. Al Aronowitz was one of the first to see Dylan as a metamorphosed Beat � he wanted to be the newly formed Velvet�s manager but was outflanked by AW � AA also helped with the link between Miles and Hendrix - insisting that MD go to Seattle for the funeral.

John Cale was on Mixing It talking about Hobosapiens. I bought this CD for the drive up to Durham and it didn�t take especially well. To be honest the individual tracks sounded better on the radio than off my CD. I looked up the 65-66 section of his autobiography. He says he could see that the Kinks were mixing observational writing about low-life with very electric sounds. He was worried that the VU would miss its chance � its window of opportunity.

I listened to some Soft Machine (who were on the first Hendrix tour of the US). John Martyn live and Steely Dan and thought how much I liked the sound of the electric piano. So I messed about on the upright on a symmetrical sequence Cmaj7 Bb 13 Ebmaj7 Db 13 Gbmaj7 etc. The 13th chords with rootless with the 13th and 7th a semitone apart. I began to wonder what the difference was between Soft Machine and the Grateful Dead given that connection with a Founding Father of Minimalism, liking for long distance improvisation and creating non standard structures are not candidates. Perhaps the Dead were just more ambitious.

I looked into Madonna�s early career at Ann Arbor where she may have overlapped with Destroy All Monsters. (Yesterday I was reading about Stevie Wonder growing up just under a decade earlier in the same locale.) Madonna claims she didn�t get into New Wave until the early 1980s and was initially well into Joni Mitchell.

Missed Emmylou Harris on Desert Island Discs. Watched a bit of the James Brown story.