I got a parking ticket yesterday - while I was still in the shower. Woke up this morning and got outta bed - started working on Stories2 - the bigger set - some of the more out-ideas I threw in on the first pass - the 16 inch guns for example . I put some guitar on a couple of pieces - the Gamut piece - which quite likes the addition I feel.

Yesterday I met someone who does NPDI the Toyota Way - potentially very useful indeed -just off Watling St. Talking of Toyota the new Avensis have started to arrive - rather too big for me I fear.

Later I had a bloody mary in the old pub in Kenilworth as I read more Adrian Piper - including the introduction. AP was young and impressionable when she tumbled into conceptual art at the end of the 60s in NYC and took to it in a big way. It was by following the threads from CA that she got to philosophy. She identified a subject position within white male middle class art whereby subjective views are expressed as if they were objectively true and she decided that she would adopt this position as a black woman artist - to see what happened. This thread is followed through in her examination of the supersensible grounding of Kant�s philosophy of action. It�s a nice question whether for example when she is doing performance art with George Clinton tracks she grounds the performance directly in that element of Kantian philosophy - or that middle class subject position with its apparent Kantian grounding is being quietly exposed to ridicule.

AP reminds me of Ms Rosenthal who ended up in Santa Monica on a very similar journey - except she was of a generation to be taught by both Artaud in France and Cage in NYC. AP�s links with J Rawls at Havard matches this nicely. Parallels with Mike Kelley and his engagement with MC5 in Ann Arbour at this point in time and also the Belville 3 in another part of Michigan. I hear from BBC4 that there is quite a post-punk revival under way.

AP�s engagement with selfhood has been compared to Cindy Sherman�s - the conscious reflection and notation is similar to Mrs L Reid (nee Anderson - Superman etc - who I was lucky enough to catch in retrospect in Milan at the start of Manufuture.)

Steve went to see the Manufuture guru at Loughborough yesterday and did the business. On the strength of this I ordered his book about the Birmingham gun industry. Our man started as an apprentice and via a PhD at Cambs is now FREng. Steve had secured the key section on the EC policy paper so that we might introduce the odd sentence that will facilitate our access to the increased budget - he also got some floorspace at the big international conference in December at Rolls Royce.

To aid my self orientation towards PW�s perfume piece I am using the cheapest possible Tesco deodorant this week. When you spray it on and accidentally inhale it provokes a fit of coughing. Do I feel a performance piece coming on?

I had an invitation to Hawaii - I am trying to work out why - given that the main incentive offered to go there was to buy cheap books - I must have got this wrong. I had a look at the books they were promoting and downloaded a couple of free chapters. I sent the summary Ch on Strategic Management post 2000 to Laurence - who has been strangely silent. We had a pitch over a decade ago about the turbulent nature of the new times - I have suggested to L that we were a decade too early with it because the �new directions in strategic thinking� is pretty much where we were pointing - relevance of chaos and complexity theory, for example and the soft skills implications.

I also sent a copy to Stuart whom I met last week at the bar - he has his own company based in Mayfair which provides ICT specialists eg to niche city firms. His wife comes from the lower West side in NYC (and knows the Village Vanguard well and has even seen Merce perform). His flat near the Grand Union in N1 is a few yards from where Paul B Paul W and I used to rehearse Ghosts 30 years ago in a basement.

Nigel, Keith and I are working up a pitch document for an item in the Labour Party Business Manifesto 2005 - I decided that it was worth some of the better items I have garnered over the last few months - that we represent 40% of the UK overseas trade in goods - a sector where productivity grew 20% in the last 4 years compared with less than 5% in the UK economy as a whole - and that we know where the gold is buried on certain key issues in the skills and gobalisation domain - each worker in our sector exports more than 200 thousand pounds a year - a figure I still find hard to imagine. I also slipped in the Carnegie Mellon Maturity Model. Interesting seminar on this stuff is being organized by the US Society of Automotive Engineers.

I phoned Capt P about changes to the KK site. Earlier I had spoken to Bob about the way the way the Capt�s software (OIM) worked out in the Academy Graduate pilot programme. I think this stuff could be quite edgey in terms of knowledge management and we need to complete the Demming Loop so we lock the value in. I also mentioned the Capt to my other lead from the hols - a small company in W London that is big in DVD production - and he goaded me into trying to keep it warm. The deal-maker from the firm bummed a yacht ride from Kas to Kalkan along the Turquoise Coast and I ended up talking to him about NYC digital art and Bill Viola and getting his business card. Also mentioned Henry W�s new job in today�s em just in case.