Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-04-27 - 7:11 a.m.

The IF Board paper on The Academy with my "gap analysis" was completed (not by me) and I think it makes a reasonable pitch. In fact the time series of Gross Value Added against Labour Costs is masterly IMHO. Also the ITT I did last week is on its way to an eager world (again hastened not by me. I have suggested it goes to a compamy who could be part of Plan D - although I'd actually rather pitch Plundafonix at them as the owners bought two copies of Serious Music.)

Maybe this is how I am most productive - starting things off for others to knock into shape.

I am having to knock into shape the Brno "speech" on the UK's place in the global future of the automotive industry. In fact I have mailed it here so I can work on it this weekend. It looks as if the programme of visits in Czech Rep might be coming together. When I was in Brno about a year ago I was taken to a local student bar where I caught the last part of a set by a local piano trio - and very good they sounded too. In fact I found the whole jazz bar scene very nostalgic. I expect Prague will be much more so - I have only been driven through the town in the rush hour. I thought the railway station was a great art nouveau piece.

Yesterday I went to have lunch with Peter Tebby - an amazing guy who is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and now works in part of the Cabinet Office. This is part of my Plan B if The Academy doesn't have a place for me. My toe-hold on Plan A relates to the time I worked with Peter at the Civil Service College and got the revenue up by 80% in four years. Anyway he was delayed by an annual appraisal interview - a bit of seasonal existential sadism in my view - and didnt show. But I bumped into Tony Kestern who I was in the same section that I was placed in in 1975 when I joined. He is working in an Academy relevant bit of the Department - so that was quite useful encounter.

As I was in Petty France I strolled back to the St Margaret's burial ground site and read the information boards. Yes it was definitely there in the 1740s - so it is a credible point of intersection for the allignments. Then I slipped into the map shop near Caxton Hall - a place I have spent months and a fortune in over the years. I got an 1890s large scale map of the centre of Guildford and a map of the Grand Union Canal between Birmingham and Milton Keynes. This goes through Soilihull and Knowle which is approx where my new office could me. I will need to find some kind of bolthole and the canal matrix should be a wortwhile perspective on the possibilities.

Yvonne Vita and Jake have gone to East Anglia to see her sister and mother leaving James and myself to pursue our interests (plus the task list I have been left). Jake is a Norwich Terrier. I managed to get Serious Music and Plundafonix in the post to Chris Wallis the old skoolfrend who does the Book at Bedtime - who knows if he really likes something..?

James has just got his 18th birthday present from Vita which is the Director's Cut of Apolcalypse Now. I watched the opening sequence with The End - gripping. (In the spirit of the exchange with diarist James on those alltime gigs I have to add The Doors and Jefferson Airplane at the Roundhouse in 1967 - an all nighter. A must for any visit to LA is to go to Venice Beach where the Doors started. Reflecting on the Doors time here I concluded the best groups are bonded in their late teens - must be why I do a lot of solo work.)

I also heard an interview on Radio 3 with S Beevor (author Stalingrad) on his new book on the Battle of Berlin. He made it sound absolutely essential. He went onto the project as a result of material that he came across doing Stalingrad and he discovered that it had not been properly researched in the light of the new availability of Soviet archives. What the archives show partly explains this - evidence which tarnishes the heroic view of the Soviet Army. Apparently there was a chronic shortage of junior officers in the Red Army by this stage - there was an incredible attrition rate not to mention the purges. The net effect was that discipline was very weak which explains partly why they behaved so badly.

Russian self-esteem is now so delicate after over 10 years of capitalist decline that no one has the heart to denigrate their heros. (The male death rate has fallen faster in Russia since the end of Communism than any other period in recorded history.)

Beevor had some interesting things to say about the personalities of Hitler and Stalin. One of the gripping things about Stalingrad is the way it was seen at the time as a personal conflict by the two leaders. Beevor said that it is easier to show that Stalin was psychotic than it is in Hitler's case. Hitler had a personality disorder but was less obviously mad. I am not sure about this - Hitler was obviously a very manipulative personality. But Stalin had the sense to devolve responsibility. Apparently one of the reasons he liked Zhukov was that Z was more brutal than Stalin had imagined possible.

During the evening I linked the D-HORN up to the old PC running Vienna Soundfont and started editing patches partly with what is in the ROM and then I realised that I can get WAVS in as well - indeed mix them with the ROM patches. So this means wind control over four octaves of any sound I can lay my grubby mits on. This patch could lead .... who knows where?

Inspired, I plugged the audio-out of the D-HORN into the mike socket of the new Dell (I am still pondering what USB audio box to get) and managed to raise the input in Crusher-X for radical granular synthesis. I ran some loops in Wavelab and Traktor simultaneously and started busking against them. It felt very new - a new way of thinking needed in terms of phrasing off the preceding crushed episode. I must think of an artistic analogue - I had been working with Rauschenberg in the back of my mind - the discovery that he could take images from any printed sourve and drop them in a painterly fashion onto his canvas. But maybe that metaphor isnt quite right here.

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