Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-06-08 - 9:27 p.m.

The people at Verve must really have their marketing sorted. This is the second month running where I have read an article in Jazzwise about one of their releases and ended up buying it. This time it was Wayne Shorter Live - I listened to about half of it on the way in from the airport and thought it well worth the VAT free rate I got it for at Terminal One. It sounds to me a lot like the live album of the 1967 Miles European Tour - but that is all to the good.

In the HMV store they were doing three own label CDs for unfer 13 pounds. I have listened to two - Flute Jazz and a Gil Evans album. The first is much more worthwhile than I expected - I thought it was going to be mostly polite West Coast jazz - not at all. There are two tracks by Eric Dolphy and a lot of 60s material that is basically flutes and percussion, The GE is extraordinary - it comes not long after jis triumphs with Miles and they asked him to do an album of jazz standards in his own way. There is one original - Nevada - which I got the chart for on Times Square. The featured soloist is Cannonball Adderly who was in the Miles 6tet which did Kind of Blue. The arrangements are packed with great timbres, great lines and great voicings. I have been thinking I ought to do some work on his arrangements so this is very timely.

The third HMV is a WS compilation - which I havent played yet although I have read the slieve notes which start with noting with awe the WS-Trane conversations in Philly.

Obviously its a bit premature to comment on Prague but the FCO had the good sense to book me into a hotel with a bebop bar and music shop round the corner which I have already spotted has a 1971 natural wood Gibson SG with case for under GBP 500 - better give that a wide berth. I might add that the architecture is profoundly to my taste - art nouveau, art deco and international modern. The hotel is neo-expressionist and the minibar is affordable and had a plain chocolate Bounty Bar until I dealt with it. Very much a case of so far so good.

I wasnt wild about the flight but it was only 2 hours and the business at this end was quite easy.

I have brought with me a book on structure and scenery in England which is musch more tractable than the one I was talking about yesterday. I can see now a kind of super-symmetry - say rather like a bird shape. The tail would be the Weald and the North and South Downs . The left wing would be the Test valley and the right wing would be the Thames Valley and Kennet. Each of the wings would have the same internal symmetry.

This volume is also interesting on the subject of the West Midlands. As the M40 goes North from Banbury it goes through a channel which was cut by a glacial lake hemmed in against the Cotswolds scarp by a glacier in the Severn Valley. The lake has been christened Lake Harrison - this theory could account for some of the valley shapes eg round Chequers and High Wycombe in the Chilterns.

Whenever I come away it means I sort out some of the papers cluttering up my bag. One of these was a print from the Pyrford site - the place where James used to go teenage drinking. I failed to mention that J Donne lived there and caused a lot of trouble by eloping thence. Also when Henry VIII appropriated the nearby Abbey he is said to have set up cannon in the churchyard and have bombarded the abbey buildings down on the Wey.

There were also a couple about the political dimension of imagery and representation - one by Terry Eagleton and another by Jurgen Habermas. I liked them both but the Habermas one goes deeper. He suggests that the gentlemanly ideal of good manners is derived from the behavioural display required when you are the local embodiment of authority eg as the lord of the manor. There is a good quotation from Goethe about the bourgeois having to produce his/herself whereas the aristocrat merely projects. Habermas suggests that the Arnoldian-Leavisite ideal of the ego developed through critcal engagement with literature kind of evolves from this two poles. The bourgeois ideal is to produce oneself in the image of the courtly projection of aristocratic taste. I think there's a lot in this and indeed it may even take you as far as the cultivation of the primitive ( ie the blues ) that was common when I was a teenager. The Drake geberation produced themselves as aesthetes through engagement with the primitive - I think there may be a dash of Nietzsche in there as well.

I have left for James a copy of the New York Review of books with a really interesting article in it about the emergence of oligarchs in post communist Russia - cos he sounded interested when I mentioned it to him this morning - and I know he loves anything to do with the history of Communism. Its about how in the late 80s some bright bunnies identified legal ways of converting funny into real money in the margins of the Soviet State. For example you might have, on behalf of the State, a sauna which cost a million pounds - you didnt have to pay this because it was funny money - but at some point the conversion was made and the sauna facility became privately owned back eg by massive state credit guarantees based on the (now) real money it owed the enterprise.

I have to say this reminded me a lot of how we ramped capital investment into the Civil Service College when it was a public body and then aspired to buy it at a cut-price rate when the fashion was to sell off the assets. I vaguely know the person who has actually managed to buy it in the last couple of years - his company is called Style Conferences - must find out what he paid for it.

There are still little private shrines here to people of my generation who died in the Prague Spring in their early 20s - over 30 years ago.

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