Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-07-07 - 6:46 a.m.

Angus Maclise, first drummer with the Velvet Underground travelled to the UK at the end of the 1940s to study medieval music in Haselmere at the Dolmetch School - about twenty minutes drive from here to the south. Haselmere also has a place in the history of the spread of Bhuddism within the UK at around this time - I wonder if AM found out about it. If you know this most middle class of Surrey towns you'll probably enjoy the irony of its emerging role in the counter culture.

Yesterday I finished clipping a large plant in front of my house. Its covered in protective thorns and so now my arms are stinging with the scratches I received getting it into a more orderly shape. Other domestic tasks included cooking and ironing - also looking for my car key which I found pretty irritating.

I downloaded a MIDI file of a hiphop beat and used it to start a version of Weil's September Song - at 80 bpm. Vita agreed to let me use her bass guitar - she is pretty restrictive on this point. This is the first time I have recorded the bass directly into Cubase. I am not sure what I think of the piece so far.

In the evening I set up the Amiga which I got from Stefan. Its a slightly later version that the one I used to use but it seems to run the programmes that I have kept together in a disc box. I used something called a "tracker-style" called MED which was developed by a Finnish enthusiast. You can load up a quantity of samples - maybe twenty depending on their size and each sample can be played over two and a bit octaves. Sample editting is very straightforward - changing pitches or adding samples together. There are four channels.

For about six years this was the vehicle for all my composing. Listening to some of the pieces yesterday I was surprised I had the patience. Currently I am thinking terms of creating timbres and textures with it.

This what Maclise does on the CD I bought on Friday. I thought maybe there was a causal link between Haslemere and AM's Bhuddism. It seems that it could be synchronicity. Dennis Lingwood aka Sangharakshita founded the Western Bhuddist Order in April 1968 but then set off for Haslemere for an Easter retreat in a rundown cottage in the grounds of Quatermaine; DL discovered Bhuddism in a big way when he was 16 or 17 in the British Army in India during WW2.

. Now its time for a quotation from Foucault's History of Sexuality: "What stands out in the texts of the first centuries is the insistence on the attention that should be brought to bear on oneself; it is the modality scope and constancy and the exactitude of the required vigilance; it is the anxiety concerning all the disturbances of the body and the mind which must be prevented by the means of an austere regimen; it is the importance attributed to self respect not just insofar as ones' status is concerned but as concerns ones' rational nature - a self respect that is exercised by depriving oneself of pleasure...... .... In short this added emphasis on sexual austerity in moral reflection takes the form of an intensification of the relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as the subject of ones' acts".

. So it would not be a case of "I think therfore I am" but more like "I meditate on The Good to tame by passions and therefore I am a better person". Not much Hume there? I don't actually think Foucault was a great practitioner of these ancient disciplines - more of a covert Humean. But that can be dismissed as gossip.

. One of the reasons I like this sentence is because of the light it throws on a strain of thought In Kierkegaard and ND. In "The Sickness Unto Death" K explains the unique character of the human self. Roughly, the true nature of the self is in its relationship to itself - a pretty vertiginous notion. Foucault's triumph is to catch this relation developing in culture - in his terms as a form of discourse - onr one might say as a Hegelian moment in the dialectic of Geist. Its in this way that culture engenders identity - individuals only exist as individuals when culture and texts orient their attention in this way - towards these objectives - subectivity is shaped by broader social forces. This is of course the kind of thing that gets postmodernism a bad name.

. Assiduous readers may like to know that this is from Volume 3 of the History of Sexuality - my honeymoon reading was volume 1.

. ND is able to make the self's relationship to its itself the structural process of the songs. Not everyone cracks that.

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