Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-11-05 - 9:37 a.m.

Do aggravations come in collections? Say � a tyre on the car, the central heating in Guildford � and last night the fuse blew on the lighting circuit in my flat in Leamington. There isn�t much natural light in the flat and anyway it was dark. This morning I found the fuse box � high up in a built in cupboard. I think some reflection is a good idea before taking the next step. Getting a torch is a sensible step one. Shaving with a minimum of light might be a memorable experience.

Another irritation is a missing biographical note on Tim Murray which has been consumed by the evil administrative deity of living in two locations.

The AIDS newsgroup that I belong to circulated a blistering article from the Guardian�s correspondent in South Africa � who is just transferring to Jerusalem. Its obviously the piece he wanted to write but could only do so when he was about to leg it. It goes for the heart of the matter on the half-hearted approach of Mbeki to the AIDS crisis. I strongly recommend it � I posted it in the news section at www.kwase-kwaza.org

I kept getting my e-mails bounced from Tracy at DTI � I phoned her office and found that she had fallen over outside her house and broken her ankle. So she is off work for 6 weeks. There seems to be a debate starting between the economists at DTI and my new employer. I wanted to get her read out on the wider context of this. Anyway I was talking to Keith Jordan about an e-mail that is sent my boss into the stratosphere. It refers to bounded rationality � its an ill wind that blows no one any good. I spent a fair amount of time on this issue about 10 � 15 years ago. The genius is Herbert Simon and he got a Nobel Prize for it. I was talking this over with Keith and he spotted that the idea comes from the same intellectual milieu as is displayed in A Beautiful Mind. Simon had been involved in practical work during the war and then he went back to academia and starting to re-examine the rationality assumptions which underpin economics.

I have been trying to get a better balance between the level of exercise is a normal working day � mostly going down and upstairs to the laser printer office � and what I eat (as it is quite difficult to cook small quantities for yourself). So I am experimenting with cutting out lunch � but this can have some fall-out in terms of focus and attitude in the afternoons I suspect.

I listened to a late Terry Riley SQ � the one in Memoriam for the son of one of the Kronos Quartet � still not convinced about this � say compared with that new Reich piece I heard at the weekend where he seems to have got back to some kind of core focus.

With my one reading light, I connected up the digital hub to the portable and tried the configuration with digital MIDI in and monitoring analogue out. Not particularly stable. Anyway I managed to get some Dhorn onto the first of the pieces that Gilbert sent me at the weekend � which is a glorious abstract soundscape on guitar. I have added organ vibraphone and string bass loosely based on a tone row � plus a trombone line freely blown and the Dhorn with some marginal editing after. I think I might mail Gilbert an immediate MP3 as a first draft to get his reactions. I am worried the additional parts might be too substantial for his track.

previous - next