Two people who bought Serious Music for the Highveld are made Companions of the Order of Bath in the New Year�s Honours List � congratulations to them especially as the CB is well up from the CBE which Peter Ackroyd gets in the same list. (Apparently as a CB you get some odd privilege which means that your children can get married in (I think) Westminster Abbey � but I don�t think Peter Ackroyd has any children.)

Anyway, one of the SMHV purchasers had Cathy Bell�s mum (Betty) as her boss when we all worked in Waterloo Bridge House in the mid 70s . This building is next to the Waterloo church (from which Waterloo Station takes its name) and it was through her � Ms CompanionBath - that I got to know Betty. At the time Paul Bell Paul Wheeler and I were doing Ghosts in a basement in Islington. Knowing several people in the Honours List must be a sign of advancing years .

The art historical joke which James cracked as we drove round the M25 the other day drove me to the same conclusion about elapsed time. Yvonne was driving and asked about a long purple tubular flexible artefact draped along the edge of the motorway. I said that either it was something to do with drainage or it was a bit of Land Art. James looked up from his comic introduction to Foucault and said �This is not a pipe�. Vita continued stitching away at her GCSE Fashion and Textiles assignment in silence listening to the Foo Fighters. She is in that lucky position where you don�t have to say much to be cool � nearly 15 and about 5ft 5ins. Anyway we have just heard that James has been offered a place at Hogwarts next October � so his sense of humour can�t have put too many people off there. He is actually pretty pleased to have cracked it.

And so to the subject of New Year�s Resolutions � for the past few years if anyone asked me what my resolution was I would reply that it was to wear more womens� clothes. Why should NYR reflect internalised long term intentions? A naturalistic view of NYR shows that they are things which are discussed rather than put into practice � so a good NYR might be something which engenders an interesting discussion. Alternatively maybe a NYR is something which causes certain behaviour for about a week and then stops causing it. So a good NYR will be framed so that the behaviour it causes has the greatest payoff if it is checked out and reflected on after a week or so.

If you brought New Years Resolutions under the global automotive quality standard TS 16949 (part 2) you would have a management regime which helped you to check the results of the behaviour after about a week.

The next step in the learning cycle is the really interesting one � the fourth step after Plan Do Check. It is the one that Laurence majors on � Reflection. So a good process regime for NYR � which put it alongside other TLAs like TPM and SPC and the other key tools - would be to make sure that about two weeks into the year you meet up with Laurence. This is harder than it sounds especially if you are both the kind of people who lose phone numbers email addresses maps etc.

So � if you frame that objective as the specific NYR � see Laurence two week�s into 2003 - you might see that specific item as a metaresolution � a resolution which is framed to improve the effectiveness of base or operational resolutions. Peter Senge in Harvard built an international reputation as a guru around the idea that the 5th Discipline is one which enables you to improve metaresolution management. One needs to be careful with the �metas� here.

Another way of looking at it would be in terms of means-ends chains. The ends which flow from the means can themselves be a means in a higher level dyad. I am buying a notebook to write down email addresses � I want to write the email addresses because I keep losing them through an insufficiently strong structural preference in my personal make-up and if I can I have a better way of looking after them then I will keep in touch with people better etc.

These chains can be bcome very long indeed but I think experiments show that most people can only keep a chain of four or five dyads in their mind at any one time. Addressing that constraint � even at a personal level � might be an important step in making things work better � and at a collective level it might be very important.

In fact I bought a book with that intent back in September. I left it behind on my introductory course for TS16949 but fortunately it found its way back to me.

A question in Aristotle is whether all mean-ends chains lead to the same end eventually. People like to think they do as it is a comforting metaphysical counterbalance to the diversity of their experience � I am pretty sure they don�t. Maybe Laurence is right that there are seven distinct ends. If not one and not three then why not seven � after all it�s a prime. How about 211? That has a kind of presentational coherence to it !

Suppose one posits a contemporaneous cultural tension between structurally overt Minimalism and content/process rich AntiForm . This could be a conceptual space within which the narrative of a composition might unfold. You might create that narrative before or after the event. If I were to give an account of Dayindayout and some of the phase pieces then that is what I would do. In fact I have been wondering about the antiform moment on Serious Music � it is gestural in its source but the specific gesture which is conditioned by the technology path the music is on.

One of the things that comes out of the Serra-Glass Moving Company is whether Glass talked to Serra in the truck about say the activity of throwing the molten lead at the wall. Casting is part of the traditional process of making sculpture � and throwing liquid has been highlighted by the gestural interpretation of Pollock�s triumph � the throwing might especially come to mind after the 1967 retrospective. By taking the painting process gesture and transferring it to sculpture you get a new genre of antiform artworks. In the late 60s it might be important to have a set of signature art processes rather than just one like Newman or Rothko.

The Glass stuff with the very long sheets of music stretched round the room kind of suggests that there may have been a cross over of ideas from Serra�s style of artistic innovation. Particularly if Glass as the last of the Minimalists didn�t want to follow (say) the Reich path � or had fallen out with Reich. You also see Glass�s deliberations in a context where the relationship between art money and society is amazingly dynamic. Pollock never made enough money out of art to stop worrying about it but with five years of his death his paintings were being sold for incredible sums.

Andy Warhol�s idea of The Factory was revolutionary in all kinds of ways within this field. To start with it disrupts the lone-producer-gallery axis. The demos that Gavin sent me are the Velvets before they get into the Factory. Warhol created a social space in which it was possible for all kinds of media to undergo dramatic cross fertilisation and development � the gap between the demos and the Banana LP � for example � or all the things which happened in film. How many bands even today take their demos into a development process that is as rich as that? At times there is enough going on for the development to be influenced by the ecology. Maybe Manchester in the 1980s for example.

This kind of thinking was under way in Dan Graham�s head starting a gallery in 1964 and seeing how it interacted with the classic Minimalist works as they were being created � and that experience shaped his artitistic agenda eg highlighting inside/outside dynamics.

If you are driving the truck with the lead thrower and you go past the Factory as you move a big Minimalist sculpture from one locale to another --- and you have just fallen out with Steve Reich � then you are likely to come up with a compositional agenda which is based on a novel artistic ecology � but within which getting out of what Joni Mitchell calls �the Boho Zone� is going to be important. Do you want to drive trucks for the rest of your life?

(By the way I couldn�t help thinking about writing the Aesthetics of Improvisation as a dissertation at this point � while doing practical work with a leading edge practitioner � given a broad enough eco-system then this could have been worse in terms of timing.)

(The ecology metaphor also explains how Varese silence after Density 21.5 came to be broken � he became aware that he was part of an artistic ferment that embraced recording innovators like Les Paul, bebop, conceptual innovators like Cage, poetic innovators like Frank O Hara and Ginsberg, compositional innovators like Feldman, visual innovators like Rothko and De Kooning.)

Back into antiform for a moment - different technology paths to make music offer different ways of introducing antiform ideas. The Serious Music track comes from a specific set of keyboard commands. The Schoenberg derived antiform comes from another control interface. Digital audio creates yet another set of gestural antiform possibilities some of which have gone into BBC500 Antiform. Turntabulism is a genre which takes antiform related creative aspirations and exploits a particular set of gestural-technical interfaces. I remember one of the Pet Shop Boys saying how exciting it was that popular atonality had just fallen out of this without anyone caring much.

Its about time I mentioned Jake Thakeray who died recently aged 63. Reading the obituary made me think how original he was � he used the acoustic guitar and his voice to adapt the French chansonier tradition to the England in the mid 1960s. He had studied French at university and lived and worked there a bit and in that way absorbed the tradition. I can�t say how much influence he had although he did get some good quality TV shows in the late 60s and early 70s. There is a really serious point to be made looking at the similarities and differences between him and Nick � especially in terms of strategies for taking a lyric which has a high level of significance and setting it � also any possible French influence.

Yvonne and I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury select an Incredible String Band track for one of his Desert Island Discs which started a discussion of where they fit in these days � the Incredibles not the Church of England (ho ho ho). On the latter point I have put his Dimbleby Lecture on www.kwase-kwaza.org. I think its pretty good.

I have come across a nice late version of Triste the Jobim tune � by Joe Henderson � a live gig in LA in 1994 � on a cover disc from Jazzwise promoting the new Blue Note label. In a sense it is neo-classical but the drumming pushes everyone out to the limits of the tune and the twists and turns in the harmonic narrative means that it keeps threatening to dissolve. The samba bass is the anchor. Also McCoy Tyner playing solo a Coltrane tune � Lonnie�s Lament � in 1995 � very affecting � it has that slow loping rhythm that provides a platform for really serious modal excavation. Plus a beautiful slow groove with Joe Zawinul backing Cannonball Adderley in Hollywood in 1966 � and Bud Powell�s band weaving a bop line in 1949 � recorded when I was two months old.

I looked up Eighty from the Eighties � a collection of interviews with 80 people doing creative work in West Penwith in the 1980s. We have booked a cottage there for two weeks in the Summer. It is a great list � B Jansch, W Jones, J McShee, J Tabor, K Tickell, C Palmer, J Renbourn, R Williamson � and that�s just the musos � there are poets painters potters and writers too . One of the words I learned the last time I was university was proscopography which is collective biography. If you want to do serious cultural analysis then proscopgraphy is one possible tool.

I got this book in the mid 90s � from the same publisher who had created another marvellous collection � asking 20 artists from the area to talk about their studios. Both books can be read as survival manuals. It became clear to me from the studio book that survival required such an enclave. The 80s book is about how to survive in a hostile culture � in a real sense the deep South West is a different country � closer to parts of Europe and North America than was to London at that point in time.