The unfamiliar sensation of driving to work through Warwickshire and trying to pick up some threads.

I had a call from Nick Brown in Cambridge which ended up being mostly about the Conspiracy film � which he really enjoyed too. I mentioned to him that Linda Thompson�s brother was in the cast of Conspiracy and he said that he had once put on some entertainment at a Scottish castle weekend party with Richard T � who enjoyed playing Knees-up Mother Brown or whatever was required. Nick never ceases to amaze me � his life is like something out of an early Huxley novel. He mentioned a colleague � Philip Allott whose line of work is quite similar to Laurence�s. Nick and I talked a bit about the B52s who have apparently been booked for next year�s May Ball at Hughes. Somewhere in the middle of all this fun we managed to make some progress on the City Lecture.

I mailed Gavin Gribbon to thank him for the VU tape and he mailed back with various thoughts including some feedback on Plundafonix not least on Robin�s song � You Are Here. I also mailed Laurence with some Allott material which he seemed to like. Somewhere in the course of the day there was a management meeting. I mailed my boss an article from Detroit which pointed out that Toyota is valued currently at five times the bet worth of the Ford Motor Company (who says fuel cells don�t pay). I had a quick meeting with Geoff about the accreditation of our procurement product.

I decided to get the last but one Huxley biography from Amazon � very cheap indeed. It�s by a guy at Oxford who is interested in Huxley from a history of ideas point of view and has written a book about way that his ideas about world government shifted (from a kind of fascism in the 1920s to the Zen society). The author has been into his links with H G Wells - an angle that I especially like. Wells (a poor boy) studied with Huxley�s grandfather in South Kensington and the science that you get � say in The Time Machine - comes from that older Huxley. Wells went on to advocate a kind of scientifically based world government and this is often thought to be the butt of the satire in Brave New World. It seems that Phillip Allott � Nick�s friend - fishes in this pool a bit � the idea of some kind of universal law that is rooted in more than ad hoc agreement between parties � a notion of law which taps into some sense of duty and obligation and can bind the disparate forces in global civil society. Apparently Clinton B is also quite into this.

I discovered that A Huxley�s younger half brother won a Nobel Prize about twenty years ago.

Paul mailed about Whuffle � I had asked him what he knew � it was mentioned as the real engine behind the net � things like this �frakctured site�. Paul provides an explanation by the originator - Mr Doctorow :

� And in the Bitchun Society what's left instead of money or goods is something called WHUFFIE, which is a measure of reputation, the esteem in which someone holds you. There are a lot of bloodless coups in this world, because one group of people will suddenly decide they would do a better job of managing some arbitrary resource than the group currently doing it, and they just step in and do it. I call these groups ad-hocracies.�

A framework of international law might even regulate these coups?

I am nearly ready to start work on Robin�s song Night Blooming Thing which I have to say I think is pretty hooky.

Some delayed Christmas cards from the Czech Republic which I must reply to � especially from the Skoda College � I wish they all could be Eastern European Girls.

I have been asked whether I want to go on the four day course on TS 16949 next week. Sounds good to me especially from the free lunch point of view � seriously there are some core tools in TS16949 that I need need to understand better, especially Failure Mode Effect Analysis. Listened to Alice Coltrane while I cooked my supper then I had a crack at Robin�s song of the night � finished that just at midnight � didn�t want to push my luck.

The new Miles biography is by John Szwed who wrote Space is the Place about Sun Ra. So he is very good on how, as the 2nd great 5tet started, it began to embrace New Wave techniques. For example he notes that on Miles in Berlin (which I don�t have � it was recorded in September 64 ) Herbie Hancock stops playing the changes towards the end of Wayne Shorter�s solo on Autumn Leaves and just plays one chord repeatedly. HH says about the Plugged Nickel recording four months later that they are thinking about playing �anti-music�. The parallels with whats happening just then in other forms is very striking. Especially as Wayne, for example is bringing a knowledge of philosophy and cosmology to the enterprise � at one point he explains that a piece requires everyone just play the DNA of the music � maybe this is the inner determinant of form rather than the outward finality. In live performance Miles stops playing one song and then another but fuses the repertoire into continuous set long pieces as indeed he did at Hammersmith when I heard that band two and a half years later. Szwed confirms that through Macero Miles had closely studied Partch and Cage (�and others� � I suppose this is likely to include Feldman). Buster Miles is very interesting on what it was like to dep for Ron Carter in the 5tet � how hard it was to work with form when everyone seemed to be so far from it � until he realized that he was the form.

At that point I had to get up and listen to the Shortstories.