A new eating option from Tesco � smoked turkey rashers � allegedly a healthier eating possibility � not after I have finished cooking them they aren�t!

Last night�s marathon on 10 Shortstories and Fourfifths seems to have paid off. I have burned CDs to consider for Mark, Robin and Gilbert. I just have to get them into the post. I also took the definitive set of recordings down onto the portable mp3 machine.

I have been listening to an excellent value John Martyn double CD today - it is a compilation mostly of his more famous songs but drawn from the reworkings that he did about 10 to 15 years ago. This might seem odd to some people � why not listen to the originals? Well you can only listen so much to most things before the appreciation is dulled and besides many of these tracks have the Andy Shepherd on saxes. How a wind voice fits round songs of this kind has long been a major interest of mine and AS manages to combine top class jazz chops with an interpretive ability to fit this material.

Also on the turntables today is a different (and even cheaper) supermarket soul collection. Heaven knows how this one was put together � it contains some reconstructions (eg Love Child, Hold On I�m Coming), some classic tracks and some strange originals. Foremost in the last category is a version of Rainy Night in Georgia by an anonymous crooner. The gender change makes the story much more plausible � he is a traveller caught out in the rain who takes refuge in a boxcar and pulls out his guitar to cheer himself up � and comes across the metaphysical thought that it could be raining all over the world. This version is more firmly rooted in Georgia and the boxcar � but this grounding makes the metaphysics more powerful. Also a version of �Feet don�t fail me now� and the original of Sam and Dave�s �Soul Man� with that hooky guitar riff that skips along.

I had a look this morning at the Pure DRX 701ES What HiFi product of the year 2002. It pulls out of the ether 24 bit digital audio which might flow through my Tascam interface into this PC and be captured as WAV never confronting the horrors of AD conversion. The opportunities for piracy and general textuality are very extensive. It also will do optical SPDIF out to a minidisk at 48K. They even include a USB in so that they can sell you future software upgrades. And all this at the HiFi store round the corner for less than �250.

My office neighbour Keith is back at work having suffered from a nasty recurrent medical episode over the hols. Paul W mailed a piece about the ambivalent US attitude towards China. Also a mail from Gilbert discussing where we have got to on the project

We met our contact from the local LSC to kick the ball around � in advance I gave Graham � my boss � a draft overview paper which I think framed the discussion well enough.

I phoned NYC to make sure they�d go the details of the tribal visit right � and counted the weeks � answer six � until we touch down at JFK and get the cab across the 59th Street Bridge.

I have been thinking about Robins nitesong � in connection with the Hughes biography � that someone should be seen as invitingly embracing dark forces. I guess we won�t be able to leave this pairing alone � in the Airburst Suite is a setting of the first of the Birthday Letters. I haven�t persuaded anyone to sing it yet � but the idea is still there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/speech/berlin/index.shtml is Tacita Dean�s sound piece about Berlin. I got out one of Yvonne�s TD books when I was home over Christmas � a collection over photographs bought in markets � all over the place. TD says that the project of making the collection is partly about the drama of completion � that�s quite a Dan Graham kind of idea - that the end of anything helping to complete its form. This is obviously true of a life � hence the Greek�s would say �Call no one happy until they are dead.�

Somewhere on the R3 site is Tacita�s recordings narrating the making of the piece and the difficulty of crossing the threshold of starting the project. Not everyone would want to call this organisation of sound �art� of course. I think it is compelling in a very quiet Zen way � a bit like Feldman. On the site you also get 40 photographs that Tacita found when she was making the programme. A pretty bourgeoise woman, between the wars, cuddles a fierce member of the cat family � maybe a cougar � to name just one.

Yesterday I was going to quote from Baudrillard but decided against it � from his 1972 book on consumption. He virtually reinstates Hegel by thinking about what consumption is these days � not something that we do to meet our pre-existent needs. Acts of consumption exist in ordered sets � pathways or trajectories � and these linkages are given outside us and independently of our will. Suppose its true that advertising cars in colour supplements or the Economist is intended to influence consumption decisions ten or twenty years hence - and that people tend to buy and read these things when they are in their teens or early twenties as part of a process of selecting pre-defined roles which they will take up in life to counter the anxiety of normlessness or formlessness. The embededness of advertising within consumed media makes this very credible .

Talking of tastes there s a bit towards the end of Tacita�s Berlin piece about the �just knowable� thresholds of perception � a tick of a watch at 20 feet � similarly one (I spent some time looking at reviews of the book devoted to Electric Miles � the author was at Goldsmiths in the early 1990s � I guess that would be just after the great era of D Hirst etc.) I have been trying to find the bit in one of Matthew Collings� books where he is a bit disdainful of TD but luckily I can�t put my finger on it as least not in Blimey which is the one about Hirst and chums. His viewpoint seems barmy to me to criticise someone for standing in the great tradition on US abstraction/conceptualism. The Germans obviously take this view or they wouldn�t have made her an artist in residence.

My boss went to university in Aston and so he has lots of anecdotes about how gang culture has grown up there. It sounds a bit like LA to me. I have to get my car fixed at a garage there and this is yet another reason for putting that off.