Talking of Ventura I find I really like Paul Hardcastle�s cover of America�s Ventura Highway. I wish I didn�t but I do. America played St Johns� May Ball with Steeleye Span, Shakin Stephens and some outfit or other I was in � I think this must have been 1970.

My boss has asked me to look into benchmarking � maybe I should include the 13 second introduction in my report.

I read in the Wire that Ron Geeson arranged an album for Bridget St John in the early 1970s.

Yvonne is going to Verona for the weekend early tomorrow. James is having re-union with the people he met in Russia over in Chiswick. Vita and I are likely to do more guerrilla warfare.

Try http://freespace.virgin.net/angela.peagram/Debates.htm It�s a contemporary take on art and entities or objects.

I have been dipping into the background which I can�t fully grasp and so I have to simplify. Abstract painting came to be valued as pure painting which derived its aesthetic worth from within � internally � by a refusal to refer to anything outside itself � a kind of contraction or introversion in the work. Its aesthetic value emerged from its essence � colour in two dimensional space. Abstraction is a stripping away back to the essence of the artform

From this distance it looks as if Minimalist sculpture was doing the same thing within a three dimensional medium. It seems peverse to complain about people walking round a piece of sculpture when it exists in three dimensions . Or to complain about sculptors who want to work on an abstracting/reductionist agenda arising from the sculpture as a three dimensional object. Or wondering how far you can strip down the three-dimensional object until it stops having aesthetic value.

What�s the difference between something and nothing if the thing in question is an artwork? If its in a gallery then you can walk round it even when its nothing .

This is very like the famous Cage piece � except that Cage seems to have got there first. The artistic intention and other bits of context make something where the history of the medium reaches a certain point.

I discovered I have a recording over a short Cage piece written when he was being taught by Schoenberg.

I went to see Goodbye Lenin last night � a comedy of care and pretence.