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Unearthing

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OK - pictured is a rather poor self-portrait I painted in 1987, sat on our landing floor - randomly for the purposes of this post - which we've recently freed from the hegemony [the floor that is] of the hideous inherited fitted carpets that we've put up with for the last twenty-odd years. My point in this juxtaposition of disparates is that of uncovering the past. In the case of the picture, it is one of the few remaining pieces of my work I have, and certainly not a piece I would exhibit, flawed as it is [and not in a good way]. It was an attempt to emulate historical oil technique - glazing - in modern acrylic paints, and was not entirely successful, although I still think the basic likeness was passable to this day. In the case of the floorboards, the one on which the picture lies is a nineteenth century nine-inch board that runs the complete depth of the house, examples of which are a joy to find. We'll repaint the boards over the next few weeks in perhaps a dark blue,...
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Strength or Futility?

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We were watching a film this afternoon that we were aware of but which neither of us had seen, despite it being twenty years old now: 'Children of Men', a dystopian view of a world of universal human infertility set in the UK of 2027. The riots and violent state oppression, the subtext of refugee migration; the destruction of property outside of the gated community occupied by the protected elite and the rule of martial law seemed to us as a an entirely plausible but a [maybe not too] distant reality here in the UK; but by coincidence, this afternoon I had taken delivery of this month's New Internationalist, which served to remind us that these violent dystopian situations are the norm for millions of people around the globe. Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Gaza, and so many more countries and regions, whose people are estranged from normality by the violence and war imposed on them either by outside forces or by their own people for whatever twisted purpose they see fit. And the re...
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There's Time, and then There's Time...

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Following on from my recent vaguely philosophical musings on time, I find myself thinking about metrical time, rather than the more general, temporal sort. Rhythm, and in particular, musical rhythm. What started this chain of thought was watching a short YouTube by a creator I'd not come across before - he currently has only a relative handful of subscribers - playing the bass alongside a Jack Bruce song, allowing the bass part to stand out from the rest of the piece whilst leaving enough context for the bass line to make sense musically, rather than hearing it in isolation. It was a later Bruce composition that I'd not heard before, which meant I was hearing 'his' playing with fresh ears, as opposed to simply nodding along to and enjoying a familiar gestalt. What I realised for the first time in nearly sixty years of being a Jack Bruce fan, was that he never really stopped being the upright bass jazz player that he started out as. I'll probably revisit his loudest ...
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Tempus Imperatur

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Well, here we are again at the turn of yet another Autumn Equinox, with its attendant mild jet-lag and confuzzlement in tow. I like the equinoxes more than I like the solstices as they seem more sudden in the change they bring [and I'm not referring to the artifice of British or anybody else's Summertime constructs], with a sharper dip into Winter and the subsequent shout of Spring. The equinoxes feel physical, with the solstices being broader signposts to the changing seasons. Again this modus mentis of mine harks back to a post I made some time ago about one's internal visualisation of time and its passage as a virtual physical space; I've forgotten when I posted it and I've just failed to come up with the link to that post in these pages, despite using all the obvious search terms, but it's the one about my internal time-spiral visualisation, which I hasten to add is a known psychological phenomenon - cf the post I can't find - although everyone that vis...
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Rolling With It...

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Seventy-two and counting: my birthday today. Yay! Whoopdeedoo! Who gives one? I left school in nineteen-seventy-two, which is kind of synchronicity, but only tenuously, in a numerological kind of way, and I would struggle to come up with any other combinations of the digits seven and two that would suggest any manner of cosmic significance, so I won't bother even trying. What it is, though, is another year thinking 'why do I still feel thirty-five in my head?' To be frank, thirty-five was the age at which I was physically fittest and strongest; and it is my son's current age, and as I said to him on their visit this afternoon, looking extremely dapper having been to a rather grand wedding in the Conwy Valley; I would have it that I was that age physically but knowing what I know now, thirty-seven years hence. I hope that I have learned from the past, from history, and from those around me, and that I truly exercise the precept voiced by Edmund Burke in a letter to Fanny...
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Fish & Fowl

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Tonight's rather meagre offering is, as the above image would suggest, a quite gratuitous food post of the most egregious kind. Apologies. Jane's back from her week's sojourn down Pen Lleyn and she returned bearing some rather fine chicken thighs purchased on a slight return detour to Hooton's Farm Foods on Ynys Môn. I roasted them with lemon, thyme, bay, garlic, and anchovy fillets in chilli oil [avec olive oil, salt & pepper, obviously]; and served them up with minted, boiled baby potatoes and tenderstem broccoli. Simple and very tasty. Adding anchovy really does up the ante flavour-wise: I've only really ever used anchovy with lamb previously, but I can attest to its efficacy with a bit of chicken, too. Tomorrow I'll use the two pieces left to knock up some more of those wonderful tacos I mentioned the other day . I might even pass on the the recipe in full...
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The Great & The Small

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Following on from last night's exasperated economic sigh, I was reading - again in last week's New Statesman - an interview with author Dan Wang's take on America's changing role in world politics under Trump: the courting of Russia and China and the focus on AI as the future of the American economy. The interview was long and detailed and his conclusions too wide-ranging to summarise in the few words of tonight's post, but some key points are worth picking out of it. The underlying faith in AI as the next US gold rush is largely based on the performance of Silicon Valley over the past several decades: a tech bubble on the west coast that functions almost as a separate national entity, unlikely to continue indefinitely as the physical and economic constraints of the semiconductor industry, software bloat and the voracious hardware demands of AI really start to bite. The truth is that the industry will hit a physical capability and manufacturing capacity brick wall, ...
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