Observations from a Hill

I've mentioned before how, as a Brummie growing up in the sixties and seventies, I came to grow fond of Brutalist and functionalist architecture in most of its forms - the now listed New Street Station signal box is still moot as far as I'm concerned, but I think that is more a question of location and context rather architectural quality, and as it and I have aged together, I'm more inclined to look at it in a more favourable light these days. I was inordinately fond of the [old] New Library which sadly met its demise a few years ago to be replaced by what strikes me as a slightly fussy building, at least from the exterior. Having said that, I really loved the Victorian library that the [old] New Library replaced: it was truly the absolute exemplar of "library-ness", and everything a card catalogue-loving geek such as myself ever wanted, with its multiple levels of shelves interconnected by cast iron walkways, accessed by beautiful, ornate cast iron spiral stairc...

There's a piece in this weekend's FT 'Opinion' which caught my eye just now, about that very modern phenomenon of not owning one's music collection any more. And by that I mean streaming: as with all other subscription-based listen or watch on demand services, you only get access to the stuff you curate into your playlist for as long as your direct debit holds good. As soon as you default on that payment, for whatever reason, you lose your stuff to back whence it came. As James Max observes in his piece, '... when it comes to the music that actually matters to me, the albums I return to, the ones that reward proper listening, I want something permanent. Something that doesn't disappear because a licensing deal in California wobbled... ' He has now set about capitalising on the resurgence of vinyl record popularity and production by buying up a new collection to fill the void left by the vacuum of streaming non-ownership. I have to say I concur and wholeh...

Human creativity is one of the fundamental driving forces in 'our' world - an undeniable truth and practically a truism - for better or worse as far as the rest of creation that we share the planet with. I'm sticking with the notion that the human imagination is effectively an infinity of infinities wrapped up in just shy of one and a half kilos of grey matter and stuffed into a thin carapace of a bony skull. Some of us have the intuition to see but cannot understand - for there is no understanding, much as no lens can focus upon itself - the infinity of thought that we all possess within us. Some either can't or simply choose not to introspect on such things, relying instead on the outer stimulus of others and events beyond their sphere to populate their Weltanschauung with meaning. Some choose to tout their ignorance wilfully as a badge of honour, embedding themselves in the confusion of the world without question and attempting to exploit that chaos to their own ...

OK, Wunderkammern and Infinities. The last two night's posts have hinted at the kind of Zen that I espouse and kind of follow, as following is not really my kind of thing, if you know what I mean. What do I mean by this? Good question and no doctrinal answer will do, as I don't do doctrine or dogma. The easiest way to approach it is by trawling back and accessing your store of childhood memories, before adolescence clouded your mind with sex and aspirations for your future life; a time when there was stuff that needed to be dealt with, in the moment, on the spot, day in, day out. When priorities were as and when they presented themselves, not part of some grand plan as yet to be formulated let alone unfold. In short, child-mind: the mind-state untainted by the weight of the future yet to be, entangled as it inevitably will be by the exigencies of daily necessity and struggle. Sometimes, those travails and the baggage of formal education plus the abstraction of 'career pat...

We went into town today to drop off some charity shop donations of clothes and books, as we're in the process of thinning down some - only some - of our stuff, in truth probably to make way for more of the same. After the drops we went up to Bangor's little 'village' Kyffin, at the top of town, for coffee at Jo Pott's excellent little café there. She serves great coffee and bakes most of the cakes and other stuff on sale there, including her beautiful lemon sponge. The ambience of the place is world music, posh chocolate and well, comfortably 'alternative'. She keeps a daily copy of the i Paper, Private Eye, and a floating selection of other periodicals. Today I picked up the current issue of The New Internationalist, in which I found a good essay by Remy Ngamije entitled "Approaching Infinity", which gave me much food for thought. Randomly, I've just lit upon a YouTube episode of the excellent podcast "The Rest is Science" ponderin...

Wunderkammer. The word itself is redolent of mystery and wonder; of rooms and cabinets of curiosities, discoverables, themselves discovered, and curated reverently and felicitously in no particular order save that of the principle of the 'good neighbour'. I am gradually getting my space back to the realms of such creations, after many years of simply living within a forest of stacks of books, records, CDs and magazines, all very nice, if gathering great gouts of dust, Quentin Crisp style, but not seeing enough actual use; and hence not quite approaching a liveable ideal. So, as pictured above, more shelves have gone up today, almost completing my two-wall covering of books and interesting 'stuff'. Where I go when I've used up every square inch of those two surfaces, I've not yet decided, but I have ideas: I like ordered clutter if that makes any sense, and although it can rapidly spiral out of control if left to chance, as it has done in the past, if a little re...