John's Quavering Pencil

Insomnia has me in its grips. I have woken several times through the course of the night. At this minute, I gain some relief from typing to you, my dear blogophiles. It is 05.45 GMT and I have been playing the piano for this last hour. Although the exercises that I have been practicing for my teacher are not too bad, my lesson is first thing tomorrow morning and they are not quite up to scratch. My week is paced by  these keyboard drills. Thursday is full of optimism. Ivories are tickled conscientiously on Friday and Saturday. Perhaps the garden or the supermarket side-tracks me at the weekend. Monday comes and imperfections flag up to me how rapidly Wednesday is approaching.

On a more positive note, and no pun is intended here, I played Lou Reed’s Perfect Day for the first time at my internet gig at the Cup n Spittle, yesterday. Chordage was basic and sparse, timing was terribly elastic, somehow it didn’t matter; it suited the song IMHO.

I can hear the sounds of a door closing, of a light switch being pulled, of pitta-patta  upon my skylight window. I deduce, Watson, two things: firstly that A.N. Other of my family is awake and, secondly, it must be raining. I was tempted to say that it must be raining outside, but given a watertight roof where else could it be raining?

I can feel a craving for a cup of tea coming on. Can you imagine it? Hot and steaming… fingers taking the rich tea biscuit from the saucer… slowly dunking… lifting (careful, now, don’t let it break and grungify your PJs)… open wide… (it’s ok, you are not at the dentist)… and drop it in, sucking off the soft bit cleanly… then back into the cup for a second dunk.

I gave in. I have the tea. It is great!

On Sunday, at Cascadia Harmonics, I played the Nancy Sinatra song Boots. This is not an obvious cover for a male singer. I thought about the lyric and decided that only one word needed to be changed. In the last verse there is a reference to ‘he’ which needs to become ‘she’ in order to secure the gender transformation. In the past I have suffered female infidelity on more than one occasion and no amount of political correctness would inhibit me from singing about it. There are some lovely turns of phrase within the lyric. “You keep lying when you ought to be truthing” is one, “You keep saming when you ought to be a-changing” is another. I’m sure there is a word in linguistics for when a noun is turned into a verb (truthing is an example from the song) but I cannot think what it is at present. Of course, verbing would be a reflexive solution to the problem. There is some discussion of this on the web. See, for example, http://www.dailywritingtips.com/verbing-nouns/

It is still raining. I had hoped to go out somewhere and do some sketching later this morning. I suppose I could sit in the car and draw. It feels a bit dismal to do that and you have to keep flicking the windscreen wiper in order to get a clear view of your subject. Although it is very difficult to draw rain convincingly, one advantage of sketching in bad weather is that shadows pose less of a problem to those of us with Cross-Hatch Anxiety (CHA).

An hour has passed. The cup of tea stands empty. It is time to try for more sleep. Should I say ‘Goodnight’? Perhaps ‘Goodmorning’ would be more appropriate. This is a tricky problem. Typically, goodmorning is a salutation, while goodnight is more likely to be said as farewell. Goodnight terminates things. Normally, it is said in the evening at the end of the day. My deviant sleep pattern appears to be messing up my ability to use the English language clearly and effectively. Were I to be a shift worker, the use of goodnight, as the dawn breaks, might be forgiven. But I am not. I feel linguistically disruptive. If grammar and syntax are the chains that bind reader to writer, context provides the weakest link. Speak to you later.

I turn onto the A1 motorway northbound, setting my mental compass for the airport. I find myself slowing to a crawl and trace the snaking queue of cars and lorries into the far distance. The vehicles get progressively smaller as the line winds its way like a calligraphic brush stroke, this way and that, up to the  top of the dark frame that my car windscreen makes (and, through which, I view the world). Time passes… I am now stationary. I left early but the thoughts of coffee and raspberry muffin now begin to fade to the back of my mind; I am trapped in the aftermath of somebody else’s accident. I punch the car radio to the local station and soon hear a description of the massive tailback in which I am embedded. A lorry has toppled in these ferocious winds and spilt its load. Inch by inch I advance. I start to wonder whether I shall reach the airport in time but once I pass the police and the incident vehicle the pace picks up a little.

I park my car and hurry to the arrivals area. I glance at the overhead screen and discover that the plane I am meeting landed 10 minutes ago. I take a pee and then decide that there is no time for a snack at the coffee shop. Disgruntled, I settle for a chocolate bar from the vending machine. She-who-must-not-be-named emerges through the swing doors and I drive home. Her bag did not manage to get itself on the same plane and will be forwarded later.

… It is now Sunday morning. I am pushing my cart around the supermarket, throwing in a couple of pizzas and a loaf of bread. This is a light shop, today. I breeze through the tills and sit on a handy chair while I wait for she-who-must-not-be-named. To pass the time, I take my A6 sketch pad out of my pocket and crack open my .05 drawing pen. I look at the girl working at the check-out and quickly get the shape of her head, suggesting the flowing pony tail as I drape a few lines across her shoulder. Less is more. I should have left it very sparse, but it will have to do. It is a 30 second sketch. I feel myself being careful not to stare too hard at the woman, even though that would be better from an artistic standpoint. I have no wish to get into far-fetched explanations of what I am doing with the security guards. I flip my pad shut and move out in convoy with she-who-must-not-be-named to stow the goods into the boot (= trunk in North America) of my car.

Happy with small things, I make a simple sandwich for my lunch and munch on it contendedly. I wash it down with a glass of milk. Still, I must stop writing with my mouth full. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

The wind is howling outside; it makes short work of my flimsy plastic garden chairs. I have to go drive to the airport to meet someone on a plane from New York. I hope the turbulence is not too excessive and that there are no delays. Airports are best experienced through the escapism of page-turners and bodice-rippers. I would like to drink some coffee at this moment but I have to make up my mind in terms of delayed gratification. I know that I can get a half-decent cup at the airport and that is an attractive option. It would make waiting more pleasurable than it might otherwise be. However, were I to endulge now the law of diminishing returns might take the edge off the airport coffee experience. The first cup of coffee of the day is always the best, other things being equal.

… I gave in. I made the coffee. It is great. I shall have another one at the airport but I have thought of a way to reduce its significance. I shall treat myself to a raspberry muffin and allow that, not the coffee, to take centre stage. I have imperceptibly slipped into dereliction mode. I should be tidying up the house at this point but I can’t be bothered. I still haven’t planted the onion bulbs that I bought a week ago.

1984 Penguin Edition cover on a coffee mug

The image on my coffee mug is that of the cover for the Penguin Books edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Society had not quite got there back then but with the acquisition of so many huge flat-screen TV monitors, I think it will not be long. The technology could so easily be adapted for societally malicious purposes. Had the book been entitled 2084 I should be getting worried in about 30 years time, as the reality starts to outstrip the fiction.

I really must do some more drawing and painting. I shall pop a mini sketch pad into my pocket to take out with me now. I must go or I shall miss that plane! Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

It is 06.00 a.m.

My mother used to stay up all night reading her novels. Now I stay up all night listening to music on Second Life. I like to sample the musicians that play after my midnight and through my night to dawn. Obviously I cannot do that too often. It is strange sometimes when I go to a gig and bump into someone who more usually inhabits the Euro gigtimes. This is not going to be a long blog. I am falling to sleep as I type. Speak to you later

I set off, with my daughter, to visit my friend Patrick who lives beyond Alston. I have turned onto the A1 heading north and notice that the traffic in the southern carriageway is heavy. Traffic news on the radio mentions that a lorry carrying assorted nuts and bolts has overturned a few miles south and that part of the road would be blocked for quite some time to come. While I feel empathically sorry for the drivers across the divide, I have to say I feel a sense of relief that we have not been plagued by a slow start. The turning to Hexham looms and I veer off to the left. Ten minutes have passed and already we are leaving behind all signs of habitation. Occasionally we skirt a Northumberland market town, such as Corbridge. Once past Hexham I take a sharp left into a minor road that winds up and down the hillside. The hairpin bends are arranged spectacularly for our entertainment.

Imperceptibly we have been drawn into a deep, engulfing wood. Through the windscreen I see the tarmac stretching ahead, framed on both sides by overhanging trees. Branches entwine  to form a womblike tunnel (thank you Dr Freud) as we are sucked inexorably into a primordial terrain. The colours of the leaves are turning to autumnal gold; another week will bring out the reds, too. Pheasants scurry across the road from time to time. The frequent signs of roadkill suggests that many do not make it to the other side.

More and more moor

I drive up the phenomenally steep central high street at Alston and take the lane to the village-beyond-nowhere, past which my friend lives. The driving becomes more and more demanding as we move through each stage of the journey, moving deeper and deeper into remoteness. Finally, we arrive at the nearest village and head off up into what can only be described as nothingness.

When I first visited him, the house looked more like a barn than a house. Here is an example of the sort of structure I have in mind. This barn can be seen from his sitting room window just beyond a drystone wall which vaguely marks the perimiter of his property.

Decades of hard work has transformed his house to what it is today. I walk right in and call out to him. We settle in his sitting room where he has lit a fire; it feels so welcoming and takes the chill off the room.

"Come in" she said "I'll give you ~ shelter from the storm"

 He makes us tea and coffee and we go through to the kitchen to drink it. This room is dominated by a rather splendid 1950s Aga. I find myself standing close to it, warming my bum: these stoves are wonderful inventions.

We eat a simple lunch with fresh baguette rolls, Greek salad, and a selection of cheeses. I notice that one of the cats has slunk off to the moor to get a snack. They never have to buy cat food here. Although the cats are pets, I believe their function is partly to keep out the mice and rats. Easygoing chat flows. Afterwards, I play a few covers on the piano he has. It is rather loud and slightly out of tune but that doesn’t really matter. Soon it is time to say farewell, and I drive back again.

We hit the afternoon rush hour as soon as we approach the metropolis known as Newcastle, home to a football team whose black and white shirts have earned them the epithet of barcodes (thank you Coinslot for this illuminating information). By the time we get home, I am ready for another cup of coffee. And now I have to do some stuff. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

I press the light switch on my digital watch and, grappling for my spectacles, peer into the little screen; it is 05.00 a.m. Grumpishly, I toss and turn but sleep eludes me. I get out of bed, make a cup of tea and bring it upstairs, with a couple of biscuits for dunking. And here I am, typing to you.

I shall go back to bed a bit later. I need to top up my sleep by a couple of hours because I am going on a trip today to see my friend Patrick. He lives in the middle of nowhere in an alternate reality known as ‘Beyond Alston’. You can’t even get a mobile phone signal in his house.

I am in the garden, yesterday, walking around aimlessly. What is this, by the path? A clump of fungi. [Cut to my bedroom bookshelf… opening the book on mushrooms and toadstools… flip, flip, squint, sigh… can’t find it… return book to shelf] So, do you know what they are? If so, please tell me in a comment here.

I spot a red rose, solitary. I capture its moment of extreme autumnal beauty with my camera. I am thoughtful. I am taking this picture in order to share it with you. I can think of no other reason. This triggers further thoughts. What am I doing, writing this blog. I am sharing my life with you. Esse est percipi, as Bishop Berkeley is reported to have once said: To be, is to be percieved. You, my dear blogophiles, are the ones who percieve what I am thinking here, and thus indirectly assist me to be. A couple of centuries ago I might well have been writing in my leather-bound journal with my quill pen; writing for posterity. The journal, with its copperplate hand, would have held the promise that one day someone, perhaps you, would have stumbled upon it as you poke about some dusty junk shop back room, nosing through the fruits harvested from a cash-in-hand house clearance. In your act of reading, you would have retrospectively bestowed existence upon my hypothetical being of the past.

If I read my own blog, I am able to narcissistically confirm my own existence; this is the mental equivalent of physically standing in front of a mirror. Does my ego look fat in this blog? I might ask myself, as I metaphorically fondle my adjectival clauses.

I have to get this blog posted and get back to bed for a bit more sleep. I shall talk to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Friday…
I am sitting at the table with a sea view at Bungalow cafe. In fact we look out onto the harbour and Roker pier. I have taken a pic to give you an idea of the sort of day it is today.  The waitress has just served us with the full English breakfast and Tom has poured the coffee. We take a bite, and then relax into a couple of hours of meandering conversation, as is our wont each Friday morning.

Sunday…
zzzapppp… where did time go? Did I experience Saturday? Can I remember anything significant about it? Oh… it is all coming back. This reminds me of the time I had a bad concussion when I was playing rugby once. The memories start to trickle back.

Friday night was a good late night gig at Terra Fyrmusica. There was a nice crowd there. We got griefed (smoke bombs). I was over the other side of my studio playing piano. We didn’t manage to work out who it was. Anyway, it was a great gig. RichJack and Costello were there and we hung out after the show had finished, along with Jeaninne and Gil. Coinslot was there I remember, too, but he moved on (my guess is to another gig).

I stayed up real late on Friday night. I remember  going with Woody to the Mocha bar at the Nitida Ridge .. must have been around 3 or 4 a.m. my time. They had a pass the mic session going on and I took over from Jellyjellyjelly Benelli and played some stuff on piano. I can’t normally sing as late as that but I was on my own, apart from my daughter downstairs. I really had a blast. My voice was growling. Surprising as it may seem, I went to bed and then got up in time to play my one hour show at Foxy Hollow at 11 a.m. on Saturday. I also later caught the relay streaming show where JJJ sang the songs and played acoustic guitar, streamed it to Toby Lancaster who then played his guitar lead over the top and that sound was then streamed up to Second Life and back down to the listeners. I loved their show. JJJ has a good voice and plays some good songs. Toby is an excellent guitar player; he is very melodic, without being too flash about it. I certainly want to catch them again.

So back to Sunday, and I played Cascadia Harmonics at 7 p.m., as usual. Reg, who is German, was at the gig so I sang a Rammstein song (Ohne Dich). I’m really getting into Rammstein. I also slotted in a timed 3 minute digital piano improvisation in a string quartet voicing. As usual, folks thought of it in terms of a horror movie sound track. I have stopped using my kitchen timer because the beeps are just too shrill. I now use my digital watch timer. When it goes off, I take one hand of the piano and hold the watch to the mic. I think that works quite well. Anyway, I think my arrangement of Geldorf’s Mondays song is coming on nicely now. I am very pleased with it

Ok. It is nearly midnight. I had better get to bed or something. Speak to you later.

I am driving through the late September sunshine; it is morning and I’m feeling fine. I turn off the urban motorway into a small retail park and abandon the car at one of the neatly drawn parking bays of the garden centre. Striding swiftly into the store I press the right arrow of my mental keyboard to swerve the first life avatar to the right,  gliding smoothly to a holt in front of the packet seed rack. My eyes rotate in their sockets as I scan for over-winter cabbage. Damn, they have none. My research online last night indicated that you need to make sure you get seeds that are appropriate for autumnal sewing. I abort this plan and swivel to the left in order to inspect the bulbs that hang in perforated plastic baglets, full of promise for the spring of 2010. 

I throw some snow drops and irises into the basket. I am about to make a dive for the till when I notice some onions. I perform cognitive categorization gymnastics on the spot: onions :- VEGETABLES :- cabbage. This neat bridge is sufficient to salvage the recently  aborted plan. I smile, make purchases, and head for the car. I promise myself lunch as a Skinnerian reward for adaptive behaviour.

Brrrrmm….. Brrrrmmm…. Vroooom…. Vrooommm… Well, in my car perhaps it is putttt…. putttt… fizzzzle…. pottttterrrr…. Either way, I arrive at what was once Europe’s largest shopping mall (or so I am told), the Gateshead Metro Centre .

I head for the very lovely Marks & Spencer store and stock up on some essential items of clothing: 1pr black chord pants (trousers, to the English); 2 pr undershirts (vests, to the English); 3 pr boxers (saucily striped, to anyone); 1 shirt. Deep breathing enables me to avoid fainting at the checkout when I discover how much it all costs. It is fairly painless: the card is flashed; the pin number is button-pressed; the personal inventory is incremented by 7 items.

Pencil & watercolour 25.09.09

I settle at a table by the window in an Italian coffee shop and put my lunch tray down. Were I a food psychiatrist, I should say that my plate of quiche and chips was undoubtedly suffering from chronic depression. Indeed, I think the only way to liven them up would be to give them a sharp dose of ECT….. Munch…. munch…. chew…. chew…. I watch the world go by as I wash down the solids with a more than passable mug of Americano coffee. Bottoms, some huge and bulbous, others tightly petite, wobble and role past. I regret that I did not manage to sketch any bottoms in situ, as it were, but I have sketched for you a rather fabulous example of the species post-hoc. The woman appears to be leaning into a roadside telephone booth and from the look of it I would imagine she has stopped somewhere on a highway in the  States, possibly to order a pizza for her dinner. This is the first painting that I have done since I withdrew from the MA course and I am very pleased to have broken the watercolour duck, in this regard. My nephew is a surgeon who specialises in colorectal surgery; maybe I shall follow in his footsteps and specialise in bottom sketching.

 A young woman has her toddler in a baby chair at the next table and is feeding her spoonfuls of gorgeous goo, if the gurgling sounds of glee are anything to go by. I note that it is not only policemen that get younger every year; mothers do too.

Driving home I leave the contempation of mortality back at the mall, where it seems to belong, and mull over my early morning piano lesson. I played badly today. I think what happens is that I look at the sheet music and my eyes become glazed as I focus on some point in the middle distance about six feet beyond the piano. So I am not actually reading the music. What I play, is what I have imperfectly remembered from practice. Since I have not practiced in order to remember, this results in frequent breakdowns and stoppages as I struggle to find my place in the music. If this sounds dreadful to you, believe me it sounds (literally) much worse in my teacher’s parlour. I really must sort this out.

As I drawn nearer to the city I think about the preview of the MA Students exhibition I went to see last night at the university Design Department. It was good to meet up with some of my old friends, but I did not really fit in. The night was a night for celebration and a mature student who had withdrawn (well, quit – let us not beat about the bush) for rather vague personal reasons was no longer occupying the proper role for the occasion. I came away feeling very sad. It had seemed important to me that I go to this event, though; it would have been cowardly not to do so. It was the last thing I needed to do to provide myself with a sense of closure. While I was walking round the exhibits, I did try to talk to various people about my drawing and what I wanted to do in terms of making this blog into an illustrated journal but somehow this seemed to be of scant relevance to the university in general or this programme in particular, and my conversations were patchy. Folks were very kind to me, but my speech was somehow located in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the way back I compared it with the highly animated chat artists and sketching techniques I had had with my neighbour that morning: chalk and cheese.

Speaking of art and all that stuff, I bought a small protractor today. I would still like to learn a little more about calligraphy and one has to pay attention to the angle at which the strokes lean. Originally I needed to explore the families of calligraphic hands in terms of the title pages for my animation film. Who knows, that film might still get made one day.

I had intended to plant my bulbs this afternoon but I think I need to take a nap. Speak to you later.

It is a warm morning and I am in the garden, weeding a circular rose bed in the middle of the lawn. The sun is slanting in low; I contemplate putting on my straw panama but the bushes seem to be shading me once I get down into the dirt. Weeding can be a chore, unless you become at one with it in the here and now. I think about the cult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I read when I was a postgrad student in the 1970s, and also about a lovely little book called Zen Guitar which, regrettably, I seem to have lost. Today all is good; I have Zen weeding.

My new nextdoor neighbour’s father arrives in his builders truck and starts carrying in bags of cement and what-have-you. They are in the middle of a major renovation of the property and are not yet moved in. We pass the time of day and I fork out another weed. I am sitting on an upturned plastic storage box. I get up from time to time to take a swig of tea from the mug I have placed on the living room windowsill. I notice how stiff my leg joints feel as I move into the upright position. Gardening is a pleasant way to give the body a gentle workout.

My other neighbour, Bob, emerges from his house to go for the newspaper. He stops and we have one of our easy-going chats. He is an exceptionally good realistic artist, currently working mainly with acrylics. He takes my back into his studio and shows me some paintings of Venice that he has recently completed. They are awe-inspiring. He has already hung some of his work in galleries. He very generously explains some of his techniques to me, and I am totally fascinated. A couple of years ago, what he says would probably have been wasted on me. My studies on the MA course last year have changed all that. I could relate what he was saying to things both my life drawing tutor and the illustration tutor had said to me. I explained to him that I would like to incorporate more of my sketches into this blog, so it becomes more of an illustrated journal. I gave him my website address and I hope he has a look at it sometime. By the time we finished chatting I needed to go indoors and brew some coffee. I shall probably finish off the weeding of the rose bed this afternoon.

I have so much to do today. I am determined to look again at my piano boogie DVD and my piano lesson has been moved to tomorrow, Wednesday, this week. I want to try to think about what to take in to my teacher so I can get the most from the lesson. I have three exercises to practice for her, anyway. Then I need to make a decision as to whether to go to the preview opening of the MA students’ design show. A week ago, I could not have contemplated doing this; I think I was in the equivalent of mourning. Today I feel a lot stronger. I have started to put sketches into this blog and the chat with my neighbour has put me in a good frame of mind as far as my art is concerned. I shall mull this over. Maybe I will go. It would mean that I was on top of it all. And I would love to see some of the tutors again. It might be a case of taking a deep breath and standing tall. I’ll speak to you later.

Apart from hamburgers, one of the most enthusiastically welcomed imports to English culture from the States has to be the baseball cap; even I own one (see my pencil sketch). I am currently deciding whether or not to stowe my cap into the closet, along with my summer shorts. I have steadfastly resisted the temptation to wear the cap back to front, a practice so fondly embraced by the yoof of today. My cap, far from being a fashion statement, is functional: it keeps the summer sun off my eyes. As such I have begrudgingly allowed it to usurp my panama hat which is made of straw and has a delightful black band around the circumference. I don’t have time to sketch that right now, maybe tomorrow.

A DVD that I ordered last week arrived in the post today. It is all about how to play boogie and blues on the piano. I find this to be quite a difficult thing to do and I’m not very good at getting my right hand to do something different from what my left hand is doing. The DVD has been put together by Louis Vause and Seamus Beaghen and I think I am going to enjoy working through their exercises very much indeed. For example, today Louis was talking about this problem of the two hands and he suggested thinking about it as a multi-tasking problem. So, setting up a bass boogie pattern in the left hand, he challenged me to pick up a pencil from the top of the piano, move it a little way across, and put it down again. At first I just could not do it and keep the bass going at the same time. He gave a few other examples of things to try out before putting the right hand fingers anywhere near the keyboard. I can see this is going to be an entertaining challenge.

I have to have something to eat before I get ready for my internet show at The Vibe tonight. Oh, btw, thanks for your comment Coin (I approved it on the blog earlier this afternoon). I must get going now. Speak to you later