Ransen's Blog

I heard a program about Val Wilmer , an English jazz journalist who knew all the greats. She made an interesting point: In the last hundred years black music and cinema are the two art forms which changed the world more than any other. Without black music... ...there'd be no Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones or Elvis Presely, and all that followed. And maybe without black music there'd be more racism. What ever Tacita Dean says about how important Cy Twombly's handwriting is for art... ...she's speaking to a navel gazing elite. Neither Dean non Twombli will be remembered in another hundred years. But I bet the musicians above are. (And the critics gush and fawn on Dean, Twombli, Kapoor, Cross , and their ilk, without ever seeming to understand anything real.)

The Radio Three Documentary often has interesting podcasts which I listen to as I drive to and from work. But sometimes I want to throw my MP3 player out of the car window at the things they say. Such was the case with " Sunday Feature: Select Copy Paste 3 partsConception ". It is about using technology in art, and how it affects the artist. One of the first to be interviewed was Holly Hendon who pointed out something that I've thought for a long time. Traditional blown, plucked, hit, instruments are very limited in the sounds they can make, and it takes ages to learn how to blow pluck and hit them. But the computer has an infinite variety of sounds which you can get to use without having to learn how to blow, pluck and hit.  Unfortunately, from the extracts in the program, the music (the sounds) Holly creates with the computer are not great. They avoid cliche but they also avoid being listenable music. She said that she "exposes what is happening in societ

I'm reading "La morte in banca"by Giuseppe Pontiggia. It is set in 1950s Italy and is about a 17 year old who gets a job at a bank, but who really wants to study literature at university. I won't spoil the plot for you, but one scene struck me. A roomful of people all working on mechanical adding machines. And I thought that in some ways not much has changed. As far as I can make out at least 50% of all people in all the offices in all the world are copying columns of numbers from one Excel sheet to another Excel sheet. Excel is silent compared with a mechanical adding machine, but I imagine the expressions on the faces of the operators are much the same. And how many people use Excel as a database!? They think: " Excel has a lot of tables, databases have a lot of tables, therefore Excel is a database ". Excel is a brilliant calculator, but a godawful error-prone inefficient "database."  The problem with Excel is that you can start using i

There are only two real mysteries in the universe. Mystery Number One: Why is there something and not nothing? Mystery Number Two: How come we are conscious, what is consciousness, how come we think? All the other mysteries are sub-mysteries, and depend on these first two. Slightly connected,  a poem attributed to the Persian poet Hafez (1326 -1389): I wish I could show you,  when you are lonely or in the darkness,  the astonishing light of your own being.

I used to drink Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey: Now I drink Bush Mills Irish Whiskey. For some reason Tullamore Dew is no longer available in one of the biggest supermarkest in Italy. But Bushmills is: One Summer evening, when it was too too hot to sleep, I stood on the balcony and looked towards the horizon. A few stars were visible, but the horizon was too bright too see many. And to my right, to the south, huge clouds climbed into the sky. The shapely bumpy gigantic clouds which I like and which I could go to sleep on. They were dark, because it was night, but they were not grey. So it was a dark white, not a grey, which piled up hugely into the sky. And in these clouds were flashes of lightening, but no thunder. Presumably they were so far away, as if constellations, that no sound reached me on the balcony. And since there was no thunder I knew that our cat, outside somewhere, would not be frightened. I remembered that one evening we came bac

I discovered three "old" things which made me think that maybe I should have a careful look at my book and CD collections rather than ordering the latest thing from Amazon. A few weeks ago I came across a very old CD, "The Year of the Cat" by Al Stewart. I bought it in the 1980s I think. I had a vague idea that he is/was(?) a one hit wonder ("The Year of the Cat" single), but I listened to the whole album, and it is all good. ( There were none of the, er, crappy lyrics which pass for songs these days. ) And in the same week, not knowing what to order from Amazon to read, I picked up my old copy of "The Collected Dorothy Parker". The stories seem a bit dated now, but I read with glee her book reviews, which are mostly scathing sideways attacks on poorly written books and bad authors. And it did not matter that I had not heard of the books she mentioned, I just enjoyed her put-downs. And finally, I re-read a book I'd read about ei

I heard an interview with a British screenwriter a month or so ago (I can't remember his name, the interview was on one of the BBC R4 Front Row podcasts). One of the things he said made me laugh out loud. He suffers from clinical depression. (No it wasn't that that made me laugh.) And he explained that he had tried everything, drugs and talking therapies, the lot. Nothing worked very much. The problem with talking therapies, he said, was that you have to find a therapist at the very least as intelligent as yourself, and hopefully more intelligent than yourself. Otherwise, how on earth can you take the therapy seriously? And the problem was that in twenty years he had not found a single good therapist. He was not saying, I think, that he was particularly intelligent, but that with, for example, 165,000 licensed therapists in the USA the average level is going to be pretty average. I mean, are all 165,000 brighter than their patients? You may fin