I’m In A New Year’s State of Mind

Tags

berlin, diet, food, home, new year, resolutions, swindon shuffle

The turn of a new year is really only a collective state of mind, a mass agreement on how we measure time, a man made concept. That said, it acts as a great focus for looking at your life and it’s goals and seeing where you are going. As stated before in a previous post I am not one for resolutions but as this year marks a bit of a land mark for me (A Journey into “L”) I have already enacted a few changes regarding my diet and already, just a week in, I feel better for it. The percentage of fruit and veg that I eat has greatly increased, red meat has been largely replaced by oily fish and carb intake is now much lessened. Junk food is out of the window and combined with the organic and freshly sourced food I am buying I guess it is simply a case of less MSG’s, chemicals and additives are greatly reduced.  The morning coffee is now black tea and cheeky snacks are now apple-shaped.

It is also interesting to look back on the changes in my life over the last year. This time last year I was renting a flat (a really nice one but renting none the less) I had a fledgling record label with a couple of releases and I was feeling a bit lost. I end the year owning my own house outright, have now worked with about a dozen acts to help release their music, have been co-organiser of the biggest Swindon Shuffle Festival to date and a string of great gigs on an almost weekly average and am still (just about) supporting myself through all these endeavours. I even managed to get back over to Berlin to spent some quality time with friends and was involved in making music videos for a couple of the acts on the label.

Next year is looking even more promising with The Shuffle entering year 9 and a music event being planned where we take some of the labels acts into Europe.

So all in all a pretty successful year and more than anything I seem to have re-established, in my own mind at least, who I am.

Advertisements

The Occidental Tourist

Tags

america, city lights book store, dean moriarty, egypt, germany, greece, home, israel, jack kerouac, jordan, neal cassady, on the road, sal paradise, san francisco, usa

On reflection, any traveling I have done has always taken me east from the UK; Greece, Egypt, Jordan, Germany, Israel; a subconscious decision to head into morning rather than the setting sun? Maybe. It is odd therefore that one of my favourite travel writers, if you can use the term for someone who was essentially a hitchhiker in his own country, is Jack Kerouac. Whilst reading about his road adventures through what he defined as the Beat era of post war America, his hedonistic travels involving bars, music, women, drugs and thrill seeking of the modern era, my own adventures have been more based on visiting much more ancient cultures, visiting biblical and classical locations. The reason that I bring this up is as part of my blogging regarding the new house as recently a friend of mine returned from a business trip to America where he was lucky enough to visit The City Lights Book Store in San Francisco. Whilst selling underground literature, left field poets and non-mainstream taste in books, it was more famously the place where emerging writers and poets, such as the people who would become central to the Beat movement would hang out (apparently it was one of the first places in the area to have a coffee machine) and try out their new works. As a house-warming present he brought me back a poster of Kerouac and Neal Cassady, the central characters of On The Road who appear under pseudonym as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.

In a house full of more ancient  and oriental facing references, from pictures of Rameses The Great at The Battle of Meggido, to a collection of Turkish Hats, From East European bank notes to a brace of Indian cavalry sabres, it is nice to have a touch of the more recent occident looking down on it all. Two road warriors of the modern age, breaking through a whole new underground wild west and immortalised in this famous picture of youth and brotherhood. I’ve always likes the idea of seeing America, the America off of the tourist trail, the trucker bars and the southern bayou’s, the railway yards and the down town cafes. Maybe one day I will but for now I have Dean and Sal’s presence to remind me of a road that beckons.

By the book

Tags

blogging, books, buffy the vampire slayer, computers, history, history books, home, internet

As I lay there in bed with the sun streaming through a gap in the curtains listening to the chirp and chatter of the birds who live in the eaves above the window and the clock radio decides on Debussy as the signal to start my day, the new house really feels like home now. After a month of shifting, sorting, assembling and replacing, I think things are ninety-per-cent the way I want them. There are still a few jobs to do and a few items to upgrade and a home doesn’t feel right to me without plenty of free stuff and organics to aerate the place and generally soften the contours, but for the first time it feels comfortable. I thought that over the next few posts I would talk about some of the thoughts and ideas that have sprung up whilst going through my phase of building a new nest, a musing on the nature of the things that we draw around us to create our homes.

As many of you know, one of my passions is history books so we will start with that. I was once asked if I had read all of the books I have in my house, to which I replied no, they are reference works and I don’t view them like that. The books in the picture are mainly history with the likes of religion, mythology and anthropology making up the numbers and my approach is that I like to have my own personal library to hand. Should a subject come up I like the idea that I can find a book and at least have a starting point to explore the subject be it The Etruscan culture or The Retreat from Cordoba, the campaigns of Edward I or the ideology of early Coptic Christians. That might seems an odd approach in this day and age when information seems so accessible and so bountiful, but when it comes to knowledge I often feel that almost everything on the net and even the dedicated documentary TV channels is either wrong or aimed at a 10 year old. The internet especially, anyone can have a blog or website, anyone can get their work out there and from the onset it is hard to distinguish from just the titles which sites to trust. Most of it is unsourced and uncited information written on a whim by a 15 year old blogging after watching a PBS broadcast.

I would say that “you can keep your internet” but obviously the hypocrisy of that is that I am typing this into an on-line blog, but I will say that it’s always best to chose the right tool for the job and when it comes to imparting a knowledge of history then you can’t beat, solid, dependable, professionally published books.

It also reminds me of a wonderful quote that comes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of all places….

 

Jenny Calendar: Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much? 
Giles: The smell. 
Jenny Calendar: Computers don’t smell, Rupert. 
Giles: I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a – it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It’s-it’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly. 

3,2,1, you’re back in the room

Tags

home, tom stoppard

After a few false starts with deliveries and more crucially broadband connections I think I am back in the swing of things. More importantly it means that i can actually earn some money again. it’s amazing how much I rely on the internet, a sad but modern inditement I guess. Without it I have been unable to write any of my regular paying articles, it’s not so much the lack of ability to send these pieces in, more that music journalism and the like requires a fair amount of research and cafe Nero or random internet cafes just don’t seem conducive to the creative process. Still, I’m back now and raring to go.

The other problem of having no internet means that I haven’t been able to buy the rest of the things for the new house as quickly as I would have liked. Working from home means no car these days and so being reliant on things being delivered to me, from weekly groceries up to new dining room tables, but it is all shaping up slowly and it is nice to finally have the extra elbow room and a place that I can call my own. It’s funny how when moving from a flat to a house, there are loads of unplanned minor bonuses that you hadn’t really thought about. Simple things such as being able to put washing on the line in your own garden, a really good supply of hot water (my previous flat was designed with young families in mind and so had really low and unadjustable, temperature settings on the water supply) and just the general airiness that you get from a through draft which again a flat didn’t provide. My view as I sit and write this is still one of urban town centre but broken up by my nice little courtyard, some nice beech trees and a nice slab of sky, where as before it was the cold brickwork of a tall council building and the sight of Jeremy Kyle Show types arguing outside that office as they decide which pub to spend their free hand outs whilst their kids pull the wing mirrors off of cars.

I love the slight randomness that comes with Victorian houses that have been adapted and altered to meet modern requirements. I love the fact that nothing is quite straight or fits quite as perfectly as it might. I love the fact that if you open the bedroom window at night the bedroom door rattles very slightly, it’s quite soothing in it’s own way and I find that a copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead wedged underneath makes the noise go away…though I’m sure any Tom Stoppard play will do the trick.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this place, a lot of work and mainly good fortune but it is beginning to finally feel like home.

 

The storm before the calm?

Tags

home, moving house, personal space

I’ve just been putting my last few writing pieces and arrangements for tomorrows radio show in order before I pack up my house and move to the new place. Although I’m having all the heavy stuff professionally dealt with, I want to box up all the smaller personal items myself and it’s only then that you realise how much crap…I mean sentimental items of your past life you collect during your three score and ten. I think that there will have to be a bit of a cull during the process, although I am moving to a bigger place, the last thing I want to do is fill all that room with junk…I mean sentimental items of a past life.

Fresh starts are great, on the whole I hate moving, creature of habit I guess, I mean comfort zones are called comfort zones for a reason and couple that with the logistics of moving thousands of books and records and the task becomes a bit of a mountain of a task. Hence the reason why I am paying for someone to do most of the work, Muhammad’s coming to my own personal mountain as the skewed analogy goes. Still the end result will be work it, a larger place in a quieter part of town with my own writing room/office for the record label to run from. It pays to reinvent yourself every now and again, evolution of a sort and the same goes for your personal space, a change in the immediate surroundings can often spark changes in the way you work creatively, your routines and your personal modus operandi. It will be interesting to see where this all takes me but for now I just have to get through a couple of days of chaos, a storm before the calm.