Discoveries while wandering in the city

Originally uploaded by jonathantee

Wandering to a house party in Finsbury Park after a meal at the always sumptious Jai Krishna, SD and I stumbled upon this mural-ed alleyway.

It’s cool to discover previously unknown bits of an area you know, isn’t it. I guess such is partly the joy of a dérive…

Back in March we ‘discovered’ the cocktail bar at the top of the oxo tower which is rather lovely

Come across any random/ interesting/ noteworthy ‘discoveries’ recently?

One is a gardener

Originally uploaded by jonathantee

Waking up this morning to a grey, wet midsummer’s day I felt elated. Great weather for my tomatoes!

It is possible I may be becoming a gardener…

I’m travelling down from the new glitzy St Pancras International station to (perhaps) rather less glitzy Sutton. Arriving early at the station I wander around to look at what shops are there. I’m drawn to Pret a Manger (though I don’t go in). In striking contrast to the harsh overhead glare of the main area of the station (and most of the other shops), Pret has low ambient lighting, appealing comfy-looking chairs and strains of what sounds like 40s jazz drifting out into the station.

And yet something seems wrong. It’s not the 40s, this isn’t a late-nigt, smoke-filled underground jazz bar. It’s a retail store trying to entice me in to buy sandwiches using music and interior design to evoke this set (or similar) of connotations.

It’s a fake. A surface pretending to a depth it does not, can not offer.

But is it?

How is it any more fake than a 40s underground smoke-filled jazz bar deploying music (jazz) and décor (grungy, low lighting) to attract in punters to buy alcohol? What is fake about these surfaces (or, what would be the depth that would make it authentic – would the music being live make any difference?)?

And even if it is fake (which I’m not sure it is), then does that matter? If deploying music and lighting can make a (relatively) appealing environment to sit for a time, think, chat, read and have a coffee – or even just to look and listen in on as you pass and feel momentarily lifted – then is that really a bad thing?

Taxis using cycle lanes…

Originally uploaded by jonathantee

Every day, when I cycle to the British Library, I cycle along Goodsway, behind Kings Cross station and approaching the bridge under the new Eurostar line. The road and junction got renovated with the completion of the Eurostar line recently. Taxi ranks run alongside the station.

As you can see, there’s a cycle lane, leading to an ASL bay before the lights. But taxi drivers seem to have decided that they will sit in the cycle lane and ASL bay rather than stay in the car lane. Why? Because they’re all turning left. And it kind of makes sense as few cyclists are turning left here – it means the taxis don’t have to turn left across the cyclists going straight on.

But….. it leaves no cycle lane !!!

I don’t know exactly why it pisses me off (okay – only mildly, but, nonetheless!). Is it because the taxi drivers are in the cycle lane making my approach to that junction more dangerous when there’s a fair amount of traffic? Is it because whoever put the cycle lane there didn’t think through the fact that cyclists would be going straight on and taxis turning left, and so this behaviour would be inevitable? Is it because so many cycle lanes are just generally ill thought through and don’t achieve what they should?

Probably all of the above !!!

Does this irritate you?

For the past few days I’ve been listening again and again to an unknown track. As it’s on my ipod shuffle, I hadn’t heard it before and I have no idea who it is by, or what it is called… but it’s been grabbing, grabbing and demanding my attention. It won’t let me go. Why?

A description: it starts off with some vaguely dubby UKG-esque echoey rhythmic synth chords in the mid range. Hihat and other percussive sounds build a higher-pitched rhythmic backdrop. Vaguely samba-esque? The percussion then drops and out two big, low-mid range synth chords and an off-beat low bass (sounding once per bar) begin alternating every 8 beats. Very much LTJ Buken/early Logical Progression series style. Percussion rejoins. Very vibey, mellow. First couple of minutes.

Then the percussion drops out again and a big ol’ fat bass drum kicks in with an even deeper syncopated bass – deep house style. Nice The hihat and other percussion rejoins in classic offbeat house rhythm. In fact this starts to sound like quite early 90s Banco de Gaia. It’s impossible not to be dancing by this point.

Finally sampled male and female vocals cut in and out, again UKG-style. Every now and then some vocal-esque synth chords are overlaid.

And so it goes on in its wonderful, utterly addictive and compelling way.

Why is this so addictive?!

The syncopation between the bass drum and bass line w/ the offbeaty dubby overlay makes me jump around. It gives me that expanding from lower chest-downwards emotional warm tingle hollowness that music with big slow moving chords often does.

But why?

Murray Shafer, in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, suggests that low-pitched sounds with a high volume are experienced as touch – through the skin – as much as they are heard, through the ears. He also claims that modern electronic music makes much greater use of lower frequencies which are by nature harder to localise in space. As a result, listening to, say, dance music on a decent stereo leads to an effect of feeling immersed in sound:

“The listener finds himself at the center of the sound; he is massaged by it, flooded by it” (Shafer)

This effect being even stronger when listening on headphones, with the sound seemingly coming from within ones head. Listening with headphones, according to Shafer, causes the ‘acoustic horizon’ to shrink, with the outside (sonic) world excluded. The listener becomes the world, enjoined with the sounds of the music that constitute that sonic world.

So how does this link with this particular track? Well… the more I listen to it, the more I’m struck by the mid-low range of the chords, the deepness of the bass drum, the even deeper bass line, the lack of many mid-high range frequencies at all. The higher-pitched dubbby chords and cut up vocals seem to bounce along on top of this deep sea of sound. ‘Immersive’ is the correct word – this is music which caresses and holds the body. It isn’t coming at you from anywhere. It surrounds and envelops. The boundaries of your body blur with the music – your skin doesn’t separate you from the world (of the music) outside. Rather you feel the music (if listened to at an appropriately loud volume) inside your body – it passes right through your skin to be heard inside, in your organs. And even at very loud volumes this track is not harsh on the ear – there are no grating high frequencies – no guitars, no real ’singing’ to hurt the ear drum. Consequently, you can listen to this very loud

Immersion, an experience like being held in water, deep regular rhythmic sounds, no sense of separateness, blurred boundaries, broken up vocals heard indistinctly…. it all sounds very womb-like doesn’t it…

Anyways, it’s good, this track….

[update: turns out the track is 'Skidoos' by Akufen. Thanks Matt ]

Found myself in the British Library yesterday feeling irritated at the £3 I had to spend to copy 15 pages at 20pence per page. (Yes – it’s the trivial stuff that really matters, don’t let anyone tell you different).

Over a coffee and Green and Black’s chocolate bar (£1.90) later on I found myself wondering at how easy it is not to blanche at buying a pint (~£2.50-£3) but easy to bridle at an equivalent cost for getting access to some thought-provoking ideas (Milton Klonsky on Coney Island in this case) that could be with you the rest of your life.

Easy to think this is just a case of warped values I suppose: obviously ideas are far more valuable than coffee or alcohol… But if you need the coffee to take in the ideas, and want the regular enjoyment of a pint and a laugh with friends then….

Am i alone in still bridling at having to ask for a ‘regular americano’ rather than a simple ‘black coffee’?

Don’t get me wrong. I am truly grateful that britain finally has good coffee- I remember the weak, tasteless instant that passed for ‘coffee’ in the 80s. But why the silly, pretentious names for it. ‘latte’? What’s wrong with calling it ‘white coffee’?!

And what do they call black coffee in America i wonder?

Anyone with me on this? Or am I just (becoming?) a stuck in my ways curmudgeon?

Hmm…. So a busy month in December – off to Brazil for the World Ultimate Beach Championships in Maceio then two weeks of heads-down essay writing on my MA. Certainly no time for blogging…

And then last week I looked at visitor stats… what should have been no surprise – an absence of posts has declined into an absence of people checking for posts!

So here’s the dilemma – post more regularly (takes time, do I have enough interesting things I want to share regularly here), post less frequently (less chance people will bother to check if there’s only a post every now and again), stop posting altogether (seems a shame).

Part of the problem is not the not having ideas to post. Rather it’s a slightly perfectionist tendency of wanting to polish an idea pre-sharing because of the vaguely public arena of the blog. But maybe this is daft – the point of this blog is quite explicit – to stimulate conversation with friends and share the sorts of ideas I used to send in letters. So maybe the answer is simply to blog more frequently but with less fully formed thoughts – rough diamonds (or maybe not diamonds at all…). Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

Let me know if you think shorter, less thought out is more or less interesting !

Cycling yesterday and i found myself thinking ‘Jon is hoping that he doesn’t get caught in the rain’.

Hmm.. I thought. Facebook status update. Except I very rarely update my status and in fact increasingly rarely even log into Facebook. Too busy!

But I wonder about this tendency that seems to have remained of seeing oneself in the third person, communicated to others.

I did like hearing what other people- especially friends I see less often- were doing. The minutiae of everyday life. The normally private, mundane moments that we all share, but normally don’t share with each other.

Still. I don’t want to go back to wasting time on Facebook!

Anyone else had a similar experience?