Without the state

Joan Baez and Billie Holiday

Listening a few days ago to some early tracks by Joan Baez (on the Woodstock DVD) I realised just how beautiful her voice was then. I don't know of any other singer before or since with quite the same quality. I don't just mean it was a good voice. There are many good voices, - Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Eva Cassidy, Kate Bush, Aretha Franklin - each with a distinctive timbre that identifies it within a couple of notes. In Joan's voice however there are no overtones - it gains its identity from its purity and clarity.

At Woodstock for example she sang the Ballad of Joe Hill giving the song an intensity that transcends mere performance. Two other favourites of mine are traditional songs (from the Joan Baez Ballad Book of 1972 - on vinyl) 'Go away from my window' and 'Barbara Allen' again both sung with an intense directness and purity.

At the other end of the spectrum is Billie Holiday. One of the most beautiful and affecting albums of all time is Lady in Satin. Here the 'voice' has almost gone, all that is left are overtones and resonances of a pretty desperate life. Listen to 'You've Changed' or 'Violets for my furs' to see what I mean.

I don't know why two such different voices can both be called beautiful. Perhaps in Billie's case it is the ability to hear what she was, still buried in the voice we hear now as the beautiful woman is buried in Rodin's sculpture of the old woman "She Who Was the Helmet-Maker's Beautiful Wife"

I love music

I love music - I think I always have. My earliest musical memory is probably of hymns on a sunday evening with my grandmother. I became interested in jazz and blues however from a very early age - probably about 11 or 12. I still have some pre-recorded reel to reel tapes of Ellington and Fats Waller I acquired about then - unfortunately I don't have the equipment to play them. Since then I think my musical tastes have continued to grow

When I'm working in what I laughingly call my office (you can see about 50% of it behind me in the photo!) I always have music playing. Most of the time I'm playing compilations put on MiniDisc. The music is therefore in the background but even so there are some tracks which always make me put down my pen or sit back from the keyboard and listen.

I've listed some of them below.

Vissi d'arte from Tosca
You've changed - Billy Holiday (from Lady in Satin)
Summertime Blues - Who (Live at Leeds)
Dos Gardenias - Ibrahim Ferrer (Buena Vista Social Club)
How blue can you get - B B King (Best of B B King)

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What stops you in your tracks when you hear it?

Built environment in education

Perhaps this joint press release from the DCMS and DfES is the way to tackle the poor quality of design in the public realm. It is better than nothing of course but I'm pretty sure we've been there before. I remember assisting on a training course for teachers covering these issues in the 1970s. I haven't seen a particularly high level of awareness since then (by teachers or taught).

Portmeirion

Until City Comforts picked up my post on bad design I hadn't realised that there was a Portmeirion web site. Portmeirion is of course well known to many as the location for the cult TV series The Prisoner but is a magical place in its own right. I have some photos somewhere which I will post when I get the chance.

I have a dream

It is 40 years since Martin Luther King spoke in Washington. Read his speech again here

History of bad design

I have a few old planning books. It is depressing to see how we are so often still failing to learn the same lessons. I wonder for example if anyone remembers the books by Ian Nairn (published in the 1950s) called "Outrage" and "Counter Attack" which described in trenchant terms the mess we were making at the time of the public environments in which we lived.

Nairn wasn't even the first. "England and the Octopus" by Clough Williams-Ellis (he of Portmeirion) was published in 1928 and in the language of the day said much the same thing.

In that book are two cartoons from Punch dating from 1919.

I'm most emphatically not saying we shouldn't be building - only that after all this time we still appear to be unable to do it right.

Its a man thing!

Being male and over 50 I have this thing about steam engines, so I was rather taken by this sad little engine outside STEAM in Swindon.

Inistioge

My Ireland photo album, includes a photo of the village of Inistioge. There are some rather different photos here, which I discovered quite by chance on the Irish Eyes TypePad blog

Prison and George W Bush

From an interview with Joan Baez in the Guardian:

...prison is an education. Anybody who wants to know anything about themselves or their own country should spend at least 24 hours in the local jail. Especially anybody who is running for office. They should do a week."

Then she laughs again. "And George Bush should be a lifer."

Blogs as Place

There is a fascinating discussion going on at Ecotone about the idea of blogs as place rather than being about place.

I'm currently trying to read a hefty book called "The Production of Space" by Henri Lefebvre. According to the blurb this is about:

a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live).

Now my reading of this so far is still patchy and incomplete but what is interesting in the present context however is actually a comment by the translator to the effect that:

English speaking experts tend perhaps not to use the word 'space' with quite the same facility as their French speaking counterparts use the word espace, but they do have a corresponding fondness for such spatial terms as 'sector' and 'sphere'. (footnote p8)

Now what I think that means is that the idea of non-physical space is more than just a metaphor - and I think I agree. Lefebvre is probably not the first to make that point. His book dates from 1974while about 10 years before that another writer, Melvin Webber, wrote an article called "The urban place and the non-place urban realm". His argument was that communities of interest no longer depended on propinquity. I haven't been able to find a URL for the article but this is from a paper on a similar theme

In 1964 Melvin Webber challenged the notions of community and centrality used in urban studies by demonstrating that ‘community without propinquity’ was emerging within certain social networks. He argued that individuals were enmeshed in an overlapping range of groups, and that increasingly these social networks were not limited by physical or geographical location.

This is long before the web and even before much of the writing of Ted Nelson so Webber was pretty much ahead of the game. (Interestingly however Nelson coined the term 'hypertext' in 1965!)

What this all means I think is that a weblog, especially one with a wide user base offering commetns and discussion, is a place, incorporating many of the characteristics of a physical locality but adding new features of its own. After all how often do we see terms like 'drop by' etc in relation to someones blog?

Could sites like RedPaper be viewed similarly?