NO GOOD (CAN COME OF THIS)

 I recently uploaded a couple of new songs to YouTube.

I think most of us, by now, have a bit of a love-hate relationship with digital media.  I abandoned Facebook and Twitter long ago for various reasons, but YouTube remains an important medium.  I have disabled the history and I don’t follow “suggestions”.  I just have a slowly growing list of channels that I check in on.  Mostly I like to listen to intelligent long-form discussions.  I guess I’m addicted to multi-tasking because most of the time this is a background activity while I’m beavering away in Revit.

 

 

That’s a song we used to do in the 70s when I had a pub band in Sheffield.  We were called
“Jump” which is the name of a mining village in South Yorkshire.  I use the past tense because coal mining is no longer a thing.  There was a bus called the “Jump Circular” that I used to see in Barnsley bus station as a teenager.  That was going to be the title of our first LP.  Those were the days of large circular vinyl “records”.

 

We played it quite differently in those days of course, closer to the “Swinging Blue Jeans” version.  And I used to use standard tuning on an electric guitar.  This impromptu version uses an acoustic sound and open G tuning. The rhythm is a bit more syncopated.  I’m a compulsive meddler when it comes to performing.  It’s interesting to watch footage of Chuck Berry on YooToob.  He was always messing with the timing, and the phrasing, and the keys, and the backup band, and Keith Richards 😊

Today I was listening to a discussion between Jordan Peterson and another psychologist.  Mention of Horus and the symbolic Eye, which is also Buddhist of course, in relation to “attention” as an aspect of human thought set me to doodling in a small notebook that I carry around.   

 

 

 

That’s a habit I had in my twenties and thirties that I have recently revived.  The era of digital devices means that I can “scan” that image with my phone and brink it into Autodesk Sketchbook for further enhancement.  I’m not suggesting that this has any deep meaning, but I do think that letting visual ideas bubble up from my subconscious on a daily basis is “good for my soul”  Contrary to the mischievous title of this post “Some Good Can Come of This.”

 

 

I uploaded an electric version of Little Red Rooster a few years ago.  This is a rather different take. Trying hard to let the remnants of my Yorkshire accent rise to the surface here and there.  Keeping my acoustic tuned to open G allows this kind of slide work to take place when the spirit moves me in that direction.

Father’s day is this weekend apparently.  Difficult for me to forget completely because I have a daughter.  Those of you with adult daughters will now that they tend to be good at sending out cards and such to remind you of the deep family bonds.  Signed on behalf of all 3 of my children and waiting for me on my desk when I went into the office yesterday.  

 

By the way the desktop background on my laptop is a compilation of photos from many phases of my life up to about 10 years ago when I last updated that image.  The one image that pops out is from my Parametric Pumpkin submission of 2012, a witch’s head assembled from vegetables, inspired by the painter Arcimboldo and based on the classic Walt Disney version of Snow White. 

I will conclude by sharing a picture from 10 years ago when we all gathered in Cape Town for my 60^th.  Joe had studied at UCT so that seemed like a good location for us to meet up.  The last time we had been there together as a family was 20 years prior when I spend a couple of years as a mature student in Joburg.  That was part of my transition from teaching in Zimbabwe, back to architecture which I had abandoned after my first degree in London. 

This has ended up as a bit of a personal history post.  Sometimes good to look back and take stock of the journey.  I have certainly been blessed with an interesting path through life.