I adapted the name from Kevin Werbach’s Werblog, which seemed like a cool thing to do at the time. I’d been blogging for a few years before that (since the twentieth century) but only fragments survive. The archive suggests I used to update it a lot more too – back before Twitter. Anyway, I’ll tweet [...]
Last week I used one of the days of ‘community leave’ the BBC gives me to spend the day interviewing candidates for deputy head at the junior school in Hertfordshire where I’m chair of the governors. I was one of three governors on the panel, along with the school’s excellent head and our very brilliant [...]
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Posted 16 May 2012
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Tagged: career, governor, Hertfordshire, job, junior, primary, recruitment, school, teach, teacher, teaching, volunteer
1984. I’m well into my fourth ‘gap year’ (in fact, I’m redefining the term ‘gap’). I’m working at a telesales place in Queen’s Park. This telesales place is different from the other dumps I worked at during the slack years, though – it’s run by a Californian cult whose working practices involve shouty ritual humiliation, [...]
The Player Piano was the Tupac Hologram of its day. The most thrilling of our inventions are the ones that return to us a person we’ve lost or that recall a scene from the past that we couldn’t have experienced or a place we couldn’t have known. There’s a rush, a kind of zipwire effect. [...]
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Posted 22 April 2012
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Tagged: 2Pac, BBC, Broadcasting House, classical, history, Igor Stravinsky, Media, memory, Music, Pianola, Playel, Radio3, rapper, recording, reproduction, Rex Lawson, Tupac Shakur, uncanny
I love a bed. I should leave it to a radio production expert to explain what I mean by a bed, but since I don’t have one to hand, a ‘bed’ is the radio term for sound (usually music) played under the presenter’s voice during a link. In music radio it stops things going dead, [...]
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Posted 13 April 2012
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Tagged: 6Music, Africa, audio, background, BBC, bed, DJ, Gilles Peterson, John Humphrys, Liberia, location, Music, presenter, radio, Radio1, Radio4, Sound, studio, Today, Zane Lowe
Everyone’s going on about curation these days. We’re all curators now. But yesterday I witnessed some of the old-fashioned variety, the kind they do in art galleries, and I was blown away. I took two of my kids to Tate Britain (four different modes of transport: train, tube, boat and bus – I suspect that’s [...]
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Posted 10 April 2012
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Tagged: Art, Britain, Clore, collection, curation, curator, David Blayney Brown, film, gallery, history, Museum, painter, Patrick Keiller, Photography, Robinson Institute, Tate Britain, Turner
The ‘Spirit of Schubert’ finished a week ago. It was Radio 3′s biggest ‘takeover’ yet – over 200 hours of output devoted exclusively to the work of Franz Schubert. Every one of his ‘performable works’ was played, many in brand new versions, some for the first time ever. It was a remarkable thing – and [...]
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Posted 09 April 2012
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Tagged: BBC, classical, composer, curation, Music, online, radio, Radio3, Schubert, season, takeover
Some disagreement out there about what BERG’s Little Printer is for. I don’t have any special insight but I think it’s a charming and clever thing and I badly want one (I’ve put my name on the tell-me-when-I-can-order-one mailing list). So I had a think about what I’d print if I did have one: Inscrutable [...]
This crisis (I’ll call it that. There are better words but this one has a Greek origin) makes you think doesn’t it? It makes you think, among other things, about what a country is, how we see other countries, how they see us. For example, the massive, inarticulate bloody-mindedness of the Greek protestors looks, well, [...]
Robert Scoble’s got a touching video on Google Plus today. He’s outside Apple’s Cupertino HQ and talking about his first encounter with an Apple computer. He talks about unboxing an Apple IIGS, the last in the line of pre-Mac Apples and a hugely influential machine in its time. He says: That was the time I [...]
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Posted 06 October 2011
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Tagged: apple, career, change, computer, death, fork, Mac, Obituary, RIP, steve jobs, unbox