I sometimes listen to Radio 3’s Mixing It. Freaky stuff from every corner of music and only occasionally a bit po-faced. This week I stumbled across a web page about their visit to NYC in August 2002. They recorded a one-off programme with members of the downtown music scene, many of whom lived and worked within a few blocks of the WTC – Sonic Youth in Murray Street, Laurie Anderson in Greenwich Street, for instance. The programme is excellent – you can listen to it in Real Audio. Some of the artists interviewed have obviously had their worlds turned upside down by the event. Others do that amazing thing that only artists and egomaniacs can do – coming through a world-changing trauma, worldview, prejudices and ego intact – “yeah. It was a nightmare. And now I’m mostly working with tabla and tape loops…”
Tag: Life
Powerpoint in pedagogy
We’ve pressed the Powerbook and MS Powerpoint into half term service for our four year-old’s revision. In kiosk mode it’s easy to create a constrained sequence of words, letters, numbers that will only advance when he clicks in the right place and that provides an entertaining sound as a reward for getting the task right.
We learn: too much entertainment along the way is a major distraction (no pictures!); sometimes Olly wants to motor through the presentation thumbnails instead of following the sequence; knowledge acquired elsewhere (while browsing the web, for instance) is readily applied – “Why can’t I go backwards?”; sometimes computers are rubbish and spreading everything out on the table for easy scribbling and rearranging is best.
The whole thing makes me wonder if there’s an app out there for this kind of DIY educational computing. Something that would allow us to roll our own exercises easily and react quickly to the child’s demands? Something that would allow us to save the result to the web so others could play or so that we could call up exercises from anywhere?
Fireworks
Today we bought fireworks. I mean we really bought fireworks. They’re having a toofer at Tesco’s so we wound up with a shopping trolley-full of fireworks for half price. Driving them home was like The Wages of Fear – I maintained a steady 5 mph as the sweat beaded on my forehead. We’re going to set them all off in the garden next weekend. I hereby prophesy that we’ll manage about three Roman Candles before one or all of the small children present goes bonkers or a parent sets light to the shed and we have to call the whole thing off.
My come-back
I haven’t blogged for nearly a month. It was the shock. My carefully constructed blogger.com weblog exploded. I won’t go on about it. I’m better now. Anyway, I can confirm that blogging is not like riding a bike. I’m back on my bike now, though, thanks to the gorgeous Movable Type and to an excellent book (UK, US) I just got from the nice people at O’Reilly about blogging. So I’m going to ease myself back in with some frankly trivial stuff. Bear with me…
Normal service will be resumed…
The general weirdness and flakiness of Blogger lately (look at my lovely links!) has pushed me over the edge. I’m going to import the whole lot to Movable Type later today. Using the special temporary blogger template the MT people provide for this purpose I don’t even need to set up an RSS feed (thanks to Robin for the research). I don’t want to speak too soon but this could easily be my last day as a Blogger.com user.
Miss, Mr and Mrs
I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister, Pete Seeger
Miss Chatelaine, kd lang
Miss Lucifer, Primal Scream
Miss Punta Blanca, Jane Siberry
Miss Sadie Mae, John Lee Hooker
Miss Sarajevo, George Michael
Mr E’s Beautiful Remix (Butch ‘n’ Joey Remix), Eels
Mr Gold and Mr Mud, Townes Van Zandt
Mr Jones, Counting Crows
Mr Soul (very rare live), Neil Young with Booker T and the MGs
Mr Big, Free
Mr Clean, Frank Zappa
Mr Follow Follow, Fela Anikulapo Kuti
That Green Jesus, Mr Natural
Mr President, The Heptones & Jah Lion
Mr Ray, Suicide
Mr Spaceman, The Flying Burrito Brothers
Mr Wheeler, Pere Ubu
Mr Writer, Stereophonics
Mrs Robinson, Simon & Garfunkel
The Memphis Blues (Or Mister Crump), Louis Armstrong
Indirect Current
The North London Line (timetables here) is one of London’s marvelous oddities – it doesn’t go anywhere. Or at least not in the purposeful, busy sort of way that the main lines do. It sort of idly wanders through North London, going all the way from Kew by the river at the Western end to North Woolwich, also by the river, at the Eastern end. It doesn’t pretend to a giant Central London shed like the great 19th Century lines, all of which point urgently out into the provinces from their expensive land on the edge of the West End. It’s more modest. When I first lived on the North London Line (in West Hampstead), it was a very shabby affair – creaky slam-door trains, run down stations and never a ticket collector to be seen. Later Ken’s GLC annexed the line to his grand transport strategy – it even made it onto the tube map –?and then rail privatisation brought new trains and video cameras and a new name (Silverlink – everyone still calls it the North London Line).
The line still occasionally makes it into the news when nuclear waste is moved along it from the docks to a junction somewhere in North London for the journey to Sellafield but the big time was never really going to arrive. The North London Line is never grander than two tracks wide and the embankments and cuttings are so thickly lined with vegetation that you could easily be in the Cotswolds for most of its route – church spires glimpsed through trees, men leaning on shovels in their allotments – all observed at approximately walking pace. It’s this dilatory, not-at-all thrusting progress that always makes me wonder where passengers on the North London Line are actually going. I fantasise that they’re all flaneurs, poets (lots of them seem to be reading Blake, Auden) – or at least on their way to auditions. Of course, this is silly. They’re doing the same as me – going to work – but this is my reverie.
Anyway, to get to the point, standing on the platform at West Hampstead the other day – watching the guy who stands on the platform edge singing, as if the people waiting on the other platform were his audience – a train going in the opposite direction pulled in and I noticed that it had a name – one of those heavy-looking plaques (reserved, surely, for the grander cross country Express trains, not sliding door locals). The plaque said ‘Nikola Tesla’. For some reason I found this collision: electrical visionary – inventor and engineer of genuinely mythic stature (Google him if you don’t believe me) – and the ever-so-humble, hidden-away North London Line mind-blowing (I’ll leave the irony of the fact that the train carrying the name of this practically religious pioneer of alternating current is powered by direct current to someone who knows what they’re talking about). Whose idea was it? Are all the trains named after pioneers of electricity? Or famous Serbians? Or inventors? Did someone pay for the inscription? Did I imagine it? If I carried my camera around with me for the next five years would I ever see that train again? London still has the power to amaze.