London: Thursday: "...the constant music of a thousand guitars..."

[rhythmaning]

Thursday started bright and clear; it would have been great for taking pictures - I thought about wandering around Hampstead, looking down the alleys and the little squares, seeking out the cute cottages; but I wasn't in the mood: I was meeting a couple of guys to talk about the possibility of working together, and I was trying to focus on work rather than holidays.

So I sat at my brother's computer and played with iTunes. I am not a fan of music through the PC: after all, that is what I have a hifi for; but I couldn't get my bother's main hifi working. I had been using the PC's speakers to play my little walkman radio through, so once I noticed iTunes on the desktop, I thought I'd have a go with that.

It was fun, but I still think listening to music through a PC is deeply flawed. I played four versions of Coltrane's Afro-Blue (all live); I played a range of Simple Mind's tunes, a bit of Ellington; Sympathy for the Devil, by the Stones (I have no Stones' CDs, nor anything by the Beatles; nada. But I do like the Stones) - morgaine_x had prompted that one.

I think my problem with iTunes stems from the sheer volume of music available. I knew my brother had eclectic tastes; and I knew he had a lot of music. But I hadn’t realised just how much he had. Twelve thousand tunes; that’s about eighty days’ worth. Solid.

OK, there’s a fair bit of duplication there – some really dodgy genres – for instance, “Sixties Rock” and “60s Rock”; and some tracks didn’t seem to exist. But still, that is two months’ worth of non-stop music, twenty four hours a day.

And those genres: far too limiting, for me. Are the Rolling Stones 60s or 70s rock? (Or perhaps a special class of their own – geriatric rock?) Is Abdullah Ibrahim South African jazz or modern jazz? And Ellington, Armstrong and Basie – classic jazz? Big band? Sure, that is where playlists might come into it – but whilst I like some randomness (searching for one CD, catching sight of another – and knowing that that is what I really must here now - having no control over what I heard would piss me off. I would be pressing “skip” constantly.

For me, it really wouldn’t work. I like to choose a CD, pick it up, feel it. (And oh, the feel of vinyl – it is still so special.) Some things I can cope with dematerialising – money, share certificates. But music? Keep it real!

Still, I had a laugh playing about with my brother’s music. Please don’t tell him that I deleted twenty LPs’ worth of rare Amon Duul II tracks.

I went down to Hammersmith for my lunchtime meeting. I was early, so I went for a walk around. I used to know Hammersmith quite well – the first indoor gig I went to was at Hammersmith Odeon (and note, please, it will always be the Hammersmith Odeon, whoever owns it – and I went to the Hammersmith Palais a few times; and friends lived nearby.

Hammersmith tube station has changed beyond recognition. It used to be somewhere one went to in order to get to somewhere else – the Odeon, for instance; or the pub. Now, it seems to be trying to be somewhere to stay: because the tube station is no longer just a tube station, it is a shopping centre. A huge shopping centre, too. This struck me as being rather strange – I mean, I am sure it makes economic sense – using all that dead space above the rails – but aren’t there enough shops in London? And since the shops seemed to be the same as all the other shops everywhere else, why would anyone choose to go to the tube station to go shopping?

I strolled down King Street. At the traffic lights, a zealot with a megaphone was shouting at me: “Are you a sinner or a winner?” Can’t I be both? I am sure I am damned – well, I would be if I believed that this guy’s imaginary friend was really watching over me, keeping account of my actions (I must surely be in credit by now) – but can’t I be a winner and a sinner?

A little further on was an old man, a war veteran with a red poppy, silently holding a banner decrying the war in Iraq. Perhaps he should have been bellowing at people through a megaphone too; except everyone looked like they agreed with this guy, whilst they were running away from the zealot.

I went to the coffee bar where we were to meet, and grabbed a cappuccino. I then sat down and mapped out what I wanted to say. But J was early too. He wasn’t wearing a tie, so I took mine off – I generally prefer to be overdressed rather than underdressed, but this was the first time I had worn a tie in months, and I saw no reason to wear one if it wasn’t necessary. He got a coffee, took a couple of calls, and then we chatted for a while. C arrived, and we went off to eat. I hadn’t met C before – the purpose of lunch was so we could meet and get to know each other. It was a very positive meeting, and we agreed to talk further about the details.

I enjoy talking to people; I wonder if there is a job where I could make money, just talking to people?

We had lunch in a pub called the Hop & Pole. I couldn’t help thinking that this might actually be a pole dancing club, rather than a reference to the hop fields of Kent.

I walked back into the autumn sun, and went to the other Hammersmith tube station – the old Victorian one (it used to be called the Metropolitan line, but now it is the Hammersmith & City) – and got the train to Latimer Road. It is odd to call this the underground, because it is in fact high above street level. There were fine views of the Westway spur; and the new BBC building, with so many satellite antennae it looked like Jodrell Bank.

Latimer Road is pretty near some old kicking grounds: G spent many years living in different parts of Ladbroke Grove; and I spent a summer living in D&A’s flat around the corner from the All Saint’s Road, as my relationship with T fell apart (and T lived in a posh flat in Holland Park, the other end – the uncool end – of the Grove.

I was there to go to an exhibition, in a new gallery; I walked down towards Holland Park Avenue, nearly getting to the end of the road before realising I must have missed the turn. Towards Holland Park Avenue, it is quite salubrious; but further north, there are tower blocks and shutters on the shops and a nervousness in people’s faces.

I found the gallery. But I couldn’t find the door. I walked around the block, pushing at potential doors, ringing bells. It seemed hermetically sealed: nothing opened or slid. There appeared to be no way in. Perhaps this was the idea – maybe the whole exhibition was meant to be imaginary.

I was mighty hacked off, because I really wanted to see the show, and these few days were likely to be the only opportunity to see it.

I walked back down to Holland Park Avenue, getting my exercise for the day. I found streets I never knew existed: I knew that there was a Princedale St, because J&A – a different J, that is – lived there once, and I sometimes stayed with them when visiting London; but I hadn’t realised that there were also Kingdale and Queendale. Holland Park Avenue was busy: there were queues to get into the cafes and boulangeries; young women were out pushing their children in buggies, and there were teenagers streaming across the road from the comprehensive.

I got the tube, and went back to Embankment: because I had my camera with me now, and I wanted to take pictures – of the skyline, of the bridges, of the Thames. So I did. I walked south over the east bridge, and back north over the west bridge; and then I walked through the Embankment Gardens (remembering being there with a girl who broke my heart; and a song from Fairground Attraction: “I remember when we used to walk by the Thames, the lights on the Embankment like jewels on chains; I’ll never forget what you said from the start, you said “I’ll put a string of lights ‘round your heart”… Perhaps I’ll walk down the Embankment alone, oh sweetheart I’m glad that we met”) and onto Waterloo Bridge.

Looking east, the City was spread out beside the Thames, catching the afternoon sun. It was quite beautiful, from St Bride’s, hidden behind Fleet St (St Bride’s was the church where we had a memorial service for my father, before decamping to Kettner’s in Soho for a party; I really should remember that Kettner’s is always associated with loss and the blues), past the grandeur of St Paul’s and then the modern glass world of JP Morgan (well it used to be JP Morgan – I once went for an interview in Angel Court, a large building nestling down an alley opposite the old Stock Exchange building – now itself reduced to rubble, the trading floor long gone, as the City reinvents itself), the NatWest Tower (does anyone really call it Tower 42? No, I didn’t think so), the ever-phallic Gherkin and over to Canary Wharf, tall but far away.

I walked back again, past the painful jewels on chains, and caught the tube north; where I played with iTunes some more (Stereolab - though I found it hard to believe that with 12,000 tracks, my brother managed not to have French Disko; and Ellington – a lot of Ellington) and read.

The book I was reading was Jonathon Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I had started it the previous evening; it was compulsive reading: although quite long – three hundred pages – I read it quickly. It is a very powerful work, very powerful; it has made more of an impression on me than anything I can remember reading for a long, long time (by which I mean twenty years or so). It grabbed me quickly – within a page or two, I was hooked, and I knew it was going to be special; I hadn’t realised quite how hooked or how special. I can’t quite put my finger on just why I think it is so good, so gripping, so powerful – because frankly not much happens; a lot of walking, a lot of searching, exploring New York and emotions and families. It is full of beautiful, poetic writing – there are some genuinely haunting lines – and some wonderful ideas: loving something, someone so much one cannot speak of it; the overpowering need to write, to document everything; the horror of living when what you love is dead. And there are some magical stories and characters along the way. I was sad when I finished it – almost manic – the idea of being without it, without anything to read (though that story comes later).

So I sat and read; and then I went back into town.

I was meeting pshtaku at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society; I had never been to their London rooms, though I had walked past many times when down in London on business – I used to stay in Kings Cross and walk to the City, through Grays Inn, past Mount Pleasant (a misnomer if ever there was one), Farringdon and the Barbican. SMWS calls itself a “wee gem in the heart of the City”; and it is found above a pub/restaurant called the Bleeding Heart Tavern (I went there many years ago; my mother worked around the corner, in Hatton Garden). The heart was bleeding because it was freshly cut from an ox: Smithfield meat market is just down the road.

Aside from seeing pshtaku and having a whisky or three, the excuse for being there was the opening of an exhibition of painting by Jamie Primrose. Jamie is one of my neighbours, a prolific and successful painter – I bought my wife one of his pictures for Christmas last year. I really like Jamie’s work – he paints skies and mountains and Edinburgh and, recently, Venice – one of my favourite places. I hadn’t seen his pictures of Edinburgh before – they dated back before he moved onto our stair; but they were beautiful. I mistook one of his pictures of Edinburgh for Venice: the broad sweep of the Royal Mile was opaque, the cobbles looking like the muddy brown water of a canal. He manages to capture the light beautifully. They are lovely pictures.

It was busy; pshtaku and I picked at the hors d’oeuvres (some of which seemed a bit iffy – steak tartare, I think, which I didn’t feel should really have been left around in a warm room; still, I didn’t die; yet) and wandered around looking at the pictures - pshtaku seemed to like them as much as me; and then we sat and chatted; well, we’d been chatting all the time, but we got some more whiskies and chatted properly – about friends, about work, about LJ (never!), about Scotland (and, in particular, Orkney); and about whisky. And then some more about friends. It was very good conversation, and it was great to meet up with pshtaku again.

We left about nine-ish, me for the tube, pshtaku for a bus. Back in Hampstead, a little tipsy still, and very hungry (warm steak tartare really not doing it for me), I went and had a burger and a beer, sitting in what used to be a pub and is now part of a chain called Giraffe. I couldn’t quite work out why Giraffe made sense for somewhere that sold burgers, but it was fine: I sat and ate and read. And had a beer.

But I began to feel morose, melancholy; maybe being in London, alone again; maybe it was the book – powerful, sad, full of longing; maybe it was the whisky, the Scottish spirit pulling me down. It was strange – I had had a great day, and a lovely evening – I really shouldn’t have been feeling down; but I was.

And then I went to bed.

Comments

[morgaine-x.livejournal.com]

I love the light in the pictures.

And I'd be happy to burn you a CD of Stones stuff - for me, they transcend classification; my earliest memory of an album cover was my uncle's copy of "Let It Bleed". I have a tonne of their stuff, although, sadly, not the vinyl since my divorce. One of the best things about my early years in the UK was hunting down Stones' bootlegs in Soho & Camden.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the offer - but if I really, really felt the need, I'd go and buy "Get Ya Ya Yas Out" and "Beggar's Banquet"... But most of the time I am perfectly happy hearing the odd track on the radio!

I used to hang out in Camden Market when I was younger, too!