Pat Metheny Orchestrion, originally uploaded by lemon.grass.

I am fairly hooked on Pat Metheny’s music, so I was really looking forward to seeing him live with Orchestrion at the Barbican Centre last night.  The atmosphere was good, and I had one of the best seats in the house, 7 rows back and right in the centre of the stalls.  The technology is fascinating - lots of solenoids controlling mainly acoustic instruments and some electric guitars.  He can control the whole setup from his guitar in almost real time.  It’s a great setup.  OK, so the technology let him down last night near the end of the concert, and his closing number had to be cancelled; that didn’t matter as we were treated to some more familiar pieces instead.  The trouble is that the automated setup has some serious musical limitations which in the end left me feeling that it was frankly boring.  Pat’s act used the orchestrion in two distinct modes: pre-programmed, and live.  In the pre-programmed mode, computers had previously recorded Pat’s playing of the orchestrion, and on stage he soloed as it accompanied.  In the live mode, the automated instruments sounded in response to Pat’s playing, detecting the tones of the notes and playing them on the many percussion and strung instruments in the ensemble.

Player pianos are fascinating devices, as Pat points out, and one can watch them for ages.  But frankly one doesn’t look to them to produce inspiring performances.  What makes an inspiring performance on stage?  The interplay between the players; the way they react to one another and inspire each other to go a bit further; the feeling that we, as members of the audience, are privy to the excitement which flows between the performers.  All that is lost with a pseudo-solo performance like this, and worse, the automaton doesn’t read and react to timing and mood changes in the live performance.  When Pat starts a soulful solo, and then the orchestrion comes in, it often comes in at the wrong speed.  A live backing group would be listening to the soloist and timing their entrance to match his tempo.  The opposite problem occurs when Pat leads the performance in the live mode.  The detection of which notes are playing and the reaction time of the mechanics leads to a noticable lag between the soloist’s performance and the accompaniment.  I did become use to this delay after a while, but it is a serious limitation, compared with multiple performers playing together.

Overall, I found the Orchestrion experience flat and somewhat disappointing.  As he freely admits, it’s an experiment, and he’s feeling his way. The most interesting part of the evening was listening to him talking about how it worked, and demonstrating the machine. He has a very pleasant manner and comes across well. I hope I get the chance to see him performing live with live performers soon, so that I can experience the real music.

There were problems, however.  The analogue monitors were subject to disturbance from the electrical interference generated by powerful electric locomotives as they drew power from the overhead lines.  This would scramble the displays for a minute or so as trains left the station travelling north towards Newcastle.  Over time the displays themselves became tired and began to fail, and it proved too difficult for the museum to arrange for them to be repaired.  Such systems are built by disparate consortia and put into museums as a result of goodwill and negotiation.  As people move on and firms are taken over or close down, the network of contacts which installed the displays can disperse.  First, the departures board stopped working, and then one monitor after another failed and was switched off.  I recall the day when I went to the museum to see a notice declaring that the display was to be removed; I was very sad.  This became one reason why I no longer regularly visited the museum.

Earlier this week however I visited once again to have lunch, and went up to the gallery to see what was going on in the workshops.  Imagine my surprise and joy to see that the live display had been modernised and re-presented, with five new flat-screen displays offering a much improved view of ECML operations.  I was thrilled.  The NRM had pulled a rabbit out of the hat.  My future visits to the NRM will be much happier ones.  Thanks, NRM!

NRM IECC display - overview.

NRM IECC Display - North of Doncaster.

“We asked 20,000 listeners ‘How would you rate your level of Mornington Crescent satisfaction? Excellent, good, or merely well above average?’  and the reply we got back, …,  came from a Mrs. Trellis of North Wales, who I see has ticked the box marked ‘Neither Good nor Bad,’ and also the boxes marked ‘Poor,’ ‘Very Poor,’ ‘Really Extremely Poor,’ ‘Words Begin to Escape Me as to Quite How Poor,’ and ‘Buttock-clenchingly Piss-Poor’.  In fact, Mrs. Trellis sent us back the wrong form, and if there’s anyone listening at Virgin Rail wondering where it got to, …”

Using Asterisk, I can connect telephones in my children’s bedrooms to the one in the kitchen, and allow them to make phone calls (with restrictions).  I can also connect to my home telephone system from the Internet and call my wife on a real phone from my iPod Touch, or make a call apparently from home when I am in a conference room in the USA.  Also, I can provide new telephone numbers in minutes (via VOIPuser for example) which connect directly to a particular phone in my house, or my PC wherever it is in the world that day, or to an automated message.  I can receive voicemails and have them sent to me by email.  I can also write simple teleohony apps which (for example) tell my wife how many emails she has when she dials *90 on the phone in the kitchen.  The telecoms world becomes my oyster.

Asterisk is available in many forms, both in source and binary distributions designed to run on a PC.  The easiest approach is to dedicate a PC to running Asterisk (though mine also runs a firewall for my home network and a disk server).  Pre-packaged distribtions for this are available and the one I prefer is Trixbox.

Getting Asterisk to work in the UK with caller-id can be tricky.  Having struggled with it several times and found a solution which works, I thought I’d write it down both for my own reference and to help other people struggling with this problem.

1. Install Trixbox 2.8.0.1 from CD.  Trixbox is based on the CentOS Linux distribution.  Mind, it will find and destroy *all* your hard disks at installation time.
2. Upgrade to Asterisk 1.6.0.10 (I think)

# yum clean all
# rpm -del –nodeps kmod-dahdi-linux dahdi-linux
# yum -y update           (this takes a while)
# yum install kmod-dahdi-linux dahdi-linux

3. Then edit /etc/modprobe.d/dahdi to add a line as follows:

options wctdm opermode=UK fwringdetect=1 battthresh=4

4. Then edit /etc/asterisk/chan_dahdi.conf to add the following lines after “usecallerid=yes”

cidsignalling=v23
cidstart=polarity

NOTE that Asterisk seems to refuse to use the outgoing line after a reboot until the line is unplugged and plugged back in again!

The middle teenage years and the time up until one goes into full-time employment seem to me the most exciting and turbulent time of life emotionally, and one to be lived fully, drunk deeply.  The ups and downs of teenagerhood can seem extreme.

I would like to understand better how other people were cared for during their growing years.  Does a supportive adult outside the immediate family play a role in most people’s growing-up?  How has that changed over the last few decades?  The Internet might suck our children’s attention into their computer screens, but it doesn’t change their emotional needs.  So where do today’s teenagers get the emotional support they need and the wisdom that they will need?  Can the Internet have a positive role to play here, as well as the negative tendancy to diminish social contact with older people?

I have always wanted to be a godparent, and it’s been one of the disappointments of life that no-one has ever asked me to take that role.  Godparents are of course a mixed bag.  I’ve had three, only one of whom I can really even remember.  My children have 10 between them.  We chose them with as much care as we could, but only two or three of them have been any good.  It’s obviously not an easy thing to get right, nor an easy role to fulfil.

In addition to the normal banter of our social-networking friendships, I have been talking to some of my younger social networking contacts about issues they have in their lives.  I didn’t set out looking for mentoring-type relationships at all, and in fact I generally steer clear of younger contacts so that I can behave badly online without corrupting children.  However a few carefully-chosen such contacts have really added a special element to social networking for me.  It’s a far cry from godparenting with the commitments which that implies, but it’s not unrelated.  It’s almost tempting to think of setting up a service to put wise old folk in touch with needy teenagers; for about a second.  I think such contacts are much more personal (spiritual) than would be best served by an on-line matchmaking service.  Vouching for the wizened wisearses would be impossibly dicey, with reputation scores being impracticable, and all sorts of undesirable results possible.  However, I do think that social network sites can provide places where such contacts can be made, slowly and carefully.

The flip side of all this is that one has to be careful not to end up letting the activity of supporting others drown out the support one needs oneself.  I use social networking for amusement and to let out my own feelings, and gain a supportive buzz from my online friends.  Other people have told me that sometimes this can become a real burden.  Just as in the rest of life, a healthy balance is needed.

It does seem that demand outstrips supply in this market! I wonder if this will change over the next decades.  There are lots of wise old folk out there who are also lonely.  Perhaps as the population ages, older people will become sufficiently computer literate to get connected with younger folk looking for advice and support.  This is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

One of the troubles with Plurk, though, is that it sucks up a lot of one’s time and energy.  Fairly early on I became Plurk-obsessed, spending all night typing messages to people (you know who you are!).  After a while I got over it and scaled back to a manageable level.  One of the key features of Plurk is the ability to turn on and off one’s subscription to the posts of one’s “friends”, without dropping them as friends, and without them being informed.  There are lots of ways of managing one’s reading load on Plurk, but mine is to reduce my friend list as much as possible and then to switch on (”follow“) only those friends whose Plurks I genuinely want to read.  In this way I can pay full attention to those people.  If I tire of reading someone’s Plurks, I switch them off for a while and try again in a few weeks.  If they stay off for ages, I eventually drop them as a friend.  Usually, they haven’t been commenting on my Plurks, so the uninterest is mutual!

In these ways, I select and get to know a group of people of whom I eventually become quite fond.  Some of them, I get awfully fond of.  To be fair to me, I haven’t fallen hopelessly  in love with anyone on Plurk (you know who you nearly were!), but that’s only because I’m older and a little more balanced than perhaps I once was.

Then comes the sad part: sometimes people leave Plurk.  As I mentioned before, it can be a terror in stealing one’s free time, or one’s otherwise committed time, or one’s creative time.  (I have worried about this myself a bit, because my creative activities have certainly suffered.  But my social life has certainly benefited.)  So they leave, and leaving is usually a struggle, because those left behind cling on (”We’ll eat you up - we love you so”, said the Wild Things).  The manner of leaving therefore becomes sudden and shocking - a clean break is the only way to do it.  Then comes the grieving.  I’m doing some of that today as you might have guessed.

As a one-horse social networker so to speak, I lack the confidence in cyberspace that some of my friends have - “I’ll see you elsewhere on the Internet”, some of them say.  But I think, “But what if I don’t?”  So I need to grow up and remember that real contacts made will last beyond Plurk.  I still remember the brother of one of my remaining Plurk friends, who left last Summer.  I was so upset that I tracked him down and met up with him in the pub.  Must do that again actually.  I almost managed to meet another plurker at Leeds station a few weeks ago, and have every hope of meeting a Canadian plurkfriend in Vancouver next week.  Physical hugs are more satisfying than virtual ones, but the sad thing is, one gets them so much less frequently.

Of course, one makes contacts and loses them again in person as well as on the Internet.  One big difference though is the turnover rate.  I’ve made more deep contacts online since June last year than I have in person in the last 10 years.  (I’ve likened it to a second teenagerhood.)  With those who have left Plurk, I know that I won’t have the daily contact in the future that I have enjoyed in the last months.  There’s no doubt that I will be grieving.

Will I “learn” from these natural, blameless losses not to get into such deep emotional commitments?  Perhaps getting into deep relationships on Plurk has been part of the recovery from my mid-life crisis, exploring the possibility of making commitments again, having lost the ability to do that completely a few years back.  Part of me really hopes I don’t “learn” not to do that - the part of me that has always been an over-committer; someone who is willing to throw themselves into an activity or commitment without reserve, without keeping something back for a rainy day.  I love that attitude, because it represents the living of life to the full, the plunging deeply into incarnation and getting the most out of one’s experience of life.  If I have re-learnt part of that through Plurk, then it’s been an experience well met, well sent, well planned.

Catch that speck of hate, which you created;
Hold it, and convert it into love.
Grow with it, then release it
To the world.

I wrote those lines for a fellow student and friend at university, Andy T.,  who had a lot of anger.  He was much impressed and took the poem away with him.  It also worked for me, as part of the introspection which was already part of my life by then.  I was really able to catch myself in the process of thinking a nasty thought, and hold the thought, cherish it and change it into a loving one.  It was quite a revelation and several of my friends took it on board.  Nowadays there’s not much hate in my life, but I filter my feelings less too.

May the events that seek me
come unto me;
May I receive them
with a quiet mind
Through the Father’s ground of peace
on which we walk.

May the people who seek me
come unto me;
May I receive them
with an understanding heart
Through the Christ’s stream of love
in which we live.

May the spirits which seek me
come unto me;
May I receive them
with a clear soul
Through the healing Spirit’s Light
by which we see.

The loaf is soft and moist, and has a cheesy layer of shredded red pepper and onion in the middle.  Our family of six gets through one loaf in a meal, but larger people might be hungrier still.  Typically I make two and freeze one - it freezes well.

The loaf

225g ground cashew nuts
100g fresh wholemeal breadcrumbs (stale white ones also work!)
100g finely chopped onion
25g  butter
1 clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
2 eggs, beaten
150ml milk
grated rind of one lemon
half-teaspoonful of finely chopped marjoram
salt
freshly ground black pepper

The filling

100g finely chopped onion
225g shredded red pepper (very approximately)
25g butter
freshly ground black pepper
salt
100g coarsely grated Edam or Cheddar cheese
1 egg, beaten

Method

Set the oven at 200C (400°F, gas mark 6 (UK)).  Note that both the loaf and filling require chopped onion, so chop it all at once!

To make the loaf, mix together the nuts and breadcrumbs in a bowl.  If using broken cashew pieces, grind in a mixer together with chunks of bread for the breadcrumbs - it seems to grind better with both together.

Fry the onion in the butter until soft and golden brown. Add the garlic and fry gently for a few moments longer without allowing it to colour.  Take out of the pan and add to the mixed nuts and crumbs.

Beat the eggs with the milk, lemon rind, marjoram, salt and pepper.  Pour into the nut and crumb mixture and mix thoroughly.

To make the filling, fry the onion and red pepper in the butter until almost soft but not browned.  Season liberally with black pepper and a little salt, then remove from the heat and add the cheese and enough beaten egg to bind the mixture.

Line a 1 litre capacity hinged loaf tin (I just use a bread tin) with greaseproof paper and press half the nut mixture into the bottom of the tin.  Spread the filling mixture on top, then cover with the remaining nut mixture.  One could decorate the top perhaps with nuts, but I haven’t tried that!

Bake in the pre-heated oven for 30-40 minutes or until firm.  (In a Rayburn or Aga it seems to take longer.)

Serve hot with Béarnaise sauce accompanied with caulifower or broccoli, or (as we prefer) a tomato and onion sauce made with a roux, and carrots and potatos.

I spent the day in Annecy. It deserves a blog entry of its own, but for now here’s the nicest photo I managed to take.