Knitting The Amen Break

Word up.

Today I learnt about the Amen Break via the medium of knitting. The optimum route to knowledge. Here is how it occurred: The Amen Break is a 5.20sec four-bar break, taken from The Winstons' 1969 track Amen Brother:

G. C. Coleman's drum solo constitutes this most re-used and re-abused of breaks. Gradually, it made its way into musical consciousness, especially in the late 80s when sampled music entered the mainstream. Swept into British consciousness through tracks such as Hijack's Style Wars, & America's N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton the amen break was soon a staple sample, forming the backbone for a huge number of tracks. It made this journey via, of course, legends such as James Brown & Parliament Funkadelic, where would we be without Parliament? We now find it all over the shop. Where the amen break really made its mark, however, was in the transition between house and breakbeat; the breakbeat side of things morphing into jungle & drum&bass, of which the amen became absolute staple. According to our 1XRA's Crissy Criss this beauty was one of the first jungle tracks:

Yum yum. You can hear our old friend, the amen pinning up this badboi too:

The mathematician and author of A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe Micheal S. Schneider, has discussed the mathematical attributes of the amen break. For him, the attraction of the amen break lies in its proportional reflection of the Golden Ratio: that  'a whole line may be divided in such a way that the length of the whole relates to its large part in the same way that the large part relates to the small part. In other words, the same relationship appears on different scales, comprehending a mathematically balanced whole.' This 'same relationship' he relates back to the human body, with the peaks in the visual soundwave of the amen break corresponding to the ideal harmonious proportions of the body. (There are some GREAT pictures that you should probably check out). I really like this idea, and in a 1XTRA mini-lecture the euphoric effects of the amen break were discussed at length with many from the DnB DJ community, though I'm not sure that it's anything beyond a wonderful and beautiful coincidence. 'Amen' is an interesting word, from Latin, Greek and Hebrew roots it means 'certainly', 'truth'.

ANYWAY. The breadcrumbs I followed to end up HERE were the delicious detrital morsels of Andrew Salomone, kindly thrown down by the Guardian. LOOK AT THIS!

Oh, this is brilliant.

Mmm-hmm. But wait! There's more:

This kindly artistic chap designed a jumper with tattoos anatomically corresponding to those on Amy Winehouse's body so that she could stay warm, yet maintain her 'publicly recognizable' image. What a lovely human. It makes me quite sad that she never got to wear it, I feel quite certain it would have cheered her, I know it would me.

This is he:

Do take a look at his blog --andrewsalomone.com-- I thoroughly enjoyed discovering an artist, who wonderfully, and quite poignantly I think, manages to negotiate the interaction between digital and craft, mass and artisan.

Here are some things to sing you out, just because I think you might like to hear them.

Oh, and if there's anything at all incorrect or objectionable present please do say something. [Samb, I know you'd be turning in your grave (if you were dead, and if you were reading this; two, thankfully, unlikely things) at my butchery]. I'm by no means an expert on all this, and I think I've established I LIKE LEARNING.

Our War

This is the only thing I've written in a good while.

Our War

That is,                                    first contact

exciting he was dead I                                    wanted

to kill                           them him eye               for eye

distance           I                       angry   and

  his                                          blood was on my shirt

from where I’d carried his body armour

I only cried when I read the letter

aloud I’d written to his mother telling

the story of his death, how it had all

happened, that the sergeant had given

him mouth to mouth and his signs of

life had given us hope

Don’t you drop him you fucking cunts. Don’t you dare drop him. Drop him and I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking shoot you in the fucking head.

1 in a million or a million million or something or
shot. the hole was tiny. he’s not losing

much blood he's

He’s dead. [subtitles: He’s dead.]

Exit wound at the front. He’s hit. Man down

man down the line. I couldn’t say it, I

won’t believe it. Man down man

down it needed passing. Must get to the sergeant

safe at back. No point. MAN DOWN.

LWMG. 30-40:1

I developed epilepsy & later an intolerance

to senseless pain. Now I am a teacher.

3^rd Platoon, 1^st Royal Anglican

Guidance: Contains very strong language and some upsetting scenes.

The Fourth of Few

As you may have noticed, this place of being has been rather neglected over the past few months. All those thoughts that were promised to be given the care and attention they might deserve have been left to wither by the proverbial wayside. (Or more to the point, I rather hope, invested in other people and other places; so sorry to you two who actually read this. I still love you.)

This alarmingly immediate decline is perhaps, in part, (the other being --avert your eyes all those currently surveying my curriculum vitae for employability-- a humongous lack of Time Management Skills) because another place of being has been rather busy of late. In September I moved down to London; a move that I found rather more difficult than I'd anticipated. Mostly because I tend to vastly overestimate my capacity for adaptation. I'm not much of a city-dweller, see. I like to be able to see stars. It was fine for the first couple of months because I nipped back and forth from Sheffield to bridge the gap between myself and the magnificent people I've left there. But gradually, as these visits petered out, I came to realise that I actually LIVED in London rather than going on weekly holidays to the capital to see the sights, do a little studying and engage in general Good Times in the City. This was quite a shock. Another shock came in the course, which isn't entirely what I was expecting. Wonderful, but unexpectedly disorientating and intimidating. The long and the short of it: I have been busy. (yes, I did just learn how to put a link in, aren't I clever? Next thing I'll be EMBEDDING things.)

Anyway, I hope that is satisfactory in explaining why I've been so neglectful of you. --Gentle reader, please forgive me. Thanks.

A post in the near future will be on the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (not Wichtenstein, as I've been calling him for the past few weeks.) I want to formulate a few thoughts on him because, as you may have gathered from the previous, I know nothing of him. His name gets bandied about a lot on our course by students and tutors alike so I think it about time I made the effort to make his acquaintance.

But enough of the past and the future: on to the present!

We're just starting a new course: Down: Melancholy, Depression and Regeneration. I'm approaching this one with a degree of apprehension, despite being more than eager to be back in London, studying things. My anxiety stems, I think, from the extremes that talking about mental illness, especially depression, tends to elicit. I find it difficult when conversations swing wildly from sentimentalised complete avoidances to sweeping generalisations that suggest that people should bloody well stop feeling sorry for themselves and get out of the house more. I can't help but get frustrated: I remember a particular a conversation with a friend (one of my best) who was of the (a bit paraphrased) opinion that everybody gets sad and that people with depression essentially need to pull themselves together. I definitely find it difficult to talk and write about depression, never having experienced it myself. That's not to say I haven't been very sad, there have been times I've felt like I've been a bit teetering on the edge of something consuming that might be something of depression but it's (and I'm very grateful for this) always passed. I'm certain, though, if depression were a case of just getting out of bed that the people whose lives have been very much affected by it (whether directly or indirectly) would probably have worked that out by now and would be skipping out of bed each and every morning. But I'm quite sure it's not. I really think, at this moment at least, that I'd rather take a step back and just talk about the things I've been reading...This might be me affirming the continual avoidance that surrounds depression but I'd rather have a better think and say what I really mean rather than boshing something out unconsidered, like.

It's hardly surprising that melancholia elicits such extreme, and often oppositional, responses. Melancholia has been considered since the late Middle Ages to to have 'stood in some special relationship to Saturn, and that the latter was to blame for the melancholic's unfortunate character and destiny' (Klibansky, p. 127). Not that we believe any of that astrology gubbins any longer. Associated with black bile, Saturn and in turn Kronos, who is 'distinguished by a marked internal contradiction or ambivalence' (Klibansky, p. 134), melancholy has been the site of much conflict and, for Freud, ambivalence. Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia' was on our reading list for this week and, reading it, I was surprised at how compelling I found it, having read only The Interpretation of Dreams prior to this. And I'm not going to lie to you, I rather struggled and straggled through it, got thoroughly lost and eventually drowned in a bog. (Oh, I AM enjoying this!) Maybe it is time for a revisit. One of the things that surprised me most were the metaphors of economy and exchange invested in libidinal attachment and energy. I suppose it's a metaphor that makes sense, and is easy to understand but I help shake that it goes somewhat deeper. Although obviously Freud could not have predicted the pharmaceutical  companies' profiteering their ways through mental illness, but it rings quite soundly. Freud seems to figure libidinal energy or attachment as entropic: when replacing a lost love-object, in normal mourning, the severance of the libidinal attachment is 'so slow and gradual that by the time it has been finished the expenditure of energy necessary for it is also dissipated'. Dr Ronald Pies, I have read today, suggests that 'we might say that depression is to sorrow as falling is to leaping'. To me this seems, again, to be verging on an entropy of mental health, which I think, though I'm not sure, is troubling. The inherent negativity of falling --down, descent-- and all its connotation --hell, lessness,-- is set up in direct dialectic with its opposite, leaping (up, ascent, heaven), which is inherently (though years of semiotic build-up) positive. All of the latter require energy to be put into the system in order for them to occur, suggesting an excess, a surplus and, consequently, strength and betterness. Falling is more passive, easier, requiring less or no energy input into the system (in a system where gravity happens) and is so considered weaker somehow. That depression is associated with this more passive, entropic (yes, I'm quite sure that's not an adjective, and even if it is I'm not quite using it correctly. Well, I'm the one with the keybard and the 'Publish' button.) notion of existence perhaps accounts for the idea that people should just pull themselves together.

This has been rather hurried and cobbled. The next one, I promise, will have much more strength and betterness.

Thirty-four Words

Thirty-four Words

I knew you before you 

had hairs on your chest, before

they clustered like old men

round a pub table, backs curved;

and though the silence is deep

and hollow,

I know you still.

A Certain Work in Progress

Deaf-Blind Signing

                        For O

fingers that encase gently, & more soft

than the shell of a hermit and kind.

flesh curved & velveteen concave the

undulating mouth of conch                 ring box

precious & held cargo, flesh & communication

to be known or at the very least react

digits tangle & multiply, segregate the

movement fluid into a meaning or

something that means something else

like a word                  a transfer         language = the ability to refer to something not there

something of flesh to flesh:

in skin there is so much touch that is not tactile

of opening & closing, presses & retreat

closeness, the intimacy of a pinch

a kite tacking under unseen pressures

soft & hard

      squeeze

laking as together as together

it is fragile, the as, a kind of comparison

&almost a mask, something to pretend behind, something false & that is not certain or comfortable in what it is. that reveals a lot. although to be comfortable in what something is is not everything

The sweat on our skin held us.

He will sketch out his communicative aim in the future perfect tense

The project of the speaker is always a matter of imaginative reconstruction for his interpreter and so is attended by a certain vagueness and uncertainty.

He said this isn’t what I meant to happen.

The First of Many

I had a lot of trouble thinking what to call this little external cupboard of my brain. When confronted with something which, I suppose, is intended to sum a person up or at least give an idea of who You Are, I found myself scrabbling for all kinds of grandiose literature-licking words (‘ephemeral’, ‘dreaming’) and wracking my brains for some kind of interesting hobby or character trait that would hopefully impress and ingratiate me to you, the unseen reader. I settled eventually on ‘Place to Be’ -a shamelessly stolen title of the wonderful song by Nick Drake on his 1972 album, Pink Moon.  Nick Drake is one of those musicians who I think will always be in my life, if that's not too pretentious a statement. There are those musicians and albums that come and go, cherished  for maybe a few months or years but sink back into the ether after a while, welcomely exhumed every now and then but largely laid to rest. Nick Drake, though, is someone to listen to any time. A keeper. The fragility of his songwriting has a melodious benevolence that, I think, is similar to the continual generosity of a favourite book...one that Just Keeps Giving, no matter how many times you read it. You know the ones: a gentle, kind constant. Very sentimental, I know. But I do like to allow myself these moments, despite their danger. 

This place of being (whatever that pertains to...linguistic, representational, personal, cyber-spatial) I hope will be a place to exercise nerve pathways that seem to have dissolved significantly over the summer. I want to it be a place where I can put down and make coherent thoughts that would otherwise pass through my brain neglected. A space for a few passing thoughts that, given a little attention, could be of some value in extricating. I want what I write here to be honest and considered: not just throw-away comment that I'll look back on within the week and regret. Although that's fine too -maybe it'll be a place of rage sometime. A friend of a friend once said that he tried not to do anything his Grandfather wouldn't do, and although I wouldn't adopt this maxim for all areas of life, I reckon what's behind it is pretty sound. (This friend is also the one who after graduating did away with his mobile phone so I may be enamoured with this statement rather than the one above, I'm not sure.) Although there'll no doubt be things that I do write that I'll not stand by when I look back on, that's the way it should be otherwise I wouldn't have changed or grown in that time. I'm not attempting  to carve out a monument or structure of What I Think: I realise what I write and my thoughts are contained only to these moments and are informed only by what I know now. Who knows what I'll know in a few months? But that is being and what it is to exist and be a person. It's also why I think 'Place to Be', albeit a little bit sanctimonious, will do nicely.