Mary Rose Cook

I saw my old friend, Max, this weekend and he recommended For Whom The Bell Tolls. I bought a copy and started it on the train home from Leeds. I have just got to a very tense scene where Robert is in the guerrillas’ cave and is asserting his authority over the disillusioned Pablo.

Hemingway writes so plainly and everything is so well grounded, literally, in the senses. He gives us a few specific details to convey a meal, or an environment. His rope-soled canvas shoes and his oily wines are impressions that rest upon our tongues and beneath our feet - at our points of contact with the world.

A few years ago, I was killing time at the airport and I read the first few pages of a Tom Clancy novel. Clancy is a writer who, presumably to maximise his output, begins sentences with very little idea of where they are going. So, he spends most of his time writing himself out of linguistic holes. He will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid repetition, referring to the spinning blades of the helicopter to avoid repeating the word rotor. In contrast, if Hemingway has said wine already, he will say it again if it helps make the sentence clearer.

The videos from C41, the second iteration of the Mac software development conference, are now online at curator Rentzsch’s website.

Wil Shipley’s talk on hype is particularly good.

I just cannot stop listening to B. Fleischmann’s Melancholie, an electronica re-interpretation of Schubert piano miniatures. So beautiful and so sad. Danke, Theresa. Get it.

Heading off to Berlin. A guy with a skateboard has, so far, been with me the whole way. I wonder of he is going too.

Look at this cover. People on the tube are going to think I’m reading a fucking romance novel.

Loathe as I am, I am compelled:

The external monitor is not on because, when I said to the guy in the Apple Store, “All the cables I need are included, right?”, instead of answering, “No, they’re not. You’ll need to buy a special adapter”, he, either lying or mis-informed, said, “Yes”.

This is the first time I’ve had a proper keyboard and mouse for my laptop. The big joke is, I keep on reaching over them to get to the inbuilt trackpad and keyboard.

Pictured: 20” Apple Cinema Display, MacBook, microKORG, iPhone, Tascam US-122, SM58, children’s eight-note glockenspiel (in C).

What about this? The music starts and, after a little while, you hear static and then the click of the radio being switched off. Someone begins speaking to someone else in the room and, thus, a play begins, only to be interrupted by one of the characters opening a window and the music resuming from a car parked outside. Or this? Past loves are characters who have left Neighbours: “I just bumped into Karl Kennedy and he said that Sophie had rung from Brisbane and she’s going out with a drug dealer” etc.

I play guitar all the time, but some weeks, even some months, I just can’t write music. But then, out of nowhere, my fingers are in some configuration, and I pick some pattern and it sounds good. I record it into Ableton Live and start messing around. Maybe I try to sing sad (always sad) melodies over what I have recorded, or maybe I tinker with my keyboard or doss around making crazy effects to add to the guitar. And things get easier after that because one riff suggests another.

So, after that, I usually end up with a few consecutive sections of song. This is the first draft. I might then send an mp3 to my Dad to get his opinion, or just start adding sections or layers that sound good. I might keep the original vocal melodies or rip them out and try again. I might start doing some drums, one of the few musical things I can do when I’m not feeling inspired.

Once the song is finished, I write out the nonsensical ramblings that I sang when working out the vocal melodies, take my meter and syllable counts from there and then write some real lyrics.

By this point, the original idea is usually lost. If I’ve kept it in the song, it is by sheer chance because the music is so hard to find that the idea must be discarded at the first sign of its incompatibility with the song. So, the lyrical idea doesn’t so much drape over as balance on top of the music.

Or, to put it another way, the wine never shapes the glass.

On Sunday morning, I took the tube from Brixton to Leicester Square, walked down Charing Cross Road and sat on the steps of Trafalgar Square. As I smoked a cigarette, someone went past with a cup of coffee and so I got up, walked to Pret and got myself a cup and then resumed my position.

I sat in perfect contentment, the misleadingly named Destroyer playing on my iPhone, the sun in my eyes and the coffee warm between my hands. I thought about how happy I was.

Twelve-thirty came and I walked up the steps of the National Gallery to meet my Dad. We looked at some Van Dyke paintings and then headed off to see some Rembrants.

My phone rang. It was work and something was broken and I had to go in.