Late Style

I’ve been exploring potential links with Imperial where I did my PhD and have managed to get myself an invitation to a closed workshop on Third Wave AI (3AI, Human-Like Computing HCL, Artificial General Intelligence AGI). Very blue skies academia. No deliverables. No commercial applications until 2030s. I had to submit 500 words on my current research and I got invited! Sounds silly because it’s just a day’s workshop but I’m excited.

So that’s my news, other than missing Lakeview and wanting a dog, and fantasising about living in a motor home.

Movement between D and G in Wave by …
Sleeping and dreaming
Intrusive thoughts – split off, egodystonic re flat or behaviour
Music playlist from 2003, 16 years ago (56y)
Death, shroud, dressing gown
Piano chords in muscle memory
Bingeing at 5 pm, happy hour
Yesterday’s nightmare day, no rescue fantasy, but nice walk (but cryptic)
Indoor day, reaction formation … against what?

I often scan through the travel page at the back of the NYT. I even have a list of places at the back of my moleskine.

• Winter – Caribbean, island hopping on boats /planes, Cuba
• Spring – Greece
• Summer – Amsterdam, or Frisian Islands
• Autumn – Cornwall, or New York or Shanghai

Travelling slowly by trains and boats. Brief two week trips, and once a year stay for longer, like six weeks or three months. Maybe a sailing course in warm weather.

Amagansett
Long Island

Travelling alone, independent, light. Not looking back. Trying to shed as much of myself, my past, my stuff. I can feel so free away from home.

S writes

Had a great time but it’s a bottle best left beautifully in view but very tightly corked

Love the metaphor. Things not to do, paths not to take, however enticing. Maybe at another time of life I might have gone there. Getting old and letting go, mourning the irretrievable past, youth.

The ponies run, the girls are young
The odds are there to beat
You win a while and then it’s done
Your little winning streak
(Leonard Cohen)

I’ve been out and about in Amsterdam, which really means hopping between cafes and bars, trying not to catch a cold in between. In fact I caught a cold on Sunday afternoon walking round Vondelpark – it was such a long walk, and an immersion experience in Dutch social behaviour, mainly bicycles, families, couples and ease.

Vondelpark

The Dutch seem so easy, so relaxed, so carefree, so comfortable within their bodies. I’m always confronted by my Englishness when I come here. I love the Amstel river and a cafe on it called de Ysbreeker just up from where the Prinzegracht feeds into the river. And there’s a lovely old brewery on the Herengracht where it gets narrower as it nears the dam.

Today is a blustery old day though, some storm sweeping in from the north – glad I’m not landing at Schipol. The author in the book I’m reading has just come across something his father wrote in a student magazine when he was 18, and he wants to give his father some advice and correct the article! What advice I would have given my father?

There was an op-ed article in the NYT at the weekend written by David Brooks about Selfism. He often writes about social psychology and I thought he was describing a new development from the judgemental critical super-ego (Old Testament god) and ego-ideal (Christianity) to a non-judgemental meaningfulness of the self. I was beginning to think this was very interesting until I suddenly realised he was being completely ironic and mocking the snow-flake generation (and Trump as well). I felt so stupid and gullible that I hadn’t spotted the irony straight away, but then kept coming back to the article and ended up thinking it was cleverly ambiguous. I was hoping that it offered a new way to transcend guilt and shame and all those legacies of religion within our culture (and our psyche).

I watched ABC Murders, which had a very clever plot. Poiret’s obsessional attention to detail is like a smoke-screen to his Freud-like speculative reasoning which in some fictional way always leads him to find the perpetrator. His Catholicism was interesting too.

Just watched Nancy Pelosi winning the speaker’s chair on CNN. So moving. Such a moment of hope. I keep writing in my Moleskine that maybe today is the tipping point. Hope against hope. And before she spoke, the minority leader Kevin McCarthy talked about representative democracy in a way I haven’t heard in the UK for years. Goodness knows what the new year is going to bring this country. It’s such a mess.

I was too tired last night to anything except fire up Amazon Prime, and saw the most awful film. It was called Black Mother, set in Jamaica, and had been compared in the NYT review with The Harder They Come (1972). But it was complete rubbish, absolute rubbish. I don’t think I have seen a worse film. And the guy who made it is described on LetterboxD as –

Khalik Allah is a self taught filmmaker and photographer. His profoundly personal work has been described as visceral, hauntingly beautiful, penetrative and honest.

Really? Serious doubts about the NYT reviewer’s judgement.

This holiday season has been manic, relatively speaking, given that I usually don’t do much. For some reason evenings have been eaten up and evenings are when I write. It’s almost as if the day has a trajectory which lands me late afternoon in a space which dictates the remains of the day. AI is still in the cardboard box. So is Spanish now. Resurrected is jazz piano, especially Swing rhythm and “comping”. And I continue to write stuff for this blog. There is just not enough time. In fact the piano could easily occupy my entire day, what’s left of it when I’m not dashing out on some other mission.

Anyway I’m off to Europe, hopefully not for the last time as a European. There’s nothing to pack since I’m only going to be in Amsterdam a few days. (EasyJet from Luton!). I’ve bought a Bluetooth super-thin keyboard that connects to my iPhone, so maybe I’ll be active on the ether whilst in AMS.