[ 00:23 thursday 4 september – haggerston road ]
ninety-eight pictures from may and june.
: granny (v 2008) :
27 photos – being with granny in hospital, her beautiful garden, echoes of her around the house.
: stromboli (v 2008) :
17 photos – brief but glorious escape to stromboli, bush fires in sicily, rome from the air.
: hokkaido (vi 2008) :
54 photos – infinity ventures summit in sapporo, the misty shores of lake shikotsu, climbing mount aniwa.
: c :
[ 22:13 friday 29 august – ginostra, isola di stromboli ]
it’s eight years since i last spent a night here in the tiny village of ginostra, huddled the opposite side of the island from stromboli’s principal settlement. back then there was no electricity and no quay big enough to accommodate the ferries and hydrofoils which ply the rest of the archipelago. having a shower meant pumping a lever for five minutes to fill a header tank. houses were lit in the evening by paraffin lamps and candles. mobile phones were turned on for just a few minutes a day and could be taken to gian luca for recharging via his solar panel for a modest fee. ginostra has historically attracted a particular class of tourist, predominantly wealthy intellectuals from milan, florence and bologna. they came to live in ginostra for a month or two each year during july and august, a self-conscious retreat from the hubbub of the modern world. they would dress in simple clothes, eat simple food and positively relish the non- electrified inconvenience of the place.
this is what i found when i came eight years ago. the peculiar intensity of the location and the bizarre community there gathered represented a fascinating blend of real and artificial to me. only thirty people lived there all through the year, too few to be a viable community in its own right. they were more like stage-hands, keeping the wings swept tidy and sustaining the illusion of a real village for the gratification of the ethereal summer residents. more than anything it brought to mind marie-antoinette with her shepherdess fantasies at versailles.
that was in the august of two thousand during my very first visit to stromboli. now, eight years later, many things have changed in ginostra. during a fateful san remo festival, broadcast live to the italian nation, a plea went out that the people of ginostra should be provided with electricity that they might share in the delights of the festival. the machinery of the italian state duly creaked into action and a huge solar generation facility was installed. as a result the houses now have electric lighting, hot and cold running water and televisions. mobile phones remain turned on throughout the day. at the same time a huge cement quay was being constructed, dwarfing the old harbour (the “pertusa”) which is suspected to be the tiniest in the world. five hydrofoil services a day now dock at ginostra during the summer months, with ferries arriving three times a week.
other things remain unchanged. there are no roads, no motor vehicles and no street lights. everything arriving at the new quay is still carried up the steep cliffside on the back of a mule. after midnight the village is immersed in an intoxicating silence, even in august. but the advent of electricity and easy transport have upset the previous delicate equilibrium in which tourism was poised. life in ginostra no longer demands such an exacting or spartan sensibility. different people are coming, seeking different pleasures. being here the last few days it has sometimes felt as if an unusually chic suburb of milan had been transplanted to this remote outpost, preserving its complex web of parties, social obligations and status distinctions intact. this is no less surreal than the marie-antoinette fantasy i found before but i cannot help but reflect that its aesthetic qualities are somewhat diminished.
personally my preference has been to seek a certain pensive solitude. right now i sit writing by candlelight on the terrace of the house where i’ve been staying the last few days. ripe bunches of musty purple grapes hang from the vines entwining the roof. the sea stretches dark before me with the lights of the other six islands in the archipelago glimmering on the horizon. a million stars blaze above me with an occasional flash of silent lightning to my left. the air is hot and humid, sweet with the perfume of fallen prickly pears fermenting on the path in front of the house.
for me this is not an idle vacation. there are many choices to make about the next chapter in trampoline’s development. i have come here to unclutter my mind and see things with a clearer perspective. during that first stay in ginostra eight years ago i wrote the specifications for the simple prototype system which was destined to be the seed that later sprouted into trampoline and has consumed these last years. It is fitting that this should be the place to which i return now to consider where the path leads next.
it’s not all been work, though. on wednesday evening i gave a little performance of bach’s goldberg variations for the crowd at stromboli’s bookshop and on the street outside, for which i was accompanied by several cockerels gathered in the neighbouring garden. also gusti has brought a clutch of fire jugglers and artists to the island who are giving a series of performances. and these last days in ginostra i’ve spent many hours sitting on rocks, swimming in the azure water and reading. last night at half past midnight i decided to go to punta u corvu and watch the volcano erupt. i’d never been there before and ginostra is a maze of paths and alleyways but after a variety of wrong turnings my instinct led me where i wanted to go. i sat there an hour or so watching the lava arcing gracefully into the air and everything fell into place around me.
: c :
[ 04:27 saturday 23 august – haggerston road ]
i’ve spent the last two hours working out how i can get to stromboli by sunday evening and booking tickets accordingly. finally it’s done. the trenitalia website (italian state train operator) nearly drove me bonkers with its byzantine booking system. i have a stack of reservation details sitting on my printer as follows:
– train ticket from london kings cross to sheffield
– air ticket from east midlands airport to rome
– train ticket from rome to naples
– hydrofoil from naples to stromboli
– hydrofoil from stromboli to naples
– air ticket from naples to london gatwick
right now a week on stromboli is a welcome prospect. i might even sneak round to tiny ginostra on the other side of the island for the second half of the week. my friend matteo is renting a house there and invited me to come and stay.
: c :
[ 00:42 thursday 21 august – haggerston road ]
twenty-seven new pictures from april and may.
: new york (v 2008) :
9 photos of new york in the rain and sheltering with annie in greenwich village.
: london (iv-v 2008) :
9 photos of social innovation camp and my final visit to grandpa and mary’s house to recover treasures.
: the trampery (v 2008) :
9 photos moving into trampoline systems’ new offices in shoreditch.
: c :
[ 15:06 sunday 10 august – haggerston road ]
over the past couple of weeks i’ve done another burst of scanning, assisted by the persistent rain that’s blighted london. here are the first fifty-eight pictures.
: nant (iii 2008) :
19 photos from my whirlwind trip through lyon and montpellier to the remote village of nant for easter with josselin and his family, then driving back across the massif centrale in a blizzard.
: malta & gozo (iv 2008)
21 photos exploring the island of malta and its wild sibling gozo.
: san francisco (iv 2008)
18 photos performing with shemoel at the institute of art and hunting wildlife with nate in the marin headlands.
: c :
[ 18:55 saturday 19 july – miami international airport, florida ]
i’m in my seat on the flight for london, taking advantage of a pre take-off delay to tap out a few words on my trusty laptop. following foo camp i took a couple of days’ holiday to stop off here in miami and visit shemoel at his family home. the main objective was for us to work out a modus operandi for producing songs together with me in london and him in san francisco.
this is the first time we’ve tried composing together instead of improvising. neither of us knew how it would work out but things fell into place smoothly. after two days our first song is already coming together. shemoel put down an idea which sparked me to add something, which in turn prompted him to change another section and so on. i recorded bass clarinet, vocals and a few electronic bits. shemoel recorded drums and the bulk of the electronics. we listen to a lot of similar electronic artists but we have very different musical personalities. i’m constantly delighted by shemoel’s perspective and how he responds musically in a completely different way to me. the process we followed over the last couple of days seems like it will lend itself well to long-distance collaboration. it will take more will power to keep it going but hopefully we can muster that.
we took breaks from the music to go swimming on the beach, hang out in sweat records (the epicentre of miami’s small experimental music scene) and join the full moon drum circle on the beach until the police broke it up. i managed to record half an hour of this on my new digital audio recorder.
it looks like the flight’s cleared for take-off so i need to shut my laptop. there are big tropical storms all the way up the florida coast. it should be an exciting ride.
: c :
[ 19:25 sunday 13 july – bodega head, california ]
here i am, a couple of hours north from san francisco, looking out to sea as the evening sun casts a golden glow over the jagged rocks. from where i stand a narrow ridge leads across to a guano-covered islet thick with nesting seabirds. below me is a little cove with a coarse sand beach an a kind of seaweed i’ve never seen before; thick elastic sheets dappled in cream and forest green. i nibbled at some but it was tough and rather flavourless. on my way here i stopped at a beach the other side of botega bay and took a swim in the icy-cold pacific.
for the past two days i’ve been embroiled in an event called foo camp just east of here in sebastopol. each year tim o’reilly, the technology publisher and impresario, invites three hundred technologists, scientists, artists and thinkers to spend a weekend camped out in the orchard behind his company’s offices. this year i was lucky enough to be included.
the event was structured very loosely. after supper on friday evening a couple of big boards were propped up against the wall with a grid comprising a dozen or so spaces along the top (ranging from meeting rooms to marquees) and time slots down the left hand side. anyone could take a giant sticky note, write down a topic for a session they wanted to lead and put it in a square on the grid. as soon as the boards went up there was a stampede of people eager to claim prime slots. this was followed by a gradual jostle of revisions through saturday and sunday.
some of the interesting sessions i attended included neuro-mechanics and techniques for disrupting how your brain functions, the emergence of data visualisation as a mainstream interface discipline and modifying the knowledge-worker lifestyle to be better matched to the ways of living for which we evolved. on saturday evening i led a session on the relationship between technological innovation and the emergence of new organisational structures. a lot of ad hoc conversations happened outside the sessions and there were all kinds of projects and activities going on at the fringes.
on saturday night the campus turned into a kind of esoteric kindergarten with clusters of people in every corner making puzzles, fabricating circuit-boards and playing games. i had a whale of a time playing gypsy jazz with my bass clarinet in a group consisting of two guitars, a ukelele and a baby accordion. this is the first time i’ve done anything other than experimental improvisation with the clarinet so having to play in key and in time was quite a challenge. the session ended with me singing a somewhat unorthodox of weill’s “mack the knife”.
the most striking aspect of the weekend was its fluidity and openness. things just happened. i was expecting it to be uncomfortably cliquey but in fact it was easy to walk up to anyone, however well known, and talk to them about anything you felt like. my thinking was challenged on several fronts, i made a bunch of new friends and i came away fired up to do great things.
: c :
[ 01:33 monday 30 june – haggerston road, london ]
here are sixty more photos from march.
: last days at leonard street :
19 photos from trampoline’s final days in the office at leonard street before the property developers moved in to convert the building to bourgeois apartments.
: highway 1 :
27 photos of my five hundred mile road trip from san francisco to san diego down the iconic highway 1.
: breckenridge :
14 photos of breckenridge high in the colorado rockies, staying at warren’s condo and snowboarding with mum, dad and jill.
: c :
[ 13:26 saturday 14 june – haggerston road, london ]
i got back to london yesterday. unusually, i’m really pleased to be home. last night i went out dancing with jan and martin in jet-lagged frenzy. i woke up ridiculously early this morning so i took the opportunity to upload some photos!
: london (xi 2007 – ii 2008) :
14 photos, mostly of music-making antics in my flat.
: cornwall (xii 2007 – i 2008) :
19 photos from christmas and new year in cornwall with family and friends.
: grandpa & mary (i-ii 2008) :
12 photos of scattering grandpa & mary’s ashes in the wilderness at bushey park, then clearing out their east molesey house.
: c :
i noticed that my last couple of despatches haven’t made it through the system so i’ll try sending them again.
[ 20:36 sunday 8 june – itou onsen, lake shikotsu, hokkaido, japan ]
last week i was in sapporo, the largest city in japan’s northernmost island hokkaido, to give a presentation at a technology conference. next week i have to be in boston for another one. it’s been a stressful week so on friday evening i decided to try and escape into the wilderness for the weekend. i spent half an hour on the web looking for interesting places. initially i was tempted by some lakes in the far east of the island but it turned out it would take nine hours to get there. hokkaido is enormous. after a bit more searching lake shikotsu caught my eye, with its mysterious forests and mountains. i found a small slightly run-down looking onsen (a hotel beside a hot spring) in an isolated location at the lake’s edge. i phoned. one of the staff spoke some english. a room was available. i made a reservation for two nights and made my way down by bus yesterday afternoon.
i’m sitting now in an old-fashioned tatami-floored room with a thin futon where i’ll soon sleep. the sliding window is fully open. through it i look out across the huge still surface of the lake, ringed by three volcanoes each rising more than a thousand metres. everything is covered with dense deciduous forest. a small cluster of lights in the distance marks a cluster of restaurants and shops the other side of the lake, otherwise the horizon is dark in every direction. i hear the slap and gurgle of the small waves against the shore and the occasional cry of a heron. if i leave my room, go down the stairs, left out of the door onto the lakeside and down some steps i reach a pool made from rocks at the edge of the lake, with a fence dividing men’s and women’s sides. this is where the hot spring emerges, accompanied by a faint whiff of sulphur.
today i climbed mount eniwa, the largest of the three volcanos, which rises directly behind the onsen. it’s a steep climb and reaching the summit at one thousand four hundred metres was hard work. several sections even required ropes. the path mainly follows a sharp ridge that arrives at the summit from the east. a succession of fumeroles belches out sulphurous gases which mingle with the clouds eddying and swirling round the peak of the mountain. people said it would take four hours to get up but i did it in less than two hours. i passed half a dozen people on the way, each with the customary bell tinkling on their backpacks. at the summit i met a couple of friendly chaps from a town near sapporo so we made the descent together and taught each other a few words. i was exhausted when i reached the onsen. stripping and lowering myself into the pool was blissful. i stayed in there a couple of hours, watching fisherman come and go in their little boats.
granny’s funeral was held on friday the twenty-third of may in shrewsbury. in the middle of the service i played the second movement of bach’s italian concerto on the organ. i never had a chance to play this for her but i think she’d have liked it a lot. i was nervous that i might break down in tears halfway through playing it, which happened when i was practicing it the day before. but i avoided this and actually i think it was the best performance of the piece i’ve given. i found the christian elements of the service quite distasteful. the priest’s contributions all seemed to be impersonal and grim. shockingly he even got granny’s name wrong at the committal. a couple of my favourite photos of granny are here with me now, propped on chests at the side of the room. it’s hard to believe i won’t be taking any more.
immediately after granny’s funeral i escaped to stromboli for a few days. alitalia overbooked the flight so i ended up in a milan hotel for the night then on the six o’clock plane to palermo the next morning. the only way i could reach the last hydrofoil of the day to stromboli was to get a taxi all the way from palermo to milazzo, about two hundred and fifty kilometres. my visit coincided with an intense scirocco and temperatures in the mid thirties. i spent much of the time on the beach and in the sea. despite the brevity of the visit i saw a lot of my friends. i also saw antonio’s almost-completed portrait of neptune for the first time, a remarkable piece of work. on the monday night i walked up to punta u bronzu with giuliano. we watched the volcano erupting and the moon rise as the hot wind blew over us.
a taxi will be here at five in the morning to take me to the airport so i ought to pack my bags and get a few hours’ sleep. tomorrow i fly to tokyo, then new york.
: c :
// charles armstrong // 