Things I've learnt this week

A sweltering Sunday, and I need to stay indoors a bit just to catch up on various domestic chores, as I'm away a lot in the next month.

Had a couple of interesting weeks - almost back to normal activity following the op, and finally off the meds this weekend - though I go back in a month.

Manchester is busily vibrant at this time of year particularly if, like me, you get involved in different things. There are launches, workshops, conferences, festivals, as well as regular networking meetings, irregular art launches. In the bigger world there's signature TV shows like Dr. Who and Ashes to Ashes - though if the sun keeps shining I won't even watch them on iPlayer till the Autumn - new films ("Four Lions"), new books (David Mitchell). Someone somewhere is ordering their iPad. The festival season is coming up and and and and and...

Guess it makes us lucky. Yet all this frantic activity isn't necessarily that conducive to creative work. I've said it before, that the irony about literary fame and success is that the good work happens in the shadows, in the private time. Whereas sportsman have their greatest moments in front of the cameras, and despite all the hard work that goes into it, actors and musicians require the spotlight; writers only come blinking into the sunlight when the work is all done, when the good things have happened.

I've been putting together a short collection of poems, and though it took a week of intense re-reading to choose the line-up and the order, the hard work happened at other times. Pleasingly, there are three recent poems in the selection - and hopefully these are as good as ones I've had a longer time to consider. More of this later.

I'm going to be looking at my web presence shortly as well - as turning things on their head a bit - I realise that a writer has to do more than just write new stuff, good as it is. Readers, if there are still such things, want the full experience - a fulfilling finished work, nicely packaged, and with something of a backstory. What would you say when reading a poem out loud for instance?

Maybe the whirlpool of activity I get sucked into every spring and autumn will subside a bit under a new government - certainly I've drank my fair share of wine and ate my fair share of canapes and small dishes over the years - all paid for by some project somewhere. I have a horribly sneaking suspicion that the one area of cuts that the government will find it obstinately difficult to cut is the money paid out to consultants, particularly the big boys, who will surely bring in their restructuring expertise to replace their special advice departments.

Manchester's great virtues remains its underground, get-up-and-go side. Most of the gems in the year's creative cycle have come from individuals and groups of people getting together and just doing something. It may, in fact, turn out to be easier to do this in a harsher economic climate, though anyone who has ever run a volunteer programme knows that a little bit of funding goes further here than almost anywhere else.

Lots to do, lots to think about. Football season is over, but the World Cup will inevitably take over for a month or so. At Futureeverything this year one of the themes was serendipity city - and as a phrase to describe Manchester its ideal.

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Forgot to mention that the BBC's adaption of "Money" is on tonight. I've often wondered why the BBC doesn't adapt more contemporary novels - though this is quarter of a century old now, so doesn't even count as that. Amis's novel has been referred to as unfilmable, which always seemed a little ridiculous, given its settings. I've some apprehension, given the way the BBC usually films the 80s (e.g. as costume drama) but was given hope by both the way they've done last week's Boy George drama "Worried about the Boy" (though that was Manchester's excellent Red Productions - home of Queer as Folk  - who clearly know what they're doing with pop culture) and by the presence of Nick Frost, who seems big and loud enough to play John Self. There's an interview with Martin Amis afterwards on BBC4 as well.

Glass is sand, and pianos are string instruments...

Philip Glass at the RNCM last night for an intimate recital of 8 of his piano studies, Etudes, and other solo piano pieces. Remarkably I was in the first row, with just the "pit" in front of me. (Note to bloke with Afro, get a haircut.) So felt it a very privileged position. The sound was excellent, and what could have been quite intimidating, (for both audience and performer) an hour and a half of one man and his piano, was made very easy by Glass's relaxed attitude. The audience was almost entirely made up of people who'd seen "Koyaanisquatsi" on Channel 4 in 1984, so very homogenous. All the questions about "new audiences" for classical music should have been answered here:- here's your new audience, indie music fans in their 40s and 50s. Yet our next gig will probably be Kraftwerk, or David Byrne or the Arcade Fire.

I'd not heard the Etudes before and they're fascinating, as you'd imagine studies to be, approaching the piano in different ways. I was reminded that the piano is both a string instrument and percussive, and Glass's work has primarily worked with these two parts of the orchestra. He's the not the go-to guy for a brass ensemble for instance. Strings and percussion, fit both the minimalist and sequenced work that is his signature, but also his wider composition. In parts these Etudes felt closer to Schubert Lieder, albeit instrumental versions, with a few American forebears, notably Joplin, and on a couple of pieces Gershwin. Going in the other direction, and an appropriate libretto would turn them into the third Arcade Fire album. These, by the way, are all positives. If Glass is the most transparent of composers in the sense that his music works as popular idiom, it is also true that there is a grit to it, that is leavened by his innate tunefulness. He clearly went a different direction than Reich for instance, and though he may owe something to the experiments of later 20th century classical music, there seems something older, more romantic in his nature. He's a composer who has made himself useful to the film commission, or, as he reminded us of the origin of one piece written for the Dalai Lama, civic occasion. "We're not sure when he's arriving," he'd been told, "so can you make it of indeterminate length?" "Not a problem," Glass deadpanned.

It's perhaps incredible in its own sense that in an age where "classical" music seems to be divided between the repertoire on the one hand and classical performers as pop stars on the other, that a very serious musician/composer can be at once a prolific recording artist, film-scorer, collaborator (with dance in particular), and bestselling performer. This is not difficult music, but neither is Glass is easy, that facility with melody (never to be knocked) aside. When I saw his ensemble over a decade ago, it was the range of his compositions that impressed; he's no one-trick pony, yet he does have that remarkable arpeggiated signature, which, I'd say anyone who loves Glass would agree, is beautiful, emotive, and above all, powerful, however many times it has been appropriated. History may well say that the American composers of the second half of the twentieth century, particularly Adams and Glass, but also Reich, Carter and others, were both chroniclers of that age, and conduits to some kind of universal music, that is unafraid to unpick the distinctions between popular song, rock music, and the "serious" musics of the conservatory.

For yesterday's concert, I was left with a sense of being privileged to have been there, that he'd been able and willing to travel to the north of England, to play to a packed house in a small, venerable hall. Listening to him, before, during and after the concert, I was struck by how much his music has had a subtle influence on much of what I've written over the years, and also appears in much of the music that I like. Not for the first time, I'm struck how much the best of American art, music and literature continues to be distinctly the cornerstone of my aesthetic.

This Complex Web

I've spent the last two days at Manchester's Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit, running back and forth down Oxford Road, as I've had some critical things to do in work. I always seem to get some kind of "conference anxiety" three-quarters few the second day of events such as this - as the "input" level reaches critical, without any chance to "process" what you've heard. There were a number of themes at this years conference, and there are some good overviews on the site blog. Environment 2.0 is one theme - and a little like New Writing Worlds last year - there's a real tension between optimists and pessimists. That "global warming" is a key theme across all kinds of different conferences these days is a good thing, yet so intractable appears the problem, and so immense the disaster, that how on earth are artists, technologists, academics et al to respond? The optimists believe that technology will save all. Funnily this year there was less of an "open source" evangelism than you usually find at Futuresonic, a few pockets aside, but perhaps more worringly a certain complacency from the mainstream that social media and a more participatory culture will somehow solve larger issues. I'm a pessimist in this company since I don't find technology an answer on its own. Part of me wants to stand up and shout "you just need to start doing things right!" But of course institutions get things wrong, frequently - or, have too many vested interests to start with a clean piece of paper. I'm a recipient of technology's benefits, I guess - this blog is part of that - yet I'm always wanting to challenge the orthodoxy. It seems obvious to me that if technology is too far ahead of what people want and need then it will fail, just as surely if the need is too far ahead of what technology can do to fix it. There was subplot or two during the conference, around the digital economy, (and again pessimism v. optimism). Plenty of energetic dot.com start ups, but with a sense that to get one success, you need a thousand blooms. This is supply side economic oversupply at its worst. I'd hazard a guess that how technology and innovation will get us out of the current recession will not be through this excessive oversupply (of mortgage products, motor cars or Web 2.0 apps) but through a better and closely application of technology to peoples real needs. Plenty to think about.

On Wednesday night I went along to Cube gallery for the Futuresonic art strand, and its an impressive show. I also liked the reading of the Climate Change report outside of the gallery. I'm hoping to have a second, more extended look tomorrow, before seeing Philip Glass solo at the RNCM tomorrow night. Lots of people are taking better photographs than I ever could here.

Its a busy weekend, with Chorlton Art Festival also requiring a visit at some point.