Lou Reed and the Metal Machine Trio

OK, Lou Reed is a genius. He's so clever I can't understand what two hours of feedback and distortion - ninety minutes in the presence of its master - is trying to say however, my eardrums are so sonically challenged - thanks to his earlier oeuvre - that I couldn't take more than an hour of the Metal Machine Trio at The Cambridge Junction tonight.

For all I know, after I walked out, he got off his chair and stopped hiding behind his monster rack of FX pedals and played 'Vicious' or 'Perfect Day' which most of the audience of 40 to 60 somethings secretly wished he would and he knowingly refused to pander to.

In 1975 this industrial form of music had originality and deducing his motive for revisiting it 35 years later could sustain a Ph.D. BUT I've heard a lot of contemporary music lately (at frequent Faster Than Sound events and Mira Calix et al) and while I discern musicality in many of those performers, with this iteration you might as well be talking about String Theory, it's all a cosmic musical in-joke as far as I can tell.

The opening number of what was billed as a night of 'Deep Noise (No Songs)' was several of Lou's guitars left leaning against the PA system so that the pickups could feed back and after a bit of twiddling by the roadies, a throbbing AC hum built up over 30 minutes (rather like the engines of a ship) whereupon, just as it was getting to be painful, Lou and his entourage discretely wandered into the auditorium behind the audience like some latecomers and stood amongst the assembled pilgrims and considered the effect. 


There at last in front of me was a god, the actual figure of my lengthy veneration in the darkness of bedrooms, my audio accomplice in exploring the mysteries of sexual congress and mind-altering chemicals. This god was dressed in a grey hoodie sweatshirt. If I had encountered him in a pedestrian underpass, my prejudices might have been concerned he was someone with dementia that had wandered away but it was perfect. He was stripped down to the most basic truth; a sweatshirt and some Levis. What you see is what you get. Apparently the impatience of the crowd was insufficient so the enigmatic ignored old man shuffled off backstage for another twenty minutes to change. Then he appeared on stage in an equally proletarian vinyl bomber jacket.

Lou is now 68 but walks like an 80 year old. His jaw seems set by some kind of facial paralysis - or grim resolution not to sing - and appears to have limited upper body strength too. To lift a leg to activate a guitar pedal takes obvious effort. To switch between instruments, a roadie has to run in and lift one off his lap and place another whereas you would expect anyone who was able-bodied could just pick one out of a stand within arm's reach. Perhaps this is why he is now exploring the possibilities of automatic, machine generated music rather than the traditional muscle-powered rock and roll (or classical music). His sidemen pounding their keyboard or blowing a sax was the only human activity you couldn't capture with a pinhole camera. His co-performers Ulrich Krieger's and Sarth Calhoun's own work is likely to reward seeking out and they are people to watch. Krieger transcribed Lou's original album Metal Machine Music into an orchestral work and performed it which impressed Lou Reed enough to hire him for the tour.

Though he may appear frail (and that may be an act) Reed is still very much in charge. The body language and scowls and instructions I could lip-read, relayed from his chair by another roadie to his sidemen, clearly show this trio is dominated by his vision. It was an irritable old geezer, an angry wounded lion, barking from his EZ Up chair.

We had a compact. I did not and would not go see someone perform all their old hits just for the sake of hearing them. Here I felt there was some honesty that Reed was an artist continually at work and he had kindly deigned to allow us to come and watch and didn't give a f*ck if we liked it or not.

But Reed is a star and he in the past has cultivated his stardom and an audience and if you are to be successful as a performer, you will let the audience project themselves into the vessel you have made for them. Reed's star power is still magnetic. Onto Reed's craggy lined face and broken body (while the hair remains buoyant) I projected Johnny Cash who just before he died offered the world a work of musical catharsis (although it was a cover of someone else's song). I wondered what Reed could produce, since he has also lived as hard as Cash did, as he possesses an enormous gift for the composition of accessible Tin Pan Alley songs. If Reed could combine his lifetime of experience and his musical gifts, he might still write songs with the appeal of his previous hits that addresses his condition now. Then he would transcend his past appeal rather than ram it into a wall of musique concrete.

If I recall, Reed notoriously becomes combative with any journalist or pundit claiming to understand his motives or ambitions in interviews or profiles. Reviews of this work's previous incarnations seem to fall back on amusing comparison of the experience with life's other challenging but ultimately productive experiences, such as the first time I stayed out too late and had to sleep in a bus shelter when I learned there are people lost in the dark corners of society and the soundtrack of the city is the throbbing of an idling bus engine.


At least I tried to hear him out and understand what he is trying to say. It's lame to say "I don't get it" but I don't and if Reed is pushing the boundary of the known universe of music that begins with the clockwork music box, then I'm happy to wait for the pictures from NASA and the TV pundits to tell me what it is rather than decipher the raw data flowing in.


Reed's music this night might have produced dark and intense feelings if I had stuck it out for another thirty minutes but the ringing in my ears was drowning out any subtle variation in the noise his manipulations could produce. Reed has lived one third longer than I have, I had wondered what his greater experience could teach me but ultimately, tonight at least, I thought life was too short to find out.


Leaving the Junction, I ran a phalanx of insipid chart music blaring from a series of identikit bars and clubs. The parking garage's payment machine ate my ticket and I went in search of a disinterested security guard who opened up the box to reveal that the machine is a bog-standard PC inside (with such possibilities?) and the squeal of tires and clanging of lift doors were muffled in the blanket of the tinnitus in my ears. Only when a random staccato burst of voices on the radio ether punctuated the droning hum of my car tyres on the dark country road did I consider that Lou just might still be a part of the soundtrack of my life.

© Nat Bocking

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The local paper reviewed this gig too.

Your community and your CV: building both by voluntary work.

I am making appeals in every possible media that young people or people returning to work should consider community work as a way of demonstrating their capabilities to potential employers

It’s a common chicken and egg problem.  Even though you’ve graduated college with good qualifications and have got energy and enthusiasm for any challenge an employer might give you, you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job.

It’s the same for people recovering from a long-term illness or say, women returning to work after raising a family. In these difficult times, having been a successful parent or diligent jobseeker isn’t enough to impress employers with your CV. If you’re in that situation and want to break that log-jam, please hear me out on how to do something about it and if you know anyone living in or near Worlingham or Beccles in Suffolk, you might want to pass the news of an exciting development in their community.

The community of Worlingham has recently completed a lengthy consultation to produce a ‘Parish Plan’ in which they were guided and supported by Suffolk ACRE.

These exercises help determine a community’s priorities for the next ten years or so. The Government has stated that Parish Plans should be used to “identify key facilities and services, set out the problems that need to be tackled and demonstrate how distinctive character and features should be preserved”.

This plan has identified that this community needs and wants a good neighbour scheme. There are more than twenty of these schemes in Suffolk which are supported by Suffolk ACRE and many hundreds of these schemes are operating throughout the country. The BBC ‘One Show’ made a good short film about them which you can find on YouTube.

On March 2^nd  2010 at Worlingham Middle School, I and my colleague Robert Horn from Suffolk ACRE made a presentation about good neighbour schemes hosted by parish councillor Michael Culyer. Afterwards, sixteen people stepped forward prepared to be volunteers in the scheme, which is an impressive start. Four people said they would be on the committee “if they had to”. But I was struck at the meeting that this scheme could, and should, also be an opportunity for young people locally who might be in the job market, to gain some very useful skills. I asked everyone to spread the word. If a committee of six could be recruited and if the committee had at least one person between 18 and 25 or so, that would be fantastic.

What are these schemes?

A good neighbour scheme is a way that communities can work together to provide mutual support in everyday tasks when someone finds that essential task difficult. It often supports elderly or disabled residents but they are open to all. The benefits these schemes create are many; bringing people in contact with each other strengthens community bonds. It enables people to be productive by giving to charity a little bit of their time instead of just their money, doing whatever they are best able to do.

Helping people who have an occasional immediate need (don’t we all sometimes?) can help older people live in their homes longer (so their simple practical needs don’t burden on the NHS or Social Services and your council tax), younger children may not miss school so often, working people might not have to take days off to attend to one of their dependents and so on. By building networks of mutual support, both trust and responsibility towards each other are nurtured in a community.

If you’re sceptical of these ideals, just listen to how older people long for the good old days when everyone knew their neighbours and people helped each other when they needed it, unlike today, they add ruefully. It worked then and it can still work today.

How a scheme basically works is that a telephone number for a mobile phone is advertised in the community and a rota of volunteers takes turns to ‘hold’ the phone. When somebody needs assistance with a task, they call the phone and that day’s holder logs the call and checks a directory of other available volunteers (who have some training and a CRB check done). They match the volunteer to the task and despatch them. When the task is done, the volunteer calls in and the job is logged as completed.

What tasks the scheme does and doesn’t do depends on the needs of the community. No two schemes are alike in terms of the needs they fulfil but all work on the system of a ‘time bank’, a ‘skill directory’ and common phone number to ensure access for all.

Many schemes offer transport with volunteers driving their cars to take people to doctor’s appointments - for which there is normally a small charge to cover petrol - but these schemes can help all kinds of people with all kinds of tasks. A young man who broke his leg once asked a scheme to walk his dog for him.

Generally, a rule of thumb is that help is offered with basic everyday tasks when there is an urgent need for them to be done.  An elderly person might have difficulty changing a light bulb or a battery in their smoke detector which if left undone would put them in danger. Somebody might need help filling in a form or assembling some flat-pack furniture or just a hand at the other end of the wardrobe while preparing a room for a new baby.

People unfamiliar with these schemes wonder how it can actually work?  How do you filter out lazy people or those wanting something done for nothing? Don’t the volunteers burn out quickly with all the jobs that need doing? In practise this rarely happens and by learning from the experience of the many existing schemes, ways of successfully managing these issues if they arise are found. These techniques are straightforward but require the use of judgement and management skills, which most of us possess, while Suffolk ACRE can provide additional support if it is needed.

Their opportunities

That these challenges exist is my point though; the running of a good neighbour scheme is an excellent way for someone to get management experience - in exactly the sort of challenges you would face in business - that can be demonstrated and quantified on a CV.

You would only need to invest a few hours a month to a good neighbour scheme to prove to potential employers that you possess initiative, good judgement, people skills and trustworthiness and that you can handle responsibility.

I believe anyone looking to prove themselves a capable of a well paying job should consider the useful experience they can gain from sitting on a community committee, be it their village hall, their pre-school or their good neighbour scheme.

There’s no need to take a gap-year in an exotic country while there is plenty of really useful community work to be done at home. I wonder why more young people don’t seize their local opportunities to get involved? It may be that they don’t hear about them. Young people and older people, such as the newly-retired who look for such opportunites, move in different orbits. I asked the twenty five apparently mostly middle-aged people who came to the meeting if anyone had a Facebook or Twitter account and none had.

On many community organisations, such as the village hall or a parish council, you will find their committees already have on them highly qualified people who might want to put a lifetime’s experience to good use in their community.

While this is a good thing, often there is some deference to them. People, especially those without experience or many qualifications, might feel it’s not their place. However, such people are often influential locally, which if you’re looking for a job, they can be useful contacts. And it’s not really a conspiracy that every parish organisation has the ‘usual suspects’ but a symptom of that those who are prepared to give their time to the community tend to be in short supply.

In some communities though, there not enough retired business people willing to give their time, but there is just as much, if not more, need for things to be done. Addressing that imbalance is part of the remit of Suffolk ACRE.

So in the way the good neighbour schemes operate, the tasks and roles of the committee are often structured so that you don’t need highly qualified people to run them. It would be great if you were one but there is always room for people to grow within these schemes. The schemes start with doing only what it is capable of and then grows its capacity, if it wishes to, to do more. And as far as good neighbour schemes in Suffolk go, these opportunities are plentiful and all its volunteers can be supported by the resources of Suffolk ACRE.

My own story

Can doing community work really make a difference to your CV? I say it does with the benefit of personal experience. 

In 1999 I came to live in Suffolk after working abroad for eighteen years as a film technician where I started working in London as a news photographer, often going overseas on assignments and only coming home in-between. Then in 2003 I was made redundant. In a sense that blow to my long held ambition was a relief as by then my children needed me to be at home like a normal father but I struggled to find local employment, and so I scratched a living going hand to mouth doing anything I could find. 

You see I was basically unemployable in a traditional context as twenty five years previously I had left school without any O-levels. In the world of film-making and photo-journalism, that meant nothing as examples of my work were in your multiplex and my last news splash was my CV but in the real world, where freelance photo-journalism doesn’t pay a mortgage, I found that employers looking at my CV saw someone without any qualifications and didn’t understand how my wide experience could be relevant to their business. 

Despite creating every kind of movie magic and talking my way in to interview and photograph countless famous people for newspapers, however dependable I was, my career choices were characteristic of a sole-trader without management responsibilities. People said they just didn’t know what to make of me.

In the meantime my young children were going to pre-school and I was begged to be on its committee. After a while we became frustrated with all the problems it had with substandard premises and we thought the best solution would be to raise the money for a new building. Over the next two years, the fundraising chairman and I, as the treasurer, had to overcome many challenges to raise £147,000 to build and equip a new school and open it on time but we did it.

It took many, many, nights of poring over budgets and leases and building contracts as well as persuading recalcitrant contractors, inspectors and funders to deliver what we wanted from them. In the meantime, I went back to college part-time and in 2009 I got an MA in combined business and arts management.

Although those qualifications might have opened more doors than before, when I graduated I now had to compete with thousands of other graduates also looking for jobs. I noticed though, that in every job interview I’ve had since then, I was always asked about my role in the pre-school; how many people I had supervised and how much money I had managed.  It gave me enormous satisfaction that I could show I had responsibility for all financial, personnel and employment matters for five staff for three years and had successfully project-managed something within their terms of reference.

The interesting thing is my colleague on the pre-school project says exactly the same thing. During the project she was an at-home mum with young children and when they went to middle-school and she went job hunting she found “they always ask me about running the pre-school”.

I don’t think running a good neighbour scheme would be as challenging as that building project was and I wish I had had someone like Suffolk ACRE who I now work for to support us. When I am supporting good neighbour schemes in Suffolk Coastal and Waveney districts, I constantly refer to this experience - especially when someone thinks there is an insolvable crisis - as proof that people with a common purpose in a community can pull together and that it sometimes takes lateral thinking and a bit of initiative to get what you want out of life.

So, if you want to get involved in helping in your community by participating in a good neighbour scheme as a volunteer in any capacity, or you think your community needs a good neighbour scheme, please get in touch and I can tell you more. You could be benefitting yourself as well as someone else by creating a better community for yourself, which would be the most satisfactory outcome for all concerned.

Nat Bocking

Community Development Researcher

Suffolk ACRE

nat.bocking@suffolkacre.org.uk

Reception           01473 345300

Mobile                07787 258137

Questions: why blog?

A reader has asked:

I am intrigued that you write blogs, not being a blogger myself.  Do you know how many people read your blogs?  Is it disappointing if no one comments?  How do people find you, or know if they want to read your blogs?  Why do you call yours watertowerproject?

Thank you very much for your questions, it's good to reflect sometimes:

If I had the time I could make more effort and make my personal blog more like traditional blogs and try to attract traffic etc. but I don't really want to do that. I could know how many people read my blog if I wanted to as Google provide tools for that but I haven't installed it as I don't care how many people read the water tower project.

I state my blog's purpose clearly so people can move on if they land on it randomly. Successful blogs are usually on a specific subject so the user can rely on the blog as a resource and regularly return to it or subscribe to it; such as blogs about modern design or trains or water towers but for me I find this technolgy is a useful way of notebooking my ideas and sharing them. Apart from putting up random essays, I can also email things I find on the web directly to the blog and then link to the blog in correspondence with people rather than send large attachments. Having a blog enables me to do this from any computer with web access.

I don't expect people to find me via the blog but it is nice when they do. I used to put my email address but I got inundated with spam or timewasters. Now if people comment, I get an email alert. If people care enough about what I'm saying and don't want to comment, they can always find my email and phone number. My contacts are all over the web.This blog has lead to me making many local contacts, such as yourself, with people concerned about the same issues I am who don't neccessarily comment on the blog.

I write some other blogs. The busiest is www.bwtas.blogspot.com which is the reason my blog is called the water tower project as the project was getting bwtas off the  ground. I later transferred most of the content. I couldn't think of a memorable name for my random collection of thoughts so I stuck with the name, as besides, water towers are storage made useful by elevation, which in some ways is what my blog is.

RFID & wrong fuel problem

According to the AA, over 20 million pounds per year is wasted by putting the wrong fuel in vehicles, including a huge number of taxpayer funded vehicles like police cars.


In the UK, Ireland and Europe, the petrol fuel nozzle is 21 mm in diameter and the diesel fuel nozzle is 25 mm diameter as standard EN 13012 so although it is hard to put a diesel nozzle into a petrol tank, the costlier and more damaging petrol into a diesel tank is easily managed.


Even when the nozzles have letters six inches high and colour coded jackets, under the sodium vapour lights of a forecourt at midnight, a tired or distracted driver can easily not register that they've selected the wrong nozzle as they are running on auto-pilot trying to get somewhere. The danger is the routine; you fill your Lamborghini with petrol twice a day so you forget you're driving you're wife's diesel Range Rover and you fill it with petrol.

Although there has been talk of redesigning fuel nozzles and filler caps, I haven't seen any measures in use. There are gadgets on the market which check your fuel nozzle is correct but they depend on the operator remembering to use them, which is obviously where the problem lies in the first place. There are some gadgets like this and this on the market that replace the filler cap with one that has a valve that can only be opened with the correct nozzle, the cheapest costs at least £40 and there have to be many variables made to fit around the huge variety of fuel filler cap and door designs. Perhaps the auto industry should fit them as standard but it seems the nozzles aren't all standard so you could find yourself unable to fill up with the right fuel anyway.

I have a simple fail-safe solution to the problem, one that is in use in the trucking industry in a similar vein and which presents a fantastic marketing opportunity for the first oil company to introduce it.


The oil companies should simply offer motorists a free sticker they can put on the fuel filler door or on the filler cap that contains a RFID chip which reports to a detector on the pump (with any kind of nozzle) whether it is attached to a diesel or petrol vehicle. If the wrong fuel for the tag detected is selected, an helpful alarm is triggered with a helpful "are you sure" override button. If the car doesn't have a tag, or it can't be detected, then the system lets the driver choose as normal. Many petrol stations already utilise similar systems for "pay at the pump" authorisation and fleet sales where RFID is proven technology. 


If these tags were given away at petrol stations, the brand loyalty benefits would be enormous to the first company to introduce them.


After I had this idea myself, I googled it and found others are thinking exactly the same thing too. I can't understand why it wouldn't be a big hit with motorists and fleet operators and millions of these tags wouldn't be snapped up by grateful motorists.

Reimagining Norwich's Riverside

Recently Norwich's papers reported that plans are afoot to improve Norwich's riverside, a mainly underutilised area which I also think is full of potential. The EDP reported that "Norwich HEART and the Norwich Society are commissioning researchers to look at how part of the river at the back of the Playhouse Theatre could be opened up to pedestrians..."  I took up their invitation to make suggestions:

I came to love this part of Norwich when I was a student at Norwich University College of the Arts and so I think this institution holds the key to making an enormous difference to the usability of the riverside. If NUCA would allow a public right of way through one of its buildings, which would require extensive but not impossible modifications; given what has been spent on the area already, this action would magnify the benefits of that effort ten-fold.

NUCA is spread over several buildings either side of St George's Street which has recently been pedestrianised to link Cinema City to the Norwich Playhouse with the college and many cafes and bars in-between.

During the day St Georges Street is just as the planners had wished for; a hive of activity with students and office workers from Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Balloon Dog and many other firms mingling and milling around. During lunchtimes they frequent the many cafes either side of the bridge and incidentally, the coffee stand at the foot of the bridge serves the best cappucino in Norwich.

On the east side of St George's is (A) the main Technical School building which still houses the bulk of the college and opposite on its west side is (B) a building called Guntons which houses workshops and further teaching space.

Behind the Technical School building on the east side is a courtyard in which are located (C) the graduate centre The Monastery and the NUCA Student Union.

Further to the west, on Duke Street, is (D) the new NUCA Learning Centre or student library. 

From my experience, on a typical day, many students will traipse from the Learning Centre to the Monastery and back again several times.

The problem is, the most direct access from the hub of St George's street to the Learning Centre and (E) the St Andrews Car Park (Norwich's biggest) is either by Duke Street or by St Andrews Street, which are indirect routes, especially if you are heading for one of the many office buildings south of the river. 

But when you come out of St Andrew's car park on Duke Street and want to go northeast towards St George's, there is an inviting riverside path on the south bank heading towards NUCA but alas this riverside path dead-ends at the back of the Guntons building.

If only there was a way through Guntons to St George's, then many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people per day would not have to negotiate the pedestrian-unfriendly car park beside the Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP buildings (located behind the Premier Inn on Duke Street) on the north side to get to St George's Street and the Norwich Playhouse and its nearby cafes and bars.

The solution I propose is that the path blocked by the Guntons building should be extended through Guntons so that it would  carry the foot traffic that now walks through the PWC car park.

This would both give much better access to St George's Street from the St Andrews Parking structure and connect the riverside walkways either side of St George's Bridge together.

Then you could walk from Duke Street to the Cow Tower on along the south bank of the Wensum with a short diversion through the historic and interesting couryard of the Monastery behind the technical school. 

The part of the Guntons building on the riverfront itself looks to be a later addition to the main building and it would not be of any significant architectural loss if doors were made in its back wall that faces a parking structure. This passageway, facing the river, would also overlook the Norwich Playhouse and with its industrial glazing and ironwork façade, it could be made into a very attractive space.

Postscript:


I sent my suggestion to HEART and this is their response. 


Thank you for your suggestions in relation to the Parkway project. You won’t be surprised to hear that you haven’t been the first to suggest this. We will be assessing a range of options and are likely to be in a position by next Spring to move something forward.

Best regards and thanks for your interest.

Michael Loveday

Chief Executive

Heritage Economic & Regeneration Trust (HEART)

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My apologies to Google for using their images. I intend to replace them with hotlinks to their live maps as soon as I have worked out how to do it.