mintybloggydiarythingy 2.0

Week from Monday 10th February 2025 Week from Monday 17th February 2025 - Whoops! I missed a week! Y'see, the trouble with all this KEEPING A DIGITAL DIARY* malarkey is... My life is split between mundane periods of having NOTHING NEW to write about, or being so otherwise busy that I DON'T HAVE TIME to write about it all! Last week was divided equally between both contingencies. (*BTW the normal repetitive routine medical stuff still gets logged in a good old-fashioned PAPER diary, using an actual 'analogue' BIRO.) "The very act of concentrating on writing makes it difficult to do so, since ideas normally arise not when one is focused, but when one is open in some way..." (Brian Eno) Earlier in the week, I had another sudden flurry of back'n'forth activity with our Edinburgh correspondent CLOUDLAND BLUE QUARTET. Mister Quartet is planning the public release (on that there Bandcamp) of the results of our recent collaborative efforts. He now suggest...

Week from Monday 3rd February 2025 - Having taken my customary STEP BACK for a few days, I've now reached the next stage of our "UNTITLED ABSTRACT PIECES" project. This is where I enjoy selecting and editing down 'THE GOOD BITS'. I am taking the most interesting(?) of my versions and those of CLOUDLAND BLUE QUARTET's, and concatenating them together to form one of my famous, continuously flowing, "MINTYMEGAMIX" seedies. I've now assembled the 'piece' and have indexed it as individual 'episodes' for CD purposes... and now I take another break and come back to it later "TO SEE IF I STILL LIKE IT!"... I've been taking a similar "WAIT AND SEE" approach to TWITTER... I've stayed away from it now for a few weeks, probably long enough to determine that I no longer NEED it anymore. But I can't yet make myself let it go altogether. Perhaps I should just delete the APP from my portable devices, thus making...

Week from Monday 27th January 2025 - I haven't scrapped my TWITTER account entirely (now that Elno has gone full-on NAZI), but I have stopped bothering to post things on that platform. I find myself visiting less and less. My own 'pre-X' Twitter app is still quite 'comfortable' to use and relatively fascist-free, but there's very little point in TALKING TO MYSELF on Twitter. Any FOLLOWERS who ever interacted with me have now jumped ship and gone to THE BLUE SKIES PLACE instead. A lot of the usual suspects on my READING LIST can just as easily be accessed via the Bloosky nowadays... Not too surprisingly (given how CLOUDLAND BLUE QUARTET tends to work), my 'little' eleven-minute piano noodle has generated hours and hours of stretched droneage! I'm quite pleased with a couple of the 'finished' pieces, which have resulted from a couple of days of remote BACK'n'FORTH via the cloud(s). But I must admit, though I'm just as guilty of M...

Week from Monday 6th January 2025 - Happy New Quarter-Of-A-Century! To be honest, even though I don't 'PARTICIPATE', I'm kinda glad that the days are back to some sort of 'NORMAL'. I suppose the most interesting thing that happened to me over the 'HOLIDAYS' was another Saturday visit to an almost-empty HODU. Not knowing what to expect from the bus companies, I'd travelled and arrived at the hozzy ridiculously early, and so got through my treatment in record time! The weather's been behaving itself so far this week, at least at this end of the country. Yesterday, I decided to give my emaciated little leggies a workout and went for a hobble around PORTSMOUTH - the Commercial Road bit of it anyway! A nice day out (admittedly a lot of it spent riding around on buses), which didn't cost me a thing! I've also been for a hobble around FAREHAM, mainly to visit the bank and do some POUNDLANDing, during which I discovered that the powers-that-be...

Week from Monday 30th December 2024 - I've just been watching a 1982 KING CRIMSON concert off of German TV, newly posted on That YouTube They Have Now... I've made no secret of the fact that I'm not MUCH of a fan of the 1980s KCrim, or "THE BELEW YEARS" as I like to call it. The guitar-gamelan/math-rock approach I've always found to be more an 'INTERESTING' listen than an EXCITING one. 'MY' Crimso lies elsewhere. The repertoire of that period, while it was certainly a novel and worthy approach, which I did enjoy at the time, mostly leaves no room for SPONTANEITY, an essential ingredient for any pop music that can push my own buttons in any lasting way. For this audient, the improvisatory 'GOOD STUFF' ("Requiem", "Industry", "Nuages"...) only seemed to happen during those times when they'd failed to come up with any fresh THROUGH-COMPOSED material. While it's always fun to be able to see closely ...

Week from Monday 16th December 2024 - I had my scheduled telephone chat with the KIDNEY PEOPLE up at the Horse Piddle. My latest blood test shows an okay "U&E" but my "eGFR" is still fairly low "for someone my age". Apparently, I don't drink enough WATER. I just pee it out. They gave me a target of TWO LITRES PER DAY, which sounds to me an extraordinary amount when I think about it. You know those little 250mL bottles of water you get at the supermarket? Then imagine EIGHT of those. PER DAY?!? But who am I to question the experts? I'll just spend ALL night in the bathroom, shall I? (By the way, "U&E" means "Urea and Electrolytes" and "eGFR" means "Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate". So now you know.) I went for a shopping trip into town, where I availed myself of Uncut magazine's "KING CRIMSON: THE ULTIMATE MUSIC GUIDE". Nearly twelve quid is rather expensive for what, let's ...

New Releases 2024 FERGUS McCREADIE TRIO - "Stream" Nothing brings me greater musical pleasure these days than the sound of a jazz piano trio. It's the perfect format (unless of course the pianist decides to sabotage the recording by 'vocalising' all the way through it. But that's another story...) Those young whippersnappers McCreadie, Bowden and Henderson win it again for me this year with the new one "Stream", not to mention their frequent appearances on the radio (bla bla bla dum-de-dum BBC Radio Three "New Generation Artists" bla bla bla and so forth). Fergus's playing is, as always, absolutely astonishing and there are plenty of banging self-penned tunes, all steeped in traditional 'folk music' flavours, coupled with some great improvisational interplay. First-class acoustic piano, double bass and drums, guaranteed no extraneous grunting and groaning - what more can anyone ask for? THE SMILE - "Wall of Eyes...