Somerset Hairdressers - Listening Skills and Emotional Empathy

Driving to Wells the other day, listening to BBC Radio 4. An item came on, an interview with someone from  the Hairdressers Representative Association, or similar.

The gist of the interview was that hairdressers play a huge role in their customers' emotional lives, with empathic listening skills, and understanding of their problems.

As this continued, I mentally worked through some local haircutting experiences.......

The one-off in Burnham-on-Sea, when visiting family, years ago. By the time I'd left the town centre, there was the odd sticky-uppy bit.  Within half an hour my hair was sticking up, out, all over the place.

Then there was another one-off in Weston super Mare. The woman who ran the place had recently parted  from her partner. Acrimoniously. Meanwhile, she took out her angers on my head. Here a cuff, there a cuff. I don't think my head was stationary for more than a couple of seconds throughout.

A neighbour of mine went into Cheddar for a haircut. Paid up, came home.
Paused to admire himself in the hallway mirror, as you do.
They hadn't actually finished the job. Half cut. Just stopped half way through.

A hairdressers in Wells I've used on several occasions. They do a good haircut. Empathic listening ? Endless chatter between the two people who run it.

And of course, there is the well-known barber near the bus station in Wells. Also does a good haircut. I think that the whole experience can be described thus. The waiting customers are the audience, while L, the proprietor, cuts hair and holds forth with his trenchant views on this, that, and his ex-wife. The account that I particularly recall described the problems that L had had with someone who repeatedly parked their car directly outside his house. The space that L regarded as his own.

The story ends, as L pauses from cutting, and turns wide-eyed towards the punters.... ,

"Is it my fault that an Alsation shit all over his door handle.....?".

Phillipa Rees Talk

Last week I drove up to Bristol for a talk by Phillipa Rees.
Loosely, it was about consciousness.

I was reasonably familiar, from about 20 years ago, with the theories of Rupert Sheldrake.
( Hypothesis of Formative Causation). I'd never heard of Phillippa Rees, and certainly was unaware that her work ( Involution ) had preceded that of Sheldrake, Irving Lazlo and others..., by many years. 

She spoke for 90 minutes. No yawns. No fidgeting.

Reference near the end to Phi - The Golden Ratio.

( The Best ) Halloween Song

Morning ......

As I made breakfast this morning I thought..

" The sun is always shining somewhere..."

The Green Table

The other day, as I watched the news about events in Ukraine, I recalled something I'd seen years ago. In the early to mid 90's, I went to various ballet performances. Mostly the classic stuff. Swan Lake, Coppelia, Hobson's Choice....
However, one production really impressed me. Performed . I think, by the London City Ballet.

'The Green Table' by Kurt Jooss. Diplomatic negotiations in the 1930's.

Leo Kottke - Eight Miles High...

I love this.... 

John Coltrane's "India" inspired the intro to 'Eight Miles High'. Not too obvious in the Byrds original.  The repeated jazz phrasing is very clear here though.

I find Leo Kottke's melodic country underlay quite hypnotic. 

VOX CONTINENTAL...... How Cool Is That

Brilliant.



Mike Barson of Madness used it.

And years an years ago so did Ray Manzarek of The Doors. Like so.....

Timeless ....

I had one of those going nuts in Axbridge days today.., or as I said to someone a couple of years ago.. "I feel like I'm dying here..".

So I had a little drive into Weston-super-Mare, ,, and took my camera. A week or so ago, I'd seen something and thought.. "Well, they've done a really good job of that...

The new Grand Pier..

And about 100 yards from the Pier entrance.., 

The Regent Cafe. The cafe scene in the film of Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go'. I did some work in this film, almost at the spot where I've taken this photo. I haven't seen the film.., unfortunately I read the book. Has it got a happy ending? Uh.., not exactly.

Rise Up

It's a new day....

Time For A Big Mac

Well, my ancient laptop finally went clunk for the last time a few weeks back. Of course I have still have my Asus Eee PC netbook, the original netbook, no crappy imitators here.

The Eee is brilliant for when I wake up up at 6.00 am and do a few hours work before I exit from bed.

However, sometimes I need to see the bigger picture.

I considered the options. I'd come to hate Windows and all the security stuff, malware avoidance, and electronic counter-measures necessary to just switch on and do something. And I'd installed Linux on my now deceased laptop, but I'd never tried an AppleMac. So I looked around.

All my internet access is done through a USB broadband stick, so I kept that in mind. I decided that a second-user iBook G4 might be OK. However, I didn't particularly want to spend £250 on computer hardware. Next option, an iBook G3. Cost would be about £150.

However, the USB ports on the iBook G3 are the old USB 1.1 non-high-speed variety which meant that internet performance would hardly improve over my old laptop. Well. I could live with that, for a while.

Then I remembered. I'd read that sales of desktop PC's had plateaued, or slightly declined, while laptops had continued to increase. So... "Laptops, popular., That must be keeping the prices up." I wandered off to... and found a thing called an eMac, deeply unfashionable, designed for the educational market, same performance as an iBook G3.

£30.00 on eBay. A gallon of diesel. £5 for a new internal clock battery. And a quick dunt with a heavy hammer to re-align a loose panel. At last, 4 decades after Elect. Eng. years at one of the best engineering universities in the country.... Fruition.

Very individualistic styling, I love it..., it looks like a space capsule. I can almost imagine climbing in , to re-appear through the other side in another world..., like Ewan MacGregor in Trainspotting, head down the toilet...

There's an End

I watched the Jim Jarmusch film 'Broken Flowers' a few nights ago. Liked the first piece of music on it, and googled on the film later. Came up with the song There is an End by a band called the Greenhornes and with vocals by Holly Golightly. I searched on her and came up with this, her own version of the song.



Beautiful.

Electric bass.., very double-bassy.., woody and electric.

I wondered about the sound. Apparently, it was recorded at the Toe-Rag
studios in London. The owner, some years ago, knew that he wanted to run
a recording studio, but felt that so many people who poured their money into
today's digital equipment.., really just ended up sounding the same as everyone
else, and soon went bust.

So he took a different route. Guitars with flatwound strings , Vox amplifiers,
Revox tape decks, analogue mixing desks acquired from the Abbey Road studios.

Result. 

Kenneth Bager - Fragment 8 - The Sound of Swing

The Renault UK TV Ad

Security Men and Libraries

26/12/08


About 6 am, some months ago. The Film Location for BBC TV series Lark Rise to Candleford. The tiny orange figure is a security man who has just started to run towards me, as I stand on the bonnet of a jeep taking photographs. Funny, the whole security man thing. You always find it in societies constructed for the rich, or on the slide. Seen it in so many countries.

10/01/09
Update to this

Just been in to a local library, the Campus, Weston-super-Mare, sit down, sign in at PC, about 15 seconds later, a burly uniformed security man walks up, glances at what is on my screen, then proceeds down all the other internet PC's.

I immediately got up and walked over to the assistants' desk.... "Excuse me, would you kindly tell your security man to stay away from me. Your computers are already filled up with your ghastly surveillance software, and I'm not having some guy peering over me. "

Feel like a criminal in my own library. Thought a library was somewhere you could relax, study, work, read , develop....

Instead they seem to be turning into places for the thought police. A while back, I typed in 'Heresy' on a screen just to see what happened, and instead of search results, up came huge red letters ACCESS DENIED . I've used libraries in about 6 UK counties, and North Somerset is about the most blatant, although the surveillance system introduced by Somerset County libraries about last April is very much its equal.

I do know that professional librarians, at least in Australia.. itself not exactly a place of liberal attitudes..., are very, very unhappy at the amount of censorship and surveillance that is now taking place in libraries. Here in the UK librarians have just gone along quietly with all the censorious crap. Unfortuneately, far too many qualified librarians have been quietly removed and replaced with people who, in the name of 'community', don't know much more than how to wield a bar-code reader. Oh, and 'business managers'. I wish someone would say to them....

"You're not a business. A business, any business, exists to generate a profit. You're here to give a great service to members. You are not a business."

Library, security man has wandered off. When I'd finished what I was doing, and headed for the exit, there he was .., leaning on the counter , joking with the staff. Whose library is it?



The more security men, the sicker the society, imo. And I particularly don't want them in libraries.

Woolworths Last Day

Woolworths in High Street Weston-super-Mare, yesterday. All the staff are there, in groups of two or three: they look lost. There is nothing left on the shelves, and in about half an hour they're out of a job. A few minutes previously I'd overheard someone speak with an assistant, who replied... "Well, we've got 12 cameras....". They both look up; surveillance cameras, to go.

Interesting article by journalist Miranda Sawyer about her local Woolies .....excerpt..

Woolworths was a democratic brand. Everyone shopped there: young, old, posh, not. There are few other shops that would cater so graciously for what is now called the care-in-the-community sector. Once it disappears from our high streets, those streets will go one of two ways. Either the site will be bought by a glitzy Tesco Metro or upmarket Waitrose.

Or you'll get Netto, or another pound shop, or it will lie empty and rot. And that egalitarian, come-one-come-all feel will have gone. You'll know the investment value of your local area by what happens to your Woolworths site

Click Here For the Full Article

I rather feel, take away the references to other store names, and you're left with a statement of some of the values of Woolworths. I believe there will be a New Woolworths.

The Baghdad Shoe Thrower....

First shoe flies towards Bush. "This is a goodbye kiss, you dog,".

Second Shoe... "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

First Sales of My New Book

The first sales of my book last night, 2 copies. Real sales that is, not family, or friends. Splashed the proceeds on a bottle of wine to celebrate.
Here

Messing About in the Kitchen

New Photo....

Well, I got tired of that agent's photo, so I had a bit of a think, pulled my camera out, stood up against the door of my flat, set the camera to black and white. Then I took about 100 shots , and chose this one.

I also subscribed to the film database at Imdb. My resume is on here

Photos....

Recently received a text from the Bath agent. They'd organised a photo day in Bristol, so if I wanted mine updated...

So .....

As you can see, there's a certain qualitative difference between these pictures.

If you think I look a bit rough, well all I can say is that this is a fairly standard casting agency bodyshot for a background actor. And I'd had a rush to get there, ages to find a parking space etc.. The other photo is a typical agents /Spotlight picture for an actor.

Actor is Natalia Tena. She worked on one of the 'Afterlife' episodes that I did.


Andrew

"The Other Boleyn Girl " / Cameron Diaz

I received payment this week for a bit of my work on "The Other Boleyn Girl'.
Anyway, having received some of the money that Boleyn Productions Ltd of Pinewood (aka Sony/Columbia Pictures) owe me, I feel able to recount a lighter moment from this film...

On the last day of filming at Chalfield Manor near Bath, the weather was fairly grim. If it wasn't raining, it was getting ready to... The day wore on , running late, constant interrupts to the shoot. Multiple changes of hot-water bottles for the stars, Scarlet Johannsen, Natalie Portman, Eric Bana. For the director/assistant directors, crew.., life increasingly tense. Though not for the extras ....

Most days the background actors had crowded into the cow-shed. However, on this last day there was just 8..., 5 manservants and 3 woman-servants. We rested in the manor tea-room. Warm, cosy, convivial, coffee, biscuits. Snug as bugs in a very large rug. As life got darker and colder outside, and dark, damp, brooding figures carrying film equipment trudged past in the mud, they would gaze in as the jokes and the laughter grew.

With us was the costumier .., Jacqi. Impassive, done this work for 30 years, part of the roving band of location filmspeople.., half of life spent in edge-of-town hotels. Impassive at first, but she gradually opened up, and told a little story.

Once upon a time, there was a big budget Hollywood production somewhere in the U.S. The actors included Cameron Diaz. Jacqui and various other Brits were in the crew.

One evening, at the end of the day's shoot, Diaz returned to her trailer. She opened the door, and right in front of her she saw that someone had laid an absolutely giant turd. Beautifully formed, almost steaming, and with a lovely curly, piggy-tail on top. Needless to say, this caused great consternation and...

Next morning, the American producer gathered the whole crew together. This was serious, the famous American sense of humour had failed. "I think you all know why I am speaking to you today. This is a very serious matter, and I want the person who did this to step forward.."

And as his voice echoed out over the assembly, little speech bubbles formed above the heads .. "I did it..", "No,it was me.." , "No, no it wasn't him,I did it..". And.., well no.

Cameron Diaz took it all quite well, apparently.