The Shawshank Redemption

This film was on Channel 4 last night and I hadn’t seen it for a few years. Classic, one of my all-time favourites.

Korg Triton keyboard and a book on New Labour

I have been tinkering around with my marvellous Korg Triton keyboard today, including a bit of work on possible keyboard parts for the album. The final mixes will probably end up with about half of the keyboards done by myself and half by Laurence (Monty Oxy Moron).

One of the good things about delayed progress with the album has been an opportunity to slowly familiarize myself with the Korg Triton over the last 12 months or so. It really is a great box of tricks and the first pro keyboard I’ve owned since my old Roland Juno 6 back in the eighties. And its nice and simple to use, just twiddle around with a few knobs to switch from sound to sound – no complex programming for my simple brain!

Out of the several hundred preset sounds, I’ve got about 30 or 40 that I keep coming back to. I have these all scribbled down in my diary, usually with various notes and possible ideas scribbled next to them. These include a range of “pad” or string sounds, mostly on the cosmic or spacey side. A setting called “Sailing” (COMBI A 18 on the settings, for anyone who might be interested) and “Dolphin Ride” (PROG C 77) are two I particularly enjoy playing with and there’ll be some of that sort of thing on a track somewhere. I can lock into a simple chord sequence for ages and just space out with those. Cosmic man! Then there is “Digi Ice Pad” (PROG 073 B), an interesting sad atmospheric sound that helped me write a track provisionally called “Living Without Love”.

There is a lot more to the Triton than the spacey sounds of course. Some great rhythms, special effects, every type of percussion, dance beats, pianos and organs, just about eveything really. A setting such as “Electric Laboratory” (COMBI C 023) is an excellent combination of a simple dance rhythm and some nice string sounds. I’ve written a kind of “Moby goes prog” track with that one, although I’m not sure if I will use it for the album. Sometimes the instrument enables you to write a whole track complete with drums, bass and guitar/keyboard all in one go. I haven’t started programming my own sounds as there is such a vast range of pre-programmed ones.

After a read of the papers this morning, and a skip through the very impressive new Arcade Fire album in Virgin records, I browsed the politics section of Borders in Brighton and stumbled across a paperback, “Plundering The Public Sector”. This is such a good read I actually bought it. It came out last year and is about New Labour’s obsession with consultants and “experts”, how Blair and his chums have given vast amounts of taxpayers’ money to management and IT consultants, particularly in their third term of office. One of the biggest of many consulting disasters is the new NHS computer system, “up to £30 billion taken out of patient care”.

Over the last year I have experienced a few NHS disasters first hand in my job as an agency nurse. The system they have brought in to supposedly save money on agency staff (such as myself) is completely incompetent and badly thought out. It has played its part in destroying the morale of several wards where I regularly work, one being in a hospital that is already threatened with closure. Yesterday I heard from a staff nurse on another ward how cost-cutting has led to many staff going off sick with depression.

The book confirms much of what I had suspected and picked up through television and newspaper articles already. It gives some idea of why and how the New Labour party has buggered up a lot of things in its crusade to modernize public services. I suspect things will get worse before they get better. It is almost enough to make one consider voting Conservative. Almost.

Can’t we find something better than this sham of a system called “democracy”?

Saturn in my 6th house

I have just returned from a marvellous run along the sea-front down the road. Glorious sunshine, fantastic!

A couple of days ago I had a lengthy chat with an ex-partner of mine about our astrological charts which got me pondering on a few things, particularly the current position of Saturn in my chart which has been very obvious over the last year or two. Astrology is such a brilliant tool for understanding the cycles and processes of one’s life. It is still a mystery to me as to why real astrology is not more widely acknowledged but there are many obvious and not-so-obvious reasons for that. In my opinion astrologers themselves don’t do astrology any favours by writing the crap “horoscopes” everyone reads in the papers, but I suppose people enjoy them and it is virtually impossible to make a living if you just stick to dealing with the real deeper stuff. Anyway…

For anyone who doesn’t know, the movement of Saturn around a person’s birth chart represents a 29-year complete cycle of learning. The birth chart is a circle divided up into 12 segments called houses, each representing a different area of life. Saturn moves through each house for about two and a half years, bringing lessons to be learnt, difficulties and obligations, and a general re-structuring in that area. If we dealt with Saturn contructively, we reap the benefits of a more realistic relationship with a particular area of life at the end of the period.

At the moment, “the schoolteacher of the zodiac” is moving through my 6th house from June 2005 until August 2007, an important phase of preparation for when it moves above the horizon into my 7th house and beyond. I have just been re-reading “Saturn In Transit” by Erin Sullivan, and the section on the 6th house makes total sense as regards what is going on in my life these days. “The capacity to acquire and refine new skills as well as digest and process new material is a particular feature… one can materialize one’s inner worth. Everything that one has acquired over the last fourteen-year cycle must be consolidated and rendered practical. However, it takes consciousness and constant awareness that the process is towards a greater goal, albeit unknown.” My new album, the acting and a few other things all feel relevant to the above comments.

Erin Sullivan then goes on to talk about some of the dangers of the house. “If the response is one of debilitated exhaustion, it is a sign that burn-out has occurred. The psyche, the soul, is sick at heart and the body has no energy to carry out meaningless tasks. There are enough examples of individuals who have lost employment during this transit, either through redundancy, illness or sheer boredom, to indicate that there is some secret intent behind such losses.” A perfect description of when I stopped my agency N.H.S. nursing work last year, which in fact was kind of a combination of redundancy, illness and sheer boredom, even though it was my decision. I have since joined a different agency and found one or two more caring environments (e.g. Mencap homes for people with learning disabilities) than some of the N.H.S. hospital wards I know which have been ruined by incompetent government cost-cutting.

Saturn entering my 7th house in August signifies an important time of entering into “public participation” after fourteen years of more introverted preparation. I am looking forward to it.