This year’s Brighton Festival might come across as “Brian Eno Week” as Nicola says, because he’s been curating the Festival. We have a big day out and finally pottered around all the bits I’ve been mourning over from behind a window, glued to a dissertation.

Out of the assorted faff of red, blue, yellow and green rooms, bored looking attendants, and quotes on the walls that don’t put much in context (although I nod knowingly, and think “oooh, disco balls” when I spot them) there’s good bits.

Whilst the patch of synthetic grass in the middle of the room makes no sense, and the peculiar humming of flower-shapes-on-sticks and disco balls are mindlessly nice, and we sit on armchairs listening to strange music surrounded by firs, this catches me eye.

There’s a nice electronic music piece. Nothing fancy, but comparatively fun and interactive (nouns Eno might not be a fan of). It involves long benches with thin strands of wire going from a sensor at one end, to the other where buckets of rocks hung off the end. I stand gormlessly for a while until the ‘art lady’ starts lifting taking some out of the basket, changing the idle hum from the speaker. We leap on it, idly worrying that we’ll destroy the exhibition by throwing the rocks into the basket all at once. But it doesn’t, and the pitch goes from very high to very low. It’s incredibly simple in a way, but really nice (especially compared to the other bits..)

Later we stumble into Fabrica where Eno’s out again. Jonathan wrote a brilliant description so I’m shameless stealing it.

“Rather misleadingly titled ‘77 Million Paintings’, the show actually focuses on one piece – a large, evolving graphic up on a large screen at the far end of the dark church. The same aesthetic which drives much of Eno’s music is apparent in the work; it is neither instantly rewarding nor demanding, but instead a kind of slow, transformative experience for which the term ‘ambient’ (traditionally used to characterise much of Eno’s music) remains the best descriptive term I can conjure up.

It’s essentially a series of locked geometric shapes which move through a range of patterns and colours in a sequence determined by ‘generative software’ which is capable – as the title of the piece suggests – of 77 million possible permutations (which would take, apparently, over a thousand years to unfold). The transformations are slow but remarkably evocative.
..
Imagine yourself sat in a church, half-dozing, glancing down at the cobbled floor. As the sun progresses slowly across the sky outside, light catches panes of the stained glass windows high above, and casts a reflection down on the floor in front of you. The light shimmers and shines, ducks behind a cloud, comes up for air. The quality of light changes, and different parts of the window are alternately obscured and revealed. What plays out on the floor in front of you is the combination of chance, nature and design, and it is playing only for you.”

We loved it. Later in the week my parents visit and I show them this cultural hi-light. My Father falls asleep.

Oh hello, lots of shoes hanging infront of a balcony? This sort of arty shit makes me happy. I pottered around Clerkenwell Design Week (by which I mean they lie as it lasts only 3 days) before going to the Pop Up Pirate typography bar thing (Bitchbuzz review here).

I thought a light by Dare Studio was cool, but distracted myself from a lot of things that weren’t that interesting by trying to juggle a camera and a square of pizza. Pepperoni can be a tricky bitch.

It was all pretty interesting apart from the section about floor panels. The band that played from the balcony was pretty good, though I don’t know their name. There was lots of shiny stuff to keep me entertained. And fancy back-lighting of a wall behind a chair. Some of it came in mirrored cubicles. I could have wept. Photos instead of words.

Oh, and a Robot thing that doubled as a bike rack. CAN I HAVE ONE?

An illustrative photo of Brighton beach.

I didn’t have a gap yah. I dropped out of University instead and now I’m about to finish my degree I’m puzzled by the world’s attitude to work.

“Enjoy this summer, it’ll be the best of your life” Mike said.
“But I’m working,” I pointed out.
“All of it?” he said, as agog as one can be through msn.
“Yes” I said, perplexed.

My parents, lovely people, are retiring in a couple of years from long lives of Microsoft Engineer-style IT training and Pegasus Consulting, amongst other things. Apparently way back in the 20th Century they hatched a plan that upon retirement they would move to New Zealand for half a year. I’m not sure why; Lord of the Rings hadn’t yet aired with nine hours of NZ mountain footage, and Tolkien makes little reference to the place in the book. I assume, with my Mother’s keen aversion to America (and also the brand “Tesco”, the two main horrors in her life) they chose somewhere a bit British, and didn’t fancy Australia.

Anyway, I’m not sure what drove them to New Zealand, but forty years after the muttered birth of their plan my Mother mentioned it to me in passing. “You could visit us,” she said. A stylish sort of Wales with a hip accent? I thought. Yes, I could probably do that. But why wait forty years to have what is essentially a gap year? Why is a post-University summer, presumably to spend three months on Brighton beach greedily drowning myself in ice cream and cheap wine the last ‘good summer’ I’ll ever have before I retire? Perhaps the longest yes, but what stops other people doing this if it is indeed so fantastic?

An illustrative fence metaphor.

Three sentence-long anecdotes:

Fun things should always be fun, and not merely invented and discovered when one loses a job or reaches 65. (I meanwhile, am not one to talk, having spent most of holidays beadily interning around but that’s a pre-first-job different scenario.) I deduce there is there some sort of vacuum that sucks a person into work and refuses to spit them out for fear of being unproductive. Perhaps our notion of ‘what is productive’ changes through work. Unproductive is not heralded enough.

Yes, it’s a bit of a privileged outlook, so let’s assume I’m talking to the privileged. But this mostly stems from being halfway through a dissertation writing a lot about Castells’ notion of the Global Network Society which most likely includes you, First World. (In short he says: horray for those that have computers.) A key part is the arrival of flexi-time, and contractual and freelance work. Also with that thing called frugality (later: how to turn potato sacks into shirts) it’s not impossible. For example, a nice Glue colleague disappeared off for a year or so with his wife to Africa to “play with Lions or save something [sic]” and I have a lot of respect for this. Job relocation’s equally viable, aside from the need to learn the different cultural practices in PR/Advertising (for me). I suppose you get the gist.

So, note to self: Investigate another country at some point before age of 65.
And to summarise. For all and for me: more fun with traveling. Less: being sucked into work.

“Students” they scoff. Lazy lazy students, what do they know? Alright, alright.. yeah.