This entry, subbed in the evening, has been shorn of several elements.
On Sunday and Tuesday a fire and some appalling people made sleep impossible for most of the night. I've learned from experience that trying to catch a little before work only makes me feel worse.
On Saturday, though, I'll be taking a much-needed break and am looking forward immensely to using that week well to pursue my projects and some ideas I'd spun around in a more leisurely way!
Matignon: the magic roundabout
How little time the Wikipedia needs to work nowadays. Those people had France's new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin (Wikipedia) on their front page almost before the news agencies got it all out. Finding out how they manage it is something I could add to a list of next week's "to dos". There are many of those waiting for a week's rest. How I look forward to it.
No comment on President Jacques Chirac's talent for getting himself off the hook. Of the new man in Matignon, as Frogs call the official residence, all I note is that in the days when this log began, partly as a safety-valve for some steam, he was one of few politicians -- then foreign minister -- to give an intelligent and reasoned pre-war speech at the United Nations before that so-called "coalition" launched its "war on terror" in Iraq; that permanent war today proving itself the inevitable catch-all for anything that gets up noses in Washington and other insanely righteous circles.
Maybe I should write a little more -- and perhaps more seriously -- about that French No and its fall-out, but when I said a while back you'll get little more politics here, I meant it.
I'm so sick of the hypocrisy, the tedium, the predictability. What I feel I can do about it is more constructive than adding my voice to a cacaphony.
Did Edison invent iPods?
BJ visits Arts and Letters Daily assiduously (and, in passing, he's now a big Opera fan: the browser, not his luck last week in getting to chat to Cecilia Bartoli during a quick trip to London and a performance he enjoyed of some Rossini [ROH, Covent Garden] staged with a light & comic touch.)
 Barry's a fan of the latest Opera browser because it's good with increasingly indispensable newsfeeds and a fan of Bartoli "because, Nick, she's a very fine actress too." A nice woman.
It hadn't occurred to me to include Cecilia's famous voice and her "classical" contemporaries among the VoWs ... maybe I should (the picture -- hate the sickbay-wall green, do like her gear -- comes from Gabi Estrellita's website, in German, where she manages an interview with God, note that, Nat!)...
What BJ wanted me to know about, via A & L Daily, was "The Record Effect: How technology has transformed the sound of music,' a New Yorker article by Alex Ross, who:
"discovered much of my favorite music through LPs and CDs, and I am not about to join the party of Luddite lament. Modern urban environments are often so chaotic, soulless, or ugly that I'm grateful for the humanizing touch of electronics. But I want to be aware of technology's effects, positive and negative.
For music to remain vital, recordings have to exist in balance with live performance, and, these days, live performance is by far the smaller part of the equation. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we listen to CDs in order to get to know the music better, or to supplement what we get from concerts and shows. But, honestly, a lot of us don't go to hear live music that often."
Barry does. He performs it too, a clarinettist and fan of the basset horn, an orchestral musician whose perspective and outlook is very different from mine, now making music has to be a thing of my past. Still, many of our tastes overlap, I tell BJ about today's tech, and he recommends Ross for the same reason I pass on the reference.
It's worth looking 99 years back into the past as that "critic at large" does, since Ross's article is an entertaining reminder of how profoundly technology began to affect music and musicians almost from the outset with Edison. It's a keeper for the Kid the next time she plugs in her iPod, taking for granted some of the very strange noises and voices she gets out of it.
Thanks, mate.
Sensual sounds and brainstorms
I'm returning to the only politics I've expressed much interest in for months. Sexual ones, of course, and a reminder to self to try to dig out a copy of an already old book in French my first Paris girlfriend gave me about sex and music: the sex that goes into music, often where you'd least expect it!
I forget now who wrote it and must ask the woman, because it was offbeat but right on the pulse, downright weird sometimes, didn't have very much to do with the sublimation of sexual desire and passion into creativity -- there's plenty of that kind of writing around -- and full of fascinating insights.
'Ring-a-ring o' roses ... you must love me'
Cue an article I spotted myself on a newsreader and I'll tell you what I was beginning to say last night.
Never forgetting, when I do, "...it's all in your head!"
If a "team led by a neuroscientist, an anthropologist and a social psychologist" are right, so it is, always was and I always knew it.
 "You just can't tell where you might find love these days," says a learned scientific study made easier to follow on EurekAlert!
Oh dear, I'm a right-brainer.
Very right-brained, very left-handed. Sometimes gauche enough to blog a naked woman, or even two like I did last night, with a teaser in mind. Well, let's forget the "female prairie vole" and those "peacock's fancy tail feathers" -- so what again?
We know about the "myriad physiological ornaments" of attraction and those ties some men wear though the Squip says she'll never think of ties quite the same way since I logged what they say: follow that arrow right on down, girls.
I'm not known for my own physiological accessories and get on with women who don't give a damn about my holes, saying they're truly more interested in the person they see through them, while he's often vividly imagining how he'll to say "Hey!" once they've absolutely no ornaments left of their own.
I didn't know, however, that "romance is on the right, 'attractiveness' to the left" when it comes to the halves of our cranial walnuts. So says Lucy L. Brown, who found herself a "surprised" scientist.
Nor am I jumping to any hasty conclusions. The picture of my thinking apparatus (borrowed from a site that doesn't credit the artist) has already been cut along the dotted line rather too often.
The very name of a study called 'Reward, motivation and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love,' to appear in the July issue of the 'Journal of Neurophysiology', published by the American Physiological Society (APS), might be almost enough to put people right off sex for life. At least a day or two.
I can almost hear Eleanor telling me: "Nick, what's all this analysis?"
More masochistic people -- or those who enjoy messing around with ideas like these -- could go to the trouble of following up EurekAlert! to its source, where the piece is called "Love Really Is 'All In Your Head,' Though Intense Romantic Love Looks More Like The Brass Ring Than A Bouquet Of Roses" (APS). Apparently, you may download the full study, but I imagine it costs.
Get happy! This stuff "has 'links seen to stalking, suicide, clinical depression, even autism." What more could anybody want?
It's "love at first sight"? You're just fast-track mammals, folks, headed for bondage more rapidly than most. It's about survival, the species, you've heard it before. Romeo and Juliet just got unlucky.
But gracious!
"Our results support what people have always assumed – that romantic love is one of the most powerful of all human experiences," [says fellow researcher Helen Fisher]. "It is definitely more powerful than the sex drive."
There's little new under the sun, though Brown's excited since "we are beginning to track what happens in the brain as a love relationship matures."
Circuit failure
I'm not going over old ground, there's been enough of that and far worse never written in the log while it happened. These people make sense.
But -- this is a big but -- they've been looking at coupled human samples of romantic love in what I think is one kind of society we've known for centuries, which has begun to end, very slowly; but surely enough.
I'm more interested in what doesn't make sense as evolution any more -- traditional, long-established "mating patterns" -- and what people get up to instead. There's a line in the report summary that caught my eye because I've known it for a while now: "Sex and romantic love involve," says Arthur Aron, "quite different brain systems."
Yes. They do.
They involve quite different brain systems and the one, very literally, has sweet fuck all to do with the other.
Moreover, other scientists are slowly gathering evidence that "old" mating patterns and practices are over. They were never the same everywhere anyway. Women, to take the obvious example, no longer need a man around the place to keep the species going successfully. Modern medicine has seen to that.
This is where life -- including my own in the months since I was declared completely nuts, back in one piece and a resident of planet earth; in a word, "healed" -- gets very interesting indeed.
In our "western" society, some still talk of the "institution of marriage", as if it actually was any such thing. An institution, a permanent fixture, with sexual fidelity a code of practice enshrined to ensure survival.
The suffering entailed has been phenomenal for millennia. In Nigeria, according to a story I subbed and sent into the world yesterday it still is. Men have used strong-arm tactics for so long that if an Amnesty International report is close in accuracy to the figures given, at least half the of the millions of women in Lagos, a vast sprawl of a city, endure every kind of abuse. Some women who commit the mildest of perceived offences, an absent meal, for example, risk a pretty terminal sentence. Death.
And nobody does anything about it, though senior police officers make noises about law enforcement. In our own society, many women still routinely expect to wear a nice dress just the once. Afterwards, it goes into the attic in a box. So do most of their fantasies; unless it's "Wow, that was some office party! What was his name?"
I exaggerate, deliberately, but have a point to make. All the science mentioned adds a few alarming labels and wiring diagrams to some of the livelier personal adventures recounted on this log, not always much fun for me though I've sometimes been funny about it, so people say, even less amusing for my "victims".
Why should this be?
The findings might seem to indicate that romantic pursuit, "obsession", then fidelity are hardwired into our systems. They aren't; that's nonsense!
Romantic love can lead to the upsides and the many downers reported by the team, and on to something else. But try to convince me that having sex has very much to do with loving fidelity to just one person and I'll reply: churches, lawyers, outdated "moral" values, received ideas. In a word, codswallop!
Nobody would come here any more if I was incapable of seeing the absurd aspects of all this, the tragi-comedy people make of their lives when they become jealous, possessive or guilty. But if you're here today, then you probably know about the Quiet Revolution, the quiet revolutionaries I've met or rediscovered, as in another chat in the M last night.
What the heck, why not? The passing acquaintance enjoyed it as well -- one of those chats made easy because of a phenomenon I've mentioned before in more detail, when people who are relaxed by iPods and other music players size others up and any element of threat disappears if they like and accept what they see.
Far more broadly -- and gradually -- I reckon the partnerships of the future, the loving of the future, are going to be about something else: words like sharing, caring, wisdom ... and trust.
The Métro woman was pretty. I tend to "negative discrimination". If you don't turn me on, you don't stand a hope. The same, of course, works the other way round. And once we were through, we both plugged the music back into our heads, after she said: "Happy listening!"
"Same to you."
It might have turned out differently, neither of us were hurried; both chose otherwise, with no nervousness, just ordinary confidence. She was a quiet revolutionary, that went without saying almost as soon as we started talking. The day I made up my mind about sex -- by doing the uncoupling scientists are now also studying between "sexual animals" and unpossessive human beings -- I knew that a tiny little "nothing" had given me a much bigger story to take a good look at and to tell.
Freedom is the hardest choice
I've changed my mind.
That's what the Quiet Revolution is, isn't it? It's all about changing your mind.
Doing that can be a very strange business. You can't do it for anybody else and if you've got any sense, you wouldn't dream of having a go. The chances are if you leave a quiet revolutionary alone, he or she will come to you.
Then you say "Hello, I think I know you from somewhere. Haven't we met before?"
They may not know it, that's the odd thing, but they do once you say it and the chances are then, all you'll get for an answer is a smile.
Recognition.
Proof of the pudding? On the sheeting.
You know those yoghurts I get from the Factory canteen to eat at night? I told them how I was so tired I took them to bed with a book. When I woke up, there was yoghurt on the pillow, the sheet, my specs, the book and me, especially in my hair.
It could have been a lemon one or an orange and peach one, I love those. But the "laws of nature" being what they are, the yoghurt was a wild red fruit one, the messiest possible to make the worst stains. Except on the cat.
"Thanks for the story, Nick," said Michelle, fleeing down the stairs, back to a world she runs where sensible, ordinary things happen and her job is to worry about her department, French social life. Referendums? That's where we began.
Have we got any further?
8:00:06 AM 
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