Dissertation seminar & First "Random Blast from the Past"

The "express" coach to London gets me to LSE by library opening time of 8:00. This morning's reading was a paper by Steve Fuller called Is History and Philosophy of Science Withering on the Vine?, from 1991. The answer is presumably either yes, if his prescription wasn't followed, or no if it was. I suspect it is no, but not for his reasons!

Our dissertation seminar is back as a group and I was first on for a presentation on a past dissertation. Mine was on a paper called "Gruesome simplicity" from 2004 which was a very high scoring paper which I was not impressed by. No idea really why it was marked so high! As has happened before, my presentation turned out to be by far the best of the six today - a good handout (no one else gave out anything) and well structured. Every one else was pretty poor. So once again, it probably wasn't worth going down to see.

From reading Robert Fripp's blog (http://www.dgmlive.com/) I have hit on the idea of including some bits from my diaries from the distant past for roughly the same day. I had a very quick sort out of them all and will try, for the next few blogs to select something interesting from them. Here is the first and one that I do rather like.

"A random blast from the past"

Sunday February 26th 1984

I called in at Chris's place and stayed for an hour or so before heading off for Victoria and the crowds of people waiting outside the Palace Theatre for the best gig in town.

Of course I breezed through the entrance, cassette recorder and all. But the problems of illegally taping concerts don't end here as I discovered. For one thing it is a good idea to discover where the microphone is on it before it got dark. After Dead Can Dance had finished - who were very good - I discovered that the machine hadn't worked at all which was a shame. I sorted that out and was all set to go when the Cocteau Twins came on. Loads of people went down the front and I followed to get a better sound in case it did work this time. And what a shock. Second song is my favourite from the second Peel Session and unrecorded till now. Shivers went down my back at this and I could feel goose bumps on my neck. Song number 6 was "Blind dumb deaf" from the first album. I changed the tape over at 8, just in time for "Musette and drums". They went off after and everyone cheered for ages and eventually they came back on to repeat a song they had already done. Liz Fraser looked overcome. My tape scored a 6.5 out of 10

(Addendum - This night was the first time I saw Dead Can Dance, and the first concert I tried to bootleg tape. Two months later they played a few shows in London as headliner that I saw - Brixton Loughborough Hotel and Fulham Town Hall. By then I had improved my taping technique and made two beautiful recordings of these shows - still the best copies available on the worldwide bootleg community! I have seen DCD over 40 times now. By contrast, I was coming to the end of my liking of the Cocteaus - they were losing their early edgy sound and becoming soft and fluffy. The "Chris" mentioned above is presumably Chris Lever)