14.44 This morning: David & I checked the first substantive run through for "Live Groove", fine tuning the CD by small incremental advances.
A telephone call to Richard Chadwick at Opium Arts: I am requesting that an Under 21 Section be provided at The Fox Theatre, Boulder, and wherever else this is feasible should local ordinances have age limits. I have also requested that in future this become a standard part of our performance contract.
Part of the same call: an outline plan for next year to get ProjeKCt underway, allowing for it to meet two aims:
1. To be a foundation for the next King Crimson undertaking;
2. To acquire and develop a life of its own.
This afternoon Nick Beggs is coming to tea. Nick plays the Chapman Stick and is currently touring with Howard Jones as part of the Culture Club / Human League package. Nick is recently back from the US and about to be returning there.
22.12
The graphics disappeared on the SADiE editing computer so our incremental tweaking of "Live Groove" is not, cannot, and does not, until we have a new graphics card. This has to be tomorrow - I'm off to Chez Belewbeloible on Sunday for ProjeKct Four and David's flying to Los Angeles for the finalising and completising of the KC DVD - "deja VROOOM" - on Monday (stunning artwork by Pam Crook, winningly crafted onto a cover by Hugh of the DGM Art Department).
So my evening shift has been in the Coach House, continuing to clean up the mess accumulated during six years of battle with EG. Several volumes of transcriptions from Mr. Bennett's talks and meetings at Sherborne House are now closer to hand, although boxes of Bennett archives covering many years await organisation and display. Dipping into, for example, Q&A at Denison House, 1951, what information! And of a great deal more practical use to me than 25 years ago...
Mr. Bennett travelled a long way in the 23 years remaining to him after this Denison House talk: he came to speak increasingly, and convincingly, from his own authority. Mr. B. seems to have upset many of his own generation, and even today continues to be persona non grata with senior power-possessors. The generation who went to Sherborne, young enough to be his grandchildren, found a very different Bennett to the one who irritated and exasperated his contemporaries. Perhaps his peers didn't glimpse the Bennett who, after fifty years, arrived at where he was going. Of this, the Sherborne generation had no doubt.
Along the shelf from the Sherborne Papers are cherished letters from Elizabeth Bennett, my spiritual mother. Elizabeth came here for tea with Toyah and myself the week before her cancer was diagnosed. Elizabeth told us that she had been feeling unwell. The clarity, generosity, attention and care she put into settling all her outstanding business, in preparation to fly away without baggage, was a clear example and demonstration of the line Elizabeth followed. The evening after her death I sat with her for a little while. Today, and every day, when I rise from bed and my feet hit the floor, I salute the day and send good wishes to the parents who gave me my Sister and a body to move through this world; and good wishes to my parents of another family. Tonight, and every night, before my head hits the pillow good wishes go to all my parents.
"Comparison with others is a mark of the fool."
