England, Their England

When I was out with Smat last weekend she gave me a right telling off for referring to the England football team as 'us'.

"When are we playing next?," I ask her. "What do you mean, 'we'?," she replies. "We aren't in it."

Smat thinks I should think of myself as Scottish, like she is. Like her, I was born there and I grew up there. But unlike her, and my brother, and my two cousins, I never had a Scottish accent. My accent has always been quite posh and English to the core.

The primary school I went to was full of English kids, because we lived by an RAF base, which was full of flight lieutenants and squadron leaders on postings from sister bases in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. My secondary school was a posh public school full of rich English kids whose Dads worked in the City and thought that a spell of roughing it in the North of Scotland would do their kids good. (Mostly it didn't.)

I developed a strange fondness for England from the first time I went there at the age of about 12, and realised that in England, fields are separated by hedges, not fences. For some reason, this was the one thing that made me really want to live there. Fences are horrible. Hedges are nice.

As it turned out, I went to live in Italy before I ever lived in England. Upon leaving school at the tender age of 17, I dispatched myself on a nightmare 48-hour coach trip from Inverness to Florence, where I'd got a job as an au pair. I arrived at five in the morning, to find no one there to pick me up, and unable to speak a word of the language. It wasn't an auspicious start.

It rapidly got less auspicious as I realised that not only was I rubbish at being an au pair, I also wasn't the least bit interested in the things that 17-year old Italian girls were interested in, namely handbags, makeup and Italian boys. In fact I still can't see the appeal of any of these things. The Italians struck me as being obsessed with outward appearances, from clothes to makeup to interior décor, and not so hot on the things that I liked, namely being moody, writing avant-garde plays (obviously Luigi Pirandello was a bit of an exception, but I didn't know about him then) and thinking a lot.

In the end I got so depressed by it all that by Christmas I was on tranquillisers.

Fortunately by Christmas I was also more or less fluent in Italian, and when my employers told me they no longer required my services, I realised that I had achieved what I'd set out to do (i.e. learn the language), and was free to go home. Hurrah!

I finally got to move to England a week shy of my 19th birthday, when I fetched up at the furthest possible university from the parental home, namely Exeter. With no disrespect to any of my Scottish friends (er, that'll be you, Smat), I thought that England was the greatest place on earth. I thought I'd found somewhere I really belonged. It had proper shops, and proper goths, and bands played gigs nearby, and it was full of proper small-town indie kids with proper Arthurian-style* hippy leanings. It was great.

My university chums had other ideas, though. Most of them came from towns and counties within 100 miles of Exeter, and to them I was some sort of exotic outsider. They were constantly teasing me for having a Scottish accent, which was very odd, because I don't**. My name is sort of Scottish, and they assumed that so too was I. So in the end I felt like I didn't really belong at all.

Even after having lived here for 17 years (give or take a couple of years in France), I still don't fully feel like I belong. When I go back to Scotland, I feel like I belong there even less. It's not like I'm an immigrant from some far-flung country. In fact it's such small-scale rootlessness, it's laughable. But even so, the words 'English' and 'Scottish' throw me into a bit of confusion. And even after 17 years, the Cross of St George seems alien to me, while the St Andrew's Cross seems right and familiar.

I'll still be supporting England this afternoon, though. Sorry Smat.


* Well, somewhere between Arthurian-style and Neil-from-the-Young-Ones-style.

** Unless I've been labouring under a misapprehension all this time, and I do in fact talk like a character in an Alan Warner novel. In which case, could someone please let me know? It'll do wonders for my sense of identity.


tags: england | scotland

Choke On That, Causality!

NEWSFLASH: Hurrah - more Futurama finally on its way!

Looks like I won't be cancelling my Sky subscription just yet after all...


tags: futurama

Academia Blues

That essay I wrote during the unearthly small hours of last week came back from the tutor the other day.

I thought it was such an appalling load of facile rubbish that I couldn't even bring myself to open the envelope and confront the inevitable scathing critique. But today I had to, because I had a tutorial this evening. And bugger me if it doesn't have comments like 'this is really exciting!' (for a bit I wrote about Sandi Thom, for Christ's sake), and 'this would make an excellent PhD research topic!', for a bit I wrote about how we all work for Google now.

I can only think of four five possible explanations:

1. Academic standards have dropped so far that a hastily cobbled-together paragraph about the Arctic Monkeys now counts as a work of considerable scholarship.

2. My tutor is insane.

3. My tutor is patronising me.

4. I am doing the most Mickey Mouse degree ever*.

5. My tutor fancies me. (Highly unlikely, but he is quite nice**, so I thought I might as well put it in).

I'm inclining towards 2., since a section I wrote describing what the internet is made of (servers and hubs and puppy dogs' tails) elicited the comment 'I had no idea about this!'.

Next essay is on 'things people make in the blogosphere'. If anyone's seen any cool things (writing, art, photography, comics, poetry, music, recipes, knitting patterns, bits of code that do stuff etc.) that bloggers have made with their own little typing fingers, please do let me know. I *am* doing my own research, honest. I just wouldn't want to miss anything really great.


* I can't make up my mind about this. Sometimes cultural studies seems like this really brilliant secular belief system that explains everything we see around us without having to invoke some invisible, omnipotent Creator (sorry Dave). Other times it seems just to consist of a lot of people spouting a lot of incomprehensible polysyllabic guff about not much.

** I've just remembered I gave him and my fellow MA Pop Culters the address of this blog, oh dear.


tags: academia | popular culture | sandi thom

Waiter, Waiter, There's A...

I just found a dead mosquito in my M&S salad. Should I:

a) Run around hysterically screaming 'eww! eww!' until my one of my colleagues slaps me across the face?

b) Contact Watchdog immediately?

c) Take it back to the shop and create some kind of almighty scene?

d) Blog about it, in the hope that it will spark some kind of grass-roots consumer uprising against our retail-industry oppressors?

e) Remove it and finish eating the salad?

Cast your votes - and quickly, because I'm starving.


UPDATE: Thank you all for your suggestions. In the end I did d) and then f), which was 'dither about until it starts to smell, then wrap it up in a bag and throw it in the bin'. Oh yes, I'm quite the crusader for consumer justice.


tags: m&s | mosquito | salad

Unsuitable Clothes I Have Worn

I have no real explanation for why I ever wore any of these things:

1. That really short leopard-print miniskirt

2. That even shorter cream-coloured PVC miniskirt

3. That even shorter, furry, dalmatian-print skirt

4. Those black PVC trousers (although actually I really liked them)

5. Those green Red or Dead hotpants (I was drunk when I bought them)

6. Those silver lurex hotpants (although to be frank, I quite liked them as well)

7. That snakeskin-print top (shudder)

8. All these things have

9. Long since been dispatched to the charity shop.

10. Thank god.

There's A Rainbow Inside My Mind

At one point on my Grand Tour through the subcultures of Britain's youth, I was a raver.

I can't say I ever *really* got into it, mind you. For one thing, I was far too self-conscious to go around sucking lollipops while wearing my hair in bunches, which seemed to be the de rigueur get-up for raver chicks in the very early 90s*. For another thing, well, it wasn't a very intellectual scene, was it? There were no deep and meaningful lyrics to analyse, or corpuses of literature that one had to read in order to 'belong', not like there was with indie and goth.

No, mostly it consisted of getting totally wasted in fields and warehouses, dancing to really mental, bleepy music, blowing whistles, sniffing Vicks inhalers and babbling on about shamanic insight and transcendental journeys to other planes. Hardly Friday night at Les Deux Magots with Jean-Paul and Simone.

So I wasn't particularly sad to hang up my whistle and glowsticks when Britpop came along, and I haven't really looked back since.

Until last September, that is, when long-term Quinquireme readers may recall that I briefly attended the Bestival festival on the Isle of Wight. Not only did I end up wearing a cowboy hat, but I also ended up dancing like a nutter, with 25,000 other people, to Soulwax's mental, bleepy set. Ooh, it was just like 1992 all over again. Fantastic!

So obviously I had to download this Soulwax remix thing that turned up on Said The Gramophone the other day. Oh boy. This is really not for the faint-hearted. The first minute and a half seem to go on forever, and sound like 10,000 old-school fax-modems that have taken it upon themselves to dial straight into your brain and deliver an incoherent message about shouting and excuses. But luckily once the beat kicks in, it just gets better and better and better, until all I want to do is pull my hair into bunches and jump around non-stop for eight hours in a West Country field**.

If there's anyone reading who has ever held aloft a glowstick like the oriflamme at Roncesvalles, this is for you:


Soulwax - NY Excuse (Justice Remix) (mp3) - courtesy of Said The Gramophone


NB I may or may not have listened to this eight times in a row on the way to Islington today. This may or may not be why I now have a terrible headache.


* I wasn't too self-conscious to go out into the world wearing silver lurex hotpants, but that's another story.

** Better not, though - I've got a meeting tomorrow.


tags: rave | soulwax | oriflamme

Newsflash: 'Carpentry The New Blogging' Shocker

You heard it here first. Well, unless you read it on Ben Hammersley's blog two weeks ago, in which case you heard it here in another ordinal.

Now, where's my brad awl?


tags: carpentry

Cop Out

It's been, ooh, four days, so I thought I'd better write something to show I'm still alive. Although I suppose it's possible that this post could be being written by a ninja Turing nanobot rather than the 'real' me, and [continues in cyberpunk-lite vein for several hours...]

I thought about writing something (not something interesting, don't worry) about dating, but my stringent editorial policy doesn't allow that. Then I thought about writing something about the currencies of the blogosphere, but I'm *always* writing about blogging, and anyway if I don't write it here it means I've got something to write about for the nice people at Open Journal Montreal who have asked me to write a guest post. They found me through a tag - yay for tags!

Then I thought about posting up the summer barbecue playlist that I created with help from the Hype Machine (go go go, if you use the search box, it's like a nice, tidy Napster for thirtysomethings), but the sun's gone away, so it wouldn't be right.

Plus this week's heavy schedule of writing pseudo-academic rubbish at 3.30am, oppressing the proletariat at work (although I did unchain them from the spinning jennies in time for the football, because I'm an enlightened despot) and debating the similarities between Bleak House and Big Momma's House with Pashmina, Wyndham, Annie and Tim has made me really quite tired, so... I... think I'll stop now.

Oo, but before I go, here's a soaring, joyous summer song. You know this one, but it's still brilliant. Apparently it was on a Baileys advert, but I don't watch TV so I can listen to it without having to think about how Minnie Riperton has been co-opted twice - once into supplying the vocals for this tune, and once again to sell some gloopy, faux-Irish whisky-based drink. I heartily encourage you to do the same.

4 Hero - Les Fleurs (mp3) - courtesy of Cubik Musik

Here Is The News

1. Deadline for 4,000-word essay: 9am tomorrow morning. Number of words written so far: 1,769, all of them rubbish. Hmm.

3. I've forgotten to drink my tea again.

4. The always lovely Danny O'Brien turns up in this week's Economist, going on about how O'Reilly wanted him to write a book of Life Hacks, but he couldn't find the motivation to do it. Ho ho ho.

5. That Heart-Shaped Box/Superstition/Jenny From The Block mashup (mp3) is still the greatest tune ever.

4. I haven't watched television for 23 days.

6. Wikipedia now a metaphor for the whole of 21st-century civilisation.

7. Crikey, it's hot, isn't it?


UPDATE: I was going to fix the numbering, but actually I like it better like that.

Conversational Highlight, Mashuptasticness

INT. SWANKY BAR - EVENING

Tabby Rabbit, LC, M. and I are having a valedictory drink (non-alcoholic mojitos, mmm) to see TR on her way to Boston, Mass., where she'll be setting up the US division of our company.

Tabby Rabbit: ...and there's just so much going on over there, technology-wise, and there's MIT, and there's Harvard, and our new office is actually on Harvard Square, so we'll be right in the middle of it...

Me: Our new office is on Harvard Square? Wow, that's cool.

LC: You're a company director! How can you not know these things?

Me: Mainly because I live in a complete fantasy world.

[Pause]

Me: Things not to say to the staff: 'I live in a complete fantasy world and have no idea what's going on'.

[Pause]

LC: Did you just call me 'the staff'?

Me: Things not to say...


This conversational highlight was partly brought to you by Luke Enlow*'s tip-top 'now with hands-in-the-air breakdown section' version of Apeboy's Smack My Bitch Up/Orinoco Flow mashup, which is *just* the thing to be listening to indoors with the blinds down on the hottest day of the year when you're trying to write 5,000 words about the death of the culture industry while everyone else is waiting for the football to start:

Apeboy - Enya vs. Prodigy (Lenlow Edit) (mp3) - thanks to James for that one.

(MASH)UPDATE**: This J-Lo/Nirvana/Stevie Wonder one is also outstanding***, and I command you to play it at all your summer barbecues:

Lenlow - J-Lo vs K-Co vs S-Wo (mp3)


* Who, as it turns out, also hails from Boston, Mass. This isn't the first time that's happened, either. Spooky musico-geographical coincidences abound on this blog. Sinister!

** Sorry.

*** [About 87 listens later...] Where by 'outstanding' I mean possibly the GREATEST TUNE EVER, with the GREATEST INTRO EVER. Ahem.


tags: mashups


Readers! Please help me with my Unscientific Blogging Survey!

Patroclus, Like, Totally Betrays The Sisterhood

The other day I was having some top comment- and email-based chat with Scroobious Scrivener about whether female bloggers are held in lower regard - both inside and outwith the blogosphere - than our male counterparts.

Scroob was convinced that this is the case; I, being the eternal optimist, was trying to argue that all is actually fair and equitable in the fluffy world of blogging. I even went so far as to suggest that female bloggers may have the upper hand over men, seeing as there seem to be more of us, and 'communication' is a skill traditionally associated with the female of the species.

Even this nasty Guardian piece that Tim found didn't sway my judgment. Catherine Bennett is just ill-informed and misguided, I thought. Women aren't victims of patriarchal oppression in blogworld; they participate on an equal footing, they have interesting things to say, and they say them well.

I am clearly a champion of gender equality. Go me!

Then yesterday at work we got a request from our industry rag asking us to nominate blogs that we like. I dutifully dashed off a list of media-friendly favourites, complete with witty and pithy commentary on just what makes each one so great.

No sooner had I pressed 'send' than I thought 'hang on a minute...' and reviewed the list again. All of them, without exception, written by men. I thought about sending an addendum with some of my favourite female-authored blogs in it, but I worried that the (male) journo might have considered them 'frivolous', because they tend to eschew a single theme or gimmick in favour of a mixture of 'serious' topics and personal stuff.

To my absolute horror, I realised this means that even *I* subconsciously think that stuff written by men is more 'important' and 'worthy of attention' than stuff written by women. How on earth did this happen?

*stands back and awaits torches, burning pitchforks, bitter polemic, ad hominem (poor choice of words there) attacks, recriminations, tears before bedtime, etc.*

Signs Of The Times, Part 3

I think this kind of thing so often nowadays that I asked the lovely and talented Biscuits to make it into a cartoon:




That isn't me in the picture by the way. I can't wear things with buttons down the front.


tags: hive mind | buttons


Readers! Please help me with my Unscientific Blogging Survey!

Song Of The Week

If, like me, your hatred of the summer months borders on the psychotically violent, then you, like me, will be wanting to listen to soothing music like this:

Peeping Tom - Sucker (mp3) - courtesy of Berkeley Place

Warning: Swearing. Mentalness. Norah Jones*.

CORRECTION: This is the one with the mentalness (and Massive Attack). The other one only has swearing and Norah Jones:

Peeping Tom - Kill the DJ (mp3) - courtesy of Culture Bully

Oh, the narrative in this post has gone all non-linear. Perhaps this is what Rudy Rucker's metanovel is going to be like, in which case, god help us all.

Either way, the Peeping Tom album is pretty damn excellent, in a sweary, mental, totally eclectic kind of way.


* And I'm sure she used to be such a nice girl.


Readers! Please help me with my Unscientific Blogging Survey!

Relics

This afternoon I discovered three things:

1. It's eminently possible to sunbathe from the comfort of my own bedroom floor. Result!

2. While reclining thus, I noticed that someone had hidden something up the chimney. It turned out to be a framed photograph of a half nice-, half evil-looking young man in a cream-coloured cardigan leaning against a drinks cabinet upon which are arranged a number of elaborate liqueur bottles whose appearance suggest a Costa del Sol holiday resort provenance. If I had any imagination, I could invent a story about how someone came to conceal this photograph in the chimney. But sadly I have none, so all I've really got is a manky old photograph and a lot of feathery fairy dust and dried-up bits of old bird's nest all over the carpet.

3. Also while reclining thus, I discovered under my bed a box of letters that Camo Netting Man sent me in the early 90s. Most of our relationship was spent apart, so we both became prolific letter writers. The collection provides what is probably one of the most extensive eye-witness accounts of the early 90s London rave scene that anyone could possibly wish for. On Feb 16, 1992, for example, CNM writes:

This afternoon I walked up to Hammersmith and found a Maplins shop*. I popped in and found a couple of excellent kits which enable you to build complex things. The first was a kit for a ZMW laser and its controller (£125) and the second, slightly more affordable, was for a TVFX module - which (if built correctly) would plug into the TV and generate all sorts of trippy psychedelic patterns, plus there's even an option for a sound to light mode (i.e. the music generates the patterns). It's £70, so if M. and I bought it together, it would be actually affordable. I'd want to see one working before I splashed out a week's worth of money on it, but it definitely sounds like a fun thing to have.

The letters are all brittle and yellowing now, and for all their talk of lasers and technomancy, the very fact that they belong to a pre-internet** era makes them feel like relics from another age. For a moment I thought of donating them to the magnificent Museum of Techno, but there's too much sentimental value attached.

Next week: What I Found Behind The Washing Machine.


* Coincidentally, the same one as I visited here.

** In that we knew it existed, but we'd never seen it.


tags: techno | sunbathing


Readers! Please help me with my Unscientific Blogging Survey!

Unscientific Research

As I never tire of telling everyone, I'm writing my MA dissertation about blogging. In three years' time this will probably seem terribly quaint and mid-noughties, but for the moment it's still a newish and fascinating subject, which has opened up all kinds of ideas and avenues of enquiry that would never have suggested themselves to me otherwise.

I'm quite far forward on the theoretical side, and now I want to get a better understanding of why people like blogging so much, and also what kind of people like it. So, lovely readers, I want to get some insight from you.

This is highly unscientific and won't stand up to any kind of academic scrutiny, so I'm not going to be quoting anyone in my essay thing. However, if you feel so inclined, I'd be very grateful if you could answer all or any the following questions for me as background research:

Questions for people who have their own blog:

1. Why did you start writing a blog?

2. Has your blog changed your life in any way, and if so, in what way?

3. Has your blog ever caused you any kind of worry, and if so, what sort?

4. How do you decide what to write about?

5. What's the best thing about blogging, in your view?

Questions for people who read blogs but don't have their own:

1. Why do you like reading people's blogs?

2. What sort of thing do you like reading about the most?

3. Why don't you want to start one of your own?

4. If you used to have one but gave it up, why did you give up?

Feel free to put your answers in the comments or send me an email at quadrireme at googlemail dot com.

Much obliged to you all!

Hauled Before The Beak

Pashmina correctly notes today that blogging is a good thing, because it inspires you to go out and do stuff so that you have something to write about.

If I didn't have this blog, for example, I would never have skinny-dipped in the phosphorescent waters of the southern Caribbean, attended an obscure electronica festival in Helsinki or met cyberpunk-tastic author Bruce Sterling.

But when I got up this morning I was convinced that today's shenanigans would top all of those. Ever since that time I was tear-gassed in Park Lane amid the burning cars, I've quite fancied myself as an urban guerrilla, a lone fugitive from justice, an off-world outlaw cruising the meatspaces and metaverses of West London armed only with a samurai sword and a copy of Elle Decoration.

My mysterious-lone-renegade status manifests itself in many ways, including, it seems, accidentally failing to pay for vital local authority services. So when I was summoned to court for not paying The Man's own repressive Council Tax, I judged that I had two choices: submit weakly, or defend myself heroically in a Court of Law. 'I could just phone the council,' I thought, 'but going to court - now *that* would be something to blog about'.

So off to court I went, having taken the sensible precaution of actually paying the council tax first, just in case they wanted to send me to prison or something. That would be something to blog about as well, but I don't think they let you take laptops in, and even if they did, they probably don't have wi-fi.

In my mind, I'd imagined it would be like the climactic courtroom scene in JFK, with Kevin Costner (me) delivering a moving and brilliant soliloquy that demonstrated beyond any doubt that The Man had no case against me, and that I had as much right to have my rubbish removed and my street illuminated as any other tax-paying resident of W12.

To my great disappointment, it wasn't like that at all. I was ushered to a table where a nice lady told me that I wouldn't have to pay any court charges, seeing as I was up to date with my payments, and asked me if I wanted to pay by direct debit from now on. I said 'yes please' and filled in a form. The whole thing took two minutes. I briefly considered creating a scene, just so I could have something to blog about, but I had to get back to work.

I didn't even get to use the blog post title that I'd made up on the way there, which was 'I Mumbled A Bit At The Law, But The Law Won'. Still, I *did* get to use the phrase 'hauled before the beak', which is one of my favourite expressions in the whole of English idiom. So perhaps it wasn't a wasted effort after all.


tags: courtroom drama

Out Of The Mouths Of Clients...

Part 1 in a probably very limited series.


"The blame culture here at MegaCorp* - it's all the sales director's fault."


* Names have been changed to protect the innocent. And me. Mainly me.

Note To J.M. Bernstein

If you really want people to read your scene-setting introduction to T.W. Adorno's essays on the culture industry, it might be an idea to start with something a little bit more jolly than this sentence:

The contentious arguments surrounding the idea of an affirmative postmodernist culture have brought with them a persistent theoretical depreciation of the claims of high modernist art as well as a positive re-evaluation of the character and potentialities of popular (mass) culture.

In fact, you might like to take a leaf out of extemporanea's book, who has subjected the poetry of A.A. Milne to a Marxist-feminist analysis, and unsurprisingly found him wanting. Great stuff.

Art Imitates Blog Shocker

Having written about it in this post, I was gratified to discover earlier that someone has taken the idea of Burne-Jones's Perseus series as a giant comic strip literally, and from this:


has created this:



Quality.

More superheroes in artistic settings to be had here (via BoingBoing).

Patroclus Gets All Confused. Again.

Settle in everyone, it's going to be a long story.

Right! I've just spent a highly instructive evening in Hammersmith's dingiest pub with my good friend the lovely S., and during the course of the conversation it transpired that while I've been merrily blogging away like some tedious Saturday supplement columnist about gigs I went to and showbiz lunches I had, there have been piling up around me in the 'real' world some Huge and Weighty Problems.

And in my usual 'oh, everything'll sort itself out eventually' kind of way, I have more or less completely ignored them in favour of blogging merrily away about gigs I went to and showbiz lunches I had. But as it turns out, these things probably won't sort themselves out without some kind of actual determined intervention from me. And possibly leading an increasingly escapist online existence isn't the kind of intervention that's required.

Which got me to thinking on the way home, with things being how they are just at present, is it really a good idea for me to keep this blog going at all? It's got to a point (and don't we all regularly get to this point?) where I can't write about any of the things that are actually on my mind, for fear of annoying, worrying or otherwise upsetting some or more of my lovely readers.

So I thought about starting again somewhere new, under a new name, where I could perhaps witter on at length about all the things that worry, annoy and upset me. And then I thought 'perhaps PP had the right idea after all, and I should just write it all in a book'. And then I thought 'maybe I'm just drunk and emotional' - but then I remembered I'd only had half a glass of red wine.

Right, er, now I'm not sure what the point was. Perhaps just to observe that what you read in here is not necessarily an accurate guide to what actually goes on in the World of Patroclus. Not that I'm assuming you were all that interested. I was going to say 'I might go away for a bit', but the last time I said that I was back within 24 hours, and that was when my marriage fell apart. And as the stuff happening at the moment isn't *quite* of that magnitude, it's safe to say I won't be going away at all, really.

So, er, there you have it. Patroclus: some issues, but not going anywhere.

Well, I feel better for that, anyhow.

You've been a lovely audience. Thank you and good night.

'Regular' As In 'Never To Be Seen Again'

And lo! we move on to a new Regular Feature, which will undoubtedly prove to be as short-lived as most of the other Regular Features I've attempted to introduce.

This time we rummage with our bare hands in the filth and mire of my Outlook inbox to fish out a selection of Superior Quality Emails.

Considering that I currently have 4,750 emails in my inbox, it's surprising how few of them have actually made me laugh out loud*. Here are four that make the grade, not all for the same reason.

Starting with the intriguing:

One day I'm going to work out how to sing a convincing version of "Money For Nothing" in Chaucerian Middle English.

And moving on to the disconcertingly ambiguous:

Fuck butler. Get it out.

And the commendably Norf Londonesque:

I met him in the Tesco Metro around the corner buying low quality sausages. "I don't normally buy these," he says. "I'm making a TV programme about them. We should go out for drinks."

Before finishing up with the somewhat surreal:

Do not worry about your dissertation as I had an important apocalyptic dream. Everyone was wearing ragged togas, the streets were made of dust, and there were VIRUSES which meant we had to wipe everything with Johnsons baby wipes. All children spoke as though they had been badly dubbed and there was a complex black market in peach-coloured bicycle wheels with square bits of wood attached. We walked from Oxford to London and were tired so we sat in a meadow with a gospel choir and had to beat a hasty retreat, followed them to a secret chair rental depot where we bumped into R. lying next to a huge green caravan with gold handles... I could go on but think you can understand the dissertation contents pale into insignificance.

More quality emails soon! Probably.


* Admittedly, making me laugh out loud is probably not the primary objective of most - or indeed any - of my email correspondents. Which is a very great shame.

Ker-ching

Just counted up all the loose change in the flat. GBP 104.12, EUR 0.61, five lighters and an elastic band.

Now, what to do with it...

Right!

Enough of this rubbish. Back when I'm in a better mood.

Rubbish Week

Warning: I'm always very grumpy in the summer. This is no doubt just the first of many whiny posts to appear before the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness descends upon us once more. And on that merrie note:

What a completely rubbish week it's been. Not only have I been going to bed when it's still light and getting up when it's still dark, but I've also received a court summons, growled at a colleague and accidentally ignited a Giant Internet Flame War in which I apparently upset a child and allegedly sent someone else a threatening email. Also, the cat has gone mad, I've run out of milk, I keep having panic attacks and the lights won't go on in the kitchen.

Apart from that, everything's fine and dandy. Hurrah!


tags: rubbishness | milk | growling

Song Of The Week

In true local radio stylee, I'm dedicating this one to all my fellow mopy Green Wing fans who were less than pleased with the way the series ended last night. Don't worry everyone, all will be alright come the Christmas episode. I hope.

This song has got nothing to do with GW, but it *is* a lovely bit of uplifting indie-psych-pop from Grandaddy, whose entire now-finished career has inexplicably passed me by until this very moment:


Grandaddy - Elevate Myself (mp3) - courtesy of Everybody Cares


And just for Tamburlaine:


Grandaddy - Where I'm Any More (mp3) - courtesy of Bows + Arrows


Also, please welcome new additions to the ever-expanding blogroll: one-woman (although I could be wrong on both those counts) media empire Ceridwen Devi, and fellow W12 resident Oye Billy! Go visit, make friends, prosper.


tags: grandaddy | green wing

More 2.0

As if Monday's encounter with Bruce Sterling wasn't enough, today I found myself in fairly close proximity* to Ben 'Quite Famous Now' Hammersley, at the Blogs and Social Media Forum. And it's only Wednesday! I'm not sure how much more of this brave-new-world excitement I can take, to be perfectly honest.

As befits his role as standard-bearer for the New Social Revolution, Ben was decked out in full Web 2.0 regalia, which looks something like this:


Gentlemen, take a moment to check your attire. Are you wearing a skirt? Has it been fashioned in a kind of combat style? Failing that, is it made of pleated leather? If not, I'm afraid you are not eligible to establish any form of weblog or wiki wiki, nor to use the words 'interestingness', 'findability', 'frictionless' or 'astroturfing'. Your pathetic attempts at RSS syndication will fail. Do not try to pretend you invented the word 'podcast', because no one will believe you. You work in what? Television? Pull yourself together, man! The age of broadcast ended ten years ago! Where's my coffee? Where's my agent?

Apart from that, what can I tell you? Those of you with proper jobs will probably shortly find your boss frothing at the mouth about markets being conversations and blogs and wikis being the only way to do business in the modern era, and you'll all be made to write a blog post every day about how great your job is and how great your company's products are, while you're simultaneously threatened with the sack over that picture you posted on your personal blog of you lining the cat's litter tray with a copy of the annual report. So that's something to look forward to. Web 2.0 is fun, remember?


* In that he was sitting on a stage, and I was in the audience.


tags: social media forum | web 2.0

Battleship Quinquireme

It's not every day you find yourself trapped in an upstairs room of a phenomenally posh pub with only one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk/steampunk to chat to.

But such was my fate last night, and as I'm rubbish at standing around with a drink in my hand playing at Who Can Say The Cleverest Thing, I instead chose to ask Bruce Sterling whether he thought that blogging might - in the immortal words of Ned's Atomic Dustbin - kill your television.

Anyway, the man from Austin/Belgrade/Viridian Design he say yes, blogging (and Flickr and digg.com and YouTube and last.fm) *is* the new television. Unless you're a woman, or poor, or uneducated, in which case you're probably still slumped in front of the telly mindlessly absorbing the output of the Murdoch empire. Well. I can legitimately claim to be at least one of those things, but I haven't watched any telly (GW notwithstanding), for the last eight months. Perhaps that means I'm an honorary man. Not sure.

Prior to this conversation, Bruce had been preaching to the assembled crowd (which mainly consisted of educated blokes) about the New Social Revolution that is 'Web 2.0'. For the uninitiated, Web 2.0 is a handy term that's being applied to any web-based technology where the users get to create the content - like blogging, or putting photos on Flickr, or tagging things, or putting your band's music on myspace, or contributing to Wikipedia (pace Chuffy!).

Photo courtesy of Tom Armitage at Infovore

According to Bruce, this whole culture of mass participation means that there are 'no consumers any more', as we've stopped mindlessly buying/reading/watching stuff and started making it instead.

It's the Why Don't You? paradox made flesh!

While there are clearly gaping holes in this argument (like, you generally have to buy computers and stuff to even get on the internet, and there's ample evidence that the 'mindless consumer' never existed in the first place, plus there's the fact that 'Chairman Bruce' is still selling his books in ye olde paper format, presumably because that way they actually make him money), I do find it all terribly exciting.

I mean, when has it ever been this easy to be a revolutionary? In the old days you had to wear scratchy coats and rush about half-starved on battleships in the freezing cold, probably being shot at. Now all you have to do is post up a picture of two men kissing and a couple of sentences about getting on a train to Southampton, and suddenly you're the Great Destroyer of the Culture Industry. Brilliant!

As I haven't done this subject any kind of justice whatsoever, I recommend you get the proper lowdown on what Bruce Sterling said about Web 2.0 (and the threat of climate change, and futuristic RFID torture devices) by downloading his talk and the subsequent Q&A session as two podcasts here:

Bruce Sterling May 15 2006 podcasts

NB: This post has been brought to you by Tunng's splendid folktronica cover of Bloc Party's 'The Pioneers', which you can download for your aural pleasure here:

Tunng - The Pioneers (mp3) - courtesy of Lonesome Music


tags: bruce sterling | web 2.0 | tunng

Everybody Loves Dead Chatboards

This is probably only going to be of (possibly limited) interest to about five people*, but for those five:

Calm yourselves, it's the entire EHA archive!

For everyone else, normal service will be resumed. By which I mean me posting items that are of limited interest to about five people.


* So pretty much the entire readership, then.


UPDATE: By 'entire', I meant of course 'partial' and 'mostly broken'. But I did my best.

Picaresque

Right, now I am going to get on a train to an unnamed destination Southampton, in search of Adventure and Excitement. Updates to follow, if I make it back...

*Ahem*

Or Reasons Why I Love Green Wing:



Surely not even Spinny can argue with that?

(thanks to smoo2 for the picture!)

Lyrics 'Not Meaningless' Shocker

Having listened attentively to that Okkervil River album all week, I feel I ought to apologise to the band* for Tuesday's fatuous suggestion that their lyrics are empty and meaningless.

In fact, 'Black' may be the only bouncy indie-rock song you'll ever hear in which the singer is trying to deal with the fact that his elusive not-quite girlfriend was abused as a child. It's not real (it's a concept album, so it's part of a story), but even so, does that make it wrong to enjoy it? You decide:

Okkervil River - Black (mp3)


* Because I've no doubt that they're avid readers of the Quinquireme.

Elephantine

I meant to post these up on Monday, but somehow it's become Thursday without anyone telling me.

But here are some pictures, courtesy of the lovely S, of a giant robot elephant parading last Sunday in Horseguards, er, Parade.




What you can't see is that the Giant Robot Elephant was towing a live band behind it, which was playing Dramatic 80s-Style French Synth Music, making the whole experience slightly akin to having overdone it on the mushroom vodka at an open-air Jean-Michel Jarre concert.

In a good way.

I missed most of the four-day Sultan's Elephant show, so I don't really know what it was all about, but luckily the London Bloggers were out in force. So you can watch an experimental video at Annie's, see some arty pictures at longcat's, get your Marquez-magical-realism analogies (and celebrity sightings) at The Complex Christ, and look at proper professional photos at the London Daily Photo.

Oo, we bloggers like a shared experience, it makes us feel like a huge...errr...internet...bluebottle with...um...thousands of eyes, buzzing annoyingly in the Established Media's...hair.

But that could just be the mushroom vodka talking.


tags: sultan's elephant

Shoreditch Twattery

INT. CARGO, SHOREDITCH - NIGHT

PATROCLUS and PATROCLUS'S COMPANION are sitting at a fashionably peculiar skinny wooden table in a Hoxton bar whose décor is quite long on exposed brickwork and oversized stainless steel air ducts. Critically acclaimed Texan indie-prog-punk-country-rock band Okkervil River are playing (or, more accurately, shouting and groaning) in the background.

Companion (morosely): These American indie bands all sound the same. I blame Generation X. If that book hadn't been written, none of these bands would exist!

Patroclus: How can you *say* that? How can you say that Okkervil River sound like Spoon, or that Spoon sound like Hem, or that Hem sound like the Decemberists?

Companion: This lot sound *exactly* like the Decemberists.

Patroclus: Yeah, they do actually. Good trumpets, though.

Companion: I thought the trumpets were crap. They only played one note. And these lyrics are empty. Meaningless. They're like metaphors stuffed inside other metaphors and the whole thing is an empty metaphor for the utter meaninglessness of all American indie music that's ever been produced since Generation X was written.

Patroclus: How can you *say* that? He rhymes 'wisteria' with 'seething bacterium'! That's genius!

Companion: Anyone can rhyme big words. It doesn't mean anything. What's that song actually about?

Patroclus: Not a clue. But it rhymes 'abecedarian' with 'magisterial'! And it has quite sinister overtones! And I like it! Isn't that enough?

Companion: There's just no originality in music any more.

Patroclus: Well, that's the postmodern condition for you.

[...]

Companion: Have we turned into a pair of Shoreditch twats?

Patroclus: It would appear so*.


Okkervil River - For Real (mp3)


* UPDATE: According to this New York Metro article that Dave put on his blog the other day, it would appear that I am, in fact, in a state of advanced gruptitude. Hahahaaa!


tags: okkervil river

Austintacious

Much excitement here on the good ship Quinquireme at the prospect (via NTK) of attending a talk given by uber-cyberpunk author and neo-green activist Bruce Sterling in a Belgravia pub the week after next.

Apart from anything else, the boy Bruce (or 'Chairman Bruce', as I believe is the customary address) is a top neologist, having coined the words 'spime' (an electronically trackable item) and 'buckyjunk' (something made of carbon nanotubes, named after geodesic dome enthusiast Buckminster Fuller). Although this doesn't detract from the fact that the dialogue in that book he wrote with that other uber-cyberpunk author is woefully unreadable.

Bruce hails from Austin, Texas, as do no fewer than three of my very favouritest indie bands; Voxtrot, Spoon and Okkervil River. Coincidentally enough, this Monday I'm going to see 'the' River play at Cargo in Shoreditch, which I'm very excited about too, because I missed them last time around, and because singer/songwriter Will Sheff has a fabulous way with lyrics.

Even more coincidentally, Spoon are playing at Koko in Camden the day after Bruce's talk. Expect the burglary rate in Austin, TX to skyrocket as all its showbiz residents swan about London Town.

Spoon are co-headlining with the New Pornographers, who don't come from Austin, being Canadian, but who do produce some marvellous indie-jangle-pop songs. Here's a splendid example, featuring what may be the best drum solo intro* since Elvis Costello's Watching The Detectives:

The New Pornographers - Electric Version (mp3) - courtesy of Good Weather for Airstrikes

Also not from Austin (Omaha, Nebraska) are Tilly And The Wall, who get Artwork of the Week for their lovely website, and Song of the Week for this stupidly infectious tango**-meets-60s girl group-meets-Riot Grrrl tune:

Tilly And The Wall - Bad Education (mp3) - courtesy of Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands

And that should surely be enough for anyone.


* According to Wikipedia, this song starts with 'an arpeggiated diminished triad—a rare and strange opening flourish for a pop song'. Ahem. I knew that.

** By which I mean some sort of Spanish/Latin American dance-type thing with handclaps and twirling and stamping feet and accordions, could be flamenco, any corrections gratefully received.


tags: bruce sterling | okkervil river | tilly and the wall

It's The Quinquireme Super Free Music Giveaway!

It's springtime here at Quinquireme Towers (and possibly everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere), and as the sun unfurls the sukebind buds in the verdant lanes and meadows that girt my stately pile around, my fancy turns lightly to thoughts of my blog readers and how loyal and tolerant they are.

'Time to give something back,' I think.

'Even if it's something they don't want,' I think.

As luck would have it, I had a very pleasant email correspondence last week with a chap called Patrick, at Future Appletree Records in Davenport, Iowa. Patrick's record label is home to a Chicago band called Track a Tiger, who specialise in twee acoustic alt.country harmonies with just enough blips and bleeps to keep the lo-fi electronica fans happy.

I was going to buy just one copy of their album, Woke Up Early The Day I Died, but Patrick was so lovely, and the current dollar-sterling exchange rate so great, that I ended up buying THREE copies, plus shipping, for the same price as you might pay - if you were so inclined - for ONE James Blunt album in HMV. Fantastic! From now on I'm going to buy everything on mail order from the States! Because it's cheaper than going down the shops!

Anyway, this means I have two spare copies to give away to the first two people who want one and are prepared to reveal their postal address to me by email. Unless I know your postal address already, in which case it'll be even easier!

This album isn't going to change your life, but it's full of sweet, melodic, country-ish, melancholy-ish songs that will make you feel oddly pensive and sad in a sort of happy way*, especially if you listen to it while having a bath or re-potting some geraniums, or doing the ironing. Or writing a rubbish blog post about how you bought some CDs really cheaply from America.

And should you want to try before you commit yourself, here are the first three tracks:

Track A Tiger - Glad To Be Scattered (mp3)

Track A Tiger - Sound As Ever (mp3)

Track A Tiger - Seashaken Heart (mp3)

The first two commenters to claim a copy get a copy. Go to it!


UPDATE: Copies now duly dispatched to long-time reader and super high-powered globetrotting chum Tabby Rabbit, and to newcomer Aimee (welcome!). Oo, that was fun, wasn't it? Might do that again sometime.


* Unless you're Betty, in which case I can pretty much guarantee that you'll hate it.


tags: track a tiger

Just Generally Overexcited

Well, other than general overexcitement, I have completely failed to identify a unifying theme to link all of the major elements of the past week's shenanigans, which included:

1. One tip-top super Iron & Wine/Calexico gig at the Kentish Town Forum, at which the mighty nibus and I had to pretend to be from Radio 2 (we weren't very good at this, and kept getting in the wrong queue), and which thanks to our swanky guest list status we were allowed to view from a distant and muggy vantage point somewhere at the back, near the ceiling. I'm still not totally convinced about Calexico's new album, but All Systems Red, which gradually builds up into a mighty wall of guitar noise, is almost Sigur Rós-ishly awesome live. Nice work, Calexico boys!

2. One tip-top super Jenny Lewis gig at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, which was only slightly marred by her creepy 70s-horror-film-style dress and the fact that I had inadvertently got tickets for a distant and muggy vantage point somewhere at the back, near the ceiling. But the lovely Jenny has a gorgeous voice and some spankingly good songs, *and* she can rhyme 'mirrors' with 'fears', which is a skill sadly denied to us Brits. Nice work, Jenny!

3. One tip-top super lunch that was attended by ACTUAL REAL TELEVISION AND FILM STARS. I got terribly overexcited and started shouting things like "perspicacity!" and "it's grown a hive mind - it's producing its own thoughts!", which didn't work quite as well as conversational gambits as I'd hoped. Luckily my lovely companions (most of whom I think I also offered jobs to, like some kind of diminutive, scruffy-haired, one-woman press gang) made up for this by steering the conversation towards sensible things like football and Shakespeare. Nice work, lovely companions!

4. A meeting with my tutor, who professed my tortuous 5,000-word essay to be "rather excellent", and asked if I'd thought about doing a PhD, at which point I got ridiculously overexcited again and started rattling on about virtual gift economies, the decommercialisation of culture, and similar claptrap. Nice work, future pop-culture academic patroclus!

5. The Modernism exhibition at the V&A, which for anyone considering going, is not only very, very, very well put together, but is also stuffed full of (possibly unintentionally) comical items and captions. The captions are always my favourite thing about any art exhibition, and I often find myself reading them without even looking at the actual artworks on display. Today's favourite (relating to this building) was:

[Bruno] Taut believed that glass could orchestrate human emotions and contribute to the creation of a spiritual Utopia.

Apparently Modernism was all about achieving universal human happiness by getting everyone to live in buildings that look like upside-down daleks, wear felt suits decorated with brightly coloured chevrons, and sit on columns of air. Sadly it largely failed in these ambitions, but you have to admire them for trying. Nice work, ultimately unsuccessful proponents of the modernist aesthetic!

6. Nutso amounts of work, which only served to contribute further to this week's general ridiculous levels of stress and overexcitement. Nice work, work!

Ahem. I think I'll just slink off now, take a couple of valium* and lie down till I regain some semblance of composure. Nice work, prescription barbiturates**!


* Not really - Bach Rescue Remedy is as far as I venture into the world of narcotics these days.

** Or, more accurately, 'Nice work, prescription benzodiazepines!'- thanks to Dr Snackspot, renowned comestibles specialist, for the correction. I knew I should have looked that up.


tags: calexico | jenny lewis | V&A | modernism

Hiatus

Blogging on temporary hold while brain attempts to condense the exciting events'n'developments* of the past few days into one succinct, light-hearted and thematically consistent post. Back soon. Don't go away now!


* Not *that* sort of development.

Funniest. Post. Ever.

It's not often I see something that makes me laugh until I'm nearly sick. But this post of First Nations' had me in such apoplectic fits at work that I had to turn it off and come back later when there was no one around.

You want Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with artistic representations of Judith and Holofernes? Of course you do. Go to it!

Pure comedy genius.

Tangotronicatastic

Scrap everything I said about not liking songs in languages I can't understand. That can't be true, otherwise I wouldn't be listening to this new Gotan Project album over and over again.

Top track is Mi Confesión, which sounds like Leftfield's Afro Left, only in Spanish and with a tango accordion on it. Brilliant, in other words.

Can't find that one online, though, so here's Tango Canción instead:

Gotan Project - Tango Canción (mp3) - courtesy of Motel de Moka

UPDATE: Found it now:

Gotan Project - Mi Confesión (mp3) - courtesy of Varyushkin


Fenomenál!


tags: gotan project | tangotronica

That Ought To Do It

In other news, Prolix has stunning photographic evidence of DEFRA's hi-tech efforts to contain a possible outbreak of bird flu outside the Co-Op in Cranbrook, Kent. Go to it!


tags: bird flu | defra

Neologorrhoea

Warning - extreme pretentiousness follows:

When I was in the fifth form, I thought it would be fun to invent a new word and see how quickly it would spread round the school. As you can see, my notion of fun was a bit different from that of most of my schoolmates, who generally preferred drinking gin in the woods, sniffing tippex thinners in bed and smoking out of the dormitory window. (Not all at the same time).

In your classic American High School Movie terms, my level of popularity and influence at school was roughly on a par with the nerdy girl in Heathers who Winona Ryder plays croquet with after everyone else is dead, so why I thought anyone would adopt my new word is beyond me. But I gave it a go.

My chosen word was "shmick", which sounds to me now like it should mean something in Yiddish (anyone?) but at the time I 'coined' it, it was supposed to mean 'arty and pretentious'. My dissemination strategy involved saying 'shmick' at seemingly appropriate junctures and within earshot of powerful and influential people, and writing it on as many things as possible, the better to impress it into the minds of my schoolmates.

Despite all my best efforts, I only observed the word 'shmick' being uttered once in the wild, and by this time it had assumed a secondary connotation of 'yuk, that's disgusting'. Frankly I was very disappointed with the whole outcome, and moved swiftly on to a new endeavour, which was probably writing an Abstract Expressionist play about Matt Johnson out of The The being sick on a cross-channel ferry.

I'd like to say that now I'm a functioning adult I'm not nearly as tiresome as the teenage me, but actually I am. I know this because of the unholy sense of excitement I got when I realised the terrible - and seemingly largely untapped - power of the Technorati Tags for tracking the invention and uptake of new words.

Tagging lets you summarise what your blog post is about in a few keywords, so that other people can find your posts when they search on those words. Not many people seem to be using tags yet, which is possibly why, in the entire history of blogging, only me and an Australian chap called Cam Pegg have ever used the term 'mashed potato' to tag a blog post. On the other hand, it could just be that no one else blogs about mashed potato quite as much as me and my new potato purée-loving friend Cam.

But when *everyone* starts using tags, I'm quite looking forward to the merry hell that will break out as irritating people like me attempt to coin and spread new words just for the personal glory of inventing one that sticks.

In the 'real' world, it's hard to establish who first coined a given word or phrase. There has to be written evidence, and the written evidence has to be dated, and attributable to a specific individual. But in blogworld, everything is written, dated and attributable to a specific individual. So if you've got a fancy new word or phrase, this is probably the best place to 'claim' it. And if you write it as a tag, all you need to do is click on it to see a) if anyone's used it before, and b) how many other people have used it since.

Ooh, the power!

Last week, for example, the Economist invented the word 'womenomics'. Eight days later, is the word 'womenomics' catching on? Well, sort of, but I just love how easy it is to find out.

Taxonomy fans beware: it's going to get very, very messy.


UPDATE: And as if to prove some kind of point, my own 'neology' tag brought me to this post, which explains it all much better, and with fewer references to mashed potato.


tags: tagging | neology | folksonomy

Signs Of The Times, Part 2

INT. PUB - NIGHT

K: Someone sent me something in the...oh, what's that thing...it's like email, but it comes on a trolley...

H: The post?

K: That's the one.


EXT. CHISWICK HIGH ROAD - DAY

Me: You should start a blog, you know.

PP: Well I thought I might.

Me: You really should.

PP: Yes, I think I will start a blog, but I think I'll write it in a book.


tags: internet culture | blogging

An Unoriginal Contribution To Human Thought

Currently plumbing the depths of sleep deprivation and mental exhaustion after spending the whole weekend trying to assemble 5,000 words on how the blogosphere is giving rise to a New Folk Culture.

Betty, incidentally, has done this infinitely better and more entertainingly in just a few short paragraphs.

Sometimes I find this topic very exciting, and sometimes I think "but blogging - it's really just one huge wanky Islington dinner party, isn't it?". Anyway, the 5,000 words are done now, and some of them make sense, and there are properly formatted footnotes, and I probably mentioned Gramsci, as one is supposed to, and I criticised Howard Rheingold for not covering certain topics in enough detail (Yeah *Howard*, get back to your desk this instant, you feckless layabout).

And when I wasn't doing that I was out delivering election leaflets for my new friends the Lib Dems, so you can see how exciting a weekend it was. The Lib Dems in my council ward all have terribly posh names, which makes me worry slightly about their appeal to the ragbag local electorate, but hey, they've got me, Woman of the People, as a footsoldier, so perhaps they'll be OK.

Rounded off the weekend by having a torrid dream about my long-lost cat returning with a huge gaping wound where its ear used to be, while a fellow blogger (mentioning no names, of course) attempted to ravish me on a pink sofa as World War Three broke out around us.

On waking up it occurred to me that this is not dissimilar to the final scene in Vile Bodies. It could be a portent, or it could just be because I ate too much mashed potato (again) last night. Who knows?


tags: internet culture | mashed potato | evelyn waugh

Life Momentarily Imitates Pop Video Conceit

Walking down Paddenswick Road earlier (in the manner of Richard Ashcroft in any Verve video, only happier), the scent of almond blossom in the air, the sun shining on the colourful stucco facades of the rich people's houses, a small child in front of me blowing bubbles that reflected the rich metallic blue of a parked Peugeot 306 convertible, listening to Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins singing "Melt Your Heart", was all quite lovely.

Then the sun went in, the kid started screeching and "Shot By Both Sides" by Magazine came on, but never mind...


largely experimental tags: shuffelicity | tag rot | jenny lewis

Procrastination

New in work avoidance:

Spell your name the Flickr way (via Slaminsky)

Fake Morrissey song titles (via Cultural Snow)

Must... Control... Brain... Of... Thoughts

UPDATE: Grammatical mobius strip now fixed, I think. Thanks all for your suggestions!

Trains of thought this morning that could have ended up as blog posts if I had the time and dedication (be very thankful that I don't):

1. Calexico's Garden Ruin vs. Howe Gelb's 'Sno Angel Like You. If I was Joey Burns or John Convertino, I'd be feeling a mite irritated that my gravelly-voiced ex-bandmate had come up with a far better album than my own latest creation. Gelb 1, Calexico 0, frankly.

2. Giant Sand's cover of Nick Cave's Red Right Hand. When Messrs Burns and Convertino were in a band with Howe Gelb, it was called Giant Sand. They covered Red Right Hand, one of the greatest songs ever written (sorry, W), but they covered it all wrong. This is because they tried to make it sound like a spooky desertscape, while letting the lyrics go all to buggery. But the lyrics are the best thing about Red Right Hand. The thing is practically a poem, the lyrics provide the rhythm of the whole song. You can't go missing words out, or it all gets shot to pieces. So there! Cave 1, Sand 0.

3. "Womenomics". This week's Economist gets all excited - to the extent of creating a new word - about the fact that women are cleverer than men and now lots of us have jobs too! Never mind what type of job we have, or the fact that all the pictures in the entire magazine are still of men, apparently women are now driving the global economy! Go us! The Economist's conclusion? "If women are to get out and power the global economy, it is surely only fair that men should at last do more of the housework." Or alternatively, just get your own house. Rah!

4. Computer terminology in pop music lyrics. With computers and networking now a part of everyday life, you'd think there'd be more songs about MSN Messenger* and SSH tunnelling and stuff. But sadly the world of pop songcraft seems largely to overlook the massive technological advances going on around us. So I was heartened to discover Swedish alt-country chanteuse Britta Persson singing a wistful song about wishing she had a program to defrag her heart (video here). More of that, please.


* The Winter Rush by Some By Sea has a line that goes "I miss the nightly readouts/Of all the things we spewed out", which I like to think is a reference to MSN's evil Message History feature. So that's OK then.


tags: howe gelb | britta persson | womenomics | some by sea

Uninteresting Times

What I'm Currently Doing: writing a brochure about a square, grey building in Hertfordshire.

What I'd Rather Be Doing: reading the unutterably pretentious Stylus Magazine's review of every UK number one single since Jan 1, 2000.


tags: stylus magazine

Burning Bright

Got up at 4am to write an essay, but ended up adopting a beautiful tiger instead.










I've only got a tiny flat, so I'm hoping it'll get on alright with the cat.


tags: tigers | wwf | malu pothi

20 Tracks

UPDATE: Tag-ees now listed at the end.

Hurrah for Chaucer’s Bitch, who nominated me for this one, which I’ve been dying to do for ages. I did stamp my foot and sulk until she tagged me though, so it may not really count, but still, here goes:

1. A track from your early childhood
I was sheltered from the media in a tiny cottage in the North of Scotland for a lot of my early childhood, but when I was nine my Dad bought my brother and me a dodgy old telly for a pound in the school jumble sale. On this telly I remember watching Top of the Pops, and on Top of the Pops in 1980* I remember seeing Video Killed the Radio Star by Buggles, Going Underground by The Jam, and Sergeant Rock by XTC. As early song memories go, that’s a pretty damn fine selection.

2. A track that you associate with your first love
Love as in actual real grown-up love, or love as in playground love? If the latter, then definitely It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To by Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin. I was 11 or 12. Jonathan Thompson was my first boyfriend. I don’t know where he is now. (Jonathan, if you’re reading, please make yourself known).

My first real grown-up love was Camouflage Netting Man. In the declining days of our relationship, we lived in a shared house in Windsor with a bunch of DJs, including the future editor of Sleazenation mag. They were all students; I’d graduated and was the only one with a job (working behind the till in Past Times). On one of my mornings off, Camo Netting Man and I were lying in bed listening to Fallen by One Dove, when his Dad burst in unannounced – which was quite amazing, since he lived a hundred miles away – and ordered me to get up and clean the house, because that was my job as “the only woman in the place.” (There was another girl who lived upstairs, ACTUALLY, but we never saw her). I still have that CD. It still reminds me of being ordered out of bed by my boyfriend’s dad to clean up after a bunch of lazy stoner students. Possibly not what One Dove, or this question, intended.

3. A track that reminds you of a holiday trip
Teardrop by Massive Attack reminds me of my first proper holiday – a week in Tuscany with ex-Mr P not long after we’d started going out. With him at the wheel, I’d managed to navigate our way out of Rome in a hire car with only a map of the Rome metro for guidance. Not an approach I would necessarily recommend to other holidaymakers. I spent this holiday drinking, smoking, crying about my parents splitting up, fending off snakes with a broom, looking at frescos by Piero della Francesca, translating things into and out of Italian, and reading Catch-22. My Dad, his girlfriend and his dog also kept turning up, which was quite amazing, since they lived in a completely different country.

4. A track you like but wouldn't want to be associated with in public
I Want You by Savage Garden. Let us not examine this too closely.

5. A track that accompanied you when you were lovesick
Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere? by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I don’t recommend this song to anyone. Every time I hear it the sky goes black, birds drop from the trees and I’m immediately compelled to rock back and forth in my chair, sobbing desolately. Painful memories, and all the more painful for still being pretty recent.

6. The track you have listened to most often
According to iTunes, There She Goes, My Beautiful World, also by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. And who am I to argue with iTunes?

7. A track that is your favourite instrumental
I’m a terrible philistine when it comes to music, and I really only like songs for the lyrics. I have very little truck with instrumentals. I can just about listen to all of Hunted by a Freak by Mogwai, so it’ll have to be that.

8. A track that represents one of your favourite bands
Black Heart by Calexico. The greatest broken-heart dirge ever, unlike Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?, which is just mental cruelty in song form.

9. A track which best represents yourself
Return To Yesterday by the Lilac Time. I’m still listening to it after nearly 20 years, which is quite something, seeing as I normally grow to hate all songs within a fortnight of deciding I like them.

10. A track which reminds you of a special person
Mechanic Dancing by XTC (in fact, anything by XTC) reminds me of my little brother, and he’s very special (everyone say “awwwww”).

11. A track to which you can relax
Still…Sleeping by Canyon Country. I’ve never heard this song to the end, because it does actually send me to sleep. In a nice way.

12. A track that stands for a really good time in your life
The best time I’ve had in my life is undoubtedly right now, so I’ll go for Gold Lion by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Yeah.

13. A track that is currently your favourite
This week’s Song of the Week is But I Did Not, by Howe Gelb, ex-frontman of British Net Celebrity-scaring alt.country band Giant Sand. It’s like Lou Reed singing Appalachian porch blues (I have no idea what I’m talking about there, incidentally) with a Canadian gospel choir thrown in. Marvellous.

14. A track that you'd dedicate to your best friend
Does this require me to be soppy and that? I don’t really do soppy. I also have more than one best friend. It’s a minefield! Alright then, for Smat, Don’t Go by the Hothouse Flowers, for reasons she’ll appreciate and that are mainly to do with binbags, and for Tabby Rabbit, Chicago by Sufjan Stevens, because that’s where we’re going in July. Not in a van, sadly, but you can't have everything.

15. A track that you like especially for its lyrics
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart by Wilco. Turgid song, but beautiful, quite erotic, emotionally twisted lyrics.

16. A track that no one likes but you
I Want You by Savage Garden, probably.

17. A track that you like that's neither English nor German
That only leaves French, because I don’t like songs with words I don’t understand. So, either the French version of Ballad of Cable Hogue by Calexico, or Le Freestyle de l’Obsolète by MC Solaar.

18. The track that best lets you release tension
That’s the same as 11, isn’t it?

19. A track you want to be played at your funeral
I really hope my friend S will a) still be with us, and will also b) DJ at my funeral wearing his electric blue catsuit and fairy wings. In which case it’s likely to be Ooh Aah Just A Little Bit by Gina G – and frankly I can’t think of a better song to accompany anyone to the grave.

20. A track that you'd nominate for "Best Track of All Time"
Oo, now this really *is* a minefield. Minefield, I tell you. You should have seen the withering look that Wyndham gave me on Wednesday night when I answered this very same question. I’m not saying.

UPDATE: Now hold still while I tag you, and you won't feel a thing: Pashmina, Nibus and Occasional Poster!


* Or 1979. Not sure.

Schizophrenic

Apparently you're no one these days if you don't have at least three separate identities. Or at least this appeared to be the theme of the various entertainments I attended last night, starting with Londonist's Blogging Demystified seminar at the Apple Store.

Topics ranged from the practical - "you can't predict how many comments you'll get", "you can't make a lot of money from blogging" etc. (courtesy of Annie Mole of the London Underground Blog), to the ultra-philosophical - "how does my blog identity differ from my real identity or my World of Warcraft identity?", "how can I prove that it's actually me that writes my blog?"* (courtesy of "Tom Reynolds" of Random Acts of Reality).

I don't know what the audience - which consisted almost entirely of spiky-haired young men in black glasses and stripy scarves - made of it all, but I did like the nice science girls from Inky Circus, because they giggled a lot** and have a stalker, which is what blogging is really all about.

Afterwards DG (not his real homepage), Wyndham (not his real name), Robert (who apparently has no alternative online identities) and I (the 'real' me) went to see Calexico play a secretish gig at the 100 Club to promote their new album Garden Ruin.

If any band knows about having multiple identities it's Calexico; even their name is a nod to the fact that they're half Californian indie-rock and half Mexican mariachi music, and their style swings wildly depending on what combination of instruments they're playing, what language they're singing in, and who's doing the singing.

I was slightly disappointed that they didn't play any of my favourites (apart from their top cover of Love's Alone Again Or), but this was more than made up for by the fact that the tickets were free, courtesy of pro ligger Wyndham (thanks W!), and there was a display of the most awful dancing I have ever seen, ever, by two quite inebriated gentlemen standing in front of me. If only this pair had elected to play air trumpet or air double bass, instead of air guitar, the evening would have been nothing short of monumental.

Ended up drinking in Soho afterwards with a pop star called Terri Walker, whose new album is called I Am Terri Walker. So there's at least one person left who isn't suffering a postmodern identity crisis.


* I'm still not sure why you would want/need to do this, as the Liberal Democrats phoned me up at a crucial juncture in the presentation, but I've got some lovely arcane ideas about how you would go about proving your identity, mainly involving "lexical fingerprinting", which is my new favourite phrase, along with "folksonomy".

** I've been worrying about this all day. Obviously they didn't *just* giggle (as I would have done, had I been in their place), they also made some great points about how to encourage commenters and how to project your own personality through your blog. And as well as having a stalker, they've also received THREE MARRIAGE PROPOSALS and TWO MEGA-MEDIA BUYOUT OFFERS, all of which they admirably turned down.


tags: blogging | calexico | terri walker

And Flaming Torches

Woohoo - Chicago here I come!


tags: pitchfork

This Is Not A Meme

It seems I've been tagged all the way from Thailand by the lovely Tim from Cultural Snow. Gosh, how far the internet's tentricles reach, eh?

The game with this one is to think of the Ten Best Films ever, then scrap that list, and list your Ten Favourite Films instead. For which, phew, quite frankly. I'm no film buff, so I'd have no chance of creating a list of Best Films Ever. But favourites, now, that I can do.

My film appreciation criteria are more or less the same as my music appreciation criteria: it's mainly to do with the words. Spiky, witty dialogue, that's what I like*. So here, in no particular order, are my Ten Favourite Films, with bonus facetious commentary:

1. Withnail and I: Yes, yes, I know, say what you like, but there's never been a more perfectly quotable film, ever. Every line a classic. *And* it's British. Hurrah!

2. Amélie: A friend and I were discussing at the weekend why it is that France produces brilliant films but execrable pop music. We came to the conclusion that it's because the French are just too spookily comfortable with their own emotions. They may be, but we Brits aren't, and that's why I can never quite establish why this film makes me cry so much. Also, it's so pretty to look at that I've got a poster of it in my bedroom. It's a bit like sharing a two-man dormitory with Audrey Tautou, and she never turns the light off, which is quite annoying.

3. Ed Wood: Zombies! Aliens! Bela Lugosi! A giant inanimate octopus! A cross-dressing Johnny Depp in an angora sweater! The best dialogue of any film that isn't Withnail & I! What more do you need?

4. Ghostbusters: My unseemly love of geeks was almost entirely formed by Dr Egon Spengler. "I collect spores, moulds, and fungus." Ooh, baby.

5. Lost In Translation: Because any film that has the Jesus and Mary Chain on the soundtrack gets my vote.

6. Memento: I could claim to admire it for its sheer cleverness and technical innovation and all that, but really it's probably something a bit more straightforward to do with Guy Pearce. Moving on...

7. A Knight's Tale. We don't really have to talk about why I like this one, do we? Oh, alright then. More attractive men per square inch of celluloid than any other film, ever. Paul Bettany as a periodically naked Geoffrey Chaucer? ("Chaucer's the name, writing's the game" etc.) Has to be a winner.

8. A Beautiful Mind. Maths geeks and secret codes - only two of my favourite things ever! I wanted this all to be true soooo much that I can only watch it up to halfway. Russell Crowe hideously miscast. Paul Bettany sadly remains fully clothed throughout. Never mind.

9. Sleepy Hollow: Excellent comedy turn from the boy Depp, doing his best Withnail impression. He's so clearly a comic actor that I don't know why anyone ever bothers asking him to do serious stuff.

10. Swingers: It's cool, it's funny, it's got some cracking dialogue, and Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are just great.

God, that was awful. Anyone else want a go?


* Although now I've made the list, it seems that I like attractive men almost as much as I like spiky, witty dialogue. Tsk, whatever would Seven of Nine say?


tags: films | johnny depp | bill murray | ghostbusters