being the delicate blogging of an english chap in austin, texas, who has recently
ressumed his technical writing career but is still searching for eternal verities in
the bottom of his martini glass and on curious web pages. he is married, quite old
and off to the gym in a few minutes. you can email him at anything-that-doesn't-have-the-word-blog-in-it (at) nerichardson (dot)
co (dot) uk...
You can read about the real "Yes/No Interlude" here.
Saturday, June 29, 2002
One of the few things I had my doubts about before moving to the USA was the absence of Budweiser Budvar due to the litigious rotters at Anheuser-Busch and their lawyers. It was a nasty tale that had dragged on since 1939. But now it's available as Czechvar - in Texas and a dozen or so other fortunate states. Try it, and you'll never want to insult your palate with the weedy St. Louis imitator again.
I see I missed the Bad Lileks spilling a bibful last week. I wish he'd stick to hymning the praises of Target, a store I have spent many mostly happy hours in over the last few days, loading up the trolley with all the essentials for the new apartment. Phone, Michael Graves toaster, Mr Coffee, Phillipe Starck hairdrier (alas, too late for my depleted dome), linen, towels, bathmat and lint remover. It's a strange kind of fun to be furnishing a place from scratch again, having to buy little things like shower curtain rings and bath plugs and a queen size bed.
Meanwhile, the radio stations play either Kylie or a maudlin country song about a boy and his boat.
Okay, we've now settled into our apartment in Austin and I've signed up with Texas.net for a few months while we get ourselves sorted out. Currently assembling IKEA furniture and dodging the thunderstorms. (I've never seen lightning like last night's outside of science fiction movies.) Sheltering in HEB last night I knew we were a long way from Leeds. Overwhelmed by choice. It's fun to be confronted by 87 different types of Cheerios when you're on holiday, but when you're trying to do basic grocery shopping it's mindfogging.
I'll be keeping this updated again now I've assembled a desk and chair. My crappy laptop is just about functioning and I remembered to bring all my passwords and usernames along with me.
Don't miss England yet. We brought across 1.125 kg of Marmite and enough Gentleman's Relish to keep me going until I discover some local delicacy of equal breakfast-time potency. Life is good even without broadband, cable, Tivo or a job....
T minus 44 hours. Zounds! Time to dismantle the stereo, stick one last box of junk in the attic and scrap the 3mm of accumulated sludge from the kitchen floor.
T minus.... yikes. No time to write the necessary 1,800 word diatribes on dirty bombs, Spiderman, Donald "people and countries sort out their own problems" Rumsfeld, 55 Cancri, Black Rod and that rather silly, pious and belated letter from about 60 "prominent Americans" in today's Grauniad.... (I don't so much disagree with what they're saying, just the tired "we'll-show-'em-we'll-form-a-committee-and-write-a-letter" mentality. You end up looking at the names rather than the content and base your response on how you feel about Ed Asner, Edward Said and Mos Def.) Things to do, bags to pack, wet skies to stare out at while wondering why I don't feel particulary sad to be leaving this place.
T minus 9. The countdown to the big relocation enters its closing stages and all the big stuff has been dealt with. A few last change of addresses - or should that be changes of address? - to send out. Get my limited company ready for ceasation, inform nine billion inland revenue departments that they'll be looking elsewhere for their pound of flesh. Finish that bottle of absinthe as importing the stuff into the USA carries about the same penalty as smuggling in heroin, nuclear weapons, Nazi war criminals or a teensy-weensy Cuban cigarillo. Remember not to pack away my chest X-ray as I have to carry that with me on the plane so I can prove I'm not carrying an foetal alien chestburster. Time now to hire someone to clean the carpets and soft furnishings, paint the spare bedroom, put a lock on the loft door and make a detailed inventory of what we're leaving behind for that nice couple who'll be renting the place.
Oh yeah, there was some footie game this afternoon and I think the local team won. Headingley was chaotic - all the pasty-faced students suddenly embrued with a lairy patriotic spirit, brandishing homemade union flags and howling the football songs they'd probably only previously heard on the telly. Something had happened on the Otley Road - maybe related, maybe not. A couple of cop cars, traffic being redirected, a helicopter overhead and a big crowd of fans hanging around, probably unsure what to do next. Getting drunk and rowdy is the all purpose English mass reaction to just about everything good or bad, although in this rare celebratory instance the absence of someone to shout abuse at probably left a lot of people confused and frustrated.
Watching the match on TV I actually felt a stirring - a wish that I could get into football and feel whatever it was half the country seemed to be feeling. But when I saw the mobs of twerps roaming the streets afterward I soon changed my mind.
Sweet! I've tried to put in words my ambivalence to the popularist bleats of James Lileks before and failed miserably. I shouldn't have bothered. Roy Edroso does the job just dandy here, here, here and here. However, unlike the rabidly surreal Warbloggerwatch attack on Jimbo, Edroso appreciates the "good" Lileks, "a frequently lovely writer with a winning, Thurberesque style", which makes his critiques more pertinent and even more fun.
Lileks is unique in that he's an online diarist - given to detailing the comfy, contented life - with the soul of a warblogger, and so his maddening rants have an resonance more conventional warbloggers lack. The guy's humanity, which makes the sentimental, middlebrow nerdiness of his nonwarblog bleats so appealing, also gives his swaggering rants a dimension the likes of Instapundit and gang lack - which is why a single paragraph of his nasty stuff riles me more than fifty pages of those other guys at their crackerbarrel worse. It's a real person sloshing around in that dark sea of incoherent apocalyptic rage, not a cartoon republican firing off reflex squibs. This doesn't excuse some of the nonsense he comes out with in Bad Lileks mode but it probably explains why I go on reading it....
T minus 10 days. Minimal posting this week due to the sudden convergence of A Million Things That Have To Be Done More Or Less Simultaniously. Things to be cancelled, things to be changed, things to be redirected, things to be held up in disbelief, things to be put to one side until the very last minute. A thousand customer service numbers to be phoned, all with their own delightful selection of "on hold" music ranging from Frank Sinatra to ear-hurting rawk. Buried beneath telephone numbers, account numbers, passwords, user IDs. No time to write all those meaty and trenchant 1,000 word diatribes and rants about the political and moral issues of the day....
T minus 12 days. The big red truck arrived at nine this morning and most of our worldly goods were packed away and taken to be shipped across the Atlantic. The living room sounds different without the acoustic baffling of all the CDs, vinyl and books. Have only kept a few select CDs back to keep me amused over the next ten weeks or however long it takes for all our stuff to reach Austin. Summery music like Pet Sounds, obviously... Nothing too intense and nervy. The four CD Nuggets compilation... Serge Gainsbourg's Comic Strip... Live Evil by Miles Davis... Four Tet's Pause. A cheap Augustus Pablo compilation.... Suitable stuff for this last fortnight in England. But who knows what I'll be yearning to hear after a couple of weeks beneath the scorching Texas sun?
When I said I was becoming "more of a republican" I meant it in the British rather than the American sense. My dislike of a system that promotes the "divine right of kings", regards us as subjects rather than citizens and all the associated nincompoopery in no way means I harbour any fond feelings towards Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft and all those pernicious stiffs. Just thought I'd better make that clear.
Back from Livebait, having devoured half an aquarium and a nice Chilean chablis. Monday night is "free lobster upgrade" night. The words "free lobster upgrade" just don't occur often enough in this life.
Back to reading a real online diary - Gus's Random Ever After after growing tired of the terse, impersonal world of weblogs. Sometimes the unfocused musing on an uneventful walk in a park means a whole lot more than a thousand earnest bloggers regurgitating the latest article in The Weekly Standard.
Woke up late, looked out at the patchy skies then checked online to see if nuclear war has broken out yet. There is a strange lethargic lack of general concern about the Kashmir situation. There are people using terms like "doomsday scenario" but it's not as if it really matters - not like the world cup or the excruciating third infliction of Big Brother or Lance Bass going into space or even the Queen's golden jubilee.
Talking of which, even though I think I'm more of a republician this time around, I'm far less against this jubilee than the Silver one back in 1977. Back then the whole thing was a gruesome wallow in our dutiful subjugation to the "mad parade" of royalty, pomp and class. Now it's just a showbiz diversion, an alternative to Posh 'n' Becks' slightly hipper charade. Back then we had punk as a counterforce. This time around all we've got is bloody Billy Bragg, whose miserable dirge "Take Down the Union Jack" I caught a few bars of on Friday's Top of the Pops. I'd forgotten quite how appalling Bragg was - I'm pretty sure it was his first couple of albums that singlehandedly turned British youth away from potato-faced blokes strumming guitars and whinging about Thatcher towards apolitical pop and dance music back in the 80s. But this new record is even worse than I could have imagined, as self-righteous and pious as it is tuneless and witless, wet-fart bleating to the converted.... The sort of thing to send a new generation of would-be disidents straight into the arms of S Club Juniors.
Four stacks of CDs building up around me: (1) those I want to take to Austin, (2) those I want to take to Polar Bear to part-exchange, (3) those I know Polar Bear won't be interested in and can therefore go in the attic and (4) a pile I'm not sure about and will have to listen to before I decide. Right now it's Th' Faith Healers' Lido from 1992, which I'm thinking abouttaking just for their cover of Can's Mother Sky (oh, and there's a sticker on it showing I got it secondhand from Polar Bear for £2.99). Th' Faith Healers were the sort of band I'd see at the Duchess of York (or miss seeing as their gigs were so badly advertised), which used to have a couple of cool shows a week but has since been knocked down and turned into a Hugo Boss shop - which I although thought was the perfect act to symbolise the end of something although I was never sure exactly what.... live music in Leeds, independent rock music, post-punk subculture, my interest in these things....
#695 - Go to the Sugar Altar by The Kelley Deal 6000... #696 - Paavo Heininen's Arioso, Piano Concerto No. 2 and Symphony No. 2... #697 - Anna (bande originale de la comedie musicale) by Serge Gainsbourg.... and that's all the CDs I'll be taking, or rather that will be picked up on Wednesday and shipped across, to arrive in Austin in about ten weeks. Now I've got to decide which I need to keep back, the ten or so I really can't live without for that time.
And now the records.... I think one hundred slabs of vinyl should do.
#533 - LTJ Bukem presents Logical Progression from 1996. Keep or trade? Got a whole bunch of what was known as "intelligent drum 'n' bass" for a year or so, and was almost all I listened to during yet another odd phase of my life. Should keep one, maybe Goldie's Timeless, for nostalgia's sake. Reminds me of Prozac, solitude, starting my web diary and the discovery that most of the people I liked I hadn't yet met....
#534 - Schwingungen by Ash Ra Tempel. Scary album from 1972, acid-drenched, timeslipped, hippy-punk Krautrock when the band was joined by Matthias Wehler wailing free on alto sax and the genuinely deranged John L., who was kicked out of Agitation Free for performing wearing nothing but green paint on his penis, providing the most shredded, brain-curdled approximation of vocals. Evokes an elaborate fantasy of a anarcho-lysergic Germany awash with Stooges albums, horribly stained loon pants and House on the Borderland imagery....
Lots of tiresome 25 year anniversary of punk retrospectives starting to crop up everywhere. Makes me a bit uneasy. My view of punk has changed in hindsight. I'm still cataloging my CD collection and have noticed I've only one CD reissue of '77 punk: Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch EP. And most of what I do have on vinyl I never listen to. Punk was an awesome and necessary explosion at the time, but most of it was pretty superfluous as music once you'd leapt around to it half a dozen times and used it to upset your Yes, Rush and Genesis loving acquaintences. By about mid '78 you could split those of us who had earlier clutched Never Mind the Bollocks to our hearts into two camps: those who saw punk as a purgative, as a cleansing of the musical palate before we moved on to something more satisfying, and those who wanted it as a lifestyle, comforting in its limited, deadening pantomime of fury. After Wire's Chairs Missing and the Slits' Cut showed that the true spirit behind punk was to get the hell away from the stagnant mess punk had become as soon as a fourth chord was learned and check out some influences beyond the Stooges and the New York Dolls, things started to get very interesting. For a while anyway.
Listening right now to Robert Simpson's String Quartet No. 7, played by the Delme String Quartet. Simpson's a composer I really got into back in the late eighties, back when I was cultivating what I hoped was a disolute aesthetic pose, attending first performances of modern classical works at the South Bank and Wigmore Hall, but I don't think I've listened to him since. Anyway, this CD is the 455th to be entered into the spreadsheet...
