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.
Wednesday, May 29, 2002
20 days to go - bookcases and CD stacks dismantled ready to stuff in the attic. Entering the CDs, LPs and books we're taking with us onto an Excel spreadsheet for insurance purposes. When I moved from London up to Leeds back in the early 90s I misplaced a whole bunch of albums whose loss I've only just been able to verify - or did I sell them? If so, who to, and why did they only want Fall and Swans LPs? Everyone tells me I've got a lot of records and CDs but compared to other people I know who are serious about music I've barely got a patchy selection of a real collection. There are whole genres of music unrepresented. Hardly any folk music, no opera, little hardcore Japanese noise, hardly any early 70s French underground rock besides Mahogany Brain and Fille Qui Mousse's extremely odd Trixie Stapelton 291, little freakbeat, no primitive methodist music...
One of the good things about getting old and senile is the accidental rediscovery of something you once loved but subsequently forgot about. Such was Fantastique!, a fanzine by Alistair Fitchett back in the early 90s, that contained much of my favourite writing on a certain kind of pop culture. Fitchett was a fanzine writer in the truest sense, inspired by that particular and peculiar post-punk fan ethos whereby writing about remembering the way a record made you feel on a wet Tuesday morning in a rented bedsit was a million times more important and real than the putrid celeb gossip, recording contract bumpf and corporation-vetted bluster that made up most other writing in pop and rock magazines. And in this late-flowering indie-pop fanzine world, Fitchett was Proust and his madelaine an ultra-obscure Josef K B-side....
And thankfully he's still at it. I lost touch with him when I got online and only today stumbled across a link to a link to a link to the webzine he edits, Tangents. There's an archive of stuff going back to mid-90s articles that I now remember - with bittersweet nostalgic ressonances - reading, coming right up to date, plus other similarly evocative writers. A ton of stuff I'm only just scratching at. It gives me a thrill inappropriate to my years on this planet to see how he makes a connection between Freezepop (Boston, 2001) and Strawberry Switchblade (Glasgow, 1982). Oh I'm still a sucker for this stuff, for the languid, shy sweetness of a pop culture that continues to exist away from the stinky dullness of the mainstream and the megastore-tolerated "alternative". Even if I don't buy it or even listen to it, I still feel the world is a better place for people who start bedroom bands inspired by Hurrah and the Shop Assistants....
Supernova poised to go off near Earth, sez the New Scientist. HR 8210 is just 150 lightyears away,which is close enough to blast us with enough high-energy electromagnetic radiation and cosmic rays to rip the ozone layer right off. Fortunately "poised" in a cosmological context means "within the next few hundred million years", so I won't be losing too much sleep.
Tomorrow night is the Eurovision Song Contest, which is what Europe is really all about, a mixture of gormlessness, faux-innocence and wasted technology. It went well beyond being "so bad it's good", decades ago and is now the ultimate in cheesy entertainment for the making-quotation-marks-with-fingertips-is-irony brigade. Yet there really arepeoplewhotakeit(too)seriously. But grab a few beers, turn off your critical faculties and turn on the Ceefax subtitles for the curious translations for what is still an obligatory annual hootfest.... It may not be big or clever, but where else will you get to see about 200,000 elderly dinner-jacketed European broadcasting executives getting down to a trio of Slovian transvestites dressed as air hostesses or a fat Russian boy band called "Prime Minister"? (And just for one night Israel is part of Europe.)
This is assuming the world doesn't end in the next 24 hours....
TALIBUM ALERT! MACHO British Marines told yesterday how they had to take rearguard action to fight off randy gay Afghan men. Troops were shocked when they were targeted by frisky fellas wearing PINK LIPSTICK, NAIL POLISH and PERFUME. The hunky soldiers were hotly pursued by the horny hordes in mountain villages.
I can see another fine British sitcom from the school of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum and Allo, Allo writing itself even as I type these words.
Busy lugging boxes of books, comics and bits of dismantled stereo equipment up into the attic, wondering if WWIII will break out when I'm up there - and I'll miss it, won't get a chance to blog my historically significant thoughts during its seven minute span. I'll come down and post "almost dropped 43 issues of Sandman on my head" instead.
Almost a calamity - stumbled across the Television Without Pity page that gives capsule reviews of all the episodes of 24 - and we're only at 11am here in the UK. Fortunately I managed not to take anything in. I know the show is total balderdash, but it's maintained such a consistent level of balderdash right from the first minute that it works perfectly, doesn't give you a chance to say "hold on a minute, that just doesn't make any sense at all!" until too late. It's an odd choice for Sunday night TV by BBC2, especially as it's followed by that show that's a bit like the X Files used to be, and stars some of the same people, but is unutterably lame.... I think it's called the X Files.
Went to see Waking Life last night at the Hyde Park. It isn't every night you see the city you're going to be moving to transformed into an hallucinogenic cartoon. Fascinating, intelligent film, like a dream version of Slacker, slipping in and out of focus and you think you've got a grip on what it's about. It looks unlike any other film and even when it just seems to be disconnected gibberish it still seduces and intrigues. And any film that refers to an essay by Philip K. Dick is bound to get three thumbs up from me. (And Wiley Wiggins, like 97% of the population, has a blog.)
One to wrongfoot the Instapundit androids: Colin Powell is right: a little humility wouldn't go amiss by Peter Preston in yesterday's Guardian. "Can Spain and Britain, best of friends, settle a tiny trauma over Gibraltar? Probably not... We can't solve stuff - old stuff, middle-sized stuff - within our own borders. Why on earth should we presume to lecture the rest of the world on conflict resolution?" There is a great feeling of liberation and relief, for a Euro-liberal anyway, in saying the supposedly unsayable like this. Some of us don't want Britain to be America's poodle but at the same time we're not - to put it mildly - convinced of Europe's superiority in all areas....
Went to see Waking Life last night at the Hyde Park. It isn't every night you see the city you're going to be moving to transformed into an hallucinogenic cartoon, starring a guy who used to live in Stacey's attic. Fascinating, intelligent film, like a dream version of Slacker, slipping in and out of focus and you think you've got a grip on what it's about. It looks unlike any other film and even when it just seems to be disconnected gibberish it still seduces and intrigues. And any film that refers to an essay by Philip K. Dick is bound to get three thumbs up from me.
Hey, protest kids, you can read the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke's How Israeli terrorism and American treason caused the September 11 Attacks in Indymedia, that "democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth," as they themselves say. If there's a punchline to this it's too sick for me to think of.
The launch of the first of possibly a hundred dung-fueled power stations for the UK is being held up because of Environment Agency red tape over whether the cow, chicken and pig shit being delivered should be classified as "waste product" or "fertilizer".
Sunday lunchtime and I've only just finished reading yesterday's paper - and that's just one paper. I'm too slow at this newsgathering lark for keeping an informative and up-to-the-minute blog. And I've hardly looked at the one million and one essential online sources of information a well-rounded and knowledgable person should peruse before breakfast every morning. But right now I'm too busy searching for online stuff that will be of use for acclimatising me to life in the USA. The move is just one month away now and I need to replace four hundred thousand years of UK pop culture in my head with the American equivalent. And while we've always been bombarded with US pop culture over here (and assimilated most of it despite our sarky and superior attitude), there are still a lot of things that baffle me. So I think Pop Culture Junk Mail should help plug me in....
Meanwhile, in the real world: "Hollywood producer Steve Bing has sued Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer owner Kirk Kerkorian for $1 billion (686 million pounds), claiming that the 84-year-old mogul stole his dental floss from the trash to use as evidence in a bitter paternity battle with his ex-wife," according to Reuters.
Finished my contract on Thursday. So that's that - the end of being a technical writer in England. Get my timesheet and invoice in, sort out my taxes and I'm ready for my new life. I did get to see the product on the afternoon, after 20 months there, which was anticlimatic but a novel change.
Hit by a migraine on the train home, halfway through reading Charlie Stross's Nebula Award nominated novelette (has any other genre besides science fiction used that term?), Lobsters. I don't think it was the "dense, fractal info-overload" of the story that set it off, more likely the sudden oppressive heat, the gloopy pesto and red wine at lunchtime (hottest day of the year so far) and long-awaited epochal/anticlimactic significance of the moment. Struggled home - it's hard to get into a taxi when you're not sure if you're going to give your address or make a bunch of random noises. A rotten ending to what had until then been my favourite last day at work ever. Friday was spent waiting for the electrician and trying to decide whether to go out or not. And now it's Saturday and time to start writing like this was a proper blog....
Bringing me up to speed on what I can expect to find living in the walls in our Austin apartment, Stacey found a site detailing the Mammals of Texas. I wasn't expecting Texas to be home to mountain lions, sperm whales, grizzly bears and hairy legged vampires. Ulp.
Tuesday was our second wedding anniversary - cotton (traditional) or china (modern), it sez here. Two years ago, in Isamu Taniguchi's Japanese garden in Zilker Park, Austin, Texas, the justice of the peace - a jovial Kenny Rogers lookalike in gown and cowboy boots - did the verbals, slipping in a bit of new age sentimentality from The Prophet. All things considered it was the best wedding I've attended. Two cellists played. We drank champagne, the guests blew bubbles (less messy to clean up than confetti) and all the would-be photographers failed to capture the moment due to dud batteries, faulty equipment, the wrong kind of film, psychic interference, etc. Once we're back in Austin we plan to restage the moment and get some decent pictures taken. In addition, we're about 60 pounds lighter between us and I've given up pretending I still have hair so the results should be rather more presentable - and ought to be snapped up by Hello!, OK! or Old English Guys With Young American Brides Monthly.
I was expecting another extract from Francis Fukuyama's The Posthuman Future in this morning's Grauniad, but it looks like Monday andTuesday's snippets are all we're getting. Reading them does make me wonder how Fukuyama got his reputation as a big, brave and prophetic thinker as he's saying nothing that hasn't been said - and routinely demolished - countless times before. He's just rehashing in a way that appeals to his target audience, the Wall Street Journal-reading classes who want their preconceptions reflected back at them larded with the appropriate scholarly references.
Just as well this is my last week at work as GNER have withdrawn the 7.10am Leeds to Newcastle train. I thought I'd missed it yesterday but today discovered it hadn't been there to miss. It is typical of GNER to do this in respond to a crash on a line two hundred miles away. There are probably be genuine safety reasons for this but it comes across as something between petulance and desperation. Ooooh, you want safe trains do you? Well just for that you're not getting any trains at all....
I'm a bit puzzled by the Rolling Stone list of 50 Coolest Albums. I finally got around to going through it and discovered I have eleven of them, which is a worryingly inconclusive number. If it was higher I could say "yeah, it's a cool list and I'm cool for having so many". If lower I could laugh at the very notion of farty old Rolling Stone professing to know what cool is. But eleven? And only three of those - Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure, Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat and the Serge Gainsbourg compilation Comic Strip - would make it into my coolest fifty. It's hard to take any list of "must have" albums seriously, especially one so faddish that it contains the White Stripes and the Strokes but not the Beach Boys, Nirvana, the Pixies, Patti Smith, Captain Beefheart or the coolest album ever, The Beau Hunks Play the Original Laurel and Hardy Music....
The revelation that Richard Desmond, publisher of "top-shelf" magazinesAsian Babes and Nude Readers Wives (not to mention Big Ones, Amateur Video, Fifty Plus, Big and Black, Contact Girls, Double Sex A, Electric Blue, Horny Housewives, Only 18, Private Lust, Red-hot Pack, X-treme and Mothers-in-Law) gave £100,000 to New Labour within days of the then industry secretary, Stephen Byers, giving the go-ahead for Mr Desmond's Northern and Shell group to take over Express Newspapers is barely worth a yawn, but this comment from the Northern Ireland secretary, John Reid makes even a cynic like me go "whaaaaaaa?"
"We have acted with complete propriety, We have acted with integrity. We have been transparent. If you are asking if we are going to sit in moral judgment, in political judgment, on those who wish to contribute to the Labour party, then the answer to that is no."
I'm not old-fashioned enough to expect moral and political judgment from a political party, but I expect them to be a bit shamefaced and apologetic when they get caught taking money from someone who makes their money from Horny Housewives, not to use it as an excuse to start bragging about their "propriety" and "integrity".
Dept of Too Much Time: There are people feeding the whole of the Warp catalogue through various audio-visualisation plug-ins and finding stuff. Like Richard D. James' devilish face in the last few seconds of a track on the Windowlicker EP. Just think what you might find in something by Merzbow....
You know an article about the social and moral implications of scientific advancements in a broadsheet newspaper is going to be dodgy if it makes reference to Star Trek, but this one,"Save us from Perfection" by Michael Gove in yesterday's Times starts with Dr Who. It's predictable stuff, prompted by Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future: science is a'messin' with things it shouldn't oughta. I'm sure there were hacks churning out nonsense like this when Jenner came up with the smallpox vaccine or when the first specticles were made. T'aint natural - it's "abolishing human nature". And it's always amusing to see the old argument about how the rich will be able to afford to have fitter, healthier, more intelligent offspring than the poor - like this is something they are only going to start doing now that science is getting out of hand. The children of the rich have always have such advantages and papers like the Times have never objected to private schools and private medicine. And it's the distribution and availability of any new bio-tech innovations that needs scrutiny, not the science itself.
This thing was crawled by Googlebot for the first time around midnight. Curiously the first six searches that showed up in my log were for Charlotte Church's rear. (Or maybe it was the rear of a church in Charlotte, North Carolina they were after.) And the seventh was for Magnus Pyke.
T Minus 41, I think. I finish my contract next Friday and then we can concentrate on tying up all the loose ends before we fly away to our new life in Austin. Time to fix up the flat so we can rent it out to executives or students with rich daddies. Downsize my book, record and CD collections again, but seriously this time. Wind up the mighty NE Richardson Ltd and see what remains when the taxman has taken his cut.
I've been preparing myself for the Texas heat - it's already hitting the 90s there, a good 40 degrees hotter than here in Leeds. Which is why I've got rid of about two stone of superfluous man-blubber since mid-February, leaving less of me to get sun stroke or heat exhaustion as I dash from the pool to Trudy's for the first Mexican Martini of the evening.
Not entirely sure what sort of job I'll be doing when we get there. Don't want to rush blindly into anything. Do I want to continue as a technical writer? Don't I deserve a change after 15 years of "Click on Close to exit the system"? Can't I affect a David Niven or Terry-Thomas lilt and capitalise on my Englishness instead, making a living sticking "I say" and "frightfully" and "absolute shower" into my sentences?
"Danny Elfman has written another graceless score that sounds like someone jammed tubas up the butts of a dozen elephants and put them on StairMasters."
The Lileks that even we Guardian-reading Euro-weenies can read for pleasure is still back.
82,000 indecent cloaks were seized in Jeddah, Riyadh and Dammam earlier in the month - but here's a response from a Saudi woman that shows that this kind of obsessive attention has long since stopped being a joke. Remember this?
It's amusing how many rightist bloggers seem to see Christopher Hitchens as a kindred spirit when his less lovable brother Peter is closer to most of them. Hitchens has a little squib about his hero (and subject of his next book) George Orwell in the LA Weekly. It doesn't say anything new but it's always good to be reminded:
we use the word "Orwellian" in two senses. The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammeled power. The second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and which may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.
Since my late teens the 4 volumes of the Penguin Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell have been my bible - although over the last decade or so I've probably opened them as often as I've opened the bible. Time for that to change though, starting with "Antisemitism in Britain" and "Notes on Nationalism", both from 1945....
Superblogger Gary Farber seems to find it "wacky" that I would call an electrician to fix the bathroom shower. I can see this as a cause of much Anglo-American misunderstanding, so here is what we in the UK know of as a shower - although it doesn't explain that you can have heat or water pressure but not both at the same time.
Listening to KVRX, student radio at the University of Texas. We're not just moving to Austin because they played Aphex Twin, Mouse on Mars and Autechre one after the other when we tuned in this morning, but it's heartening to know that we'll probably never have to hear Will, Gareth, those cloned S Club foetuses or any of the pap that passes as music on the radio here when we've said adieu to the UK.
Oh, and boo hoo, that there are no UK acts in the US top 100 for the first time since 1963. Now just to get all the UK acts out of the UK charts and the world will be a better place....
Prince Philip's latest "gaffe" - saying to a blind woman, "Do you know they now do eating dogs for the anorexic?" But does this counts as a gaffe? It's surreal enough to be a Gary Larson cartoon.
Kyliewatch - she's on the cover of all the tabloids again today - and I glad to see I'll still be able to keep up with all the news about the pert bottomed one when we're in Austin. But what about Britney's butt?
I didn't get around to voting yesterday in the local elections. It was a foregone conclusion - only Labour bothered putting anything through the letterbox. They've held Leeds for 22 years, so not voting is the equivalent of a half-hearted thumbs up for the status quo.
In Hartlepool a monkey was elected mayor, which perhaps makes amends for the fact that a monkey was hanged by the townfolk during the Napoleonic wars because they thought it was a French spy. It wasn't a real monkey this time around but the football club's mascot who has "been thrown out of two away games, once when he simulated sex with a woman steward in Scunthorpe in 2000 and a year ago for his antics with an inflatable doll at Blackpool".
Funny how the Labour party's chairman has responded by saying the government might have to think again about the system of directly-elected mayors....
Gwapple me gwapenuts! David Bellamy got on the train at Durham this morning and took the seat next to me. Bellamy is one of those characters who started appearing on British TV in the 70s when goofy scientists were all the rage, like Magnus Pyke, Hans Woolf and, the daddy of them all, Patrick Moore - guys you could tolerate being smart because they looked ridiculous and probably didn't get laid. Bellamy was the jolly naturalist, a big bearded figure in shorts and a loud shirt with that always popular British inability to pronounce his Rs. I'm not sure what his field of expertise was, but he moved towards conservationism and although he still pops up on TV probably isn't considered goodlooking enough for regular telly work these days.
I hate to have to admit it, but there are still a residue of racist comedians up here in the north. But it is cheering to read that even Leeds United footballers won't stand for this sort of shit any more.
LATER: Although they did rather spoil it by saying that when they hired him the only people they thought he'd be racist about were the Germans....
"It's become acceptable to like Simple Minds again," John Peel, Radio 1, tonight.
I'm not 100% convinced but listening to "The American" from 1981 I wish I hadn't given all those albums to Oxfam. What sounded irredeemably flaky ten years ago now sounds pretty good. Maybe it's taken 21 years to forget what a twit Jim Kerr was. This could of course be a temporary thing, a taste blip. Next week I might have to come back and delete this entry. But I can forsee an early 80s Scottish indie revival: the Associates, Joseph K., Orange Juice, etc.
Forgot to upload anything yesterday, mainly because I was ridiculously sleepy all day. And this morning Demon has been spluttering and squelching, unwilling to let me do even something as dull as download a new virus checker.
Lads, eh? Despite all the rumours they're still allowed out in public, I see. On the train last night three of 'em - probably Business Studies students or something equally "well mashed" or "wicked" - were having problems opening their copies of Maxim, Loaded and FHM, seeing how they're all in special packaging this month with free disposable razors and pork scratchings amongst the usual "Top Ten Trouser-Troublin' Telly Totty!" pull-outs and other essential goodies for slobbering onanists and Jamie Oliver lookalikes on the way back home from university to get their mum to do a term's worth of washing. None of them had gone for Jack, James Brown's latest brainwave which is aimed at men who have supposedly outgrown the hedonistic excesses of "ladhood" and now want to relax into early middle age with a cardigan, slippers, a faithful retriever, a "best of the Style Council" CD and an article on collecting Nazi war regalia. I haven't been tempted to have buy a copy of Jack - it looks cheap and cheesy, which in this case isn't necessarily a good thing. Even without opening it I'm reminded off all those articles that used to appear in soft porn mags in the 70s, the padding that probably had to make up a certain percentage of the pages for legal reasons, and always had soul-deadening titles like like "Meet Archie Blenksman: The Indominable Toastmaster", "A Salute to the Cravat!" or "How to Build the Ultimate Sportsman's Den - Without Your Wife or Mother Knowing!"
I don't think that men do grow out of lads' mags - not the men who read them in the right spirit in the first place - they just become increasingly disenchanted with having to experience it as a spectator sport, seeing that lifestyle (obliging babes, footballer/criminal pals, expense account drugs and corporate lackies to clean up the mess) receeding on the other side of a glossy page and contrasting it with what adult life has doled out to them. They only got to peek at the hedonic excesses James Brown may have grown weary of - they grew tired of the pissy version they had to make do with instead. But in their lager-stained hearts they still want all that stuff, Hollyoaks starlets in their underwear, tales of footballing debauchery, bad behaviour and Howard Marks hagliographies....
