The third UK series of Big Brother began this week. I unwillingly became addicted to the first and second series, but it's not going to happen this time. Why on earth would I want to follow the lives and thoughts of twelve complete strangers in such intimate detail? I find the obsessive, compulsive need to keep up to date with their movements quite disturbing. I also resent the fact that I get hooked and stay up watching TV when I'm tired and really should be in bed.
Oh no, complete waste of time. You won't catch me doing that when I've got more worthwhile options. Such as: following the lives and thoughts of various complete strangers in intimate detail via their blogs. Such as: obsessively, compulsively keeping up to date with the movements of various complete strangers via their blogs. Such as: getting hooked and staying up glued to the PC when I'm tired and really should be in bed.
No, no, no; you'd never find me wasting my time on such fruitless triviality. I have more important things to do.
Posted by Hg on Friday 31 May 2002 at 23:26.
Received 4 comments so far.
It's been a curious day in which I've felt somewhat apart from the world. Minutes have taken hours to pass, hours have apparently passed by in minutes. The consummate professional actor, to the untrained eye I might even have looked thrusting and dynamic. Inside, however, it was a different story.
Snatches of song lyrics looped through my brain, unsolicited images and metaphors formed just out of sight. Mythic aspirations shadowed mundane incidents, haphazard voyages became holy quests and all the time I was faintly aware of the mesmerising hum of the singing sands at the edge of the world.
At five minutes to eight this evening, something happened. Dusk had fallen early, conferring a stormy, dreamlike ambience. Walking down the street, I felt the sensation of ice-cold lead being poured down my spine. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. For less than a second I felt raw, naked fear as something passed through me. I jumped and then the world went into slow motion. My face turned gracefully to my right and alighted on four canine eyes in a parked van. Their gaze locked onto mine and I knew they had seen it.
They reassured me, but obviously I scared them. I harked as they barked, watched the vehicle shaking as they jumped from seat to seat. I wondered exactly what kind of lost soul I had just encountered and whether it had taken anything that was even mine to give in the first place.
Posted by Hg on Thursday 30 May 2002 at 21:19.
Received 3 comments so far.
Winston Churchill is the subject
Winston Churchill is the subject of a forthcoming TV movie, The Gathering Storm. I was recently reading an interesting summarised history of Churchill's life, which reveals him as a man who had a keen sense of humour and wit. His grandson, the Tory MP Nicholas Soames, recounts one visit to his grandparents' home:
"Apparently one day I got into his bedroom past the valet who guarded his door. He looked up from his paper and said, 'What do you want?' I asked him if it was true that he was the greatest man in the world. He replied, 'Yes, it is true. Now bugger off.'"
On another occasion, he was asked to comment on the draft of an address by an American general, to which he responded:
"Too many passives and too many zeds... Too many Latinate polysyllabics like 'systemize', 'prioritize' and 'finalize'. And then the passives. What if I had said, instead of 'We shall fight them on the beaches', 'Hostilities will be engaged with our adversaries on the coastal perimeter'?"
Posted by Hg on Thursday 30 May 2002 at 11:23.
Received 5 comments so far.
The week's AA Gill quote, on the phenomenon of 'phantom' lunch dates, where the ritual of organising, cancelling and reorganising is more important than the lunch itself (which invariably never happens):
"With the phantom lunch... the lower, beta chap presents his bottom and says, let's do lunch, and the dominant alpha guy inspects his bum and a diary, and says 'Yes, how about Wednesday week? Get your people to call my people', thereby effecting the ritual mount. Both parties have gained confirmation of their status. Beta can say: 'Actually, I've got a lunch pencilled in with Alpha," and Alpha can say: 'Oh God, I can't do Wednesday, I've got some tedious work thing.'"
Posted by Hg on Thursday 30 May 2002 at 11:21.
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We now have comments...
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 29 May 2002 at 19:36.
Received 11 comments so far.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 29 May 2002 at 16:59.
Received 3 comments so far.
A couple of weeks ago I went out for a meal with twelve other people. Ten countries were represented by birth, with a further four included by virtue of parental ethnic background. Only two of the thirteen were actually born in London and their parents were immigrants to the city. This is a fairly good example of the multi-cultural aspect of London that I love.
Multi-culturalism doesn't necessarily mean that your friends or colleagues are more interesting than in a mono-cultural society, but I do believe that it gives you a head start. There's more to talk about: more opportunity to discover different ways of looking at the world, different customs, beliefs and backgrounds. Other people's lives are always fascinating and the less similar they are to your own, the more you can learn.
As well as the differences between people, multi-culturalism can stress the similarities. With varied upbringings, geographic backgrounds, faiths and even languages, people make more of an effort to find common ground. By contrast, my own experience of growing up in a relatively homogenous small town - admittedly in a very different cultural climate in the Seventies and early Eighties - was that people who were essentially very similar spent all of their time trying to find fault in niggling little differences (he was somewhat distant, she was frivolous, his garden fence was an eyesore, she was Catholic, and so on).
Diversity also reduces the impact of of cultural majorities and minorities. When you're part of a majority you can become complacent, even arrogant. When you're part of a minority you can become distrustful, even resentful. The majority can become intolerant and the minority can retreat into a ghetto. Yes, these are generalisations and no, life isn't actually this simple, but I'll stand by these assertions. Just look at what's happening in Europe at the moment with the shift towards right-wing politics and the relationship between indigenous and immigrant cultural groups.
In a political sense, diversity manifests itself in coalition governments. These are often seen as weak and ineffective because decisions must be made by consensus and no single party has the ability to push its own agenda or strategy forward. While strategies are helpful for transport, finance or defence, in human terms I believe that 'coalition' is a strength rather than a weakness. If no particular section of the community has the opportunity to dominate, everyone has to understand and accommodate the other person's point of view.
Britain as a whole has a culturally diverse history. We're descended from Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Normans and Vikings. More recently, we've welcomed Arabs & Jews, Afro-Carribeans, Chinese and Indian immigrants, plus many others. London, as the capital, has generally been at the forefront of this activity. It's the ultimate mongrel city, happily sharing its genes with anyone willing to join in. It's this vibrancy and generosity of spirit - at odds with the popular image of the city as a cold, impersonal, uncaring place - that provides me with one of the many reasons that I love living here. It's life-affirming.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 29 May 2002 at 11:35.
Received 2 comments so far.
"Bantainam's father, Augustine, said his
"Bantainam's father, Augustine, said his son eats more chillies than chocolates or sweets, and still does not shed tears or show signs of any burning sensation inside his mouth."
This story caught my eye, providing a little light relief from the current heavy-duty political events in India & Pakistan. The page also contains a link to an article called "Chilli link to bowel disorders", surely the most un-newsworthy headline I've ever read. Anyone who ever had a beer-induced Friday night "doner [kebab] with chilli" could have told you that...
Posted by Hg on Tuesday 28 May 2002 at 21:10.
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So, yesterday evening I found myself waiting for Prol at The Spitz, a bar, venue and arts club on the edge of Spitalfields market on the Commercial Road, where The City starts to bleed into the East End (see previous post - I hope you've been paying attention).
I know the areas around Spitalfields, but I've never been to the market itself. It's a fascinating place - I wandered past a group of people doing the Jack the Ripper guided walk, led by a flamboyant guy in a long Barbour cape. It's only two minutes from Liverpool Street station, but you could be stepping a hundred years back in time. It's also under threat of redevelopment. While I don't believe that we have to preserve every last inch of our culture and history in aspic, sometimes I despair at how freely we rip down the old and replace it with the new.
The support act was Florida. Around 9pm we rolled our eyes and sighed like stroppy adolescents and said "oh well, I suppose we'd better go and see them" and made our way upstairs from the bar to the venue. As it turned out, they were actually rather interesting - isn't that always the way? Their label's web site describes them as "Suicide fronted by Peters & Lee", which is as good or bad a description as any. Prol and I thought they sounded at various times like Microdisney, The Beautiful South, Saint Etienne, INXS, Velvet Underground, Dave-id Busaras, Stereolab and The Pogues. We bought copies of their album, which, on a first very brief listen, doesn't seem to have quite captured the magic of their live performance (I might revise that opinion after I've heard it a few more times).
[Update: I have indeed revised that opinion and in retrospect think it was a silly comment to make; studio recordings and live performances are totally different ways of experiencing music.]
However, the main attraction of the evening was Cathal Coughlan. When Prol and I first got to know each other in 1994, we swapped various bands. I gave her James and she gave me the Fatima Mansions, Coughlan's former band. The latter's Viva Dead Ponies is a landmark album of the early 1990s and I need to find my copy and play it again at the weekend.
Coughlan's strengths are his deep, rich voice, his rigorous, intellectual lyrics, his witty, abrasive sense of humour and his passionate, furious rage against... well, everything. It's the latter that means that I find him interesting rather than compelling. Anger is indeed an energy but it needs to be balanced with a little positivity too, just as a shadow needs the light. Watching him perform, spittle flying from his mouth, veins bulging and neck tendons taut as wires, I hope that performance is catharsis for him. If not, his first heart attack surely approaches.
His material has two moods - reflective, piano driven 'pastorals' (his description) and shouty, eloquent rants. My favourite piece last night was a tender tirade about a girl with "obsidian eyes set against skin as pale as chalk". Ultimately, though, it's the banter between the songs that I enjoyed most. Especially when, with a smirk, he advised us all that he was "possibly one of the most subtle people you'll ever meet... if you stay in a box for the rest of your life."
I won't be buying the album, but I'm glad it's out there. If you're interested, he's recently made his first solo album, Grand Necropolitan, available online as a collection of MP3 files.
Posted by Hg on Tuesday 28 May 2002 at 11:41.
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Before I start waxing lyrical about London, let me explain a little about its physical and cultural geography so you know how it fits together and where some of the place names and descriptions come from.
When we refer to 'London', we're actually talking about two distinct places. The City of London is the true heart of London and is the business and financial district, hence the way the location of the London Stock Exchange is generally referred to as 'The City'. It's remarkably small and is often referred to as the 'Square Mile'.
The seat of the UK's government (putting aside the new regional assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and the place that most tourists visit is actually the City of Westminster, hence the way the Houses of Parliament are often referred to as 'Westminster'. Westminster is more commonly known as the 'West End', hence the title of the Pet Shop Boys' song West End Girls. (Just to confuse you, the 'East End' is not the same as 'The City' - keeping up?)
The West End has the high profile shops, theatres, restaurants and bars. It's the home to Oxford Street (ugh), The Mousetrap (ugh too), The Ivy restaurant (yummy) and pretty much any current musical that you care to mention. For me, its highlights are Soho, Fitzrovia and the quieter parts of Covent Garden.
The City, by contrast, is bustling with besuited business people during the week yet is almost a ghost town at weekends, when most shops and many bars and restaurants close due to lack of trade. The City has most of the history - the Great Fire of London began here in Pudding Lane, the Old Bailey is based here, the Tower (of London) lies at its southern edge. The street names alone are fantastic: Seething Lane, Mincing Lane, Pope's Head Lane, Poultry and Throgmorton Avenue are all within a mile or so of each other.
I don't know the City as well as I'd like to, even though I recently recommended it to Prol as a less conventional tourist attraction. I need to get along to the Museum of London and find out more. One day I'd like to be working in the City - it just hasn't happened yet.
To the east of the City, the third commercial component of the metropolis has been forming over the past twenty years. The Docklands, formerly the city's docks on the Thames estuary, was designated a development zone in the 1980s and planning regulations were relaxed to stimulate growth. It's an uneasy mixture of old and new, business and living space. It was over-hyped for its first ten years and is now going through a quiet period, but it seems to be undergoing something of a re-emergence and the triptych of West End, City and Docklands will eventually be more evenly balanced.
As for the suburbs, we generally refer to them by postcode. Thus we refer to north London (N), north-west London (NW), west (W), south-east (SE), and east London (E). We talk about south London, but it uses a mixture of SE and SW postcodes. Curiously, in all the time I've lived here, I've never heard anyone who actually resides in the city refer to 'north-east London' and there is no NE postcode.
We refer to the city's onion-ring-style transport ticketing zones as a way of defining how close to the centre we live. The city centre is Zone 1 and the outermost suburbs are Zone 6. Zones 1 and 2 are considered urban and cool. Zones 3 and 4 are still acceptable although less desirable. Zones 5 and 6 are 'the sticks'.
London is pretty much circular, slightly stretched horizontally into an oval. The river Thames runs directly through it from east to west, excepting the odd wavy bit (see the opening credits of EastEnders for enlightenment). The city is physically contained by the orbital (i.e. circular) M25 motorway with its 31 junctions. Half-way between the M25 and the centre of the city runs the north/south circular road.
The north/south (of the river) divide is prominent and faintly ridiculous. Both the cities of London and Westminster are north of the river, as are most of the tube lines. Those born north of the river rarely move south and vice versa. Born and bred north Londoners tell me that south London is "foreign", somewhere that they feel "lost". Cab drivers in the West End will often refuse to go south of the river late at night (despite the fact that they are legally obliged to take you anywhere within the city's boundaries, I believe).
There are many more ways that the jewel can be cut, but these are the most common.
Posted by Hg on Monday 27 May 2002 at 16:34.
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"Water is essential for life, so the discovery enhances the belief that Mars could have had life in the past and perhaps in the present as well."
Sloppy thinking, or at least sloppy writing. Water is essential for life as we know it. But who's to say that other forms of life can't survive on light waves, or rocks, or some kind of invisible cosmic stuff that we don't even know about?
Posted by Hg on Monday 27 May 2002 at 11:21.
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A few disjointed memories of the day. Gatwick is Sussex's hellmouth, so I picked up Prol and got the funk out as quickly as possible. Bad accident on the motorway - I took a risk that we'd get through it fairly quickly but we didn't, so the journey to Oxford took twice as long as it should've. We passed between sunshine and rain.
Sunday lunch at the Parsonage Bar (very nice, traditional English without the chintz). The rain held off while we wandered the streets, searched half-heartedly for some spires and ended up at the Arne Jacobsen exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
More wandering, then coffee at the ultra-trendy Quod bar of the Old Bank Hotel. Headed back to London on the M40. The skies opened again and the motorway did its best car park impression. Finally reached our regal destination after two hours. Deposited Prol in B's capable hands, had a quick drink and then headed home, exhausted but with a smile on my face.
Posted by Hg on Sunday 26 May 2002 at 21:18.
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London-related posts still forming. Off
London-related posts still forming. Off to Oxford tomorrow with Prol, so they'll have to wait.
Speaking of capitals, CHRIS! REDESIGNS! We like. Also very keen on Meg's visual answerphone.
[Update: Meg's 'answerphone' pictures keep changing, so my mouse-hover comment now makes no sense at all, but I'm keeping it as a reminder.]
Posted by Hg on Saturday 25 May 2002 at 22:05.
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I can feel several London-related
I can feel several London-related posts forming at the back of my mind, all of which will have a distinctly pro-metropolitan tone. If that's not your thing, please bear with me.
Londoners, especially the immigrant kind like myself, can occasionally be dismissive of the rest of the UK. I don't want to fall into that trap, I just want to explain a few of the reasons why I love living here.
Posted by Hg on Friday 24 May 2002 at 16:51.
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My recent trips abroad have thrown an interesting light on my relationship with London. I came here sixteen years ago as a student, having wanted to live here for as long as I can remember. In just over two years' time, I'll have lived here longer than anywhere else.
I was a student in an inner London suburb and then I worked in roughly the same area for a year after graduating. Next I worked for five years in central London, followed by six years in west London. Our office moved out of the capital last summer and I remember an interesting conversation with an ex-colleague before we moved.
His family was based in Cheshire and he lived in a small studio flat in London during the week, returning home at weekends. His view was that the impact of moving the office out of London was vastly over-rated because no one 'used' London anyway. He asked how many shows I had been to see recently, how many museums I had visited, which attractions I liked and why anyone would want to live in such close proximity to seven or eight million other people.
Well, I guess that's why he lived in Cheshire and I live in London. You see, I like living in close proximity to seven or eight million other people (about which, more some other time). I don't go to shows, museums or 'attractions', which I generally view as being for tourists. For me, London is a city of pubs, bars, restaurants and shops. It's the place where I live and, until recently, was nothing more or less than the ultra-vibrant metropolitan backdrop to my daily existence. I've never visited the Houses of Parliament or the London Eye, but my train passed them twice a day and they were a familiar, exciting part of the landscape.
However, my new perspective on the place has come from being a guest in other capitals and from being a potential or actual host to visitors. I started to wonder what advice I could give them, in the same way that they advised me. "Bar Italia is a great 24-hour café". "Boheme Kitchen has funky bar stools." "Livebait is becoming more of a chain operation and is a little over-priced, but still worth going to."
Buckingham Palace? Tower of London? Saint Paul's Cathedral? Highgate Cemetery? No idea. In sixteen years, I'm almost ashamed to say that I've never visited them. I drive past some of them on a weekly basis, but I'm always more concerned with not hitting the confused driver ahead or the courier bike overtaking on the wrong side.
My oldest niece just got a camera for her ninth birthday and is now apparently becoming quite seriously interested in photography. I've promised to take her on an expedition round London and she's made me swear that this will include the Tower (of which she knows more history than I do). I think I'm going to take advantage of her enthusiasm and book the two of us on an open-topped sightseeing bus trip, so we can both - with twenty-five years' age difference between us - see these things for the first time.
Posted by Hg on Friday 24 May 2002 at 11:46.
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The rain was so heavy this morning that it felt more like I was driving through the motorway than on it.
And then, a magical moment. The rain stopped abruptly, the sun broke through the clouds and for just one minute the wheel-spray from the huge juggernaut in front of me turned into a hundred fractured rainbows.
Posted by Hg on Friday 24 May 2002 at 11:28.
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Posted by Hg on Thursday 23 May 2002 at 21:41.
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So, the Eurovision Song Contest weekend approaches. These days I'm fairly agnostic about it, but when I was younger it was a thing of magic.
In today's interconnected world, it's easy to forget just how alluring Eurovision was in the 1970s. In fact, if you've grown up with a hundred satellite TV channels, mobile phone international roaming agreements and the myriad services of the internet, you might be forgiven for thinking that the whole idea is simply banal. However, the UK in the Seventies was a communication-starved place.
We had three TV channels, one of which broadcast for only half the day and the other two of which finished around midnight. Breakfast TV was unknown and the BBC had yet to discover the delights of soap opera. Before EastEnders, the nation was obsessed with the altogether more soporific charms of ATV's Crossroads.
There were four national radio stations (crap pop music, crap easy listening music, boring classical music or The Archers). If you lived in a larger town or city you probably had a BBC local radio station too, serving up a smorgasbord of all the things that were too crap to be broadcast on the national stations. If you were really lucky, you had one of those newfangled local commercial stations with DJs that talked really fast so they could fit the adverts in.
Not every house had a telephone. Party lines, where you shared your line with your neighbours, were not uncommon. National dialing codes had been around for several years, but people still tended to answer their phones in an All Creatures Great and Small "Darrowby 85?" style. International calls required a chain of operators to frantically plug cables into switchboards in every capital city between you and your remote family member, assuming you had won the pools (no lottery) and could afford to pay for the call in the first place.
And then there was Eurovision. The television stations of all the major western European countries linked together for a night, so their citizens could sing songs to each other. It was fantastic. I can't overstate the feeling of international community that this imparted to a ten year-old. People in France, Germany, Spain and Italy were watching the same television programme that you were. You, on your swirly brown carpet with your cheesy football snacks and your purple flared jeans.
Eurovision fascinated me for a whole load of reasons. I was into short-wave radio, so TV was something of a side-interest. I listened to foreign radio stations at home but, apart from going on holiday, Eurovision was the only way to get to see 'foreign' TV. I loved the music, loved looking at the way that each country represented itself. I loved the different languages. I loved, in fact still love, the whole voting ritual - "Helsinki calling..." - and the crackly, unreliable lines that linked the remote juries to the TV studio.
Nowadays, of course, it's all so slick and polished. The environment in which it operates is so different, we're much more cosmopolitan and sophisticated. We can link people from twenty-four different countries together so seamlessly that we can't tell the difference (more globalisation, vicar?). High-bandwidth links provide audio so clear that the juries could be sitting next to you. The internet provides you with an enviable amount of background resources, including the Eurovision website itself (with the requisite sound and video samples).
It's more, yet at the same time it's less. For all the gloss and infotastic detail, I think we've lost a little of the wonder.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 22 May 2002 at 20:13.
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"Cats are domesticated animals that
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 22 May 2002 at 17:12.
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"Scott could never understand why
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 22 May 2002 at 17:08.
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I've just spent a few minutes running through the FranklinCovey Mission Builder. I'm a sucker for this 'organise your life' stuff, probably because of my over-developed sense of personal responsibility. (If you can't organise your own life to get what you want, who else is going to do it for you?)
I guess you either like this kind of thing or you don't. Personally I think the Mission Builder is quite a useful tool, though some of the other advice on their site sounds a little over the top. If I were to say to my beloved that "our relationship is really important to me but I am feeling very stressed - do you have any ideas how we can have some relationship time together this week and I can still get my projects done?" (from Re-kindling Your Relationship with your Partner), it would be a race to see which one of us would crack up with laughter first.
The most interesting part of the Mission Builder for me is right at the end, where they recount the tale of the friend whose life's mission is "to serve". This got me thinking - if I had to sum up all of my life's aspirations in one verb, what would it be?
I'm quite intrigued by this challenge. Most of our traditional aspirations tend to cover being or getting - I want to be in love, I want to be happy, I want a nice house, I want a big, fast, shiny black car. Defining ourselves and our objectives by what we want to do - to serve, to love, to protect, to teach, to improve, etc - is a more proactive, practical approach. It focuses on what we intend to give, rather than what we would like to receive, and in this respect it appeals to me a great deal.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 22 May 2002 at 12:20.
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I've been reading a lot of stuff recently about how alphanumeric passwords will slowly disappear in favour of systems based on fingerprint or iris recognition. One question: when your security is compromised, does this mean you have to send all of your users out for plastic surgery?
Posted by Hg on Tuesday 21 May 2002 at 12:43.
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The horror! My car stereo has fallen silent overnight. It's in some kind of mysterious half-way state between 'on' and 'off' - its LED display is enigmatically glowing red without actually telling me anything useful about the problem.
To the best of my knowledge, I have never, ever, driven without some form of background music or talk. Even in my first car, which didn't have a radio of its own, we would bring out the battery-operated radio-cassette from the kitchen and stick it on the back seat.
This morning's journey into work was uncharacteristically good for a Monday morning, but even so it seemed to take forever and the car was doing all kinds of strange things that I never normally notice. (You mean that the indicators are supposed to make that clicking noise?) Concentration on the road itself was harder. I developed the theory that the music normally makes me feel more alert, though maybe I just had a particularly numbing case of 'Monday morning jetlag' today.
The car dealer's service department tells me that it can give me an appointment on Friday next week. I can't imagine two weeks of muted motorways - motoring without music. Suddenly the world seems a very quiet place.
Posted by Hg on Monday 20 May 2002 at 12:59.
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While I remember, my taxi driver on Friday evening was quite a short guy, driving the largest people carrier I've ever travelled in. Honestly, you could have played a World Cup qualifying match in the back seat leg-room alone.
Clipped to the dashboard, I noticed a tiny mobile phone with a jungle-themed snap-on cover. On closer inspection, the main motif was an elephant, though its trunk was cut off by the phone's screen. (Someone please prevent me from making some awful pun on the word 'truncated', I've got away with far too much of that kind of thing recently.)
I pass no comment, other than the possibly unwarranted speculation that this was a guy for whom size might be an issue.
Posted by Hg on Sunday 19 May 2002 at 20:56.
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Continuing the weekend's "I have
Continuing the weekend's "I have nothing to say, so let's quote lots of journalists instead" theme, here is the week's quote from AA Gill's Sunday Times column. He's been given a parking ticket for being badly, rather than illegally, parked:
"...I'm rather impressed. I like the idea of Peter York-type style wardens holding up numbered cards, marking motors like Torvill and Dean. And, frankly, why stop there? Why not colour-code cars? You've been fined for parking a green car next to a red car. Residential streets could become huge Rubik's cubes, with everyone moving up and down until it's all blue one side and all white the other."
Posted by Hg on Sunday 19 May 2002 at 09:23.
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Posted by Hg on Saturday 18 May 2002 at 17:34.
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"What made Fortuyn special was
Posted by Hg on Saturday 18 May 2002 at 17:31.
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"...kidney- and plectrum-shaped pools are
Posted by Hg on Saturday 18 May 2002 at 17:28.
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All I want to say to you, at five past three in the morning, is: treasure life. Every fucking minute of it.
And with that unfocused and slightly soppy sentiment, I'm off to bed.
Posted by Hg on Saturday 18 May 2002 at 03:05.
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"For some commuters, the smart
"For some commuters, the smart card has almost become an object of desire."
Posted by Hg on Friday 17 May 2002 at 12:17.
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Taste and smell are powerful senses. One sip of chai and I'm back on Prol's black leather sofa in Amsterdam, listening to trams pass the window. A whiff of caramel tea and I'm perched on a chair in a kitchen in Paris with a ginger cat demanding my attention. Now, talking about aftershave this evening, even the memory of a smell evokes further memories: Brut for Men.
1978. Record Mirror and Disc magazine. My new bedroom. The girl three doors down. The den at the top of the garden. Top of the Pops. Sitting on the heating pipes at school. The world defined by how far I could ride my bike. A nagging sense that there was more. Waiting...
Posted by Hg on Thursday 16 May 2002 at 21:50.
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"We must be the only nation that is embarrassed by academic excellence - where being too clever sometimes serves as a term of abuse."
Is this just pedantic semantics, or am I even inadvertently proving her point, but doesn't 'clever' imply a certain amount of cheekiness - even with a tinge of malevolence - while 'intelligent' is more a simple statement of ability?
"She's so intelligent." "He's so clever." No?
Now I'm getting one of those trippy word repetition things that not.so.soft covered a few weeks ago. Clever. K'levah. C-lever. Kleaver. Cslevver. Kleeve-are. Clayvair. Kuhlevuh. Clev-aaargh...
Posted by Hg on Thursday 16 May 2002 at 17:12.
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Sunshine. Friends. Food. Drink. Laughter.There
Sunshine. Friends. Food. Drink. Laughter.
There is no finer way to spend your lunch hour.
Posted by Hg on Thursday 16 May 2002 at 12:52.
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It's 1am and the silence is deafening. I am inappropriately awake, pulses careering round my body. I've got the power, but it's unchanneled. This much mental electricity should be able to run a small city, but instead I'm more like a cut power line, arcing and sparking spasmodically. I'm totally wired, my resistance is low and I have no capacity for sleep.
I need a transformer, to splice myself into the national grid. I want to dissolve my body into its million, billion atoms and send them down the line, humming and buzzing with the resonance of life itself. I could flow north, south, west, east, random and vibrant, joy-riding the pylons the length and breadth of the country. And eventually, the regeneration complete, my polarity would reverse and my spirit would turn and head back to its source in a shocking collision of love, lust and energy.
Oh yes, the power you're supplying - it's electrifying. Better shape up.
Posted by Hg on Thursday 16 May 2002 at 00:04.
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"To explore the unknown and the familiar, distant and near, and to record, in detail with the eyes of a child, any beauty of the flesh or otherwise, horror, irony, traces of utopia or Hell" - Dan Eldon
An online photojournalism site featuring pictures from central and eastern Europe, discovered in the comments section of not.so.soft.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 15 May 2002 at 06:54.
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I've had two or three e-mails recently suggesting that I should implement a comments system on this blog, particularly since I've passed the odd remark about how nice feedback can be. One person indicated that I should be more than happy to do this, since I contribute regularly to other blogs' comments.
There are a few reasons that I've given both to others and to myself for not having done this so far. Firstly, there's the technical side of it. It's probably neither difficult nor time-consuming, but I'm really not in the mood for more registration, learning, designing and coding at the moment.
Secondly, there's the further call on mental resources. It's already enough to read other people's blogs, to read their comments, to contribute to their comments, to read the news and other regular non-blog sites, then to come up with the occasional interesting piece of writing myself. A comments system of my own is just something else to administer, to read, to feed - more responsibility.
To be completely frank with you, the main reason that there is no comments system here is because I'm a control freak, plain and simple. You people? On my site? Unthinkable! What if someone says something nasty about me? What if someone says something more interesting than I have? What if someone contradicts me? What if someone says "there's a much better blog at muchbetterblog.com" and you all decide to read that instead? Oh no, it's simply much too risky.
Just kidding, of course (he said convincingly). By popular request a comments system is now on the 'To Do' list, but as usual I'm over-committed and spread far too thinly. Hopefully you'll see something over the next few weeks. However, the control freak thing is true - I am a control freak and it's a hard habit to break. In many ways, it's a very useful trait to have and I could convincingly cite it as the prime source of my financial, material and career achievements to date.
However, it's also the source of the occasional stress-related blip in my life, when my desire to do everything - myself, perfectly, all the time - progresses from merely a healthy attitude to responsibility towards an unhealthy obsession with making sure that everything is identified, checked, planned, implemented, covered, addressed, documented and accounted for.
The trick, as ever, is to achieve balance. To misquote a very useful maxim: grant me the courage to control the things I can, the patience to accept the things I cannot and the wisdom to know the difference. Some things absolutely must be controlled and some absolutely must never be. Some could be, but there isn't a sufficiently attractive return on the time invested. Some used to be, but priorities changed.
Life is all about change. Control is a bad thing when it's used to resist change and a better thing when it's used to encourage it.
Posted by Hg on Tuesday 14 May 2002 at 19:25.
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Today's snake story at SomeTHING...
Today's snake story at SomeTHING... reminded me of a similar incident of my own from several years ago.
I had just left college and had started my first temporary job. I was between accommodation, so I was staying at my girlfriend's student flat. Like most of our student flats, this one had a mouse problem and various trays of poison had recently been laid. I came home in the evening and sat down in the lounge with a beer, intending to relax in front of the TV. Then I saw the tail sticking out from underneath the long curtain.
For a minute I sat very still, not sure what to do. The mouse had obviously not heard me, or thought it was safe, so I got up quietly and went into the kitchen. Much though I didn't want it to be there, I couldn't kill it. I decided to deal with it with a large-scale version of my 'glass and postcard' humane spider disposal technique, so I found a mixing bowl in the kitchen cupboard and grabbed a vinyl album sleeve (remember them?) from the bedroom.
I crept back into the lounge, praying that the mouse would not have moved; luckily it hadn't. I decided that if I moved the curtain it would run, so I decided to trap it under the curtain with the bowl and then work out what to do next. I tiptoed up to the curtain and, with the speed of a panther, slammed the bowl down on top of the poor creature.
It was a clean capture and I slowly pulled the curtain out from under the bowl, making sure that the mouse remained trapped. Occasionally its tail poked out of the side of the bowl, thrashing wildly as I pulled the curtain. I hoped I wasn't hurting it too much. Then I gently slid the album sleeve between the bowl and the carpet, again with the tail thrashing. I gingerly picked the whole thing up and headed out of the house.
The flat was just down the road from a church, which seemed a fitting new home. I wandered along the street with my mixing bowl and album sleeve, getting the occasional curious look from pedestrians and drivers. I walked into the churchyard and found a sheltered spot away from the road. I held the mixing bowl and album at arm's length, tilting them away from me slightly. I got ready to run, assuming that the mouse would jump off the album sleeve. I hoped I wouldn't disgrace myself by screaming too loudly if it decided to run onto my arm instead.
Slowly I lifted the bowl. Two eyes stared blankly at me - it appeared to be paralysed, frozen to the spot. I tilted the album sleeve some more and, stiff as a board, the dead mouse - obviously poisoned and at the advanced stage of rigor mortis - slid off the cardboard and bounced on the grass at my feet...
Posted by Hg on Tuesday 14 May 2002 at 11:12.
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I'm currently putting together an
I'm currently putting together an Associates and Billy Mackenzie rarities compilation for someone and I keep coming across whole chunks of lyrics that I want to quote. Before I change my mind yet again, here are a few lines from Where There's Love, from the under-rated 1990 album Wild and Lonely:
I can't get to it if I don't know how to
I've never been shown and you expect me to
Give up a ghost that I've known so long and hold you
And hold you closer than I ever thought possible
I'm staying right here of my own free will
You stole my heart and took away the chill
To find out that there's love
Where there's love
Oh, bugger it. Words alone disobey and the album is deleted. Here's a relatively lo-fi version (56Kbps, 1.9MB). If anyone has any serious objections, or if the album ever gets re-released, I'll consider taking it down.
Posted by Hg on Monday 13 May 2002 at 20:36.
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http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.net
http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.net
Posted by Hg on Monday 13 May 2002 at 19:58.
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"Black! Black! BLACK! Like the
"Black! Black! BLACK! Like the clouds of DEATH that follow me into the Forest of DOOM! And hide in the wardrobe of DARKNESS! BLACK!"
Today I'm feeling a little like Johnny, the melodramatic, depressive painter from The Fast Show. Every time I look out of the window and see the grey, wet, miserable nothingness that seems to be the day's dominant theme, I too want to hide in the wardrobe of darkness.
The weather affects my moods far more than I care to admit. On light, airy days I have a cheerful, sunny disposition. When it's cold, I'm brittle and frosty. I can enjoy the high drama of a fierce storm (thunderbolts and lightning, deliciously frightening), but a monotonous drizzle turns my emotions to monochrome.
Today it hasn't really got light here and consequently I feel like the day was only half-lived. I've been going through the motions, waiting for someone to flick the switch and provide some mental illumination. The day was void, limbo - as featureless and invisible as the crack between paving stones or the half-second break between TV adverts.
Some days, you never really get going at all. The engine misfires, the body shudders to a halt. The journey is called off, replanned for some other time. Today was one of those days. Not good, not bad, not anything in particular. Torn between the light and dark.
This all sounds very heavy, man, but I mean it quite light-heartedly. I'm just idly playing around with words and inflicting the results on you, dear reader. Instead of Johnny's black, think of transparency - heart of glass, rather than heart of darkness. You can see right through me if you look hard enough.
Posted by Hg on Monday 13 May 2002 at 19:51.
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This week's AA Gill quote:"The
This week's AA Gill quote:
"The only thing I demand of a film is a happy ending. And I'll kill anyone to get one. I'll put up with bad acting, stupid scripts, unbelievable plots, just so long as they end up having sex or tea or putting the kids to bed. Why would anyone want anything else? I mean, if they gave you a choice at the box office, 'Leave happy or suicidal', which would you choose? 'Oh, suicidal please, with subtitles.'"
Posted by Hg on Monday 13 May 2002 at 11:32.
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I forgot to mention this yesterday: this page explains the epitaph on Jim Morrison's grave. The potential ambiguity of the translation is very interesting.
Posted by Hg on Monday 13 May 2002 at 07:05.
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"...Père Lachaise is a truly unusual place. Land of the dead, or rather of Death, its paths and side-paths form a truly phantasmagoric maze. Mystic enclosure within earshot of the sounds of the city, Père Lachaise lives on its history, its secrets and its legends (necrophilism, prostitution, black masses)."
I hadn't really intended to go to Père Lachaise. It seemed such a cliché, redolent of tortured adolescent students visiting Wilde's grave so that Morrissey will somehow love them that bit more, or shallow hippie stoners expecting some of Jim Morrison's awkward charisma to rub off on them.
However, as I set off to explore Paris last Saturday morning I noticed that the cemetery was only a few métro stops away. It was early, my head was slightly fuzzy from the night before and a quiet walk seemed like a better way to start the day. I stayed on the train past my connection and ended up at the south-western cemetery steps only a few minutes later.
The cemetery has an elaborate underground drainage system that gives it a sporadic, atmospheric stench of death. The trees overhang everything and the noise of the city is strangely muted. The most noticeable feature of the lower part of the cemetery - to British eyes, at least - is the vista of sepultures (sepulchres). Mostly absent from the British experience of death, these tall burial chambers are the size of telephone boxes and are effectively mini-churches, with grey stone walls, wrought ironwork doors, an altar overlooked by a stained glass window.
I headed towards the grave of Jim Morrison, the only one I saw that has a permanent guard. The former bust that gazed blankly at visitors has now disappeared from the grave and it contains only a paltry collection of flowers, candles, cigarette butts and métro tickets. Fans have left notes and letters in the grave, the most prominent of which says "Jim, your grave looks like SHIT, Pieter". Pieter may be rude and arrogant or simply shocked and appalled, but he's certainly accurate (not that his yellow post-it note helps things).
Putting aside the question of whether Jim really is resting here or is actually selling burgers in Detroit, I considered the question of what motivates people, including myself, to visit graves such as these. There's certainly a ghoulish element to it (finally getting to 'meet' the celebrity), maybe a hint of tragic self-righteousness (all those drugs, look what they do to you) and it's definitely something to tell the folks back home (as I am now).
However, in a more positive light, it's a homage. I'm not a Doors fanatic, but I'm certainly a fan. I think Morrison was an interesting, if sometimes obnoxious, character. I've seen plenty of video footage of him both on stage and off. I've seen the Oliver Stone movie, which gives a dramatised glimpse, however flawed, of his final hours. Visiting his grave makes a connection between those flickering images and the physical reality of his death. Despite my cynicism, I have to admit that I stood and stared at his name carved into the marble and was moved.
Next up, Oscar Wilde. I had seen pictures of this monument before and always thought that it seemed far ahead of its time. I discovered that it was actually created in the 1970s. Sure enough, there were flowers and notes placed across the ledge that runs along the monument. I was both delighted and appalled to see that Morrissey quote scrawled on a sheet of lined paper in an adolescent hand.
A plaque at the base of the monument advises that it is now a listed national monument and asks visitors not to deface it. Someone has therefore initiated a wonderful compromise - lipstick kisses all over the stone. A young girl and I hung around the monument together for five minutes or so. I was waiting for her to leave to take a photograph and eventually I had to change my angle to ensure that she was excluded from the shot. As I turned to leave, she darted forward and kissed the stone and I realised that she too had been waiting for her own moment of solitude with Oscar.
I visited more graves of artists whose work has meant something to me. I'm still not able to express adequately why I did it or what I got out of it. However, one thing is clear: however illogical, visiting the last resting place of their mortal remains was equally as gripping as listening to, or looking at, the immortal voices, lyrics, poetry or paintings that they have left behind.
Posted by Hg on Sunday 12 May 2002 at 12:36.
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Another gallery update - a few seaside pics from our trip to Whitstable the weekend before last.
Posted by Hg on Saturday 11 May 2002 at 22:23.
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One of the best radio stations that I listened to in Paris was Radio FG (also known as Fréquence Gaie, a gay station). The first time I was there, it seemed to have borrowed my record collection for the afternoon. The second time, it played loads of great stuff that I'd never heard before. Happy to report that its website offers a streaming live broadcast.
Posted by Hg on Saturday 11 May 2002 at 21:49.
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"In the tent of powder and lace
She can hear some violins, watches the strings
Threading through the room"
That last post might have been a completely unintentional plagarism of a song that I haven't heard for probably eighteen years. Funny how the mind works - it's all still in there, somewhere.
Posted by Hg on Saturday 11 May 2002 at 11:28.
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The veins wrap around her arms like ropes and the backs of her hands look more like sculpture than living flesh. Fingernails bitten down to the quick, skin torn and bloody, she raises the cigarette to her mouth and inhales the smoke that she hopes will kill her.
With grace, dignity and a heartbreaking absence of despair, she pulls the blanket around herself. This can only keep in the warmth. No material was yet woven that will capture and contain the slow dissolution of a soul that has no reason to live.
Posted by Hg on Friday 10 May 2002 at 21:50.
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As we seem to be stuck in a musical groove today, here are three threes:
Intending to buy... How I Do by Res, Ceci N'Est Pas Un Disque by TTC, The Glamour Chase/Perhaps by Associates.
Waiting for... The Eminem Show by Eminem, Your Love Means Everything by Faultline, A Little Deeper by Ms Dynamite.
Must investigate... Baz, Pina Kollars, Alpinestars
Posted by Hg on Friday 10 May 2002 at 17:32.
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Also accompanying me to and from work on the car stereo this week has been Tweet's new album, Southern Hummingbird. I saw her on the Jools Holland TV show a couple of weeks ago, having read an interview with her a few days previously. I was impressed; she has great stage presence, combining the energy of the young Tina Turner with the enigmatic smile of Minnie Driver. Reviews have compared her to another Minnie, the fabulously named 1970s soul diva Minnie Riperton.
She's a Missy Elliott and Timbaland protégée and if you haven't heard her single Oops (Oh My) already, I'm sure you will soon. It's built on the same kind of sparse, looped backing as Missy's own Get Ur Freak On, but it substitutes oboe (or quiet sax?) for GUFO's sitar. It's feminine, sensual and beguiling where GUFO was masculine, aggressive and insistent.
The rest of the album is mostly nothing like the single, a mixture of soul and R&B that sounds in places like Macy Gray, Aaliyah, Alicia Keys and Missy's own funk workouts on her latest album. I think it's over-long - of the fifteen tracks, probably five wouldn't be missed - but the good stuff is very good indeed.
Posted by Hg on Friday 10 May 2002 at 16:25.
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I've been enjoying the Futurism
I've been enjoying the Futurism electroclash compilation for the past few weeks, but it's only this week that I've realised exactly how good the sequencing of the tracks is. Now I've got Fisherspooner's debut album, #1, the track Emerge doesn't sound right without the Alpinestars song that follows it on the compilation.
I'm waiting to be convinced by #1. It's good in places, but I find it a little uneven. After Futurism, I suppose any single-artist album is going to sound tame. My favourite track so far is Horizon, which starts off with Hawtin-esque ticks and rumbles and slowly morphs into Hardfloor on special melting drugs.
Does anyone know who is doing the vocals on that Alpinestars track (Burning Up)? I know nothing about them, but they seem to use guest vocalists. Brian Molko is on their latest single, but this track's vocal reminds me of the late Rozz Williams of Christian Death (who may have been a pantomime Goth band, but his voice was superb).
Speaking of melting, Google's logo of the day reflects the fact that it's Salvador Dali's birthday.
Posted by Hg on Friday 10 May 2002 at 12:59.
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UK readers - and anyone else who can get the BBC2 TV channel - should set their videos for 10pm Mondays, when the insanely funny 1994 satirical news show The Day Today is being repeated for the next six weeks.
The show gave me my first encounter with the dangerous comedy of Chris Morris and introduced the world to Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge character (which subsequently enjoyed success in its own right - these TDT repeats are being shown as part of a Partridge retrospective). It also starred Doon MacKichan, now part of the equally bizarre but much gentler world of Smack The Pony.
Once you've watched this show, you'll never be able to take the news seriously again.
Posted by Hg on Friday 10 May 2002 at 07:10.
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I'm heading north for the day on business, so I'm going to leave you with my Paris pictures, newly added to the gallery. I've split them down into two sections, the ones of the Père Lachaise cemetery and the ones of everywhere else.
Père Lachaise is simply amazing and I'll tell you more about it some other time. I'm pleased with these shots - one or two of them are a little dark, but mostly they're good. The other ones are a mixed bunch - both in terms of subject and quality - so I'm offering them up more as holiday snapshots than as examples of good photography.
I've only had my camera since December and I'm still getting to know it. I think I have a reasonable eye, but technically I don't understand nearly enough yet. Each roll of film that I shoot highlights another area that I need to pay more attention to.
I think the time has come to stop playing around and to seek out some hard information. I'm wondering whether the web or a book would be enough, or whether I should sign up for an evening class.
Posted by Hg on Thursday 09 May 2002 at 04:37.
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On the subject of confidence, I was much more comfortable speaking French this time. Having learnt the language around twenty years ago and not having had much occasion to use it since, I suppose the previous month's trip provided a useful refresher. However, I think that, as ever, my own perception of my abilities was the most significant factor.
Last time I was in Paris, it was frustrating not to be able to speak French as well as I speak English. I take pleasure in the tools of conversation - my favourites include precision, metaphor, humour, exaggeration - and it was difficult to be suddenly without them. In many cases, I kept quiet when I would normally have spoken.
However, since then I've been to Amsterdam, where I really couldn't speak a word of the language apart from the obligatory 'please' and 'thank you'. Maybe Dutch is not quite as widely used as French or Spanish, but I still felt that I should have been able to handle a few more basics.
Returning to Paris, I realised exactly how much French I could speak (especially watching the film Legend in English with French subtitles, when I realised that I was primarily reading the subtitles and only occasionally listening). Sure, my accent is a bit rusty and my vocabulary relatively small, but I can hold a conversation. It was a pleasure to be able to communicate. My perception had shifted and suddenly the glass was half-full.
Communication is becoming more and more important to me. I used to be quite a loner, whereas now I find people fascinating. Hey, I'm even beginning to like myself.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 08 May 2002 at 18:47.
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You know, I nearly didn't go to Paris at all. It was organised three weeks in advance, but the day beforehand my friend phoned me and said that she couldn't be there that weekend. I was still welcome to go, her flatmate was happy to let me stay, all I needed to do was pick up the key before I left.
I received this news during the inevitable manic pre-holiday afternoon at work. My immediate instinct was to panic. Still go? Without my friend? Stay with her flatmate? I was really uncertain. "I should go, I'll probably regret it if I don't," I told her, "but it feels a bit strange." "Are you sure 'should' is enough," she asked, "or would you rather cancel?"
I asked colleagues for an opinion. I asked a friend for an opinion. I tried to call my wife at work for an opinion, but she wasn't around. I swung back and forth, from wanting to go to not wanting to go, intending to go then intending to cancel. Most unlike me - sometimes I make gut decisions and other times I evaluate slowly and logically before deciding, but I rarely get caught in a decision-making paralysis like this.
Finally I decided to go, with the proviso that I would phone the flatmate myself and judge her reaction. So, I called her up and acted the cardboard cut-out Englishman for a couple of minutes ("terribly kind of you, don't want to be an inconvenience, are you sure you don't mind, sorry, sorry, sorry...") and was relieved that she sounded fine, if a little bemused.
Of course, the moment I got there it was clear that all my concerns were completely groundless. I had got on well with her the last time I visited; this time we spent more time together and really hit it off. I'm invited back anytime I like. She's invited over to London anytime she likes. Who knows, this may even be the start of a friendship. So what the hell was all that angst about?
Confidence, I guess, or rather a lack thereof. Lack of confidence in my ability to be a likeable person who gets on well with others. Lack of confidence in my ability to handle it if things aren't quite so easy-going. Also probably a large dose of black and white thinking - "if the trip is not going to go exactly as planned, the trip must be cancelled". In retrospect, I'm amazed that I felt so tense about the whole thing and so glad that I decided to go regardless.
So, that's my first lesson for May. Even though it's something that I already know, it never hurts to be reminded. It's generally good to take risks; if they don't destroy you, they make you stronger.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 08 May 2002 at 16:22.
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