Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Friday, August 31, 2001

Defendant is a creator and publisher of numerous comic books and magazines. Among DC's best-known characters are Superman and Barman.

Now that's a parallel universe I could definitely live in. Barman, fearless defender of the innocent - as long as they lean forwards at something like a 20 degree angle with a tenner in their hand and a hopeful look! Or, anywhere in West or Central London, clueless mid-pubescent with a shit goatee and no ability to pour beer whatsoever! I tell you, there was more head on the first attempt to pour me a pint in The Punch and Judy on Tuesday than there was in Caligula passim.

(via Tom)

For reference purposes: the following is taking the piss, but in a gentle, loving and, hey, self-mocking way.

Turns out that Paul has been the beneficiary of such an extensive education, even his statements are qualified. Although I'm not sure where this utterly reasonable thesis leaves the trousers. Wrapped around somebody's legs, I suppose. Which is in general a good thing.

I would, however, like to take issue with the cri de coeur "If you have the academic ability, there's just no opportunity to set yourself apart from the crowd anymore".

Of course there is.

Get into Oxford. Or, at a pinch, Cambridge.

Thursday, August 30, 2001

Mo must be trippin'. I mean, I've spent most of my life in an attic listening to indie rock from the early 90s, reading slim volumes, perfecting my scary Janeane Garofalo shrine and generally shunning and being shunned by the flesh, and even I have had sex with more than eight people. Although not simultaneously. Three thousand shags over the course of a lifetime seems awfully pessimistic, also...

Oddly, the rest of these statistics seem exactly correct, if a bit optimistic on the vomiting and Windows fronts...

"Then, quite unexpectedly, we developed a sexual tension problem during a particularly dull Wednesday afternoon..."

Oh, Ben is to blame for the below. Beware his repeating MIDI of the first three seconds of "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing". It is evil.

Ceasetoexistceasetoexistceasetoexistceasetoexist.

Yes, it's Miss Teen USA! These prematurely aged showponies are quite the most terrifying thing I have ever seen. Well, not the most terrfying, but that's a story for another day.

Actually, I tell a lie. Scarier than the scary fascist panty grins and the teased-up ho hair are their pronouncements:

She would love to be the scientist who finds the cure for AIDS!

There is no reason for that exclamation mark. None.

"Target Acquired, sir. Clean shot available. Awaiting command."

"Hold steady. Repeat, hold steady. I want to hear her sing for a bit."

Cults a-go-go on the Upsideclown.

Wednesday, August 29, 2001

Ah. This makes more sense. Currently obscured by a double tag on NotSoSoft:

Case in point: there is someone I don't know well enough online or offline to know whether I like him or not, but based on what he writes online, I'm veering towards not liking him very much at all. And I really don't actually like disliking people - because stupidly, I want to believe that people online - you know, the personal publishers, the geeks, the big happy family, the ones who actually get it - are generally decent and generous and clued up and passionate and believe that there's more to be gained from working together - collaboration and community and all that mallarkey - than bitching about each other - in public or private. But evidence proves to the contrary and it irritates the hell out of me - especially when experience takes the form of random, public, personal attacks. What's the point in that? Christ, I want to feel positive about people, I really do, but some individuals just make it bloody difficult sometimes. This is the woolly liberal dichotomy in me again, don't you see? One of these days I'm going to have to wake up and come to the inevitable realisation that some people in this world are just surly cunts. That's all. And I wish like anything that it wasn't true.

I do believe she means me, readers. Which is a little confusing. Personal attacks? I see no personal attack. A personal attack is....ooooh.....something like calling somebody a "surly cunt". Which, before anyone gets agitated, has not occured. Meg is describing a hypothesis which she wishes not to see proved. although at some point in the future it will become inescapable. No harm, no foul.

So, let's try to dialogue what might have led to this. Well, the mimetic "case in point" suggests that the cudgels are being taken up in relation to this. Which is unfortunate, really, not to say a little bewildering. This may perhaps be down to a confusion of the words "unexceptional" and "unexceptionable". The latter means "to whom or to which no exception can be taken". I have, to follow the sentence structure, never observed anything other than unimpeachable goodness of character in personal dealing with P. And yet (and stay with me here), certain of the posts on his highly readable weblog do sometimes make me slightly antsy. Generally, posts in which the "mass" are located as other to some confederacy of the enlightened make me antsy. It's a thing. To describe this as a personal attack would be rather like my flatmate interpreting my failure to vote Tory in the last election as a personal attack on him.

Make no mistake; I do find generalisations about the people (and hey, people is the operative term here. Not gimps, not fuckwits, not even cunts, but people) who attained degrees of a certain class at a certain place or group of places antsy-generating, but I don't assume that people are hologrammatic - that their entire personality is expressed in miniature through every action and feature. The aforementioned flatmate is a Eurosceptic Free-Market Conservative who believes in several things which I find not just antsy-making but actively repugnant. He is also intelligent, funny, brave, loyal and a damn good friend. The two are not mutually exclusive.

So, I'm not a fan of P's exclusivity, he is not a fan of my pedantry, or probably my wishy-washy humanism. Which is where the idea of online personae comes in. People display different facets of themselves in different situations. The status of a single "I", a single, default self, has been under question since Modernism and before. What is a little disappointing is that the passage above seems to have focused on the least important part of the entire question of limited access to other people's personalities, the snapshot effect caused by anything other than 24-7 weblogging - the example. And, again I say without rancour, to have misread that. The concept is the thing here, not the subject. No offence, and certainly no attack, was intended. I simply believe that a degree of honesty in why you are pondering something is often as important and as useful as the question itself.

On the bright side, getting some interesting comments on the original question, which is well worth incurring the wrath of UKBlogging's most influential couple. Meep.

You know, I have the funniest feeling this may be a little pen portrait (or, more correctly, keystroke cameo) of an "online persona" I know...or is that just crazy talk? Tell me.

One soldier and one South American tribal type try warning dozens of people that US Army pesticides have mutated some ants. Every time they meet someone, that someone doesn't believe them and then they get eaten. What a great story.

Ah, Ant Wars. Or, more precisely, argh, Ant Wars. This and other horrors in the nostalgia-tastic 2000AD website.

And from prostitution to rough sleeping, on today's egalitarian, socially aware Venusberg.

There was a target, it may have been to cut the number or rough sleepers by two-thirds in five years but the specifics are not important; there is a target and the deadline is approaching. The number of rough sleepers is measured by a streetcount: a hastily assembled militia of workers and volunteers walks around a city at night, pairs with carefully prescribed areas, counting anybody they see sleeping out. Each report back their result, results are totalled to produce a figure; the figure, of course, is hugely inaccurate: anyone who has gone to any effort to hide themselves away (a bush, a car, any kind of concealment) does not end up in the figure, but the streetcount takes place at regular intervals (let us say every three months) and it is hoped that the inaccuracy of each figure will cancel themselves out: it is the variation which is important.

Neil's getting quietly furious on the Upsideclown.

What on Earth was a prostitue doing at the top of Brick Lane at 8:45 this morning? I'm thinking traditional pitch, but wildly unconventional timing. Often have I wished I was enjoying a lie-in, but rarely enough to veer off on the way into work to the lodgings of a doxy.

Which reminds me, it's been three years since I paid a prostitute. And that was to smuggle me into Kabul in a carpet.

I must write a book of my travel memoirs sometime...

Tuesday, August 28, 2001

Metablog warning:

Meg wonders if it is OK to dislike somebody - at times - based on what they write on the Internet. To which the honest answer is "God, I hope so". But this seemingly innocent question can be broken down in all sorts of crunchy ways. For example, somebody whom you just plumb don't like is naturally likely to be just as hard to like on the Interwebnet. Ian Duncan Smith is no more lovable a proposition over the ether than on the soapbox.

The pattern breaks up when we start talking about people who are both attractive and repulsive at different points in their online presence, or for that matter people who present very differently on the Interwebnet than in other media, which may be because of specificities in their approach to the medium of writing, or the medium of the Internet, or any number of other possible factors. To what extent can one be said to "like" or "dislike" such a phenomenon?

Case in point. Whenever I have met Paul, I have found him to be entirely unexceptionable company. And yet the parts of himself that he presents on the Internet are at times, on a purely subjective level, abrasive. Just as he has at times become agitated by the parts of myself that, for example, question the morphological fixity of prose. Case in point: high GCSE results give stupid people false hope.

There is a lot in this entry which I agree with on a politico-social level. I agree that there is probably too much tertiary education, and/or that education is canted towards academic subjects which already have too many graduates rather than practical or vocational skills. I sympathise with the view that a degree in, say, automotive retail (available, last time I looked, at Loughborough University of Technology) may be less useful than three years selling cars. I believe in a robust and functional system of apprenticeships. I know the statistics for media studies graduates actually working in the media, and so forth.

But I also believe that this can only be done with any sense of equality or equity if academic success is deprivileged to the point where people who could be very talented and able in a variety of fields do not instead throw themselves pointlessly into unprofitable degree courses. And that it is slightly disingenuous to preface the contention "this isn't elitism, snobbery or any other misused lexeme you care to throw around; it's realism" with the prior contention "the fact is, I don't want the fact I've got a degree to equate me with some gimp who's got a 2:2 in Stairlifts from Basingstoke John Inman University". Because once you start cutting the cake that way, where do you stop? Can the holder of a first feel cheapened by the fact that people who were only clever enough to get 2:1s feel entitled to claim that they too are possessed of academic qualification? Can holders of degrees from Oxbridge Academy, London claim entitlement to feel violated by people with qualifications of a comparable class from a "New University" like, say, Birmingham or Bristol appending the same initials to the end of their names? At what point does the desire for acknowledgement bleed into insecurity?

And at what point can an online identity be said to cohere sufficiently to be considered a persona able to generate or sustain value-judgements of liking or disliking? Tell me.

Ah, back from the long weekend. Which really didn't feel very long at all. Spent hanging out with friends, watching Buffy, getting a disabling heat-migraine, and viewing for the first time Jojo's new hairstyle, which makes her look like a friendly Predator. Excellent. Not enough time spent writing or reading, unfortunately, especially as Writing and Difference is not the easiest book to drop in and out of on the tube. Great car chase in chapter 2, though. Actually, I tell a lie. Tube Reading at the moment is provided by Poetry Review, the Eclogues and Heidegger, Habermass and the Mobile Phone, because they are both singly and collectively a lot easier to carry. All hail slim volumes. We need a war to cull our young upper class gentlemen and stimulate slim volume production.

Friday, August 24, 2001

Today is Robyn's birthday. And my sister's. Although I doubt that they are the same person. In either case, many happy returns to both. If you like, I'm sure you can buy Robyn something from her Amazon wishlist, although in the real world that might be considered stalking. If you even use the phrase "Amazon wishlist" in conversation with my sister, she will probably look at you with pity and not a little contempt. And then punch your teeth out. She's a very well-adjusted young woman.

...the place we ended up at (by which point I may have misplaced both J. and the Girl Whose
Name Escapes Me) was some strangely seedy place where I believe there was a curtain, behind which something was going on for which people were queueing up. I was in the queue at one stage, and remember thinking that this was a Brave and Necessary thing to do, but never got past that curtain... Of course, by this point the night had taken on the surreal and hallucinatory status of a dream, or 'After Hours', and needless to say I didn't make it to
work on Friday.

Most people's friends have a little too much to drink and end up with a hangover, or a with a girl/boy they don't know very well. My friends have a little too much to drink, and end up in the White Lodge. Fine....

Oh, and I just read "Guide", but more on that later.

Wednesday, August 22, 2001

Nick Jordan is one of the top agents of the French intelligence service that used to be called the Deuxi�me Bureau, then became the SDECE in the 1960s, and later the DGSE. His superior is a retired military officer dubbed "Le Vieux" (The Old Man), the name traditionally given to the head of French Intelligence -- like "M" or "Control" in England.

This actually explains a lot. Nick's secret life, courtesy of this superb site.

The power of positive self-hatred: On Monday, my. Ex. Girl. Friend. makes a comment about the curious existence of half-an-inch of squishable flesh on my stomach. Cue panic. Cue cutting carbs out at lunchtime. Cue endless tensing and prodding. And already I seem to be more toned.

Loathe your body. It's the look people love.

(Although don't be surprised if everybody gets really pissed off with you wailing, "I'm faaaaaaaaaaat!")

And just when you thought the Daily Mail couldn't get any more evil...

Tuesday, August 21, 2001

Recently read: Little Green Man by Simon Armitage. I'm a great admirer of Armitage as a poet; he is one of very few writing in the British Isles who presents a convincing argument for buying new collections whenever they come out. As a playwright, I have reservations, but Mister Heracles and his eclipse play both have enough stylistic heft to justify investigation. As an essayist he is patchy but often both charming and interesting. And as a novelist...

Hmmm. There's no shame in playing to your strengths. Which is not to say that Little Green Man is a bad novel. It isn't. As a mid-life crisis retelling of Lord of the Flies, set in an unidentified Yorkshire town, it is a perfectly good story. It has plot, characters, conflicts, everything you might expect. But, when reading it, I found that the parts I enjoyed had elements of the tough, aphoristic character of some of the poems in Book of Matches. And you realise that his accounts of growing up, of Subutteo pitches, five-a-side football and penny sweets, don't really feel new. There isn't the sense of the alienation of familiar things that so often makes his poetry involving. And, although it may be a response to thirtysomething Hornby/Parsons slurry, by engaging at all it is bound by some of the same terrible smallness.

So, not a bad novel. But perhaps a bad use of time.

Oh, there's a review here, which says about the same but takes a lot longer to do it. And an interview with Armitage here, which may provide another perspective.

Realistically, she was never going to back Clarke. I am curious to know whether having that rambling old madwoman standing behind you still has any heft in the sad shires where the tory leadership candidates will stand or fall.

Monday, August 20, 2001

Skeletor. Michelle Yeoh. Some manga woman in surprisingly decorous school uniform wielding a sword.

Who in the Blue Hell buys these things? With actual money? Presumably the kids who might have made up the core audience of, say, the original Masters of the Universe figures can't afford these rather intricate reboots. Then again, mold technology has no doubt moved on. But nonetheless. Is there any kid out there who wants a Michelle Yeoh action figure? Surely not.

So, grown-ups. And, conversely, who fails to realise just how ridiculous a plastic homuncula is going to look on a mantelpiece? Display cabinets full of them? Little pet people to stroke and arrange and talk to?

Meep. Scared. So Scared. When I get home I'm going to have to share this horror with my Transformers. They'll understand.

Of course, it's all downhill from here. Justin Timberlake trivialises the plays of Timberlake Wertenbaker. Britney Spears doesn't so much trivialise the desire of middle-aged men to spurt sterile, beer-poisoned jism all over their fur-lined paunches while thinking of teenagers in school uniform as institutionalise it and provide a multimedia presentation on the benefits of phasing it in. Phil Collins trivialises the idea of human existence, just by being a part of it.

It's the tip of the nonceberg. I'm up on the UpsideClown and I'm not treating things as seriously as possibly I should.

Although actually, it is only about as evil as something I came across on Saturday while kicking around Borders with my insanely fastidious classical music buff friend. "My Secret Passion - Michael Bolton Sings Arias. Right up there in the listenability stakes, one suspects, with "My Secret Passion - Herman Goering rapes Livestock".

I've only seen a man vomit blood once before.

Jesus Christ's cruciform cock. This is insane. Monstrous. Evil.

How Manowar are you?

Older readers may recall that I am channelling Chris Jericho. The reasons for this have yet to become clear. However, I did feel every thud, thump and thmackeroonie of this epic clash early in the ayem, which made a night of uninterrupted slumber pretty much unattainable. I particularly remember starting out of bed in near-appendicitic agony when that thunder-thighed man-bitch Rhyno hit me with the Gore.

Mind you, the Gore wasn't exactly ecstatic about it, either. Raised from his septuagenarian slumbers in Ravello, transported to the States, just for one hyperthyroidal heavy to smack another in the chops with him in the manner of a home-run hitter. Did he pen Myra Breckinridge for that?

Cyclists driving through red lights is fantastically annoying, even when not actively life-threatening. I must confess, however, that it is not quite as irritating, for my money, as cyclists riding on the pavement, and behaving as if this is the most natural thing in the world. Now, I'm sympathetic. I myself do not feel safe cycling in the grand guignol that is London traffic. Which is why I fucking walk, you gang of shitgobblers.

I've noticed my reactions becoming progresssively more extreme - standing in cyclists' paths and forcing them to stop is beginning to resurface. I very nearly clotheslined some wankspanker cycling along platform 12 at London Bridge. In Oxford I used to catch cyclists. There's a trick to arresting their forward motion without losing your balance. 10 points for each catch, with a ten-point bonus if they scream at you. Great fun.

The edge of fury is not a good place to live. Must breathe deeply. Must love humanity.

A terrifying realisation disturbs my monitor duty. The final two on "Big Brother" represented archetypes from sex comedy of the 70s. The culture-virus is spreading...

Friday, August 17, 2001

And again - skip this.

Tuesday - drinks with Ben and Toby, one high point of which has to have been being quizzed as to our membership of the Liberal club (we had none) as we sat on the balcony of 1 Whitehall Place, and being sternly enjoined not to attempt ingress to the Liberal club dressed like that. A reprimand made particularly sweet by our monitor wearing the nastiest jacket ever. All very peculiar. Top night out, though, although the tales of self-blending, wrong thoughts and the explosive market in nuptuals was probably best spared an audience.

Because I haven't got around to filling in the entries in my diary yet - this is just autobio and pretty dull, so ignore this post:

Last night - one of those evenings that goes on slightly too long. Not that it wasn't fun, it just meant too much to drink, too many cigarettes, missing the last tube, cabs, having somebody tell me again that I reminded them of Jim Carey. I mean, what the fuck is that all about? Really?

Ah well. Hip-hop and poetry night at Liquid, except no poets, so Jacob did his DJ thing intermittently all night. Joe and Matt also present along with various new faces. Polite enquiries revealed that "Bo, selecta!" was not an appropriate response. Definitely worth dropping in on.

Matt notes that the invitation on the front page of Airhammer's web site - "Enter My Children" - would benefit massively from a comma, judiciously placed. He's right.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that people are a bit oversensitive, but I can't shake the feeling that Bruce Sterling is not actually saying "Look! I'm hanging out with all these primo webloggers. How cool am I?" The tip is more along the lines of "Look! These eejits have crammed themselves into my bathroom. Gods in their own little world they may be, but I, a minor celebrity in a niche publishing market, fat shouty Oliver Hardy to tall otherworldly William Gisbon's Stan Laurel, am still so many orders of magnitude more famous and impressive than they are that I can get them to do this simply by asking."

Which is actually kind of a nice comment on the idea of Bruce Sterling as brand, although one might go on to add that science-fiction writers are generally required only to have ideas. Certainly any facility with writing seems to be considered otiose.

I'm not sure that there is much to be gained from this in terms of life lessons. Except possibly that American webloggers photograph badly and really need to do something about their hair. Pretty much passim.

Wednesday, August 15, 2001

Curious intersections department. While shopping for CDs, I picked up, on a whim, a single by unfeasibly unkown - not obscure, just unknown - indie not-a-chancers Airhammer. Intrigued by the name - is it a slang term for a pneumatic drill, perhaps? - I did a quick search and discovered that it was a Transformer, as featured on the cover of the single. One from after my time, in fact. One, clearly, from the time when the creators started getting fucked on drugs all the time. All the time. All the fucking time.

A robot who transforms into a hybrid of a hawk and a hammerhead shark. The fuck were they thinking? And what's with his hands? One's a mouth, one's a shark's tail bottle opener. How does he open doors? Does he have to chew through every single one? Why, God, why?

All very strange. Also strange. In the same batch of singles an a capella version of "She's Not There". This sounded liek a terrible idea, and it was. The Magnets are evil. Truly evil. Although I like the idea of them doing a tribute to Stephin Merritt entitled "Magnet-ic Attraction". Plus. one of them looks uncannily like Nick.

Tuesday, August 14, 2001

Jojo is moving south, to a place not a million miles away from me. This is good, as I do not see enough of Jojo and I like the idea of a Friends-like local community. It is bad, however, as it has spawned in the twisty, twisty mind of my flatmate the idea of inviting her over for dinner, calmly explaining that if she does not eat up we will be so offended as to exclude her viciously from our lives, and then producing a plate of genetically modified foie gras.

You can probably fill in a lot about Jojo from that fact.

Can you think of a more evil foodstuff? Tell me.

My rough feelings about children can be summed up by the following points in human history when the attitude to children has somehow been correct: Minoa (sacrifice); North Korea (eat); wartime London (send them hundreds of miles away to "be safe" and get jobs); the classic children's novel The Water Babies (pop them in a river).

Thank God for a bit of sanity. Matt is finding meaning on the UpsideClown.

From the "Why Jennifer?" section of Scary Boy's world of pain:

It's really hard to narrow down in simple terms why Jennifer is so appealing. When I think of Jenny a myriad of words come to mind; beauty, depth, elegance, refinement, talent, charm, sensuality, intellect...and these are just the first that come to mind! It's true that Jennifer is an extremely beautiful young woman with nothing short of a stunning physique, so of course Jennifer's physical beauty has a lot to do with my attraction to her. I'm a full blooded male and can't be any different. Where I differ from your average drooling male fan is that for me, the attraction goes beyond the physical - I appreciate Jennifer in a more holistic sense.

I enjoy watching Jennifer's performances simply because they make me feel good. I know that sounds simplistic, but it's hard to describe in more complex terms! She brings a romantic and mystifying element to each role that mesmerizes me. Watching Jennifer act is a wonderful experience for those who can truly appreciate her talent. Her acting is like a beautiful and elegant work of art.

What I particularly love about this deranged little man is that he believes there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to be a Jennifer Connelly obsessive. Bless.

Also in the world of "bless" - there is something incredibly endearing about the phrase "Sophie is a girl aged 10 and has no pets. She only knows how to look after some animals". And yet at the same time it is intensely functional. It tells you that, if you have a pet who needs looking after, you should probably check with Holly or Vicky first.

Just....takin' care of business.

I love Jennifer Connelly. Really i do. I love her primarily because she clearly should not be an actress - which is no reflection on her ability to act - but still, despite having almost no public profile whatsoever, still makes more money being a largely unsuccessful actress than she could doing anything else. Rather like Peter Shilton, still strapping on the gloves at the age of 70 in an attempt to recoup his gambling debts. I also love her because I suspect her to have been in more "the making of..." films than actual film films, which may if true make her the first movie metastar.

Nonetheless, seeing of Love and Shadows with Katy last night was like having a mongoose fuck my eye sockets. This is perhaps the most tiresome pile of shit ever, and Antonio Banderas and la Connelly getting soft-focus down and dirty is not going to save it. Glacial, tedious wank, and badly dubbed to boot. Allende really is the kiss of death to movie adaptations...

Meanwhile, one man who deserves stardom is the real Peter Shilton. He's a family man, baby, just...takin' care of business.

Monday, August 13, 2001

Hang on...maybe she means she can kill any animal found around the house, assuming it is armed with a baseball bat. This is actually a pretty safe bet, as without an opposable thumb and a decent swing, a baseball bat is of little practical use anyway. More a hindrance than a help. Unless your father or mother breeds intelligent mutant bears/chimpanzees.

Damn, Canada is a fucked up place.

And speaking of Holden Caulfield - the Fisher-Price Catcher in the Rye fucking rocks. Evan Dorkin, neurotic manic-depressive maestro behind this and other works of mightiness, has just released a collection of pieces from his irregular title, Dork. I strongly suggest that you at least take the opportunity to flick through it. Almost uniquely, it is a graphic novel that can be read and enjoyed without any particular knowledge of comics in general, or a faint smell of milk.

Holden Caulfield corner. It isn't between he and I. It is between him and me. Prepositions take the object, not the subject. Clarity on this is one of many reasons why Ancient Greek is the coolest language ever.

For the record I can kill just about any animal around the house with a baseball bat, I hunt, fish, and skin my own catch. I can camp with out make up, and I can probably whip your ass faster than your stupid little face could blink. I am a Canadian champion wrestler and a three time black belt in Judo.

I think I just found my ideal woman. From a response to this reminder that the richest country in the world is also the nation least likely to be able to tie its own shoelaces.

But what does she mean by "I could kill any animal around the house"? Household pets? Houseflies? The one is horrid, the other an overreaction. Or does she mean that she could kill any animal, from man-eating tiger to manatee, but only within the confines of her own home? Gotta love the advantage of familiar terrain...

Friday, August 10, 2001

I confess I haven't been much a-blogging lately, either as reader or writer. This is primarily because, as webloggers tend to mention in the third or fourth of their eight 1000-word posts of the day, there is more to life than blogging. It's also because I think I'm suffering from "meme too far" syndrome. The "accounts of things people said to them" schtick has given every impression that my fellow webloggers on this island are stuck in environments surrounded by people whose only aim in opening their mouths is to let the air out of their heads. I begin to understand Paul's permanent ulcer.

Maybe it would be more affirmative to list the happiest things you have heard in the last couple of days. Like:

"All right, how about Optimus Prime in the kitchen - and you know, Prime's going to have one of those big white Swedish minimalist kitchens, with a SMEG fridge, natch. Anyway, he's in the kitchen, kneeling down, wearing a pair of loose pyjama bottoms, drawstring obviously, and getting out some freshly-squeezed orange juice. No, you're right, strawberries. Definitely strawberries. And there's Arcee - or possibly Sam Neill - wearing a big oversized men's shirt, leaning against the doorway into the kitchen, and her - or his - lips quirk up, and she - or he - says "That's just Prime."

"So, ultimate fighting. No rules, no mercy. In the blue corner, a rottweiler. In the red corner, feral and starved, a rottweiler's weight in chihuahas. Who wins?"

"You want more, the Nazi? Nazi wants more...."

Yep, Garlic and Shots again. These evenings are restorative, and I made it home this time without wandering around the West End for forty-five minutes asking passers-by if they had seen a car park lately.

Wednesday, August 08, 2001

Oh, and the Winter's Tale on Friday last at the Olivier. Which was...all right. Once Alex Jennings stopped fucking shouting he turned in a decent performance, and Paulina was terrific. But...well, that's not enough to base a performance on. The presentation of the sheep-shearing festival as Glasters was just a bit laboured and clever-clever..."Look! Florizel's smoking dope! "Unusual weeds"! Do you see?". Some of the comic moments were nicely done, although often not helped by Perdita being almost incomprehensible, and there were some nice, understated touches, like Camillo the straight arrow securing a cheeky spliff for himself, but there was too often a sense of strain.

And what about Phil Daniels? A shiftless, shifty Autolycus, played somewhere between Bob Dylan and Richard Digance. Entertaining, but too much based on the Parklife factor. A bit of cockney, a transposition of "in it" to "innit", an Ali G impression decked out in FUBU, a tour de force rap utterly inserted..pantomime. Pure pantomime. And good fun with it.

Nonetheless, I left the theatre feeling like about half a good cast had been somewhat thrown to the wolves. A good laugh, but I really do expect players at the National Theatre neither to be carried along by the verse without strength nor to smack it repeatedly in the face, and both happened too often for comfort.

I even got a Christmas gift from the President of MCA with a note: Look forward to breaking Laptop huge in 2000. He was right. They did break Laptop: my momentum, my sanity, my desire to be on a major ever again.

Laptop. Rebooting your heartware for a millennium that, frankly, hates your guts. Accustomed as I am to hearing his stuff in its full-on "ironica" glory, seeing Jesse Hartman performing with just an acoustic guitar and a labcoat seemed oddly like a live nude revue. And some of the choices for performance were eccentric to say the least - the odd duet, some songs which depend heavily on sequenced vocals, all rather odd. But it still rocked. Although not what you'd call charismatic, Laptop is wry and charming and generally adorable, although if he devotes "I'm so happy you failed" to the future of the Strokes one more time he may get an ulcerated soul. With just a 6-string and his surprisingly versatile voice, the effect was wierdly confessional - like Stephen Merritt pastiching Nirvana Unplugged.

And if you don't understand that....well, have a decco at the website. Download some of his songs. See what you think.

Tuesday, August 07, 2001

This is a metapost - specifically, a post about the post I would be writing if I had time.

It would probably start with some brief account of the Barbelith meet on Saturday, where Tom was finally coaxed out to have all his prejudices confirmed, the Crazy Christian story did the rounds not once but twice, and fun was generally had. Followed by some ruminations on Harry Potter, with a link to Notsosoft, and reference to an article on the Barbelith webzine, thence to Potter and Foucault ("Discipline and Punish? I'm more a quidditch man, myself").

Then, a breathless account of the Laptop acoustic set I attended tonight with James, which fucking rocked, and a slightly shamefaced admission that for the first time in my life I succumbed to fanboygasm and asked for the setlist. Didn't nick it, mind. Asked politely, reassured him that I was not going to publish the notes on the Internet (for some reason nobody ever believes in my discretion), and departed with a hearty handshake. Which is possibly even sadder. Meep.

Anyway, all of the above. Links when possible. More when possible.

Thursday, August 02, 2001

Out Monday night with Matt, Simon, Steve and James. James doesn't have a weblog, but should, if only so he can call it "Three Miles form Milk, a Hundred Miles from Indie Rock". Topics discussed over the course of realising we were not going to make it to Greenwich, realising that I was not going to make it home and realising that the bathroom at Matt's place is larger than the living room, which seems somehow...strange:

That there is something to spirits.
That "I like him on a lot of levels".
Metagodzilla, post-modern and hip-kid version of MechaGodzilla.
Kaycee Nicole - tragic cancer tot, consensual hallucination or white trash spelling bee?
Soft toothbrushes, a chewable contrivance on sale in the toilets at Chomsky's, which promise to leave teeth sparklingly clean. They taste like concentrated wrong. And make your gums bleed.
That "I was quite taken with that whole Tiger Dragon thing".
What Omega to the power of -1 was, and supplementarily if there was any letter in any language more beautiful than the Omega.
Knocking on the door of Tregarde the Dungeon Master, who lived next door to a mate, and pretending to have done it by mistake.

Wednesday, August 01, 2001

I knew there was something. After a discussion of, amongst other things, almost-entirely-forgotten aristo writer Shane Leslie (on a discussion of people generally considered to be pretty hot shit in their day, but utterly forgotten by posterity - will the real Colley Cibber please stand up - in the wider context of why the holy living fuck Andrew "you got the moves, baby, I've got the" Motion is Poet Laureate, and who else might have been in his place), I had the nagging, gnawing sensation that there was one very, very important fact about him that I had lost track of. It came to me in a flash at about two in the morning, as I did the traditional post-installing Norton Utilities disaster recovery (we cure your system....by killing it. You cannot kill what doessss not live....). But no, went the post-inspiration chiding, you must be hallucinating. Nobody would do that. Don't be such a stupid, stupid, stupid boy.

But no. At last it can be told. Shane Leslie did indeed write a narrative poem on the Battle of Jutland.

The fuck was he thinking? Somebody find me this, and I will suck their toes. Or promise not to. Whatever it takes.

Instinct can be a very dangeous thing.

Case in point. I don't normally listen very much to commercial radio, but, having left my Discman in the office last night, I found myself experiencing XFM on the way into work today. Specifically, the "Crazy Christian" breakfast show. Sadly referring to a man called Christian, not an insane Seventh-Day Adventist they found on the street and put in charge of the morning drivetime slot.

Anyway, Crazy Christian had decided to add a feature to his show, in which he invited us the audience to give him the telephone number of candidates for a prank phone call. A number was duly given, and we began.

Crazy Christian: Hello, is that (name)?
Innocent Victim: Yes.
Crazy Christian: It's (name) here, I'm the headmaster of your son's comprehensive.
Innocent Victim: Oh. Right.
CC: I'm afraid your son's been (corpses, fit of giggles, drops shit Yorkshire accent) suspended for drugs.
IV: (pause) I don't know if this is a joke, but my son was killed in a car crash two months ago. Who is this?
CC: (Oh fuck moment) It's Crazy Christian from XFM. A friend of yours emailed us and said we should....so your son's dead?
IV: (with, I think, remarkable patience) Yes.

Now, a normal human response might have been to say something along the lines of "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I really didn't mean to do this" or something along those lines. But the DJ instincts kick in.

CC: Can we send you over a CD?
IV: (gettting a leetle brusque) No.

And it gets worse. The fear of dead air kicks in. DJ instincts scream "say something, anything".

CC: What's your favourite breakfast radio show?
IV: (understandably impatient) Jono in the Morning.
Click.

So, the moral of the story is, don't trust your instincts. And don't present a radio program if you have a plate in your head.

Venusberg.org finds Blogger very attractive...

elsewhere:

Interconnected
Plasticbag
Oh Skylab
Barcablog
Orbyn

moreover:

Brainsluice
Mo Morgan
Mothninja
Tajmahal
Wherever y'are
Prandial Post

thereafter:

Toby Kay
McCargow
Blogadoon
LinkMachineGo
Methylsalicylate
Hammersley
Joeblog
Grayblog
the Collective
Nick Jordan
Kooky Mojo
Betty Woo
Moth
Mr. Thomas G

the author:

danATvenusberg.org

and finally...

the archives