It’s That Time of Year Again

Them as have been round these parts a while may be fed of of my more-or-less yearly exhortations to everyone to go see Jason Webley. Tough.

For the rest of you: He’s a very nice, and more importantly, very talented chap, who deserves to be rich and famous. If you like Tom Waits, or Kurt Weil, or klezma, or that sort of cabaret-type-thing, you will like him.

Also, Neil Gaiman likes him, for the goth and comic nerds in the audience. And Amanda Palmer out of the Dresden Dolls did a single with him. If you go see him now, you can claim to have seen him before he got big. It’s clearly only a matter of time.

He’s playing again, in Camden on the 17th (next Tuesday) and Brighton on the 20th. I can’t do Brighton, since I am seeing My Bloody Valentine that night, but does anyone fancy the Tuesday show?

Links For Thursday 12th June 2008

Little Brother

It’ll get posted as a link later in the day anyway, but I just finished reading Little Brother, Cory Doctorow’s new YA novel at lunch, and wanted to recommend it very strongly to, well, everyone. It’s an absolutely brilliant stealth primer on the issues surrounding on-line privacy and civil liberties, as well as being a entertaining read. It’s a YA novel, so it reads at a terrifying pace – I think it took me a hair under two hours to read cover to cover – but there’s quite a lot of information in there, disguised as a ten-seconds-in-the-future yarn about what happens when Homeland Security fuck with the wrong teenager.

Yes, surveillance, civil liberties, e-privacy and so on will be familiar hobby horses to anyone who’s read Doctorow’s stuff on BoingBoing or in the media, but this is the first time he’s come out with a book aimed so squarely at them, and his passion for the subjects clearly drives him without it ever feeling preachy.

You can get the book for free in a variety of formats, and it will amply reward time invested in it. Highly recommended.

Idle Question

This may all come to naught, but I’m just wondering: while I know I have a number of friends in what I might charitably call “the largely irrelevant bit outside the M25” (Who, me? Parochial?), I’m just wondering: do I know anyone in (or in easily commutable distance of) Leeds? And importantly, is there anyone of that parish who might be able to put me up for a night or two later in the year?

Fickle Fashion

Last summer, I picked up a few really rather nice short-sleeved linen shirts – two black, and one purple. (Yes, there is a theme in my wardrobe. Well done for spotting it.) Anyway: They were reasonably priced, fairly nice looking and very comfortable. I’ve still got them, but I thought I’d try and pick up a few more this year. Initial expedition to the places I got last year’s from have failed to bear fruit, so I thought I’d look on-line. Surely somewhere in the world has to be selling the sort of shirt I want, in a colour I want.

Apparently not. Can I find anywhere that’s setting men’s short sleeved linen shirts in non-pastel colours? Not a fucking chance.

I have nothing useful to say, I just wanted to vent. Go back to whatever you were doing.

You Know I Could Stay Here All Night

Friday. End of a week off (which is why I haven’t been about/replying to email much). Spent it doing the spring cleaning I’ve been putting off for a month or so now.

Spring cleaning was soundtracked by Billy Bragg, The Dropkicks and the Levellers, so naturally, what I feel I should be doing now is smashing the state in some way. I may compensate by reading another chapter or two of Demand The Impossible, a book on the history of anarchism that I never got around to finishing, largely because it had migrated to somewhere under the bed.

Speaking of books – I seem to have acquired a copy of “The Watcher’s Guide” volume 2 of a series of Buffy annotations books, the sort of thing that I’d never have willingly paid cash for, and I don’t recall ever reading it. Can anyone explain why I have it? Did I borrow it off someone (and can you remember why)? Did someone leave it at behind at our place, and has it just migrated in here? Have I been anywhere that they would have been giving them away? And, assuming that no-one sticks their hand up here in the next fortnight to claim it as theirs, would anyone like it? It’s just taking up shelf space, and I don’t have enough of it to waste.

(In a similar vein: anyone want copies of Cerulean Sins or Incubus Dreams, the Laurel K Hamilton books? I bought them in a fit of desperation for anything to read at an airport, and read them both, and now never need to do so again, ever, please don’t make me, so could so with the shelf space back. If they’re not taken in a fortnight, they’re going in the recycling.)

Fun weekend coming up – Saturday afternoon: board games in a pub. Saturday evening I: Flogging Molly gig. Saturday evening II: clubbing – last weekend was written off to that cold, one the basis I’d rather have written the night off than most of the week.

Sunday will probably be recovery, and not much else. Catching up on my reading after spending most of the last six months in a state of having run out of new stuff to read, I now have a respectable pile to read, and really ought to get on with it.

Monday, it’s back to work, where the insanity will almost certainly have begun – I had to cancel a day of my holiday, and go in to work on Wednsday, for what turned out to be a six-hour meeting in Luton. I can recommend against both of those things.

Right, time to tidy this desk. The rest of the place is tidy, so having a desk like a bombsite rather spoils the effect. Also, I’ve lost my My Bloody Valentine tickets, so they’d better be on here somewhere. Plus, there may be paperwork that needs sorting out on here.

Result!

Tom Waits, Edinburgh, July 28th, 8pm. Let joy be unconfined! And er, my wallet be rather *more* confined for the next while. Still, it was 100% worth it last time, and this time I get a weekend away as well.

Indy IV

In a franchise that has contained the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, it should not be possible to say “that ending was too fucking stupid”.

And yet I am saying exactly that.

Let’s be clear: it wasn’t a Phantom-Menace-grade celluloid abortion. It wasn’t a waste of money or time, mine or the makers. I was amusingly diverted for most of the movie. But at the points where it gets stupid, it get really, unforgivably fucking stupid. Not in a “switch-your-brain-off-and-it’ll-be-entertaining” way, no. In a “so-stupid-it’s-just-plain-poor” way.

What bugs me is that it’s meant to be pulp. The very font of fun-but-stupid. Except I can’t help feeling that what they made was the inverse. Stupid-but-fun. I feel I’m forgiving it the massive weaknesses, because the fun bits were good. And then I think about the fun bits, and realise they could have done those same sequences in *any* Indy film, and they get less forgivable.

But, in the end, I had fun staring at a really big screen. It’s just not fun I feel entirely good about.

Appropos of Nothing

That musical toy I was mugged by the other week is possibly the best bit of beeping, flashing plastic I have ever wasted 20 quid one. Really, an irrational amount of fun.

Also, I suspect NIN’s latest album was made on one.

I have…

  • Glorious spring weather out the window behind me.
  • Plans for the weekend that I’m looking forward to.
  • A week off next week.
  • Just about managed to get back into a regular exercise regime, and actually made a little progress on it.

I am…

  • At work.
  • Coming down with a cold.

I could do without this. I refuse to have my life disrupted by getting the plague, dammit.