Unreliable information since 1972
It’s because someone has unfortunately afflicted the electric internet pixies in our phone line with a case of the black death. We’ve dumped their little digital carcasses in a plague pit, and we’ve got a fresh batch on order but apparently there’s a quarantine period, and BT won’t let us have a fresh lot in until Monday.
(I’ll stop torturing the metaphor now.)
I won’t be on-line outside of office hours. If you want to get hold of me, use the mobile. Or your hands.
Just trying to organise my thoughts about what I want to do with my on-line presence this year.
Secondary thought: I’m moving away from LJ as a place to write anything over a couple hundred words, because I don’t feel it’s the right kind of context for anything other than personal life and conversations with friends. I find I censor myself, thinking “no bastard on my friends list is going to give a toss” or even just worrying about seeming pretentious. But, saying that, I also know that it’s trivial these days to post anything I produce in WordPress to LJ. Should I set up another journal for the purpose of dumping the contents of alasdair.biz, Dead Air and whatever I wind up doing with Black Ink to? Should I just dump it here anyway?
Getting these in early this week.
This Week’s Book: The Penguin of Death
Things you need to know about The Penguin of Death:
Someone (and I apologise for forgetting exactly who) gave me a birthday card with this on it a year or two back. It’s one of the few birthday cards I have kept, because really, what’s not to love about a card with an enigmatic penguin of death on it?
And then the other day while risking life and wallet in a bookstore in January (Fatal. Fatal, I tell you.), I ran across this book, which is an illustrated short poem about said Antarctic bird, beauty and death.
I’m not really sure how to describe it, except to say that I loved it.
(I feel a bit like I’m cheating talking about a short book like this. I’m also reading “Still Life” by Joe Donnelly, but since I just got a jbo lot of his books second hand the other day, I think the odds are reasonable that I’ll be talking about one of them next week, hence the penguin this week.)
This Week’s Album: Gutters and Pews
I can feel this one growing on me. I picked this up via Emusic’s recommendations engine, where it drew comparisons to Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong. And on first listen, it’s perfectly acceptable middle-of-the-road blues rock, that I wouldn’t be sorry to hear when it comes up on the random shuffle, but I didn’t see myself seeking it out a lot, either. But I’ve listened to it a couple more times, and I find it a little more appealing now – while the musical arrangements are, like I say, a bit straightforward, there’s a bit more to the lyrics. On the strength of this, I might give one of his more recent albums a try.
This is a detail from one of Sheone’s larger works, and honestly, I don’t remember how reflective of the larger piece it is – possibly not very, as I was conscious of being very selective with the viewfinder. I honestly have nothing else I can possibly say about this that isn’t going to sound like utter pretension, so I’ll leave it at noting that I’m quite happy with how this turned out.
The week’s book: In Search of Perfection
“What’s this, Alasdair?” you cry, “A cookbook? Are you changing your ways? Surely if you want to try learning to cook again, you could try something simpler than dishes created by one of the most finicky chefs in the world?”
No. I still can’t cook, and this isn’t a cookbook. It’s a 320 page book that happens to contain 8 recipes and some general tips about making food.
If you saw the BBC series, well, you probably know most of it, but it’s quite nice to have it flip through. If you didn’t, but you’ve heard of Blumenthal and are thinking “why the hell would anyone want his cookbook? Who needs to cook snail porridge, for god’s sake?” I should point out that the recipes are for traditional ordinary dishes. Roast Chicken. Spag Bol. Steak and Salad. The book is about how to produce the absolute best version of them that’s possible. This is a book about farming, about the role of food in society, about the ways in which science and technology are changing the way we do things. It’s entertaining and informative, and is very, very clearly the work of a man of passion.
This week’s music: Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys
Recommended by burge and stu_n among others. Ace. Utterly Ace. I could go on at length about the relationships between chanties, worksongs, folk and blues music, but there’s no point. There’s not a bad track on this, and some of the people you’d expect to be less than exciting are suddenly stellar – I mean, I like U2, but I’ve never enjoyed Bono’s singing like I have on this album. And likewise, suddenly Sting has produced stuff I really enjoy for the first time in years.
And y’know, a lot of it is complete filth, too. Which is always nice.
Highly recommended.
Sheone is the adopted name of a London graffiti artist who has been working for 20-odd years. The had an exhibition on this week in a building on the South Bank that is scheduled for demolition tomorrow. So I went along to see. There was no particular structure to the exhibition, but this was certainly the piece that caught my attention first.
Graffiti is one of the few art forms that I think it acceptable to photograph – there’s a technical challenge in reproducing it to capture (or subvert) the spirit of the original piece, choices to be made about how much of the original context to include or not, there’s a certain documentary concern, and so on, that make photographing it different to taking a picture of something that was made to hang in a gallery. I’m not trying to claim the artist’s work as my own, simply trying to be inspired by and respond to it.
So that’s my justification for putting pictures of someone else’s work online, anyway.
I’ve been trying to write some little memorial for him, something to explain what his writing meant to me, the huge, huge effect it’s had on me, and I keep coming up short, deleting paragraphs of content because there’s no way I can make you understand what it felt like when I first encountered his work.
I’ll leave it at this: more than any other writer I’ve ever read, I would not be the man I am today if I hadn’t read his books.
I’ll leave you with this quote, in the hope that you can see some of the value in him that I do:
“Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.” – Robert Anton Wilson, 5 days before his death.
But this both here and on my workblog, because well, it’s social media, and professionally relevant, but it’s also something I’d like more of my friends to use.
I’ve been playing with Twitter for a while now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I really like it, for two reasons.
It is the single simplest way I have to put a quick note somewhere I know I’ll find it later on. The post via SMS function (which I know most blogs have, but I don’t want that sort of content on a blog) allow me to note things I want to see/do/buy/read or whatever, wherever I am.
But more than that – I like the way that when my friends on there update, I get an unobtrusive little notification in my IM client. (Which reminds me: GTalk users can find me at the predictable [firstname].[surname]@gmail.com). It’s a nice, effortless way of hearing from them, especially those I don’t see very often. It promotes a surprising sense of connectedness. I don’t just hear about what they’re worrying about, or what they think is worth writing a couple of hundred words over. I get little details that I would otherwise go unremarked, except perhaps over a pint. And because it’s not something I have to seek out, I don’t find myself bored hearing about what they’re having for lunch, or whatever.
So go on, sign up. You might find you like it.
It is Saturday. I am in the office. This would be bad enough, but it is pissing down with rain. This is a problem, because I am hungry, but I have no food. The nearest supermarket is a ten minute walk, in which time I will be soaked to the skin.
