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Thought for the day: Magic, religion, and Mad Uncle Al(an)

I picked up a copy of Mustard in GOSH, yesterday, because it was a quid fifty, and contained a sizeable interview with Alan Moore. In between talking about comics, and his new novel, and etc, there is, as usual, a bit about magic, in which Alan says “I approach magic the same way I approach writing – no one taught me how to do it, I just thought let’s take a look at this from the outside, see if I can figure it out, and come up with my own approach from there. Y’know, magic is an art, so I’ve decided to approach it the same way I would any art.”

He goes on to say a lot of other things, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don’t, but that quote is such a nice summation of my attitude to the whole thing, I though it was worth noting. I’m always suspicious of magic traditions that require teachers and initiations, and similar bollocks, partly because they have the stink of religion on them, and if magic is anything concrete and proveable, it’s a device for thinking for one’s self, by one’s own lights (I think it’s more, but that’s the most basic use for it, I feel) where as every. single. religion. is about suggesting to their followers that “this is the way you ought to think/feel”. Some of them are nicer about it, some (many) don’t evangelise, some appeal to different subsets, some don’t suggest that it matters much if you do or don’t, but still, every relgion I’ve run across is a means for defining your patterns of thought by the light of belonging to a group of like-minded others. If you like it, ace, glad it works for you, but I have no need for it myself.

I also avoid them partly because, as Moore says: magic is an art (or the Art, if you want to get terribly pretentious about it), and frankly, teachers and tradtions and that sort of thing seems as useful to me as writers workshops, or painting classes. Again, if you like them, good, glad you’re happy. They’re not for me. I’m a hopeless autodidact – if I can’t learn it on my own, by practice and reading a few books, then I don’t want to know. Creativity, to me, is a totally individual thing. Being taught someone else’s techniques *might* be helpful, but I think it has as much, if not more chance of just getting in the way.

I have this sense that today might be a slightly odd day.

(Cheese update: not *as* fucked up as the opium shit, but still, a bit of quality traumatic subconcious behaviour last night.)

This week, I have:

Written a couple of bastard clever AJAX based tools. This is incomprehensible to most of you, I’m sure, but basically, they’re quite tricky, and prior to this week, I had done almost sod-all AJAX related stuff, so what it basically means is that I am a god-like genius, and you should all be Very Bastard Impressed, OK?

In my spare time, I have put together http://ala.sda.ir, which is basically a one-stop shop for all the various places I produce writing, photos, and general stuff. I’ve got a few bits and pieces left to do on it – I want to more clearly mark the origins of the different posts, and while it goes and fetches all the content itself, at the moment it only does so when I tell it to, rather than, say, automatically checking every few hours. I’ve got a couple of hoops to jump through to make it do that, but that’s fine.

I’ve also found time to finally sort myself out with some decent time planning stuff. If you should be moved by insatiable curiosity about what I’m doing on a given day, you can get out http://ala.sda.ir/cal which will list those of my movements as I’m willing to share with the world. (Before anyone asks: on those Wednesdays where they or I aren’t busy, I visit my folks.) If anyone knows of a PC app that will allow me to convert from iCal (which it uses) to vCal (which my PDA uses) format, then I will buy you a pint if I wind up using it. I also need to write a tool to pick up the week’s diary every Monday, and dump it out, probably both to LJ and to ala.sda.ir.

I’ve registered http://www.dead-air.org, which I intend to wire into half a dozen blogs and news sources, as a sort of personal info-feed.

I’ve also been to the gym once (would have been twice, but I had the plague), read three books, picked up two levels in World of Warcraft, and tonight, I’m off to see what promises to be a storming gig, followed by a packed weekend.

Can you tell that I’m feeling more like myself than I have in six months?

Prototype

I’ve spent the last couple of days doing a bit of work involving tarmac AJAX, and while I’m sure everyone else in my line of work discovered them yonks ago, I’d just like to take a moment to sing the praises of both script.aculo.us and especially the Prototype javascript library that it uses. These are clearly the work of clever bastards, because even I, with my attrophied Javascript can knock together some fairly nice stuff with them. If you’re engaged in web development these days, then really you ought to be using this stuff. They’ve saved me so much work it’s untrue. (Which isn’t to say it was all painless, but it wasn’t the special torture it might’ve been.)

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Opium Dreams

As anyone who’s been near me in the last few week or two can attest, I am currently suffering from a cough that would make the most consumptive poet give up and go home, clearly overmatched in the smashed lung stakes. This, honestly, doesn’t bother me. It has happened to me almost every time I have had a cold since I was small child. It sounds (and is) unpleasant, but it’s getting better. But for the last week or so, in order to make sure I get more than a few hours fractured sleep at night, I am taking a thing called Gee’s Linctus, who contains, among other things, a weak tincture of Opium. It’s pretty much guaranteed to knock me out in about ten minutes flat.

I will refrain from sharing the details with you, but let’s just say that I’ve been having some pretty fucked up dreams. I am almost at the point where I want the cough to fuck off less for it’s own symptoms, and more because I’d like some dreamless sleep some time soon.

Better Living Through Chemistry

I spent Saturday at Whisky Live. Which means I got to try a lot of excellent booze. And I got to thinking.

I used to write quite a lot about comics. And then I realised that really, I didn’t give that much of toss any more. I still read ’em, I still enjoyed ’em, but they weren’t not the objects of passion they once were. So, I stoppped writing about them. I might start again, if I get really excited about them again.

But whisky, on the other hand, still is something I love. So, let’s talk about whisky, then. In previous years, my whisky live write up has more or less consisted of a list of what I tried, and what I thought of it. This year, though, I thought I’d do something more than that. I thought I’d attempt a few essays about the drink itself. I’ll get to what I like in due course. But I thought I’d use the first of them to make sure we’re all on the same page, and talk about the basics of making the stuff. Later on, I’ll talk in more depth about the taste, and about what I like. For now, let’s just make sure we all understand how it gets into the glass, and just what it is we’re drinking.

Whisky Making For Beginners

Speaking of gigging

The unfeasibly lordly and betimes oft-mentioned…

I’m sorry, I appear to have fallen down a linguistic hole of some kind. I’ll start again.

You’ve all heard me go on about Flipron from time to time, or possibly more often than that. Well, good news! They’re playing in London, not once, but twice this month – The Notting Hill Arts Club on the 12th of March (which I can’t make), and The Watershed in Wimbledon on the 16th, (which I can and will). I endorse this product and/or service, and recommend you go to see them. They will sing you songs about old people, two-headed dogs and sentient cars, with a sense of end-of-the-pier menace that you will enjoy.

In less concrete news: The even more fantastically fucking marvellous Jason Webley will be playing in Guildford on the 30th of March, although I don’t know where exactly yet. I know it’s out of town and a weeknight, but if you can possibly drag yourself there (it’s not hard to get there from the centre of town, anyway), then I really, really recommend you go. I will, and if you go, and do not enjoy it, I will personally refund your entry fee. If you like mentalist cabaret, Tom Waits, Firewater, The Dresden Dolls, drinking songs, pirates of any kind or are really just alive in any meaningful way, then I think you will like his show.

Really decent takeaway

I’ve been pointed in the direction of Deliverance as a place that does really good takeaway (although priced accordingly higher than your average takeout), but typically, they don’t serve my postcode, just the one next door. Bastards. Still, maybe they’ll expand their delivery area, or it’ll be os use to someone else.

Recent Songs

Tagged by mightygodking, 7 songs I am digging right now, in no particular order:

1) Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (oringial version). Talking about it on tyrell‘s LJ today reminded me just how much I love the original. I like the secularised version that you generally hear as well, but there’s something magic in the lines “There’s a blaze of light / In every word / It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah”. “There’s a blaze of light in every word”. Fuck, I love that.

2) Flogging Molly – May The Living Be Dead (In Our Wake). “And the ghosts of our souls thanking Christ we’re alive.” Screamed out to that foot-stomping beat, it’s a fantastic affirmation of love and joy. Again, from tyrell‘s discussion of love songs earlier in the day.

3) The Go! Team – Ladyflash. Brilliant pop, electric and spiky made entirely from jangly sounds and bubblegum.

4) Carter USM – Let’s Get Tattoos. It’s bloody good, daft, fun. It’s straightfoward teenage take-on-the-world shouty music.

5) Firewater – Dark Days Indeed. “We walk but once among the living/so no regrets and no forgiving”. Rules to live by. It’s also a bloody good “cheer you up” tune, all footstomping percussion and carnival sounds.

6) Johnny Boy – You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve. I can never decide if I wish they’d put an album out, or just leave me with this one, perfect, pop song.

7) Menlo Park – Big Black Smoke. I just love this. It’s hard to articulate, it’s just sleazy and loud and fucking aces.