Serendipity and Over-Enthusiasm

I got up early yesterday with a view to avoiding the crowds at the barbers and thinking I was early enough, decided not to take a book to read. I was just beaten to the chair by someone and had to pick something from the standard pile of magazines in the corner where I found this :-

The barber couldn't tell where it had come from but he let me keep it. I am beginning to wonder if I have just flipped from one universe to another as I have not heard of this paper ever - I am imagining a black-hole in my brain, some piece of mystical hypnotism that has kept the existence of it from me. It is what the NME used to be when it was good and then so much more, the missing link between Wire and Mojo, a collection of great writing, bands you really should hear and a layout that obviously references David Carson in a subtly English way. I thought at first it might be some music section from a Sunday Paper but the writing is obviously not of that style. As it is free I think it is probably left lying around students' Unions and various dingy flats to add an air of coolness. You can subscribe but it seems silly to pay three pounds for each issue when it can be had for nothing. I'd of course need two - one for keeping and reading and one for the scrapbook.

My current and immediate obsession from Stool Pigeon is with the two wonderful songs of Smoke Fairies who take the sweet folk of Pooka and drag it round America in the back of a freight wagon with Jack Kerouac before coming home and dressing up like Sloan Rangers channeling any number of long-dead bluesmen. Too much you think? Listen and make up your own mind. 

All this means I have far too much to read -

Proust and the Squid

The Pre-Raphaelites

The Idler - QI Issue

A History of Modern Britain

Stool Pigeon

Highlights in the History of Concrete

Oh well the last one was pretend though as I have mentioned many times before my dad does have a book on the history of concrete but he was a civil engineer. Very civil he is too.

Well done to Robert Webb - weird but strangely hypnotic.

Occam's Razor Applied to Small, Plastic Toys

Listening to The Goldberg Variations (Bach and Schiff)

The robot is still missing and there is some debate as to whether it's disappearance is accident or conspiracy. I tend to choose the simplest solution in any case such as this and I think it got broken and was thrown away when the office was cleaned. I am not sure this is the simplest solution but rather the most plausible. I suppose that this is like using Occam's Razor to decide on whether life is the result of a single button press on behalf of the creator or a long and complex path of ever-increasing complexity leading to more and more intelligent life-forms. The button-press sounds much the more plausible solution doesn't it? Until of course you add in the question of who created the creator which in a single leap increases the complexity by orders of magnitude. One golden moment of a great idea realised as a beautiful whole or a slow and laborious climb mostly involving slime and insects with a lot of dead ends (literally) along the way.

I think this is the theme of Climbing Mount Improbable - a title which I just realise must be a quiet tribute to Douglas Adams because of course we are dealing with the improbable rather than the impossible. The return argument is of course, that at the level of a possible creator, the spiritual transcends reality and needs no scientific explanation. This is why, no matter how strong anyone's belief in science and rationality is, everyone (even Dawkins I seem to remember) has to lay some portion of their confidence aside to accommodate the possibility that rationality fails.

I'm not sure the argument in that last paragraph was in any way structured and robust. It leaves out a lot of airy thought-processes from my internal formulation of it. I am not eloquent enough to arrange those thoughts.

Changes of Season

Flatland, no weather here, but mud
that goes from feet to sea and sky
in sticky waves, slow-breathing sands,
and salty-channel mazes, silted up
with all the human dust of cities,
drawn to this coast by edgy gravity
and left to sink as proof of us.

What conscience builds us houses here,
this losers' ground, an unfit place
for anyone not damaged, scarred
by cataloguing, damned by language?
But silence solves the howling,
The fixed echoes of the city, anchored
In the grey caves and folds of mind.

All these days can never be arranged,
they stretch behind and forward,
A single line of time, smoothed down
To flatten out the anger and to save,
To overwhelm and overcome the noise,
The resonance of life accelerating,
The victory of fractions over time.

The Semi-Colon Persecution Affinity

Listening to Dry by PJ Harvey in rapt anticipation of A Woman a Man Walked by.

I don't use javascript very much but every so often I have to pin down a few bits of validation on an asp.net page and out comes javascript for dummies (this means you - ed). Being a VB man, I am regularly caught out by case sensitivity and the scattering of semi-colons that this language requires. I have nothing against javascript or java or even c# though I might start twitching at the thought of c++ which I have never used in anger. The last c course I went on was the day before a Lush gig in Liverpool which goes to show how long ago that was.

Rossum's Revenge

There is a mystery - right here in this very pod. A small, plastic robot which has been guarding the desk next to mine for some time has been mutilated and some of its dismembered parts stolen. Suspects have been identified and told that an eye is being kept on them. I will keep you posted.

Currently listening to Changes of Season from the album Withholding Pattern by John Surman which has at last been liberated from the dusty no-man's land of the garage. I bought this on a whim simply because it was on ECM (an icy and dark place full of crystal clear recordings with a heart of madness and unpredictability - I was 20 - I have an excuse). The track Changes of Season could be the unused soundtrack to The Wasp Factory or the film of an unwritten book set in the marshes of some southern sea coast. It tells of boredom set to music, rippling keyboards like a whimsical Philip Glass track, overlaid with sad Saxophone and nothing else. Elsewhere on the album we have dancing duets of Surman playing against a digital delay. It is like no other album I know including all the other John Surman albums. Get this and find yourself in a strangely-lit flatland, mud stretching to the sea or the horizon - clouds painted and immobile. You will find yourself calm and happy and knowing something deeper about the world.

I don't get paid for this you know.

The Secret Diary of .....

Any resembelance to persons rich or poor (though mostly rich) is entirely coincidental.

December 31st 2008

It's been an ace month! Lots of the usual not doing anything really and no one really cares. All this and they pay me as well. Just found out that I can go at the end of next month and still get an extra grand a month. Looking forward to the festivities tonight - lots of drink and food - maybe some work on the latest car tomorrow. Brilliant isn't it.

January 1st 2009

Head feels like there's a rock in there somewhere and my tongue looks like the floor of the garage after I've got the rust of a new aquisition. It's nearly tea time now so obviously no work on the car today. Water! Water!

January 2nd

Just wondering what the next month will bring. I obviously can't start anything important so it looks like I'll just be hanging around in meetings and trying not to get involved in anything too heavy - not that I did any way. Ha Ha.

Later:

Just heard that Gordon wants me down in London for a few days to talk to some commitee or other. They want to know what I have to say about all the recent business - you know - the economy stupid. I don't know what they think it has to do with me; I don't think that I have much to do with anything outside the company anyway but they've got it into their collective heads that I'm clever or something. As if! Never mind. I'm sure the lunches will be good. Just keep thinking about the end of the month.

January 4th.

Worked on the car

January 5th.

Worked on the car

January 6th

Personal Email from Gordon. I was tempted not to open it - I was going to say it looked like one of those dodgy ones that the IT boys keep telling us just to delete but I expect Gordon's men have some sort of clever trace on it so they can tell if you read it. Talk about Big Brother - Phew. Anyway - he seems to be quite unhappy about something. I may be getting paranoid but he seems to be blaming me for everything. i thought he said it was the yanks and then the rest of the world. Anyone but him hey? Well I'm not going to take the rap for this. I can fight dirty like him.

Later : Calm down! He's not going to kill you and he can't take away the pension can he. Can he? I don't think I read the small print. My bad! Same happened with that company we bought and look what happened to that. Not that I have to deal with anyone ever again. I may just retire and go into hiding.

January 7th

Back in the office today. Everyone seems a little offhand this morning. Usually I would jump on them for not being as busy as they should be but as I have been saying I don't really want to get involved in anything that might last longer than a few days. Not my problem in a few weeks anyway.

As always happens after Christmas (and the Summer holidays - and the Easter Holidays) I'd forgotten my password. The people on the help-desk asked me to send them an email to prove who I was but I told them I couldn't log in to send them an email. Eventually Sandra came in and after seeing me sitting there trying password after password, she harrumphed and typed it in for me. I'll miss Sandra. I wouldn't be able to work without her. I heard one of the guys on the board describe her as 'leat' but they must have strange tastes. I don't fancy her at all.

Over 200 spam messages. Where do they get the email from. deleted them all but out of the corner of my eye, I saw one from Gordon as I pressed the return key. I wonder what it was about.

Long lunch today. As usual. I was going home afterwards when Sandra came running up with a print out of the email from Gordon which she said she'd found in the wastebasket. I wonder who printed it out and then threw it away? I should have a word with them about security. Nothing important - it was just the menu for the meeting in the smoke. I'm having the liver and onions. ha ha - as if!

January 8th

Two days in a row. A record. I really should have a look at the other directorships. I tried to list them in my head as I drove in but I seem to have forgotten one. I know I'm on seven boards but I could only think of six and then I realised I'd forgotten this one - only the one I drive to two days out of every five and what has got me that huge pension. Doh! Stupid - Stupid - Stupid. Sandra was at my desk when I got in. She looked slightly flustered and claimed she was fixing the computer. I think she might be up to something but I don't want to rock the boat at the moment so I'll keep quiet.

Had to sign lots of stuff today - all that leaving-the-company rubbish. The man from personnel kept asking me questions about options I needed to make but I just told him to check all the boxes that gave me the most money. That's the only way to make decisions these days isn't it. Apparently I have to get it authorised by some minister or other - good luck to him trying to understand it - I certainly can't.

Golf tomorrow ... and some meeting with .... no ... it's gone. Sandra will know.

January 9th.

It bloody rained! No golf! I'm not one of those idiots who puts on bright orange waterproofs and wades across the fairway (fareway???). I'm not stupid. Stayed at home with the paper (I was in it again) until it was time for lunch. Good nosh with the boss of (censored) - can't quite remember what decision we made at the end but I think it was good for the company.

To be continued after a rest.

The Last Man in Europe

I cannot remember the name of the Italian Prime Minister - I know what he looks like - he had a hair transplant - I know quite a lot about the political issues in Italy to which he is party and I also know that the name will probably come to me before the end of this sentence - which indeed it has - his name is Sylvio Berlusconi. We were trying to work out which UK politician was the wife of the British Lawyer who was accused and found guilty of accepting a bribe from Berlusconi. Our trail of various people who were involved with this has been completed even if the exact details of the issues at stake have not been resolved. It was tessas Jowell if you are at all interested - not Harriet Harman at all.

Now I'm not sure what I wanted to talk about - forgetting the names of European Prime-Ministers or the whole sorry business of what David Mills seems to think of as perfectly acceptable behaviour? It all boils down to the idea from The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy that those who want and get power are those absolutely not suited to having it. Almost any denouncement of one politician by another can be attacked as hypocritical because a slight amount of digging will find out something controversial about the denouncing party. We have the Fred Goodwin Pension debacle where the Minister involved had a pension of similar magnitude with the same company. We might look back to what could be considered the golden years of politics but I suspect that even the great figures of the past had just as many skeletons in just as many closets as today's bunch.

My personal opinion is that a lot of today's issues in public life are to do with unfinished business. So many high-ups have myriad roles in both public and private sector business with absolutely no chance of their ever being able to complete anything. They would probably argue that they simply make high-level decisions which take up small amounts of time. My counter would be that they cannot possibly have enough information to hand to be able to make those decisions effectively. The fact is that the blur of legislation and political horse-trading which makes up the sensory input of your average politician is not only a mystery to us mortals but very probably to politicians from Gordon downwards. I suppose that this all can be summed up as "emperor's new clothes" but we still sleepwalk into the state that this will ultimately lead to. Maybe my argument means that no one really wants nineteen-eighty-four to be reality; it's just going to happen because no one really understands that it is going to turn out as the result of various half-hearted, ill-considered and technologically-unsound initiatives that stream out of the empty minds of Westminster these days. And suddenly it will just get away from us and we'll all be watching each other and denouncing the misfits to whichever agency we think is fit.

Everything is reduced to that which gives the least offence. Failure is just being "differently successful". No one shouts at anyone any more and yet we have the impression that the state is trying to tell us more and more what to do and what to feel. Sometimes, people just fail at what they do but that is not acceptable to the state. Without failure there is nothing to measure success against and therefore no success at all. Apart from the occasional sporting success or major terrorist incident, the news falls into a fuzzy band of "isn't it all just crap", where we all fit the average and no one sticks their head above the line. Welcome to Airstrip One. We don't actually have a room 101 - rather than a split second of abject terror to force our will on you we have a lifetime of crapness to stop you from bothering about anything.

I was worrying that this blue period was just the result of some chemical imbalance but it seems to be more than just a local issue. There is a general miasma about - a resigned sigh - the sinking of tired limbs into the quicksand that is what makes up our existence in this state of paperwork and numbers, of knowing that your name, address and every number which defines you is deep on some hard-disk somewhere, ready to be ejected into the atmosphere for anyone to find and laugh at. The problem is now that this is for everyone to endure.

I didn't really envisage this post being like this and to be honest I do feel a lot better after having written it out. The whole thing is now on the cusp of catastrophe theory in that I may or may not post. Is the cat alive or dead?

Erin Pizzey and the Streisand Effect

In the spirit of the many column inches written this week on the subject of lying about books you have read, I have to come clean and mention that while I own Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain I haven't actually read it yet. My excuse would have been that it needs a specific mood to start such a book. Well now I have a reason to read it if only for one single sentence - that and the fact that any current unsold stock has been recalled for pulping - Amazon resellers will be doing good business won't they? To avoid any need for you to read it I will just say that Arthur bruised his upper arm.

Why would anyone lie about having read nineteen-eighty-four? I can understand it about Ulysses having started it myself several times (and having waded through a good percentage of its stream of consciousness, while following a completely different one of my own) but nineteen-eighty-four drags you in from the beginning.

Gaucamole Nation

We do things differently over here don't we? It could have been acid or a gun and yet someone can still walk up to a high-ranking Government member and throw foodstuffs at him. I was amused by the way that the protester just stood around waiting to be dragged to the floor by secret-service men and when no one bothered she just walked off. With the threat of being shot for running for a train these days, it does take courage to do something like this but the way it played out gives me hope that we might not be as doomed to an Orwellian future as we think. The trouble is that the fact that there was not security might encourage the nutters of many causes to have a go with something a little more lethal than Birds finest mixed with a bit of food colouring. I hope Mandy is thinking about how lucky he actually was today.

I have another dream to report today. I suspect that the number of dreams I am remembering at the moment is because my sleep from 4am is disturbed by a vociferous blackbird who has chosen the tree in our front garden as the main lookout post for his early-morning territorial patrol. Today's dream was set in a garden but as I may have mentioned, very few dreams I have actually take place inside. Some might have furniture and the general set-up of a room indoors but there are no walls and no ceiling. There is not much detail about this one. Twice I spotted what I took to be the space shuttle streaking overhead or powering up into orbit and each time it dropped something. The first time was a small plaque which had a painting like a Russian Icon on it, of two angels or Madonnas. The second time it was strange object like a large version of the plastic things that disposable contact lenses come in but from reading the text on the side, I worked out that it was actually the cover for chocks used to keep the shuttle in place when it was the ground. From this I deduced that the cover had somehow stuck to the wheel of the shuttle and remained attached until the next mission. After this I was talking to someone who I was vaguely aware was something to do with work all the time strolling through a vegetable garden with a strange half-light in the sky.

Serious Freud Office

We start with a dream. It must have been a very short one as I was certainly awake and aware of the time before it happened. I was on a Japanese island - well I was in the air above and to the south of this Island in a way that made me aware of its location on The Earth in relation to everything else - a full-scale version of Google Earth if you like. The island itself was mostly man-made, a sort of long pier like the two arms of a letter 'L' with a sort of mini-roundabout at the join. However, at one end of the pier, there was some very low-lying land- just sand and rocks battered by the sea. On descending to the island, I found that this real land was actually more extensive than it looked, with a few forests and sun-lit glades but always within reach of the sea. At some point the vertical distance between where I was and the actual beach/rocks/smashing waves was increased to the extent I could see a church built right on the edge of the ocean being smashed by giant surfers' waves. And then of course something made me look at the clock and realise that it was time for work.

... Short break for the drive to work ...

The sun had actually risen when I got here this morning, which is the first time that has happened this year. Our office is a standard glass-covered, open-plan edifice, though this floor has some blocked-in server and equipment rooms which mean that there is a long and featureless wall facing the rising sun. This creates an interesting shadow. When people get in after me, they add to this shadow until the sun moves higher and the shadows merge with the more muted cones of light from the ceiling. I have often though of this as a version of Plato's cave which I am sure makes me eligible for some potential pseuds award. Except of course no one is actually chained to their desk here which means that the intellectual meat of the issue is nothing like Plato's cave. Physically it resembles the set-up but by not existing for any more than the few minutes while the sun is in the right position it just becomes a trigger for the real idea. I have not seen the light or anything. Well just a spark maybe.

Link Wray to Leopard Ray

I jettisoned the Douglas Adams Biog - the official one I might add - after being bored rigid by talk of various wurthy/luvvy combinations at a rather tedious party that DNA once held at his home. Normally I just decide not to carry on reading after putting down a book with the intention of reading more. This time I would have thrown the book if I'd had room. V. Poor.

Anyway, great news is that in its place is The Olivetti Chronicles which I found at the library with only two previous borrowings. Why it is not reserved I cannot tell. It is a list of short pieces of journalism by John Peel, mostly on music though lots from The Radio Times, in alphabetical order of title meaning that it skips from the early seventies to the early 2000s and back regularly. Strangely, the dateline gives me the ability to place how Peely sounded at that particular time and to have the voice in my head read the prose correctly. A piece from Sounds in the early seventies will be read by that gauche schoolboy, always seeming on the edge of breakdown, while the later RT pieces will have the growly edge that I like to think was his proper voice. A very good read.

Music recently has been quite odd. I was taken by the rack divider which described the classical CD behind it as "The Goldenberg Variations" which for a split second made me wonder if a great, lost piece of Bach had been discovered. It was of course just the run-of-the-mill piano of The Goldberg Variations which I purchased on the recommendation of a chapter heading in the Douglas Adams book (obviously one of the early chapters). Can't find the quote anywhere and I'm not confident enough to quote it exactly. Anyway, it compared Bach with the universe and that is enough for me.
1980s twaddle has been the CD of Into The Gap by The Thompson Twins which I loved then and I love now. I'm not sure what John Peel thought of their music but he apparently upset them to the extent that they specified that he was never to introduce them on Top of the Pops. I might rave about the production, the icy use of technology which fails to cover up any emotion of the songs. I might admit the Greetings card sentiment of the lyrics but nothing of that proves how good TTT actually are.

To reclaim my position of Bleeding Edge, Cultural out-thereness, I raced to download Black-Hearted Love by PJ Harvey and John Parish last night in the split second that it died away after being played on the Zane Lowe show - why do they insist on making us middle-aged people listen to Wunnerful Radio One? Its review will be that it was exactly what my wife was expecting and not quite what I was expecting. Oh - and that it is very excellent and satisfying. Buy, buy, buy. I listen to it as I write.

Moving image culture has been weird. There is of course the meaty bite that is Paxman's Victorians - a chunky slab of image and analysis without ever seeming academic. Beautiful pictures, not the standard know ones and a trek through the meaningful places of the that century. However, Saturday night was taken up with an hour of Jeremy Vine's brother Tim - a stand-up comic and actor who stars with Lee Mack in Not Going Out - currently on Fridays on BBC1. He tells no dirty jokes and does not swear. His act consists of a stream of one-liners and puns of the most excruciating type and yet coming so thick and fast it keeps the chuckle meter up above the red line in a strange way that I cannot quite explain. Stranger still is that we actually sat through the 40-minute DVD extra consisting of a video of a month in the life of Tim Vine. It could so easily have been repetitive but actually turned into a visual version of his stand-up routine. The only running theme was his desire to affix a small sticker bearing the word "Trespasser" to any cat which dared to venture into his garden. I won't spoil the infinitesimally-small chance that you might ever see this video by revealing the result.