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.

... and Copies and Copies and Copies and ...

Much to discuss.

The video below (and here) is of Hack Green "Secret" Nuclear Bunker which we have been meaning to visit for some time. We finally got there on Friday. Many of these sort of things fail to impress me because the realism has been removed in the name of heritage (two mutually exclusive concepts as far as I can see) but at Hack Green the very structure of the building makes it difficult to leave it as anything very different from the purpose it was created for. The lower floor especially has been left pretty much as it was in The Cold War - all the various control rooms are as they were, and as you can see the low-level lighting adds much to the ambiance. The children were slightly disappointed that the buttons were almost all no-touchy but the sheer number of genuine flashing lights seemed to make up for that. Entry is via a pretty-realistic NAAFI overshadowed by genuine weapons of mass destruction - do I win the prize for finding them? The rest of the place consists of a tour of either museum-like cabinets of various Cold War and Atomic-related ephemera or the actual rooms of the bunker as you see in the video. Children were pleased to able to test the beds in the ladies dormitory. We emerged blinking into the grey Cheshire afternoon with post-time-travel-stress-disorder. My nephew is responsible for the choice of music on the video. More Photos Here.

Culture Section.

1. Books

Currently reading A Mind of its Own by Cordelia Fine.

However, it was pushed on the stack while I whistled through this :-

Who Writes This Crap? by Luke Wright and Joel Stickley - an attempt to document all the writing that one person reads in a single day (November 1st 2007 I think). It is all parody of course - some of it straight and some of it outrageously not straight. The humour is on the dark side with an ambiguous ending that left me slightly creeped out. However, it is possibly as much of a warning as Nineteen Eighty Four so ... err ... be warned.

2. Films

Random choice from the library DVD racks was Infamous, one of the two recent films about Truman Capote and his investigations that led to In Cold Blood. I did not really know anything about TC beyond that he wrote In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's and spoke like Donald Duck on Helium ( but that doesn't mean you shouldn't watch the film - it did not distract me). Somebody once lent me a copy of In Cold Blood but it had been annotated in great detail by someone obviously much taken with the crime committed and I jettisoned it unread. So watching this film brought to me the great and welcome surprise that Harper Lee was one of the main characters along with the even stranger (to me) fact that Truman Capote was the model for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sandra Bullock played Lee in a way that reminded me of Scout as I suppose she should. In fact the entire film had the slow grace of To Kill a Mockingbird but maybe that is just because the idea is in my head. Thank Goodness for Random.

3. Mathematics.

Nice to see that Marcus du Sautoy has been given the Simonyi Professorship of the Public Understanding of Science in the stead of Richard Dawkins. There is a nice article here.