News Sluice

Out of the dust it came...

2011-09-22T14:05:00.009+01:00

Hello one and all. Been a while, eh? So, umm, how’ve you been? I’ve honestly been meaning to catch up with you for ages, but... you know... stuff.

The thing is that work, life and all sorts of other stuff got in the way, and I didn’t feel like I had a great deal of import to say (that wasn’t able to be condensed into a rant on FaceBook...).

I’ve been trying to come up with a reason to start up the blog again and there’s a long-ish term project that just might suit. I’ve started building electric guitars.

Ages back, when I was at school, the chance arose in a technology class to build any project you wanted, using any combination of wood, metal, whatever. Armed with no information whatsoever, and using what I now know are the worst woods for “luthierie”, I set about building myself what I would now consider a metal axe. Pointy, daft and with as much planning behind it as a fling at a Vegas business conference, it vaguely looked the part, but was both a: unfinished and b: unutterably shit.

Now, of course, I’m an expert in simply everything, so I decided to revisit the idea. Slight correction: the internet has happened and, though there’s an ocean of utter garbage out there (homeopathy, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Republicans, nations not called England, etc.), there are also people who decide to collate useful information, share decades of experience and offer help to those of us who want to maybe attempt to do things properly.

The amount of guitars I own has held steady at around the 30 mark for the last ten years or so, with old ones exiting as new ones arrive. I always customise or tinker in some way with them, as there’s always room for improvement in some department or other. Even with Gibson Les Pauls, you purist bastards.

Though I love (and have given silly names to) many of my guitars, the ever-present spectre of GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome) looms large. So, I figured, with sites like the Luthier’s Corner forum on My Les Paul, I might want to give it a go and see if I could build, if not exactly the guitar I was after, something I’d still enjoy playing and - possibly more importantly - enjoy building.

I’ve been posting some pics up on FB, but will hopefully remember to document the whole thing and post pics here as it goes along. It’s going to be erratic as it has to fit in around work schedules and weather (I currently don’t have any shed/workshop space, so basic woodworking has to take place out in the open in the garden), but I’ll try to compile progress updates as I go.

I now have a decent Bosch router, capable of ripping holes in hands/arms/legs (though this has yet to happen, dear reader), as well as producing titanic levels of sawdust and shavings. My initial body blank was cut from a block of cedar which, after well over an hour of noisy routing, had me covered in deep orange shavings and dust, looking like I’d suffered from a fluffy and fast-moving alien fungal attack.

Other tools are to come from the luthier suppliers, Stewart-Macdonald in the US (whose catalogue is basically guitar-tool porn), but I’ll take some shots soon of the tool purchases so far. The first guitar I build will end up costing tons more than if I’d bought it in a store due to the investment in tools but (aside from the satisfaction of having built it myself), subsequent guitars will come in much, much cheaper and again, will be built to my personal specs. The initial build round will be a few Les Pauls, one a very standard ’59 replica, others with Floyd-Rose trem units and locking nuts. Then, once I (hopefully) get my woodworking chops in order, it’ll be onto the baritones and 7-strings...

We shall see. :-D

The Case Continues

2009-08-12T13:16:00.002+01:00

Just to keep things current, here’s the latest on the Simon Singh case:

Legal Update BCA v Singh

Simon Singh announced today that he will continue the fight in his libel case with the British Chiropractic Association after his application to appeal the preliminary ruling was rejected last week. He has now has the option to try and overturn that decision at an oral appeal. If this fails his case will be tried on a meaning of a phrase he did not intend and is indefensible. This highlights the problem of narrow defences that, along with high costs and wide jurisdiction, make the English libel laws so restrictive to free speech.

Simon said today: “I can confirm today that I have applied for a hearing to ask the Court of Appeal to reconsider its recent denial of permission. A great deal has happened since my original article was published back in April 2008 and I suspect that the libel case will continue for many more months (or maybe years). While my case is ongoing, it continues to raise a whole series of arguably more important issues, particularly the appalling state of English libel laws. I am pleased that the Culture Secretary has agreed to meet with signatories of the Keep Libel Laws out of Science campaign statement to hear how the laws affect writers. We are also pursuing a meeting at the Ministry of Justice and with front benchers in other departments to lobby for a change in the law.”

Read Simon’s full statement and more about his next steps here.

BEWARE THE SPINAL TRAP

2009-08-08T22:38:00.004+01:00

I’m posting this for a few reasons:

I hate seeing people taken in by bullshit like chiropractic, osteopathy, crystals, reiki, homeopathy and other such flummery
Simon Singh is still fighting his case against the British Chiropractic Association, due to a judge who, in my opinion, is a fucking retard
Chiropractic contributed in no small measure to the rupturing of two of my intervertebral discs several years back which, thanks to the intervention of a brilliant team of proper medics at the National Hospital for Neurosurgery (headed by James Palmer), didn’t leave me permanently paralysed. Only lost some function in my left arm and both legs, ta.

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying – even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.”

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. This is an edited version of an article published in The Guardian for which Singh is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association.

Grow the fuck up

2009-01-19T14:41:00.006Z

For a measured view on the ridiculous pissing competition currently being played out in the Middle East:

(Gerald Kaufman, eh? Who’d have thought...)

Shooting people really doesn’t help. Hamas and the Israeli administration, if you’ve got any balls at all (which I frankly doubt), sit down and negotiate a deal. And don’t give me any of that “The other side refuse to negotiate” crap. Just get on with it, it’s what the people you represent put you in place for, not a load of macho posturing that gets people killed.

Reaching for a gun is the last resort of a coward.

Aiming all the way up to “average”

2008-10-31T17:30:00.011Z

Not that any one show is or could be the paragon of all that is holy, good, refulgent and right with the world, but... WTF is happening to people’s standards?

Doctor Who really isn’t very good (sorry folks, repeatedly shouting that it is won’t change physical reality), Spooks has fallen teeth-first into the kerb, and there’s precious little entertainment on the box that isn’t a fluff-based product (Strictly, Britain Has NO Fucking Talent, Big Brother Evisceration Special, et al.). Now, I’m not terribly likely to complain about the fluff, as it isn’t competing against drama. At least not in my head, it isn’t - I can happily gawk at the delightfully bonkers Claudia Winkleman for hours on end, in much the same way as some people see no need to behead Davina McCall, I suppose. Any human who calls their budgerigar “Claudia Winkleman’s Budgie” is alright by me.

This is in no way an intimation that we are somehow facing the End Times™ of all TeeVee and that, hereafter, we shall all be reduced to staring vacantly at old broken televisions, flickering fires within, until the Terminators come to get us. Nope, the Beeb are making a good fist of costume drama in the shapely, toned and often pert and muscular Little Dorrit (please don’t bring up Lark Shite to Candelabra in my presence) and ITV, well, you never know, they might do something good soon... ;-)

Having known and worked with some truly excellent people at the BBC, I have to say that they aren’t in the majority. By a country light-year. Institutionalised arrogance, placing greater value on ‘executives’ (with all their endless fucking meetings and inability make decisions) than anyone who can actually do anything, a smugness of behaviour and an ingrained (and entirely unjustified) contempt of anyone working for an independent company have finally caused the lumbering behemoth to strip off and run straight at a wall made of piss-covered spikes. See GD’s excellent (and often poetic) post on, among other things, the ‘joys’ of sharing a nationality with some very misguided presenters.

With the controllers of the publicly-funded channels having been promoted to the levels of their incompetence from the verdant pasture of BBC executive-land, how is anything of any value likely to be commissioned? In fact, I posit that it’s unlikely that programmes of quality are even being searched for. The contracts I’ve had to deal with that have appeared from within the ‘hallowed halls’ are usually couched in terminally soporific drivel concerning ‘brand values’ and ‘market share’, featuring empty terminology: ‘aspirational’, ‘inclusive’, ‘synergistic’, and the deathless ‘beyond imagination’. In fact, a recent set of guidelines issued on behalf of the Beeb contained so many typos (‘routed’ instead of ‘rooted’, ‘banter’ instead of ‘barter’ and the smirk-worthy ‘colour caste’), technical inaccuracies (the assumption that HDV is the only type of HD on the market) and a general level of implied comprehension of the process that made it sound like it had partly been written in the 1950s. By someone who’d had a crack at their Home Trepanning Kit. Other instructions in it were comedically patronising (‘the BBC’s result will be better’ in a section about grading, for example).

The assumption that the best technical people in the world wouldn’t want to work as freelancers for ludicrous sums of money, but would prefer to spend their days being suffocated in beauracracy and nonsensical working practices is jaw-droppingly worrying.

Again, I return to my assertion that there are some terrific people working at the Beeb. Trouble is, I’d really love to see them spread their wings and fly, see what they’re capable of out in the real world where they can drop their shoulders and charge.

As a brief aside, and because it needs as many outings as possible, here is the absolutely honest truth about TV, courtesy of the incomparable Sir Charles of Brooker:

Ever since the BBC outsourced creativity and original thinking to the lowest bidder, I’m afraid that this is only likely to get worse. And the BBC will become known as the place that the talentless go to die.

Dumbed

2008-09-17T13:39:00.009+01:00

Horizon, the BBC’s flagship science show, of which I have been an avid viewer since childhood, has just lost me.

A run of shows (which will presumably be narrated by the same person) has just started, with the theme of educating the next president of the US as to what science is, as well as how it can be best used as a tool to improve lives, reduce pollution, provide power and prevent catastrophes (or at least minimise their effects). Entitled The President’s Guide to Science, it aims, with the assistance of (among others) Richard Dawkins, Sir Paul Nurse, Michio Kaku and Richard L Garwin to highlight why ignoring science, cutting funding and somehow thinking that science has provided nothing for humanity is not exactly the way to go...

Let’s face it, US presidents since Kennedy are not entirely known for their loving embrace toward any science other than getting elected.

However, humorous mock-the-yanks reasoning aside, the show has become unwatchable due to one, seemingly minor, thing. The female narrator cannot pronounce the word “nuclear”. Yep, you guessed it, it’s coming out as that delightful noo-kyoo-lar mangling that seems to be prevalent in pockets of northern America these days.

Now, this sounds like a tiny and rather pedantic reason to stop watching a show (and it probably is, being honest). However, if the show is attempting (even in a wry, self-deprecating and ironic manner) to teach a Septic President how that complicated science thing works, an effort could have been made to get the narrator to fucking pronounce a simple word correctly. Especially one that comes up so often in the show. And even more as it’s one which doesn’t have British/US alternative spellings (I’m completely with the US on aluminum, by the way, it was first). What the holy fuck was the director doing when he/she should have been checking this during recording? Fuck quality control, eh?

An educational programme can’t educate when you get stuff wrong. You’re not talking about Ghost Hunter Extreme, Gillian McKeith’s pseudo-scientific diet-related crap, or even those right-wing creationist Politically Incorrect Guide to... books. This is supposed to be factual programme-making.

An apposite example, brought to you by our correspondent for Van Halen affairs:

Demanding M&Ms of a particular colour to be in their dressing-room as part of the contract with a venue for playing a show was nothing to do with fuelling egos (mighty though Diamond Dave’s evidently is). Instead, it was a canny little check that everything else on a lengthy contract had been done as promised. This would include all of the safety and fire regulations checks, along with security personnel requirements. Most of this would be checked out anyway by the manager on arrival, but the lack of the M&Ms would highlight that there might be other things missing that might be a lot more serious.

Back to reality: if a factual show about science can’t be bothered to get the narrator to pronounce a scientific word correctly, what else is wrong with it that no-one’s noticed?

You wouldn’t get this sort of crap on The Wire...

Because Will made me do it...

2008-09-13T21:07:00.003+01:00

This is all Dixon’s fault...

Create Fake Magazine Covers with your own picture at MagMyPic.com

So it’s got nothing to do with my towering ego. No sir...

Caught by the fuzz

2008-09-13T16:41:00.010+01:00

Got pulled over yesterday by the pigs...

Actually, it was my own fault, as I’d been driving a short distance with my phone next to my ear, and thoroughly deserved to be dragged from my car and beaten. Getting a new phone meant that I hadn’t sorted out the Bluetooth pairing of my little earpiece thingy, so when it rang in the car, I answered it. Cutting the conversation down to a minimum is all well and good, but I’m not sure we would have missed a shuttle launch or a cure for cancer had I waited until I got back home and returned the call.

Funnily enough, the hands-free kit is now well and truly sorted and that sort of thing won’t be happening again, m’lud. Lesson learned.

This all came to mind as a post, due to coming across a blog that concerns itself with how the UK is essentially a police-state and that we’re all going to be killed into oblivion in our beds by the British equivalent of the Stasi.

You see, I’m as rabid a supporter of chav-sterilisation as the next person, but I’m not all that sure we are living in the “End Times” (or whatever your local branch of the god-botherers are calling it). When confronted by the two cops in the car, I sheepishly got out, admitted I’d behaved like a twat and proceeded to talk to the guy about how great rear-wheel drive cars are for power-sliding round corners, while the WPC filled out my ‘don’t do it again’ form. Though disappointed that the description section of the form didn’t include words like ‘devastating’, ‘eye-wateringly rugged’ or ‘hysterically manly’, I have to say that the two of them were pleasant, courteous and respectful and never once did they patronise or attempt to intimidate me.

There was no expectation from them that I was likely to be any trouble, or that I might be involved in a plot to overthrow the government. In fact, we ended up talking about police procedurals and I recommended they take a look at The Wire.

You see, I’ve been pulled over by traffic cops in the US and, frankly, they scare the shit out of me. Everything about them screams I want to shoot you, please please please give me a reason to empty the clip into your head, motherfucker. There seems to be a presumption not only of guilt in relation to a traffic violation, but that you’re probably a chainsaw-wielding, anti-American terrorist who ought to go back wherever the fuck it was you came from...

This contrasts greatly with the former Sergeant Cam Woolley of Toronto, who I watched with great affection on Canadian TV (in a simply fantastic hat), explaining driving skills when in the vicinity of trucks that seemed blindingly obvious to me. But then I’m from Europe, where we all drive teeny-weeny cars, and are most likely a lot more ‘truck-aware’. The enormous things that were humming down the freeways in Canada were gargantuan in proportion, and by that I mean the family vehicles. I once briefly spotted a Smart car amidst the steel leviathans, and silently offered up a prayer for the driver - he seemed lost amidst the wheeled behemoths.

So, PC Healy and your companion from Hitchin police station, I salute you for your commendable dealings with a scruffy old git who ought to know better, and won’t do it again. ;-)

Technology news

2008-09-08T12:28:00.005+01:00

Can those of the population who actually seriously think the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole capable of destroying the planet/universe on Wednesday, please raise their hands?

It’ll make the cull much, much easier...

Frak...

2008-08-07T10:51:00.005+01:00

Just a worthy note that today I received an email informing me that my fanboy-tastic Battlestar Galactica Cylon Toaster has been shipped via FedEx.
I am such an anorak... ;-)

PS. For those with a DIY bent, check this out!

A minor addendum:

It looks significantly less ‘gun-metal’ than the publicity photo implies (ie. it’s just chrome)
I forgot about needing a transformer to bring US electrical equipment out of the dark ages - ah well, I’ll pick one up soon and give it a blast

Tagged, like a treen in a disabled spaceship...

2008-06-20T18:55:00.010+01:00

From the erudite and bold GD, comes the tag (furthered from the redoubtable Jason A) to:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now.

So, here goes:

A World Without Heroes - Kiss (Music from The Elder)
Try to pretend that they aren’t dressed in silly clown outfits and usually write fairly nondescript rock tunes that really don’t gel with their image when listening to this - it’s the crowning glory of an album that most Kiss fans loathe as it was a huge stretch away from all that. What a crying shame they weren’t able to carry on down this avenue a little more...
The Pretender - Foo Fighters (Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace)
How can you not like a tune that runs up to you, kicks you awake and then yells solidly at you for a few minutes, before running off grinning to do the same to someone else?
Turn It Up - The Feeling (Join With Us)
I suppose this lot are very much an “Electric Light Orchestra for the new millennium” or some other such rubbish. Good, uplifting pop with amazing complexity under the hood.
Shine - Take That (Beautiful World)
I never thought I’d take to a TT tune as much as I have with this one. More uplifting pop - hurrah!
Secret Song - Homestar Runner (Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits)
Buy this album, religiously go to the Homestar Runner site, and become as addicted as I...
Billie Jean - Chris Cornell (Carry On)
I’ve been a huge fan of Mister C since the Soundgarden days and he just keeps getting better and better. His “You know my name” opener for Casino Royale was also a killer. This improves no end on the original (there’s a school of thought that I subscribe to that states: if you don’t bring anything new to the table, don’t do a cover)
Tom Traubert’s Blues - Tom Waits (Small Change)
Anyone that can take Waltzing Matilda and make it a heartbreaking story of the decline of a Vietnam vet ought to get the moniker ‘genius’ in my book. This is such an excellent piece of work.

I believe that the next course of action is to tag another seven people to come up with their Secret Seven, so, umm, I’ll get onto working out who they are real soon now... ;-)

We were on FIRE...

2008-05-18T21:41:00.011+01:00

Last night, Twelfth Night (of whom I’m the junior member - ho ho) played a gig just south of London, back at a venue we’d played last year as a warm-up to the main show at The Albany Theatre (which will be out on DVD later this year - shameless plug).

Last November’s show at The Peel was booked primarily as a warm-up and shakedown for a band who hadn’t played at battle speed together in over two decades, with the addition of a keyboardist (me) who hadn’t played with any of them before. I’d invested, as a Mac user, in a Native Instruments KORE computer-based keyboard rig (see past posts) which I knew had the potential to fall over, yet I was keen to add a larger dimension to the sound and needed a pretty huge palette of options open to me. Well, it hasn’t really fallen over in a major way so far and is off to Barcelona with me next week for our headline slot at the Tiana progressive rock festival. Being honest, I was just pleased to have made it through last year’s Peel show without too many major cock-ups, so hadn’t really been able to pay much attention to actually performing in any real way.

The “main” gig, at The Albany Theatre in south London, was fabulous. Great lighting, projection of imagery that supported the themes of the songs, an amazing crew and a great theatre space made it a really good night. Except for Andy Revell, who had horrible technical troubles with his guitars that, though not really affecting the songs themselves, made for a nerve-wracking night for him.

With the end of year, and the news that the Tiana festival was a go, two additional gigs had been booked up. The first, last Friday, was organised by the Classic Rock Society and took place in Rotherham in Yorkshire. I’ll go into fuller detail of that show in a later post, as we ended up with a great guest onstage with us for a song and that deserves a better explanation than in the middle of this post. The second gig was last night’s Peel outing.

There’s a story told of Laurence Olivier in a theatre production during which the rest of the cast noticed that he’d taken flight and was suddenly on a level far, far above them. When wanting to congratulate him after the show, the rest of the cast were greeted by the closed and locked door of his dressing room, from which they could hear yelling, stamping and the sounds of furniture being thrown about. Eventually, Maggie Smith plucked up the courage to knock and was allowed in to find a scowling, enraged Olivier. Puzzled, she explained that the rest of the cast had been amazed by his performance and all wanted congratulate him. This produced more scowling. She then tentatively asked why, after having given such a fantastic performance, was he so furious?

“I know I was good! I just don’t know why!”

Last night at the Peel, this version of Twelfth Night finally played like a band. Not that we hadn’t played well enough together during rehearsals and the last three gigs, but this was where the wings finally unfurled, the afterburners kicked in, and we took off. Believe me, there were cock-ups from all corners (as there are at any gig, with the possible exception of Amy Winebar, whose entire career is a cock-up...), but no-one was thrown or wound up by them in any way. The music became more alive, ad-libs were thrown in that enhanced what we were doing (and that’s quite a toughie in a prog band) and the audience were with us all the way.

On many occasions, I could just look up to see Andy Revell actually (and I’d probably have to tell him what this actually means, as he has no idea how good he is) shredding on his guitar, with the most enormous grin on his face. Clive was positively soaking wet with sweat, Andy Sears was in fine voice and Brian, frankly, played the holy living shit out of the drums all night long. We tore through the set like a tearing thing through something that tears easily, and all came offstage elated and slightly bewildered at how bloody good it had been.

I wonder why? ;-)

PS. Thanks to my sister for the photo.

Nano-thin patience

2008-03-29T23:36:00.011Z

I’ve been talking through something with my brother that’s had me puzzled for a few years now. It seems that I have to somehow prove to certain people that I know what I’m doing and can do my job to a professional standard? Mulling it over with David brought up a couple of interesting traits in the people that seem to give me the most grief, the biggest one being a connection to “fandom”.

I’ll let Harlan take it from here (props to GD for alerting me)...

Now, before someone gets the wrong end of the stick here, I’ve nothing against genuine amateurs - those who are taking their early, faltering steps on the road to becoming, in some way, ‘professional’. What I do have a problem with is an attitude that reeks of ‘if you’re prepared to help me, you must be not very good at your job’ or, worse still ‘I’ve been on a course, so I know what I’m on about’. And don’t for a second think that I view myself as some kind of “know-everything” veteran, skilled in every martial art as well as being an undercover agent and celebrity pharmacist...

I don’t know where it comes from, but I’ve witnessed actors, directors and writers being buttonholed at conventions and told how to improve by ardent fans. Do these people, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, go to an Eric Clapton concert and start trying to give the man guitar lessons?

Hmm, I’m wondering whether a parallel between myself and Eric Clapton might seem just a teensy little bit, umm, preposterous... ;-)

Still, fuck that. If a professional needs to be told how to do something, they’ll usually ask. Otherwise, if they’re just getting on with it, it’s probably safe to assume that they may have a fairly good grasp of what they’re up to, no?

Which, circuitously, brings me back to the (as usual) fairly nebulous point I was making. A recent exchange of messages on Good Dog’s reply segment with Irascible Ian demonstrated that there are even amateur teachers, charging money for “documentary film-making courses” which are, it seems, clueless shit. Having people teaching film-making that don’t have the faintest idea of what they’re on about (and only half the gear the students needed to shoot footage) isn’t helping those of us that have a bit of an idea what we’re doing.

Fuckers like this are propagating lazy working practices, slack attitudes to work and building a culture of anti-professionalism amongst those that are attempting to break into this business. They are producing jumped-up runners from Channel 4 who believe that calling themselves film-makers (while not knowing what a white balance is, or the difference between region encoding and video standards) makes them the next Scorcese. If they’ve even heard of Scorcese. These are the same people who describe their PCs as having “two hundred gigs of memory” and should be hurt with un-earthed electrical appliances. Harrumph...

Example: On two documentary projects that are currently running through the pipes here, the chap we’re working with seriously thinks that scripting a show comes just before the edit. Not necessarily his fault if he doesn’t know any better, but where the fuck did he learn to think like that? And why, more worryingly, is he resistant to or suspicious of other ways of working?

And don’t get me started on the BBC’s working practices and guidelines...

Fucking Ben Affleck

2008-02-25T21:19:00.002Z

The joyously bonkers fake row between Jimmy Kimmel, Matt Damon, Sarah Silverman and now Ben Affleck has escalated once again.

And who wouldn’t be fucking Ben Affleck, with all those celebrity endorsements? I know I have...

It is to enjoy.

Eye-Tee-Vee

2008-02-17T14:24:00.005Z

It would seem, from my idle attempt to watch a small clip of someone called Suzanne executing what is apparently known as a “headbanger lift” from ITV’s Dancing on Ice, that I don’t have the computer setup they would like me to have.

It’s not got Windows Media Mangler 9 (actually it has, even though it’s a Mac), I’m not using Microshaft Internet Exploder 5.5 or above (nope, you got me there, I’m using something designed in the twenty-first century - Firefox) and, above all, it’s not running Windows (the very thought!)

Ahhh, pity. I was rather hoping to discover some footage of a large elevator filled with greasy rockers, with piped music by Anthrax, showing ‘Suzanne’ why her mother told her not to stay out late.

Dodged that bullet... ;-)

Obsolete - absalom

2008-02-12T08:46:00.004Z

After (bizarrely) coming into 2008 trailing what appears to be a small PROFIT (how the hell did that happen?), and with copious amounts of audio production and three new documentaries to produce, it began to dawn on me that the main workstation I’ve been using is running out of puff.

I wouldn’t mind so much if I was using some creaky old Dell heap that I’d got from PC World, but I’m talking about a 2.5GHz Dual G5 Mac, less than two years old. One of the big silver monoliths that they found on Mars, which I was assured I could use to take over the world... This thing was the first machine on which I could use Motion (which produced lots of ooh-ing and ahh-ing when viewing its preset templates), would generally tear through audio and video tasks in Nuendo and Final Cut Pro 5 respectively, and made working in Photoshop hilariously swift. Always used with two monitors (three when outputting to video), you felt that it wasn’t getting in the way of whatever arcane task you wanted to perform by simply hanging about.

In the run-up to the Twelfth Night gigs, when trying out Apple’s Logic Studio (more specifically the Main Stage component) versus the hardware/software combo of Kore/Komplete from Native Instruments, it became painfully obvious that Apple’s offering was asking way too much of the hardware. NI’s rig just about held it together, so was chosen by default to be the live setup. Even so, there were moments which, now I can hear the audio tracks in isolation, contain stuttering and dropouts where the two G5 processors were throwing their hands in the air and screaming “you want me to do what, you bastard?”.

The trouble is, when the G5 machine was new, Apple’s current shiny version of the operating system ate up a certain percentage of the power of the machine doing what it does (pretty pictures, little drop shadows on windows and things of that ilk). Updates and fixes come along (as they do with any operating system) which, erm, update and fix things. Then, before you know it, things seem just a little less responsive than they did on that first, glorious day when the machinery was kicked into life. This has hit many of my friends who made a change from Windows XP to Windows Vista - suddenly, what had originally been a pretty nippy machine felt like it was crawling through treacle just opening a window or displaying a list of files.

I like computer interface prettification, really I do. If the research teams at Palo Alto hadn’t come up with the basis of the interfaces we all now use, command-lines like DOS and UNIX would inspire much of the “take a gun to work/school and kill people” rage going on in the world. However, I’m damned sure that, given a choice between semi-transparent icons, bouncy little animations when opening files, visual representations of things that simply have to have a reflection underneath them or getting on and performing the task at hand, I really do need the task doing as quickly as possible.

Icons the size of housing estates, folders that sproing open and display little pictures of their contents, “cover flow” (ugh) and multiple “spaces” to enable me to keep making a mess of the desktop ad infinitum aren’t helping me in any really meaningful way to do what my computer is generally for - work. By that, I also mean some of the incredibly arcane little bits of utility software that seem to have incomprehensible interfaces designed by sadistic cryptographers...

Sadly, I know that the shiny, new 8-core thing that is now lurking under one of the desks here will be wheezing and struggling to do basic stuff in less than three years (and therefore getting in my way), at which point I’ll have to shell out for a new machine with a hundred processors and eleventy-billion gig of RAM that considers me obsolete. Hey ho, ’twas ever thus.

Enough with the window-dressing and bloat-ware already, I need to get some work done!

Pauze

2008-02-04T09:29:00.000Z

Taking a small break in blogging (because real life has, funnily enough, got things for me to do).

There’ll be another coffee/get-together/easy networking thing for those inclined on Thursday 21st of Feb at the Euston Novotel again. I’ll be there from around 3.30pm until late in the evening, so come along if you fancy an excuse to socialise. ;-)

Do pass on to those who anyone you want to drag along.

Porcelain is the surest plan

2008-02-02T15:13:00.000Z

Some people have too much time on their hands. Many of those people produce “fan-films” or “fan-fiction” which is generally excruciating.

Sometimes though, the right kind of person ends up with too much time on their hands. Like a chappie who goes by the moniker of “Buffalax”. He takes obscure, dodgy old videos by groups performing in a language other than English and then, with a glorious disregard for what the lyrics might actually mean, adds subtitles that equate to what the lyrics sort of sound like. Check him out on Youtube, but here’s the one that got me hooked - the German pop ‘sensation’ Dschingis Khan’s Moskau from 1979.

Armies, up sleevies...

2008-01-29T08:43:00.000Z

Good Dog raises some very good points here about the often atrocious quality of DVD sleeve artwork, often those for classic films that would originally have had superbly-executed promotional posters. Most of said poster artwork would have been portrait format, and therefore quite likely to be able to be “re-purposed” (as my lovely business-degree-type friends say) for the sleeve.

Why is this so often not the case? Are there copyright issues over the original poster artworks? In so many cases? Are there legions of drooling idiots who think they know what Photoshop is for (and might even pay for a legit copy of it one day...) who might starve if not given ‘work’ mangling screengrabs in order to produce shouty, hideous imagery for the benefit of, erm, their mates?

It has been suggested by the svelte and effervescent Lucy that Good Dog, I and several of his correspondents may be frankly too long in the tooth to appreciate what is now being offered and harking back to a ‘golden age’ where every scribble on a napkin was a Rembrandt (not exactly her words, by about a billion miles...). She may well have a point. I’m sure that, as always, many of what are now considered design classics in the film poster field were regarded with horror and opprobrium when they first saw the light of day, just as Fred Astaire’s famous (and probably apocryphal) assessment at the hands of an RKO screen-tester described him thus “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.”

Art is obviously subjective and a slippery fucker to pin down, especially in terms of defining whether it is ‘good’ or not. Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko and Henry Moore still divide people and provoke strong discourse on whether anything they produced at all is worthy of the term “art”. I’m sure that several thousand years ago there were druids passing through the Salisbury area that caught a glimpse of Stonehenge and cried “What the holy living fuck is that monstrosity?!”

Sadly, as with war, US chocolate and The Darkness, there is no equation that will definitively prove that something is unutterably crap. If there were, life would be more easily defined, yet almost definitely less colourful. The Eurovision Song Contest is a monument to cheesy awfulness, yet I’m almost OCD about watching it - quite possibly more for Terry Wogan and Ken Bruce’s delightfully bonkers commentary that never quite descends into abuse than for a tiny post-Soviet country’s attempt at a ‘pop’ tune. Strictly Come Dancing is eerily lacking in ‘art’, yet is a must-see for the Sluice household. Its awful North American spin-off, which just oozes far too much saccharine and is laden with too high a quota of “I’d like to thank God for this great opportunity”, makes most UK-residents distinctly uneasy and want to hit the contestants and dancers in the face with a tea-tray (let alone the presenters - where do they get these freaks from?).

Though there’s always a horribly murky middle ground in which the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of a piece of work constantly eludes one’s grasp, I’m sure that, if a benchmark has been previously set, then surely one should at least aim to exceed it or admit defeat? If not, then we’re likely to see a case of diminishing returns as Photoshop hackery takes over where art is supposed to be, training replaces education, TV becomes so self-referential (qv. Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach) that it ceases to be about anything other than itself, punctuation and grammar are abandoned in favour of txt-spk, and Shakespeare gets set to drum and bass/speed metal/techno/whatever.

Banging...

Al-Jazeera proudly presents (in association with Dean Lerner)

2008-01-28T13:27:00.000Z

(please note, I neither know nor care about the journalistic style of said media vomitorium - ta.)

I’m going to attempt to keep a sporadic log of the progress of the repairs and mix of two album projects I’ve got on the go: Airbridge’s Quiet Sky and the Twelfth Night Live at The Albany 2007 epic, which will also get a 5.1 surround mix for the DVD release. There’s also a potential third album to help a friend arrange, record and mix (more of which in the future).

Background to the albums:
Avid readers (are there such things?) will know that I was once in a progressive band called Lahost, wayyyy back when. Also in that band were members of the (by then) defunct Airbridge, notably Sean Godfrey on bass. As the years have stolen by, some of us have stayed in contact and this has meant that occasionally we get to do bits and pieces of music together or, at the very least, compare notes on what we might currently be doing. Also on the circuit at that time were a slew of other prog bands, some of which have fallen by the wayside (as did Lahost) though some continue to tour even now, notably IQ, Marillion, Pendragon among others.

During 2007, former Airbridge guitarist Lorenzo Bedini had been writing some new material with Sean Godfrey and they asked whether I’d be interested in helping them out with it in terms of production and mixing. I’ll go into detail about the technicalities of what is going with it in another post, but suffice to say that I said ‘yes’. This material was all recorded in Cubase on an old blue and white G3 mac and will be finished/polished/fiddled with in Nuendo on an eight-core monster Mac Pro. Yum.

Look back through older posts for my involvement with Twelfth Night. The November 2007 gig at the Albany Theatre was recorded as a multitrack Protools session, so that repairs/tweaks/mixing could be carried out in order to both release it as a double live CD and to do further surround mixing for DVD release, as the gig was filmed. Most of the ‘repairs’ that are being done are where old guitars had trouble staying in tune, people couldn’t clearly hear each other for timings, pedal switching noises are removed, and so forth. Also being removed (as if it never happened...) is the false start of the first encore, Take A Look, the intro of which went south in a major way. He he he, it’s good to be king... ;-)

TN’s stuff is being produced within the relatively new (to me) environment of Apple’s Logic Studio. I grew up in MIDI terms via Steinberg’s product line. Originally the Pro-24 sequencer on an Atari ST computer, followed by the first (and incredibly flaky) version of Cubase, I’ve been with them through all the subsequent iterations and eventually moved up to Nuendo during my migration Mac-wards, for its surround mixing and post capabilities. So, there’s a fluency there that I won’t have in Logic. I’m sure it can do all (if not more) than Nuendo can, but most of the struggles so far involve finding out how it does all the things I can find quickly in Nuendo. Nothing like learning new stuff though, eh?

Current states of play will follow in subsequent posts. Both projects should be quite interesting for me to work on, not least because both groups of people feature some pretty strong-willed characters with definite ideas of how things should be done (including me). We shall see how that all works out... ;-)

A bit nippy

2008-01-04T11:00:00.001Z

For those of us in the UK that are currently grumbling about how bad the weather is, how we haven’t had a summer, that the Empire is finally falling, etc., take a gander at this salutary tale from the effervescent Jim Henshaw.

Snowbound

Not so bad in Britain, is it? Apart from the floods, obviously...

Organisation

2008-01-01T21:45:00.000Z

For those UK-based bloggers who still pay any attention to my deranged ramblings, and any other readers of this esteemed organ (coo-err, he’s on a roll here...), there will be a coffee get-together at 1pm on Thursday 17th of January 2008 in the lobby bar at the Euston Novotel in London.

It’ll most likely then lead on to a pub somewhere, so pitch up before 3pm if you don’t want to get left behind... ;-)

Use the email link in my profile (unless you’re on Facebook, where you can contact me directly) if you want a contact number for the day.

Fermata

2007-12-28T18:42:00.000Z

Like the quiet before the avalanche, the span of days between Christmas and New Year is coasting by. No bargains worth mentioning to be had at the sales, I’ve even refrained from buying several bits of kit I’ve had my eye on for some time.

Christmas/Winter Festival/Whatever doesn’t seem to grab at my wallet the way it used to... ;-)

Though I may well still invest in a terrifying amount of fireworks to see in 2008. And put the town of Letchworth’s municipal efforts to shame. Simple pleasures...

Round and round

2007-12-02T20:28:00.001Z

My wheels are still spinning, but for now, the hamster’s dead.

I may be back, I may not.

Chunka chunka bam

2007-11-08T17:11:00.000Z

I think that’s how one of the tunes goes...

Well, faithful readers, it appears that the gigs are almost upon us and that work (you know, the real-life stuff) is getting squeezed a little too much into the wee hours of the morning. Two deadlines almost missed because of letdowns and other factors I just ran out of ‘contingency time’ on means that my blogging went str8 in da bin.

Facebook (or “crackbook” as I now know it, thanks to Caroline) takes up a little too much time that I ought to be spending on work, but I’ve even reined that in, as there’s just too much to do, even with the amount of people now cranking out work for me.

However, it seems that fortuitous timing is on my side, with a client about to let me loose on a bunch of project management for some of the jobs we already work on further down the chain. Now, I know that paperwork isn’t something that I’m all that hot on, but my sister and several other friends are dead good at it and do project management as part of their gainful employment. More than that, they’re looking for some work on the side so, cunningly, they can come to work for me on a few of these projects and open up all-new, super-shiny and oh-so-lucrative revenue streams from an existing client. Yum, and indeed, yum. Feels great to be able to hand work on to good people.

It’s looking highly likely that the ‘house-flipping’ venture will begin to take off next year, as well as potentially co-creating some documentaries for the archive Doctor Who DVD releases, so I’ll need to be hanging onto my hat at this rate!

I hope that everyone else out there is rocking along well. It may be some time before I throw out another missive, certainly before the final gig on the 24th at the Albany.

More days, please

2007-10-29T18:10:00.000Z

I seem to have misplaced those extra three or four days that I’m sure fall between Friday and Saturday for the month of November.

With clients of various stripe breathing down my neck about deadlines and rehearsals required for the upcoming two gigs, November’s looking like an oddly truncated month. Still, after hauling the gear back and re-constructing the keyboard setup in the studio for daily run-throughs of the set following the weekend’s rehearsals, the musical side shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Keeping up appearances with the clients is another cauldron of haddock, however. Nowadays, I have three freelancers who are starting to take on some of the workload from the biggest of my clients (much Flash programming of healthcare-related stuff). So, as long as I can crank them up to speed and ensure reliable results handed back through to the client, I can spare the time for the musical stuff without worrying about deadlines being missed and the like because I’m spending a month sat behind a pile of keyboards in the run-up to the gigs.

The other thing this has all given me is a fresh view on my patchy time in the music business, especially whether I still have any hankerings to try it all out again “one more time”. Have I become boring and un-“rock and roll” because I’ve become a businessman? Does working in healthcare and making corporate films mean I’ve sold my soul to The Man? Am I jealous of those bands from the time I bounced around on the Marquee stage that have managed to carry on and not head out into the real world for gainful employment? (Err, that would be a resounding no...)

Hmmm... Looking back at most of the time in bands (aside from actually performing at good gigs), I was penniless, malnourished and (if we’re honest here) more than slightly deluded. Even when LaHost were a going concern (mid-late 80s) we were always going to be an insanely tough sell: neo-progressive rock in a climate of post-New Wave electronica and Wham’s assault on the charts with incredibly catchy pop tunes. Which would you invest in (as long as you have a functioning brain stem) to turn a profit, or at least not haemorrhage money?

Post-justification or not, I like my life now. I get to play music pretty much when I want, write it purely for commercial reward or just plain enjoyment and not for some la-la land dream of a record deal. I don’t drive a completely shit car any more, and I can afford almost all of the toys I always wanted when I was a starving, penniless hack singer back in the day. I wish all of the other people that are still in there all the best, but it’s just not for me any more.

Life has its ups and downs, but there’s plenty more contentment on offer these days. When it comes to choosing how to spend my life, I’ll take that over being in a band every time. And you can quote all this to me if you turn up to the gigs - I’ll still stand by it, however much fun the two nights are. ;-)

Normal Service

2007-10-16T22:02:00.000+01:00

Like there’s ever been anything remotely like normal service around here, I must say...

I’m off to the Netherlands for the first break in quite some time, even though I’m taking a bunch of work with me and my trusty ol’ beaten-up Powerbook so I can do some work while all my Dutch mates run around after some telly people.

It was while doing a photographic job a few years back that I seemingly made about twenty instant (and very good) friends at a sci-fi convention in Scheveningen in the Netherlands.

Fact fans: Scheveningen is a Dutch shibboleth. During World War Two, the natives could identify foreigners by their foolhardy attempts to stagger through the pronunciation, often swallowing their own tongues. Apparently, at this time (and for reasons which will forever remain shrouded in mystery) the Germans stole every single bicycle in the country. Ask any Dutchman. Or woman.

Anyway, a dear friend of mine is an actor who was once in the sort of show that has a currency at these events and, as he was going to be there, doing the photography seemed like it would be a jolly trip somewhere new. My brother and his then girlfriend (now wife) came along and we had an absolute blast. So much so that, when it came time for brother David’s bachelor party, we immediately headed for the same hotel (the Bilderberg) and spent a thoroughly fabulous, low-key weekend shooting zombies in the arcade, playing air-hockey and being gigantic children at the seaside. Only with more money. ;-)

This weekend sees the very last event organised by the Utopia crowd and the “old guard” are getting together to see it out in style. As an honorary, English-speaking, stumble-through-some-Dutch part of the crew, I’ll muck in where necessary, probably from my vantage point of a deeply convivial bar... I will undoubtedly be surrounded by the full spectrum of fandom, from boggle-eyed fruit-loops through to those who, with humour and good grace, share a deep love of some terrific shows.

Oh, and there’ll be some people off the telly too.

Oh, the shame...

2007-09-20T22:35:00.000+01:00

My one and only Top Tag from Technorati is...

“torchwood”

I’m off to drink myself to death...

Addendum: Until it’s willing to play nice, I’ve shoved the Technorati stuff down to the bottom of the page. Torchwood indeed...

FOT

2007-09-18T08:54:00.000+01:00

I’ve arrived, obviously.

Being listed in a website forum as “replacement fot Rick Battersby” while my name was given in the post above is certainly something that I wish you could all experience the warm glow of but, as mere mortals, you’ll never scale the dizzy heights to which I have now, erm, scaled... ;-)

Bon chance!

How utterly lovely

2007-09-14T09:51:00.000+01:00

Check out this over at Alex’s blog.

I’d happily have a cat like Charley.

It goes like this...

2007-09-05T08:53:00.000+01:00

Well folks, here we are: the final (or should that be “ultimate”?) line-up of Twelfth Night.
From left to right: Andy Revell (guitars), Andy Sears (vocals), the local bigmouth, Clive Mitten (bass) and Brian Devoil (drums).
Taken outside the studio where we had our first (and slightly shaky in some areas, hem hem) rehearsal, it was a weekend of hard work and fun. Actually, the job titles are a little disingenuous, as Andy S ends up playing bits of keys, percussion and guitars, Andy R plays the odd keyboard bassline and does some backing vocals and Clive... Well, I don’t think they’ve invented enough instruments for Captain Bass Solo yet... ;-) Brian is the only one (if memory serves correctly) who doesn’t get roped into something other than drumming.

Here’s the poster for the gig which will be filmed at the Albany in Deptford on November 24th, 2007. A date for one’s diary, indeed, groovers.

A brief aside: There used to be a fun band in the South London of the mid-1980s called the Deptford Draylons, a riff on Brentford Nylons, a manufacturer of the sort of shirt in the 1970s that would combine maximum sweating with high-output static discharge. A winning combination, if ever I’ve heard one.
The Deptford Draylons, giving it large at Club Draylon

Back to reality:
Poor Clive ended up having to borrow basses and bits off me for the rehearsal, as the place he’d dropped off all his super-ninja basses and guitars to had rather inconveniently shut for a holiday on the day he’d previously arranged to go and collect them. The twats. Still, he made more of a fist of the tunes than I did, even though he was severely lacking in strings in certain ditties. I of course attribute this to large-scale cheating on his part...

I’d managed, in my infinite and labyrinthine wisdom, to bring copies of Clive’s notes on the songs and leave my own at home. This didn’t help terribly, as all my crib sheets would have meant I could actually have played on a lot more of the stuff on day one. Clive’s notes are obliquely useful (and I’m grateful for them, at the very least for working out what he calls this bit here, etc.), but there are a million little shorthand clues I’ve given myself on my notes that refer to sound patches, silly names for parts (which help me remember them) and when and where it turns into “Battle of the Keyboardists” with three people playing simultaneously.

“You mean I have to actually play all the way through this song? With both hands? God, man! Have you taken leave of your senses?”

Hope to see the odd reader of this blog at the Albany, as I’m sure it’ll be a gas.

Pretty vacancy

2007-08-28T16:40:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

If anyone knows of a junior Flash developer, someone young who wants to get started in the field of Flash work, or a freelancer with a bit of spare time to devote to some not-terribly-taxing work, push them my way. I suppose that location doesn’t really matter, unless you’re after the full-time position. Then it’s Hertfordshire, UK, people.

It’s time to expand and the work is getting beyond me now.

I’ll be asking on FB too.

Grrr...

2007-08-18T22:03:00.001+01:00

Apart from being ill, which rarely improves my mood, I’ve just finished reading the excellent Moon Dust by Andrew Smith (boy, did we ever get a better cover than the US release!), in which he tracks down the nine remaining men who actually set foot on the moon during the plainly bonkers period of the Apollo missions. Hate it when a good book comes to an end, however unavoidable it obviously is.

Apollo and Concorde. Two examples of where we’re heading technologically backwards.

Ho hum.

That ain’t workin’

2007-08-17T09:57:00.000+01:00

I know I ought to be working on the various bits of Flash programming for one of our healthcare clients, but the more I work on the TN tunes, the more easily I can find reasons to be tinkering with them, finding new sounds or a different slant on them to offer the rest of the guys when we meet up for official rehearsals in a couple of weeks.

Usually, my role as Tactical Work Avoidance Officer sees me clearing out another host tower in Oblivion or completing a quest in the huge world of Tamriel (if you don’t know what I’m on about, think yourself lucky that you’re not a computer geek like me...). Now, however, I seem to be neglecting my duties as a sword-wielding adventurer, saving the virtual world of Tamriel from certain doom, and instead find myself wondering whether I could replace a particular synth sound with something else, whether a part could be changed or removed entirely, or if I could somehow surreptitiously fit a banjo solo in somewhere.

Okay, that last bit was stretching it somewhat, but you get the picture.

Even though I’m learning other peoples’ parts (oo-err), there’s much fun to be had working out the tunes. Obviously, I’d never listened to them in this manner before, and I’m discovering some real gems tucked away in the arrangements. If there’s anyone reading this that’s a TN fan from way back and that is going to be at the gigs, fear not. The songs are NOT going to unrecognisable caricatures of their earlier incarnations. Some have so little need of input from me in terms of arrangement, and stand up on their own. Others need a little coaxing to emerge into the light, while a few need a damn good thrashing to sort them out. ;-)

Now, apart from putting that always-tempting banjo well out of reach, I need to remove two desks from my studio in order to put together a live keyboard/bass/guitar setup that isn’t the size of Mount Olympus. TTFN...

Sequencing

2007-08-16T08:36:00.001+01:00

Some of the most defining moments in TN history, certainly from the point of view of an audience member, would have to be found in a couple of large tracks, Sequences and Creepshow. The former is over sixteen minutes long, with the latter weighing in at around twelve.

Both are lyrically involved, with dark and intense subject matter, and both lent themselves to the theatricality of the frontman (whether it was Andy or Geoff) becoming the conduit for the story. While Creepshow is ostensibly about the abnegation of individual free will to that of the state in the form of meek compliance and acceptance of one’s role in society (see 1984’s media manipulation and restriction of information), Sequences took the subject of the Great War to illustrate a similar theme. Without detracting in any way from the horrific sacrifice of the individual, it went for the jugular of the will of the state, which fed an entire (and sadly willing) generation into the uncaring abbatoir of war.

I could be wrong, but I think we’re seeing the same thing happening to young Americans/Brits/‘westerners’ and a section of the followers of Islam that have both been persuaded that killing each other is a ‘patriotic duty’ that overarches any kind of personal or individual respect for freedom. From the lyric of Sequences:

If hate and war could solve anything, don’t you think they’d have solved it a long time ago?

Though there are many excellent songs about war, this one (and that line in particular) rings true. I remember quoting it to Frank, who had been through the farce of Operation Market Garden in Arnhem and, after a pause with a faraway look in his eyes, he just nodded.

So, whether you’re an atheist like me, or you have some holy book you read out of for comfort or guidance, isn’t it about time that we all started playing nice? Especially if we consider ourselves to be in any way evolved...

Plastic fantastic

2007-08-15T08:53:00.000+01:00

So far, I’ve managed to procure five of the nine pieces of the fairing for the bike from around the world.

The even better news is that, apart from one of them, most of the missing plastic bits are either quite small, or are supposed to be a different colour from the rest of it.

Of course, this was all a lot easier when the task was to find any fairing panels at all in the right colour. As it narrows down to just one or two, I’m sure it’s going to drag on and on. But still, I’ve got a bunch of old panels that I’m painting up in a suitable colour that will do until it gets dressed up in the proper outfit.

Hurrah, the path back to rideability is slowly getting shorter. ;-)

Tally ho!

2007-08-13T18:26:00.000+01:00

Today in the UK, there is a story rolling around in the news-bucket about a video that has been made by some ex-pupils from a public school (Non-Empire Citizens, this means a private school. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, just report them in all their idiocy). In this video, some youths are getting ready for the hunt. This involves sitting on a horse in a red coat, being terribly posh and sipping champagne. They then set out on the hunt for what would normally be a fox or other small and generally insignificant creature (I use that in the sense of scale, not worth).

What’s different this time is that they are out hunting chavs. Chasing them across fields (though I wouldn’t imagine that a genuine chav has any idea what a field actually is) and eventually gunning them down in glorious slow motion. Well, the last bit is actually just them leaping about a bit. There’s no blood. Pity...

This has, in typical British fashion, caused a furore among the chattering classes who, when confronted with any perceived dig at the proles, react with wide-eyed (and tiresomely predictable) outrage.

The big problem with this reaction is twofold.

The video was made by kids from (relatively) privileged backgrounds, yet the kids playing the chavs (let’s not forget that this is FICTION, by the way) are also from the same school. It was done to raise a few laughs and is not the beginning of some kind of class war. If there was one afoot, I’d contend that it had already been started by the chavs and the middle- to upper-classes had only just realised they ought to turn up and do something.
This story broke in the same week that a father of three was beaten to death by teenagers outside his own home, after attempting to get them to stop breaking windows in the digger parked in his own driveway.

So, I think there might just be a problem of perspective on the part of “outraged of Islington”. Once the scruffy herberts who think that ‘violence proves you’re a man’ stop acting like packs of wild dogs on the streets, perhaps the odd humorous video might be seen as just that and not the end of the world (yet again).

I thought it was rather well-made actually. A couple of pieces to look out for: When one of the chavs is pinned down on the ground, the solitary “hunt dog” is giving his arm a friendly licking rather than being terribly savage in any way, and the occasional giggling going on by the “chavs” as they run past the camera. Nice choice of music too.

I have to wonder, had this been a sketch on Rory Bremner’s show, Catherine Tate’s, or the redoubtable John Stewart’s Daily Show whether it would have caused any outrage whatsoever. Guess that’s the power of celebrity - we can’t have amateurs knocking this stuff out, can we?

Diddly-diddly-diddly-dee...

2007-08-13T10:24:00.000+01:00

Argh, my brain is starting to fry with learning the keyboard parts for the Twelfth Night gigs. ;-)

Try as I might, and I’m making copious crib-notes here, some of the parts are starting to blur into each other. One of the major difficulties is that there are constantly at least two versions of any given tune running through my head.

The original version. This is the one I’m attempting to pull parts from by ear. Though I’ve got a bunch of notes to help me (thanks, Clive!), it’s realistically more easy for me to zip backwards and forwards through a tune and dissect it, before working out the sounds that most closely resemble those used at the time of recording.
The “live” arrangement. This would be me sat down, thinking, “well, I can’t play that, that AND that as well,” so I need to work out what can actually be played by a keyboardist with less than six arms, and what are the most relevant parts for live performance.
The “this century” version. This is the trickiest one for me. Not wanting to butcher the songs, but seeing the screaming great holes where FEEL is missing or where a section is crying out to be instrumentally rearranged to bring out the best in the tune. I’m also not really in the market for pissing off the rest of the guys in the band by breezing in and saying “No no no, do it like this, it’s much better than the way you ever did it before I came along”. That’ll go down like a lead balloon full of plague and herpes. That said, there’s a particular tune which, in my notes, I’ve christened the Twelfth Night Christmas Special as it’s a disturbingly Yule-tastic ballad, with enormous Phil Spector-like strings and (over) production. Rather than attempt to go bonkers sequencing a huge string section (which is unlikely to be played in time with live), I suggested stripping it down to a two-guitars-and-singer basic arrangement, bringing out the simple elegance of the song, and letting the singer not have to compete with eight hundred violins sawing away in the background. And that, it seems, is how we’re going to be doing it. He’s got a good voice and it also adds a lovely bit of light and shade to the set.

Harrumph. We’ll see how well the other ideas go down at the end of the month. Back to a bit of Flash programming for clients to take my mind off it...

In the margins

2007-08-10T17:24:00.000+01:00

Traffic congestion, as even the most startlingly retarded and web-fingered amongst us ought to be able to recognise, is becoming worse.

Solutions, such as they are, usually involve massive (and therefore expensive and environmentally damaging) road-building schemes which, during the time they are carried out, cause even more congestion and usually end up ‘solving’ the problem for only about six months. If at all. And this doesn’t even touch on rail ‘solutions’ (read ‘cock-ups’).

One of the slightly more forward-thinking attempts at alleviating the road congestion in the UK has been the advent of Bus Lanes, which pretty much didn’t exist when I was a kid. Eleventy trillion years ago.
Though not exactly a revolution, they are at least an attempt to persuade punters to not use a car for a journey that they can clearly see a bus making in a tenth of the time at rush hour. All niggles aside (like traveling at a time when children are allowed to use the damn things, our unique British way of needing the imagined privacy of our own car and not wanting any involvement at all with other people whatsoever, etc.), they are generally a good move and enable public transport to keep moving when other traffic is at a standstill.

Another way of cutting through traffic, especially like that shown above, is on a motorcycle. Filtering through the stationary lines of cars at a few miles an hour, intently watching for the jerk who changes lanes without seeming to find the indicator or mirrors that I’m damn sure were fitted to his/her car, can get you to your destination without adding in any way whatsoever to the congestion.

Which, circuitously, brings us back to Bus Lanes. Currently, in almost all parts of the UK, all other motorised vehicles are forbidden from using Bus Lanes. Restricting cars and trucks I understand. If there are enough of them, they just fill up the lane and the bus can’t get through. But bikes? Why? Unless there was a sudden failure of the electrics on all the bikes in a big rally (actually, if you had a big bunch of Harley Davidsons, that is a distinct possibility...) it’s rather unlikely that a broken-down or even illegally parked bike would cause much of an obstruction to a bus. Besides, the primary use of any vehicle is to get to the destination, so they would naturally keep moving. As you can see from the picture above, taxis are able to use the lanes, so how come bikes are not?

Recently, a petition on the government’s website was started:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Allow the use of “Bus Only” lanes by scooters and motorcycles throughout the UK.

Generally stated, the idea is that we (bike riders) should be able to use the bus lanes without risk of penalty at any time of the day. Bikes (unlike taxis) don’t contribute to congestion, so it ought to be a no-brainer.

Here’s the eventual, timid-as-fuck, buck-passing reply (my emphasis).

“The Government recognises that motorcycling has become increasingly popular and offers a number of benefits.

Bus lanes are the responsibility of the relevant highway authority. In February 2007, The Department for Transport issued new guidance in the form of a Traffic Advisory Leaflet 2/07 on “The Use of Bus Lanes by Motorcycles”. This makes clear to local highway authorities that it is open to them to decide whether or not to allow motorcycles to use bus lanes and encourage them to make an objective assessment of the issue.

The new guidance revises the previous Department for Transport’s advice on bus lanes, Local Transport Note 1/97: Keeping Buses Moving, which recommended that motorcycles should not normally be permitted to use bus lanes.”

So, they’ve sort of vaguely told local highway authorities to sort it out for themselves. Not recommended that they take it as the default position, just “made it clear” to local highway authorities to, erm, decide for themselves. Wow, tough stuff, eh? And just how are motorcyclists going to be able to work out whether a particular local authority is allowing or restricting usage? “Offers a number of benefits”. What? Like free healthcare and a two-for-one offer at the movies?

This is just one of those “Look at us, we had a meeting about it. Aren’t we great? Bet you didn’t have a meeting.” statements, stringing a bunch of English words together into something that looks like a coherent sentence, but is suspiciously free of meaning.

What staggers me even more is that there was, in 1997, a document drafted and passed, called “Keeping Buses Moving” that actually recommended that bikes not be allowed to use the lanes. This implies that someone somewhere actually took the time to think about it and came up with the addle-pated conclusion that somehow bikes would slow buses down. I’d love to know how.

When debating this, generally it actually has to be stated (and I’m not kidding here) that the subject is about bus lanes being used by traffic traveling in the same direction as the buses. Dear god...

Back in 2005, Baroness Hanham tried to raise an amendment in the House of Lords:

“My Lords, I return to the discussion that we had in Committee on the possibility of motorcycles using bus lanes. Primarily that would deliver important improvements in road safety, particularly for motorcyclists themselves. Moreover, increasing the safety of motorcycling would perhaps encourage more people to take up this environmentally friendly alternative to the car, which in turn would make significant contributions to the alleviation of local traffic problems.”

A good point, well made, to which Baroness Crawley came out with this platter of fresh tripe:

“As noble Lords will know, the purpose of designating bus lanes is to give priority to buses over other classes of traffic. The more other motorised vehicles are allowed to use those lanes as a statutory entitlement, the more their purpose becomes devalued. I am sympathetic to the principle of improving facilities for motorcyclists, including their use of bus lanes where appropriate. Local authorities have powers to allow other vehicles to use bus lanes if they consider that it would be desirable, and probably a minority of local authorities are pursuing that practice. We do not have the exact figures of the number of local authorities that allow motorcyclists to use bus lanes, but as the noble Baroness has said, the provision is there for local authorities to take up.”

So, allowing the use of bus lanes by vehicles which cause infinitesimal to no congestion and are much more environmentally friendly than cars would “devalue the purpose” of the bus lane? What utter drivel. I contend that buses and bikes could easily co-exist in the same space without the latter holding up the former in any way. And I’m itching for some car-industry-financed whore to attempt to prove otherwise...

Fobbing the responsibility off to scattered local authorities will result in a patchwork of confused permissions for bikes to use bus lanes and a slew of court cases featuring bikers disputing their fines, on the basis that there was no clear signposting, that will reveal the policy to be another ill-thought-out mess by an over-timid government which seems unable to apply common sense to a clear-cut situation.

Also, you have to think of the other road users’ need to know that a bike is supposed to be in the bus lane. Paramount in this is informing pedestrians. I for one wouldn’t like a kid from one area, where bikes are prohibited from using the lanes, staying at a relative’s place and getting injured by running out into the bus lane when a bike is approaching. The rider will also get hurt, by the way. You don’t plough through things and drive off on a bike...

Back to Baroness Hanham, bless her:

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply. I am slightly disappointed because I thought that in Committee we were probably opening a little door to what seems to be a perfectly sensible proposal for road safety. I understand that local authorities may have their own views on this but, equally, I understand that there is consistency in most road usage. However, there is no consistency about buses using bus lanes. While it is not a matter for this amendment, noble Lords will be aware of many occasions when buses have been not in the bus lane, which takes at least half the width of the road, but in the motorists’ part of the road. So some even-handedness is required.

Hear hear, as they say. Sadly, her attempted amendment was forced to be withdrawn. It has taken a public petition to even get this tiny change in the position of government. I’m confused, don’t they work for us?

Mark Spencer, reanimator

2007-08-08T12:45:00.000+01:00

I’ve got one of these in my back garden. Not exactly what you’d call a super-duper new cutting-edge, racing thing, but a solid old sports-tourer (with the emphasis on the tourer, not the sport). The bits of the bike that look black in the photo above (such as the tank, fairing and front mudguard) are actually a rather fetching dark metallic navy blue*.

*Which I have since discovered is called “Prussian Blue Metallic” by Suzuki.

For those interested, the GSXF750 (or GSX750F, depending on how your bike was painted) is a detuned GSX-R (R is for racing) 750 engine in a more pedestrian frame, and a much more comfortable riding position for doing anything other than screaming about at a billion miles per hour. I’ve been to Scotland a couple of times on the old girl, and she’s always been a good ride (no sniggering at the back there!).

Sadly, money and the need to transport more gear than I could on a bike (plus the shitty bike weather for most of the year and having had spinal surgery) meant that she got put under a cover and pretty much abandoned. I’d spent some time amateurishly attempting a respray in a brighter metallic blue, but it was always going to be a bit of a botch-job, as it was being conducted out in the open in the back garden, in some of the windiest weather we’d had for a while...

So, sadly, a most enjoyable bike was left to rot. Every once in a while I’d lift the covers to show someone what it was like, and as the years progressed, the wrapping of cobwebs underneath the thick cover had enveloped her even more. She was less in a slumber and more in a coma from which it seemed I’d never have the time or resources to revive her.

Five years ago, eBay was not the thing it is now. Getting hold of parts for an old bike that Suzuki haven’t made in years is now a distinct possibility. That, plus finally finding gaps in the work schedule to do things for myself (like go to Canada, buy the occasional new guitar and so forth) meant that I was gradually clearing a backlog of “things to do”. The red bike, which I’ll take a shot of soon, was hauled out of its two-year stupor and got back on the road. The car, which had been misbehaving more and more, was finally serviced and put back in order. I also finally had a shed of a decent size, which I’d always planned (dreamed) might be put into service as a workshop to “fix up that old blue thing”.

I also have a pressure-washer now so, armed with that, wearing my overalls, goggles and gloves and with a selection of brushes, detergents and de-gunging liquids to hand, I gingerly peeled off the dirty old cover and revealed a very sorry-looking wreck of a bike. A thick layer of grey webbing had pretty much enveloped it and made removing the cover a pretty unpleasant task.

I set about it with the pressure washer in order to make it clean enough so I could find the bolts to undo the plastic panels of the bodywork and remove the seat and fuel tank. As soon as that was off, I then had to clean it all over again as the removal had just revealed more hideous crap and snail droppings from where things had crawled into the frame and taken up residence. Once that was done, the front and rear light assemblies came off to be cleaned and have their rust spots removed.
As you can see, she’s looking deeply sorry for herself (as you probably also would, having a naked picture paraded around the internet by your owner), with the removed pieces scattered about all over the garden and tucked away in the shed (unless they’ve been thrown away). However, even in this state, the rear wheel has cleaned up shockingly well, the carbs seem to be moving freely and all the lines and hoses appear to be intact. eBay has provided me with a couple of parts of the bodywork in a pristine, never-been-fitted state, so I continue to scour the auctions for the odd bit and piece (let’s hope the remaining bits of plastic don’t take me five years to source!) that I discover I need as I go.

It’s going to be a long project (the red bike needed three days of cleaning alone before it was back on the road), but it stops me from being sat in front of a computer all day and gets me out doing something with my hands that I find very therapeutic. Plus, with a little bit of help from eBay, I reckon I can bring her back from the dead. She deserves a few more years of fun before shuffling off to the scrapyard, just like me.

The black keys are the loud ones, right?

2007-08-01T09:35:00.000+01:00

This morning, I will mostly be sitting down and working my way through the tunes I have to learn in order to get through the first real rehearsal in September in one piece without eliciting a smack in the mouth from the other band members for being, well, crap.

Martin Orford, the (very talented) keyboardist and founder member of IQ, summed up the art and mystery of the keyboardist’s duties thus:

Keyboards is easy. I mean, you can play keyboards when you’re drunk. The low notes are one end and the high notes the other end.

No-one likes a smart-arse, Martin... ;-) Actually though, he’s right. All the clues as to what to play are right in front of you - go right for high notes, go left for low notes. The difficulties with this gig are much the same as they would be for a guitarist, drummer, bassist or singer, coming to a series of tunes with parts already recorded by someone else, viz:

The parts themselves are not natural. Though they fit with the song, another person’s rhythms are always hard to decipher. What seems natural and ‘obvious’ to me will not be so to someone else and vice-versa. I work as a musician very much based on the feel of the constituent parts of a piece. It will seem very stilted until it finally gels in my head. And may take some time to do so.
Many of the parts were recorded in the 1980s. This means that, in some areas, horrid keyboard stabs and some pretty ghastly preset sounds were used. This is in no way to denigrate the band themselves, merely the time in which these things were recorded. Fuck me, we all used to think that orchestra stabs (which reached their nadir on Paul Young’s Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down) were a good idea at one point. One only has to listen to Muse, Radiohead, Coldplay, Porcupine Tree, Keane and Mansun (among many others) to hear how the textural use of sounds has evolved across the years. Thank christ...
Live gigs are not the same as recorded tracks. I know that seems to be stating the obvious, but too many bands attempt to faithfully reproduce exactly what was recorded in the studio live. Recording and gigging are very different things. When playing live there is an audience. Again, this sounds bloody obvious but, as a band, your duty to the audience is to put on a show, not to please yourself with how many notes-per-second you can get into a solo or how high you can sing, or any of the many other unforgivable “muso” indulgences. Most of the parts I’m working on are undoubtedly reproducible live, but many of them will be changed. Not just because “I want to”, but to improve what the audience get to hear and see, as well as to let some more important parts, simultaneously played by other band members, to breathe a bit.
Some of the parts are simply not very good. I don’t mean technically, as they’re all in time and in tune. It’s just that there are some of them that crowd out other features of the songs (see point 3), as well as some that fight against the tone of the song that they sit within. This applies almost equally to some of the drum parts which, at times, unnecessarily follow the riff of a tune, instead of offering a backdrop for the riff to stand against. Back to the keys, there is a song, essentially about fascism, which really requires some Marilyn Manson-esque soundscapes, rather than the parts already existing. So, I’m coming up with new stuff to help bring a bit of ‘edge’ to this and a good few other tunes.
I’m trying very hard not to buy a huge bunch of new gear with which to do a few gigs and then not be able to find a use for afterwards. Most of my keyboard sounds are generated by plugins within my various computers, so having a big pile of rack units is a bit on the redundant side. That said, computers have a gleeful ploy of nose-diving at the most inopportune moments, and these little sods will most likely leave me soundless right at the moment I have to leap into a big, pivotal part in a tune. Hmm, tricky. So, I’m keeping one eye on a few things on eBay for possible purchase, god help my bank accounts...

Fortunately, as long as I don’t eviscerate what any of the tunes essentially are, I’ve at least got a free rein to bring something new to the table. The guys are open to suggestion, though a couple don’t seem to have heard any new bands in the last twenty years (certainly outside of prog-land), so it could be a bit of an uphill struggle to find common reference material... ;-)

With regard to point 3 above, in the panoply of neo-prog bands around at the same time as us, there were two camps. One lot that wore cheesecloth shirts, patched jeans, long frizzy hair and studiously stood around, playing deeply anorak-y, yawn-worthy, earnest music and the second lot who, though playing reasonably technical stuff, tended to show more than a passing interest in make-up, ‘stage clothes’ and general leaping about, putting on a show. The band I’m joining may well have had a cheesecloth era, but they certainly weren’t like that by the time I knew them. Make-up, spandex and beads in the hair were all part of their show, along with the liberal use of props for the singer for some of the more ‘epic’ numbers. I was also a spandex devotee (fear not, I’m far too old for all of that now, it would just be too embarrassing for words) and had by far the most outrageous haircuts of any of the prog frontmen of the time.

Rest assured, I won’t be looking much like this again (that’s me on the right). I simply don’t have the hair any more...

Nice earrings...

There’s also a large chunk of inertia to fight on my part. Not that I don’t want to do the gigs, but it means ripping apart my studio setup to even rehearse, a task that shouldn’t take too long to do, but ages to put right. Then again, that has usually meant that I put it back together in a more usable fashion, so I should probably be grateful. Or something.

Today, now that I’ve shut up a couple of my major clients by throwing tons of work back at them, I’m going to be sorting through the tunes, attempting to work out whether I can do them all with the gear I have, without tying myself in knots or wrecking my studio to do so. I’ll keep you posted...

I have the powerrrrrrr...

2007-07-30T14:49:00.000+01:00

I have had a red mexican Fender Strat for the best part of the last twenty years, during which time it’s never really been used in anger. Certainly not at a gig or anything. Though it was second-hand when I got it, with all its dings and scrapes, it still is a real Fender Strat and I do rather enjoy playing it.

I would have been hopping from foot to foot as a teenage proto-musician if I’d have been able to lay my hands on one of them, simply for the fact that, if you put the pickup selector switch just there, you get a wonderful, bell-like, kind-of-hard-to-describe sound that no other guitar really gets anywhere near. That, plus I had no money.

Now, it’s had plenty of studio outings, where its lack of oomph can be worked around, but I’d always hankered after somehow ‘getting it sorted’ so I could use it more. It’s enjoyable to play, just frustratingly gutless compared to all my other guitars (of which there are currently thirteen, and a banjo).

For those unfamiliar with the world of electric guitars and their aftermarket bits ‘n’ bobs, the two closest approximations I can think of are either the world of custom computer building (of which I am also an avid inhabitee), or the far more ghastly world of strap-on bits for cars. Mainly, this latter area seems to be for people who hold to strange and arcane beliefs that a gutless, worthless, hideous pile of rusty compact-car tat can be made into a thing of gorgeous artistic loveliness by the simple application of some deafening speakers, horrifyingly expensive paint, stripes, plastic replacement lights that apparently make your tiny car look like a Lexus, and what are known as ‘body kits’. Which just make cars look like shit.

Returning to my main thrust (oo-err), there is a pretty large market of bits and pieces with which to, umm, make one’s guitar go faster. Or, in this case, “go more louderer”. There are boutique manufacturers of pickups, designed to elicit tones “you never knew your guitar could produce”. What, like the bellow of a defecating gorilla with hemmorhoids? There are literally hundreds of potential “drop-in” replacement parts before one even thinks of taking a router to the wood and accommodating something larger.

I’m no stranger to the smell of the soldering iron. Many of my other guitars are modified, tweaked, fiddled with in some way or otherwise non-standard. When younger, I always just thought that a guitar was a guitar and you pretty much got what you were given. Oh, how I can look back and laugh now... ;-)

The prime reason for taking so long with the Strat comes back to that particular sound it can produce. You wouldn’t want to up the power but in the process lose the tone, would you? Not that you couldn’t put it back to the way it was before, but it just seems a rather profligate way forward.

Then, light dawned. Or, more accurately the manufacturer EMG came up with a rather neat little solution. As you can see from the pic of the guitar, all the pickups and electronics (volume and tone controls) are actually mounted on a sheet of plastic, known as a pickguard. After removing the strings, about seven screws and desoldering the two wires to the jack socket, the whole assembly lifts out. What EMG have done is not only make completely wired-up drop-in pickguards (because a whole bunch of other manufacturers do that), they’ve been working with respected guitarists across the years to come up with signature series pickguards, like the one I’ve just replaced Fender’s feeble pickups with, the David Gilmour model.

Knowing that it would be highly unlikely that Mr. G would want to lose the tone of the Strat (not too hard to find documentary evidence, really...) and being an admirer of his anyway, I thought it would be a fairly safe bet. It was indeed. The output from the guitar is now certainly comparable with many of the high-output Les Pauls and Yamahas that I have, but still has a lovely sweetness of tone that is the signature of the Strat. I’ve only just realised that the EMG website describes his main Strat as red too. Ooh, now I seem like a total fanboy...

Now all I have to do is find a way to be playing the thing for days on end without letting my business fall to the ground and remembering to eat occasionally... ;-)

Oh, and doing the keyboard rehearsals for the TN gigs. Oops, did I say that out loud..? ;-)

All aboard the Shite train

2007-07-29T12:43:00.000+01:00

The UK government has recently announced ‘major’ plans to upgrade the ailing rail network across the entire country. They’ve called it, in a typical blat of spin-induced frenzy, “the most ambitious plans for expanding the railway for 50 years”. Oh, my sides - the sheer hilarity...

I’m not sure whether the government believes that everyone in the UK has never been abroad and seen decent rail services for themselves, or whether they just don’t give a shit what the public think, but the plans amount to a publicly-funded, cheap-ass, low-rent patch-up job on a network that was eviscerated in the 1960s and hasn’t looked forward since.

‘Ground-breaking’ ideas like making platforms longer, chucking more trains on the already congested network and opening up the congested bottlenecks like Birmingham New Street and Reading. All of this is to be phased in across the next seven years and, once we get to 2014, will be evidently not enough and a new plan will have to be drawn up that takes into account that this one was the work of a conclave of retards.

Oh, but they have ruled out Maglev trains as they’re too expensive. Whoop-de-doo. And there was I, thinking that we’d all be given free jetpacks at our destinations by girls with purple hair wearing silver mini-skirts. Actually, I wonder if we can work that last bit in somehow... ;-)

At the risk of dredging up the ghost of the corrupt imbecile Beeching and his rail ‘reforms’ (look it up under “butchery” in the dictionary), there needs to be a little more forward thinking going on here. Otherwise, you can just give the money to me and I’ll burn it out on the patio. The rail users will be just as pissed off either way. Like it or not (and I happen to love it), the UK is part of Europe and really ought to start behaving appropriately. A long-term plan for adopting the continental loading gauges (the size of the trains themselves, not the distance between the rails, which is generally the same) would be much easier to implement. If the station platforms are going to be altered make them longer, why not make them lower and slightly further away from the trains? This would mean that continental rolling stock and (here comes the sucker punch of the whole piece) double-decker trains can start to be used, dramatically increasing passenger loads without cramming humans in like cargo.

Cattle get more space per animal when transported than humans. Bear that in mind...

In the 1890s, a real visionary by the name of Edward Watkin, chair of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway decided to expand and build its own line into London. Other rail companies were charging extortionate rates for use of their lines, and he also had another plan up his sleeve. Adopting the continental loading gauge, he wanted eventually to build a tunnel under the English Channel (or La Manche - “The Sleeve”, from the less proprietorial French perspective) and have a direct rail link to the mainland. One which would, rather handily, automatically be able to send trains through to his line with no adaptation or restrictions. History, in the shape of World War 1 and the financial overstretch of building the line (over £11 million) were sadly against the plans of the ambitious Great Central Railway.

As part of Doctor Beeching’s narrow-minded The Reshaping of British Railways (if you take out the “esh” in the first word, you get a much closer approximation of what he actually did...), the GCR was closed, much of its track was lifted, and only small sections remain in the hands of enthusiasts who just won’t let it die. Good for them.

Now, bearing in mind that there are lots of derelict track-beds about (yes, I know they’re not all complete now and some re-routing will have to take place), couldn’t the real re-building of the UK’s rail network begin to take place on old, abandoned routes, building a realistic network that could have the capacity for passengers and freight far exceeding those of the proposed “ambitious” plans? Yes, Birmingham and Reading desperately need expanding, but imagining that cobbling that together with a bunch of platform- and train-lengthening somehow constitutes a “plan” is the work of a gibbering syphilitic madman who grins while soiling himself.

We’re running out of space (actually, we pretty much already have run out of space) to build more roads. Most of which are either being destroyed by the amount of trucks using them, or are being clogged by them as they overtake each other at a speed differential of one mile per hour. The twats. There is a section of road between here and my mum’s which actually has permanently-installed signs warning of skidding hazards. Which have been caused by trucks gouging huge gullies in the roadbed of the nearside lane. These grooves, which are obviously wider than the wheelbase of most standard cars, drag the driver from side-to-side in the lane in a most disconcerting manner. Not a thought of repairing the damn surface, mind. Just a bunch of fucking signs.

I suppose one could always invest in a Hummer (a truck for people with no taste who can’t drive and don’t wish to learn, but somehow ‘need’ a military vehicle) which might just be wide enough. Or maybe a Lamborghini, though that might actually be even wider...

Freight by rail is more cost-effective if there’s a decent infrastructure in place. More passengers would surely use the rail network if they didn’t feel they’d be treated like cargo and crammed onto out-of-date rolling-stock (and possibly killed in one of our increasingly frequent crash “spectaculars”). I both love using the rail networks in mainland Europe and simultaneously feel ashamed of ours whenever I travel abroad.

So, ‘government’, stop patching up an old, knackered network, start thinking a little harder and actually take responsibility for making some tough, expensive decisions that will work on the larger timescales this country needs if it isn’t going to be the laughing-stock of the rest of the world. Stop putting old farts in decision-making posts regarding technology. They don’t know what they’re on about. Just look at the NHS IT reforms and tell me these overpaid buffoons know what the difference between a hard drive and memory is.*

And stop thinking that “more roads” is the kind of solution that someone with a functioning brain-stem would do anything other than spit on. Public execution would be too good for you.

*If you think they’re the same thing, go out into the yard and shoot yourself. Do it. Do it now, you cretin. Also do it if you think that “hard drive” is the big box that you switch on. That’s called a computer, you web-fingered throwback.

God Speed

2007-07-24T09:46:00.001+01:00

Writer Pal had organised a B&B, so I drove us down to Southampton to stay the night and get the ferry in the morning. Initially, we were going to take the car over, but as I hadn’t driven on the island before, didn’t know my way around, and the car ferry takes 55 minutes compared to the passenger-only hydrofoil’s nippy 23 minutes, I made the executive decision to leave the car in Southampton and travel by cabs once we hit the island.

The mighty Hank arrived, on his way back from a family holiday and the three of us boarded the ferry, beginning what was to become a day of often very amusing reminiscing of our times with our now-absent friend, Frank.

I’d never set foot on the Isle of Wight before Monday. Picturesque and hilly, it was unfortunately being drizzled on from the leaden skies, something which never really stopped for the whole day. Didn’t stop it from being a pleasant place, though the cab drivers would have a tough time beating a glacier in a speed trial. After coffees in the terminal area, we schlepped across to the crematorium for the service. Pulling into the car park, I was relieved to see at least one athletically-torsoed young woman with her top off, as a family hastily got dressed into more funereal duds behind a car. If you’re reading, I’m sure a light blue lacy bra was “just what Frank would have wanted”. Ho ho.

Meeting up with Marion, Frank’s ex-wife who’d arranged much of the day, we were introduced in quick succession to a whole host of family and friends who were all doing their best to hold it together before the service kicked off. A lovely little booklet, with a photo of Frank at his dashing best, outlined the non-religious order of things, and it was lovely to see that another mate, though not able to attend, had selected a poem to be read out during the ceremony.

Amy, the celebrant, took us through a wonderfully personal history of Frank. Too many funerals have an impersonal feel, with the speaker obviously not really knowing much about the subject and caring little for the detail of their lives. Not this one. In fact, it was so moving, both in terms of laughter and tears, and evoking so many treasured memories of our boy that I, for one, was glad that there was a Van Morrison tune in the middle.

I can’t stand Van Morrison. Having something else to think about, ie. just what it was that would drive normally sane people to waste perfectly good money on Van bloody Morrison albums, gave me a brief, but desperately welcome respite from knowing that, just over there in that box, my mate was dead. In truth, I’m not exactly dry-eyed as I write this.

After the ceremony, we took another glacial cab to this place - the Spyglass in Ventnor:

In the boathouse at the back, collages of photos and old publicity shots were laid out from Frank’s time as a stunt-man and arranger. There were many shots of him taken at fan conventions and Prisoner-related events down the years, many of which triggered yet more memories amongst us. There was an awful lot of “Do you remember when Frank said...” or “What about that time when Frank...” as the afternoon turned into the evening. A lovely spread of food and wine was descended upon by the assembled horde and many a glass was raised by us all in memory of our very dear friend.

A chap called Dave told us about the time he’d been out walking his dog at the same time Frank had been walking his two. Another dog had created some kind of disturbance, at which Frank’s two dogs had proceeded to run round his legs, tying them together with their leads. Frank had fallen over and this chap Dave had gone to see if he was alright. The first thing out of Frank’s mouth, as he was lying there on the floor, was “Normally, I’d have rolled out of that. I’m a stuntman, you know...”

During the ceremony, Frank’s friend Steve had understatedly described Frank as not exactly a religious man. Though he speculated that, if Frank was to be proved wrong and there was an afterlife, he could just see Frank wandering up to the fella in the throne, asking him what rank he was, and then quietly telling him “You’re in my chair...”.

I chatted briefly with Frank’s daughter who, it turns out, lives not too far away from me with her family - small world, eh? Marion and her new husband Paul were a mine of information about the island and were instructing me on places to see and places to stay when I go back. I will be going back hopefully this year, when there may just be a bit of half-decent weather, on the bike, to do a little bit of a tour of the island at a leisurely pace. Even though it was rainy and overcast, looking out to sea then back up at the small town of Ventnor hugging the small harbour and modest beach, I could definitely see why Frank had decided eventually to go there to live and, eventually, make it the place he would be laid to rest.

Adieu, from all of Frank’s boys.

Under Water

2007-07-22T13:28:00.000+01:00

As most of the UK is disappearing under the floods, the RNLI is bizarrely having to send lifeboats inland, in order to rescue people from hotel bedrooms, stranded cars and their homes. If you’re able, please spare a thought for the volunteers who man the real “fourth emergency service” and, if you can, donate a few quid.

I’m off to stay in a hotel in Southampton tonight, in order to make the ferry crossing tomorrow morning for Frank Maher’s funeral and wake (see blog entries passim) on the Isle of Wight. It’s good to know that there are quite a few of us making the trek to see him off. Though there’s more rain scheduled, the wake’s going to be in Frank’s favourite pub, so we’ll be able to give him a decent send-off without needing rescuing... ;-)

Now to find a nice loud shirt to go with my black suit. Frank always appreciated my sartorial elegance. Usually by wincing when he saw me... :-)

Dead Lines

2007-07-20T10:50:00.000+01:00

Well, well, well... It seems that, on a Friday mid-morning, a client has decided to have a teleconference to go through their ideas for a job that needs a complete rework for a client meeting Wednesday next week.

’Scuse me if I don’t fall off my chair in shock, surprise or anything other than a spot of moderately weary resignation that this is the way of things. This particular job is also being developed with a writer who, being a mother, has the added joy of school finishing early today at 1pm and therefore having a short supply of available concentration time this afternoon.

When, during the teleconference, the client outlined the timescale for delivery, there was an unhealthy and awkward pause, during which the writer and I really couldn’t think of anything to say. Well, no really easy way of saying “you’re fucking kidding, right?”. Having had a previous deadline reduced from nine days to two to get a bunch of visuals in on time, and having shoved tons of other work out of the way to do so, it does grate somewhat to have the same thing repeated no more than a week later, after getting things back on track (ish).

Not that I hold anyone at the client particularly responsible. Being the supplier at the end of a long chain of clients, end-clients and legal departments means that everyone’s hold-ups collect in a malodorous pile on my desk. My client is running about almost as much as I am to get this stuff delivered to their client. One of the more difficult things about operating a business and being in direct contact with clients is knowing how to say no, or to knock them back when they start treating you (unconsciously, I hope) as an employee, or at least as someone who has no other clients than them.

Terpsichore, my legal-eagle chum, often has the same problems with one of her clients for whom she does a three-day-a-week residency at their HQ. Her immediate bosses have no space in their diaries for any new appointments between now and Christmas, yet she’s just been asked (well, it’s basically been assumed) to attend three meetings, at which she’s expected to stand up and do a presentation, in just over a week. In Birmingham, Manchester and London (I think). Finding just the right levels of insouciance with which to raise one eyebrow, laugh and say “I think not” are sometimes a little tricky.

And, instead of getting on with the work, what am I doing? Blogging... ;-)

Compact rehearsals

2007-07-18T22:17:00.000+01:00

A small room, four musicians and twenty years since the music in question’s been played at what one might charitably term “battle speed”. What had the potential to have been a process akin to extracting teeth with mole grips while simultaneously being kicked in the nuts actually turned out to be one of quite jolly fun.

I am now part of a venture which will remain nameless for a few more weeks (though the generally astute and venerable readers of this blog will undoubtedly piece together the fiendishly cryptic clues and work it out) until it gets announced officially. As long as my memory, right hand and available practice time hold together for me, I should be involved in playing keyboards, the odd bit of bass, guitar and singing here and there at some gigs later in the year. What fun!

As was commented on during today’s relaxed rehearsals, there are the people who will come and see the band who were originally fans, but there is also a whole slew of people who have never known any of us in any kind of musical context. The reactions of the latter to seeing us on stage should cause some not inconsiderable merriment among our ranks.

Not that I’ll be able to do much in the way of “rocking out” as I may have done in the past for two very good reasons.

I’m not the singer in this particular outfit. Being the singer (at least when I used to do it) meant that one could stare keenly in the other direction when loading and unloading of vans took place, producing a battered tambourine from a rucksack at the appropriate moment as if it had required some kind of effort. Moreover, it meant that one was relatively unencumbered on stage with tiresome things like instruments. This gives one free rein to leap about, shake one’s mane and otherwise indulge in ‘giving it the large one in a rock stylee’. (nb. this usually results in one’s singing coming out like the gasps of a bronchial marathon runner, so not necessarily a terribly good thing)
I’m going to be playing keyboard parts that are 20% simple, 70% moderate to complex and 10% holy crap. While playing the first 20%, I’m sure I could bounce around a bit, the 70% ranges from grooving on the spot to fairly vigorous head-nodding, but the last 10% are a carpal-tunnel syndrome sufferer’s nightmare. Not that I’m complaining, mind. I’m sure our first ‘all the band together’ rehearsal will be conspicuous for being let down the most by my good self, but that hasn’t deterred me from finding a good deal of fun in it all.

If the shrewd observer wishes to see a particularly fine example of me ‘rocking out’, then look no further than the first track in the set, on which I play bass and not keyboards. One of my old buddies in this venture says he can’t wait to see this happen, but may need to be carried off the stage as he’ll be in fits of hysterics. Charming, eh? ;-)

I’ll probably jot the occasional batch of rehearsal notes as we go on, for those interested.

Fearless Frank

2007-07-14T11:47:00.001+01:00

The world has just lost a tiny bit of its lustre.

Frank Maher, my friend, passed away yesterday.

A mini-bio from the Cult TV website:

After serving in the Parachute Regiment during the war, Frank Maher worked as a stuntman and actor on many of the ITC action adventure shows. An expert in all forms of fighting, he became a master at crashing cars, falling from great heights and leaping through windows.

A stunt man on The Avengers, he played roles in three episodes opposite Honor Blackman. When Diana Rigg took over as Steed’s assistant he appeared as Nicholls in You Have Just Been Murdered, ultimately impaled on a scythe by Emma Peel.

After working on Man in a Suitcase he acted as the stunt co-ordinator for both Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

As well as Roger Moore’s stunt double in The Saint, he played Kraft in The Paper Chase and Rip Savage in the two-part story The Fiction Makers. Two years later he doubled for Moore a second time in The Persuaders!, and appeared in the episode The Man in the Middle.

Forging a long association with Patrick McGoohan after being his stunt double in Danger Man, Frank teamed up with the actor for The Prisoner.

As stunt director on the series, responsible for the action sequences and choreographed fight scenes, he played Number Six in the episode The Schizoid Man and appeared as a Gunman in Living in Harmony.

Frank retired from stunt work, after working on Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, and spent his later years writing adventure novels.

I first met Frank when we were both guests at the Cult TV Festival, back in 2000. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend who had worked with him on Blake’s 7, many years previously. We instantly got on, our shared sense of humour and taste for the absurd forging a strong bond of comradeship, which often seemed an unlikely match to observers, as we were both from widely different backgrounds and generations.

Frank had a thousand hilarious and moving anecdotes about the industry, was fiercely loyal, took absolutely no shit from studio types (especially Michael Winner), was a long-time friend of Robert Mitchum and Roger Moore, used to hang out with the Rat Pack and had only (when I met him, in his seventies) recently given up his black belt in shotokan karate.

Frank inspired people. My friend Henry, who Frank immediately christened “Hank”, and I would often sit and talk through the night with Frank, fascinated by his insights and the story of his life. I would tell friends that I knew were going to meet him for the first time that they were “going to fall in love with Frank”. Much like Hank, there are people who you can gauge other people by - if they like them, they’re good people. If they don’t, forget ’em.

My biggest regret is that I never saw enough of Frank, and never managed to badger out of him the full account of his time in Arnhem during WWII (or, “that fucking shambles” as he often referred to it). From what Frank told me, the film A Bridge Too Far came close, but nowhere near close enough.

Ladies and gentlemen, wherever you are, if you’re able, please raise a glass in memory of one of our country’s very finest sons - Mr. Frank Maher.

Band of Extreme Metal +5

2007-07-09T11:00:00.000+01:00

Having bought a couple of tickets to a guitar-type gig (Steve Vai) a couple of years back, I dragged along my mate H (she of the healthcare, policy, legal, pr industry, guru-type) who happens to also do a good line in ‘rock chick’ whenever the Bon Jovi circus rolls into town. She’d not seen Vai before, and was suitably astonished, blown away and so forth by not only the man’s virtuosity and versatility, but also by the amount of fun that can be had watching what is basically a bunch of abnormally talented musicians letting loose and having a blast onstage.

Note to Kaiser Chiefs, Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, et al: it is actually possible to entertain people while not actually dumbing everything down to its lowest common denominator.

So, in return a little while back, and due in large part to the manner in which I continually buttonhole people about how Metallica put on a good show, H bought a bunch of tickets for their Wembley Stadium gig last night.

Though we were up in the stratosphere as can be seen from the shot taken from my phone, the show was a good one. Marred mainly by the family of three jug-eared twats just in front of us who insisted on standing and blocking the view for much of the set. Hey ho.

Judging by the tour dates listed on the backs of several t-shirts (the European leg only consisting of 12 shows) and the tour’s name - Sick of the Studio, it’s fairly safe to say that the boys have decided to let off steam with some stripped-down shows, rather than put on the full, 27-truck monster stage show that they have in recent years. If you haven’t seen the DVDs of Cunning Stunts, I really suggest you do. They’re quite something.

As full disclosure, the reason (apart from being a computer geek and complete nerd) that I ended up checking out Metallica live is due to working as a designer on several of their albums. From Load through to Garage, Inc. I had the distinct pleasure of working for and then with Andie Airfix of Satori (who really needs to get a website!) on translating Lars’ ideas, the rest of the band’s sketches and input, along with the management at Q-Prime’s ability to rein it all in into gargantuan artwork for the albums. Eventually I had to decamp a load of my gear into the Satori studio, so that Andie and I could be on tap for the US and also so we could bounce ideas around and quickly get things worked up into something that was worth sending across to the band. Andie has an astonishing CV, as long as your arm, of top acts he’s designed for. Plus, he’s a great guy and very easy to work with.

The Metallica jobs were always a joy to work on. The best photography (Anton Corbijn going out on tour with them as well as scores of sessions he’d done with them), always the largest amount of pages one could fit into a CD booklet, and many opportunities to have some fun with a few spoof covers flying backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. Though the boys in the band had very definite ideas about how things should look, they certainly weren’t averse to trying other suggestions out. One of the photo shoots for Load even had the band looking like they’d just walked out of the glam rock era of the seventies, make-up, false eyelashes, lipstick, fur coats and so forth. I can’t say that I blame the band for not using them in the end. Load was such a radical departure from their previous work that many previously loyal fans walked away from them at that moment. Personally, I think it’s their best since the Black Album, featuring some very thoughtful songwriting.

I was already away from working with them when the whole Some Kind of Monster, psycho-therapist, Jason-leaving thing happened, so I can’t comment on what might be going through their collective consciousness as a band. I watched the SKoM DVD and, from my experience of working with them, I’d say it’s a pretty accurate and honest showing of what they’re like as people. I remember having a long conversation in a bar with Jason after one of their London shows about the physical requirements and dexterity required for playing jazz. He sounded very much like a man eager to try out as many different musical styles as possible. A relaxed and charming man, very much aware of ‘taking off’ his stage persona after the show. Certainly someone I’d be very keen to work with musically.

Anyway, in all Wembley was a thoroughly enjoyable night - huge thanks to H for sorting tickets and taking us all out for the night. If you ever get the chance to see the boys and aren’t already a fan, go check ’em out. You may surprise yourself and like it.

Meanwhile, from a bunker somewhere in the desert...

2007-07-04T08:37:00.000+01:00

I know, I’ve got this great idea to get people to take us seriously and treat our ‘grievances’ sympathetically.

First, we kidnap someone. A journalist, maybe.

Then we get him on video denouncing the west and everyone in it as tyrants and criminals.

If that doesn’t work, strap a shitload of explosives to him and then get him to talk on camera about how well we’re treating him and that the western world’s a place full of torturers and hypocrites.

That’ll work, honest...

Go here for the full outline.

“Army of Islam”, indeed. I have little enough time for religion as it is, but nasty little fuckers like these have absolutely nothing to do with god-bothering in any shape or form. The only struggle they’re going through is the same sort of self-pitying whining that Hitler ceaselessly churned out in Mein Kampf. The oh-poor-me, no-one’s ever had it as hard and no-one understands the weight of destiny on my poor wee shoulders sort of bilge that people expect of adolescents who listen to emo music, but not of grown men and women.

Open message to terrorists everywhere:
If you’re so right about your cause and so strong in your belief that victory is inevitable, pony up to the table like everyone else has to and talk to people. Discuss, debate, engage with free speech (you might want to look that one up ahead of time) and do deals. Cigars or no cigars, Clinton would at least talk with anyone and try to see what they want. Life is a compromise, deal with it. As the great philosopher Jagger once said “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.”

If, however, what you really want is to destroy things, blow things up, steal other people’s territory, settle old tribal scores and gain absolute power and influence by any means, then don’t act so surprised that the rest of us want to remove all trace of you from the gene pool and wipe you from the face of OUR planet.

Gig news

2007-06-21T12:33:00.001+01:00

For those of you who read the post about being in a progressive rock band way back when, here’s a news item from the Twelfth Night info page:

The event by Andy Sears and Clive Mitten will have a warm-up gig on November 17th at the Peel in Kingston. Tickets will be available from 19th June. You are able to obtain tickets directly through the venue via credit card on 020 8546 3516. You can also send a cheque payable to Peel Leisure Co., 160 Cambridge Rd, Kingston KT1 3HH. Tickets will be £10.00 in advance.

And it doesn’t stop, two more gigs are being planned, and will possibly be recorded for CD and DVD!

The guys are doing what I suppose could be termed a ‘nano-tour’ - some gigs in London and Manchester during November. Whether all of the remaining band members are involved is still currently up in the air, but the gigs are the first time in *ahem* years that Twelfth Night material has had a live airing, so are a must for fans of the era.

I’ll probably be involved somewhere along the line with the gigs, and I'll keep you posted as to exactly how. If you’re really unfortunate, some of you may well even get to enjoy the rare, umm, “treat” of seeing me on stage at some point during the proceedings. ;-)

Fat Kids = Dead Kids

2007-06-19T08:09:00.000+01:00

Okay, having worked with various related lobbying organisations and pressure groups across the years, as well as simply walking about on the streets of Britain with my bloody eyes open, it’s particularly hard to deny the obvious and blinding evidence of the public deciding that being a fat fucking mess is (apparently) a worthwhile lifestyle choice.

Now, I’m not advocating a size-zero, unattainable figure for anyone. The mistake that all the campaigns to get the Great British Prole™ not turning into Flabba the Butt have made up until now is that they have almost solely focused on image. The “bikini diet”, “get fit for summer” and “two weeks to get you from dead to an über-abs goddess”. Okay, I made that last one up, but we’re all familiar with having seen this sort of crap in various tabloids, exhorting the masses to puff and pant (a teeny-weeny bit) and take up some ridiculous diet.

These are generally water-loss diets, or complete twaddle like the Atkins “revolution” (remember how well *that* worked, eh?) that encourage at most a two-week regime of consuming ground-up mung beans or lentil shells in a juice made of fruit you’ve never heard of (and that probably comes from Saturn). I’ll cover the utter bullshit that is “superfoods” in another post, otherwise I’ll blow a bloody O-ring... :-(

People are different shapes and sizes. Much like certain genetic markers predispose some of us to become alcoholics which means that they literally cannot touch booze again for the rest of their lives, certain people are big and will remain big. This is perfectly okay. It does not, in and of itself, mean that they are unhealthy. On the flipside, there are ‘regular’-shaped people who are as unfit as they can be without actually being dead.

Campaigns to stop the national health service collapsing (literally) under the weight of conditions brought on by obesity absolutely have to be based on health and not on image. How much of an insult to someone is it to tell them that their shape is ‘unapproved’ by society? Conversely, having a mountain of a woman waddle down the street, with rolls of fat and bingo wings exposed by clothing designed for a slim woman with trim abs and a firm ass, often brings me to wistfully muse at length on the legislation that forbids the ownership and wilful use of cattle-prods in polite society.

More even than this, it has to apply to men. Guys, if you have a big gut, it means that fat is also wrapping itself very firmly, like a sinister and lethal duvet, around your overworked heart. It is, without doubt, killing you. Also, you look like a fucking slob and will rarely be taken seriously in life. This is due to the fact that people mentally equate a disregard for appearance with a disregard for most other life-skills. And how devastated do you think that your family is going to be after you’ve killed yourself early, you selfish sod?

Valerie Elliott, The Times’ Consumer Editor, has reported that:

Mars UK, which has tried to curry favour with health chiefs by halting production of its super-size chocolate bars, has simply re-packaged the products. Instead of reducing the size, Mars has split each product in two, selling both parts inside one wrapper.

The products have simply been re-branded as a ‘duo bar’. Mars Duo still weighs 85 grams (3oz) and contains 386 calories - exactly the same as the criticised king-sized bars. Similarly, Snickers Duo is sold as two bars. But the product weighs 100 grams and, with 511 calories, has exactly the same calorific content as the former king-size bar. Health campaigners are now accusing the manufacturer of cynicism and are questioning the company’s commitment to improving the nation’s diet.

What I love is that ‘questioning the company’s commitment to improving the nation’s diet’ bit. That’s like questioning the commitment of Mugabe to Zimbabwe’s agricultural policy.

The fact that parents freely hand over sugary crap to their kids whenever they whine for it, plonk them in front of brightly-coloured scribblecast telly to shut them up and seemingly have no time to educate them about sensible food and moderate exercise is, in the words of many leading experts, ‘child abuse’. Arguments from parents about having busy lives and such should have been thought through (or even about) before breeding, sorry.

Caroline Flint, Public Health Minister, when asked what she was doing to tackle obesity, turned in this grammatically-challenged eructation of incomprehensibility:

We have developed a robust social marketing/consumer insight framework to inform and enable targeted work at a national, regional and local level to tackle childhood obesity. We have also been working closely with a wide range of stakeholders across the food and activity sectors, including representatives from Government, commercial and not-for-profit sectors. A core expert review group have (sic) validated the approach taken and outputs to date.

Err, it was all English words, but not exactly in English sentence order. As far as I could fathom, anyway...

So, unsurprising that the manufacturers are skipping and laughing on the sidelines while ministers spout, well, just a bunch of words, really.

If there’s going to be a change, it needs to be in the form of how this is tackled. Campaigns must be primarily about health and fitness, and not image. Fitness enhances the body’s immune system, improves life-expectancy, counteracts many forms of depression and enables the body to much more aggressively deal with many life-threatening illnesses. It almost sounds like all those old-time Victorian cure-all syrups and tinctures, doesn’t it?

For the life of me, I can’t work out why there would need to be a remedy for women. Are they a disease? Did I miss a meeting?

In summary, all of this has rather tedious and uninspiring solutions. Eat regularly from a variety of foods and, above all, perform some amount of exercise. That’s it, I’m afraid. Not terribly glamorous, eh? Whether it’s something monstrously energetic like going for a run, or just adding a small amount of walking to the working day, keep in mind this one thing: Exercise is cumulative. That means that if you manage to do six little, ten-minute bursts in a day, you’ve exercised as much as you would have done in an hour. Not bad, huh?

For good examples of real-world, useful exercises, take a browse through the Mayo Clinic’s online plans, in particular, their core program.

How likely is it that government and big business are going to really help you out? Not terribly, I’d hazard, so don’t buy into stupid diet plans and gizmos that promise eternal happiness in the form of tight thigh muscles and certainly don’t eat the crap that’s being foisted on you in the form of too much processed food and high-sugar drinks and snacks.

Hmmm, now where’s my ThighMaster and Bullworker..?

Excellent elegies

2007-06-14T11:57:00.001+01:00

Well, well, well...

It looks like the monster that GD and I have betwixt us engendered mayhap have...

Sorry, went a bit Garth Marenghi there for a moment.

It seems that a project I dreamt up about a millennium ago (and had the acuity to involve Good Dog in as soon as possible) is beginning to garner some interest in the right kind of circles. Jim H, this is the one I was banging on about in Toronto... ;-)

As some of you may have read over at GD’s pad, our mysterious friend at Granada has made some positive comments about the first episode of a series we’ve concocted. Working with GD on this has been a ball, mainly as his abilities as a screenwriter are phenomenal. I’m sure that much of the door-opening the scripts will hopefully do will be in the main caused by their immediacy and sureness of tone. With GD’s input, the initial concept for the show has been through many tweaks, some of them major, though lots that would take scenes from good to great. Though based on what I thought up several years ago, it would certainly not be anything like the show it is now if GD hadn’t been the kind of writer he is.

Though the concepts behind it all are all quite simple, in some areas, the threads are quite a slow-burn. There are more than a few examples of pulling the rug out from under the audience, and much that will reward the loyal viewer that sticks with it across the projected eighteen seasons (I’m kidding...). Though this may make it all sound a bit of a slave to the ‘series arc’, that’s very much not the case on an episodic basis. Even though the show has been shelved to ‘mature in wood’ (as Adrian Mead would describe it) many times, there has always been something in it that fires us up in the same way that, say, the Sopranos or Heroes would. I think (or hope) that we’re attempting to create the sort of TV that we’d really love to watch. And that alone has us aiming way above most of the fare on UK telly.

Whether or not we’ve hit any of our targets remains to be seen, but it’s already something that has (I think) pleasantly surprised our friend at Granada. Which is nice. ;-)

PS. You all have to sign fifteen million non-disclosure agreements now, so you don’t steal our ideas... :-D

Fixings

2007-05-31T09:20:00.000+01:00

Things that have been fixed include:

The tooth is now back in place with a semi-permanent resin attachment
The car now goes like the clappers thanks to a new bit I got off eBay a lot cheaper than through a dealer (£35 vs. £160)
I also bought a circuit board off eBay for my central heating/hot water boiler (£60 vs. £200), fitted it this morning and the house is now toasty warm again. After two days of a plumber not being able to fix it , I did the damn thing myself. Hurrah!

Just need one more major thing to complete my collection.

Come on mum and Addenbrooke’s, make the full set...

Smiles all round

2007-05-30T19:21:00.000+01:00

Things to make you smile (if you haven’t already seen them):

Badgers
The glorious lolcats

It’s what the internet is for.

Aside from porn, obviously.

Thanks to Alex for alerting me. Cheers, fella!

Just press the cure button

2007-05-30T09:59:00.000+01:00

Hey all,

Been a bit lax of late with things piling up (though his Royal Dogness stopped by to keep my sanity levels up) and the situation with mum is not great.

A bit of background on my mad mother (who I love to bits, as it happens). She’s 68, lives on her own in a bungalow in a small village in Norfolk and is very well-liked by all her neighbours who often come to her to borrow from her extensive collection of tools and DIY items in the garage. She’s become the honorary auntie to a host of small children who know her as “Auntie B” and never seems to have hair the same colour twice (much like North American television, only more stylish).

‘Active’ hardly compasses the way my mum lives her life. She has probably repainted some or all of the bungalow at least twice in the last twelve months, is a dab hand at laying carpet, rewiring and often can be found zooming about in her car, doing the shopping for some of the young mothers in the village.

This is not, fairly obviously, a frail, old woman.

INT. HOSPITAL WARD - EVENING.

Nurses and orderlies shuffle about in the aimless way they don’t on ER. MARK SPENCER and CONCERNED NEIGHBOUR stand by the bed of AUNTIE B. A NURSE is filling in a questionnaire.

NURSE
Does she have home help?

MARK
(Puzzled)
No. Why would she?

NURSE
(ticking a box)
Does she suffer from pressure sores?

MARK
What? She doesn’t stay still long enough to get them.
Can you get them on your feet? From running around?

MARK starts looking over the form that the NURSE is filling in.

NURSE
(to herself)
Bedbound.

MARK
Wait a minute.
(he indicates the unconscious patient in the bed)
See her there?

The NURSE nods.

MARK
Imagine someone the complete opposite of that.
Loud. Rushing about. Fit. Busy.
This is like the antimatter version of my mum here.

The NURSE nods, then returns to the form.

NURSE
Does she have her meals delivered?

MARK screams and punches the NURSE through a wall. He begins to build a gigantic sacrificial tower from forms, clipboards and pieces of passing junior doctor.

Back to reality. It seems that mum has nothing wrong with her back muscles per se. What she does have is a dose of septicemia that the docs can’t seem to find the root cause of. The septicemia is a staphylococcus aureleus (SA) infection, though thankfully not MRSA. It’s a tough gig for me to see her so frail and weak, knowing what she’s usually like. I can only imagine how throughly pissed off she is with not being able to be up and about, fixing a neighbour’s roof or something equally taxing.

It would seem that the initial back pain was from her kidneys giving out due to massive dehydration.

I now have a stinking cold, so can’t go in and see her. Grrrr...

Thanks to all that have stopped by and wished her well.

Stormin...

2007-05-23T19:10:00.000+01:00

For reasons of clarity, this is not a post for sympathy, rather it is a document of my own astonishment at not being particularly perturbed by recent goings-on.

A brief summary of recent events:

Central heating/hot water boiler defunct and in need of expensive repairs
Front left centre tooth crown has snapped off at the gumline, leaving me with a new look that couldn’t even charitably be described as “piratical” or “rakish”. “Pikey” would be nearer the mark...
Windscreen of car has just received an unwelcome belt from a flying stone and now got three long cracks in it, so needs replacing
The car’s already not running right and will need an unspecified amount of work on it
My mum’s poorly after having a muscle in her back go into spasm and is now unable to walk
I’m months behind the writing for the Lahost album

It just gets funnier and funnier, no?

And the most frustrating thing is that this is all in the midst of a tidal wave of work that I’ve been after for years - I’ve spent the last six to nine months craftily working on getting a particular firm to start handing us work and, lo and behold, they throw a ridiculous amount our way.

I’m also at the stage of hair growth that only a mother could love, between mid-length and long. Usually described as a mess. I would post a picture, but I keep it under a hat most of the time. Here’s an example from Niagara Falls, courtesy of the excellent Caroline.

Mmmm, plenty of plates in the air, no? ;-)

Luckily I am blessed with a mental amount of absolutely top friends who always rally round and say just the right thing to keep me on track. They’re ace, and indeed ‘skill’.

More blogging when the tiger I have by the tail stops being so stroppy and submits.

Colonial One

2007-05-11T20:31:00.000+01:00

Well, well, well...

This post finds your humble fabulist in parts foreign. Canada to be fairly general, and Toronto to be precise. News Sluice’s temporary location while the plumbers are in is situated on the dining table of Caroline.

My planned excursions are the fairly obvious (CN tower, Niagara Falls) combined with the less touristy (meeting up last night for a Mexican meal with DMc, John Callaghan and the mighty Jim Henshaw, as well as doing a spot of trawling round the musical instrument stores on Monday with John, in search of a Geddy Lee signature bass and whatever else I might be able to somehow convince myself I can take back as carry-on...).

Caroline has been a top girl in providing hospitality, as well as a small beach-head for Imperial Blogging™ in the colonies. The food seems edible, the natives are friendly and the internet over here goes at warp speed - hurrah!

Very nice colonies they seem too. It’s always slightly disorienting for someone who grew up in towns and cities that grew and twisted into their current forms over hundreds, if not thousands of years to be plonked down in a grid-plan city. There seem to be no points of obvious reference with which to orient oneself. Obviously there are, I’m just not seeing them.

Several DVDs have been purchased, including a couple of requests from back in the Old Country™, as well as a few items of clothing from Roots 73. Undoubtedly there will be purchasing aplenty before I sheepishly attempt to return home with half of Canada in a case. The strength of the British pound is quite something to behold when confronted with a pile of DVDs that total what you’d expect to pay for just the second series of Extras. Eerie.

Still, off to the theatre next week, guitar shopping and, if the weather holds out, catching a movie at a drive-in somewhere out of town.

More soon! I might even throw out a review of Rush’s new album if I can actually find a copy in a store... (Best Buy didn’t have any, the bastards...)

Rage against the Luddites

2007-04-21T10:30:00.000+01:00

I’m trying very hard to stick to the “if you haven’t got anything good to say, don’t say anything” maxim, but every once in a while, something has to give.

Russel T. Davies has, in his most recent Radio Times interview, opted to say one of the more crass things I’ve ever heard come out of the mouth of a human. While talking about Daleks being created in a genetic experiment (which, apparently makes them brilliant geneticists - just like Frankenstein’s monster was adept at lobbing together body parts to make pals...), he then goes on to say, “And in an age of GM crops and DNA experiments, that strikes a chord with all of us. I think we’re all slightly afraid of all this stem-cell research.”

Now, I’ll put up with so much before I snap, and this has done it for me.

From the above quote, RTD obviously doesn’t know what the purpose or methodology of stem-cell research is, what its ultimate benefits could be, or how genetics works. More importantly, ill-informed commenting in a public arena and potentially swaying the opinions of people by making such daft statements is what drove research back about ten years in the US.

Go tell Michael J. Fox, any Parkinson’s sufferer or anyone who’s had loss of function as the result of a spinal cord trauma that people should be scared of stem-cell research. Thanks a bunch, RTD.

Five of your Earth goals

2007-04-18T10:53:00.000+01:00

The svelte and delectable Emily tagged me with a meme of my Five Goals.

So here we go:

1) Write and record an album of material I’m proud of. Not much of a request, eh? Hehehe... All of the things I’ve recorded across the eleventy-billion years of my life, whether with a band or as a solo artist, have always seemed a little not quite finished. Or at least, not as complete as I’d like. Any musos reading this will be rolling their eyes, knowing that one is never, ever satisfied with the finished product. Ah, but I didn’t say satisfied, did I? Just something to be proud of, before my left hand stops working for good and I’m unable to walk unaided. That would be nice, thankyouverymuchindeed.

2) Get my studio built. This kind of goes hand in hand with the next point, but as I have a 50-metre (150ft, for all the flat-earthers out there) back garden with an invitingly empty far end, coupled with a house with far too many computers, guitars, keyboards and other electronica crammed into it, I really ought to sort out my creative workspace and get a studio built. I'll probably be having one of these, should the finances work out. At least it should be easier to assemble than the shed, which took so much jiggling and botching it was unbelievable (big shout-outs to those who put the damn thing up - GD & Jos!).

3) Pay off my debt. I have far, far too much credit card debt dragging along behind me. Really quite horrible amounts. :-( So, across the next few years (yes, it really will take that long) I aim to reduce it to much more manageable levels, if not rid myself of it entirely. As the business is taking off again, that may not be too much of a stretch.

4) Stop being scared. Emily also had this in her version of these answers. I also have a propensity for backing out of difficult situations, presumably based on a fear of fucking up. Even though I’m an outgoing, gregarious type generally, I have black periods where I just can’t get moving at all and fail to see why anyone would be interested in what I have to say, or what I can do. This obviously becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, in reference to Emily’s post, I could always, always take out a clown if it got remotely threatening. I’m a mean motherfucker when I get shirty. ;-)

5) Get fitter. Passing forty hasn’t necessarily left me in a heap of extreme unfitness on the floor, unable to move, but it certainly has gracelessly pointed out a few of the things I don’t seem to be able to do of late. Not that this is irredeemably lost, just that I need to actually do something about it. I couldn’t give less of a shit about grey hair and wrinkles, I just don’t feel like carking it just yet.

And there you have it. Onto tagging others, here are some carefully selected victims...
Good Dog
Brian Sibley
Will Dixon
Alex Crouzen
Caroline
LitBrit
LaraG
IQCrash

So, go to it, my army of robot warriors! Conquer the world with your goal-tastic goodness!

Left wanting more

2007-04-13T08:50:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

In a brief hiatus from twanging geetars and noodling about on the ol’ joanna in search of something less clichéd than I usually produce...

I’ve been swimming about in Life On Mars from Kudos. The debonair and erudite Dog of Goodness has a quote from Caitlin Moran about the finale of series two, where she’d claimed that there was both an ending for stupid people and one for clever people. I’m obviously nowhere near as clever as I’d like to have you all believe, as I’d only spotted the one for stupid people. There are spoilers ahead, for those of you who haven’t yet seen the finale...

I’d recorded the Life On Mars episode as it loses out in my book to CSI, which was on at the same time. Funnily enough, before seeing the LoM finale yesterday, I felt let down by the CSI episode (the one with Ned Beatty as a serial-killing dentist and Grissom off holidaying somewhere with less of a daily body-count...) as it seemed just a little too pat. Things fell into place in a manner that doesn’t usually happen in a CSI episode, even the ones where they’re gusting on at length about their innermost feelings and such. It was the sort of episode where, as the credits start to roll, you look at each other with a faintly bemused air of betrayal, a raised eyebrow and an ‘eh?’. Not one where you really go all Charlie Brooker, spitting blood at the screen and wanting to have the writers hung, drawn and chucked in a blender, but just leaving you with a vague sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction. And gloom.

It’s rather like going back to your favourite curry house, which you haven’t been to for months, anticipating a repeat of your last meal there (which was amazing) and finding out that, though the menu is the same, the kitchen staff have changed. The long-awaited meal arrives and, though it’s good, it just doesn’t quite do it for you. In the non-biblical sense, of course. Hem-hem...

Back to Life On Mars. A series storyline that dodged about nicely, never quite letting you know how it might resolve. A solid ensemble cast that, once I’d got over the sometimes shoddy representation of the 1970s (as it’s supposed to be in his head, it could indeed be as clichéd as it came across, with all the anachronisms flying about too), offered many touching moments of emotional depth that the writers could easily have abandoned in their rush to be all, you know, ’70s, maaan. The central character of Sam Tyler, a modern police officer somehow thrown back from the present day to the Manchester of 1973 is your fairly typical ‘fish out of water’, but with many worthy and well-developed traits as well as the obvious quest to find out how to get back to the present day.

Many pundits seemed to be harping on about the Big Question™ being whether 1973 was all in Sam’s head as he was in a coma in 2006, or whether he’d dreamed the future (startlingly accurately, as it happens, and not at all like the visions of the future we were sold in the ’70s) and was in fact from 1973 after all.

Umm, unless I missed a meeting, he was definitely from the 2006/7 era and the Big Question™ was whether he was imagining it all, or had actually somehow gone back in time. Theories abounded here at the Tower. Many of them related to Sam’s eventual return to the present day and what he might do when he did (that aspect of the storyline seeming to be a given). Would he search the records of the police force, and discover that the characters he dreamt up actually existed? Would he then try to track them down? Wouldn’t there be more in terms of drama and rug-pulling from beneath the audience in having him actually travel in time? There wouldn’t necessarily need to be an explanation of how (in fact, that might well prove ruinous), just close the episode with some lovely ‘oh wow’ sort of stuff.

So, even though Sam has arrived back in the present day and many of the odd names and references have now been explained - Hyde 2612 being his hospital room number, etc, etc. - having him actually discover an old photo with him and the team in it, or that Gene Hunt existed, or even something as murky as all the records from that era having been lost in a fire, but someone dimly remembering something that places him back then, would surely have been a more satisfactory (though wonderfully frustrating!) conclusion to the series.

I don’t know if I wasn’t paying enough attention (unlikely), but having the 1970s being purely a fiction created during the coma, the present day as dry and stultifying, and Sam’s eventual decision to kill himself to ‘return to the dream’ seemed like one of those ideas you have right at the start of the session, long before you come up with something a little less simplistic. Not that the episode was in any way simple. It nipped around like a demented thing, just about managing to hold on to the plot, before seemingly fizzling out and leaving the viewer with the same vague feeling of having been ever-so-slightly cheated.

Pity. I started to get quite into it by the end.

Off to the land of prog...

2007-03-27T20:33:00.000+01:00

I’m going to be spending the next couple of weeks attempting to brush the rust off my songwriting skills (such as they are) and embarking on the path of coming up with some new tunes for an old band. The old band I was in about a million years ago, Lahost, to be precise.

I’ll keep you posted when there are demos to hear. Hopefully they’ll be an unpretentious take on progressive rock, though I may well succumb to the temptation to be overblown and ridiculous... ;-)

In other news, I’ve been back in contact with some old pals from back then, notably drummer Brian Devoil of Twelfth Night, who I’ll be working with to see if we can produce a live concert DVD of one of their shows from footage shot back in 1983. Gawd, I bet Emily wasn’t even alive then... ;-)

Am I not a man and a brother?

2007-03-23T09:10:00.000Z

“He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” - Exodus XXI, 16.
The title of this post was stamped onto coins that all those who wished to express sympathy and fellow-feeling for the Abolitionists would carry about their person. Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings, the TV tie-in to his book on the abolition of the slave trade and the shoddy establishment of colonies by the British in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, airs tonight on BBC2 at 9pm.

During the War of Independence, many slaves were attracted to fighting on the side of King George against the revolutionary forces, due to the fact that British law (by this time) stated that ‘no man could be the property of another’. Eventually, after General Dunmore suffered defeat after defeat and, having to think of something to give the former slaves in return for their service, a hastily dreamt-up colony in Nova Scotia was handed over. Hmm, a freezing cold, boulder-strewn wasteland (apologies to any current residents, but that’s what it was back then), the colony was eventually abandoned and a new, independent state was offered to the former slaves: Sierra Leone, back in Africa. You gotta love how the British felt it was okay to hand around bits of the planet they had decided that they now ‘owned’. Charming lot...

Freetown (the capital of Sierra Leone) was, during the reign of James Clarkson, a place of wondrous novelty. The first occurrence of a white man being whipped legally by a black man, the first place black people were allowed to vote and the first place on planet Earth that women (regardless of colour) were allowed to vote. Bite down hard on that, all you nations who think you’re so terribly progressive...

Sadly, Clarkson’s successors were not cut from similar moral cloth, and their vicissitudes brought the fledgling state of Sierra Leone to its knees, made more bitter and poignant by such a hopeful birth.

Though there is undoubtedly going to be a tidal wave of slavery-related media offerings (quite rightly too), many will be of questionable quality and accuracy. Schama, though capable of being an irksome presenter, is certain to offer many challenges to the perceived caricatures of noble slave, morally righteous abolitionist, sybaritic British governor, benevolent founding father and demonic white slaver. Whether his adopted country of the last 20 years takes kindly to a view of history that doesn’t support vainglorious monuments to overblown historical figures remains to be seen.

There follows an excerpt from John Greenleaf Whittier’s Our Countrymen in Chains, 1834. Apologies for cutting it down to a slightly more manageable size. A quick Googling should reward the persistent reader with the full version, one of many voices raised at the time of a bleak period in our history...

OUR fellow-countrymen in chains!
Slaves, in a land of light and law!
Slaves, crouching on the very plains
Where rolled the storm of Freedom’s war!
A groan from Eutaw’s haunted wood,
A wail where Camden’s martyrs fell,
By every shrine of patriot blood,
From Moultrie’s wall and Jasper’s well!

What, ho! our countrymen in chains!
The whip on woman’s shrinking flesh!
Our soil yet reddening with the stains
Caught from her scourging, warm and fresh!
What! mothers from their children riven!
What! God’s own image bought and sold!
Americans to market driven,
And bartered as the brute for gold!

Shall Belgium feel, and gallant France,
By Vendome’s pile and Schoenbrun’s wall,
And Poland, gasping on her lance,
The impulse of our cheering call?
And shall the slave, beneath our eye,
Clank o’er our fields his hateful chain?
And toss his fettered arms on high,
And groan for Freedom’s gift, in vain?

Oh, say, shall Prussia’s banner be
A refuge for the stricken slave?
And shall the Russian serf go free
By Baikal’s lake and Neva’s wave?
And shall the wintry-bosomed Dane
Relax the iron hand of pride,
And bid his bondmen cast the chain
From fettered soul and limb aside?

Shall every flap of England’s flag
Proclaim that all around are free,
From farthest Ind to each blue crag
That beetles o’er the Western Sea?
And shall we scoff at Europe’s kings,
When Freedom’s fire is dim with us,
And round our country’s altar clings
The damning shade of Slavery’s curse?

Go, let us ask of Constantine
To loose his grasp on Poland’s throat;
And beg the lord of Mahmoud’s line
To spare the struggling Suliote;
Will not the scorching answer come
From turbaned Turk, and scornful Russ
“Go, loose your fettered slaves at home,
Then turn, and ask the like of us!”

Up, then, in Freedom’s manly part,
From graybeard eld to fiery youth,
And on the nation’s naked heart
Scatter the living coals of Truth!
Up! while ye slumber, deeper yet
The shadow of our fame is growing!
Up! while ye pause, our sun may set
In blood, around our altars flowing!

Rise now for Freedom! not in strife
Like that your sterner fathers saw,
The awful waste of human life,
The glory and the guilt of war:
But break the chain, the yoke remove,
And smite to earth Oppression’s rod,
With those mild arms of Truth and Love,
Made mighty through the living God!

Down let the shrine of Moloch sink,
And leave no traces where it stood;
Nor longer let its idol drink
His daily cup of human blood;
But rear another altar there,
To Truth and Love and Mercy given,
And Freedom’s gift, and Freedom’s prayer,
Shall call an answer down from Heaven!

Sobering, yet inspiring stuff.

What’s stopping you working?

2007-03-20T08:44:00.000Z

Okay, time to ’fess up.

While sat staring at whatever it is on your computer that you really need to do right now, what is it in the room or in your head that gets in the way of doing it?

For me, it’s the peril of iTunes. I’ve got, let’s see... 16,404 songs (that’s 48.9 days) of music safely tucked away for my auditory wallowing. While typing this, dear readers, the song Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm by the Crash Test Dummies has come round on Shuffle. Thought you’d like to know.

This wouldn’t be quite as enormous a distraction if I also didn’t have this in the room:
Not that I’m complaining or anything (and there are more of them over the other side of the room), but it doesn’t take much for me to hear something inspirational, take one of them from the rack and start noodling away for an hour or so.

And I wonder why certain jobs take so long! ;-)

So, for me, it’s the combination of unexpected music coming up on iTunes’ Shuffle setting and a pile of musical instruments looking at me as if I don’t love them. Over to you...

Pruning

2007-03-19T18:16:00.000Z

In the spirit of recent advice on being generally positive about the world (which I usually am), I’m going to do a spot of pruning of older posts that may have been a little, ahem, vitriolic.

Get a quick read in if you feel like it, they’ll be going offline by the end of the week...

;-)

PS. All done now...

MeadKerr seminar

2007-03-18T21:47:00.000Z

Went off with Good Dog to “that London” on Saturday to experience Adrian Mead chatting about what steps screenwriters should take to maximise their careers.

An affable and disarming chap, Adrian’s insights into the various aspects of writerdom were presented in densely-packed sessions of a couple of hours across the day, interspersed with coffee-breaks and lunch, all followed by a trip to the Museum Arms pub. As with any one-day course, you often take along pad, pen and sundry other note-taking materials, unsure whether there’ll actually be any point in using them other than to doodle hysterically more complex mandalas (or crude representations of genitalia, depending on one’s artistic preference). I’m glad to say that several sides of A4 were covered in copious notes, as almost every sentence out of Adrian’s mouth either needed copying down verbatim or inspired some jotting regarding one or other of the projects currently on the go.

Adrian, like most of us, has had a career that one might term chequered. Among other jobs, once a hairdresser, also a bouncer (and for a period both at the same time - nice), he had managed to raise finance for his first short film, New York Diary (shot on 35mm in New York and with a UK/US crew) by working every hour there was and not heeding those in his circle of friends that just raised eyebrows when he stated his intentions to be a film-maker. As GD wryly commented, during this period, it was probably not a good idea to have got him to cut your hair late on a Friday afternoon... Though he now confesses that NYD was total “arty bollocks”, it was definitely an assured step in the direction his heart told him to go. He also mentions on the MeadKerr website that it seemed a more practical idea for him than spending three or four years at film school. Fair play. I’ve always learned more “on the job” as ’twere and can entirely see his viewpoint.

Though, by the very nature of the subject matter, plenty of jumping around had to be done to cover ground and to clarify things based on where audience questions took him, Adrian managed to pack a day full of useful, real-world tips and tried and tested techniques for making the most of a writer’s efforts. As he himself says, “it’s not complicated, but it is hard work”.

As GD and I had arrived early that morning, we grabbed an outside table at a nearby cafe and sat with coffee, mulling over the coming day’s activities and wondering whether we’d get away with not having any coloured pens. After about ten minutes, other bloggers that GD knew started turning up. Lucy, Lianne, Lara, Dom and the fragrant and fascinating Potdoll expanded the crowd around our little table and, by the time the day was through, Pillock had made himself known. I’d held forth on why blogging was useful to so many non-bloggers that I was starting to sound like a salesman for Blogger, and copious quantities of cards had been exchanged.

After the day’s do, almost the entire audience shot off the Museum Arms pub for a couple of swifties before heading home. Lara and I had spent a good half hour in some actorly bitching for laughs at the end of the bar, and it seems from dispatches that GD had ended up groping cute Lucy’s butt (but this may have all been incited by Lucy grabbing Lianne’s boob...). Most of the bloggers, on meeting for the first time, are usually surprised by the appearance of the person with whom they’ve been corresponding for possibly months. Luckily for me, virtually no-one over here reads my rantings (or comes near me without a taser close to hand), so I escaped having any preconceptions. Having said that, Mister Sibley, next time you’ve got a free afternoon somewhere near London, let me know and I’ll stump up for lunch! Actually, that stands for any of the bloggers who’ve had the stamina to sit through any of my charming, sophisticated and erudite meanderings over the past whatever-it’s-been. Hey, I’m off to meet up with lots of terribly kind and undoubtedly beautiful people in the second largest country in the world when I go to stay with Caroline in May, so I don’t think London (or anywhere else in Europe for that matter) should be that much of a stretch.

Huge kudos for the whole MeadKerr team who schlepped down to London to put the day’s course on. The only thing I’d suggest they do is a bit of a revamp of their website, to make the courses more prominent!

And Adrian? That photo of you on the website’s fooling no-one. We all know you’re a cheery soul now... And where’s Claire’s pic? Bad boy.

To the bloggers - what an undiluted pleasure you all are. Thanks for playing nice.

Comic Relief

2007-03-16T17:27:00.000Z

Whether you’re an incorrigible old cynic like the mad resident of this crumbling pile, or a hopelessly optimistic fool, destined to be kidnapped and sold into slavery (or at least turned into a gorgeous pair of shoes), Comic Relief will have impinged in some way on your consciousness.

Irrespective of why exactly Lenny Henry is allowed onto screens, the good work that Comic Relief does is beyond reproach. Saving lives, rescuing communities and restoring basic human dignity around the planet, CR has so far raised over £400 million (that’s real money, none of that foreign rubbish...) which has gone to alleviate suffering on a scale that simply shouldn’t be happening on a civilised planet.

BBC One will have an evening of ‘fun of sometimes questionable merit’, starting at 7pm Empire Time. Amidst the grotesque acts of (often career-destroying) jollity, there will also be short films that show where your money will go. If these films don’t stop you in your tracks and give you pause for thought, you’re dead from the neck up.

So, whether you find any of it funny or not, find some way of donating something to the cause.

Your action undoubtedly will save someone’s life.

Let’s cover an old tune!

2007-03-15T09:08:00.000Z

Sometimes, the pull of banging through an old tune with bigger, fatter, chunkier, sexier (whatever) sounds gets too much for an artist, and they commit what can be one of the worst sins in music, ie. the cover version.

Now, sometimes they work (see almost anything of Bob Dylan’s done by other people), but most of the time they don’t (Robbie Williams ‘doing’ swing or blaspheming the memory of Saint Freddie by laying a cable on the altar of rock that is We Are The Champions, the Sugababes/Girls Aloud raping of Walk This Way for Comic Relief and so forth). Sometimes they can be funny, sometimes they can add another dimension to a song that you hadn’t previously realised was there and very, very rarely can take your breath away (Eva Cassidy’s breathtaking rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow springs to mind).

“What brings you on to this subject?” I hear the sum total of no-one ask. “Well,” I reply to the corner of my lavishly padded cell, “it was this post by Will D, so blame him.”

Cover versions of films or old TV shows. Not that it hasn’t been done, and probably really well in some places, but maybe it might be an idea to come up with some new ideas. Or am I going to get a kicking for suggesting that? I don’t mean agonising over well-thumbed copies of Joseph Campbell story-analysis or berating oneself for plagiarising things like, ooh, having a story with a beginning, middle and end. If you must take inspiration from an old idea, why no ditch the name and use the basic concept as a launch-pad? I really don’t think that there’s as much cachet in old TV show names as middling marketing executives have told their bosses there is. In order to make their jobs seem, in some small and oleaginous way, worthwhile.

What musos have known for years is that, generally speaking, cover versions rarely hold a candle to the original. This is, in my opinion, to do with the writer/original artist’s intimate knowledge of the truth of the piece. Pretentious as that sounds, give it a moment’s thought. Would you feel the sentiments behind a given tune as well as the writer? There may well be huge chunks of the song that resonate with something that happened in your life at the time you first heard it. It may well lyrically sum up some aspect of your emotional journey through life, or may just have an atmosphere that moves you incredibly (Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees has always been able to move me to tears, but the lyrics themselves are a bit on the incomprehensible side).

However, while I may be able to do a bit of investigation of the how and why Thom Yorke arrived at that performance, it’ll all be academic. It won’t turn me into him, and it won’t give me any clues to a way of re-recording the tune and improving it. This would seem to be the point of doing a cover - if you can bring something new and innovative to the table, give it a blast.

This doesn’t mean that several ‘flawed but nonetheless excellent’ covers should be binned because the originals are so good (Tori Amos did a starkly bleak version of Smells Like Teen Spirit which worked, while a UK disco artist Annabel did a version* which was appalling). Peter Gabriel, certainly an individual artist known for pushing the boundaries of production and exploring new sonic territories, was asked to perform John Lennon’s Imagine at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in 2006. Sadly, Big Pete took the tune and proceeded to drop a barge on it. Ugh.

The strangest thing about cover version films is the sheer “you’re kidding, right?” decision-making behind them. The Avengers for example, another bloody old ITC show which had moments of interest (mainly to do with a woman in tight-fitting clothing) was certainly an odd choice for a film aiming at being a worldwide hit, being very, very British in its demeanour. Now there’s talk of a Prisoner film and a ‘big-budget’ new TV show. Dear god, why? A show so incredibly rooted in its time, with visuals and setting straight out of the 60s/John Lennon/Beatles/Floyd/Warhol and a setup familiar to those who were currently living through Vietnam and the mess of the Cold War/Bay of Pigs fiasco. So, a film about the 60s. That’ll work, chasing a new, young audience in 2007/8. Thing is, if it’s not going to have all the 60s stuff in it, why call it The Prisoner? Why not consider the core of the story (a former intelligence operative who angrily retires from the agency. The agency suspects he knows something he shouldn’t, he doesn’t let on whether he does or doesn’t. They kidnap him and somehow place him in a situation in which he can trust no-one and has to rely purely on strength of will and self-belief to resist attempts to break him) and rework it from the ground up?

I realise that may not be the most perfect reading of The Prisoner, but that’s partly the point. I can watch The Prisoner on DVD - I want to see something new. In the modern world, an agency would not waste time dropping a former spy into a cartoony world of quaint, bonkers Englishness. They’d drug him and/or beat the crap out of him until he gave in. Wouldn’t take too long and wouldn’t be all that pretty (or terribly watchable, I imagine). The holier-than-thou US administration are having a jolly time trying this sort of thing out in Gantanamo Bay while the rest of the world sits on its hands, so I can’t see why somewhere like the UK, for example, wouldn’t discreetly lamp a former agent in the face with a two-by-four if they thought he could tell them something of interest. Work the numbers...

Infernal Affairs becoming The Departed is, I’d say, a good example of getting it right. What was it that made the original film so gripping? It’s not the actors or the location - it’s the intrigue, the duplicity, the shifting sands of loyalty and disloyalty. These are the things that got transferred, not stylistic or direct visual riffs. If any were, they’ve been ‘re-rooted’ in US culture, rather than attempting to shoe-horn Hong Kong cultural idiosyncrasies into a US movie. Approaching Infernal Affairs, there were fairly evident ways in which the organised crime in Hong Kong would have echoes in 1970s Boston. A big shout-out should go to William Monahan for his work on adapting the script, I feel.

Perhaps the Avengers film just didn’t go far enough with its adaptation. Personally, I think DMC’s on the right track with the bald fact that having a script might have been a good one to check off the list before cameras rolled.

Still - can’t wait for the three-hour epic re-imagining of Gilligan’s Island or Last of the Summer Wine starring Tom Cruise and featuring the entire universe blowing up. They’ve already made a movie of the Trailer Park Boys, haven’t they? ...snigger...

Any suggestions (and your reasons why they should be done and not left to moulder quietly away) for franchise re-animation should be sent to your humble blogger, so I can maybe make some money out of them and ignore you once I’m weighed down with stupefying amounts of cash...

* Yeah sorry, I recorded and mixed that one for her. My bad.

Urggg...

2007-03-13T10:36:00.000Z

Off to spend the rest of the day programming in Flash (gotta pay the rent, lads and lasses) for a healthcare client.

Hopefully, listening to John 5 and some Sturm und Drang classical music in the background will help the day pass quickly.

Damn, gotta sort the road tax for my bike too...

Laters, all.

The Tag-O-Tron

2007-03-12T19:34:00.000Z

Or, Riddley’s Believe It Or Not! (what a shameless rip-off merchant...)

Brian Sibley, who has been moderately revealing (which is, I think, the point) has tagged me to come up with five things that no one (or most people) won’t know and then tag five other bloggers to carry on the game…

Here are my five “Secrets of Spencer Shame”. Or something.

I…

1) Posed nude for a variety of photographers…
My life is finite, and I’m going to try as many things as possible on the way. Why be ashamed of nudity? Too English and repressed for me... ;-)

2) Once took up the euphonium…
It was at school, and everyone else had already had all the good instruments, like the violins, trombones and flutes. By the time I got to “choose” something, I ended up being handed a lump of brass I’d never heard of. Soon abandoned when I discovered “rock” and guitars. Mwaaahhahahahaha...

3) Was the recording engineer on the Chesney Hawkes “I am the one and only” sessions…
I know. I’m sorry. Really I am. I was young, I needed the money...

4) Sung onstage at Wembley Arena...
I was the keyboardist for Kym Mazelle, who was the support act for Alexander O’Neal during his ’90-’91 European tour. She had previously scored a minor hit with a song with Doctor Robert of the Blow Monkeys called “Wait” and, as he was unavailable for the tour, I got to come out from behind the Rick Wakeman-esque tower of synths and sing his part. Excellent fun! By the latter stages of the tour, I was onstage during Mr. O’Neal’s set too!

5) Spent a fabulous evening with Traci Lords…
Who was witty, erudite, charming and disarming. Of course, during dinner, I fell for her completely and couldn’t give a fig for what people may or may not think of her past. ;-) She was absolutely adorable and, having watched the small indie film Chump Change in which she co-stars, is an actor of some note. Check it out.

That’s five quite possibly uninteresting things, and now I’ll tag:

Emily
Oh Caroline-ah
LitBrit
Callaghan
Alex Crouzen
Big Will Dixon, Texas Ranger
(apologies if I’ve tagged someone who’s had quite enough of this sort of thing)

So, what FIVE things about you doesn’t anyone know? Tell me if and when you blog details of your secret life and I’ll post a link.

Thanks again to Brian.

Likes & Loathes

2007-03-10T10:45:00.001Z

Brian Sibley generously passed me the letter ‘L’ and this is what fell out of my head (in no particular order)...

My top 10 L-Likes

1. Life...
Pretty obvious at first glance, but I particularly mean those moments when one feels truly alive, whether that be due to an adrenaline rush of fear or excitement, or just that moment when you look out of the window, see the sun and clear skies, and get the swelling of the chest, deep breath, alive feeling that makes the day skip by in an irresistibly positive way.

2. Literature...
The written word, following in the footsteps of the oral tradition, that gives us such a rich background of human history, struggle, tragedy and hope. The “wisdom hotline from the dead back to the living” as XTC once said.

3. Laughing...
Finding amusement in anything and everything. Sharing a joke or an entire evening of mirth with mates. How great is that?

4. Learning...
The ability to find out about new things that lead you on to other new things that fascinate and captivate.

5. Led Zeppelin...
You know when people say that such-and-such are “arguably” the best rock band in the world? Stop arguing, it’s over. Zeppelin won. Ages ago.

6. Language...
Especially the regular new infusions from outside that are so vital to the survival and improvement of a language. Not to mention things like Engrish, Spanglish, Franglais and all the other comedic bastard offspring of any given couple of tongues (espeially if you can combine it with two countries that don’t get on!).

7. Love...
Which is for poets, apparently.

8. Listening...
Which I rarely indulge in as often as I probably should...

9. Lava lamps...
Are still one of those inventions that prove humanity is just ace.

10. Luthiers..
The people that design and produce custom guitars of exquisite beauty and craftsmanship (John Deacon, Hugh Manson and so forth) as well as the master artisans in the Fender and Gibson Custom shops - love you guys!

My Top 10 L-Loathes

1. Lies...
Whether it’s the “I’ll be there in ten minutes” type, or the full-blown “Of course Saddam’s got WMDs, let’s start a war” example. Hate them. And find it even worse when I resort to them. ☹

2. Laziness...
Procrastination, sitting about on your arse not doing the cleaning or just not bloody caring about anything.

3. Laminectomy...
I’ve had one of these, and they’re really not fun.

4. Lowest common denominator...
Attempts to appeal to a mass-market by removing talent, taste, ability, passion and intellectual challenge. Most game shows, reality shows and a lot of recent drama. Harry Potter also. The scriptwriters of the film Doom (and I was expecting so much...).

5. Loudness...
A button on a stereo system designed to turn a perfectly well-mixed tune into an abortion of too much bass, muddy lower-mids and tinny, screechy top end. Horrible, horrible, horrible...

6. Lottery...
An exercise designed to part the poorest sections of society from their money that works far too well for my liking.

7. Local colour...
This is about reporters descending on a hitherto un-newsworthy region which, sensing its only chance to make a mark on the world stage, rolls out morris dancers, fig-jugglers, bat-sexers, tree-huggers, crystal-worshippers and other “assignable to the asylum” fucktards in a desperate, pitiful attempt to appear something other than committing shameful and degrading acts of self-loathing.

8. List shows...
“And now on Channel 4, the Top 100 All-time best lists of all time Musical Horror Drama Comedy One-off Christmas Special Disaster Chart Successes On Ice Celebrity Heartwarming Tragedy Chef Exposés as voted for by Premium Line Vegetables”. Oh, just fuck off and fuck off now. Even if it is for Comic Relief. You have soured the planet and soiled my TV, you bastards.

9. Littering...
Is there any need to just throw stuff on the ground and walk away? The things you see when you haven’t got your gun... grrrr...

10. Laundry...
When will it ever end?

So there you have it. A seriously rambling and incoherent list of unreasonable likes and irrational loathings. Apply for your very own letter today! ;-)

Thanks to Brian.

It was twenty years ago today...

2007-02-27T09:53:00.000Z

Actually, it’s closer to twenty-three, but hey, that far back is all a blur anyway.

I was once part of what was given the delightful monicker of the New Wave of British Progressive Rock in the 80s. NWOBPR really has a ring to it, no? The brief spate of optimistic bands encompassed everything from Marillion’s Genesis-esque musical stylings, through to us (Lahost) who were a sort of poppy, punky version of prog. There were bands with names like Pendragon, Solstice, Gothique, Pallas (who did an album all about Atlantis as I vaguely recall), Galahad and the occasionally transcendent Twelfth Night. The movement also coined the term “neo-progressive”, or “neo-prog”. Vile, huh?

As you can probably deduce, this wasn’t exactly hard-rockin’, in-your-face, working-class music from ‘da streetz’ (location unknown). Plus, due to the fiendishly complex time signatures the songs were often written in, you wouldn’t have been able to dance to it unless you had seven or nine legs and were on drugs. The musicians making up this ‘movement’ were generally college boys, middle-class angst-ridden students and those with a worrying desire to be seen in public wearing cheesecloth shirts and kaftans while playing impenetrably complex music to crowds of a similarly knowing demographic.

Lyrics would rarely be about, you know, relationships, because most of those in the bands didn’t have them and wouldn’t know what they were if they were hit in the face by them. Subject matter tended to be lofty, arty, obscure and (here comes that word again) impenetrable. Some examples:

Men of steel who endured the most
The Father The Son and The Holy Ghost
The butterflies of war flying so high
sick as a pig on American pie

from Pendragon’s World’s End (part 1: the lost children)

The rain auditions at my window, its symphony echoes in my womb
My gaze scans the walls of this apartment
To rectify the confines of my tomb

from Marillion’s The Web

Contemplating hopes and dreams of a new age
All we leave behind is tainted by tears
Our tomorrows lie ahead there in the stars
Reaching for the stars in seven heavens
Into the haven of the night
Formations flying like Geese, we are free

from Pallas’ The Ark of Infinity
(suspiciously referring to a Doctor Who story. Hmmm)

Slow in the slowtime, battered by pride
I can feel myself fall in the falling rain
Smoothing the edges with violence
Flesh on the rocks, another tide
And I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming out loud...

from Lahost’s The Drowning Pool
(a jolly little ditty about patricide...)

So, we can all have a giggle about lyrical and musical pretensions. Quite a loud belly-laugh in some cases. The thing is, some of the bands were actually terribly good. IQ, for example, are still going, most likely due to the fact that they knock out good music and put on a decent live show. Twelfth Night had a certain something that was indefinably better than many of the other bands on the scene, whether you liked the Geoff Mann or Andy Sears eras (a subject of endless conjecture about the merits of either singer), and many of their tunes, though firmly rooted in the complexity of the prog oeuvre (try as I might, I can’t stop being pretentious around this subject...) are still very listenable today.

As the late eighties moved inexorably toward a financial clusterfuck by the UK government and stock market regulators, some bands called it a day, while others downsized for the long winter during which complicated music just wasn’t wanted. Others, notably Twelfth Night, attempted to shift gears into stadium rock. In their case, with producer John L. Waters (who wouldn’t have known “rock” if it had come up and kicked his head off. Which I would have paid to see), it was a commercial disaster and alienated many of their original fans. The radar for potential cases of ‘selling out’ was always hyper-sensitive around the prog market.

So, all consigned to the rubbish bin of history, yes? Not quite, it would seem.

Twelfth Night are now in possession of their original copyrighted masters and have a healthy fan-base buying up the old LPs (remember them?) on CD, IQ re busy touring Europe where possible, and prog festivals hav sprouted up around the world, featuring new bands as well as “old” ones from the brief flare we experienced in the 80s. Marillion continue to explore new ground, Pendragon have recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the release of one of their albums.

Why?

I have a few pet theories, revolving around bands like Radiohead and Blur who, after the initial commercial success of snappy tunes and ‘easy’ melodies, started to wander off into more complex and demanding territory. Muse are so prog it’s not true, and the continued success of “new kids” Dream Theater (only 15 albums? Pah...) means that there’s still an audience out there for something a little left-field. The Police’s Synchronicity album had liberal slatherings of prog to it - unsurprising really, Stewart Copeland had formerly drummed for Curved Air and both Sting and Andy Summers weren’t averse to a bit of jazz. Now and then. It wasn’t something they couldn’t control though... There is also the consideration of the interweb and its magical removal of the need for niche music to need a ‘record deal’ (see how these terms are becoming obsolete?).

Now even we (Lahost) are kicking around the idea of a new album and seeing how writing together after a billion years away from each other would work. Listening through to our old stuff brought back a whole load of happy memories, as well as a lot of wincing at how little ability I had as a singer back then. Still, I did have a rather fetching selection of haircuts which obviously covered for the lack of a decent voice.

There will eventually be a website up featuring all the nostalgia you can eat, and if we actually get around to any new music, you’ll be the first to know. You unlucky people... ;-)

Big Dave versus The Directors

2007-02-26T11:08:00.000Z

Hmmm, not being what you might call a huge fan of Doctor Who, and having seen enough of the BBC production of Casanova to make me heave, I’ve not been terribly caught up in the current wave of David Tennant-mania that has been sweeping the nation.

With the music of the Smiths (stick with it...), I stayed open to the (admittedly unlikely) possibility that there might be a track at least that took my fancy (in their case, it was How Soon Is Now, right up until Morrissey insisted on opening his whining gob). With Big Dave Ten-Inch, I hoped it was a bad case of Lucas-itis (n: a director with a very particular vision stamps so hard on the abilities of a given actor or actors that they turn into soulless meat puppets).

It would seem, from last night’s showing of Tony Marchant’s Recovery, that it has been just that. David Tennant plays Alan Hamilton, head of a building firm, who sustains a brain injury when he steps out in front of a passing van after going out for a drink with a friend.

The resulting accident leaves him in a deep coma but with remarkably few physical injuries. His wife, Tricia, (played superbly by Sarah Parish) is delighted when he comes round - only to discover that the man she loved has disappeared. His personality is completely different. He’s lost all of his inhibitions and he veers from being violently angry and frustrated to vulnerable and childlike. Tricia longs to find her husband but fears she may have lost him forever.

Tipped off by Mr. Marchant showing some impressive-looking clips and talking through the gestation of the show at the DeMontfort University Scriptwriting day attended by GD and moi, I tuned in to check out the whole show. Though my recent brain-melt had only been minor and thankfully temporary, there was a soupçon of fellow-feeling for the main character’s plight.

The tenor of the NHS’ lack of post-operative care was certainly bang-on. I left hospital ten years ago after spinal surgery with a whole bunch of stitches and staples that should have been removed, barley able to walk more than a few tens of feet and with no organisation or provision of physical therapy whatsoever. This is not the fault of individual nurses or doctors. It is more the case that there is actually so little after-care available in the public health sector per se, that there’s often simply nothing to actually pass you on to. In many cases, the nurses and doctors don’t even know about organisations like Headway, who are able to offer support and information for the families of brain injury patients. The families often have no choice but to become full-time carers of their injured loved ones, putting their lives on permanent hold. This invariably causes anger, bitterness and isolation which leads to divorces and abandonment if not caught in time.

This was masterfully portrayed by both Tennant and Parish as the family fragmented, old grudges with the in-laws resurfaced, family friends drifted away and the focus on the elder son’s college education lost its momentum completely. Tennant had apparently spent time at a group session for brain injury survivors at Headway’s Essex Centre, meeting survivors and staff while doing research for his role.

Though the final denoument brought rays of hope, it didn’t wrap everything up in ribbons and present a world in which people on TV never stay hurt. There was no miracle recovery, no way back for the family to where they were before, yet the place they were now in was somewhere in which they could find a different, yet fulfilling life together. It did have one or two irritating passages of “oh come on!” in which the set-ups stood out a mile, but they were few and far between and definitely more than made up for by the entirety of the piece.

The supporting cast nailed their parts consummately, and the direction was not flag-waving, ooh, look at the ISSUE rubbish, but gentle, thoughtful and above all, respectful. Well photographed too, I thought.

As far as Tony Marchant’s writing goes, I was struck by the fact that it felt very even-handed, neither siding with how awful it was for the injured party, nor how much the family suffered.

After last night’s performance, I now look forward to more of Big Dave’s work, in the hope that other directors, such as Recovery’s Andy DeEmmony, get to work with him and not the Saturday girl they get in on Doctor Poo.

My brain hurts...

2007-02-06T15:00:00.000Z

Here’s a thing (and also explains why I’ve not been around for a while).

Consider, if you will, the basic function of linguistic facility. The plain old ability to form words, string them together into sentences, read signs and books and generally jot and scribble ones thoughts down in a coherent form.

It’s an easy one to take for granted. It’s also terrifying to have it taken away from you.

A week or so ago, while enjoying a hearty pile of food for the evening repast and watching the telly with the usual levels of scorn and derision, I felt compelled to voice to my g/f my concerns that the news item on the box was, in some way, unsatisfactorily reported. So, I muttered something in her direction, to which she absent-mindedly nodded back.

The worrying thing was, I hadn’t understood a single word I’d just said. More quietly, I ventured another comment. This was also plainly gibberish. Unsettled, I trotted upstairs to grab a pen and paper and write down a note to my girlfriend that, for some reason, I couldn’t speak properly. Surely I wouldn’t have lost the ability to write?

I felt I’d made a fair fist of a note, even though reading it back seemed a little hard, and hurried back downstairs. As my other half looked uncomprehendingly at the note and then back at me, I suddenly felt very frightened. In fact, “Scared” was the only word I could get out after much trying.

An ambulance-ride later, and with much testing at the hospital (with occasional bursts of near-lucidity), the most unearthly headache hit me, and I had to cover my eyes as any light was incredibly painful. I was admitted, and my poor other half had to go home in a cab.

Consultants buzzed round in the morning, by which time I was back to my normal self, aside from the remnants of the headache. A bit of conjecture here and there and it was decided that it ‘probably wasn’t an aneurysm’. Well, that’s good then. Much more detailed chats with the ward nurses during the day came up with some other contenders - a migraine, a stoppage of bloodflow to the brain or a thing known as a Transient Ischaemic Attack.

The mystery ‘stoppage’ would have to be tracked down, but it was considered an unlikely cause due to the recovery rate. It was generally thought that it would have taken several days if not weeks to settle down after something like that. Plus, finding out what caused it would be tricky (if you can’t diagnose, it’s likely to take quite a bit of testing and tweaking to find out the root cause).

Transient Ischaemic Attacks (TIAs) are stoppages of bloodflow within the brain, usually caused by a small blood clot getting stuck in a narrow blood vessel. A part of the brain is starved of oxygen for a few minutes, then recovers (either the clot breaks up, or other vessels compensate). It seems that the blood clots are generated by atheromas in blood vessels - small fatty deposits on the artery walls. Hmm, guess I’m not the Olympian athlete I thought I was - ahem... The symptoms of a TIA are similar to a stroke (which is what I thought I was having). The nurses called them ‘warnings that a stroke is coming unless you do something about it’. Cheery stuff, eh?The migraine theory rested on a period of tingling and numbness I’d had in my arms previously that evening. Anyone normal should have questioned the tingling thing but, as I had spinal surgery eight years ago and kinda get more than the odd trapped nerve on a regular basis, I just left it to run its course. It also had a lot to do with the recovery rate and a huge blind spot I’d developed before the headache began. And a whole bunch of stuff to do with shining lights into my eyes and asking me the same question over and over again. WTF?

Bear in mind that at this moment I was nowhere near the internet, so couldn’t do any rummaging myself (which would have helped enormously, as it turns out) and trying not to think that some kind of tumour had erupted in my head and I was going to die. I was told a consultant neurologist would be round later to see me and judge whether I needed to be kept in for an immediate scan or treated as an outpatient. Well, my other half came by, having taken the day off work, and stayed at the hospital well into the evening with the neurologist being a no-show. How ridiculous is that? Based at another hospital, sometimes he just ‘didn’t make it round’. Thank fuck I wasn’t having an aneurysm and bleeding out of my eyes then. The dick. Ever heard of the “telephone”, you ass?

During the night, as I was in the Medical Admissions Unit (short stays only and no cabaret or massage), a couple of new people were noisily brought in. One of whom had to use a commode. After much huffing, puffing and moaning. Then her floodgates opened and I decided to try sleeping on a chair down the corridor. It doesn’t take long for you to feel like you’re trapped in an institution...

Still, the next day, eventually, a different neurologist arrived, had a chat with me (by this time, I’m not in the pyjamas any more - I’m back in my own clothes and wanting to go the fuck home) and decided within fifteen minutes that the migraine theory was way out in front and I’d be best treated as an outpatient. This means a three-month waiting-list for a brain-scan (I wonder if they’ll find one?) then whatever follow-up they remember to do.

I must just say that the nurses and junior doctors there were a great laugh and working stupid hours didn’t seem to dull their edge much. Then again, they are all terribly young... ;-) They even put up with me stalking the corridors, muttering that, if this consultant that didn’t show had been an employee of mine, he would have been fired long ago. Bless ’em! And they’d all watched Green Wing, so there was much in-joke hilarity going on at the expense of all the other patients. Hey, I never said I’d become a saint...

Back home I pretty much immediately Googled “migraine speech loss” and “migraine dysphasia”, which immediately took a weight off my mind. Apparently, dysphasia is one of the top five common aura symptoms preceding a migraine, ie. if you’re one of the migraine sufferers who gets an aura, losing the ability to tell anyone that you’ve got a migraine coming is quite high on the list. Handy. You won’t even be able to ask where the painkillers are. Still, a goodly amount of research helped ease what I laughingly call my mind. Though I spent the next week deliberately being calm and sedate, thinking that, if I got a bit angry about something, my head might explode, I gave up in the end.

The pain of not being able to yell abuse at the TV was worse than the headache...

Agents

2007-01-15T18:47:00.000Z

Just throwing something out there to the interweb...

Anyone over here in the UK got any recommendations or horror stories about the getting of (or indeed, the working with) an agent?

We have a few projects in the pipeline, some features, others drama series, etc, and were after a few tips (if anyone cares to divulge) on the process of hurling oneself into the maelstrom.

Ideas?

Obviously, input from anywhere on the little blue marble that is Earth is fine by us! Caroline can take a break on this one if she feels like it - she’s already being quite disturbingly helpful of late... ;-)

Better posts forthcoming soon, some quite spicy and piquant. But not sugar-coated...

-M.

These are not my sour grapes!

2006-12-24T19:01:00.000Z

A quick one (which is all I can manage now I’m so old...) to refer you to a lovely post by The Last Duchess, and the fallout from her and her hubby’s inventive lights for Christmas.

Whether you’re a supporter of CND in the UK or not, or feel that the peace logo has been hijacked by other causes (they’ve never really hung onto it long when it’s been tried), you’ve seriously got to worry about the sort of person that drops in a note complaining about an “awful 1960s Peace sign”. The twat.

I’d be more interested in assisting in the cremation of those buffoons who plaster their entire houses in enough lights to get the city of Las Vegas ringing up and asking why they’re experiencing a blackout and whose gardens resemble a runway from LAX...

Blessings to one and all from smiling, cheery, avuncular old Riddley here at Sluice Mansions.

“Bah” and indeed “Humbug” ;-)

Torchwood twaddle

2006-12-20T21:10:00.000Z

Having been alerted to this excellent summation of the many areas in which the execrable Torchwood fails to be worthy of pissing on if it was on fire, I feel duty-bound to reproduce in full. (crib-sheet for colonials - “fanny” equates with “pussy”, not “ass”)

SCENE ONE: CARDIFF

GWEN
Hello Jack, I found this in a spaceship.
It has made my tits huge.

JACK
Watch out, it’s got monsters in it!

THEY FUCK UNTIL GWEN GLOWS

GWEN
WHAT IS HAPPENING??
MY TITS ARE HATCHING!!

JACK
I’m just that good, baby.
[he smokes a cigarette which also hatches]

SCENE TWO: STILL CARDIFF

OWEN
Can I have a fag please?

JACK
That’s what I say half the time - I’m totally bisexual.
How do you like them apples?

OWEN
It genuinely means nothing to me.

JACK
Right, whatever bitch, I’m off to stand
on top of St Paul’s Cathedral. Laters.

SCENE THREE: ABOVE CARDIFF

TOSH
I think I fancy Owen.

JACK
Girls and boys having sex is boring and for children.
Do something adult for blimey’s sake.

TOSH
Hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggg
*trump*

JACK
Haha! You totally farted.
Welcome back to the team.
You didn’t follow through did you?
That would be super-gross forever IDST

OWEN
Quick!
There’s a monster made out of bras on the roof!

JACK
BUT THAT’S WHERE I LIKE TO STAND

SCENE FOUR: ALTERNATE CARDIFF

Two monsters come through a Welsh rift. They look a bit adult / sexy and like they can possess humans / take human form and have sex.

JACK
Hi there!
I’m nonchalant as fuck, me.

ALIENS
You are not like the others Captain Jack Harkness,
it’s like yow ded or sommat.

JACK BITES HIS BOTTOM LIP AND RUNS OFF BLUBBING INTO A DOOR.
TOSH WALKS IN AND DOESN’T REALISE THERE’S ALIENS

TOSH
Jack, my fanny itches.
I think it’s probably aliens.
Gasp! Aliens!

ALIENS
Don’t blame us like.
You probably got barnacles from doing it
with a space whale, you mucky boot.

TOSH
YOU CAN READ MINDS?

BARNACLE
Me too!
Let’s all think about cocks.

EVERYONE ROLLS AROUND ON THE FLOOR IN SOFT FOCUS

SCENE FIVE: SPACE CARDIFF

JACK
Thank GOD they were allergic to human semen!

OWEN
And I’ve got some left over for when they come back!

JACK
I’ll put that into stor… where did all the spunk go?
There was seven gallons of spunk right here.

GWEN BURPS.
JACK PUTS HIS HANDS ON HIS HIPS AND PUFFS HIS CHEEKS OUT.
TOSH LAUGHS AND GWEN BURPS AGAIN.

THE END, OR IS IT? ETC

Russell T Davies CAN I HAVE TEN THOUSAND FUCKING POUNDS PLEASE or what?

This just about sums up the level of thought behind the show - need I say more?

Bloody excellent, Bond!

2006-12-18T22:23:00.001Z

Erk. What a very good film Casino Royale is.

Aside from comparisons with the rest of the franchise, most of which seem to exist in some kind of critical vacuum (or at least an alternate dimension where wanking the studio’s money-cock until it shoots its load over the screen time and time again is somehow seen to be a GOOD THING), it compares very favourably with action movies in general.

Tightly plotted, subtly scripted (yes, I did just use the word ‘subtle’ in a piece about a Bond movie) and believably played by a cast who can act and, probably more importantly, are being allowed to act. There’s a lot to like about the film.

Daniel Craig - if you’ve never seen anything else of his, buy Layer Cake and see how it’s done. An intense man, yet not caught up in that to the point of trying to ‘be’ intense, with the most ridiculously blue eyes outside of a Viking. It wouldn’t surprise me if he pops up in a longboat at some time with a horned helmet, on a pillaging run somewhere...

Eva Green - hmm, aside from an accent that careers wildly around the home counties (a valiant effort in all honesty), she has a brittle vulnerability in the role of Vesper Lynd that makes Bond’s reaction to her very believable. She also doesn’t telegraph her character’s true motivations, making for a very real internal struggle. Great stuff.

Judi Dench - it’s almost too easy to throw superlatives at Dame Judes, but she really is that good. Restrained, delicate and at turns imperious in the role, she’s an actor with a range most would happily murder their parents for. It’s only when you sit back and think about how right she is able to make every line, bit of business and nuance feel that you begin to experience something close to awe about the craft. In her hands, M is a complex, driven, assured woman who is taking a risk with her new ‘double-oh’ agent, but is under no illusions about how it will play out for him if he fails to toe the line.

No silly gadgets, no daft invisible cars, very little in terms of quips (and those that are in the script aren’t tediously overworked innuendo), no “look at how obscenely fucking rich I am” ostentation and a protagonist who is perfectly believable in the lonely, disaffected world of the spy/assassin.

In fact, many of the most memorable moments in the film are small in nature. When a gun is thrown at Bond, instead of ducking, he catches it without thinking and throws it straight back at the guy, hitting him in the head. This is in the middle of an astoundingly choreographed action sequence of running stunts at the start of the film. The whole sequence is great, but small touches like that, that make the man human, are vital to his overall believability.

A hero whose flaws don’t lead him to navel-gazing or leave him wracked by guilt for what he does. A hero who is propelled by his flaws to become the best in the business.

Excellent stuff! Go see it.

Ho fucking ho

2006-12-13T09:37:00.000Z

I was going to come up with something about the crass commercialisation of Christmas (easy target, huh?) but, as usual, The Onion beat me to it.

Enjoy extending withering looks (and muttering some newly-forged expressions) at the other shuffling shoppers in the mall after reading this glowing chunk of holiday cheer.

Of particular chunky loveliness are shitheel, douchelord, twatbomb and the inexplicably tautological cock-knob (a personal favourite).

Joy to all, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam...

Eye on the ball

2006-12-11T09:23:00.000Z

Isn’t it a lovely thing when you get to help a friend out in times of need?

Even better still when you get paid for it...

News in brief (ish):
With Christmas looming, my dear friend the Healthcare Goddess is under the cosh with several projects that she’s concerned about dropping balls on. Most of these require research materials being collated, distilled and re-presented to their target audiences. Not exactly the world’s most taxing job individually, but when you’ve got eleventy billion of them happening at once, it can get a little out of hand.

Halfway through November, it didn’t look like there was much work to be had for us in the run-up to Christmas, and I assumed that it was likely only to change for the busier in January, once most of the clients had recovered from sifting budgetary paperwork. So, I told the HG to throw as much work as she could my way, in order for her to meet deadlines and maybe sleep every once in a while!

I’ve been happily crunching through the odd bit of research for her, along with being a sounding-board for various business concerns, for the last few weeks. And she pays me for this, the lovely woman! She’s now in more of a position of control of the work and not quite as worried about fire-fighting and letting clients down as she was. She may even be able to prepare for her holiday soon, you never know.

Even better has been a sudden influx of work from an unexpected quarter (ie. a new client), who are ridiculously happy with the quality of our work (as well as our prices) and are intimating that there’s a vast amount of work for us for the new year. Having seen the standard of the stuff they were being handed before, I’m not surprised. A video interview for an internal presentation being done on a palmcorder with the audio from the mic on top of the camera, with no white-balancing, led to the subject sounding like he was at the bottom of a mine-shaft, with a bad dose of jaundice. And this was given to the client (a large, multi-national pharmaceutical company) by one of the biggest creative/advertising agencies on the planet.

Staggering.

But what an opportunity... ;-)

So, it’s heads-down for a while in the run-up to the Festering Season and a positive vibe for the New Year.

I’m sure I’ll get another post in before then, but hope you all have a great time and eat enough for an army of locusts where possible. Hope the positivity comes to you all too.

Reasons to watch good telly...

2006-12-09T12:54:00.000Z

Another blogger, Irascible Ian, makes a good case for the unconverted to join the legions of worshippers at the altar of BSG...

Check it out here.

Mmmmmmm, English!

2006-12-02T14:24:00.000Z

Or, The Joys Of Torture...

Something lures about English, to native speakers possessed of a bit of fluency, a fancy for comedy and a weak spot for the works of Chris Morris, Armando Ianucci, Charlie Brooker and John Stewart.

That thing is: deliberately mucking about with the English language.

Not in the "text-speak" gibberish that the (generally) illiterate unhosed spout forth on MySpace, nor the incomprehensible twaddle found in forums by those too lazy to reach all the way up there for the spell-checker (or doing what the rest of us had to do without seemingly dying of the effort - pay attention at school).

This is more like grabbing semi-related words and making them, nay forcing them to make an odd, off-kilter sense. From Chris Morris’ concocted phrases such as arse-candle, fuck-nut, cold shit action and the frankly terrifying roboplegic wrongcock to John Stewart’s Midtacular coverage of the recent merry-go-round of electorial pageantry on display in the US, there seems to be a resurgence of word-smithing and striking anew of phrases and terminology.

Good Dog asked me the other day for a more colourful term of derogation for use in a blog entry. Sick of the overuse of words like wanker, asshole and twat, he wanted something with a little more panache to enliven the vitriol.

I suggested an old favourite of mine, slubberdegullion. Not in everyday use (more’s the pity), it’s a term which you don’t get confused about (like the US has over bollocks). You know if you call someone a slubberdegullion, you aren’t being complimentary.

Here’s a section of Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, dated 1653, drawing heavily on vocabulary used in Scotland in his time and featuring a variant spelling of slubberdegullion. Dive in and experience utter wordgasm:

The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown household loaf.

Why oh why oh why is that not the way in which we converse these days?

I’m particularly enthralled by the ones that stand out by their sheer normality, such as “staring clowns” or the fact that he then mentions “other suchlike defamatory epithets”. You mean there were more? Like this? Wow...

I’ve also dreamed up my own (undoubtedly inaccurate) rendering of the last sentiment, “the great brown household loaf”. “They’re not allowed cakes, so they should eat shit”. Charming, eh? The next time you want to slyly insult someone, tell them to go and eat of the great brown household loaf.

Get these terms into everyday use and do it now. Better still, lob them into a bit of dialogue. No-one will notice...

I really do insist. ;-)

For more fun, check out World Wide Words, in particular their Weird Words section.

Cough, splutter...

2006-12-01T10:05:00.000Z

Wow, it’s been a while, eh?

Technically, I’ve been ill. I say technically because, though I’ve been coughing like a bull walrus with bronchial pneumonia after a good cigar, I’ve not felt remotely ill. Which probably explains why I’ve been generously handing around whatever version of the plague I’m going to manfully survive this time...

Anyway, while away, there’s been a slight resurgence of a type of work (graphic design for print - posters in this case) that I’d assumed had died a death for my little company. Partly this was due to not pursuing it as most of the clients we’d had were TV-company-related, and therefore unwilling to pay anything like what I know the work should cost. Therefore, as a type of work, it took up too much time, meant listening to clients who were demonstrably clueless with regard to formulating a brief or conveying said brief in human sentences to someone with an IQ larger than their shoe-size, entailed endless revisions as the clients always seemed to need to run it past everyone they’d ever met, and took time away from more productive work, even if that consisted of staring vacantly out of the window while working out the structure of an underlying story theme in an as-yet-unpublished-or-commissioned piece of fiction.

So, a friend of a friend (hereafter known as MD-Negative - for his refreshingly un-dictatorial manner as MD of a marketing company), working in the same market as the corporate filming we often do, rang and asked if we could take care of six posters for internal communications. After a short and refreshingly brief preamble, he suggested a daily rate that the end client was looking to pay. This was orders of magnitude higher than anything we’d be getting working for the knuckle-draggers in TV marketing, so I said yes.

With as much of a brief as MD-Negative could give us in the absence of a great deal of help from the end client, work got underway. Three days and six relatively pleasing (to me, anyway) poster designs later, the end client finally supplied us with the corporate branding manual we’d been after from day one. Ho hum, reworks ahoy!

What made these reworks far less painful than those encountered in the telly arena was the obviously respectful way in which our opinions were solicited about the overall designs, the sympathy over the lack of direction (which MD-Negative was experiencing just as much as us), and the fact that additional work was unequivocally going to be paid for, as it was through no fault of ours that we’d not been supplied with the correct information with a looming deadline.

I quote, without any smugness, an excerpt from an email received once the dust had all settled:

Can I just say again the stuff you are doing is excellent, and your flexibility and patience with all the changes is fantastic. So different to the creatives I am used to dealing with - an absolute pleasure!

Not bad, eh? Due to me not losing my rag over the end client’s infuriating inertia, we’ve not only kept them very happy with a handful of posters, we’re now filming with them next week and have ended up on their approved suppliers list. Huzzah!

One of the things that I used to berate an ex-guitarist for (bear with me, this does have a point) was not dabbling outside his musical comfort-zone. He played rock, and that was that. No funk, jazz, blues, classical or anything other than ‘chunky’ rock. Though his playing was good, there would be things in certain songs that he would just not get and would always sound laboured. If he’d nipped out into uncharted territory every once in a while, he might have been able to add other dimensions to his playing.

One of the great joys about writing with Good Dog is that our backgrounds are, in some areas, wildly different. In my opinion, this is a great thing, as there are always things in our histories that have an unexpectedly useful bearing on a script problem, plot point or character facet.

Yep, stepping back outside the current stream of work and “keeping your hand in” in a particular style of work pays off.

I bet that almost all of the writers out there unwittingly mine their ‘previous lives’ for material.

And why not? It’s better than watching Torchwood... ;-)

Damn you Dixon, damn you to hell!

2006-11-13T14:24:00.000Z

Shaking my fist at the air, impotently raging at myself for listening...

Ah, calmer now, back to the beginning:

Will, among a few others, alerted me a while back to a show called Heroes. Thought I’d get around to flicking through an episode or two, just to humour him. Curses, it’s good!

I watched the first episode and thought “Hmmm, it’s not bad, a little clunky in places, but there might be something to it, so I’ll give it another episode or two to see where it goes.” Now I’m sat, gnashing my teeth, having watched the first six shows and have been thoroughly drawn into its quirky little universe.

My initial lukewarm reaction is undoubtedly due to being able to cherry-pick some outstanding (mainly US) shows against which I subconsciously compare anything new. The scarily high-budget Lost, Battlestar Galactica’s consummate spectacle, Deadwood, The West Wing, etc, etc, all predispose me with a very high expectation of any given new show.

This is not to say that Heroes is in any way bad, but more that I’d been spoiling myself a little, thinking that as soon as the bar had been raised, there wouldn’t be any more tat (silly boy...).

The show has gone for a nice, slightly off-beam take on the whole ‘normal person becoming endowed with superpowers’ thing and brought it to bear on the lives of some fairly ordinary people. None of the Smallville ‘what do they do with the regular, non-gorgeous people in this town?’ syndrome or, worse still, the Torchwood ‘he’s a weapons expert, she’s a ninja death assassin, she’s a whore with a heart of gold and none of them suffer fools gladly’ tosh.

Nope, these are interesting, flawed, complicated characters with a good amount of depth, set against a world of murky grey areas, with an unfolding series of plotlines that pique interest without being just ‘bloody mysterious’ for the sake of it.

A fuller cannonade of blather will no doubt follow this as the series progresses, but that Will Dixon keeps on finding the tasty visual nibblies for us greedy types out here. Well done, sir!

A proud nation awakes

2006-11-09T10:21:00.000Z

Well, would you look at those mid-term election results, huh?

Without putting together a coherent message, other than “Fed up of the Republicans? Then vote for us!”, the Democrats have managed to stage a mini-coup in the US.

Just goes to show what the democratic process can do in the hands of several million pissed-off voters, doesn’t it?

I came across this, over at The Last Duchess’ place, and thought it deserved a post here. Spend 4.5 minutes of your time with a smile on your face inspired by a jolly US citizen who was “as mad as hell and not gonna take it any more”...

What a carve-up

2006-11-08T19:35:00.000Z

In between oceans of self-regard, delusions as a serious writer and just plain good ol’ staring out the window, I occasionally deign to view some of the televisual efforts of our colonial cousins in a bid to give them a little encouragement and a patronising pat on the back for at least trying...

This week’s worthy eyefest that’s been on my monitor is the gloriously put-together DEXTER, and is truly, monumentally fabulous.

A riveting and compelling central performance by Six Feet Under’s Michael C Hall as the eponymous protagonist - an amiable Miami police forensics expert specialising in blood-spatter analysis, who also happens to be a spare-time serial killer. He has an uncanny knack for spotting those who are “like him” or who have slipped through the net of justice (other serial killers, child molesters, rapists) in society and has chosen to spend his time removing them from the gene pool in a spectacularly understated, yet chilling fashion. Having been adopted as a child and raised by an honourable cop who saw the potential in the young man for murder, Dexter works to a strict and well-defined code of rules. Without falling at any step into noticeable cliché, this makes for a truly fascinating character without portraying him as a monster. How bizarre...

Accompanying Hall are a great ensemble cast, who aren’t just there as backdrop material. Jennifer Carpenter as Dexter’s sister Debra (a homicide cop), lacking the confidence in her own abilities to take her up to the role of detective, is constantly tapping Dexter for clues and help with her cases.

Erik King’s powerful and intense Sergeant Doakes relies on the work of the forensics crew, but trusts Dexter about as far as he could spit a battleship. There are also some great revelations about and for him as the series progresses. Doakes doesn’t like Dexter one little bit, finding his fascination with his work more than a tad creepy.

Dexter’s complicated and multi-layered boss, Lt. Laguerta (Laren Veléz) has definitely got irons in fires she shouldn’t have. Politically ambitious, she has a touch of the David Aceveda from The Shield about her. Fascinating.

Another member of the forensics squad is Angel Batista, played by David Zayas who has the same magnetic watchability as Jean Reno, different in approach to the work from Dexter, yet thorough and played with a light, deft touch. Three episodes in and I already want to know as much about the “supporting” characters as I do about Dexter.

Though the show is narrated in great part by Hall, illuminating the workings of Dexter’s mind, this doesn’t have the intrusive feel of, say, Harrison Ford’s narration of Blade Runner.

Congratulations and kudos obviously go to Jeff Lindsay, the Florida-based crime writer who came up with the character in the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, but a huge shout-out must also go to those people involved in the commissioning, screenwriting and production of the show. It’s got a distinct visual style of its own, without having to rely too heavily on style over content, it has a well-crafted narrative and some great moments of dark humour, it’s got some serenely understated performances from a great cast and it has the ability to reference other genre shows and films without ripping them off.

More than anything though, it has taken some chances and is more fuel for the theory that “no-one in this town knows anything” with regard to what will work and what won’t.

“Guys? I have a great idea for a show. The central character is a serial killer, but a kind of good one.”

[click...]

“Guys? Hello?”

“Anyone there?”

Marvellous! And they’ve already commissioned Season Two - excellent! Trebles all round!

Will made me do it...

2006-11-08T11:15:00.000Z

This was a rant I’d posted on Will Dixon's excellent blog, which I thought I’d tweak and post up here, just in case it was all a bit much for a “comment”...

Though war is the ultimate insanity perpetrated by one “nation” upon another (anybody recall actually being personally asked whether we wanted to go to war in Iraq?) and it is colouring the issues over which the current “Midtacular” is being fought, there are still things external to this that are fundamentally flawed with the Bush administration.

Keith Olbermann (and Colbert and Stewart) does a fine job outlining Iraq-related issues as well as highlighting those of domestic policy, in which civil liberty infringements and McCarthyism seem to be sneaking in through the back door.

In a similar fashion to the UK, where we have a general public astonishingly credulous of the clumsy fabrications of fact and political ‘spin’ by a government whose oratorial abilities are not much more advanced than those of student debating societies, the US administration (not particularly known for its anti-corruption efforts) is, for the most part, baldly lying to its electorate. And getting away with it.

I generally try to stay away from getting too involved in it all. Partly because I’ll get an ulcer if I let it get to me too much, but also because a lot of my company’s corporate work is tied to, you guessed it, the Houses of Parliament over here. Anyone know of any area of life that isn’t shades of murky grey?

I’m as involved in US politics as most US citizens (possibly more so), mainly due to the US wielding such enormous power on the world stage. The cheesy line “With great power comes great responsibility” is sadly being ignored by the Bush administration to the point that, whenever a conflict arises around the world, the only ambassador that elicits groans of horror when they arrive is Condoleezza Rice. You just know that things are going to get worse once she starts harping on at whoever it is that’s fighting...

The major difficulty facing the US is, as is the way of things in modern times, one of perception. When I was growing up, the US was a country to aspire to visit; kids would dream of going to US schools, having US friends, eating US food and talking in that wonderfully exotic (at the time) accent.

Now, the US is broadly percieved as an arrogant, blundering idiot child of a country, crashing around demanding the rest of the world does things its way, shouting and kicking until it gets its way. I’ve got to stress that this is a perception of the country and is not an attack on the citizens of the US, who are f**king excellent people, IMHO.

As with all generalisations, close scrutiny makes this evaporate quicker than a good glass of whisky in an air-conditioned hotel bar. Citizens of the US are being done a horrifying disservice by their administration, led by a thick, red-necked buffoon who, if he wasn’t in charge of the biggest economy in the world (and all that leviathan entails), would be just the funny little man who runs Dumbfuckistan. However, this illiterate fuckwit and his accomplices have managed to make the world a progressively more dangerous place, provoked wars, increased globabl terrorism (not without the odd spot of help here and there, obviously), pushed the US into brain-melting national debt, endangered relations between many countries and made the rest of us constantly have to remind ourselves that the rest of the US public are not like him.

Bill Clinton, for all his foibles (Jesus, he got his dick sucked - lighten up!), was a deal-maker. Though not possessed of the greatest track record of any US president, he was willing to ask of even some of the most extreme foreign leaders: “What is it you want?” and “How can we come to a compromise that doesn’t involve shooting people?” You have to start from there. Unwillingness to compromise is not strength, it is weakness borne of fear and hatred.

So, I have a plan. Reasonable, moderate and stylish (naturally).

Over here in the UK, we once had this fella called Guy Fawkes...

No, seriously. Get out and vote. Participate in bringing down this bastard and installing someone (anyone!) with a brain and an awareness that foreigners are a GOOD THING and should be engaged in an inclusive dialogue instead of bombed, burnt, tortured and obliterated. Republican or Democrat? Doesn’t matter, just stop him and stop him now. You badly need a government in which you can place some trust.

Rant over. Apologies all...

Currently listening to: Out Of Exile by Audioslave

Aha! Now we know...

2006-10-21T10:31:00.000+01:00

So that’s what the CS Expo is really like...

Emily, we’re coming over next year, so we'll buy lunch in exchange for some parking tips.

Fire The Engines Of God

2006-10-20T09:29:00.000+01:00

Partly due to the nagging feeling that, due to being out of London and not having huge amounts of room for people to stay, I'd been putting off sorting any kind of celebration for my birthday (40th, Sunday 29th Oct - cash always accepted) on the purely pragmatic notion that in all likelihood very few people would be able to turn up.

I’ve since been cajoled by more sensible people into emailing a selection of the elite from the address book, and have got a good response back about who fancies coming and whether or not, at their ages, they could even contemplate fancy dress. Well, what's the point of becoming an adult, earning cash and having all those bills to pay if you can’t occasionally dress like a twat? I know I’m going to give the boots (see earlier post) a good outing... ;-)

So, the Birthday Party Planning Campaign swings into action like a well-oiled machine. With several (if not all) of the vital components missing. Because I’ve done so little prep, I have no idea what I’m going to do for the evening, other than some nebulous “party” thing.

I’ve bought a big fire-pit, as it’s October and cold. Laugh all you want, LA-types...

I’ve made some lists of things to buy (even bought a couple...).

I’m going to cook, so there are quite a few large food-warming devices to be requisitioned.

Obviously, the English will drink furiously (note to self - order more booze) and thereby cover any organisational gaps, but how about some of you volunteering some ideas of not-too-hard-to-arrange things to do, or even just a checklist of stuff for me to go through.

Yes, I know it’s my birthday, but I would rather like people to enjoy the party too, in between bouts of telling me how young, talented and gorgeous I still am... ahem...

Seriakh

2006-10-16T18:53:00.000+01:00

Just a short note to let you all know that Seriakh is now waiting with open legs for your reading pleasure.

Or something... It's just a piece of fun for some of us to do the odd spot of venting. ;-)

We're currently holding open auditions for Worst Piece Of Crap Idea for a Show. Check it out...

Te Deum, or Tedium?

2006-10-10T22:20:00.000+01:00

I make no apologies for the fact that this entry veers all over the place like a turbo-charged shopping trolley. Can't think why, but it all seemed to make sense when I was writing it...

Ohboyohboyohboy, I been watching some reeeeeeaaaaaal tasty telly of late.

Courtesy of Callaghan over at Creatively Progressing, I checked out Studio 60 on The Sunset Strip. Now, we all undoubtedly have fairly high expectations (quite rightly) of Mr & Mrs Sorkin's little boy Aaron, so I crossed my fingers and hoped that it would give me the same kind of "grin factor" feeling engendered when one stumbles across a particularly fine piece of work.

It did. I grinned like a dribbling buffoon who'd just been given a morphine enema.

I need to nail my colours to the mast here about telly/movies and the making thereof. For me, it's less important that something is "down to the dirt" factually accurate about its subject if that comes at the cost of it being good entertainment. If I wanted a true picture of forensic procedures, I'd watch a documentary, not CSI. The same goes for any dramatic endeavour. I'm here to be entertained, fercrissakes, not lectured about how much the author knows about a given subject. Whether that entertaining takes the form of an emotional journey into the bleak recesses of the protagonist's soul, or is just a bunch of edge-of-the-seat, action-packed, blow up every building bigger than a shed eye-candy isn't important.

I'm not saying that a writer or creator should abandon the idea of research and knowing the field in which the piece is set, just that it needs to be tempered with the view that the end result is a piece of entertainment.

Obviously, drama is a variable and movable feast for different people. Many erudite and eloquent screenwriters whose opinions I generally respect would rather challenge someone to a duel to the death than allow Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge to be included on a list of decent films, for example. Others will sweepingly rebuff anyone that tentatively offers anything that Hollywood has produced in the last hundred years as anything other than bilge.

We all know that this field is subjective. If we could have a machine you could plug a movie into and it would flash a light telling you it was either a masterpiece or a piece of shit, well, that would mean the same old thing being trotted out time and time again, because "it makes the machine show the Masterpiece light".

There isn't such a machine, which means that Marty Scorcese gets to make movies as well as Troma. And there are audiences for both. I've evangelised about the new Battlestar Galactica over here in the UK and let me tell you, it's a tough sell. "The old thing with the robots?" is generally what you hear, alongside "Oh no, I don't really watch any sci-fi". Admittedly, if you get to watch what the UK is currently selling by the pound under the banner of sci-fi (Doctor bleeding Who), then I too would opt out of seeing anything remotely similar on grounds of I might have to cut my own head off to escape infecting my eyes with it.

Hey, I didn't say we couldn't be opinionated, now did I? ;-)

Circuitously, this brings me around to the subject of Studio 60. A blank look generally greets the mention of the show (as it's not being shown here yet), so I mention Aaron Sorkin. A glimmer of recognition. "West Wing?" Ah yes, that gets their interest. Then you have to say, "It's like West Wing, but not about politics, though it's sort of about corporate politics and they run a TV show, not the country, and no, Martin Sheen's not in it as a stand-up comic". And you've lost 'em again.

Whether or not the artistry is perfect, or the characters are absolutely believable (Sarah Paulson is pushing it a bit as a comic actress for me) doesn't impact on the show being (for me) a very well crafted bit of television with a lot of rooom for growth and storylines. I don't care whether the writer's room's on SNL were exactly like that, this is a dramatisation, not a documentary.

And it's bloody entertaining.

The prettiest star

2006-10-04T14:21:00.000+01:00

I had written a long eulogy to a talented friend who I recently lost, but I've just scrapped it.

I'd only be wallowing.

And you probably didn't know her.

Staying back in your memory
Are the movies in the past
How you moved is all it takes
To sing a song of when I loved
The Prettiest Star
- The Bowie.

Reality Updated

2006-09-24T14:08:00.000+01:00

Certain times of one's life are usually accompanied by exclamations of "oh, you're f**king kidding!" spewed forth in a resigned, yet furious tone. This is one of those times, fun-seekers...

Rock for Dullards™

Tommy Lee's Rockstar Supermegahypernova has a winner - the skunk-haired ego-prince Lukas Rossi.

Monkeyboy Lukas Rossi - Oh dear god...

Now, before you all say "Mark, it's only a TV show, and no-one with real talent would be a contestant" - YOU'RE WRONG (and possibly haven't had sex for a while). There were a couple of entrants in the pile, as detailed previously (do try to keep up) that were talented singer-songwriters, blessed with stage presence and great voices.

Unfortunately, Lukas Rossi does not appear to be one of the cream. Not to say he's terrible. One only had to listen to Zayra Alvarez (mental) or Storm Large (what a name! Right up there with Dick Thrust) to know that he's head and shoulders above them. He just didn't have a superabundance of what another fave TV show is named after: "The X Factor". He has intriguing 'style', especially in the hair department, and spends wayyy too much time on makeup and prettification to really rock in any sort of meaningful way. Always fiddling with his clothes and appearance, there's seemingly very little about him that is anything other than superficial.

Again, before anyone decides to point out the obvious (ie. popular music is, for the most part, one of the most superficial activities on the planet), I just feel that "pissing about with one's hair for hours per day" was lower on the list of duties for Jimi Hendrix than, say, becoming one with his godlike affinity with blues, jazz, rock and the white Fender Strat. I could be wrong, but I'll happily fight ya for it...

Hey ho, here we go down the Corporate Rock rut again. ;-) With a bit of luck Magni Ásgeirsson (deeply talented and soulful), Toby Rand (the most "rock and roll" of the lot) and even ol' Ryan Star (edgy and possibly a little out of the musical zone he should be working in) will have the wit and perseverance to have careers in the music industry that have some kind of value to them above and beyond that of impressing all your mates down at the Whisky or Rainbow on the Strip or The Joint in Vegas. They certainly seemed to have the talent and tenacity.

The X Factor

This one still keeps dragging me away from the computers (or the shed, or the ridiculous amount of D-I-Y I'm supposed to have done already). With the initial few series, it was necessary to show the judges' characters as grotesques - a conciliatory role between two hardened businessmen within the industry, one of whom is portrayed as a complete bitch.

Now though, the great un-hosed (the British public) is familiar enough with who these people are for the producers to be able to show them in the more human role which they actually occupy in reality. Therefore, the comments and criticisms that are selected for broadcast are much more enlightening and reasoned, as they are generally about those entrants who actually do posess some innate, if raw, talent. Of course, they still throw in the odd talentless munter whose family and friends have told them they're the greatest singer on earth, in the vain hope that what the world needs is a voice like a squeezed corpse housed in a frame that bears a horrifying resemblance to someone having a nightmare entitled "When The Oil-Rigs Came Alive And Started Yelling At Me".

Well, you've gotta have some laughs, right? And it beats playing "Death F**k 2: Zombie Apocalypse" until your thumbs bleed, doesn't it?

Actually, I'll get back to you on that last one...

Kicking my preconceptions in the nuts

2006-09-21T23:18:00.000+01:00

"America, fuck yeah!" as the US foreign policy advertising slogan goes...

Well, funnily enough, advertising in the US is something that's floored me recently. Yet again, there's a surprise cunningly secreted up the sleeves of our colonial upstart cousins (if you're not getting the humour in these comments about the US, go read another blog, eh?).

GEICO Insurance (which doesn't, as far as I'm aware, have a market in the UK) has had a mascot in the form of a gecko for the last six years, which has been voiced by various different people in their animated TV advertising.

Recently, production house Rhythm & Hues Studios have brought him into the 3D world with a CGI creation voiced by Brit actor Jake Wood. This is a voicing that has a real "working class, dodgy car dealer, slightly shifty, but ever-so-Brit" feel to it. Very much not a blue-collar US citizen voice.

And bizarrely it's going down a storm in a country not known for its tolerance or comprehension of British regional accents (asking a Londoner if they're from Australia, for example...).

In fact, it's going down so well that it has won awards and plaudits from across the board. Advertising Week has thrown gongs at it, it's been voted one of the most recognisable icons in advertising in the US and its popularity hasn't seemed to dwindle with the years or the changing actors drafted in to give the little fella life. Here's a taste:

You can also check out the full range of GEICO's TV ads here.

Sometimes, just sometimes, people in advertising and marketing redeem themselves spectacularly. Hehehe...

Kudos to Good Dog for alerting me to this.

All in the mind

2006-09-20T11:20:00.000+01:00

The writer, actor, raconteur and all-round good egg Stephen Fry last night hosted the first segment of a two-part documentary on bipolar disorder (which used to be known as "manic depression" in the good old days). It was an honest account of his life coping with the condition, and featured case studies and contributions from people of all walks of life from around the planet.

As someone with bipolar disorder myself (I don't suffer from it, it's simply part of how I'm made), I found it to be very enlightening, refreshing and elegantly presented. As a man who has presented his "funny side" to the world for most of his career, Stephen showed just what the disorder can do to one's self-esteem, social agonising and inability to function in what one estimates to be a normal fashion. If nothing else, it showed the facts in a normal, measured way that hopefully will foster understanding not just in carers closely associated with bipolar people, but in the wider public.

Bipolar disorder is generally characterised by mood swings that take the form of horrid, depressing lows that lead to inertia, suicidal thoughts, negative self-image and reclusiveness, coupled with hysterical highs during which one feels able to take on any task, destroy opposition to one's plans, lead nations into a bright new tomorrow and so forth. This then spirals out of control, dumping one back into the lows in a cycle that can, at times, feel inescapable for those trapped in them.

A major problem in breaking the cycle is that the initial stages of the highs can literally be one's most productive times - you have an unshakeable faith in your beliefs, jobs that "mere mortals" would take ages to do are annihilated in record time and yet still done very well. This is a seductive and dangerous state to be in. Everything feels more intense, you feel more alive, the world seems to just click into place around you, people find you more attractive and you feel a burning desire to just get out there and do stuff, because you know it'll be brilliant.

Along with this, however, comes a nagging worry that the people who find you attractive only do so because of the state you're in (and it won't last...), that other people involved in your work need to just speed up somehow to keep up with your freewheeling mind, that maybe you're somehow better than anyone else or destined for greatness if only everyone else could just see it. These feelings then precipitate the plummet into the depths, where the rage, bitterness and anger about missed chances or "being dealt an unfair hand" lie.

The efficacy of treatment is, naturally, different for every person with bipolar disorder. What would certainly have helped me in the early stages of finding out what was wrong with me over twenty years ago, is getting over the fear of letting anyone know that I'm "mental". By that, I mean that there is an inbuilt fear of vulnerability, that somehow letting people know that you're not normal will make them run a mile and all those worries about whether anyone really likes you will be confirmed.

Many of the interviewees with bipolar disorder (including Carrie Fisher, Robbie Williams and Tony Slattery) stated that, although it has caused them almost unbearable suffering at times, if they were presented with a button that could take it away, they wouldn't press it.This strikes many people as odd, but imagine that you could live your life in regular pastel shades but every once in a while, it would flip into glorious Technicolour with surround sound and everything, and I do mean everything, would just fit into place. That's what the highs feel like before they get out of control. It also means that the cost for those periods is to serve another section of your life out in grainy, scratchy black and white with muffled mono sound. Most of the contributors felt that the high periods were where they were at their most creative and inspired.

This is not to say that being bipolar is somehow a blessing - it's not. It's not a badge to wave for sympathy, and it's certainly not something to flaunt as if other people should be envious.

Stephen's Hollywood agent, when asked about Stephen's revelatory role in the show, was quoted as saying "Contrary to popular opinion you don’t have to be gay or Jewish to get on in Hollywood, but by God you’ve got to be bipolar. I can give you any number of people for your documentary." Illuminating, huh? Perhaps not - maybe I should start thinking about moving across? ;-)

Stephen Fry and the team behind the show have, even in the first half of the piece, done a huge service if only for the simple fact of showing that there are heaps of people living with and managing the condition, they're not attempting to go on gun rampages or eat babies at dawn, and that being diagnosed bipolar is not a curse, but the opening of a door onto the future.

Well done, Stephen. I look forward to next Tuesday's concluding segment.

Speaking freely

2006-09-12T23:21:00.000+01:00

This is one of the stronger pieces of evidence that democracy is (believe it or not) still alive and well in the United States of America.

I first encountered this on Crooks and Liars, a site I thoroughly recommend for those non-US citizens such as myself that may have previously, misguidedly, thought that the majority of the population of the US actually agrees with anything that their deranged administration does or says...

Of particular interest, in the light of the anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attack, is the following erudite and eloquent speech:

Tally ho!

2006-09-09T23:14:00.000+01:00

I quite like science-fiction conventions. There, I've said it.

Not all of them, admittedly, but those that work well, like the one up in Coventry recently are usually quite a blast. The organisers have a healthy disrespect for themselves and the whole idea of conventions without it spilling over into ridicule. They all know that they're not working on a cure for cancer, or that a shuttle launch won't go ahead without them. The atmosphere is therefore one of unforced, gentle fun. Jolly convivial and allows for a few extended spots of catching-up/business chat with various actor friends over coffee and nibblies without them having to rush off to a photo shoot or signing within seconds of sitting down.

The other extremely pleasant thing (other organisers take note, please) is that those running the show are open to the fact that people like us are not attendees or particularly virulent fans of any of the shows, but are working in the industry. We also have to grab time with some of our work colleagues in strange places (such as sci-fi conventions). This placing of us on the "other side of the table" is profoundly helpful, as it stops a whole load of awkwardness and the perception of us as gawping fans, hoping for an autograph or a few snatched minutes of superficial conversation with a guest.

Meeting up with Tai Chi Supergirl was superbly timed, as she'd just finished an activity and had a lunchtime gap of a couple of hours before needing to be sitting in the signing queue. Long chats regarding the development of a website for her newly-invigorated business drive went well. There was loads of personal catch-up time for Good Dog and her, furiously swapping notes about novels and current writers that have caught their eye. She'd recently been through some very taxing business dealings, and has come out the other side a much stronger and focused person. Good to be around people like that! ;-)

Our Lead Participant was also there, in a festive and jolly mood. Not having met Tai Chi Supergirl, they'd been introduced the night before and got on like a house on fire. We presented the final DVD containing the main show and interview segments for her perusal. Also saw one of the interviewees there and passed him a courtesy copy. Always helps to get people on-side, plus he's a fine chap and it's good to keep him appraised of what we're doing with his material. Wise to let people know that you're not misrepresenting them, I feel...

Also met up with Bond Darling, who is always a joy to be around, and Booking Babe (who was looking after her) who enjoyed my boots perhaps a little too much. Or not enough, depending on one's viewpoint, ho ho...

All in all, a positive, life-affirming day. Even with the mind-bendingly dire traffic/roadworks abortion that was the trip home. Inconvenient temporary speed limits coupled with the now obvious fact that most drivers in the UK got their licences out of a cereal packet and have no bloody idea how to drive. Or have any courtesy whatsoever.

Still...

Back to HQ to tie up loose ends on the Lead Participant's DVD project to finally put that to bed, sort out our cauldron of nebulous ideas into some kind of plans that we can put into production or a form that can be pitched to people, review the original ideas for Tai Chi Supergirl's website and fix up the PC that I botched last week...

Currently listening to: The Boomtown Rats - In The Long Grass. In most places, it doesn't even come up to patchy. Guess they just weren't the songwriters they thought they were. After Rat Trap (A Tonic for the Troops) and I Don't Like Mondays (The Fine Art of Surfacing), they seem to have fallen to bits.

Not waving/not drowning/not sure...

2006-09-07T15:00:00.000+01:00

Focus.

It's a lovely thing to have, driving you onward in work and leisure, helping you achieve tasks in record time and inspiring others.

Trouble is, sometimes it just ups and leaves without even closing the door, giving you the uneasy feeling that it might not be back any time soon. If at all.

One of my most treasured friends calls times like these "Treacle Days", the analogy being that it's like trying to swim through treacle and no progress seems to be made for all the effort that might be going in.

Having had a great start to the week, some recent events have derailed the whole thing. All the momentum built up on Monday and Tuesday seems to have gone, and work seems an insurmountable obstacle. Intellectually, I know this to not be the case, plus I'm armed with a few handy-dandy little tricks to sneak back into the work habit while part of me looks the other way, so I know that it will pan out fine in the end.

One of the things I love doing is helping other people out. Especially if they hit situations like this.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to ask for help any more.

Oh dear...

2006-09-02T18:28:00.000+01:00

Are we all just going to sit here blogging or rabbiting on MyEmptySpace while the world zooms past outside..?

I have to say though, as I randomly access other blogs via the handily named "Next Blog" button, I feel terribly English (ie. I can't read anyone else's languages!). This does somewhat limit my ability to interact and learn from other cultures. Perhaps that's what I need to do next in all that leisure time I don't have - charge my way through learning some non-English languages (starting with Dutch, otherwise my girlfriend will kill me...).

Hmmm, another project in the making! ;-)

The horror of Reality™

2006-08-31T13:07:00.000+01:00

Arm yourselves with copious trugs of past-the-sell-by-date fruit and veg. Push me into a wipe-clean corner of a room with blood channels and a drain in a town where no-one will wonder where I've gone. Prepare the onslaught of abuse, deliquescent fodder and sharp, pointy objects, for I have found glimmerings of joy in...

Tommy Lee's Rockstar Supernova and The X Factor...

The sheer vacuousness of telly-reality-contest-hopeful-gurning-plebs has been something that generally has me slack-jawed in contempt, gazing hatred at the screen while I furiously will the television to implode. Second only to my desire to see the producers of said bilge have an on-screen live aneurysm and shoot blood from their eyes and both nostrils, this is a rage without too many parallels in my "oh bugger, the food's arrived, so I'll surely be able to find something on the box worth watching for 30 minutes or so" teevee grazing.

I think it's born out of the knowledge that there's so damn much f**king excellent telly about in the shape of things like the new Battlestar Galactica, The Shield, Deadwood, Carnivale, Firefly, The West Wing, The Wire (are we noticing that this is all coming out of the US at all?) that I fail to see why prime-time is getting clogged like a glutton's arteries with this dreck.

And breathe...

Rockstar Supernova (now there's an idea to take somewhere - today's empty-headed fame whores gathered up and pushed into a fusion reactor to see what happens) is one of those "get a bunch of plebs together to audition for a singer's job and televise it with audience votes to make a chunk of CAAAAAASSSH" efforts.

What makes it so risibly watchable is the job that these fools are after. Singing for a, ahem, "rock supergroup" made up of Tommy Lee (who slipped Pam Anderson a length on video or something), Jason Newstead (who got so sick of the whining in Metallica that he sensibly left) and someone called Gilby Clark (who I’d never heard of, but is apparently a highly decent chap). No evidence so far of terribly good tunes beyond the sort of Velvet Revolver sleaze-rock currently being purveyed by about a zillion Guns 'n' Roses wannabees, not much in the way of talent for the generality of the entrants (apart from two who are bloody great), and an audience who seem to be primarily from the "Californian blonde-haired airhead secretary who thinks that rock is all about doing the 'devil horns' sign and gurning furiously at the camera as it swoops past" demographic. Along with a scattering of boys who obviously want to get into bed with them.

The entrants all live in a "rock mansion" for the duration of the contest and are given a bunch of songs to fight and squabble over so that they can perform them in front of the assembled mob and three band members. Oh, and producer, MC and guitar "legend" Dave Navarro, who wears marginally less makeup than a Blackpool drag queen.

The entrants do their schtick, and the comments come forth. And such pearls of wisdom they are too. Actually, Jason N (with whom I once had a fascinating conversation about Jazz many years ago) is indeed capable of stringing a coherent sentence together, which instantly puts him in the unenviable position of having to explain all his comments to the mouth-breathing proles onstage and in the audience.

The other two, now there's where the problems start. Gilby Clark (who replaced someone in GnR around about the implosion time and long after Slash) has black hair. Really, amazingly, made-from-the-stuff-they-build-black-holes-out-of black. In essence, straight out of a bottle black. I think he has some tattoos, and probably a pierced nipple. Oh, Dave Navarro has those too. Wow, they rock. Gilby’s comments on performances by the wretched auditionees leave you with a dull sense of "did that actually mean anything?". Most of the time, in the aftermath of a perfectly creditable performance by an understandably nervous entrant, Gilby, Dave and Tommy will just find something objectionable in it so that they can patronise the hopeful nerve-bag with a lecture about how any number of their terribly famous friends would never have done it like that...

Tommy Lee is just the class idiot who lucked into being famous by being a drummer. Who'd have thought, eh? A massive overbite, a sense of rhythm that he keeps in a crate somewhere backstage, painfully "rock" tattoos and an inability to finish a sentence without tacking on "man", "baby", "word" or some other "Look at me, I'm a rockstar" parlance.

Q. What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?
A. A drummer.

Q. What's the difference between a drum machine and a drummer?
A. You only have to punch the instructions into the drum machine once.

I thank you...

Tommy Lee, Gilby Clark and Dave Bloody Navarro have put so much effort into looking the part that (to a UK musician who expects people to loook a little bit, well, grubby) they all fail hopelessly. Regulation tattoos (all of which probably relate to some, like, "deep" thing that once happened to them, man), piercings (because of course, hotel receptionists, nurses, police officers and a million other regular people don't have them...), an inability to comment on anything without sounding smug, superior, condescending or thick, and self-belief that edges dangerously toward worship.

The two contestants that actually have some kind of star quality as well as a good voice (girls and guys, "attitude" is not the same thing as talent, thanks) are an Icelandic man, Magni, who is possessed of a real ability to open his heart on stage and pour out real emotional content into a tune, and a girl called Dilana who has that raw, smoky rock voice that all the rest of us wish we'd been born with. The cow... ;-) Plus, they both have stage presence (which the band is going to need in abundance, judging by the current members) and aren't swaggering, ego-throwers.

If either of them get through, I really hope they actually have the chance to make their own mark in their own way, contribute on equal terms in the band and not be dictated to by ridiculous rock caricatures like Dave Bleeding Navarro and Tommy Lee.

Okay people, you need to listen to Jason...

The X Factor. Bizarre beyond belief, yet oddly touching.

Can't believe I'm watching this...