The Diamond Age

I can't say I've ever really enjoyed the Star Wars films although I like the ideas of future/science fiction and so forth. One of the good things about the very first film was that it portrayed space related artifacts as slightly beaten up. Much like cars in Winter, the elements had a chance to spatter grit around.

Its the same around at rashbre central, when a piece of theoretically gleaming technology has to be taken into the repair shop.

It has just happened to my little work PC, which suddenly had a collection of meltdowns. First the keyboard fatigue that somehow makes rashbre central a source of google hits for people emulating my technique to reapply loose keys. Then the buzzy fan which sounds like a hovercraft preparing for Channel crossing. Then the clicks from the special shock absorbing disk and finally the one that clinched it - the blank screen. Not Blue screen. No screen. Oh dear.

Resourcefully I just plugged in a spare monitor into the erstwhile laptop until I could find a time to drop it in for repair. It was a day I was travelling abroad and I could afford to operate from Blackberry. But then I got the phone call. It said - "when we switched your machine on, the disk failed - so we have to make you a new fresh image of your disk".

Some would go weak at the knees from such news, but I'd already backed up the entire disk, so I could laugh it off. And sure enough, they've given me a replacement machine with a new disk. Same model, same age and I've noticed the 'new image' seems to mean that a few popular office products seem to now close with mystery errors involving serious looking hexadecimal codes.

So perhaps Star Wars is right and we are closer to scruffy cyberpunk rather than gleaming sci-fi.

treasured?

Perhaps this week's budget speech by Darling was a clever ploy to camouflage whatever parlous state we are in fiscally. Everyone expected his delivery to be boring and by popular accounts it was more of an incantation, perhaps suited to a wizard from Harry Potter.

Most of the budget information had been leaked in advance, which used to be a sackable offence. Presumably nowadays its to give all the management accountants a chance to get their at-a-glance briefings prepared. It certainly meant that much of what he said was recited like so many lines from a dull spreadsheet.

And no 'special something' to brighten up the fagsgasnbooze increases.

Nada.

Yet a first budget, which would have been the ideal time for Darling to make his mark on something. Maybe he's already done that with his dithered assistance to Northern Rock's flailing deficit or the way he presided over the Department which lost 25 million citizen records.

Its likely that Pa Broon asked Alistair to keep a low profile as he's not already been fired for any of the above points. A hint now that the next election won't be until 2010, but maybe a separate bet whether Darling makes it that far. Unless, his near neighbour in Scotland, JK Rowling, gives him some new spells.

car cam revisited

A dirty pretty remix of Wednesday's meander across West London featuring M3, M25, M4, A4, Hogarth's, Hammersmith, Knightsbridge, Beauchamp Place, Sloane Street, Sloane Square, Chelsea Bridge. Finishing at the Snack Bar.

copy cats say cheez

Those new London posters from the Met about how to report terrorists have been getting a fairly rapid set of copy cats. I particularly like this one by the mainly anonymous lex10. I suppose we'd all better be mindful now about taking photos of surveillance cameras in London, carrying multiple phones or swapping SIMs.

2 cool for catz.

Srsly.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, london, cats, catz, watch+dem+bak

Wordless Wednesday?

carcam around west London yesterday evening

Technorati Tags: rashbre, wordless, wordless+wednesday, OTA, london, kensington, chelsea, M4, M25

blowin' in the wind

I woke on Monday to the sound of wheely bins careering around the pavement.

The rather strong Ides of March had playfully decided to beat the bin men to the recycling contents and to playfully scatter papers all over the road aided and abetted by the rain.

I don't think it would make a very enchanting picture, so instead, as I sit here this evening in the full aroma of daffodils and tulips scenting the room, I thought an appropriate picture would instead be the unusual view of the London Eye that I awoke to a few days ago.

Mad Men

I've just watched the second episode of this show by some of the Sopranos team, with a slew of new actors. I really want to like it but I'm struggling at the moment. Its certainly well filmed and luscious but I'm not sure about the pacing which may be a little slow for modern viewing. As a quick 'for instance' Tin Men was on television yesterday - the one set in a similar era about the scams of selling aluminum house cladding with Danny de Vito, and I must say that had a more driven plotline, sharper cuts and still funny observations of the time.

I guess the challenge with Mad Men is that in between the clever evocative Madison Avenue 1960 colour schemes there's an acting style that seems to owe too much to old TV re-runs from the era. The press releases all say how wonderful this show is and historically accurate and so forth but I wonder then if it sways towards unnecessary reverence in some of the portrayals.

For my eyes there's still to much sign-posting around the what would be judged in 2008 as political and social incorrectness of the 1950s turning into the 1960s. Tonight when the girl walks in playing spacemen with a clothing plastic bag over her head, the comments about 'I hope you haven't left my dry cleaning on the floor' seemed just a little too forced. And when our secretary heroine is being eyed by the 'red blooded office men' it gets a lengthy montage in case anyone is missing the point.

The equivalent 1970s incorrectness of the British 'Life on Mars', for me, usually in a split second gesture gives a more robust counter to some of the social change between the decades.

So back on Madison Avenue, there's the new girl in the office, who presumably will fall inappropriately for one of the other office workers by the end of the first series. There's the main man with a pretty but ailing wife and bohemian mistress (who probably lives on Bleeker St., but I suspect another couple of episodes before that unfolds). I'm concerned that we have another psychiatrist supporting a main character though in Sopranos it was Tony, this time it's the wife. And there's the sort of barber's shop quartet of main man's office buddies, all of whom smoke copiously and drink manhattans, old fashioneds and similar cocktails from about 11am.

At the moment I'm struggling to find characters to like. Perhaps they will do more with the advertising campaigns that get passing mention. Cigarettes, Nixon and new aerosol Right Guard all have potential, but somehow are being underplayed. Maybe I'm looking for plot when the series main ticket is a form of sixties evocation that I don't properly comprehend.

Perhaps I need a blast of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to set me more in the era. Bring on 169 East 71 Street. And maybe some cultural drift from the real 1960s into what is presumably still a late 1950s workplace. Don't think twice, its alright.

neutral sons

People sometimes talk about parallel universes, in my case there is sometime the one between visible and hidden. So when the CD I'd acquired from Neutral Sons morphed into a hidden world for several months, it meant I'd moved from a brief initial hearing to being unable to make more informed comment.

Fortunately, its resurfaced in all its yellowy greenness and spins as I type. Inbetweentimes I'd listened to some tracks on the web-site and also an impromptu live jam somewhere in a bar, via melanie.

Anyway, the album is filled with silky goodness. How to describe? Two primary musicians Richard Knutson and Mark Cottrell have somehow collaborated across the space between UK and USA and provided a mix which is very seamless even with the musicians sending each other takes of their parts of the tracks.

The more conventional tracks have a shimmery floating quality with layers of instruments backed with ambient choruses sometimes of singing, other times of strange and mysterious sounds.

'Drop out' has a quite Zappa-esque feel and there's some subsequent pieces that maybe pay some dues to Captain Beefheart. Further along several species of small furry animals may well have been gathered together in a cave and be grooving with a Pict. I don't mean its all 'Ah feel like Ahcid' stomping, but rather that there is considerable variety with jazzy wah-ed guitars and slices of flange and phase washing across some of the tracks. Parts of the vocal can sound a little Velvet Underground early days although the majority of the record has a bubbly uplifting vibe.

I don't want to attempt to over categorize though, because this is really an album to listen to on its unique creative merits. There's tracks which have been given a chance to breathe like rm 101, which, whilst short, takes a simple riff and provides a sensible chorused progression of the idea.

I may have to sit munching picasso truffles and vanilla beans whilst I listen. There's clear care and attention to the mixing and some rather good wide spacey stereo too, more enveloping and swirly than just nailing the instruments to a position. The ambient pieces made me look around a few times before I realized there were little pingy effects and voices off that have been dripped into the mixing.

So I mentioned parallel universes at the beginning and indeed this album finishes with a dark universe, but along the way has yielded a partisan and committed soundtrack - anything but neutral.

flat surfaces

Some time spent decluttering today. There seemed to be more stuff coming indoors than going out and I needed to adjust the equilibrium.

Yesterday I junked a seriously large amount of unneeded items and today was similar. So indoor areas show more clear horizontal surfaces again, which is always a good sign. When I've done this before I've also managed to donate items to others fairly successfully, but even that needs a time limit.

My retention/rejection criteria included: Does it make me smile? Have I used it in the last year? Can I squish two of something down to one instead? Are there boxes of stuff that haven't been used at all for the last year? I could probably have been more calculated, but this seemed to work well enough.

economy of intelligence

Unexpectedly, a complementary copy of the Economist's foray into quarterly publications thudded through the letterbox a few days ago, with a personalised letter dated February 2008.

The heavy volume was titled Winter 2007 and I can't help thinking they may have had a few left over as the news included the upcoming Led Zep concert (December) and somewhere a picture of figgy pudding.

Big format, thick matt art paper, I was expecting something quite special. Unfortunately, the advertisers have better grasped the page size compared with the journalists. A few classy jewellry, perfume, watch and fashion advertisements leading into...an airport seat back magazine. Genre equivalents like Vanity Fair or even the ft's 'How to spend it' do the job better. And I'd rather read 'Why things suck' in Feb's Wired than the pathetic analysis of what's wrong with airports in the freebie. And twice baked potatoes don't suck, by the way.

Advertising itself as "Intelligent Life" I found it more of an unfortunate contribution to the wrong side of the carbon footprint debate. Perhaps the website version will be better although as that still promotes the Winter version too, I wonder if their heart is really in this project?

Technorati Tags: rashbre, economist, intelligent+life, magazine, vanity+fair, wired

jammy dodger

I see they are talking about new pay lanes on some of the UK motorways around London, like the M3 and M4. The idea is to make the outside lane chargeable in the rush hour and cars would have some kind of sensor like the TAG that's already used on the M6.

I'm sure there will be big debate about this, on top of congestion charge and £25/$50 per day parking for London.

But my guilty confession is that I couldn't help smiling whilst in Milan this week being driven around in big black Mercs that zip around all kinds of special lanes that bypass the normal traffic.

The driver yesterday even had a black peaked cap and sunglasses. When I worked regularly used in Milan I thought that Italian traffic didn't really park, it was just momentarily at rest. Yesterday, my driver reversed up along the pavement to the front door of the building where I was working and then used a combination of bus and taxi lanes and some special routes separate from the slow main traffic to drive me around.

So I'm sure the UK arguments about the pay lanes will escalate, but for a day I can't help admitting its quite fun to speed past the jams.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, london, motorway, toll, M3, M4, Milan, congestion, TfL,

my manic and milan

Speaking of Union Chapel, I was also supposed to be there tonight, because I'd got one of the magic tickets to see Laura Marling and others performing live. Unfortunately, despite leaving Milan centre at 17:00 to take the fast route back to Linate, it was all in vain because the plane was delayed taking off.

The pilot made suggestions that we'd be able to fly really fast knocking some 40 minutes off the advertised time, but as I suspected it was uphill on the way back and we actually arrived around 30 minutes late.

By the time we'd got steps to the plane, been bussed around half of Heathrow and then retrieved my car it was around 21:15. With the gig about 50 minutes away if the traffic was perfect, I had to cut my losses and admit defeat.

So above, instead, is Laura Marling singing to accompany me taking a drive this evening across Milan to the airport.

And here, as Siouxsie Sioux leaves the stage, is Laura singing 'New Romantic' on Jools Holland.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, milan, linate, laura, marling, union, chapel, lauramarling, manic,