a visit from the goon squad

I first read something by Jennifer Egan in a magazine. I liked the rhythm and humour of the piece and subsequently googled to see if she’d written anything more.

It turned out there was a novel set in the same genre, which I recently enjoyed and appears to now be getting some press coverage. It’s called “A Visit From the Goon Squad” and is a kind of mashup of stories and lives, loosely around the music industry.

The structure is charmingly bonkers, with what could be a series of separate short stories that somehow interlink to create a mood and a lifestyle.

I can relate to the idea of creating characters, placing them and then letting them run wild, to see what they’d do and how they impact one another. Its best to go with the flow in the early part and let the storylines gradually converge like reassembling a cut-up.

I like to think that even the book’s binding gives some of this away, with that uncut rough edged look to the pages. It might be simply that I’ve got a rogue copy, but I suspect not.

And the story telling has a sort of continuity in amongst the multiplicity of points of views and huge gaps in time between characters and events. Artfully done by drifting from one character to another across the chapters.

I won’t describe the woven storyline here. It’s amoral West Coast American punk-rock meets East Coast business, vectoring into deserts, war-zones and a post iPod accelerated generation.

Its funny, edgy and despite the shapeshifting, there’s a heart.

Oh, and a chapter in PowerPoint.

give peas a chance (redux)

From time to time I get people email me about a picture that I've posted onto flickr.

It will usually be a snap of a particular London building that someone wants for an online guide or a picture of a 'thing' like a locomotive or 'person' like a pop-star that I've clicked at some point.

If it's non-commercial/non-political then I'm happy to assist and I can usually work out the basis of the request. This time someone has asked me about the bridge on the M25, which I happened to snap when riding as a passenger whilst stuck in a traffic jam. The slogan on the bridge is known to many travellers 'Give Peas a Chance'. There's probably quite a few of us that smile as we pass it (even in the traffic jams).

Anyway, I was intrigued at the request and did a sort of reverse google to find the person that had asked me. It turns out that they have a special site for the bridge on Facebook and are collecting pictures of the bridge. It's a bit like when I started to collect those little yellow men crossing pictures that have been spotted by various pedestrian road crossings.

What fascinated me about the bridge was a backstory that the sign hasn't always said "Give Peas a chance". Apparently it started out with just "Peas" and someone else added the rest of the slogan. I've uploaded a large resolution version of the picture and, yes, there's a difference in the painting style between the word "Peas" and the rest.

And thats all we are saying.

not whining

A few of us had met together in a riverside pub. It was a somewhat ad-hoc gathering after work.

It felt almost unusual to be close to 'home ground' because several of us have been travelling with paths that have crossed randomly in other cities and countries.

I was drinking London Pride and innocently made a comment about proper London beer, getting a response about, "So what other sort have you been drinking?" to which I explained my recent travel which has also involved some fancy wine bars and similar.

Indeed, during my travels I was even part of a Swiss/Dutch/Swedish/English winning pub quiz team. The wine meant my return trip had checked baggage.

Another well-travelled but non quiz-winning colleague was drinking expensive Belgian beer in any case.

So we looked around the little group of us, there were a tall frosted glasses of premium lager, various bottles and someone sipping beer from a wine glass. I think I was the only one that would keep draft bitter as a default drink.

But I'm not bitter, even if I do have a little wine.

sparrowhawk

Back at home after a week on the road. A passing visitor to the garden this morning gave the usual occupants a run for their lives.

I was making a cup of tea and spotted the initially languid sparrowhawk. I worked out that the only reason the bird would be perched was ahead of hunting.

Sure enough, within seconds it did that sparrowhawk thing of launching towards the bushes and scaring some kind of finch out of cover.

The sparrowhawk has both great speed and incredible manoeuvrability alongside a brilliant 3D eyesight system. Within a couple of seconds the raptor had a different and no doubt equally startled small bird in its talons before itself disappearing into the bushes.

Black Cabs : TX4 and Vito

Most people will recognise the taxi above as a London Black Cab. There's actually more than one shape, but they are similar enough and apart from the mixed colours of maroon, silver and occasionally white, they are still generically referred to as black cabs.

The thing is, it's all changing, and quite significantly.

Mercedes have designed a version of their van-car called the Vito which also meets the London cab specification. That includes the need for bits of high viz interior, ways to carry wheelchairs and other accessibility features and even a turning circle to allow Yuwees (U-Turns). They achieved the last point by adding a button that actually makes the rear wheels steer when turning around at less than 5 mph.

According to my recent taxi driver these replacements are selling well and have comfy driving areas and quiet reliable engines. It's just that they don't look like London taxis. They look more like minicabs or vans. Nothing against that well-known London company that drives corporates to the airport but, well, the London Cab is part of London branding.

I was leaving a meeting last week and needed a taxi. I couldn't help notice that the first two in the rank were both silver versions of the new type. I looked twice for the little white taxi driver number, in order to check that they were not minicabs. Not black and not taxi shaped. Now the small white oblong becomes the frame of reference.

Add that to the other recent night-time phenomenon where we're seeing official looking blue high visibility jacketed minicab touts outside some of the west end venues. I assume its legal, but wonder if its borderline?

It'll be an interesting period to see whether the makers of the more traditional shaped taxis figure out better engines, economy, driver comfort or whether Vito2 will have a more taxi shaped look, to stop the drift away of an iconic part of London.

Sunday morning cycling

Cycling this morning and although I'd wrapped up, the wind was cutting a little too thoroughly through to my head. The aerodynamic cycling helmet's vents are sometimes too efficient. It's partly my own fault though because I did sip some wine yesterday evening and have found myself feeling slightly fragile today.

In truth I don't think its last night's modest drink but perhaps my body resetting after a week on 'the Malaysian project' which has been pretty full-on.

Actually I awoke at around 4am this morning and thought it was already Monday and therefore that I needed to be in Paris, only to realise that I could afford a few more hours sleep and a much more leisurely start.

And then mysteriously during my cycling travels I came across the building illustrated at the top of the post. Its called 'the Triangle' or something similar. What intrigues me is that I've genuinely never noticed it before yet I use a building quite close to it as an inspiration for a setting in the second book - The Square. I guess there's plenty of places called 'The Triangle' around, but weird that one is so close to an actual venue I've selected.

I'm back at home now and the next priority is packing.

A small bag only for this trip. Reminds me of an airport scene.

flutter nanoblog redux

Seen those twitter add-ons for longer messages? Er...misses the point? Remember flutter, the 26 char version of twitter?

(above msg has 20 characters left)

inconspicous corners

It's not part of my normal behaviour, although I do know other people that do it.

Hanging around on corners.

I was trying to be inconspicuous about it.

It was only doing it out of necessity, after all.

Three times in the last couple of weeks. Once, it was the wet forum, then rice and finally moonlighting.

It was because of the problems; drowned computers then drowned phones and finally annoying pop-ups. During my search I was told that Silverlight would give me a better experience, and I actually said 'Yes'. The better experience comprised unexpected screenfuls of invitations to join vacation sites, wine clubs "and more".

I don't think so.

So then to the forums to figure out how to disable everything.

That's where it pays to be inconspicuous.

Wanting to disable certain cherished features seemed to be treated by others like a betrayal of trust. I didn't want to be one of the ones that gets a post saying 'this person seems to have written something negative'. It seems to become an invitation to others to add their stylish critiques

A sort of mob mentality.

Not very silver. And not very light.

water filled iphone recovery

Having just recovered the MacBook Pro that was inadvertently filled with water, it's time to move onto the equivalent iPhone. This one fell into the loo, which apparently is a more common situation than one might imagine.

The rescued dead phone was handed to me to fix. The basics are:

1) Power it off by holding down the power and front buttons for 4 seconds.
2) Remove the SIM, so that more air can get inside.
3) Put it in a ziploc bag of uncooked rice.
4) Place it on a warm to hot radiator.

The 'power it' off step is slightly futile, because if it was on when it hit water any shorting out will have already occurred. The remove SIM is mainly because the space created improves airflow. The rice is something that readily absorbs water, like those little bags of silica gel sometimes in the packaging of electronic devices. The radiator is to heat up the innards and hopefully assist recovery.

Leave 24 hours and it should all be back to normal.

If it doesn't recover, there's still a good chance that the iPhone will be readable in iTunes. That's because the screen is the most likely piece to fail, which doesn't affect the rest of the operation of the device. If so, back it up - it can be recovered to another device.

In this case, normal service has been resumed.

something understood: the disguise

Kudos to Sarah Cuddon this morning for the little early Radio 4 slot usually referenced as religion and ethics, which ran "Something Understood: The Disguise", which is about identity.

It kicked off with the splintery world of Fernando Passoa - an author whose Book of Disquiet I often find within arms' reach. Then Orwell down and out in London and Paris, Bob Dylan, Max Power - the short-lived Homer Simpson alter ego as well as the name on every hairdryer. And onward.

The fascination for me was the creative discoveries from within the assumed identity. Not schizophrenic, more as another way to think about something. David Bowie 'taken over' by Ziggy Stardust. Patrick McGuinness channeling the back-story for an imaginary dissident Romanian poet as Liviu Campanu.

It explored the areas around writing where the characters and aliases start as imagined but rather than being there to hide things are much more there to inform.

This is where it rang bells with my own writing, my attempts at novels and also sometimes with lyrics. It's still interesting to me how the characters can come alive and create their own behaviours. Unlike Passoa's approach, I do park them when I'm not in that writing mode. Passoa was discovered to have 72 alter egos which he'd written about and stashed into a trunk as well as four different and clearly delineated published pseudonyms.

McGuinness explained that sometimes people judging will take more from the idea of the alias than from the thoughts created - with his Campanu character, there became more written about the fiction of it than the ideas within it - which some how missed the point of what he was trying to say through a different voice.

Sarah Cuddon also explored some where the other identity took over - Snake eating Alice Cooper and the agent generated stage persona of Norma Jean Baker. "They crawled out of the woodwork and whispered into your brain, they set you on a treadmill and they made you change your name" - so the Taupin lyrics go.

Then onwards towards award winning Romain Gary writing secretly as Emile Ajar -a madman- but strangely giving Gary the freedom to say what he wanted.

Add in some other music including Gillian Welsh accompanied on a fiddle singing "no-one knows my name" and a sprinkling of Beethoven and there's a thought provoking thirty minutes.

And all before seven a.m.

Here's the iPlayer link

i've got an ap for that

I decided to abandon the February Album Writing Month this year; I'm getting a backlog of half finished toons and novels which could take years to clear. Then a phone call today goaded me to one last entry.

What rhymes with 'anthropomorphic'?
I've got an ap for that
I've got an ap for that

How to hear Lykke Li's new one?
I've got an ap for that
I've got an ap for that

Where's a bar that gives away chestnuts?
I've got an ap for that
I've got an ap for that

Let's make it all kind of fuzzy
Using an ap for that
And a cracked cone speaker

Forget about fingers, fumbs can push it
You don't need books if there's a three-gee signal
If you can't find it, wave that smartphone
Cos there's an ap for that
Yeah there's an ap for that

Breakdown
Bbb-bbb-bbb
Ppp-ppp-ppp
Please press reset.

Siegfried's patients

I wonder what 'The Black Swan' would look like as a black-and-white movie? The light and shade in it was pretty heavily contrasted with a storyline that would fit well as a Grand Guignol piece. Certainly there were some clever scenes, like the 32 fouettés en tournant where the dancer grew a swan's wings. But overall I thought it came across somewhat tongue (and file!) in cheek.

Old French horror theatre would use pseudo realistic blood, gore and sharp implements to entertain and that seemed to be part of this film's premise. I liked the creeping around the darkened and deserted theatre and the clever soundtrack with its off-centre effects.

It matched the off-centre prima-ballerina too, and possibly her similarly distracted rival, if she really existed. And that seemed to be the main plot-line. Like in Swan Lake itself, we'll have two people who significantly overlap and then see what happens.

So there were parallel identities, eating disorders and a descent into a form of madness. And that was just me watching it.

As a piece of melodrama, with some manifestly annoying characters, it pirouetted towards ever building excesses. And then fell awkwardly into an ultimately predictable ending.

Although I realise I'm probably out of line in considering this art-house Oscar candidate as a piece of two dimensional whimsy, stuffing ballet cliches and a borrowed storyline into an exploitation slasher flick.

The pizza afterwards was excellent.