in which i finally see The Artist

We were in Mayfair on Saturday evening and stopped off at the Curzon to see "The Artist". I know everyone else has seen it and it's won all of the prizes, but I was actually a little bit underwhelmed.

The lead actors were charming enough, the doggy was cute and the story was heavily signposted along the way with plenty of 'those bits' that you want to get from this type of film. It had clearly been made with some affection for the genre.

But I was waiting for it to add something, rather than being a very good copy with high fidelity music. Sure, there were a couple of scenes with (shock horror) sound, and some borrowed musical soundtrack too, but I couldn't help thinking I'd prefer to watch "Singin' in the rain" to get roughly this movie's plot line.

The other thing was the filming of the story. There was quite an art to some of the ways that people shot the old monochrome and I was expecting to see some of this in the film's tones. There's some of this done to good effect in the stills from the picture, but I felt that the main filming was fairly bland in nature rather than stylised - almost as if someone had just shot a colour film, desaturated it to a slight beige and then boosted the white on whoever was the star.

I know I'm in a minority here, but it isn't really a film I'd particularly want to see again, despite it winning so many awards.

Capital moment

I'm reading that John Lanchester novel called Capital at the moment. It's about people who live in a London street and how their lives are separate but intertwined.

I originally downloaded it from Amazon, after it came up as a plausible (to me) recommendation. That was before I noticed the huge marketing that the book seems to be getting, with a full back page advert in the newspaper the other day and an interview with Lanchester on Newsnight.

My motives were somewhat simpler for buying it, it was about London and originally I thought it was about an ordinary street called Pepys Road, which I imagined to be something like the North London Victorian Road I'd once lived in.

There's an immediate difference that this street's houses have all done rather well and are now worth silly money, despite the collection of 'all walks of life' characters assembled to drive the various plot lines.

There's Roger the banker, Freddy the (Senegalese) footballer. There's an anonymous artist and a corner shop run by the Kumars, sorry, the Kamals. Throw in a political refugee as a traffic warden and we almost have that card game complete. Who has got Zbigniew, the Polish plumber?

We had builders, postmen, teachers, the man who owned huskies, a Greek restaurant owner, a security alarm firm and shop assistants as neighbours in our version of the story. Before we got robbed. Twice. So we left.

I'm only part way through the novel at the moment but starting to get a feeling that the ensemble are there to play their relevant parts in a slightly predictable and caricatured way. A sort of distant pair of tweezers picking through scraps of humanity. Perhaps that is the point, but the background premise around London 'doing alright' despite the banking crisis and still the place people want to 'come to' rather than 'escape from' could be explored with more vigour.

It'll be a race against time for me now though, because such is the marketing and media interest that yesterday evening I heard it being advertised as next week's "Book at Bedtime" on Radio Four.

revenge of the auto bots

There's been quite a bit in the news today about the new T&Cs for Google and the aggregation of some 70 different sets of conditions, spread across a whole raft of intertwined software.

I've previously wondered what happens as the marketplace consolidates down to a few main players and the degree to which various things overlap.

In my case there's been another system which has changed ownership/branding/software recently. Its called Twaitter and I used to use it to drive some robotic twittering based upon a few of the characters from my novel, "The Triangle".

So @trianglejake, @trianglebigsy, @chuckmanners and @triangleclare would send each other little messages on fairly long timer loops (measured in days, weeks and months).

And it sort of worked for the last couple of years. They all got followers (more than me in some cases) and I shipped a few copies of the book.

Of course, I could't resist a couple of extra characters just for fun - Mr Bubble @bubbleOoO - which just tweets strings of OOOooos and Mr Tic-Tac, which sends occasional updates on the number of tic-tacs being consumed.

I'd originally set them all up as experiments and they happily babbled away until recently.

"Twaitter is now Gremln."

Everything is supposed to have been transferred across seamlessly (anyone remember Haloscan?)

I can see the various ex twaitter accounts in Gremln.

I can even open the special new control panels.

But that's about it. I can't stop the messages, change them and some of Mr Bubble's are even appearing as if they have been generated by rashbre central - which to me is a sort of privacy infringement.

Don't let the cute little logos fool you, I suspect there is a missing letter in Gremln.

never let me go

I'd originally started to write this post a few months ago when the Kazuo Ishiguro story called 'Never Let Me Go' was running as a movie on television. I read the novel quite a long time ago but only saw the (similar) movie recently, and then watched it again on Monday as it's flittering around again on Sky.

I think when it was first on movie release it didn't get such good reviews from the critics. Contrastingly, I found its slower pace and surprisingly accepting attitudes of the main players made for quite an interesting thought piece. The main character behaviours are just not as one might expect.

The premise is a sort of alternative state of Britain, which has made some different scientific discoveries and has developed clone humans to use for spare parts.
Instead of setting it in some sort of Total Recall/Bladerunner/Terminator-esque world, we have English boarding schools, quaint farmyards and seaside homes.

Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield play Ruth, Kathy and Tommy - three young 'donors' who have been raised through the cloning process via a special school and are on the paths to their own destruction, yet accepting it in a surprisingly calm manner. I won't relate the whole story here, suffice to say their paths are quite intertwined.

There's a few more science fiction type stories that deal with the ideas of this novel, but I was reminded by its contrasts of the scenes in "O Lucky Man" when the Malcolm McDowell coffee salesman stumbles into a science research project which involves experiments with people and animals.

It's like the ideas in "O Lucky Man" with its altogether more jarring story have morphed into something both more genteel and also industrialised. A kind of erosion of the sensibilities.

Both stories play around with the role of the state and in the case of this novel and film there's the inevitable commercialisation of the processes involves, which ominously become more production lined for the successors of Ruth, Kathy and Tommy.

in which i make a few accidental holes in the wall

A few domestic chores today, including the removal of a cupboard, which is off to a new home. The room it has been in also contains a deceptively large sofa which disguises its size by cunning stripes.

It reminded me of when we'd originally moved the sofa into its position in an upstairs room. It fitted the room fine, but didn't like our staircase on the way.

After more than an hour of trying to twist it around the bend in the stairs, I finally made a hole in the wall to allow the extra few centimetres it needed to twist around.

I can remember that we had a party a few days later and I'd had to hang some temporary artwork in an unusual place to hide the hole.

We said at the time that if we needed to get the sofa back out, we'd probably have to dismantle it.

Let's say that today's cupboard was moved with no trouble, but a short test run of exiting the sofa was much less successful. It means we'll need to do a spot of redecorating in the stairway, although today's holes were seated by accident and are somewhat smaller than the one when the sofa was moving in.

Meanwhile, the sofa is back in its usual position. The blue stripes will survive a little longer.

staying away from the key lime pie

The last 2-3 days I've been quite busy with work and some of it has spilled across into Saturday. Actually, there were some things I needed to do yesterday evening as well, although I'd set myself 8p.m. as the cutoff point.

Alongside it all I'm still keeping to my cycling plans and managing to hit the targets I've set. When I started I wanted the majority of the targets to be achievable, so I might have set a few of them too low, although truthfully in the first week of my plans I wondered if I'd be able to keep to it.

There's a mixture of factors affecting the weekly outcomes which include whether I'm at home, access to a functioning bike, whether I've got other tasks piled up and so on. I've realised that there can always be reasons why I can't do something, but its probably better to cultivate the positive mind set. After all, except when its slippery I do enjoy the cycling.

So, just for fun, here's a few of my recent completed goals, which get tracked by the little gadget on my bike.

I'm partly putting them here so that I can look back in a few months to see whether there is any difference, which could be to do with the weather, my workload or any manner of things.

If I look at the goals critically, I can see I should probably crank a few numbers north, but at the moment I think I'll stick with my overachieving.

And no, I didn't eat the cream cake at the top of the post. Although I know someone who did.

jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz

Well, they say that Jackdaws are harbingers of rain, so maybe the UK drought is about to end. This bird and it's mate were strutting around looking opportunistic earlier today.

I'm inclined to think they are more interested in shiny things than in telling the weather though, because I also spotted a red admiral fluttering around and a blackbird had decided it was time to fluff its feathers for a February sunbathe.

wine, railway arches and helicopters

Wine with a friend, in the railway arches, across the bridge from my main current work area in Westminster.

We'd both noticed today's increased police presence, hi-viz jackets, emergency services and helicopters around central London, linked to the events unfolding across the river in Aldwych.

It was the rehearsal of an emergency tube station terror scenario, one of the unfortunate necessities in preparation for the Olympics, as the countdown continues and London starts to change, just a little, every day.

trouble every day

I've been watching the TV seeing Greece sliding into the water next to traders hedging the Euro and politicians continuing to dither. Meanwhile the 'work-habit' scheme which removes benefits is being dropped by retailers and has pushed the Syrian tanks to fourth listing.

Things like the British fuel price hike and drought have been pushed out based on all the Category 1 news.

A very old Frank Zappa song won't leave my head.

almost advertising

I know, its a sort of advertisement. But it will be good.

in which a couple of MacBook Pros get bigger disks

A small task during last weekend was recovering the disk on a silver keyboard MacBook Pro. It had been to the Apple Store and the Genius there had said it was unrecoverable and that the machine was out of warranty.

I had a quick look and realised that the disk had also been reformatted (Erased) so we effectively had an empty machine.

But it was late so I abandoned thinking about it.

Then, the next day I was walking along an unfamiliar street and happened upon a Maplin's store.

"I wonder?" I thought.

They did. They sold inexpensive SATA laptop disks that would surely fit the MacBook.

That way, if I reloaded the software, at least the disk would be a larger capacity and 5 years newer.

This was the earlier generation MacBook with the so-called 'discrete' body. It still looks pretty elegant and without many unsightly screws holding the body together.

Except...there are a lot. Most are easy to remove, but there are also two Torq TR6 in the middle of the back of the chassis. These need a special screwdriver to get out. Or (not recommended) a lot of pressure with a phillips screwdriver.

Anyway, after carefully removing the keyboard I could get to the disk. Another four screws and it was out and the new one swapped in. Put it all back together again and reload Apple's Snow Leopard OS/X and iLife from the Family Edition DVDs.

And ta-da its back like a new (empty) machine - except the original had a 100Gb disk and it now has 500Gb.

I couldn't resist getting a second disk for my 17inch MacBook Pro, which only had 120Gb and now has 750Gb after using superduper to clone the original disk before I installed the replacement.

Bridie Jackson and the Arbour

We were sitting down to eat an enjoyable spaghetti in Gateshead, and had plunked on the new album by Bridie Jackson and the Arbour.

It's a beautiful album of chilled folkish tracks with very atmospheric vocals featuring haunting choral sounds ranging through to an altogether more robust acapella. It's a highly accomplished debut with a talented band playing a wide range of instruments. One of those albums that registers on the first listen and just begs to be played again straight away.

But I didn't have the album when I first heard it and subsequently downloaded it from Bridie's bandcamp site. I consequently had a fresh CD copy waiting for me when I returned home.

It turns out the recording was made at the Sage in Gateshead, close to where we were sitting, and the gig at the end of February is in The Central pub, which is about five short steps from where we were eating the spaghetti. Heck, we are probably the only people to have tested the 'take-away' beer in cartons from the Central, because it's so close and because you can.

But back to the music, here's a super fret-cam of Bridie playing guitar and singing 'Prolong':

And check out the album here: