London fog makes me feel so blue?

Of course, it's not always sunny around docklands, and this time we've some of the fog atmosphere, the way that London gets portrayed in old movies.

Pea-souper fog, umbrellas and bowler hats. As if.

counting the cars on the east London Air Way

Another week of commuting across the Thames using the cable car. It's interesting how much the view changes on a daily basis, from the sunshine of Monday, through rain and mist and fog. I don't have much blogging time this week, so a few snaps of the journey from my iPhone should suffice to keep things moving along.

I can remember the frisson of pleasure the first time I travelled on the New Jersey Turnpike out of New York. That song, obviously. And I was somehow drawn to remember it when I watched the cars on the east London Air-Way. Even without a gaberdine suit.

wolf of wall street

We went along to see The Wolf of Wall Street on Saturday evening. It's a film about excess. The Leonardo di Caprio lead character of Jordan Belfort leads us through boiler room scams making money initially from penny shares.

When I say excess, everything in the whole movie is writ large. There's expletives beyond count, partying that would fit well into scenes from those hangover movies, snow drifts of cocaine and bottles of the last Quaaludes left on the planet.

The sexual politics are (deliberately?) very dated and I did see a few people walk out of the cinema during the movie. It wouldn't pass the Bechdel test, for sure: many females; mainly love interests; or prostitutes; main roles involve men/sex/child rearing; often not fully clothed. Oh and did I mention the dwarf tossing?

Add noisy rows of leery barrow-boy traders at Stratton Oakmont extracting large sums of money from people ill-equipped to deal with share trading.

Pump and dump the chop stock, as the scam theory goes.

Buy the cheap share illegally, inflate its price, sell it to the ignorant and then sell your own now inflated price shares before the price tumbles. Easy money in the unregulated '80s.

Interestingly, we don't get to see the actual punters, except in the sense that the early recruits to the firm could have all been punters themselves. Tire salesmen*, furniture shop workers. Maybe it needed a postman as well.

The style of the movie remanded me of Goodfellas with lead character Jordan narrating his point of view, sometimes to camera, and even a drug addled scene reminiscent of the helicopter part when Henry Hill is cooking the ziti.

There's a helicopter in this movie too, at one time parked badly by di Caprio and later receiving a Titanic fate. Like everything else in the film, you just know that a boat trip from a glassy sun drenched Portofino to the 200km distant Monaco can only have one type of weather. Excess. Oh yes. 100 foot waves that would do the North Sea proud.

But that's to quibble. And they could always throw a party on the rescue boat.

I enjoyed the film for it's melodramatic portrayal of the excess. There were a few extemporised scenes that ran too long and could have sliced some time from the around 3 hour run time. There wasn't a lot to like about the di Caprio character, whose real-life counterpart makes a small appearance at the end of the movie.

It also illustrated the worrying sales culture trend to extract money from punters at all times. What's the business being bought or sold? Don't know, don't care. Gimme your money. Want to cash in? Don't care. Gimme some more of your money.

Boiler room scams persist to this day. They've just got the internet and ACD (Automatic call dialling) to ramp them up from those early days.

Oh, and the real Jordan Belfort to help get the sales lines right.

siri, samatha, cortana and clippy

Although it was first being discussed several months ago, the new Microsoft equivalent of Siri is getting recent attention. I know the code name was Cortana, but it seems that the implementation is to get that name as well.

It's one of those names that, when googled, can get *ahem* more than one expects. I guess it's because it was also used in that popular game Halo, as the VGH* avatar for the Artificial Intelligence.

Some may have seen that Spike Jonze movie 'Her' about a guy who falls in love with Samantha, his Scarlett Johanssen voiced electronic personal assistant. In the freeze-frame below, that's Samantha in Joaquin Phoenix's shirt pocket.

If you switch the American female voice on in Siri, it'll give 'Samatha' short shrift. I didn't find it works so well with the UK voice, which has more of a male butler's tone.

But I suppose there'll be fun to be had when both Siri and Cortana are available together. Start a conversation with one of them, keep the other one switched on and see what they make of each other. It has to be done

I guess it's all moved on from Clippy the annoying Paperclip.

wheeler dealers

Thursday and I'm still commuting by cable-car.

I couldn’t help notice the number of wheely bags around. The rumble of the big wheeled silver Rimowa and the skitter of colourful smaller rollers.

Clusters of dark clothed professional people checked out of hotels pulling their bags to their client sites, presumably before heading back to distant homes. It’s another variation on the road traffic move away from busy Friday to busy Thursday.

I suppose Friday has become work from home day, which I makes for wheely Thursday.

For me, as I headed back on the cable-car, Friday would still be another office day.

Multi Pass

Yes, a multi-pass moment.

gravity

I remember seeing the trailer for Gravity ages before the film came out. All jump cuts like most trailers with hardly a scene lasting more than a second.

Sometimes the trailers are so narrative-rich they there's no need to see the move at all. 'Atonement' was one that I always remember being in that category.

Gravity is different, where the all-action trailer missed the deliberately shaded dynamics in the film.

The opening scene to me is a great case in point, where we adjust our eyes to the dark of space, the earth and little else. Then notice something in transit, which we recognise as having activity around it. Suddenly there's a kind of ground rush effect as it gets bigger and we see the detail. All held on a more or less fixed camera position.

Of course, there's plenty more that happens later in the film, in what is actually a fairly simple 2-hander story or maybe a 3-hander if I count 'Space' as the third person. It's told in a way that gives a real sense of the scale and dynamics of space.

I don't think I'll be orbiting earth any time soon, so this type of movie on a massive screen and with a few 3D flying shapes gives the next best sense.

Yes, even with Gravity's simple story, I found myself being pulled in.

cable-car commuting

It had to be done. The weather is even sunny for it.

Yes, I've managed to find a reason to commute to work by cable car at the moment. It's the Air Line across the River Thames and it fits with my short term needs quite well.

It'll only be for a short time, but it certainly makes a change from the usual trains and cars.

I've used the route in the past, for what I'd describe as sightseeing views across London, so for the moment I will join the very limited number of actual commuters using this under-publicised service.

ye car parkes of olde England

Saturday, we headed to a different town for some stunt shopping. That's the type where there are particular, but unusual, items in mind.

Not knowing the area, we headed for the car park with the most likely name for a city centre.

This would be a combination of words like 'Gate', 'Abbey', 'Nunnery', 'Market', 'Cross', 'Friary', 'Wall', cardinal points, an old fashioned craft product and maybe the odd 'The'. Friary Wall, Abbey Cross, West Gate, The Lace Market. You get the idea.

We found one and drove in. "No spaces available", it proudly announced outside. Then another sign that said "no lifts working" or something similar. Then a really big sign that said "Pay and display or £80 fine". I was passenger as we drove ever higher around thin little turnings to try to find a space.

Soon enough we reached the upper floors. There were spaces. Another sign explained that the car park was not being maintained to the usual standard.

We descended the seven flights of stairs out into the shopping area's afternoon sunlight. I wondered if the condition of infrastructure was cause or effect of the demise of some central shopping areas?

@bookmerica : Washington State #bookmerica

Drinking coffee around St James before a meeting, I thought of another book for the bookmerica.org project. Yesterday I picked New York State, this time I've gone for Washington State.

Two books again as a starting point.

First up, 'The Financial Lives of the Poets', by Jess Walter, which I read about a month ago.

This isn't explicitly set in Washington State, and is a kind of 'Anywhere, USA' suburban tale.

The smart money says it's based in the author's hometown of Spokane, WA, and that's my excuse for including it here.

It's the tale of a middle-aged man who gets fired, is being foreclosed on his house (his wife doesn't know) and stumbles into a little pot-dealing after meeting some slackers in a 7/11 store. His wife is having an affair with the man from the DIY store.

Matt Prior was a newspaper reporter, who now narrates this story of our time as the forces of economic collapse, digital replacements and fast food see him living on the edge of ruin. His misadventures receive police attention, but even that doesn't go smoothly.

If it sounds bleak, its actually quite funny, treading along the edge of a crumbling America, with characters exhibiting both dumb moves and survivalist instincts whilst trapped in a suburban middle class bubble.

One to read to get a slightly nutty sense of mainly white suburban anywhere in troubled times.

My second Washington State book is Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland.

I first read this back in 1995, and recently found my original loaned-out hardback copy for a reprise. It still had the bookmark price ticket in it.

There's a familiarity because I've visited Microsoft's Redmond campuses a few times, spent time in the neighbourhood and lived out of hotels in Belleview and Kirkland, which feature in the story.

It's narrated in the form of a Apple Powerbook diary by Dan Underwood. He's a computer programmer for Microsoft, and it tells how he lives with a bunch of other developers around Seattle. There's plenty of references to a recognisable Microsoft, and their offbeat '90s lifestyle.

It has plenty of colour such as the flat food to be passed under doors into the coding rooms, the jargon of vesting shares and dozens of wearably quotable lines:
"I say ‘Uhmm...’ a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. It means you’re assembling data in your head - spooling.”

“Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.”

“Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental-- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.”

“...most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they're gone for the day - if not the week - and can't be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair.”

The second half of the book sees the gang branch out into a start-up company, ahead of the dot bomb. They move off to Silicon Valley and here the tale is around Sand Hills Road and San Jose, where they illustrate a kind of beta test of parts of the world we all live in, now, in the early 21st Century.

If I could choose just one of them to put into the bookmerica machine, it'll have to be the Coupland. I've loved most of Coupland's books anyway. Girlfriend in a coma is another bittersweet favourite.

As Coupland is saying: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything.

@bookmerica : traintime = booktime #bookmerica

My book reading can be extremely variable, depending upon what else I'm doing. At the moment I've been commuting again, which means Kindle time on main line trains as well as the tube.

I've just read a couple of books about New York, and thought I could link one of them into a project that fellow blogger Hannah has just started, which is called Bookmerica.org. It's all about creating a crowdsourced American State based reading list.

The first of the books I could consider is Triburbia, by Karl Taro Greenfeld

It's formatted as a novel, but is really a set of stories set in a posh bit of New York. Last year I read John Lancaster’s Capital, which was about a gentrified street in London where the properties had whizzed up in value and the stories were of a kind of interlinking of the characters inhabiting adjacent houses.

This turns out to be a similar idea, set in around Tribeca in Manhattan, with characters with suitably artsy creative jobs - sound engineers, artists, photographers and the like. And a gangster type.

The fellas all meet together for occasional coffee after dropping off kids for school and there’s interweaving between incident of their lives, which are more like a set of individual tales with some overlaps.

I’ve wandered around Tribeca and can recognise they there would be well-heeled people inhabiting the area's gentrified blocks. Maybe like parts of Islington or Notting Hill?

The story telling is pleasant enough, but I didn’t really warm to the characters or their predicaments. I suppose the idea was to paint pictures of the privileged nouveau artisans of the area, seen through the mainly 30-40 year old male perspective.

I didn't really have enough empathy for the characters, and found it to be a little like a soap, rather than fully holding my attention.

I guess it's one to read to enjoy intrigues of urban high-income 30-somethings, inhabiting a privileged lifestyle in a busy part of Manhattan. Possible, but not ideal, for bookmerica?

By comparison, I've just been reading The Deep Whatsis, by Peter Mattei. Note the cover doesn't have a title on it.

Also set in Manhatten, this one was much more fun*, giving a first person perspective of a high-flyer Chief Ideas Officer for an advertising company.

Massively paid, ruthless, cynical, downsizing his department as a sport, the anti-hero is also losing grip on his life. There's an inevitability to his mishaps with the Intern, the high end New York bars and bistros that he inhabits, the effects of over indulgence and the sociopathic voice that continues to drive him.

There's other stories that deal with some of the themes, including the movie 'In the Air' with Clooney, but the voice of the protagonist in this story keeps the attention as he slides obliviously from one horrible incident to another.

One to read to recognise some of the excesses of corporate mayhem, with a morally bankrupt lead character who manages to get worse as the story progresses. One I'll probably re-read - and have decided to suggest to bookmerica.

* and a bit rude

lucy visits a cloud

An emailshot today that created a mild puzzle was the one from iTunes advertising the 'new' release of the Beatles back-catalogue, from the USA.

For a mere £89.99, I could click to order a dozen of the Beatle US releases, to be downloaded to iTunes.

That's where it seems odd. There'd be a little picture of the cover art from the original US recording, with both the mono and stereo versions of each track.

If, like many Brits, I've already got the UK versions of a reasonable number of the tracks, why would I want the American versions? I could understand it if there was some kind of collectable element (like the original gatefold covers, or the extensive artwork of the Magical Mystery Tour), but otherwise it amounts to little more than a playlist re-organisation of the UK versions.

Although, I notice that on iTunes at the moment, all of the UK versions are priced at £10.99.