Grand Budapest Hotel

I stood on a tube platform marvelling at the huge advertisement for the Wes Anderson movie 'Grand Budapest Hotel', already in the knowledge that we'd booked to see it on the comfy chairs in the Electric Cinema.

It's been done on an elaborate scale, with something of a modernised 'Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines' crazy caper style about it.

The hotel looks like an iced cake confection in some of the scenes and when shown in its later more run-down state has a kind of over-signaged Germanic utilitarian orange glow about it.

The vast array of well-know actors keep a relentless pace with many 21st century sensibilities in the dialogue, and a sharpness to the wit, rather than something to laugh out loud about.

I enjoyed it, although it is a bit like drowning in a very rich pink iced cake mix.

magnolias, beach blankets and babylon

There were bright blasts of Magnolia trees on every corner, when we decided to drop into BBB for a spot of lunch.

Well, not exactly drop into, it was slightly planned, and meant we could get a complementary prosecco before we dined.

Beach Blanket Babylon is a rococo institution in Notting Hill, and a lovely way to spend a relaxed lunchtime with a good changing cast of interesting local folk.

It's just a street or two away from the busy market, made famous in that film, and an oasis of chill in a bustling area.

We sat close to the bar, in that area with the Gaudi-like mosaics and the understated fireplace.

re Knog-ing the Cayo

It should only take a few minutes really.

The re-Knog-ing just required the location of the frogs and a quick check that they were still powerful enough. They winked back at me alright but I couldn't resist flipping them and adding new cells.

A quick slip around the carbon of the Cayo and everything was ready.

It's not the frogs that are the problem actually, I've discovered a new creak and it's coming from the Arione. Never mind, the horses can hear me on the lanes.

Today's interesting sightings: The mum jogging up the steep hill with her baby in a three-wheeler buggy. The randomly startled pheasants running back and forth across the road. The caw caw caw from the rookery. The tightrope squirrels on the power lines. That green woodpecker flying parallel to the road. A few early morning gunshots. About a dozen other cyclists saying hello.

tripping the dark fantastic

Last weekend was the first outing for the carbon bike this year.

It involved the rigmarole of pumping tyres and checking things and I really do need to give it some oil to make some of the bits spin around a little more smoothly.

I've entered for some sort of event in just over a week so I suppose I'd better make sure that everything is functional. That includes me, of course, having today tripped over a large loudspeaker box and ladder which had been placed across the entrance into a darkened room.

Ouch.

not quite a London particular

Two days this week I've woken to an etherised view of London. A grey haze rubbing the window panes.

I've walked past closed sawdust pubs to the morning tube and joined the lines waiting patiently at just the right spots on the platform.

By evening it has all changed. A bright yellow splash across the darkness and those same market-side pubs spilling animated people onto the pavements. Just one more before the bus or train home.

This London is only a stone's throw from the Thames, and with all the signs of a pickup in the beat.

twelve years a slave

We'd left the pub mid-evening and decided to see Twelve Years a Slave, the story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man from Saratoga, New York. He is tricked into a visit to Washington, where he is kidnapped and trafficked to Louisiana, and sold as a slave.

Artist/director Steve McQueen shows the Northup memoirs as a harrowing tale. It's from the slave's perspective showing the violent treatment by 'owners' towards what they considered their property in the form of the slaves.

It's unremitting, Northup is passed around from owner to owner, with casual violence in each locale. The wives of the owners are as desensitised, with the slaves mainly treated as little more than livestock.

The narrative creates a range of brutal episodes. It's a tough one to watch because of it, with slow cuts and long scenes to drive home the point.

In parts the camera is closely involved, and at other times there's an almost documentary stillness to painterly yet often harsh scenes.

As the final accelerated ending played out, it left me with mixed feelings about it as a movie. Worthy, yes. A story that needs to be told. Undoubtedly. Closure. No, or at least only partly. There were many things left unresolved and a rushed conclusion.

It's a part of a huge and somewhat suppressed story about the institutional supply chains that supported America's foundations, too vast to encapsulate in this single film.

my hotel television keeps trying to sell me things

Working until late most days this week, plus evenings at a selection of Moroccan, Indian and Brazilian restaurants.

It wasn't until Thursday that I had time to flop in front of the Temporary Television That Has To Be Treated With Care.

That's because although it has a wide selection of channels, it doesn't very easily go past '5'. It's something to do with the remote control, I think, and I've tried pointing it from very close and pressing the buttons firmly, but it'll usually give me a sporting chance to get as far as ITV1 and on a couple occasions I even found Sky 1.

Otherwise, it flips to various sales menus. Would I like high-speed internet access? Maybe a recent movie? Something -er- salacious?

It doesn't tire of offering from around these selections, but it does mean I've been somewhat limited in what I can watch. I suppose I could phone downstairs to get it fixed, and it's probably just tired batteries (the telly's or maybe mine?)

Instead I've remembered that I loaded episode two of True Detective onto the iPad. That will do nicely for an evening's amusement.

I'm still only at the second episode, where there's various quotes from the mysterious 1895 Robert W. Chambers book 'King in Yellow' which is about a play that drives people mad. Chambers set this prismatic story in an unnerving future of 1920.

Considering the obvious tie-in to this story, the creepy book is a steal on Kindle as a freebie at the moment. If there was ever a real live time traveller (as well as Thomas Pynchon) then I'd plump for Chambers as a strong candidate. Oh, okay, and William Gibson. Adding to the fun, I see the Amazon book was transcribed by a community of volunteers to get it into Kindle format.

So, television problem solved. Watch the episode and then read the book. Starting with the macabre Repairer of Reputations.

...And maybe admire the mocked-up magazine cover art on Slate.

watching the detectives non procedurally, with a king in yellow

I've been watching Line of Duty on catch-up.

I'm not sure if its because I've been away from home, but it's a Wednesday evening "don't miss" type of programme, whilst tucked in my temporary room. Good enough that I watched it again when I got back home this weekend.

I already know I'll miss the next episode because of a business dinner somewhere. It's like the old days of television where you have to be there at the right time. I guess I'll find it on iPlayer afterwards if I'm still away.

The underlying plot involves a deadly witness protection car ambush with Detective Lindsay Denton in charge of the convoy and now the chief suspect.

There's conspiracies, twists and a bit of potential corruption, with other important players not surviving into the second reel.

No need for subtitles from Nordic. Some would call it a police procedural, but I'll call it a proper drama.

I've also just watched the cinematic first episode of the Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson True Detective series set in a moodily drawn Louisiana. It started deceptively grounded in procedure - a murder, ritual, scenes at the morgue but simmering underneath is a kind of Lovecraftian/Edgar Allen Poe mysticism. There's various bumps and screams under the surface which I assume will reveal over the coming weeks.

McConaughey's character frequently trips off on little speeches about existence, “This place is like someone’s memory of a town and that memory’s faded,” he says. “Stop saying stuff like that,” comes Harrelson's more grounded retort. I'm guessing the rather skewed camera angle on the scene above isn't an accident. Look how everything else in the scene is so well arranged.

There's also various occult artefacts. A kind of devil's trap made of twigs. I remember seeing some of these eerily hanging in a wood in Canada once. More work to make than a circle of salt or a pentagram? And possibly a mandrake wrapped in the centre of the trap? Don't they scream and try to kill whoever pulls them from the ground?

I'm expecting this show to go weirder and already have the second episode ready to watch when I get a moment.

limited time

I've been carrying one of those beanie hats this week because even on short walks there'll be sudden downpours of rain.

It seems to fit with the look on the tube too, where parts of commuter uniform include (a) those hats - mainly more stylish than my plain black one (b) various types of running shoe or similar sports footwear (c) a digital device to read - definitely not a newspaper in the morning. (d) an optional copy of the Standard, Time Out (Tuesday) or bizarrely Decanter(Thursday) to read on the evening tube.

Yes, I'm not commuting by cable car at the moment, but instead picking my tube doors wisely.

shards of thought

I'm temporarily living in the shadow of the Shard.

An interesting building which somehow dominates the view late at night.

Stand three steps further back and the main cityscape is of its always-on lights.

I've mused over why different levels of the building use different colour lighting, and why some apparently empty areas are fully lit whilst others are always in shadow?

But it's mainly one of those examples of where I'm 'in the scene' instead of 'observing the scene'.

Maybe next week I'll slow down enough to have time to take a better look.

you need a fast flyin' train on a tornado track

After I saw that recent movie about the '60s folksinger, I flipped to listening to some Bob Dylan again in the car. Not exclusively, but when on recent circuits of the M25, it's formed a lyrically intense soundtrack.

On my bike, if on a turbo instead of the road, I listen to higher beats per minute stuff that's good for the cycling.

I've noticed there's often not much to the words though. Kind of "feel my body heat, yeah, come close to me' repeated about 50 times. I also know pain points like when Red Oktober by Ex-Plosion comes on during the hill climb in Hell Hath No Fury. Old school synth with a bad bass line. Same with Krystal Nation on another damp tee shirt climb.

So back with the Dylan I'm on track 192, which my car steadfastly informs me is about 60% through the list.

It's Isis and worryingly I seem to know all the words. "A man in the corner approached me for a match. I knew right away he was not ordinary. He said, "Are you lookin' for somethin' easy to catch?" I said, "I got no money", he said, "That ain't necessary" Just that little piece already outdoes my cycle-listening lyrics and that isn't even the full setup for the story.

And there's the ones I've played twice. Like the Dylan poem about Woody Guthrie. So much packed into seven minutes. Although I'm not sure it would urge me up the hill in the same way as Ex-Plosion.

When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb
When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb...
Check out the video.

everything is awesome

Yes, we decided to see that Lego Movie.

I suppose there was a hint of product placement within this movie, but it was a hoot of a story, which also managed a good twist before the Lego based credits rolled.

The story revolves around Emmett the construction worker (yes, one who reads the instructions) and a plot to blow up everything that is weird (i.e. stuff made without the instructions). A bit recent Lego vs Old School.

We saw it in 3D and some of the scenes were breathtakingly fast and frenzied. It felt as if I'd ingested a few E numbers within the first ten minutes of the action and somehow continued to ramp up throughout the movie.

The big screen scale of the Lego scenes was astonishing, just watching the orderly traffic flow on the motorways or a sweeping scene across the Arizona desert of the Wild West.

Naturally there's adept repurposing of Lego blocks at every opportunity although some Lego characters are better at it than others. The blue 1980s spaceman springs to mind as someone who only really knows how to make a...spaceship. Others could recall Lego parts by serial number and quick fire assemble just about anything.

Further to add the movie's tongue-in-cheek commercial appeal is a cheesy song,"Everything is awesome", which the construction workers will spontaneously start singing, and then continue to sing for multiple hours. "It's a small world", anyone? Oh, no, that's from the competition. And newsflash, I just found the Tegan and Sara version, featuring The Lonely Island. Once heard, never forgotten.

There's rapid-fire humour too, including pokes at the movie itself: "blah-blah-blah - interesting back story - but we know you want to get to the next piece of action"

Weirdly, I'd actually like to see this again (as long as they don't try to blow me up).

1000 miles walked since Santa Barbara

Since I got a fitbit in Santa Barbara.

i need shine

Crazy busy days zig-zagging London, without time for side projects.

Saturday's decompression.

A bike ride.

And now I can hear a blackbird singing.

holding back the tide?

After the fire alarm a few days ago, things have settled. Even the tube strike was called off. The weather has been interfering with my ongoing cable-car commute, because of occasional high winds closing the Air-Line.

Nonetheless, this morning it was working and I could get a view of the Thames Barrier. It was raised again for the umpteenth time this year, to protect London from the highest tide for 60 years.

They explain it's the gulf stream's route that is causing the deluge and that the water is being picked up around the other side of the world. Fluid mechanics in action.

almost hot and steamy

Sunday and I'd just unloaded my bags when the alarm sounded. I was alone in the almost empty car park. There were sirens and a rising set of voices the other side of a row of screened fencing.

I realised I'd have to repack the car and follow the little green signs towards the exits. The first door was locked. A fire exit, eh?

Then I noticed the 'break me' button.

The button didn't break, instead it slid down and the adjacent door opened into a stairwell full of people. They immediately started asking me questions in broken English, assuming that if I'd appeared through this door I must know something.

I didn't and instead made my way downstairs and out into the street.

Quite a few people were wrapped in tinfoil. Space blankets - the sort of thing to pack on a hike, just in case. I couldn't work out how so many people would be this well-prepared but it did add a further dream-like quality to the scene.

I headed to a nearby store to buy some groceries.

By the time I returned the story was that someone had left the steam-room door open.

fear and trembling with loving sabotage

Fellow blogger Kitty Hannah suggested Amélie Nothomb would be a good read and so I planned to download a novel onto Kindle. It wasn't to be, because only the French editions were available.

I persisted and ordered the paperbacks in English, which arrived in time for me to take them to my temporary bunker on the east side of London.

The two I picked are both autobiographical of what I learn to be a thoughtful and quirky individual.

I read the one where she was twenty-something before I read the one where she was around 5-6 ish. They were both fascinating stories.

In 'Fear and Trembling' she's working in an office in the hierarchies of Japan. She's become an office flower/OL/office lady/shokuba no hana and has a female boss, who should, by rights, have left the office to get married to a salaryman. It's the story of demeaning tasks, a stilted office protocol and a real type of fear built into the system.

It unpacks slowly and with several very graphical scenes, as well as some interesting mind diversions, almost all within the closed walls of the office. I found it a fascinating evocation of the very strange working world seen through western eyes.

And for another author, here's three of the different cover-arts.

Then backwards to China, where she was at a younger age, in the ghetto of the diplomatic classes, again locked away behind walls this time in '70s Beijing.

Aside: Notice that my copy at the top of the post has a different typeface from the one below. Marketing to bring the set to a consistent look?

The kids of the diplomats wage a permanent war against one another, with roughly hewn distinctions which somehow even the numbers. It's written through the child's voice, but with the wisdom and philosophies of a later age. She rides a bicycle (horse) everywhere and is smitten by one of the newcomers to the environment.

There was a moment during the week when a 'blockbuster TV show' was about to start - something I'd usually enjoy - but instead I found myself thinking I'd prefer to see how Amélie was getting on with Elena in 'Loving Sabotage.'

I found them both highly enjoyable reads, and an insight into the author's thinking. Thanks, Kitty, for what proved to be an excellent suggestion.

removing the Office 15 Click-to-Run Extensibility component can be a long scream

Yesterday I mentioned the Sufferfest videos. There's another good one called 'The long scream'. It's title came to mind when I was back in Windows world. I needed to install a new program. Windows wasn't having any of it.

"Unable to install because you have Office 15 Click-to-Run Extensibility component installed"

Really? I wonder what that is?

I hunted through the Uninstall programs part of control panel for the mystical beast.

Nothing showed.

Maybe a reboot?

Still nothing.

Google?

Oh, here we go, some technical articles about how to hack the registry to remove a certain key. This doesn't seem like a particularly on-piste method.

Another search and I found the name of the file that contains the "Office 15 Click-to-Run Extensibility component"

c2rint.msi (How silly of me not to have realised)

Now, do I have it on my computer?

Search c2rintmsi.

Yes, there it is. Now, not to delete it- I'll have to uninstall it.

Right click it, find the 'Uninstall' option and run it.

Sure, enough, it worked, and the "Office 15 Click-to-Run Extensibility component" uninstalled itself.

Now to try re-installing the new thing and this time it worked.

Then Microsoft Office said it had detected an error. Would I like it fixed automatically?

Huh? Yes, please

So I clicked the little repair button and it whirred away.

Then I noticed the Outlook and Word icons had disappeared from the taskline.

Then I noticed that the 'Repair' had deleted my entire MS Office setup.

That's when I particularly thought of the long scream.

Time to go for a bicycle ride.

turbo bike ride instead of braving the white marbles

Today the white marbles were falling out of the sky, so I decided to have another bicycle ride on the turbo. I decided I'd do the same ride as yesterday and see whether I could stay above the line all the way up two steep hills in the middle of the session.

I didn't.

It's hard to spot on the chart above, but after some energetic spinning at the start, I conk out momentarily at about 22 and 26 minutes. It's very subtle, but I know I faded.

Both yesterday and today I ran out of watts before the top of the two big climbs.

I've used this course in the past and somehow these times I didn't feel quite as feeble by the end of it. Perhaps my last 2-3 weeks of non-cycling have given my system a chance to recover.

I'm also pleased to say I can keep peddling all the way through these kind of scenes now. When I started I'd usually have to stop after about 20 minutes and sometimes by the hour it could get a bit embarrassing.

At least I'm up to 46 miles cycled this week.

But before I feel too righteous about this and the Dryathalon (no booze) during January, I have to report this year's creme eggs beckon. With that in mind, tomorrow I might try Blender.

my own little sufferfest

I was pinged by fellow fitbit user Amanda today. She'd just overtaken me in the personal fitbit leaderboard stakes and I've already sent my congratulations. It's a strange concept really, using an internet enabled pedometer to measure mileage, calories, flights of stairs climbed and to be able to socially compete with total strangers.

Personally, I prefer the fitbit to all of the gaudy bracelet type systems, which shout 'look at me'. The fitbit is totally discreet and can work by simply being in a pocket.

I also looked at my cycling for the last month or so. Because of where I've been working, I haven't been out on a bike since 19 Jan, until today.

During January I managed 258 miles, which may sound respectable, but is somewhat short of me being able to meet a decent annual target.

So far in February I've just done one cycling session and that was today, indoors, on the turbo. I used one of the Trainerroad/Sufferfest workouts and videos, but have had to abandon my plan to do the Sufferfest competition that ran over end of January and start of February. I'm just nowhere near my bike.

Instead, today's turbo session was 'Hell hath no fury' which is around one hour twenty minutes. By the end I was starting to dissolve. It's described as a 2 x 20 minute workout and features women's professional cycle racing. Certainly no pushover.

I feel very overtaken today. In a good way, of course.

turbulence on the cable car

My great commuting plan came a little unstuck today. It's the first day of the Tube strike, but with my aerial commute using the cable car I thought I'd be able to avoid the problems.

There was a slight increase in passengers this morning, although I still had a car to myself as we took off for the flight across the Thames. Then at the cruising altitude of 297 feet, a special announcement about turbulence came onto the speaker system.

The cable care was swaying around, but I regard that as part of the fun of the journey.

We landed and I disembarked for the next part of my journey.

Except.

The wind continued to grow and by around lunch time it was difficult to walk around.

The cable cars had disappeared.

They'd all been tucked back into their little shelters at either end of the route. I was now stranded on the wrong side of the river.

Things could get rather tricky for me to get back to base.

about time I saw this

I've just seen that Richard Curtis film called 'About Time', which is a rom-com with an understated bit of time travelling thrown in. No need for Gigawatts of power or police boxes, in this film it's achieved by standing in a cupboard and clenching fists.

Although there's a central part of the plot around this, the film seems to be much more a study of a family with some commentary on the value of relishing every moment.

Coincidentally, I saw Curtis being interviewed yesterday and he explained that he was stepping down from directing so that he could, himself, live some of the values that the film espoused.

The plot is on the packaging, so we get a humorously narrated Domnhall Gleeson playing the lead and trying to get the girl played by Rachel McAdams. Bill Nighy is the father and there's a quirky purple clad sister too. And other cast make a suitably crafted Curtis potpourri of interesting family and friends.

Things do go wrong, but the film's plot line was mostly feel-good aside from the potential creepiness of the Groundhog day styled replays of certain events. Probably because I've been watching Nordic Noir I was expecting some specifically dark twists, but even the grim moments are played with a light touch.

It was an easy movie to watch and enjoyable in a mostly light-hearted way.

Oh yes, and Curtis knows how to do weddings. The one in this movie has to be an all time great.

Curtis has an amazing back-catalogue of popular Brit-coms like Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and Bridget Jones, and there was even a little sequence at the end of the movie that did some sharp cuts to what could have been scenes from other Curtis stories.

The Next Train to Depart - (Review)

Live Theatre to see the sold out play by John Challis, “The Next Train to Depart”, commissioned as a new work by Queens Hall Arts, Hexham.

The tag-line described a ‘Brief Encounter for the 21st Century’. It's a two-hander set in the ambient sounds of Newcastle Central, where an aspirant poet meets a call centre worker.

Both twenty-somethings, she doesn’t remember their first encounter, when rendered mortal as the result of a Lambrini fuelled Hen night.

He writes initially over-the-top poems which he’ll perform under spotlight as the action progresses.

There’s a weave to the action. A dialogue that gradually tunes as they get to know one over several meetings. Maybe the call centre worker has the more poetic eye? Maybe the hours of observing from a table at the station have created an overload?

The performance by Adam Donaldson as Dante created an enigmatic poet, becoming more grounded through the influence of Alex Tahnée as Kayleigh. Alex presents a feisty spirit, a canny awareness of Dante’s observations and a great counterpoint to his outpourings.

Snappily directed by Melanie Rashbrooke, with scarcely an unused second or nuance, this was an elegant performance worthy of its current North Eastern tour, but also in need of being seen by a wider audience throughout the UK.

Somewhere like Theatre 503 should consider this for a London airing.

waiting at the station

I've travelled to the North through the rain then snow then rain again.

Now it's feeling gale force cold, but I suspect that's more about my southerner constitution rather than the actual climate here.

No one else here seems to notice.

I've just been waiting for the next train to depart.

...Could almost be the title of a play.

a near future experience

I feel as if I'm from the near future at the moment. Except I don't know the raffle ticket numbers.

It's the combination of commuting in the little space bubble, being on evening video conferences from a hotel room and then eating Japanese noodles from a pot.

Somewhere between cowboy bebop and fifth element.

I've noticed there's an exhibition across the river about life in 2050. I think I'll need to visit.

hot toddies at the Folly

One of the standard freebies in London is the little wallet to keep Oyster cards and other travel tickets safe. I usually use them as a main wallet, which is also a way of paring down the amount I'm carrying.

There's plenty of sources, beyond the ones from the train stations and I've been using a Royal Academy one recently. Of course they eventually wear out, but are surprisingly robust and can last for more than a year before the first sticky tape has to be applied.

It's always good to have a couple of spares, and today's 'snowy London Town' scene addition was from The Folly where we'd arranged to meet for an early evening supper.

The Folly is one of those slightly subterranean bustling bars and restaurants that seems to be perpetually busy. It's much bigger on the inside than you'd expect and has various zones with different designs varying from garden areas, lounges, long tables and stand up bar areas. We'd taken the precaution to book because even at an early hour the place fills with a boisterous evening shift of clientele.

We'd picked the venue partly because of its location, kind of equidistant from Bank and London Bridge. I'd walked from London Bridge station, over the bridge, thereby becoming the evening's lone person walking north against the solid commuter flow heading south*.

An entertaining supper followed as we chatted and schemed, before heading in opposite directions which would see us finish the evening hundreds of miles apart. London's closeness. For card carrying members, with free wallets.

* Pretty much the route used by Bridget Jones in that movie

Inside Llewyn Davis - cool for cats?

In Leicester Square, it was a last minute decision to go to see 'Inside Llewyn Davis', the movie about a struggling folk singer on the 1961 Greenwich Village circuit. We're talking the era of early Bob Dylan and the emerging folk scene from the Village inside of New York. I enjoy wandering the area around Bleecker when I'm in New York. So that's a double tick in the box. Music and district. The movie is also directed by the Coen Brothers. Should be another tick.

Yes, I expected to like it a lot. There's great cinematography with every scene evoking stylish album covers from the era and locations that look brilliant.

I just wasn't sure about the main story or character. Oops.

Our man, Llewyn played by Oscar Isaac is in a spiral of downward situations, most of which he tries to escape from by bailing onto the nearest fire escape. Not a complete unknown, he's seen earlier modest recognition with a co-singer who committed jumped off the Washington Bridge.

Llewyn sings fairly well and plays a lot of C, F and G chords. I know he wasn't supposed to be likeable, but aside from throwing the occasional strop, there wasn't any real passion or heart to create empathy.

There's other characters that add some spark. A double act by Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan as a couple of folkies who help Llewyn along. That's Justin on the right.

Mulligan has other problems, but that's where, for me, the film goes rather too formulaic. I don't think she was given the best script here and tries to act her way our of being given a caricatured and sometimes illogical part. Later, when stoned jazz muzo John Goodman turns up, he's also give a part that is larger than life.

Then there's a few middle of the road folk acts that turn up wearing matching sweaters or singing novelty space race tunes. Whenever Llewyn has a chance to get royalties on a song or join an up and coming commercial opportunity, he makes the poor wrong decision. If there's a sign pointing to anywhere better, or anywhere redeeming, our man will miss it. Akron, Ohio, springs to mind.

I began to wonder if the film was all a big movie buffs' in-joke. Introduce a cat to make the main character show some loveable compassion. Show the main character is a bounder by him maybe getting his best friend's girl pregnant. Even the graffiti in the toilet at one stage asks,"What are you doing?"

The Coens are good at quirky humour and I suppose there was some in here. It could be possible to play an irony card too, but I don't think that for me it has really worked. Even the film's narrative loop seemed flimsy and somehow unsatisfactory. I was thinking, surely it can't just be that? as the final credits appeared. Maybe I did care more for the cat(s).

I can understand that sometimes music albums need to be listened to a few times to appreciate their greatness. I'm not so certain that this will happen for me with this movie.

margins of respectability?

Flying past Canary Wharf every day at the moment, I keep seeing the trader blocks in the distance.

I've already written about Wolf of Wall Street and although I'm not convinced it was part of the original plan for the movie, it's one that lingers because of some of the ideas.

There's the rampant sales culture about 'sell anything', the premise that the punters are fools, a totally unreliable narrative which we are expected to follow. There's fair warning right from the start when the Ferrari changes colour from red to white during a trip along a freeway in the opening scenes.

Then there's the almost entirely male wheeler-dealers and the women often regarded as little more than objects.

I'm reminded of a few of the other movies about the same era 1980-2008 which includes 'Wall Street', 'Boiler Room' and the tad more extreme 'American Psycho'.

One that has previously stuck in my mind (which even had a female Investment Banker) was 'Margin Call'. That's the one about the collapse of a Lehman-like bank.

Without it being a spoiler, and true to many Hollywood scripts, the character played by Demi Moore was the one who became the scapegoat.

The worrying thought in the back of my mind is that although this stuff gets made into movies it is probably still happening.

Who really knows what happens when the US prints another $40bn per month of QE? Or how this gets beamed around the planet and then every so often a currency in another country collapses?

In a few of the words from the amoral Margin Call...

John Tuld: There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

Peter Sullivan: Look at these people. Wandering around with absolutely no idea what's about to happen.

Eric Dale: I run Risk Management. I don't really see how that's a natural place to start cutting jobs.

blurred vision

What with whizzing around London and working in various offices, I've really had to put the blog on the back-burner this week.

A few hasty iPhone grabbed snap-shots is about all I can declare.

No television, no external entertainment, pretty much head-down.

A blur, really.

the crane in rain

I said this would be a week of few words as I fly around docklands. The foggy iPhone picture of the crane from yesterday needs further development, so here's one of it around sunrise. Even the people punching the tickets on the Air Line were taking pictures of the bright early morning.

It wouldn't be complete without another one of the crane in rain.

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.

fifteen months, and what do you get...

Strange what goes through one's mind sometimes. I was standing on the tube today reading the Standard when the old cowboy song '16 tons' came into my head. I amused myself adapting it.

People say pol-i-tics is made 'a hot air.
Poli-ti-cians words seem that they don't care.
They don't care as long as they get on
Position for elections with expenses that's strong.

You got fifteen months, what do you get?
Every day older and deeper in debt.
Cameron don't call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to Osborne and Co.

Wake up every mornin' at the break of day.
Pick up my iPhone, off into the fray.
I load sixteen gig of Windows eight files
But the smug man says "I'll soon wipe that smile"

Take fifteen billion, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Politicians don't call me 'cause I can't go
All my money's in the government sto'.

I woke up one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain
Scrimp and save are my middle name
Payin' to the government, fistfuls of what I'd earn
But the government will lose it and I'll never learn

Take twenty billion, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Bankers don't call me 'cause I can't go
You shipped all the money to the haven off-sho'

If you see me comin', better step aside
A lotta men didn't, a lotta men tried
One fist of printed dollars, the other T-bill.
If the quantitive don't get you
Then the easing will.

Take 25 billion, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Politicians don't call me 'cause I can't go
We owe all the money to the politicians' sto'.

I know, it needs more work. I got to my stop. And apologies to Ernie Ford.

timeless

One of those strange nights.

I'm back to a more normal routine this week and decided to have an early night to sort of 'reset' myself.

It didn't work.

Curiously, I woke up at what I thought would be near morning to discover it was only 00:55.

Often I wouldn't be in bed until that type of time, so this was something strange.

Then I woke up again at about 03:55.

Not a big deal, but I flipped to listen to the radio, which a few minutes later did the pips for 04:00. Except it was on BBC World Service and so it didn't say the time at all.

Apparently because the World Service is available everywhere means the time can't be stated. Surely a little bit bonkers?

They've started not stating the time for programmes in the schedule too. They just say the programmes are 'on today'. Kind of Dali's 'Persistence of Memory' based scheduling.

I'm sure it didn't used to be like that. I seem to remember times in GMT because I'd have to mentally adjust that it was one hour later during the summer. I think they also used to say things like 'It's 7am in Moscow and 5am in Paris' as well.

Still. Darkness and rain when the alarm finally peeped.

Welcome to the normal form of January.

Timeless.

Lilyhammer

When I worked in Norway, the seasons were very definite, compared with the UK. In the summer months there was an outdoor cafe life and in the winter there was reliable snow.

With that in mind, I've been watching the heavily advertised Lilyhammer series. It uses the premise of Steven Van Zandt playing a Soprano-style gangster moving to Lillehammer, Norway on witness protection and the various scrapes that ensure.

Early snowy episodes include a singing policeman, who plays a kind of Norwegian Elvis. It reminded me of a gig I attended in Stavanger, where a Police band called 'Strong arm of the law' played a rock set.

A curious parallel perhaps, but the series is full of observations about differences between US and Nordic sensibilities. Although made in Norway, the American point of view seems to prevail in many of the outcomes (i.e. the ex-mobster generally wins).

Turn the tables when the Elvis cop character visits New York and offers the local detective a donut, but is told 'Sorry I'm on a low cholesterol diet'.

I've watched the whole series 1 now, suspending my disbelief through the dozens of helpful co-incidences that get the hero started on the new lifestyle, which allows him to create a new Lillehammer bar, The Flamingo, which looks remarkably like Silvio Dante's club in the Sopranos.

The series gets American screening too, although I wonder how the spoken Norwegian with American sub-titles will go down? It's clearly a hit show in Norway as evidenced by van Zandt's appearance on chat show Ylvis.

I'll watch series 2, it's already all up on Netflix.

dancing through the days

Usually, December sails along at a fair rate of knots but then after the New Year arrives, the January anchor is thrown overboard preceding a rather slow drift through the month. Not so this year, when I'm already mildly obsessing about whether the indoor tree lights will be down before twelfth night.

I've dismantled the front garden lights today, braving sleety rain and they are now tucked away in the garage for another year.

The speed effect has also affected my blog writing, where I've noticed several incomplete draft entries that will now not now see light of day.

I was going to write about the over-reaction from certain quarters to PJ Harvey's guest editing of the Today Show a couple of days ago. I usually hear the Today show - often only the first half because of schedules. The prior special editions last week were guest-curated by a Barclays banker, the ex head of SI5 and Oxford Python and traveller Michael Palin, with nary a peep from the listeners.

Musician writer PJ Harvey dared to take a slightly less middle road with some controversial inserts whilst discussing ways to challenge power.

I thought it appropriate; it wasn't all about agreeing with the content, more that it created a dynamic basis for thought and debate. I'd place the programme more as an obvious opinion piece rather than fact-driven, but it did shift the approach from the normal format in a provocative way. I don't think it gave answers, but that's another discussion - but one that will be quietly buried, probably.

The Torygraph, Fail and Stannit were quick to use it as a reason to challenge the ongoing role of the BBC and leftishness in general. Usually British politics is about the fight for the presentable middle. Whichever part of the Bullingdon/Eton/Westminster/Oxbridge set are in play will use the middle to help hold their position.

The recent discussions about 11% pay rises for politicians are a case in point. A red herring when most of them are quite well off, thank you very much.

Picking at random, using published figures, defence man Philip Hammond's worth is supposedly around £5m, cyclist party leader Cameron £3.2m + legacies, Labour leader Ed Miliband cagily hides his worth assumed to be north of £2m, wallpaper magnate and chancellor Osborne's at £4.5m, health supervisor Jeremy Hunt around £4.5m.

That's all before any post-political directorships and special advisor roles. Of course that doesn't always work out. Ex MP Michael Mates tried to get one of those police commissioner roles by moving from his ongoing family home in Chichester into rented rooms in Winchester just before the relevant election. Turns out he didn't win, but I'm not sure if that's enough reason to let it drop?

I know there will be MPs without 'other interests', but there's an awful lot with the prime indicator of second homes. 340 of the MPs claim their entirely legitimate energy bills for their second homes on expenses, as a quick example.

The discussions by the likes of Polly J and recently Russell Brand can be flags about a situation rather than providing answers. We enter 2014 with a still broken economy. The UK doesn't print as much quantitive easing money as the Americans, but UK is still sitting on all kinds of hidden debts, underemployment and crashed pension plans.

The stats appear to show improvements, but if one applies the reasonableness tests, it doesn't quite feel right.

Sometimes there's a need for a more useful challenge to status quo, which has to go beyond trying to put a quote into a politicians mouth suitable for a rolling news feed.

So I'm all for a bit of thought provocation from some non-politicians as a way to try to see past the usual moves.

FaceTime picture scrambler

It's many years since the use of personalised video calls started. I had one of those cameras to clip onto a PC before they became embedded in the screens of devices.

It was still mainly an occasional thing to go for a proper video conference though. Usually it would be something important like a major review, or something involving lots of countries, although even then there could be problems with sound out of sync or a mis-dialled office.

Nowadays we all have FaceTime, Lync, Skype and similar facilities. It's made it ubiquitous, although my experience is still that people mainly use telephone conference calls and maybe a shared workspace for some powerpoint or screen control.

I guess it's partly that adding the faces in non-studio conditions can sometimes create unexpected looks.

Challenges include loss of eye-line, big shadows and the unflattering low angles. My inner photographer always want to adjust the image presented.

There's also the dilemma of early morning calls on FaceTime. Will the other person be 'prepared' or is it all going to go a little bit strange? I'm inventing a special screen saver for that purpose.

One that looks as if there is something wrong with the connection, but where the sound still works.

press reset

All kinds of counts are reset to zero for the start of the new year, so I thought I'd cross check my bicycle stats. I've added all of the monthly running totals into a simple table and then compared the last two years.

My original target for each week was 40 miles and for a month was 160 miles, so I'm quite a way ahead of that. My baseline annual target was therefore 1,600 miles. I set braze, slier and gold targets on top at 2000, 3000 and 4000 miles to make it more interesting. Both of the last two years I've done well to pass the targets and this year the 6200 miles seems pretty good.

It's like the salesman problem though, where the targets get harder year on year, and I've not sandbagged any mileage to start the next year, so it could be difficult to increase any further than last time around.

After last evening's bash and a somewhat late start, I've managed to get in a few miles today, but I guess I'll have to ease myself back in after what feels like a quieter period around the festive season.

I've also been told about that dryathalon thing for January, and may well have a go at that as well.

So far, so good, as they say.

elemental start

2014, eh?

By now it's morning and we're rearranging ourselves from last night's various shindigs.

We've already decided that today needs to be a slow one, although I think I've made the coffee a bit too strong.

The rain abated around midnight for the fireworks, but has returned today; one of the crackers had a question about the commonest element. I think we can safely say hydrogen.

Although, after the last few days of celebrations, I'm beginning to wonder if the most common element ought to be cake.