Happy Bloomsday!

Posted on 16 June, 2003 by adrian

Happy Bloomsday!

I first read James Joyce’s Ulysses seven or eight years ago. Since then, I’d always intended (but never managed, either through forgetting or being engrossed in some other book) to read, or rather be in the process of reading, the book on Bloomsday: 16 June, the anniversary of the day in 1904 when the entire book takes place. This year I managed it… I started, with plump Buck Mulligan appearing for his morning shave, a few days ago, and intend to celebrate the day by finding the time to read another couple of decent-sized chunks.

Of course, it’d be nice to try reading the whole thing in the equivalent 24-hour period it covers, but I have a Real Life to attend to, and it’d be even better to follow the course of the book round Dublin… something for the centenary next year, maybe. For now, though, I’m just re-reading it, and although there’s enormous scope for descriptive appreciation, any number of literary boffins can do that a lot more convincingly and effectively than I can. One thing I will say, though…

Ulysses is often, not entirely without justification, described as one of those “difficult” books, read only in the context of formal literary study or criticism. This is a shame; like other similarly-categorised works, a little effort is greatly rewarded. And although I’m well aware that, for many people, reading should ideally be the equivalent of drinking Horlicks, I can’t imagine not wanting to be challenged, either by imagery, language or intellectual concepts. There are plenty of fairly straightforward, easily-readable works in my list of favourite books, but Ulysses, with its constantly changing styles and its down-to-earth yet learned tone, suits me down to the ground. It’s pointless to compare such things, but I think I enjoy Ulysses in the same way as I enjoy the music of Frank Zappa.

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(Not) down in the Tube station at midnight

Posted on 10 June, 2003 by adrian

London is a vibrant, exciting capital city, with a 24-hour party vibe. Well, that’s the marketing angle, but even in the reality occupied by those of us who don’t need ludicrous “urban designer wear” there’s a few things you can do in London well into the night. The difficulty is how to get home again… night buses are cheap, but only provide a slow and limited coverage out in the suburbs. Taxis are too expensive even for short daytime trips; out of the question for the journey home late at night.

I live in an area where local overground trains are the best method of transport, but the late-night performance depends on the post-privatisation company running your local network. If you’re lucky enough to live in Reading, for instance, there’s a restricted but regular service running right through the night. Where I live, though, the truly incompetent South Central have only just changed the last departure from Victoria… from 23:33 to 23:51… whoo, thanks South Central, you’re way too kind.

So… what I’m basically rambling around to saying is that I think the Late Tube Petition is a worthy campaign. Of course, there may well be issues I fail to understand, about why the system needs to be switched off for certain times, but it’s surely worth investigating. Even though the Underground isn’t normally the most convenient transport option for me, a late-night service could easily be combined with a number of short-run night-bus services around the outer edges of the Tube networks. Round here, some of the standard daytime buses have been extended beyond 1am, so at least *someone* realises that there’s scope for development here.

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New music – Talking About Nothing on a Summer Evening

Posted on 5 June, 2003 by adrian

A little bit of new music. It’s a short collaboration with my good pal Rick Booth…

Talking About Nothing on a Summer Evening (3.2MB mp3)

Here’s how it happened… Rick gave me a recording of his guitar part, a solo piece that he’d recorded a while ago and never found a use for. I came up with some other parts that I thought would enhance the mood. Bingo!

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Venezia/Bologna

Posted on 2 June, 2003 by adrian

It’s been a while… my lame excuse comes in the shape of a short trip to Italy, courtesy of some cheap Easyjet and Ryanair flights.

Having only ever seen Venice on an all-too-brief day trip, we spent three days there, getting to know the parts of the city outside the obvious St Mark’s Square tourist hotspots. It’s well worth doing this; you avoid the teeming hordes of snapshooting coach parties, and there’s plenty of sites with equivalent beauty and intrigue (if not iconic status) away from the Campanile and Doges’ Palace. The sad thing, though, is that Venice is *such* a rip-off. Obviously, as one of the most popular (deservedly so) destinations in the world, and one constantly teetering on the brink of destruction, prices are going to be higher than elsewhere in Italy. But there seems to be so much cynical money grabbing, and frequently without a suitable level of quality service to match. Based on a random sample of restaurant menus around the city, I reckon your average low-budget backstreet trattoria in Venice is almost twice as expensive as the equivalent in Florence. Still, it’s a totally fascinating place to see, and one that just begs for repeat visits.

From Venice, we took a Eurostar class train on Italy’s splendid rail network to Bologna, where we spent the next couple of days. In terms of tourist sites and iconic views, Bologna, capital of the prosperous Emilia-Romagna region, is a long way below Venice, but it still has the timeless charm and grace typical of so many Italian cities. It might not have Tintoretto, Brunelleschi or Leonardo (although there’s a couple of very early Michelangelo sculptures in one of the churches) but that doesn’t matter. The whole city centre is a wonderfully preserved display of medieval architecture, with porticos lining almost every street.

Bologna’s main claim to fame is probably its reputation as something of a gourmet capital of Italy. We weren’t going to be testing any of the finer establishments, but this didn’t matter… even in the relatively cheap restaurants we dined at, the quality was fantastic – quite a contrast after the perfunctory tourist fare of so many Venice eateries.

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Ageing

Posted on 20 May, 2003 by adrian

Catching up on a backlog of entries from Richard Herring’s excellent blog, I came across this entry, which made me (a person of roughly the same age as Richard, although seemingly with less grey hair) laugh a lot. Especially this bit…

The other day I chanced across my first passport. There’s a photo of me in there when I was 17 or 18. I was actually surprised at how thin and attractive I was. I always thought I was nothing special and remember thinking I was fat as a teenager (but then I didn’t realise how far it would go). But I tell you, I was gorgeous. I’d have done me. And in fact I did. About three times a day. Because no-one else seemed to want to.

I know exactly what he means. I don’t feel any older (mentally or physically) than I did ten or fifteen years ago; if anything, I feel younger in certain ways, because adulthood seems to have given me, in lieu of the tight-lipped, controlled responsibility you’re supposed to get, an even worse tendency to be totally blasé about anything that’s not globally terrifying. Oh well.

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The Lego Mac

Posted on 16 May, 2003 by adrian

Did you play with Lego as a kid? I did, obsessively, but I never built a Mac out of Lego. Daniele Procida, from the uk.comp.sys.mac newsgroup, built one, and he’s selling it on Ebay.

(As the Ebay link will have expired by the time you read this, I’ve saved one of the pictures here).

And yes, it’s a fully functional Mac!

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Doug Boucher on the state of music

Posted on 12 May, 2003 by adrian

I talk about music a lot. I frequently despair at the superficial, artless machinations of the music industry and the seeming mistrust of creativity. I get myself into a terrible froth sometimes.

But in a post to alt.music.mike-keneally, Doug Boucher says all that needs to be said.

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Third division play-off, first leg

Posted on 10 May, 2003 by adrian

5-3?! Nice to have the two-goal cushion, but what happened to the second best defence in the Nationwide League?

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Could Kenny G be classed as a terrorist?

Posted on 2 May, 2003 by adrian

Just a couple of good links to tide you over until I can string together some words of my own…

An article from AlterNet could so easily be about life in one of the dictatorships that George Bush wants to “liberate”. But it isn’t. It’s about life in the USA.

And on a lighter note… like me, you may have been impressed by jazz guitarist Pat Metheny’s rant about Kenny G, jazz-lite’s King of Blandness. Well, Richard Thompson went one better and wrote an anti-Kenny song, entitled “I Agree With Pat Metheny”. With such talented people as this, why is there even a *need* for Kenny G?

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iTunes 4 and the Apple Music Store

Posted on 30 April, 2003 by adrian

Apple have released iTunes 4, the latest version of one of my favourite pieces of Mac software. Version 4 comes with AAC encoding and playback facilities; it’s nice to see Apple keeping up with new developments, even if I’m having trouble hearing any difference whatsoever between equivalent AAC and mp3 files, encoded at the same bitrate. Never mind, eh?

The other major development with iTunes 4 (apart from the minor design tweaks, which I like) is the direct link to Apple’s new Music Store, where you can search for songs or complete albums, listen to previews and then pay to download complete tracks. This is nothing new (several similar services are either in operation or at the planning stage) but it represents a great opportunity for compromise between the record industry and the filesharing/downloading community.

However, it has to be done properly, and although I’m prepared to accept that it’s early days yet, Apple really need to avoid another “dodgy public beta” accusation. So it’s not promising to learn that you can only use Music Store if your credit card is registered to a US postal address. As Ben Hammersley says, “This is the internet, you daft sods”.

Still desperately trying not to be nitpicky, I browsed the tracks and albums online (yes, this facility at least is available to us non-Americans). As you’d expect for a currently US-based service, there’s a comprehensive, if not exactly daring, selection of jazz, country and blues, with plenty of big-name pop acts and US grunge-lite. But it’s quite startling how many relatively well-known artists are not represented at all… Frank Zappa, Stravinsky, Aphex Twin, Soft Machine, Mercury Rev. That’s just a random sample from my list of favourites, and I’m not exactly your average top-40 fan, but even so… we’re not talking Bolivian lizard chanting here.

My worry is that the music industry could end up missing the whole point, and indeed the huge potential of online music delivery. I and a lot of people I know (financially secure adults with eclectic musical tastes) use filesharing networks not as a slacker expression of wannabe anarchy, but as a simple reaction to the fact that so much music is otherwise unavailable. I don’t know who to point the finger at here (I fear I’d need more than my full complement of fingers, anyway) but when even large London CD shops and online stores such as Amazon don’t have what you want, illegal downloading is the only way to hear a lot of relatively obscure music.

The only way the record industry can properly address the filesharing issue is to work towards a musically comprehensive network of online facilities, with a range of filesizes/bitrates and a progressive pricing policy to match. I would definitely use such a thing. However, with Apple’s Music Store tracks currently set at 99 cents each (these are mp3s, remember, *not* CD-quality tracks), I’m starting to wonder what the UK prices will be…

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