mercredi 30 mars 2005

The shape of things to come "So you'll be going down to the betting shop on Zim?" someone asked, this eve of the parliamentary polls. No. To bet with President Bob, who's gone very nastily twisted to the ruin of the country, when 'Mugabe Predicts Win in Zimbabwe Elections' (AP summed it up well) and make money out of anybody optimistic enough to hope for a different outcome would leave me feeling filthy inside. Some folk hold that whatever your faith -- and even if you've got nothing you believe in as a benign being beyond our ken -- that if enough people pray hard for something, such a concentration of "prayer power" alone can make it happen; if this is true, then all I'd pray for myself, expecting no miracles, is peace during the vote and honesty, rather than blindness, from the electoral observers. No more politics here: yes, I said that. But I have friends and colleagues in that brutally ruled country who have suffered enough. While Mugabe goes on bashing Tony Blair -- to hell with the pair of 'em, I reckon -- and everybody else but himself for the misery of Zimbabweans of all races, there are people who've lost almost everything. April is set to be the cruellest month so far in some parts of Africa, with a list of trouble-prone events already on the agenda to be covered by we media experts on the continent. Though I'll leave it off the log unless more than usually outraged, since there's no lack of excellent sources for people who care about both the bad and the good news, maybe I will be doing some praying. 'allAfrica' is particularly comprehensive, though sometimes "late" with some of the news. Better late than lacking in insight, they're also to be commended for a sub-section which has joined 'Sustainable Africa' in my blogroll: 'Peace Africa'. I may be coming home from the Factory so pissed off by the horrible things we report on that you'll be served up more poetry, music and funny stuff than ever. The sex now goes without saying. Just so people comfortably used to easy ways of getting the word round know it's a bit different in Africa, here's a bit of one of my favourite Factory service notes of the past month. Martin had the temerity to ask Dave, bureau chief in Nigeria, just as I have, to "please put the fucking conversions in the story before you send it to us". This is what's required to oblige: note-engdesk "attn mb LAGOS - 1525 - 12/3 - Sorry late reply on your (10/03/05 - 1230) re dollar/euro conversions. We take your point, and I will try to ensure Tunde and Ade always include the calculations. Please note, however (re: your recommending http://www.xe.com/ucc/full.shtml) that for someone on the desk to visit this useful website takes two clicks of the mouse. For us, we'd likely have to get a motorcycle taxi to a cybercafe and wait there for the afternoon powercut to end, or ask a large number of engineers to come to the office some time in the next 24 to 48 hours and sit looking at our modem sucking their thumbs for a while, at least until siesta time or evening prayers. We'll do the calculations with a calculator, taking the forex rates from the last wire story (so long as we can access EAA, touch wood) but please bear with us. cheers, dc" We'll go on doing the conversions. Anyway, I'm solvent! I am finally solvent. The nearest branch of my bank said "No cash over the counter." The next said "No cash over the counter on Wednesdays." My own, which is the furthest walk but open on Saturdays -- it seemed like a good idea at the time -- made me late for work, but gave me money. As well a functioning bank card they'd inevitably failed to tell me was ready. Instead of calling in the engineers and waiting for evening prayers, I've already started punching the new digits into all the websites that banned me. The iTunes Music Store is next stop and kind enough to warn us that some items are "explicit", including by VoW ('Voices of Women'). If "explicit" means the likes of Angela McCluskey singing "you know what that fucker can do" in 'Sucker', listed on Angel Records with no reference to Mugabe, then that's angelic indeed, compared with a routine day's work. So I'll leave the routine out of my records, huh, and just get on with the mental gymnastics. By the way, Kate was so nice today, only once telling me to shut up and never to go and wash my mouth out, just cut my fingernails a bit, that I've got over that short-lived nervousness around women. I'll even oblige with the sharp claws, since they're no longer required for dealings with the local branch of the International Monetary Fund, which has treated me rather better than the institution does many Africans. 10:06:16 PM  link   your views? [] Too famous for my own felicity Note to self: Introduce self properly one day soon, if still of this world, to a self-styled "metaphysical designer". Meantime, "Hello Jacob, Your elogens Eloquence, M.D." as per request. Jacob has a nice virtual place where he's lately been writing about stuff on a telly I don't have, but on Monday wrote something I understood. The VerseGuru said: "The business plan for my Lumiere project is exciting. Transferring it from my brain to paper -- less so." Tell me about it! Tonight I've been busy on the 'Lotus Project' again and getting over the terrible shock occasioned by seeing just how many "hits" people have thumped me with in the past 36 hours or so. I'm unused to such popularity and mail from people like biologists who tell me terrifying things like "I'm excited by your project and wish you well in furthering public understanding of scientific thinking on the gradual demise of ownership concepts in affective relationships." I didn't know this was what I've been doing, since my aim's only to give you a good story or two. She presumably means that at some unspecified time in the last century human beings embarked on new ways of sticking together, like partnerships I enjoy where they don't "belong to each other", since the old glues of outmoded evolutionary principles have slowly started becoming extinct. The end of marriage, however, still strikes me as being beyond the current anticipated span of my life, which is now very short indeed. Even the Kid remains determined to get wedlocked in frighteningly few years' time, though I've told both her and you she'd better pay for it herself if she does. I'm aware of Jacob's existence because I prefer metaphysical silly money like blogshares (see left-hand column) to common currency, of which I've now been deprived for more than two weeks. Jacob at some time stuck a ladder across to my place, it seems. It's odd to find out whose blogrolls you didn't know you were on. Maybe it was a Bad Idea to inform Lauren, Ellie and others roughly how many hundreds of people apparently read of certain activities described at luxurious length to people who take the green pill (see right-hand column). Also the weather was yucky on the birthday of one of those much-loved friends, which wasn't what she wanted or deserved, so I imagine that soon enough I will be belted so hard for recent revelations that I will fly almost faster than light to Cannes, where Jacob once had his abode. My blogshares are on the up again to an alarming extent and I yearn to go back to the far safer days of the Faithful 5 & ¾. If I let Lauren fully tell us what happened in Touba, the sacred city where she failed to meet almost anybody but pilgrims who frequently pinched things, like her backside, and wouldn't have her in mosques though she behaved well about shoes and headwear, I expect her account will have to go in the orchard, along with the sex and other wonderful and weird stuff. Despite the harassment, which at least I can do without being too serious, she managed to send the Factory good stories about what Eric Ross calls a "spiritual metropolis of the modern world." But everything Lauren didn't put in her news copy sounded highly old-fashioned and unspiritual to me. I got the impression that "the astronomical proportions and many excellent (sic) attributes" Mr Ross referred to in a very slow-loading page at aui.ma, wherever that is, may refer to more material objects than the Tree of Paradise. With no offence intended to Muslims, either Lauren's sunglasses failed to let in the "tûbâ" of bliss and beatitude or the Tree of Paradise was not Lost but temporarily mislaid during her visit. When it comes to people being laid or mislaid, I think I've said more than enough already this week. My bank manager obviously agrees since I observed tonight on the Net that my account is no longer frozen but having more money taken out of it, partly by the bank, which still hasn't sent me a new card to access those funds myself. I've only one request to make of all the women who are probably ganging up now round the world to punish me in unison. Please go on telling me true-life sex stories in detail I can bung in the film if fitting, because they're much funnier than the whoppers made up by many men. They'll keep me entertained until the huge kick you deliver sends me spinning out of earth's atmosphere into an orbit where even the bank manager can't get at my overdraft any more. In that dimension, a metaphysical designer might come in handy. Bear in mind when you bash me that I briefly bask only in your reflected glory, which is scarcely my fault. Thanks and good night. I'm now going to watch somebody else's 'X-Files', with yoghurts aplenty, before retiring to bed. BJ paid for the yoghurts. See, even that couldn't last. I had to tap him for his canteen card. When I wake up, it'll be a woman, Kate, who will be helping me on Africa. Kate's great, but I'm still shaking in my sandals. No 'X-Files', perhaps. Even Scully would scare me tonight. 12:52:30 AM  link   your views? []

lundi 28 mars 2005

When does life return to normal? What came of it all? A weekend which began with a four-leafed clover of no coincidence and a shaman, saw another strange but true scene completed in the LP, a pun on "draft" intended as such, and a public opening ceremony more open than planned? Ellie chose a raspberry one, stirred up the fruit I like leaving to the end and enjoyed it her way. I eat those yoghurts chilled late at night, a DVD dinner, especially good with the X-Files, when not seeking more Scullies to my Mulder. That she didn't pinch my own favourite was surprise n° 3 of Easter Monday. N° 1 could have started a bad day. "I was a little taken aback" was among international reactions awaiting me at the Factory, about the previous huge entry. Nobody, thanks, was nasty though about my True Confessions, because me, I was gobsmacked. Yes, you were to get the fuller story of how my two new big creative ventures began. Before leaving home, I checked for typos again, reposted it and left the Mac delivering the whole site up to the server in the States after work on it, for later release. No way did I mean to splash El's picture and some ... unusual details across the Front Page. Now it's done, take heed: those who've had comments to make on the sex I wrote about have seen nothing yet. The worst -- or the best, certainly the funniest I can remember -- is still to come. The film's packed with it and still I have almost all the really hard work to do. The first I knew of the size of today's "accident" came in a comment from more than halfway round the world. In my haste, I forgot to look at the "category" boxes used to send log entries. Surprise n° 2 was a shock: the rota. Eleanor, it told me, would be making one of her occasional trips in to work within a couple of hours this very day. I could hardly rush home to put the marathon saga of how "Ellie's film" came to be -- with all the rest -- back "in the orchard" and break it gently, just as you were to be given the big "back door" key rather later. Oh well, "in for a penny, in for a pound." Once she was there, I confessed to my latest sin as soon as I dared. You know what? All she asked, unflustered, was: "Which photo did you use?" "The nicest I've got," I replied. It was taken, as it happens, in a hurry at Monoprix the day we first had lunch together, she was a little bit tired, which shows, and she went off to work with a smile. I remember she left me so mind-blown and heart-smitten that the bus I caught home was one going in the wrong direction, a detail I failed to notice for several stops. Well, here I still am, head still on shoulders. El got her share of the chocolate ration and a choice of yoghurt. She charitably warned me about the dangers of not shaking the pot like a maniac to avoid a sugar overdose at the end. But sometimes you need high blood sugar levels to take the X-Files before bed, let alone Mulder's jokes, worse than mine. In the Métro this morning, before realising what I'd done, the woman's voice was 'A Girl called Eddy', to say more, maybe, about why it pleases me once I've further explored it -- it certainly does. Coming home, there was going to be the rest of Eddy until I noticed 'Anastasia' (Amazon Fr.) in the playlist, and remembered how the Kid and me loved Don Bluth's (IMDb bio) unlikely musical animation story of the stray Romanov princess, orphaned by the Russian revolution and wanted dead by the nastily living corpse Rasputin. Call us sentimental (or wildly romantic) but we must have seen it at least three times in 1998. On the last, in a small but favourite art cinema in Ellie's part of town, we had the smallest of the salles, whimsically named Vasco de Gama, has the fewest seats and a small screen but the greatest surround sound system of all four explorers' theatres. That wasn't the only time we enjoyed a "private showing", since we go to the cinema when most people are doing other stuff. The soundtrack is superb. Often witty songs and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, with a full orchestral score by one of the lesser known veterans of sometimes offbeat movies, David Newman, in whose 'Anastasia' music I enjoy a tip of the hat to Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and other stars of the Russian romantic firmament. I'm glad to note that at Amazon both in France and the UK, 'Anastasia' gets the full five-star treatment from almost everybody, and won't pick up the DVD now on offer for nine euros round the corner because it's the French version only. The original voice cast includes the likes of John Cusack, Meg Ryan, Angela Lansbury and it is a film for grown-up kids. I agree with two comments, though not the capital letters, in Sarita Dutta's Amazon UK review, when she says "elements [that] truly separate this ... from any other animated movie [are] heart, emotion, sacrifice, depth and feeling." That sounds overblown, but Sarita's right, as she probably is to reckon that had it not been for 'Titanic' -- which I enjoyed much less -- 'Anastasia' could have "come home with two most deserving Oscars for Best Song and Best Score." Too good for an Oscar in my rather cynical view of such awards. Tonight, after seeing Ellie again, another reason why this was one of my favourite films struck me. Given my own state in '98, compared with the place I've got to since she turned up, perhaps I was very susceptible to a tale about someone suffering from amnesia and seeking to get those childhood memories back. Mix in a little of the Big L, though in my own screenplay, this is no longer what I took it for at the time, an act of blind gods who hurl it down on us, and heavens, I was a sucker for Love. Now you know what happens if you "take the green pill" (henceforth a permanent link here) and go through that door, it remains only to say that the orchard is a work in progress, where you'll occasionally find entries about people and projects particularly dear to me. From a first few seedbeds well protected for one of those people, it's grown strong and is the place out back where I'll keep you up to date particularly on the 'Sting in the Lotus'. The rest of the Quiet Revolution and all those women's voices will remain right here, up front. 11:11:12 PM  link   your views? [] Quite a draft now the door's open The back door opens to a former secret garden, so watch your feet. Should you find strange matter or be alarmed, it's no place for you. Too many people are scared as it is of what they find bizarre and inexplicable in the "real world": [evening edit] this shared planet of ours, where from the eye of a quite a storm around her, I learned that while my favourite novelist may cover four in one of her books, there may be infinite ways to forgiveness. And understanding. Like the trees of the Master Patterner's grove on the island of Roke in Ursula's Earthsea books, fancies and people in the orchard have lives of their own. Nobody, including me, ever knows where they may be on waking up in the morning. The more alleyways I find in the garden, the bigger it is, with more paths to explore. Before going on, I should note that some of the details in this epic come from 'Real Life Dialogue Practice,' an unpublished imaginary conversation with the White Goddess, the first deity or a sub-atomic something. This unpublished material, mostly about real events, was originally intended for the amusement of friends. There's plenty more! But it now has a more public raison d'être. Long before the time came to tear down fences in my life, however, I seeded the first flowerbeds for Eleanor. What El makes of Easter I don't know, but to me it's a fine myth once divested of the trappings and accretions of millennia. Today's an appropriate Sunday to breathe new life into these pages without going to the trouble of being "born again". This first story of spring says just a little of the person she is, no longer the muse and life's dreams projected on to her, though part of me denied do so, when I took her for the woman in my life ... or "wimmel" as Tony called such people. My late friend has a place you may one day find down the end of a path. So do some others very special to me. There'll be a little about them, but I've had no occasion to speak to Ellie herself for weeks apart from adding a little spice to Factory cooking on rare occasions. She asked me to write her short e-mails. Several options come to mind, but it's hard to make up my own, so I'll bung three possible mails in ... later. After all, while Eleanor Beardsley tells us what's going down in France at NPR, in some of her regular public appearances as a Paris-based mainly radio journalist, I've no idea what's happening behind the scenes. If I had, you wouldn't be told. A mystery remains and the answer will always elude me. I've written before March 2004 how some people's paths cross our own and when they do, it changes us. Soon after starting this log, I described some who are particularly special to me ... even "gurus". Like most people, until recently I put such encounters down -- with reservations -- to hazard, fortuitous accident. Not any more. Once EB showed up, it was different. Rather like a day I spent with a shaman in Senegal in 1997, within less than an hour of meeting Ellie I knew I'd waited all my life for the encounter. Now a lot of people have enjoyed or endured, including me, the "surprise", "amazement," and other emotions heaped upon me in and out of the Factory when this marathon story stayed on the log's main page for the best part of today, the rest of it, is going where it was meant to stay in the first place, "in the orchard" out back. All I can say, since I'm still alive to say it, is "Thanks!" 9:54:54 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 27 mars 2005

'Plan de redressement' - a multiple board game Sunday's dilemmas. What do I do about El? The time's come to do something, but with care. How much project can I finish before I go back tomorrow to the Factory? April in Africa's hard work -- lots of elections (allAfrica), who knows what else? Is it 'Voices of Women', more of the LP screenplay or another sit-rep? Ah, priorities, priorities... I want something to show for the past week. When I do, watch this space for the weblink. Progress on my "spare-time projects" has seen constant setbacks and also left me with daily choices between commitments to other interested people and making the most of time long intended for my immediate friends. Mostly I chose to do my best for the latter, because I've chosen a lifestyle in the past few months based on knowing I get my biggest kicks from doing stuff for other people. I'm through with me! Still, today the phone gets answered to nobody. "I should kill you," I told Francis yesterday evening, on going back to his news, books and stationery shop for the third time. He has deadlines. I despise deadlines, but meet them and like to help others faced with the damned things. When Francis isn't earning a living, he's into artistic endeavours his squalling adorable brats keep interrupting. He was so stuck with a presentation due on Monday that he pulled a face and a voice stunt I've never heard before from a feller, just the Kid and one or two older women who know how to manage a winning pout. "Please, please, please ... unless I do it tonight I can't. I get so little time to myself." So I was nice, but burning him a CD full of the tools and guides he needed ate into three more precious hours of LP time! After all, he's not rich but has had the sense to abandon a silly fling with Bill Gates -- a false economy, now admitted -- and return to the fold of Mac users. "How can I --?" "For starters," I cut in, "one day you come round and I show you how it works instead of wasting ages making you write it down and doing you silly pictures. And I'm 'borrowing' this." Six euros worth of the latest 'Fantastic Report' issue snatched from a shelf; there's a big choice in France (info-Presse, Fr), but this one stays in my budget. "Next week, who knows? I might even pay you for it. Bon week-end!" zzz Now I know what it's like to be an African president who's up front, like Kenya's, and making a determined effort to crack down on financial mismanagement. For two weeks now, I've been banned from writing a cheque and using cash machines and a now defunct VISA card number. The hassles entailed wasted so much time but were a lesson in just how many people insist these days on a valid credit card. I'd thought it was a convenience, but find it's almost indispensable to have one, which I will next week. The bank's bought my long-term solution, so the staff say, which is a remedy more radical and paid off more quickly than anything they ever proposed. But meantime, the minion I dealt with before going over his head in frustration and an anger kept just under control gave me his "interim" plan to sign. He'd recovered from my counter-offensive of Tuesday and wrapped his "product" in glittery garbage. I imagine the IMF works the same way and was sure once he came out with it: "Have you got it, monsieur? This is an 'economic recovery scheme'." Oh yes, I'd got it. But then he said: "We wouldn't do this for just anybody, you know. You realise that?" I should have sneezed as rudely as Will Smith, but hadn't seen 'I, Robot' (61 per cent "fresh"?) until last night when I'd done enough work on the LP, overcame reservations and watched it because the Kid's said it's good. As the cop, Smith sneezes when the future Bill Gates of robotics does some preaching of his own. "Sorry," he says. "I'm allergic to bullshit." Though a well-read sci-fi fan, I never liked Asimov. Ideas sure, but his two-dimensional characters never convinced me, and the Foundation (and Empire) stuff -- now "e-books" -- bored me as an export into the future of behaviour and industrialised societies shaped in ways I find primitive and governed by absurd, outmoded laws. 'I, Robot' was OK as a film, with more effort put into characters than in the book it claims to be based on -- so loosely that Asimov fans protested all over the Net. My own screenplay's become more intriguing. What I'm enjoying is putting the Quiet Revolution it recounts into practice in a world where there's a war on, a very new kind of war which looks inevitable to scientists in many disciplines, not just me. Today, but not here, I'll tell you more, if you're interested in further news about 'Sting in the Lotus'. Ellie's film! It'll always be that, though the LP's come so far since the first scene was completed she'd scarcely recognise it. So much the better. However much I might loot people's lives, they do have a right to some privacy. zzz The guy at the BNP was predictable when it came to my projects and how much they cost me. His immediate question was: "Where's the gain? How much profit?" One of my friends is right, that's a "perfectly reasonable" question from a banker. But he went on to ask more with an attitude that simply let me know it's none of his business. I walked out leaving him with the impression he'd recovered from my treatment of him in the presence of his boss and given me a pair of the blinkers people put on skittish horses to narrow their vision and keep them on track. Not me. Their plan de redressement suits and it's been instructive to learn how to get by for a couple of weeks without having to borrow more than 10 euros from somebody who got it back within days. I don't think, though, that without more determined tactics than those already used to tackle the bank, it would be easy to go on avoiding dragging friends and their money into it, so my deep sympathy for some of the poor buggers driven out of their homes on to the streets with a begging bowl grows. It takes very little imagination to understand how they got there once you've felt the first wheels of the meat grinder at work on you. With my friend, it was easy to discuss ways of quantifying "profit and loss" by criteria that have nothing to do with money. That makes Lauren the kind of woman I'm writing a movie about. The bank guy's nice enough if decently treated, but governed by values so different that when the warfare becomes open, as it will, I wonder whether he'll take off his own blinders. I know which one of us looked happier at the end of our discussion. 1:08:32 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 25 mars 2005

Triple fucking whammy Destiny? I'm not sure. Are you? Difficult to say in a universe where we need maybe around seven other dimensions (superstring theory) for the four we're familiar with to work. Not to speak of that thing about Time. Real time. Does it exist? Want to know? Don't look at your watch, it won't help. Probability theory? I call it the White Goddess. Wow! She's very busy about me now. I'm working so hard on my personal projects that it's fewer than four hours sleep a night. That's fine. When I'm here, one change of scenery not yet up for show has moved an African marabout -- shaman, "traditional healer" if you will, "witch-doctor" no thanks! -- from one place to another. He's in Senegal, written up a long while ago. This morning, unexpectedly, a UPS guy showed up to give me a box for one of the iPods for repair and will be back for it soon. So much the better (and damn all the phone calls entailed because of the supposed shut-down of my bank accounts) since, once fixed, the musical box will be heading off to next stop Dakar. In Senegal. That's where I called Lauren with news for her. No, of course she never uses her portable while driving to work. In Dakar, where anything might fall off or out of the taxi you're trying to keep an eye on through the black filth pouring out of that truck? France Telecom will lift a little extra cash off next month because my phone bleeped this morning saying "You used up your monthly time allowance last night". That was with the Wildcat, about her projects and mine, with lots of sex and great fun. Lauren says she off to Touba (A lovely world) early next week for a huge festival. A sacred orgy of pilgrims and sorcerers. Bang! I'd bet the marabout will be there for the celebration in the city of the Mouride Brotherhood. A travel entry on 'Benn loxo du taccu' lines up a 'Touba trip' with the African music on an iPod due for repair -- and that's a planetary musical site I'll be visiting again when I'm less busy. All Lauren knows is once this entry is done I'll tell her what she might get up to in Touba. We'll also discuss the other thing. It's more fun from home -- and safer -- than when ears are falling off other people on the desk. Don't tell Bernie, but she "owes me one", though I'm less and less into ownership with each passing day. What on earth?! Telling Bernie's OK too. The WG pulled another stunt chez Francis. I've got to have my fortnightly dose of the X-Files, also for the Kid. She knew nothing of the part of my talk with the guru in Senegal about sex and ways to rock'n'roll better since he'd put her to sleep with a snap of his fingers. Don't want to believe me? It's true. He woke her up the same way when our serious fun was finished. A kind-looking, astute and grey-bearded chap in the store chipped in when Francis and I were talking shop about Macs. Name of 'Paoli'. He asked me if I'd got a few minutes to come take a gander at his art and discuss a diagnosis of his Mac. I've always time for an obvious Quiet Revolutionary who's on "tu-toi" terms with you within moments of meeting ... even when he invites you to see his etchings. Our topics of conversation included a little Mac fixing he'll need. He gave me a painting because he's a QR. I wouldn't have given him anything like his age on a cursory inspection. Well into his '70s. "There's a lot of synchronicity in the air right now," I told Yves Simonpauli, the full name of the feller with whom I was firm friends within our quarter of an hour together. While I sussed out for starters that his Mac needs more memory, he talked copyright, quick on how it works -- and how it doesn't. He's a sharer. I said what 'Creative Commons' (foot of every page here) are, even in France. And we did music. And Africa. When the Kid and I check out his place in Chartres apart from the atelier round the corner. No messing around. "C'est la pleine lune aujourd'hui," Yves informed me. "You scarcely surprise me. The White Goddess is having a high time with me today too." "The who?" Two sentences were enough. I'll tell him how she does probability theory and synchronicity theory next time around. Along with the sex. Once I've filled you in. That's in hand, along with the 'Sting in the Lotus', to inform, possibly enlighten and definitely, I hope, entertain. "Africa?" Yves said as we shook hands before I returned to my work. "Aïe, let's hope they don't get re-colonised by the Americans! Go on doing things their way. In their time. With their their arts." They won't. Wait for the news from Touba -- sorry, did I just turn up the heat? You'll have a great time. Triple whammy. That's only this morning. Later I looked more closely at Yves's card. What a good Friday! He'd told me he was a retired dentist, but prefers now to paint. There are other medical qualifications on there too. As well as research director and university professor. Thanks, WG. This is even better than iTunes synch and those totally tuned in "What did you think of last night's performance?" games with BJ. How did you know whom I'd like as consultant for the next parts of the LP? Not the pulling of fangs. Oh, knock, knock and the iPod's just left for the Netherlands. You're quite a fixer when you feel like it, aren't you. Holy fuck! Lauren, let's not bother with the phone. Telepathy's cheaper today. I look forward to subbing the tales from Touba, stay clear of the purple and there'll probably not be a word needing a change. When the other jaws drop, mine won't, not after this. Unless somebody gives you one of the charms recommended to make your cock bigger. By that time, the man had shown me enough to give me the sense to say "That's very kind, but no thanks." I've got into enough trouble with hard-ons as it is. Pauli's painting, scanned for you here? It's on wood. He didn't tell me if he's given it a name. I have, until he does. 'Benediction.' I dunno why people find this kind of stuff so freaky. It's only natural. 3:54:18 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 22 mars 2005

Using make-up in secret This place is getting its long-overdue facelift. Should any signs of it have escaped all but the most astute of onlookers (on the assumption there are any), so much the better. That's no more deliberately obscure than my habitual way with words. What's been going on (and off) for part of tonight is where it should be. Hidden from public view. With luck and a dash of genius, the improvements should soon be apparent to all. Meanwhile, if you're looking for fun and games why not start <----- here? There must be somebody in the blogroll on your frequency while I change stations... 10:45:13 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 21 mars 2005

'If it doesn't work, will you sing to me in jail?' [Updated the next day to avoid a new piece tediously treading old ground.] The entry title's a slight variation on my parting line to some mates in the office, since of them I requested merely an occasional visit. Unreliable with vows of silence on life's oddities, if never commitments to friends, I'll brag that when an independent financial advisor perused a dossier full of words, numbers, colourful camemberts and tables, she said it was the most well-prepared case to be put to a bank -- when it has your neck in a noose and an eager hand on the lever -- anybody had shown her in a long career. It took me hours to compile the damned sit-rep and long-term solution request plan yesterday, and I disappointed Sam by skipping lunch at the Canteen, but suspect even a recently mentioned ex-wimmel would be impressed. [Update of Tuesday afternoon.] It worked. The latest episode began with a trip to the post office to sign for a registered letter to be taken in my stride over a strong coffee before moving in to wage "wow, quite a battle!" -- yes, Nadia, it was but thanks for some hot tips. Now it's over, I'll just say one learns to thrown punches every bit as hard as you get once a bank thinks it's just told you, three days after the measure was enacted, you'll never use a cheque book again in the next five years and your Visa card is for the trash bin. In brief, the bank's servant responsible for my accounts took none too kindly to my iron insistence that his director take part in our friendly chit-chat, then to see his chair literally pulled from under him for the use of the boss while he stood in the corner. All the vilainous measures I've logged in the past week are lifted as of today, the content of even this morning's letter rendered null and void, and I guess the BNP would consider I'm "on parole", though its staff weren't quite as blunt as me. That's fine, just as long as the bank acknowledges that henceforth, the person who decides how my long-term cashflow concerns are dealt with is me, not some salesperson out for his or her cut. I return to these dull matters to say both this log and the Lotus Project will go on unhindered and I wouldn't be telling you so were it not for wise advice from several readers of both, one online, the other still largely under wraps, and also people who share my appreciation of the 'Voices of Women' to such an extent they've become much more than one of the things I write about here, to be pursued. That really good coffee I needed was served in a corner café for whose owner the very mention of jazz in France, or anywhere else, is to unleash an almost irresistible tide of the latest tidings, names of hot clubs, great guys and delectable dames. On trying to cork the flow with a "More next time maybe? See, I've got this r.v. at the bank," the response regarding such institutions, where harmony is scarcely the rule, is virtually unprintable even on a log where pretty much anything goes apart from libel... Since they're an abiding interest, a scheme actively to promote up and coming musicians in need of a boost in their own "war" -- against diehard barons of an obsolescent music industry obsolescence -- is no longer just an old, occasionally updated, file full of notes, noises and netlinks on "Nick's Mac" (whose real name is grey wolf). "Wimmel," if not thrown at you before, was Tony's invention for "woman in my life", so does that give us "mimmel" too? With surprise, I briefly saw another wimmel at the Factory today, a rare and still heartstab occurrence though I gave up my gift for reinventing her months ago. It's painful when women remain so fair once a guy's packed this in. I dared not engage her in a quick chat since (a) she looked preoccupied and (b) those eyes of hers, I'd better not go on... Even if dropping in to the place when on vacation to check over a financial file was little fun, it was a good if odd feeling to get a glimpse of her, agreeable to be wished luck for the bid permanently to resolve a dilemma which left me with precisely eight euros and 75 cents left in pocket if I didn't, and nice to get more helpful hints. Meanwhile Martin, who was "on Africa", unwittingly gave me an idea how to get useful words like "wimmel" or Ellie's magnificent "ungodily" into circulation more quickly than any currency is likely to come flying my way for a while. "I don't read your blog," he reminded me -- who can blame him? -- but I wonder what my favourite online reference site could do with wimmels. Martin does get a regular dose of 'Arts and Letters Daily', he said, killing two birds with one stone. Now I remember what I've intended to add to a part of the blogroll for weeks and AL Daily came up when I turned to the Wikipedia to give him a quick fix on Morocco's king. "It seemed preposterous that an encyclopedia could be written and edited by just anyone," AL Daily comments. "Maybe that’s what Wikipedia really is..." Quite. So I rejoice they put it on today's front page and plugged into 'The Book Stops Here' (Wired 13.03), an article adding to some I've written titbits about to show how the free -- in all senses -- encyclopaedia gets put together when "anyone can edit" the Wikipedia. In Wired, Daniel H. Pink describes this initiative as a "self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future", which sums it up nicely, if it's non-fiction you need. Since it's a form of the "quiet revolution" in action, Pink tickled me with the disclosure that the place has a "god-king", one Jimmy Wales. There's a name to ring bells for anybody who ever sought out "artwork" either for a weblog or other wicked reasons, pictures of a kind to please ... not everybody. Wales was CEO of Bomis when its company's 'Babe Report' (you've been alerted) was a prime draw. That was before pictures of girls as unburdened by garments as possible ceased to be a sporadic feature of this place and I was interested in adolescent provocation -- especially of search engines -- than evoking the 'Voices of Women' instead. Like me, though you may dub me a moron for retaining such faith the day before my first dealings with the "god-king" of my bank branch face to face, it seems the "Wikipedia represents a belief in the supremacy of reason and the goodness of others. In the Wikipedia ideal, people of goodwill sometimes disagree. But from the respectful clash of opposing viewpoints and the combined wisdom of the many, something resembling the truth will emerge. Most of the time. "If you looked up Jimmy Carter on Wikipedia one morning this winter, you would have discovered something you couldn't learn from Britannica," Pink writes. "According to the photo that accompanied Carter's entry, America's 39th president was a scruffy, random unshaven man with his left index finger shoved firmly up his nose. "Lurking in the underbrush of Wikipedia's idyllic forest of reason and good intentions are contributors less noble in purpose, whose numbers are multiplying. Wiki devotees have names for many of them. First, there are the trolls, minor troublemakers who breach the principle of good faith with inane edits designed to rile serious users. More insidious are vandals, who try to wreck the site - inserting profanity and ethnic slurs, unleashing bots that put ads into entries, and pasting pictures of penises and other junior-high laugh-getters. Considering how easy it is to make changes on Wikipedia, you'd imagine these ne'er-do-wells could potentially overwhelm the site. But they haven't - at least not yet - because defenses against them are built into the structure." That's as much as I'll lift, suggesting that if you're in the mood for an entertaining story, do read the rest at 'Wired' (home page this time). As with the Wikipedia, so it is with the blogosphere. The "defences ... built into the structure" consist almost invariably of people! Even on launching this log -- its second birthday went as unnoticed as those, unfortunately, of only too many of my friends -- back in days when "how many hits?" and "getting Googled" sometimes worried me, I knew little of spiders and never risked the silliness (or was it really balls?) to send anybody the kind of "request" that landed in my mail last week: "I saw the 'Blogroll Me' link on your site. I'll put up your link if you put up ours," read an opening sentence without a "Hi". Guess what? Wikipedia covers netiquette more comprehensively than the notion probably penetrated my correspondent's head. For now, the fellow will have to take this for an answer, along with an assurance Google and its kind will likely find him soon enough, since that's what he says he wants. The very name of his band indicates an obsession with the most powerful world leader, in whom I've lost almost all interest. But, mate, while I'd suggest just a little diplomacy can get people a long way and that you check out what a poetic friend of yours wrote about 'Listening through Mindfulness' (mousemusings), don't let me discourage you! If everybody were as disabused by politicians as I've become, the world would be even worse off, and if it's music you're making and it sounds good to me, then I'll keep an ear out for you still. Today's voice? Apple being Apple, on my first chance in months to cross town to the official repair workshop with two dud iPods for attention during a week I can even fetch them back once fixed ... it was "exceptionally shut" until Wednesday. The other poor sod swearing outside and who'd found no warning online was less lucky. He'd shlepped in from the backwater 'burbs and didn't have a headful of Katie Melua. 'Call off the Search', which is new to me but released in November 2003, when she was 18. And she's "got it", this girl really does. With more attention, maybe I'd have heard her top charts for weeks -- was that, by any chance, with 'The Closest Thing to Crazy', a scrumptious song whose title's all it has in common with the other bloke outside the shut shop? -- but I'll go crazy the next time I see Katie Melua (official site) -- or anybody else young and very gifted -- called "the next Norah Jones". There must be a dozen of 'em now. Why the heck can so few critics hear musicians for who they are instead of leaping for labels? As for mindfulness, Melua turns hers to very sweet jazz and good old backyard blues, as well as some standards, with a voice and timing to melt you in minutes. Another real talent to follow. Closely. Oh. With all due respect and that to my workmates, I'm glad you won't have to visit me behind bars, let alone assail my ears. There are fine exceptions in the instrumentalists and spare-time singers among you, including the ladies, but usually when I'm reduced to sticking on my iPod while working on the desk, well ... you know what I'm trying to shut out, don't you, and that it's not just the politicians you sometimes insist on listening to, as if having to read the buggers' drivel wasn't enough, on the blasted telly? 9:49:25 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 19 mars 2005

Relax ... and let rip Unless a renewed optimism subbed into the previous entry, after bludgeoning my way beyond one of those ubiquitous call centres to speak to a bank employee with decision-making authority and apparently even intelligence, later proves unfounded, that's all I'll log on the topic. Except this: after several days with almost no money to hand or available -- I'll never more turn to family or friends to bail me out of partly self-inflicted fuss and hassle -- the temporary lock-down of my accounts starts to feel like an immense relief. Not from responsibility, never from an insatiable desire to pursue my musical explorations while paying artists for their achievements, but from a near addiction to premature acquisition (my favourite P2P client for Mac OS X goes by that name too). A long-awaited week of largely free time to delve deep into what I've already got has begun, my conscience clean even about the Factory since I left a long "handover note" telling those now faced with Africa what to expect and how to cover it during my absence. When the unpredictable happens, good luck to them! Heck, I even washed out my coffee cup. When home, I'll be reading other people's blogs more than I've had time for in months. This one has long been due a minor overhaul, to shift a few entries and stories, making for easier access, and if possible to optimise as best I can the use of several different servers to shorten the sometimes slow page-loading times which are a nuisance to those of the Faithful Five & ¾ living in Africa, where Net connections don't always come easy. One thing I can't change, short of removing those titles, is an occasional slowdown due to excess demands on the 'All Consuming' booklist server, but my admiration for the sharing principles underpinning site creator Erik Benson's initiative grows the more I explore it, so if some of what I write interests you, please be patient with my friends and acquaintances. The imminent official arrival of a northern hemisphere spring means the LP comes out of hibernation, since my hunch that if left to germinate for a while, the movie script would take on a richer life of its own at the back of my mind proved right. For several months, I've been grateful to Donald -- a veteran who recently ceased working for the Factory -- for having lent me a couple of good books on film writing. The shorter one, Syd Field's 'Screenplay' dates back to 1987, but some of the finest movies he uses as examples are scarcely new either. The fat tome, 'Successful Script Writing' by Jurgen Wolff and Kerry Cox, is more wide-ranging than I need, but so lucidly done and helpful that I'll undoubtedly soon get a copy of my own. Another possibility is what one anonymous Amazon UK reader calls "hokey and American, but a true gem...", Viki King's account of something I won't do with a project as ambitious as 'Sting in the Lotus' (LP for short ... perhaps I'd better find a "frequent abbreviations" spot on this front log page). She explains 'How to Write a Movie in 21 Days', which looks fine apart from its subtitle, "The Inner Movie Method." That's unlikely bait for a Brit whose log has coincided with enough "inner this" and "inner that", guts, blood, neuron, private parts and all, as regulars know to their cost, to last him a very long time. Finally, I like the sound of Andrew Horton's 'Writing the Character-centred Screenplay,' if only because the mishaps and adventures of my mainly very sexy cast of mostly Quiet Revolutionaries, though still enduring a lock-down of their own in a growing file on the Mac, have become so outrageous and risky, chilling and tragi-comic that their resemblance to people I know well alarms me and they may need reining in. There you go. At least three new ways to spend money. Since I can't, I'll also be doing plenty of the best way of learning, pillaging my own wickedly large DVD library and watching how others do it. When she's around, there are few more annoying things for the Kid than a father who will suddenly pause a film at a suspenseful moment, run it back and replay the scene for a closer look. For the dad, little is more irritating than a cruel daughter who shares his enjoyment of the X-Files (to which we've been hopelessly addicted since batches of story are being released fortnightly in order via Francis's shop), leaps ahead of him and then bursts in on his work to try to tell him what happens in episodes he's yet to see himself. If Manou's particularly persistent in these attempted spoilers, there's at least a code word I can use, "Complot?," which is understood to mean "Shut up, brat, this second!" if she nods "yes". This is our reference to those special episodes that give away more of the story behind the story... I have further punishment in store should she dare break that rule. Last weekend, she was exceptionally precocious even for a soon to be 16-year-old, who has since last summer needed no further parental guidance in the most intimate of encounters as long as she and her boyfriend remain relatively sensible about it. The wretch looked at my library, which is open source for people whom I like (within non-mailing distance, let me add), and asked purposefully, "Hey Dad, may I take 'Les Suèdoises font du Ski'?" Since the mostly non-Swedish lasses in this ridiculous but kind-hearted gift from Francis evidently do no such thing as skiing, except by way of what passes for a plot, the answer was "No". "Oh pleaaassse, it's for a friend. Honest, I want to tease her." Yeah. Well, we've heard that one, haven't we? If ever I'm told, however, what happens in a "complot" episode -- and she already came perilously close last time with a reference to a younger "man with a cigarette" -- she will not only borrow that film but do so with strict orders to watch it from beginning to the inevitable and almost comically appalling orgy at the end ... with her mother. Should she raise the spunk to do this, live to survive her mother's reaction and tell the tale, I'll reward her by regaling her with detailed accounts of what took place in real life with me, women and men I have known well, and even exactly who they are, if they're lucky enough to make fictional appearances in the LP. Several do. Some don't yet know it. On the "let rip" bit of this entry's title, with luck you might read more about certain other plans I have for the week later. If you don't, you may, perhaps, presume that a non-skier has done an Uma Thurman on me. 'Kill Bill - Vol. 2' has been sitting, unwatched, up on the shelf for too long. The "Uma - Vol. Perfectly Primed Number" I have in mind is, however, a little less partial to gore. 1:53:01 AM  link   your views? []

vendredi 18 mars 2005

Risky roads, worlds apart Subbed after a brief night, a day all over Africa and some hard talking, which -- with luck -- means an imminent end to a tedious saga. When one tough point of a hectic week of hard work, marked by sad and sometimes bizarre tidings, had me making an unplanned overnight trip a long way from my usual haunts, I found the bank had done its worst. My journey to spend a sleepless night under a stranger's roof seems like a "Dreamtime Return" trip, was made to keep an old promise and began late in the night with no time but to chuck a change of socks and underpants into a plastic bag. The next day I was back at my desk, after a start so early that I saw almost nothing of the place I visited, and so tired I could scarcely remember where I'd been apart from a person and the inside of a house. It's a remarkable story, but telling it would betray a trust between the living and the so suddenly dead. However, the mention is a chance to put in a word of admiration for Steve Roach (home). The double album linked to above is a classic of ancestral music given a contemporary approach, while his full site is that of a musical adventurer into places out of time, who rightly stakes claim to a fascinating capacity to weave "all things electric and organic." With the synchronicity that seems to have become part of my life since last year's decisive commitment to a desire for harmony with the "natural order" of the world, I've found others coming to me these past few days with the hard to describe feelings we get when friends die unexpectedly, that "Oh no, we can't do that, he -- or she -- has gone." Much of Roach's music draws on that of cultures so unlike our own frenetic lifestyles, if we live in places that leave as little space for ways of being I find so much more natural than the demands of city life, clock time and deadlines. Such thoughts, along with a determination somehow to pursue such so-called "primitive" patterns of existence, but adapted to an almost completely artificial environment, have become very much a part of the 'Lotus' screenplay project and my own life. It's a long way from the behaviour of bank staff and their inaccessible bosses. I again mention mine, who works one of this country's biggest, BNP Paribas (Fr), because while I've occasionally jested at the feller's expense, a degree of financial "irresponsibility" on my part -- mainly regarding all those "voices of women" though I do have a serious scheme in mind apart from the sheer pleasure of them -- was worsened by what would amount to downright lies on the part of routinely polite voices at the other end of a call centre number, were it not for the amount of contradictory misinformation involved ... and greed. The hard reality was that this week somebody at the BNP decided, without warning, to hard freeze my accounts. I ended up with 10 euros in my pocket, a Visa card rejected overnight in wall machines, stores and railway stations, and a cheque book I'd be crazy to use. A bunch of letters to "explain" this decision arrived only two mornings after it had already been implemented, though I'd rapidly done what was asked of me on Saturday to start sorting out the mess I've landed myself in. After people at the call centre had wrongly said all was well, I thought "OK, try the boss man," whose signature comes at the bottom of the threatening letters from my bank branch, to be told that he was of course, unavailable, but would call me back. The call centre number is now the only one for the general public. But did he? When first I wrote this, no. However, four phone calls later, each to a different "Hello, this is Anaïs ... Murielle ... take your pick," all sounding around 16, the man called me, was rude to me for two minutes, got the same back about his minions and their stupidity, found excuses to hang up but didn't, and after 10 minutes I was talking to a human being and discovering that we even had relatively similar views on a long-term solution to many years of short-term problems. Meantime a genuinely independent advisor, as opposed to the bank's so-called counsellors, bluntly informed me that the BNP are "thieves" and a French word for "bastards", a view long shared by my ex-wife, who has concluded that anybody who dispenses financial "assistance" is self-interested. It's smiles all the way until the shit hits the fan, whereupon the coddled customer becomes a piece of dirt overnight, as I reminded the bank manager on being allowed to address this demi-god for the first time. It may be of note that the Kid's mum mentioned a part of the underwear of one of those minions, whom she confesses she would have "slapped in the face" for a financial hole then sold me as a "solution". I don't myself recall that part of the woman's clothing, but when I told Catherine that I'd have rather taken a different physical approach to the sales lady, it earned me a generalisation about the male half of the species. That's merely an observation on people's capacity for deep change. Even maybe a year ago, I don't think a conversation with my ex-wife about a topic once as dangerous as what I do with my money -- even when it's not, yet -- could have changed tone so swiftly and ended in a "Je t'embrasse" exchange. What annoys me is knowing that I'm fortunate in having the wits, contacts and experience now to handle this kind of mess and land on my feet without losing much sleep over it, while it suffices to set foot in an average Parisian street or Métro train to stumble over or be accosted by some poor beggar who is neither alcoholic nor a drug addict but has been down a road like this, hit the same brick wall, and wound up with no roof, no self-respect and virtually no chance of any real social reintegration. I have two thoughts on such fundamental injustice of a kind profiteers from misery regard as a "natural law", based on self-interest and the survival of the most ruthless. First, uncharitable as often I am about the follies of the Factory, the inane demands of journalism without thought, and the absurdities of any vast institution where respect can tend to be demanded according to the pecking order in the hierarchy rather than for people and their human qualities, at least such places do also include people with hearts as well as brains. They bailed me out of immediate disaster with my own money, rather than trying to sell me more. The second is that while anybody's survival in our society is contingent on a willingness to be a team player and go along with "the rules", the only way I clearly see now as a means of making the world a better place to live lies in subversion as a practised skill and signing on to that Quiet Revolution many people prove to be part of once you ask them -- like my departed friend Tony, though few would have thought it on a casual acquaintance with him. The ways I'm being encouraged to pursue my insights into this "change of mind" I find in some people around me -- too complex and multiple in its shapes and manifestations to write up in one blog piece, since they entail the replacement of absurd and outmoded moral and social values by some that reflect a real intelligence in harmony with more natural laws than those long established as norms -- also make two more things evident, at least to me, to be further explored both here and in the Lotus Project screenplay. Our species has reached a point where going "back to nature", as a necessity for its mere survival let alone evolution, is more subtle a process than a wholesale rejection of modern technology or attempts to set up communities that simply shut out a world people who do this can't accept. It's far too late for that. In the same way, any genuine revolution now in ways of being and creating a new society can no longer be modelled on most historical ways of setting about it. Such words are hypothetical stuff, thinking to myself on paper at your expense with no more real explanation yet of workable theory I draw from various sciences and their daily applications -- the aspect that most intrigues me -- than I've had from the BNP to "explain" the bank's vulture in golden goose feathers' treatment of its customers. When it comes to a recent revolution in the unfolding and its impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, one online journal to explore at leisure concerns 'The Orange Revolution,' a "hastily composed" photo journal about Ukraine. We have BJ to thank for a link here to this remarkable woman's work and her warning: "My name is Elena. I run this website and I don't have anything to sell. What I do have is my motorbike and the absolute freedom to ride it wherever curiosity and the speed demon take me. "This page is maintained by the author, but when internet traffic is heavy it may be down occasionally ('Kidd of Speed, chapter 1'). Click on that last link and you'll find yourself headed to a 'Ghost Town: Chernobyl,' with Elena (home page), camera and a bike ridden where "time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now." In the red corner, a bank manager and the values upheld in his job, an establishment currently causing me a minor pain in the ass, and a problem to be tackled, with a little more diplomacy than here and some help, next week. In the grey corner, Elena (stolen picture), a young woman with many a gripping tale ('The Serpent's Wall') to tell and a heck of a way with photos and words. If it came to a showdown called 'Get a Life,' I know which of the two I'd bet on for a quick knock-out, tonight and any night. 1:27:49 AM  link   your views? []

mardi 15 mars 2005

For a sound old soldier, with spirit The name Tony, for regular passers-by, may conjure up some improbable adventures of an old friend of mine whose manners and words both in public and private remained so characteristic of a classic English gentleman that they often passed more for eccentricity than a successful way of surviving our "modern" world. Survive it he did, though, with a spirit as upright and strong as they come and a dry sense of humour shared far more frequently at his own expense than anyone else's. Though some wide-ranging conversations in the past few years began with a quick search for either a stray hearing aid or a few marbles he only thought he had lost, Tony Brock was a man who knew what's what and told people about it in ways sometimes shared with you, either in my words or, better, his own: perfectly spiced and almost invariably funny. No longer, I'm very sorry to tell you. Tony died last week, aged seventy-something -- I don't remember exactly and neither of us cared -- in his flat in Odessa Street. His words done for this log, usually concise and incisive, are but drops from a well of wisdom in the ways of the women we occasionally hate to love so hard, false prophets, asinine politicians and a much-travelled world best delighted in with him at length over dinner. As one of the most consistently decent and modestly brave people I have known and very deeply loved throughout my life in Paris from our first meetings in the early 1980s, Tony's life as a journalist, UNESCO staff writer, fine storyteller and soldier for many a cause worth the fight was one he would rightly disapprove of any attempt to sum up in a hasty blog entry (edited March 21 to add the sun of autumnal days and a post-script on it). Tony knew how to take his time getting it right and was among those who helped me start learning to do this myself. That he's left us was news I learned only very late last night, in a way which would have appealed to him if only because of a strong sense of the "oddness of things" we enjoyed sharing. It came in an email from Lee, the Odessa Street woman I discovered living under the same roof as my old friend, who informed me with a real warmth and more apologies than ever needed from such a fine person of the circumstances in which she learnt earlier in the evening of his death. I'm grateful to her for telling me with courage and kindness of such a loss so promptly. I'll indeed spend a while thinking what I'd most like further to tell you about Tony. I have a notion already, since it made him laugh so much during one of our last evenings together he said I was welcome to share it with "whomever you like". For a hard worker and a first-rate sub-editor, however, the warmest tribute I can offer is to "knock it into shape" before unleashing it on an unstable world. This was something we did to each other, beating the hell out of the worst bits of our days, particularly of a long summer evening, before taking our better selves out on to the streets and maybe a "new restaurant, let's give it a whirl." Many a whirl we enjoyed, because with Tony, you usually knew where you started but by the time you were ready for bed, it was with a handshake in the strangest of places. In our heads at least. Such was his discretion that nobody else noticed ... until it was too late. Sadly, such is the nature of busy lives in a city whose subtle changes he closely observed over a good few decades, that the same proved to be true of his passing. If this time around, Tony's wound up where he expected to be -- with a faith as Roman in its way as his vocabulary was remarkably catholic -- then a pontiff is in for an overdue and unexpectedly Anglo-Saxon greeting. Till the next time, old chum? ___________ On posting this, I left choosing a natural illustration for a moment to do it well (as with the story for you some day). But the feeling I already knew where I wanted to look was right: thanks, Squia. With an eye like yours, even Tony's window boxes would have looked more cheerful than sometimes they did. It's tough being even a geranium when you're up against a curry joint, a greasy Turkish takeaway, and Odessa Street's constant traffic fumes. 9:16:06 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 14 mars 2005

A reassuring racket Here's a heartfelt "thank you" to people who approved of my recent outbursts in defence of an "old school" of journalism (mainly in entries on February 24 and 26) that has nothing to do with neckties and nepotism. That week when the Factory became a silent Bedlam is history, mentioned again partly because like-minded hacks responded by regaling me with alarming stories of daily life in their own media institutions and primarily because fellow sufferers enjoyed BJ's diktats buried among the women a few days ago so much. Unless you want to be anonymous -- like the Reuters veteran whose unprintable mails are among the funniest anybody's sent me this year -- please use the comments box, especially if you have nice remarks to make about people I name. It can be slow, but it works; I'll pass on the rude feedback as fast as the rest and even sub that typo you only saw when it was too late. We heard today from my predecessor as Africa editor, James ("Jimmy Whiskers") Whiston, the last man at AFP to work on a typewriter until retirement, of the death of Geoffrey Minish, one of an almost legendary generation of English deskers like my agency "guru" Andreas Freund. Several of them quit shortly before I signed on in the mid-1980s after a strike famous in Factory circles but of little interest to most visitors here. Apart from an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema and a skill in writing about it that saw some of his articles published in Spanish in Cuba and in French in west Africa, Minish was more gifted than most at throwing away prodigious numbers of boring stories. The hard-drinking Canadian I remember for great one-liners could be equally savage with people, but was apparently a mentor to Eric, who's soon to move on from his job as the Factory's first non-French editor in chief ... perhaps unaware (unless he reads this) that many work-slaves have never understood a word of his Glaswegian French accent, getting the message only from the astonishing decibel count he puts into it when he's cross. At least one of those holes in my clothes began when I snagged an arm on a door-handle of a recently installed rack of lockers, supposedly for our personal use, which got the Frogs saying my end of the desk looks like a swimming-pool changing room and makes it difficult to squeeze out of it behind other other people. The real reason the damned things were put there, I suspect, is because Eric was such a first-rate Minish disciple somebody thought we needed a thick metal lining along the flimsy partition that used to be the only barrier separating my back and those of the few who risk sitting near it from his office and the sometimes phenomenal racket described in news editors' language as the regular "phone conference" among AFP's international hubs. A noisy outburst at the usually reverent end of the desk over a silly mistake in a story this afternoon had Abhik, who overheard it from Joburg, ask if I was "in a fish market". Such remarks mean a reassuring return to normality. Eric told us one bright spark once dared to ask Minish: "Why did you sub down my feature into three paragraphs?" "Because," came the blunt response, "I couldn't get it into two." There you go, Lauren, it's blogged. That's your reward for an article about the weekend's anti-malaria fund-raising concert, which deserves to be widely picked up by clients who like reading people who tell it as it is. Before sending it up to the satellites, I reassured Lauren that even if you work for a Factory, when it comes to stories about major music events and other aspects of what we're learning to call "lifestyle" as well as the arts, it's fine to bend the rules and express your opinions about the performances under a byline ... on condition you know what you're talking about, which she did. Since the story was already long, I left out a detail Lauren gave me in the lively report from Dakar I'd sought on the phone. Rwanda's Corneille (Africa Live again), making his first big African comeback since losing much of his family to the 1994 genocide, may have elicited the wildest shrieks from the teeny-boppers in the audience. But for all his music awards, mainly in Québec where he currently lives, Corneille (TQS bio; Fr.) outstayed his welcome among some of his fellow musicians. He hogged the stage for an hour and a half, Lauren tells me, cutting into the slot allocated to one of the many performers both of us have more time for. The deceptively demure Rokia Traoré thus got only 45 minutes. Lauren's excuse for working from home today wasn't the chance she got to talk to one of Mali's most remarkable women. And it was better than one I heard out of most journalists based in a bureau not too far from the slopes of Kilimanjaro, pictured in today's issue of The Guardian because its "trademark snowy cap, at 5,895 metres (1,934 ft), is now all but gone - 15 years before scientists predicted it would melt through global warming". Yes, BJ, I'd have excised the "trademark", a trendy adjective as useless as Lauren's story about the concert would have been if she'd given us yet another mere "shopping list" of names all too widespread in what people write about the arts. She's badly bruised but unbroken after catching my habit of falling over and trying it on the stairs. In the Nairobi bureau, however, I found only Otto and Bosire, the local journalists, struggling over one computer between them in the hallway. Since their foreign colleagues were filing stories just as busily, I don't imagine they'd taken their laptops for a night and a day on a bare mountain. But staying out of the office because of the foul stench of a paint job that was taking longer than planned is the best excuse for absence thrown my way since somebody drew my attention to the New York Times story about people getting into tangled messes with the dangling wires of their iPods. Bosire and Otto sounded happy enough: the painters, Otto explained, were "ladies". "It's the same in Moscow," said BJ. Painted women, music, the woes of wires, what more do you want for tonight? OK. The name's Angela McCluskey (Flash warning for clean offices: her site can come loud). The voice is sometimes unpolished, raw. Most people call the style soul-pop, but when some mention Billie Holliday in almost the same breath, they've got good ears. Angela's solo debut album (after The Wild Colonials, Tryptich) is 'The Things We Do'. As Ade in Lagos would note, "kindly disregard" some of the sourer critics at Amazon UK. The lyrics aren't great poetry, but neither are emotional adventures at the sharp end of a stick, which Angela picks up in a unique and engaging way which keeps you hanging on until the sun comes out again. This album, sparsely and originally orchestrated, was one of my last "safe" downloads from the iTMS before the thing Brigitte in the personnel department did for me was kind enough to placate people at my bank until next week. I'll try to persuade my "counsellor" that collecting the voices of dozens of women has become a task no less professional than a Nairobi paint job. There'll I leave all these noises before I start counting and risk a shopping list. With luck I'll find time next week to start hiding one somewhere on this log as cunningly as once I tried to hide a garden. There's a pair of initials on tomorrow's rota which tells me I'm in for a "hello stranger" encounter... Who knows? It might encourage me to leave off blogging for a while to return to the screenplay she inspired. I hope she's in a fishy mood. 11:55:32 PM  link   your views? [] Can't give it all up "Aïe, take this back, you idiot." The Kid thrust the fag into my hand as the seventh airport bus came into sight. "If she catches me with one of these..." Marianne dislikes cigarettes, but held mine as I adjusted my belt. She inspected me as the bus we hoped her mother would finally be on drew up to the stop: "And do up your coat. She'll see the hole in your jersey." "It's only a small one." Old habits die harder than even my clothes. Her mum and me haven't lived together for a dozen years, but the Kid probably recalls blunt remarks about my aged garments and enforced excursions to buy new ones better than I do. Her mother has stopped chastising me and long since renounced the dirty looks she gave me whenever I put on something too ancient. Tonight, she just grinned again and was too content to care, after enjoying a week in a small Moroccan coastal town so nice that its name's best kept a secret. Such holidays are decidedly her department this year, not mine. If today's welcome change in the weather is a precursor to an end of winter any time soon, I'll have to try to keep my word and give up smoking when the sunshine and warmth come back to town. Maybe the man who keeps a lid on a "bottomless pit" I mentioned last time speaks English and even dropped in here long enough to spot those ill-advised words. More likely some computer set off an alarm. Whatever. The weekend began with an early call from my "'counsellor" at the bank, telling me the boss wanted to see some more money on my account within days if not seconds. The "Or else..." rang bells from the early 1980s in France, when banking regulations were so tight recent imports like me weren't allowed ever to go into the red. When one of the employers I've had who was lousy at handing over salaries was late once too often, neither entreaties from me or a letter from him taking all the blame could bend the law: the Banque de France put me on a blacklist, took away my cheque book for a year and my French was so bad then it wouldn't have surprised me if I'd wound up behind bars. Perhaps I should be grateful to Scrivener, whose law (Fr.) about "protecting consumers of products and services" makes for fearful reading if the person you need you to be saved from is yourself. I'm a menace, particularly when I wonder how he'd feel if somebody set about his teeth with a pair of pliers. I presume Scrivener's a "he", since it hurts to much to look for a website which bothers to give me a French politician's first name. The Factory's unlikely to fuss about the interim measure required, but any notion I had of quitting town in a week's time when I get a bunch of days off has vanished. Next go the cigarettes. I hope nobody will find me becoming one of those abominable people who constantly tells you how foul the habit is just as soon as they've given up themselves. After DVDs and long after Mac mags, the very last thing I'll give up is music. Being able even to think of it as a "product" or "service" is almost beyond my power. Even a warning like yesterday's served only to slow me down with my online shopping baskets, though I'll still avoid any site's 1-Click minefield. The bloke at the bank said he was too busy on Saturdays for a swift chit-chat and next week he'd be sunning himself somewhere. Like journalists, my successive bank counsellors tend to work to last-minute deadlines. They give you the news, usually bad, as late as they can, put the blame on their machines, leap on your shortcomings and scarcely know what praise means. You're only as good as your last excuse for them to make money, but they don't have sub-editors, which means my bank statements are sometimes punctuated by substantial figures in the wrong column, which go unexplained apart from a curt reference to "handling fees". Enough. I've got plenty of praise for Amazon users who write thoughtful reviews and helpful lists of things I'd much rather explore than the world of low finance. A couple I've checked out before taking undue risks recently include Jason Cafer, who seems funny, and "poet and music lover" Juan Mobili, whose eclectic taste is a match for anyone's. These two have the knack of standing out in a crowd. Cafer claims a 'Best of 2004' selection was "the work of an 82-year-old woman", while Mobili became irresistible by calling one list 'Young, Brave and Intimate.' If I've bored you with overlong blog pieces, my apologies, which also go to the very small handful of people whose mail is still unanswered. Recent entries have often kept me occupied while hefty chunks of the Mac's processing power were diverted to pillaging the French iTMS -- it's more interesting now the people who fly that wing of Apple's music store have filled the place with enough music from the stratosphere of the charts to start chasing rarer birds -- and to shifting all the "old" CDs I like for company on to my belt. Now iTunes informs me the latter part of the job has been done so thoroughly it will keep me going for a fortnight without having to hear the same thing twice if I want to be a sleepless hermit, and I've picked up some tips on the way: - one of my "five favourite annoyances" (John Rizzo's are at the MacDev Center) has been iTunes's habit of automatically updating your iPod when you've set it this way but don't want that for once. The remedy's among the keyboard shortcuts in the Help menu: "Command-Option as you connect the iPod to your computer (hold the keys down until the iPod appears in the iTunes Source list)"; - if you want a new window or more in iTunes, the answer often lies in a quick double-click, for instance on the blue note to the very left of a playlist's name. That may be obvious but wasn't to me, thanks Kid; - should reminding yourself what you find in the music store should be on a "wish list", not in a basket where the temptation to click the "buy" button is strong, you can create a new playlist, call it 'Not Tonight, Darling!' and drag songs from the store into it; - if you need a cure for shopping mania, ask a police officer if you can borrow a set of handcuffs for a while, without the key. If you must stay indoors, relax at the Squip's Photo Gallery or meditate, with Iain Banks, on the madness of wanting to own too much and export ways of doing it. When Norm did, he made a good move in suggesting that "this is how science fiction has turned anti-American, and why there'll be no WMD in outer space". I was able to avoid the two latest offerings in a generally good DVD sci-fi series coming out fortnightly here since both films took exporting the current White House values for granted; - plot with your friends. If I prove unable to give up acquiring libraries to share with them, I'm got most of the team in place for a bank job now, gathered among those who need a few "handling fees" of their own. My sixth tip also came from the Kid, who said it before I could: "Listening to really good music is like going on holiday anyway." Well almost. Nat and alter ego have finished their Luxor travelogue (Blaugustine). The closest I'll get to Egypt for the foreseeable future is with Youssou N'Dour -- whose latest, it seems, goes down less well in Senegal than it does with me among those who don't like a change of tune. Someone I know seems to have been too busy so far to write any more about N'Dour. She's not alone: apart from "curtain-raisers", there's not much around on the Net as yet about the Roll Back Malaria concert in Dakar (BBC) this weekend. Even the Africa Live festival's blog (Fr.) packed in for the duration. Who wants to go away and write about it when you can listen to it? I can't wait for the DVD... Me? Jealous? I've given it up. 12:14:33 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 10 mars 2005

Sounds great (iv): Aren't they all International Women's Days? Updated on March 14. Pity nobody took me up on a rhetorical bet... Heightened attention to the voices of women and a moratorium on madness: these were my plans until it swiftly became apparent the most modest of goals can be mutually exclusive. The week had barely begun when one woman friend said she thought we should never speak to each other again, for reasons I'd be unlikely to give you even if I knew what they were. She uses the word "complicated" far too frequently and previously expressed both admiration and irritation at my conclusion, from a still recent survey of the state of the world, that nobody's ever likely to get into a mess of a kind new to human experience and thus one "you simply can't understand". Were I allowed to tell you more, there's probably a tidy fortune to be made from anybody willing to risk betting the woman still won't be trading words with me by the end of the month, but it's simpler to say "Stina Nordenstam". Never mind that I'm around seven years late in writing a plug for 'People are Strange', a title which once suited my mood of a moment well enough to grab it and seek out more of her later. "Like flawed glass, there is a terrible and forboding quality that surrounds this album. (...) You cannot compare Stina Nordenstam [pinched pic by Matthias Elgemark] to any other artist when she sings her own material, and so you resist the temptation when she perfoms songs by Leonard Cohen, Rod Stewart, Prince. "This album is winningly and consistently original. It prickles like raw glass fibre. And, as you listen, the sounds swaddle you in the discomforting warmth of a favourite rash." A little precious perhaps, but 'merve.funboy' at the Amazon link gets the girl about right. [March 14: as, it seems, did I. That bet nobody took me up on? She held out for all of three days before a touch of the sun made her right as rain again.] I got a less pleasant dose of "discomforting warmth" when somebody who has only to open their mouth sometimes to slide a notion like Blog Bitch of the Month Award -- irrespective of gender -- into my head decided almost to rub shoulders with me and asked moments later: "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?" The straight answer? "Yes. If you don't like my vocabulary, I'll lend you my spare earplugs." I've given up many habits some people don't like. The liberal application of obscenities to shoddy work on my editor's screen at the Factory from journalists who should know better isn't one of them, especially now I know we do well to say what we're thinking (and so will you, in due course, if your attention hasn't yet wandered elsewhere). I'm slightly ashamed to admit my mouth has been nowhere near my mum for around four years by her count, except during our phone conversations. That's how long she thinks it is since any desire to cross the Channel has taken hold of me. But Tuesday was International Women's Day so I decided to leave out the suggestion that the woman who had plunked her butt in the seat next to mine choose one of the several empty ones out of hearing range until her mood had improved. Anyway, a few moments later I was jammed up against other bodies underground and plugged into PJ Harvey's timely account of "The Life And Death Of Mr. Badmouth", the first track on 'Uh Huh Her', after ignoring a kindly warning from the iTMS (need I still spell out iTunes Music Store) that the woman was "explicit" -- just how I like 'em. I don't know quite what it is about PJ, but she and her moods have become an indispensable part of a library of voices of women so varied the chances of further musical synchronicity with BJ were next to nil and I didn't bother to ask what he'd been listening to on Tuesday night. Barry's just joined the cavalry. After a couple of weeks when the relentless tide of news refused to ebb for an understaffed English desk at the Factory simply because the school holidays were upon us, David -- whose name I'll give you now he's had his honeymoon and is no longer the "new desk chief" -- decided to let me keep a second "Africa person" rather than stealing the ones whose initials were down for it, on a ever-changing, rota for other duties including taking turns to go to Rome. Thus it was that BJ spent his first day in Africa with me (promptly to be addressed as "Baz" by Lauren in Dakar). I can only regret that the repeat duet due on Friday has been called off, again for reasons beyond our control. One of the few things Barry "B-Flat Liquorice-Stick Bluenote" James (as we thought Lauren ought to call him instead) and me don't get to chat about is non-classical music recorded after the man's cut-off date, since he's got one but I lost mine on account of the Kid and a bottomless pit some tedious people at the bank prefer to call "your troubled account". If he objected to my small tales, even the ones where I'm the object of constant sexual harassment, he was kind enough not to say so. Remember my now infamous but widely read "Diktats" of New Year's Day? These were nothing to BJ's helpful hints when he was a big chief at UPI back in the days before news agencies had to start sending journalists to waste their time in hotel rooms waiting for a pontiff to pop his clogs, partly because that particular outfit apparently bribed the Vatican doctor to give them a wink when he snuffed it. The physician, it seems, saw fit to prove his word with a few snapshots of dead pope, whereupon UPI published them. The upshot is that if a pope decides to hang around Urbi et Orbi during vacation time in newsrooms nowadays, they get even emptier. I end up temporarily turning Factories into Madhouses in this log. I just about manage to keep my head and sometimes my temper while I'm inside them. You the Faithful Five and ¾ suffer the consequences of such restraint if you can be bothered to take a sauna in the steam vented about why I include myself among the "old timers" who know the difference between a news story and the "modern" way of bombarding clients with whistles and bells about nonsense of no interest to anyone but other journalists doing exactly the same. Last week, life took an upturn when those who had temporarily deemed it safer -- after protests from people who told us our chit-chat and jokes were bad for their concentration -- to pass each other notes reading "Shouldn't gossip, but [wild fancies or cunning thoughts fill this space]" timidly ventured to resume our banter. Things got even better when I walked into work on Monday to find the place had switched from red-alert Madhouse status to the usual neon-lit Factory and even that Martin was so oblivious to all those rota changes he'd decided to come in and do Africa with me, after an enjoyable trip to the southern end of the continent, when I expected to be on my own again. Jokes were clearly once again allowed on deck. BJ, who'd survived hell, was dispensing diktats -- the illustration here is a historical document -- when the news was in capitals and the word "wire" meant what it says instead of a satellite link. I don't recall whether soft patterned toilet tissue had then been invented, but in those days the Factory was a place I occasionally visited on trade union business. Its own stories circulated on extra-large bogrolls of a hue which hasn't improved in my archives with age, unless vomit green is back in style, and AFP computer screens were the green on black colours idiot "experts" then thought good for the eyes, which France subsequently adopted for the Minitel before everybody discovered the Internet. Like television, the Net is both a boon and bane of the profession in ways interestingly written about in one of the books on the updated list on the left, Dan Gillmor's 'We The Media'. In that list, you'll also find the reason I was able to tell Harmonie -- a woman apparently so incapable of keeping quiet I suggested she might want to put up a flag if bits of her vocalised stream of consciousness are for anybody's benefit but for her own -- about: "Hack 61. Talk to Yourself "Language isn't just for talking to other people; it may play a vital role in helping your brain combine information from different modules. Language might be an astoundingly efficient way of getting information into your head from the outside [Hack #49], but that's not its only job. It also helps you think. Far from being a sign of madness, talking to yourself is something at the essence of being human. (...) "Peter Carruthers [warning: MGs* required] thinks that you get this effect because language is essential for conjoining information from different modules. Specifically he thinks that it is needed at the interface between beliefs, desires, and planning. Combining across modalities is possible without language for simple actions (see the other crossmodal hacks [Hack #57] through [Hack #59] in this book for examples), but there's something about planning, and that includes reorientation, that requires language. "This would explain why people sometimes begin to talk to themselves—to instruct themselves out loud—during especially difficult tasks. Children use self-instruction as a normal part of their development to help them carry out things they find difficult. Telling them to keep quiet is unfair and probably makes it harder for them to finish what they are doing." There's some great stuff in 'Mind Hacks'. Stephen Hampshire remarks in a review at Amazon UK: "The authors have an infectious enthusiasm for the subject which is manifest in a lot of links and supplementary reading (as well as a blog). It's certainly a good idea to have the internet accessible to you while you read so you can look up the demos they link to, or you'll find your copy overflowing with bookmarks like I did." These often clever ideas from Matt Webb and Tom Stafford (O'Reilly UK, December 2004), are ideal Safari Bookshelf material, since reading them the way that superb site presents them on line means you can dispense with paper bookmarks altogether. The book is full of tips for anybody with as subversive an outlook on life and what my parents called "the System", meaning generally established ways of behaving, as my own. I'll probably use a lot of my stored-up Safari points to download the whole thing in .pdf format at this rate, but have to confess that one section has taught me precisely why some people are better than others at working and messing around at the same time. I suppose that means I'll have to take it more graciously than ever when told to "Just shut up!" Who among us can resist hacks like "Explore Your Defence Hardware" (no 32 of 100) or "Keep Your Sources Straight (If you Can)" (no 84), plus a bit of help to "Spread a Bad Mood Around" (no 99)? Since I value my job marginally more than my reputation I'll spare everybody the names of those who have no need of that last little number. Also, I have yet to find the appropriate hack for people like Ellie who hum to themselves while they work, but I bet there is one. All the same, the psychology stored in my neurons is that people have so many different sorts of intelligence any attempt to qualify one of them as better than another is almost invariably absurd. We all pick and choose from a range of "multi-tasking" abilities in our own ways. Unlike the Kid and her kind, I find it almost impossible to write while listening to music. I'm disappointed women's place in music and the other arts have yet to be given the space they deserve in a Wikipedia article on the event ... or in most of this year's reports on it at the Factory, where all anybody seemed to care about was the politics and economics of the occasion. The voices of women have shot back up to the top of my list of favourite sounds so fast of late that the whole idea of a special day for them now has a very absurd side, unless I could issue a diktat suggesting that just once a year maybe they could all stop protesting about my bad habits. On Sunday the Kid said: "Dad, you're crazy. That's your fourth iPod. What are you going to do for holiday money?" "Sell at least one of the others as soon as I've had a chance to get them fixed," I replied. I might, but the truth is I'd rather keep my head as full of music as working days will allow than worry about vacations, especially when the times many people clear out of Paris are my favourite ones to be here. With the latest iPod on my belt and more storage space than ever, my next stop was my CD library for the 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes?' box set of 41 songs by the late, very special Sandy Denny -- Reinhard Zierke's site is one of the Net's best tributes to a woman I'd once travel a long way to hear -- along with a few more women now part of a portable feast. Then I went mad at the iTunes music store, both for myself and the Kid, who really deserves a present or two simply for being one of the sanest people around me. My last woman pictured here is Aimee Mann, since I enjoyed 'Bachelor No. 2' so much that I listened to the whole album twice on Monday to take in some really good lyrics. Recently enough for it to be mildly embarrassing, I noted what a pity it was few women songwriters seemed to have touched on the darker sides of the Big L and tell it like it is when things fall apart. I happily withdraw that remark for the stupidity it was now I know better. There are places in the ever expanding domain of sexual politics I'd prefer never to revisit, but should you be in the kind of mood where you think nobody can ever understand how you feel, let alone written a decent song about it, I'd also take a substantial bet you're wrong. Just think. If I win one of the bets in this entry, perhaps I could go part-time at the Factory and turn the celebration of women into an almost full-time occupation! For now, however, that's like trying to keep music a profit machine for fat cats, mostly male: a 'Downhill Battle'. ____ *Do I still need to spell out "mental gymnastics"? 12:27:57 AM  link   your views? []

vendredi 4 mars 2005

Parisian purgatory She was moon-faced and managing to look both hopeless and cheerful, hunched over a tube map with almost the smallest print imaginable. I took pity on her. "Perdue?" She looked blank. "Lost?" "Is this a nice place to go?" she asked, smothering three Métro stations at once with a chubby finger. "Montmartre?" I asked. "In this weather?" "No, here." "I can't read it." "Abbesses. It's my last day. At the hotel they said it's a nice place to go." "Well, I suppose it's about as nice as anywhere else today, if you plan on staying out of doors," I answered, remembering a Russian restaurant with warm staff and filling food suited to the season, without bothering to add that from there she was likely to find herself on the nearby funicular up to the top of the Sacré Coeur hill anyway, staring down over the city as long as she could stand the biting wind. "What madness brings you to Paris at this filthy time of year?" I asked. "The cold," she said bluntly, looking as if she meant it. Thus my day began on the M platform a few moments after taking the picture of the post box and my pizzeria Canteen, with the camera in my phone. Some fool at the Factory apparently told the world, fortunately not on our English wires, that "heavy snow" fell on Paris overnight. The International Herald Tribune even published a front-page Eiffel tower picture which somebody must have thought romantic. Heavy? It's a light dusting of treacherous slippery yuk. So I told the Chinese-Malay tourist from California in the M where to change lines, added that this kind of weather usually lasts until the end of April, blamed global warming and decided to add an extra month for a newly arrived American colleague at work who said she'd had enough of the winter. Haven't we all? The pictures are for the Squip, my response to her request beneath a previous blog post. Maybe she'll remember previous snaps of the view south and north from my perch overlooking Losserand Street in brighter months when I'm more inclined to outdoor activity, with or without clothes, than right now. She's welcome to come and have a look for herself if she sends me a fitting answer to a question it's safer to leave off this public log and ask women I've not met either by e-mail or on the phone. Hint: don't wear black... Should the answer be as suitable as I suspect it might, I'd be only too happy to let her put an arm in mine out on that street on a day like this to keep me upright and make sure this site and all other ongoing business doesn't come to a permanent halt. I've already survived three falls in 2005 as dramatic as a lone oak tree brought down with the final swipe of a chainsaw. The second was sudden and noisy enough to rouse any Spanish speakers enjoying a siesta at the far end of the news room in the Factory ... which is no longer the Madhouse I dubbed it while Bush was this side of the Atlantic and doctors, cardinals and "death-watch" journalists were wondering which Saint Peter the pontiff would be seeing next: an earthbound square or the one who allegedly guards the gates upstairs. That particular fall happened the wrong side -- if she has one -- of the final victim of my happily abandoned habit of "falling in love with Love" instead of women. I'd imagined once that should I ever find myself flat at her feet, it would be in front of her rather than directly behind her chair when dozens of people were around. When I called our new desk chief the next day to say I was sick and gave "fatigue" as an excuse, his answer was of the kind I deserved for assuming he already knew about my accident and for being incoherent since by dawn the pain was acute and Ellie had said she heard ghastly "cracking noises". All that seems to have happened ages ago and the knee the doctor told me was still more or less intact no longer hurts, nor -- much -- do other bits of me bashed in the third and I hope last such crash of the year. But it feels like even this morning is weeks past already, something I only remark on because another woman at work, Emma, said time seems to have gone wonky, then a friend in a local shop said the same thing tonight. Maybe for me it has something to do with no longer measuring time, at a scarcely conscious level, by intervals between seeing Eleanor, which I haven't for a few weeks. Sometimes I catch myself missing her deeply, the way I guess maybe most of us do others who've played a huge part in our lives and then suddenly aren't there any more. I can't find the words to say what I mean. When I can, it'll probably bring my screenplay out of hibernation. She's only a phone call or a quick e-mail away, but for some reason beyond any explanation, I've felt a sense of rightness in doing neither, as with another friend with whom I've avoided contact for a little while. Some relationships need to gestate. If you don't understand a word of this, fine. Neither do I... Maybe it's the weather. 12:08:13 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 2 mars 2005

Mad March hacks My uncharitable disposition broadened at the weekend to include Apple for temporarily wrecking my iPod. Cupertino has again shot itself by coming out with a great product then issuing a software so-called "update" which kills the device. Not for everybody, but for enough people to have caused an uproar on a handful of Mac sites among even those of us who should know better but rarely bother to check out warnings before plunging into an upgrade. The hard disk on my iPod spins like crazy but has done nothing sensible or useful since I ran iPod Updater 2005-02-22 (Apple article) on it. If you happen on these lines before trying it yourself, think twice and take a look at the MacFixit site and help forum (rather than my usual recommended place, Techsurvivors, where I see no trace of the problems reported elsewhere, along with fixes that work for some but not everyone). The downloadable upgrade was clever enough, according to the nasty tales, to destroy different models of iPod in different ways, so I'll leave out details and just say that even a total reformat of its hard disk -- not just a recommended "reset" -- then reinstalling the previous version of the software didn't do the trick. Apple, habitually discreet about its blunders, has quietly just slipped out a revised support document on 'Resetting iPod if it appears frozen or doesn't respond'. I'll try what it suggests at the weekend and let you know if it works, but suspect that the dead device is more likely to end up going to the AppleCare centre along with its predecessor, which gave up the ghost just days after the guarantee ran out. My own interim solution, since the very notion of a day without a head full of music is a nightmare, was to buy another one! I couldn't afford it, but am good at rationalising myself into wild expenditure ... and have plans for the "old" ones suiting both me and somebody else. The iPod photo is mainly a colourful gimmick, given the size of the screen, but fun all the same. I was miffed merely to find that its cost includes an Apple iPod holder, a revolting black pouch which like almost all accessories provided by my favourite computer company is an overpriced piece of rubbish. Plenty of other firms make better and cheaper ones which not only allow you to get at your iPod's controls but have a sturdy belt clip less likely to break at the very moment a subway train is coming into the station and drop your music player in front of it. Pretty gadget or not, with all the projects on my burners, the iPod photo gives me another 60 gigabytes of storage space which can also be used to play music. That space has of late become a necessity rather than self-indulgence. It's time anyway to put in a mention for the ever-helpful iPod Lounge and iPod Hacks sites, along with a further good word for the O'Reilly team. The day the destructive software update came out, Wei Meng Lee wrote a good piece on how to display album artwork in iTunes (and also on an iPod photo). The site he recommends in his second method works surprisingly well, but it can be haphazard in what it turns up for albums which stray off the beaten track. As for my O'Reilly Safari bookshelf, it's so rarely used that I think of cancelling my subscription sometimes, but don't. The largely technical stuff on offer gets better and better and it's worth every cent whenever I make the time to use the points members collect each month, enabling us to download just the chapter chunks of book we need as .pdf files rather than actually buying them and reading only the bits of any use to us. I've almost given up buying textbooks in science and technology because they're both expensive and rapidly outdated and there are dozens of ways to find what I want on the Web. 'Mind Hacks' by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb (published in November 2004) is one of the latest on offer online and a clever, well-written "exploration into the moment-by-moment works of the brain, (which) uses cognitive neuroscience to present experiments, tricks, and tips related to vision, motor skills, attention, cognition, subliminal perception. Each 'hack' examines specific operations of the brain." That's the publisher's packaging, but what's between the covers lives up to it and this a very rare recommendation from somebody who usually hates anything resembling a "self-help" book. 9:01:38 PM  link   your views? []