mememachine.net

Ground Zero

Our new home is in Manor House (Green Lanes), North London, scant yards from the now-legendary Finsbury Park Mosque, ground zero of British Islamist radicalism, bomb-making and hooked-handed, cloudy-eyed cleric and ‘mad-mullah’ Abu Hamza. I had a dream about him the other night. He walked past us on the street and I whispered to Adrienne ‘Look, its the main man.’ He overheard me, turned round and delcared ‘Right on, my brother, Jihad!’ waving his hook in the air, and gazing at me expectantly. I didn’t really want to be shouting ‘Jihad!’, so I made the horny hand of Satan and cried ‘Rock on, Dude!’ He seemed happy with that…

Green Lanes also made the news last week when 500 police officers raided numerous addresses and later claimed to have cracked a huge heroin smuggling and distribution operation, centered on a family of Turkish ‘kingpins’. There have been quite a few shootings and even a pitched gun battle between Kosovar Albanian and other gangsters, just round the corner. Ooh, I feel so urban. I suppose some of our friends will be too scared to visit us, but I have to say that I really like the neighbourhood (Turks are very friendly, generous and hospitable people, apart from the raging psycho drug barons) and I think I will enjoy living in London, congestion problems notwithstanding. No shortage of excellent kebabs, and the other night we had a brilliant meal at a Turkish seafood restaurant, where I enjoyed a delightful chargrilled seabass, and where they gave us wine on the house as we didn’t have enough cash on us. Lovely.

B.O.T.H.

Big thanks to the lovely people at the Harper Collins publicity dept. for my review copy of Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck. Review coming in the next week. Perhaps I can blag a review copy of Pattern Recognition as well…

P.O.N.A.

Updates to the blog will now be resumed, as we have moved into our new home, partially decorated, and unpacked some of our belongings. They may remain intermittent for a while as we are currently an unwired household, yes, we are Persons of No Account. How very third world.

Hopefully in the next few weeks we will have a ‘soopafast’ 1MBit connection, courtesy of Telewest Broadband, just as soon as I have rustled up and faxed the requisite 15 pieces of ID, bills from previous addresses, etc etc. Then I will have to sort out wifi so I can surf at high speeds while on the toilet…

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chopper and scimitar

I was up in Cambridge yesterday, doing some more work on the Broughton House Gallery website, and Rosemary (the owner) mentioned over lunch that, as I was a designer, I should meet a friend of hers, Tom Karen, who is an industrial designer. Then she dropped the bomb that he not only designed the Bond Bug, Reliant Scimitar and Reliant Robin, but was also the genius behind the Raleigh Chopper! Omigod! And he might want a website! Yowza!! Apparently he is in his 70s and currently working on redesigning airliners.

I hope I get to meet him, then I can point out that the Sturmey-Archer three-speed gearstick was perfectly positioned to mangle a young boy’s ‘nads should he suffer a high-speed crash while playing CHiPS (“I’m Ponch” “NO, I’M Ponch!”) with his friend.

Actually, I never actually owned a Raleigh Chopper (too expensive), but I did have a cheap rip-off called a "Setter". It was so shoddy that one time when I tried to wheelie while zooming down a hill in Hunstanton the entire front fork assembly dropped out, spilling ball-bearings, and me, all over the road. Oops.

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he got game

Excellent game-design related blog from Greg Costik. Greg’s central thesis is that videogames should be viewed as art, a viewpoint I heartily endorse, particularly having played a few hours of Splinter Cell the other night. Holy cow, that is a seriously impressive piece of work.

Nevertheless, I am looking forward to a possible future scenario where games no longer strive for ultimate realism – particularly in their graphical rendering – I want more abstract, stylized, dreamlike, hallucinogenic games. Of course they should remain logically consistent, but can’t we have a few more left-field ideas like Rez, Vib Ribbon, and that mad Japanese one where you whip enemies with your scarf?

I suppose the increasing complexity and cost of developing games mitigates against taking such chances very often, better to make yet another FPS/driving game, but a boy can dream. Actually, I quite often dream video games, in which I am the protagonist, and they invariably kick arse. Just the other night I was being attacked by a giant cyborg Viking who was hurling huge, heat-seeking axes at me. Scary. I had to run my blacksuit up to 500% speed in order to dispatch him (the blacksuit idea was flagrantly stolen by my dreaming mind from Jim Munroe’s excellent novel Everyone In Silico.)

Having said all that, I can’t wait to see what Rare do with the Xbox. Maybe if I get a bit more work I might even buy one.

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german artists

We went to our friend Catharine's birthday party on Saturday. It was at the Robert Sandelson gallery, which she manages, and was jam-packed with artists, many of whom were German. (apparently Turner nominee (and loser) Fiona Banner and Jake Chapman were there, but as I don’t know what they look like, I cannot confirm. There were certainly a whole lot of weird lookin’ folks…

Anyway, one German artist in particular (whose name I forget, but he was very sweet) had come all the way from Berlin to show his ‘piece’ which was a cake on a podium, which he exploded at midnight. Except it didn’t work – the cake was toroidal and the charge must have just dissipated through the hole. There seems to be some sort of metaphor for conceptual art in all of this…

By 3am everyone was very drunk, many glasses were smashed, and there was fruit cake all over the floor of the gallery. Not a pretty site. Sunday I had a colossal hangover and have vowed never to get drunk again. Again. It was fun.

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sig

While browsing this vast interweb of ours the other day, I came across this amusing sig file: ‘Everything I know today I learned from killing smart people and eating their brains.’ Made me laugh…

craphoundtastic!

Cory ‘boingboing’ Doctorow’s new science fiction novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is now officially out, and is available as a free download from his site. Smashing.

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nicely toasted squirrels

Lisa felt compelled to comment on the funny/sad squirrel picture so at last I can link to her excellent blog, whose URL I had clean forgotten: nicely toasted. The unfortunate beast was just outside City Hall in Vancouver, and it was glistening quite beautifully with ice crystals in the early morning sunlight…I like to watch the squirrels from my desk, where I can see them sinewaving along the top of the fences in the back gardens.

Hmmm…Sinewave Squirrel. Idea for cartoon. Speaking of which, anyone got a Wacom graphics pad gathering dust that they want to lend me? Just for a few weeks, mind.

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Goodbye HTML and CSS, hello DMT and 2-CB

Of course I would never dreaming of ingesting psychedelic substances, which are illegal, but I did have a very interesting dream that I had taken magic mushrooms while in Vancouver, and in this dream I had a number of transcendental realizations which I believe will percolate rapidly into my everyday life, not to mention some very pretty pictures and a vast increase, you might say mushrooming, of creative thought. This dream has persuaded me to change my career plan, and has reawoken my briefly dormant intelluctual curiosity about the psychedelic experience and its potential for self-actualization. Man.

So, for the duration of this obsession (probably a few months, but you never know, might be longer) expect lots of links to counter-cultural type articles about psychedelics (or entheogens, which is the preferred term), neo-shamanism and suchlike. Which will at the very least make a pleasant change from my banging on about CSS, which let’s face it isn’t really intrinsically interesting, and there are already plenty of chaps out there doing a perfectly good job of that.

Right then. Lycaeum and Erowid are probably good places to start.

Cybernetics & Entheogenics: From Cyberspace to Neurospace is an interesting and well-reasoned article by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey).

Erik Davis, author of the most excellent Techgnosis, has a number of good artivles up at his website, including personal favourites Adventures in Inner Space and Psychedelic Culture: One or Many? which was first published by Trip Magazine.

New York journalist Daniel Pinchbeck has written what looks to be a spiritual heir to Huxley’s Doors of Perception in Breaking Open the Head, his acoount of his own journey from cynicism to shamanism.

Given the current wildly fucked-up state of the world, I can’t help thinking that responsible and inquisitive adults making an educated and informed decision to explore realms of non-ordinary reality and allowing the possibility of an increase in self-awareness, humility, love and connectedness to the planet, not to mention a sense that anything is possible, that for example we might be able to dig ourselves out of the shit we are currently deep in, might not be such a bad thing. Although of course, it is illegal. And perhaps it isn’t surprising that a substance which causes one to so clearly perceive the stupidity, insensitivity and unsustainability of the current capitalist project should be suppressed?

André Malraux apparently said: ‘The 21st Century will be mystical, or it will not be’. He may have had a point…but I am also bearing in mind Terrence McKenna’s dictum that the important thing is what you do when you are not on psychedelics.

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safari, sagoodi!

Sorry about that terrible pun. Ahem. Safari has become my default browser in less than a day, despite the stoopid name. I particularly like the snap-back feature and the way it automatically tidies up downloaded .bin files. Oh and integrates properly with RealPlayer, which wasn’t the case with the fairly buggy IE 5.2. Good work, chaps.

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insanely twisted rabbits

I forgot to mention in my comics rant earlier, the very talented and great Michel Gagné, who as well as making books such as Insanely Twisted Rabbits is also a very talented animator (check out Prelude To Eden – Realplayer reqd.), special effects designer, and seems like a very nice guy. Don’t you just hate people like that?

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how do you like them apples?

So, a new 17" screen powerbook with, get this, a backlit keyboard, which I am sure all electronic musicians will be delighted with – no more Kensington flylight required; complete integration of iTunes/iMovie/iPhoto/iDVD in the cheesily named iLife; a new browser, Safari based on Konqueror (and standards-compliant, which is nice) with lots of clever features, although I wish they would lose the brushed-metal interface look; my recently-built CSS-tastic standards-compliant websites all look fine in Safari, so I am fairly happy, except the usual dotted border rendering as dashes problem; no sign of a handheld device yet, but we live in hope…

And no video iPod, but fret not, early adopter tech wonks, for the Sharp AV1 personal video player is just the ticket!

gosh!

My good friend Michael is visiting from Japan. We met up last night and so naturally I have a big hangover today. Still, it masks the jetlag fairly effectively. I am resolved to live healthily from now on, it’s tai chi and chai tea for me!

We went to the British Museum today, because Michael has never been. Naturally, we were too monged to enjoy it, we just kinda staggered blearily through the place, weaving erratically around the various Sphinxes, Assyrian Gods with permed beards, flocks of Burberry-clad Japanese (I’m somewhat surprised they are still going for that burberry thing, isn’t it getting kinda old, it must be three years now? Establish a new trend to slavishly follow, dammit, oh inscrutable ones!)

Speaking of all things Japanese, I popped into the Japan Centre yesterday just to see if they carry import copies of the Spirited Away DVD; they do, but at a hefty (and some might say bizarrely arbitrary) £31.27. I don’t think I want to see it that much. After all there is always Carracho.

w00t!

And so but, we didn’t really get much from the British Museum, but we did spend a very enjoyable hour or so browsing in Gosh! Comics, just opposite. There appear to be a large number of very good, interesting, original and extremely bizarre comics around at the moment, and indeed the staff seemed to feel that things were looking pretty good these days.

The nice thing about Gosh! is that it is a proper comic shop, in that it focuses on comics themselves, and thus attracts a better class of clientele (studious, poloneck sweater wearing hipsters with good personal hygiene habits) whereas the stinky, slack-jawed plebs all flock to the much bigger, but woefully inferior Forbidden Planet, which long ago sold its soul to Santa and caters to the apparently insatiable demand for The Crow figurines, life-size Boba Fett cutouts, replica Conan swords and other such no-brow cultural detritus as pleases the watery nubbins of video-game addled halfwits. But I digress…

prepare for massive joy

ANYWAY, we had a good old browse, and I was particularly taken with Crumple by Dave Cooper, Everything Can Be Beaten by Jhonen Vasquez, the genius behind Invader Zim (interview at AWN) and the long interview with Jim Woodring in the Comics Journal, in which he reveals that he once took LSD a few times. No, really? You would never guess from this. Or this. Or this, this and this.

trippy dippy hippy

AANNYYWWAAYY…I tried to get Michael to buy Frank, as he has seen the light and now likes comics, but he flicked through it and was unimpressed –  in fact his mouth went into a little moué of distaste, an actual genuine moué! – and he accused me of liking ‘weird, trippy things’. Mea culpa.

neuroblog

William Gibson has a weblog. And he has even started posting entries. Chap!

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albums of 2002

Here, as if you care, is my top ten albums of 2002:

• Akufen – My Way
• Jan Jelinek – loop-finding-jazz-records
• The Notwist – Neon Golden
• Farben – Textstar
• dj /rupture – Gold Teeth Thief
• Murcof - Martes
• V/A – Futuristic Experiments #004
• Múm – Finally We Are No-one
• Eminen – The Eminem Show (so sue me…)
• DJ Shadow – The Private Press

Album of the year, by a mile, was the Akufen, which I played virtually incessantly for several months over the summer. Apologies to all the friends I bored by raving about it, heh.

math-metal

It seems that ‘heavy metal’ has undergone an interesting mutation since the last time I paid any real attention to the genre (circa ‘Roots’ by Sepultura). The new (to me) genre of ‘math-metal’ takes its cues from hardcore, has free-jazz influences, and is thankfully free from tedious guitar solos. The ridiculously intense Dillinger Escape Plan appear to be at the forefront of this movement, and the MP3 of ‘When Good Dogs Do Bad Things‘ from the ‘Irony is a Dead Scene EP’ collaboration with Mike Patton (of Faith No More/Mr Bungle/Fantomas/Tomahawk, etc etc) fame is mind-meltingly awesome. And loud. They have done a cover version of ‘Come To Daddy’ by Aphex Twin, which I simply have to hear. Ah, guitars, can’t beat ‘em…

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Happy New Year and resolutions…

I hope you all had a very pleasant festive season. We are just back from Vancouver, where we had a wonderful three weeks, ate a great deal of sushi, and recharged our batteries after the fairly intense year that was 2002.

I feel full of optimism for 2003, and had something of a revelation in Vancouver, namely that I really, deep down, want to be an ‘artist’, specifically an animator. Now, given that I cannot draw for beans, this may take a while to achieve. I’m going to give myself ten years to make it. First step, learning to draw…now where did I put ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’? Oh yeah, it is in a box somewhere…

We watched Monsters Inc. again last night, those Pixar guys are just amazingly talented; their new movie Finding Nemo looks set to raise the bar again technically, taking place underwater and around a coral reef. Check out the trailer.

Equally breathtaking is Spirited Away, the newest film by Hayao Miyazaki, director of Princess Mononoke. It is the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, and has received virtually unanimous critical acclaim. Apparently it had a UK cinema release last year, which I managed to completely miss. Damn! No sign of a UK DVD release yet, hmm…

So I have just downloaded Maya 4.5 Personal Learning Edition. Now all I need is to work really, really hard for years on end and I can fulfil my dream. Wish me luck.