Author: moleitau

What’s that coming over the hill?

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Not Accepted Anywhere
Not Accepted Anywhere
Automatic

Just a short musical indulgence.

Currently loving The Automatic's single "Monster" from the album "Not Accepted Anywhere"

It's a very basic bit of young, energetic post-punkish fun, but it's a got an onery-earworm-of-a-chorus, which I can imagine would be large amounts of fun to belt out in various stages of inebriation, while pogoing.

It goes like this:

"What's that coming over the hill?

Is it a Monster?!?

Is it a MON-STERR??!!?"

Fantastic.

The Automatic have a collective age of about 13, and, like all good things, are from South Wales.

Isn't it.

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles

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It was a trip to New York, Seattle and San Francisco in 1997 with my boss.

We boarded the BA plane at Heathrow, and moments after take-off there were human screams and screams of twisted metal as I saw the bulkhead dividers shear in rotation against the movement of the fuselage.

There had been a bird strike in one of the engines, and it had caught fire quite spectacularly during takeoff.

Things calmed down a little as the Captain announced this, and fear turned to grumbling as he informed us that we would be circling over the English Channel to dump fuel and come back into land at Heathrow.

We did so and deplaned back into a welcome from BA ground staff with enough beverage vouchers for the entire manifest of passengers to get thoroughly drunk and get to know each other, which leads to a story for another day…

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The lizard, the marmot, the monkey and me

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Another session at the amazing NLPing hypnodentist today, this time to get my gums blasted with drugs in order to preserve them until Aubrey DeGrey's life-extension 2-in-1 toothpaste and mouthwash hits the market.

It all went well and I'm even getting enough feeling back to slurp down some miso ramen prepared by Nurse Foe, but I can't help feeling that each time I go back to the amazing hypnodentist that his spell on me is getting weaker and weaker.

It's very peculiar to feel your mind stratifying but effectively that's what it felt like today.

My conscious mind felt like it was up on the safety balcony as I previously described but  this time I still had enough of 'myself' left in the lizard (or marmot, or monkey – whatever) brain to flinch when the cleaning machine got a bit too aggresive.

I'm still finding the combination of morbid fascination I have with HypnoDentist's process and the support/gratitude I get from Fiona motivating enough to get me back into the reclining chair of doom, but don't know for how much longer.

Some other thoughts from today's stratified stream of consciousness (probably from atop the balcony of bliss), before I forget them:

  1. I wonder if a young David Cronenburg had to have extensive dentistry?
  2. I feel faintly ridiculous wearing shorts while this is happening
  3. I am very glad I am getting this all done pre-peak-oil / while a significant amount of resources in the first world can be put to the comforting of cowards / before northern europe goes medieval.

And now, football. Portugal Vs. England, then to meet Veen if he survives watching the football in the middle of London on EuroPride day (hope he has the good sense to go to Bradley's Spanish Bar or something…)

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Obligatory World Cup Post

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Clive Thompson on why “Soccer” (sic) annoys merkins:

“…game design reflects the national soul. Americans are predisposed to enjoy games where the rules encourage lots of scoring. Soccer wasn’t architected that way, so Americans don’t like it. Baseball, basketball, and football, in contrast, were designed to allow for lots of scoring — and they are thus huge hits in America, a country obsessed with toting up manichean victories.

I seriously doubt Cannon and Lessner are even aware of the existence of ludology — the philosophy and design of play. But they have nonetheless illustrated precisely why ludology is such a powerful way to understand national cultures, and the differences between Americans and Europeans. It also helps you understand why the writers are so damn snarky, and their critics so correspondingly nasty: It’s because ludology is one of the most gut-level, passionate areas of philosophy, and play is so central to our identities. People can be tepid about whether or not they like a book or a movie. But nobody is is wishy-washy about play. A game either totally rocks or totally sucks, and there is no phase transition between the two.”

Voodoo Fabbing

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The Availbot
The Availbot

Went to the Royal College of Art show last night, and amongst some beers, the sweltering heat of a packed art college and  saying lots of hellos to people I haven't seen in a long time I actually got to see some work.

I'll definately have to go back with Fiona and peruse it all at leisure – there were some really intruiging things as per usual in the Architecture section, including an 'electomagnetic therapy centre' (paging the Hanso Foundation!)

The best thing though for the vain interaction designer about town is finding that you have been fabbed into a tiny USB-connected version of yourself that jumps up and collapses to my iChat status.

Jack Schulze of Schulze&Webb made the Availbots (there's also one of Ben Cerveny, apparently) for his end of year show – it's a triumph of servos and string. Jack sent me a rendering from the CAD/CAM file a few weeks back announcing his intention to do it, and I've been using it as my icon here on Vox ever since.

I felt an odd feeling of distress as the availbot collapsed violently each time the iChat status changed – I predict a technopagan market for rapidly fabricated voodoo dolls from your avatars…

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I’m reading (or about to read)…

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Mortal Engines (The Hungry City Chronicles)
Mortal Engines (The Hungry City Chronicles)
Philip Reeve

I've started reading a series of books by Phillip Reeve that I've inherited from Foe.

With her new job producing science exhibits for kids and teenagers, we have a lot of 'books for young adults' in the house under the guise of research.

I finished the first in the series "Mortal Engines" yesterday.

I knew I was going to like it from the the first line… which pretty much pushed all the matt-buttons at once:

"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."

They are pretty standard adventure stories I guess (the kids are orphans of righteous parents – heard that before anywhere?) but the imagination and detail invested in the setting is very enjoyable.

About to start the next one: "Predators Gold", in the hope that there's less of the familiar tropes of youth sci-fi/fantasy and more unfamiliar, fantastic settings…

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1989. The Number. Another Summer.

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Fg
Fg

Just watched "The Summer of 1989" in a shameless bout of nostalgia.

It was a whistle-stop tour through the most exciting year of my youth. The last year of school, just before leaving for college. Stuck in a small seaside town, but sensing still that you were taking part in something much bigger that was going on.

Acid-House, illegal raves, the fabled M25 Orbital party scene were all quite far away. A couple of the cool kids you knew in Art class had been at a rave, perhaps, you'd heard.

Probably the cultural moment they showed that had most impact for me was the Top-of-the-pops (if you don't know, TOTP is a venerable and somewhat crusty weekly pop programme on British TV) where both The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays played.

Back in those days of four-channel, unfragmented, untimeshifted media, something like that hit like a meteor – an extinction-level event for the cultural dinosaurs around you. You knew that you and your bright-eyed, wide-eyed nimble pop mammals were now going to inherit the earth.

I did actually get to one illegal party in 1989. It was canonical stuff. Waiting in the carpark of the Swansea Odeon Cinema, for the one person who knew where it was happening to lead us in the canonical convoy up into the hills around the town.

It was in the canonical farmers field, with the bemused but happy farmer and his wife making a killing on bottled water and rather-delicious (as I remember) home-made burgers. Muddy and manic, the throng of dancing, smiley, happy people stretched for, oh, hundreds of metres – this was South Wales, not Castlemorton – assisted by speed and acid mainly it seemed – again, this was South Wales, and the new wonder chemical had not made it at least to Swansea in great quantities by then.

Your reporter of course limited his intake to the delicious home-made burgers, as he was driving the Fiat Panda full of his friends there and back again…

One other memory prompted by the programme, and a question.

The show attempted to tie (rather lightly) the cultural/political mood in the UK to the wider changes around the world: fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, etc. There was no mention of what was happening in the USA at the time at all.

The credits rolled to the sound of Public Enemy's "Fight the Power", which along with The Stone Roses and 808 State could often be heard blasting (!) from the stereo of my doughty little Fiat Panda as it dashed around the South Wales coast full of my friends.

I don't really know what was happening if you were 17/18 in 1989 in the USA – perhaps people in my neighbourhood here could fill me in? Was there a sense of revolution (false or otherwise) in the air like there was in the UK? What was the counterculture like? What was going on for you?

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