Friday, 28th of May, 2004

Hm. Kevin Purdy’s a really nice guy. Been a muso round the traps for years and years, since the ’80s, doing weird indie guitar stuff, tape manipulations, what have you… Not only does he have a great radio show on 2ser (The 3rd Ear - and boy, you should see his record collection - puts my records & CDs to shame!), and an awesome duo Tooth (trio? huge orchestra?) with Shane Robbo (co-presenter of Frigid), but he does beautiful samples-and-live-instrument stuff himself too, as Purdy.
Yeah, so I’ve played on all the Tooth releases and I’m also on the new Purdy album, and that’s why I’m posting this, as I was just doing a vanity search in Google and came across this interview with Kevin, in which he is disarmingly lovely about, er… me:

Peter Hollo aka Raven put down some insanely gorgeous cello on several tracks. I have worked many times with Peter, both live and on record, he has a wonderful ear and is a really sweet guy. On some tracks he put down seemingly random lines, one on top of the other, which, when you heard the final result, wound around each other, swelled and harmonised perfectly. I hardly touched a thing he did.

Awwwwwwwwwwww.

OK, so I added the Raven link - so sue me!

Sunday, 9th of May, 2004

Charlie Stross is trying to think happy thoughts, but failing - instead giving us a great polemic on what happens when people try to run a country like it’s a corporation. It’s a scary world, folks. It’s like Gibson’s zaibatsus, or Pohl & Kornbluth’s Space Merchants, have snuck in the back door whilst simultaneously taking over society out the front as well…

Hm, excuse the classic-science-fiction references. Take a large helping of John Brunner while you’re at it, and then check out my new book reviews over in the sidebar… McAuley coming up, soon.

Thursday, 6th of May, 2004

I’m only just coming up to speed with the atrocities that some US (and perhaps British) troops have been committing in Iraq. It’s sickening.
Last week I played Xiu Xiu’s track Support Our Troops, OH! (Black Angels) to start my Anzac Day show, and wondered if I was a little out of line. I don’t think so. Now I think Jamie Stewart might have known what he was talking about, and I present you with this part of the spoken-word component of that song:

“Did you know that you were going to shoot off the top of a 4-year-old girl’s head and look across her car seat down into her skull and see into her throat/And did you know that her dad would say to you, ‘Please sir, can I take her body home.’
Oh wait, you totally did know that that would happen/ because you’re a jock who is too stupid, and too greedy, and too unmotivated to do anything else but still be the biggest and still do what other people tell you to do…
Why should I care if you get killed?”

Jocks? Yeah probably, but in any case there’s certainly something wrong with these people. Yes, they probably don’t represent the majority of “our troops” (do they?), but I never was going to be suckered by the argument that “even if you don’t support the war in Iraq, you’ve got to support our troops” (OH).
Bugger that. We’re complicit in something atrocious. We’ve always known it, but now none of us can avoid it.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden as usual writes beautifully about it.

Wednesday, 5th of May, 2004

Reading my LiveJournal friends page is always lots of fun… Today Neil Gaiman writes about how cool New Scientist is, and mentions as an aside that every so often, like this week, you get a Dave McKean cover.
Bloody hell! I run over to grab the current NS, and indeed that’s a strikingly familiar image style. And in very very very small print alongside the photos on the contents page, it says COVER IMAGE: DAVE MCKEAN! How damn cool.

Saturday, 1st of May, 2004

When Charlie Stross’s first short story collection, Toast and other rusted futures, came out around 2001, he wrote an introduction for it called “After the future imploded”, in which he suggested that in a sense science fiction is a fool’s game because the future is catching up with us so fast (or is it us who are catching up with the future?)

This weekend Charlie is guest of honour at plotka.con in Newbury, England. If only it were a month & a bit later! Cory Doctorow is there on Saturday, interviewing Charlie.
The reason I write, though, is to draw your attention to Charlie’s new-and-improved look at sf, the present, and the future: “The future bites”, which he wrote for plotka.con’s program book. Something tells me this bloke knows what he’s talking about.

Oh and Cory links to the same article over at boingboing, calling it a “corker”. So it must be worth a gander, eh?