Monday, 28th of June, 2004

Well yeah. So I’m home. How’d that happen? Somehow I mislaid my girlfriend along the way – Ange’s still in London, then going on to Belfast/Dublin/Ireland, and then to Paris, before stopping over in Singapore for a day and then finally getting home. Three weeks tomorrow. In the meantime I shall have to find other things to keep me from getting too lonely!

So Thursday’s Camden experience was relatively uninteresting. Don’t know whether I’m just not so interested any more, but Cyberdog seemed on the whole rather try-hard, and there was just too much of the whole anarchist-hippie-leech thing going on. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a left-libertarian-greenie, but hey. Markets are always full of cynical people who just want to make a buck out of you really… Um.

So we get to Friday – my last day overseas! We got up, like, heaps early to check out of the hotel, as my old friend Michael was picking us up around 8am so we could get out of town before the traffic hit. On Thursday arvo/eve I’d juggled everything around to work out the best configuration, ending up with my vinyl purchases and pretty much all CDs carefully placed in the Sónar bag we got with our Sónar Pro passes, as my second on-board bag. My laptop-backpack was stuffed full as well, in an attempt to:
a) keep my suitcase’s weight down (what with the books and comics I’d somehow picked up on the way as well) and
b) do the above while also bringing home a selection of things for Ange (so as to keep her luggage within weight restrictions too – more stringent for her Ireland leg) and for various other special people *g*

Mike has been living in the UK for almost 4 years (coming home at the end of this year, hurrah) and showed us where he used to live in Bayswater before heading out of town, eventually up the M1. It was really quite an easy drive, stopping briefly at a pit-stop kinda place for breakfast on a bap (so to speak) and arriving in Nottingham by 11am or so… Having only visited Nottingham by train in the past, I had to get my bearings – but a visit to Information got us sorted out, and we found Market St, home of the wonderful Page 45 comics, as well as Nottingham’s Selectadisc and another second-hand record store.
Page 45 is always worth a long browse, and despite having pretty much run out money, I found a few goodies to take home with me (including a couple of “free comics day” comics that they were selling for the cost price of 26p. “Free Comics Day” is an interesting concept meant to attract more people to buying comics; none of the stores in Sydney can be bothered with it, so we missed out on a few great little anthology single-issue comics…)
Selectadisc is great too, but like I said, I’d pretty much exhasted my spending muscles and couldn’t bring myself to purchase any more. A relief to the fans really ;)

Following Nottingham we decided to go back via Coventry, which is a surprisingly modern and heavily-developed city with spaghetti-junction overpasses galore. Stuck in the middle of that is the old town, hanging together somehow despite having been bombed in the blitz. You can walk around the old Coventry Cathedral, which was thoroughly destroyed – although the impressive spire still stands. We agreed that the new cathedral is pretty ugly and uninspiring, despite all being atheists. A walk around town brought us to the statue of Lady Godiva, but unfortunately it left almost everything to the imagination – what’s the point of that?

We then headed on to visit Banbury, the town where Mike is currently living, where I plugged my laptop in and hopped into his wireless network for a last-minute email-check. On the way in to Heathrow we finally hit some real traffic, but I still made it to check-in in time. The queue was pretty huge, and the flight was full – what’s more the computer where I was checking in had some weird error, so that whereas I started off having a middle seat to Bangkok and an aisle from there to Sydney, she couldn’t print out the first boarding pass, and ended up having to move me somewhere else to print me out – the upshot being that I had a middle seat the whole time! Gnarg.
Dinner at an Italian place downstairs, and then I had to say goodbye. Was sad to see Mikey for one day and then not for another six months, but at least he’ll be back then! Angela I was now not going to see for slightly longer than I’d just spent with her, so that was no fun at all… Long goodbye, and now I shall have to live with SMSes, emails and occasional phone calls for the next three and a bit weeks.

After travelling with Ange for so long, that made the trip back even harder, but I finished Ted Chiang’s amazing Stories of Your Life and Other Stories and read quite a bit of David Langford’s pretty extraordinary Different Kinds of Darkness collection too, whilst listening to a few CDs and half-watching some stupid stuff on the personal entertainment screens. I managed to move about a bit, slept maybe 5 hours max over the 24-hour trip, and moved myself finally to an aisle for landing only.

On arrival I was greeted with the longest customs queue since the USA. It took literally about half an hour of listlessly standing around, gradually moving forward, to get past the passport check and pick up my suitcase, only to queue again for the next check (just like in LA). Finally I reached the outside world, where Mum & Dad were waiting to pick me up (in my own car, complete with new battery which is a bit of a relief) and take me home. Covered bed in stuff as I unpacked, moved things around, and after sticking as-yet unlistened-to bits of vinyl on turntable I ended up falling asleep for probably a few hours more.
I somehow managed to listen to a few things as well, and filled up my CD and record bags before heading off to a family dinner and then to FBi for my first Utility Fog in three weeks – lots of fun, despite not having Ange there in the background. Played heaps of new stuff and still have heaps to get through next week! Got some lovely phone calls and all was fine.

I am now most lethargic on a Monday arvo, although listening to the delightful Paul Pimmon’s “Paul’s Playlunch” at noon was a beautiful thing…
So I’m home! Howzabout that? Stay tuned for book reviews soonish, and no doubt some morsels about Ange’s exploits over the next few weeks…

Thursday, 24th of June, 2004

Well so after our not entirely satisfactory jacket potato, eaten half in the rain, we wandered northwards from Covent Garden and ended up at Neal’s Yard, a cute tiny little square where the other Rough Trade shop is located under a skate shop. Didn’t find anything there really that we hadn’t seen at the other store… Also in Neal’s Yard is the World Food Café, whose book Ange & I have used for a number of excellent recipes – a shame we’d already had lunch!
From there, we ventured across to Charing Cross Rd, where I reacquainted myself with New Worlds (science fiction specialist underneath/part of Murder One) – and I was a little chilled to discover that, just like all those bookstores in the USA, I couldn’t find Ted Chiang’s short story collection there! Argh. I did find the first issue of PS Publishing’s new genre magazine, Postscripts, which looks very good.
Across the road at Borders I broke the Ted Chiang jinx, so that’s a relief… Looking forward to re-reading the ones I’ve already come across and reading the rest, finally. We then proceeded to Soho, which I’d sortof been avoiding because it seemed like we’d exhaust all of London in one go. Past Soho Square we ran across the Blue Room, a very excellent café that I had spent some time at back in 1999 when staying with Kirra and Danae. Ange decided we had to go back for lunch another day, and we then caught the Music & Video Exchange on Berwick St (pretty crap) and Sister Ray next door, just before closing time. Dinner at Fakhreldine, and the New York schawarma was still the best (but did New York have za’atar pide? Of course not!)

On Tuesday we were due to meet up with a good friend from Brighton, Chris Cook (a mate of Henry Collins aka Shitmat), whom I’d never met in person. We decided to meet for lunch at the Blue Room, as Ange & I hadn’t finished with Soho yet. First up it was time to visit some comics shops. Michael had told me that Forbidden Planet had moved and changed, and was worth visiting – and indeed despite the figurines and crap on the ground floor, below ground is a fairly decent collection of comics. But more impressive by far is the science fiction/fantasy section: a seemingly full run of PS books for a start, and plenty of other small-press titles and other good stuff. Probably at least as good as New Worlds down the road. I got a few things there and then headed up to Gosh!, one of the UK’s best comics shops. There I was to meet a friend of Chris’s called Adrian, who gave me a (fortunately fairly small) pile of stuff for Chris that he’d been holding off sending until it was large enough to warrant postal costs. Thanks guys – if I’m deemed overweight on the flight back, um, it’s probably not your fault anyway. Damn.
Gosh also had some of Karl Wills’s brilliant Jessica of the Schoolyard minicomics (I’d already picked up one at Lambiek) and plenty of other good stuff.
After meeting Adrian we met Chris Cook and his girlfriend Vicky, and I had a mushroom omelette at the Blue Room… Not much else of interest in Soho, but Selectadisc is still quite good. Looking forward to visiting the Selectadisc in Nottingham when we drive up with Michael on Friday, as well as Page 45 – indisputably Britain’s best comics shop. Still, I think I’ve spent all my money already!
We had a very fine Chinese meal on Queensway that night, at a place that I’m pretty sure we visited with FourPlay in 2000. Roast duck, yum yum. More blogging in the evening as you may have noticed – found an internet café with WiFi.

On Wednesday we went to Tate Modern in the morning (well, I say morning – it took a little while to get going) – the one gallery I was definitely keen to see while in London. The weather was particularly crappy, and as we walked across the Millennium Bridge I was thankful that they closed it down in 2000 and made sure it wouldn’t fall apart… The wind-chill factor was vicious (and to think that Tuesday (or Monday?) was summer solstice! Madness!) Saw some great stuff, and had to stop and stare at Dali’s “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” as always. Also enjoyed a few Magrittes – still my favourite painter.
Stumbled home through the blizzard and had some delicious crispy roast port and rice from a different Chinese restaurant on Queensway. Then that evening we headed into town to have an Indian dinner with John Chantler, an Aussie electronic musician who I exchange a lot of emails with but haven’t met properly before. He’s been living in London for the last 8 months or so, and we had a great conversation about music, record stores (hello Norman!), cost of living, travelling and all that.

And that brings us, I do believe, to today. Camden Markets go from Thursday to Sunday, so today was Camden day. All in all, although it was enjoyable to head out there and remember our gigs at Bartok (just up Chalk Farm Rd) and all, the markets pretty much sucked. In addition, Rhythm Records has closed (and been replaced by a particularly uninspiring Music & Video Exchange – those places are spawning everywhere!) , and I think the interesting bookshop there has gone as well. So nothing much doing, had a banana & honey crepe and we headed back. I’m finishing my blog here and checking through a few emails, and will then do some hardcore packing because Mike’s picking us up pretty early to go for a drive tomorrow. You should’ve seen Chris Cook & his girlfriend’s mouths drop when we said we were just going to have a daytrip up to Nottingham – seems that the English sense of distance is still a bit different from us Aussies ;)
Given that I’m bringing a few odds & sods home for Ange and various other bits & pieces for other people, I’m going to have to fill my Sónar bag with CDs and/or books and take that on board along with my laptop backpack I think, in order to keep my suitcase under the weight limit. Yargh. All good though. Looking forward to my mighty return to Utility Fog – hope I don’t fall asleep at the wheel, so to speak! Will miss Ange lots for the next three-and-a-bit weeks, but at least I’ll have all my other friends :) [Except Mikey - come home soon!] Last update, I guess, will be from home in a few days.

Last night I was chucked out of the internet cafe at midnight, just before I got to tell y’all about the end of the Sónar by Day event. The stage at Sónar Village, where the Domino showcase was happening, had been washed out by torrential rain, and To Roccoco Rot’s set had to stop before it started… Dale was convinced it’d just be DJing from thereon in, but I had faith. And yes, not long after the appointed hour, the Steve Reich-like music that was playing glitched out, and up started the very distinctive drum break for “As Serious As Your Life”. Kieran Hebden (Mr Four Tet) had his laptop(s) and effects setup in the DJ booth, and lo and behold, the sun had come out and all was perfect!
“As Serious As Your Life” was about as extended as I’ve heard it (up there with the 20-minute “live” version on the single), and certainly as way-out as it can be. It was followed, eventually, by a short delicious fragment of “My Angel Rocks Back And Forth” (and a tiny bit something else maybe? It was at this stage I grabbed my pen and started writing the setlist on my mini-program, so enthused was I…) but very quickly the bassline for “Glasshead” cut in. This was also an incredibly long and fucked-up version of this oldish track, intercut by lots of noise but then dropping back into the bassline.
Eventually the high-pitched frenetic guitar-picking of “Spirit Fingers” entered, and Kieran began washing it out rather gorgeously, but clearly he’d tapped into the energy of the crowd (huge and joyous after the crazy conditions) and decided we needed some more madness, so he proceeded to drop under the “Spirit Fingers” loops the most perfect amen break and deep bass hits – breakcore Four Tet, the crowd goes wild and I’m in heaven ;) Clearly Mr Hebden has lots of pre-prepared stuff up his sleeves (ie on his hard drive) and there was some wicked programming here, reversed bits for the intro-filler and nice distorted speed-breaks. Intense noise kept breaking in, and shortly we headed into “No More Mosquitoes”, done 2step-house stylee. Not too surprisingly, this then morphed into “Calamine”. Many of these numbers also feature on the excellent “Live in Copenhagen” CDR that I managed to snag from Domino’s website a while back, but I honestly think this set surpassed that one – and not just because of the jungle bit, I promise ;) Nor just because I was there! Calamine had all it usual features: the fake radio station changes, the 2steppy beat and all. It gradually got more crazy, and was a heady and fabulous end to the “by Day” part of the festival.

After the set people were climbing through the fence to chat to Keiran, so I eventually followed suit, to shake his hand and mention that I’d interviewed him over the phone from Sydney the other week. He said he really enjoyed the tour, hung out with my lovely mates Clue To Kalo and Qua, and said that the Sydney gig was one of the best ever, a really great crowd. No doubt many of those Utility Fog listeners who are big Four Tet fans were there… He was certainly a lovely bloke. I handed him a Raven Progress Report CDR and headed off.

We dropped home to prepare for a late night in the elements, expecting at “Sónar Park” out at the Sónar by Night area to be an outside affair. Dale was home and the three of us went into town to have dinner together. A few blocks south of the by-Day area we found a number of tapas bars, and after rejecting a couple we promised each other we’d either go into the next one or go back to this one. We ended up in a pokey little place where we were directed upstairs, and we each ordered an authentic-looking dish from the menu. And delicious it was! Dale pronounced his squid with potato salad the best meal he’d had on his trip, Ange’s fishy thing was good too, and my sausages with fried egg and potato chips were pretty yummy. Dale thought it was pretty funny that I was having bangers with egg and chips, but that’s not how it was described, and the sausages were distinctly Spanish, as was the presentation – so there! Accompanying the meal was bread with olive oil and salt, very good all round!
Next stop: Sónar by Night. Dale led us down La Rambla, as he recalled the shuttle bus going from there. We walked past the red-light district, where a number of the “girls” looked pretty male to my eyes, and ended up (after I checked) finding the bus. It cost �1.50, a bit steep when I expected it to be free, but what the heck. When we arrived I thanked Seb once again for recommending Sónar Pro, as we just marched straight in past the street markets (ridiculous fried sausages and chips, who’d eat that kind of thing? Um, off the street that is…) and laughed oh-so-heartily at the immense line of plebs queueing up next to us. Once in we discovered that all three venues were in fact undercover. The one where Massive Attack were playing (we pretty much missed them, but I’m sure it was the same show we saw @ the Ent Cent in Sydney last year) was gigantic, with of all things a dodgem car rink setup at the back. Ange & I briefly considered having a go, but in the end we went back across to the hip-hop room, which was far less crowded during Jaylib’s set. It was mostly way too minimal for me, loose loose rapping over very simple beats. Madlib got on the drum-kit at one stage, and was just as loose there as he is on the mic. In fact, he was later joined by Scott Herren aka Prefuse 73 on a second kit, for yet more imprecise drum-kit jamming. Not altogether inspiring.
Much more amazing was Jay Dilla’s pick-up-and-drop-the-needle one-turntable mixing. How the flaming FUCK does he do that? I can only presume the beats are at just the right bpm so that wherever he drops the needle it’s at the same point in the bar…

Kid Koala followed, and played pretty much the same set as at the Gaelic Club in Sydney. Altogether amazing, although his attempts at Spanish left a lot to be desired. Once we realised where it was heading, we just had to stay till the end to hear the stunning version of “Moon River” he does with two copies of the same record. He does a number of other things that way (such as the “Drunk Trumpet”) but generally has a backing loop on a third turntable. Not here! It’s beatless and gorgeous, complete with string solo and turntables slowing to a stop and then picking up again. I need a recording of this!
Our journey home was fraught with difficulties – try and catch a taxi from the site? Would’ve been good, but was confusing and stressful so we took the shuttle bus back to La Rambla again, only to discover that bugger all taxis were free… Consequently we arrived home sometime after 4am, and we’d organised our man to check us out of the apartment at 10:30 on Sunday morning – about when we had to run off to the airport anyway.

So Sunday morning was a rather lethargic experience for Peter & Ange, dragging suitcase and backpacks through Metro and train, up and down stairs, along walkway, until we reached Barcelona aiport. We checked in to London (once again on a 3×3-seat plane, so missing out on a window seat) and went looking for something to eat. Amazingly, Barcelona seems to have managed to keep both McDonalds and Burger King out of their airport. Eventually we found a nice crappy Spanish fast-food place, I got my final good orange juice (remember what “fresh fruit” is like in England?) and Ange tried to work out how to get the tax back on her Camper shoes. This proved dreadfully confusing and time-wasting. Eventually she found a helpful customs person who told her where to go, and as I walked towards the gate she went downstairs (back through customs, or the bag-check thingy anyway) to work it out. The plane was boarding and she came zipping along just in time to join me at the end of the line – unfortunately having been told that she couldn’t claim the tax back until she left Paris in a month’s time.
The as we sat on the aeroplane I heard her say “Fuck” – not a good omen. She had left her mobile phone at customs! (That would explain why she didn’t reply to my last message…) She managed to convince the staff on board to let her run all the way back to the x-ray machines again, where they’d held her phone and got her to enter the PIN to prove it was hers. So all’s well that ends well I guess. Too much running around and stress for one tired day though.
At least the Cointreau at the airport was cheap!

When we got to London, as I think I’ve mentioned, it was COLD AND RAINY. And lo and behold, apart from some shortish periods of sunniness, so it has continued. We took the Heathrow Express in to Paddington – despite the �13 fare, worth it for the speed – and once we worked out that it was worth getting weekly transport passes, thence to Bayswater. I’ve always thought it strange that the station called Bayswater is halfway down the Queensway from the intersection with Bayswater Rd, while Queensway is on the corner of Queensway and Bayswater Rd… But anyway it’s lovely to be back in Bayswater (of course the station is named after the suburb, not the road), and the Royal Bayswater Hotel where we’re staying is up a considerable number of levels in quality from the places we stayed last time ;) Clean, decent bed, non-smelly bathroom (yep!), all good. And we got a room on the back-side, so we avoid the traffic noise from Bayswater Rd (at the expense, perhaps, of a view of Hyde Park).

Queensway is a great street, with heaps of good ethnic eating – probably as good a street for food as you can find in London, English understanding of gastronomy being what it is. Not only are there plenty of good Chinese restaurants (at least three of which have ducks and roast pork and Char Siu hanging in the windows) but there are also plenty of Lebanese places, foremost of which is the Fakhreldine Express, from which, last time I stayed here, I would get za’atar pide and babaghanouj when we returned home late at night. We ate just that, along with a plate of marinated chillis and olives, for a late sort-of lunch on Sunday.
Later on, we took the tube to meet Ange’s friends Amy & Melissa, whom we hadn’t seen for ages (Amy’s been in London for about 18 months and Mel for maybe a year). We met at a Turkish restaurant across the road from the New Globe Theatre, where Amy had been seeing a play. Unfortunately Cannon Street is only open Monday-to-Friday, so we ended up a stop too far, but we crossed London Bridge and walked alongside the Thames, and only got there a little late. During the walk I tuned my mobile phone’s radio into 104.4MHz, which I recalled as the frequency for Resonance-FM, and listened to an American-accented guy, even more soft-spoken than myself, play great electronica, hip-hop and a bit of jungle, without once mentioning his name (despite playing quite a bit of his own music), nor giving out a call-sign until right at the end of his show [it was probably this]. Classic community radio, but great at that. Must listen again soon.
In the afternoon before we left I got a call from Mike Hurwood, one of my oldest bestest friends who’s been living in/around London for the last few years. He’s been back in Sydney a number of times but this will be the first time I get to see him in the UK (and the last, as I think he’s actually returning at the end of the year). So many meetings with (sortof) long-lost friends, and indeed a number of meetings with friends never-met in person coming up too.

Monday was our first full day in London. Ange is staying here for over a week after I leave still, but I only have 5 days, so I had to decide what I wanted to see first. In the end it seemed easiest to walk down Bayswater Rd to Notting Hill Gate, and there we visited the myriad weirdly-specialised Music & Video Exchanges. I found a couple of vinyl things I’d been looking for (the Sia promo with Four Tet and Ulrich Schnauss mixes), and a few worthwhile CD and comic purchases (more Langridge!) before we started the lovely walk up Portobello Rd, past numerous cute boutique shops that Ange browsed (scarves for between �50 & �110, anyone?) and ended up at the famous Rough Trade Shop on Talbot Rd. I knew I’d find some good stuff there, but it was a bit of a shock to the system as I just pulled off item after item that had been sitting on my list since before the US… Ange pulled out a Four Tet split 12″ I thought I’d never see, and my selection piled up scarily. Rough Trade have a slightly bizarre classification scheme, so I ended up browsing through pretty much everything. They also let you listen to vinyl and CDs (unlike most New York stores, at least as far as CDs go, and similarly with the main London ones) and the guy behind the counter pulled out a bunch of other stuff with a “so have you heard this, then?” My sort of place.
I did whittle things down a bit with a listen, but still ended up with a few things I hadn’t known about (Fennesz remixing the Junior Boys? Beautiful!) So I was practically music-purchased out within half a day in London…
Still having plenty of time left, we decided to head on into town for a bit. Easier said than done: Closest tube is Ladbroke Grove, on the “Hammersmith and Shitty Line”, as it’s still known as. This time we were informed that “due to a person under a train at Great Portland Street, Eastbound trains will be terminating at Edgware Road”. I can’t say how many times during the day we were informed about the “person under a train”… In any case, we got off at Edgware and it was of course raining. Eventually someone told us to catch a bus, and we hopped off at Regent St, walked to Piccadilly, and took the tube to Covent Garden, where we had a decent enough but expensive jacket potato and then visited the Neal’s Yard Rough Trade.

There I must leave you, as we’re about to head off to have an Indian dinner with John Chantler. More about the rest of our first huge day in London, and the rest, will come, er, soonish? Hope you’re all well! Gimme a comment if you’re reading and feel inclined. Going home in a couple of days now, so maybe one more entry before I return – we’ll see!

Wednesday, 23rd of June, 2004

Last night I left off diarising upon our departure for Barcelona. On our arrival one thing was immediately noticeable: It was hot. Damn hot. We got a map of the city and were told that we could get a T-10 (10 metro trips) for only €6. Armed with these, we headed off to catch the train into town. Strangely, the music they played on the train in was Beethoven’s 5th. Not quite sure what they were trying to say with that.
A change to the metro system later, we arrived at Camp de L’Arpa station and found our apartment only a couple of blocks down from the main road, past a nice-looking patisserie and fruit shop. In fine European style the woman who was waiting to greet us had been smoking – but fortunately there wasn’t much of a smell. The place was very pleasant; a tiny kitchen and small (but perfectly fine) bathroom, with a separate bedroom and a sofa-bed in the living room. Dale Harrison (illustrious bass player in the Herd & Bass Elefant, who I’ve known since I started Uni) had emailed the previous week, having decided rather late to head over to Sónar. He’d been having hassles finding accommodation and wondered if we had space for him. This was no problem at all, so when he checked out from his crappy hotel the following day we shared with him for two nights.

Dale joining us was also convenient as we had inadvertently bought an extra two tickets for the Thursday night concert at L’Auditori. After settling in and buying some fruit (and a very pungent chorizo sausage), we discovered we had very little time to get back into town, pick up our Sónar Pro passes and then head over to L’Auditori. The concert started at 7:30pm and the office for passes closed at 8:30, so we had to get our passes first. I had a vague idea that Catalunya was the right station for the main Sónar area, so we got off the Metro there, and proceeded to get rather lost. I think that after New York’s grid and Amsterdam’s bicycle-wheel, the weird angles and even weirder street nomenclature of Barcelona confused us somewhat.

We thus arrived even more hot and sweaty than necessary at the Sónar office to pick up our “accreditations”. Passports were examined, numbers given out, digital photos taken, and almost immediately we had lovely new laminated Sónar Pro accreditation passes to hang around our necks. We were handed rather spiffy vinyl bags full of useless junk (and some useful non-junk, I hasten to add), picked up the English-language program paper thing, and attempted to find our way to L’Auditori. This proved far less difficult than I’d imagined, with some inspired guessing. We also glimpsed our first piece of bizarre architecture – a new phallic object, mostly finished, a few blocks away. Clearly not a Gaudi, but perhaps a contemporary version thereof.
Luckily Dale had been running late too. We waited and were let in after the first number (although maybe it was the second?)
The concert consisted of various electronic artists performing alongside a symphony orchestra. The first we saw was Ryuichi Sakamoto, who didn’t seem to do much except create occasional frequency sweeps. The orchestra played some stock-standard classical stuff, which didn’t seem to do much for the collaboration either. Perhaps the mixing wasn’t up to scratch.
Following him, we got Pan Sonic doing a piece of theirs, beautifully orchestrated by, er, someone. Their breed of minimal electronic breaks and slowly evolving tones worked wonderfully with exclamations from the brass and shimmers from the strings, although the percussion section didn’t always seem to be perfectly in time. Although the dialogue here was pre-prepared, this seemed to be the most successful collaboration.
Last, after Pan Sonic, was Fennesz. The two orchestra pieces chosen for (by?) him were more suited for this kind of thing than Sakamoto’s – first something by (I presume) a contemporary Spanish composer (somebody Torres?) and then a John Adams piece (minimalist composer, same vintage as Steve Reich etc). Fennesz’s contributions seemed more interesting than Sakamoto’s, with his trademark digital grunge, and some nice delay-line effects audible during orchestral pauses.

Following this concert, we all headed back to the Sónar by Day site to see Megadebt perform. This collective are associated with Beta Bodega in Miami, and do a sort of political electronica, bits of breakcore, weird effects courtesy of Otto Von Schirach and friends… It was interesting but suffered from sound restrictions that made a bit of a mockery of the more fierce bits, as our host Ed kept pointing out with much enthusiastic swearing ;)
Dale took us to a good area for dinner, and we confirmed that the only place in the world that can’t do a decent pizza is New Zealand (thanks for pointing that out, Ange!)

Next day, Dale moved in in the morning, and we then headed in to check out the city. First stop, Diagonal, where Ange wanted to look in a Camper store (cute Spanish shoes, kids!) Then we walked all the way down the Ramblas to the water, and then through the narrow winding streets of the Barrio Gotic, where I stumbled upon a tiny clothing store that included a table-full’s worth of boutique electronica shop. Stumbling became more than just a metaphor as the heat combined with my already less-than-happy foot situation, and it was with relief that we sat down for a lunch of — none other than schawarma pita! Who could’ve guessed? The schawarma here was ok, but they had marinated chillis, reasonable tahini (called “sesame” in Spanish) and a great chilli sauce which we dunked our chips in. Nice one.
Oh – and don’t let me forget the wonderful gelati from Dino’s – particularly good were the Dutch Chocolate and the Banana, in this blogger’s less-than-humble opinion (who needs to be humble about taste in ice-cream anyway?)

Next, we headed over to Sónar by Day to see Nobody and Prefuse 73, both DJing despite Nobody being billed as live. Then we went over to Sónar Complex to take in Maja Ratkje’s extraordinary vocal inflections – much more impressive live than the recordings I’ve heard. Later stuff in the same Rune Grammofon showcase seemed interesting, but the last thing I was going to do was miss Drop The Lime! This boy can perform, and with programming that’s like Venetian Snares without the odd time signatures, plus rude-bwoy-punk antics on stage and mic, this was a definite highlight. About 20 minutes in, he told us he was up to his last song. Doily (from Brøklyn Beats) kept on getting him to play more, though, so we ended up with a full set. He chucked some 12″s and one CD into the audience, but I didn’t manage to teleport myself to the right spot in time (as he said, some people got sleeves, some people got records – hmm). Unfortunately Sónar made no effort whatsoever to make it easy to get artists’ releases, and I didn’t run into the guy after his gig, so I’ll have to settle for the 12″ and 7″ I have (plus some mp3s) for now. Expect to hear more on UFog upon my return.
Oh, and I spied Jace Clayton (aka DJ /rupture) standing behind me looking very amused, but when I turned round again to have a chat he’d gone. His pass said he was with Criterion (ie Brøklyn Beats) but he lives in Barcelona these days anyway I believe…

After DTL it was time to go back to Sónar Village (by the way, all these stages are in one area, much like a Big Day Out only more compact [and profuse thanks to Seb for recommending Sónar Pro passes - the queues for the plebs looked insane!]) where the Lex Records showcase was happening. Boom Bip DJed some excellent selections – bits of Steve Reich mixed with tweeting birds, etc. As we awaited Hymie’s Basement, it became apparent that only one guy was on stage. It turned out for some reason or other Why? couldn’t make it, so we got basically a Fog set, with a couple of Hymie’s songs dropped in – no bad thing, mind you. Fog is a bit of a lunatic, and put together a great set with bizarre sampler-created backings, and songs on piano, acoustic guitar and vocals.
Afterwards, Ange & I wandered for a ridiculously long time around the Rambla, trying to find something to eat (having been told not eat on La Rambla itself). Eventually, just as we were about to give up (not sure what that means – we had no intention of missing dinner. Um) we found a place that seemed half-decent, doing paella that looked ok. I had a chicken and veges one, neatly avoiding the seafood/fish issue, and Ange had something seafood. It was ok, pretty much – nothing great. Our waitress was initially surly, but not unhelpful.

On Saturday morning Dale had decided that his cooking skills must not go to waste, so after getting supplies, he cooked up a smashing breakfast that can only be described as a “Spanish omelette”: fried up chorizo sausage, spring onion and other delicacies with egg, very tasty indeed.
After brekkie, Ange & I headed two stops down the track to the rather amazing Sagrada Familia, which dazzled considerably more in person than in photographs – particularly the opposite side from the train station. We didn’t have any music to see till about 6pm, so we wandered the city. I had found out the day before that I could take my laptop in and plug it into a network cable in the Pro area @ Sónar, so I did that, after which we dropped the laptop home and then wandered town some more, taking in a whole bunch of record stores (particularly the awesome cd.drome) and more Camper stores etc… Ange discovered that the range wasn’t that big because it was summer-sandal season, and thus didn’t decide on anything until we went back up to Diagonal.

Funny black shoes with bizarrely unmatching designs on each foot later, we dropped back to the hotel and then headed back into town – only somewhere in the middle of all this it had started RAINING. Well no – not raining. POURING. This is clearly unheard-of in Barcelona at this time of year, and consequently there was no preparation whatsoever for this eventuality. The Pro area was crowded to bursting, simply because it was undercover, and fans of Max Tundra (second artist in the Domino showcase going on out at the Sónar Village, just inside the main area from Sónar Pro) were getting summarily soaked. Nonetheless the Tundra (Ben Jacobs, here joined by his sister on vocals) put in a sterling effort, and when we ventured out at the end of his set it was positively bopping along.
We had to go back undercover after him though, and sometime during To Roccoco Rot’s set we discovered that they weren’t really playing after all – the stage had been flooded and everything was being packed away.

And there I must leave you, as this store is being closed in one minute. I’ll have to finish tomorrow, maybe first thing if I get my act together. The suspense must be killing you – how can Four Tet play his set when the stage is being covered in tarps and the electricals being removed? Tune in very soon!

Tuesday, 22nd of June, 2004

So… We’ve made it to London, and it’s rainy and cold – what a surprise ;)
Strangely though, the weather apparently was beautiful until we arrived. *sigh* Hopefully it’ll improve, although weather reports claim it’ll rain until Friday. I don’t mind cold rather than hot weather (walking around in hot weather, as you’ll have gathered from my previous post, does not agree with me…) but when it’s cold(ish), they heat the insides of everywhere, so it’s nonstop on-and-off with jumper, and I get sweaty anyway. Fun.
Another disappointment: Cory Doctorow is giving a talk in London on “Nerd Determinism, Nerd Fatalism, and the Copyfight” – next Monday. And I go back home on Friday. Oh well.

Housekeeping: please note there are some additional bits in red in the last Tour Diary entry – stuff I forgot to include before…

Where did I leave off? Just before the last day in New York, I do believe! Last day in New York, we had a plane to catch at 6pm or something, so had some time (leaving our luggage @ the lobby) to look around a bit. To our disappointment, the Museum of Modern Art (which I haven’t been to) is closed on Monday – trust us not to find out until we’d already decided to do museums then! So we wandered up to the Guggenheim. Always great to visit it simply because it’s a beautiful piece of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. Good stuff there, then we walked through Central Park, and ended up having lunch at the same diner we breakfasted at on our first day…

The train out to JFK a reasonably uncomplicated affair, and not hugely expensive. You take the subway out to Howard Beach or something, and then catch the airport train to the airport. Bizarrely, the latter thing is a two-carriage train without any driver at all. Nor any staff on it. Completely automatic. Presumably they’re so precisely timed that they just go round and round, like toy train sets. Wheee!
Once at the airport, Ange wanted to look for some sort of universal power adapter for the MiniDisc player she’d bought – and none were to be found! Clearly more US isolationism at work, methinks…
There were annoying American kids on our flight, but other than that everything seemed ok. Due to time-zone changes between the US and Europe, we ended up losing basically the entire night for flying…

We got to Dublin airport and nobody on our Aer Lingus flight told us what to do about transfers. The line for customs was rather long, and our connecting flight was perilously close. We dashed off as soon as we could, round and up and across through the terrorist-check, and arrived just in time to see the stairway being pulled away from the plane. “We didn’t think you’d make it in time”. Well thanks.
On zipping back down to the baggage claim we discovered the transfers desk, where the girls were extraordinarily helpful. They told us our baggage wouldn’t have made that plane anyway, and put us on the next flight to Amsterdam – 3 hours hence. We got �6.50 breakfast vouchers and headed off to wait. Awesome upshot of this: They have free WiFi at Dublin airport! So Peter’s internet-addiction was fed nicely, and the time was used well.

Once we arrived in Amsterdam, it was an easy hop onto the train to Amsterdam-Centraal, and thence on a tram down to our hotel, the Quentin Hotel – a cute little place around the corner from the Leidseplein that FourPlay stayed at on our last European tour. Despite having left my Amsterdam map at home, I was proud to work out where we were going. Mostly my remembered mental map of Amsterdam was on-target.

Amsterdam’s a beautiful place, and even though it was hardly warm after the US, it was very pleasant to be there. Ange was enchanted straight away, and decided we could move there sometime *chuckle* – and its easy-going nature, combined with all the fabulous old streets/canals/buildings made an immediate impact compared to America. The overall feeling was “Why does the US think it’s so great?” Annnnyway.
Our hotel room was absolutely tiny, but still very cute and perfectly comfortable. Although my feet were aching (and didn’t stop aching – better now in London, although not 100%), we just had to wander the streets. After all the delays, we had less than half a day left, but Wednesday was to be our only full day in Amsterdam. I decided we’d go looking for Lambiek, a very cool comics shop/gallery and compulsory place of visitation in Amsterdam. I’d forgotten my map though (remember?), and we thus trooped along Prinsengracht for, well, some time before I decided it definitely wasn’t right.
Heading up the perpendicular street (if that makes sense, given A’dam’s amazing concentric-circular layout) we stumbled upon a very cool record store, Get Records – which I don’t think existed when I was last there. Perhaps I was just ignorant. We immediately discovered just how cheap US CDs are… At near �20 per CD with an exchange rate of about double for AUD$, most albums were just priced right out of our range, despite Get having a wonderful selection. I bought the new Shadow Huntaz EP and the guy behind the desk commented that I was an Australian with great taste in music ;) We asked him where Lambiek was an discovered I’d been one street out – it was on the non-canal street that goes around just inside Prinsengracht’s “orbit”.
Lambiek’s main shop is being renovated (it truly looks like it’s going to cave in, although many of Amsterdam’s buildings have looked like that for decades I’m sure), so it was confusingly on the other side of the road, and in smaller premises. Still quite a good lot of stuff, but very little artwork on display. I found a few old comics and we headed on. I found the internet caf� that I referred to in my 1999 Tour Diary (back when it was called Internet Caf�, much to my amusement) and we had some great cheap internet and a strong hot chocolate… or was it pear juice? These details are what make my tour diaries, um… suck, I think. Anyway.

Exhaustion set in, and we ended up having delicious schawarma pita with marinated chillis and endless salad from one of the places up from the Leidseplein – a meal that was in fact my staple diet on previous visits to the ‘Dam. Our New York schawarma was probably better, but lacked the essential chillis and cabbage an’ all.
Next day, more of the same. We visited the Van Gogh museum, which was fun (especially some of his contemporaries, Fauvists and the like). We walked and walked, looked around the Jordaan and found very little, ate more schawarma… Ended up having Thai for dinner, with an Australian Thai waitress.

I organised with Al Reynolds to meet up with him at Schiphol Airport on the Thursday, as it’s quite near to where he lives, about an hour before we had to go through customs for our flight to Barcelona. So we headed up in the morning to Centraal station, and tried to find the platform for the Schiphol train. After some waiting we discovered that the train on the platform wasn’t going to the airport – and nor was the next one when we changed platforms! On inquiring, we were informed that there were no trains going to Schiphol, because of some electrical fault somewhere, and we’d have to take a train to some other station and change there for the airport. Time was running out fast, and I was getting increasingly jittery as we waited for the first train, then got off and waited for the other train in god-knows-where, Netherlands (actually not far out, but anyway). By the time we got to the meeting point our appointed (haha) hour with Alastair was long gone, and I couldn’t find him anywhere there. We checked in upstairs and headed back down, but the time was gone (he had a meeting he had to get to in the arvo). So I missed out on meeting one of my fave sf authors. See the Cory Doctorow note above for more vexing sf scheduling… in addition, the timing change (to June) that made it possible for us to go to Sónar (which I don’t regret for a minute) meant that I couldn’t find a way to fit in a visit to Edinburgh and a meeting with Charlie Stross. Oh well. Next time.

And I think I’ll leave it there for now. Next time (hopefully tomorrow), I’ll give a full review of our Barcelona/Sónar experiences, including a storming set from Drop The Lime, the awesomely awesome Four Tet and the ever-charming Kid Koala…

Monday, 14th of June, 2004

Well here it is, finally – what you’ve all been waiting for! The first post in my weblog tour diary. We got to New York after Boston and I couldn’t get the internet in the room to work – ended up finding out it was my fault with some squirreled-away networking setting… However, it’s running painfully slowly, so I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get this blog entry going… Slow and annoying! Bloody NYC.

So after staying up for the usual Utility Fog show, we got up bright and early on Monday to finish stuffing things in bags, and then it was off to the airport! Ange realised half-way along the way that she couldn’t find her earphones – and assuming that they were probably on my bed or something, she got some new ones at the airport. Then Dad emailed a couple of days ago saying that Mum had found them – on the floor of her car! Oops, hope that’s not the story of our trip…

During the flight, I read Max Barry’s extremely excellent Jennifer Government from cover to cover. I’d forgotten how looooooooong, well… long flights are! The first leg was something like 12 hours, and by half-way to Los Angeles I was entirely ready for it to be over. But despite having the sniffles and dry eyes and all, I could tell already that my hayfever and crappiness was abating. Once we reached the ridiculously hot weather in the east coast, it pretty much disappeared straight away!
But… we’re not there yet! First, we have to traverse the madness that is US Customs.
Actually – it wasn’t that mad, in and of itself. But the queuing! Yargh. You walk down from the gate, under smiling photos of Dubya and Dick, and you hit the boustrophedon from hell… About an hour later, we reach the front of the queue. Unfortunately, because we’re not married, Ange & I have to go through customs separately. Then the guy I get says “are you travelling on your own?” …Uh, no I’m with ‘er (*gestures across to counter where Ange is*)
But wait! That’s not all! Then after picking up our luggage, it’s queue-time again! By now, as we wait (im)patiently to walk past a bored customs dude, we’re getting worried that we’ll miss our connection to Boston… After getting past the guy (”Do you have any food with you?” Um… Chocolate. “That’s fine. No vegemite? Disgusting stuff.” Sadly not.), we give our luggage to the people because it’s been checked through to Boston (Ange did spend the whole trip to Boston worrying whether our luggage was indeed coming with us) and up two levels and across, only to find ourselves queuing again – this time to put our bits of metal and bags through the detector-thingies. Present boarding passes and passports yet again. Then finally through, with a small amount of time to find some snackies, and then on board our much smaller plane to Boston.

By this time I was completely exhaustopated. I tried to read on the flight (another 6 hours!) but ended up dozing/sleeping (slept through whatever meal they tried to feed us, thankfully) and feeeling all yucky. We reached Boston, and “deplaning” was much easier this time. We found our way to the shuttle bus that took us to the trains, and thence all the way into Cambridge – for a mere $1.25! Walking down to the B&B from Central Square station I noticed that we passed the Middle East Club, where we were going to see Greg Davis the next night – yay! So we’re not staying in the middle of nowhere after all. Actually, I knew that, but what’s wrong with a bit of melodrama?

The B&B was really lovely. Owned by a chap named Marc Shulman and his wife Patty – and the latter also runs a bar called the All Asia Caf� just down the road, the upshot being that at breakfast time she brings Yum Cha containers with sliced-up shallot pancake, fried dumplings, spring rolls etc – yum! In our room was a network connection, resulting in instant cable internet. Small but comfortable, and well-situated. So we went off to have our first US meal, and it was late, so we ended up with pizza. Our first run-in with what was to become an inevitability in the USA: They just eat so fucking much! Admittedly, we ordered a large pizza, because the options were “small” and “large”. Turns out small was 12″, and large was 16″ – and I can tell you, we were not up to eating a whole 16 inches of pizza as well as garlic bread.
Nice though.

Next day, we decided we’d explore Cambridge – the opposite side of the Charles River from Boston proper, and the bit of Boston where MIT, Harvard, Tufts, and a bunch of other Universities reside. Lovely area – one thing we noticed, bizarrely, was that all the cars seemed dead keen to stop in the middle of the road, whenever a pedestrian so much as looked in the direction of crossing… (Later note:) Keith-Hrvatski mentioned later that he feels that Bostonians are like that to differentiate themselves from New Yorkers, who he believes do their level best to actually run people over at all opportunities. On reaching New York, we found ourselves unable to disagree with this assessment.
In Central Square (the area where we were staying, north part of MIT-land basically), we found some 2nd-hand record stores (with nothing of interest) and a great 2nd-hand bookshop (where I found a huge lot of old Asimov’s science fiction magazines, including the one with Pat Cadigan’s short story after which Pretty Boy Crossover named themselves).
Up further north-west we got to Harvard Square, a big mostly-independent shopping area around Harvard Uni. There we found Pandemonium Books (a reasonably disappointing sf/fantasy specialist), the Harvard Square branch of Newbury Comics (about which more in a minute), and Million Year Picnic (an excellent comics shop). Newbury Comics are a chain which started as a comics store, but these days have precious little picture-books, specialising more in very reasonably priced CDs – and a pretty good range too! Ange & I both spent up there, and I also picked up the wonderful new Chris Ware-edited volume of the McSweeneys hardcover periodical.

For lunch we ate at the Middle East, having decided already to have Asian for dinner. Once again we failed to deal with insane US food quantities, but it was all very yummy, including some bizarre grated fetta cheese in a bowl, great falafel, some sort of pickled radishes, etc etc.
What I’ve forgotten to mention thus far was how ridiculously hot it was. Only the following day managed to trump it, but exhausted as we were, we headed back to the B&B to rest our legs & feet, and then headed out a little later to check out the MIT Museum. We walked down Mass Ave almost all the way to the river, and having not found it decided to check the MIT map. There it was, and when I thought about it I realised that it was actually literally around the corner from where we were staying. *sigh* Lots of fun though, silly gadgets and bits of robots and interactive sculptures and exhibits.

Later that night, as previously mentioned, it was Greg Davis live @ the Middle East. As I half-expected, while we waited for the music to start, none other than Keith Fullerton Whitman aka Hrvatski walked in. Keith was putting Greg up while he was in town (one of the reasons Ange & I couldn’t stay with him), and we had a good chat before & during the gig. Greg played some lovely droney stuff in preparation for his up-coming release on Kranky, reminiscent of Keith’s work for that label: one piece derived from live electric guitar, the other from mouth harmonica (and very cool too!) Met Greg afterwards, who is coming to Australia later this year for Sound Summit. Keith gave me his cell-phone number and said to call him the next day, as he was dropping Greg off at the airport in the morning.

Next day we walked across the Charles River and explored Newbury St – including the original Newbury Comics and various other fairly up-market places along that street. We then walked through Boston Common, got some utterly horrible cherry snow-cone thing that I couldn’t eat, observed a mobile post office in action (bizarre!) and then took the subway back to Harvard Square. I rang Keith along the way, and he met us in the middle of the square, sweating our butts off as the Americans might say. I twice heard the phrase “Hot enough for ya?” and twice stopped myself saying “It’s too fucking hot for me, and that’s what you mean isn’t it? Crazy Americanos!”
Anyway. Keith took us for a walk and showed me where Twisted Village is (experimental record store like Synaesthesia only moreso)… We then went and got excellent sandwiches at a deli and munched them with Keith in a park by the river. Altogether a lovely afternoon, and I’m glad I bumped into Mr Hrvatski.
My only regret is that I forgot about Comicopia, which by all accounts is a great place.

We then headed off to the airport (drag suitcase, laptop on back… catch three different trains and a shuttle bus, but it only costs USD$1.25 and it’s pretty quick, so worth it!) Got off the shuttle at the American Airlines spot, only to be told when we got to the front of the queue that our flight was operated by American Eagle, back down the way. Luckily easily walkable, checked in immediately, and then walked through to the gate, which turned out to be one big area like Brisbane airport, only crappier. And we waited, and waited… La Guardia was having some weird weather-related delays, and even once we boarded the tiny plane (two seats on the right, one on the left, about 15 rows max), the pilot told us we were on and off for another half hour before we got going. *yawn*
Got to New York to stifling heat and it took us another age to get to the place. The apartment isn’t too bad, with no character to speak of but good air-conditioning, a stereo, and a perfectly reasonable bed. However, the internet sucks. After many calls to the managers of the property and Time-Warner Cable, I ascertained that there IS some kind of problem in the wiring and there’s bugger all we can do. So flakey cable it is, slower than modem except when it wants to pop something through. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try and actually get the WiFi card working somewhere – last day!

What happened in New York? Oh, the usual. Insane drivers trying to kill you, pedestrians same (hm), lots of great shops, etc. On the first night we were forced (yes, true!) to eat McDonalds, because nothing else was open up here… First day we wandered down Broadway, stopping at the amazing Strand Books (now 16 miles of books!) and Barnes & Noble, and then St Mark’s Place (more books, and Mondo Kim’s, an annoying but great record store) and then to Other Music – surely New York’s best record store. Across the road from Other Music is the Tower Records store, and in the middle is a lobby with an elevator which we took up to a little studio where none other than Greta Gertler was mixing the by now rather old second Peccadillo album. It was pretty bizarre listening to cello parts I’d recorded probably some 6 years ago or more. But it’s sounding great – can’t wait to hear it all and do a remix too :)

We headed on into Greenwich Village – an area Ange hadn’t seen before – and found there a schawarma/falafel joint I remembered from the last couple of visits to New York. Mmmmmmmm delicious! We ended up lunching there three days in a row… Did I forget to mention the breakfast we had though? At a diner just down from Strand Books, we ate French toast with bacon (and I had poached eggs too – decadent!) We asked especially for no syrup of any sort – what is it with these Americans having bacon AND maple syrup?) but the French toast nevertheless was dusted with icing sugar. Bizarre. The bacon was the best I’ve had in a long time though.
Annnyway. Food. So.
Oh! Forgot: Thursday evening we ended up wandering round the Lower East side, and found the seminal NY drum’n'bass store Breakbeat Science. They had a tiny breakcore section in which I found a CDATAKILL 12″ I’ve been looking for for ages – won’t get to hear it till I get home, but what the heck – it has his Billy Holiday “remix” on it…

Friday we wandered around uptown in the morning (Midtown Comics isn’t that great, but Jim Hanley’s fucking rules), we headed down to East Village in the afternoon, dropped by a (very) new (and very cute) gallery/shop called Jigsaw where Ange bought some funny little works of art, and visited such important places as alt.coffee (best hot chocolate on Manhattan) and so on. Checking my email there I discovered that tickets to the Funkstörung/Datach’i gig that night were available from a store called Etherea right on Avenue A! So we headed a couple of blocks down to that very place, and what an awesome little store it is too! Right up there with Other Music, with a great selection of idm and other electronica, as well as heaps of excellent indie. My kind of place.
Unfortunately though, that night we were so damn tired that we were falling asleep at the club. I was excited to see the Datach’i man, but we waited until 11pm and he hadn’t come on, so I decided he must’ve been just DJing instead – they’d been playing lots of great old idm and drill’n'bass, so that was fun anyway. Having seen a very disappointing Funkstörung set in Sydney a little while back, and despite loving them at the Knitting Factory in 1999 (bizarre coincidence to be in NY same time as them again!), we decided we were dropping fast, and headed home.

On Saturday we wandered uptown a bit more, and found a market in Union Square where they had wondrous fresh veges and fruit, and I couldn’t get the WiFi on my laptop to work (maybe my fault, maybe not…) Then it was off to Brooklyn to meet up with Gretskaya. Greta showed us around her neighbourhood (neither of us had been to Brooklyn before) and took us up to the park for a bit. We had dinner in Chinatown (which is sortof to New York as New York is to the rest of the world, in terms of mad people and traffic at least)…

And that brings us, roundabout and up and down, to today. What did we do? I’m not sure I can remember. Um.
That’s right! It’s a Sunday. Went back to Other Music, but it was closed until midday. Headed down Broadway, looked at SoHo and suchlike, found funny arty bookshop where Ange got funny arty postcards… Very rock record store next door, didn’t get anything. Trudged back up along Broadway, tried to go to the loo at Barnes & Noble but it was being slowly cleaned (and why can’t I find Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others ANYWHERE in the USA?), so we popped back into Kim’s to dredge through all the second-hand. Found a couple of good things there, trudged all the way across to schawarmaSCHAWARMAYUMMMMM (via ice-cold cup of watermelon from a street market), and then back uptown.
Uptown. That’s right. Ran into some fucking huge fucking Puerto Rican rally going on up 5th Avenue. Hell to cross it, and the avenues either side were full of the spill-off from it. Sheer madness.

Some observations: Americans take their pollution very seriously. Exhibit A: First US plane we take, American Airlines from LA to Boston, and the AA magazine has a huge spread about what car to buy (just make sure it’s the size of a tank – they had them classified according to your rank in society, even including “Environmental activist” or something, wot a laff). And the cars are uniformly huge gas guzzlers. If you ride a motorbike (or indeed drive a car), you MUST rev then engine so as to accelerate climate change that bit more. Which brings us to Exibit B: Noise pollution. Stick your boom-box on the handle-bars of your pushbike… Turn up the bass in your car (if you’re black, this is compulsory apparently)… Talk loudly, all the time. And definitely, while in New York, honk your horn NON STOP. Exhibit C: The smells, the smells! On every corner, those damn street food vendors. They’re always out, so they never get cleaned I think, and the smoke issuing from them is chemically potent. Then some young gun in a sports car screams round the corner and the air is filled with noxious carbon-monoxide-and-god-knows-what-else fumes for all the pedestrians to breathe in joyously.
However, smoking seems quite un-hip, unless you’re ethnic or a poseur. So, back to the Puerto-Rican rally. LOTS of smokers, lots of revving of car engines and tooting of horns, lots of black dudes and dudettes with bit white t-shirts, girls stuffing themselves into tiny skirts (why is this? Especially if you have a fat ass – it’s ugly girls, get with it)… Oh what fun!

I have blisters on my feet (but then I do have the flattest feet ever) and I’m still dog-tired, and we have a plane flight that, along with the time difference, means we get no real Monday night tomorrow… I have lots of great new music and some great books (including Tony Daniel’s latest, Superluminal – finally!) and a few comics… I can’t wait for Amsterdam.
Not sure I’ll have ANY laptop-assisted net access any more. Hopefully here and there, but I’ll try and blog from internet caf�s otherwise. You’ll be hearing from me! Make a comment if you’re in the mood, or write. We’re missing you all!

Saturday, 5th of June, 2004

Ken Macleod is a very funny man. I’ve almost finished Newton’s Wake, his new standalone space opera (so it declares itself, and you can see the glint in the guy’s eye as he wrote that…) Dedicated, by the way, to Charlie and Feòrag, it turns out that it’s about the only thing to come close to Charlie’s own Singularity Sky in terms of its approach to the subject matter. There’s also what seems to be a hugely entertaining homage to Alastair Reynolds, involving the retrieval of an advanced artefact from a very difficult place under farcically extreme conditions…

Newton’s Wake is Macleod doing the New Space Opera in his own Macleodian terms. It’s set after a “Hard Rapture”, in which the military AIs of the American industrial complex undergo a Singularity, and decimate the human population of the solar system before disappearing off into a posthuman never-never land over yon horizon, leaving mysterious artefacts for the various human factions to use, reverse engineer or ignore as is their wont. As usual there are communists and libertarians of sorts, there’s a Utopian post-scarcity society, and there are Scots in space.
These particular Scots are ruled over by a clan of Glaswegian gangsters (the “bloody Carlyles”), except that because of the combined technologies of life-extension and mind-backing-up, people from wildly separated generations can co-exist. Two woeful Glaswegian folk singers from the time of rebellion against the machines are resurrected among all this, while post-human artefacts on the world of Eurydice (until recently unknowing that there is a galaxy of other human survivors out there) are about to create a new world order (so to speak)…

Other factions include the Knights of Enlightenment (who study post-human technology and work a lot of it out, but eschew any use of technology such as backups on themselves, preferring yoga and Zen-like self-control to keep from ageing) and the DK (Demokratische Kommunistbund? Democratic Korea? They’re communists who believe in self-sufficiency), as well as America Offline, who worship “Jesus Koresh”!

There are heaps of hilarious throwaway lines (including one about Microsoft patches), many of which turn out to be serious plot points later on… But despite being a little while away from the finish still, I just had sit down and write out this quote, describing what happens when you try to experiment on post-humans in a virtual environment:

The uploads replicate and develop relationships. Most of them go very bad. You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God.

So it’s vintage Macleod, but for once I don’t feel awkward about this singular ethics. He’s got sympathetic post-humans and even AIs, and his way of showing every viewpoint possible has really come to the fore here. This may seem like a throwaway joke space opera, but in some ways it’s the best Macleod yet, a must-read for anyone interested in the vanguard of contemporary sf.

Friday, 4th of June, 2004

Sometimes, I listen to the radio, and I wonder… who is the person behind that voice I hear?
I mean, who the hell do they think they are?

Well… Strangely enough, this is going to be associated with how I, like, have a radio show isn’t it?
Yep!
So mosey on over to the FBi site and check out the new presenter profiles. You can even read the demented ramblings of yours truly. Scary eh?

Thursday, 3rd of June, 2004

Trying to see how this trackback thing works! Graham had, er, nothing to say earlier today, so I’m trying to trackback to him. I too have nothing to say. Right now.

So… how does PingBack differ from Trackback?

LIARS.
Well, I know. The cliché tells us that all politicians are liars. Well, few are more consummate liars than the Howard Government and the Bush Administration. The always astute Margo Kingston has a smasher of an article explaining the extent to which the Howard Government must have lied to us to protect America (and thus America’s own lies).
I’ve missed the link now, but I really wanted to permanently enshrine that cover story on the Wednesday SMH, which was basically “Johnny Howard: It’s not my fault, honest!”
The fucker. He’s got to go down. They’ve all got to. Somebody call an election!

Wednesday, 2nd of June, 2004

It’s true! Stumblings has, all of a sudden, become a WordPress blog. Yes, it is basically because of the Movable Type debacle (I host five weblogs with three authors, and it just wasn’t going to be affordable – especially with it looking like a number more were coming).

But frankly, apart from that, WordPress is beautiful anyway. I moved Utility Fog over first, and it was so easy it’s not funny… So here’s Stumblings! Thanks to version 1.2 of WordPress, I’ve been able to keep my recent reading/listening reviews in the sidebar, and pretty much the look is still the same. Big list of monthly links over in the sidebar too…

The one thing I haven’t sorted out yet is the category archives – they’re only showing a few entries each for reading and listening. Not sure why, but I think the simplest solution is to create new template files for them instead of using some fancy-schmancy WordPress stuff – that’ll be easy to implement soon. I also hacked Nick Momrik’s recent-comments plugin to display my 5 last comments in the way I like.
And that’s the thing – WordPress is so nice because it’s all in php and if you like you can go and fiddle with stuff… Admittedly the documentation is… sparse, to say the least. But it’s not too hard to work out what does what, with help from google, WordPress’s support forums, and all those other people who been moving over and documenting their progress – hello Graham!

So, welcome to the new improved Stumblings. Take a seat, make yourself comfortable. I’m going overseas this coming Monday, so hopefully there’ll be exciting diary entries along the way – maybe I’ll even create a new “Tour Diary” category for them!