knee deep in static

I figured that I should resurrect the hate list - I kept one on my final year project blog and it at least kept me entertained in programming/dissertation purgetory.

So here it is! Ta-da!

…yeah.

Coughing then.

I’ve got some kind of virus, plague whatever and I keep coughing. Not enough to warrant running off to the chemist to get some sort of cough linctus yet and not enough to be painful, but just enough that it makes me feel sick.

It’s annoying to say the least. I can only think that if I just threw up, then the coughing wouldn’t be so bad - but I’m not coughing enough for that. Just ALMOST enough.

Augh.

“Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.” - Hyman Rickover

Peace One Day is an organisation initially set up to get a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, a “Peace Day”, recognised.

They decided that the best way to go about it would be to get the UN to do something and subsequently found that the UN already had one of these Peace Days, only… nothing really got done on this day. So stuff happened and eventually they got it ratified as this day of global ceasefire and non-violence and got it a fixed day rather than a vague third-tuesday-in-September,-but-maybe-we’ll-celebrate-early affair.

ANYWAY. They did it. And a documentary was made about it and broadcast on tv. Quite late at night. Which was when I caught the last two thirds of it when it was first broadcast, as I was uncharacteristically watching tv downstairs, late at night, rather than browsing the net in my room. I was fascinated, not just because it’s a really well-made and well-constructed documentary or because Jeremy Gilley is an infectiously driven dreamer-hero of the story, but because it’s a damn good idea.

A day of actual peace. Where children can be immunised without health workers fearing that they will be hurt. Where aid can be delivered to places that need it but are usually too difficult to get to. Where one person does not kill another person.

Because to achieve world peace, you have to start somewhere. And why not start with just one day.

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” - Thomas Edison

Over the last few years, I have been able to celebrate this global day of peace more, well, vocally I guess. Being a student, I always had plenty of time to get something sorted out. This year however, while I did manage to do something to strive towards peace, I didn’t have the time to be vocal about it or remind every body I knew that it was coming.

The tragedy of no longer being a student and having days full of… slacking between lectures. Stupid work.

Anyway, to remedy this, I have decided I am going to start early. In fact I am going to start planning now. This way I’ll have plenty of time between work, church, the two courses I am doing and whatever else life throws at me to get something done.

And hopefully, it’ll be nice and big and vocal and spread the world and encourage people who don’t know about Peace One Day or the day of global ceasefire and non-violence or all the good that gets done and CAN be done on such a day to celebrate it and DO something.

“An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.” - The Buddha

Peace One Day is a nice idea. However, if it is only an idea, it is worthless. An idea this vital, this important must be put into action. It is not enough to think about it and do nothing. Do something, even if all it is it telling someone else about it.

Lives depend on it.

“The other thing about this Wednesday is that it appears to have quite a serious hangover.

Alcohol…

Always seems like such a good idea at the time. The problem, of course, is that the brain that thinks it’s a good idea is one suffering from increasingly impaired judgment. You start the evening as a sophisticated gentleman, judiciously sipping a jaunty beer as you discuss the dominant cultural forces in seventeenth century Flanders, and next thing you know you’re dressed up like a nun and running around the town baying at the moon. Unless you started the evening as a nun, I guess, in which case maybe you wind up dressed as a writer. I don’t know. I’ll have to find a nun and ask her. Seems like a high mountain to climb right now, though.

On the upside, I got my week’s exercise done by standing up for the whole evening. So on balance I think I can feel pretty virtuous about the whole thing.”

- Michael Marshall Smith

It’s stuff like this that makes me wish he wrote stuff more often.

I was reading an interview with Keiron Gillen, the writer of Phonogram* and something was mentioned that I thought about and realised was probably one of those things that is true for nearly everyone. A life truth as it were. So… I have stolen it and made a new category for just these.

Of course, I’m not numbering them sequentially. That would be ridiculous.

Anyway, back to the point.

Chris Arrant: On a great tangent, one thing I found particularly interesting that happens both in comics and music is how a majority of people’s music and comic tastes in their older years is latched into the music of their teenage years. As with comics where we see a majority of the audience still holding out for the superheroics of the comics of their younger days, in music a large percentage of the average consumer-base continues to follow the musical acts of their teenage years. While people might veer outside their particular genre choices for the biggest hits of the day, they still call the tastes of their teenage years as their evergreen stomping grounds.

Kieron Gillen: God, there’s a lot of that in Phonogram. One things which pleased me - as it wasn’t something I was actively trying to write, as I think comics-as-commentary-on-comics-culture is so painfully overdone now - was how the whole defining yourself by your teenage loves is something that’s just as true in music and comic circles. Which is absolutely true - in fact, of all the pop art-forms, they’re the two which are most strongly polarised in that way. Films, TV, Games… you may have some of your tastes defined in terms of genre or whatever, but there’s always a constant consumption for new things which you may not always get in some people in Music or Comics.

On the topic of films and tv - I have always been a fan of science fiction. I probably always will be. It’s something I got into when I was about 3 or 4 and it’s something that will be difficult to shake off. Even before I was born, my cousins were trying to convince my parents to name me “Princess Leia”.

Music, however, is a bit different. While I will watch pretty much ANY sci-fi, I will not listen (and enjoy) ANY rock music. Or indie. Or hardcore. Or pop. Or whatever. I liked Blur AND Oasis, but never really got into Pulp back in the day. I was probably too young to really appreciate Pulp as a commentary on life at the time of BritPop, so all I was left with was the sound of the songs and… I just didn’t get into Pulp.

Ben Folds Five, I loved, I still love and will love for years to come. I heard one song by them when I was about 12 on Capital Radio and loved it, but didn’t know who the band were. Three months later, I heard a different song by them but this time managed to catch the band’s name and then proceeded to buy their back-catalogue. (I have a weird memory for stuff like that.) I can remember all the times I have heard them on the radio. I remember the heady heights of them hitting somewhere in the region of the Top 20 in the UK singles chart and then their subsequent appearance on Top of the Pops. Ben Folds on his own though, has never inspired the same devotion as Ben Folds with the other two guys, even though it is essentially exactly the same music. There is just something missing.

AFI are a big big love of mine and it makes me glad to think that there are now legions of teenagers who love them too and that they’re finally getting some of the attention that I thought they deserved back when I first got into them. And it only took them 15 years to get somewhere.

Silverchair, Feeder and Idlewild are probably the other three bands who I will listen to anything by. I may not have sat down and listened to them purposely for a long long time, but I know that if I fancy going to a gig (like I did back in April and then bought tickets for last week’s Silverchair gig) I can go and see them and I will enjoy the music.

While all my friends were beavering away at their GCSE art exams and I had two days off (being a scientist of course :)), I listened to the Manics entire repetoire of the time - on cassettes lent to me by one of my art GCSE-studying friends. In fact, I listened to it all on repeat for the entire two days while I mostly played minesweeper and solitaire on our old PC and marvelled that I hadn’t really listened to them before.

That one Cure song on the soundtrack to The Crow infected me with a love for the darker side of The Cure. Their less upbeat-sounding (regardless of the mood of the lyrics) songs.

I have a soft spot for 80s/early 90s pop music. Mostly Kylie, Jason Donovan, Rick Astley…anything I remember from TV when I was in primary school, as I didn’t listen to the radio then.

And finally “Echo Beach” by Martha and the Muffins. From the first album I bought which was a Best Summer Hits compilation.

And now? I like the Editors, but only really because they sound like Idlewild at the REM end of their spectrum. I don’t get the Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen or Amy Winehouse or Fall Out Boy or the Klaxons. I got into NIN late in the day from listening to AFI and the Cure and getting curious about AFI’s influences. I started dabbling in Soundgarden a bit from my listening to Silverchair.

Electric Six somehow combined the dark bits of AFI with a slightly seedy version of “Echo Beach”’s otherwordliness. Or at least they did with “Switzerland”.

It’s all music that reminds me of when I didn’t worry about anything. Not that I worry about anything now, but now I know that there are things that I could be worrying about, responsibilities, the future, stuff. Life was just easier. I was younger. I didn’t get tired like I do now. Life was golden and peppered with blissful ignorance.

“But before all that, before I spoke the way I do, thought the way I do, before I had all my scars, I was a child too. Hard to believe, but true.

Do you remember that? Do you remember being a child?

The answer is no, I’m afraid. You may think you can. But you can’t. All you can remember of those dim intense days are the bits that have helped to make you what you are now. Your remember the times when you felt alive, a few snapshots of special days and chance impressions, but those are a part of you anyway. You can’t remember the rest. You can’t remember actually being a child, when that was all you knew.

Except in Jeamland.

In Jeamland you can remember what it was like to be stupidly happy, when happiness wasn’t something you had to search for, when it knew where to find you by itself. ”
- Only Forward Michael Marshall Smith

That, in a way, is something of what the music from your early life and teenage years captures. The music you listened to then brings back the feeling of how easy it was to be happy then. And even if you were mopey and angsty and listened to the Smiths, listening to them again now gives the satisfying feeling that someone understands you on some level. In some way, it made you more content with life.

And memory brings back that feeling of contentment when you listen to that same music.

Of course now, I’m just waffling and babbling. Thinking about it, I doubt I’ve explained myself very well, but it’s late, I’ve had a busy weekend, training it around the country and I am exhausted, so that’s as good as it’s going to get.

*BTW. Phonogram is AWESOME. Magically deliciously awesome. I even yoinked some of the artwork for my “gone fishing” note on my other journal when I went on holiday in a bout of Manics nostalgia.

Go and buy it. Do it now. The rest of the internet can wait.

Silverchair are awesome on a stick. I saw them live last Friday and they were great. The music was great, the banter was great and I really really enjoyed the show.

PLUS they even played a grand total of 4 songs from the albums I do have. Must track down more recent albums.

When Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson and his cast and crew, including Gerard Butler and Stellan Skarsgård, set upon Iceland to film Beowulf & Grendel in 2004, they expected the usual complications involved in making a major motion picture.

What they encountered was a ruthless Icelandic winter on a foreboding landscape, financing complications and a bizarre run of bad luck that led some of them to believe they were in an epic battle with the Norse gods themselves. Filmmaker Jon Gustafsson was along for the ride. Hired to play one of Beowulf’s warriors, he’s one set with his camera as the crew battles hurricane force winds and he’s in the backroom as the producers scramble to shore up a collapsing deal, creating an intimate portrait of filmmakers fighting the odds in pursuit of a vision.

I really enjoyed Wrath of Gods. Not only is it good value for money (it has hours and hours of stuff to watch), but watching all the problems that they had making the film Beowulf & Grendel was bizarrely interesting, as was seeing what kind of sort of “normal” things go on behind the scenes. Like stuff to do with cashflow and accounting and health and safety and mud. And it make makes me want to see Beowulf & Grendel even more, because the little bits you get to see to do with the film look wicked cool.

Plus Iceland is a beautiful place.

The number of people going to the cinema in the UK fell for the second consecutive year in 2006, despite an increase in the number of films shown.

…going to the cinema is bloomin’ expensive and there seems to be some surprise that less people are going?

For one adult ticket at my local cinema it’s about £7.50. Now on orange Wednesdays, I bring my mum along and then it’s two for £7.50. Which is tolerable, except I like going to the cinema on my own.

In Birmingham however, one adult ticket is about £3.50 and then with Orange Wednesdays again, it’s two for £3.50. Far more tolerable.

So why is there the huge variation in ticket price? For the cost of one ticket to my local cinema, I could WAIT until the film comes out on DVD and then buy that. It’d probably end up cheaper.

A new film reviving the cult 1990s TV series The X-Files is moving closer to being made, according to reports

So exciting. I’m still suffering from 90s nostalgia brought on by getting a box-set of the entire series last Christmas, so this may just satisfy it.

Of course, they’ve been saying there’ll be another X-Files films for years.

Went a bit mad last week and ordered a bunch of DVDs, most of which arrived yesterday. Last night I watched A for Andromeda, which was really good. It’s a remake of a sixties tv series of the same name condensed down into one episode/tvmovie. I’ve not seen the original and I know that a number of changes have been made from the original, but I enjoyed this production.

The idea of an alien civilisation sending us the instructions to build a computer which is then found to be able to potentially save lives and bring us everything we could dream of is an interesting one and the question of whether we should blindly do what we are told and not question why they might be doing it is something that is addressed in the film. Although, of course, we never find out in “A for Andromeda” why (other than to destroy humanity) the computer design is sent - it’s suggested that it might be because this alien intelligence is looking for a new place to live as their current home is under some kind of threat.

The characters, especially John Fleming, all undergo some sort of transformation - with Professor Dawney and Dr Fleming swapping viewpoints. Initially Dr Fleming wants to keep working on his quantum computer and deciphering the message that they are being sent and Prof Dawney tells him to stop (or at least, passes on instructions from the powers that be). Then, when Prof Dawney is building Andromeda according to the instructions from the alien civilisation’s computer, Dr Fleming voices his doubts and misgivings and says that she should stop.

All in all, a good film.