Archive for 2007
Sometime back, a mate showed me an episode of South Park called 'Stupid Spoilt Whore Video Playset". This convinced me that it was time to revisit my mild interest in South Park and really watch the thing.
Over the 11 seasons this thing has been running, the authors have gone from mad to worse. Nothing is sacred, no one is safe.
To best protect myself, I am not taking up residence in South Park.
It seems almost no time since I wrote anything. LIfe has been rollercoastering from one adventure to another. I have been travelling a lot and each place has been a joy – Mykonons, Madrid, Paris, Bordeaux, not to mention London itself.
Beautiful, wonderful, amazing, vibrant London. I love it here.
Finally I have moved into a great flat in Marble Arch with two truely wonderful Aussie boys. My room faces east more or less and in the mornings at the moment Iam waking up to this incredible Mary Poppins skyline of chimny stacks siloetted against indigo and peach sky. I will try and remember to keep my camera by the beed and snap a shot of it in the morning soon.
People keep going on about how dreary the winters are and how cold and aweful its going to be, but for now I am loving it. In themorning I walk to the tube station along Marylebone Rd to Baker St. In the evening I get off at High Holborn, train in Covent Garden and catch the tube home from Tottenham Court Rd.
My life is a Monopoly Board.
This weekend I am off to Amsterdam with a friend and I am looking forward to it. Not perhaps the best time to visit the city, but apparently there is still much to do an see, so I am very excited.
Sometimes when you travel, particularly when you have stood still for a long while, the places you visit get inside you. today I feel positively aglow, willingly invaded by the basking golden glow of Iberian sunshine.
I am in the stunning new airport in Madrid awaiting my flight back to my new home in London and I can feel the warmth and contentment radiating from me.
The parties over the weekend were wild and exciting, the people unbelievably open, helped no doubt by old friends from San Francisco – now Londoners, Andreas and Massimo, who seem to both know everyone and be welcomed by them. A better introduction I could not have had.
Not enough sleep, not enough food but there was hardly time to stop . There were too many things to see and do, to many people to meet to let me feet touch the ground for long – little own my head hit the pillow.
Something in me feels like it has come alive again, a contentment and connection to the world that I have not felt since San Francisco. I still have no idea how this latest adventure, this chapter in my life, will play out. But I am sure this was the right decision.
London is apparently a little grey today, and wrapped in a blanket of tension from the latest terrorist threats, but I am heading back there a glow with the warmth of Spain and the excitement of unknown possibilities.
My recent post wrongly implied that my UK work Visa had been approved, alas that wasn't the case.
Now it is! And I am really excited.
The last 12 months has contained a lot of challenges, things that I have wanted slipped through my fingers. Opportunities that appeared to offer me the things I real|y wanted, ended up taking away far more.
Dramatic? True? this time it's Both!
So what about the UK? Could this latest venture turn sour? Of course it could. But I don't think it will this time. Not because of any mystical "rightness" or because I am somehow more deserving now, Or even because I "learned" something.
I think this has sorted out and come through because I have sorted out my head and put in the effort. I am ready for this change and it shows in the results.
I can deal with the out come of my decisions, whatever they may be.
"Come what may" doesn't mean – provided its good, it means regardless of what happens I will come through OK.
So here I go to London – Come what may.
The day is coming soon when I will depart these sun burnt shores to follow in the footsteps of some of my countries great cultural exports, Edna Everage, Clive James and Kylie Minogue. That impending departure has had me thinking about my countries obsession with travel
Like them, and thousands before me, I am leaving this Great Southern Land to seek my fortune in the "mother country", whose green and pleasant shores have long held a fascination for Australians. Steeped in history and rich in cultural significance, two things noticeably lacking from a place only 2200 years old (to us whities), for Anglos (or skips as the Wogs call us) England has an attraction that is hard to define, and impossible to deny.
The land from which (some of) my forbears were exiled, supposedly to the remotest, most unforgiving place on earth, is still called home by some in the, now, incredibly multi-cultural and diverse Australia. While we eventually thrived, how we arrived here and the unforgiving landscape left us with a lingering desire for Another County .
For Australia's in the 50's & 60's there was a sense of pilgrimage about the voyage back to England, partially because of the immense distance, cost and time involved in the voyage but mostly because it was like returning to the house of parents who had cast us out of. We return to Blighty as prodigal sons & daughters, either as a supplicant. Desperately trying to conform, or as the brash, uncultured antipodeans out to gain acceptance by force.
Australians returned to England to rejoin a world they felt cast them out, abandoned them. A world of culture and refinement, the like of which, in the 1950's, was hard to imagine would ever come here.
Nowadays things are very different. It seems the whole world is beating a path to our door ad you can't throw a rock without hitting an enormous, up coming talent.
The galleries, salons, opera houses, recording studios, films & television programs of the old world and the new world are full of the children of the New New World. Children of no revolution – apart from an internal one, that has led us to find a buoyant joy in who we are, and where we have come from.
The old drive to travel is still there, but n0w it is motivated by the desire to explore, to adventure. to learn, to experience – all under pinned by a sense of play that is palpable and With none of perception of smug, entitlement that makes the average American so painful – and unpopular.
So with my long hermitage nearly over I am preparing to pick up the bags my countries past has packed for me and walk the ether way down the yellow brick road.
I am trying to figure out if these things are fakes, or if they actually work.
The Ad-Speak around them quotes Antonio Riello, the artist, saying:
"Using leopard skins, brightly lacquered colors, inset jewels and fake furs, I create a range of specialized items for wives of mafia bosses, arms dealers, sophisticated ladies and exigent soldiers….hybrids born from Italian obsession for high fashion as well as for violence".
I think its particularly sweet that the artist, has named the models after girls he has gone out with.
All I can say is you would want to have a steady hand to make these.
This was reported in a sad British Tabloid (who I will not dignify by naming or linking to) presumably to get them selves Slashdotted to drive up ad revenue.
I doubt it's true – but if it is I will find the responsible parties, give them a sound talking to and quite possibly kick them square in the nuts.
DO NOT stand between me and my goofy Sci-Fi. You killed off Rose, that was bad enough, don't be taking the whole thing away now.
To be serious for a second, I find it hard to credit that the BBC would give up such a lucrative franchise – nor do I think that Russell T. Davies and crew would be so petty as to pick up bat and ball, and go home rather than passing the torch.
The article was clearly writen with non-film people in mind. It says the "senior staff are feeling the strain of the heavy workload imposed by the show, nine months a year of 16-hour days, and plan to resign en-masse in 2008.
Um hello! 9 mths of 16 hour days is standard for the film industry.
Duran Duran's Roger Taylor has just celebrated his second wedding – this time to his Peruvian fiancee Gisella Bernales – in the exclusive Jalousie Plantation, St Lucia.
The rest of the band were there to see him take his vows and apparently to run interference for the print media.
Guests in the hotel were annoyed to be confronted by a very loud Simon Le Bon shouting 'You can't take photos, they have an exclusive deal with OK magazine, they won't get the money if you take photos".
But very much enjoyed the sight soon after of Yasmin Le Bon shouting at Simon "Why do you always have to get so drunk?"
I think the answer to that question is two fold:
Classy, huh.
Around 10 years ago, Steve Jobs returned from the wilderness, regained the helm cf Apple Computers, prising it from the cold, near dead fingers of the evil, careless regencies of Gil Amelio and "Prince John" Sculley.
In a fit of typical, and fairly predictable, Jobsian peak he ran through Apple cancelling programs and product lines left and right. In most cases he was absolutely correct. Apple was over extended, with way too many product variants. It had strayed far from it's base as the alternate to the beige boxed rampaging normalcy of windows. Jobs return was the start of a substantial shift by the Cupertino based computer maker, and with the inclusion of Jonathan Ive as the head of design a legend was (re) born.
I may not have the personal credentials to be able to judge Jobs but as I sit here in a cafe writing this on my Apple Newton 2000 I have to wonder if that at least one product line that he killed a little too quickly.
Granted it's a little boxy, and not THAT much lighter than my Macbook Pro, but there is something very satisfying writing this by hand. As l watch it transform my really very messy handwriting into its quirky digital ink, with a remarkable level of accuracy, it strikes me that given most people have trouble reading my handwriting, this 10 year old doohickey is doing a bang up job.
For the last few days I have been battling with what, in Newton circles, is referred to as the "Bootstrap" problem – namely needing to have something installed on the Newton before you are able to install any thing, synchronise or get any thing off. Lets face it, a Newton unconnected is, quite frankly, an curiosity not a usable tool so this was an important battle to win .
Last night, after a few days research and a purchase or two of connecting hardware things suddenly took a very Mac like turn-namely it all just worked. So now l sit cafes, writing my blog and getting somewhat puzzled looks from people and loving the experience of actually writing.
Anyone who has owned a Newton, loved it. Aficionados are constantly talking up rumours that Apple might be about to reintroduce the product, and I have to admit that I am very hopeful. But even if they do not do so, I will keep my old greeny black box because using it is a remarkably beautiful and nontechnical experience. I love it.
The eclectic ramblings from the semi-charmed life of a slightly cranky 40-something peripatetic Australian fag with delusions of normalcy.
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