subversion

I have been using Steam for god knows how long, largely because I have the most pathetic dependency on figuring out the exact cosmology of the whole Half-Life thing - but I've never noticed the caption for their RPG section before. After I picked myself up off the floor, I took a screencap for you lucky folks. (And here's some context if you're wondering what the hell I'm blithering about.)

Shopping and stfucking

Literary Theory: An Introduction, After Theory and the gloriously-titled Terry Eagleton Presents: Jesus Christ.

Impro For Storytellers by Ian Johnstone.

Join Hands and The Scream by Siouxsie & The Banshees.

The Bridge (2005), dir. Eric Steel.

[A pre-order of] O Lucky Man!, starring Malcolm McDowell and dir. Lindsay Anderson.

Straw cogs

Many questions in hindsight may be less profound than they appear, and the answers make no difference anyway. I'm still a fake, but I've got the conscience to recognise it, the guts to do something about it, and the good taste not to inflict it on you. You don't have to say 'thank you'.

Five things that I'm very pleased with right now:

1. Lars & The Real Girl. An acutely purposeful film, in the hands of a lesser cast and crew it would undoubtedly seem aimless and cloying but here it's simply a delight: while being delicate and sensitive, it's also direct and sufficiently unsentimental to avoid being twee. I think the last film that I enjoyed this much was Babe 2: Pig In The City, which is similarly disarming and much more touching than its premise leads one to expect.

2. Not In Our Name by the Liberation Music Orchestra. 'Arranged & conducted by Carla Bley' is pretty much a gold seal of approval for me at this point at my life, and this (2004) album is a furious tumble of blazing scorn and audible searching for what's next for America, for us all. Charlie Haden's sleevenotes make positively the irascible, damning intent of the record, cut in the year when the industrial-idolatry complex stole the election for themselves again, the bastards, and the penetrating "America The Beautiful" medley (seguing from the original hymn to Gary McFarland's 1968 interpretation - subtitled "An Account Of Its Disappearance" - through James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice & Sing" to, finally, yes, Ornette Coleman's "Skies Of America") is about as close to holy music as I get right now. Curtis Fowlkes' trombone is a glorious, baleful presence throughout.

3. Psychonauts. Purchased a couple of weeks ago on the recommendation of the largely infallible Yahtzee, this game proceeded to take over my life for a couple of very happy weeks, proving a rare moment of good timing: an escape from reality exactly when one was needed. On Steam and a variety of other platforms besides, this is a lovely, delirious game that plays fast and loose with all manner of conventions and literally switches through different persona more or less as the fancy takes it. The fact that it doesn't feel quite long enough and becomes more-or-less impossible at a few key points unless one has (a) a great deal of patience, and (b) one of those two-handed console controller things, can't forcibly detract from the excellent storytelling, three-dimensional characters, outright hilarious gags and its delicious, wonderfully-judged musical score. I completed this game on Saturday night and actively miss it.

4. Bananas. Not the Woody Allen film, but the fruit. I can only imagine what it must have been like as a war baby to see or eat a banana for the first time. Even the ever-more-forceful apprehension of all kinds of horrific economic/social/global crises looming in the immediate future cannot dissuade me from being idiotically gleeful about the taste, texture and delirious smell of a ripe banana. My absolute favourite smell.

5. Getting up early in the mornings. I've been out of bed by a quarter to seven lately, and into the office by half eight. This works better for me. I can also justifiably leave at five, leaving more of the evening to myself. I like this. It is gratifying. I have to remember to go to bed early (where 'early' means 'about eleven') but there's never anything worth staying up for anyhow.

Lastly but not numbered, because it doesn't entirely exist yet, is Apocalypse Now by Nishlyn Ramanna 'with', er, me. Around a month ago I set up a recording session with N. and I doing computer aided improv with a nice upright piano and a (rather crude) set of live-processing programs I had lashed together. While the original notion of printing unedited improvs to disk has largely fallen by the wayside - my contributions to the cause being far from distinguished - the emergent idea of attacking the basic recordings as jumping-off points for a set of razor-edit pieces that try to pull together how either of us feel about the state of the world today and our respective places in it. I'm really stupidly excited about this project and all that it involves. It's another reason to get out of bed.

My back won't let me lie in bed anymore. I mean, after I've woken up. It starts bitching and aching and I have to get up just to make it stop. It's just not fair.

Oh well. Onwards to infamy.

Work in progress

With a last wail and a writhe of purple fog the sun rose majestically. "Didn't mean to startle you," it said sweetly. "Afraid I got separated. Since I am basically a computer program, I am every woman."

Q. What does Control need?
A. Control needs TIME.
 

You don't learn anything

If you build something and it works perfectly first time, that is. God better be keeping a fucking notebook is all I have to say about that.

I fell victim to the BBC iPlayer at last. Regraded broadband (to the lofty heights of a nominal 8Mb from a wait-what 250kb line) and the reappearance of the deathless Jonathan Meades on our television screens are to blame for that.

On Saturday morning I helped shovel about four tons of scalpings. My hamstrings are seriously pissed about this. On Saturday afternoon I found a small plastic box containing no fewer than five Mullard OC71 germanium transistors. "A-ha!" I thought. "I will build a germanium transistor fuzzbox."

The short story is that I didn't. What I managed to do was build a heroically unstable preamplifier based on R.G. Keen's tracing of the Orange Treble & Mid Booster, somewhat the worse for (a) having to substitute aforementioned OC71 for the ideal OC76, and (b) it being my first time using breadboard to prototype anything. The final thing worked, strictly speaking, but not well enough to do anything at all with the output from a guitar, which is the whole point. Stuffing a signal generator into it and viewing the output on a scope, it became clear that it did function as a (fairly crude) preamp, but not a guitar preamp. So that was that stuffed, but I learned to use breadboard and a few things about debugging circuits, which is something.

Today I came down for Mother's Day and gave my mum two presents, one of the latest of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus detective books, which she likes a lot and which I would like a lot more if he didn't have the slightly maddening habit of dropping references to his (Rankin's) record collection all over the place: previous titles include Let It Bleed and Dead Souls (Joy Division rather than Gogol); the one I bought her is apparently the latest and is named Exit Music. I also snagged her Michael Palin's published diaries for 1969-1979. "The Python Years", it said. I rather wanted this for myself but having skimmed a few entries at a friend's house I'm sure she'll enjoy it. Palin, it's horribly clear, is one of those really educated educated people who just don't fuck around. Given that I've always felt he was the most versatile and, frankly, terrifying performer among the Pythons, this ongoing and orderly interior monologue communicates a picture of The Compleat Man that's almost too Olympian to contemplate. The bastard.

Now I am attempting to play Audiosurf to Emerson Lake & Palmer. This won't turn out well.

Lost albums

Found these both down the back of the sofa. They sound amazing. No, you can't have a rapidshare.

Bob Dylan, ‘Stillness Of The Earth & Other Favourites’ (1965)

Talkin’ Sub-Prime Mortgage Overvaluation Usurocracy Blues
If I Don’t Be Seeing You Again
Stillness Of The Earth
Lately I’ve Been Nothin’ But A Man
Thomas Cranmer Blues

Hard Times In Boulder, Colorado
Faithless Prophet
If I Should Call You By Your Second Name
Mariah
The Forgotten Prayers Of Man


Sonic Youth, 'Venomous Reptiles Of North America' (1997)

Tite Cage
Solomon Kiss
Tuesday
Mizuno Atsuo & The Harold Arlen Breathmint
Hard Dream
Blu Meaney
Sister Crawlspace
Bathrobe (For Henry Darger)
Dragons Of N.Y.C.
Chrome Sigh

Remembering Daniel F. Rosebridge

Daniel F. Rosebridge (1919 – 1971) saw active service in WWII only briefly before discharge on medical grounds after he received a perforated eardrum at Gazala. Following demob he was taken on by the War Office and established himself as a reporter and propagandist of some distinction.

Assembling a complete bibliography is a task yet to be completed, since D.F.R. published under many pseudonyms. Precisely how many is not yet known, although among the others are these: Oliver F. Coldwater; Graham Clewes; E.H. Renfirth; and David M.R. Jones.

His first novel (They Died At Your Convenience, 1953, Martin Secker & Warburg) was withdrawn and pulped shortly after its first edition following severe threats from the Lord Chamberlain. Surviving copies are extremely rare. Rosebridge found it hard to recover from the dismissal of this highly personal work, and while further novels followed, he began devoting the bulk of his enthusiasm to short stories and other commissioned work, for which remuneration and restrictions proved more generous. Many of these are now lost.

In the early months of 1970 he moved to the United States in response to invitations to screenwriting work; this never materialised, and after nine months he returned to England, and his beloved Dymchurch, something of a broken man. His mysterious death by drowning at the age of 52 was recorded in the diary of Samuel Beckett:

Rosebridge died last week, I heard today. Tick-tock.

The coroner's inquest recorded an open verdict.

Novels

They Died At Your Convenience (1953)
The Conquered Life Of Edward Shackleton (1955)
The Coral Mind (1961)
Non Plus Ultra (1964), a novella.
Twenty-Four Hate (1967)
Exploded Diagram (1968)
Toulouse the Reckless (1968), for children.
The Shuttered Heart (1970)
On Liquidation (1971-3), unfinished.

Short stories, collections & anthologies

Alfred Hitchcock’s Wraiths & Demons, 1964, contains “Susan & the Photograph” by ‘Graham Clewes’.
The Third Armada Book of Crime Fiction, 1967, contains “The Wrong Man” by ‘David M.R. Jones’ and “The Administration” by D.F.R.
The Fifth Armada Book of Crime Fiction, 1969, contains “Beaten” by D.F.R.
The Abbreviated Man: Introductions to D.F. Rosebridge, 2003, ed. Cathleen Tweed. Contains 12 stories, some biography and the five extant chapters of On Liquidation.