Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Warm beer
Cool reception for pubs serving beer as warm as bathwaterlink
Jun 22 2005
Hundreds of British pubs are serving real ale which is too warm to be refreshing, an inspection has revealed.
Many hand-pulled pints exceed the optimum drinking temperature of between 11C to 13C.
One pub even sold beer which was a bath-like 35C, quality assessors from Cask Marque found.
Contrary to popular belief, hand-pulled real ale should be cooler than room temperature. But 44 per cent of pints bought at 2,000 pubs across the UK were warmer than the recommended 11C to 13C, Cask Marque inspectors found.
Publicans in London, Essex, Middlesex, Cambridgeshire and the West Midlands all pulled pints measuring between 25.9C and 28.1C. The worst offender was in Kent, where an inspector recorded a beer at 35C.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Assault on Tom Cruise
People get assaulted every day and who cares, most of them will never be caught, it's just life and most of us just have to deal with it. Someone squirts water on Tom Cruise and they get jailed by Scotland Yard. So much for democracy.
Channel 4 crew in hot water over Cruise pranklink
Stephen Brook
Monday June 20, 2005
Four members of a Channel 4 film crew have been bailed following their arrests for allegedly squirting water at Hollywood star Tom Cruise at the London premiere of his new film.
The four men, who were working on a new comedy programme, may be charged with assaulting the A-list actor.
He reacted angrily to the prank, repeatedly calling the man who soaked him a "jerk".
Scotland Yard said the men had been bailed to return for questioning later today.
Cruise was on a walkabout talking to some of the 5,000 fans who packed into Leicester Square yesterday for the star-studded premiere of War of the Worlds and was accompanied by his new fiancee, actress Katie Holmes.
As he answered questions from journalists, a bogus reporter, wearing a white and green T-shirt, stuck out a joke microphone and used it to squirt water into Cruise's face.
The star struggled to maintain his composure and confronted the man, taking his hand and saying: "Why would you do that ... why would you do that ... why would you do that?"
As the prankster offered a barely audible excuse, Cruise said: "Do you like thinking less of people, is that it?"
After an uncomfortable silence the Channel 4 man went to walk away but Cruise said: "Don't run away."
He told his assailant: "That's incredibly rude. I'm here giving you an interview and you do that ... it's incredibly rude."
Cruise then said forcibly: "You're a jerk ... jerk ... you're a jerk."
The man was escorted away by security guards and taken inside the cinema where he and the three other members of his freelance camera crew were arrested.
A Channel 4 spokesman said: "The incident was for a new Channel 4 entertainment show, part of which involves playing comedy pranks on celebrities and on members of the public.
"The water squirting was not intended to cause offence and was very much in a spirit of fun."
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Gipi
I just discovered this website - it's the personal site of Gipi, an Italian cartoonist I met in Angouleme back in January. He's very good and is doing a book in the Ignatz series too. However I noticed to my chagrin that according to his Web log he finished his first volume in a month (it took me about four months which I considered pretty fast.) He did a longer book last year called Notes for a War Story which is a big thick book, lots of small panels, and that seemed to take him about nine months. Ah well. We can't all be geniuses I guess! Every time I look at his covers I resolve to learn colour watercolour - I usually just use watercolour for grey-tones since I have no technical painting ability. For colour I am forced to resort to flat computer-generated tones.
link
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Books
Pete Ashton wants people to talk about their books.
Total number of books I've owned:
Probably in the hundreds, I don't know. For a while living in California my job let me buy a certain amount of books each month on an expense account in remuneration for a side project I was doing, so I accumulated a lot of stuff I didn't really even want, big art books etc. I sold most of those and most other books i owned when moving to the UK. Since then I have accumulated lots more despite the higher cost of books here and the lower availability of used bookshops. At the moment I have too many and need to get rid of some, I probably have between a hundred and a couple of hundred.
Last book bought:
I think it was a pair of books bought simultaneously while on holiday last week in the States: collected short stories of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.
I have been trying for some time to find an American author I can feel really enthusiastic about. There's still Thomas Pynchon, especially "V" and "Gravity's Rainbow", I admire his American-ness and the energy of his prose, but over the years have come to feel like the postmodern tricks are a bit of a dead end. There's also Hunter S Thompson, ditto about the language, but outside of "Fear and Loathing" and an essay called "Decadence and Depravity at the Kentucky Derby" I find him unreadable. I've tried without success to like DeLillo, the guy who wrote English Patient (including Canadian authors in the North American school of things), still need to try Douglas Coupland... even tried picking up Tom Wolfe, despite the fact that his magazine essays have made me want to choke, and sure enough the introduction to "Bonfire of the Vanities" and what I read of the inside seemed emptily pompous.
Another American writer I discovered lately is somebody called Jack Black, who wrote a hobo memoir in the 1920s, a more honest and colourful piece of writing couldn't be asked for. So far, two out of three of the good American books I've listed are in some sense memoirs or nonfiction, I don't know why that should be...
Ahead of this trip to the US I picked up the New York Trilogy and while I quite liked the first two parts I couldn't really get into it. Was planning to read Bob Dylan's new memoir but didn't get around to it - judging by the trend noted already, I will probably prefer it to the novels. American-wise, there is also F Scott Fitzgerald - I liked Great Gatsby, didn't really like an earlier novel by him (forget the name) and have been meaning to try out his short stories.
Twain is someone I felt I should be able to get into but aside from Huck Finn there isn't a lot there that stays with me, I'm afraid. Twain has been elevated to genius status by a US literary establishment looking for heroes, but I don't think this really holds up if you're honest.
Oh, another US writer I do like is Poe... he's sort of an authentic genius, although I hate that word. His stories kind of transcend whatever it is that he's trying to do and seem to come alive of their own accord. Lovecraft is sort of in a similar vein but the writing itself is so bad you have to classify him more like an outsider-artist or something. I went through a phase of really liking Chandler and still do think he's probably one of the best US authors there are, probably he ranks up there with my favourite authors overall.
So, My efforts to find a north american writer I identify with have been patchy so far. While in the US I started thinking about Southern writers - there's a definite literary tradition going on there but I know next to nothing about it. I picked up the two story collections mentioned above.
Haven't been able to make much headway with Faulkner in the past and evidently I haven't got much smarter since I last gave him a try 10 years ago. The stories were mostly opaque to me. Some of them seemed weirdly clunky and old-fashioned, like you could really imagine them having been printed in some 1950s American magazine. There was one I really liked - Two Soldiers, about a young boy who goes into Memphis to find his brother who's just enlisted. Aside from that, nothing grabbed me.
The O'Connor stories were a slightly different matter. I read "A good man is hard to find" just before going to sleep and wished I hadn't - it is the story of an entire family who gets executed in the woods by an escaped convict. The others seemed much the same, the sort of material you'd expect to find in a horror anthology. I will probably have another go at it but only when I'm in a more objective frame of mind. In any case, not really my sort of thing it seems.
So, it seems my hunt for essential American literature will have to continue...
Five books that mean something to me, in the order in which I first read them.
V by Thomas Pynchon.
I group this with Gravity's Rainbow but V is sort of a more compact version. In these books I found an American voice, with its slang expressions and casual, improvised atmosphere, along with what felt like a true "literary" accomplishment. Today I still like V in particular, for the atmosphere if nothing else, but find it a bit artificial. Maybe American literature has to be artificial, since it's kind of cut off from its European cultural roots and has to invent a new history for itself.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.
I never read detective novels until I was in my mid-20s, since the ones I'd had contact with were schlocky, and had an unpleasant undercurrent of sweaty machismo. I still find The Maltese Falcon and its ilk a bit hard to take. However Chandler seems to be one of those writers whose work you can read as a whole, his letters and short stories and novels etc; there's a kind of unity through all of it. The Big Sleep was his first novel and the first one I read. as in all his books it's the atmosphere I love, the sense of a decayed and corrupted world seen through the eyes of someone able to appreciate the depravity of things from a bit outside of it. The detective novel is a limited form, and Chandler's all take place in the Los Angeles area, but he manages to turn it into a rich microcosm of humanity. Ian Rankin, whose Edinburgh crime novels I like to read on holiday, seem to me the contemporary descendent of Chandler.
Death on Credit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Céline is a household name in France, but is unknown in the English-speaking world except to pretentious literary types. Discovering that a writer like him existed and that I had never had the first clue about him was like reaching the New World. The first book of his I read was his most famous and first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, which was recommended in passing by a French cartoonist called Lewis Trondheim. I loved it but didn't bother reading others of his novels on the usually correct assumption that in the 20th century most great writers usually have one great book and the rest are different degrees of filler. When I finally got around to reading his second book, Death on Credit, I realised that in fact all of Céline's novels get progressively better, right through his career until the novel left unfinished when he died. Like Chandler he is a writer whose work and life are of a piece and you feel everything you read about or by him will add up to a bigger picture, you'll appreciate it more rather than less. His subject-matter is depressing, on the surface of it it's just railing against life, but it's so brilliantly written, so savagely comic in tone, that it is completely satisfying.
Le Père Goriot by Balzac.
The first book I read by Balzac, which I picked up because Balzac is known as a kind of French Dickens. It starts off as a fairly typical Dickens-style 19th century novel, with lots of characters and social realism etc., but by the end it has turned into a phantasmagorical nightmare full of unintentional comedy and a weird vigor that is impossible to categorise or explain. All other 19th century writers except maybe Dostoyevsky seem dull and unimaginative compared with Balzac. As with Céline all his writings are of a piece with his life, it just gets more and more gripping and strange, in a way you would never expect from a supposedly realistic portrayal of French society.
You Can't Win by Jack Black
I have to include this because it made a big impact on me when I read it recently. At the time it seemed like a possible gateway into a side of American culture I had been fruitlessly looking for for a long time. That feeling could go away over time of course. This is the memoir of a boy who is entranced by tales and the idea of the West, and decides to go see it for himself. He gets to know the hobo criminal fraternity of the West and depicts their lives, their culture, the neologisms they made up (many still with us) and the dream of the West that motivates many of them. It's written in a straightforward style that manages to be gripping and honest and even poetic at times. The action takes place in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the book was published in the 1920s, at a time when the free way of life in the book had already disappeared. For all the rubbish that is written about the American spirit of freedom this was the first book I'd read that convinced me that there had ever been any substance to the idea. It's all the more powerful because it depicts a way of life that's been erased by improved communications, transportation and police technology like fingerprinting; by the 20s people could no longer drift to the next town and count on having a new identity.
I found the narrative satisfying on a lot of different levels. It's a genuinely American theme, dealing with the myth of the West that everyone is familiar with, but in a down-to-earth way free of intellectualisation. It's the narrative of an underworld figure who, despite the fact that he's reformed, is fully aware of the hypocrisy of the "upper-world" in which he now lives; Black seemed to stay honest with himself his whole life. Black is no literary genius but his persona goes back hundreds of years in Western culture. The medieval French poet François Villon was once imaginatively described by a modern writer as a gaunt, hard figure with the hands of a thief and the eyes of a poet. The description is weirdly appropriate to the real-life figures of Céline and also Jack Black. William S Burroughs tapped into this myth; maybe Kerouac too.
Honorable mentions
The Waste Land
This was probably the first "literary" work I really liked. I came across it in high school via a class assignment and the fragmented, visual imagery and the gloomy atmosphere really struck me, even though I didn't have a clue as to the very Edwardian English cultural references. I re-read it many times, along with a few other Eliot poems like Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and still go back to it at times.
Arabian Nights
This made a huge impression on me. It really is a great read. I found myself thinking of all the stuff in Western books and culture that ultimately derives from this.
Total number of books I've owned:
Probably in the hundreds, I don't know. For a while living in California my job let me buy a certain amount of books each month on an expense account in remuneration for a side project I was doing, so I accumulated a lot of stuff I didn't really even want, big art books etc. I sold most of those and most other books i owned when moving to the UK. Since then I have accumulated lots more despite the higher cost of books here and the lower availability of used bookshops. At the moment I have too many and need to get rid of some, I probably have between a hundred and a couple of hundred.
Last book bought:
I think it was a pair of books bought simultaneously while on holiday last week in the States: collected short stories of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.
I have been trying for some time to find an American author I can feel really enthusiastic about. There's still Thomas Pynchon, especially "V" and "Gravity's Rainbow", I admire his American-ness and the energy of his prose, but over the years have come to feel like the postmodern tricks are a bit of a dead end. There's also Hunter S Thompson, ditto about the language, but outside of "Fear and Loathing" and an essay called "Decadence and Depravity at the Kentucky Derby" I find him unreadable. I've tried without success to like DeLillo, the guy who wrote English Patient (including Canadian authors in the North American school of things), still need to try Douglas Coupland... even tried picking up Tom Wolfe, despite the fact that his magazine essays have made me want to choke, and sure enough the introduction to "Bonfire of the Vanities" and what I read of the inside seemed emptily pompous.
Another American writer I discovered lately is somebody called Jack Black, who wrote a hobo memoir in the 1920s, a more honest and colourful piece of writing couldn't be asked for. So far, two out of three of the good American books I've listed are in some sense memoirs or nonfiction, I don't know why that should be...
Ahead of this trip to the US I picked up the New York Trilogy and while I quite liked the first two parts I couldn't really get into it. Was planning to read Bob Dylan's new memoir but didn't get around to it - judging by the trend noted already, I will probably prefer it to the novels. American-wise, there is also F Scott Fitzgerald - I liked Great Gatsby, didn't really like an earlier novel by him (forget the name) and have been meaning to try out his short stories.
Twain is someone I felt I should be able to get into but aside from Huck Finn there isn't a lot there that stays with me, I'm afraid. Twain has been elevated to genius status by a US literary establishment looking for heroes, but I don't think this really holds up if you're honest.
Oh, another US writer I do like is Poe... he's sort of an authentic genius, although I hate that word. His stories kind of transcend whatever it is that he's trying to do and seem to come alive of their own accord. Lovecraft is sort of in a similar vein but the writing itself is so bad you have to classify him more like an outsider-artist or something. I went through a phase of really liking Chandler and still do think he's probably one of the best US authors there are, probably he ranks up there with my favourite authors overall.
So, My efforts to find a north american writer I identify with have been patchy so far. While in the US I started thinking about Southern writers - there's a definite literary tradition going on there but I know next to nothing about it. I picked up the two story collections mentioned above.
Haven't been able to make much headway with Faulkner in the past and evidently I haven't got much smarter since I last gave him a try 10 years ago. The stories were mostly opaque to me. Some of them seemed weirdly clunky and old-fashioned, like you could really imagine them having been printed in some 1950s American magazine. There was one I really liked - Two Soldiers, about a young boy who goes into Memphis to find his brother who's just enlisted. Aside from that, nothing grabbed me.
The O'Connor stories were a slightly different matter. I read "A good man is hard to find" just before going to sleep and wished I hadn't - it is the story of an entire family who gets executed in the woods by an escaped convict. The others seemed much the same, the sort of material you'd expect to find in a horror anthology. I will probably have another go at it but only when I'm in a more objective frame of mind. In any case, not really my sort of thing it seems.
So, it seems my hunt for essential American literature will have to continue...
Five books that mean something to me, in the order in which I first read them.
V by Thomas Pynchon.
I group this with Gravity's Rainbow but V is sort of a more compact version. In these books I found an American voice, with its slang expressions and casual, improvised atmosphere, along with what felt like a true "literary" accomplishment. Today I still like V in particular, for the atmosphere if nothing else, but find it a bit artificial. Maybe American literature has to be artificial, since it's kind of cut off from its European cultural roots and has to invent a new history for itself.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.
I never read detective novels until I was in my mid-20s, since the ones I'd had contact with were schlocky, and had an unpleasant undercurrent of sweaty machismo. I still find The Maltese Falcon and its ilk a bit hard to take. However Chandler seems to be one of those writers whose work you can read as a whole, his letters and short stories and novels etc; there's a kind of unity through all of it. The Big Sleep was his first novel and the first one I read. as in all his books it's the atmosphere I love, the sense of a decayed and corrupted world seen through the eyes of someone able to appreciate the depravity of things from a bit outside of it. The detective novel is a limited form, and Chandler's all take place in the Los Angeles area, but he manages to turn it into a rich microcosm of humanity. Ian Rankin, whose Edinburgh crime novels I like to read on holiday, seem to me the contemporary descendent of Chandler.
Death on Credit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Céline is a household name in France, but is unknown in the English-speaking world except to pretentious literary types. Discovering that a writer like him existed and that I had never had the first clue about him was like reaching the New World. The first book of his I read was his most famous and first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, which was recommended in passing by a French cartoonist called Lewis Trondheim. I loved it but didn't bother reading others of his novels on the usually correct assumption that in the 20th century most great writers usually have one great book and the rest are different degrees of filler. When I finally got around to reading his second book, Death on Credit, I realised that in fact all of Céline's novels get progressively better, right through his career until the novel left unfinished when he died. Like Chandler he is a writer whose work and life are of a piece and you feel everything you read about or by him will add up to a bigger picture, you'll appreciate it more rather than less. His subject-matter is depressing, on the surface of it it's just railing against life, but it's so brilliantly written, so savagely comic in tone, that it is completely satisfying.
Le Père Goriot by Balzac.
The first book I read by Balzac, which I picked up because Balzac is known as a kind of French Dickens. It starts off as a fairly typical Dickens-style 19th century novel, with lots of characters and social realism etc., but by the end it has turned into a phantasmagorical nightmare full of unintentional comedy and a weird vigor that is impossible to categorise or explain. All other 19th century writers except maybe Dostoyevsky seem dull and unimaginative compared with Balzac. As with Céline all his writings are of a piece with his life, it just gets more and more gripping and strange, in a way you would never expect from a supposedly realistic portrayal of French society.
You Can't Win by Jack Black
I have to include this because it made a big impact on me when I read it recently. At the time it seemed like a possible gateway into a side of American culture I had been fruitlessly looking for for a long time. That feeling could go away over time of course. This is the memoir of a boy who is entranced by tales and the idea of the West, and decides to go see it for himself. He gets to know the hobo criminal fraternity of the West and depicts their lives, their culture, the neologisms they made up (many still with us) and the dream of the West that motivates many of them. It's written in a straightforward style that manages to be gripping and honest and even poetic at times. The action takes place in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the book was published in the 1920s, at a time when the free way of life in the book had already disappeared. For all the rubbish that is written about the American spirit of freedom this was the first book I'd read that convinced me that there had ever been any substance to the idea. It's all the more powerful because it depicts a way of life that's been erased by improved communications, transportation and police technology like fingerprinting; by the 20s people could no longer drift to the next town and count on having a new identity.
I found the narrative satisfying on a lot of different levels. It's a genuinely American theme, dealing with the myth of the West that everyone is familiar with, but in a down-to-earth way free of intellectualisation. It's the narrative of an underworld figure who, despite the fact that he's reformed, is fully aware of the hypocrisy of the "upper-world" in which he now lives; Black seemed to stay honest with himself his whole life. Black is no literary genius but his persona goes back hundreds of years in Western culture. The medieval French poet François Villon was once imaginatively described by a modern writer as a gaunt, hard figure with the hands of a thief and the eyes of a poet. The description is weirdly appropriate to the real-life figures of Céline and also Jack Black. William S Burroughs tapped into this myth; maybe Kerouac too.
Honorable mentions
The Waste Land
This was probably the first "literary" work I really liked. I came across it in high school via a class assignment and the fragmented, visual imagery and the gloomy atmosphere really struck me, even though I didn't have a clue as to the very Edwardian English cultural references. I re-read it many times, along with a few other Eliot poems like Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and still go back to it at times.
Arabian Nights
This made a huge impression on me. It really is a great read. I found myself thinking of all the stuff in Western books and culture that ultimately derives from this.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Dancing space robots
Sensitive [robot] skin was identified as a key technology. It will prove vital in situations where humans and robots work side-by-side in the construction of large telescopes and in the operation of both in-space and extraterrestrial equipment. To demonstrate this sort of situation, here is a short movie of a robot dancing with a ballerina. link
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Humans + Robots = Supermen
anaesthetica writes "A project at Tsukuba University has produced a battery-powered robot suit designed to aid the wearer in strength-related tasks, like lifting heavy objects. The suit also has the capability of propelling itself, which is potentially useful for helping the handicapped or elderly walk. The optimistic professor who lead the project stated, 'Humans may be able to mutate into supermen in the near future.'"link
