Life Writing
-
Or a mixture of old and new, as with The Rezillos. ↩︎
-
This is why you should always save links, folks. ↩︎
-
God, I really come from another time, don’t I? ↩︎
-
Somebody must have, of course. ↩︎
-
In an amusing followup to recent thoughts, I originally wrote that as “army,” but find that lyrics sites think this plural too. Correctly, of course. ↩︎
-
Post! This post, not this tweet. ↩︎
-
The City of London, that is: the Square Mile. ↩︎
Looking Back and Forward
My recent and forthcoming live music experiences all involve bands of my youth that have reformed and are touring their old material.1 Wallowing in nostalgia, some might call it.
But there’s nothing inherently wrong with bands getting back together. It can be problematic if you are the band that tours as the Dead Kennedys, of course. There’s a whole saga there that I won’t go into, but if Jello Biafra’s not involved, and in fact is actively against it, then it’s not the Dead Kennedys.
Indeed, in his song “Buy My Snake Oil” Jello suggested that a way for old punks to make money off their history would be to
Give in
Ride the punk nostalgia wave
For all it’s worth
Recycle the name of my old band
For a big reunion tour
Sing all those hits from the “good ol’ days”
‘Bout how bad the good ol’ days were
Which is a fair criticism of old bands doing their thing in modern days, I guess. But I see two arguments to counter it, from a gig-goer’s point of view.
Unfinished
The first was made by my friend Andrew, around the time that the Sex Pistols reformed and toured. This would have been in 1996.
“I missed them first time round,” he said when I challenged him about it. “This is unfinished business for me.”
Which was a good point, and kind of made me regret playing the purist and not going.
In 1993 I had investigated going to see the reunited Velvet Underground. But I really didn’t want to see them at an all-seated venue. Partly because I’d had a bad experience seeing Lou Reed a year or so before (despite having had a very good experience with him a year or two before that).
I recall that I phoned the venue — Earl’s Court, I think — and found that it did have some standing room. But those tickets were sold out. So I didn’t go. Regretted that, too. So I’m taking the chance to see bands like the Rezillos, or The Beat and The Selecter, that I missed first time around.
OK, But What is it Really?
The second point about the “punk nostalgia wave” (or any similar accusation of nostalgia) is: that is not what it is.
Because here’s the thing: it isn’t nostalgia if you’re carrying on with something that was always there.
according to Cambridge.Nostalgia (noun): a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past
But this isn’t that. Because while those bands’ heydays might have been in the past, their music has remained available and frequently-played. You can’t be nostalgic for an album you listened to last week, or last night.
And a live performance always happens in the present.
This train of thought was kicked off for me a couple of years back when there was an article in the Guardian, prior to The Force Awakens coming out. I can’t find it now,2 but it claimed that “nostalgia” was part of the cause of the excitement for the new film.
And I thought, no. Well, maybe for some people. But for many of us, if not most of us, Star Wars never went away. We’ve watched it, talked about it, read theories about it, and so on. It has been part of our lives.
Or take Doctor Who. Sure, there were the wilderness years before 2005, but The Doctor never really went away. The Tardis and Daleks are burned into Britain’s cultural memory, and I think they always will be.
Now if I were to see an episode of, say, Marine Boy: that would be nostalgic. I remember it fondly from my childhood, and have never seen it since. I’ve never even seen it in colour, because those were the days of black & white televisions.3
But I can’t be nostalgic for punk bands or Star Wars or Doctor Who, because they never went away. The sense of warmth and shared experience they bring: that’s not nostalgia, it’s something else. Familiarity, at worst. Or better: community.
Saved Life
In International Clash Day I mentioned a life-changing song: “Wasted Life,” by Stiff Little Fingers. SLF’s anti-military song literally changed my life; or its potential direction, at least. I was probably moving in an anti-war kind of direction anyway, to be fair, but it was definitely a trigger point.
People say — or used they to, at least — that a song couldn’t change your life. By comparison, I don’t think there was ever a similar tendency to say that a book couldn’t change a person’s life. I suspect that is down to their comparative sizes: it seems respectable for something the size of a novel to have a major impact on a human’s psyche, while a three-minute song? Not so much.
Although if it were merely length, then people wouldn’t have complained if you said an album changed your life. I’m not sure that anyone ever said that,1 but I suspect that if they had, their statement would have been pooh-poohed just as much as the same claim for a song.
At this point I feel I ought to quote Springsteen, giving the opposite view:
We learned more from a three-minute record, baby,
Than we ever learned in school
he sings in “No Surrender.” Hyperbole, certainly, but there is a core of truth to it: the truth of the feeling you can get from listening to a great song.
With “Wasted Life” the feeling for me was of sudden crystallisation, or realisation. I had, for some years, been saying that I wanted to be pilot, join the RAF. This was before the horrors of the Gulf War, or for that matter the Balkans. Though it was in the heart of the Cold War, and British soldiers were stationed in Northern Ireland during the troubles — though not so much RAF staff, I would think.
But I was blind to all that, brought up as I was on a diet of Second World War films, Commando comics, and Airfix models of warplanes. I had, in short, a thoroughly romanticised view of war. And I just wanted to fly.
But I didn’t want to kill. I had always known that, I’m sure. But two lines of that one song made it real for me:
Stuff their fucking armies
Killing isn’t my idea of fun2
And that was all it took. I remember that it was a while before I could tell my parents that I had changed my plans. Perhaps because they would have asked why, and I didn’t want to have to explain it. Maybe because I thought they’d be disappointed. I’m sure my Mum wasn’t. My Dad kind of was: “But you were going to be a Spanish-speaking pilot,” he said. He had always been slightly amused that my school taught half of us Spanish, instead of the then-much-more-conventional French.
A life can hinge on such a small moment.
It's Not Tomorrow if You Haven't Gone to Sleep yet
Yeah, OK, so I missed my deadline: I’m typing this after midnight. But it’s still the same day I got up in, in sleep-cycle terms. Also in terms of how the TV listings mags give the days, too. Which can actually get a little bit confusing sometimes.
It stems, of course, from the days when all TV would have stopped by midnight or shortly after. Yes, kids, I know it’s hard to imagine, but TV stations used to “close down” at night. One or other of the channels used to even have a wee programme that was actually called Closedown, if I remember correctly. I think it was one of the weird religious things, where a priest or minister would come on and give a Thought for the Day kind of mini sermon.
Anyway, and still on TV, apparently the best comedy show around, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, is having that annoying recent habit, a mid-season break. We have no idea when it will be back. And… well, if you’ve watched it…
No, I’m not going to say any more about it. Just hurry up and get back, guys.
I may actually backdate this post, just so my daily posting doesn’t show a gap. After all, I’m treating it as still Thursday 16th of February, even if the clock doesn’t.
The Origin of the Bitface
Things go quicker than you think. This tweet post1 was inspired by a tweet, and I thought it wasn’t too long ago. But in fact it was April last year.
My friend Yusuf’s tweet inspired me to finally write about the term “biftace” and why I chose it and what it means. Actually I thought I had written this before, but it seems not.
So a long time ago, when I was first thinking of a name for my blog — before it even existed, indeed — I thought about the way the press used to refer to teachers working “at the chalkface.” The analogy with miners at the coalface was probably originally meant to disparage the labour of teachers as being less than that of miners. I’m guessing here, but considering the term seems to have originated in tabloid journalism, and tabloids tend to be disparaging of anything intellectual — though to be fair, they haven’t exactly been friends to miners either, over the years.
Anyway, I quite liked the term, and wanted to come up with something similar to refer to my own industry, that of programming. I tried out one or two for size, at least in my head. “Byteface” felt more accurate (it’s rare for an application programmer to care to much about bit-level things, and I mainly write Java, which compiles to bytecode); but it didn’t feel right.”Codeface” would have been another, but again, didn’t feel right.
“Bitface” did feel right, and so an early version became “The Bitface Diaries.” I don’t think I ever made that live.
When I started my Livejournal (which nowadays is just one of my syndication targets) I went with “Tales from the Bitface,” which I still like. And then when I decided to set up my own site I went with “A Labourer at the Bitface,” which harked back to the original impetus for inventing the word, and also alluded to my support for the Labour Party.
Which means I’m considering a rename now, as I consider my future in said party. But that’s another blog entry.
The conversation with with Yusuf was about hardware, which is not what the term was about. But I never worked out what we should call working with hardware in similar terminology.
Recent Events
Just in case you think that I haven’t been paying attention to recent events… yeah, I know, how likely is that…?
Brexit? Trump? Celebrity deaths? 2016 is well behind us — though regarding Trump and Brexit, the worst is still ahead.
But anyway, I haven’t said anything about my work status since back in the summer. So I should bring things up to date.
I had a few interviews, but no serious interest. Then July was ending, and I was beginning to think that soon we’d be going on holiday, and once we got back it would be nearly September. That was longer than I fancied going without having something lined up.
And then I got a call from a recruiter telling me there was a bank in the City looking for someone with my exact skill set for a six-month contract. It was supporting — and to some extent building on — the products that I used to make at Misys. That wasn’t quite what I had seen myself doing. I was looking for something that was more of a change, more of a challenge.
But I went in to talk to them and it all sounded pretty good. A significant number of the people who work there are ex-Misys, and I know them, so it would make for a relatively smooth transition.
But a contract. I hadn’t really intended to go down that route. Still, the idea of being a freelancer appealed. I’d like to have a go at indie development one of these days, and the two can be complementary. We’ll see where that goes. But I decided to go for it. Set up the limited company (more on that in a later post), discussed the contract (including while I was on holiday) and started at the end of August.
And it’s… OK. The people are good, the location is great. But the work is not that interesting, and the internal politics are… interesting.
And there’s the pressure of knowing that you’re dealing (sometimes) with a live system. With real people’s actual money. Having only worked for a software company before, that feels unexpectedly high-pressure.
All things considered, when my contract is up for renewal at the end of February, I don’t think I’ll be renewing it (even assuming they offer it to me, which they probably will). So I’ll be looking for another position shortly. Maybe contract, maybe permanent again. It depends what comes up.
Pokémon Gone
I am so not a gamer.
Oh, I loved Asteroids back in the day. I solved Monument Valley, and I got on fine with Alto’s Adventure. But I’ve never got more sophisticated modern games. There’s a whole big post about that that I’ll maybe write one day.
But Pokémon Go has lit up the internet for the last week or so, and it sounded kind of fun. So I thought I’d give it a try. Probably more healthy than arguing about the Labour leadership crisis on Facebook, anyway.
I was just out at the shops, and I remembered I had it, and sure enough, there was a wild Golbat outside the local supermarket. You’ve got to throw the pokéball to catch them, right? I’ve seen enough of the TV series with my kids to get that.
But could I catch it? Could I buggery. No matter how many times I flicked up on the screen to send the ball towards it, it just would not connect. I must have tried like fifty times, standing outside the shop like an idiot.
This is why I never get into games. I soon hit upon something frustrating and get bored with them. No doubt I was doing something wrong. I’ll try again, I suppose, but it’s very discouraging.
Oh, and I couldn’t get the name I wanted. “Devilgate” was taken, but so was it along with just about every suffix I could think of, including just random strings of numbers.
Kind of cool to see the pokéball rolling off under the vegetable racks, though.
Suzi Q, where are you?
I got a card in the post the other day, from my friends Di and Johnny. Regular readers will know Di as one of the most frequent commenters here (ie, she has commented). We disagreed over The Great Gatsby.
Anyway, the card had a post-it stuck inside, with some writing on it that I couldn’t quite make out. Di wrote, “Been trying to get this for you for ages… can you guess who it is?”
I was slow to realise that the “who” referred to the writing on the post-it. But she also said there was a clue on the back of the card.
On the back she’d written “devilgate.org”.
The post-it looks like this:
And I read it to say, “To Martin. Suzi Quatro.”
I mean, if it says that it makes sense considering my origin story; otherwise, not so much.
Thanks Di and Johnny. It’s a lovely thought.
I phone, you phone
So, I've got an iPhone. I walked into the O2 shop near work the other day, and came out half an hour later with an 8 GB phone and a £30-a-month contract.
The device itself is a thing of beauty, in both hardware and software terms.
iTunes, however, is an ugly piece of dingbat’s kidneys.
Don’t get me wrong: it does its thing well, from playing music, through purchases, to synchronisation. But my god, it looks ugly.
And nor do I like the way it presents the music it knows about; but then, I’ve never seen an application that does that very well.
As to typing with the on-screen keyboard, well, it’s actually not that bad; it’s never going to. Be fast, bit there are some smart optimisations, like automatically switching back from the symbol keyboard to the letter one when you hit space after a comma, or immediately after you type an apostrophe.
And I almost cry with happiness every time I see the transition from one app to another.
ETA: As you can see from the typoes above, I wrote that on the shiny device. I’ll leave them in for posterity.
Exciting times
These are exciting times in Hackney. Not only has my son just started secondary school today (where did those eleven years go?) but it seems that we are getting a new bookshop near the top of our road.
This is big news indeed. Our little corner of Lower Clapton is characterised more by chicken-based fast-food joints and kebab shops. A children’s bookshop opened on nearby Chatsworth Road a year or two ago (my daughter was their first customer). There was a brief, exciting moment last year when something that looked like a bookshop opened up on Lower Clapton Road, but it turned out to be a religious booksop, specialising the the Christian field.
But today I went up to get my hair cut, and I noticed a new sign up: Pages of Hackney. A new bookshop on the Lower Clapton Road, opening on Saturday 13th September. Excellent news.
Not so good is that Saf’s Barbers is “closed until further notice”. I hope everything’s all right. I still have shaggy hair, which never looks good when it’s receding.
Here's Tae Us
I just heard John Bell of the Iona Community on 'Thought for the Day'. He was talking, since it's St Andrew's day, about the old Scottish saying, or toast, "Here's tae us, wha's like us? Damn few, and they're a' deid." That's, "Here's to us, who's like us? Damn few, and they're all dead," in case you have trouble with Scots.
Thing is, Bell was bemoaning the attitude he thinks it represents. He thinks it means, “The only people we can emulate are dead.” He thinks it epitomises a ‘national inferiority complex.’
That’s not how I ever understood it.
Rather than looking back wistfully on past glories, to me it was triumphal, celebratory, even arrogant, if you need a negative adjective. It said – it says – “We’re here, and we’re great; there’s no-one like us.”
So happy St Andrew’s day: we rock.
What Exactly Does it Mean to Book a Train Ticket, Anyway?
I had a slightly weird experience with train bookings a while back. Twice I've booked tickets via The Trainline between London and Glasgow (once on my own, once for the whole family). On both cases the tickets arrived with the legend "No Seat" printed in the spaces for the seat details. In both cases I phoned the company and was able to arrange seats (with greater or lesser difficulty and need to switch services)
But the weirdness to my mind is that on The Trainline’s website, you have to select specific trains when you’re booking (even if the ticket you are buying is flexible enough that you can travel on a different service in the end). So you’re always “booking” a particular train; but not, automatically, booking a seat. What, exactly, does it mean to do that?
I mean, let’s assume that all seats on the train are full when you get on, as they usually are on routes like London to Glasgow; is there a particular circle of floor space that is yours? You have a booking on that service, after all: it must mean something.
I recall, years ago, when I used to travel up and down these lines a lot, that there were a lot of services, especially at weekend peak times, on which seat bookings were “mandatory”. There were still people without bookings who got on and crammed in between the carriages, so I’m not entirely sure what that meant, either. But at least it meant that when you booked a ticket (at a station or a travel agent: no web in those days), you also booked a seat.
And having booked it, you nearly always got it; British Rail had its problems, but incompatible systems between the booking agents and the different train operating companies wasn’t one of them, as it seems to be now. The Trainline’s other strangeness was that, after phoning to add the seat bookings, I was sent the details for the outgoing service (on Virgin Trains), but not those for the return (on GNER). When that happened on the first of those trips, I assumed it was a mistake, so I mentioned it when I phoned for the second one. I was told that it was unavoidable because GNER use a different system, and they (The Trainline) were only able to book on paper (and then, what, post the details to GNER?)
I blame the Tories, of course: privatisation was always an appalling idea.
Heat, streets and beats
I was in The City,1 this morning. The client’s offices were at Vintners’ Court; the street sign next to it says, “Formerly Anchor Alley”. Which is a much better name: almost worthy of JK Rowling herself.
The newer name is pretty good too, mind.
Afterwards I walked across Southwark Bridge and to Waterloo along the South Bank. London sparkled as it sweltered.
In other news, Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses has posted a lovely piece in her blog, ThrowingMusic, about her son’s birthday:
I met a toddler named Ryder in the airport last night, of all things. Then I came home to a six foot man named Ryder that I call my son. Crazy how the past keeps walking out the door and not even saying goodbye. It colors our present images to an extent that allows us to believe it’s real, but it isn’t. It’s gone. Pioneertown is burning. Today is the anniversary of my stepfather, Wayne’s, death. How can Baby Ry, Pioneertown and Wayne be nowhere?
Eye Contact, or: Pay Attention to the Web Behind the Curtain.
Eyes in the sky
There is a strange and mighty power to eye contact, it seems.
I’m not talking about the effects of making — or not making — eye contact while talking to someone, though of course that does indeed have a great symbolic strength and communicative ability. Rather, I’m talking about the effect of making eye contact at a distance; specifically while cycling.
As you might imagine, cycling round the streets of London has its hazards. It’s not as fraught with danger as some believe (fear of the dangers is one of the main reasons people give for why they don’t, or wouldn’t, cycle; which is a shame, because it’s good for the individual, and good for the environment), but that’s another discussion.
Most potential problems can be avoided with a suitable degree of alertness. But the necessary alertness isn’t all on the part of the cyclist: it’s important for other road users to be alert to the presence of cyclists, too. Who remembers “Think once, think twice, think bike!“, the road-safety campaign on British TV during the seventies? That was intended to make other road-users more aware of cyclists (and motorcyclists).
That is where one of the biggest dangers lies: quite frankly, there are a lot of road users who just don’t notice cyclists. And it’s not just the BMW drivers and Royal Mail vans (in my experience the two most dangerous types of motorised vehicle, from a cyclist’s point of view (though all generalisations are false, of course)).
No, any motor vehicle can be a problem, and pedestrians and even other cyclists are almost as bad. Indeed , the two accidents I’ve had in all my years of cycling in London were both caused, at least in part, by pedestrians. There is, however, a simple technique that can — almost magically, it sometimes seems — make other road users notice you.
Look them in the eye.
That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Just make eye contact with the driver, cyclist or pedestrian, and suddenly they realise you’re there.
Which is not so surprising: it’s hard to not be aware of the presence of someone who is looking you in the eye. What is strange, though, is the way in which it works at a distance. You don’t have to be able to see the other person’s eyes, or even to see the person. Innumerable times I have been hurtling along a road and seen a car or van about to pull out of a side road and smash into me (or at least, make me brake sharply). I can’t see the driver because of distance or dark windows, but I aim a hard stare at the area where I know the driver’s head must be. And the car (or van) suddenly brakes, and lets me sweep past.
Similarly, a burst of laser-like staring swept across a group of pedestrians can stop them stepping off the kerb and into my path. It’s quite remarkable, really.
I’m reminded of the story of James Dean’s death. He crashed his car into another car that was pulling out of a side road, and supposedly Dean said to his passenger, (who survived the crash), “It’s all right, he sees me.”
Clearly, the other driver didn’t. Perhaps if Dean had just tried looking at where the other driver’s eyes were, the strange, near-telepathic effect might have happened, and he could have lived to make many more films.
The effect is, I suspect, related to the “feeling of being watched” that most people have experienced at some time. There’s no obvious mechanism for it, but it does seem to be the case that, when someone is looking at us, we become aware of the fact.
Attention surfeit disorder?
When some one is looking at us, or is paying attention to us. Which brings me to another angle on this. That is the idea of attention.. Up here in The Future, in the days of the development of “Web 2.0″ (which, by the way, is pronounced “two point zero”, not “two point oh”, as I heard them saying on Newsnight the other day; we are, after all, scientists) we are often told (though perhaps mainly by Doc Searls) of how important our attention is.
Indeed, the phrase “the attention economy” is in use by some. Of course, the expression “pay attention” has been around for a long time, but only now has attention taken on some of the other trappings of money. We can “pay” for a web site’s services with our attention. Any site with adverts effectively meets this model, though there are more direct examples, such as Salon‘s premium content, for which you can get a “day pass” by sitting through a short advert — as an alternative to paying actual cash for a subscription.
The force of our attention — of looking — is powerful in multiple ways.