I’ve Been Rodded

A few years ago it came to my attention that geriatric member of the rock gentry Rod Stewart was around in my life more often than one would expect.
I mean, Rod doesn’t get that much radio play, spends a lot of time abroad, isn’t on TV much, and yet almost every day some Rod-reference would present itself.
Back in 2005 I was explaining the Rodomena to a friend of mine on the way to watch Liverpool play Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. He dismissed my crazy idea, that we all encounter Rod everyday, as nonsense as he had not seen anything of Rod ‘for ages’. Well after a rather dull game of football we were duly shepherded away from Stamford Bridge up towards Earl’s Court. An Earl’s court that was, and I do not use this word lightly, festooned with posters, banners, announcements and all manner of visual promotion devices for a forthcoming concert by…ROD STEWART.
Often the Rodcounters will be as simple as seeing one of his CDs, American Songbook Vol. XIV for example, languishing in a bargain bin in Lidl or the alarmingly regular announcement of his having fathered another child. Other times it will be sneakier. Yesterday I looked up the actress Britt Eckland on Wikipedia to settle a debate about her age I was having with my wife, only to discover that Britt Eckand had a much publicised romance with Rod in the 1970s. A documentary I watched about music in the the early 70s, featuring some idealistic young folk and also T-Rex, was suddenly hijacked by Ronnie Wood and it was with a crushing inevitability that the next half-drunk mod to step out of an inappropriate sports car would be Rod.
So I started to catalogue these meetings on Twitter using #ivebeenrodded (a hashtag created by @BarrySkellern) and it seems that, although not daily, Rod does present himself regularly.
So, if Rod enters your life, please do join the party.

Note: One last strange point to note is that Rod’s Essex mansion is probably less than four miles from where we live, but I’ve never physically seen him. Or even a car with ROD1 on its number plate. Not like Alan Sugar, see him all the bloody time…

Eoin Colfer: And Another Thing

In the first of an occasional series here is a review of a book that came out a while ago but I only just got round to reading. I mean, you don’t expect me to buy books do you? I borrowed this one. This blog is, like, so current…

As you may know, And Another Thing was published about a year ago to ‘celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’. The book is written as the sixth book in the ‘increasingly inaccurately named’ trilogy.
Now, I wasn’t too sure about all this. I have been, since my early teens, a huge Douglas Adams fan and have read the original five books many times and, as such, I am possibly a bit precious about messing with Adams’ legacy. However I was also excited. The fifth book, which is in many ways rather, erm, final, did leave some questions open, some mysteries and I was interested to see if these would be resolved and how.
The task of reanimating the much loved characters of Adams’ universe (galaxy?) fell to the author Eoin Colfer. Best known of his Artemis Fowl series of books for young adults I wondered if Colfer would have the necessary sharpness for the job and indeed Adams’ gift for infrequent and well timed crudeness. Also would he have the imagination to come up with a new direction to take the characters in? A new head spinning concept, such as Mostly Harmless’ ‘Guide 2’? The answers is, for the most part, no.
As I mentioned I have been a fan of Adam’s work for over twenty years and his style is so familiar that any attempt to emulate it would be tough job, however, it’s not the style that lets AAT (if I may) down, it’s the lack of imagination.
For the most part Colfer recycles characters, plot ideas, turns of phrase and just about everything else from the earlier books. And not just major characters. Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged features heavily, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall and Eccentrica Galumbits are regularly, almost lazily, invoked, people say ‘Zark!’ ALL THE TIME. In many cases new characters or references could have been created but Colfer seems afraid to move away from Adams’ pre-existing creations. And sometimes he just gets it wrong. A fairly major character is a chap named Hillman Hunter. In choosing this name Colfer is clearly referencing Ford Prefect’s ‘named after a car’ schtick. Except it makes no sense. Ford, an alien, chose his name when, due to poor research, he mistook cars to be the dominant species on Earth and thus ‘Ford Prefect’ was an inconspicuous name. Hillman Hunter is from Earth, very much human, and therefore there is no reason for the joke other than to reference Adams. Again.
Finally the plot itself is just too linear. Adams’ stories would swim uncomfortably backwards and forwards in time, space, parallel universes and any direction other than a straight line. Here, after a bit of exposition, the major players are thrown together to complete the adventure as a big adventure team. Like the human, the elf, the dwarf, the magician and what have you in some pulp fantasy novel. In Adam’s work he would leave people stranded on their own, throw people together, even suck people out of existence, just to keep us on our toes. Colfer shows no such flair.
I didn’t want to be disappointed by AAT, I wanted it to be a fitting conclusion to a series that, before his death, Adam’s had said had another book in it, and yet sadly this is not that book. The final, touching denouement to this effort is not enough to redeem it and the whole exercise serves only to show what a wholly remarkable talent Douglas Adams was.

Space Shuttle Doesn’t Want to Retire

It seems that Discovery isn’t happy about it’s impending retirement. A leaky pipe has forced the final mission to be postponed. I can’t help but imagine some Herbie-like idea where the ship is deliberately self sabotaging (that is breaking bits of itself to put off the inevitable, as opposed to throwing clogs in itself*)

*It appears that this is not, in fact, the etymology of sabotage at all, that’s disappointing.

Mark and Rebecca Williamson go live

I’ve put a few first fruits of the Mark and Rebecca Williamson project up on MySpace (sorry, I’ll get with it and use SoundCloud or something when I can work it out). I’m still not sure what direction we want to take this in but I’m useless and holding stuff back and working on it till it’s right.
There’s four tracks up there, a couple of originals, an arrangement of a (I think) nineteenth century song called ‘The Hungry Army‘ and a cover of Help by the Beatles which, in the right circumstances, could probably sell a million mobile phones.

So really it’s just experimenting with sounds and ideas. All the music has been made with acoustic instruments and, where I’ve managed to get Bec to sing, I’ve pushed her vocal right up so you don’t have to listen to my whining.
Typically, after recording about six pieces for this project I’ve now hit a writing wall, this often happens but it’s a bit annoying. Hopefully I’ll get some new ideas soon and we can expand on this.
Anyway, see what you think, if possible use headphones or good speakers, and I know there’s probably too much bass, but once a bass player…

Enterprise: Redeemed

I’ve recently been watching re-runs of Enterprise, arguably the least successful of all the Star Trek spin offs, certainly in commercial terms. Personally I like it, but then I am not known for being the pickiest person when it comes to action and space.
Whilst doing a bit of reading around I came upon an obvious statement which just hadn’t crossed my mind and, somehow, shocked me in a way I would never expect: JJ Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot has removed all previous series of Star Trek from the fictional Star Trek timeline, with the exception of Enterprise.
Forgetting Enterprise for now, what is hard to grasp with this is that the future events portrayed in the past series remain canon but simply didn’t will have happened.
The reason this is so shocking is that this de-existing has will have going to occur within the reality. As a contrast, look at the two recent Batman films. In these reboots the origin of Batman himself and his history with the Joker has been altered from the Keaton/Kilmer/Clooney timeline. These two versions stand apart from each other, as separate stories their events still occurred within their particular realities. Because of the way the Star Trek reboot has been handled, keeping the story in the same ‘universe’, the events of the original 1960s series, the original cast movies, Star Trek: The Next Generation and associated feature films, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager all did not will happened.
What makes this weird is that in some ways there is no longer any reason to write anything else featuring those characters. I have never read a Star Trek novel, or bought a Star Trek comic, but I do not doubt that there is a market for this stuff, some people probably make a lot of money out of it. But what now for those authors? There’s no point writing a story about the time Jean Luc Picard found a lost artefact which nearly caused/helped prevent a war with a hitherto unknown crystalline species because he can’t will have. He probably won’t even have existed, and it’s almost certain he won’t have followed the same career trajectory given that the universe of his ancestors now has the possibility to will have developed in any number of ways.
There is only one way that these characters can be saved, and that is as ridiculous ‘bearded Spock’ alternative versions of themselves and I’m fairly sure that the original actors and Abrams are a bit more elegant and dignified than that.
So, the much maligned and short lived Enterprise has gained itself a distinction after all. Along with the 2009 movie it is now the only ‘recorded’ Star Trek reality that has not faded away, like Marty McFly almost did. So those writers, and I guess that includes Bill Shatner himself, can no longer churn out lost histories of the franchise’s old hands unless they write of Captain Jonathan Archer and the brave crew of the NX-O1 USS Enterprise.

Note: As the great Douglas Adams pointed out, one of the greatest problems associated with time travel is grammar (although I have found that is often actually grandma). I have, for fun, bravely tried to make some grammatic sense. I have, of course, failed.

Trouser Questions

I own a pair of leather trousers. There, I said it. I am a thirty four year old man and I own leather trousers. To paint a picture; they are more leather jeans than specialised motorcycle equipment, they are not too tight, or too shiny. They are comfortable. They do, however, pose a couple of questions, one sartorial and one ethical.
You see, I’m a vegetarian, a fairly rubbish one on account of fish-eating, but a vegetarian nonetheless. So many might say, I am being hypocritical. It’s the same as the leather shoe problem. The usual response is to explain that the shoes will last for a long time and so the poor helpless cow (kangaroo, snake, crocodile) at least died to keep one’s feet warm for a while, as opposed to some instant steak-gratification.
Of course this is silly, leather is still an animal product which, unlike say cheese, required the animal to die before it was harvested. So the question becomes; where is the line? There are Buddhists who will go out of their way to avoid squashing a spider or an ant, but what of smaller insects they cannot see? Consider the microbes! My take on vegetarianism is sort of based on karma. I see it as an insurance policy just in case there is such a thing as reincarnation. Surely being a vegetarian, even a crap one, increases my chances of at least being reincarnated as something with legs. But, I don’t mind if I eat off a plate that once held meat, or if my freind’s meaty hands touch my Quorn burger at a barbecue, because I didn’t mean it to happen, in principle I am avoiding meat, whilst also refraining from being an annoying bastard, which is surely good karma.
So to shoes, sure synthetic leather shoes are available, but like the vegetarian option at a Toby Carvery the selection is limited. So what about second-hand shoes? It was someone else who directly paid the cow murderer, my blood money goes to charity. Does this work? Maybe. And, here’s the thing, my leather trousers came from a charity shop so, hygiene issues aside, does this make them more morally valid than fresh ones?
I don’t have any answers to all this, I’m just posing questions.
The second question is; should I be wearing them at all? I like to think that I can wear what I want, there is a kind of knowing wink in my dress sense. Without being ‘whacky’ or indeed ‘zany’ I believe an inherent sense of my own ridiculousness cancels out the perceived ridiculousness and thus may even render the trousers cool. Hopefully. Also I would never wear them with a leather jacket. Unless I was going a)on ride on a motorbike or b)to a fancy dress party as the Elvis Comeback Special. After my initial enthusiasm I have now calmed down my leather trouser wearing to ‘occasional’, a big downgrade from the initial ‘constant’. I think this helps too.
So those are my thoughts on my leather trousers which can be condensed to this: I shouldn’t wear them, but i do.

To Boldly Go…

As a four year old child in April 1981 I can clearly remember the first flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia. It’s hardly surprising, the launch was a Massive News Event. This was a new dawn for space travel, for the first time astronauts would return to Earth, not via an unceremonious parachuted drop into the ocean squashed into something that resembles the symbol for a loudspeaker, but by landing on a runway. In something that looked like a proper spaceship.
Up until this point there had been a gulf between science fiction and science fact. In science fiction it would be inconceivable to have a craft which essentially fell completely to pieces just to get into the sky and then was only used once. No, we wanted X-Wings and Corellian Corvettes, capable of leaving planets as simply as Spitfire from a grassy field. We wanted the USS Enterprise and the United Planets Cruiser C-57D, capable of re-entering the atmosphere without so much as breaking a sweat. And the Space Shuttle was a step in the right direction.
One of my favourite toys at the time was a low loading articulated truck which carried on its back a terribly out of scale Space Shuttle (very like this modern version). I realised this but didn’t care about scale, only that I had my own Space Shuttle to look at and tow about and do whatever else it is small boys to with toy cars (I think I may also have attempted to ‘ramp’ the whole assembly, a practice which involved finding a suitable slope or drop off and ‘zooming’ a toy vehicle as fast as one could toward it. The idea was that the toy would fly through the air like the General Lee before executing a perfect landing and possibly coming to a halt with a bootleg turn). I often wonder where that truck went, I must check my parent’s loft next time I’m home.
Even at that tender age I can remember thinking that if we could go from the Wright Brothers to this in less than eighty years it would only a be a few more short years before those oft promised Moon bases became a reality. So excited was I by all this that I submitted a number of designs for space houses, space scooters, space buses and other space ephemera to the space people at the then British Aerospace (where my Dad worked). I can only assume that after my designs were presented to the space people they were sent to be developed in some super top secret area, away from public view, as I have yet to see any of my designs in use, or in space.
As time went by, I came to realise that technology progresses slower than I realised and the same old Space Shuttle kept on taking off and coming back. Occasionally a new orbiter would enter service, or a particularly dangerous or difficult mission would be undertaken and my interest would pique again. But I was growing older and was no longer as excited about outer space as I used to be, and of course the terrible disasters which claimed first Challenger and then Columbia with the loss of all on board, took some of the shine away from the Shuttle program. But now we are two or three launches away from the end of the Space Shuttle program. No like-for-like replacement is in place and this particular era of space exploration is coming to an end.
Many will point to the fact that space exploration is hugely costly and, in a time of global financial crisis, America (or anyone else for that matter) can ill afford to be throwing $450 million a pop at Shuttle missions. Is it worth that amount to science to keep the Hubble Space Telescope going, for example? The Shuttle was a versatile platform able to perform launches, maintenance, construction, scientific experiments, basically whatever was required. The proposed replacements I have seen, look like a step backwards; unmanned craft, multi stage rockets. I mean, in 2063 Zephram Cochrane is supposed to make the first warp flight. It aint that far away. But cost is the problem, and much as I would love to see billions poured into space exploration I would rather see those billions poured into medicine, the eradication of Third World debt, equal education, clean power and any number of other worthy causes.
I suppose this means that the Space Shuttle has become a relic of the Eighties, a cowboy president searching for his own Wild West in a time of greed and selfishness when humanity’s needs could be dismissed for the sake of humanity’s goals.
But that doesn’t mean I won’t be sad to see the end of the Space Shuttle program. I’ve grown up with the Space Shuttle, lived with it through triumph and tragedy. Like Concorde before it the financial world has not been able to keep up with the science, priorities have changed. In both cases it seems economy has won over convenience.
Discovery is scheduled to take off for the final time on November the first this year, Endeavor will retire after its mission scheduled for February 26th 2011. This could be the last ever mission. A final mission for Atlantis has been proposed, but not approved for June 28th 2011, thirty days and two months after Columbia’s first flight.
Then Discovery, Endeavor and Atlantis will be sent to various museums and collections, as will Enterprise, the prototype which never achieved orbital flight.
On September 17th 1976 Enterprise rolled out of the manufacturing facility Palmdale, California. Originally it was to be named Constitution (in honour of the bicentennial of the US Constitution) but a write-in campaign by Star Trek fans convinced NASA and the White House to change the name. The photograph below was taken at the dedication ceremony where, fittingly, Gene Roddenberry and a number of original Star Trek cast members were in attendance. I was three months old. It looks like I may be somewhat older before we really do boldly go where no one has gone before.

Great News!

Yesterday I finally managed to entice Becca into the studio (spare room) to record some vocals for the new project. Not only did she do a great job, allowing me to bury my vocals so far in the mix they hardly sound out of key, she also enjoyed it, and even mentioned playing gigs at some future point!
Hurrah! But now I must tread carefully as I do not want to put her off by being too enthusiastic.
Writing this I realise that part of the reason for my current creativity is I have realised that, in my wife, I have a muse. I always thought that when you fell in love with someone they automatically became your muse and you would spend the rest of your days penning lavender scented paeans of devotion and tenderness dedicated to their beauty. But no, I carried on producing barely listenable ambient metal.
But NOW I realise, by writing for Becca in both senses of the word ‘for’ I can open pathways formerly closed.
This is going to take some time, and it’s going to take all my willpower not to splatter this stuff all over the internet before it’s ready…but one day it will be ready. So keep yer ears to the ground…

The Guys I Read

I spent most of my 20s working as a holiday rep. Fortunately I was not required to shepherd drunken Brits around the bars and ‘nite clubs’ of Faliraki, organising dubious beach games and then trying to get them all to the airport for a 3am flight back home before being up at five to do it all over again.
No, I was engaged in the rather more sedate business of the self drive camping holiday, a sector in which the reps were much drunker than the clients. As it should be.
I imagine these days there are laptops, DVDs, iPads and all sorts of distractions for the reps during their, not inconsiderable, downtime. Back then however we had little choice but to listen to our tapes (and later CDs. CDs!), get drunk and read books.
Now herein lay a problem. The season ran from March to October and, what with books being an essentially bulky item, one could not hope to bring enough along, nor rely on one’s colleagues for swaps. What was a poor boy to do?
It’s been so long now I can’t really remember what I used to read before I went to France. From memory it was generally lots on non-fiction about stone circles, something of an obsession at the time. However there was a genre, if it can so be called, with which I was ill acquainted.
As we travelled around in March and April that first season, setting up campsites as we went, we would inevitably come upon a big blue box know as the Leisure Chest. The Leisure Chest would contain items that the clients could borrow when they realised that, having filled their cars with catering sized packets of cornflakes, bottles of ketchup and tins of beans they had (arguably) neglected to bring anything with which they could have fun. Thus with pleading and expectant eyes they would delve into the Leisure Chest to recover such items as: One wooden bat, a shuttlecock (broken), some water filled plastic boules, a bit of net (purpose unclear) and other delights. However, in the depths of the Leisure Chest, underneath everything else in the Leisure Chest, was the real treasure; the books.
And after months of denial I finally read one. These were books which had been left behind, some read once and discarded, some were veterans, read many times, others appeared that they had never been finished. They came in two sizes: Very Thick and Very Thin. In seven years of working abroad I am proud to say I was never tempted by the Very Thin books, for these were the Mills and Boon books, every day tales of a nurse who falls for a Dutch doctor whose wife has just died and who isn’t ready to love again (I know this because my mother used to read these books, she informs me this is the plot of all of them, if you don’t believe me read something by Betty Neels). The biographies on the back of these books would often begin “X has written 87 books she is a former Nurse and is married to a Dutch surgeon”. I steered clear of the Very Thin books.
The Very Thick books were a different prospect. They had the authors name in MASSIVE on the front. They had pictures of helicopters on them. They were called things like ‘A Call to Action’ or ‘A Call to Death’ or ‘Shortcut to Death’. To be honest they looked ace. But I resisted, I was supposed to be reading Kerouac and Burroughs and poetry and books about stone circles and rock n’ roll. I had an image to maintain.
Then, one day, I finally gave in. I started one of the Very Thick books. It was called ‘Time to Hunt’(608 pages), by a man called Stephen Hunter, who I thought was a bit vain to put some of his name in the title so it said ‘hunt’ on the cover twice, both in MASSIVE and in normal. It was about an American sniper in the Vietnam War who had a nemesis who was also a sniper, but this time Russian. Only the first half of the book was set during the Vietnam War, the second half was in the present day. Whatever. I really enjoyed it. I think I was a bit fragile at the time because I also made myself a ‘Nam hat. It was a flat beachball, made into a tin hat shape, with a packet of Marlboro taped to the side and ‘Born to Kill’ biro’d on the front. Ahem.
From that point I was hooked, I read Jeffery Deaver, James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, Chris Ryan, Tom Clancy, Andy McNab, whoever was going really. I ended up with a couple of favourites, Frederick Forsyth (who I consider quite classy, he wrote Day of the Jackal (416 pages) which is not only exciting but also invented the ‘bad guy as good guy’ and the ‘we know how this will end but are still enthralled’ plot device) and Clive Cussler.
Clive Cussler is great. Every single one of his books has a quote on the cover, attributed to Tom Clancy; ‘Clive Cussler is the guy I read’. As with all of these quotes I’m always dubious about context. For example Clancy could have said; ‘Clive Cussler is the guy I read when I get kidnapped and forced to read Clive Cussler books’. Who knows.
Clive Cussler’s books are often about a man called Dirk Pitt, who is a marine scientist and action man. They generally follow Lester Dent’s Pulp Fiction Master Plot and almost always involve a megalomaniac with an improbable scheme to take over the world. They always have a prologue where it is 1087, Norway. Most importantly there are pictures! And a map! To be honest there are usually only two or three pictures, and any self respecting art critic would probably describe them as ‘shit’, but they force you to power through the book to get to them and when you get them you power on to find the bit in the book they refer to.
In the end Dirk and his ‘pal’, Al Giordino, save the world and go back to their cigars and classic car collections. Oh, and I almost forgot, Clive Cussler always appears in his own books. Actually this is the one bit I don’t like. He’ll appear as a man sailing round the world in his retirement, or volunteer bus driver. You know it’s him because the description given will be that of Clive Cussler. It might not be so bad if he left it there, but he doesn’t. The scene will usually end with Dirk Pitt saying ‘Haven’t we met before’ and Clive Cussler will say ‘Gee, I don’t know son, my name is Clive Cussler’. These scenes are awful. But the rest of the story is generally ace.
So far the absolute zenith (nadir?) of my Very Thick book experience has been a book called Temple (784 pages) by a man named Matthew Reilly. It concerns the story of a mild mannered linguistic professor who has to help retrieve a radioactive meteorite from a South American Jungle. There are giant cats, giant crocodiles, Nazis, a base in a volcano and, amazingly, a scene involving a fight, a conveyor belt and a crashed helicopter with spinning blades. I think you can work out the rest. At one point three paragraphs in sequence begin with the word ‘Suddenly’. Me and my friends used to have competitions to see who could read it the quickest. I think the record was just over five hours.
I have no shame in admitting I read these Very Thick books. I feel it is no worse than enjoying a Bruce Willis film, or some Michael Bay explosion-fest, or even a late night Steven Seagal vehicle. It’s just brainless entertainment. We all have a right to switch off and relax. My Dad is the cleverest man I know yet the only films he watches are action films and Harry Potter. His argument, which I kind of agree with, is that he has enough to think about in everyday life without having to think about being entertained.
So next time you find yourself bookless in an airport or train station, about to embark on a long journey. Go to WH Smiths or Waterstones, find the book with the most MASSIVE authors name, with the best embossing, the most helicopters, the best photoshopped explosion, the nearest to 700 pages and the most convincing recommendation from Tom Clancy and buy it. Or, if you’re planning in advance, go to anyone’s house and borrow one, there will be one there. You’ll be able to swap it for another at the house/hotel/hospital you’re on your way to. Then darkness will fall swiftly over the rocky headland, two hundred and fifty yards out to sea a few bubbles on the surface will be the only evidence of the diver’s approach. He will have trained hard for this mission, with many months of secret preparation at a location known to only a few shadowy government workers. He will have but one objective, and will not care whether he lives once his mission is complete; The President must die!

A Recent Construction

I find building things very therapeutic, not just robots but other things too. Building musical instruments is always something I always dreamed of doing but never thought possible. However, having built my Bisto pot synth and my diddley bow I am always looking for new ideas.
I’m not sure what inspired me to build a suitcase bass drum, but I did. From what my scant research revealed there’s something of a tradition of suitcase bass drums, especially amongst (obviously) buskers and similar travelling musicians. Indeed it has a cousin in the more professional foot drums, which could be adapted normal drums, as played on this rather wonderful version of Stairway to Heaven by Lissie, or a more custom built piece of equipment like these astonishing creations.
Anyway, I’m hardly going to type out instructions on how to build a suitcase bass drum as you should be able to work it out from the series of photos below. As I already had the suitcase (although I’m sure you could pick one up cheap enough at a car boot sale) the whole lot, including a cheap pedal off eBay, cost me less than £10. It actually sounds pretty good too, especially with a tambourine stuck to the top.