All Work And No Play Makes This A Dull Blog

Dearie me. It's been intolerably quiet in this little corner of the interweb over the last fortnight and the more days that go by without posting the harder it gets to actually sit down and bloody write something. Simply enough, I've been jolly knackered thanks to a wodge of extra hours I've been working, so that by the time I've got home and dinner's out of the way there's just no joie de blog left in me. I dunno, life just seems to fly by in a blur of work-sleep-work-sleep-work-sleep-WEEKEND!-sleep-work repeated ad nauseum. Quite feeble really. Goodness knows how anyone has the energy to work a full-time job and raise a family without any help from robotic servants or magical powers.

So, what's been going on in Naglville lately? Aside from the aforementioned increased work, not much at all. Tonight the fiancée and me are off to a concert together for the first time since, bloody hell, October 2006, to see our beloved Portishead blow the roof off the Edinburgh Corn Exchange just down the road. Having already heard the new album and been suitably impressed by it (proper write-up once released, but it's a heavier, chillier beast than their previous albums and is likely to be a right ear-clobberer live) I'm exceedingly excited about tonight. I last saw them live at the Southampton Guildhall in, oh god, November 1997 (the ticket's in my college cuttings book) and that was stunning, one of my favourite gigs ever, with me particularly bewitched by Beth Gibbons giving the sort of heartfelt performance that made by 20 year old indiekid heart leap. Going by the glimpses of live footage from ATP, they've still got it in spades - a seven-track performance went up online late last night, but I'm not watching it until tomorrow, just to make tonight that little bit fresher and surprising.

Haven't worked on any artwork for the last few weeks either which, like blogging or going to the gym, becomes more intimidating and infuriating the longer I leave it. Bloody ridiculous, but I'll get something done tomorrow or fall asleep trying. Until Thursday I'd not been to the gym for over a fortnight either, but have got back into the swing of that in the last two days. A particular highpoint in exercising occured yesterday on the treadmill when a rather long Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan track came on the iPod shuffle and I went into some kind of zen-like state of bliss, running for double the time I'd normally do (or manage). I thought that fast relentless chuggy metal (System of a Down, Torche - not Melt Banana, that'd induce a hernia) or fast electronica (Orbital at their technoist, particularly Rewind) made the best workout music, but turns out it's a bunch of blokes clapping and singing lyrics I cannot possibly understand. If I ever do a proper run, I'm filling the shuffle with Qawwali chanting.

What else? Saw [Rec] yesterday which really deserves its own post, so hopefully I can manage that in the next 24 hours, but in summary - brutal, brief, claustrophobic, genuinely terrifying finale, bloody good horror. Currently reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene which is as good as it's modern-classic status suggests, managing to be both scientifically thorough yet accessible to a lumbering berk like meself. The only problem I have is that it's taking time to read - as with Brian Greene's wonderful superstring books, you can't just nip in & out of the text like a lightweight fiction - and I'm desperate to finish. Not because it's not enjoyable - far from it, it's a cracking read and I'd recommend it to every one of you - but the book I read before it was Master and Commander, the first of the Aubrey/Maturin novels, and it was such a joy that I'm now gagging to get into the second one, Post Captain. I got hold of it a couple of days back and it now sits on the table like a wicked temptress, calling me away from the joys of genes with the promise of 19th century shenanigans. But nay! I shall be strong!

Hurrahs and huzzahs to the BBC this week for enabling the BBC iPlayer for use on the Wii Internet browser. It's all very well using said player on computers, but as the Wii is hooked up to the television this basically allows you to watch iPlayer shows on the telly rather than a monitor, just as it should be. We had a go at this on Wednesday - Doctor Who Confidential kept pausing every five minutes or so, most likely due to too many people on the neighbourhood broadband line at the time (6:30pm) but when we had a second go an hour later with Transatlantic Sessions the entire programme streamed without a pause. Picture quality is inevitably sub-broadcast but still finer than YouTube, while the sound quality sounded good to these ears. Good to see they're not averse to putting full-length features up - Danny Boyle's Millions is up for another day - and we'll probably pop Later with Jools Holland on sometime next week, what with it featuring Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglova playing music from the wonderful soundtrack of the wonderful soundtrack for the adorable Once, and Goldfrapp playing from the spookily dreamy Seventh Tree, the perfect soundtrack for a nice sunny Spring, if only there were one rather the rerun of Autumn we're currently experiencing.

Anything else? We're now onto the second series of Jeeves And Wooster and it continues to be a sublime pleasure, even better than I thought back in - gulp - 1991. It's incredibly comforting to watch, for reasons I can't quite explain, but it's all so cosy and makes one wistful for a world of politeness, decorum, tailoring and omnipotent manservants. Following on from that, the third of Stephen Fry's podcasts - sorry, podgrams - is up and waiting for you on iTunes (don't fear, they're still free). Very nice too - such is the loveliness of Fry that it could be half an hour of him reading the ingredients for Frosties and it would still be charming. Of course, his writing is far more interesting than the ingredients for Frosties, so it's a class act all round - I particularly enjoyed his previous piece on dancing and the inability to do so, being similarly hapless at cutting a groove. No doubt I'll end up quoting it verbatim when people start asking about there being a First Dance after the wedding...

I'm still waiting for Mario Kart Wii and my vinyl copy of R.E.M.s thrilling Accelerate to come through the post, the former of which undoubtedly leading to hours, days, weeks flying by in our little flat as the Lass & I challenge each other to tournament after tournament of wheely madness. I still remember just how much time during my study in Dublin was spent on Mario Kart 64 with my housemates - I would regret it and wonder wistfully that if I'd spent all that time animating I might be a better artist now, but to be honest it was a bloody good time and therefore jolly well spent. Though goodness knows what kind of driver I'll make when I inevitably learn to drive one day and go tearing down roads, looking for mushrooms and checking the rear view mirror for blue spiky shells.

Oh, and I baked some raisin flapjacks last Saturday. They were lovely. Go me!

Comments

[Larry]

Tool are pretty good to jog along with - extra distraction comes from trying to count the beats! Like spotting the Fibonacci sequence in Lateralus. You can get similar stuff going in Dream Theatre, Meshuggah, and lots of random jazz.

Yes, I am a sad maths geek... ;)

[jons dad]

you watch the Transatlantic sessions? - there was one on Friday - sheer joy - I have downloaded both CDs and have stuff from cara dillon if interested -

re running we should do the London marathon together next year - bound to get on tv

[Croila]

Ah, "The Selfish Gene"? I've got that, but i've not read it yet. I'd like to hear your considered opinions once you've finished it.

E read the whole Master & Commander series last year and was very into them. Unfortunately he's given them all to his dad to read or I'd have let you borrow them. I quite liked the Master & Commander film - you've seen it, I presume? If not, we've got it on DVD which you could borrow :-)

[Nagl]

Larry: Aye, I've had Tool on a few times in the past when exercising - going from Parabol to Parabola is a treat when you want to crank things up. I didn't have a scooby about Fibonacci in Lateralus at all until you mentioned it, at which point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7CZIJVxFY
NIFTY! I'll have to try the reordering of the tracks as suggested...

Dad: Yeah, we watched them when first shown last year, pretty much the only time when I've heard Scottish traditional music that sounded good and interesting to my ears. As for doing the marathon - heh, not with these lungs! Might try a 10K or halfie later this year... possibly...

Croila: I saw Master & Commander when first out at the cinema and loved it to bits, then bought it a couple of weeks back after reading the book - it was even better second time round!

[burge]

For more top gym tunes along the lines of "blokes clapping and singing lyrics I cannot possibly understand" I'd recommend that you go out* and purchase yourself some Tinariwen, who set a fine powerwalking pace for the treadmill and elliptical. Also, selected tracks from The Imagined Village keep one stomping through. Particularly 'Tam Lyn Retold'.

*(or stop in and order online)