gervais nonsense to cost money shock

The news that Audible plans to charge for podcasts of Rocky Gervais laughing like a macaque at the adolescent surrealism of his sidekicks doesn't come as an enormous sorrow to me I must say. But it's certainly one to watch in terms of the web economy. The consensus on Guardian Unlimited suggests that this is an elementary mistake which fails to understand the structure of the web and who am I to disagree with the geekocracy? I'll certainly be amazed if it stays top of the charts.

getting pictorial

If I have to thank the nice people at immigration for anything (and I'd really rather not), it's that the whole rigmarole forced me to take a day off last Friday, and found me wandering back from the station in a relaxed mode in the middle of gorgeous winter sunshine. I took the opportunity to get some photos of our new haunts. Unfortunately my camera suddenly ran out of memory after only a couple of pics from inside the house, and I was too tired and ignorant to try and do anything about it, so I went to bed instead.

blood-sucking immigrants

I write this entry (offline) from the cold metal benches of Lunar House in Croydon. Well-named, commented my wife, given the absurd bureaucracy which daily plays out within its walls. Lunar House is the Home Office's clearing house for immigrants, where documents are produced and vast quantities of money paid for the privilege of living and working in this country and paying taxes.

I have two observations: 1. From reading the papers in this country you'd be forgiven for believing that immigrants roll off the boat in Dover to a waiting council house wallpapered with social security cheques, and live happily ever after off the sweat of the English yeomanry's common toil, stirring from their sloth from time to time only to plot the destruction of everything we hold dear. I'm willing to bet that it would come as an almighty shock to the average sun-reader to know that the price for a foreigner married to an english citizen to enter the country is in the region of £300; the price for remaining after two years is £500 (both non-refundable in the event of refusal, natch); and stipulated in both types of visa is a prohibition in recourse to public funds. Say hello to the folks who clean our toilets, drive our cabs, serve our coffee, pay taxes for our public services and generally get abused and despised by those who don't know better, and some of those who do.

The second observation will have to wait - they've just called our number. Joy . . .

It's all me, me, me

Very belatedly catching up with Dan Hill's treatise on the context for music listening (well, it was very long, and I've been moving to south london - didn't you know?). Hard to disagree and refreshing to read such a reflective piece on an area too often characterised by heady technophilia (or luddite nostalgia). On the subject of the representativeness or otherwise of the various "presentations of self" available through digital media, that certainly strikes a chord. My audioscrobbler list is certainly skewed, for example, partly as a result of the deficiency of metadata encouraged by interface limitations which means that much of my classical music is incorrectly tagged, and partly as a result of the fact that most of it just isn't on my digital player because basically, it's no good shuffling Mahler's 3rd, and rarely any good listening to it on the move. But aren't all digital self-presentations partial, edited, filtered either by accident or design? Obviously that's part of the point. If you don't know me, you won't know what lifestooshort's real name is and maybe that's my way (like so many bloggers') of dealing with the somewhat amorphous and abstract possibility of strangers reading my intimate thoughts (though to be fair that's less likely to happen to me than it is to Dan . . .)

However, while Dan's dreaming of multidisciplinary approaches to bring analogue richness into our brittle digital world, we could also have a little think about the problem of personal history - nobody's digital life really started more than a few years ago. Nick Drake only scores highly on my audioscrobbler, for example, because I got into his music a few months ago. My mother isn't there on my flickr space because she passed away a few years ago. Some people get round these problems by introducing a back-catalogue, but that seems like a lot of effort. I suppose this isn't really a big deal for anyone but us in the in-between generation - but then I suspect that our children will be an in-between generation fo tomorrow's technologies too. So perhaps we should reconcile ourselves to these inadequacies and abandon the narcissistic quest for vicarious, virtual self-presentation?

a shocking calamity

Generally the iPod is quite good at dishing out pleasant surprises in the way it strings things together. Last night was not one such occasion.... as my bike and I wended through the streets of south Peckham (irrelevant detail just to show I can vaguely keep this on the south london topic) my soul was somewhere else (maybe already in Dulwich?), thanks to the slow movement of Beethoven's op.132 A minor quartet. I was literally halfway through the gossamer-smooth modulation from the first D major episode, and expecting to find myself again lost in the cosmic yearning of the F lydian music of the Heiliger Dankgesang (probably the first use of the lydian mode in "serious music" since the 16th century, and my God, what a use) when what happens? I must have leant on a button or something, because instead of that, I get The Heptones' Equal Rights ('hairy man has an equal right to live and be free'). I know, value-judgements are invidious and everything has its aesthetic context etc etc..... but...

davos webcasts

It's done! We are now officially and physically south londoners. First impressions range from mild euphoria at having a bathtub for the first time in six years to a sense of existential shock at a transcendentally grim first bike-ride home through the dimly-sodium-bathed streets of Walworth and Peckham - not helped by the freezing fog of a January evening. More to come (plus pics) soon once we get a bit more unpacking done and sort our connectivity out.

....in the meantime though, and straying off message again, just wanted to point you in the direction of a webcast of my (disembodied) father doing his amazing job as simultaneous interpreter at the recent World Economic Form in Davos. Click on the "join the webcast" button. Come on, you know you want to. Tax avoidance is the new rock & roll.