Thursday, February 20, 2003
Got a funky digital map wheel that counts the kms for me. And there look to be many. The route is making itself clear to me, which is very satisfying if not a little scary. Still can’t quite believe that I’ll be arriving in Newfoundland in June, with so much other stuff going on.
Away at the weekend – Roswell, White Sands, Cloudcroft, snow, desert, military towns and astrochimps.
Friday, February 14, 2003
Despite nine years in Dublin, I’d never sat down and read a long account of the Famine. Good thing too, in many ways. After a couple of days trawling through the horror stories, I came to the conclusion that any book on emigration would only be about death, poverty and pain. That visiting Saint John in New Brunswick or Grosse Isle near Quebec City would feel like a trip to the morgue.
Fortunately, things looked better in the morning – those who arrived in Canada in the late 1840s might have had few options, and many died trying, but it behoves the survivors (and their descendants, myself included) to live on as large as we can. And write about the good stuff and the bad stuff side by side.
Spent the afternoon wearing my hack’s hat, researching a newsletter on web content. A feast of interesting websites, information architecture blogs and some mad vocab. After work on the book, it feels like another world, but it’s one I’m pretty familiar with, too. A weird collision.
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Finally feel I’m getting somewhere with the route. The latest book, Flight from Famine by Donald Mackay details the successive waves of emigration from Ireland to Canada, and from it there’s a pattern emerging that matches what looks like a good bike journey with a historical reason for being there.
There’s an incredible amount of info on the Peter Robinson-led and government-backed emigrations of 1823 and 1825. Although these were atypical, being funded by the British govt, the specificity of people, place and story mean it’ll be great to follow them from Co. Cork to what became Peterborough, a little north of Lake Ontario.
In non-work news, still shaking my head of Michael Jackson’s weirdly naive and frightening performance in Martin Bashir’s adroit documentary last week. Give some people enough rope. . .
And after a particularly intense spinning session yesterday, I’m wondering if getting your heart rate to 208 bpm can be good for you.
Thursday, February 06, 2003
Just finished one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. The Danger Tree by David Macfarlane mixes family history, memory and research into a deeply moving portrait of Newfoundland and the effects of war.
Three of his great-uncles died in the First World War, and with great skill and wisdom, he tells their stories and the stories of those left behind. And the island of Newfoundland itself becomes a character, with all its barren beauty, heartache and missed chances. A beautiful and at times very funny book, and riveting.
In more prosaic news, Powells has become my new US-based online bookshop of choice, with all the stuff I wanted that Amazon didn’t have, or said they had and then couldn’t send me. And it feels good to be supporting an independent bookseller. What I wanted was a pile of maps, and a book about the Irish in Canada.
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
Back after a weekend in LA – hence no blogging (must investigate some mobile solutions). Prior to my departure I went for a haircut here in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was in a jewellery shop – past the cabinets and into the back room with the chair. Robert did a nice job on my hair, and told me about the Middle Eastern guys who were attacking the US where it hurts – in its jewellery market. He’d called the Feds and the CIA about it, and either he was completely mad, or there’s a lot to be said for his observations. Or both.
Which is why you should always get your haircut when you’re visiting somewhere – like taxi drivers, barbers always know what’s going on.
And thence to LA. Yes to Venice Beach (and Amelia’s great coffee and panini). Yes to air hockey on Santa Monica Pier. Yes to Philippe’s french dip sandwiches, and a big yes to Union Station. Birds singing, moist thick air, temps in the high 80s in early Feb, palm trees and the madness of Beverly Hills.
And The Grove, a frightening example of the privatisation of public space, corporate co-option of small-town American symbols, and commodification of community – a whole fake streetscape with an Abercrombie and Fitch where the town hall should be, musical fountains and a neighbourhood Italian restaurant seen through the eyes of money men.
Back to Canada work today.
Saturday, January 25, 2003
Big news in Mooro Towers. The first book is currently technically not quite a book. It’s an 80,000 word Word and .pdf document (although I’m proud to say it was written in BBEdit), and it’s been shopped around agents and publishers in London and Dublin for some months now. Some were interested, some took over a year to reply, and some kept their opinions to themselves.
But that might all be about to change – it’s all still up in the air, which makes me nervous, but it’s looking like I’ve found a publisher. And not a bad one either. I’ll not say more till I have a contract in my hand, but it does mean the Canada trip is now subject to change if I’m working on rewrites and edits. A good problem to have, but it’s making it hard to get down to work on anything until I know for sure.
On the bike front, I’m been comparing the putative Carpe Diem with a Cannondale T2000. I’d say both are great bikes, but the wheelset options on the CD don’t include any 36-spokers, which seem to be a good idea for real touring. And the Cannondale gets great reviews and is not a cyclocross/touring hybrid, but a pure-bred tourer (albeit with an alu frame). Maybe I get the CD with the spec I want, and get some chunky touring wheels elsewhere.
British military endeavours in 1812? You’re thinking Napoleon, right? So was I until I discovered the young republic of the USA invaded British North America from Detroit in that year, eventually burning York (later named Toronto). The struggle went back and forth, with a British fleet eventually arriving in Chesapeake Bay and torching Washington. The Treaty of Ghent returned the borders to the way they’d been before, and everyone went home. But the strange set of differences and similarities between North Americans on both sides of the border is perhaps encapsulated in this war – there was nobody more like a proto-Canadian than his cousin across the border, but they still went to war (with the native Americans on the British side, the US receiving French support, and most British subjects in the area being Francophone). How what was to become Canada went from a sparsely-populated set of provinces with little clout to the most powerful of all the dominions by mid-late C19 is a story I’m interested in hearing. If only I could be bothered to do any work.
Thursday, January 23, 2003
Got to love the ease with which you can buy things online in the US. Just received a mouse to make my laptop computing more straightforward. Who knew right-mouse clicks worked in Apple OS 10.2?
Yet to hear back from the other bike manufacturers I contacted about sponsorship for the Canada trip, but a big hand for Airborne (http://www.airborne.net) for their speedy offer of a big discount on a Carpe Diem. There don’t look to be many roads in Newfoundland – maybe I need something chunkier?
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
It’s bright and sunny in Santa Fe, New Mexico as I write this, a welcome to my blog. I’m staying here in a lovely house while the weather in Dublin is miserable, and I’m planning the big bike expedition in Canada, scheduled for May. More random thoughts as I have them, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
DIY and interior design shows purport to improve your life by improving your environment – but do any of them actually work?
You can get the Homefront team to do your kitchen for you, or call for DIY SOS when you’ve made a hames of things yourself. The Changing Rooms posse will let your neighbours loose in your living room, and The Property Ladder shows you how to turn a profit from getting your hands dirty.
Interior desecrating is everywhere, but when the film crew has left, are you really better off?
You’re going to pile all the same old shite you had before back onto the shelves and carry on regardless – like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. If you’re miserable before, you’ll be miserable afterwards.
Unless you’ve been to The Life Laundry, which takes an innovative look at how people relate to their stuff.
The premise of the programme is simple – arrive at a frighteningly cluttered house, dump all the contents into the back garden, and force the homeowners to shred, sell, or give away almost all of it. Shift the remainder back inside, where the decorators have been busy, and voila, a brighter and less cluttered environment.
Some of the houses visited are so shocking even Carol Smillie would lose her grin. Junk strewn everywhere, baked bean tins from two decades ago in the kitchen cupboards, several years’ worth of unopened mail in a plastic bag halfway up the stairs.
You’d think that making an improvement in cases like this would be straightforward, but it can be very hard to persuade the homeowners they’re better off without this crap.
These houses are clogged with baggage in more ways than one. People seem to surround themselves with stuff as a result of important personal issues – bereavement, loneliness, childhood trauma.
Most episodes have a defining moment in which the chief hoarder in the household is driven to tears by host Dawna Walter’s insistence that a particular item has to go. The detritus is a physical manifestation of some emotional obstacle that they’re often unwilling to face.
It might be just a green scarf to you, but to the hoarder it’s something much more, and through sensitive handling of the situation, the show allows its subjects to do a mental spring cleaning that’s as valuable as the physical one. A new kind of interior decoration.
Most of us aren’t in the extreme positions of the people on the show, but in a small way, The Life Laundry shows how important it is to get our stuff together. And it’s not about rag rolling your walls or putting in a dado rail.
So you’re waiting for The Two Towers to open, and you’re looking for some action and spectacle. Potter and Bond have arrived in cinemas promising to deliver, but don’t be fooled – forget those franchised phoneys and stay at home with The Brotherhood of the Wolf.
The new blockbusters represent the triumph of craft over talent. The Chamber of Secrets and Die Another Day are reliably diverting and well put together. They do exactly what it says on the tin, reassuring the consumer that even though they’ve not seen this particular film, they already know what to expect.
Which is what makes The Brotherhood of the Wolf (just out on video and DVD after its sell-out run at the IFC earlier in the year) such a triumph – you’ve no idea what to expect from an 18th-century French kung-fu anti-Enlightenment conspiracy monster movie. Think Peter Greenaway meets John Woo and you’re not even close.
Brilliantly shot, it’s stylish and playful in equal measure, swaggering across the screen completely confident in its unique vision.
Based on the true story of an unidentified beast that terrorised a remote part of pre-Revolutionary France, it follows the attempt of explorer and naturalist Fronsac and his native American companion Mani to track down the creature.
The film gleefully rips up the genre rules, but amazingly it still ends up as a coherent whole, and a ripping yarn. Amid the beauty, violence and general insanity, there’s even time to raise questions of aristocratic dissipation, environmentalism and fascistic mechanisation.
Forget Harry and James, and choose the film that’s got the best of both of them – gadgets, fights, suave heroes, chases, intrigue, spies and monsters. And frock coats.