All posts by Armand

Media & Marketing

Oh, crap

Two other things: Damian and Tom have gone far to establishing The Line, which, if you’re an interesting, well-written Londoner and you want to contribute to the journalistic well-being of your fair city you should contribute to.

Also, have recently become a big, big fan of Questionable Content, an Indie webcomic. Astonishingly clever, well drawn, and compelling, and with possibly one of the best (by which I mean amusingly geeky) sidekicks ever – Pintsize, an “Anthro-PC”. Go read it. Now.

I think I’ll stop now. Blog overload!

[Listening to: Harder to Breathe – Maroon 5 – 1.22.03.Acoustic (03:10)]
Miscellany

Utter, utter genius

I need a thesaurus. I said “utter” about 20 times in my last post, and I can’t be bothered to edit it.

Either a thesaurus, or a new collection of stock superlatives. I need some that are at least as good as, if not better, than the Sun.

[Listening to: This Love – Maroon 5 – 1.22.03.Acoustic (04:15)]
Books, Film, Media & Marketing, Music, Personal

So much to blog, so little time

Ok, so there’s 8,000 inane websites like this one popping up every day, but that’s not going to stop me from annoying my friends with whatever trivia, observations, or self-referential prose with limited aim that I feel like. So Nyah.

Quick three or four part blog.

Good books: Anthropology, by Dan Rhodes – a 100 stories about girlfriends, at a paragraph each, provided me with a couple of bus journeys worth of absolute delight. Brilliant and satirical, terrible and emotional, they are the story any man can empathise with. It was like a punch to my emotional solarplexus; utter genius.

Also: In the City by the Sea, by Kamila Shamsie is utter brilliance; despite being a woman and an adult, Ms Shamsie brilliantly steps into the mind of an 11-year-old boy in a slightly fictionalised version of Pakistan. Having recently read a review by Kamila of another author’s book where she said literally nothing about the content of the book, I feel obliged to do exactly the opposite here – this is the story of a boy who’s uncle, a leader in the opposition, is placed under arrest by the despot General calling the shots. It tells his reaction, his decision to “depose the President”, his conversations with a cast of lively and unbelievable characters who you want to believe could be real – The Oldest Man, Wid, Ami and Aba, Salman Mamoo, and the wonderful Zehra, who I think, had I been 11, I would have fallen in love with. The whole story is told with reference to one of the most utterly devastating but remarkably concise opening sequences ever, in which the book’s hero, Hassan Haq, watches his neighbour, Azeem, fall off a roof to his death while trying to fly a kite. A metaphor for freedom, or an illustration of death without purpose; I haven’t finished it yet, so I don’t know. So far, it is utter lyrical genius, I go through the full range of my emotions from one paragraph to the next and feel the need to read bits out loud. I’m reading it slower as I approach the climax – I can’t bear to see what happens to the heroic Salman Haq.

Filmwize: Shrek 2 – 100% as good as Shrek 1, ’nuff said. Garfield – terrible, even for a longstanding Jim Davis, Lasagna and Jennifer Love-Hewitt fan. The Girl Next Door – cringeworthy American teen trash – I liked it a lot. I think that’s enough for now.

Music: undergoing a slight indie revival – Keane, Killers, Razorlight (and yes, ok, Busted and Mcfly), have been on my playlists lately, as well as the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack. Some good stuff there.

Finally: life – been busy. There’ve been some good parties lately, and I’ve met some very good new people: here’s to more, once the thesis is dealt with (I’m dealing, I’m dealing).

[Listening to: run – snow patrol (05:56)]
Media & Marketing, Miscellany

Pun of the Week

The Sun featured a screengrab from Shrek 2 with the headline “Chancellor of the Ex-shrek-quer”, next to a photo of Gordon Brown. Having seen the film, I concur that there is a resemblance between the honourable chancellor and Mr. Shrek and was duly amused by the pun.

Submit your puns of the week here.

Sorry for short posts. More substantial ones to follow at the weekend.

[Listening to: To The Sea – Razorlight – Up All Night (05:46)]
Miscellany, Personal

Henley Rah-gatta

Yesterday saw the conclusion of the Henley regatta, an annual summer boatfest that sees all sorts of people head down to the sleepy town of Henley and cheer on their clubs and teams, or other people’s clubs and teams, as they consume pimms by the river.

Sarah, an excellent friend of mine, had us over to her home in Henley for some post-event Pimms, which was complete fun and very enjoyable. The voyage there and back, however, was marred by the “all sorts” of people somewhat.

I mean, football fans get a bad rap, but being stuck on a train with 500 pimms and sun-wasted upper-middle-class aristo wannabes was irritating, even for a middle-class aristo wannabe like myself.

As one particular ponce redirected fellow travellers to a different toilet because one of his friends was having an “emergency situation”, I began to rethink my assessment. “Ponce he may be,” thought I, “but at least he looks out for his friend.” Some minutes later, though, I heard a knocking from the inside of the loo and noticed that the “friend” had wedged his foot against the door, preventing egress. When he eventually let his companion escape from the cramped train loo, gasping for breath through his blue-black-and-yellow crested boat-club blazer, my estimation sank once again.

Still, we had a nice time in Henley.

Miscellany, Personal

Shopping

I hate shopping. Really; you have no idea. The only time I really enjoy shopping is (a) if I have an unlimited budget (it’s never happened) or (b) if I’m helping a beautiful woman choose a beautiful dress, and they’re trying lots of adventurous items on and need my view on them (“you don’t think this is too slutty?” “no, never fear”, say I).

The rest of the time, it’s dull, frustrating, crowded and tiring.

That said, the last two weekends I’ve needed to go and buy clothes. Once for a black tie dinner that I’m going to on Monday (my agency has been nominated as “best consultancy”), the other just because I needed to broaden my work wardrobe (which has consisted entirely of variations on about 4 differents trousers and jackets and a number of shirts).

And I’ve got to say, much as our piggish gender mocks the fairer sex for their love of the field sport of shopping, its much more pleasant going with a lady than without. Buying the DJ (tuxedo for you transatlantics out there) by myself was difficult: the shop (Moss Bros) had disappointingly few mirrors, so while I had the impression that the costume fit me, every time I wandered out of the changing room to examine myself in their sparse collection of mirrors (in a manner of speaking), I grew increasingly paranoid that someone would run in and nab the tatty pair of trousers I’d been wearing along with my wallet and mobile phone.

Yesterday, the lovely Maya (my effervescent and wonderful mother), who’s visiting with my gregarious and eminently bearded father, insisted on accompanying me on a short escapade which was infinitely more efficient, enjoyable and successful than my previous excursion.

Some might mock a grown man for shopping with his mother; I, for one, recommend it. Mum’s presence provided an arbiter of taste, a holder of mobile phones, a foil for my frustration, and a broad and proud grin every time I found something that suited me. Also (and I’m not rationalising here, I’d shop with Mum anyway) given that I see her for about 3 weeks a year, I like to spend as much time as possible with her (well, with both my folks).

The whole thing reminds me of an entertaining amateur poet I heard at tha ABCTales event that my brother performed at: Eddie Gibbons performed a piece called “Shopping Forecast”, which I recommend anyone reading if they can only find it on the interweb (I can’t).

Personal

Graduation

Fresh back from my brother’s graduation ceremony (long, but proud of the shaggy-haired one) and about to pop off for dinner. Feel the vicarious triumph and sadness of a good thing coming to a good end.

Off to the graduation dinner now. Gravy-tastic. Have a good weekend, y’all.

Books, Media & Marketing

Nostalgia for Infinity

Finished both American Gods and Absolution Gap now; both very enjoyable for very different reasons, and very clever/dumb for others.

American Gods, Gaiman’s exploration of what it means to be America (not really an American, but the spirit of the country, kind of thing, only less wishy washy and crap than that – something more visceral), sees a war between the Old Gods and the New. The Old Gods being those from the Norse, Egyptian, Hindu, Amazon etc., Pantheons (there are about a thousand references I didn’t get through inadequate knowledge of different mythologies and faiths) and the new, predicatably, being Media (who at one point takes the form of the eponymous character in “I love Lucy” and offers Shadow, the human protagonist, “a flash of Lucy’s tits”), Technology and the like. The novel twists, turns, flips you upside down and carries you in a kind of bewildered haze, much as it does to Shadow, the book’s hero. Shadow (we learn no other name for him), fresh out of prison and recently broken to the news that his wife has been killed in a tragic car crash, finds himself adrift. Circumstance, fate, and scheming manipulation lead him to the mysterious Mr Wednesday – and chaos seems to break loose. Other than an occasionally wavering narrative structure (Gaiman likes his set pieces a bit much), the book is deeply entertaining and really quite moving at the end, even if an absence of any real faith in anything and a lack of experience of America and the American Dream made it difficult for me to fully appreciate, I got the sense there was something big there, something good.

Absolution Gap, the fourth in Alistair Reynolds’ Inhibitors series, is a brilliant hard-science fiction novel for the first 500 of its 550 pages. Reynolds completely loses the plot in the end; Deus ex Machina utterly ruins his careful and brilliant characterisation and plot development, and he concludes a series which could have gone on for another entire book in 50 disappointing pages. The plot of this series is, essentially, (and bear with the far-fetchedness, it is science fiction, after all), that a group of black cubic smart-robots (or something) called the Inhibitors, have detected humanity’s presence in the universe (through the actions of a particularly precocious human, Dan Sylveste, in an earlier book in the series) and have concluded that they are at the threshold of self-destruction. That is to say, they have reached a point of Spacefaring where it is inevitable that they will eventually turn all their technology on each other and lay waste to the universe. To that end, the inhibitors (or whoever created them) deemed that it would be necessary to blank the slate by “inhibiting” the further development of the species by the methodical elimination of every single human. Absolution Gap sees several of the protagonists from the earlier books in the series battle the inhibitors and find the only forces in the universe that can stop them. Lovable characters include Clavain, the “Butcher of Tharsis”, Scorpio, the man-pig warrior, Remontoire and Skade, Conjoiner “Spiders”, and Captain John Branningan, who’s sentience has been absorbed into the galactic cruiser (Lighthugger) the “Nostalgia for Infinity” following a nasty case of the Melding Plague. Apart from anything else, Reynolds has a great talent for spinning out memorable names.

Anyway, I’d recommend the former to anyone, and the latter to anyone who likes Sci-Fi and has read and enjoyed the (generally superior) preceding novels in the series.

[Listening to: This Photograph is Proof (I Kn – Taking Back Sunday – Spiderman 2 OST (04:12)]

Books, Media & Marketing, Personal

Luton Bungalow

On Wednesday I went to see my brother perform at the Bloomsbury festival, as part of an ABCTales promoting-affair, which saw a couple of other ABCTalers reading their work, as well as the luminescent performance poet Zena Edwards, the amusing and quirky former resident of the Bronx Michale Donaghy (who recited a wonderful poem called “Black Ice and Rain” and inexplicably played the flute at us), and they hysterically entertaining John Hegley, on stage with all his vibrant humour, his ukelele, and his tales of his Luton Bungalow.

Arvind was fantastic; dressed in his Lex Luthor jacket he presented his very emotive story “Her London Bed”, and while his Indian/Malaysian accent didn’t hold entirely, he moved the audience, including me, despite having heard/read the story a number of times before.

[Listening to: Did You – Hoobastank – Spiderman 2 OST (03:19)]