The book I mentioned earlier

30 Apr 2008, 8am

I COMMAND you at once to order a copy of Things I Learned About My Dad, an anthology of writing gathered by the well-known dooce woman which happens to feature my girlfriend Gail Armstrong, whose contribution, a memoir about life with her father, is SUPERLATIVE.

We haven’t seen a copy yet but Gail’s piece better be PRECISELY at the point where the book naturally FALLS OPEN to the casual READER or I shall be VERY CROSS indeed.

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The Hubert

29 Apr 2008, 1pm

Renting a house in France, at least based on the anecdotal experience I’m about to share, is witheringly expensive. When in 2004 we had to decamp from Pompignan (north of Montpellier) to where we are now (north of Avignon), the out-of-pocket hit was unbelievable. A two month deposit on the new place, plus an agency fee just under a thousand zorros, plus another grand paid to the swervingly drunk moving organisation. Unlike what one is used to in North America, when you move into a rental you aren’t provided with basic appliances; our stove wouldn’t fit, so another five hundred on an oven and a countertop stove, then the washer/dryer, then the fence to keep the dogs in, and on and on until you feel like everyone’s just randomly slicing off flesh as you bumble along the day.

It’s only dumb luck that has us located where we now are – there was an ad on an untrafficked real estate web site which had been up for so long we assumed it had to be a mistake, that someone had forgotten to take it down, but we called and yes, it was still available and yes, do come have a look. We found a fairly standard thick-walled, wood-beamed box of a house, albeit one built in the 1840s, divided up so the kids could each have a room, the grownups could each have an office, and the washer/dryer could have a cozy corner to rattle and belch in. 

Despite all that out-of-pocket, getting installed was easy enough. There’s a funny thing that happens to me – maybe it happens to you – when moving somewhere new, which is remembering with sharply etched clarity every single moment of the first month or so. It’s four years on and I still remember every banal detail of those days, every breakfast, every shower; whereas if you asked me to describe last week I’d maybe come up with something about getting into the car once, and I think we watched TV at some point. Doubtless there’s an evolutionary survival explanation involving brain activity being piqued in unfamiliar settings, but I wonder if there’s a way to get that sort of mental stenography in a perpetual way, short of moving somewhere new every month. Would beat the pants off of writing things down all the time.

Anyway the house, or more specifically the landlord, who lives across the way. Like every rural French man of a certain age he’s never not outside clipping or trimming or blasting or beekeeping or making some sort of defiant gesture at the Stalinite oppression of peace and quiet. Outside, as I write this, he’s got the putain de leaf blower on, moving piles of dead vegetable matter from one side of the courtyard to the other. One notes that today it’s the purple velour pyjamas he’s opted to work in.

He’s a good enough guy, a former bureaucrat with the national electrical utility EDF, who navigated his career path at the menacingly barb-wired and sentried Marcoule nuclear research facility, which is a fifteen minute drive down the road, and which is the reason that every year or so we receive free (gosh, thanks) prescriptions for iodine tablets from the local governing body, in case something goes, you know, spectacularly wrong and we’re concerned about thyroid health. Built in the early 1950s, whereupon it caused something of an employment boom in an otherwise docile wine and asparagus economy, Marcoule is also the main reason why our town can adequately be described as a quaint 500-year-old core at the centre of a huge ring of nasty quick-dry prefab midcentury housing.

A couple years ago we were asked over for a drink at Christmas, because apparently that’s what neighbours do. Having poured, without even asking, sticky-sweet bubbly wine for his wife and Herself, and having noticed via the recycling bin that I’m not completely averse to enjoying a glass of whiskey now and again, he very grandly produced a bottle of Chivas, sploshed four, maybe five fingers into a tumbler for me, poured himself another in equal measure, and, muttering something about acid reflux, topped it up with (I kind of wish I were making this up) Orange Fanta.

The real surprise of the evening however was learning that he was one of a very small crowd of early Apple adopters in this country, albeit one who adopted early then called it a day. He showed us a yellowed, winded late-80s portable, his current computer, which he was until then treating very much like a plug-in typewriter. Internets? Never heard of them. I had an old Macbook lying around and immediately schemed out a plan wherein I would give him a (relatively) modern, connected computing device in exchange for, I don’t know, less grief about there being divots in the walls or the dogs taking the occasional shit in his garden.

It’s lazy comedy to make fun of someone trying out, with all attendant panics and confusion, something that to you is second nature, so I’ll limit my summary of the last couple years of tragicomic cross-courtyard technical support to an incident: there was a pounding on the door because he’d been on Google News and, being logged into Gmail at the time, had seen a div on the corner of the page that greeted him by name and suggested he might be interested in the following stories, and he was seriously freaked out about why the entire internet was being told what his reading interests were.

Click-throughs built the pyramids

28 Apr 2008, 6pm

However you may happen to feel on the subject, I’m pleased as punch to have been asked to participate in The Deck, the rakishly named advertising network ‘reaching creative, web and design professionals’ run by Coudal Partners in Chicago. Textism now joins The Kottke, Gary Fireball, El Jefe, The Other Baldwin Brother and suchlike damn fine web sites providing the goods and asking little in return but the occasional pause to click through and consider a product or service that may be of use. If not, not. Your call.

My only condition for joining was free license to slap around others in the network, and the advertisers themselves, to which Jim Coudal’s response was ‘of course’, so, as they say, sorted.

Yet another peony

28 Apr 2008, 12pm

This one is in decay, which makes me think of absinthe and black kohl, sweat, amphetamines and teenagers working through anger and rage in notebooks full of crap.

And, after a weekend up to my armpits in it, may I make the following observation: Aperture (and, to a lesser degree, Lightroom) is to Photoshop as a finely honed chef’s knife is to a factory full of circular saws.

On cameras and flies

25 Apr 2008, 5pm

I am as they say hereabouts nul when it comes to taking photographs. As a designer slash art director I think I had a fairly good eye for what makes a picture work, and what makes one work in a layout – at least I hope so, wouldn’t want those thousands of hours spent squinting into loupes over light tables saying nope nope nope to have amounted to nothing. When it comes to taking the things myself though, always a frustration. Press the shutter release, hope for the best, and never ever end up with what was expected (well, maybe once). Not entirely unversed in the logic of exposure time and apertures, but ultimately just too impatient to develop anything like the supple knowledge photographers whose work I like can access in an instant. That and I’ve been using the wrong goddamn cameras.

For years now I’ve used Leica (or more often the Panasonic Lumix versions, which have the same glass and electronics but come much cheaper) consumer-end cameras, mainly because some lingering art school snobbery I picked up as a teenager dictates that anything Leica or Hasselblad marks you as a better photographer than any Japanese silliness ever possibly could. True or not (not) the pictures kept turning out wrong: impossible to get a good white balance in anything other than direct sunlight, noisy junk all over the place at any speed greater than 100 ASA, slippery autofocus that took, like, a couple hours to lock in before firing the shutter. Finally it dawned on me after a few years of blind brand allegiance what Leica’s consumer products are: a brilliant, razor-sharp lens up front, a webcam on back.

I’ve always been reluctant to use a DSLR – the one sure thing about being an expat is you never want to look like a tourist – however having just this week received a lump sum payment that has at long last made its way through the barely perceptible movements of the rusty squeaking gears that is accounts payable at a certain publishing concern that shall remain, er, unnamed, I did two capricious things I’d been champing at the bit to do for ages: bought Herself (who is, justifiably, more than a little tired of being given my smoked and smudged hand-me-downs) a bright shiny white portable computing device, and myself a Nikon D60, with the standard vanilla 18–55mm kit lens. After all I’m now at the stage in life where, looks-wise, coming off as a tourist occupies the least of my concern.

First fly spotted this year. Many billions more will come.

Christ on a bike what a difference. I feel like someone handed a slice of hot toast spread with cultured butter after a lifetime breakfasting on Skittles and government cheese. I mean, it does what I want it to! It autofocuses in less time than it takes my eyes to imagine what a proper focus would be! You can take pictures in tungsten light without tacking a fucking white card to the wall and metering fifteen times! You push the button and it takes a fucking picture! I am in consumer ecstasy! I am in consumer ecstasy! NyQuil! Advil! Malt liquor! 

Ahem. Gonna go take pictures of my feet.

Podswollop

24 Apr 2008, 12pm

Alright, here’s another item about a well-established phenomenon that everyone has already commented the bejaysus out of, but I’ve decided it’s my turn so deal.

Back in the day, by the time Winer (is there anything Dave Winer doesn’t claim to have invented?) and Curry were at mortal combat over who came up with the podcast, the format already had Sturgeon’s Law so firmly applied that the time requirements and relatively laborious process of trying one out just to see if you like it were plainly unworthy of the effort. One morning, so it seemed, there it was: an ocean of audio to choose from, and any programmatic or communo-Darwinian attempts to filter out quality failed or dried up in no time. Sure, if you’re the sort of person who takes Lost seriously, you’re going to listen to a Lost podcast; to each his own cultural flags and lapel pins. But the stylistic arena of text and images is so exponentially more vast, and so much easier to negotiate a rewarding path through, it’s hard not to think of the format as broken, a dead end. Perhaps that’s why many come and go so quickly.

Tim Bray twat something the other day which I think goes to a core problem with podcasts: they’re useless unless you’re driving, or cooking, or exercising, or doing anything at all other than thinking.

That said, and as eagerly as I concur with Maciej’s timeless slapaway of the early hype, it seems podcasts have to an extent matured, however little they’ve ‘revolutionised’ ‘blogging’. And the early awkwardnesses of delivery are clearly gone as well: consider the various excellent tools that iTunes offers to let you get to your music. Sorts, searches, ratings, playlists, smart folders: all good stuff, and I can’t think of much more you could do to make navigation easier, but despite having music absolutely ground into my DNA, I still gravitate more nowadays to podcasts. I realise this has more to do with their listen-once-then-delete nature versus the pleasures of hearing music again, but the way iTunes and iPods handle podcasts is just so much better: you know right away how recent something is and whether it’s been heard or not. Both will happily resume playing an item at the exact spot you paused it weeks before. And of course the process of passive subscription via XML feed is perfectly executed.

As to the qualities of maturity, here’s what I currently listen to:

The Bugle – Audio Newspaper for a Visual World
The Daily Show’s John Oliver and standup Andy Zaltzmann bicker, snark, and bicker some more about the week’s news. Very funny and surprisingly rude considering it’s done under the imprimatur of the Times of London.

Start the Week
The best cultural round-table show in existence, I think. Every week the BBC’s Andrew Marr gathers together a group of people with something to plug, and forces them to comment on each other’s work. This can get uncomfortable. First thing I listen to when it shows up late Monday.

The Film Programme
The BBC’s Friday afternoon movie show. Don’t care about the star interviews or the poets brought in to review the new releases, I just like Francine Stock’s voice.

This American Life
No words needed, really.

Front Row Highlights
Always good weekly wrapup of the week-nightly BBC arts and letters programme. Mark Lawson is a very sharp writer and broadcaster, but if there is such a thing as an English honky, his voice would be easily considered the definition thereof.

Jonathan Ross Podcast
Those unfamiliar with Jonafan Woss’s TV talk shows and radio gig at BBC2 may recall him cavorting and picnicking with Ricky Gervais in the second series of Extras. Standard celebrity interviews and banter about his dogs, fascination with contemporary Japanese kitsch, usually worth a chuckle while, I don’t know, making lunch.

Mark Kermode’s Film Reviews
This is the only radio that I sometimes listen to streamed live. A vainglorious, tetchy, pompadoured skiffle musician with the balls to refer to himself as ‘Dr Kermode’ because he once completed a thesis on genre fiction bickers with the rather more sports-focused host about the week’s movies. Kermode is best when he goes off on a tear, the Da Vinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean III rants being good examples easily found via a quick boo at them video sharing sites.

Fresh Air
It kind of irks me that this flawlessly researched and always interesting show lets its political allegiances slip so often, whether I agree with them or not, but Terry Gross is easily the interviewer I most want to hear confront the creative and the powerful. And Gene Simmons. Less xsittinginforterrygross though, please.

Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me
The format never changes, Carl Kassell never gets the jokes, but it’s always hilarious, in that gentle, not-too-far, NPR way.

On the Media
Even more politically slanted than Fresh Air, but always interesting and tenacious. Wish they’d change the theme music one of these decades.

Studio 360
With Kurt Andersen, the only Spy magazine founder who didn’t go on to embody everything that Spy magazine used to mock. Great piece recently about Will Self’s habit of getting into town from airports on foot.

Stephen Fry’s Podgrams
For someone so relentlessly deft with language, the neologisms he’s been flinging about at stephenfry.com (‘blessays’,‘blisquisitions’,‘podgrams’) are downright cloth-eared, but no matter: the posts are great, the geekery is great, and the podcasts are just bliss, as intimate as good narrative radio, but notably, what, self-consciously unselfconscious? So much has been said about Fry’s ability to just talk, and here, in unedited and largely improvised sessions, he does just that.

(I was going to mention Radiolab, but stopped subscribing to it because as much of a fan of Robert Krulwich I am, the mannered nature of the show’s production makes listening to it not unlike trying to read a good science book surrounded by kids on a playdate, and then there’s YLNT, but that one’s on a timeout for now, until we can have a wee bit less merkins and baby vomit.)

Dog day morning

22 Apr 2008, 2pm

It likely goes back to the childhood tendency to resist bedtime because you don’t want to miss out on anything, but after a lifetime of thinking of sleep (or, more precisely, the effort of getting to sleep chemically unaided) as an enemy of sorts – a boring frustration to wage a war of resistance against – I’m now that guy who’ll willingly hit the sack at, say, nine, and get up at, say, five or six. Living rurally this is of course standard; people get cracking early because there’s work to be done, real work involving maybe the employment of machines and livestock, or the government of children, not sitting around all confused about why your left joins are borked or blathering on about your sleep habits.

The bonus of step-fatherhood, at least inasmuch as I’ve managed to wrangle my way into it, is never having to have gone through the years of constant sleep interruption brought on by infants. (I really don’t know how you people do that. I mean, I admire the skill and tenacity required, but find it difficult to envy: sleep anxiety or not, once you go under the last thing you want to do is stop.) When I arrived here the kids were just approaching tweenhood, now they’re away at school most of the time. Lovely when they’re here (well, ‘lovely’ factoring in every possible variation of the stupidly bothersome cliches of the worldwide alliance of teenaged girls rulebook) but when they’re not, meh, I’m going to need someone to explain the downside of this ‘empty nest syndrome’ to me in plain language. Plus I can sleep whenever I want.

No matter how early I get up, the landlord slash neighbour slash troublesome IT client’s lights will already be on. As a retired bureaucrat, he has no real labour to get to; most likely he’s doodling little hearts and teddy bears in his Nicolas Sarkozy notebook.

Anyway I’m pretty sure it’s not the quiet tranquility of the early morning that has caused this behaviour shift – quiet tranquility piles up like uncollected trash here in hicktown France. It’s not the GTD, cleared inbasket, mailbox zero efficiency that the extra time offers (though it is useful to get a head start violating the copyright of whatever interesting happened to be on television the night before throughout the commonwealth of english-speaking content provision, and, for better or worse, I suppose it’s had a lot to do with the return of this site). It’s not the beauty of sunrise, so much in favour with businessmen after that first heart attack. I’m hoping it’s enough to conclude that it’s learning, however late, to think of a day as connected in some way to what went on during the one previous, and what will on the one following, rather than treating a day, as I have for years and years, as something to pad with distractions and microscopic achievements until it’s time once more to wage war with sleep. I’m aiming to have some understanding of this time-as-continuum business when I grow up, but in the meantime Russian poetry has started making a lot more sense.

The dogs, amazingly, are approaching this new early-rising folderol with rather less nuance, reflecting not at all on anyone’s considerations of sleep and time. Their math is simple: light plus vertical people means dogs go out for walk then dogs eat full stop. They’re reasonably well-behaved – not Cesar Milan well-behaved, not dog borstal either – and the natural weimaraner tendency to own the room at all times has been lessened over the years, but Hugo before the morning walk, man. Imagine commanding a rolling tank to keep it down and hold on a minute before flattening that there house, fella.

Given that we prefer to take the boys out for their walk together, if I get up at, say, six, and Herself opts to sleep until, say, nine, the dog choices are as follows:

Leave both in the bedroom with Herself
This results in both dogs pacing, whining, and pressing the small of her back with cold wet noses in case she is unaware that, hello, the day has begun, but I get some nice quiet time downstairs to drink coffee and write bullshit like this.

Leave Oliver in the bedroom and bring Hugo downstairs
On his own, Hugo can be weirdly calm, even in advance of the walk. He’ll just sit at attention beside my desk, confusedly staring. Oliver, upstairs, will be pacing and whining, but to a smaller degree than if Hugo were there (they bring out the worst in each other). He’ll also climb up on the bed when I’m not around, the presumptuous bounder.

Leave Hugo in the bedroom and bring Oliver downstairs
This is not an option, as Hugo’s tendency to go jealously mental if there’s any possibility Oliver is having more fun than he will contribute, eventually, to the universe collapsing on itself.

Bring both dogs downstairs
This can work. Let the boys out for a quick drain in the back yard, then they just sort of hang, quietly anxious, in my office. I can usually shush the pacing and whining, but if it gets to be too much, the all-purpose timeout zone that is the cages in the room next door works a treat. So long as the occasional rustle of noise indicates I’m still nearby, they’re perfectly calm. However. If I leave my office for any length of time, for, say, ablutions or another cup of coffee: imagine the sound of a packed kennel just as a cat steps through the front door, and multiply by seven.

A friend writes

21 Apr 2008, 12pm

I don’t know what kind of self-important fucknozzle you have to be to consider your personal correspondence worthy of interest to site visitors, but it turns out I’m one of them:

Dean

re “Still looks like complete pants on Windows, but no surprises there.” (April 8 post)

Isn’t this proof of your excellently muddled citizenship? I mean, to use “pants” at all reveals a man who knows his Amis (and not just his amis), a Londoner at heart; and the addition of “complete” is Canadian through and through; but to say something looks “like” pants is pure American, surely. Proper Ye Olde English usage is simply “looks pants”, no?

Good to have you back – and very glad last summer is gone.

Best wishes to you and Gail.

yrs Matt.

I nominate this to be awarded the prize for the greatest email ever written, in a competition to be judged by a panel of me and my affectations.

Please stop doing this

19 Apr 2008, 10am

Surely any semantic machine doing semantic machine-reading will be semantically smart enough to know what to look for. Do we really need to think about it every time?

Just a feed that works will do nicely kthxbai.

20 Apr 2008, 11am

UPDATE  Having seen some responses to this, it’s clear I should’ve been less terse here. My point is that feed autodiscovery as it is in Safari (and Firefox, Camino, Firefox 2 on XP, Opera, iCab) is a very good thing, and I agree it’s perfect for this sort of application, allowing feeds carrying different content to be quickly tweezed out without one having to hunt for links on a page. If however you argue that multiple formats are important because, say, Microsoft prefers RSS while Google prefers Atom, then it’s trivial for you, Microsoft and Google to work that out amongst yourselves (think CSS). Just please don’t require every single person who tries a feed autodiscovery popup to have to decide if they want their ice cream served in a boot, a Pontiac, or a waffle cone.

21 Apr 2008, 9am

UPDATE  Oh, clarity, clarity. For the record I should say I in no way intended to ‘call out’ Dan Hill or his excellent site City of Sound for doing any wrong whatsoever. I merely happened to be subscribing to his feed and was reminded how annoying this particular annoyance is. Really it was just intended as a yo to those now producing templates for web publishing apps to be aware that browser feed autodiscovery + multiple feed formats = vastly bigger problem than any solved by multiple formats.

Twitch

18 Apr 2008, 3pm

Okay, so: a couple weeks in, thirteen items – whup, I guess fourteen now. Long mea culpa: check; lazy satire of silly hype: check; dork meme: check; create even more unhelpful about page than that dinosaur from 2003: check; unnecessarily detailed food porn: check; bit of oldskoollinkylove: check. What else what else. Oh: write for the sake of writing.

Where we live now is forty five minutes from everywhere. It takes just as long to get to Nîmes as to Avignon, to Alès as to Orange. Montpellier and Marseille (much more desirable destinations) are an hour and fifteen minutes each. Montpellier is the good Asian food store, the good Apple-centric shop and, lately, Ikea. Marseille is the international airport and, until recently, Ikea.

It’s only now, in my forties, that I’ve developed involuntary physical reactions to trivial stimuli. For example there’s that Scandinavian pop song (whistling, bongo drums) from last year that was firmly, intractably stuck in my head during a patch of time that was so bad it seemed the world was quietly and meticulously toiling away at ever more bad news to send my way. Song and bad patch are melded together, like chewing gum and sand. I’ve deleted the song from every device and playlist, but each time I go to the more desirable grocery store (seven minutes away, as opposed to the less desirable’s five), I keep forgetting that they play its opening hook over the PA every fifteen minutes or so, presumably to perk my attention before a honeyed voice-over artist delivers the assertion that the experience of shopping there (not the goods therein, nor the store itself) is making my life simpler. In some ways this is true, but let me not digress.

So the scene goes like this: tallish, po-faced man is scanning the dairy aisle for the ever-elusive, elastic and frankly invisible dividing lines between yaourt, fromage frais and fromage blanc; he has a crinkled look that says, this really should make more sense, and then whup, here comes the big whistle and the bongo drums, and he twitches around in a three-quarter turn as though someone had just emptied a cup of warm water into his waistband. There is little dignity in this.

I think it’s pure coincidence that the other example of a small stimulus – I refer here to Ikea – causing involuntary reaction is Scandinavian, but perhaps not. I do know that what greets you when you walk in the door: the smell of dirty children screaming in the ball room, the smell of cheap sausage meat steaming, right beside the entrance, in the exit snäkbär, the smell of MDF, of balsawood, of Lithuanian pine, the knowing you’ll have to do the grand tour or get lost rather than just find something and leave, the cheap shittiness of everything on display, even the little fucking pencils, combined with that fact this inescapable blue-and-yellow thing has gotten rich via one of the most elaborate tax dodges in human history, well. Last time I actually started twitching in the parking lot.

And that darling one is why we’re not going to Ikea any more.