Oh it is so on

1 May 2008, 9am

Here we go again. The vines are cracking off, ready for another season hoovering up all the delicious carbon dioxide and belching out ‘oxygen’. I’m told the fruit however is sometimes useful.

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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.

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.