I have brought my journal back, but I shall only be making private postings from now on. Apologies to anyone who was reading. I have learned that to have something is to risk losing it every moment, so this is my attempt to have as little as possible. Some things are too precious to be shared, and some are too tawdry to inflict on others. I may be both.

So yeah, I am still in that emo phase of writing lyrics on my walls/ceiling. And I hope it never ends


Cogs and Spring

when you broke down
like a clockwork soldier
the cogwheels crumbled
teeth came undone
springs unwound flailing wires
red white audio cables
you shrieked into
the diffuser
bubble of sound in
static hiss
rhythm dissolved
under weight of age

this noise of tearing metal
has continued so long
it begins to form words


Wicked Child

Mother Mary come to me
for i am a wicked child
i have sinned and i am so confused and i am a wicked child
i am a wicked child

i am the devils son
and i wish i could be good
i walk a crooked mile
but i wish i could be good
i wish i could be good

if i could have kept on the straight and narrow
if i could have kept on the straight and narrow
and not have broke your heart
not have broke your heart

now i wake up in the night
it's tugging at my arms and legs
like i was a marionette

send baby jesus
to radiate his light
to radiate his light

Captains' log - stardate .. now

Feel so stupid. Stupid and emo. Also I hate the word 'emo', it's like apologising for having feelings. Pants to that, I say.


supplemental

I hate hipsters. Seriously. I've never thought before that the removal of a whole section of society would benefit everyone, but in this case I may be prepared to make an exception. Am I hitler? Too bad jews aren't cool enough to be hipsters. Or perhaps the hipsters are symptomatic of a bigger problem, and we should all hug our children more. Or stop making children entirely and start again from the amoeba.

Music is on hold for a week while I try to work on writing - manuscript stuff hopefully. Next week is music week. Avec les remixes.

also, this weekend was fantastic. Best Sin City ever, accompanied by Friday night craziness with Shay and her ex (not in a naked crazy way, but a crazy random way). Now on the hunt for a new Sin outfit for next time, without spending money. There is talk of an unofficial superhero theme.

I've finally started using Ableton. It's pretty big and confusing, and I don't trust its opinion of the tempo in my songs, but I like it. The effects are much more flexible than Garageband, and I have a feeling I'll be able to route in my turntables and things more easily (although I haven't tried this yet).

Now working on (as much a reminder list for me as anything)

Regina Spektor remix
A couple of Radiohead remixes
Portishead remix of 'The Rip'
Finding a vocalist/rapper for 'Music to Die for'
Electric guitar stuff (I may be renting some equipment for a few days for this)

And there was the website...

and the website gave birth to livejournal

and livejournal took a backseat to MySpace

and MySpace became Facebook

and Facebook became social withdrawal

and the website became another website

and the website spake unto Facebook

and Livejournal spake unto Facebook (which spake unto the website)

and the Lord saw it, and he said 'I'm going for a lie down'

It took a while, but I have updated my videos page for the people who complained that the videos were just pictures rather than links (Caitlin, I'm looking at you here). I'm also going to add some more stuff if I have any time this week. www.markleci.com

Even though the title makes me think of the Rage Against the Machine cover, flames aren't really anything to do with what it's about, it's just a reference to an event in one of the stories. I get the impression that the titles were all added much later, possibly by an editor or publicist who had to stay up all night. For anyone who's never read David Sedaris, his stories are semi-autobiographical tales of his life and family. I was expecting him to be young, but he's not. Actually, he's the same age as my father. This means he has that older generation style of writing, not really what you'd associate with an edgy short story collection, but more with something translated from another language in the 70s.

Having said that, Sedaris does a pretty good job of not getting too caught in his own generation, and his writing is accessible: there are no big words or complex philosophical issues. Not that it's empty writing: like most good short story writers, his ability to distil social interactions down to their essence and build characters in a few short lines is excellent.

I was also expecting this book to be hilarious; everyone I know who's read his books says that they're amazingly funny. I wouldn't agree with that completely, however a couple of moments had be chuckling. Humour isn't the focus of his writing, so it's not really fair to compare him to Pratchett, Wodehouse etc. but it's always there in the background. The same is true of his sexuality: it's there in a couple of stories, but like most people of his generation, he seems slightly uncomfortable with it. On the plus side, this really makes a couple of the stories funny.

The thing that really prevented me from loving this book was the style. It's written in what I'd call a column style, i.e. the same style people use to write columns. It's very distinctive: every event has to be presented separately and assume no prior knowledge. In a short story, there are thousands of ways to start, and in a collection there are usually several styles over the course of the book. A column is a lot like an essay, and it tends to begin with a topic sentence, then progress in the same way. This is fine when you're reading just one, but reading lots all at once gives you the feeling that you're stuck in some kind of endless loop, and nothing is happening. The other distinctive feature of column writing is the ending, which always seems to be what for want of a better description I'd call a Hollywood ending. It either finishes everything off with a little one-liner, or takes you back to the topic sentence and alters it slightly. Again, reading this once would be fine, but over and over is enough to cause a serious migraine. The writing is less creative in its form than in its content.

That's not to say I'd compare it to the awful columns you can see in something like '24 Hours'. There's a romance one that I think is generated by a computer program selecting random lines of dialogue from 'sex and the city', and adding other random lines from what I picture as a small cardboard box with 'humour?' printed on a little white label. At least Sedaris' writing has actual experience in it, and some originality and life.

So it wasn't what I was expecting, but I still enjoyed it far more than Neil Gaiman's short stories, which I abandoned half way through. I'm still willing to give Neil Gaiman another chance, but only one. I think I would read another David Sedaris, but I'll have to take a long break first, or I might find that column style making me start all my sentences with 'have you ever noticed?'.

That was a typical column ending by the way. I don't know if anyone caught that.


Do book reviews usually give ratings?

Unputdownability  -  6 out of 10 rabid dolphins leaping
Inspirationalness -  7.5 out of 10 inspiratrons
Artistic impression - 7 out of 10 guitar pedals (batteries not included)
Technical merit      - 8 out of 10 figure skaters leaping on rabid dolphins

Finally finished part of my website. Or at least, decided to cut it off before it gets so long that even I have no interest in following it all the way through. Hooray for coding!

First there was the weirdness of seeing Christopher Lloyd in both Star Trek III and One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest in the same week, playing a mental patient and a Klingon, although not necessarily in that order. Then there was Star Trek VI with Kim Catrall and Christian Slater, and right now I'm watching Star Trek Generations, with Malcolm McDowell. Caligula, a Clockwork Orange, and Star Trek. Diuerse, as some might say.

As part of my continuing ventures into knowledge, I got my site certified today as xhtml 1.0 and css compliant. To give you some idea, this livejournal page had 231 errors that needed correcting before it could be certified, and the Google homepage had 62. For anyone who knows html, xhtml is basically it's prissy younger sister. It only likes lowercase, and everything must be closed with /> instead of >, including single tags like <br> (which is now <br/>). Gone are the days of leaving p tags open, and closing tags in different orders than you opened them. So why would you do this? Well, html 4.01 is just better than html 3.x, and xhtml is better still, unless you're just a big ol lazy fatass. And how many web programmers are lazy fata.... ok I think we could have a problem here. Anyway, the reason I did it was for the neat logos. Check out my homepage to see them. Neat. Or possibly neato.

To validate your page, go to

http://validator.w3.org

I decided this afternoon to go and sit in a cafe on Main street and study. Unfortunately, it seems that everyone else in Vancouver had the same idea. The Rhizome was packed, Our Town was crammed to it's muffin-encrusted rafters; Caffe Barney was without an inch of space in which to wear a weird 1980s shell jacket while writing on one's Macbook Pro; even Lugz had some customers who didn't look like they worked there.

I ventured further up, going as far as 10th avenue (which for those who don't know Vancouver, is 5 blocks away from 5th, where I started) in my search for somewhere to sit and study. The answer: Waves. The reason that Waves is the answer, as I discovered, is that unfortunately they don't speak English. I'm no kind of insane anglocentric, but it seems to me that a grasp of English sufficient to, let's say, name all of the objects that you sell or offer to customers is probably a prerequisite for working in or running a cafe. Seemingly this is not the case. The young person who served me (and I am now of an age where I can refer to people as persons) was utterly confused by my request for a saucer, attempting at one point to give me a sausage in its place. After much pointing and gesturing, I finally found one being used by someone else (who presumably had brought it with them), and realization slowly dawned. It's a good job too, because I was not looking forward to the prospect of attempting to balance my cup of tea on a tepid tube of pig intestines.

Before I get too crazy, feel free to correct me if there's some North American word for saucer that I should have been using instead. This has happened so often I expect it now. Generally the word is one that requires about 20-30% of the brainpower to memorize that the English word does. I would guess something like 'cup plate' or 'spoon dish' or something like that. I know we don't expect intelligence or eloquence from cafe employees: I wouldn't expect them to be able to describe the ceiling of the Sistine chapel (or even know what country it's in), but enough English to ask for a cup of tea and a saucer with two sugars would definitely help. I can only assume that the various other packed cafes along Main have staff that can handle requests for such complexities as spoons, honey, and 'that thing with the brown stuff where you shake it and it goes all on the top of like the foam and stuff'. Proof again that intelligence is good for business.

I should add as a side note that two places didn't even warrant a glance from me, and so I'm not sure if they were busy or not. One is that pretentious place opposite the Foundation (or 'kitty-corner' if you like), and the other is Starbucks. The first is too expensive, no good, and doesn't have comfortable chairs. This being the case, it's always packed with the kind of people who like having huge glass windows on both sides of them, allowing their adoring fans to witness them drinking $5 americanos in uncomfortable chairs, while outside the most cryptic advertising slogan ever proclaims that 'instant coffee loves everyone'. Starbucks is never packed. Have you ever seen a packed Starbucks? If it ever gets busy, they just open another one on the next block as a kind of overflow. Perhaps their floors have a low weight tolerance. I would have to be very desperate to resort to studying in Starbucks. But knowledge is so very tasty.

Are you aware of other people watching you and judging you when grocery shopping? There's probably some terminology we should get out of the way here. Firstly, a paranoid is someone who believes that people are watching and judging them when they aren't. Since I know people are watching, that rules me out of this category. Secondly, I would say that someone who thinks that society isn't watching and also behaves that way would qualify as a sociopath, so in fact thinking this way makes me perfectly normal. So there.

I've noticed that I tend to buy more healthy food because I think people are watching. If I was the only one in the supermarket (and I could go through the checkout without a cashier or whatever they're called) I would buy all kinds of unhealthy stuff like energy drinks and nesquik mix and fried tofu things and chips, whereas in the real world I stack my basket full of fruit and vegetables, then maybe slip a small bag of chips in the side, where it looks like it kind of dropped in by accident and might slip out again at any time. One of the side effects of this is that adding certain things to your grocery basket makes you feel a certain way. Add a bag of pittas and you're saying either a) yes, I have friends, and we like to snack and talk about the political climate or b) I have a relaxed attitude to cooking and I enjoy a simple pitta, possibly filled with a lighter middle eastern houmous, rather than the heavier greek kind. Add a few hot peppers and you're saying: I'm having some of the guys round for nachos and a movie.

This is especially true if you buy a lot of a particular item. What would you think if you saw someone with say six different kinds of mushrooms in their basket, and nothing else? Or four boxes of the same kind of cereal, all placed neatly in a row. Or maybe just a basket full of different kinds of yoghurt. I once had to buy twelve rolls of cliingfilm (aka saran wrap) in a corner store, and was asked if I had 'some special plan' for it. It took me a couple of years to understand what she meant.

For me it was most noticeable when I picked up diapers to add to my basket. Diapers are one of those things you can't hide when grocery shopping, like the large pack of condoms that either falls out of the basket next to an old lady, or won't scan no matter how many times the cashier swipes it back and forth over the little red demon that lives under her desk. Incidentally, diapers also don't fit in a grocery basket, which I think tells you everything you need to know about society vis a vis single parents. Once I picked up the diapers, I went from being someone buying lots of fruit and vegetables that could have been for anyone, to a father out foraging in the wilderness of aisle 5 (frozen foods), hewing my child's fare out of the very ice, possibly with a dagger gripped between my teeth. Even if one would usually ask for assistance with taking the groceries out to one's vehicle, this would be impossible with diapers. No, the furrowed brow would say, I am man. Watch as I carry eight bags using only one finger of my left hand.

As a side note, I wonder if they would help you carry your groceries back to your house? If they wouldn't, that seems rather car-centric to me. What about if it's a mobile home, that's just a car that's parked a long way away? 

fin

Wow. Just wow.

'tis said that eating before bed gives you interesting dreams. Well, I've tried it the last few days in the hopes of injecting some colour into my otherwise dull life, but it hasn't worked. Of course, the standard recommendation is for a piece of cheese, however as a vegan this is not really possible. I could consider soy cheese, but the thought of it is more likely to provoke bad dreams than actually eating it. So I tried some vegan alternatives. A pitta covered in humus, no result. And this was lemon humus, not the regular kind. Some kind of French-inspired soup made with red wine, nothing. Even something fried (I forget what) seemed to have no effect. Then yesterday, paydirt. The perfect combination of ingredients designed to send you on a trip to crazy land.

Firstly, sushi. Remember again that this is vegetarian sushi, so no cheating by loading oneself with fried prawns and raw tuna, which I'm sure would have the same effect on the subconscious mind as sticking one's finger in a light socket. So I resorted to avocado rolls, yam tempura and (I think this one is important) a mango roll. Think tropical fruits = weird happenings = strange dreams. All kinds of strange things go on in the tropics. The Bermuda triangle, which as I understand is the small piece of fabric used to make the crotch of Bermuda shorts; hurricanes, freakish waves, nothing to eat but bloody pineapples, and yet most strangely of all, natives who seem very content with this situation, to the extent of playing steel drums and grinning a lot.

Anyway, add to the sushi mix some soy ice cream. Just as creamy as regular ice cream, and therefore just as likely to provoke the brain in slumber to the mental equivalent of getting up early and running around the house looking for the car keys. This particular one was a mint variety, mint being another stimulating herb (or is it just a plant).

The final ingredient, and now that I come to think of it, probably the most essential, is drugs. Not the 'I bought this from a guy at the bus stop' kind of drugs, but the 'I'm allergic to cats and don't want eyes the size of golfballs' kind of drugs. This particular kind is the non-non-drowsy kind. Would it be right to just call them drowsy? It doesn't really make sense when you contrast 'this is a non-drowsy medication' to 'this is a drowsy medication'. I suppose it's all part of what I was thinking of the other day as 'pragmatic ellision', the deletion of parts of a well-used phrase or term, which then sound strange when you try to change it.

So, as a result of this cocktail of nutrients, chemicals and.. fake ice cream, I finally had some interesting dreams. I don't now remember much of them, but I do remember being on a boat (anyone who knows me well will know that my terror of boats perpetually comes out in dreams) and trying to get to an old book before the evil madman could get to it. Actually I think he was some kind of strange reptile god. So I get to the bottom floor of the boat (I'm sure in nautical terms it's called the mainbrace or the carpsul or something just as intuitive) and the book is gone. I can see the god splashing away, because for some reason this part of the boat is open to the water, like a bedroom with a hot tub in it. Between myself and the water is a bunk bed, and there's a suspicious mound in the bed. I fling back the sheets, and, no joke, underneath is Dr. Katanga from Live and Let Die (the Bond Movie), but covered in KFC chicken batter. Just imagine what he could have been covered in if I'd eaten real ice cream. The mind boggles.

http://www.active.com/fitness/who-wants-to-get-active


but still fun!

Failed social experiment

versus

Routine is killing your brain



Instead of socialising, try -

1/ picking up random things from the street
2// making lists of unrelated objects: duck eggs, tennis rackets, small pots of butter, shrill animal calls, blankets with orange juice stains on them
3/// sitting at home all day waiting for nightmares
4.. using drugs?
5/.. walking on the other side of the road, or taking a random bus/train and seeing where you end up
6,/. looking at people on the street
7. /.. taking $40 from a cash machine and spending it on the first interesting thing you see, then sit at a bus stop, on the street, or outside a cafe and use it/read it/eat it/wear it
8 .../ notice if the world has ended
09 . 9 ..{}/ make imaginary lives and practice for rehearsing
10 .><./ hoard

On prose poetry


The fact is that nobody can write good poetry without practice, and there are so few good poets around that bad poetry is often mistaken for good, because awful poetry is so common. And while there is no objective standard for art, that does not mean there is no objective standard for good writing, or for what good art should be. I think the agreement is that good art should be beautiful, challenging, intriguing, or perhaps even shocking. Some combination of all four is desirable. But most modern poetry is none of these. In fact the two words that spring to mind are confusing and lacklustre. Either so intricate and deeply rooted in the history of some 17th century event that only the author knows anything about, and for some reason desires to inform us about in oblique writing, generally with a combination of opacity and poor diction that makes it as readable as the worst Pound; or another expression of something so overwrought or tired that reading the first line maps out every other line in the head. Actually there is another kind: the prose poem. For those who are so talentless that they can write neither poetry nor fiction, rejoice! there is another medium waiting for you. It looks like poetry when written down (it's in short lines and stanzas, ergo poetry), but when read aloud it's like reading fiction. Or rather, like listening to someone read a newspaper article. I can't think of another art form that I dislike more than this at the moment. The form that is neither one nor the other, and combines the worst of both. Leaving aside the fact that poetry and prose are by definition opposites. Poetic essays or novels however can be fantastic (Autobiography of Red) or truly awful (Beautiful Losers), but at least generally tend to make a definite impression, rather than prose poetry, which is as likely to make an impression as a small mouse jumping up and down on a diamond. I would very much like to meet the person responsible for endorsing the first prose poems. Preferably late at night in an alleyway, while armed with the complete works of Anne Carson in large print.

English is evolving, always evolving, toujours evolving. But it is evolving in itself, and not updating its files from other languages. Hence:

negligee
A robe or a dressing gown, usually of sheer or soft fabric for women. French uses négligé (masculine form, with accents) or nuisette. Négligée qualifies a woman who neglects her appearance.

All this and more at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_phrases#Only_found_in_English


Now I wouldn't put it past the Academie to declare words as obsolete just to make the English look foolish, but it's interesting that French (yes even French) has declared words obsolete that are still part of modern English. In several hundred years, these phrases could be considered true English, having been out of use for so long in French (which will probably persist in using 'la sejour au fin de la semaine' instead of weekend just because).


Now back to Paris Je T'aime and badly spoken French.

proche.. plus proche.. toujours plus proche..


I must stay out of bookshops. Such things there are.. and I buy one book for every 1/3 of a book I read. At this rate if I live to be 60 I won't be able to leave my apartment. Which could be all for the best I suppose. I think by that time, people will consider paper books to be a horrible waste of resources, and will look on the huge libraries of the 19th and 20th centuries as ecological graveyards. There. When we wonder what habits we have now that will be considered horrible by future generations, this could well be one.