Hey, I’ve just found out that some podcaster out there liked my Thing-ummi-Jig track so much that he decided to use it as playout music on the weekly podcast he publishes. You can check him and the podcast here:
http://sinceretheory.net/weblog/index.php/2005/10/podcast0010
Category: Diary
In the post: The 21st Century Guide to King Crimson, Part II
I did a little monkey dance around the kitchen when this arrived, much to the amusement of The Missus. She wanted to film it for the website, but I declined because I look unshaved and even more like a monkey than usual.
Looking back, it’s hard to remember what life was like before the Internet. I remember I first became exposed to the murky world of the web around 1996. It was a lot different then: there was no MP3 files, no P2P file sharing, no rich media, not a lot really, just a load of text. My first experiences of net life were quite exciting and I got involved with the relatively niche “chat” community that was being run on MSN. It was cool to talk to people around the world, but it was here that I learnt that nothing is ever what it seems. It was also my first of two net regrets.
While chatting, you make a circle of virtual friends and certain people become “closer” to you than others. At one point, I was spending a lot of time chatting to one woman. At the time it was all a thrill and I was flattered that someone on the other side of the world could find me interesting enough to want to talk to me. However, things progressed in a direction I had not envisioned and before I knew it, this person had found out where I was working in London and was sending me packages of love letters and photographs, etc.
As you can imagine this is very embarrassing when you open a Fedex package expecting it to be work related and something unexpected drops out onto your desk. I quickly realised that the web had lead my up a dark alley and I need to back-pedal ASAP. OK – I wasn’t exactly innoncent in all of this as there had been a level of reciprocated virtual flirting, but I didn’t expect the full stalker treatment. It was revealed that this woman had spent in excess of $60 to track me down and more money sending the stuff to me. Long phones calls came into my office, again at my embarrassment and this woman threatened suicide if I stopped talking to her. With those words and that threat, I told her I could no longer speak to her, because it is not good to be put at the end of an ultimatum like that. My gamble paid off and this woman didn’t kill herself. I heard that she found someone else to hook up with. And to think she wanted to leave her husband and child to be with a dopey old, limey, eh?
Well that got your attention, didn’t it? That is my standard warning about the Internet. Sometimes it is very hard to have any perspective because unlike real conversations where you can read body language, facial expressions and timbre of voice, you have no such cues on the Internet. Whereas you might think something is a big joke, the person at the other side of the world is weeping into a hankie believing all is real. Like that story I just told. I just made that up to illustrate a point. Or did I? With the Internet, you never really know…
On the other hand, the Internet has enabled me to do a lot. I’ve managed to torture the world with my excrusiatingly dull music and learn an awful lot of useless facts. Without the Net, would my life be any less richer? Who knows? It’s hard to say, it’s become so pervasive. For me, the Internet has partly replaced the radio or Teletext as an information source. But it is so much more than that.
If you get your fingers burnt, you tend to withdraw somewhat and that’s what I did. There are a lot of strange people out there who use the Internet has some kind of support network. This is great if you can manage it. Personally, it has never worked for me as I have only ever found one other person out there willing to give me any support, but that’s beside the point. I am working towards my other big regret…
Hide his drumsticks… 🙂
When I am feeling a little down, I can’t be bothered to write entries on this blog thing, therefore I guess you can guage my manic mood swings by the quality and length of the material submitted here. If its a good day, there’ll be loads of text; if there’s a bad day, there’s nothing. Or it could be that nothing of any significance has happened.
Well not a lot has happened lately. I’ve just been plugging away with this book thing. I got to chapter ten and now I have over 30,000 words in the bag. Now writing a novel is a lot like growing up. At the beginning, you are full of excitement and energy and ideas and nothing can hold you back – that’s like being a toddler again. When you get to the halfway stage, you have a crisis, you wonder if it’s all been for naught and whether you can carry on – that’s middle age. And when you get towards the end, you just want it to be over, you beg for swift resolution. That’s lying half-dead in a nursing home somewhere.
I’m at the halfway stage and so I am full of doubt and criticism over what I’ve written. Is it any good? Is it a decent story? Will people want to read it? Will a publisher or an agent want to pick it up? Am I writing this for nothing? Why couldn’t I have a practical career that actually earns us serious cash, rather than being a complete and utter parasite who wastes his time with all of this nonsense?
Well I am 10 chapters in and committed to the project by 30,000 words, so I’ve got to continue. I am enjoying telling the story, but no-one else other than the Missus gets to read it, so I don’t have much feedback. When I was working, I used to hand out manuscripts willy-nilly for people to read over the weekend and the feedback was generally good, so this spurred you on. Now I feel adrift in a sea of troubles. It’s at moments like this I wish I had the support network that most other people have, but I don’t, so deal with it.
The thing is, I just want to be vindicated. I just want to be able to produce something that gets picked up and then I can turn around to people and say: “Look I was born to do this afterall.” I mean, I don’t think there’s anything else I can do other than put words together. The problem with that is that I’m turning my back on my only revenue stream (freelance writing) to pursue this. I’m being awfully selfish, but I feel I have to do it. I feel compelled. Oh well, the worst thing that can happen is that The Missus finally has enough of being married to completely useless bum and ups and leaves. Then the Embankment and that cardboard box beckons…I wonder how Alex the Wonderdog will adjust to sleeping under the stars?
Anyway, it’s chapter 10 and I’ve taken the main narrative thread away from Vince Pearl, the ghost, and introduced the reader to the heavy metal band that going to be using his lyrics. Yes, the lead singer Daniel De’Ath is in communion with a spirit and has a hard time convincing his band that the gimmick of putting out an album of dead men’s songs will work. “Well everyone likes Alice Cooper and Manson,” reasons Guy the drummer and so they agree to work on the lyrics for their difficult third album.
Has that got you interested? Nope…ah well, I give up.
Meanwhile, my other novel, my “magnum opus”, my serious novel, the one that is my ultimate expression of characterisation, London Voices (though that title will change), is languishing at a similar stage of development. It’s the halfway mark and I’ve got to pull together a lot of material for that. The problem with that story is that it isn’t a story at all, just a thinly connected series of character vignettes, told in first person.
You would tell me if I am wasting my time, wouldn’t you?
Video Google is another interesting thing happening to the net. It allows you to upload your video clips and let people search for them (or find them randomly as is the current state of the website). I uploaded a couple of the small videos I made in 2003 to accompany some music I’d recorded for “Without Words”. The videos came out of a magazine commission I was given to make videos using various software. The “Reality Lives on Pleasure” video is something I am very proud of because, despite looking a bit crappy now, all the animations on it were done by me using various fractal animation software on the net. It took a whole morning (that long!!!!) to put together. It’s a shame because I have the proper DVD quality MPEG files somewhere, but I can’t find the disc in my archive. I was going to put out a Darren Lock DVD – no sniggering at the back. Anyway, here’s my entry on Video Google.
Losing those original MPEG files got me thinking that maybe I should do another video project to take advantage of Video Google… Hmmmm….???
Also, look to the right of the screen and you will notice a new feature. It’s an automated playlist, so if I am playing some music on “The Beast” then you’ll know all about it. If “It’s Raining Men” appears by The Weather Girls it was a glitch in the space-time continuum because, as we all know, I only like manly, anorakish, progressive rock. What a total cunt am I.
Today, The Missus’s PC finally blew up. I told her, but she wouldn’t listen. Hard drive retrieved, she is now forced to work on my laptop.
I’m not going to lie, I’ve learnt everything I know from TV. When I was about 10 years old, there was one show that completely gripped my imagination and through its use of language and imagery, changed the way I looked at the world. That programme was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I know, I know, compared to today’s TV documentaries it is old-fashioned and slow, but this TV was made in a time when there was a level of intelligence involved and things didn’t rely on celebrity endorsements or CGI graphics. This programme taught me a lot about the world (the same way LIfe on Earth did) and caused me to look upwards a lot. Why don’t we look upwards anymore?
Well anyway, I’ve been aching to get a copy of this TV series since I heard it came out on DVD a couple of years back. Whenever I am lucky enough to travel to the US, I always search the DVD shelves for a copy, but I’ve never been lucky. I could buy a copy from eBay but the prices have always been just that little bit prohibitive. Well a few weeks ago, I saw a Chinese copy on eBay going for about £10 with postage. I couldn’t resist and the item arrived today in the post.
OK – the packaging isn’t up to much, but the discs are superb and I had a little preview of the first episode. As the opening music by Vangelis surrounded me in 5.1 stereo, I felt my eyes becoming moist. I was little ltitle optomistic kid again. Of course, I realised that this was the first time I had even seen the show in colour. The first and only time I saw it was on the family’s old black and white TV. We were poor and didn’t get a colour set until the late 1980s. Anyway, I look forward to torturing The Missus with this over the next 13 episodes. 🙂
Also in the post: The 21st Century Guide to King Crimson Part One
OK, OK. I know I already own this, but being a complete King Crimson collection whore, I decided to purchase this version too. The original version came in a large cardboard sleeve and was custom bound into a long hardback book. This version is the size of a CD case and features four separate CD jewel cases and a separate booklet.
Here are the photos:
The two sets, side-by-side
The smaller set revealed