So what's this superbowl thing, anyhow?

Okay -- when the person at work that you think is the most politically savvy and non-brainwashed sends a company-wide email asking people if they'd liked to join his dungeons and dragons club then it's time to start re-evaluating your situation, right?

I was wondering why the R---- Corporate Park was so generous with their neat, sinusoidal paved walkways seeing how the pedestrian is regarded as some despicable creature somewhere between the liberal and the non-celebrity child molester out here in "edge city". And then I saw their true purpose -- they're really not for walking on but for the souped-up golf carts straight out of The Prisoner, so they can get around without getting in the way of all the SUVs and trucks that all people who work with software and insurance claims absolutely need here. I'm not sure what the purpose of the little old men on these carts is, how paranoid I ought to feel when I see one approaching out of the corner of my eye. But I suspect it's not The Prisoner I should be using as my reference but JG Ballard's Super-Cannes. And that's scary....

I've always had a phobia about "edge cities" even before I knew they had a name, so it's grimly ironic that I should end up working in one. At least I'm living as far away as possible. I'm a traditionalist who likes to keep his cities and countryside straight and always hoped that technological advancement would mean that you could maybe telecommute from a nice little cottage and take the train into the city for shopping or fun, once you'd outgrown the 24 hour thrill of urban living, that is. But the reverse has happened, it's all ass backwards -- I'm living in the city, where it's laidback and sleepy and wildlife teems and commuting out to what was the countryside, where it's now nothing but big, soulless office blocks, unending traffic, prefabricated apartments and giant impersonal stores....

Apparently David Hasselhoff is upset that his role in the fall of the Berlin Wall isn't appreciated.

I'd say something about the Hutton Inquiry and the gruesome spectacle of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell doing their gloat-dance on the grave of Dr Kelly, but I suspect I've been subconsciously influenced to say something nasty and intemperate so I won't. It's good to see that of the British media only the Sun and its downmarket stablemate the Times swallow this whitewash whole and I suspect there's going to be a backlash against Teflon Tony and his doctrine of self-infalibility. But maybe Tony can find another nice pliant judge who'll rule that WMD were found all over Iraq and anyone who says otherwise is deluded. Jeez, sometimes I think it would be worth moving back to England just so I could leave again....

Family values and the sanctity of marriage, as praised by Resident Shrub in his SOTU routine: Neil Bush style, that is. But at least he's not gay and using steroids....

A quick plug for Bill Bishop's Texas news blog at the Statesman, Lasso, through which I found the depressing but necessary Economic Policy Institute's website, an antidote to feckless nonsense like this in the Washington Post: The Jobless Recovery... which seems to being saying -- amongst a veritable Niagara of other breathtakingly wrongheaded bollocks -- that jobless recoveries are good because they mean there'll be fewer layoffs next time a recession comes along. Of course! So instead of the left complaining that in December only 1,000 of the 306,000 jobs George Bush promised would be created each month actually materialized they ought to praise him for saving those 305,000 from the hell of having a job that they might eventually lose....

Moving my website without really telling anyone is a good way to start afresh, although it is a bit of a deflating experience to go from about 150 hits a day to 40. But by dumping my archives I've thrown off all those perverts who came here via curious, seemingly random Google searches. I always wanted to kid myself that people came to my blog because they were keen to read what I had to say about world events and contemporary culture not because they were looking for pictures of goth chicks bursting balloons, information about horny housewives in Hull or anything to do with Charlotte Church's bottom. The only hits I've had via Google of late have been looking for Jeff Sharlet's "Big World: How Clear Channel programs America" article from December's Harper's, which I'm afraid isn't reprinted here. (I would like a few more visits, however, so I shall pander to the search engines with the following salacious phrases: "mungo and shoddy", "chaffing the colonial chicken", "doing it Hannity style", "Craig David featuring Sting" and "chocolate Coulter snood". That should have me back in the bloggers top 99.9999% percentile before you know it.)

Britney's new single, "Toxic", is a vast improvement on that nonsense she put out as a favor to her ailing grandma a few months ago. Now she's decided that if she's going to be someone else it'll be Pink and since it's Pink before she got angsty and self-lacerating that's probably okay. It has a bit of a tune, doesn't hang around and certainly serves its purpose -- as an excuse for another "raunchy" video in which Britney demostrates a variety of almost fetishistic Alias-style outfits (although in one scene she seems to be wearing nothing but a smile and a teaspoonful of powdered sugar) and poses that almost hide the fact she's gotten rather stocky lately. It's supposedly her belated reply to Justina Timberland's "Crimea River" or something, but I pay no heed to such trivia, so I suspect I'm missing out on the deeper significance, like the fat man who turns into David Beckham. I'm also open to your readings of what the geese at the end of the video mean. Don't be shy, pop kids.

I've never liked Joe Lieberman, mainly because he looked like the "dad" off Diff'rent Strokes (or any other American sitcom patriarch) but for this he deserved to be forbidden from taking part in any political or public activities for the rest of his life. Is there a technical term for a play on words several levels below the pun? Besides "Sun headline"?

Damn it -- someone's got Paul Morley's Words and Music checked out of the UT Fine Arts Library until the 3rd of June! Bloody students, how long does it take them to read a book?

Damn it. I missed the long-anticipated appearance of Thomas Pynchon on The Simpsons tonight because we were getting quarters to do the laundry. This did involve another visit to the Clarksville branch of FreshPlus which had its moments -- how many upmarket grocery stores do you know where they play Royal Trux and the world's surliest clerk wears a "blondes have more fun" t-shirt despite being a brunette, although since she constantly wearing an expression that says if fun so much as peeked around the door she'd beat it to a runny mess with the cash register it isn't exactly ironic....

The current Wired -- online next month I guess -- has one of those pieces that reminds me that it was, and may still be, the Reader's Digest of the New Economy rather than anything more elevated. The cover story is about the transfer of hi-tech jobs to India, where an extremely subservient worker will do your programming for about an eighth a bolshy American programmers will expect. And he or she (that it could just be a "she" gives Wired an excuse to put a pretty girl on the cover, just as the story about artificial diamonds a few months ago made it possible to use a hot chick wearing nothing but a couple of hundred fake diamonds) won't cover his cubicle in dangerously subversive Dilbert cartoons....

As you'd expect, the Wired view is that this is a good thing. Change is good, remember? Workers survived the shift from farm work to factory work, factory work to knowledge work, so they'll easily come to terms with the shift from knowledge work to whatever comes next. Not that the article explains what comes next... oh it does, sorry, I missed the one word answer: creativity.

That's okay then. Because creativity is such a big earner. Let's all become novelists and composers and architects. While working for $6.80 an hour at Walmart during the day....

Which reminds me -- if this doesn't break your heart you're not really human: A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class. (And it didn't appear in Wired....)

Cripes, Marcello Carlin may not be updating The Naked Maja very often these days but when he does... well, his latest post is about five times the length of this entire blog and covers 1985 --his thoughts on every Top 40 single and every NME critics' Top 50 single and LP of that year. Apparently it was the worse year for music ever. I'm not entirely convinced -- I'm sure there were some rotten years during the 15th century, even if Russ Abbott and Sting weren't releasing singles then -- but I don't think the point of the post was to provide cast iron evidence for this statement. Although I'm not exactly sure what the point is with Marcello's blog -- I love it and crave new updates but I couldn't begin to speculate as to why he expends so much time and effort on these vast, encyclopedic postings.

Of course I only have a vague idea of why I do this -- but since it's only a piddly thing to remind myself and maybe a few other people that I'm still alive I don't really feel the need for any deep motivation. Besides, if I wasn't doing this I'd probably be doing something equally life-enhancing like the washing-up or sending change of address letters to banks and pension companies.... But if I had Marcello's stamina, intelligence and dedication, why I'd be dangerous.... or at least working on a series for Channel 4 or VH1 called I Explain the 80s (In The Context of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson). Shame he doesn't link to me anymore, but I'm too proud to beg.

Is it acceptable to get a meanspirited kick from seeing gay Republicans squirm as they try to find a way to remain faithful to George and his regimes's ghastly set of conservative philosophies while pretending the puritanical elements don't apply -- at least not to them?

Loyal reader: Well, um, that's a tricky one... although, um, you're talking about Andrew Sullivan, aren't you?

Ah-huh.

Loyal reader: In that case snigger away, dude!

The problem with not being able to spend 24 hours a day online reading blogs and other newsworthy stuff is that when you do find something to write about it can be days before (a) you post it and (b) you then discover someone else has already said it about ten times better. Like about Andrew Sullivan's post-SOTU realization that George Bush, who he's been promoting as the most gay-friendly politician ever, isn't going to be appearing on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy any time soon, and then Sullivan's subsequent sudden pronouncement, after being attacked by his readers for not being the 100% Bush dittohead they take him for, that "when it's him caught in between, suddenly nuance is a good thing and absolute polar opposites not". Should remember to read Sulliwatch before even thinking about writing anything regarding Sully. And TBlogg and a whole bunch more. But it iss good to know that Sullivan has now decided that "you're either part of the solution or part of the problem" isn't a good enough philosophy to apply to everything in life. Maybe one day he'll accept that other people can be allowed to have opinions that don't fit the usual absolutist boilerplate too. But don't hold your breath.

Does this bring back any memories, fellow UK fortysomethings?

I thought I was the only person who remembered Ace of Wands, an early 70s children's series and most of my memories are tied up in the incredibly evocative theme song -- which was on a curious ragbag of a CD from RPM entitled Magpie -- 20 Junkshop Pop Ads & Themes I got for Xmas from someone who wasn't born when the program was lasted shown. But there's a really well-researched site here: Ace of Wands. I won't say any more as all remember is a scary episode where an old woman was attacked by a sentient washing machine. The pictures make it look a bit like Man about the House with magic and an owl, but it was something truly weird -- in hindsight, anyway. Maybe back then a magician and his cute telepathic assistant (Kate Beckendale's mom in the first two series) fighting aliens at country fetes might have been typical tea-time telly viewing....

Reading Doug Henwood's After the New Economy (although I'm only on the first chapter, so this isn't a review and probably doesn't have any relevance to the book) does beg the question: is the New Economy dead? I don't think so. By this point you might have thought that any mention of it would be the biggest faux pas imaginable -- but Bush used the term last night, and while you can't take anything in his State of the Union routine as having any connection to any recognizable version of reality, I don't really see any sign that the jibber-jabbber that underpinned the New Economy has been replaced by anything new... or newer than New. A few sacrificial victims have been spectacularly kicked to death (or just chuckled at) but otherwise it's business as usual. There's no real sign that the madness that overtook the markets in the nineties has really been consigned to the dustbin.

One of the major axioms of the New Economy was that it could never be wrong. It was too nebulous and diffuse for any non-believer to get to grips with its inner philosophy. Like any evangelical faith you had to believe before you could understand. But if you were some smart-ass critic who though you'd found some flaw, maybe noticed that reality wasn't behaving quite in accordance with the thinking of geniuses like George Gilder, then you were obviously referring to an old release of their pronouncements and needed to buy the updated version. The CHANGE IS GOOD credo was an excuse for everything -- it was your fault for not keeping up with the latest revision, for clinging to the past.

The core belief of the New Economy was that a financial value could be assigned to anything, not just products and services. Nothing was too intangible to be given a price. If a company had a book value of five million dollars but the market insisted on valuing it at ten million, then that surplus five million was obviously something very special as it wasn't tied up in base material things like assets or resources, grubby stuff like stock piled up in warehouses and pesky employees. That superabundant five million dollars was the company's higher essence, it's spirit or numen. So it was easy for a true believer in the New Economy to see that the way to salvation lay in reducing the nasty, corporal, physical side of things while increasing the disembodied, "pure" value. Why spend more than two bucks making a pair of sneakers when the brand name and celebrity endorsements were what people were really willing to hand over $150 for? And to take it to the Enron level of things, why bother being a multi-billion dollar company when you can sell the idea of being one? The New Economy was an hallucination straight out of Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint that only ended when people suddenly realized that what they held in their hand wasn't worth a million dollars -- it was just a piece of paper with "this piece of paper is worth a million dollars" written on it.

But has anything really changed? The New Economy was just good old fashioned free market capitalism in techno-overdrive and all that's really happened (the economy going belly up doesn't really count to true believers) is that a bunch of scapegoats have been found and blamed -- the game is still the same and still going on. It's just evolved slightly, a few tweaks and patches, interim bugfixes. No radical changes, not even New Economy V2.0. Maybe what we have now is just New Economy V1.0.1 and an even sillier version is going to be unleashed real soon now....

Spurious George is waffling away as I write, telling it like it is on a planet that only bares the vaguest resemblance to ours. My ears perked at the mention of massively increasing the funding for the "National Endowment for Democracy" in order "to focus its new work on the development of free elections, free markets, free press, and free labor unions" but of course that's for the Middle East, not here.

It was of course Mick Farren who wrote the 1976 "The Titanic Sails at Dawn" piece in the NME that many old timers still remember fondly as being one of the harbingers that rock's old hierarchy was in urgent need of a good kick in the arse, and it's good to find it available on his site. I've been wanting to re-read it for ages because although its reputation seems to have grown with the years, he's quite disparaging about it in his book. And it's true -- in my mind it had expanded into a mighty, mythic, flailing, Bangsian call-to-arms, but in reality it was just a short piece about how many NME's letter writers were growing uneasy about the pomposity, self-importance and irrelevance of their supposed heroes... and as Farren says, the groundwork for punk was already well underway by the time he wrote the piece.

But it is interesting, at this late date, to be reminded that in many ways the foundation of punk wasn't all that situationist guff about a complete revolutionary rejection of everything old fart rock stood for but simply an attempt to return to rock 'n' roll's original spirit and values, to return the music and scene to its original owners, snotty kids wanting a thrilling immediacy of their own rather than meekly buying into a world of millionaire jetsetters forging a lordly career -- and at the same time helps explain why so much of what came out of 76/7 now sounds more dated and traditional than what it tried to replace. It's been said before but punk wasn't the start of something but the end of something. Think of the Pistols and Clash and their affinity for Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran riffs, only played faster and nastier. Punk only seemed new, but it was mostly rock taken back to basics, pre-pomp, pre-psycho, pre-moptop, with a few extraneous modernistic gimmicks added to upset the tabloids.

This also explains why so many of my fellow students who I assumed I'd piss off mightily by blasting out "God Save The Queen" in the summer of '77 surprised me by loving it straight way. They were Led Zep and Floyd fans who hated my Faust, Captain Beefheart and Henry Cow albums and had assumed that punk would be something foul and beneath them from what they had read or seen, but as soon as they actually heard it they couldn't help but jump up and down to its straightforward power chords and beat. The grandiose music they seemed to like had, for all its pomp and silliness, grown from the simple root of lusty, simple, gleeful rock 'n' roll.... Looking back, I'm tempted to believe that it was those of us who thought punk was a radical paradigm shift that was going to transform the whole artist/audience interface and all that malarky who were the pompous ones. But it was fun at the time.

It's Martin Luther King Day, one of those holidays here in the USA that only teachers, librarians, garbage collectors and other useful members of society get. It's a good indication of whether your job is meaningful or just some money-grubbing nonsense -- if you're in the corporate playground, making money for people you'd punch in the throat if you met them in a dark alleyway, it's work as usual. (Unless you work for a bank of course, in which case my "either/or" theory falls apart as banks are the ultimate capitalistic invention and they're all closed today.)

Poor MLK... He gets a holiday but does anyone really remember much about him apart from his assasination and the "I have a dream" speech?

Very much am I enjoying Mick Farren's Give the Anarchist a Cigarette. (The hardback was 4.99 -- the pound sign seems to have dropped off this thing -- in HMV's new year sale back in Leeds -- or you could pay $44.95 for a "passable" secondhand copy on Amazon.com...) I guess I'm still a sucker for self-aggrandizing/deprecating tales of lowlife misadventure and thwarted aspiration, especially with a sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll bent. And Farren was always one of my favorite writers back when I was an impressionable teen reading the pre-punk NME. I lost track of him over the last two and a half decades or so, didn't realize he had produced dozens of novels and a bunch of CDs and was now working for the LA City Beat. It's good to see that not all those guys who influenced me at a not-so-tender age are reduced to writing 50 word reviews for Mojo and Q....

And he's started a blog too: Doc 40.

Something I noticed today -- none of the cars in the office parking spaces have bumper stickers. In central Austin most of the vehicles are held together by bumper stickers for bands, stores, political organizations or just plain weirdness. As you move outwards the "Bush is a Punk-Assed Chump" (or is it "Chump-Assed Punk"?) stickers give way to "God Bless America" and anti-abortion slogans but in the corporate office park there are none, not even innocent signs of scholastic pride or radio station loyalty. I know there's something a bit sad about people who reduce their personality and philosophy to a bumper sticker but this is something else and walking to work through all these clean, blank vehicles is a spooky experience.

My office is cave-like, windowless, rarely entered but anyone but myself -- an oubliette out in the exopolis, the DMZ of deregulation, the triumphalistic palaces of the corporate ethos, to lapse into Baffler-spiel. And somewhat sepulchal now as I don't turn on the headache-inducing overhead strip lighting, instead relying on a 60 watt lamp with a "natural light" bulb. I have to keep thinking of reasons to e-mail my boss as there's no other way of letting anyone know that I'm there. The only other sign of individuality I have so far is a calendar from my aunt showing picturesque scenes of Worcester, which looks a bit sad on its own, especially as the current picture is a gray, murk shot of a bridge over the River Severn. Today I had the wild fantasy of turning the place from an anonymous white cube into an Edwardian gentleman's den, lush and opulent, with a chaise longue for those meditative moments, the harshy, boxy corners softened with ornate pillows and rugs and exquisite cabinets filled with curios from Morocco, Borneo and the east. A wind-up gramophone will play dubious songs about the old bazaar in Cairo and Ali Baba's camel. Anyone wanting a meeting will have to put on a fez first and sample various Turkish sweetmeats. Books on Java, XML and SQL will be concealed behind leather-bound volumes of Swinburne, Chatterton and Beardsley, whose prints will cover the walls except for a couple of Burne-Jones originals. My PC will be stripped of its nasty beige plastic, clad in mahogany and inlayed with silver and mother-of-pearl. Canapes slathered with Patum Peppernum will be served at eleven and four with regular libations of bison grass martinis or iced tea. A humidor will contain a selection of Cuban cigars and the long-unobtainable Scott's Number 2 cheroots. By ringing a little bell, I will...

Or maybe I'll leave it dreary and drab to remind myself that it is work after all, the place I go through lack of any reasonable alternatives. But I'm working on it. Or thinking about getting around to working on it.... There's got to be a better buyer if I'm selling my arse to techno-capitalism....

Roky Erickson did a signing on Friday night at Waterloo Records. He's got a CD out, although it's a bunch of recordings from The Evil One session back in 1978 which have probably already been released more than a few dozen times in various quasi-legit formats. I didn't go -- it's good to hear that Erickson is getting out of the house again after decades of confinement, self-imposed and otherwise, but it would be too freaky and more than a little sad to encounter such a legendary figure under such circumstances, promoting some leftover material from quarter of a century ago. I'm assuming his mental health is a lot better now than it's been in quite a while, but it seems wrong to want to test this out by shoving a CD cover under his nose to sign. If it was new material, if he had decided that after all this time he wanted to make music again, it would be a different story and I'd forgo my usual reticence and reluctance to indulge in these non-musical promotional activities. That would be something to actively support.

To me Erickson is the core of Austin's music, the father of everything half-decent that has come out of this part of Texas, from the Butthole Surfers to Explosions in the Sky. All that timeserving bluesy, country, singer-songwritery, I-shared-a-burrito-with-Janis-and-Jimmy-Ray nonsense is just for the tourists as far as I'm concerned and if you really must have corny Tex-Mex frathouse music then you might as well put on "Woolly Bully" or "She's About A Mover" for the zillionth play, but knowing that the strand of unrestrained psychedelic that started with the 13th Floor Elevators and still infects nearly everything I still listen to, new and old, originated here is one of the things that makes me very happy to be here in Austin.

Got given the Richard X album for Xmas -- which was nice. That, plus CDs by Girls Aloud and Kylie (I'm sorry to go against conventional wisdom and postmodern bletherings but I like the squeaky reconstituted scattershot simulacra-pop of Body Language and I might tell you why later) all make me realize that I've got to stay in touch with contrived UK chart music. Also got the latest issue of Uncut that has their best of 2003 CD on it, which made me realize... um... that I've got to stay in touch with contrived UK chart music. Because if that dour stuff is what we grizzled serious music fans are meant to be tapping our Zimmer frames to then I'm going to have to start lying about my age and my sexuality from now on.

I now have my own office at work, which ought to mean something... but everyone else has his or her own office too -- except the help desk people who have cubicles and the QA guys who have to be sat on top of one another for some reason -- so it doesn't have any prestige. Instead I find myself thinking that early each morning I'm traveling 11 miles out from all the things that make Austin what it is (and in the direction of all the things that make the rest of Texas what it is) to spend the day on my own in a windowless room. It's a funny old world at the cutting edge of IT....

Should have kept notes during our trip to England as it's all becoming a blur now. Lots of shopping, lots of culture shock, lots of curious moments where I wasn't sure if I felt English, American, modishly global or just out of it. We went with two suitcases, one containing presents and came back with three, stuffed with things you can't get in Austin, like Twiglets, Bagpuss sleepwear, the Blue Nile's Hats (a snip at 3.99 on CD in HMV) and kitten heeled elf boots. I also came back with a raw throat and a rotten cold, which everyone in England seemed to have and which resulted in almost terminal aero-otitis. What a fine keepsake that was, folks.

First day in Leeds, everyone looked wrong. Hair, clothes, gait, posture.... it seemed to be 1979, only this time nearly everyone seemed to be in on it. Punk hair and pirate boots, fishnets and parkas and the 30th re-incarnation of Goth. Everyone was hunched and pinched, smoking fags and eating chips, dressed inappropriately. More female flesh on display on a freezing Monday afternoon than midnight on 6th St. Everything seemed so cramped, personal space reduced to a finger's width. Such agitation and barely contained irritation. And that version of "Mad World" from Donny Darko at number one in the singles charts....

Back in Austin now, my ears almost functioning again after having committed the grave error of flying with a head cold. Currently busy deleting one or two emails that accumulated in our absence, most of which kindly offered wholesale "vi@gra" or a generous share in yet another 45.5 million dollars of misappropriated Nigerian funds. It's as cold here as it was back in Leeds where we spent the last two weeks, which is a bit of a drag, as is returning to an apartment we had only moved into a day or two before leaving for England. Stuff remains in boxes, half unpacked and the stereo is still in pieces. I feel tired, weary and dislocated. Going to work with a heavy cold, jetlag, ear-ache and after minus hours sleep has me feeling totally spooked and weird. And not in a good way.

Will try to update in the next few days. Expand the right hand column to include your blogs, at least those of you who haven't decided to discontinue your efforts. By the end of the month everything will be flippin' marvelous....

Otherwise occupied until the new year -- back in Leeds, England and doing family stuff that doesn't give me time to so much as check your lovely blogs let along post my own. But some time around January 5th 2004 it'll all change, by the cripes. You see if it doesn't.

See ya then and have a good un.

Insert best whatevers list of 2003 here.

To the opening of the 3rd Annual Blue Genie Art Bazaar. Blue Genie do some pretty amazing artwork themselves -- half of the stores and restaurants in Austin, and not just the cool ones, seem to feature their signs, murals or sculptures. Whenever you see anything like a giant monkey in a fez, crouched atop a building, the lightbulb guy or the hamburger girl you know who did it. At times it does almost feel like it's a legal requirement for establishments to use their work, part of some official "Keep Austin Weird" deal, but at its best their stuff captures all the right elements of evocative roadside Americana without lapsing into the usual easy cliches of retro pop culture. And who could ever tire a smoking monkey in a fez?

The bazaar, however, features the works of about 80 other local artists ranging from the self-consciously weird to traditional portrature. It was good to see that some many of the people you see around town who look like they're funky boho artist types actually are and not just spoilt kids playing at it. I'm man enough to accept almost any amount of coffee shop poseury if there's some life-enhanciing creativity going on. I bought a couple of prints from Debby Wolfinsohn and the missus got a couple of cute Will Heron T-shirts. We were tempted by a lot more and will maybe splash out on some Studio K glassware once we've settled into our new apartment. And what kind of monster could resist some Weens Art?

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Gripes and whines galore. The slow motion emergence of this blog has become mired in blah blah blah blah. If there is any meaning behind this moaning it'll have to wait a day or two, until the voices in my head stop shrieking and learn to couch their complaints in wryly amusing, finely-formed sentences with wacky anecdotes galore. My shoes are obscenely adhered to the sticky carpets of greatly diminished expectations. Blah blah -- and, if you will, blah....

Chris Waltrip's Dublog is an essential daily dose of art on the web, from highbrow to no-brow, deranged to functional, accidental to obsessive, and more. A random selection of links will take you to: The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were, Beetle Science: Carbon Dust Illustrations and Forgotten Detroit.

Tramplamps -- now you can have women's underwear hanging around your house and justify it as art....

Woke up this morning with the first migraine of this blog. Confusing -- all the usual symptoms and side-effects but in the wrong order, as if my brain had decided that since I'd missed the onset by being asleep it would provide me with a rerun when it was able to interrupt the regular script. Scrambled vision, headache localized in left eyebrow, right arm feeling like it had been packed in ice overnight, tongue like some bloated fish, mild nausea and the standard photo-, phono- and osmophobia. Ouch.

An extra half hour of sleep helped as did the usual darkness of the office, plenty of black coffee and a fistful of pills, but the lingering conviction remained that my brain (a) would become completely detached if I moved my head too quickly and (b) was nothing more than a bundle of squelchy meat inside my skull, as comically susceptible to chemical changes and bio-electrical tweaks as a splayed frog on a dissection board. I don't like being reminded that my brain is an organ, a bodily part. I like to think of it as the cradle of my soul, my intellect, my consciousness, something divine and perfect, not a fallible lump of horror film gristle that can be fucked about by a microscopic squirt of excess serotonin or whatever they've decided is the culprit this year.

But later, later, when the pain and indignation has faded I have to admit that as migraineurs go, I'm pretty lucky. My migraines last about three hours at the most -- some people's incapacitate them for three days and they get as many in a month as I get in a year. And maybe I was asking for it -- last night's red wine and dark chocolate are traditionally held up as the most common instigators, even when it's a nice rioja and Valrhona, the brand for the true chocolate snob. (You wouldn't catch Nigella Lawson languidly licking any other make off her sticky utensils.)

Listening to Einojuhani Rautavaara's spooky, lushly neo-romantic Cantus Arcticus from 1972 and it reminds me of living in London -- which is hardly surprising as it was one of the first "modern" pieces of classical music I ever attended. It was during the poly-stylistic boom in the late 80s and you couldn't move for premieres of Schnittke and Gorecki. I was tubby and single and in my early 30s and a future of solitary bachelorhood and rented rooms looked likely. A bowtie and corduroy trousers would have been the next step. Sundays spent at the Tate and National Gallery, hours in front of Botticelli's Mystic Nativity or Antonello de Messina's St. Jerome in his Study, then dinner alone at the Stockpot, feeling like a character from a Muriel Spark novel. I was exquisitely unhappy in those days. I think I cultivated it, a heroic sadness that I probably thought ennobling and perfectly in tune with the city around me. Those chill morning mists of Peckham Rye, those train and underground journeys that took me into, beneath and out of the city, listening to Honneger's 3rd and 5th Symphonies, up through the wastes of North London and out to Stonebridge Park where I did what I do now only for a lot more money and with more elevated conversations, sexier colleagues and at least two hangovers a week. (Later, when I moved back to Leeds the conversations were severely dumbed down and the colleagues less lovely but the hangover frequency doubled so I hardly noticed.) I can't imagine getting drunk with the people I work with now. It just couldn't happen. The culture is too different.

But back to Rautavaara. I was always a sucker for neo-romanticism, especially when it has just enough of a modernist edge not to sound too sappy, like Arvo Pärt's pre-holy minimalist 2nd Symphony where a gorgeous arrangement of a Tchaikovsky piano piece for children is suddenly subverted by the sound of hundreds of squeaky toys. Cantus Arcticus is fairly straightforward except for the tape recording of birdsong that runs through it. Which could easily make it corny, relying entirely on clichéd sound effects to bolster a cut-price Sibelius melody and little more than a soundtrack for David Attenborough ("...and, as dawn approaches, once again the majestic swans of the marshland..."). And I have to admit to being a lot less awed by it than I once was, but it still evokes a forlorn, impossibly lonely place on the edge of the world. Only now, for me, that place is London, not the bogs of Liminka as the composer intended....

Curious, curious stuff indeed -- Keenan and Jessa still get written about in the Austin Chronicle despite having fled to the frozen north months ago. Seems that some folk 'round these parts will never forgive Bookslut for (a) suggesting that the literary section of the Chronicle ought to run a book review or two ocassionally and (b) writing that BookPeople isn't the greatest bookshop in central Austin let alone the world. Curious and a touch dubious -- is this the cream of Austin literary gossip? Hasn't Neal Pollack done something funny lately? (Mr TMFTML and one or two hundred others come gallantly to Jessa's aid....)

Ick! Not everyone in Austin is a cool hipster. The person who invented the oxymoronic term "compassionate conservatism" is a Professor of Journalism at UT: Marvin Olasky.

Joe Conason's Big Lies is the adult's version of a Michael Moore book, focused, waffle-free, filled with disgust and sadness rather than self-enhancing bile. Moore serves his purpose and I'm glad he's around -- he riles the ninnies and gets the disenfranchised off their butts -- but he's the Stephen King of liberalism, someone who you can depend on to deliver but always leaves you feeling both a bit guilty and shortchanged.

Conason doesn't crack many joke or make nasty fun of anyone, but since the right is such a ludicrous, if deadly, joke he doesn't have to. I had to keep checking on the web to affirm that he wasn't slipping into parody at times, only to find that such sleazy, comedic masterpieces as Tom DeLay's excuse for avoiding the draft were indeed true. Basically the book is an encyclopedic repost to the lies of the right, giving chapter and verse on all the misinformation churned out by the Republicans and their cronies. Every virtue the right claims is pretty much demolished or shown to be more true of the Democrats. It's preaching to the converted, obviously, as no-one who believes the right really stands for honesty, morality, compassion, business sense, patriotism, strong defense and the American way of life will go near this book but it's good to have all the information and references in one volume for demolishing just about any knee-jerk argument from the right. And you can never be reminded too often just what a bunch of shits these people are....

A swarm of ladybugs settled on my window at work this afternoon. I counted over thirty at one point with more hovering around or dropping down out of the tree outside. One or two would have been cute but more than two dozen of the little buggers trudling around like out-of-control pacmen was gross.

Here's a neat interview in City Pages with the Left Business Observer's Doug Henwood which makes the point I've not seen made anywhere else: yes, Bush's tax cuts and rebates have had a positive effect on the US economy and it's pointless for the left to deny this -- but it's hardly an economic miracle, just the side-effect of moving money from one place to another. And now that money's gone....

In the fantasyworld of the right (say, Sean Hannity), it's good to give money to the rich because they will use it to build factories which will take on all the unemployed who will then be able to pay taxes and so on and everything will be dandy, folks. In reality, rich people are just like the rest of us and when they get extra money they either blow it on luxuries or stick it somewhere safe -- they don't think "Hmmm, I think I'll stimulate the economy with this little windfall."

So the economy has bucked up briefly. But when all the rebates have been spent, then what?

Being a member of the liberal elite (my card is in the post) I don't want to see the rancid crony capitalism of BushCo validified but at the same time I want the economy to improve. I'm too jaded to be able to believe in the farty old Marxist view, that things need to get really rotten so that the people will rise up and burn every Wal*Mart to the ground. I want things to get better but I don't want the Republicans to get the credit....

The latest Harper's has a nice, baggy piece by Jeff Sharlet: "Big World: How Clear Channel programs America". Sharlet is one of the magazine's sharpest, most interesting writers who actually goes out and researches his pieces rather that sits somewhere in academia and chews his pen -- if you haven't read his earlier piece, "Jesus Plus Nothing" you really need to.Unfortunately his latest article isn't online (yet), but here's a nice chunk to give you a taster: