majorarcana

Posts Tagged ‘Travel’

Texas Strangers

I had a pretty good time at SXSW this year. It’s deeply satisfying to be around so many intelligent, creative people, and well, to get drunk with them. Jeremy Keith made the comment in the How to Rawk SXSW about how he felt he was amongst his tribe at the festival, and that’s certainly the way I felt - just hanging out with so many progressively minded, technically literate, enthusiastic and media-savvy people was a great feeling, and a reward in of itself. I also came up with a brilliantly catchy business-speak way of describing it, but Mark stole it for one of his tweets, so it’s dead to me now.

(At the same panel, Ben Huh asserted that without a doubt, at some point in the festival we would all end up in a strange car with strange people at 4am, to which I thought - bullshit; our hotel was 2 minutes from the conference centre, right in the middle of downtown where all the parties were happening - what possible reason did I have to get in a strange car. Then on the 4am Wednesday morning, I found myself in a strange car with a bunch of strangers. It’s funny how things turn out sometimes).

Anyways, here’s some of the talks I enjoyed:

The panel Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration was great not just because of the engaging and novel subject matter, but also because I got to ask someone who actually works at NASA a question. If I ever go back in time, I’ve finally done something my eight-year old self would be impressed by.
Twitter’s Mark Trammell gave a great, inspiring talk in What Can Carl Sagan Teach Us About The Web?, making extensive use of Cosmos to illustrate points about design, engineering and team-working.
Bruce Lawson and Martin Kliehm demonstrated the awesomeness of HTML5 in HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches. Let’s hurry up and kill Flash, eh? Just shoot it in the head or something. Twice.
How The Other Half Lives: Touring The Digital Divide - Jessamyn West and Jenny Engstrom gave an interesting talk on their experiences as librarians in rural and urban America, acting both as sometimes the only point of access to the internet for their communities, and as de facto trainers for a generation with no online experience whatsoever. Notes here.
And I have to mention Memory Matters: How Do Elephants Do It by Mark Channon and Paul Duncan, not only because it was good and entertaining, but because it was a big part of the reason I got to go.

Supposedly, most of these are going to be podcast at some point, but I can’t find them at the moment. All well worth listening to if they do ever appear, however.

Posted on April 18th, 2010
by
nick.brownlow
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Oh God, why is the internet so slow in this house?

Hmm. I did promise to say something about my holiday, didn’t I? A post of sorts exists in notebook form, but looking over it, it’s a rather dull effort so I’m probably going to consign it to the ether. The short version is I went walking in the Lake District towards the end of October, and had a very nice time. There’re pictures and everything.

At the start of the year, I had the goal of doing a minimum of a blog post a month, which obviously I didn’t stick to, and then after my personal life imploded I assumed I’d have a lot more time on my hands and thought hey - maybe I can manage two or three a month - but that didn’t happen either. To be honest, I’ve thrown myself into my day job a bit over the last eight months, and haven’t felt I’ve had a lot to write about (although 15 posts is slightly better than what you would have got in the original plan…). I have to rethink what I want to use this place for again, I think. Most of the blogs I’ve followed over the years have abandoned news/links/micro-posts because there are better outlets for that sort of thing now. The trend seems to be for longer essays, which of course takes time and effort. And if I was going to go down that route, I’d like to do something that might actually be of interest to anyone apart from immediate friends and family - as I’ve pretty much done everything a blogger could do to drive casual traffic away from this site over the last few years, it might be nice to come up with something that might conceivably attract an audience for a change. Less prattling about meeeeeeee next year whatever happens, I reckon.

Creatively, as ever, I need to get more writing done. I’m also getting a bit hacked off with stuff I actually make the effort to finish and place ending up with publications that subsequently crash or disappear without trace. I’m hardly prolific, and the fact the one or two pieces I’m proudest of have effectively been in limbo - in some cases for years - is pretty sickening. I recently found out my major completed project of last year, for a book that was supposed to be out last January, probably now isn’t going to be in the book at all, and will likely end up as a promotional pdf. All very demoralising, and I certainly need to rethink my focus next year.

I’d thought about doing a separate best of the year post, but I think I’ll just blurt it all out here: Book: Bad Vibes, Music: St Vincent - Actor, Film: Moon, TV: Err, The Inbetweeners? Was that this year? It was for me, Comic: Batman: RIP - fuck you internet, I loved it.

See you next year, unless I get chatty between now and new year. Have a good one.

Posted on December 26th, 2009
by
nick.brownlow
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I am now responsible for the spiritual and moral development of someone else’s child

A few weekends ago, I made the trip up North to become Godparent to my nephew. Fortunately, my brother and his wife don’t take the massive responsibilities they’ve asked me to accept too seriously, so mainly this meant going into a Church for an hour and then onto an afternoon do at a local public house, where said nephew regularly admonished me for spending too much time at the bar and not enough time at his party. I’m pleased to report he’s developed a keen fascination with trains, and can now readily discern between an electrically powered Pendelino and a regular diesel train (both pass through his local station regularly). Whilst there is something impressive about the speed of the Pendelino trains that run up and down that west coast line, not to mention the engineering that allows them to do it, I hope he doesn’t become too disillusioned when he travels on one and finds they’re hideously cramped, uncomfortable, and always ludicrously overbooked coming out of London. Branson, if you allow that to happen to my young charge, they’ll be Hell to pay.

After the main party I continued drinking in town with my brother and Terry Christian, which was unexpected, where they attempted to convince me Bramhall, Cheshire was a better place to be single than London.

Meanwhile, been to the cinema recently:

Moon - reservations about how much you’d actually save, economically speaking, by establishing the kind of set-up that serves as the the film’s premise aside, I really enjoyed Bowie Jnr’s directorial debut. Was pleased the much talked about twist was actually the premise, and that it turned out to be a rather touching, thought-provoking movie about alienation, identity and compassion. A great performance from Sam Rockwell also cements his place as one of the best actors of his generation.

District 9 - This, on the other hand, was just silly and tedious. Tonally it veered all over the place, from humourous to horrific to po-faced cod-meaningful, and never in a particularly entertaining way. I also think if you’re going to make a film about the evils of racism, then making the ‘others’ part of a caste system in which the entirety of the lower-caste act throughout the film exactly as the human racists describe them as acting, probably isn’t a particularly smart decision.

Next: what I did on my holidays

Posted on October 24th, 2009
by
nick.brownlow
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I often dream of trains

Generally speaking, my experience of trains involves daily commutes on our increasingly dilapidated underground system or else impossibly crammed Friday afternoon virgin train carriages heading northwards, so it’s easy to forget they’re actually my preferred form of transportation. When it works it’s relaxed, comfortable, even dignified, and allows time and opportunity to lose one self in the scenery. It helps that I usually take long trips for good reasons. Last month, trains took me to Bristol to see an old friend, and this month they took me to Exeter to see an entirely different old friend.

Travelling west always feels peculiar. I lived for a long time in the M3/M4 corridor of course, so there’s plenty of personal memories and genera life detritus associated with that particular, most Ballardian of landscapes, however over the years a number of my oldest friends have, through chance rather than choice, drifted westwards and the act of visiting them - reconnecting with good times past - has lent the journey a slightly unreal, almost mystical feeling of going back in time, a feeling the landscape of rolling hills, fairy mounds and standing stones only serves to accentuate. Like I say, peculiar.

Anyway, my point is long train rides through the country, weekends with good company, sunshine and the seaside rock.

Also on the train, I read Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, a short eating manifesto preceeded by 200-odd pages of argument as to why you should adopt it. It offers much food (haha) for thought. At times Pollan seems to be adopting a mildly anti-science, preachy new-agey tone of which I’m instinctively sceptical, however his argument is more broadly anti-bad science, in particular science he believes is biased or outright compromised by food manufacturers. His main target is ‘nutritionism’ - the reductionist view that the value of food is entirely derived from the sum of its nutritional components, and the only value of eating is to promote bodily health. Pollan provides many examples of just how tenuous that argument is, and exposes the health claims of many food manufacturers as at best a quasi-science ill-supported by real research. The manifesto itself is delightfully simple and revolves around advice like: eat with company; avoid anything with more than five ingredients on the label; cook; and the book’s core message, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. Pollan makes a convincing argument and offers workable solutions. I’m already finding myself trying to follow some of his advice, checking food labels, going all-organic, and generally worrying myself about becoming too middle-class. As someone who’s general diet has gone completely to pot over the last few months though, this feels like a very positive step in the right direction. Cheers, Michael.

I’ve been following Harper’s Island on iPlayer. It’s advertised as a mystery thriller, the novelty being a character gets killed off every episode, with even the cast none the wiser as to what order they were going to be offed in until the day of shooting where their number gets called. Nice idea, except it really isn’t all that suspenseful waiting to see which muppet gets to die, and the killings themselves feel a bit tagged on to the end of every episode. It’s essentially a slasher film dragged out to thirteen-odd episodes, but I have a weakness for slashers, and whist the characters are every bit as inept and uncurious as their big screen counterparts, I’m finding it oddly compelling viewing.

Posted on September 30th, 2009
by
nick.brownlow
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I keep forgetting about the Goddamn tiger

The Hangover is gloriously stupid and mostly hilarious, the latest in a string of Hollywood comedies that remove or else sideline the obligatory romantic subplot and concentrate on the business of actually being funny. See also anything by Ferrell/McKay, Superbad, 40-Year Old Virgin, Tropic Thunder et al. I saw it in the incongruous environs of the Tricycle Cinema, which I can get to from my front door in about three minutes and costs only a fiver, so there is the plus of easier access to cool stuff to mitigate the minuses of tides of insatiable vermin and casual street crime here in Kilburn.

Been keeping my weekends busy of late; firstly, had the family down to the big smoke for a couple of days, leading to many touristy things being done, such as paddling in Hyde Park, heckling people on the Plinth and pretending to be pirates on the Golden Hinde. Revelation of the weekend was that the Original and Big Bus companies’ employees really hate each other, and bad-mouth their competitors at every opportunity. Glorious visions of the two uniformed tribes engaged in pitched pub battles ensued. Also, ate at Planet Hollywood for the first time and was seated beside Bruce Willis’s vest from Die Hard with a Vengeance and one of Freddy Kreuger’s gloves, which went some way towards making up for a disappointing steak dinner.

Then last weekend I ventured out to Bristol to meet up with old chum Andy, and we went drinking on the Whiteladies Road. Our evening culminated in the Victoria pub and an increasingly dark conversation (”what this country needs is a dictator”) with an old boy who eventually announced he’d voted for the BNP in the last election (in his defence, he had nothing kind to say about Hitler). After a leisurely start the following morning, we went for a walk along the Downs, taking in Clifton and the Avon gorge, which was nice.

Rattled through Sarah Pinborough’s The Taken last week, which was a solid, enjoyable mass-market horror novel concerning a remote English village under siege by a multitude of evil ghost children rather than the traditional solitary apparition. Liked it enough to pre-order Feeding Ground, at any rate.