M e   A t   A   G l a n c e   O n

N e t a d e l i c a

I: was born in Germany, grew up in England, went to a comprehensive, 'did' Computer Science, work in IT, have green anarchist leanings, vote Labour or Liberal Democrat depending on my mood, eat fruit, Quorn and crisps, don't drive, tend towards Jung, want a cat, am an aetheist who believes in an afterlife, drink, smoke, don't look at zebra crossings, maintain that art and politics are incompatible, and blow my nose when I need to.

Out of work, I enjoy a rich and varied mix of activities that encompass personal self-development and enriching team-based recreation. Hmmmm ... no I don't. I single-mindedly pursue personal obsessions as the mood takes me. These include:

• Music - Divine Comedy, Philip Glass, Radiohead, Prodigy, Jimi Hendrix, Gregson and Collister, Stereoloab, European techno, Love, the Oyster Band, Boiled in Lead, plus a swooning adoration of Beethoven and Haydn. The best album of the last ten years is Primal Scream's Screamadelica, obviously. I won't argue about that. Radiohead's OK Computer may well be the best album of the next ten years. I don't know yet.
• Playing stuff - guitar and piano, but then everyone does that. I bought a 1920s Lubitz piano recently, a sodding great black gothic German machine of the type that frightens children. I like annoying my neighbours with Eric Satie's Trois Gymnopedies, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and selections from Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish. I can't play anything else, and I'm incapable of writing any piece of music that isn't in C# minor for some reason. I learned guitar by inventing a load of chord shapes like 'bucket' and 'spade' on a knackered bass guitar. Years later, a music student told me I'd re-invented the entire Western music system from scratch - crivens!
• Places- Barcelona. The Ramblas starts off respectable at the top and ends in desperation. All aspects of the human condition exist in between. You can be naiive, elated, terrified and suicidal along the way. And then there's the rest of Barcelona. Then the rest of Spain.
• Writing - spastic stanzas, emphatic manifesta, make pretend literature and gibberish. (see Fent Poorly.) I'll show you what I'm writing now when I'm ready to.
• Coding - retro arcade games, text processors, genetic algorithms and whatever takes my fancy. My little Space Invaders game won a competition run in comp.lang.basic.misc in 1996. There were four entries. You can get the game executable for MS-DOS . It's in QBASIC (stop laughing!). Also, see my coding pages.
• Backgammon - I never understood chess, but got hooked by backgammon. (see my backgammon page).
• Father Ted - you either love Ted, Dougal, Jack and Mrs Doyle with all your heart or you hate them, you feckin' eejit. The only programme on telly that makes me laugh so much, you know, I don't think I could possibly laugh any more unless my head exploded with laughing so much. Well, you have to watch it I suppose.
• Goodies - Jung, Gaugin, Joyce, Stephen Fry, Martin Amis, Lennon, Bobby Gillespie, Coronation Street, Zoe Ball before the tabloids mauled her, Scary Spice, William Burroughs, my Mum, Brian Wilson, Stephen Hawkin, Viz, Bill Drummond, Sid James, Quentin Crisp, Will Self, Caroline Quentin, David Attenborough (bless him), Kylie, Mike Leigh, Jude off Casualty (phwoarr, etc.), Alan McGee, Thom Yorke, Linus Torvaald, Richard Dawkins, the people who make Green & Black chocolate.
• Baddies - Brian Mawhinney, Garry Bushell, advertisments, Eric Clapton, Eastenders, Esther Rantzen, Daily Mail readers, Daily Express readers, censors, and all manner of dicks, shitheads, prudes and tossers. Go on, fuck off, the lot of you! Well, really.

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