M e A t A G l a n c e O n
N e t a d e l i c a
I often find it difficult to gauge when reading someone's "about me"
pages if I'm on the same wavelength (man) or if I'm reading the
ramblings of a snivelling Daily Mail-reading sociopath. This page is a
childish list that defines my wavelength (man). Yes, I should get out
more.
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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