thoughtwax's blog

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.

(I feel like blessing myself and muttering some apologetic prayer to the god of climate change before starting this.)

I've been all over this year. Between work and (now that I've finished my Masters) personal holidays, I visited 14 cities in 4 continents in 2007:

• Dublin
• Turin (well, actually snowboarding tragically close by)
• San Francisco
• Galway
• Agadir
• Essaouira
• Marrakesh
• Newcastle
• Seville
• Belfast
• Aukland
• Christchurch
• Queenstown
• Seoul (just overnight, but I'm counting it)

But it's only made the travel bug worse. I experienced the most amazing places I've ever been this year, Morocco and New Zealand especially, and I can see that I've only begun to realise the possibilities that adventurous travel has to offer me, and that I've only begun to touch them. It's a never-ending chase, but I love the experience, feel hugely broadened after, and have the best travel buddy ever.

For the first time in ages that I can remember, I've now got a blank slate in front of me: no plans yet settled to move out of the country. But ideas are stewing, and I fully intend to make the most of them.

Found in the digital equivalent of an old drawer:

(Don't worry, I'm not going to start with some terrible bastardization of Sgt. Peppers. There was enough of that when Sgt. Peppers itself was 40 years old a couple of weeks ago, and probably in everything written about any album anniversary since, ever.)

Anyway, it was ten years ago today that Radiohead released OK Computer, and ever since people have been going on about it being the Greatest Album Of All Time andwhathaveyou. While I hate to agree with those awful British music magazines, and think that the GAOAT concept is probably a logical fallacy anyway, today I feel obliged to doff my cap in OK Computer's direction.

Ten years ago (ten years ago!) I bought the album on CD. I know people say this type of thing about old music all the time, about wearing out records till the needle broke and about songs changing their life, but here I go anyway: I distinctly recall sitting in my bedroom that same day listening to the album intently for the very first time and being totally fucking blown away. I thought it sounded amazing.

I was seventeen, and I think there's something formative about the music you hear when you're seventeen. Most people that I know, by or around that age, have settled on their taste in music. I know that's probably a controversial thing to say, and I've got friends who would shout at me across our pints for accusing them of something like that, but I think it's largely true. It's not because your taste becomes immutable, it doesn't (some of the electronic music that I now love would have been heaped with scorn by my seventeen year old self). It's not because I haven't encountered music that has the potential to effect me as much as OK Computer since. It's that I haven't listened to an album the same way since: sitting in my bedroom, inlay card in hand, concentrating on the speaker while the music played.

That last sentence probably gave you an idea of the type of seventeen year old I was, and probably explains things a bit more. I was about to go to college to study humanities and politics, and here was this great new music from my favourite band, music about riot shields and mobile phone pylons crackling in the sky (and so on). It was great, and I invited it in. It's a zeitgeist album, and I was of that time and place.

I still love new music and seek it out at every opportunity. But I'd be lying if I said that I still listen to new music the way I did ten years ago; fanatically, ravenously. I guess I don't have the time any more (my world became a lot bigger in the following year), or maybe I just don't have the energy to wade through all the crap that's out there. To some seventeen year old, it's not crap at all though.

I suppose I should stop navel-gazing and say something about the album. I still think it's fantastic. There are only a couple of other albums that I can think of that run so well from start to finish as a single piece of music. To me, it is totally evocative of a time and place, and I can smile when I think about it. It's layered with vivid detail. But there I go again, I can't separate OK Computer from my own experience of it and just talk about the music. If you want that, go read the Guardian or something, I'm sure they've got some very clever deconstruction of the whole thing, no doubt starting off with the requisite Sgt. Yorke pun.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

The Band, The Last Waltz
Jeff Buckley at Sin é
Nina Simone at the Village Gate

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Was anyone else kind of underwhelmed by the new Apple products announced yesterday?

iTunes looks ok, but none of the new features are really available to me (no album covers because I didn't import with iTunes, no movies for Europe yet (although in fairness I won't buy them then anyway)), and now there's an ugly blue icon in my dock. As for the interface, which apparrently is a preview of what the Leopard UI will look like; well, perhaps shinyshiny Aqua needed to be toned down a tad, but there's something about the dull scrollbars that whispers KDE to me.

I never liked the design of the iPod mini, and now the Nano looks like it. I guess the Shuffle is nice, but I think I prefer the design of the old one, and it can't be plugged directly into a USB port, which is a big shame.

This goes to show how important design is in Apple's products for some people. No doubt, from an engineering point of view the new products are great (24 hour battery life for the Nano!), but here I am, griping about a blue icon.