Come On Up To The House

I have soup. It’s nice. It’s keeping me company on my lunch break.

As I was logging in to WordPress just now, the “hawt post” of the day was from the fabled Stuff White People Like. I hadn’t looked at this before, and I’m starting to both regret the fact that I did, and resent it. This is post-irony at its most American. Americans (at least so it seems to us outsiders) never really got irony; therefore the blogging generation skipped a beat and hopped straight to the self-deprecating white-boy angst of the awkward phase that’s halfway between geek-and-proud (a la xkcd) and out-and-out normal person.

So I’m sticking with my bloggers from this side of the pond. Here we carp about architecture, or blog in some sort of made-up youth language (I kid, I dig) or waffle about music in unintelligible fashion. It’s all a lot more appealing than the self-loathing-yet-sickeningly-condescending mp3 blog world, or the mass consumer culture of the celebrity obsessed uber-blogs. I have warbled on for no reason for 176 words now; I will now stop.

So’s, I’ve been updating my flickrs again - some new pictures of New York, Bah-ston, even back as far as Northern Ireland. I’ve not kept up my self-imposed photographic regime as much as I thought I could, sadly, but now the nice weather is approaching, p’raps I’ll be out at the front line, in graveyards and alleyways again.

Today I’m pootling around on my lunch break again, taking a break from the wall of emails that threatens to topple onto my head at any point. I’m resorting to locating my photos on the flickr map. I like maps.

On the topic of which: I started to get a little obsessed with the London Profiler. Brought to you by the good folks of University College London (who also brought us the most awesome live weather machine), it’s a little slow yet but is full of information about the ethnic makeup of your bit of London, crime rates, transport, house prices - all via google maps. It’s a beautiful thing.

Also new: I finally got around to visiting Fashionable Wood Green’s newest attraction, a gin-u-wine nice, independent bookshop. In Wood Green! Pretty exciting. And it’s great, which is a relief. The Big Green Bookshop is, well, not exactly big, and it’s a bit green, but it’s definitely a bookshop, and a good one at that. It has the following things which rate it highly in my book:

• a coffee machine
• A goodly selection of literature (interestingly classics and poetry and everything mixed in with fiction, which is unusual…)
• An ace ‘multicultural’ section - it gives the shop a real local feel in general
• Recommended read cards, handwritten
• Book of the month/reading group-esque promotions
• Paper bags with an actual inkstamp on (this I like)
• Finally, my lovely new collection of Dostoevsky short stories which I may well tackle after I’ve broken my head getting through Foucault’s Pendulum.

These all make a nice addition to Wood Green, and makes me all the happier to be living in this part of town. You may look down on us, but now we have a bookshop and two (count ‘em) cinemas! It beats huge swathes of South London, that’s for certain.

I’m pretty proud of the fact that up until now, I haven’t required a Television category on this blog. I am dragged in by the glowing tubes, but I’m not happy with the situation, and thus I do not want to have it as a category. Hence, this goes in London.

I say all that, but I’m still in thrall to it in certain situations. When I find a programme such as The Apprentice, that just about sits on the right side of can’t bear to watch vs. can’t bear not to watch, I’m sucked in (cf. Lost, Dragons Den, et al). And it’s a joyous thing, bewildering in its damning indictment of the human condition, vast in voyeuristic guilty pleasure, pillow-shreddingly embarassing in its selection of the self-aggrandising dregs of the business world.

The show is a testament to the skill of BBC editors: while focusing ‘on the team as a whole’, and their varied arsenal of mixed metaphors, it always becomes increasingly obvious who is going to be one of the final few set up for eviction. The plums vs. lads rift was played up, the dark horses touched on but only subtly and the toff got his comeuppance. But it’s only the start of it; I know of one who (through second hand news) is a compulsive liar that still owes rent to a landlady in Harlow. Exclusive Fact, beat that, The Sun!

In other news, my personal icon Chris Hollins has been promoted to anchor on BBC Breakfast - a sterling development, the man’s a have-a-go hero.

Google do a webpages kind of deal for free. How come everybody doesn’t do things for free? This is easy though basic, straightforward, and the price is right. It’s not really suitable for what I want it for, but as a template to other businesses - please note how Google literally gives everything away and is still the big name in net technology. Free is good.

I still need a webhosting/design package though - my knowledge extends very little past a Google level of knowledge, which isn’t very much at all. There’s a whole world of acronyms out there that ave no relation to my life. I feel I’m missing out.

There was a dancing man on the tube last night. This is a step up from the distinctly smely hobo on taking up an entire carriage on the R line in New York. No, the dancing man got on the tube, barked something about how great peace, love and unity were, then started to tap dance. He wasn’t good. He wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t that good. There was no asking for money though, and that’s almost unheard of. Even the crazies that catch the tube ask for money for doing wacky things.

The best underground buskers/artists/crazies I’ve seen were, I think, in Boston. One man was an exceptional acoustic guitarist, so he got a couple of dollars. My favourite was a typical American bum - an older gentleman, fingerless mitts, balding pate, woolly hat, the works - and he was singing, a capella, just singing. Showtunes, oldies-but-goodies from the great American songbook. My favourite was the evergreen Rainbow Connection. Bless ‘im.

So the boss that went away for a long time is back, and news is: he’s resigning, and the boss in between me and he is also going. Essentially, this means that my colleague and I will be manning the big summer dealie by ourselves. We have at least 5 minutes experience in the area. At least. It all means lots of gossiping from mid-floor staff and upstairs and downstairs types, that don’t communicate, and it’s easy to see the groupings emerging.

World Of Academia: the rankings

1) Office monkeys - admin grades such as myself

2) Middle management, friends with the lackeys - less the Brents of scorn, more the local-boys-made-good: managers who still want to be buddies with the workforce.

3) Middle management, head in the stars - still middle managers, but resenting it and assuming a position of much higher authority.

4) Directors - bloodthirsty, paranoid types, as far as I can see.

5) Outsiders - in this case, high-ranking academics that meddle, meddle some more, cause more work for the monkeys, and take home a whopping cheque.

Yours,
Disgruntled of N22

Modern culture contains curious proportionalities and unexpected corrolations. The incidence of reading Dave Eggers novels is directly proportional to the wordiness and/or purgative, soliloquative nature of one’s blogging. Also related, listening to Morrissey’s Bona Drag is directly proportional to the once-impossible desire to actually return to the likes of Sheerness-on-sea. Who could have imagined such a thing?

Eggers’ self-confessional, inner-monologue style really threw me when reading A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius - it’s autobiographical, right? Or is it? I think some sort of bizarre mixture of fact and fiction, carefully treading a line between wistful, genuine beauty and family-alienating, ugly truth. You Shall Know Our Velocity is entirely fictional, but the protagonist’s internal wranglings have a real ring of authenticity about them, in the same way as, say, Nick Hornby’s oft-lovelorn, mostly scarily recognisable prose.

It lends itself well to blogging, this gushing, pouring, near stream-of-consciousness approach.

And so, with a bump, I’m back to reality. At least, a mildly hallucinogenic, sleep-induced traumatic reality. This is a place in which I often find myself on ordinary days anyway, so I’m quite prepared for this non-nightmarish hinterworld. Everything’s different in London. Or the same as they were before, but different from what I’ve been used to. Gone are the cars that all look a little bit the same. Gone are the East Coast accents. Gone are the huge boulevardish Manhattan avenues and the insanely vast structures that compose that iconic skyline. Gone is the detached, Calvin & Hobbes suburbia and the accompanying parade of chains and local restaurants. Gone are the wide lanes to fit wide vehicles and the drains with steam rising up and the tenement blocks with fire escapes and the yellow cabs and the snow on the ground and the trolleys and the coconut palms and the food covered in sticky and the pace of life which makes London seem relaxed and the taxi drivers named ‘Juice’ and the highways and expressways and freeways and routes.

Welcome home to sunny Wood Green, a ragtag accumulation of dirt and cheap wealth that I call home. And I’m happy to be here.

*papal ground kiss*

Today I went to Cambridge, MA. Heck yes. I love that I have to specify places with two extra letters now. On Saturday I’ll be going to NYC, NY. Acronym City!

 Actually, it was pretty nice. Sort of like Oxford or, indeed, Cambridge UK, the Mass. version is riddled through with world-beating university. In this case, Harvard. While it is therefore, like most American stuff, a knock off of something older, it’s still a great little town with some cute shops and particularly some excellent bookshops. My favourite purchase was this:

You may well snigger, but to me, this is blinking great stuff. I’m such a nerd sometimes. I guess yer lass at Going Underground would understand, if noone else.

I also discovered the Peet’s Coffee chain. This is a step up from the frighteningly ubiquitous Starbucks, in that it actually serves nice coffee. The tea leaves a little to be desired but the java is strong, dark and tasty. They also seem to care about the coffee, which is an unusual step-up from the corporation-centred, lifestyle-domineering latter. Star, bucks, money runs the universe, man. It’s still not a patch on the delights of Old Compton Street’s Old Algerian Coffee Store or the staggeringly wonderful Monmouth coffee company, but it’s not bad. It makes a change from seeing that green logo on every block: there’s no competition here at the same level as Costa or Nero in the UK, which is a shame - especially as Nero’s coffee, particularly, is considerably better than ‘bucks’.

But seriously Americans, learn how to make a cup of tea. Even at Peet’s, Newton Center, it was a bitter, unpleasant experience. Tea should be strong and bold, an unsubtle, powerful brew. It shouldn’t be frou-frou - if you want the option to choose from over 30 different varieties, then you should also offer simple, builders strength tea in a polystyrene cup, not a paper one. It’s just math, people!

I’m staying in a hotel designed for relaxation. It has carefully selected colour schemes and haikus everywhere. Yet there’s a big old noisy fan in the corner. Fatal flaw! I’ll be used to it soon…

Today was spent in Boston - arriving, driving, talking, viewing, eating. It’s a good town! I’ve decided Custom House is my new favourite building in the world - a huge, random, olde-looking tower in the middle of the city. It’s a real old/new place - different to London where the last 200 years are all represented, it’s a combination of colonial, turn of the C.20, and brand new skyscrapers. A heady mix, no doubt, but beautiful, especially at night. I approve.

I also drove on the other side of the road for the first time today, and with a SatNav for the first time. A wealth of new experiences, to be certain. In America, I have to admit, they do drive on the right side. Back home, however, we drive on the correct side - for some reason, this way round makes no sense. I didn’t die though, which was nice.