“Here in LA, foggy and chilly. Overcast in the early morning.”
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Legal Alien Homesick Blues
On the 30th August 2004 I had my green card interview. It was, in the words of the immigration officer, a slam dunk. The card would be with me in two weeks.
It is now almost ten months later and my green card has not arrived. I have a stamp in my passport which is, in effect, a temporary green card. It expires on August 30th 2005, at which point I will be in England. Without a green card I cannot re-enter the USA, except as a tourist.
We rang the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services disinformation line a few months ago and were advised to delay taking any action to find out where the card was. “Wait and see” was the tone of the advice. With six weeks left before we board a plane for the UK, waiting is no longer a sensible option.
As Happy as a Dog with…
…six legs?
It’s another beautiful day in northern California, and for the first time in a few weeks Courtney isn’t working on an English essay. Earlier I managed to wrest the laptop from her typing talons and have a browse around. The third thing I came across was this:
A puppy with two extra legs and a second penis is drawing curious stares at a temple in Pandamaran town.
He certainly looks pretty happy.
Yosemite Encore
From last month’s trip to Yosemite, here’s the view from a boardwalk across the marshland of Yosemite Valley floor. The falls in the previous pictures feed into this contrasting loveliness.
Three Good Quotes
Nagl, a Glasgow-resident sassenach, has posted a collection of three carefully chosen quotes on his blog, Falling Sky. They read rather well together.
Yosemite Gawpers
Gourmet my Arse!
The word "gourmet" is over-used in the USA. Constant application to items such as burgers, jerky and cat food have stretched the word out, made it frayed and baggy, worn holes in the knees and rendered it useless for carrying meaning.
Today laughing chance brought me stumbling across a section of the salon.com website known as the Surreal Gourmet. A chap called Bob Blumer advocates recipes in which a familiar ingredient is cooked in an unfamiliar appliance and vice versa. Did you know you can poach salmon in a dishwasher?
At first I thought "how ingenious," but in the last few minutes it’s occured to me that it’s as "ingenious" as it is "gourmet". True ingenuity is not using a non-essential electrical appliance to amuse dinner party guests, it’s plastering a dead hedgehog in mud and roasting it in a bonfire, gypsy style. That, and making water flow uphill using a corkscrew tube.
Email of the Week 30th May – 5th June
This week, Dave-Dad:
Hi Liam,
Your Big Chill tickets arrived this am.
Dad.
My response to this news is best expressed in the words of Alan Partridge.
JURASSIC PARK!
Oscillate Artfully
Wow, has so much time already passed since I promised to write more blog posts? Time flies when you’re having visitors. In fact, I’ve over a month’s worth of thought backlog to transcribe and edit into legible form.
About a month ago, James and I were merrily meandering down Haight Street when we came upon what is probably the best record shop in the world. The experience of walking into Amoeba records for the first time is roughly similar to going downstairs in Blackwells in Oxford. You see the lines of shelves running away and converging on the distant horizon and your mind somersaults to think that there’s so much good stuff out there. There can’t be enough hours in a human life to listen to all the CDs in Amoeba, but if the staff would have let me sleep there I’d have been tempted to try.
I was good; I limited myself to one purchase – and what a purchase! I shelled out eighteen clams for a little cardboard box titled Oscillons from the Anti-Sun. Said box contains three CDs of tracks from Stereolab’s elusive EPs, a DVD of promo videos and live performances, and little CD sleeve sized stickers of their EP covers. All excellent, but most importantly it has the song Fluorescences, which I heard once in 1996 on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 1 graveyard slot and have wanted ever since. It’s just as good as I remember.
A lot of the early Stereolab stuff I haven’t heard before. Listening to Jenny Ondioline I realised that, odd as it may sound, there are aesthetic similarities between Stereolab and Wilco, especially when you compare the groop’s early stuff to material from Wilco’s latest, A Ghost is Born. There are moments where both bands will build up a tapestry of noise, a repetitive riff, a synthy drone and mechanical percussion, and then they’ll break through this with a pretty melody sung by a modest voice.
And what’s an oscillon? It’s a recent (1996) discovery in the field of physics. Here’s a video of an oscillon in action. Essentially they are surprisingly constant patterns formed by vibrating particles, of great significance to those who study chaos theory.
And who are Stereolab? They’re an oddly retro-futuristic band who often stuff a gamut of musical styles into three-part pop songs. Half of the band are from London, the other half from Paris, and I’m a sucker for their singer, Laetitia Sadier. Imagine Juliette Binoche playing a cooly detatched pop singer and you’re almost there.
More Soon
Although the blog suggests otherwise, I’ve not gone belly-up or been disappeared by Homeland Security. Visits from first James and then Mum and Dave-Dad (as opposed to Duncan-Dad) have eaten up all my time and quite a bit of Courtney’s.
Speaking of Courtney, she’s just walked in the door with two big bottles of my favourite beer (St. Peter’s English Ale, since you ask) to quell the pain of Norwich’s embarrassing 6-0 exit from the Permiership. My big green and yellow bruise is subsiding already.
Play Online Poker!
Today has been comment spam day. I just had to delete about fifty gibberish comments, all linking to an online poker website. Consequently I’ve installed a spam filter. Let me know if your legitimate comments don’t make it past my new security measures.
Coming soon: metal detectors, shoe searches, magic puffer machines which blow your shirt up in search of boobies and, allegedly, traces of explosive dust, and my personal favourite, cavity searches!
Chilled Out
Grrrboooaaaaggghhhh! The Big Chill website is down. We’ve been waiting for it to be back up so we can buy our tickets for about a week. We’ve given up. I’m calling their phone booking line tomorrow morning. Whoop-de-whoop for days off.
Anybody know any more than me about this badness? I hope it doesn’t mean the website collapsed under the weight of demand for tickets, although I doubt that would be the case. It’s not as if it’s as manic as Glastonbury.
Email of the Week 18th-24th April
From Jon:
Fearn and me found a live rat in the bin outside the other day and had to kill it. First I tried hitting it with a pole and then tried smoking it out. Nothing worked so Fearn poured boiling water over it. He’s changed now, has a distant look in his eyes like solider back from Nam.
You can’t let a rat go.
This has a certain essential beauty, I feel. Transcendent almost. Quivering, naked, raw.
The Day of the Cucumber Sandwich (part two)
Picnic Day turned out to be more fun than I thought. Having witnessed a pretty half-arsed St. Patrick’s Day parade in Rochester last year, I’ve been apprehensive about parades. As I’ve discovered from watching student films, there’s little entertainment to be had from watching people walking.
Yesterday I discovered I may have been too harsh in that judgement.
The Day of the Cucumber Sandwich (Part One)
Tomorrow I’m being hauled into work – missing the televised coverage of Crystal Palace vs Norwich – to help Mishka’s deal with the craziness of Picnic Day. Apparently, everyone who has ever lived in Davis returns to the town for the day to watch a parade and a dachshund steeplechase.
I’m charging the camera batteries as I type.
Dead Blog
I really hope this chap does some more updates, but I fear it is a blog as dead as its subjects.
Nil points for spelling and grammar, though. "Mouses," indeed.
Facetiousness: A Poll
In future, should I mark facetious blog posts out with a little [facetious] in the title?
To clear up any misunderstanding that may have occurred after the last post, me and the missus are as perfectly happy as normal, or bumbling along in our own little way, whichever you’d rather imagine.
Must stop now and take my beating. I’ll blog more when I can sit down at the computer again.
Media Career? Think Different
Considering the glut of qualified graduates queuing up for a job in the media, is it any wonder people are getting used? Reading this makes me think that my less conventional approach to breaking into the film and TV industry may actually be the better bet.
‘Exploitation is more widespread than ever’ Media Guardian, 11th April, 2005
For those of you who are unsure exactly what my method is, here’s the lowdown:
- Move as far away from the place you want to work as possible. The other side of the world is a good starting point. If you want a job in London, try moving to the west coast of America.
- Get a job in an industry as far removed from the media as possible. Try food service, in particular, coffee shops. Girls flock to coffee shops.
- Take up writing. Doesn’t matter if you’re any good at it or not. Girls always swoon when they hear the line "I’m a writer," delivered with an English accent; especially stupid ones with lots of money. Target them mercilessly.
- Move in with rich, stupid girl. Live off her like a parasite. Get drunk as often as possible and claim you’re "networking."
- When your rich, stupid girlfriend finally discovers you’re a fraud, break down and cry shamelessly in front of her. Tell her you love her, but you have writer’s block and/or homesickness. This should buy you a couple of weeks to find a second stupid rich girl. Make sure the first one doesn’t dump your stuff out in the street in the meantime.
That’s my method so far. Due to lack of data, I cannot promise it will deliver the desired results, but I feel my big break is just around the corner. It’s a lot more fun than working eighty hours a week for a pittance in London, and I appear to have come just as far by doing so. Here’s to being a Deadbeattm!
Road Trip (again)
When my old webhost deleted my entire site all the pictures went too. At Rev. Rehash’s request I’ve restored all the pictures that accompanied my road trip diary. If you’re really that interested, click here to begin at the beginning.
Email of the Week 11th-17th April
This week, Kelvin:
Oh, last night at about two in the morning, there was a bizarre film about a man without a head, who was worried that his lack of bonce would prove to be a hindrance in his love life, so saved up money to buy a noggin, only to discover, of course, that the love of his life cares not a jot whether he has a head or not, and in fact loves him for who he is.
The first scene I caught as I channel-hopped had the headless one dancing about his poor attic apartment in a tuxedo, Fred Astaire style. I knew immediately that it was French.
Does anyone know what this movie is called and where I can find it?
Film Festival
Davis Film Festival tonight and tomorrow. Lots of shorts, lots of schmoozing. And, thanks to one of my regular caffeine-addicts, I have a free ticket. Get in!
Cycle Karma
Apologies, this is a very Davis-centric post. Rachel, one of my regular coffee shop customers, recently mentioned that she’s riding her bike 100 miles around Lake Tahoe in aid of a young lad with acute lymphocytic leukaemia. This is a big effort, and earns her several hundred Junkopia kudos points.Rachel’s blog, which documents the endeavour, is worth a look, although I’m sure what she really wants is for people to go to the donation page.
Grief Porn
Yes folks, grief porn is the best definition I’ve heard this week.
Email of the Week 4th – 10th April
In a craven attempt to get people to send me more splendidly written email – and so I have more material to fill the blog on slow days – I have decided to blog the wittiest, coolest, funniest sentence/paragraph/section of email I get each week.
This week’s comes from my mate Neil:
Cancelled my psychotherapy session due to cranial fibrillations elicited by last night’s assimilation of a quantity of alcohol toxic to all but the resolutely anaerobic respirers of the amoebic realm. Thus, have time to write sentences so long and ostentatiously verbose as to provoke a green line from my spelling and grammar checker. Currently sweating neat scotch into my dressing gown having only relatively recently attempted verticality.
Friends, readers, you are all fodder.