McMinn and Cheese

Vince Gill – Guitar Slinger (review)

November 5th, 2011
2011 is proving to be one of those years when you get a cluster of great albums from major country artists. There’s a new Alan Jackson due in the shops soon (its first single “Long Way to Go” is on iTunes now), and we’ve recently seen very good records from the likes of Martina McBride (ELEVEN, well worth a listen) and Miranda Lambert (Four the Record, another corker).

Earlier in the year we had Stronger from Sara Evans and This is Country Music from Brad Paisley, both vying along with the two above to be the Best Country Album of 2011. But it’s Game Over when you hear the new Vince Gill: Guitar Slinger is the album I’ve wanted him to release for a long time.

Mr Gill’s last outing was These Days in 2006, a four (count ’em) album set, covering different styles, genres, and collaborators. It was a typically generous (43 songs!) offering from an artist whose integrity is beyond question. The price of These Days, when I bought it, was a little more than the cost of a single album. It’s now on iTunes for £15.99, which probably seems a bit steep if you’re not familiar with Mr Gill’s music. He clearly had a lot of material he wanted to put out, and he also wanted to take something of a career break to recharge his batteries. He has made guest appearances here and there, and there was a compo, but Guitar Slinger is the first new material in five years.

Mr Gill is versatile and talented, but his record company obviously realised a long time ago that there was gold in them there ballads. So there have been a lot of those over the years, and to be radio-friendly, his unbelievably good guitaring has taken a back seat. His truly soulful singing voice is about as far from Country standard as you can get, and his guitar playing is so subtle and tasteful that other players like Mr Paisley and Mr Urban get all the attention. Like George Harrison and Mike Campbell, he always puts the song first. His harmony vocals make him the number one choice for any female singer looking for a duet, as his voice blends beautifully with any other.

Starting as a banjo player in Pure Prairie League, Mr Gill’s solo career started in 1983. His Wikipedia entry suggests he was once asked to join Dire Straits, which might have made for one tasteful guitar player too many in that particular line-up.

Like other Nashville musicians, Mr Gill had a large number of instruments in storage when floods hit Nashville last year, including a Telecaster prototype that he later auctioned to raise money for the flood relief charity (he also organised a concert that raised $1.7 million). Luckily for him, his most precious Tele was with him at the time of the flood and this album seems to be a response to the losses and the spared. There are two versions of the album. The Deluxe version has three extra tracks. I thought I’d ordered regular, but ended up with Deluxe. I tend to prefer a shorter album. Deluxe comes in at over an hour.

Opening with a rocker (the title track; the Deluxe follows this with another rocker: “All Nighter Comin’”), which is a statement of intent, the album moves onto familiar Gill territory with a smooth, soulful ballad, “Tell Me Fool”. Songs like this have always been Gill’s strength, and he sometimes deigns to play a short, appropriate, guitar solo on them. On Guitar Slinger, he offers scorchingly good guitar on every track. For me, this is heaven. “Tell Me Fool” is the perfect Gill track. Give it a listen. It’s not just the notes that he plays; it’s all about the notes he doesn’t play. “Tell Me Fool” is followed by the gospel-styled “Threaten Me With Heaven”, which is another instant five-star favourite in iTunes.

“When the Lady Sings the Blues” moves from gospel/soul to blues (with blues guitar), and then we’re back to ballads with “When Lonely Comes Around” (and “Who Wouldn’t Fall in Love With You” on Deluxe).

There’s lots to enjoy here, and this is definitely an album to play over and over again. My one complaint is that this is not yet released in the UK. I do wish record companies would wake up to the fact that there is this thing called the internet and that their silly games with release dates and territoriality are completely irrelevant. I ordered an import from Amazon.

Related articles
- Vince Gill: Guitar Slinger (Review) (popmatters.com)
- Vince Gill Guitar Slinger Album Review (countrymusicnewsblog.com)
- Vince Gill – “Threaten Me With Heaven” (roughstock.com)
Using Scrivener to publish a Kindle book

October 28th, 2011

I bought Scrivener version 1.5 when I did NaNoWriMo properly for the first time a couple of years ago.

It’s an application dedicated to researching and writing, and though I didn’t use anywhere near all of its features, I found it quite useful and pleasant to use.

I think Scrivener would really work for a professional writer, though it’s probably overkill for an amateur like me, but I’m planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year, so I upgraded to version 2.

I noticed that Scrivener now has options to output electronic books (I wasn’t aware of this feature in version 1.5, though it might have been there). Although I’m in love with type and would love to have a printed book (I did take advantage of the offer to produce a printed proof of my last completed NaNoWriMo), it’s more realistic to think you might finish and revise a book and put it out on the Kindle. You never know.

I discussed this with a colleague at work. The thing about Kindle books is, a lot of them are free, or quite low priced, and by people you’ve never heard of. In these circumstances, you tend to judge a book by its cover. Which is ironic, given that Kindle books don’t actually have “covers”. Still, we thought, if you had a good cover, you never know who might be tempted to download.

I realised I already had a very high quality book I could publish. Even if I do say it myself, my 1999 thesis on Don DeLillo is very good indeed. It’s well written, thoroughly researched, and highly original. Why wasn’t it ever published, then, I hear you ask? Short answer, I left academia and went to work in marketing. I never saw the need. The publish-or-perish life of the academic never really appealed to me. I always found most academic writing to be an impenetrable, badly written, load of old wank.

Some of my thesis was published. A couple of (edited) chapters appeared in journals. One was presented as a conference paper (and may have been published as well, I don’t recall). And my last hurrah was to have a chapter published in a book, this one in fact.

The thing about academic publishing is, it’s not about the money. I’m sure the publishers do very well (as they should, at £33 a pop), but the individual authors see nothing. So it was always about careers, and since I didn’t have an academic career, I didn’t try to get my thesis published.

Which is a shame, because it was written in a very accessible style, and would certainly appeal to the general Don DeLillo fan, as well as the odd research student.

My chapter in Underwords has actually been cited in a couple of other books. I get a passing mention (which is all you can hope for) in Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man by Stacey Olster and in Partial Faiths: postsecular fiction in the age of Pynchon and Morrisson by John A. McLure.

So I was already primed when I noticed that Scrivener can output electronic book formats, and decided to have a go. Unfortunately, the only copy of my thesis manuscript to hand was the PDF version, which looks beautiful, but was hard to edit. The text output included page furniture and numbering, which had to be edited by hand. The output also stripped out all the formatting (italics, small caps etc.), so I had to go through and manually edit as many of those as I could spot. I found this easier to do in Pages than in Scrivener. For example, when I was doing a find-replace on certain words and phrases, Pages allowed me to edit on the page (by hitting Command-I to italicise, say), without losing the Find-Replace window. This saved a couple of seconds for every instance.

(Of course, what I could have done, if I’d remembered the shortcut, was use Cmd-G and then Cmd-I, both in Scrivener and Pages, which would have saved time. And I wouldn’t have needed Pages at all. I used to know Cmd-G, but clean forgot it. More fool me. Thanks to commenter Ioa Petra’ka for reminding me.)

It took a few days to edit each chapter in a satisfactory way. I kept doing test exports in the Kindle format, and using Amazon’s free Kindle Preview app (as well as testing on my own Kindle) to see how things were turning out. Block quotes were tricky. Scrivener had a paragraph style called Essay Block Quote (Preserved), which did the trick. I managed to put in a diagram, and designed a cover that worked in colour (for the Kindle app on computers, phones, and the iPad) as well as greyscale. Scrivener makes it easy to create a hyperlinked table of contents. I also converted the footnotes in the thesis to hyperlinked endnotes.

I edited the text a bit, changing a few paragraphs that seemed particularly dated, and looking out for language like “recent” to describe Underworld, which was “recent” in 1999, but isn’t any more. On the whole, though, it all holds up very well. And it’s interesting to read my discussion of Mao II, terrorism, and images, written a couple of years before 11 September 2001 but somehow still relevant.

It’s a shame in a way that I couldn’t publish a second volume based on DeLillo’s output since 1999, but to be honest The Body Artist annoyed me so much that I haven’t touched a DeLillo book since.

Amazon make it fairly easy to publish. They don’t insist on an ISBN. These aren’t a legal requirement and hardly anyone is likely to search for a book based on one. You can enter bank account details (you need the long international account identifier from your statements) for payment in Euros and Sterling, but you have to get dollars from Amazon.com in cheque form. Unfortunately, Amazon retain 30% of your royalty for the IRS, which you can try to claim back by filling in forms.

But I doubt this will be much of an issue.

I opted for their 70% royalty and a low price rather than a 35% one and a much higher price. Academic books are usually very expensive, but I resent that, given that most students don’t have much money. If my book had been published by an academic publisher back in 1999/2000, it would probably be out of print by now, or would cost £30+ to buy.

Apple, unlike Amazon, make it very difficult to publish as an individual. They demand an ISBN and some kind of tax certificate. They recommend that you go through one of their partner aggregators. The only European one is in Germany, and their web site is in German. So screw that, for now. You can get the Kindle app on the iPhone and the iPad, and buy the book from Amazon instead.

All in all, Scrivener made it relatively painless to publish on Kindle. My only difficulties were caused by having to convert from a PDF – if I’d retained the original Word document, it would have been easy.

Amazon UK link

Amazon US link
Fringe Season 3

October 11th, 2011

Image by .noir photographer via Flickr

We’d been looking forward to this for most of a year, my daughters and I. I often hear people say that there aren’t any good SF series out there since the end of Lost, but there is Fringe to fill the gap. Awareness of Fringe in the UK seems very low, since (I assume) people just don’t watch things on Sky, even though they subscribe*.

Series 1 of Fringe was only average, I would say, but it became brilliant in Season 2. The moment you knew it was going to be brilliant was the first episode set in an alternate universe (which I think was the final episode in the first season). The producers created a new title sequence, with a different colour palette, just for that show.

In Series 2, an episode set in 1985 also received the “new title sequence” treatment – complete with 80s-style music and a cheesy typeface.

None of which has much to do with the content of the show, except to indicate the attention to detail.

First there was Alias, which I loved. Then there was Lost. Most of us have mixed feelings about Lost. We all felt a little jerked around by Lost, but there were bold, creative strokes. Then came Fringe. Here’s a paragraph about Fringe, if you’ve never seen it:

Olivia Dunham is in a relationship with her FBI partner, John Scott, who is injured in a chemical explosion following a mysterious “flesh dissolving” attack on an aeroplane. In her desperate attempts to save Scott’s life, Dunham recruits a mad scientist (he’s in a mental institution), Walter Bishop, and his estranged son Peter. Dunham gets sucked into a secret division of the FBI, which is investigating a pattern of weird events, which are categorised under the heading of Fringe science. The Fringe team’s investigations eventually reveal the existence of an alternate universe, which appears to be making incursions into our own. At the end of the first season, Olivia finders herself in the alternate universe, where she meets the exiled William Bell, CEO of a powerful technology company (Massive Dynamic) and former partner of Walter Bishop. Bishop turns out to have had parts of his brain removed to make him forget something important and less dangerously intelligent. In season 2, we learn that the incursions by the other universe date back to the time Walter stole his son from the parallel world, because his real son had died. The other Walter Bishop, who hasn’t had parts of his brain removed, is Secretary of Defence, and is trying to get his son back. At the end of Season 2, the other Olivia has swapped placed with our Olivia, in order to infiltrate Fringe Division on our side and complete a mission. Our Olivia is being drugged and brainwashed into thinking she belongs in the alternate universe.

So starts Season 3. The producers tried to make each episode stand on its own, but the ongoing narrative is still driving things. For the first half of the season, we alternate between universes. We learn more about the other Fringe Division and actually warm to the characters who are not comic book “evil” as they might have been in the Star Trek parallel universe. Fauxlivia, as she is dubbed, falls for Peter Bishop, who thinks she’s the “real” Olivia. Or does he? Later on, Olivia escapes back to our universe, where she is possessed by the spirit of the dead William Bell. She talks like Leonard Nimoy for a couple of episodes. It’s fun.

Fringe is a very funny show, as well as having all that suspend-disbelief-before-you-enter extreme science going on. Don’t watch if you hate needles. There are some episodes where people are injected over and over again. There’s an episode in which all the characters get animated (as in: cartoon). There’s a twist and a shock in the final episode which hangs us over a cliff until next September.

I still love Fringe.

*My assumption is that (a) Sky subscribers are also keen on computer games, and therefore spend a lot of their free time doing that instead of watching TV. Also, (b) that watching anything on Sky is intolerable, because of the intrusive and long advert breaks, which you get in spite of the fact that you pay a subscription. Also that (c) there is too much choice if you subscribe to a package, and shows like Fringe are hidden like trees in the forest.
Apple post-Steve: too cool or not to cool?

October 6th, 2011

I think John Gruber said it best when he wrote that Steve Job’s greatest achievement wasn’t one of the gizmos (which we’re all smart enough to know weren’t “invented” by Jobs in any real sense) but the company, Apple, itself. The way it works, and the way its products just work.

I was lucky enough this summer to get a new MacBook Pro from work, and passed my old white MacBook to a colleague. I remember thinking at the time that I transferred all my data over and set up the new machine that I was finding it an underwhelming experience. I’d never been less excited by a new Mac, in all the years I’d been using them.

Why was that, I wondered?

In much the same way, I wondered years ago why it was that I hated Helvetica so much. I’d just got my first Mac (a Performa 630) and I was aggrieved that every time I started a new document in ClarisWorks, the default font was the dreaded Swiss. My investigations into my hatred of Helvetica led me to my eventual MA dissertation, at least one chapter of my PhD, and my eventual careers first as a marketing manager for an Apple dealer and then as a Media Studies teacher.

So after everything my first Mac had led to, why was I suddenly underwhelmed by my (counts under breath) tenth?

Between the ninth and the tenth, I got an iPhone. I use it every day. Not as a phone – that would be stupid – but as a camera, a twitter appliance, a remote control for slideshows and movies in lessons, something to take a register on, to keep track of things I have to do, to read and send emails, as a sat nav, a music player, an exercise tracker, and a database of my blood pressure readings, or for shopping lists, and so on. The iPhone is an integral, seamless part of my life. I do stuff with it. I don’t play with it, or stroke it, or fondle it, I just use it all the time.

Like many others, I was slightly underwhelmed by this week’s announcement of the iPhone 4S. No surprises, everything as I expected, based on my readings of the likes of Gruber and Ihnatko. An improved camera – not just because of megapixels, but other things, like the lens – and a faster processor. Voice control? Neither here nor there, but I imagine quite useful for the sight-impaired. But it didn’t look any different.

I thought of it in terms of the Top Gear cool wall. Because you’d have to explain to someone that your iPhone was a 4S model and not a 4, because it wouldn’t be immediately obvious, the iPhone 4S fails the cool test. It’s just an appliance.

I was disappointed with my new MacBook Pro for the same reason, I realise. Yes, this one is aluminium and not white plastic, but it feels exactly the same to use. Computers have been “fast enough” for a while now. We stopped caring about megahertz and megabytes a long time ago. And the process of swapping your data and your user accounts and settings from an old one to a new one is so seamless now that you barely notice the difference. It’s just like buying a new toaster.

Steve Jobs did that.

He made the thing that was complex and difficult and awkward; and which rewarded a certain obsessiveness with a certain expertise; he made that thing like buying a transistor radio. Less complicated and awkward than deciding which coffee machine to buy, in this day and age. Steve Jobs took away the need to be nerdy about computers, and megabytes, and megahertz, even screen resolution and graphics processing. There are still people who don’t “get” this fundamental change, still whining away every time a newspaper prints a story about the largest tech company in the world, but you just feel sorry for them really.

These are the same people who don’t “get” that design isn’t about how it looks. They call us fanboys who are blinded by shiny things. Here’s some news: I don’t particularly even notice the way my MacBook looks. I don’t particularly like the look of the iPhone. It’s cold and sharp and uncomfortable in the hand, and on the side of your head when you foolishly try to use it as a phone. It slides off things if you put it down without a case of some kind on it. But none of that matters. Design isn’t how it looks: it’s how it works.

And Steve Jobs, with his obsessive concerns with pixel-perfect design and user experience, did that.

Apple isn’t about hardware or the way it looks. It’s about software and the way it works. And when it just works, when there are no longer any speed bumps or awkwardness, it’s not cool any more. It’s just an appliance.

A few years ago, at my old job, we were cleaning out a cupboard full of not-for-resale software. I nearly wet myself when I came across a copy of MacWrite, the “pro” word processor that was one up from the ClarisWorks I’d first used on my first Performa. MacWrite Pro! And it was on several floppy disks. It was so exciting: software that was so big that it needed several floppy disks to install it. Software that had its own tee-shirt. Getting hold of something like that was a real occasion. It was time consuming and awkward, and you needed to check if your machine was compatible. Feeling sad, I threw it away with all the other old stuff. The world had moved on. Software came on CDs and DVDs, then. Now, you just click a link and it downloads and installs and just works.

There’s no going back from this point. It would be like going back to a CRT television set. That culture of things just working is hard-wired into Apple, Steve Jobs’ greatest creation.

It’s Steve’s World now. You just live in it.
Is everything turning to shit?

September 27th, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Of course, not all aspects of life get worse as time goes by. Some things are better than they used to be. Those concentrated stock cube thingies are quite good. Oven chips are much better than they used to be.

Then again, much of life gets incrementally worse, as tiny little bits of our civilisation are eroded. Advert breaks are longer. Chicken doesn’t taste like chicken anymore. Blue Peter are doing away with their pets in favour of gadgets.

The A413 from Buckingham to Aylesbury has had some resurfacing work. Part of it was done in the old-fashioned spray-n-chip method. Haven’t seen this for years, genuinely, and nor had anyone else, apparently. Because it was obvious people weren’t aware of the risk of shattering their windscreen if they drove too fast into an oncoming flying chip. Mind you, they didn’t even have the right signs to warn us about the risk: SKID RISK, we were told, which was patent nonsense.

Another bit has been done in the more expensive scrape-off-and-retarmac method. But I noticed a thing. They scraped off the cats’ eyes and didn’t restore them. I guess they’re relying instead on some kind of newfangled luminous paint, which will work until it doesn’t.

I’m fond of cats’ eyes. They’re a quintessentially British thing, and such a genius idea. Driving a country road at night in this country is a pleasure because of them. Meanwhile, across the channel, where they don’t have them, you can find yourself very distressed at night in the wet, when the white lines are invisible. Getting rid of them rips the heart out of this nation.

Did some accountant look at the cost of road repairs and lop off the luxury of cats’ eyes because modern cars have stupidly bright headlights and we don’t need them anymore? If so, that individual is responsible for our quality of life getting a little bit worse.
Does exercise help weight loss?

September 24th, 2011
Image via Wikipedia

No.

I’ve cycled much more this year than I did last, and I’m not noticeably slimmer. I may be fitter, of which more below, but the waistline is as it was, and – if anything – the appetite is greater.

Carbs.

I’m at least 20kg too heavy, but let’s accept that 10kg (or around 2 stones) is a more realistic weight loss target at my age. Losing 10kg would make my bike easier to ride, since the heaviest component is the engine (me). If I were to try to buy a bike that was 10kg lighter, I’d have to spend thousands of pounds. Fact! Even though my bike is only really mid-market, it’s actually pretty light. But the rider is a lump.

I’ve been monitoring my performance. The new bike brought an immediate improvement in my average riding speed – it was up two or three miles per hour immediately. But then I stalled, because there didn’t seem to be any way to get faster. I’d push myself on a ride, and then I’d be stiff and achy for a day or so. I’d ride further, with the same results. The problem is the hills. I can go down them pretty fast (faster because I’m so heavy) but then I more or less come to a full stop on the up bit. And that’s because I’m a lump. My inertia works against me.

I’ve contemplated going out for a proper all-day ride, but while the heart and lungs (and even the legs) may be willing, my hip joints and lower back are not. I’m pretty sure that the hip and back pain would be alleviated if I could lose those 10kg, but the more I ride, the hungrier I am. I could diet, but then I’d lack the energy to ride.

Earlier in the summer, I’d ride one day on one day off. I could put in three, four, rides per week, but I couldn’t go out two days in a row. Or I could do a short route (6 miles) followed by a longer (10 mile) route. But then I’d need to rest.

Then I realised where I’d been going wrong. I was trying to burn calories, and I was doing, but by draining my energy reserves, I was stopping myself from riding more often. I finally caught on to the idea of taking on some kind of energy in the form of carbohydrates, and even replacing my water with an energy drink.

I hate those isotonic drinks (garish colours, hideous taste), but since I started taking on a few extra calories before a ride and drinking more as I rode, my recovery has been quicker. I went out yesterday and I went out again today, both times on the Lillingstone Banana route that used to sap me of energy (hence the name: I used to have to stop for a banana halfway around). Instead of buying energy bars (which I have tried), I’ve taken to eating three fig rolls about half an hour before I go out. Three fig rolls is about right, and then the energy drink helps get sugar to the legs quickly.

I can feel the difference in myself. I’m not particularly faster (weight problem), but I do have more stamina. Corners that I used to turn feeling weak and wobbly, I now turn feeling strong and confident. Gumption-sapping long inclines I can now take quite easily. I’m no faster, but I don’t suffer as much. The only real suffering is when my left hip flares up or my back aches.

So I’ve hit a happy medium, where I take on carbs and calories and can go out more often and feel better about it. On the other hand, losing weight is a bust.

Related articles
- Why Exercise Won’t Help You Lose Weight . . . Sort Of (fitsugar.com)
The best since Springsteen ’75? Brad Paisley at the O2, London, 17th August 2011

August 19th, 2011
Image via Wikipedia

I was pleasantly surprised to see a tweet from Danny Baker (@Prodnose) on the day after Brad Paisley played the O2:

By Mr Apollo, I’ve never felt more alive! Last nights Brad Paisley/Darius Rucker concert at O2 best thing since Springsteen ’75.

I don’t know if I’d go that far, though not having been at the Hammersmith in ’75, and not having all that much experience of Big London Gigs, I’m not qualified to say; but it was a good night.

My daughters repeatedly questioned me about the nature of the “Special Guests” mentioned on the ticket. Support acts are not often worth discussing, and I played down the idea that the support might be special in any way so as to minimise disappointment, but the support act turned out to be none other than Darius Rucker, who has released two country albums of late, but was once better known as the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish.

I’ve got both of Mr Rucker’s recent albums, so this was good news indeed. He played a solid set of around 50 minutes, and the only spoiler was that a lot of the audience were not in their seats when his set began. We’ve been down this road before. At some London gigs these days people just won’t SHUT UP, and in any event spend the whole time going back and forth to the bar. I know I’m in a small minority here, and I know the venues encourage all this drinking, but I find the constant foot traffic distracting and rude beyond belief.

As for people who don’t sit down for the support act, more fool them. You never know who you’re going to see. Even The Beatles supported somebody once.

Everything seems to run very efficiently at the O2. I’d never been. We arrived via the Thames, which seemed a decent enough way to get there. We spent the day in London. I took my daughter to Denmark Street, where we learned that we’d missed Brad Paisley’s visit by a day (dammit!). We also narrowly missed him around the South Bank when we were making sure we knew where to catch the boat. He tweeted this photo of the Houses of Parliament around the time we were around there.

So the arena is a vast, ugly hangar, with an off-white roof. Lots of places to eat. We sat in Pizza Express, where my youngest got covered with beer when a tray of drinks went flying (some discount off bill), and then we went to watch the venue sl-o-w-ly fill. I had a dream a couple of weeks ago in which only 50 or so people turn up to this gig. Suffice it to say, there were more people than that, but there were a few empty seats.

I hate London venues and it takes something special to get me to stump up for one of these soulless arena gigs. Since top country stars so rarely visit (they have no need to as they can sell tickets all year round in the States), and even more rarely visit with a band, I felt obliged to go.

Darius Rucker was a bonus, but it was Mr Paisley we wanted to see. It’s clear the venue runs like clockwork, so I was frankly amazed that there were lots of people still unseated when Mr Paisley hit the stage and fired up “Mud on the Tyres”. Fucking hell! These tickets cost £40, including the booking fee, and still they’d rather sit in the bar.

Brad Paisley is one of those rare musicians who is both a talented singer and a superb instrumentalist. You have to understand that his songs are vehicles not just for the sentiment and humour that are the hallmarks of Country music, but also for proper back-porch style showing off of his extraordinary and inventive guitar playing.

It was an entertaining show. I didn’t like the acoustics of the venue (no change there: music fans have been short-changed in this respect since forever), but they weren’t bad enough to spoil his playing. The visuals behind the excellent backing band were more than a light show, but combined extracts from videos, animation, captioning, and more, which were tightly integrated with what was being played on stage.

Paisley also made the obligatory trip through the audience (playing the amazing solo for “Camouflage”) all the way, and sat at a smaller mini-stage near the back, which was a bonus for those people at that end who’d bothered to come in from the bar.

Mr Paisley is an attractive personality, and he complimented the audience for their genuinely broader knowledge of his material than he’s used to in the USA. He’s said in interviews that in his home country his audiences tend to only know the songs that get radio play, which is an interesting insight into the differences between the two countries. Over here, we get the albums, and that’s it. Good. Mr Paisley’s recent This is Country Music is as strong as any of his recent releases, including the excellent American Saturday Night from the year before. It’s fair to say that he’s a musician at the top of his game. Why let US commercial radio dictate what gets played.

Ronnie Wood made his obligatory appearance at the close of the gig. Out of his depth just a little bit, I think.

Related articles
- AP Interview: Brad Paisley Incognito in Europe (abcnews.go.com)
- Brad Paisley Shares The Stage With A Rolling Stone (y108.radio.com)
- Brad Paisley brings his world tour to London (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
Can I get some Southern Comfort?

August 16th, 2011
Group

I kind of hate the South of France, but I’m outvoted in my family by three to one, so it looks like it will be my lot to spend a week or more down there every summer. The photo above captures some of the reason why: a whole bunch of my wife’s relatives are down there every summer (I’m the GIANT at the back), and we joined up with them this year for the first time since my oldest (now 13) was a baby. I don’t know which one took the photo, but they didn’t frame it very well.

The location is La Londe Les Maures, which is a bit of a nothing town next to the Mediterranean Sea, with a few crowded beaches and an ugly port for the kind of boats owned by people too poor to moor them at St. Tropez, which is a few km down the coast.

It’s true that if you drive any distance you can usually find stunning scenery and even a lovely beach with good swimming in clear blue/green water, but La Londe has a beach with the texture of builders’ sand and the water is full of bark (of all things), shed from plane trees and washed out to see from all over. Every now and then a plane flies past towing a banner exhorting you to visit the nearest big shopping centre in Hyeres.

It’s crowded, and it’s hot. You actually have to hurry yourself in order to get a parking space (we were two or three km away from where everybody congregated, which is a long way with an inflatable dinghy and all the other beach gear), which is not what I look for in a holiday. So we were often on the beach close to nine a.m. (it was warm enough). Not relaxing.

If you try to go anywhere in the South by car, you end up sitting in queues of traffic and (usually) unable to find a parking space when you get where you’re going. One evening, we made a particularly memorable tour of the two car parks in Bormes Les Mimosas. On another, we drove to St. Tropez, saw both car parks were full, and went on to Ramatuelle, which is less good for gawping at rich people. I did note that wealthy people tended just to park anywhere and presumably pay the ticket, which is the kind of thing that makes me want to smash things up.

The camp site (of which more on another blog) was okay, but not the best experience I’ve ever had. Item: ants, all sizes, who after they learned where we lived, formed an orderly procession around the tent and the table where we sometimes ate. Item: there was one civilised (as opposed to Turkish) toilet with a seat, but using it meant you had to ignore the fact that the pipe from the cistern sprayed water everywhere when you flushed. I could go on, but I’ll just say the one word: burrs.

I tell you, I almost snapped when my wife announced she wanted to stay an extra day.

Related articles
- Ramatuelle (backyardprovence.wordpress.com)
- Exploring the Côte d’Azur by public transport – a travelers’ tale (provencevive.com)
Do you want help finding a restaurant?

August 14th, 2011
Image via Wikipedia

No, of course you don’t.

I’ve just been reading about a new Volvo in the Torygraph, which supposedly uses its sat nav to help you book a restaurant table in the town you’re about to arrive in. My own phone-based sat nav gadget offers a similar service. In fact, when you try to find “points of interest”, restaurants are the top choice. Click the green arrow and the phone turns into a phone to phone the restaurant (or, in my case, to accidentally start a phone call and then cut off).

I made the mistake of buying a Michelin travel guide app for my recent holiday, and that was utterly useless for finding interesting places to go, but was chock-full of information about (expensive) restaurants offering fancy food, Michelin style.

What’s that all about then? Because I really don’t think there’s much call for this kind of thing. People rarely leave the house, set a destination and then think about where they’re going to eat. You might arrive somewhere and wander around looking at the bills of faire posted outside, but you don’t book a restaurant, sight unseen, just because it’s in your sat nav. And in this economy?

We were wondering around Le Lavandou the other day, and there were lots of restaurants, most sparsely occupied. And there were a lot of people walking the streets gawping, but very few of them looking to sit down and eat. The French have taken to street food in a big way, and even places where you might get away with spending less than €100 aren’t seeing much action. And, face it, the cheaper restaurants are not going to be the ones in your sat nav or travel guide app.

So whence comes this fantasy that people are walking around booking restaurants on the fly? It’s a load of old shit. It may be hard to get a table in the places run by top TV chefs, but most restaurants are serving tumbleweed these days. No need to book.

Related articles
- Le Lavandou (backyardprovence.wordpress.com)
Do you wanna see me crawl across the floor?

July 2nd, 2011
Cover of Layla (Hybr) (Ms)

I’ve been on a 70s jag recently. A little bit of ELO, a lot of Tom Petty, a little bit of Jackson Browne. I kind of hate Jackson Browne, so I’m unbelievably fussy about the songs I download, but he does have a really pleasant voice, and “Running on Empty” is such a great song.

So I was watching a truly terrible film, The Box, and I heard something on the soundtrack that pushed some buttons. Sounded 70s. Was followed on ST by “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Tucker Band. So a quick Google later, I’d discovered it was “Bell Bottom Blues” from Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.

It may surprise you that, apart from the title track, I’d never heard any of this album.

I always liked “Layla” – not for the riff, not really for the song itself, but for the extended piano coda, which Radio Caroline at least used to play in full. Other radio stations tended to fade the song, I think.

So not only had I never heard it, but I never realised that the album never even made the charts in the UK (which fact is on both Wikipedia and Clapton’s official site).

So what’s it like? Muddy and gruff, in places. Don’t like that singing style. Some of guitar playing is good, but Clapton’s own guitar sounds thin on several tracks. I’m not keen on the blues so I only really like the poppier tracks like “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Anyway”, both of which are worth a download. Even those are marred, I think, by the muddy sound mix. Even compared to an Allman Bros record (with two drummers and two lead guitars), it doesn’t compare well. My ears have been spoiled by listening to country music.

Still, I’ve heard it now, 40 years on. But what does it say about the average British music fan that it didn’t even get in the charts? Not a recognisable brand? It suggests that music fandom is always more about peer pressure and wanting to impress people than it is about the music. Because it’s not that bad.

Related articles
- Jackson Browne (musicofourheart.wordpress.com)
- Dierks Bentley, “Sideways.” Official Full Length Country Music Video. (top5gonewild.com)