Just a reminder, mostly for the Londoners, (although I will be getting broadcast live on the the elektrical internets by webcam, if anyone is that heart-stoppingly bored) that I will be on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of One And Other on Monday July the 20th (not quite two weeks away, now) between 10 and 11pm.

I plan to be up there with camera and tripod taking such pictures as suggest themselves to me, weather permitting. If you fancy coming along to watch/throw things, I’d appreciate the support. If you fancy turning up in some kind of ludicrous outfit, thus helping ensure that I have things to photograph from up on the plinth, that’s even better, but outfit or not, if you’re in town, and not busy, do swing by.

Attention conservation notice:RPGs, H.P. Lovecraft, J.G. Ballard, Nigel Kneale, passign mention of Charles Stross and related matters. Skip if these don’t interest you.

What follows owes a substantial debt to Matt Jones, for kick-starting a certain chain of ideas. This is still only half-formed in my head, but I want to try and get something set down while it’s still reasonably fresh in my head, so I’ve got a point to come back to later. This is liable to get a bit fractured, as I’m trying to weave together a few different strands into something coherent.

So: I have a minor obsession with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and I am a roleplayer and all round big nerd, but I have never had any interest in running or playing in one of the great classic roleplaying games, Call of Cthulhu. Roleplaying games, as I have wittered on about before, are, like any really good fiction, a tool to examine our modern human condition, either through use of the past, the never-happened, or the future.

Lovecraft falls down as a tool for this, by virtue of his era: too close to the present to really be 100% the past, not near enough to the present to be relevant – a modernist in a post-modernist age. (Just go with that one, OK?)

The idea of dragging Lovecraft’s squamous, rugose and pointlessly-adjectived horrors into the modern era is not a new one either – witness supplements like the faintly rubbish Delta Green, set in the late 90s, an X-Files-esque milieu, where the characters get mixed up with a government agency that is allegedly fighting the Elder Gods and Great Old Ones, but is actually a front for the Mi-go (the sentient fungi from Yuggoth from The Whisperer In Darkness). Where Delta Green falls down is that it mistakes “you can’t win/both choices are bad” moral-compromise horror for genuine alone-in-the-face-of-a-hostile-cosmos alienation. If there are sides, you can pick one, and you’re not alone, even if you don’t like your side.

Another strike against it, as far as I’m concerned, is that conspiracy theory is a very American form of fiction – it rather rests on the idea that the government is halfway competent, and is Out To Get You. British fiction tends to cast the government as hidebound, bureaucratic and barely-competent, but more or less decent, or, if it isn’t, it’s evil borne or selfishness, greed and corruption, rather than malevolence and hatred – Charles Stross’ Atrocity Archives/Jennifer Morgue series – a fusion of Lovecraft and various British spy thrillers – are a good example of that but Stross’ work to date has rather knocked the horror out of Lovecraft, in favour of comedy (although I hear rumour that the third book in the series is putting a lot of the horror back again, and I look forward to that).

So: straight Lovecraft doesn’t work for me. Conspiracy/spy thriller Lovecraft doesn’t really sit right, either. How, then, can I modernise Lovecraft in a way that I like?

H.P. Lovecraft, meet J.G. Ballard.

Two writers whose work deals with themes of alienation, the outsider, strange geometries and unnatural constructions, and the idea of landscapes as symbolic of mental states. One can draw a clear line from the “lonely and curious” country around Dunwich, with its “stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes” to Ballards’s High Rise which is “an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence”.

I’m not the first to make this connection – the ever-excellent Ballardian has an excellent trilogy of articles on the subject. But what Matt got me thinking about was adding Nigel Kneale into the mix.

Nigel Kneale, for the young, ill-educated, or just plain foreign among you, was a British TV writer from the 50s to the 90s, who was hugely influential in the development of modern television – his key creation, I suppose, is Dr Bernard Quatermass of the The British Experimental Rocket Group. If you need me to tell you who or what that is, there is something wrong with you, and I direct you to Google. Without Kneale and Quatermass, you would not have Doctor Who (for all Kneale disliked it), or an entire strain of British SF TV. (And I’d just note in passing that he was asked to write for the X-Files, but declined to do so.)

I am thinking of works like Kneale’s own Quatermass, or The Stone Tape, or other science-horror classics of my childhood like The Children of The Stones, works where the scientist/scholar hero (a common enough Lovecraftian trope) runs up against and barely-comprehensible horror, often in some out-of-the-way village, and in my head I’m coupling that with a period in which Britain is moving from the green idyll of the immediate post-war era into the Ballard’s concrete brutalism and warped sexuality. Matt and I were kicking the joke back and forth on Twitter this afternoon, the idea of Ballard and Alison and Peter Smithson leading something like UNIT or SHADO, writing terrible sigils on the British countryside, disguised as motorway junctions, prayerwheels of steel and concrete to bind ancient and evil gods under the british countryside, to prevent them spilling out of ailing collieries and disused iron foundries – the landscape as psychological mirror. Flash forward from this period to present day Britain, and suddenly there are chav cultists summoning things from Outside in the underpass, inbred subhumans going happy-slapping in county towns, and the the CCTVs on every corner that are part of our Orwellian nightmare architecture of control are there to watch for incursions of the Elder Gods, but trampling over the rights of everyone else in the process, the War On Terror made suddenly very literal indeed.

I think there’s mileage in this – either in a 60s era game, where you’re taking ancient myths of the land, and conflating them with horrors, to show the birth of modern Britain via what might be called a golden age of British design, or to run something in the present day, but the key is unquestionably Ballard’s treatment of landscape, media and technology as alienating factors.

In response to one of my periodic demands for things to write about, Miranda asked me to talk about three places of significance to me.

You’re all expecting me to say “London” aren’t you? And to trot out the some variant on my usual lines about history and stories and blood and fire and stone and mythology, and then pick three bits of London where I know of some ghoulish bit of history that resonates with something in my brain. So let’s pretend I did that, and move on to a different set of three.

St Andrew’s Square Bus Station, Edinburgh

The first time I moved out of my parent’s house, it was to move to Edinburgh. I caught the overnight coach from London, and arrived in Edinburgh at about 5:30 am on Friday the 13th of September, 1996, getting off the coach to bright sunlight and the smell of diesel fumes. I had had about three hours uncomfortable sleep, and was gritty eyed and knackered. I checked my ridiculously heavy bag, containing everything I owned that wasn’t a book or a computer into a left-luggage locker, and went in search of breakfast, and then of the place where I could pick up the key to my student flat some 4 hours later – that turned out to be an hour’s walk away, so it was as well I had time. Anyway, having done that, I had to come back to the bus station, to pick up my bag, and then walk with it most of the way back again, staggering only slightly under the weight.

But I digress. Yes, the rest of that day was kind of hard going, but that moment of getting off the bus is absolutely etched into me. The unexpected warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the fumes, even that gritty-eyed ill-slept feeling, they really did feel like signs of the future – I still love the smell of the fumes on airport tarmac or in bus stations, and I still get a perverse enjoyment of that scratchy-eyed badly-rested feeling that I can trace back to that morning. Whenever I’m in Edinburgh, I try and pass through St Andrew’s Square on my own at some point. Hell, some years ago, I even deliberately stayed up a couple of hours past pub closing in Edinburgh, just so’s I could swing by the bus station at 5 am on a bright summer morning. I know it’s a weird and irrational thing, but that crappy little coach station really does feel to me like a place that rings with all the promise of the unwritten future.

Balintoy

I am sure that 99% of are scratching your heads and going “where”? Here. It’s a tiny cove and harbour a couple of houses and a church on the Antrim coast. And if ever I reach the point where I can no longer face living anywhere where there are other people it is here that I shall go. It’s just down the coast from The Giant’s Causeway, Carrick-a-Rede, and the Bushmills distillery.

As I have protested a number of times in the past, I am not a man who derives any particular peace from being surrounded by nature and out in the countryside, but this tiny little place is just a pure joy. I get back to Northern Ireland for a few days once a year these days, but somehow I find the time to drag either my Dad or Brother (or any other family member who stands still for too long) up here – we stop by Bushmills to buy a bottle of something, and get some lunch, then drive on down here and wander about for a bit, maybe take a few pictures, maybe stop off again a bit down the coast at one of the other marvellous bits of scenery. The Antrim cost is just about the most beautiful place I know, and it’s a place I share with family, and a place to recharge.

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, New Orleans

Despite the name, this is a bar. Back in 2001, Andrew, Antony and I headed for the US, to visit San Diego, stopping in New Orleans for most of a week on the way. I don’t deal well with heat or humidity, and New Orleans damn near killed me. But we saw and did a lot stuff, but thiswas the first and last bar we had a drink in, and in between those times we contrived to end most of our nights there, stopping in for a nightcap on the way back to the hotel.

Lafitte’s is in the French Quarter, a distance down Bourbon Street, a couple of blocks past where the neon given out, just as the neighbourhood starts to look a bit run down. It’s a tiny little bar that look like it could fall down at any minute – it’s one of the oldest building in New Orleans – and it contains no electric lights, and at the time, also had a battered grand piano being played badly by a man whose voice was almost as battered as the piano. I have a vivid memory of the three of sitting there drinking spirits over a lot of ice at 2am on a night as hot and humid as any midday I’d had in London, lit by the candles around the place, while the guy gamely fought his way through Tom Waits’ “The Piano Has Been Drinking”. It was one of those nights that was a little slice of pure magic, and I am going to drink there again before I die. It’s a place I think of to remind me that there are, in fact, any number of experiences worth having that cannot be found in London.

My friend Rob pointed me in the direction of MegaHAL the other day, having managed to get amusing results out of it when he taught it to talk from a diet of his own LJ posts. I had initially hoped to feed it a diet of my twitter posts, then use it set up a bot that would twitter random sentences in response to certain triggers, but I can’t find any easy config settings that would easily allow me to teach the thing to respond only in 140-character sentences, so cracking the thing open and fiddling in the source code is a job for another day.

So instead, here is a conversation with a barely-trained version of MegaHAL, fed a diet of my (non-linkblog) blogposts for the last few months. I am heartened to see that the computerised version of me is even more incoherent than my normal self, which gives me hope for my future job prospects in a robot-dominated workforce. Apparently, I am irreplaceable. Anyway, that’s enough from me…

Good afternoon, MegaHal. How are you today?

After all, St George was a clever bastard, and it’s wearing to be thought of as pretentious and for us to do something slightly stupid because we’re all routinely letting our computers know that, say if you are just because you have defined as “home”, then no-one who is standing in judgement. I do find it disturbing that I, who basically contribute nothing to society.

Feeling slightly incoherent, I see. I know the feeling. Anything I can do?

4 strangers wake up one day in a this is not one of yours, do I think they’re not hurting anyone? No. But I can do?

Is someone hurt?

Very kind of incandescent rage I normally reserve for bigots, morons and people who were present at a loss to understand why they’ve done, they got one thing so, so right, and that’s because i’m a bit about why an adult male in his early thirties spends large chunks of his time making up weird and there’s a story. Whether it’s outweighed by everyone’s browser will at least have the internet available to them. To use my metaphor from five years ago, I wrote a short piece about “technological shamanism”. When I wrote it, I was completely allowed to take photos of the currently ongoing genocides. Not one is organise a look, I appreciate that it’ll probably be a successor technology that does this, but essentially, what oauth enables is the key to binding all this ghostly data into place – tying it to the physical so, as most of you probably know, i’m a six foot skinhead in a roleplaying game is impossible or pretentious.

And I firmly disagree with that. I’m thinking of you, and as ever, if there’s been a trend in recent as is probably eyeball-searingly obvious, I am against it with appropriate access rights, and throwing it into a data cloud for our friends and families to pull down with the kind of teenage power fantasy game, or an exercise in probability maths. It’s not the most thumpingly original concept, I admit, but what I want to continue to stretch this metaphor through, but I think it’s outweighed by everyone’s browser will know who they are, log them in (if they’re browsing, we’ll be delighted to at least make reasonable guesses about your relationships with people on this basis. Someone who has been to your And even aside from the lovely people: I will absolutely, defend roleplaying a legitimate storytelling capital-a-art form. This is very peculiar.

The key step, though, is geodata, which is the key to binding all this ghostly data into place – tying it to the job, and that that’s important to take a few others of this is even close to outweighing the need for a police office. Or ambulance worker, or fireman, or nurse but I’ve heard so far this year. Really stellar stuff. I appreciate that folksongs about a lot of cultures I don’t need or want any more of a photography nerd. There are few things in the last several years of their lives, and an unknown agency seeking their deaths. It rapidly becomes apparent that they did at 13, do you? In fact, you’d probably worry about someone who is the pub, I had accidentally fallen.

As of the end of today, I’ve been off the drink for a month. I’ve also been single for slightly over a year. (It has not escaped my attention that I appear to be willing to give up certain human interactions for longer than I am willing to abstain from strong drink, but we’ll gloss over that, OK?) So in theory, that marks the end of my self-imposed periods of abstinence. Lock up your daughters and your booze cabinets, etc.

Except.

I dunno. I’m pretty tempted to remain off the drink. I feel much better for the lack of it, and I’ve really rather enjoyed the fact that getting up before 8am on a Saturday and Sunday is now something that just happens naturally. I get some time to get stuff done before the rest of the world is really moving yet. Honestly, the first two weeks off the drink were very strange, and not entirely without difficulty. I mean, not in an oh-god-I’m-an-alky way or anything, just that because I am a gregarious sort of chap whose meeting place of choice is the pub, I had accidentally fallen into the habit of drinking five or six nights out of seven. Not vast amounts, you understand – just two or three pints. But those pints add up, and I honestly hadn’t realised how habitual they’d been, and how much they were slowing me down until I completely cut them out. But after I’d got past those first couple of weeks, I seem to have broken the habit, and sitting in the pub with a lime and soda no longer feels that odd. And I’m taking more exercise, and finding it more effective, than I was. I’ve just got more energy to burn.

On the other hand, I have parties and holidays and other fun things coming up. And frankly, the sort of person who is the always sober one at parties is someone I have always regarded with a little suspicion. I know that “I choose not to get drunk” does not equate to “I disapprove of drunkenness”, but still: if everyone else is having a drink or three, relaxing and letting their hair down, as it is very definitely psychologically useful to do from time to time, if everyone else buying into the social contract that says “this space is an area where it is OK to do something slightly daft/say something slightly stupid because we’re all drunk”, then it is only natural to feel the person who rejects that group decision is someone who is standing in judgement. I do not wish to be that guy. Also, being the sober one at parties is often boring.

“But why not just be sensible about your drinking, Al?” I hear you ask.

Well, that’s more or less the plan. I’m only going to be allowed to drink twice a week at the very most from now on, and with any luck rather, less than I had been consuming. I’m do not intend to switch from two or three pints five nights a week to fifteen pints one night a week, because I am not a moron. But even having allowed myself that, I think I may attempt not to drink at all a bit more often, so that it’s unusual to see me drinking when down the pub, rather than the reverse.

As for single, well, that’s not exactly something I have such singular personal control over, since it is my experience that relationships are most rewarding when there are two willing participants involved. And since I don’t think I know anyone who is all three of interesting, interested and single (hell, being me, and requiring to be hit about the head before I notice these things, I don’t think I know anyone who is more than one out of three), this looks unlikely to change, but as I was saying the other month, I value my free time on my own, so this really doesn’t trouble me terribly much. I just thought it was worth marking off the finish of the year, just as a personal “goal complete” checkbox.

So there we are. This was your dose of completely self-absorbed narcissism for the day. Next goal, to be attempted after my holiday: cut out caffeine for a while.

On a less me-me-me note: I note that the universe is being rather less nice to a number of my friends than they so clearly deserve. This is obviously shoddy behaviour on the part of the universe. I’m thinking of you, and as ever, if there’s anything I can do, you know where I am.

Several people have wished me, either specifically, or as part of general bit of well wishing to all their digital friends, a Happy St George’s Day today. Because there’s been a trend in recent years to try and celebrate it, a bit like St Patrick’s Day, presumably because the big breweries will jump at any excuse to sell more beer.

I have had to restrain myself from snarling at them. I am not proud to be English. I find the suggestion that I ought to be deeply offensive. I find the notion that Englishness is anything to celebrate to be tedious, at best.

This is not out of a hatred of the English. I like the English, what with being one of them myself. I like cream teas, and gin, and pints of bitter, and awkward politeness and talking about the weather. I like my friends, and I like the culture I come from.

I like a lot of cultures I don’t come from, too. I like French cheese, red wine, and snobbery about the quality of life. I like American breakfasts and and their willingness to chip in to help others. And so on.

But I could list things I hate about all of those cultures, too. A lot of things.

Celebrating any one culture over any of the others is repugnant to me. Suggesting I should be proud of the one I come from is far too small and parochial. Patriotism, national pride, these things bespeak a tribal view of the world that exists to separate “us” from “other”. I will have none of that. I am a human being of Earth, and even saying this, I find that scale a little small.

Maybe I’m being unfair to my patriotic friends who love the good things their country and culture and just want to celebrate it. Tell you what: when we’ve got rid of the bad things, we can celebrate the good. When we’ve eliminated prejudice and want and suffering and disease and death, then we can talk about having something to celebrate. Until then, let’s not all wrench our arms patting ourselves on the back, eh?

Although, on reflection, maybe St George’s Day is a good day to celebrate being English. After all, St George was a Turk, and he is the patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, and Russia as well. The fact that we in England have tried to redefine him and his day as an English myth, and an excuse to celebrate Englishness rather than multiculturalism seems kind of appropriate.

Del asks what I think about the current expansions of police powers to curb photography/journalism. And because Del is clever, she asked that I try and be balanced about it.

As is probably eyeball-searingly obvious, I am against it with the kind of incandescent rage I normally reserve for bigots, morons and people who attempt to take away my coffee. There are a lot of negative things I could say about America, but not matter what else they’ve done, they got one thing so, so right, and that’s their First Amendment. It doesn’t guarantee that the government won’t fuck with the freedom of the press, but it makes it quite a lot harder for them to do so.

We in Britain, of course, have had to make do with an implied constitution, as enumerated by the courts, based on case law and very old bits of paper. It’s a shaky thing, and does not stand up well to the government fucking with things. And so they have. And I’m not entirely at a loss to understand why they’ve given the police more and more power to curb my freedom to point a camera at whatever I damn well please.

Here’s a tedious truth: 90% of policemen are just doing their job. And 100% of policemen are only human. So, yeah, I am sure it’s a bit wearing to have some soap dodging hippy shouting at you and picking a fight, only to be pilloried in the court of public opinion when you chin the bastard. I even think there’s an argument to be made that people’s respect for the police diminishes when every minor infraction by every single officer is brought into the light, and that that’s corrosive on a number of levels. Don’t get me wrong: I have not suddenly become stupid or confused: the blame for said corrosion lies squarely with the officers who do these stupid things. But the fact remains: they are plastered everywhere, and it erodes the public’s faith in the police, most of whom are decent people trying to do a difficult job. And if it’s wearing to be shouted at by a hippy, how wearing must it be to be judged not by your own actions, but by the worst actions of one of your colleagues?

Do I think that any of this is even close to outweighing the need for a free press? Absolutely not. Do I think it’s outweighed by everyone’s right to broadly, do as they please as long they’re not hurting anyone. No. But I can understand why the police might wish not to be constantly under the lens – it makes an already shitty and difficult job 20 times more difficult.

The police have to be 100% accountable. It may make their jobs harder. It may it hard to get the right sort of people to sign up. There are answers to this, chiefly to do with raising the salary of officers. I do find it disturbing that I, who basically contribute nothing to society (other than paying my taxes) get paid nearly twice the starting salary for a police office. (Or ambulance worker, or fireman, or nurse or teacher or blah blah blah.)

But I’ve digressed a bit.

So: the police and photography. And the threat of terrorism.

Look, you’re all informed people. You all know how stupid this is. Teaching people that individuals with cameras are suspect is one of the most patently ridiculous things I’ve ever heard of, up there with “Jesus loves you” and “a watched pot never boils”. I have done science experiments, and I can confirm that a watched pot does indeed boil, and that Jesus only said he loved me to get me into bed.

But here’s the thing: the more the police misapply these powers, they more obviously ridiculous they’ll be seen to be. So take your camera with you everywhere, photography anything you watch to, and any time anyone hassles you about it, be polite and respectful, co-operate fully, make sure you get all the relevant paperwork, document it fully and publicly, and write to your MP about it. And tell Cory Doctorow.

“The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future. “

— J.G. Ballard “The Atrocity Exhibition”.

He was a clever bastard, and it’s a shame he’s gone.

I keep feeling like I want to write a long blog post about something. And Then I come to sit and write, and I have no idea what I want to write about. This is very peculiar. Theoretically, I owe Hester and Andrea a topic each, but I’m not happy with either of the pieces I’ve got half written, as one of them is just a paean to the general aceness of my various flatmates over the years (which, while it would be lovely and ego-stroking for them to read, lacks entertainment value, and besides, if they haven’t got the idea that I think they’re ace by now, there is no bloody hope) and the other basically reads “advanced theoretical physics makes my head hurt”.

I dunno what to write about. So if anyone feels like suggesting topics for me, I’ll be delighted to at least consider them. Ever wondered what I think about something that’s important to you? Well now’s your chance to watch me detonate our friendship when you discover that I think it’s a pile of rancid donkey toss!

Yeah, this really wasn’t a very useful post was it?

Specifically, Jon Boden’s completely superb new album “Songs From The Floodplain”. I have owned it for slightly over a week, after a friend recommended it, and I thought “it’s that chap out of Bellowhead, I ought to see what he does solo”. And as a result I appear to be developing a worrying obsession with this set of 12 songs. A quick look reveals that I have listened to this album more than any other in the last 12 months, and I’ve only owned it for a week. To be honest, I’m sort of hoping that writing a bit about it might allow me to let it go, and listen to something else.

It’s a concept album – all the songs are folksongs from a post-apocalyptic England. Never mind just songwriting – much like say, Tom Waits “Mule Variations” this is an album that contains some of the finest writing of any kind I’ve heard so far this year. Really stellar stuff. I appreciate that folksongs about a landscape of dead motorways and crips packets are very much my thing, but even if you don’t have my particular combination of Ballardian futurism and hippy mythologising wired into your brain, it’s still a must-buy.

There are a number of absolutely stand out tracks – on another album, pretty much any of the first six tracks would be the single stand out track, and here there are six of them, culminating in the utterly ace “Beating The Bounds” which is a superb synthesis of ancient myth and post-collapse storytelling, an old folk tradition recast as an invocation of Britannia in the guise of a chav goddess. (And a couplet from another track, the phrase “the sweet perfume of petrol / like a lover’s parting kiss” from “Days Gone By” is just about the best metaphor I’ve heard so far this year.)

And having written this, I’m off to listen to something else for a while. Because otherwise the novelty is going to wear off.