Radio Stereolab

this is so cool! tracklisting here. i was a bit distracted when i was listening to it yesterday, but i think that "horses" by mayo thompson might be totally amazing -- in some completely loony way, natch. this is a bit like radio colette, i suppose, but much better as it doesn't have that, er, annoying french talking thing. plus the radio colette thing seems, this time, to be all stuff like franz ferdinand -- which is great and all, but we've heard that a million and one times now. and aint no one heard horses by mayo thompson. wow, it's on again now. my friend robin would *love* this. and through the power of the interweb i see that he was the fella in red krayola. *agh* it all links up ... "it's the sun we wait for in the moooorning..."

Beautiful Wallpaper Music

Hmmm, so I was a little grumpy yesterday. Feelin much less grumpy today, but (as I just revealed myself through a moment of parapraxis (fans!)) I am looking a little bit frumpy. I've got some bad polo shirt/glasses thing going on. Also, I was thinking this morning, do I have an abnormally hairy nose?!! Erm, perhaps I should have actually kept that to myself, but I managed to persuade myself that it was just the light streaming in through the window that was giving the, er, *illusion* of hirsuteness, rather than there being an actual hair/nose issue. But perhaps I'm wrong. Good job I work on my own, eh?!

Anyway, I've been working really hard today, finishing of my UE architecture, and thinking what a nice change it is to be something applied like this, rather than, er .... notional or adminstrative. I do find it alarming just how strangely geeky I can become though, and I've spent the last four hours almost delirious with joy at the revelation that everything looks so much nicer with a curved line. The whole process of compiling this sort of documentation is so enjoyable because it's a much -purer activity than the other kind of nonsense I get involved with, partly because I get to take refuge from major strategic decisions and budget issues while I get all lost in the niceties of tertiary navigation.

But this wasn't what I wanted to post about today. This is what I wanted to post about:

1) I emailed the Eley Kishimoto the other day to ask where I could buy their wallpaper. Imagine my *amazement* when Mark Eley *himself* actually emailed me back. Must admit to feeling a bit starstruck about that, as we then proceeded to exchange two or three emails. Unfortunately, though, I don't think any of the paper will be of a suitable colour to go with my bedroom light and various shades of bedding, so back to square one a bit with that (and imagine my disappointment that they don't have the lovely paper that the girl in the deer jumper is standing against. Ideally I'd like that sort of pattern in perhaps a very light pink, or a silver. Yes, silver would be lovely). But I'm going to the shop on Saturday, so am full of excitement.

2) Bettye Swann rocks. I knew that before but -- oh!! -- the new album on Honest Jon's is a bit of a my-oh-my-er. And it's definitely got me out of my Indie Rut (although I am accessorising today's frumpy fashions with a brown anorak of the kind that wouldn't look out of place on the cover of a Talulah Gosh record. Someone get this girl a fashion doctor. It's disappointing as I was trying to go for some kind of "beat"/Godard look today, and instead I just look rubbish. Oh well!). "(My Heart is) Closed for the Season" is my absolute new favourite song. What's particularly amazing is that she seems to have had three completely distinct musical styles -- well, perhaps 4 if you count the country stuff on here (Angel of the Morning, particularly, is quite astonishing), because you've got the Money stuff, and the Atlantic/Philly stuff, and the Capitol stuff that's on this. I may be wrong, but perhaps Kiss My Love Goodbye is later? Early 70s? Hmmm.

Wasting time on the Internet

(By which I mean: my professional life. Not just the odd ten minutes spent surfing.)

I've realised that the more time I spend on my own, the more I become interested in "things" rather than "people", and so the more I'm reverting to my teenage self, when I was a person driven almost entirely by semi-obsessive interests, rather than the person I've been for most of my adult life -- socially excitable, I suppose, rather than mentally so. Which was making me think again (in a tangential way), what is the Internet really for? I'm doing some complicated IA today, which I'm really enjoying, but why am I doing it? Who am I defining this process for? Yes, the 1million+ people who are supposed to use this website I'm helping to make, but I'm a bit at a loss as to why they'll really use it (I mean, i've done all my UE cases and stuff, so I know "why" they'll use it, but I mean **why** will anyone use it? why does anyone use the Internet ... reasons I use the internet include avoiding talking to real people because sometimes the thought of phone calls traumatises me beyond belief, finding out information about things I need to know, and finding out information about things I don't need to know, but which seem to be ultimately fascinating. Despite what I've been trying to professionally prove for x number of years, it's not about social networking for me, because the reason I'm in a room on my own with a computer is because I've chosen to leave the people behind. I mean, I like reading other peoples' blogs, but I sure as hell don't want them to know i've read them. Where is this going? Who knows.) Anyway, just as I was stuck in a bit of professionally redundant melancholia, I happened to see this which made me feel so much better. I went to look at the live installation yesterday, which was really interesting, but **what** is **this**? I've met so many people since I've worked here with academic aspirations and pretentions, that I find it almost deeply shocking that someone is doing this sort of thing in an institutionally dignified capacity. Which brings me back again to the weirdness of the *people who make websites* -- yes, it's all related, honestly ... Website production (although no one calls it that anymore. Everyone's giving themselves semi-scientific job titles to dignify it all) seems to attract intelligent-yet-easily-distracted people (that hurt. How does one get around not hypghenating an -ly adjective when you're compiling a compound like that? There must be a rule!!) who read a little bit of social science and a little bit of HCI psychology and who happen to perhaps think visually or be process driven, then BOOM! you're a guru, making intelligent guesses about all sorts of stuff, when everyone knows that the answer is just watching how people use things and describe themselves and extrapolating some likely answers from there. While there is undoubtedly best practice, how can we limit the organic/interactive* development of interactivity
with all these truths and answers and I Am Right. And what sort of shocks me about this list of words is that it's bringing exactly that mentality into the museum: look, I made it up, it must be right. ... No, scratch that, it's not about right and wrong. It's about "look, i made it up, IT MUST BE INTERESTING and somehow worthwhile". If we can ignore the statement I seem to be making here about creative freedom (because that's not what I mean, but I don't have the time to produce a cogent argument - I'm writing this to work out what the hell I mean), I suppose that what I'm getting at is that this is a classic example of someone being talented in one field, not knowing much about another one, and then using their elsewhere-earnt authority to dignify their activity in the field about which they know very little. Does that make sense? It's like an opera singer showing you how well they can dribble a ball; impressive because they're an opera singer, so are confounding your expectations, but not actually very impressive per se because it's actually rubbish dribbling. Yes? Making any sense? No. Feel better though.

Unrelatedly, I feel a bit disappointed in the Rough Trade Album Club. I would be quite up for signing up for 1 CD a month and just getting what the hell ever, that I'd probably never normally listen to, and being quite interested in it, but a minimum of 3!!! That's probably my entire CD buying budget. And we all know why they've done it -- so that the wannabe hipsters can get a Go Straight To Cool, Don't Pass HMV card and be able to mouth off in the pub about stuff, cos it's got the RT seal of approval. Bitter? Oh yesindeedy. Whatever can be wrong with me today!!!


**perhaps I should, ahem, coin a neologism for this. Orgactive. omg.

Why eye wrinkling doesn't work

Tuesday morning and it seems to be less than 12 hours since I was last here. So much for my new work/life balance thingy. Oh well. Anyway, I was quite late going to sleep last night, and I was lying in bed, listening to Belle and Sebastian (it's getting out of hand; it's like I'm having an "Indie Backlash" -- my 7 years in the soul wilderness seems to have come crashing down in a wave of plinky plonky piano and hand clapping. Perhaps this is my pre-31 crisis?), having got myself a bit overexcited watching the mens' "artistic gymnastics" (man, I love that stuff. However, the BBC Olympics coverage is shaping up to be some Steve Coogan-produced laugh fest: Clare Balding (who, in this picture, is trying to look like an elder statesman of sports commentating by affecting to have a Jimmy Hill chin. What an odd woman she is) menacing that charisma-less Holiday presenter man in her luminous green shirt; Adrian Moorhouse leaning backwards so that the geeky looking Other Swimmer doesn't touch him; Stylophone-quality incidental music... who thinks they spent too much on that ridiculous trailer, eh? Oh yeh, and did anyone else notice the only thing we Brits seem to be able to win easily at is hitting other people. Very telling, I reckon) and also feeling a bit bouyed by my super-successful knitting stint (I've been thinking of getting a digital camera. If I do, perhaps I can take photos of my knitting and put them up here as a progress report. I know that no one looks at this but me, but it would be an excellent mark of knitting posterity), but anyway, let's finish this Proust-long sentence, and I suddenly realised that I was lying there with my eyes really tightly screwed up, so desperate was I to get to sleep. And so, through an act of will, I very effortfully unscrewed my eyes (aware that all the tension in my face through to eye screwing was making it deeply unlikely I'd ever get to sleep), when *ping* from nowhere, there they were, screwed up again. And it was as if I was so keen to get to sleep I was trying to force it upon myself, like when you see small children closing there eyes and saying "You can't see me now, can you?"

I'm not really sure what the point of that was, but it made quite an impression on me, at any rate. Obviously I was able to get to sleep the instant that I rolled over onto my front. When I can't sleep I always forget that I always-but-always sleep on my front, and tend to lie there on my back, punishing myself with my eyes all tightly screwed up, as if I'm trying to challenge myself to sleep in the most adverse circumstances.

But anyway. User-experience maps wait for no man.

Deer Eye for the Straight Gal

This is going to be a special speed post. I'm giving myself exactly five minutes. I shouldn't really be posting at all, because I'm so goddam busy, but my brain has just gone all funny and my eyes have gone all big from screen staring and I find that I'm finding it difficult to really give a damn about the data protection act. Jeez. How did it all come to this? Writing up huge documents about stuff that everyone knows anyway? Just quite ridiculous.

This weekend was supposed to be the New Beginning. It wasn't. It was like every other weekend. The pernicious combination of knitting and drinking is killing off all my effective mental functions, and man, have I got stuff to do! There's bedroom decorating and novel finishing, which are both semi-full-time activities ... Shucks.

Anyway, I'm going to investigate getting Eley Kishimoto wallpaper at the weekend. Part of my investigation now just led me to their website, where I have seen the most beautiful jumper *in the world*. It's so amazing I can't believe that people haven't just been wearing deer jumpers for ever, so fantastic does it seem. Perhaps they have? Perhaps everyone outside of the Own Office is jumping around in fantastic animal-adorned attire, and I just can't see them cos I'm in here with the blinds down. Oh I do hope that's true.

Library Lovers

Yesterday, under the auspices of work, someone sent me an email about a project called The Romance of Libraries. Naively I thought it might have something to do with library architecture or romance languages in the context of libraries or, erm, something else equally unlikely but connected to my job. But, no -- it's about people who've fallen in love in libraries. It doesn't actually say they want to hear from people who've stalked librarians (if coyly standing by the desk in my poncho counts), but they *are* soliciting contributions from people who've experienced Unrequited Library Love. I'm very sad that Library Love is no longer a feature of my life (unrequited or otherwise). You'd have thought I'd be in an ideal position for Unrequited Museum Love, which sounds slightly more exciting, but there's Nuthin' Doin' in that department: too much museumin', not enough lovin' ... (I did gawp at someone in the newsagent at South Kensington yesterday. I'm not sure that really counts on either score, however; perhaps that's just Shop Perving, which has no romance about it at all.)

The Romance of Libraries site also lead me to discover iamalibrarian.com, a rather minimal offering that's devoted to the charming, yet utterly meaningless, Librarian Image Reform Campaign: "It is time to get rid of the stereotype and show people who we really are and how we are making a difference." As a former library worker, I'd like to have empathy with this (really, I would!), but unfortunately I can't think of a way that librarians are making a "difference": shelving those pesky books, I suppose, and telling people which volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica they can copy their homework out of, but what else? Answers on the back of an Inter-Library Loan Form please ... There's a very cool yakuza librarian in Last Life in the Universe (the first film to make me cry this year, I think. Unfortunately I waited until I was in the restaurant over the road before I did the really major crying, making it look as though i was being cruelly treated by my dinner companion); perhaps I should email cynthia@iamalibrarian.com to let her know. As she rightly asserts, "some librarians are men", of which this is proof (in a made up, At the Pictures sort of way).

Also, now I've seen her picture, I bet it's only a matter of time before Cynthia is gracing the cover of the next librarian-themed Belle & Sebastian record. She's an indie heroime in the making all right ...