ON TOY CARS

When I was four, we didn't have Super Mario Kart. We had to content ourselves with the sort of Matchbox car collections that these days you'd be more likely to see as part of the set design in the next Wes Anderson movie. One guy had the Lotus from The Spy Who Loved Me, in full underwater mode. When he pulled that out it was like the business card moment in American Psycho. If we had access to a chainsaw, Phil Collins and a Manhattan apartment in that moment, we'd have known what to do.

I had a Pontiac Firebird. It was red and the front wheels were mashed in such a way that you couldn't roll it properly. Still, Knight Rider, right?

Anyway, when I saw this, my four year old self jumped into the front of my brain and demanded we go Ebay surfing. He also wanted candy, but screw him, I've got a beer to finish.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

FRIDAY LINK PARADE

I always knew Oliver Stone was a beautiful human being

The AV Club

RIP Lee

The Guardian

Fleshbot or Facebook? You figure it out. I'm not going near this.

NYMag

Even though I can't see how this will work, these guys get a free pass. Not you, Lucas.

Movies.ie

Bet you didn't know he was one of the good guys.

The Guardian

Creative: Unblock thyself.

ISO50

Daily blogging quota achieved. I claim my prize.

ON BEAKER

I've been thinking of making some internet videos in my copious spare time, but I fear public humiliation. I probably shouldn't have watched this, then:

ON DISTRACTIONS

Want to write a screenplay? Wondering what's the next few years of films might be like?

ScriptShadow

Preparing for disaster

BLDGBLOG

Stepping over your grandmother's grave: Oscars 2010.

New York Magazine

The scaredy-cat guide to success: Gladwell on entrepreneurs.

New Yorker

You shouldn't be reading this. I shouldn't be typing it. Oh, man, I'm so depressed.

LA Times

No, actually, now I'm depressed.

The Big Picture

ON ADVERTISING

This ran during the Superbowl last night. It is (apparently) the first time the 'Don't be evil' gang have advertised on TV.

All I'm saying is: if you changed the soundtrack to the Arcade Fire and had the tagline: 'from the mind of Spike Jonze', you'd be in hipster heaven.

Or if the camera pulled back and John Hodgman was typing on the screen, we could be looking at the new Apple iPad ad.

I'm not saying you should, or that every advertiser chasing the hipster dollar is doing the same thing. I've just got too much time on my hands.

NO ESCAPE FOR ALL

via Pip R. Lagenta, via Boing Boing

Someone do the blasphemous version of this post for Irish readers...

Bit of autobiography before dinner

I remember, when I was about eleven I was in my friend Barry's house. Barry was a year or so older than me and was therefore that much closer to the bleeding edge of cool than I was. Also, he'd grown up in Pittsburgh until a couple of years before. I had no real conception of that place, but it was in America, so he was cool. Another reason for that was his collection of stuff. In every group I was ever a part of, there was one kid who always had every important product - the best Action Man, a Millennium Falcon, a ZX Spectrum (maybe not so much the last thing) - Barry was one of those guys. Poor guy didn't know many people, having only recently arrived in Ireland, which worked out fine for me.

We were on the cusp of things then (the embarrassing cusp, not any of the good ones), and lots of grown-up ideas started to emerge in a haphazard way, like a drunk explaining Wittgenstein. We didn't know any girls and were too small a group to play any sports, so we drifted to the other teenage one-upmanship game: music.

Barry had been given a ghetto blaster (even then that title was a little anachronistic, but from my point of view 'blaster' = Han Solo's gun, so it worked in a strange kind of way) for Christmas, I think. it was one of those designs that were umbilically linked to their time and place, like that TV in the shape of a motorbike helmet that I used to lust after in Switzers. It looked like it had been fashioned from leftover Ferrari parts. I bet some hipster is even now bidding well over €500 for it on Ebay.

What a lead in. Anyway, we were 'into' music, by which I mean Barry had money and could buy albums, while I had blank cassettes and would copy them off him. This is how I first heard Nirvana, The Simpsons album, Tone Loc's Wild Thing, Snow's Informer, and Vanilla Ice. I was eclectic even then. It was the best sort of relationship for this sort of thing - we both got something out of it: Barry got to be the gatekeeper to cool things, which made him cool; I got lots of free music. It wasn't all that different to collecting Garbage Pail Kids cards or birdwatching, except you could imagine not being laughed at or beaten up for doing it.

Having music always used to be a competitive sport. I think cassettes were the mobile phones of 1989, if you were a preteen. In sixth class, one kid whose name I have long forgotten leapt up the social ladder when he brought in a copy of Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. This may be the only time in recorded history that be-permed men in leather trousers could be described as aspirational. It didn't last, sadly. A year later, certain older brothers passed Appetite For Destruction down to their siblings in my class. From that point we also experienced the phenomenon of revisionist history. It was like the opposite of Woodstock. Everyone who claims not to remember it was there.

Music functioned as a social measure in another way. Everything you do as a teenager is geared towards being accepted by your chosen group, not being bothered by everyone else and hopefully, getting together with someone of your chosen sex. If you were good at managing that, congratulations. Don't trip and fall on anything sharp on your way out. Knowing about music (as long as you were careful to know about the right sort - don't discuss Dr. Alban with a guy in a Jane's Addiction t-shirt) was an infinitely more socially acceptable excuse for being otherwise monosyllabic and gauche, than having a comprehensive understanding of Dungeons & Dragons (oh, happy days) or just being crap at sports. If you were rubbish at interaction:

EXAMPLE 1

ATTRACTIVE HUMAN OF PREFERRED PERSUASION: "Hi."

YOU: (Panic behind eyes. Sweat glands activate. Brain leaves through back door) "Hey." (directed at shoes. Own shoes) "Er." (Dives into box of umbrellas)

AHofPP: " ."

So, as you might imagine, AHofPP's reaction would run the gamut from 'Huh?" to "Weirdo". But if you were wearing a Hole/Pixies/Rage Against The Machine/Smashing Pumpkins/Sonic Youth (I'm a creature of my time) t-shirt while you had your social meltdown, then at least you were a nerd in a good way (you hoped). It was also a great way to get into social groups:

EXAMPLE 2

TALLER/BETTER LOOKING/MORE JADED PEER: "Hey. Cool t-shirt."

YOU: "Oh yeah. Thanks man."

TBLMJP: "Yeah, 4 Non Blondes are wicked. Really into them."

Even in college, music was a really handy shorthand for figuring out if someone was on your wavelength, whether they would sleep with you, if their friends might, or if they could introduce you to someone who might sleep with you. It's probably the only time in my life when having an in-depth knowledge of Radiohead B-sides could be described as a pulling tool. Not a great one, mind you.

EXAMPLE 3

PERSON YOU ARE SCORING/VICTIM: "You're really cute."

YOU: "You too. This is like that song, No Surprises. Hang on, I'll put it on. How do you work this CD player?"

The funny thing about having kids about a decade before anyone else your age even considers the idea is that suddenly you have a real timetable. Not like the sort with lectures. You didn't need to change lecturers' nappies, or make sure they didn't drink all the cough medicine. Not every week, anyway. One of the casualties of kids for us was music. The sort of commitment necessary to be on top of what's going on in music was, at least in our house, incompatible with being broke and in charge of an infant.

Becoming deeply uncool from a musical point of view is expected when you grow up and get married. If you're tracking the newest and most adventurous music, you probably don't spend too much time in deepest suburbia.

I'm just really glad I discovered cookery books. Now I can be obsessive about Jamie, Nigel, Rick, Madhur, Nigella, Tamsin, Valentine and the Hairy Bikers. Plus, no matter how out of touch I become, at least I'll enjoy the food.

- Hope that made some sort of sense. Not convinced it did. For everyone studying creative writing, this is what happens when you sit down with a glass of wine and no outline and think "I'll figure something out". I'll write something desperately clever sooner or later, so please do come back.

As a quick aside, I'm now back to being eleven and getting my musical cues from other people. Everything I have listened to in the last three years (at least) has been a result of listening to other friends or (more often) by peeking at their collections. Let's hear it for Facebook. Here are some of the things I've enjoyed over the past while (that have been recommended, innit):

Adventures in Alcohol

I must do this:

Sabering in the Garden with Kathryn Borel Jr. from Kathryn Borel on Vimeo.

.

And she's got a book coming out. I have wasted my life.

Attack of the fixed gears

More here, for those of you who enjoy imagery of WWI.

The Men Who Stare At Goats (plus some other movies)

I absolutely cannot wait for this film.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Trailer)
by ThePlaylist

(Better quality version available at Apple).

If you haven't, I'd strongly recommend the original nonfiction book and THEM: Adventures with Extremists, from the inimitable Jon Ronson.

Having been to the cinema four times this summer (probably my quota for the year), let me say that Harry Potter is a good entry for those who are following the series, though not up to Azkaban's standards, Moon is splendid, well-written and features great old-school effects that blow the likes of Transformers 2 out of the water (not hard, admittedly).

Finally, Inglourious Basterds is glorious, no matter what Peter Bradshaw says.

Three months! You must have done something in that time. No? Oh well.

MHaha. I'm a blogging cliche, it seems. I think the key to this is not to attempt enormously long pieces every time. Writing being my livelihood (stop chuckling at the back), it can be hard to muster up enthusiasm for something that may never yield tangible returns.

But everyone loves link posts. Don't they?

So, here are two things that have great relevance to what I'm doing at the moment in my spare time (seriously, stop laughing).

'One time a guy handed me a picture of himself and he said. “Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.” Every picture of you is when you were younger.'

- Mitch Hedberg

(A good friend put me on to that late comic genius some time ago. Please go and watch this now).

Michael Chabon wrote a great piece recently for the New York Review of Books. I'm not sure about the legalities of pasting whole articles, so here's the link

And here's a taster:

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

My understanding is that it's part of a larger nonfiction work, out in October. If you enjoyed it, I'd recommend, ooh, everything he's ever written. But maybe Maps And Legends is a good place to start. (Actually start wherever you like. Stand up for yourself, why don't you)

And finally, I have not been unaware of the trend for images in blog posts. Never shall it be said that this writer is loath to dive into this new fad. Observe:

(thank you, As She Was)

Finally finally. A nice bit of scabrous political comedy never hurt anyone. Click the picture to order your copy. Feel free to order me one and all:

Right. That's enough to be getting on with. Maybe I'll keep this up for a while. In which case, there'll have to be a post detailing how awful Wes Anderson's adaptation of Fantastic Mr Fox looks (and sounds). But not right now. I'm still too upset.

A quick one

That really was long. Here's a funny video. Let's never discuss the economy again. It'll be our secret.


Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airpor

- Update: I don't know what the hell is up with that video. It won't resize properly, no matter what I do. Did I mention I've worked in IT?

Anyway, here's another video. Fingers crossed this works:

Inaugural Links

For those chained to a desk today:

The Guardian's coverage

The New York Times

Streaming webcasts:

CBS

C-SPAN

ABC

CNN

Official Inauguration Site

For a laugh, Fox

And since, well, why not - here's RTE (I wouldn't hold your breath).

Right. Kids need to go to school.

Update:

There's a good overview of streaming links up at lyvegyde. Some of the links (such as Hulu) are territorial US only, but there'll be something worth watching. (Cheers to Jane for the info).

Good Ideas That I Wish I'd Thought of First

Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008

- This might be a one-off thing, but it is very pretty.