A Drunk Tooth Fairy

An adventure in parenting. We’re both in our bedroom with Maeryn, getting towards the time of the evening when it’s time to brush our teeth, this week mostly to Ms. Rachel¹, when Tammy sees something in the carpet.

It’s a tooth.

We both stare at each other and then start trying to work out how and when Maeryn lost it. I am distraught that we didn’t even notice that she was in pain, saying that we’re terrible parents for not realizing. Tammy, however, is not wallowing, and doing the proper thing of getting Maeryn to open her mouth. Which she eventually does².

All her teeth are there.

So now we have gone from “how did we not notice that Maeryn has lost a tooth” to “er, there is a random human tooth in our bedroom”

Daycare Fight Club? Drunk Tooth Fairy? We will never know.

Children are fun! And full of surprises! Horrifying surprises.

Water!

We failed at the picnic part of the day’s plans (too hot!), but we had a bunch of fun with rocks and water.

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August? Great Scott!!

My worst habit: my ears perking up whenever I hear an American talking about “one hit wonders”. I dare you to say Dexys, I dare you

As tempting as it seemed, I had not flown to London to ask Eno about his past, to finally ask him about that mysterious “T” on the cover of Music for Airports, recording Devo inside a barn in the German countryside, or the ubiquitous question he might hate most of all: “So what was David Bowie really like?”

A great, long, interview with Eno.

Maeryn had her first ride in an electric Barbie car this weekend. I think the next time we do that will be when she’s 25. Or at least after some training on Mario Kart concerning steering…

The Jade Hotel Room

Every time I come to San Francisco, I do get a little trapped in the thought that this is where I should have been. But the thing is, the thing that attracts me to SF is “this would have been the place to be in the 90s.” Now, it’s a combination of somewhat hollowed out in the centre and the only thing filling that hole is money. Admittedly, a metric ton of money, but from the minute you step off the plane, you’re bombarded with adverts from companies that thought, for example, that calling themselves “Turing” was acceptable and not trading off stolen glory.

Still, I see bits of things that I recognize from Sneakers and there is that pull. But it’s not the city of Netscape and other scrappy web properties anymore, nor phreakers abusing Bell telephones. And so I diminish, and go back to the East, where I belong.

As usual, I stayed at two different hotels; Parc55 for work, but I took a chance on a newer hotel for the Sunday night. Parts of it were essentially an Ian Trap (exposed concrete ceiling, anybody?), but also, weird 1990s-William Friedkin-erotic-thriller vibes with the floor-to-ceiling-wrapping-around-corner-looking-out-at-the-Tenderloin windows and the exposed deep bath. I did the decent thing; I went to Elixir, had a couple of drinks, and then came back, poured a very hot bath and watched Gimme Shelter via the room’s Apple TV (“we know you just want to screencast”).

Having not been murdered as I got out of the bath, it was an enjoyable night. Also, the room had a QR code for tipping the cleaning staff, which I did appreciate. Coffee was imported from Shoreditch, which I guess just amped up the hipster vibes emanating from the exposed concrete.

(Parc55 was fine, but just a normal hotel room you could have anywhere. They did have cable, though, so the first thing I did was…turn it to the Disney Channel where they were showing a Bluey marathon. Sorry, I have become one of Those Parents and now you must all sit through my conversations about “where is Rusty’s father stationed? What war are the dogs fighting?” and other esoterica…)

A subdued trip, I think — the friend I normally visit couldn’t make it down into the city due to illness; the co-worker that I team up with in the evenings decided to stay on the other side of the Atlantic this time, and most nights after work, I just felt like heading to bed rather than doing anything slightly more exciting. Delightfully, though, the last dinner of the trip was at Foreign Cinema in the Mission. Which was good, but the highlight was being surrounded by board-formed concrete, explaining the construction process to my coworkers, before segueing into detailing the horrors of Mr. Blobby and Mr. Spanky to a frankly disbelieving audience. And then I sent them pictures. It’s important to provide visuals, even if nobody thanks you afterwards.

Back home now, Maeryn wearing a tiara and a pair of glasses. Nowhere else I’d rather be.

Blank Canvas

While I was away in San Francisco (on which, a bit more later), Maeryn has realized that: paper is white, the walls are white, and therefore: walls are paper.

oh no

Yes, That Is Where The Magician's Nephew Comes

In another instalment of “things I didn’t realize I had strong feelings about until now”, I have tracked down a copy of the mid-1970s Puffin boxset of The Chronicles of Narnia for Maeryn when she’s older. Having examined a bunch of more recent versions, I discovered I had a yearning for her to read the same edition that I did; titles in Helvetica, interior text in the classic Linotype Granjon typeface that even now throws me back to being six years old. And, you know, the spines are in decent shape for a set of seven books that were published fifty years ago.

(I’ll take Lewis and even Blyton over Rowling every time, by the way…but if Maeryn really does need to read English Boarding School stories, I absolutely have plans for that)

Also this week: I officially know too much Bluey lore, and I have a few questions about what conflict Rusty’s father is serving in (as seen in Cricket). Apparently, I’m six months younger than Bandit. I’m still processing that…

Hubris Times Three

Three acts of hubris over the past week and a bit:

• With Tammy away, deciding to take Maeryn out of daycare and having an extended three-day weekend with just the two of us. What I glossed over was that Maeryn…doesn’t get through the night on her own, which meant that I spent Thursday-Sunday night sleeping with her on her bed. When she wasn’t pushing me out at 4am, like on Sunday morning. By Monday, I was a wreck. Having said that, we did a lot of things, and it was a lovely time that on balance, the lack of sleep was worth it. But I’m saying that a few days out and not as completely out of all reserves as I was on Monday morning.

• For the past six months of so, the waterline on the fridge has been leaking a bit. Not a huge amount, but enough to make me think “I should get that looked at”. Which of course, I didn’t. So, cue one morning this week, where I’m heading to the kitchen with Maeryn to get her breakfast snack before she heads off to daycare, and we hear the sound of rushing water. Yes, the waterline had pulled off the back of the fridge and was now sending water all over the kitchen floor and down into the basement along the bar walls. I am now 87% a Real American, as I went to Home Depot to rent a high volume fan in an attempt to quickly dry the walls out. On the bright side, the waterline is fixed now, and the plumber replaced a badly corroded pipe…

• For the first time since…well, pre-COVID, and maybe even before I moved to Cincinnati, I have to make a lot of chocolates (about 500pc). Normally, I planned all this out. This time, I had a vague idea about what I was being to make and apparently thought I would YOLO it on one of the hottest weeks of the year. At least I had the sense to make the more complicated recipe first, so when it basically exploded out of the back of the piping bag as I was piping, I knew I had to scale down my ideas. And thank goodness for a) keeping a bag of hazelnuts at the ready and b) that they don’t take too long to grind down into a paste, unlike pistachios. And the high volume fan from the previous act of hubris has actually come in handy for keeping things cool when the chocolates are crystallizing. But given all the mistakes of Saturday, I’ll have to do it all again next weekend to make all 500…

It has been something of a week. But today, we’re going to the state’s largest free splashpad. I’ll even wear shorts (hubris x 4?)…

Shift-Y For Reload

A long time ago, there was a Children’s BBC show called Boxpops.

Music, newsreels, drama, and comedy, all linked together via text captions and exploring a different theme each episode. To be fair, the theme was normally something like “travel” rather than “Margaret Thatcher conjures up an imagined British history, obtains power and then finds herself trapped in the limited power of that vision”, but that sort of thing is more Doctor Who’s job anyway. But there is a line from Boxpops to Adam Curtis that I never really see mentioned. The other interesting thing about Boxpops is that they went to quite some length to show clips that children wouldn’t normally see. It was the first time I’d seen anything from Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Young Ones, or Monty Python. They even had clips from _Kevin Turvey: The Man Behind the Green Door _. Obviously, you weren’t going to see what you can get up to with an American Express card and Pamela Stephenson, but to go through all that effort to find things you can transmit on a children’s show going out at 11am on a Sunday…that’s quite an effort, and I’m very grateful to them for showing me such a variety of different things every weekend. And I think they deserve a little more credit.

Anyway, Shifty. Despite what Curtis is saying in interviews about how this series has been sparked from reading a book about 1848 (and, sure, the book in question seems to be a great read so far), the series goes over ground Curtis has covered before; all the way back to Pandora’s Box and as recently as Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. Individualism, neoliberalism, failed systems, conjured visions of the past, and lots of clips of people dancing. Other large chunks of the series, including the star turn from Francis Beveridge, The Civil Service Man Waiting For His Wooden Box, appeared on his blog during the early 2010s. The blog is pretty much defunct now, but you can still find all the clips, some in versions that are significantly expanded from the edits in Shifty.

The Beveridge section highlights something that often goes unmentioned - Curtis actually has a great sense of humour that often comes out in his editing (as pointed out by Hatherley). The part where he gleefully talks about Stephen Knight’s “the Royal Family were behind Jack The Ripper” theory over a bed of clips of Diana — obvious, yes, but grimly amusing. And of course, the audacity of opening the series with Jimmy Saville leading a bunch of children into Margaret Thatcher’s hands. That’s a bold choice, and it gets bolder as Curtis then gives credit to an interview Thatcher did on immigration for giving the Tories a polling turnaround in 1979…instead of…the Winter of Discontent. A claim like that demands compelling evidence and John Curtice (Britain’s polling mastermind) rips the idea to shreds around thirteen minutes into this Radio 4 broadcast.

But Curtis is infamous for this sort of thing, where you can just about forgive him for stretching a point as the vibe is mostly right. Up until midway through Shifty’s second episode where he heavily implies ZTT invented the remix. Just, no. I draw the line at historical 12” mistakes. And why was Morley missing? After my first viewing, I joked about not standing for Paul Morley erasure, but now a fortnight has passed, I’m even more mystified. The Trevor Horn clips were taken from a Newsnight segment about ZTT, and Horn, his wife, and Morley are all prominent in the feature, so why cut him out? Plus Frankie’s notoriety was pretty much all masterminded by Morley. Who said “Frankie Say Arm The Unemployed”, after all? I’m not expecting I Love 1984 but it is such a weird omission, not least because Morley has so many incredibly pretentious and wonderful interviews from this time period.

(the ghost of Anthony h. Wilson stalks the footage)

There are other roads not taken. Golden Wonder is shown in the first episode but then never mentioned again. Was there a strand of their late 80s crisp factory fire and the rise of American-backed Walkers that got left on the cutting room floor? Katie Baring is shown with Derek Hatton, but we’re not treated to any of the great Curtis/Nick Leeson interview clips about the downfall of Barings? John Major barely registers a presence, and the fall of monetarism isn’t even mentioned, despite it being a big part of the early episodes. I will say, though, that the series does a good job of pointing out that the ‘boom’ years of the 80s were really quite short, bookended on either side by grim industrial decline and negative equity. But there’s some weird time-jumping going on every once in a while, where, for example, the text narration is talking about events in the early 90s but you can plainly see a mid 90s-period Take That poster on the person’s wall on the clip being shown. It’s very much just ‘if you know, you know’, but if you do it throws you out of the narrative.

And then there is the ending.

OR IS THIS JUST ANOTHER FEEDBACK LOOP OF NOSTALGIA?

REPEATING BACK SOUNDS AND IMAGES OF THE PAST.

WHICH IS THE WAY THE SYSTEM CONTROLS YOU

AND IS THE WAY THIS SERIES WAS MADE.

Curtis is certainly aware of the limits of the form he inhabits, expressed in large point Arial¹. It’s also pointed out a with a little more humour during the Remix part of episode 2, which comes shortly after repeating an entire segment of Pandora’s Box, and the many old interviews from other Curtis documentaries that litter the series — Curtis himself becoming part of that historical edifice. But I’m wondering if this is signalling a larger end. There are limits to strip-mining the past², and again in interviews he indicates that footage beyond 1998 or so seems to lose the hauntological power that earlier clips have, signing up to Mark Fisher’s “Slow Cancellation of The Future” hypothesis³, where the replaying of the past is keeping us from establishing a new future. There’s a clip towards the very end which is clearly a phone video from the 21st century of two girls singing along to The Smiths⁴ which highlights this⁵. Meanwhile, Curtis himself tries to remove himself from the documentary, continuing his lack of vocal narration in the same manner as Traumazone⁶.

What intrigues me though is that his frustration here is a large part of his first foray into fiction, The Way, where at the end, the old stories are explicitly rejected in favour of forging new ones. And while that series definitely had its flaws, maybe it’s time for him to explore that future than mining the past…

Still, you have to love a BBC series that has a caption saying:

PRIVATISATION WAS AN IDEA INVENTED BY THE NAZIS

The Blog Is Starting To Repeat

I Will Not Stand For This Paul Morley Erasure

If you’re making a documentary on the strange end of the twentieth century in Britain, opening with a clip of Jimmy Savile taking a group of children to meet Margaret Thatcher is not exactly subtle. It’s been too long, Mr. Curtis.

(current thoughts on having seen the first episode of Shifty: feels like an expansion of The League of Gentlemen from Pandora’s Box and The Attic from The Living Dead, with some of the footage being directly lifted from those episodes. In fact, at one point, Curtis is lazy enough that he takes the clip of Not The Nine O’Clock News’s ‘Unemployment Figures’ sketch directly from Pandora’s Box, as it still has ‘1980’ in Futura burnt into the clip, instead of going back to the original footage¹. Having said all that, the ‘new’ clips are great, and to be honest, I’d be happy if he just dropped the narrative text completely at this point)

This week, we have been mostly learning how to play with sand and staring in awe at watching all our systems go down due to a global Google Cloud Platform failure…