The Isolationist http://www.theisolationist.com/ because life is pain, and pain is best shared. en-US Copyright 2008 Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:03:29 +0000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Poetry Revival I have just returned from a wonderful poetry evening at the Troubadour Café on Old Brompton Road.  Take a right out of Earl’s Court Station, down Earl’s Court Road and take a right at the bottom of the road where you will find a fabulous red patterned medieval door.  Various lutes, guitars, violins and stringed instruments hang from the ceiling, generously laden plates fly past; a happy buzz of conversation fills the different caverns.  A sip of wine, a sigh of relief.  How wonderful to be in London in this place! 

Downstairs is the poetry café, a raised platform with a man playing the accordion sets the scene.  The crowd is an interesting one: older, eccentric, from all parts of the country, all classes, all types.  This is my second Monday night at the Troubadour in the last couple of months; eight poets take ten minutes each to read poems of their choice from their various collections (they are newly published poets and experienced ones), there is a break after the first four.  It is needed.  I find I can only absorb a bit at a time but I love the experience of hearing new work, words flowing, ideas, emotions.  I tend to remember one poem from each poet and it is usually one about something emotional which touches me: tonight my favourites were about a man going to visit a friend in a psychiatric ward and not having the normal social parameters of conversation to go by; a woman imagining her friend meeting her lost loved ones in heaven and how they would greet her and a woman grieving for her husband and their sleep together. 

Looking round the audience tonight though I wondered why poetry was rather an extinct art form in our generation. Yes, there are poetry circles and evenings like this around the country but it is so far from the main stream.  I was the youngest person there by at least a decade.  Poetry is what was once learnt at school, often rather painfully (apologies, apologies) and maybe what can be found in song lyrics.  It is a small shelf at Waterstones, probably behind a pillar in an unobtrusive place, it is a present from a loved one that has rarely been looked at or a great book for the toilet, for those precious few spare moments you have in your day.  The poet may wince to think of their carefully crafted words being mulled over during a …. but no more need be said on that, at least the poems are being read! 

There is something about the freshness of experience of poetry that hits me (perhaps a longer paragraph break needed here after the last paragraph!)  A novel you have to plan, agonize over, draft and re-draft and try and finish for an eternity.  A poem can be spontaneous or struggled over but it can exist without the need for publication, it can meet that creative need to use words to express yourself instantly.  For the slightly fickle-minded character like myself, poems allow that space, that variety, that satisfaction.  You just have to like playing with words.  A poem can be a friend for life, a line remembered can accompany you in times of distress or happiness, it can help you to realise something you hadn’t quite been able to express or it can just make you laugh.  When memories start to go in old age, it is often those poems learnt by rote at school which stay in people’s minds and still they are recited. 

I wonder if anyone out there would like to share poems they enjoy with me?  We could have a poetry appreciation section. 

I had an experience this Saturday which reminded me or Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’.  I had Saturday afternoon wonderfully, wonderfully free: no school work, no house work, no visits, no phone calls to be made, no nothing, yes there were hundreds of things I could be doing but I just decided to stop all those list-ticking exercises which are duly renewed every weekend and maybe … write something.  As it turned out, I stared at my blank piece of page in wonder and thought, I have nothing to say.  It was a strange feeling.  It made me wonder if I fill up my time to stop this feeling, this anxiety, this emptiness.

 
Days by Philip Larkin

 
What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

 

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

 
Although not the happiest of Saturday afternoons, perhaps it was fruitful to realise this and to take the time ‘to stand and stare.’ 

 
I await your poems…

]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/04/caroline-child.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/04/caroline-child.html life April literature Poetry Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:03:29 +0000 Selling Out (The Fat End of the Wedge)

Right this is a rework of a rather drunken attempt at an entry or what should have been a large comment on the journalistic decline entry by Chris. Hopefully this is more coherent. In fact I'm amazed there was an underlying thread in my previous comment (you'll find it under Rambled Chicken) at all but there does seem to have been :-)

Why does everyone have a problem with pink Floyd after Syd Barret left? Actually it's by no means everybody, but many, I feel, get the impression there was some sort of sell out. I mean couldn't they just change? It would be rather unusual for a band to lose such a strong component and not do so.

Why am I talking about this you may ask? Well I was listening to 'Amused to Death' a very good (if you like that sort of thing) Roger Waters solo album made sometime in the mid to late 90s.Now I know that he's just not some folks cup of tea, and that's fine, I can understand that and he's not always mine. The album just popped up the other day and I hadn't listened since university and it took me back a little and I find it one of his better one's.

Depressingly, I kinda got it at the time but didn't really dwell much on the more underlying message to do with media, or more specifically TV news, journalism and such like. To cut a long story short it's rather loosely based on a monkey being fed TV news and media and trying to make sense of the world around him with these tools. The resulting thoughts and consequences......ah you get the picture. As an aside you might ask why I didn't dwell on this less obvious (though it would be glaringly so to most) fact and tended to dwell more on some more biting lyrics about recent events. Well I'm just slow/shallow whatever :-) erm....and I was...erm well....erm more interested in Jeff Beck's guitar playing at the time since I was working on becoming a self (badly styled) rock god. As you may have gathered by the fact that I'm typing this entry at 10:50 pm CET I didn't make it.

So this and another essay/forward to Animal Farm sprang to mind when I read Journalistic Decline by Chris. See I don't know how or who's to blame for all of this. Waters single release from this album was refused play by the BBC. There are 2 issues here: Firstly, it was not refused on any grounds of indecent language or explicitness in anyway, merely on the ground that it was I guess considered  too anti-God. This I find staggering. The song "What god wants.. (god gets god help us all)" amounts to a long list of contradictions driven by various faiths, distortions, political takes etc on religion. So its basically anything that gets done in the name of god for whatever reason and is essentially saying how easy it is to rally otherwise good folk into parting with money for a government's war, filling the pockets of some preacher in a stadium or whatever other useless rubbish they decide to embark on. I was left me rather angry and depressed that this song was refused airplay for this, since it might seem a useful point that the populace of many countries could bear in mind now and again. The second point is that, as far as I'm aware, this is a choice of the BBC, NOT something imposed on them by government.

This brings me on to the censorship suffered by Orwell on trying to release Animal Farm. It again was not enforced censorship but a fear of stepping away from the herd of what he labels the intelligentsia of his day. Which is also touched on as a factor of our 'thinning' papers in the article referred to by Chris. Nobody wanted to buck trend saying that socialism or what was sold as a socialist society could possibly be creating the monster that was the Soviet Union at the time. I mean there were good reasons since they were our allies and it was war after all, but this again was not the government stopping release of his book. The distortions and outright erasure from history of some facts of the time in the press and often academic publishing were astonishing by their own hand. Eventually, after what is now recognised as one of the most  important books of the last century was refused publishing 4 times, it made it. Orwell himself funded the translation in to Ukraine and I think some distribution/publication costs since he felt it important they had the bigger picture of what was happening to them at the hands of the Soviets.


So, where are we now? Well I will buy the Guardian occasionally. It's pretty easy to find the stories that are anything to do with vaguely investigative journalism. Normally in one of those 5 page little bits in the middle about a report or excerpts from a new book which they've paid to publish some of to save themselves the legwork. And I like the odd Sudoku.

But I guess I went through a phase where I found it staggeringly hard to pick up. It just enraged me less than other papers I guess, or no actually more. These guys are supposed to care right, the clue's in the paper's title? Sometimes I wouldn't buy it on point of principle because of items by people like Julie Burchill who I eventually brought myself to just ignore. I can still get wound up about the odd article that sticks in my mind, (and so I shall) one example being her rant about people with depression effectively being slackers. I really enjoyed that while a very close friend who worked hard all her life as a nurse and stood for some values (that the Guardian at least once pretended to) suffered a break down and subsequent depression for several years. Sorry Julie, you're just a twat that'll type up any old aggravating shit for some money. You could offer this opinion as that of a mirror to work with but its not even that since it doesn't provoke reflection as there is not enough substance to provoke it. If I wanted to read offensive, unintelligible and unsubstantiated material I'll read the BNP's mandate or something. But I don't like supporting views like this so I don't like paying for it.

But apparently the Guardian did not care, why bother with Churnalism when you can save more and just turn over the back half of your 'Review' to sex chat line advertising? Indeed why not just make the paper that? It's way cheaper? If you don't care about the quality of the journalism or what, celeb columnist's utterly offensive rhetoric you print then hey, go for it. I wonder how long before their first sex line advert that their previous Germain Greer article appeared?

Well, it aggravated me less than other papers so I get it now and again. Guess I sold out too. Maybe I just buy a Sudoku puzzle book now I think about it.

Am I being over the top? We seem to be past caring.

The last guardian article I read was a couple of weeks ago summed it up for me. It was about a report on the cost of the war in Iraq. They tried to give some context to the numbers by comparing them to UN budgets and various other things. I think the problem is is that the numbers are just too big to mean anything to most people.

This is the same as the media issue. Take in an hour or so of CNN. I watched a 'special report' on AIDS in Africa. You gotta hand it to CNN, we were told to come back after the break to see if the kid's parents made it or not as some sad fade out music bought me aghast into the aforementioned bank and golf adverts. Does that not make anyone scared? Who is editing that? What is their thought process there? I think we all know.

Looking for integrity, at the very minimum, is for sure a lost cause in most journalism now. Dig up a documentary called 'Spin'. That should be enough to frighten the life out of anyone with any doubts about the state of TV at least.

I wonder when CNN start sponsoring the military to try use weapons which have a better audience response when filmed, so long as they get 1st dibs on broadcasting such explosions? More frightening than that actually happening is that if a report came out (and was confirmed in some court of law to be true) stating that this was actually happening, we wouldn't know about it.

More frightening than that? If we did somehow find out we wouldn't be surprised would we.

Nothing jars any more. Just bigger, better dressed numbers fed a bit faster than yesterday.

The fat end of the wedge.
]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/03/selling-out-the-fat-end-of-the.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/03/selling-out-the-fat-end-of-the.html politics Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:38:26 +0000 Rambled Chicken Following recent 'chicken out' entry I felt compelled to post this comment which Chris recommended I move into an actual Entry itself. So here it is with a bit more digression and rambling :-)

Do you actually know that all the rest of the chicken is thrown away by companies/supermarkets selling cheaper broiler farm chickens? These guys are serious profit makers and I would be fairly certain they use at least some of what you don't get (even if not for moral reasons) for other purposes.

Supermarkets are also some of the countries most efficient transporters of food and I know the farmer's markets do sell fantastically better quality but there's no reason to assume you're doing the planet a favor by having 20 half full old trucks bumbling around the countryside and another 500 people getting themselves there and then to the supermarket anyway.

What is actually needed is supermarkets be forced to act more responsibly by law, meaning they aren't allowed to source food from so far etc etc. Supermarket chickens are super cheap because supermarkets are incredibly efficient because its in their interests to be (and of course because that chicken will suffer more). Efficiency concerns drive good strategically driven transport and networks of depots. The morality of what goes on with the animals etc aside, people should be prepared to admit that supermarkets do have some good points and learn from those if suggesting new methods of feeding 60 million people.

Don't get me wrong I dislike supermarkets and most of what they stand for but there is a model underneath at least worth examining. Encouraging them to change is important since they feed the majority and that's not going to change for some time. Admittedly taking one's business elsewhere will do this but it's questionable weather this is more effective than buying selectively in the supermarket since they then have more idea what you do want rather than just knowing that they have one less customer.

BTW I prefer organic and local farmers market stuff any day of the week. I just want to point out that in some ways its currently a far from perfect solution other than for one's taste-buds and health.

Ideally we'd all just stop eating meat, it'd be 10 times better for the planet and that's not much of an exaggeration honestly, it's a real biggy considering how much resource goes into animal transportation and watering and feeding. 1KG of meat requires about 100 times more water to produce. And the livestock grown on this planet for food consume about half of the worlds grain and wheat supplies.C'mon; I mean let's confess, we all know it right?


I mean if the point is animal welfare then stop eating them, if it's saving the planet then there's a many less efficient ways of bringing meat to your table then supermarkets manage. Or is it really because we want that nice tastey lamb chop on our table instead of the fat, injected crap that supermarkets dish up? Many other options exist in supermarkets these days. My biggest bug bear with supermarkets is packaging. Why must I buy my organic apples in a carton wrapped in plastic just so they can write 'organic' on it. Super pisses me off. Giveth in one and taketh with the other. This is where the government should step in and legislate. It would be really simple. It's their f*****g job after all.

It's fun to point fingers at the 'indolent fuckwits' but while we profess to know better and still don't act accordingly then there's more than an pinch of hypocrisy about it all. I see a lot of people liking meat too much and making themselves feel better about not giving it up by buying differently. I include myself here. We could all get a little more honest about this, that's all I'm trying to say. But then I guess we'd have to go and live under a rock somewhere and eat mud if we really want to be able to point the finger. We do stuff cos we like it and people just draw different lines in the sand.


Shit was that a rant? Was that even anything to do with Chris's original posting? I dunno, I just struggle with myself about the whole meat thing and farmer's markets and all that stuff is no answer to the planet's predicament and singling out other groups that aren't FOR SURE doing any worse is a difficult one for me. Just because they draw a different wrong line in the sand.

Oh dear this goes no where doesn't it? Means, 'because I do wrong I can't criticize others'. Ah, I go round and round like a fucktard's verbal merry go round. Help I can't get off!!! arrrgh. Not the most constructive argument I've ever made but this is the 'Isolationist' and I'm new here so bare with me. I wasn't sure if we're suppose to be bleak in a 'there's no hope sort of a way' or slightly more constructive. I guess I'm just becoming more and more jaded buy this stuff. Every time a new 'way forward' is suggested people find it fine to follow unquestioningly. I'm the same. Then you read something a few years later telling you that what you did before was better because of x,y and z knock on effects. But we find a dozen ways to justify it if it suits. We managed to justify theft to ourselves as soon as it saved us €15 on a CD purchase. Lots of things cost too much in this world and lots of companies make lots of money charging for them but the 1st time it was very hard to get caught stealing people convinced themselves it was OK to do so. Coincidence? Organic food from farmers markets just tastes better right?

Don't you sometimes ever feel like we're a bunch of ants running round on an egg that's fallen from a very high nest. I mean it seems to be the case. From an outsiders perspective at least. We know we're not and are trying to act accordingly and steer it somehow but the human mind's ability to head bury is vast and probably as yet mostly unexplored territory :-) we'll see soon enough I guess.

]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/03/following-recent-chicken-out-e.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/03/following-recent-chicken-out-e.html food Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:05:10 +0000 The World's Longest Sentence
Speaking of school, do you want to see my French written assignment? Tough.

It's about my profession.

125 words of pure gold!

Here we go.

Are you ready?

Voila:

"Mon profession est créateur des jeux électronique, que j’ai fait depuis 15 ans, et je l'aime beaucoup. Mais créant les jeux est long – quelques-uns demandent plus de trois ans - et stressant. Alors, je voulais une vie plus simple donc presque il y a une année j'ai quitte mon emploi et je suis revenu à bristol. Depuis que j’ai travaillé à mon compte et j'ai fait beaucoup des choses, même réparer les fenêtres ! En ce moment cependant j'ai un contrat court durée pour lequel j'ai crée un site Web prototype. Je travaille chez moi surtout, que j'aime beaucoup. Le trajet de mon travail est très court! Côté  inconvénients pendent la journée, en dehors de mon co-locateur qui travaille chez nous aussi, il y a personne à parler à."
]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/03/the-worlds-longest-sentence.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/03/the-worlds-longest-sentence.html isolationist buffy french grammar Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:40:37 +0000 Journalistic Decline London Review of Books landed on my doormat on Friday. It's a great magazine if you can find the time to read its incredibly well written but equally incredibly long articles. As a matter of fact, I've got a free subscription offer that technically I've given Clem first dibs on but it's free to a worthy home.

The lead article this week is a review of a book called Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. You can read it here and I strongly recommend that you do. As it goes its not one of the longer articles that the LRB publishes.

Ok, read it? Good. See what I mean?

I'm not going to reiterate everything that John Lancaster has written in his article but I just wanted to ruminate a little on a couple of things.

Firstly it's very interesting to read about a book that purports to give substance to what I'd hitherto suspected but not been able to quite put my finger on, namely that the contents of our newspapers have, to quote a PR monkey being interviewed about the newly diminutive Mars Bar on the Today show a couple of years ago, an increased sensation of lightness. I've felt disinclined to read newspapers for a number of years now for this very reason. For the record I read The Economist predominantly and The London Review of Books when I have time, which is not as often as I would like to even though without fail every time I do take the time I'm struck by the same thought that I wish I had more time to read this more often.

John Lancaster quotes some interesting statistics that Nick Davies' research team uncovered when they analysed the contents on the "posh" papers as he calls them and the Daily Mail. Posh I take to mean what would formerly have been described as the broadsheets. Specifically, oh what the hell, I'll stick the same quote here that's in the article, you probably didn't read it anyway:

"They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked."

So essentially journalists are regurgitating press-releases and wire copy (which he goes on to say is largely Press Association).

Reading all of this reminded me of a talk that I went to at the frontline club (a private club for foreign correspondents) which was an interview with John Fisher Burns, the Bureau Chief in Iraq for the New York Times. You can see that interview here. Incidentally there's also a recording of an interview with Nick Davies that you can see here. Anyway, go back to the John Fisher Burns interview and watch from about 40 minutes in until 50 minutes where Burns is responding to a question about who may have predicted the outcome of the invasion of Iraq at the time to which he responds that Robert Fisk was probably the only person who did before going on to explain that in the year leading up to the war that he was writing articles based on the premise that the human rights abuses going on in Iraq were so atrocious that getting rid of Saddam almost no matter what the cost was the correct course of action. He then expands on that thought I think with a remarkable degree of honestly to say that he felt that he measured the problem "by the standard of human rights [rather than] by the standard of history" and he concludes by saying that if he had his time again he would have studied the history of Iraq and the region in much greater detail.

I was absolutely flabbergasted to hear this from this man who was, and I say this with no trace of over-statement, one of the world's most important opinion formers leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here was the bureau chief for Iraq admitting that he had a "failure of imagination" and didn't grasp that removing the capstone that Saddam Hussein was would cause the kinds of problems we've been seeing for the last five years.

And we wonder why our Newspapers are light. There's your answer right there.

Makes I mad.
]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/03/journalistic-decline.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/03/journalistic-decline.html politics Flat Earth News John Fisher Burns John Lancaster London Review of Books Nick Davies Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:28:59 +0000 Hypocrisy and The Isolationist
So it is with life and so it is with the isolationist.

Now you could be forgiven for thinking that a blog entitled "the isolationist" would contain the self-indulgent ramblings of a single self-obsessed individual who eschews human contact, striving only to express the perfect solipsistic thought. And I'm not here today to contradict you. I'm just saying that rather than one isolationist there are now five. Each individual free to follow their own whims and fancies. And lets face it, if they write more I can get away with writing less, which is better for everyone.

So without further delay the new writers are:

Caroline Child
Thomas Paullier
Clemency Evans
John Shave

I asked them to be guest contributors because they've all got really interesting viewpoints on life and come from very different backgrounds as well as a penchant for wordiness which goes a long way with me. Thomas and Caroline have already written excellent articles about dancing and scuba diving and John and Clemency will be posting their first articles in the next couple of weeks.
]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/hypocrisy-and-the-isolationist.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/hypocrisy-and-the-isolationist.html isolationist caroline child clemency evans john shave thomas paullier Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:18:26 +0000 Le Grand Bleu Here I am, standing in my trunks on the side of this swimming pool which is no larger than a dozen of feet in diameter. The warm water bubbling at the surface could lead to believe that this is a Jacuzzi of some sort. But it is not. I am approaching the edge and stare hypnotically at the water which I cannot see the bottom. What looks like a tiny pool is actually an impressive tube of water, which disappears in the deepness, like an infinite column of blue fizzy liquid. This is a proper scuba diving training pool, with 15 meters of depth, the equivalent of a 5-storey building. A few minutes before my first dive, a strange feeling of vertigo takes me…

I have been thinking about this moment for the past few days with a mix of excitement and apprehension… And the closer I got to the crucial moment, the more my anxiety grew and I tried to think of an excuse that would postpone the experience. Actually, I do have a little cold these days and diving with a cold is against safety rules. But my instructor accurately assessed that this pretended cold was only as important as a couple of sneezes a day and replied wisely that I’ll be alright… Nice try… However, I’m sorry to insist but I forgot my diving license today, and it is mandatory to have it on you for any dive… you know, in case of accident for the insurance and so forth… I was hoping for a little bollocking followed by something along the lines of ‘sorry sir, the rules are the rules. I’ll let you dive next time when you have all your documentation with you, but we gonna have to cancel your dive today’. Instead, my instructor gave me a sympathetic glance. He went to his office, looked up on the internet and checked on the official website that I indeed had a licence. Then he came back to me and ‘exceptionally’ accepted that I dive without my licence. Damn it! I ran out of ideas, and accepted the fact that today was going to be the day.

I am now all equipped in my diving outfit, which makes me look like some futuristic frog - typical for a Frenchman! Before getting into the water, Christian, my instructor, reminds me the basics: ‘Remember to breath normally, to balance the pressure in your ears while going down, not to do so while going up, to exhale when you go up, to deflate your jacket as you go up'... It seems to me that there are a million things to remember and I am far too busy being nervous to be able to do so…

He jumps… And then I jump…

Wow! I love this weightlessness sensation in the water. After a few seconds at the surface, I deflate my jacket, which makes me go down in the deepness instantaneously. I feel like an astronaut. Christian and I meet at 5 meters of depth where we settle for a while, checking that everything is okay. He asks me to perform a couple of stupid exercises like taking my nozzle off or undoing my goggles and put them back on again… I perform them. No problem. I am actually much more relaxed now. The fact that we need to communicate with our hands is good fun too. From those signs, I imagine us talking like little Indians. You looking. Me going down. You following. If you problem, you telling me. Roger? Roger.

We hover around in the water and decide to carry on our descent along the vertical rope. I am really surprised by how everything is slow and blue and peaceful down here. And the deeper we get, the easier it becomes to go down. Within a few minutes, we are at the very bottom of the pool where we settle and ask each other again if everything is all right. I am happy to be here. Christian makes an applauding mime, which is no proper scuba language sign, but I understand he congratulates me for having made it. I am very proud.

We remain at 15 meters of depth for about quarter of an hour, performing various exercises, before we start moving back up again. I am very concentrated on all the safety measures during that critical phase of the dive. Not that any of it is difficult, but the fact that most incidents turn into major traumas is a good motivator to do them all properly.

As I come out of the water, I am very much aware of my weight and of the surrounding noise. It takes me a while to actually want to talk. Undoing my equipment requires a lot of effort after thirty odd minutes of lightness. Christian debriefs me on the time spent under water. Apart from a couple a minor points, he is fairly positive about this first experience.

I have a big smile on my face. I am pleased that I managed to overcome my anxiety and made this happen without any trouble. Already, I cannot wait for my next dive to occur! The real thing this time, into the wild blue sea. Le Grand Bleu…

]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/le-grand-bleu.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/le-grand-bleu.html life blue diving scuba diving Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:42:24 +0000 Bouldr.net this site, looks quite cool. Not a lot of entries for Bristol and thereabouts, though.
]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/bouldrnet.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/bouldrnet.html climbing bouldr.net bristol climbing Sun, 17 Feb 2008 12:45:41 +0000 Coming back to Climbing
The last time I climbed properly was in 2002-2003 when I first got into it and I did a couple of courses teaching how to climb outdoors safely and was regularly leading 6c's indoors at Undercover Rock at St Werburgh's. 6c is nothing to a real climber but I was quite pleased to be able to do those at the time. Outdoors I only did it "properly" once on a Very Severe, 4c multi-pitch climb in the Avon Gorge. I've published a post from the original incarnation of The Isolationist, dated 29th August 2003, describing that climb; I was quite excited.

When I first picked up climbing again, probably in September or October last year, I went all the way back to top-roping 5a's and struggled a bit with that. That was quite hard but when I went last Friday night I was quite pleased that I felt relatively comfortable leading a tricky 6a climb. At least I'm back in the 6's! I was also doing ok in the bouldering room.

So now my attentions are turning to climbing outdoors again. Time to dust off my trad gear, and hope that the ropes haven't perished and the wallnuts haven't rusted. Only one way to find out!

]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/coming-back-to-climbing.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/coming-back-to-climbing.html climbing avon gorge climbing undercover rock very severe Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:30:00 +0000 Very Severe
Another crazy climbing adventure today. We climbed Central Rib on the main walls at the Avon Gorge (VS, 4c).
"Central Rib * 220ft VS. First climbed by B. Page and Miss A. Clark in 1954. Pleasant and popular. "
Very pleasant I imagine, with only a pair of hob-nailed boots for protection. This was first time that I've properly led outdoors, placing gear and relying on it. I'll tell you, it certainly makes you feel alive. The moves weren't technically difficult but I was so scared, particularly when protection got to be a little way beneath me. So scared in fact that I started playing with it a little bit. At one point, I was probably about 150 feet up, and my leg started shaking, really quite badly: I put my hand on a nice secure hold, leg stops shaking, take it off again, leg goes again, off: shaky, on: steady, off: shaky, on: steady. Puny Earthling! So that was fun. It was a multi-pitch climb so I had to figure out how to setup a belay station roughly half-way up the wall, basically on a narrow ledge, to get Ginger up safely, which took forever. But when I finally saw Ginger making the last few moves before joining me I felt this really warm satisfied glow. The kind you get when you've done something important (to you at least). I think we mis-read the guide book a bit for the second pitch because I got up about ten feet and thought there is no way I'm climbing up that and traversed left about ten feet. When I started going up after the traverse I found a section that the guide book had described, back on track, hurray. I'm glad I didn'thave to do that other bit, flashback to images of mountain rescue. I'd never been so glad to see a little crack in rock in all my life as I was today, climbing up towards the two hundred feet mark and suddenly there was nowhere to place protection, the climbing was pretty easy but the last bit of gear was about twenty five feet below me. And that does strange things to your mind: "I know this is safe, it's really unlikely that I'll fall. But if I do, I'm falling at least fifty feet onto a bit of gear that I placed and that may or may not hold."
Add to that the fact that I can't remember what that last bit of gear was rated to withstand. Was it 2KN or 12? That makes a big difference when a sixty-five kilo man drops fifty feet, I can tell you. And remember I was getting on for two hundred feet up at this point. And I'm really quite scared of heights. Fortunately I found a little crack to jam something into. Which was nice. So that was that, 220 feet of pure adrenalin, but man, it was so satisfying reaching the top and then seeing Ginger get up safely too.


]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/very-severe-another-crazy-clim.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/very-severe-another-crazy-clim.html climbing avon gorge central rib very severe Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:25:00 +0000 Half-Nelson
In a nutshell the film is about a free-basing, crack-addicted history teacher who is nevertheless able to inspire his pupils with his unique perspective on the subject and quirky didactic style. Which is, frankly, a pretty good starting point for a film like this. And crucially, for me at least, the director (Ryan Fleck) avoids cliché and moralising by leaving it to the viewer's imagination to decide what happens Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling).

As is well understood from anyone having read anything about this film the central story revolves around the relationship between Dan and one of his pupils, Drey (Shareeka Epps), their respective problems and most interestingly how they each handle Drey's discovery of Mr Dunne, how shall I put it, whacked out of his mind on crack in the changing rooms after a basketball game. We're not talking about having had a a bit of a smoke and feeling a bit squiffy, he was in the throes of a fairly serious hit, on the floor trying to keep it together but not really succeeding.

As you might imagine that scene, being pivotal to the film, was very well executed and Ryan Gosling was careful to preserve the teacher/pupil relationship throughout, a feat not easy to carry out whilst maintaining any degree of believability. In fact I'd say that for most of the film this fine line was successfully trodden.

What makes this film interesting for me was the fact that what develops in the story is the relationship between the two main characters, not the characters themselves. This might seem obvious but in most films the story arc of the main protagonist is clear cut and by and large it involves some highs and some lows before tying any loose ends up in a neat little bundle. But we leave this film not knowing how either of the main characters will fair; Dan's drug addiction is still a big problem and as I suspect Drey's nascent career in crime will become.

I like film to reflect life; it's not simple, everyone isn't nice and things rarely end up well. This film is filled with moral ambiguity, what do we think about a teacher being high on coke whilst teaching our kids? What do we think about a teacher forming a strong bond with one of his pupils? (another good thing about this film is that the relationship never comes across as inappropriate). And Dan does some things that few of us would be proud of. But as he says to Drey, "Just because you know this one thing ... one thing doesn't make a man". And that sums it up, we're all good and bad and when we find good friends we should keep them.

]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/halfnelson.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/halfnelson.html film crack addiction half nelson ryan fleck ryan gosling shareeka epps teaching Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:15:00 +0000 European Mini-Adventure Day 3
Day 3 - 5th May

The sun rose into a clear sky over the beautiful mallorcean skyline of rugged mountains and my mood continued to brighten. The people of Palma were friendly and helpful, indulging my faltering spanish (even though mallorceans speak catalan most assuredly). Since I was last here it's clear that a lot of work has been done to improve the infrastructure of the island. From the taxi driver who drove me from the port to town to the ticket clerk they were all proud of their new subterranean train station, and rightly so. It's an austere minimalist place but relaxing to be in and easy to navigate. Also, I was able to buy a ticket to Sa Pablo, on the other side of the island near Puerto de Pollenca, for less than half the price of reserving my ticket on the train from Perpignan to Barcelona. Mum, who was planning to pick me up from Sa Pablo, was held up finishing off some work so I ended up getting the bus instead - getting the hang this malarky. Everything is easier when the sun is shining.

I met Mum at a cafe where she was having a coffee with one of her ex-pat friends and she proceeded to embarrass and fuss over me. Some things will never change but seeing mum always awakens uncomfortable feelings and memories. So much has gone wrong with our family over the years.

There was a massive thunder storm in the afternoon that put the keibosch on any grand plans I had for sitting on the beach. It was a cracking storm though, with the sound vying with the visuals for top marks in texture and quality; deep and long rumbling booms contesting with sharp crackling forks of lightning goring the ground. ]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/european-miniadvetnure-day-3.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/european-miniadvetnure-day-3.html life european mini-adventure palma Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:28:07 +0000 The Rhythm of Life I recently heard this song by Cy Coleman and it reminded me why I love dancing.  There aren’t many places where you can go these days, meet thirty strangers and come away feeling somehow more alive, more present and that you have had another wonderful night.   You go to bed with aching feet and wake up feeling refreshed becuase you've slept the whole night through.  There is no terrible hangover as you have drunk only water all evening. 

It doesn’t really matter the dance, whatever dance evening I go to, I tend to love it.  I love picking up the rhythm in the music: the fast pulse of a Latino beat; the slow curvaceous sounds of a crooner; I love spinning around, skirt twirling, catching a hand before being spun again; hundreds of pairs of feet moving in time.  You don’t know the person you’re dancing with, you might not say anything but a ‘Yes’ and a ‘Thank you’ all evening but it doesn’t matter, indeed verbal conversations sometimes lessen the experience, because you have conversations through dance.  You swiftly get to know who you naturally dance well with; who is energetic and loves to move quickly; who likes the slow dances and will move elegantly and with confidence and who likes to laugh, sing along and enjoy the music.  After a few weeks of dancing regularly, you feel very comfortable in the dance hall as you have danced with or watched most people there.  I also think that human touch is really important and certainly in London, one can too easily go through the whole day with the only human physical contact being a shove on the tube or a business hand shake.

There are of course, as in any society, your share of idiots: the man who is too sensual for comfort (everyone will have different limits on this); the jokester who extends a hand for you to grab and then whisks it away like he’s played a hilarious joke, or the man who’d rather focus on his own balletic gestures than admit he’s dancing in a pair. I am sure there would be a similar list of undesirable qualities in female partners, but someone will have to inform me of these.  But these are the minority, I always come away and feel I have met a wide range of society and a lot of interesting people away from my normal circle of colleagues and friends.

British men all too often seem to have this fear of dancing; they need to be utterly paralytic and surrounded by similarly drunken mates to venture a foot onto the dance floor.  They scoff and smirk at the man who likes dancing while they down another pint of beer.  It’s a shame.  Is this a recent phenomenon?  Dancing seemed more part of the culture in British society certainly in the older generations who seem to know how to do the waltz, the foxtrot and a variety of other dances.  I think an important social interaction has been lost.  Now, we pay money to go into impersonal gyms and sweat in silence with i-pods and television screens as our company, twelve hours indoors working, now in your leisure hour, go indoors again.  There can be a danger of loneliness, and dare I say it, isolation, in our society that dancing helps to combat.

Some might complain this kind of dancing is incredibly sexist or that they don’t like having to follow a set routine or pattern, they are too individual.  Rubbish!  If you get any good, there is tremendous freedom in dance, it’s only for those of us learning the ropes that it’s terribly structured and that helps give you some security when dancing with someone you don’t know.  Sexist, well yes it is I guess; the man leads and the woman follows but to be honest, I don’t give a damn! I like losing myself in the music and not having to worry about what move I should do next.  I have to concentrate to make sure I am following and there is still freedom in the movements. 

Have I persuaded you to get on the dance floor?  If I have, have a look on the web at your nearest Ceroc venue or salsa dance night.  There are usually beginners and intermediate classes followed by ‘freestyle’, you can just go for a one off try, it's usually about eight pounds but that's all you spend.   As Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields wrote,


‘And The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat,
Puts a tingle in your fingers and a tingle in your feet,
Rhythm in your bedroom,
Rhythm in the street,
Yes, The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat’

 

Get dancing!
     
]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/the-rhythm-of-life.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/the-rhythm-of-life.html life ceroc dancing Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:58:29 +0000 'Definitely, Maybe' How wonderful to come out of a film feeling happy!  After last week’s viewing of ‘No Country for Old Men’ this is indeed a different feeling.  I can go to bed with a feeling of contentment, a pleasant evening spent laughing; an element of hope.  I won’t have to wake up tomorrow feeling like I’ve come out of a strangely disturbing dream; I won’t have images of spurting carotid arteries popping into my mind throughout the day; nor will I be wondering whether or not the next stranger I have to interact with is a psychopathic killer (incidentally I can’t believe this actor, Javier Bardem, is going to play the main romantic hero in ‘Love in the Times of Cholera’, one of my favourite novels, how am I going to make the switch? Such an inconsiderate choice.)  I must have spent three days chewing over the plot, the images, the feelings.  As much as I left the film feeling miserable, it did allow much thought and discussion.  ‘Definitely Maybe’, did definitely not provide such musings, but I don’t care; it was just what I wanted.  The joy of the rom com: I can see it, enjoy it and forget it!  

‘Definitely Maybe’ was a little quirky in its structure, the interesting framework of a father explaining his pre-marital relationships to his ten year-old daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin from the delightful ‘Little Miss Sunshine’) provided humourous interjections as we are aligned with her in trying to guess who the mother is. Admittedly he does end up telling his daughter some pretty weird stuff (such as her mother’s lesbian affair) which makes you question his parental role… still New York children are pretty mature these days.   Cleverly timed, the Clinton presidential campaign provides an interesting early context with the Lewinsky affair mirroring the main character’s disillusionment with politics and life. 

 The film is charming but ultimately forgettable.  It doesn’t really try to be realistic: it doesn’t dwell on the pain of divorce or separation, and the way stunningly beautiful, amusing and clever women seem incredibly easy to come by may well infuriate single men.  More appealingly to us thirty-somethings, the characters don’t seem to age from 24 to 33.  The main message seems more to be you just end up with the right person at the right time without it being very much in your control.  This film is one for an enjoyable night out; the silver screen can lure you into its world and leave you with a happy sigh and a pleasant sleep, maybe. 

]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/definitely-maybe.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/definitely-maybe.html film definitely maybe romcom Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:45:00 +0000 Chicken Out Taste (purveyors of fine foods, with a particularly good butcher), give up, four massive breasts, four thighs, four drummers and a litre of tasty stock. And in addition to all that you get the livers for making paté. For a house of three people (like what I live in), that £16 goes a long long way, we'll easily get five or six meals out of it not counting soups and risottos with the stock.

So anyway, why am I writing about all that, eh? Well Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made a television (you remember that old thing?) program called Chicken Out broadcast earlier in January where he compared free range chicken production with battery chicken production because apparently Hugh was (rightly) outraged by the rise of the £2.99 supermarket chicken. Anyway on said show, again apparently because I don't sully myself with television, there were members of the unclean masses interviewed bemoaning the fact that they couldn't afford chicken if it was more expensive than £2.99. These people were the sorts that buy the chicken, microwave the fucker, eat the breasts and toss the rest away. Quite why Hugh bothers wasting his time with these indolent fuckwits I don't know but I suppose there are rather a lot of them. But there's probably not enough time between Eastenders and Coronation Street for anything other than bouts of uncontrolled flatulence, so again I don't know why he bothers.

So in conclusion then, I don't know about you (not being an indolent fuckwit) but quite apart from the moral and economic issues, (such as they are given that for less than 90p per person, per meal you can eat tasty free range chicken) the taste of an anaemic tescos (or sainsbury's, or asda or waitrose or morrisons) chicken is enough to turn you into a vegetarian. And fuck me that's saying something.

]]> http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/chicken-out.html http://www.theisolationist.com/2008/02/chicken-out.html food chicken out hugh fearnley-whittingstall Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:16:08 +0000