So the repair shop says “call back in 48 hours while we work our last-ditch effort.” So I call back today, 48 hours later. The repair shops says “um…the boss is out. Call back tomorrow?”
Annoying. But I don’t care, because I have just uncovered my long-lost copy of ODIN by Julian Cope. ODIN is “a simultaneously-synthesized parallel-harmonic Breathing Meditation of 73 minutes and 45 seconds’ duration.” Released on Head Heritage in 2000, it’s one of the most inspirational pieces of music in my collection. (And one day I’ll bore everyone to tears with my specific reason for keeping a CD collection.) Head Heritage (co.uk – google it) may still have copies, but check Amazon, your local one and co.uk, for it if they don’t. It’s one massive circular-breathing vocal mantra with Mellotron and other electronically-imported atmospherics, labeled as a “meditation on Silbury and Waden Hill” — a consideration and evocation of the dramas and mysteries of the ancient English landscape. It’s one of those things I can get absolutely lost in, and emerge from with my thinking retuned.
Sent by email from Nokia 810, of course.

Haven´t even heard from the computer shop today. I suspect my computer lays in a shallow grave in their back garden, like a dead rabbit. This serves only as a reminder to all that I remain offline and desktopless, and am posting this via email from a phone.

I am also rather concerned about the sudden urge, half an hour ago, to alphabetise my cd collection. If I don’t get my computer back soon, I will clearly be found constructing rows of tiny houses out of toenail clippings, earwax and scrote-hair in the very near future.

I just thought of names for the houses. I must go now.

Well, the Nokia/Maemo boys and girls will be delighted to hear that I managed to write an entire premise document on the 810 and got it sent off via a bluetooth tether to a N95. My eyeballs are completely shot. Also managed to get some FREAKANGELS pages written — luckily, I´m holding a lot of that in my head right now. I would kill for an open wifi spot around here someplace, though.
Dusted off an old CD player, and am listening to the first CocoRosie album while finding myself doing odd things like paging through a book of Bauhaus design, rediscovering the art of Blue Note sleeves (I love old sleeve design, and Blue Note has always been a favourite. Sleeve notes kind of died out before my time — can you miss something that was gone before you knew about it?) And re-reading Tarkovsky´s SCULPTING IN TIME, which is useful not only for some insight into his method, but also his insight into others, like the way Bergman uses sound. Which I´m sort of picking around at the same time as I pick around my responses to The Baroque Cycle (and baroque art in general) and THE BLACK DOSSIER, which I´m coming to see as baroque in many ways. Baroque can be characterised, after all, as the grandiose and insanely detailed display and exercise of complete control over one´s art. It is to say See, here, I have power over base matter. Can you think of a better description of BLACK DOSSIER? Matter doesn´t get much more base than the mire of British culture he dredges out, and yet, in vast and intricate detail, he gets an alternate history out of it. The book interests me in lots of ways, not least because it doesn´t quite work for me. Like Eddie Campbell´s FATE OF THE ARTIST, even books you find to be artistic failures are instructive when performed by savants of the medium.
Sent by email, naturally. Good night.

Well, I didn´t get hit by the earthquake. The computer shop has decided to try one more last-ditch recovery effort. Note: if your OS fails to launch, and tech support has you try to boot from the resources CD — don´t. That´s what´s foiled a complete data recovery.
I almost told them to just wipe the machine and bring it back, but the bit´s between their teeth now and they´re refusing to give up, bless ´em. The downside is that I won’t get the machine back until Friday at best.
So I´m writing here via email for the foreseeable. Which I find I am actually quite liking. Twitter is currently working via the handheld, although, with Brian Reed apparently hellbent on giving us a minute-to-minute report on the weather in whatever shithole he lives in, I expect to hit the 250 texts/week limit any moment now.

So it turns out that one of the things tech support had me try may have completely bollocksed the computer, and any kind of data recovery is unlikely at this point (as noted earlier, my backups had failed too). I find myself less upset about this than I expected. I´ve lost a music collection, of course, and some current work (all the notes for the graphic novella I´m to start writing next week, which is a bugger)… But I appear to be able to muster little more than mild annoyance or minor disappointment, and that only at a few things. My research material is largely preserved, here and at delicious, as are my photos.
Although life would have been hugely more convenient without this happening, I´m wondering if I haven´t been done a bit of a favour. A wiped computer, for me, is not unlike being presented with a clean slate for thinking. All previous ideas erased. Not necessarily a bad thing, on the occasion of your fortieth birthday. Not bad at all.
(Oh, and on top of everything else, I got knocked flat Monday by what was either a massive allergy attack or a 24-hr lungfoam infection. Which meant I finally got to finish reading the last of Neal Stephenson´s Baroque Cycle. I´d never normally recommend you read a 3000-page work, but the Cycle is just a towering piece of work, and I think you should read it before you die. A hundred pages from the end, I got that terrible longing sadness, the one that comes when you realise youŕe near the end of something and you´ĺl never have the joy of reading this in the same way again.)
Also, with the right keyboard, this Nokia 810 is a fucking joy to write on.
Sent from email, obv.

If anyone’s wondering, by the way, I’m posting these via an email-to-blog system.
So the computer has been collected for data recovery and restoration. Apparently I can expect a call tomorrow morning with the results. The guy’s not taking any chances, and is going to clone the drive before slaving it and poking around. We live in hope.
In the meantime, Shi informed me through Twitter that Stage6 is closing on Feb 28, so if you want any videos off there, grab them now. I am even more incensed about being offline than I was before, as I’d barely dented the Sherlock Holmes shows on Stage6 (got most of them on videotape, but…)

I am writing this on the Nokia 810 tablet — bless you, Quim Gil, and who knew this would become mission-critical kit so quickly? — As bluetoothed into the phone. It turns out that data recovery is in my future. A professional data recovery service just turned down the job — ¨ItÅ› only a 250GB hard drive, sir, you´d be better off taking it to a local shop rather than have us charge you 900 quid for such a little job¨ — and so I have to call around the local places tomorrow to find someone who can expedite the job of slaving the drive, yanking the data off it and reinstalling XP over it.
Short version: I doubt Iĺl be online before Wednesday, somehow.
So, if youÅ•e someone looking for pages from me, or waiting to hear from me on some social network or forum…youÅ•e shit out of luck, Im afraid…

• March of Democracy
  “This map gives us a visual ballet of democracy’s march across history as the most popular form of government. From the first ancient republics to the rise of self-governing nations, see the history of democracy: 4,000 years in 90 seconds”
  (tags: maps pol)

Well, I did wonder how this week could get worse. I walked away from the computer for five minutes this evening, and when I came back it was dead. Windows XP won’t boot, and tech support thinks the hard drive file structure has corrupted or just plain broken. I didn’t mention that my backups failed earlier in the week, did I? That was Sunday’s job. So I’m offline, and unable to work effectively if at all, until Monday at best. Unless I do a complete restore that erases the hard drive, ha ha.
I am now waiting for the house to burn down.

(Grizzly! on Flickr)

“The author stresses the point that all of these preconditions have now been met to one degree or another in the current U.S.:”

1. Soaring then crashing standards of living
2. Rising class war/disillusionment
3. A generation of abandoned intellectuals
4. Incompetent government
5. Failure of leadership
6. Fiscal Irresponsibility
7. Inept and inconsistent use of force

• The Appleseed Project: THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING
  “acceptance of a distributed social networking model is, as the internet has shown, an inevitability.”
  (tags: web sns)

His MECHA NAGA BUDDHA design becomes shirt of the day at Design By Humans.

Matt Brooker just told me that Steve Whitaker died this morning.

Steve was much nicer to me than he needed to be when I was a kid starting out. I liked him immensely for it, and was an amazed admirer of his work. Steve Whitaker was a flat-out savant. When he had the time to produce comics work, those pages just sang. I can remember one-pagers he did for fanzines in the 80s with clarity, because of the beauty and comedy of his line and the flawless stunts he could pull with storytelling and draughtmanship. He should have had far more impact on the world of colour in comics than he did, because he was, as Matt observes, world-class. For whatever reasons, things just never aligned well enough for Steve to produce the body of work that he should have done. I was asking Matt, just the other month, “has it happened yet?” I feel like we got cheated.

Matt’s notice is here.

Tell me nothing else can go wrong this week, please.

If you’re a member of my mailing list Bad Signal and had been wondering why you still haven’t gotten any posts from it, here’s why.

It turns out the current admin of the server Bad Signal’s run on decided, last Thursday, to just switch the mail server software off. Without actually telling anyone. Including, of course, the good people who arranged for my list to be run off that server many years ago. And it seems he’s not particularly interested in switching it back on.

There goes my ability to contact 11,000 readers.

I’m working to get a new system in place, but it’s going to be a couple of weeks. So, if you’re on the Signal, just stand by for instructions.

I got Ariana to crunch the viewing stats on the first episode of FREAKANGELS into a form where idiots (me) could understand it. I know some commentators (thinking of Tom Spurgeon here) like a little transparency in these things, so here’s what Ariana said to me:

Absolute Unique Visitors: 77,031

Friday, February 15, 2008 (29,016)
Saturday, February 16, 2008 (18,763)
Sunday, February 17, 2008 (13,209)
Monday, February 18, 2008 (11,887)
Tuesday, February 19, 2008 (6,738)
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 (5,065)
Thursday, February 21, 2008 (5,288)

98,697 Visits (Not unique. This will include people that came back on another day, but it’s not the ginormous number that PAGEVIEWS is — this is actual sessions. Raw logs add about 20-30K to this number, but there’s no way for me to tell you whether those are bots, spiders, or just folks with javascript disabled. I’d probably add a buffer of at least 5k folks that just weren’t calculated for whatever reason — just working off general proportions for the other sites we’re running. There’s no way for RSS readers to grab the full ep, so we _can_ assume that no one is reading the thing that’s not getting it straight from the site, or whatever reposts may be out there.)

Episode 2 is live.

• Top 40 Free Downloadable Open Source Social Networking Software | Vivalogo Resources
  “Vivalogo’s list of best free, downloadable, open source social networking software. Unlike some other lists you may find on the net, this one contains only really downloadable and functional software.”
  (tags: web sns)
• First UFO sanctuary opens in Russia – Pravda.Ru
  “A lot of mythological legends spread around Molebskaya zone… descriptions of people meeting aliens and even talks about the “Gate to Shambala” that is situated on one of the hills.”
  (tags: ufo weird)
• Folkstr
  self-hosted, extensible social network application
  (tags: sns web)
• cromple | Keep your friends updated with this simple blog system!
  Twitter competitor?
  (tags: sns microblog web blog)

The 4am is a mixtape file containing nothing but music donated directly by new and/or unsigned acts. The 4am is of no set length and is released on no set schedule. The 4am is mixed down to 128 of the kbps. If you enjoyed The 4am, please spread the word, linking back to this post.

10: Peace And Soil

Yeah, I know, it’s been a month since the last one. A combination of work pressure and really not finding much music that seems to suggest a progression or sequence for a podcast. So have a short 4am that reeks of misery, loneliness, injury, abandonment and death.

It’s about time I used something from Aaron McMullan: wonderful voice, and a real writer. Burnt Earth’s other work has a strong early Human League/Depeche Mode influence, but “Locked Inside” is, to me, the one where they reach escape velocity; it’s bigger, more muscular, stomping and grinding sparks.

“Fierce The Fallow Foe” is just beautiful, a funereal garden.

Hope you find something here to enjoy.

 

 The 4am: 10 - Peace And Soil [14:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (9199)

Aaron McMullan – “Ode To Innocence” (5:09)

Burnt Earth – “Locked Inside” (5:14)

Poles Apart – Fierce The Fallow Foe (4:25)

The 4am needs music: If you want your music to be played on The 4am, email your 128kbps-plus mp3 files directly to warrenellis@gmail.com.

The 4am has been played more than 45000 times.