All posts by Tom

Thoughts on parenthood, part one

It’s been a year since the hot July evening when my best friend gave birth to our baby daughter. That was a long day, to be followed by many long days and long nights, learning little by little how to care for a baby growing and developing before our very eyes.

She’s a toddler now. Her favourite activities are walking up and down our long living room with a little wooden trolley, and climbing onto the sofa, then climbing down, then climbing up again. Yesterday, leaving the house, she said “Bye bye Lar” to our dog, Larry. We’ve been on a couple of bike rides. She has friends at nursery school, including one who gave her a present the other day. She loves music, singing and dancing, especially rock ‘n’ roll, reggaeton and “What shall we do with the drunken sailor?”.

Parenthood is at once strange and instantly familiar. It’s the biggest responsibility, but also the most rewarding. The most fascinating thing about it is that our daughter is not just a facsimile of her parents. She’s an individual person, forming her own personality, likes and dislikes. Obviously, we’ll influence her hugely, but she is not us. And we are not her.

The life I want for our daughter is simple happiness. I want her to learn to ski and sail. To love books and travel. Not to be burdened with too much homework until she’s much bigger. To love food and cooking. To adore and respect the countryside and wildlife. And all the things she’s going to show us that I can’t even imagine now.

All in good time, Tom. All in good time.

For the moment, sleeping through the night would be a big step forward.

Bluehost are scum. Or: I’m back, baby!

BlueNOPE, more like!
BlueNOPE, more like!

This is a tale of woe, and more so because I’m with the dreaded lurgy. I’ll keep it brief:

My sites have been hosted with Bluehost for more than 10 years. In that time, I’ve paid the company several thousand dollars to have a couple of crappy blogs online, as well as to provide hosting for websites belonging to my mother, my father-in-law, a cousin of my wife and the odd friend from time to time. For a very small amount of traffic, I had paid Bluehost quite a lot of money. I think it was good business for them.

A couple of years back, Bluehost was bought by EIG, a hosting company which has become enormous by buying loads of other hosting companies in the last few years. This is when things started to go wrong. One day, hackers targeted my site (probably by means of a corrupted WordPress plugin), it was hacked and malicious files propagated across various WordPress installations.

There isn’t, you see, a way of preventing this.

Except there is!

The long and short of it is that Bluehost fails to provide industry-standard security for their hosting packages, preferring to charge $50+ per website (upwards of $400 a year for me in total) to prevent hacking attacks.

Partly as a result of this Bluehost then shut down all of my hosting and informed me that I had to remove the malicious files to get the sites back online. I did so. But a few months later, the sites were hacked and suspended once again. This time I removed the files that Bluehost told me about, only to be informed that “This is just a sample of the infected files, you’ll need to go through every file in your hosting, line by line, to be sure”.

There isn’t, you see, a tool to fix this.

Except there is!

Bluehost just wanted to charge me hundreds of dollars to remove the malicious files. After dealing with their customer service several times, including via Twitter, it became obvious that Bluehost was unwilling to help a longstanding client with an industry-standard solution. So after languishing in limbo for several months, I have managed to obtain my database files (again, no help from Bluehost who have made backing up WordPress sites a premium service, meaning I had to use phpMyAdmin, which fortunately I know how to use but many other users would obviously have just paid at this point or before).

No company is perfect, of course, but when a company starts to charge more for basic services or ignore its longstanding clients, it’s time to move on. I’ve moved to MDDHosting, which seems to be a decent outfit. The other sites previously hosted at Bluehost will shortly come online here, hopefully with their content fully intact. I still need to add in the old images for this site, restore categories and tags, etc, but that’s pretty simple work.

So hello again, and fuck you very much, Bluehost. Thank you. I’m back, baby!

Cascadia, earthquakes and Catalonia

This excellent piece from the New Yorker slipped under my radar when it was published (so you may already have read it). It covers the worrying evidence that the US Pacific coast from northern California to Vancouver Island, an area not known for its seismic activity, is actually at risk of a massive and devastating earthquake. The Cascadia subduction apparently poses much more of a risk than the more famous San Andreas fault.

This, coupled with last month’s tragic earthquake in Amatrice, led me to look up the seismic potential in Catalonia. Surely being so close to a ‘young’ mountain range like the Pyrenees indicates we’re at risk from earthquakes? The answer is: no. The Generalitat’s report into Catalonia’s seismicity found that while there have been a number of quakes in the Garrotxa region (its volcanoes last erupted 10,000 years ago), Catalonia’s a stable area. The Basque end of the Pyrenees is far more prone to tremors.

 

In deepest, darkest #Catalonia #valldellemena #rocacorba

A photo posted by Tom Clarke (@tombcn) on

We went to la Garrotxa at the weekend, celebrating ten years of marriage. We stayed in the Vall de Llèmena, just to the south. Llèmena is a real hidden gem – gorgeous forested landscapes and very little human interference. Much as I love the neighboring Empordà region, Llèmena has a lot going for it.

Are You With Me Now?

I shan’t bother with the apologies. Suffice to say, inactivity plagues this blog, like most others. My remedy: trying to post shorter, more frequent updates. And they’ll mainly be Spotify tracks & playlists (mine and from others), or music from elsewhere on the web.

First, a quick note about Spotify: many of my favorite artists aren’t on Spotify. Very little music from Drag City records, or many other independent labels, is ever published there. The reason is that artists make very little money out of ‘airplay’ on Spotify. I get that and I think it should be up to artists to choose how they want to distribute and publish their work. So I fully respect the rationale behind Neil Hagerty, for example, not having his music go up on Spotify.

That said, Spotify also represents a sort of adolescent dream made real. As a teenager, it was impossible to imagine having so much music available with the click of a mouse (or a touchscreen or whatever). It’s a great way of discovering music, particularly older tracks and compilations which just don’t make it to radio these days (with the exception of WFMU and a few other excellent stations). The Spotify Discover weekly playlist has been the source of quite a few new favorite tracks – some of which I knew, some I should have known, and some I’d never heard before. So, I’m happy to pay for a subscription to Spotify and also purchase music that I enjoy direct from the artist when possible, or from their record label.

For new music, Bandcamp and Soundcloud are excellent websites you know about already and then there are friends. We still share songs, after all.

Anyway, here’s a Spotify playlist of some songs I’ve been listening to a lot recently. Some new, many old. Some, like Spirit In The Sky buy Norman Greenbaum are true radio classics. Others, like Dion’s Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms) are completely new to me. Cate le Bon is a recent discovery, and I’m really looking forward to her gig in Barcelona this autumn.

Margo Guryan’s pop doesn’t seem to have that many followers these days, but in my opinion you can hear the bridge from her California Shake song, or a version of it at least, popping up in Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (also her Sunday Morning contrasts nicely with the Velvet Underground’s track of the same name). She also wrote the lyrics for vocal versions of Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman and numerous other songs.

BRONCHO and Alvvays are just good bands I’ve been listening to a lot. Ex Hex’s Rips is one of my favorite albums of recent years: it’s just packed with great songs and even better guitars. They were excellent at Primavera Sound last year too.

Royal Trux – Untitled – 1992

Untitled (1992) is the first Royal Trux record to feature more-or-less traditional, structured songs. It’s the bridge between Royal Trux and Twin Infinitives (albums one and two, both brilliant records but arguably more demanding on the listener), and Cats and Dogs, their fourth LP.

On Untitled, Hagerty and Herrema permit themselves to show off some of their skills in terms of songwriting, production and guitar (I love the guitar parts in particular). But that nice, unpolished feel remains.

Untitled sees Royal Trux move on from “dissonant junkie nightmare”, albeit one step at a time.

Made in America/Members Only – The Sopranos

An excellent analysis here of the final scene in the final episode of The Sopranos. Don’t read unless you’ve seen it (or don’t care about spoiling the end of a great TV show).

In-depth analysis like this of the direction, camera angles and shots, really adds something to a second or third run-through of The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire and maybe a handful of other shows. When you’re not distracted by wanting to know what’s going to happen, you’ve got more time to enjoy how the director gets you there. And make no mistake: these TV series are of a far higher calibre in this respect – the attention to detail and the thoughtfulness of exposition – than the vast majority of movies.

I think it’s time to start on The Sopranos again.

North by Northwest – Hitchcock’s Magnum Opus

While I love his tense psychological thrillers like Vertigo, the humour and tension of Rear Window and the horror of Psycho, there’s a special place in my heart for the heady mix of action, thriller and comedy that is North by Northwest. A better writer than me could certainly write an entire book about this film. I’ll limit myself to a few observations as to what I consider to be its most important qualities.

Visually, North by Northwest is stunning. Its opening titles, overlaid (allegedly) in a diagonal pointing NNW over an aerial shot of Manhattan skyscrapers is the first feature use of ‘kinetic typography’. The titles were created by Saul Bass – the master of 50s and 60s movie titles. North by Northwest might well be his best work. Indeed, it’s pretty obvious that the aesthetic of the film, including Cary Grant’s suits (and Madison Avenue profession), the sets and furniture are the inspiration for arguably the best designed television series in history – Mad Men [of which we’re about to finish our second run through. It’s all about Don and Roger’s friendship, n’est-ce pas?].

Camera angles and shots

Even more important are the camera angles and techniques used in the film. These range from the striking straight-down camera perched high up on the United Nations building, which makes the building’s entrance look like a diorama, as Roger Thornhill flees – to the awe-inspiring crop duster scene, with its jaw dropping 61 camera angles and shots. This scene still impresses today – for a film from 1959, it feels remarkably realistic and seems to confirm the opinion that skilled cinematography, acting and direction can deliver better results than computer generated imagery in the hands of a dullard (cf: most adventure films released in the last 25 years or so).

The soundtrack is also noteworthy. Composed by Bernard Herrmann, it establishes drama instantly with a sinister expression consisting of only two notes: down-up, down-up – it was certainly good enough for John Williams to rip off for Jaws 16 years later. To my ear, the theme itself has something of Shostakovitch about it, but I’m no musicologist. Herrmann and Shostakovitch did collaborate much later, but that could just be coincidental.

Cary Grant is Cary Grant at his best in North by Northwest – suave, permatanned, confident and witty. He’s terrified at times but always manages to brush it off. Eva Marie Saint is a classic Hitchcock blonde – superficially beautiful with a modern, liberal outlook fitting the turn of the decade when the film was released. James Mason is perfect as a genteel baddie – backed up by more physically threatening henchmen.

Crop Duster scene

I suppose that in the end, what makes North by Northwest so much fun is that it’s clearly unreal, yet realised for the audience in a way that we can really enjoy it. The film is a fantasy piece, heavy on fun and light on symbolism, which frees it from the need for a more realistic or explicable plot line. The film’s set pieces, particularly the crop duster scene, are iconic and clearly had a huge impact on future action thrillers. I know I get a hint of a thrill from any film which shows one of those near-abandoned prairie crossroads and I strain to hear the sound of an aircraft. Just in case.

North by Northwest is certainly one of my favourite movies, up there with The Big Lebowski (another absurd fantasy, incidentally, though obviously a screwball comedy rather than a thriller). You’ve seen it plenty of times. Watch it again. I know I will.


 

If you’ve read this far, I’m promising now to do a bit more on here, mainly about films, books, music and food. So, see you next year.

Of pans and eggs, the cooking thereof

I’m not entirely certain that there are health risks associated with Teflon coated pans. It might well be that the amount of Teflon we eat over the years pales in comparison to the plastics that seep into our food when we microwave Tupperware containers, drink from water bottles or inhale in the street. So I’m making no crypto-scientific claims about our plan to rid our house of them. I mean, I’m not this guy.

What I will say is that I’m sick of changing pans every two years. Even apparently high quality non-stick pans don’t seem capable of surviving regular use (or my mother in law scrubbing them with wire scouring pads).

So a few months ago, I bought a couple of cast iron pans, and last week a couple of stainless steel ones. The cast iron pans are good for cooking meat: pork chops and steaks in particular always turn out perfect, while it was difficult to get the temperature high enough in a non-stick pan (which are predominantly made of aluminium, with a copper core designed to make them work on our induction hob). Cast iron needs to be ‘seasoned’ – effectively burning a thin layer of oil onto the metal at high temperature, though god knows if that’s any healthier than eating Teflon – in order to make it less sticky. Once seasoned, you wash it with hot water only (never any soap), dry thoroughly and then rub on a few drops of olive oil to help preventing rusting.

I haven’t used the stainless steel pans as much yet, but made a decent vegetarian couscous the other day and had no real problems. But this morning, I ventured into dangerous  territory: frying eggs. Or I thought it was dangerous territory anyway. It turns out that common sense – using a little more oil and not getting the pan too hot – prevailed. In fact, it was bloody easy. It makes me wonder why Teflon pans ever caught on in the first place. I can only imagine that Colette Grégoire was an abysmal cook. Stainless steel pans, incidentally, need no seasoning and don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. I still apply a drop or two of olive oil after washing and drying, to protect the metal.

Identifying Netflix content tourists with science

I’d describe my level of understanding of this technology as marginally more than zero but surely this idea works on paper but could never work in the real world. Network latency is a highly unreliable metric when it comes to measuring physical distance. I suspect that the technological developments necessary to make this feasible will take longer to appear than a more sensible approach to global content distribution licensing. The current system mainly favors the studio lawyers who broker rights deals and I suspect its days are numbered.

Netflix itself, of course, couldn’t care less about content tourists. If it did, it would probably use address verification in its credit card payment interface: it’s very easy to activate and all credit cards include personalization data which include address, postcode and country. No, Netflix pays lip service to worrying about VPN/DNS services (the latter are, from experience, far superior) only to placate the lawyers whose cash cow’s days are numbered.

Purity – Jonathan Franzen

Purity, by Jonathan Franzen

I shan’t write a review outlining the plotlines or anything like that. Rather, here are a few thoughts that came to me while reading and digesting Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel.

– This feels like it was written with television in mind. Maybe writing the doomed HBO adaptation of The Corrections put him off but I felt like Franzen’s multi-threaded style has evolved to feel like a really good TV show. Varied locations, time taken to develop a character who then disappears, only to resurface, and a combination of the highly visual and highly visceral. Franzen said that The Corrections had a ‘universe’ behind it with more characters and stories which he effectively edited out of the novel. I wonder if he didn’t consciously include more of these in Purity.

– The Corrections and Freedom felt like attempts to describe America and the world at specific historical moments. Purity feels no different in this respect. While it continues in Franzen’s now traditional way to analyse family life (most specifically a Larkinesque approach to what parents do to their kids), Purity also deals with the information revolution: the Internet. Franzen has been named a Luddite by many fierce defenders of the Internet for comments he has made over the years about things like how a serious writer would never write a novel on a computer connected to the Internet. These defenders get really upset by anyone criticising their revolution. In Purity, Franzen takes some time to explain his position and his argument that the ‘revolution’ of the internet – insofar as it applies to liberty – is as false as the ‘revolution’ of the German Democratic Republic, but just as totalitarian. His observation that Google, Facebook and Twitter are often hailed for defending ‘freedom’ principles while the NSA – which really is tasked with protecting the American system – is universally loathed, is provocative. And taking some time off from such things over New Year, it is difficult to point to any true value that social media brings to an individual’s life, outside of ego boosts.

– The idea of the Great American Novel is, in itself, a sort of Moby Dick (hurr hurr) for writers like Franzen. I don’t think he’s trying to deliver that with Purity, but I do appreciate that if he has come close, it’s with a Spanish culebron packed with German characters.

– Purity’s closing message fits with a popular analysis of inter-generational strife in the post-war half century west. Our parents’ generation have fucked everything up. And they had everything. Franzen adds to this a vital component of hope – he seems to trust the ‘millennials’ far more than many authors in his position do.

– I liked Pip as a lead character.

– I found Purity to be the funniest Franzen to date. Really laugh out loud funny at times.

– For some reason, I split my reading of the book between a visit to Berlin (which felt amazingly well-timed, seeing as I could now imagine the Frankfurter Allee and Friedrichshain while reading about them, and a trip to the Philippines (which is only mentioned once, and briefly, in the novel).

– In all, an enjoyable read.