velvet six feet underground

I suppose I'm bound to have heard Walk On The Wild Side on the radio a few times as a child, but my first conscious exposure to Lou Reed (who died earlier this week) was at my aunt and uncle's house in Pangbourne in what I suppose would have been the mid-1980s. Not that my (at the time) fiftysomething aunt was heavily into the New York art-rock scene, you understand, but my cousin Martin had a copy of a Velvet Underground album (I think it was the out-takes and unreleased stuff compilation VU) which he was playing almost constantly.

It was a painful childhood rite of passage for me to realise that my (sadly now deceased) slightly younger cousin was cooler than me in almost every respect, but there it was nonetheless. I recall Martin being heavily into The Smiths as well at around the same time and driving everyone to distraction playing What Difference Does It Make? incessantly. I think I was probably still mostly listening to Queen and Dire Straits and ZZ Top at the time - much of which I stand by, but it's squarely in the box marked "mainstream" rather than "alternative", inasmuch as those descriptions have any meaning.

Anyway, it wasn't really until I got to university and discovered the record library in the student's union building that I decided to sample some Velvet Underground stuff for myself. One of the things crazy young people do is test out the boundaries of their own and others' musical tastes by having the most "out there" music in their collection, whether by virtue of having really long songs, being impenetrably noisy, or just being plain bonkers. The Velvet Underground's second album White Light/White Heat (the first record of theirs I ever owned) ticks most of these boxes - I Heard Her Call My Name features some ear-bleeding feedback, Sister Ray is 17 minutes long (and pretty noisy), and The Gift is a bizarre spoken-word piece (read by John Cale).

The Velvets only released four official studio albums, and you probably want all of them. Personally I can take or leave the stuff featuring Nico on the first album, but the rest of it (I'm Waiting For The Man, Heroin, Run Run Run, Venus In Furs) is terrific. The self-titled third album is easier on the ear, but not smearing everything in feedback obliges the band to get some stronger songs together, and What Goes On might just be my favourite Velvets song of all. To paraphrase myself from a few years back, if you don't get a head-nodding atavistic thrill from Reed and Sterling Morrison's lengthy jangly guitar outro, you basically probably just don't like rock music very much. Fourth album Loaded is fine too, not least because it's the one with Sweet Jane and Rock And Roll on it.

Other things you ought to have are the aforementioned VU compilation and also the two-CD live album from 1969 (the one with the green cover with the woman's arse on it). Worthwhile live rock albums are like hen's teeth, but I reckon this is one of them. I can't speak for the 1993 live album, but I can say that I saw them play live on the same tour from which the live album was taken, as they played at Glastonbury at the end of June 1993 (the live album was recorded in Paris, so don't bother trying to hear me in the crowd).

Reed's solo career was considerably more patchy, and I'm not the biggest fan of 1972's Transformer, but you probably ought to have it for Rock Significance alone. The other solo album you really should have is 1989's New York, which I think is the best non-Velvets thing he ever did. Some would argue for 1973's Berlin and 1982's The Blue Mask as well. I've never listened to the notorious Metal Machine Music, so you're on your own there. I do have a copy of the wide-ranging compilation NYC Man from 2003, which cherry-picks the (supposedly) best bits from the rest of his output, though as with any compilation there are those who quibble with the song selections.

It was rumoured around the time of New York that anyone wanting to interview the legendarily curmudgeonly Reed would have to endure an hour-long discussion about the minutiae of guitar amplifier set-up and miking technique before being allowed to proceed to actually being able to ask any proper questions. Reed was probably at least partially taking the piss, but the results of his devotion to getting the guitar sound just so can be witnessed in the terrific clean chunky sound of Romeo Had Juliette (the opening track of New York), and the (by contrast) blissfully buzzy and distorted sound in the otherwise very silly Egg Cream from 1996's Set The Twilight Reeling.

[alternative blog post title: "white light white sheet"; take your pick.]

oh all right, sorry about hitler

Inspired by this disturbing and effective series of consciousness-raising adverts, and also by my earlier research activities in a similar vein, I offer you this series of Google auto-complete samples using the word “atheist”, just to illustrate the level of esteem atheists are clearly held in around the world. Note that this does not mean that I am seeking to equate the oppression experienced by atheists around the world (real though it is) with that experienced by women, just to use a similar illustrative technique to make a similar point.

As a control experiment I tried substituting a few other religious groups for “atheists” – in general the results for “Christians” are relatively anodyne, with the other religions varying depending how threatening and scary and generally brown and bearded and foreign they are perceived as being by the presumably predominantly American (and therefore predominantly Christian) internet-using public who influence Google’s algorithms. Except for the Scientologists, of course, everyone hates them.

 

holy relics wholly bollocks

Just to expand a bit on the cryptozoology/religion parallels drawn in the previous post, one of the dangers of making any sort of (even in theory) verifiable claim about the way the world works is that you have to come up with a defensive strategy in the event of science getting its mucky little hands on your claim and proving it to be false, assuming of course that abandoning your belief system isn't a palatable option. This is doubly dangerous for any bullshit claim that rests on the provenance of actual physical objects, since these are particularly well-suited to scientific analysis, whether you call them "holy relics" or "some bits of old hair and skin" or whatever.

The classic recent example of a religious relic is of course the Turin Shroud; those who rest some of their faith on the claim that it is the real burial shroud of Jesus Christ have had to do some hasty rationalising in the light of the revelation that it is most likely of 13th or 14th century origin. Same goes for Bigfoot; if you're saying he's a real ape-man and, moreover, this is his actual fur right here, you have to have a fallback strategy when science comes back, as it will, and says nah, this is just some dog hair off the carpet.

Faith-based belief systems are exceptionally resistant to having most or even all of the legs sawn out from under them by reality, though, whether it's the debunking of holy relics or just the mundane business of the sun coming up, moving across the sky and then setting again in the normal manner on a day when the world was supposed to be ending in one of any number of lurid and spectacular ways. Coincidentally today is the 169th anniversary of one of the canonical examples of such an occurrence, the Great Disappointment of 1844. 

you can't handle the truth

What did I tell you? Here's Noel Gallagher, bless him, esteemed composer of at least two good and worthwhile songs during his lifetime, neither, either, or both of which may have been a searing re-enactment of real-life events, having a pop at novels in a GQ interview for not restricting themselves to a sober listing of empirically verifiable facts. He does make a halfway coherent point about halfway through about novels with ludicrous titles, but the rest of it makes no sense at all, as evidenced by the fact that even a halfwit like Danny Wallace is able to pick it apart fairly effectively.

you ain't seen nothing yeti

I was a bit torn while watching Bigfoot Files last night between thinking, well, this is actually quite sciencey and objective compared with most programs of this sort, and getting all shouty at how credulous and accepting it was of clearly absurd claims.

But overall, it was pretty good, focused as it was on actual testing of actual (supposed) yeti remains (generally hair) rather than the various blithering anecdotes of spooked altitude-crazed mountaineers. And there were some laughs on the way as well, particularly around the stuffed yeti supposedly recovered by Nazi scientist Ernst Schäfer in the late 1930s, which is not only laughably botched together out of some old animal skins and teeth and papier-mâché, but also seems to be giving a Nazi salute.

Anyway, to no-one's great surprise the hair samples retrieved and offered for analysis turned out not to be some hominid species previously unknown to science, but some sort of bear. There's some interest here in whether there might be a brown bear/polar bear hybrid species knocking around that scientists were previously unfamiliar with, but of course that's a completely different thing from the claims made for the yeti/bigfoot/whatever, which is that it is some sort of hominid ape-man thing.

There's a parallel here with the claims made by religion, and the sort of slippery refusal to define your terms that characterises those who seek to, for instance, insist that the Jesus of the New Testament was a genuine historical figure. I mean, yeah, we know the miracles described contravene the known laws of physics, so maybe those didn't happen, but maybe he was just some kind of great prophetic teacher or something. Or perhaps the figure described in the New Testament is a sort of mashup of several historical figures, with a bit of supernatural icing smeared on top. To which the sensible answer is: yeah, but you've backed off so far from the key claims that what you're left with is essentially meaningless (more on this theme here). Same with Bigfoot - either it's a crypto-hominid, or it doesn't exist.

I look forward to next week's episode about the North American variants of the legend - Bigfoot, Sasquatch and the like - as these are particularly subject to ludicrous fakery. I also relish the prospect of more unintentionally amusing huffy articles from the cryptozoology community pooh-poohing the latest findings.

One last thing: close your eyes while geneticist Bryan Sykes is speaking and see who he reminds you of.....that's right, Norris McWhirter, co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records, co-presenter of Record Breakers, and regrettable right-wing nutter.

twogging while bleeting about twogging

While I thoroughly enjoy the freedom to ramble inconsequentially at unnecessary length that the blogging platform affords me, I've always been slightly conflicted, dubious even, about Twitter. I mean, what is it for? I suppose I see the point of it if you're a celebrity, have a gazillion followers, and want an easy way of telling them what you're up to, when the new album's out, what you had for breakfast, that sort of thing, but for the everyday man in the street I don't really see the purpose of it. If you want to communicate some opinions which you think are worthy of a wider audience, get a blog. If you want to keep in touch with friends, share some amusing photos, arrange a trip down the driving range, get a Facebook account.

All that really leaves, it could be argued, is joining in some kind of imaginary Big Conversation that's going on and you feel that you can contribute to, perhaps by offering some real-time witticisms about X-Factor or The Great British Bake-Off, or maybe just by taking the easier option of retweeting what Caitlin Moran is saying about them. All of which smacks a bit too much of "getting involved" to me, not to mention resembling the constant calls by politicians for a "national debate" about various topics of burning interest. I honestly can't imagine anything less likely to result in a sensible answer than a national debate, given that most of the British public are consistently wrong about just about everything.

So it seems slightly perverse to announce that I am now on Twitter, and indeed in hindsight I can't really recall why I did it. I think I must just have been bored. But anyway, there it is. I intend to keep it light and humorous (as well as probably fairly sparse), since Twitter is an absolutely terrible medium for serious communication featuring any form of nuance, as (among others) Richard Dawkins has discovered to his cost with a few ham-fisted tweets that quite rightly generated some outraged internet shoutiness (or silent exasperated facepalming, depending on your personality type).

The other thing that non-celebs do on Twitter is try to either get followed or retweeted by a proper celebrity, and then come over all unnecessary about it. In this spirit I offer you Dara O'Briain's generous response to my fairly laboured pun on the word "Winterval" during a brief exchange about the entirely made-up festival of Arthur's Day:

I promise that's the first and last time I'll do that. What I have also done is to set up an auto-tweet facility for these blog posts, via the excellent and easy-to-use (and free) dlvr.it, so if you go onto Twitter you'll see a tweet directing you to this blog post about using Twitter, all accompanied by the crunching and slurping sound of the entire internet folding up on itself and disappearing up its own arse.

Incidentally I coined the word “twogging” to describe the combined multi-social-media activity I’m now indulging in, as you can see, but of course I instantly found that someone else had got there before me. Interestingly the usual usage of the word seems to be different, not describing tweeting while blogging, but instead twerking with dogs (here is an alternative definition derived in much the same way). The (to my ear at least) less harmonious-sounding “bleeting” has actually been used a few times in the sort of context I’m after, though you do have to sift through a lot of mis-spelt renderings of the noise a sheep makes to find them.

incidental music spot of the day

Thirty seconds or so of the late John Martyn's sublime Small Hours over a bit of the Indian section of the second part of Stephen Fry's interesting two-part documentary Out There on BBC2 tonight (it's at about 43 minutes in the iPlayer version, if you catch it before it expires). Better still, as good as the documentary is in its own right, have a look at these two clips, both from 1978 according to YouTube - firstly this acoustic version from Reading University and secondly this slightly more ragged (and apparently slightly pissed, not unusually) version from German TV show Rockpalast in the same year. Some more Martyn clips can be found collected here.

and a luger and lime for the lady

My good buds at Bud's Gun Shop have been e-mailing me again; I think their latest may just be the best one yet. As usual here it is in screen-capped and text form:

Dear Dave,

One of the most common reasons for BudsGunShop.com customer order cancellations ?....."because she found out !" 

Never fear, we have a solution.  We have partnered up with Bling It On to create a unique opportunity to buy yourself another gun AND make her very happy at the same time !  How is this possible ?....just check out the video below........

 ......and this is not your basic costume jewelry.  She will find these unique ammunition based designs from Bling It On have been featured on the most elite runways in New York and fashion magazines across the globe.  Team Buds members automatically get 20% off when using your discount code.  Also, as Tony mentions in the video above, we will soon be offering a FREE set of 9mm earrings ($30 retail value) with the purchase of select firearms.

So go ahead.....treat yourself to that new gun you have had your eye on.  Just make sure she also gets a little something from Bling It On!

So, to recap, if your spouse is in the habit of thwarting your stockpiling of massive quantities of firearms and ammunition with that typical bitchy whiny female shit like Surely We Don't Need Another Gun and The Children Must Eat and Please No I'm So Scared then here's your chance to keep the little lady quiet with some shiny trinkets, which as we all know the ladies are genetically programmed to be unable to resist, bless 'em, like magpies. And the best bit is that all the jewellery is not only made from authentic spent ammunition, but is also hand-crafted by a gargantuan-breasted orange Christian lady.

Nice to see the meathead Bud's representative in the video is actually packing heat during his filmed spot with the buxom jewellery lady, presumably just in case she tries to asphyxiate him with her enormous tits. You really can't be too careful. It does just reinforce the between-the-lines message of the e-mail which says something like: yeah, you can butter the bitch up with some bracelets, but you know you're just going to get the same old shit next time you want to fondle a Glock, or get home late at night with the smell of gunpowder on your fingers. Perhaps if you were a real man you'd just VENTILATE HER SORRY ASS RIGHT NOW. DO IT. DO IT!!!!

many bridges to cross

Fellow bridge enthusiasts will recognise the genius of this Guardian article immediately - inviting photos and reminiscences of well-loved and notable bridges from the general public. There's an inevitable urge to do a bit of Whoa I've Been There bridge-bagging, so I may as well indulge myself:

• the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge is basically what made us too late to do the Bushmills distillery tour on our Northern Ireland trip in May 2008;
• the Clifton Suspension Bridge brings back happy memories of my many years in Bristol, during which I crossed it countless times by various means - on foot, on a bike, in a car and at least once as a pillion passenger on a motorbike carrying a full set of golf clubs, probably in flagrant breach of some law or other;
• the mighty Forth Rail Bridge - this view is from North Queensferry;
• I went across the Chirk Aqueduct in a canal boat (which we'd hired from Chirk Marina) on a canal-boating holiday in April 2000 - here's a picture featuring my friends Clare, Andy and Jon to prove it;
• we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge (and back across the arguably more spectacular Manhattan Bridge) during our trip to New York for my 40th birthday in February 2010;
• I go across the second Severn Bridge pretty much every day, except when I choose to go across the old bridge instead, just for a laugh;
• the Newport Transporter Bridge as mentioned many times on this blog - the Middlesborough one also gets a mention;
• the Gates of Haast span a scary-looking gorge full of rapids in the South Island of New Zealand; needless to say when we stopped there in 2001 we decided to trek down to the rapids and take a look - here's Mario making himself useful and providing some scale.

All of these are terrific, obviously. I offer as an addition this photo of me on a rope bridge in the spectacular Abel Tasman National Park during the same trip to New Zealand in 2001, and a general view of the excitingly bouncy rope bridge over the Wye at the Biblins near Monmouth, which we trekked across and back on our camping trip last August.

the last book I read

Leading The Cheers by Justin Cartwright.

Dan Silas is at a bit of a loose end; newly single after splitting up with his girlfriend Stephanie, he's also out of a job after the acrimonious dissolution of his lucrative advertising company. So he's grateful for the opportunity for distraction and escape offered by an invitation to his high school reunion in Michigan, as well as being in a position to make a bit of an extended holiday of it.

While many of Dan's old school buddies haven't changed much, at least beyond the inevitable greying and balding and weight gain, some of them have a few surprises in store. Gary Beaner has had some sort of mental breakdown and now, when he isn't having a catatonic interlude, imagines himself to be the reincarnation of a Native American chief called Pale Eagle. Not only that, but Dan's high-school sweetheart Gloria has a few unpalatable revelations for him - not only was their brief relationship (fondly remembered by Dan) less exclusive than he'd imagined (as she was seeing someone else as well at the time), and their quickie on Thomas Jefferson's bed during a school trip to Monticello less fondly remembered by her than by him, but it also led to her becoming pregnant with his child. Not only that, but the resulting daughter grew up to become a young woman and graduate from high school herself, before being gruesomely raped and murdered by serial killer Scott Hollinger. Not only that, but Gloria also reckons that Dan would be ideally placed to go and visit Hollinger in prison to ask him about the murder in the hope of obtaining some sort of "closure".

So some food for thought, there, for sure. And more is provided by Gary, who reckons that Dan can help him retrieve some tribal artefacts from the British Museum when he returns to the UK, "retrieve" in this instance pretty much meaning "steal", of course, however much one might insist that they were stolen from their original custodians in the first place.

So Dan has some reflecting to do on his return to the UK. Could Gloria have been telling the truth about her daughter's parentage? Does he really want to act on his residual attraction for Gloria and try to rekindle their romance? And would she be interested anyway, given that she seems a lot cooler about their former relationship than he is? Is Gary entirely deranged, or could he possibly genuinely be the conduit for some sort of Native American Great Spirit that is guiding Dan towards some mysterious goal?

The answer to that last question is obviously "no", but the questions about the reliability of Gloria's account of events after Dan's original departure for the UK are never really answered. The one about the possible rekindling of their romance is, though, as Gloria reveals that (again) she's got another bloke on the go, and intends to marry this one. Dan gives her his blessing, and instead pursues restoring friendly relations with his ex-girlfriend Stephanie and throws himself into Gary's project. This involves a bit of subterfuge in the British Museum archives, during which Dan finds some evidence for the final resting-place of the great Tecumseh, and briefly returns to the USA to attend the ceremonial re-burial of his remains.

I read Cartwright's The Promise Of Happiness a while back (September 2008 to be precise) and thought it was pretty good. I don't think this is as good, mainly because it seems weirdly unfocused - lots of interesting plot strands, or at least potential plot strands, get set up and never really go anywhere, Dan doesn't seem to have much of a character arc in that he's not noticeably changed by his experiences, and some of the plot devices (the bit about Tecumseh at the end in particular) seem tacked on rather incongruously. It all zips past very readably but without it ever being clear what the purpose of any of it is. Presumably we're meant to reflect on growing up, the unreliability of some of the memories that we feel underpin our entire adult personalities, faith versus rationality, the power of ritual and tradition, that sort of thing.

Clearly plenty of people would disagree with me, though, since Leading The Cheers won the Whitbread Prize in 1998 (it's now the Costa Prize). The link to the list of winners that I provided here seems now to be defunct, so here's what appears to be a reasonably definitive one. My updated list goes 1976, 1977, 1980, 1987, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2005 and 2006.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

A sporting one for you, featuring one of today's European heroes in the Seve Trophy and current Wales Open champion Grégory Bourdy, and multi-Olympic champion and recent America's Cup miracle worker Sir Ben Ainslie.

a hilariously ironic blog post title

I was picked up and taken to task, and quite rightly, by my good friend Doug a short while back for using the phrase "achingly dull" twice in separate blog posts in relatively quick succession (actually on closer examination they were a little over two years apart, but I think Doug's point stands) to describe the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, gawd bless 'em. Not that I think it's an inaccurate description, as I'm sure that they are fantastically vacuous in person, despite the healthy glow of unearned privilege and the expensive orthodontics, but it behooves one to try not to repeat oneself, even when one's self-editing faculties are dulled by a raging throatful of republican bile.

Anyway, I was inspired to wonder what other blogversational tics I overuse, perhaps without realising it. A futile exercise pretty much by definition, you might say, since if you don't realise it, well, you won't realise it. And you may be right, but I think a capacity for sober, objective and unforgiving self-analysis is a quality to be admired and striven for. So in that vein I offer you the following: a catalogue of my overuse of the word "hilariously" during the lifetime of this blog. I find myself drawn to this word as it conveys a sort of sense of the jaw-dropping ridiculousness of much of the world and the people who inhabit it. But anyway, I probably overdo it, as is evidenced by the list that follows. Note that I've restricted myself to instances where the word "hilariously" qualifies an adjective in the classic adverb/adjective kind of way.

So:

• hilariously expensive
• hilariously unreflective
• hilariously flimsy
• hilariously stilted
• hilariously miscast
• hilariously po-faced
• hilariously inappropriate
• hilariously rubbish
• hilariously fatuous
• hilariously doomed
• hilariously bollocks
• hilariously shit
• hilariously lame
• hilariously benign
• hilariously anachronistic
• hilariously threadbare
• hilariously half-arsed

Of course, now I've done that, I will be unable to use the word ever again, except perhaps in an ironically self-referential kind of way. Conversely you might argue that once you start doing blog posts about word usage and frequency in your own blog posts you've already disappeared most of the way up your own arsehole anyway. I'm reminded of the novelist in David Lodge's Small World who was provided with a computer analysis of his own writing style and word usage and found himself unable to write ever again. We shall see.

Another way to monitor word usage is to use the excellent Wordle, which provides a graphical view of word frequency. Here's the word cloud for the current front page of this blog:

You can just paste a load of text in as well. No prizes for guessing which song lyric this cloud was derived from, but you can see how you could generate an interesting quiz out of it; just present the cloud and get people to name the song.

the last book I read

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.

We're in an un-named South American country, where the ruling regime have arranged an operatic recital for certain key local and foreign dignitaries in a bid to butter them up and attract a bit of financial investment to shore up their fragile economy. Their key target is Mr. Hosokawa, the head of a massive Japanese electronics firm, and they've lured him all the way from Japan by engaging the services of internationally-renowned opera diva and soprano Roxane Coss - Mr. Hosokawa being a bit of an opera nut and a fan of Ms. Coss in particular.

Little do the representatives of the ruling regime know that Mr. Hosokawa is such a devoted fan of Roxane Coss that he's quite prepared to travel halfway round the world to get a prime seat at a private recital, despite having no intention whatsoever of investing any of his corporation's money in the country. All that business is rendered irrelevant halfway through the gig, though, when a group of revolutionaries storm the building and take everyone hostage. The group's intention was to capture the country's president, but as he's ducked out of the gig at the eleventh hour to catch his favourite TV soap opera they find themselves having to make do with the vice-president and a load of foreign dignitaries and industrialists. They immediately release all of the women (except Roxane Coss, who has some value as a high-profile hostage) and the infirm, leaving 50-odd men and one woman.

There now follows a bit of a stalemate, while competing demands are exchanged, and the captors and captives settle into their daily routines in the expectation of a long siege. It's not easy keeping yourselves amused in these circumstances, but people find a way: Mr. Hosokawa plays chess with revolutionary leader General Benjamin, and once a proficient pianist is located among the hostages Roxane Coss keeps her operatic pipes lubricated by giving regular recitals.

Inevitably, close relationships start to form between the captives and the captors - the inevitable Stockholm Syndrome stuff, but also some more intimate liaisons. Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane Coss fall in love, as do teenage female revolutionary Carmen and Mr. Hosokawa's interpreter Gen Watanabe.

Clearly, though, for all the sense of suspension of reality that has set in, none of this is going to end well, and when it does end it's going to be at the expense of some of the relationships that have built up, because the protagonists are going to end up on opposite sides, and some of them are probably going to end up dead. And sure enough, when, after several weeks, the government's patience finally runs out and the army are sent in to bring the siege to an end, some people are rescued, and some are the recipients of a hot lead sandwich, either deliberately or as some of the inevitable collateral damage associated with liberations of this sort.

The first thing to say about this is that in general I enjoyed it very much, lest what follows be seen as an endless sequence of nit-picky criticisms. The main characters are rounded-out enough to be interesting and for the reader to care about what happens to them, not so easy in a medium-length novel (318 pages) where there are quite a lot of characters. That said, most of them are implausibly nice, even the revolutionaries. General Benjamin, the one we get to know best, plays chess and stoically bears the pain of a nasty attack of shingles, even while he's trying to overthrow the ruling regime.

As for the hostages, the French diplomat pines for his wife and cooks fabulous meals, the Russians smoke and drink too much but are generally well-intentioned, and the principal characters of Roxane Coss, Mr. Hosokawa and Gen are all dangerously close to Mary Sue territory. I mean, it's never happened to me, but I would imagine being kidnapped by armed terrorists is a fairly stressful experience, and one could be forgiven for occasionally being a bit snappy and cranky, but no, everyone's pretty fluffy and delightful throughout. I suspect that in general long hostage sieges (Bel Canto is actually loosely based on the Lima siege of 1996) are a bit more grim and savage, with the occasional arbitrary executions, the dubious hygiene and the constant hunger and thirst, but here it's all roast chickens from the lavishly-appointed kitchen and opera recitals courtesy of our heroine. And it's a bit convenient that after Roxane Coss' original accompanist dies in a diabetic coma early on there just happens to be an unsuspected piano virtuoso (one of Mr. Hosokawa's underlings) among the hostages ready to step into his shoes.

There's a lot made about the redemptive power of music, yadda yadda yadda, and fair enough I suppose, but it seems unlikely that among 60-odd people there wouldn't be a few unmoved or even positively irritated by opera, even when you've got a real-life diva belting it out less than ten feet away. And the epilogue that follows the climactic shoot-out is positively bizarre in its incongruous lack of continuity with everything that's gone before. Interestingly when the book was itself turned into an opera the writers decided to ditch the "absurd" epilogue altogether.

The other book I was reminded of while reading this was Iain Banks' Canal Dreams, which is superficially similar in that it features a world-famous musical virtuoso in a hostage situation somewhere in the Americas (that was in the Panama Canal; the specific location of Bel Canto is never revealed). That book was somewhat different in its depiction of violence, though, and in having the heroine turn into some sort of gun-toting ass-kicking Buffy/Terminator type by the end.

Bel Canto won some pretty heavyweight awards when it was published in 2002, most notably the Orange Prize (now the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction - my list goes 1997, 2002, 2005) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (my list goes 1995, 1996, 2002).

and a beaver biryani for the wife

This came through the door while we were away earlier in the week. I promise you I have not digitally manipulated this image in any way - well, beyond a bit of cropping and resizing anyway.

Now the word "Tarka" may well have some meaning I'm not aware of - Google Translate offers no assistance in any of the obvious languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu. Historically most Indian restaurants in the UK have been run by people from Sylhet, which is in what is now Bangladesh, and Google Translate doesn't specifically offer a Sylheti option, but it's apparently quite similar to Bengali, so it probably wouldn't have helped anyway.

If you're labouring through this in a fug of bafflement, let me help you out: the reason this is funny is that there is a well-known joke that goes as follows:

Waiter (imagine something a bit like this): And what can I get you sir?
Customer: I'd like a Chicken Tarka, please.
Waiter: Chicken.....Tarka?
Customer: Chicken Tarka.
Waiter: So.....Chicken Tarka.
Customer: Yes.
Waiter: So....Chicken Tarka. Chicken Tarka?
Customer: Chicken Tarka.
[Note that you can continue in this vein for as long as you think your audience will put up with it before proceeding to the punchline]
Waiter: So, just to recap: Chicken Tarka.
Customer: That's right.
Waiter: Are you sure you don't mean Chicken Tikka, sir?
Customer: Ah, no, you see, it's like Chicken Tikka, but it's a little otter.

Boom and indeed tish. There is even a recipe for Chicken Tarka online, which is doubly delicious, firstly because it all looks very nice, and secondly because the blog author seems to have missed the joke entirely. The answer to your next question is yes, they do appear to be American.

Just to spoil the joke a bit, it is of course true that there is a dish known as Tarka Dhal, and indeed it appears on the Tarka's menu just as it does on pretty much every other Indian restaurant's. This interesting Guardian article reckons that the "tarka" bit is "a mix of spices fried in oil or ghee until sizzling and aromatic". Which to be fair, sounds nicer than eating an otter anyway.

fiddy thirst state

The high disposable income glory glory days of a lavishly-stocked whisky cupboard groaning with all manner of intoxicating spiritous delights are long gone, sadly, and in these straitened times when most of my meagre income goes on nappies, nursery fees and hilariously expensive tiny shoes the old whisky cupboard is struggling along with just a skeleton staff.

But there is the odd bright spot, like this bottle of Glenfiddich Rich Oak that I picked up for 20-odd quid a month or two back. This is your basic Fiddy plus an unspecified amount of time maturing in "virgin" oak casks, which I take to mean casks that have not previously contained any form of alcoholic spirit - unlike the usual sort which will have previously held either sherry or bourbon (or, occasionally, something more exotic). Indeed the claim is made that this is "the first virgin American and European oak finished whisky in the world." That, as almost all claims about whisky uniqueness are, is hedged about with so many qualifiers as to be almost meaningless to the casual drinker, so the thing to take away is just the extra two years of cask maturation compared with the standard product.

And that makes quite a difference, it seems, as this is notably different from the light and grassy delights of the 12-year-old. It's quite a bit sweeter, for one thing, with a pronounced honey/toffee/Werther's Original (but without the paedo overtones) thing going on, and noticeably darker and richer. It's very good, and, dare I say it, more interesting than the standard 12-year-old, but it's still a bit, you know, nice for my tastes. The now seemingly defunct Caoran Reserve had, by contrast, a few rough and unruly edges and was all the better for it.

glasses: a spectacular history

So, lots of us wear glasses. Some of us find that to be a pain, what with the taking them off and putting them on, having one pair for reading, one pair for looking at far-away things, one pair for X-ray vision, etc., etc. I, on the other hand, having been wearing glasses since I was about two years old, find it as natural as breathing, indeed I feel odd being out of bed and not wearing them. Now naturally I don't mean I've been wearing the same pair of glasses since I was two, that would be ridiculous. My prescription would have changed a bit, for one thing, and while I've always had a fairly large head it has certainly got bigger over the years.

So since I've got some old family photos on a DVD, let's have a look at changing glasses fashions over the years. Just to elicit some sympathy, let me start by pointing out that in addition to your basic long-sightedness I suffered from a lazy eye as a small child, so I started out with glasses and an eye-patch. Cute, huh?

1973(ish): the John Lennon round pebbly specs look.

1978: your classic NHS tortoiseshell rims.

1979: similar, except these would have been purchased in Java, so the NHS bit doesn't apply.

1986: scary aviator-style ones seemingly designed to obscure half the face. The giant plastic nose-piece is a bit weird too.

1998: similar, but slightly smaller and in a funky red-and-black colour scheme. You'll have to excuse the slitty bleary eyes; this was taken in Dublin and I was probably very drunk and/or hungover.

2001: a return to the Lennonesque round design; not such a good look after 28 years of galloping head expansion though.

2004: heading towards the sober middle-aged rectangular look.

2006: gone properly rounded rectangular now. All I remember about these is that a) they were by Quiksilver and were well expensive and b) they lasted all of a few months before being sat on and mangled by Doug (or possibly by me after a night out with Doug). It was Doug's fault, anyway, is my point.

2008: this pair got broken as well, in this case solely through my own fault; a misplaced golf club in a moment of pique (note that I wasn't wearing them at the time) causing a fatal weakening of the nose bridge resulting in an unexpected snappy failure a few months later. It was at about this time that I realised that I was nearly forty and it was about time I put away childish things and stopped randomly breaking pairs of glasses.

2009: not much to say about these except that they were black and slightly too small for my head.

2012: the black pair were replaced by this pair of cheapo Vision Express own-brand green metallic ones. I almost immediately saw where the extra money didn't go, though, as my excessively sweaty head corroded the green paint off the side-pieces, exposing the bare metal and bringing me out in a rash. Nonetheless I persevered with them for quite a while with the regular application of black insulating tape. Eventually they were consigned to the great glasses graveyard in the sky by my daughter's grabby glasses-yanking habits, which eventually popped a small screw out, never to be found again, which left one of the arms all floppy and the whole shooting match liable to falling off my face at the slightest provocation. Which is probably why I'm using a fleecy hat to hold them on in this picture.

2013: a bit more strapped for cash these days, I resorted to buying glasses off the internet, and very successfully too, as it turned out. These two pairs are from Glasses Direct - the blue-grey lower pair are just from their standard range, but the top pair (which I intend to be my main pair) are your actual Patrick Cox designer jobs. And still a smidgen over 60 quid for two pairs, including lenses. The internet is great. Apologies for the mad starey eyes of death, by the way; taking selfies in dubious light will do that.

the last book I read

A Kind Man by Susan Hill.

Tommy Carr is the kind man of the novel's title. And a good thing too, because times are hard. What times those are is never explicitly stated, but we're in some sort of poverty-stricken working-class community, probably in the first half of the 20th century. You'd stereotypically assume we were oop North somewhere as well, but no one is rendered as talking with an outrageous accent, so it's hard to tell.

None of that stuff is particularly important, though, as the story is not concerned with the broad sweep of historical events; far from it. Tommy and Eve Gooch (no relation) meet, fall in love, marry, set up house together and have a child, Jeannie Eliza. Times are still hard, and Eve's time is taken up with caring for her daughter and helping out her sister Miriam who is saddled with both an idle and periodically unemployed husband and galloping fertility that keeps her popping out sons that want feeding and cleaning. On the upside, Tommy has a job that brings some money in, and they both adore their daughter.

So having set Eve and Tommy up as honest-to-goodness salt-of-the-earth types, it's time to heap flipping great wodges of misfortune and misery on their heads. Firstly Jeannie Eliza catches a mysterious fever and dies. Then, still consumed by grief, Tommy suffers some dramatic weight loss and then a series of growths in his abdomen and throat. The doctor concludes that he is riddled with cancer, that no treatment is possible, and sends him home to spend his remaining days with his family.

But just as Tommy is sinking into his final coma, and Eve is being desperately summoned back by the neighbours from Miriam's house, where she's been helping out with the kids, Tommy feels a great heat course through him and suddenly his pain is gone. And not only is he cured, seemingly miraculously, but he seems to have acquired the ability to cure others as well, through the transference of the same heat that has apparently cured him.

Once word gets around Tommy becomes something of a local celebrity, and people come from far away to get his hands laid on them. Some of them offer money, which he is reluctant to take, but times are hard, and eventually after curing a rich man's daughter and mother of various ailments he accepts some money for his trouble, and is instantly rewarded by having his powers taken away from him and having the cancer return with a vengeance.

So what are we to make of this? Has Tommy really been granted strange mystical healing powers, or is it all a bit of mass hysteria? And what of his recovery from the great massive tumorous lumps that were about to kill him? If it was the work of one of the pantheon of supposed gods, it's a pretty fickle, capricious and unreasonable god to re-apply the death sentence as soon as Tommy succumbs to the temptation of accepting a bit of money to make his family a bit more comfortable, although of course fickle, capricious and borderline psychopathic are qualities pretty closely associated with any of the supposed gods that humans have worshipped over the years.

The lurch into implausibility (a bit like the levitation business in The 27th Kingdom) aside, this is beautifully written, and barely long enough to qualify as a novel (185 pages, big print, lots of whitespace). What it's for is another matter - a meditation on kindness and goodness? a lament for the inscrutability of divine purpose? a black satire about grief and mass hysteria? Probably not the latter I would imagine, as the supernatural bits are played fairly straight, and Hill has known form as both a religionist and a writer of fiction depicting the supernatural.

the last book I read

Solar by Ian McEwan.

Michael Beard is a physicist, an eminent one but one whose best years are behind him. Those best years included some good stuff, though, including winning the Nobel Prize for some work expanding on Albert Einstein's work on photovoltaics. So now Beard is in his early fifties and surfing on his eminence by sitting on various councils and committees. Meanwhile his fifth marriage is falling apart. Don't get the idea that beard is some kind of square-jawed muscled Adonis though; he's more your stereotypical short fat bespectacled science guy, apparently irresistible to certain types of woman but not really a long-term prospect owing to his aversion to the idea of having children and also his pathological infidelity.

While normally it's Beard's own putting it about that signals the end of his marriages, in this case it's his wife Patrice who is having it away with the Beards' former builder in an indiscreet and shameless fashion. Eventually Patrice moves on to having an affair with Tom Aldous,  a young colleague of Beard's at a centre devoted to climate change research. When Beard returns home unexpectedly early from a fact-finding trip to Spitsbergen and surprises Aldous in his house, a freak accident involving a badly-secured bearskin rug and a sharp-cornered coffee table results in Aldous' death, a death for which Beard manages to frame Patrice's previous lover Ronald Tarpin. Meanwhile there's this dossier of secret research that Aldous had put together for Beard's eyes only, which it turns out contains some good and even revolutionary stuff.

Cut to a few years later and Beard is heading up a team pioneering artificial photosynthesis techniques using a big solar array in a newly-purchased site in the New Mexico desert. Certain of these techniques were based on the contents of Tom Aldous' notes, which Beard hasn't necessarily been scrupulous about properly attributing. He's also embroiled in a relationship with a woman, Melissa, in London, who has finally managed to snare him into fatherhood, and another one with a trailer-dwelling local waitress, Darlene. Beard is in New Mexico for the grand opening and unveiling of the test facility, but constant distractions intervene - Ronald Tarpin, recently released from prison, his own ill-health, comprising morbid obesity and a recently-diagnosed skin cancer, his various mistresses, in particular Melissa and Darlene who have each recently become aware of the other's existence, and the presence of a lawyer acting for Tom Aldous' (and Beard's) previous employer, the climate change centre, who wants to talk to him urgently to discuss some claims of plagiarism and intellectual property theft.

Like the Booker-winning Amsterdam in 1998 this is best categorised under "Entertainments" rather than "Novels", as it's blackly comic throughout. And while some of the set-pieces are derivative of other comic novels - the whole crisp-stealing story is lifted from Douglas Adams' So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, for all that it's acknowledged as such when Beard re-tells the story later, and the delivering-a-speech-while-queasy routine is straight out of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim - overall it works pretty well. There's inevitably a fair amount of exposition about climate-change issues, about which McEwan is commendably robust in defending the scientific consensus, and some more hand-wavey stuff about exactly what it is Beard is meant to have done to have earned his Nobel back in the day.

I actually enjoyed this more than the rather po-faced and self-consciously literary pairing of Atonement and Saturday, more than the barely-a-novel-at-all On Chesil Beach, indeed probably more than any McEwan I've read since 1997's Enduring Love. The unexpected death of a peripheral character halfway through providing the central protagonist with a moral dilemma does provide an odd parallel with the last McEwan I read, The Innocent, though Beard manages to resolve the situation without having to dismember anyone, which is nice.

Solar won the apparently fairly recently instigated and splendidly named Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction in 2010. My list for this one goes: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2010.

the second-last book I read

Drop City by TC Boyle.

Far out, man. So this bunch of, like, totally beautiful cats have got this place in California where they've set up a hippie commune and are totally going to, like, live off the land, get it together with Mother Nature and just be, like, at one with the whole cosmic vibes of the universe. Yeah?

Well, no, not exactly. For every person that turns up at the commune who's down with all the peace and love stuff but also prepared to do the menial mucking-in stuff like building cabins and peeling potatoes there's at least one who's just in it for the free grub and easy access to drugs and doe-eyed hippie chicks still revelling in the novelty and liberation of easy access to the contraceptive pill. Not only that, but as much as California is one of the groovier states of the USA, massive public drug consumption is still illegal, as is lobbing up a load of buildings that haven't been certified as being in accordance with all the building codes and the like. So the authorities are threatening to lay some kind of major heavy trip on the commune. Bummer. What is also far from cool are the allegations that some of the less mellowed-out members of the commune gang-raped an under-age girl on the premises.

So the commune's de facto leader, Norm, has an idea - his uncle left him a property up in the wilds of Alaska, on the banks of a tributary of the Yukon. If we were really serious about getting away from the trappings of so-called "civilisation", man, we'd relocate up there, where the air is clear, the salmon are leaping, and there's nobody around to care if you want to get out of your head for a while. How hard can it be?

Well, if you're Cecil ("Sess") Harder, pretty hard, as it happens. Sess has got the Alaskan living thing pretty well nailed, with a riverside cabin, a troop of sled dogs and a well-established fur-trapping business. But it's still a pretty harsh and lonely existence, and as much as Sess would like someone to share it with it takes a certain type of woman to put up with the seclusion and remoteness, particularly in winter. But Sess is in luck, as there's a lady called Pamela who's advertised for a husband out in the wilderness because she reckons that "civilised" society is on the brink of a catastrophic meltdown and she wants to hook up with a guy who can render his own bear-fat, make moose sausages and knock together a dog-sled with just a few bits of discarded porcupine guts and some whittling. And when it turns out that all the other marriage candidates are mentally unstable malodorous perverts, Sess is in business. So he moves Pamela into his riverside cabin and they commence a life of robust rustic domesticity, with no neighbours to worry about, or at least as long as the old homestead just up the river remains empty, and who's going to take that on, right?

So the hippies head north from California, blag their way over the Canadian border by pretending to be a rock band, and arrive in Boynton, the last outpost of civilisation before you have to load all your stuff into a canoe and head upriver. Needless to say they are regarded as if they were visitors from outer space, with their psychedelic rock music, flappy loon pants and tie-dyed headscarves. While a few of the party decide to stick around in Boynton, the hardcore group head up to Norm's uncle's place and start settling in. Certain harsh lessons are learned early on - it doesn't matter how excellent the pot is if you haven't got a roof over your head when winter comes, a commitment to lentils and animal rights is a probable death sentence when you need to be laying in meat supplies for the winter, and while you can carry a few freeloaders in sunny California you really need people to pull their weight in the frozen north. Sess and Pamela try to help out where they can, and strike up a friendship with a few of the hippies, notably Marco and Paulette aka Star, but Sess has a few unresolved troubles of his own, most notably his increasingly violent feud with unhinged ex-Marine and bush pilot Joe Bosky. And when Sess takes Marco under his wing and takes him out with the dog team for a fur-trapping expedition and Joe Bosky heads after them in his plane to take a few random pot-shots at them, the scene is set for some violent plot resolution.

This is the fourth Boyle in this series, after Riven Rock, The Inner Circle and The Tortilla Curtain, and dates from 2003, a year before The Inner Circle but after the other two. It's much more of a rollicking adventure story than any of the other three, lacking the moral ambiguity of The Tortilla Curtain and not being shackled to real-life historical events like the other two. That's not to say that for all the Jack London-esque snowy adventure stuff there aren't some sly points being made here - the similarities between the seemingly poles-apart worlds of the hippies and the Alaskan backwoodsmen, for instance, revolving as they do around a shared suspicion of "society" and a desire to withdraw from it, and also the brutally repressive treatment of women meted out by both - for all the groovy peace and love business the women in the hippie commune are still expected to do most of the cooking and cleaning, as well as being uncomplaining sex receptacles as and when required. It's no accident that the action in the book is set in 1970, at the rancid tail-end of the hippie dream, well after the Summer Of Love, after Altamont and in the year the Beatles split up. I think this is probably my favourite of the four Boyles I've read so far, but they are uniformly excellent, and I fervently urge you to get into them.