Books
Eels book in “brilliant” shocker
Things The Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett (E from Eels) is one of the best things I’ve read in ages. Some of it’s very, very sad. And some of it is like this:
During the ‘with strings’ tour one night in Germany, a concertgoer calls out “YOU ARE BORING!” between songs. He’s German and wants to rock. We play him a Scorpions riff, but it isn’t enough.
E from Eels has a book out
It’s called Things The Grandchildren Should Know, it’s an autobiography, it’s under E’s real name (Mark Oliver Everett), it’s out on the 17th and it’s getting excellent reviews from the critics. In best Amazon.com reviewer style, I haven’t read it but it’s the best book ever.
I want the book even more than I want the Official Girls Aloud 2008 Calendar. Yeah. That much.
This month also brings two double-disc Eels compilations: Meet The Eels, a kind of greatest hits (although the stunning Electro-Shock Blues is under-represented), and Useless Trinkets, a collection of B-sides and other odds and sods. The latter also comes with a DVD. Both go on sale on the 21st, and I’d imagine they’ll be on iTunes then too.
Blimey, another year’s nearly gone
As ever, magazines are doing their review of the year thing and I feel inspired to follow suit. Rather than a “what a year that was, eh?” thing, though, here’s a quick list of things I’ve really liked or been let down by this year.
Books: Mr Biffo, David Quantick and Charlie Brooker made me laugh so hard I probably damaged internal organs, and judging by the way Mrs Bigmouth has been laughing like a drain “Mommies Who Drink” is a hoot too. As always I read about 200,000 crime novels, of which the latest Ian Rankin was the most reliably entertaining, and I loved Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace. Although by “loved” I really mean “was utterly freaked out by”. Which also applies to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Music: Obligatory Radiohead joy aside (Reckoner is jaw-dropping), the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration was wonderful despite my hatred of Robert Plant’s voice and my loathing of music that sounds vaguely country. I bought all the Talk Talk records I’d already bought several times already, rediscovered the joys of The Big Dish, was let down by a rather anodyne Sugababes album (what a great first single, though!), discovered Regina Spector about a decade after everybody else and danced very badly to pretty much everything Timbaland has had a hand in this year.
Springsteen’s Magic was an unexpected old-school delight, Mark Ronson’s version of Valerie is one of the most joyous things I’ve heard for ages, Girls Aloud’s Tangled Up was worth buying for Call The Shots alone, and the reissued Joshua Tree reminded me why I used to really love U2.
Tech: Both Vista and Leopard fell into the “glad I have ‘em, could live without ‘em” category, DRM didn’t quite die - although the signs are encouraging - and I had to eat my words about the iPhone, which I thought would be a pile of crap but which I - rather shame-facedly - love dearly despite the lack of 3G. I was also wrong about the Apple TV, which I was very excited about pre-release: it seems as if Apple lost interest in it by the time it actually came out, and it’s become a technological footnote rather than anything more exciting.
FARK, Flickr and PopJustice remained brilliant, Facebook walks the line between fun and being really, really annoying, Newsgator/NetNewsWire/iPhone Integration is better than sliced bread and Logic Pro is God’s own music software. Of the big stuff, the scariest stuff happened (and will continue to happen) in the world of privacy.
Games: Halo 3, too short. Timeshift, predictable but fun enough. Bioshock, flawed but great. Still sod-all decent stuff for the Wii. Orange Box is great value for money, but Half-Life 2 Episode 2 frequently feels like Space Invaders (the antlions in the tunnels, the striders attacking). And not in a good way. Crackdown was a hoot and is well worth tracking down second-hand on eBay. On the PC I loved the Minerva mods for Half-Life 2, but the much-hyped STALKER bored me to tears when it wasn’t crashing.
A major annoyance for me was the increasing focus on online gaming, which means the single player bit of any console game can be completed in about six hours by an inept gamer like me. That probably translates as three seconds for anybody that’s any good. At 40-odd-quid per game, that’s hardly value for money.
The interesting/depressing thing about gaming this year was its increasing resemblance to the film industry: blockbuster-driven with months and months of hype and overly excited previews, with reviewers being outflanked so their words don’t appear in print or online until a terrible game’s hit the top of the charts. Never mind the quality, just look at the first-week sales. A lot of very bad games made a great deal of money this year.
Also depressing was the repeat of last year’s Wii bundle bastardy, where retailers took advantage of Nintendo’s inability to make enough consoles by forcing desperate punters to buy big bundles of crap. They’re doing it again this year.
On a happier note, Eurogamer’s featuring some excellent games writing and the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog has quickly become a favourite bookmark.
Magazines that I don’t write for: EDGE and The Word were ace as ever, although the latter is teetering on the very edge of the abyss where Uncut and Mojo live. Empire seems to have found its mojo again, Q’s better than before - less list-y, with proper writing again - although I’m now old enough not to care about 99% of the music it covers, and Car magazine remains a work of art with superb writing to boot.
What about you, ladies and gentlemen?
Books’n'telly’n'tunes
More odds and sods:
Charlie Brooker has a new book out, called Dawn of the Dumb. It includes the column Face at the Window, which may be the funniest thing I’ve ever read. I’m not exaggerating.
The BBC4 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives is a little gem. It follows E from Eels as he tries to find out more about his late father, a physics genius. I cried like a baby. If it’s repeated or turns up on a torrent it’s well worth your time.
Things you don’t hear very often these days, but should: I bought a Gerry Rafferty best-of today, and it’s brilliant.
Things you do hear too often these days, but shouldn’t: Christmas songs in pubs. I wouldn’t mind - well, I wouldn’t mind as much - if 99% of Christmas music wasn’t so bloody awful.
Quick book review: It’s not news, it’s Fark.com
Drew Curtis, overlord of Fark.com - probably my favourite site on the entire internet - has written a book about “how the mass media tries to pass off crap as news”. He’s right, it does, and the book does a superb (and superbly funny) job of identifying and skewering the various ways in which they do it.
Bravely, Curtis also tries to offer advice to mass media - and for me, that’s where things come unstuck. As Curtis rightly points out, not-news (such as stories about people doing stupid things with their penises, or Paris Hilton doing things with penises, or what Michael Jackson allegedly did with his penis) draws audiences. Curtis’s suggestion is that mass media splits the news and not-news into two different sections, so those of us who want proper news can get it, while those of us who want skateboarding dogs can get that too. And never the twain shall meet.
It’s a nice idea, but I really don’t see it - and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the one outlet he commends for resisting consultants’ suggestion that they redesign their site as a MySpace-a-like to court bored teens, a move guaranteed to alienate the grown-ups, is the BBC. Unlike pretty much every other media outlet on the planet, of course, the BBC isn’t funded by advertising.
For Curtis’s prescription to work, mass media outlets would need more than just a news and not-news section; they’d need publishers to keep the unprofitable news bit alive instead of dumping it and concentrating on the lucrative skateboarding dogs and penis accident stuff. And that’s the bit I have a hard time imagining. Just look at your local paper: if it’s anything like mine (and thanks to consolidation in the local news industry, it almost certainly is) they dumped expensive things like journalists a long time ago.
That said, Curtis makes some superb points throughout the book (particularly on the relationship between blogs and local newspapers, or YouTube and local TV), and probably the best one is about internet advertising. We’re told again and again that internet advertising doesn’t work - but what if it’s not internet advertising, but *all* advertising?
What if it’s not that internet advertising is any different, but that the whole advertising business is built on a giant pile of bullshit, and that it’s only since we stuck it on the internet that we’ve been able to see just how much bullshit the creatives and ad salespeople have been shovelling?
And that’s the interesting thing, because of course pretty much the entire internet seems to be pinning its hopes on advertising revenue. If Curtis’s own experience is correct (he was promised 4% conversion rates from display ads; the reality seems to be 0.2%, on a good day, if the planetary alignment is favourable and you’ve got a lucky rabbit’s foot) then an awful lot of people are fighting for shares of an advertising pie that’s 20 times smaller than they thought it was.
That’s good news for Google; not so good for the sites depending on ad income.
If I’m making it sound as if the book’s a dull “whither media?” treatise, I’m doing it a disservice. While there’s serious stuff in there if you want it, the book itself is more of a romp through media scaremongering, stupidity and other things beginning with S. It’s a hoot, and well worth buying.
Disclaimer 1: I’m still operating on sod-all sleep, so the above may not make any sense at all.
Disclaimer 2: Drew Curtis is a friend of .net magazine; I write for .net, so therefore there’s a mild conflict of interest here. That said, as far as I’m aware Drew would set the dogs on me if I turned up at his house demanding beer.
It’s not news, it’s FARK: the book
Just a quick book recommendation: It’s Not News, It’s FARK: How the mass media tries to pass off crap as news, by Drew Curtis of Fark.com fame. It’s very good and very, very funny. I’ll scribble a quick review when I finish it; if you’re interested, you can read chapter 1 online.
A quick book recommendation for dads-to-be
As you’d expect, most of the books about pregnancy and being a new parent are written for women. If you’re lucky, the dad gets a passing mention - “make sure he helps with the housework!” - but most of the time you don’t even get that. Maybe it’s because dads aren’t interested; more likely, it’s that dads are just expected to get on with it.
And that’s a shame, because imminent fatherhood is really bloody scary. You worry about all kinds of things, from big things - will I bond with the baby? - to really big things, such as whether you’ll ever go to the pub again (yes!) and at whether it’s still acceptable to ogle Girls Aloud when your very pregnant partner is feeling rubbish (no!). But to the authors of “so, you’re going to have a baby!” books, none of that matters. Those books are for mums, not you.
Hurrah, then, for Fatherhood: The Truth by Marcus Berkmann. I’m not just recommending it because it’s very (often brutally) honest; I’m recommending it because it made me laugh like a drain. The following bit’s typical:
All new fathers are obsessed with not dropping the baby. I have never seen this mentioned in any of the books, but it’s our overwhelming concern. Most of us have never held a newborn baby before. Most of us have fled the house rather than hold a newborn baby. But you can’t avoid holding your own.
So what if you do drop it? First, you will establish whether or not it bounces.
If that makes the book sound rather laddish, it’s not. It’s actually a very warm and sympathetic look at fatherhood from conception to the first birthday party, and it answers all the questions you might have (including the ones you’re too scared/embarrassed to ask other people).
It won’t change your life - that’s the baby’s job - but it’ll give you a much better idea of what to expect, how to cope with it and how to deal with Competitive Dads.
How to make an audiobook for iTunes
Fancy making an audiobook to sell on iTunes? Here’s what you will need.
- A script
- A microphone
- A filing cabinet
- A chair
- Two buckets (ideally metal ones)
- A sound editing program
And here’s how to do it:
- Plug the microphone into your sound editing program.
- Move the filing cabinet to the farthest corner of the room.
- Put the microphone on top of the filing cabinet.
- Put one of the buckets on top of the microphone.
- Move the chair to the corner diagonally opposite the filing cabinet.
- Put the second bucket on your head.
- Read the script very quietly.
- Save the file in the lowest possible sound quality.
- Profit!
Attack of the unsinkable rubber ducks
The new Christopher Brookmyre novel, Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks, is top fun. Unless you’re into psychics or Intelligent Design.
I’m ashamed to admit I got the geeky in-joke on page 124 immediately.
Book joy
Idly wandering around Amazon last night I discovered that not one, not two but three of my favourite authors have new books out or coming out in the next week. Yippee! They are:
- Hurricane Punch by Tim Dorsey. Serge Storms is back!
- The Watchman by Robert Crais. Elvis Cole is back! Well, Joe Pike is.
- The Overlook by Michael Connolly. Harry Bosch is back!
They’re all out now bar the last one, which comes out on Monday. And there’s a new Christopher Brookmyre (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks) due in August.