Travels Over, Work Required

I'm back in India after a week in London. I had a great time, walking around Hyde Park in glorious end of summer sun:

Seeing the Dave McKean exhibition at the Pumphouse Gallery, entitled Hypercomics. The full set of photos can be seen here:

I met my new niece, Orla, who didn't talk much, unlike this man, who did.

And then we went to a wedding in sunny Eastbourne:

And now I'm back at work.

I'm going off line for a few days as I've got to review the line edited version of 'Juvie' and put together a full synopsis for 'Stigma' as my agent is at the Frankfurt book fair next week. That means lots of work and concentration which is going to be interesting since I'm ever so slightly jet lagged and plan to move into a new apartment this weekend. 

This blog should also be appearing somewhere 'new' soon. I'll let you know details as soon as I hear more.

Right, now - work.

On Not Really Liking Curry

I know this is going to seem as blasphemy, of a sorts, to some good friends, and also not particularly grateful to the country I'm currently living in (India not Scotland), but the thing is, I've recently discovered I don't really like curry.
I don't hate it, hate is far too strong a word. In truth I don't really hate much apart from .... (lets not go there). But the thing is I don't really like it. It's okay, the taste is agreeable (it's not a heat thing. I quite like hot food), but I don't enjoy it as much as so many other food types out there. Even a Friday night curry, after work and many pints, I've always found all right - just okay - not bad - mildly diverting.
For me curry is nice on the first bite, middling on the second and then it just kind of goes down hill until I can't be bothered eating any more. I think it has something to do with the fact that when you've eaten the first few mouthfuls of curry, whatever you have with it after that, rice, naan, the many different breads they have out here, pickled veg, they all kinda taste the same.
I would much rather have slices of Parma Ham with ripe melon, or roast meat with gravy and red-current jelly, fresh langoustines baked with lemon, garlic and salt, paella or a simple bowl of pasta in a fresh tomato ragu. I like sweet and savoury mixed together, fresh simply prepared food.

Curry just leaves a bad taste in my mouth - sorry. Perhaps being over here I'll learn to love it, become some sort of disciple, able to wax lyrical on the joys of a good, true Indian curry, how to create that authentic taste and what to serve it with, but at the moment it just kind of - meh!

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I'm off to London for a week very early in the morning. There I plan to fit in numerous activities including seeing the Hypercomics Exhibition at the Pumphouse which contains some Dave McKean work, visit my newly born niece 'Orla' at my sisters, get to see the wonderful Mr. Stephen Fry at the Royal Albert Hall (who I have now attempted to see twice and failed both times) and nip down to Eastbourne for the wedding of friends Jo'n'Joe.

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In the meantime and whilst I'm away here are some links:

• India's $35 slate has been outed as a Hivision Speedpad.
• India is also about to issue biometric ID's to the entire population -  I still don't really agree with this.
• And I've just finished the complete 100 Bullets by Brian Azzerello, which is brilliant and if you haven't, then you should read.

Links 11/09/10

• Great time capture video of Tokyo by Samuel Cockedey called inter // states with a good tunes by Paul Frankland

inter // states from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

• I said I would keep an eye on this whilst out in India, but it seems that India's $35 Android tablet is reportedly on track for a January launch.
• “Although climate change could still have devastating effects for much of the world, some regions stand to benefit immensely. Canada, Scandinavia, and even Greenland could all become economic powerhouses, making "The New North" a very attractive destination.”
• M. Night Shyamalan's career (as a film by M. Night Shyamalan). I quite like some of his concepts, jut don’t think they’re always executed as well as they could be. I review of ‘The Missing,’ said it had Shyamalan undertones - which I take as a compliment.
• Third film this week. “Singer-songwriter Kirby Krackle has just released this wistful little video, illustrated by Damon O'Keefe, about how the zombie apocalypse is kind of a bummer.”

Links 06/09/10

"The Tokyo Up, Down project comprises a series of black & white photographs taken inside and outside of elevators in Tokyo. The project explores vertical transportation in the intimacy of the elevator cabin, a moment of silence suspended in space and time, which nonetheless yields a rich array of subtle interactions between strangers on the shortest ever journey."


The final Doctor (no. 13 and the last according to the original Doctor Who series) as visualised by Ben Templesmith.


"The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information. It is part of a paradigm shift that succeeds Virtual Reality; instead of disembodied occupation of virtual worlds, the physical and virtual are seen together as a contiguous, layered and dynamic whole. It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from 'reality'. The spatial organisation of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human-computer interface." The work of artist / film maker / designer Keiichi Matsuda.  


And I now have a daily paper available by paper.li. Look out for the Adam J. Shardlow Daily on the twitter feed.

Immigration Office

Had a bit of an off day today. Last night the well documented Indian food revenge hit me and so I didn't have the greatest night sleep. Then I had to up early to accompany Madame Vin to the immigration office. Finally all our papers were in order. I have to say I've done absolutely nothing to assist in the putting together of all these documents apart from sitting in a photo booth, doing some photocopying and asking the hotel reception to write us a letter to say we're staying with them. Madame Vin has done all the running around, phoning, re-phoning, re-re-phoning, emailing, shouting, screaming, pulling out of hair, re-emailing etc etc to get all of them together. A process that should have taken a week, like everything in India, has actually taken four weeks. She's brilliant is Madame Vin.

So we handed over our documents to one man, he asked to go to another room up the hall, we went there and someone took our forms and showed them to an important woman who sat at a table on her own. He returned and asked us to do 'something'. We asked him again (his English was poor, my Tamil non-existent), he pointed outside. We went outside, still none the wiser. We returned and asked again and finally worked out he wanted us to photocopy the documents, which fortunately we had already done.

Our copies in place we were then given two plastic disks with numbers on and told to go back to the room we were in originally. We sat in front of four booths with a number system for the queue. It was on number 50 we were numbers 68 and 69. We shuffled and shifted in the hot room, on the most uncomfortable chairs ever designed, to the front of the queue. Numbers 64, 65, 66 and 67 didn't exist so two hours later we make it to the front. The official took the papers, applied a stamp, wrote something incomprehensible on a scrap of paper (took the cheques, naturally) all without smiling.

All of this was done in a sort of Gilliam-esque busy bureaucratic environment with stewards running hither and thither, signs pointing in the wrong direction, stamps slapping bits of papers and general disagreement. Fans spin and move hot air around the room, everyone is tense, the officers are bored and no one seems to know what is going on. I'm sure there was order, but I couldn't see it for all the confusion.

After all that we have to go back on the 13th September to collect the final documents.

Can't wait.

Book and Comic Reviews

Perdido Street Station is the book I've been missing from China Mieville's work, probably one of my favourite writers of the last decade. He is a genre defier in that he doesn't stick to the one shelf and diversifies with each novel. That said he has created a unique fantasy world called Bas Lag that contains the very urban New Crobuzon and several of his works are set there. This is the novel that introduced that world.
It's vast and expansive and dangerous and not a nice place to live, but live there people do, millions of them, cheek by jowl. And they're not all human. You have  living cacti, humanoid bird people, scarab beetles that walk tall and frog like creatures. Then there are the remades, humans who have been mutated and physically altered through the use of Mieville's magic system of thaumaturgy.
This first novel deals with themes as diverse as love across races, drug use, the life of an artist, the tyranny of government and lives unfulfilled. The stories are as diverse as the very creatures. There is politics and science to understand, dimension of space to remember, the playful use of writing to master and characters that even though prominent might not make it to the end of the book.
Mieville is playful and creative in his big ideas and not scared to come up with his own interpretation of a world without relying on past genre creations. If you've never read any of his work, this would be one of the best places to start.

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The Swamp Thing has been around since 1971, but it was Alan Moore's reinterpretation of the character back in the 80s that is probably best remembered. Moore took a character that was essentially a 'creature of the black lagoon' horror staple and turned him into something else. He based his idea on the concept of the 'Green Man' as known in European folklore, an elemental that lives within nature because it is part of nature, the two bound up into one.
It was partly through Swamp Thing that the comics for adult readership was created and would lead to the building of the DC Vertigo brand. These comics left simple horror and violence behind and combined it with character led stories, creating a mythology and real world universe for these creatures to exist in. He also introduced the character of John Constantine in Swamp Thing.
The stories themselves are still completely accessible and have not really dated, the art however has and the colour is quite lackluster in places.

Read this week:

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore - Issues 20 to 64