Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Traditional “What have I been doing” bollocks:

A recent Wednesday (12th). Josh and I went to an Adam Buxton radio pilot recording at Televizzle centre in Oxford Circus. One of the better things about living in London is that you get to absolutely milk your TV license dry. The conceit for the show - that it was sketches about what Adam had been doing or thinking about in the last 7 days - was fairly weak, but the jokes were great, and Matt Berry, Nigel Buxton and some hot actress whose name I have sadly forgotten were also on hand to provide other voices in the sketches.

Very entertaining recording, much less of a slog than some I’ve been to, and Ad seems to work a crowd remarkably well for someone whose blog is full of self-loathing and anxiety. The man’s a virtual hero of mine, though, to the point where I even manage to struggle awake on Saturday mornings to listen to Ad & Joe on 6music. Not that I’m awake enough to text or e-mail in (and occasionally fall back asleep during it, but that’s what Listen Again is for), but maybe one day. Let’s hope he gets a series, anyway.

The Friday following. Me, Ian, Damo and Josh go to see Diary of the Dead. Romero’s latest film. Not his best work, is the general consensus, but Josh liked it. Personally I felt the “satire” felt like it was being laid on with a trowel, and that the depiction of technology was flawed at best. Because I knew it was a film in the Cloverfield strain, but with a specific point about social media, I mentally bet Youtube would be mentioned and sure enough, there it was, along with MySpace later on. Points for trying.

Unfortunately, points lost for managing to contradict itself on the whole social media issue, by first saying that you can’t trust anything in the corporate media beacuse they’ve got an agenda, but then pointing out that affording equal weight to multiple personal sources means that getting objective truth out of a matter isn’t possible (kind of like this blog). So basically, you can’t trust any source and the point of the film - to record the zombie outbreak - is annulled. The post-modernists among you might argue that Diary was presented as a student film and is therefore intentionally crap at times, but ultimately that’s an unsatisfying excuse. An accurately-made, intentionally bad film is still a bad film. Ironically, unlike Cloverfield, Diary didn’t have a big enough budget to make it look low-fi enough. Wrap your head around that one.

As Ian observed, any bit that had a zombie in it was fun, but I’d say it’s a film that’s only worth re-watching for the same reason as anyone would watch Star Trek Generations - because you’re the kind of masochist who enjoys watching a film to point out the flaws.

Some point recently, I finished The Gum Thief. After a few decent releases from Coupland, I was disappointed by this one. He hasn’t written a book this unsatisfying to me since Miss Wyoming. All the ingredients should’ve worked - Epistolary form, check. Sarcastic, depressive character, check. Canadian Goth teenager, check. Part of it even takes place in London, and name checks places I actually know! It should’ve been fantastic. Instead, it was… not. I think part of the problem was how the novel-within-a-novel, Glove Pond, continuously broke the rhythm of the character interaction. I know it’s fucking travesty, but about halfway through I started skipping the Glove Pond stuff altogether. Frankly I wasn’t going to make it through otherwise. The book really picked up in the last third, thankfully, but before that… yeesh.

On the most recent Monday (19th) Nikki and I went to Foyles in order to see Dave Gorman do a quick read from his book of the film, America Unchained, then record a Q&A vid-pod-web-cast. The documentary film was, let’s face it, a massive letdown, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. By the end, he had addressed many of the larger issues I had with it, and I can’t help wishing the film had done that.

He explained how it wasn’t really a political statement, more a nostalgic one. That clears up several problems on its own - ie, how even in going to independent cafes and petrol stations, he’s buying Coca Cola drinks and Shell oil. He also explained how he specifically decided not to take spare fuel in a jerry can, because stocking up on fuel wasn’t in the spirit of seeing if you could go across the country only buying from independents. That certainly needed to be in the film, because we spent the last half of it rolling our eyes as they ran out of petrol AGAIN and shouting at him for not filling up the damn jerry can. On balance, it does appear that the book will be way better than the film, for anyone who hasn’t been put off Dave Gorman for life but his whining on More4.

Last Wednesday, we finally addressed the matter of the mysteriously hot/cold/hot/cold boiler problem that’s been going on for some time. The engineer said some hilarious things like “This is a very old piece of equipment” and “the level of CO2 it is putting out was literally off the scale.” before declaring it unsafe and coming back to fix it the following day with new electrics. While this was going on, I started Chuck Palahniuk’s most recent book, Rant. It’s done in the style of an Oral History, and I recently (uh… in the last two years) read an Oral history of the Pixies, so I’m well-prepared for the style. Palahniuk hasn’t disappointed so far, but for the first time I’m actually so disgusted with what’s going on that I’m finding it hard to read. Palahniuk has a thing for ridiculously visceral descriptions of stuff you’d much rather not read about. I managed to read Guts without much trouble, but this time even I’m having difficulty.

That brings us, more or less, to today. I’m at home for Easter, and it’s incredibly odd that it’s been snowing all weekend. Global Warming? More like Global Cooling, AM I RITE? You knows that I am. Although seriously, if the snow continues coming any later in the year, the Olympics are going to look very weird in 2012…