An analog life

Still partying like it's 1999

2007-08-22

The science of sleep

So has anyone else ever had a really sudden, weird bout of insomnia, when there's nothing particularly wrong in your life beyond the usual day-to-day worries? Insomnia lasting weeks at a time, where you can only sleep anywhere from 45 minutes to three hours a night, and no matter how exhausted you get, as your short-term memory vanishes, your muscles start cramping from exhaustion and you have a permanent headache, you still can't sleep? Even with the aid of over-the-counter sleeping pills and every other combo of drugs and alcohol you can think of? Even after you've convinced your doctor to prescribe you something heavier and it still doesn't knock you out? After you've tried every gosh-darned thing you can think of and more, and are starting to think you may never sleep again? And you have started wondering what you should tell your employers because if it goes on much longer you will cease to function and have no valid medical reason for it? Yeah. I think I'm finally coming out the other side of one of those bouts. I've had two nights in a row of drug-free sleep now. For which I feel a tremendous sense of achievement, which is ridiculous as it's something you should be able to take for granted, isn't it?

Anyway, I'm going away for the bank holiday weekend. Want to know where?

2007-08-13

All I know about Paris comes from Indochine videos

I slept for just 45 minutes last night, a new low in my recent bouts of insomnia. And then today I went to Reading to sit in on hours of audio recording sessions. I am just about hallucinating, I'm so tired.

But though I feel like a ninety-year-old woman right now, I am able to relive my youth through the old Indochine videos people have finally started putting up on YouTube. One of the best things about growing up in Kingston was that we got MusiquePlus (the French-Canadian MTV) as well as MuchMusic (the English-Canadian MTV, inferior to the French in my opinion). One of my first music-related crushes was on the lead singer of Indochine, and I would watch for their videos on MusiquePlus. You couldn't find their albums in Kingston (I'd buy them in Montreal or Quebec City on school trips), or any more information about them as it was before the internet and they never appeared in English-language music magazines. Though my crush faded in high school due in part to my inability to learn anything more about them, Le Birthday Album is still one of my favourite albums and has permanent residence on my vintage (and therefore limited-capacity) iPod. I googled Indochine recently - how did I get by without being able to do this? - and discovered that, despite the death of the lead singer's twin brother (who was also in the band), they've continued recording through the nineties and oughties, including duets with Placebo and Melissa Auf der Maur. Some of their new songs aren't bad either (though their videos are still odd and kinda derivative). But it's been particularly fun to watch those old videos from the late eighties again. I literally haven't seen them for about sixteen years. The videos for 'More' and 'Le Baiser' were one of my first introductions to Paris. A black and white, moody, artsy, romantic Paris populated by cute boys in French/Belgian bands. Though I love Paris, having now been under all those Seine bridges myself I can attest it's not as romantic in real life. Especially with all the tourists (maybe I need to visit in winter). However, Paris is always best imagined in black and white, isn't it, like those atmospheric old Brassai posters. No city could live up to that in the flesh.

More
Le Baiser

Laugh at the dancing girls if you will, but this song is still one of my favourites for dancing around the bedroom and singing into a hairbrush:
Les Fleurs Pour Salinger

2007-08-05

Where is the summer going?

I've just returned from holidays in Quebec, a blissful interlude during which I swam, cycled, canoed (that spelling just looks weird), napped in a hammock, visited a Benedictine Abbey where they make great cheese, crossed the world's longest suspended walking bridge, read the last Harry Potter book, and ate my weight in maple sugar. Oh, and drank a lot of beer from Quebec microbreweries (which must be among the best on the planet). I am now struggling with the sad reality of being back at work. When you live for the weekend, life starts going by pretty fast. I mean, there are only, what, twelve weekends in the summer? Anyway, we're trying to plan some more trips to have something to look forwards to.

The floods in Oxford got some press in Canada. While I was at the cottage, unable to access TV or internet, I began to fear that the whole of southern England was under water. But when I came back from Heathrow by bus you'd never have known anything had happened (judging from what I saw between bouts of exhausted unconsciousness - those overnight flights kill me). Parts of the city along the Thames did flood, soaking homes that in some cases were still recovering from floods just over a year ago. A friend of mine spent a week on high alert, piling sandbags around her place (which ultimately escaped flooding), while a Scandinavian TV crew camped out across the road and annoying tourists walked around with cameras, presumably hoping to see exciting flood destruction. Many towns were worse-hit than Oxford though, all along the major rivers in this part of the country. But other than stories from a few people I work with who weren't lucky enough to be on high ground (and from many others who suddenly can't get home insurance), the only sign we've noticed is that grocery stores have been poorly stocked because the floods blocked roads and impeded agricultural production. Now, however, the news is all about the latest foot-and-mouth outbreak, which they are trying to contain.

Last night I saw the Canadian show The Newsroom on TV here. I am curious as to what British people would think of it. (They also broadcast Canada's Next Top Model, presumably filling the void between seasons of Britain's Next Top Model and America's Next Top Model.) I was also astonished when Jeff came home with little Fraggle dolls that Barclay's Bank is selling for charity. I always had the idea that Fraggle Rock was a Canadian show, but it turns out it was a collaboration between HBO, the CBC, a British TV company and Jim Henson's company. (Though it was filmed in Toronto and Canadian poets Dennis Lee and bpNichol apparently wrote for it. Now my next question is whether kids here ever read Dennis Lee poems.) Different countries filmed the human segments to be recognisable to kids from that country, so for example in the British version 'Fraggle Rock' is a 'rocky sea island with a lighthouse' based on Falmouth, Cornwall (I'm quoting Wikipedia). In France, the human segments take part in a bakery. And apparently there's a movie in the works, to be directed by Ahmet Zappa, which seems right in all kinds of ways. I think there is nothing I would rather be than someone working on a kids' TV show back in the day. I'll bet the people behind Fraggle Rock had a blast. I also watched a documentary on British children's television, and it was full of eccentric people building plasticine and felt models in backyard sheds for very odd shows like The Clangers. Hey, here's a fun trivia fact: the band The Soup Dragons was named after a character in The Clangers. It all comes together ...

Speaking of Canadian culture, I got a free CD with an NME magazine a couple of months ago that claims to be 'the sound of the new Canada scene'. Out of fifteen bands I'd only heard two (The Stills and Metric) and heard of two more (The Besnard Lakes and You Say Party! We Say Die!). This proves that either NME is out to lunch or, most likely, I am now truly, irredeemably out of touch.

Suspension bridge.

Misty evening on the lake.

Scary artwork in an antique shop in Quebec (below). I think this is one for the Museum of Bad Art, though at 90 dollars it's probably a bit beyond their budget. I don't know what it is that disturbs me ... perhaps that the cat's features are human when viewed up close - the eyes in particular. Yikes - imagine this on your wall.