Boring Like A Drill.

The good people at Sarsaparilla have invited me to join their crew of kulchur bloggers, so of course I immediately accepted. Every now and then I’ll be posting stuff over there, which will either be cross-posted or linked to here.

My first contribution is up now, and even though you’ve probably read it before I suggest you go read it again, what with the nicer formatting and other interesting things to read that they have on their site.

New on the blogroll: Straight from the Tated . It has excellent taste in links.

(Related: Take Every Day as it Comes, Brothers and Sisters)

The name and subject indices have finally been updated, to the end of September. At last you can find out what El Lissitsky, Juvenal Habriarimana and Sally Thomsett have in common.

I come back from a small holiday away only to find that my last three posts, including the one which explained I would be offline for a week or so, didn’t get posted. Oh, and July went missing for a bit there, too.

I think it’s all working OK now, although it looks a bit pointless. Normal business resumes tomorrow.

And it’s about to get slower. I’m on holiday all next week. Don’t worry, I know you’ll cope somehow.

I was going to suggest some highlights from the past month but (a) there aren’t any, really, and (b) the July archive is mangled right now. I didn’t even get around to posting the write-up of the Berlin Biennial. Ah well.

There’s been lots of activity here, but very little to show for it. Moreover, my antipodean constitution still hasn’t accomodated the fact that summer is now in the middle of the year.

New material will start to appear next week; in the meantime enjoy the indices and website, which is still pretty much empty but now sports a design that is merely dull, instead of non-existent.

The name and subject indices have been updated to the present. Yeah, I know…

Firstly, I apologise for the dodgy links in the Centre Pompidou post. Apparently the French think it costs them bandwidth for you to keep looking at a page after it’s been downloaded into your cache, so the links to artworks in their online catalogue have all expired. You’ll have to go to the front page and find them yourselves. I bet they didn’t have these problems with Minitel.

Illness and travel are keeping updates sparse this week. In the meantime, here’s a recap of the past month’s reviews:

• The Centre Pompidou (that’s in Paris!)
• Frederic Rzewski, and other political composers.
• The Eurovision Song Contest (in two parts).
• The Bang on a Can All-Stars, and Iva Bittova (en Paree!)
• The bottom half of the Tate Modern.
• Samuel Beckett’s Play.
• And, a new addition to the Boring Like A Drill Hit Parade.

Tune in again next week to hear me complain about feeling my age.

Yet another six months have passed, so it’s time to update the list of People Or Things I Have Been Mistaken For, Or Allegedly Physically Resemble, In Increasing Order Of Ridiculousness. Two more entries.

Thanks to travel, and to my internet provider screwing up my service without explanation for the better part of a fortnight, I have a large number* of half-finished posts lying around. Because all the news is stale, stale, stale, I’m going to put them up in reverse order so the latest stuff isn’t too old and the oldest stuff looks like a series of appropriately nostalgic flashbacks.

Right now, the new! improved! name and subject indices have been updated to the end of March.

A special thankyou to the extra person who subscribed to this site through Bloglines during my forced absence from updating the site regularly, only to unsubscribe again once I added a fresh post last night. I hope you enjoyed my blog while it was stagnant, and I’m sorry I spoiled everything for you by adding fresh content.

* Four.

Today is an auspicious day. My long Babylonian captivity in the laundrette down the road has come to an end and I have resumed occupation of my bunker. The internet connection is once again fully functional.

Moreover, today marks a year since I left Australia and relocated to London. This anniversary has given me cause to reflect on the many changes in my life over the past twelve months away from my native country, but one happy thought in particular stands out: I have now gone an entire year without hearing The Cat Empire. Life is good.

Lousy Bandwidth Week Fortnight continues – my soon to be ex service provider thinks 5 days’ wait for them to reply to your problem with their server is acceptable. I’m getting a feeling this could take a while. In the meantime please enjoy a couple of hasty posts below, typed up at the laundrette. From time to time I can post text, but can’t actually access my own website to see if it’s com>>>>>>%20%& nbsp;^H^H^H^He<>& nbsp;< /font>operly< /div>

I got back from Paris OK, only to return home to find that someone* had changed the locks to The Bunker. Luckily, the laundrette down the road is open 24 hours. Posting will resume sometime, once I’m safely indoors again and my ISP finally admits I’m not online like they say I am.

* “That would be the landlord.” Thanks. Stop reading over my shoulder.

Having crossed “walking across a frozen river” off my list of things to do before I die (do not try this after you are dead), I realise I still haven’t fulfilled my lifelong ambition to overturn a parked car and set it on fire. Therefore, I am off to Paris for a few days, where violent, anarchic dreams may still come true. Hopefully there will still be a few untorched Citroëns left by the time I get there. Postings will resume in a week.
Next week: Having namedropped Morton Feldman a few times this week, I plan to go to tomorrow night’s concert and book launch of Feldman’s interviews and lectures. So you can expect a writeup, plus photos from Riga on Flickr.
If you can’t stand to tear yourself away from this site to check a few links over there –>, here’s a small selection of recent reviews:

• The London Sinfonietta et al play Xenakis, parts one, two, three.
• The BBC Symphony Orchestra play Elliott Carter.
• Icebreaker play Philip Glass, badly.
• Eurovision Song Contest wrap for 2005 (one, two) – it’s only two months away…
• Looking at people looking at Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment.
• A visit to Ezra Pound’s old house in Kensington
• A walk to St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe.
• A rant about the current state of modern fiction.

Oh, and sorry about the blog’s front page disappearing for a few hours back there. I’m pretty sure that was my fault.

Attempts to get a website happening have come to naught. Because there’s some server space lying around it seemed like a good idea to set up a permanent home for some of the music that has been featured here. If you missed them last time, here’s your chance to download at your leisure the lovely and multitalented Julie Dawn’s Austrian Flame (the BLAD corporate anthem), Buddy Greco’s superlative take on Like a Rolling Stone, and (ahem) my own modest contribution.

Also includes a FREE bonus track, i.e. a fusty old piano piece I wrote several years ago and can’t be bothered talking about right now. It’s nice, really!

There are also links to music hosted elsewhere which has benefitted from my free publicity, by such disparate talents as Morton Feldman, Steve Bent, and the Evolutionary Control Committee.

Sorry, no music by Jeremy Bentham.