This is my stuff.

Herewith, my accidental Recipe for Caseio-Oneiric Disaster.

Ingredients:

• 11 episodes of “Breaking Bad” in 2 days
• One sliced thumb in the preparation of…
• One 4-egg omelette sprinkled supra-liberally with sharp Tillamook cheddar

Instructions:

1. Spread the TV show thickly over a couple of rainy days’ hiding inside. Allowing the first nine episodes to settle, retire to kitchen.
2. Take approx. 2-3mm off the top of your thumb in dicing ham for the omelette. Apply sticking plaster.
3. Cook omelette slowly with a stupidly deep layer of tangy, processed, plasticised, ready-grated Tillamook reclining across its surface. Ingest at a rate of knots.
4. Return to TV and pile on the last two episodes for good measure.
5. Journey to the land of Nod.

Results:

• The safety and warmth of your home is transformed into the clean but slightly claustrophobic, childishly-decorated motel room above the manager’s office space in a dingy, dark, commercial warehouse. Your companion contributes cantankerously to your bickering; dirt and mould encroaching everywhere in the cavernous corrugated corridors downstairs contrast  with the washing-powder odours and creamy cleanliness of the living quarters. A smooth but suffocating sensation of stasis concurrently comforts and crushes.
• A change: cold dread creeps dryly down your spine as the realisation washes over you - they’re coming for you. They want the only thing that stands between you and abject failure, collapse and ruin. You’ll have to work out what it is. Go through the cupboards. Turn out the desk drawers. Find out. They’ll never stop! The only way out is to run. Both of you must somehow get away, the stash intact. Pack it up! Get out fast. Get in the car; find somewhere to hide - yet …
• There’s nowhere to go. You’ll run forever if only you can stay ahead of them. But they’re fast. No human’s that fast. The engine rising to a scream, you scramble onto the back seat and gaze nervously out back at the gathering pall of menace swarming up the road behind you. They’re almost with you - you were right, the killers run at superhuman speed, the very thought of their progress clotting, curdling into a swarming, gelatinous mass of insidious intent, transcending and transmuting their visceral physicality to solid steam streaming into the air around you. Tentacles tear from the core, grapple with the atmosphere, careering chaos crawling to the car, emerging hands erupting, spreading, fanning out like smoke and lightning and solidified swirl behind, the shape of a face materialising into an ectoplasmic head inside your suddenly porous escape capsule, ebbing and flowing, in and out, round and about, pushing and probing at the boundary, trying to outrun, engulf, ensnare, until - something shifts. A distant call? An edict from elsewhere requesting a retreat? But it’s a reluctant, recalcitrant recession, it won’t last long - and you can’t run this fast forever.
• You wake up staring, stark, suspended, the certain knowledge lodged deep in your gut that they’ll return, soon, swifter, stronger … how to guard against their primeval power?
• No answer. All hope is gone. Ignore the screaming of your senses and wait patiently for reality to reassert itself.

I realised recently that Twitter has taken over my attention to the point where I rarely post anything to my website, except for the occasional bookmark, Flickr favourite or G-Reader item. This has meant that my site has for the last few months become nothing more than the dreaded “link blog” - that is, a stream of pointers to other people’s work.

Given that Twitter’s really good for that sort of thing, I’ve decided to stop putting anything of that sort onto my website, and use the If This, Then That service to push my favourited/starred/fffound/bookmarked items onto a separate Twitter feed, “igorlikes”. I’ll then re-tweet anything that I think others might be interested in via my normal Twitter account, “igorclark”, meaning existing followers can already see stuff I deliberately RT, and can choose to follow the whole stream (should it become any more than a trickle) if they wish.

I’m hoping this might have the side-effect of making me more inclined to write proper blog posts on my site, but I guess we’ll see how that goes.

It’s time to get this worked out. It won’t take long; there’s no need for extended therapy, risky medications or complex rationalisations, and I won’t charge you a penny. The treatment is brief, concise, and to the point. So let’s begin.

Like many people - so many more than you realise! - for some time now, you’ve been vaguely aware, somewhere deep in your hind-brain, of an unfathomed, unfulfilled desire. A primordial pining, a powerful yearning for understanding, comprehension, enlightenment even; a preternatural realisation that for far too long, your basic appreciation of what might reasonably be described as the definitive British heavy metal band - let alone any kind of respectable working knowledge of the detail of its oft-overlooked œuvre - has been so sorely lacking as to bring gut-wrenching shame upon you and your entire line.

Not only does this ignominious ignorance disgrace you socially, but it leaves you lost, lonely longing; desperate for deliverance from your sorry state of incompleteness, driven to distraction by the certain knowledge that someone, somewhere out there, has carefully curated exactly the collection of aural appetisers which together constitute the musical meal you seek; an introductory repast, an opening into the world of that which salves your soul and soothes your sorrows: the domain of down ‘n’ dirty, rough, ready and willing to rumble rock ‘n’ roll.

The scene is now set; the reason for your subconscious sorrow summarily laid bare, the fix is clear. All you need, to fill the void gnawing at your very core, is for that someone to be made known to you, in order that you might benefit from the balm of that unguent for the unconscious.

So let us tarry no further: I reveal myself to you as that someone! Yes, O weary traveller, I have the cure for your malady, and I present it to you now, for your distraction, delectation and delight: the highlights of 12 years of heavy metal history at a key point in its evolution, stripped of the populist and the filler. Friend, I bring you Motörhead killers, ’75-’87; a Spotify playlist of an hour or so of the best, beefiest, most straight-up tracks from the main proponent of what metal music is really all about; fast, heavy, bluesy rock. Get in there. Knock yourself out. You’ll find your emptiness evaporating immediately.

There’s a lot being written about Google’s collection of “private data” from WiFi networks using scanning equipment in its Street View cars. The Daily Beast says ”it’s not paranoia if Google is really snooping on you”, and that Google “collected private data from non-password protected Wi-Fi networks”; the Register informs us that “Google may have collected emails and other private information”; BoingBoing says that the search company ‘snooped’ “private data people sent over unencrypted wireless networks”; and on it goes.

Whatever you might think about Google, and whether or not you like the idea of the company holding data on you - let alone of its software as an automated arbiter of whether, for example, your face or car number-plate is correctly excised from the Street View maps - this réportage is disingenuous, and particularly disappointing because it’s coming from such generally solid sources. (I’m glad to note that Ars Technica’s coverage keeps it sensible.)

There’s been plenty of discussion recently of Facebook’s privacy policies, with luminaries like Danah Boyd writing lucidly about the issues there - which is only right - but it seems to be making for an atmosphere in which lazy journalists are playing on people’s reasonable concerns about their online privacy in order to make a big headline.

Of course, this is hardly the first time that that’s happened, and, equally, this isn’t the first instance in which Google’s approach to privacy has also been subject to scrutiny - and in some of those instances, found seriously wanting - but the way in which this particular episode is being presented serves merely to add sludge to already muddy waters, and these particular straits, treacherously complicated though they can seem, are important. The clue to the misrepresentation is in the terminology: “private data”, and “unencrypted”, “non-password protected” WiFi networks.

Obviously Google has a responsibility to ensure its software works properly and doesn’t compromise people. Obviously if it’s engaging in large-scale data collection it has a responsibility to ensure that such collection is done safely and respectfully. The reality of software engineering is that software is written by people, and people make mistakes, even in systems that are designed to look for mistakes made by people. (Obviously, it’s a shame for Google that they’ve opened themselves up through such a mistake to further criticisms about their privacy record, given recent events.)

This, however, is not the real issue. The real issue here is that technology journalists are writing stories implying that Google is secretly snooping on our private lives, on the basis that it’s been collecting information which people have been broadcasting, unencrypted, to the world at large.

This is new ground for most people, and answers to questions regarding whether Google - or indeed anyone with a WiFi card and some software - should be able to do this are not self-evident. It’s complex ground, too; the questions are not just related to technology but also ethics and, consequently, law. Articles such as those quoted above over-simplify, making unstated assumptions which aren’t apparent to many readers, and thus misrepresent this important material to exactly those people who most need to have it correctly represented.

The problem is that we’re diving head-first into a massively more complex information society, predicated on spiralling levels of technological complexity. This opens myriad issues in terms of privacy, data protection and, crucially, the comprehension of these issues by the people most affected by them. Like, if you give a shit about the security or privacy of your information, it’s down to you to take basic precautions like enabling authentication and encryption on your home network. (Let’s not even bother with the fact that the vast majority of these “private” emails make most of their transit in plain sight over the public Internet, encrypted home WiFi or not.) Clearly this makes the issues involved into big stories; technology writers know this, and take it upon themselves to inform their readerships about it. Which is as it should be.

The thing is, this is important, and the people writing about it have a responsibility to inform their readers in a level, even-handed way. If they focus instead on whatever makes the bigger story, because that sells more newspapers/magazines/ad impressions, then they do those readers as great a disservice as the companies about whom they monger their headline-grabbing scares.

Douglas Rushkoff talked compellingly at this year’s SXSW about his “Ten Commandments for a Digital Age”. The main thrust of his talk was that in this new information technology landscape, if we’re not to be completely manipulated by the biases of the technology involved, or that of the technologists who create it, we must either learn to manipulate those systems directly ourselves, or at the least we recognise that technology has biases, and is not neutral.

This clearly applies to previously existing media, as the technology journals are painfully demonstrating: the current wailing about Google’s data-gathering mechanisms seems a pretty clear example of how individual people need to learn to recognise those biases for themselves, because those who profess to inform them about the issues intrinsic to the technological advances are equally beholden to their own, pre-existing biases, amplified by scale and distribution in their new global context. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

It wasn’t just Osborne. There was an infinitely more malevolent, and manifestly less incompetent, presence on board. That’s right, it’s your friend and mine: THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS!

But will the old Etonian’s erstwhile boating companion now take full advantage of this latest nepotistic opportunity - on the back of his hopeless friend’s extraordinary elevation at the hands of a hapless fate - for yet more unelected, avowedly non-partisan, portfolio-less rounds of sinister manipulation at the heart of morally bankrupt government? If so, you’ll be able only to:

» WATCH as his ruthless PFI agenda subsumes further swathes of public service money and control into the pockets of his Big Co. pals!

» SCREAM as, empowered by a notional “mandate” borne of an abortive election, he siphons off ever-increasing percentages of GDP into murky slush funds remote-controlled by corporate fraudsters and large-scale private criminals!

» DESPAIR as healthcare, transport, the Post Office - hell, whatever he can get his hands on - collapse into the grasping, silently merciless hands of international oligarchs, and Maggie’s grim forecast of a British society entirely unsponsored by government finally comes true!

MANDELSON. Coming soon to an opportunistic, mismatched, ethically compromised coalition near you.

This week it was announced that the Royal Mail privatisation was to be delayed until after the next election. All very well, but the last 30 years of brutal corporate hegemony seem to have left our economic, social and political intellectual landscape so ravaged that in spite of the grotesque plutocratic machinations of the recent “credit crunch”, “bail-outs” and “recession” (read: fiscal coup), the issues are frequently presented as party-political, policy-neutral electioneering, and apparently no-one even wants to consider the fundamental ideological issue here, which is (in my view unfortunately) a deeply unfashionable one: that public service exists to serve the public.

So, let’s try to get this straight. I’m going to get simplistic about this, because frankly that’s what we seem to need to do in order to get the point across. According to the privatisers’ mantra spun by the Prince of Darkness and his various little wizards, the Royal Mail was to be privatised because “it wasn’t working as a business”. Since when was it a “business”? It’s a public service. It exists to serve the public, not owners or shareholders. It’s OK to run it at a loss if need be. That’s why we pay tax, so that public service can serve the public. How complicated does this have to be?

“Ah, but it’s inefficient.” So? Fix it. “The only way to fix its inefficiency is to introduce competition, because profit is what motivates people to succeed.” Well, even if we take that logical leap of faith as gospel, fine: introduce a profit motive to incentivise individuals within an organisation, give them targets and objectives, get them to feel that there’s a personal point for them in striving to make the organisation work more effectively - but don’t introduce profit as a motivation for running a public service. It’s trivially obvious that it will lead to a reduction in services that don’t generate profits, which is not what a public service is about.

Transport, hospitals, post. If people insist on having private versions because they want to spend their hard-earned cash on extra bells and whistles, that’s fine - but there’s no reason to take it as a rationale for flogging the lot and ultimately removing the base level of service that a publicly-elected and -funded government has a responsibility to provide. If you’re going to outsource the whole machinery of state and reduce taxes to a bare minimum, then setting aside the politics and ideology, you’d at least have a consistent argument for emasculating the public sector to the benefit of private capital. If, however, you’re going to pose as a left-of-centre party and maintain any levels of taxation, then rationalising the sale of public services to that private capital is nothing more than a ruse, a larceny of the sort we stared goggle-eyed at in post-Soviet Russia’s collapse into lawless oligarchy.

New “Labour”. How dare you use the name.

This is a shortened version of an article in the print edition of Rolling Stone #1075 which I happened, unusually, to pick up on Friday night. I’m glad I did; in conjunction with a piece in the otherwise fairly uninspiring new UK Wired about banks using David Li’s ‘copula’ formula to correlate risk, it lends a much clearer understanding of the current situation, and it isn’t pretty. From the declawing of Glass-Steagall, through the creation of ever-more complex derivative instruments to the eventual rejection of Congressional audit by the Federal Reserve under an obscure 1950 statute, the road to takeover by bankers of regulators and the Fed has been signposted, if only we’d known how to read the signs - or even that those strange daubs consituted signs. A companion analysis of the UK landscape would be, how you say … fascinating.

I’d already got about halfway home this evening when I decided that enough was enough, and it was now raining hard enough to merit hailing a taxi to get the rest of the way. A couple of them just didn’t see me; a third slowed down and then, for some inexplicable reason, sped off apparently on seeing me. The fourth saw me, pulled over, and let me get in without even asking where I was headed. A good Samaritan, I thought.

We passed the 7 or 8 minutes’ ride in pleasant enough conversation - what did I do, had I been doing it long, what were the people like - until it came to the point about 500 yards from the drop-off opposite my home when he decided to drop the biggy.

“Quick question?”
“Yes?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“… No.”
“Did you see my sign?”
[ A quick look reveals a sign on the front side of the glass barrier saying “JESUS IS LORD. HE DIED FOR US.” ]
“Ah. No, I didn’t see that.”
“Well, do you know about Jesus?”
“I know a bit about him. Sharp guy.”
“Sharp guy, huh. Well, I think he was God, and he died for us and rose from the dead.”
“Do you.”
“Yes. I just thought I’d let you know that.”
“OK. So, £5.60? Here’s £7. Keep the change.”
“Thanks. I just thought I’d share that with you before you got out.”
“OK. Well, have a good night.”

So. Um. Hello? Is there anybody in there? If you’re going to proselytise, oughtn’t you to start a bit sooner? I mean, you left it a bit late there dude, all I had to was just get out of the cab; you didn’t even give yourself time to corner me into a circular theological dispute I can never win even if I choose to engage in it because evidence denies faith and yeah yeah yeah. I don’t think Jesus would have been too impressed. Although thinking about it, he probably would have forgiven you. Sigh. JESUS WIN

I’ve been running PHP apps with the standard PHP FastCGI server behind nginx for a couple of years now, and in that time have worked up a set of tools to manage PHP processes with multiple configuration profiles. This has been based around my slightly hacked version of Alexey Kovyrin’s PHP–FCGI spawn script, along with a chkconfig–compatible init script I’ve written as a front–end to control it, taking in some simple per–profile configuration in /etc/sysconfig/php-fcgi.

Various contributors to the English nginx mailing list have posted in that time singing the praises of Andrei Nigmatulin’s php-fpm, a patch to the PHP source which adds “FastCGI Process Management” to the standard php-fcgi binary. It’s apparently in use in some pretty heavily–loaded sites, and I’ve had it in mind to check it out, but as my setup has been stable (if not exactly full–featured) over the last few projects, I haven’t had a huge impetus to get and do it. Today, however, I finally had enough downtime to check it out, and now I’m wishing I’d done it earlier.

My existing method basically worked like this:

· init script reads configuration file, with one “profile” per line detailing location of php.ini file, interface and port to run on, number of child processes to run, number of requests to serve before a re–spawn, etc.;

· init script uses these details to construct a command–line to call Alexey’s spawn script, once for each profile;

· spawn script constructs environment and command–line argument list to spawn a set of PHP processes for each profile entry.

This has worked fine, but as so often with these things, the init script became a bit unwieldy with additions over time, and is still unable to do anything elegant like graceful restarts on the PHP daemons.

php-fpm addresses these issues and more. The “profile” configuration is put into a sensible, clear configuration file (php-fpm.conf) which allows you to specify a number of named PHP process “pools”, each with its own detailed FastCGI server and PHP configuration.

The documentation’s somewhat light, and mostly in Russian, but it has all you need to get going, and the configuration file is easy to read. Once you’ve configured the pools you want (in my case sets of named dev/stage/live setups on different ports, so as to keep include_paths — and therefore library code — properly staged), you just need to run php-cgi —fpm. From there on, you can send various signals to the master process including SIGQUIT for a graceful stop, SIGUSR1 to cycle log files, and SIGUSR2 for a graceful reload/restart. The master process ID is stored in $PHP_PREFIX/logs/php-fpm.pid.

I’ll probably write a simple chkconfig/init wrapper to send these signals to the master using e.g. /etc/init.d/php-fpm graceful, but that’s about all I’ll need to do in order to replicate and extend my existing setup.

Not only does this simplify and tidy up my PHP–FCGI setup enormously, it also adds a number of convenient extra points, including IP–restriction and a nice fix for the fix for the “empty error” page problem. Intuitively it “feels” a lot more solid, and I’m looking forward to using it in production. Nice bit of Russian coder humour there on the “extra points” page, too. Thanks, Andrei!

I just found myself in the situation of needing to install a load of software on a RHEL 4 box which had not had up2date set up. “Simple,” I thought, “it’s RPM-based, so just install yum and all will be well. yum’s nicer than up2date anyway, so”.

A cursory Google threw up this guide to doing just that, but I found that the list of RPMs provided was incomplete, possibly due to the age of the article. With the duplicates removed, package versions matched, and downloads sourced from the up-to-date CentOS and pbone, the set now installed without dependency problems, but left a non-functioning yum installation:

Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
not using ftp, http[s], or file for repos, skipping - Null is not a valid release or hasnt been released yet
Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: update
Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: update

I hadn’t delved into yum’s config or repository setup much before, as on most non-RHEL rpm-based distributions it tends to work out of the box; I’d added other repositories, notably Dag Wieers’, but not looked at the format much. Imagine my delight on realising that now was my chance.

A first glance at the repository definition in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo suggested trying to use the baseurl entry which is commented out by default, rather than the mirrorlist. No joy, but it gave a pretty obvious clue:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/Null/os/i386/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.
Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: update
failure: repodata/repomd.xml from update: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
Error: failure: repodata/repomd.xml from update: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

Got it? That nasty Null is caused because the repository definition file uses a variable $releasever which, as man 5 yum.conf tells us, is taken from the currently installed version of the package named as distroverpkg in /etc/yum.conf - which by default is centos-release (presumably taken from the RHEL redhat-release convention). Thus the only step necessary to get was to install the centos-release package.

So here, for your edification, and as an »aide-memoire« for me, is my list of the packages required to get yum working correctly on RHEL4:

centos-release
centos-yumconf
python-elementtree
python-sqlite
python-urlgrabber
sqlite
yum
yum-metadata-parser

Joy.

Hot on the heels of Spot the Bull comes POKE’s next big campaign for Orange, Balloonacy. It’s a balloon race across Internet. No, really. It’s in its sign–up phase at the moment; the race itself starts on June 23rd.

You can launch a balloon or sign your site up to be part of the map, and if your balloon gets the furthest you can win a holiday in Ibiza.

It’s the biggest project we’ve built using our home–grown, bare–bones, remote–MVC framework, “Death Star”, and the first in which we’ve integrated it with AS3.

A lot of POKErs have been involved in this, including Iain who came up with the idea in the first place. Design is by Marc, Nicky and Dickon. In the client-side tech team, we have extreme Flash & pattern action by Dezza, with code & Papervision help from Gabes, and lovely Flash 9 sheen from POKE’s very own Caroline B. Stepping back from the Flash, we have front-end build and Death Star CMS delights from Greg; JS integration wizardry and Death Star coding from Mattias; Death Star coding, AMF services and database tomfoolery by Nilesh; system & platform architecture and team leading by mine own evil hand. Project managed by Mike who’s done his damnedest to kept us all sane. Ish.

For several years one of e. e. cummings’ selections of his poems had sat calmly on my bookshelf, unread and almost forgotten, but, unbeknownst to me, waiting patiently for life to prepare me sufficiently to grasp its content.

All the while I’d known nothing of cummings’ work save a few quirky, cheekily risqué pieces to which I’d been pointed over time, and had rashly assumed that they were what it was all about — so when, in a mood for some impish light-heartedness, I stuffed that slim volume into my pocket and dived into the first few stanzas on an empty eastward Saturday evening Tube, the strength of the undercurrent pulled me completely off course.

Two pieces in particular left me stunned into silent contemplation — who knows if the moon’s a balloon, conjuring in my mind Chagall’s eery, idealised yet somehow troubled world of airborne lovers (particularly Promenade and Lovers in the Red Sky); and Humanity i love you: a sly sucker-punch, an indulgent sigh of gentle resignation tailing finally to a hoarse rattle of anger and despair.

Here is an elegant and innocent beauty, a playful naïveté shot through with a mournful, quietly desolate seam of profound and mature comprehension, the understated expression compounding the contrast’s potency. An unexpectedly powerful discovery, for me, of an unheralded eloquence and grace.

There’s so much activity at the moment around web development using niche and previously esoteric languages that the recondite is fast becoming the norm: recherché, my dear, is the new commonplace. One can’t help but wonder in some cases how far the developer of a given zoom–to–web framework has set out with some clear design goals in mind, carefully considered specific features of various languages in the context of those goals and eventually settled on one; conversely how far languages which natively support continuations, functional or concatenative programming are simply too cool not to have three–step web app frameworks, or indeed whether the implementation of such a framework has become a rite of passage for a langue débutante. For such considerations to stray into the realms of whether particular languages are selected purely on the basis of how arcane their syntax may be would be nothing less than cynicism, which is obviously untoward in technical discussion.

Nonetheless niche is sometimes nice, focus is frequently fantastic, and it goes (almost) without saying that a tightly–focussed development effort by some extremely smart people can, and often will, bear fine fruits. Recent ponderings in the Clark–brain have concerned The Right Way To Get The Job Done, and whether a “right” way might actually exist — more to follow on that topic, but for me, it’s all about that same ol’ focus, tools for tasks, and the Unix Way — so to that end, please find herewith a beauty parade of some of the linguistic and mechanical delicacies currently whetting my appetite, and lined up for perusal at some point in the not–too–distant.

Factor Stack–based programming definitely is cool.

Merb MVC framework Looks to do what it says on the tin, neatly, without any fuss, and hopefully without eating gigabytes of RAM for entrées.

Ragel state machine compiler If it’s good enough for Zed, it’s good enough for me.

Seaside If you want old–school cool with a nu–skool polish, it doesn’t come much better than Smalltalk — even if the Smalltalk community site does try pretty darn hard to convince you otherwise.

Finally, while we’re talking continuations in web frameworks (though post-AJAX Seaside seems to be sidelining them somewhat): even if the mere thought of a “full–stack web application framework with tools and APIs to implement most common web features” is enough to make my knees itch, using continuations but still maintaining control over HTTP nuts and bolts has a cool factor of at the very least Xe+28, and the recent burst of POJO–speak has re–lit my hitherto Bean–sickened and J2EE–weakened Java fire — all of which factors combine to suggest that RIFE is likely to get a look in.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I get to see this view pretty much every day. My living room window faces straight out across the West Hills, affording gorgeous sunset after gorgeous sunset. Can't get enough of it.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Turned out I was in NYC at the time my friends at Breakfast were gearing up to launch their iPad-controlled video blimp at the NY Design Week afterparty on Saturday night (at the Ace Hotel on West 29th Street), and so I was happily recruited in to helping with setup. Cables taped up, comms lines cleared, it went off really well, and seems to have got the guys coverage at Wired blog. Schweeet.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

We built this iPad app using the Eyewitness photo series. Steve Jobs referred to it in the pre-amble to his iPhone OS 4.0 launch as "really nice", and "a cool app". I've been touched by the hand of Jobs.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Bright shoes are where it's at. They force you to be a cheery goon, which is clearly highly desirable. I've gone so far as to throw away my old dull, dark shoes. That ain't me no more.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Goose fat. That's the secret, lashings of goose fat. And when you've par-boiled the potatoes, swing 'em around in a colander so they scuff up niiice. Medium oven for an hour, regular turns, lightly steam the veg - then: stuff the whole lot in your head, quick as you can. No-one'll ever know it was there.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

If you tell people often or long enough that the people in "you and me did it" really ought to be "you and I" (as I'm the subject of that verb), what'll apparently happen is that they'll ignore it for ages, and then all of a sudden, over the last year or two, develop it into some sort of meme, whereupon they all start using the subject "I" in places where the object "me" is required. "A photo of my partner and I" - huh? Is it a photo of I? No, no, and thrice no. It's not. It's a photo of me, isn't it.

The most crushingly irritating thing about it is that people make a point of doing it. Egregious, yo.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

On Saturday I went to have yet another puncture repaired, and hopefully delay the next similar incident, by having some new tyres fitted to my bike at Lock 7 Cycle Café. On wandering along Broadway Market to pass the time while waiting for the work to be done, I chanced on the Artwords bookshop, a sister to the one on Rivington Street. It's a treasure trove. Several times I realised in the course of my visit that I was just gazing, mouth agape, at the shelf- and tablefuls of gorgeous, fascinating, beautiful books. Spent so long browsing that it would have felt really rude not to take anything with me. I love this place. I'd love to find a sort of cultural Shangri-La like this hidden in big city hills, a literary, linguistic and licentiously visual labyrinth, with room after room of tomes and quartos and lavish lithographic layouts, and spend days and weeks and months absorbing and soaking myself in the splendour, luxuriating in its lushness.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Or just a top-hatted dude with a stripey shirt, lying on his back pretending to be a dog having his tummy tickled? Or just apparently collapsed while doing a drunken zombie/ghoul/sneaky-monster walk? Not that either of those wouldn't be quite good in its own right, but I don't know, maybe I read too much into these things. Maybe I just try to connect things up too much. Anyway, nice picture. So it goes.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

… do people insist on putting toilet paper the wrong way round on the holder? It's really not even a question of preference, if you think about it - turned the other way, the strip presents itself for plucking, while this way you have to hunt around underneath the roll, like some sordid, snuffling subterranean troll. It's not computational fluid dynamics, people. It's simple efficiency.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Hang on then, better not just arrive at the airport and get on the ’plane. No, definitely better load yourselves up to the gunwales instead with supposedly-“reduced”, still-grotesquely-overpriced, indulgent shit you know you don’t need and can’t afford, but could probably buy on credit if you were to manage to allow yourself to be kidded into the delusion of “saving money” by the minor concessions made in the name of “growing the economy” by these manipulative, devious, exploitative corporate shitmongers. Much better that way, for everyone. Otherwise the gears just won’t keep turning, and we can’t have that.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I've been to Soho Japan three times now, and had this rather unusual dish on two of those occasions. Both times the Japanese waitresses have felt it necessary to make sure that we know what we're doing, as this is clearly viewed as somewhat unpalatable to Western tastes. It's definitely strong - raw baby squid tentacles in a sauce made out of the rest of the squid, pulped with salt and spice - but I enjoyed it so much the second time that I left a sufficiently empty dish for the waitress to look really quite surprised.

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An excellent eating venue: Soho Japan. An uninspiring pub transformed by the seemingly anomalous transplanting into the bar of a Japanese kitchen and staff, on this occasion providing not only rather wonderful starters and sumiyaki selection but this sashimi moriawase with some of the best, freshest toro sashimi I've ever eaten. Very good Beaujolais complemented the menu and the lack of human swarms lent a decidedly relaxed atmosphere. A new favourite, I wonder?

Igor Clark posted a photo:

This, on the wall in Marks & Spencer in Islington, North London, is one of the most meaningless, vague, weaselly, vacuous environmental "statements" I've ever seen. "By 2012 we'll aim to ensure that none of our clothing or packaging needs end up as landfill" - what does that mean? In 2012, you'll finally grace us with a decision that, at some unspecified, subsequent point, you'll somehow engender a situation where all of your clothing and packaging can be disposed of using methods other than burying them in holes in the ground? And what methods might those be? Sure, recycling could be one possible method, but does this "statement" in any way imply that it would be employed, as against, I don't know, setting fire to them, or breaking them down using some bizarre radiation process? And do you think the fact that they won't "need" to end up in the ground absolves you of any and all responsibility for the means and ultimate effects of their disposal?

No doubt there's some website or information leaflet out there somewhere which gives more detail of how M&S really are saving the world, but in terms of the phrasing and the message, this is meaningless, vacuous greenwash of the worst sort, designed to induce a feeling of hazy, warm goodwill towards M&S without any actual justification. I really hope the people who come up with this stuff find it hard to sleep at night.

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I was a bit annoyed to see people pulling apart the derelict P&D Green house shop-frontage and hence dismantling the recently-added hands piece by Run, but when I saw this old signage with its presumably pre-1990 'phone number underneath, it suddenly all seemed alright. Don't ask me why.

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From Moshi Moshi. Been a while since I had one of those bad boys. Which reminds me of when the friendly fruit-stall guy at Old Street tube station referred to bananas: "You want two of those little bad boys do you?". Yes. That's exactly what I want. Brutal.

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I took it out of the ’fridge early, rubbed on some oil and black pepper, and left it to breathe for a while. The plan was to make the best approximation I could of Jack O’Shea’s advice by giving this cross-cut onglet about 90 seconds on each side, as close as I could get it to as high as the grill would go, and then letting it rest for a good five or six minutes. It wasn’t the thickest slice I’ve seen, so I was a little concerned about over-cooking it; as it turned out, had I been in more squeamish a mood today, it probably could even have borne another 30 seconds each side, but the result was perfect for my currently vampiric mien, and the flavour - obviously largely due to the careful maturing at the ’Pig, though enhanced, I do believe, by Mr. O'Shea's tips - was quite extraordinary: a deep, broad beef, smooth and round, with a tangy edge of offal iron. This cut’ll get nowt but praise from me.

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I mean, I suppose that does look like quite a lot, I guess, but it reduces down when you cook it, doesn't it? What if it all boils away? What's that? Light steaming is never going to make anything boil away, you say? But that fish is going in the oven for half an hour, and once you've soaked the rice for a similar time it's all water anyway, right?

WRONG

Igor Clark posted a photo:

One of the things that annoys me about the fact that in all probability I won't live for ever is that it means I won't get to see all the crazy shit those space-age futuristas will come up with. Mostly the time machines. Example: only yesterday, a moment of genuine sadness overcame me when, while warming up some nice thick pea and ham soup, I glanced at my cooker and felt a real pang of regret that I might never be able to pop back to a carefully-tended Palæolithic fireside, wrest a caveman's attention from the dancing shadows cast by its oh-so-hard-won flames, zap him back to my futuristic lair and show him a god-damned GAS HOB. I mean, imagine the look on his face while I'm just standing there, switching it on, and off, and on, and off. Maybe casually scorching some paper, a candle, a sabre-tooth steak; you know, just making the point. On, again; once more, off. And hey! Look! I switched it on again! Yeah! How'd you like them apples, Cavey? He'd go batshit, I'm telling you.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Strolling down from Goodge Street towards a restaurant on Rathbone Street, I cut through Charlotte Place and discovered The Blackfoot Butchers, apparently opened in November last year by the team behind The Salt Yard just over the road. Haven't sampled the wares yet, but if you can make out the Jacob's Ladder through the reflection in the photo (apparently the same cut as an American "short rib"), then you're probably as keen to give it a go as I am. You know, if you're a weird meat obsessive like me.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I received this email from someone called "The Mentalist", using an anonymous Yahoo mailbox, out of the blue on Monday:

Hi Igor, How's (my place of work) treating you these days? Hope all the family dinners went well. Do you think you'll pursue more creative ambitions in photography or stick to the tech side of things? Best wishes, The Mentalist www.flickr.com/photos/36633002@N07/

All of this is information that I've made publicly available via Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn - I don't exactly go out of my way to keep it hidden - but it's tied together in a way suggesting someone who either knows me or is following me around on-line, which in the context of an anonymous email from "The Mentalist" is less than comforting.

So I replied, in a friendly manner, that I didn't know how far the photography would go other than as a hobby, and asked directly to whom I was speaking. No reply. I checked the email headers, found out the network location from which the mail originated and the contact details of the network manager in case I needed to use it, and left it at that.

This morning, however, I received another reply:

Well, you should maintain the photography as a side kick one way or another. Did you miss me last night? See if you can work out some mentalist abilities at seemorethanothers.com. Best, The Mentalist

Oh. This is an advert for a TV programme. Right.

The whois record for the domain linked in the mail shows the registrant as Brooklyn Brothers, a Soho digital agency who, according to their website, started because they "wanted to be an antidote to advertising in general", and who believe that:

[…] we are currently placing the future of all commerce and communications in a network that can’t be trusted to deliver a reliable answer to a simple question. You can’t trust online reviewers. You can’t trust the gossip-cum-news outlets. You can’t separate the wise from the cranks.

So, Brooklyn Brothers, I don't have a TV. I know nothing about your campaign or your product. All I see is person(s) unknown making it clear to me that they know details of my personal life, refusing to reveal their own identity, and directing me to some vaguely sinister photos. How, exactly, am I supposed to separate you from the cranks? More importantly, why should I have to?

This is not wise. It's all wrong. It's obviously intended to be 'edgy' or 'alternative', but frankly it's nothing more than intrusive and creepy.

Apart from anything else, once the load has been shot and the website link has been sent, as a campaign it just feels a bit crappy. If they had the balls, they'd go the whole hog and really scare the shit out of me by going over the line - that'd get some publicity, alright - but of course, they know they're subject to ASA guidelines and ICO laws the same way anybody else is, so they're reduced to "well, err, can you look at my website please?". Well, err, no.

As I said in my email to the Brothers, if this is the antidote to advertising, give me billboards and banners any day. This is bollocks.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I finally got my Hush print framed, and I am, like, well happy. Not only because of the awesomeness of the print, but also by what a bloody good sort Hush showed himself to be during the remote-control print-purchasing process. Nice one man.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Still quite pricey, but this time it was well worth it - the food came twenty minutes earlier than expected, its taste was exactly the taste I wanted to be tasting at exactly that unexpectedly-twenty-minute-premature moment, and even the delivery guy was friendly and polysyllabic. Fisherman's pie, yeah.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Been meaning to try the breakfasts at this well-regarded Italian café for years (though obviously not as many years as the place has been waiting for me to show up - “est. 1900”!) - to my shame, I never managed to make it down there while I was working just up the road in Shoreditch. Went there Friday morning to break fast with John Z who’s moving to an amazing job in Georgia. Bacon sausage mushrooms beans and toast. Job's a good ’un. Good luck John.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Waste of space.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

So start being a bit more bloody considerate, you towpath-hogging, danger-making, irritation-causing, bell-ding-enrudening, selfish cyclist fucks.

Yes, I know I ride my bike all over the shop; yes, I know I have been less than 100% considerate on various occasions in my life, but: it's pretty clear to anyone with even half a brain that hoofing a bike along a narrow path next to a cold pile of dirty water with lots of people walking on it is NOT a safe or good idea for those people, particularly under bridges, you daft, impatient bastards, so I just don't take my bike on the towpath, even though it would be quicker and safer for me if I didn't have to ride next to trucks and buses.

The thing is, I'm really not an especially non-selfish person; it just seems bleeding obvious - so what's with you lot? Are you different in some way? Do normal common sense, courtesy and decency not apply to you? Do you have a special dispensation from Boris Johnson to piss me off every day? Has he sunk to the level of trying to annoy individual London-dwellers one by one, by proxy? Well, I hope you all fall in. Maybe you'll all get Weil's disease and select yourselves out.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I remember having, as a young child, a red t-shirt with the Coca-cola logo emblazoned upon it in Arabic. I don’t know where I got this t-shirt; maybe an equally small visiting friend left it at our house and I “inherited” it, as there’s no way my Dad would have sanctioned its purchase, unless he really didn’t clock what it was. At any rate it feels like his very lack of realisation was part of the shirt’s attraction to me, making it somehow more mine than all the other oh-so-explicable stuff surrounding us. I loved it, anyway. It’s quite an early memory: I remember wearing it on a warm day in the main hall at my infants’ school, and we moved our house (and hence my school) in December 1978, so at the latest it would have been towards the end of the summer in that year, making me six years old. Thirty years ago. It feels like it could have been earlier, but of course recollections of childhood can be deceptive. I reckon it must be close to every time I’ve seen a tin of Coke with its writing in a language other than English since then that I’ve thought of that t-shirt, or at least my memories associated with it. It's a well-worn mental path for me now, meaning sights like this can evoke easily the excited sensations provoked in an inquisitive child by the possibility of some arcane knowledge to which he and he alone might be privy.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I knew less of Bacon before visiting the current exhibition of his work at Tate Britain than I did about Rothko, and while I can't say it had as powerful an effect on me, it's an impressive array of work, and a well-constructed exhibition.

Bacon's forthright use of structure, background and the “space-frames” featuring for example in various of his Studies after Velázquez’s "Pope Pius X” highlight the contrast of his protagonists’ emotional and physical urges with the constraints of their emotional and physical environments, both enabling and heightening his visceral evocations of how transitory are rage and angst against the carcass-likeness of our corporeal forms, and how transitory in turn are those forms, electrified briefly by some primal spark, simultaneously supremely vulnerable and supremely powerful in their ability to exploit that vulnerability, whether in themselves or in others of their kind, collapsing ultimately either through such exploitation or the passage of time into dilapidation and decay.

As the exhibition guide relates, “Explaining the explicit violence of his third triptych in 1965, [Bacon] simply stated, ‘Well, of course, we are meat. We are potential carcasses.’” You got it right there, Francis.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

One of my leaving presents from POKE was a huge bag of extremely good steak. Fillet, ribeye, T-bone, sirloin, and one of the biggest rump steaks I've seen, matured for 45 days. Not content with that, amongst other things (including a monster Friday night out) they also very generously indulged me with the gift of a day's beef butchery course at the Ginger Pig in Victoria Park. To say I'm eagerly awaiting it doesn't really begin to encapsulate my feelings about it - mild trepidation mixed with delight and excitement would go some of the way. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy these pre-cut steaks enormously. Thanks, Pokers!

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Tonight, not only did we grind our gnashers' way through 5 different cuts of impressively varied beef steak - from carpaccio of Aberdeen Angus fillet, through sirloin of grass-fed Hereford and rib-eye of grain-fed Casterbridge beef, to New York strip steak cut from 35-day Creekstone corn-fed U.S.D.A. prime - but: we ate 9th-grade Wagyu beef rump (top right) at the Maze Grill.

The Wagyu producers in Japan only export up to 5th-grade product, keeping the higher grades back for inland consumption by the local connoisseurs, and so the rump we had was Australian, its origin and California being apparently the two only other sources of such high grades.

I grant you, I've not yet been to Japan, nor tried even low-grade Japanese Wagyu beef outside it, but frankly, if the Australian stuff is as good as this, and served as deliciously broiled as this in one of the top meat restaurants in London, and I get to have a taste, then my nose is staying fairly resolutely in joint.

This was remarkable food. It's quite an endorsement of the meal as a whole if all 11 attending Meat Club members (out of a planned 12 - you know who you are, vegetarian) gladly cherish every drop even of the pudding. Jason Atherton, you and your excellent staff deserve every one of your plaudits. Thank you for treating us to this feast.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

On Friday, I left POKE, a very tough call after more than three and half amazing years. I’ve spent time this weekend realising quite how much of my emotional and mental energy had been invested in the place and its inhabitants, and how great a proportion of my life it had come to encompass. For me that can only have happened by dint of what is not only an unusually creative and genuinely inspiring environment and culture, but also by virtue of the remarkably warm and vibrant group of people without whom that environment wouldn’t, and couldn’t, exist.

As with any investment, there have been downs as well as ups, but the overall trend has been a marked increase in the capital of my life experience. Change is always good; I’m excited and enthusiastic about the future; and while past performance is no guarantee of what that future holds, I know that the experiences I’ve gained, the lessons I’ve learned, and the important friends I’ve made in my time at POKE Towers will help me to embrace it with open arms.

Thanks, POKE, and thanks, Pokers.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

A small crowd gathered ’round these two guys having a good ol’ bash underneath the railway bridge over Old Street. It sounded quite fresh, but the sax (is that a soprano sax I saw before me?) was a bit annoying on its own; what it really wanted was some propa ruff bass — or even some evil, thunderous ghetto death bass — to go with the really quite shit-hot d’n’b drumming the guy with the hair was doing. Still, all very impromptu and street and basically yeah. I particularly liked the guy stood at the side of the sax player just looking involved and generally caring a lot about it all.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Having rarely seen much of it in the flesh before yesterday, I’ve never really been sure what I think about Rothko’s work. I suppose I’d always thought there was a kind of grim humour to it, with these huge window-like figures hung high in windowless gallery rooms; and I was aware not only of a Warhol-like fascination with repetition, cycle, and (im)mutability, but also of a somewhat Klein-esque experimentation with colour, texture and profundity — even if my perception of it was mediated and inevitably emasculated through the Habitat-isation of (e.g.) “Orange and Yellow”. The Tate Modern’s current gathering of his late works reveals quite how much a real-world viewing illuminates and clarifies Rothko’s art, and hence how much sense it makes that he should have been so concerned in his lifetime with the compositional aspect of the works’ presentation — not least because the presentation in question, even though perhaps at odds with aspects of Rothko’s reported views on it, is itself so intelligent and sensitive to the work.

On first seeing abstract pieces, I often can’t help myself from wondering, Middle England-like, how much artistic ‘skill’ or ‘talent’ is required to daub paint in a seemingly random or at best simplistic manner on a canvas. After enough viewings, investigations and conversations, however, the knee-jerk “I could have done that” has at least come to be followed usually equally automatically in my mind by “Well, you didn’t; this artist did”, on which cue I settle into some kind of analytical appreciation of the work, taking authorial intention as a first principle and working outwards, as though mapping atoms of causation, into its effect on the viewer. (OK, I know, that’s mental, but come on, give me a break — I’m a computer geek, a decomposer and a re-builder of things. I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m made.) Though I started out on this exhibition in the same analytical mode, fussing over which room was which so that I could make sure I was reading the right bit of the guide, feeling slightly short-changed by small mural studies in gouache on paper looking much to my impatient brain like children’s washes of colour, by the time I left, I’d undeniably felt something quite different, brought about by these paintings; something quite inexplicable and quite powerful.

The guidebook returned more than once to what it called Rothko’s “preoccupation” with the display of his work; in the first room, a small cardboard model was shown of the space proposed to him for display of his mural at the Tate; later, photographs of some of the pieces under ultraviolet light showed details of the brushwork. Strangely, for one as construction-oriented as I am, under some circumstances I find an exhibition’s dwelling too much on the craft, the historicity, the detail of the manufacture to be a distraction, sometimes even an annoyance — surely, I ask myself (perhaps through some desire to escape, by the offices of overpowering sensation, from that very orientation) the work leaves something to be desired in terms of immediacy and appeal, if such examination is required in order to appreciate it? In this case, however, it was exactly that examination which opened up the desired sensation to me.

The respectfully muted lighting in which Rothko himself had been so insistent that his work should be presented is maintained in the main Seagram room, contrasting directly with the conservators’ inspections in the next room, the stark change of atmosphere from the practically ritual to the scientific adding weight to the feeling of getting under the ‘skin’ of the paintings. The nigh-pornographic revelation of the layers of multiple paint media under the UV lights combine with the glass-backed presentation of one painting’s underwear to instil a feeling of paradox, an unease brought about by the juxtaposition of the large murals’ seemingly uncomplicated gloomy luminescence with the sudden realisation of the actual complexity of the work undertaken to impart that appearance of simplicity. Layer upon layer, stroke upon stroke, coatings, glaze, obfuscation, redirection, misdirection … Should we be seeing this? Should we be laying bare this depth of care, rather than simply appreciating the final result, particularly in the case of an artist so intentionally proscriptive about the manner in which it might best be appreciated?

I found this dichotomy particularly striking, because it was exactly the realisation of the care taken which opened my eyes to these big, bold, engaging, contemplative canvases. Not just the care taken in and of itself, but the demonstration of what was under the surface made me consider these pieces in a new, naturalistic way. From the more or less subtle re-covering and smothering of the landscaped “Red on Maroon — Mural, Sections 5 and 74” in the Seagram room, to the intense, concentrated paper studies and the increasingly open, even loose textures of “Black on Gray”, I became aware of a kind of tangibility to the paintings, not the thickly-applied oils of a Van Gogh but something altogether delicate, as though the ethereality of the intention behind the works had somehow been infused into the physical materials, bonding with its form and somehow lightening the weight of that material even as it impresses its reality upon the viewer.

The “Black-Form Paintings” seemed to me the summation of this experience. As the guide says, “prolonged contemplation reveals the slow build-up of the surface through multiple layers and the close attention Rothko paid to gradations in tone and texture”; in the course of such contemplation, the paintings really do seem somehow to reveal something of themselves. The familiarisation of my eyes to the light, the surroundings and the composition of the space allowed the Black Forms to shimmer before me, pulling in and out of my conceptual focus, and I found something enormously compelling about these implied monoliths. Something mysterious, something suggested, something long-known and yet long-forgotten; a kind of magnetism, an unspoken yet powerful compulsion towards something just the other side of comprehensibility. It felt in that moment as though there really might exist, in the world, such a thing as human meaning, be it devoid or otherwise of objective implication, and as though such meaning might be conveyed across time and space, even through inscrutable, formless form.

I’m still not sure what I think about Rothko’s work, but at least now I know that I feel something about it. Thankyou, Mark Rothko, for your enduring obsession with communicating your wordless meaning, and thankyou, Tate Modern, for granting it this prism.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Saw this new place a couple of weeks ago, walking past on the way home from the Easton, near Exmouth Market, and having just enjoyed a rather good meal there, felt inspired to check this out at the next opportunity. Unfortunately, it was quite a let-down. For a start, the pace was extremely rushed, to the point where I had to tell the waiter that we needed a bit of time to digest even slightly before choosing a pudding. Secondly, though my starter of ham hock with jalapeños and nuts was good, the rest of the food really just wasn’t up to much. The steak was fine, but if you can buy in decent meat, which they obviously had, then you really ought not to be running a restaurant if you can’t serve it decently; the roasted cassava chips accompanying it were a tasteless waste of space; the cheesecake was too cold and hence also fairly tasteless, insufficiently crunchy for something advertised as containing hazelnuts, and generally uninspiring. A decent Malbec went well with the steak, perking things up a little, but the pudding wine which the waiter recommended to go with the cheesecake (out of a choice of only two served by the glass from the seven or eight on the menu) was too sharp, mismatched with what taste I could elicit from the pudding itself, and so merely constituted yet another disappointment.. In summary: great location, nice décor, could be good, but seriously, don’t bother until they’ve had a few critical slatings and consequently got their act together.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Here at POKE we’re not generally ones to blow our own trumpets – not really flexible enough – but this is worth a mention. Having been tech director here for more than three years, I’ve seen a fair few awards come through the studio, and have been involved with a fair few of the projects involved; this, however, is a bit different. Rather than a paid–for industry love–in with associated award ceremony, booze–up and the rest, this is part of a survey conducted amongst POKE’s peers by New Media Age. While we came out 44th of the top 100 overall (not bad in itself considering our turnover and size), we were voted “most respected by other agencies”. That’s a little bit of warm glow right there, now isn’t it? Thanks folks.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I very rarely order liver in restaurants because frankly it’s just so easy to fuck up. However having eaten some extremely good steak at Unico in Epping before, it struck me during today’s visit that their chef might well know if not his actual onions then at least his offal. While it certainly could have been a little rarer, it certainly wasn’t ruined, and the choice of cure on the bacon, though I don’t know what it was, complemented the strong liver flavour very nicely. In summary: not bad.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I’ve been meaning to write this down for a while now. I think it was in early October 1989 that I was sent on an errand which involved picking up a box of now–forgotten materials from a printer’s premises somewhere around this area; Tabernacle Street rings a distant bell. Memories fade, memory confounds, and close on twenty years have passed since that atom of happenstance flickered in and out, but I know I have an image of this place, forged by the place it then was, on that sunny autumn day.

I remember the old Tube station — I feel like it was Moorgate — as having an agèd wooden bridge over the tracks, and I remember looking, as I wandered through this maze of biblically–inspired street names, down into still–forsaken gaps in the buildings, gouged presumably by the intrusion of V2s decades earlier.

I remember that pinch in the air, that welcome snip of coolness slicing through the tail of an Indian summer’s breath. I remember the shimmering, thinning quality of the light, borne of our angle to the sun at that autumnal point; and as I remember, the years gone by conspire to spin webs of tangled connections in my mind between that glistening, concrete day in which I lived, and others, similar, but merely conjured from the minds of writers I read as a child. I remember popping in to The Castle Sandwich Bar on my way back to the station to buy a toasted sandwich: ham, cheese and pepperoni, a recent concoction, and by far my favourite at the time.

I remember so clearly how good it was; not just the butter and grease oozing out of the edges of the burnished floury white bread to soak into the bitty texture of the coarse white paper bag as I walked excitedly yet somehow deflatedly back down Paul Street to find my way home and back to the grind of the familiar, but the whole sphere of presence and determination, of an expanding vista of thus far elusive but soon–to–be graspable possibilities opening themselves to me — the thrill of the new, the budding comprehension of the enormity of it all. It felt good; it was good.

I remember the friendly faces in the Castle and the easy, matter–of–fact bonhomie of the people who worked in this oasis, alongside its even–then ageing décor; and I remember, fondly, one of my first solitary tastes of a hitherto completely unknown city.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

What with Friday night’s revelry causing me to spend most of Saturday in bed, I missed my recently-instituted weekly trip to Dalston market, and so decided today to stretch my legs and grab some essential supplies by strolling down to the supermarket in Whitechapel, walking back the long way, up towards Aldgate and back up Brick Lane. I snuck out of the side gate to cut the corner round onto Whitechapel Road, and couldn’t help but notice immediately an unusually heavy police presence. Walking further along the road I encountered more and more, stopping to snap some shots, wondering whether this could really be a normal population for a Sunday – surely the Met aren’t so uptight about Whitechapel that a few street-stalls and a fancy-dress procession would inspire such blanket coverage?

A quick consultation with an enthusiastic photographer whose view I’d inadvertently blocked in the execution of further investigations bore Olympian fruit; the Torch was to be borne along Whitechapel Road as part of its journey to Beijing, via the Millennium Dome. My gaze followed hers up to the police helicopters hovering above, back down to the sea of fluorescent jackets, and, realising that the route would coincide with mine, I continued along my way, shopping bags in one hand and camera-phone in the other.

Soon the density of detectives grew dramatically; on foot, on motorbikes, in vans and even on pedal-bikes they came, and sure enough, the first bus of the Torch Team came past the bottom of Brick Lane, aswarm with yellow coats and flashing blue lights, with more vans hot on their heels. In spite of a policewoman’s estimate of an hour, a five-deep guard of shouting, sweating, screaming officers heralded the arrival of the torch-bearer within moments of the bus, and instantaneously the atmosphere of the scene transformed from pregnant anticipation to an unmistakeable, almost tangible atavistic thrill. A battle of shouts was merely the sonic manifestation of a battle of wills between the phalanx of police, and the demonstrators whose attentions they wished to ward off, the latter shouting not only various admonitions to the boys in blue but also, amongst other things, “Free Tibet!”, “Go home!”, “You’re not welcome” – that last, I thought, particularly personal and powerful in its clarity, simplicity and directness.

Here was the representative, the conceptual; here was the pinnacle of a clash of human forces, the apex of antipathy between a set of interlinked and interwoven binary oppositions. Imperialism and freedom; China and Tibet; Western and Eastern policy, power and perception; order and anarchy; the Olympian spirit inevitably set deliberately and manipulatively in stark contrast to political machination, human frailty in the face of the temptations of power, and human cruelty in the face of that power’s actual attainability.

Yet also here was the real. The spine-tinglingly immanent reality of tribalism; of simple aggression and antagonism dressed up in self-righteousness; of the thoughtless exercise of duty. An ultimate reality, yes, the street level of this internecine struggle pointing inescapably to the reality of the powerlessness of the masses, their lives laid out before them by the soaring sweep of History and its implementation through the desires of ideologues the world over, whose causes and intentions they champion at the front line of conflict; but also the palpable, material reality of the crowd, the hormonal and adrenal dynamics of the constituents of those masses, the sudden and powerful meaninglessness of the ultimate at the very moment of its infusion into the corpus. It was that which grabbed hold of me, the excitement of the moment, the presence of the world and its power and I turned to follow the runner, first with my eyes and then with my feet, overcome not only with a sense of immediacy and connection to my surroundings but also by a heady cloud of comprehension of everything swimming around me; the grunts and Marine-like shouts of the police, the angry baying and shouting of the protestors, the apparent calm of the torch-bearer in the face of what suddenly seemed to be mayhem, organisation barely maintaining dominion over chaos.

Here, now, was a primal happening; a chink in the fabric of daily existence through which one might conceivably slip, a believable possibility of the collapse of order; people running madly down the street, pavements and roads becoming one, cyclists, pedestrians, police, protestors, passers-by like myself intermingling in a frenzy of excitement, my shopping bags swinging beside me, my camera clicking away, my mind exalted and my senses ablaze, an explicit distinction on political grounds mirroring the sociological and psychological chasms separating these groups of people so close to each other that they could reach out and touch, grab, caress, punch — and within it all, almost subsumed by the emotional seismology, the still, small voice of calm, of integrity and endeavour, its figurative presence rendering trivial the manner of its physical representation: the Olympian intention.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

This morning, I rose early and, rather than do any of the interesting things that I would actually have liked to do in the time before work, I started on the list of intensely irritatingly necessary action points life had imposed upon me, and tried to carry out chore #1 by going to the Post Office to pick up the unexpected packet they'd been “unable” to deliver the other day. (I’d decided in advance not to get into a dispute about the precise level of their delivery “abilities”.) Was it waiting for me, as promised? “Sorry, Sir, no, it's not here - I know it says that you should wait 48 hours and you’ve waited about 64, but, well, even though a number of hours in this type of ‘literature’ usually refers to actual hours rather than one-seventh or one-eighth fractions of business days, as otherwise of course they’d have specified business days, in this case, it means business hours, yes, including the night time, yes, and you see yesterday was a Bank Holiday, so it hasn’t come back to the sorting office yet”. You fuckers. You fucking fuckers.

So I cycled home, took advantage of one of the few compensations of shitty weather by putting on a warm, comforting, shitty-weather coat, and started the half-hour trudge down to the bank to carry out chore #2, “pay in cheque”. See, banks usually don’t open early, because as we all know, they’re egotistical, usuring, global-economy-devouring, economic-fallacy-propagandizing, regulation-squirming, capital-propping fascist bully-boys who’d rather piss on their own feet than actually provide a realistically useful and useable service to their “customers” unless doing so happens to coincide with “streamlining their processes”, but one of my eagle eyes had happened to take in on a recent visit to said establishment a notice proclaiming the immediate effect of their new early opening hours, so I knew it would be OK. Until I arrived to discover that not only were the bastards staying firmly shut until 9.30 today because it was a Tuesday (of course), but they’d actually taken the trouble to print up notices to that effect and plaster them all over the bloody windows, with the single intention, I felt, of rubbing my recently-arrived nose in it. Fuckers. Fucky fucking fuck fuckers.

Chore #3, “buy boring but annoyingly necessary toiletry crap” was mildly less irritating insofar as the individual items of annoying crap I needed to buy were actually in stock, but as if to mitigate that small mercy, the shop fuckers had yet again moved every single thing that I needed to buy to a different place in the shop. Are you people so staggeringly crass that you think that if I arrive in the deodorant-should-be-here place and find, I don’t know, swimming goggles or thrush cream, I’m suddenly going to go “ooh yes, now I think of it, you never know when your next bout of candida will be, do you?”, and pile excitedly in to a buy-one-get-one-free offer? You fuckers!

So, maintaining a suitable combination of upper-lip stiffness and attempted muscular looseness (a tricksy manœuvre at the best of times), I moved onto chore #4, “take pleasingly nostalgia-inducing selection of old photos filtered from pile discovered in bag in cupboard under stairs during weekend faffing mission to Snappy Snaps for cheapo automated scanning”. Imagine my escalating delight on being casually informed that yes, Snappy Snaps does indeed engage in the paid scanning of photographic materials, at £1.99 per scan, and, further, my strangulated gurgles on being told that in fact no, that’s not crazy, it costs £1.99 per scan, and that’s pretty reasonable. Hang on, are you people mad? Don’t you have some sort of brutal automaton capable of ripping through this stuff at breakneck speed? If I wanted some poor human to waste hours manually scanning and cropping a load of not spectacularly interesting photos, wouldn’t I do it myself at a charge of exactly nought pounds for fifty scans, rather than ONE HUNDRED ENGLISH? You fucking, fucky fucker fuckers.

And all of this before nine o’clock in the morning. Oh well, at least I saw a big splatty pile of splatty yoghurt mess in the road.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

A young lady sitting at a junction chatted idly with her passenger, and, when ready, thrust a tonne of moulded metal across my two-wheeled path as I sailed into a green-light gauntlet, throwing the common perception of rectitude conferred on me by that beacon into stark relief against its ultimate meaninglessness.

Time lolled lazily ahead of me, affording a nonchalant Destiny the opportunity to dangle in my sights the possibility of action against its intended trajectory; daring me to deny its dominion, challenging my challenge of its apparent authority.

Contemplation of the uselessness of an in any case absent bell done and dusted, the startling abundance of exhalation sprung like a well from my lungs was still not sufficiently strong to penetrate the toughened glass shield, and this first fist shaken furiously at the hand of Fortune fell again, futile.

Shaken suddenly from a now seemingly lifelong sensory indolence, abruptly acutely aware of the surrounding world’s almost visceral and certainly soon-to-be tangible physical indifference to my plight, my mind elevated by excitement and adrenaline to that mythical state of presence to the moment of existence, I grasped fully in that very moment the eternally infinite complexity of Now; that vortex of happenstance, that abundance of potential pathways continually strewn palm-like before us and summarily trodden beneath the grinding steps of our narcoleptic trudge through the luminous intervals we call our lives.

Seized by my own capacity, I squeezed on my brake and the back wheel – apprising me, even in my access of apprehension, of the paradox of choice and mechanism – started to skid on the dry tarmac, ceasing immediately on my grip’s relaxation; one course closed, I opened immediately another, my mind and body tightened, together, to a sneer at such dualistic distinctions, and tilted my frame away from true, leaning into a leftward swerve which though inadequate to avert entirely the expected collision, would surely diminish its force, and leave me free to proceed with my reflections?

The instant of impact took me momentarily outside of myself; in the pitching, yawing rolls of hand-wound gramophone cycles, the bike was knocked from under me and I slid to the dirt, my ear presumably, as evidenced by its subsequent revelation to a hospital nurse of chipped black metallic paint, grazing the nearside wing of the car fractions of a second before the ground treated my elbow in the same manner. The cosmos scrabbling around me in a crazed dash to regain its familiar orientation, my panorama returned to its customary aspect and I lifted my head towards the rapidly-approaching anxious onlookers, then back to the car, puzzled as to why its passenger, the door now open, was towering above me at such an unsual angle.

I stood, dazed but unbroken, and was assisted kindly to the roadside where I sat for a moment bemused, befuddled, and bewildered, distracted from my meditations by the ministrations of an emergency-ambulance motorcyclist. Where was I hurt, could I see, could I feel?

To those questions I could provide answers, but to another, more fundamental: had I averted my fate, or merely co-operated in its implementation? – I had, and have, none.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Suddenly, it seems, the hirsute crest of flourishing youth announces its
Intention to pass the way of the rest of all flesh.
Cruel is the irony of existence, played out through the path of

Testosterone: in early hours it runs a relaxed
Riot, coursing freely, unworn by care, unfettered by
Anxiety; beholden only to the satisfaction of physical
Necessity, revelling in the magnetic pull of a crown quite so full - but
Soon, the daily grind inevitably
Impinges, inescapably, upon
The hitherto heedless viscerality of

Glowing adolescence,
Leading the newly over-active adrenals to attend
Openly to their accelerated
Recession of the erstwhile pilous perimeter and its
Ignominious retreat to entirely unexpected
Areas.

Many are the compensations to be gleaned from a life increasingly
Unencumbered by juvenile confusions and agitations; yet
None can deny how cruel indeed a
Deception is wrought upon us: to grant so transcendent a glimpse of
Immortality through the briefly burgeoning bloom of experience - so swiftly and so softly whisked, wholly, away.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

We wonder how this might have come about. Of course the reason might easily have been as simple as that the TV star was hungry, angry with the homeless man (damn those homeless men), or merely criminally insane; one can’t help but wonder, however, whether there might not have been a deeper and altogether more fascinating scenario at the root of this regrettable occurrence (assuming, of course, that it was regretted and not vaunted). Perhaps the TV star had also become homeless and stumbled into a biting episode arising from a territorial dispute over begging rights with another member of the homeless fraternity (or indeed sorority)? Or maybe, just maybe, there exists a secret society whose members are all TV stars happily paying to attend staged fights between homeless men in (temperature-controlled) empty swimming pools in the basements of Barratt mansions secreted deep in Epping forest? Perhaps the TV star was so incensed at the loss of one such fight by the homeless man he or she had sponsored with a significant display of fiscal confidence that the bite was simply one of frustration? Or maybe - just maybe - the TV star, once a keen participant in such light-hearted leisure activities, might have fallen from grace, losing a coveted spot on “Celebrity Bastard Squad” following a mysterious incident with a turkey and a Cumbrian rapist, collapsing via a glut of explosively lurid coverage ultimately into a desolate morass of anonymous obscurity, eventually ending up, in a staggering and of course entirely unexpected dénouement, fighting for coins in the cellar of his replacement’s crypto-Wimpey pile?

We may never know.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

The sun sneaks its way ’round the back. The wheels just keep on turning, and the great mechanic they power hums apace; objective, indifferent, yet ultimately inspiring our tiny hearts, setting the scene for a fresh focus. Time takes its toll on our fragile frames, yes, on our rosy lips and cheeks; but also on our yokes of care. With every inch of each revolution, disappointments dissolve into distance; with each step of every rotation, losses themselves lose their very sting. “Oh, mundane earthly matters”, as my Dad had Galdós put it: “you are not worth a single sigh”. And so we rise, though sometimes our spirits sag, and this universal marker, this covenant of continuity, on greeting us grants a glimpse of how transitory are our tribulations; and so we forge, a degree more fixed, ahead. So it goes.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Zoom out from here. Pass through the wrought-iron gateway, back away down the churned, dried mud path ’til your feet are planted firmly on the cracked light grey tarmac, Leroy's firmament-focused monument still in your sights; feel the fixity, and spin yourself slowly ’round. A solitary slatted wooden house; ploughed fields, meadows a little further off, woods covering distant hills. How patiently has this land lain silent, immemorial, still and strong, untouched, its surface barely scratched, blissfully unaware of the arrival of these mayflies who flare briefly in an illuminated access of passion, a charge of excitement, yet immediately fade, scattering their corporeal detritus as though a thin cover of dust - and there is no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither is there any more pain, for these former things have passed away - and still the land lies in dignified repose, unmolested, timeless … fleeting.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

One carriage. One carriage. What is it about Sundays that transport operators think makes people either less likely to want to travel home than they were to want to travel wherever they were going the day before, or less deserving of some vague semblance of reasonable treatment in return for the stratospheric fees they have no choice but to stump up? Is this some sort of atavistic legacy from an ancient fear that a wrathful deity might smite the train drivers for daring to compromise his rest? No? Then why on earth are we lowly Sunday-travelling passengers treated like cattle even less deserving of any consideration or concern than the same beasts on any other day of the week? Surely a genuinely loving God would want His people to be happy and relaxed on His day, and to reward those who willingly sacrifice such calm in the service of others' comfort and convenience with peace, long life and everlasting virginity, or something? Anyway, to those whom it may concern: a train, consisting solely of one carriage or otherwise, which is shown plainly by the people standing in the aisles and entranceways to provide insufficient seating for the number of people to whom the train operator is prepared to sell tickets, is simply not good enough. The issue of its being composed of a single solitary carriage is consigned in light of this simple truth to a mere slapped face after the fact. Sort it out, railway-operating oligarchs.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

I like tea. Tea is well good. I don’t like caffeine though; caffeine makes me jittery, so I don’t drink things with it in them. Like, you know, normal tea. Builder’s tea. Mmm. Which is a shame, because I like drinking it. (Well, you know, I like the drinking bit, at the actual time of drinkery, because of the taste and the refreshment bit; not after the fact, because that’s exactly the point at which I do the being-made-jittery thing.) Anyway, I digress. Unlike I usually do. Usually I stay right on target, cutting incisively through to the core of the matter. Let’s face it, digressions are hardly the sort of thing you’ve come to expect from me. Anyway, about 2 months ago I went to an exhibition at the Wellcome Institute, you know, the one on Euston Road, yeah, opposite the station, well, kind of, between Euston and Euston Square, but on the other side, so I guess kind of not between them but triangulated with them, and, prior to going, I arranged to meet some friends there so that we could allow light to bounce off the exhibits through our eyes and into our brains at the same time. I arrived a bit earlier than the appointed hour, and rather than just sit there, or even stand there, testily tapping my feet in the manner of one who’d drunk too much caffeinated tea, I went to the very nice café and bought a pot of decaffeinated English Breakfast and a Bakewell slice. The crockery was rather elegant; a triangular (bit of a triangular theme going on here) plate, triangular saucer and teacup and even, if I remember correctly, a matching triangular teapot, all with satisfyingly rounded corners, reminiscent of that ’50s style of crockery whose name I obviously can’t remember, but mixed with a bit of Alessi-style pastelism to make everything feel excitingly Noughties and simple - thus functional in appearance - but stylish. Shit yeah. Anyway, the tea, this substance chemically deprived of its primary purpose - its ergon, as those Greeks might have had it - this apparently functionally defunct jitter-inducer, fulfilled an entirely different function, perfectly: it tasted brilliant, and made me go »aaaaaahhhhh«. The bakewell was pretty damn fine, too.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Written on the wall of a Turkish mosque on Kingsland Road. What you can't quite see in this shitty mobile-phone photo is that someone’s taken a much less legible ballpoint to the existing marker-pen scrawl and crossed out “Islam” to replace it with “Christianity”. No, you. Your religion’s more boring than mine. You smoke the skunk. Yeah. And your mum. Yeah, well at least I used a legible pen. Yeah, well, that’s ’cos you‘ve got nothing better to do ’cos your religion’s so boring, if you smoked enough skunk you wouldn’t have to write on walls. Yeah, well, the writing’s already on the wall for your religion. Yeah, well, your mum’s burqa’s see-through. Yeah, well »OH, SHUT UP! THE LOT OF YOU! HONESTLY, I DON'T KNOW…«

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Please wait? PLEASE WAIT? You just made me sit on the tarmac in Belgrade for over an hour with no real explanation, you gave me crap and insubstantial food on the ’plane, you farted around trundling around the runway trying to find somewhere to park your ’plane when you’d eventually landed the damn thing, and now you want me to stand here like a placid mule, hanging on your whim for 20 minutes before you’ll even deign to let me know which conveyor belt you're not going to put my luggage on for a further 25 minutes? Are you having me on? I’ve got a booze-up to attend, you know!

Igor Clark posted a photo:

Just now, I worked out that I could retrieve the photos from my ’phone using Bluetooth (oooh, check me - I’d thought my ’phone was too crap, but in fact it’s just about capable), which made me look at some pictures of things that had been lurking on it, practically forgotten, for up to a year. That reminded me of things from ages ago in general, which in turn reminded me of a list I made ages ago in response to a question I was asked about which sorts of things annoy the hell out of me. Not “annoy” in a big, important, politics-y kind of way, but in a niggling, irritating, gets-right-on-my-tits kind of way. This is that list. Well, the following bit is. The bit after this full stop. No, this one.

1. My frequent inability to find things which I only put down about 2 minutes ago.

2. Inanimate objects not doing what they’re told to do or staying where they’re told to stay, like: “I told you to stay balanced on the edge of the sink, plate! What the hell do you think you’re doing jumping on the floor and spraying gravy everywhere? You’re just an inanimate object! Do what you’re told!”

3. Related to item 2, but additionally: every (I repeat, every) time I put a bowl or pasta dish or whatever in the sink to wash it with the tap on, the spoon jumps as though with voluntary power instinct to the centre of the bowl, the stream of water from the tap gets deflected off the concave surface of the spoon and it sprays, fountain-like, all over me. I really hate that.

4. Damn wires everywhere.

6. Technology that looks really good and should do something I really want, but just doesn’t work or (even worse) works for just long enough for me to have a Damascene moment regarding its potential applications, and then breaks irretrievably.

6. Screaming kids on public transport and in supermarkets, particularly when I’m hungry or tired.

7. Actually, when I’m hungry or tired just about anything pisses me off.

8. Oh yeah, mosquitoes. Mosquitoes make me angry. "That’s my blood, you little bastard, not yours! Die! Horribly!"

9. Not being able to kill mosquitoes ’cos the little fuckers have learnt to teleport to the other side of the room right at the last femtosecond (I LOVE THAT WORD) and then just sit there, smirking at you.

10. Obsessive food snobs who turn their nose up even at better-quality premade foods, like, I don’t know, Covent Garden soups. Look, we all know that it’s not as good as a proper home- or restaurant-made soup. We all know that it hasn’t got the same quality ingredients. Etc., etc., ad nauseam. For a carton of gunk which costs about 2 quid and which you can heat up in a few minutes, it’s really not bad. Stop being a nob.

11. Anyone who actually values anything they got from The Alchemist, The Celestine Prophecy, etc, etc. Stop being a tit.

That's the end of the list. Well, that's as far as I got when I wrote it, anyway.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

As in every other recent winter, I tried to go clothes-shopping yesterday. Everywhere I went, I encountered a farrago of suspiciously drab hues; mostly sluggish greys, but also mucky browns, dirty greens, shifty-looking blues. What's with all this? We know it's winter, we know it's miserable and raining and shitty and cold. We can hardly avoid knowing it. Surely we don't need to be reminded of this all-permeating fact by the sight of every passing person blending into the next through their co-operation in this conspiracy of crud? I want bright! I want shiny! I want us all to stand out in our rainwear and I want to feel happily dazzled by vivid vermillions and acute aquamarines and day-glo oranges and acerbic lemons and louche lime greens and frightening fuschias!

I must have gone to twenty different shops, in England's London's famous Oxford Street and its nearby Covent Garden, and my eyes were dripping visual rust by the time I could take no more. Are you manufacturers in league with some hidden ministry of moping? Are the Powers that Be using clothing design to manipulate our mood and stifle open revolt? Or, worse, is there some unspoken yet universally-accepted agenda, on which such agency may piggy-back undiscovered, that because it's wearisome winter-time, we're damn-well going to mope about and feel rotten and subdued? Well I won't have it, I tell you. I found one bright yellow shirt, and I damn-well bought it. Have at you, you couturiers of the crappily crepuscular.

Igor Clark posted a photo:

It's a bright, crisp day on the autumn cusp of summer, and I’m in Portland, Maine; wandering, solitary, drinking in the surroundings and stealing snaps away with me.

As I straighten from my crouch, a young woman approaches me, an equally young man in tow. The boy, uncertain, sports a shock of orange hair; the girl wields a Sony DSLR and a resolute expression. We stand face to face, exchanging an expectant stare as though each would read the other’s intention through the eye – and, almost defiantly, she raises the camera and steals in turn a snap from me.

She lowers her device, holds my gaze for a moment, and walks calmly away. The boy follows. Not a word is spoken.

I stand for a moment, let it pass without question, and feel free.

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