overlap

Just as the increasing hours of light mean I no longer need my big front light on my bike, they also mean twice the potential for messing about with the camera. One of the things that's occasionally occurred to me over the course of various interesting moments in traffic over the last year or three is how having onboard video would offer a certain limited amount of protection, as well as the odd moment of interesting footage among the hours of nothing special. With this in mind, on friday I decided it might be a worthwhile experiment to see what quality images I could get from my camera, which appears to offer about the same video performance as the small video camera that has caught my eye. There are choices to be made between having a camera mounted to the bike, which gives the benefit of more stable placement but a more limited field of view, and head-mounting the camera for a more flexible viewpoint but risking less stability in the image. I do know that handheld, while amusing and no big deal, is probably not the best way to carry on. Fortunately that's not a problem with the improvised arrangement of a light mounting bracket and a saddle quick release bolt that mean as of now I only need to press the shutter button. More experimentation will undoubtedly follow...

Been there, done that :-) As I was saying, last week I saw Europe again, and while they were excellent last time, this time they weren't quite so great. Not sure that it's that the new album isn't as good as the previous new album, so much as perhaps the effects of getting back into the touring routine. No support band, well fair enough if the sound is excellent - and it was - but impressive as it is to be able to play 73 notes a second on the guitar, I couldn't help thinking the time could be better spent playing another song. And don't get me started on whether the world ever needs another bass solo! Now, I'm typing this over a glass of wine having just got home from seeing the Indigo Girls. In this week's earlier visit to the same venue, I was reminded just how not-dressy a venue it is, so I dug out a pair of my jeans I haven't worn in many years and wore them with my boots rather than a skirt as would have been my preference. But not looking any more out of place than I can help is more important to me than dressing entirely to my own taste. The joke was on me as I had to sit through a support act I've failed to enjoy previously, though a little familiarity meant this time around was more fun. And saying that, I was happy to have the option to hide in the dark at the back. It was several years ago I first (and last) saw the Indigo Girls. I've always been a sucker for harmony vocals, and particularly women's voices doing harmony vocals, possibly because I can't get anywhere near joining in with it. But much more than that, Emily and Amy both give good rock n roll attitude and have the right idea about the world we live in, so it's always going to be a great night out. And for me on this particular occasion doubly so, even if the swapped smirks of the doormen and the odd iffy glance from elsewhere tell their own story. I can live with that, I had a lovely time.

So, the other night, I went to see a band you've heard of, and one you probably know for one song in particular. Seen them before, they were great then and a little less great this time around. That out of the way, there was a whole other level to the evening. It's a venue I've been to half a dozen times before, and I'll be back there again in the near future, but quite possibly with a difference and this is why I was paying extra attention. This time of year is when the daylight hours start to extend a little outside of office hours, and while it's good news for riding a bike in greater visibility, that's also less good news for a different kind of visibility. Which means there's a little calendar-based pressure to make the most of the season. It occurred to me some time ago that this next show would be a particularly good one for me in my other guise, that is dressed from my other wardrobe. I'd like to think that a show by an act with a long established record of equality campaigning and a personal interest in alternative areas of sexuality ought to be a more suitably sympathetic and tolerant environment for me to go out than, for example, a football match. This plan may explain me paying closer attention than normal to what cameras are where, and why I may be being even vaguer than usual here. I'm generally not good with surprises, and it takes a certain amount of familiarity with places and people for me to feel comfortable - this applies to all aspects, not just the TV business. Having the opportunity to check things out and confirm no drastic changes since the last time I was there, knowing where I'm going to park in a city far enough away that I'm not going to bump into anyone I know by accident but close enough that I can get there and home again in reasonable time, this all adds up to a recipe of circumstances that I'm not going to better in the foreseeable. And there are other reasons too why there'll never be any time better than now. All the same, while there's no law against it, there are certain mechanisms in law that could make things very difficult for me, and it would be naive not to take that into account. After all, trouble is the last thing I want, and going through with it is by no means certain. And now that most of that is more or less straight in my mind, I can get on with the serious business of deciding what to wear!

I'm a couple of days behind, but with three gigs in the last five nights it's not all that surprising. Saturday was an excellent day topped off by seeing Tigertailz for the first time in a very long time, making them one of a very select group of acts I've seen in the '80s, '90s and '00s. I enjoyed their cartoon metal very much, and it was a fitting finale when the support act Dressed To Kill - a KISS tribute act I've seen and probably blogged about before - came out for the final track Love Bomb Baby. With the pleasingly confusing visual spectacle of 'Gene', 'Paul', 'Ace' and 'Peter' stomping about the stage and gesturing at the crowd, as seen below. Get well soon Pepsi Tate.










Last night I saw another band that I've seen before, and I'll come back to that tomorrow if I get the time, it's a lengthy and not entirely music-based story. It's not an everyday event that I leave a gig with a huge smile beaming across my face, so well done The Hussy's (their apostrophe - don't shoot me) for putting their all into the half a dozen songs they'd travelled a long way to play. We Expected is my new favourite song, and the lack of second support band meant I was in the 24 hour supermarket on my way home by 10.30 and home before 11. Result!

That line's from the BMX Bandits' Serious Drugs, which is a song I never tire of listening to. Though this time it's actually from Serious Drugs 2, which is a new-to-me rocked up version I have just been thrilled to listen to. Which brings me to the conundrum I am currently wrestling with. I only got to listen to it because the BMX Bandits are on my mind because Teenage Fanclub are, because the Gigolo Aunts are, because I've spent most of the last 48 hours pleasantly earwormed by Dave Gibbs' version of NWA's Straight Outta Compton. Because I've been drawn into the web of networked insania that is myspace. And specifically because of the musical content that myspace has to offer. I'm an inveterate collector, and there's nothing quite like finding a new version of a song that's been an old friend for years, or making friends with a song that's an instant hit. And being only a click away from a nice musical surprise is an intoxicating prospect. Of course the real selling power of myspace is the friend networking, and it's on my mind that if I had my own myspace account I could more easily keep track of all the bands and people I'd want to in the one place. At the moment I'm listening to something on the page of someone whose floor I slept on a couple of times back in the good old days of 1991 or thereabouts, it's probably the new Friends Reunited in that sense, it's so easy to run into people you know to some limited (and often outdated) extent. One of the reasons that I've not weeded out my links from here more thoroughly is that it's good to have them all in one place so I can see what has, or often hasn't, changed without having to bookmark every single one individually, and that's what threatens to ensnare me in the myspace trap. But like I said, I don't give in, and that's why already being on the web for more hours a day than is healthy makes getting stuck into another set of profile set-up and link collection a job that can definitely wait for another day.

I imagine I'm hardly the first to observe that the overnight snowfall we woke to this morning really didn't signal the end of the world, despite the suggestions of many media outlets. Saying that, after a couple of hours sorting through the pictures from my commute this morning, I'm happy to own up to a childlike joy at skidding my bike in the snow, and milking the opportunity to take my time getting to work for all its photographic worth. And yes, I'm aware of exactly what I said in my previous post! And when it's a rare chance to enjoy this sort of thing, I consider myself almost blameless for doing so!

I have a sometimes difficult relationship with the clock, though I've become less bothered about it as I've got older. All the same, while it's true that getting stressed isn't going to get me anywhere any quicker, there's a good case to be made for trying a bit harder to leave on time rather than be quite so casual about it. It's a good job that we have a relatively flexible timing regime at work, as even with only the occasional mechanical difficulty or puncture on the way in, I'd be in trouble soon enough. My days of clocking on are many years behind me, I'm happy to say, but they're not forgotten. Against this background, I'm pleased to note that six of the last seven working days have seen me either already inside or walking into the building by the time that is supposed to be my latest start. Sure, there are plenty more important things in the world to worry about, but I'm aware of the truth of the link between disturbed sleep and disturbed mental hygiene, so to be in a state where it all seems to be working out is a good sign. And/or a sign of no early hours drives home from gigs of late! In other time related news, as I key this in I am aware of living through the 20th anniversary of something both unremarkable and of huge personal significance. And while it's pretty irrelevant, it's a good example of how some dates throw themselves out of the calendar at me without any effort on my part. It can be hard work carrying such a weight of history around with me at times, but at least I'm in no doubt about where I come from.