Between the illumination and the sore finger, I feel positively Zen

[alexsarll]

The Long Blondes show...I'm glad I went, but it was in some ways a frustrating experience. The set was understandably heavy on the new material, and while I suspect I'll grow to love it all, smoother sound and all, I didn't know it yet. And being heavy on that meant they were light on material from Someone To Drive You Home, one of the best albums of recent years. I was discussing this with stephens and exliontamer afterwards, concluding that the problem was that they didn't play 'You Could Have Both', against which you have to remember that the vast majority of concerts in the world also fail to include 'You Could Have Both'.
Though it might help that the vast majority of concerts in the world also don't have Kid Acne supporting. Goldie Lookin' Chain except not funny (or, if you don't like GLC, 'even less funny') - comedy rappers coming from the school of comedy which thinks that simply mentioning a certain class of retro artefact is, in and of itself, hilarious. Please die now.


The budget was predictably depressing, with the party of the working man cutting corporation tax by a quarter, raising duty on booze and fags and announcing yet more measures to force the unwell back to the coalface.
In other government idiocy news, even compared to her colleagues Margaret Hodge is really quite impressively stupid. She is suggesting, as a new idea, libraries in shopping centres; Haringey already has one, plus one in a leisure centre. Better yet, she suggests that libraries should maybe draw in new audiences by stocking comics!*
The vast majority of the libraries I've used in the last 15 years - and there have been a lot, over many authorities - already stocked comics. The trend over time has been for that range to deepen and expand. Our libraries are in the hands of someone who clearly hasn't the faintest clue about them.
It's not great, is it? But off on the other side of the world, I did find one small good news story to offset some measure of the despair.

Have finally remembered to stop Facebook's Bookshelf from sending me impertinent emails. Yes, I have been reading The Pickwick Papers for longer than a week. It's 800 pages long and I've had various other books on the go, AS YOU WELL KNOW. Well, that was your last such irritating jab. Now all it needs is a fifth button on its recommendations, for 'Yes, I Have Already Read Another Edition Of This Book, I Told You As Much'. You'd think it would spot where titles are identical, wouldn't you? But I suppose it considers that 'identical' is just one step on from 'similar', and 'similar' makes for good recommendation - especially when you're dealing with someone who has 19 volumes of Ultimate Spider-Man on his shelf.

*I'm leaving to one side the question of whether comics are actually any good for attracting new readers in the first place, though if you read certain comics sites too much you may take it as a given that they don't. In my experience of my fellow browsers, it's usually a pretty even mixture between fans reading the stuff they couldn't be bothered to buy, and kids plucking superhero stuff out pretty much at random.

Comments

[oneofthose.livejournal.com]

I think Bookshelf's reminders should become increasingly personal and direct:
"For fuck's sake, if you've not finished it yet, it's never gonna happen."

"Let's face facts, you thought you were interested in agrarian history, but your attention waned halfway through the preface, didn't it? There's no shame in accepting this and moving on."

"It turns out it was the wife all along and she wasn't actually blind. Now you can get on with your life"

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I imagine for people fool enough to use the 'want to read' section, it'd be even worse:
"Look, we all know you only got this out of the library in a doomed attempt to impress the cute girl who works there, and she's never going to accept your friend request anyway. Admit that, remove it, and get back to rereading your favourite Andy McNab, and crying yourself to sleep."

[cappuccino-kid.livejournal.com]

Haven't Haringey sacked 80% of the staff now they're on RFID self-service? We're getting it this year and we have to organise and put on some wanky "outreach" event every five minutes, which means nobody has any time to shelve or shelf-tidy and our books look like a hurricane's just passed through. I suspect the events are their attempt to make sure at least some of us still have a job post-RFID. Right now 50% of my job is statistical monitoring for the council auditor's targets and 50% is keeping track of and reporting vandalism by the kids, and wear-and-tear to a quite pretty 200-yr-old building that has just been left to rot and decompose for the past 50 years.

We are trying to "outreach" to teenage boys not by graphic novels, which people of both genders and all ages read lots of, but by running a Games Workshop club. I fiercely resisted having to run it. The new library in Dalston is going to have a great big café *sigh*.

I'm looking forward to the Blondes album, they told me it will be all-out disco, plagiarising the Bee Gees, &c. The first album, I liked the great songs despite the loud punky guitars. When the album opened with a minute's guitar feedback I thought "Come on, you're not the Adverts, you're better than this..."

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

When I first saw Haringey's self-service stuff, it all seemed to be on the blink. "You're not sabotaging it to keep yourselves in work, are you?", I asked. "No!", replied the shocked librarian. "Although, now you suggest that..."
Pimlico has a Games Workshop club too, I wondered about that but now you say it, it makes perfect sense. I wouldn't mind if they were still playing the older editions, those were works of art in their own right. But yes, wanky 'outreach' makes Margaret Hodge feel happy inside, so expect a lot more of that. I'm not as anti- CDs/DVDs/computers as some of the old guard; I just miss the tall shelves, and lament the obsession with space and light at the expense of whichever sort of information media content.
Targets - of any sort - are the enemy of real results. Everyone in business and government should be made to watch The Wire until they grasp that. If it doesn't work first time, beat them, then resume.

The problem for me is, I only like the Bee Gees when Gallon Drunk or Steps are covering them, whereas the Adverts are my favourite punk band.

[(Anonymous)]

Margaret Hodge also, weirdly, said that it's OK to go ahead and demolish Robin Hood Gardens because "a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever". WTF?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Really? I missed that. Interesting, because that sort of thing is one bit of the transhumanist agenda in Charles Stross' Accelerando which really stuck in my craw. How come she's such a confused, behind the times fool on other matters, but a hard futurist on this?