Saturday, 21 July 2007

Relax, don't do it...

After the surprising announcement that the 1980s BBC radio DJ Mike Read will not be standing as a Conservative Party Mayoral candidate for London, I too must inform you all that I will not be standing either.
Will you be?
Well the visa is sorted (thanks to the British High Commission for working around the clock to make this work, it's only been a year in the making), and we've booked our tickets back to the UK. We'll be in Edinburgh for the start of the month-long festival, though the first priority is to find somewhere to live (assuming all the houses in Edinburgh haven't been washed away by all the rain).
So we are trying to tie up loose ends here- Ericka's working hard on gathering everything she needs for her doc (interviews, scanning photos) while I'm reading books not available to me in Edinburgh. We've also been seeing friends who we haven't yet been able to see. We're having a joint leaving party next Saturday with our good friends Sarah-Jane R and Bret who are moving to the west coast of Canada.
Fashionably behind the times, I want to sing my praises for Last FM, a 'social music revolution'. I wouldn't go that far but it's an amazing source to discover music (through listening, not reading). I've been getting lost in the weirder shades of Krautrock (Cluster, Brainticket, Guru Guru, Popol Vuh, Xhol Caravan...).
While I'm at the job of big-upping things, I'd like to do the same for The Situationist International online archive. While a lot of people, including many political science academics, scoff at the SI, I find many of their ideas fascinating. This site needs delving in to, so it's best to have a look when you have a bit of time (this one's especially for you CP- look for articles on psychogeography).
Now for some recent 'photos (click to enlarge)...

Ericka in our room


Sunflowers in our room (one of which is soon to bloom)


Ericka waiting for the subway


Elyse and I at the Harbour front


Sarah Jane R's purses


Eating out at Chinese Traditional Buns

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You laugh about Mike Read as a potential candiadate but he was seriously considered for a while by both politicians and the right-wing media alike. Which is nevertheless funny in itself... Goodness knows what Boris Johnson would be like in power. If it's true that people get the elected politicians they deserve, well, I hate to say anything bad about a whole city's majority-worth of people, but...

Did Situationists spend as much time on allocating themselves little self-descriptive tags as they did on the actual intellectual stuff? Sorry, that was facetious. I shall have a look in the future when both flat and teaching content are sorted.

I'm just off out the door to go to Leeds for a bit of flat-hunting. Bye...

Anonymous said...

come back, baby come back.

Paul Evans said...

I was delighted to hear recently that he had died. But then it turned out to be the other one.