Anyone who’s spent any time clicking randomly around YouTube will know that people are wont to post videos showing off their musical skills, be it their latest band video, the fact that they can play Pachelbel’s Canon really well, or just singing a few warbley notes in that horrid R&B “hunt-a-note” style that still seems so popular. (Mariah Carey has a lot to answer for…)

Imagine, then, that someone took the painstaking time to hunt down loads of videos on YouTube, and remix them into new coherent – and viable – musical entities. Brand new songs, composed of unrelated pieces of music, played across the globe by people who never met.

Imagine that this person cut together not one, but seven of these songs, and that they all work beautifully.

Imagine no longer. I stop talkee, you clickee watchee. It’s called THRU YOU, and it rocks my socks. (That link goes to track 3, which is my favourite, but you should really take the time to check them all out.)

–c.

It was a huge great black reclining job from Ikea, the Valhalla of household goods, and for a couple of years I loved it. I say reclining, it just had an extendable footrest that lifted up when you yanked the lever, a but like Joey and Chandler’s chairs in Friends.

But then I started to tire of the chair. The seat itself was a bucket style thing, and that just didn’t lend itself to eating dinner or sitting properly, so while it was great to recline in for an hour or two, it got uncomfortable after a while.

Recently I obtained a 2-seater sofa to replace the chair, and moved it into the bathroom until we could figure out what to do with it. It was going to go on eBay but we just didn’t get round to it, and this weekend – having suddenly been blessed with a load of free time in which to Get Things Done – I was threatening to take it to the tip. But my fiancée put an ad up on Gumtree and one on Craigslist saying that anyone who would come and get it could have it for free. It’s a big unwieldy thing too, so they would need a van or some such.

The next morning there were several replies, and a young chap with a Germanic or possibly Scandinavian accent said he would come round and take it, as he just moved into a new place and had literally no furniture. He turned up with his blue camper van, and liked the look of the chair, and we got it into his van easily, and he seemed very pleased with it. (I just hope he got it into his place OK.) At this point we had an idea regarding something else that I was needing to get rid of and couldn’t quite be bothered to eBay.

“Say, I don’t suppose by any chance you’d like an original Playstation? The PSX one? It has a few games with it…”

The look of unexpected joy on his face as he climbed back into his van carrying his new (well, quite old, but you get my meaning) Playstation was the highlight of my weekend.

What was yours?
–c.

1. He currently holds the UK record for saying fuck the most times on a live television broadcast,
2. He is related to legendary England cricketer and polymath C.B. Fry,
3. He knows precisely why the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42.

Forgive me, I am having a mildly moist moment.
–c.

“Canadian blues guitarist Jeff Healey dies at 41.”

See you when I get there, Jeff, though I may be late.
–c.

“I think politics is a lot like sex. It’s something for consenting adults to do, it’s an important part of life, and if you spend too much time thinking about it, you’re a pervert.”

- Derek Powazek.

Amen, brother.
–c.

“They’ve called me a whore, a gold digger, a fantasist, a liar, … eighteen months of abuse [and] 4,400 abusive articles,”

quoth Hopalong Moneybags.

Yeah. Dragging a national icon through a lengthy public divorce process and not stopping until you’ve got enough money to buy a medium-sized country will do that.

Is the £50 million not enough? Now you want fucking SYMPATHY? You want us to actually go “Oh poor Heather, she’s had it tough, you know.”

“Mills, whose divorce from the ex-Beatle is going through the courts, called on the public to stop buying newspapers.”

Of course. Naturally. Stop buying newspapers. Yup. Not fucking nuts or anything, then.

JUST.
FUCK.
OFF.

–c.

PLEASE FUCK OFF AND DIE.

Yours sincerely,
–c.

This is the area of one’s social life that networking sites like Friends Reunited and much more ubiquitously in recent times Facebook are so good at reawakening. I resisted Facebook for some time, seeing it as just another MySpace or Friendster or Orkut or however many others before them, but it soon became apparent that this was to be the winner, the one ring(-a-roses) to rule them all, and in the third-party app-space bind them. At this time I was also forced onto Facebook in order to better understand its implications as a web developer (thanks Mathias).

I gleefully added people to my network I wouldn’t have even credited with the ability to operate a computer, looked up my old history teacher, linked with countless contacts and added innumerable apps. But there was always a large thing missing. Thing is, it wasn’t a thing, it was a person.

It didn’t matter how many times I looked, the guy who I had spent most time with from the age of 11 to the age of 18 wasn’t on there. It appeared that he’d just not got with the digital revolution, and that was the best I could say about the situation. Even the mate I’d met through him back then, who lived over the road from him I’d met on a couple of my return trips to my hometown of Eastbourne (Hi Damien T., btw, if you ever read this!). My other great best schoolfriend, Nick R., I had since linked up with in London and indeed shared several late night drinking sessions with. But never this one guy – not a word, not a contact, not even a definite sign he was still alive.

Then, last week or perhaps the week before, his younger brother added me on Facebook, and a wave of nostalgic joy coursed through me for I knew that before long, the older brother (who, let me inform you, was part of the reason I took up guitar in the first place, and who really showed me how cool Dire Straits were) must surely follow. This guy, a man I had had no contact with in 15 years – not a peep, not a whisper – must eventually pop up on the radar.

60 minutes ago I received an email with this subject: “Mark [obscured for privacy] added you as a friend on Facebook…”

Forgive me. You, gentle reader, do not know this man. 15 years on, neither do I, of course, but now the odds are that I once again will. And that makes me extremely happy.

–c.

In 1989 I started playing electric guitar, having finally convinced my parents that I was serious about it and having received my first guitar (a Maya strat copy) for Christmas 1988. When asked I always say that I started playing because of Mark Knopfler. I was a huge Dire Straits fan for years, and while I was also into Brian May and Eric Clapton at the same time, it was Mark Knopfler who made me actually want to get up on a stage and play in front of people.

Similarly, when I first got online in 1997, it was the work of Derek Powazek that made me want to build websites. I built my first homepages very much in the mould of whatever he was doing at the time, I read his self-effacing journals (there was no such thing as blogging at the time) and his bleedingly honest stories in his storytelling site Fray. I submitted stories to Fray, and I even started a site called Interpret which was also driven by reader submitted works, and which won cool site awards back in the days when they meant something.

Then yesterday I was at the first day of the Future of Web Apps conference, and Derek was presenting a talk with Heather Champ (of Flickr, among others). I watched these two elegant eloquent San-Francisco-ites (they’re married, by the way – also I suspect that Heather is Canadian in origin, from her accent, but that could be wrong) talk passionately on the subject of web (and other) communities and I knew I had to go and be a fanboy.

After the talk we were hanging out waiting for the next session and the two of them wandered by so I ran over and buttonholed Derek (I must apologise profusely for effectively blanking Heather – I was in dribbling fanboy mode), telling him a shortened version of the first two paragraphs of this rambling post. He looked pleased to have made such an impact and asked me my name, so I told him, and he said “Oh, I know you, Clive – I thought you looked familiar!” He remembered me from my Fray submissions, and a couple of other vague contacts back in the day, and seemed genuinely happy to have made a difference to me.

It might not mean that much to most of you who read this, but believe me when I say that made my fucking month.

Colour me smiley.
–c.

—————-
Now playing: Whitesnake – Wings Of The Storm

Oddly poignant and eminently readable short stories based on one young man’s experiences of moving to London. Only two instalments at this time, but as Shaw Taylor would have advised, keep ‘em peeled for more.

(Via Ade).
–c.