Well I never

Heading of the month, from Stuff:

Rap music glamorises drug use, study says

Isolde's tale

Alex Ross in the New Yorker on the current production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met:

He might make an arresting Peter Grimes; he already has the weathered, haunted look

I’ll bet, after this experience.

From the archives: Rioja — the big taster

The drinkers
Mark Broatch is NZBC’s film reviewer and Director of the World Service.
Chris Bell writes about TV, whisky and music and is NZBC’s Director of Light Entertainment.

The drinks
a. Herederos del Marqués de Riscal Elciego (Álava) Reserva 2000: $46.95 — Accent on Wine, Auckland
From the label: “This Reserva quality wine comes from the oldest bodega in Rioja. Through adherence to time-honoured skills and original techniques, Marqués de Riscal wines retain a distinctive and appealing character, a style reflecting the best virtues of traditional Rioja. Aged in cask for at least two years, followed by a further year in bottle, Riscal Rioja has a ripe, fruity bouquet and a lingering oaky flavour.”
b. Marqués de Murrieta Ygay Reserva 1999: $42.95 — Glengarry Ponsonby
From the label: “85% Tempranillo, 8% Mazuelo, 7% Garnacha”
c. Remelluri Reserva 2000: $39.95 — The Wine Vault, Auckland
The label includes a map, to help you find your way back home, if you happen to have drunk too much of it at the bodega. However, it’s very confusing if, like us, you live in New Zealand. There’s no information about the grape blend on the bottle.

a. Herederos del Marqués de Riscal Elciego (Álava) Reserva 2000: $46.95 —Accent on Wine, Auckland
MB: “Can you smell anything?”
CB: “Very perky. It reminds me of that one we had in Vivace.”
MB: “All the tannins are settled, toned-down, muted, aged the fuck out of. Does it have the mix on the bottle...? No, it doesn’t say. Usually they’re a mix of Tempranillo grapes, sometimes Shiraz and sometimes they put a bit of Garnacha in them. I dunno… this is going to be difficult.”
CB: “In the tasting notes, he’s talking about the white version of this.”
MB: “Oh… I don’t know, it’s got plenty of front and then it sort of fades away, to my taste.”
CB: “It doesn’t taste as good as it smells. Or as much as it smells.”
MB: “No. Well, different.”
CB: “It’s really perky, I think.”
MB: “What’s that taste at the back? I thought it was shoe polish, but…”
CB: “No, I’m not getting shoe polish.”
MB: “No? There’s something right at the end… There’s something slightly sour about it.”
CB: “Mmm. Yeah, just before it finishes, it’s a bit citrusy.”
MB: “Citrusy.”
CB: “Yeah. Just a tiny bit.”
MB: “Well, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
CB: “That one smells really good, but I’m kind of underwhelmed by it.”
MB: “It’s hard to know… sometimes it’s not until I get to the second or third glass that I can tell. Shall we try the Marqués de Murrieta?”
CB: “Mmm.”

b. Marqués de Murrieta Ygay Reserva 1999: $42.95 — Glengarry Ponsonby
MB: “This is the one that he says, for the price — $40 to $45 — is one of the best value wines in the shop. This is the 1999 Marqués de Murrieta Ygay. Is that a slightly sweeter bouquet…?”
CB: “I’d have said the opposite.”
MB: “Would you? Sourer? Gee. I wouldn’t have a clue.”
CB: “That smells like boot polish to me.”
MB: [groans] “Let’s just make it all up! OK, I’m going to do this…”
CB: “I’m going in… That’s much bigger. It’s got that kind of ruby thing to it, as well, like a sherry… that sort of tawny edge to it.”
MB: “Oh yeah. I didn’t really look at that with the Riscal.”
CB: “No. This is really scientific.”
MB: “Um. Yeah, muted tannins again. Nothing ugly coming through, is there? They’re all about 13%, which, according to the guy in the wine shop is perfect, that’s exactly what they should be. They shouldn’t be above 14%, or you’d have the alcohol pushing through.”
CB: “Yeah… I reckon this is earthier than the Riscal.”
MB: “Yup. I’d agree with that. Yeah, definitely. And it’s kind of got a bigger middle to it, to my mind… maybe not.”
CB: “The Riscal was all top.”
MB: “Yeah, all top, front, whatever you call it.”
CB: “I was sort of making a musical analogy, so with the next one I could go, ‘It’s got lots of bottom-end.’”
MB: “That’s right. Reverb. It’s a nice, balanced wine. Do you like that one? It’s kind of…”
CB: “I like the Murrieta more.”
MB: “That one’s kind of quite sour at the end, as well. It sort of makes my throat go, ‘mmmerrm’.”
CB: “The Murrieta does?”
MB: “Yeah. Is it sour to you? It does taste quite sour. I think it’s all that… This one is… it says on this one, ‘85% Tempranillo, 8% Mazuelo, 7% Garnacha’. Barrel-aged for 22 months. Bottled back when I was a child: June 2002. It says 18° serving temperature. That’s probably sitting inside a hut. Inside a…”
CB: [slurring slightly] “I like this one much more.”
MB: [gulping] “Yup.”
CB: “It’s just got more character, somehow.”
MB: “Mmm.”
CB: “I think all the character in the Riscal was in the nose. And that might just be a first impression thing.”

c. Remelluri Reserva 2000: $39.95 — The Wine Vault, Auckland
MB: [mouthful of roasted almonds] “Mmm. OK… This is the Rrrrremellurrrrri… Rrremelllllurrrrri [several bogus attempts at pronunciation] Reserva 2000 Rrrrriocccchhha.”
CB: “Your Spanish is getting better.”
MB: “The bottle’s got a nice little map on the back… Doesn’t say anything… something about the old something of the monastery of Toloño. Doesn’t say anything about what’s in it. All right. Rock and roll… Mmm… This is definitely less flowery and perky, isn’t it?”
CB: “Well, my instant impression was that it was really flowery…”
MB: “Well, it’s definitely got more aroma.”
CB: “It’s got a kind of a grassy quality, like mown grass or something. Or maybe not… maybe more like…”
MB: “It smells like a dirty alleyway to me. If I was walking up a street in Spain, I’d say, ‘Should we take this shortcut?’ That’s what it smells like.”
CB: “Actually, now you mention it, I know what you mean [takes another swig]. There’s something rural about it. When I said ‘mown grass’, maybe I meant, like, shit. Like, manure.”
MB: “And it actually tastes the same. No, it actually tastes like it smells, which is the first one — well, to my mind.”
CB: “Yeah, the other two definitely didn’t taste like they smelled.”
MB: “Yeah, definitely agricultural, isn’t it. I don’t know what that means, but… we might be able to find something on the internet about what it’s got in it.”
CB: “Yeah, I’ll look the Remelluri up because it’s got a really weird name.”
MB: [slurring] Rrreemellurrrrri. “It kind of seems less sophisticated to me. To you?”
CB: [gulping down more] “Yeah.”
MB: “Like, it’s not unpleasant or anything.”
CB: “Ah! They’ve got a website, but it’s all in Spanish.”
MB: [slurring heavily] “A very inoffensive wine, that. But it doesn’t seem to have as much character, to my mind.”
CB: “It’s a bit crude, isn’t it.”
MB: “It’s sort of… yeah. Unsophisticated. It must be the country cousin of these.”
CB: [reading from a website blurb] “‘Known not for its aristocratic roots…’ Definitely not. ‘Neither for its successful style of blending modern technology with the traditional extended period in oak, Remelluri has become over the years a cult wine. Its production is tiny…’
MB: “Oh!”
CB: “‘It’s unusual for being a single estate bodega…’ blah, blah, blah…”
MB: “It’s pretty sort of contained as a wine. I think it’s really well done, but... They’ve got all sorts of weird and wonderful varietals over there.”
CB: “It says, ‘Tempranillo, Graciano and Garnacha’. What year are we drinking?”
MB: “2000. These nuts are very moreish, aren’t they? Well, should we try something new? Maybe we’ll get a different impression. Which one did we prefer, do you think?”
CB: “I definitely preferred the Murrieta.”
MB: “Yeah, I think so. Did you?”
CB: “Yeah, definitely. Although, I do tend to agree with you. When I’ve done whisky tastings, the first glass, the first sip, the first sniff was completely not the same as what I thought about it later on. Let’s go back to the Riscal. I want to see what I think of it now.”
MB: “OK. A proper glassful this time. That’s a lovely smell! That’s so comforting. There’s something kind of grandma about it…”
CB: “There is something comforting…”
MB: “Which is what attracted me to Rioja in the first place. There’s just something, like, solid and ‘home’ about it. It’s got a real core to it. It’s not all fucking fancy at the front and blah, blah…”
CB: “Rioja doesn’t feel like winter wine to me. You know, like Shiraz and stuff. Most red wine, I don’t really want to drink it in the summer. But I can imagine myself drinking this in the summer.”
MB: “Yeah, even though it’s got quite a lot of ‘oomph’ to it, definitely. I think because it’s a blend.”
CB: “It’s not as perfumed now as it was when we first opened it.”
MB: “No. But I imagine if you had a sweet tooth, Rioja would be a challenge for you… He says, necking it back like a child with cordial.”

[Back to the Riscal]
MB: “Are you enjoying that one?”
CB: “I’m still not bowled over by it.”
MB: “No.”
CB: “They obviously thought, ‘This wine tastes really average. We’ll have to flash it up with the bottle.’ Put three labels on it and some gold foil.”
MB: “Which one is this one?”
CB: “This is the one that looks like it’s going to be the best.”
MB: “Yeah. Although, you know, you get ropier Italian shit and you know it’s the roughest crap in the world.”
CB: “I mean, two words: Mateus Rosé. But I still think it’s got a bit of citrus in it.”
MB: “Could be, yeah. I’m not disagreeing.”
CB: “Not the thing you get down the back of your throat.”
MB: “On your tongue.”
CB: “Just in your mouth. The feel that you get from lemon juice. But it kind of lacks depth. And look, if you look at the colour of it, it’s nowhere near as tawny as the Murrieta.”
MB: [slurring] “Absolutely. It definitely lacks depth… I mean, it doesn’t lack depth, but there’s not a lot below the surface, is there?”
CB: “It’s like me.”
MB: “Deeply superficial.”
CB: “That can be the heading for this one.”
MB: “But I’m a real convert for the style. It’s just I wish they weren’t quite so expensive. Although having said that…”
CB: “Stop going on about the price.”
MB: “No, having said that, there was one I tried from the shop just over the road, and they do different varieties — I don’t know how they do it, presumably they age it longer — and one had a red label and one had some other colour, and it was just fantastic, and it was $17, which was quite OK. Rock ‘n’ roll.”
CB: “So was that Gran Reserva?”
MB: “What? No, no.”
CB: “It’d be nice to try a Gran Reserva, just to see.”
MB: “Yeeeeaaaah… I haven’t seen one.”
CB: “Maybe you can’t get them here.”
MB: “Maybe not. No, this was just a plain, bog-standard Rioja. But it was great. Really good.”

[Back to the Murrieta]
CB: “Ooh, that’s nice. That’s definitely the nicest.”
MB: “I think so. I definitely think so. But there’s almost nothing to the Murrieta, do you think? It goes down so smoothly.”
CB: “Maybe that’s the thing about them: they’re not really complex. They’re quite strong and heavy, but they’re not hard to drink.”
MB: “No. They’re not like big buggering Shirazes…”
CB: “No.”
MB: “That well, you know, really hammer you around. I mean, they’re great to drink but you know you’re drinking them. Whereas, I reckon you could drink this, and think, ‘Great wine’, and really have a nice experience.”
CB: “See, this… You know it’s got that tawny thing about it. It’s…”
MB: “It’s pitch black, isn’t it.”
CB: “It’s dark, and there’s something sort of chocolatey about it, like really good dark chocolate. I think. I might be completely wrong…”
MB: “No, no! Now that you say it. I’m one of those people who can’t identify things.”
CB: “I think I’ve got a reasonably good sense of smell, in that I can smell things when they’re there. But to actually relate it to stuff…”
MB: “No, I think chocolate is good.”
CB: “Maybe cocoa more than chocolate.”
MB: “Yup.”
CB: [groaning with dread] “I’m going to have to transcribe this tape.”
MB: “Well, there’s big gaps, aren’t there, between us wanking on about stuff. Well, I think we’re agreed: Murrieta.”
CB: “Yes. Although, I want to give the third one a second chance.”
MB: “Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. I just think it was far enough behind that you could say… unless it kicks in really well on the second glass, Roberto’s your uncle. [Final word on the Murrieta] “Yeah, that’s a lovely wine, isn’t it. It really is so polished.”

[MB back to the Remelluri; CB annoyingly still on the Murrieta]
MB: “I’m coming round to it!”
CB: “Is this the third one?”
MB: “No, you haven’t got the third one.”
CB: “You have?”
MB: “Yeah. I like the colour.”
CB: “I bet it’s not as good as this one.”
MB: “No, but as I say, second glass, you know. I mean, look at that, it’s pretty good, isn’t it?! And my voice is going higher and higher in pitch! Ah, pissed already. It doesn’t take much. That’s the trouble, how many years of drinking? Twenty-five, maybe. I’m no better. It still takes me about a bottle… Yeah, there’s a kind of sourness to it, a top note, if you were thinking perfume or something. No, you’ve still got the Murrieta. Have you still got that one?”
CB: [maudlin, slurred, tired and emotional] “I think so, yeah.”
MB: “I don’t mean to hurry you. I don’t. I really don’t.”
CB: “I’ve got to catch up because it’s too annoying, trying to compare pears with apples.”
MB: “All right. Let’s rock ‘n’ roll. Are you coming round to it?”
CB: “Yeah. It’s definitely between the Murrieta and the Remelluri now, isn’t it?”
MB: “Oooh! that’s a big call. That’s a big call. That’s a big call. The Riscal is the most expensive one! Shall we compare?”

[Side by side comparison: Remelluri and Riscal]
CB: “What’s this one, the Remuera?”
MB: “The Remuera of wines is on the left. What shall we do…? Which one do you prefer in the nostrils? Yup, the Riscal is far more subtle.”
CB: “I think we should have been drinking them out of these sherry copitas all along, because they collect the smell better.”
MB: “The Remelluri is a real rock ‘n’ roll smell now!”
CB: “How dare you come back, you bastard!”
MB: “OK. I’m going to try the Riscal.”
CB: “I still think it’s got that chocolatey, cocoaey… or was that the other one? I can’t remember now.”
MB: “Mmm. Mmm. I think the Riscal is kind of heavier tasting to me, but honestly, the Remelluri has really pulled back. It’s made up some ground, hasn’t it. It seemed thin and pathetic and anorexic.”
CB: “It was crude, I thought.”
MB: “Yeah, like an anorexic farm girl.”
CB: “Or maybe even a fat farm girl…”
MB: “It’s still, I think, unavoidably agricultural.”
CB: [clearly just agreeing with everything now] “Yes, yes, I totally agree with that.”
MB: “But it’s pleasant. Like, you enjoy going to the country.”
CB: “Country matters.”
MB: [shouting] “‘I’m a country member…!’ I remember.”
CB: “Yes, definitely agricultural.”
MB: “Yes, the Riscal is far more refined than the Rrrrrrrremelllllllurrrrrrri. Less offensive. But it’s kind of less interesting as a result, isn’t it?”
CB: [stunned silence]
MB: “Mmm? Don’t you think?”
CB: “Yes, yes, it is. I agree with you. This was the one that was the best in that price range?”
MB: [belches loudly]
CB: “Yeah?”
MB: “Er… No, no. That was… that was… this is slightly cheaper, the Remelluri was about five dollars cheaper than the other two. But the Murrieta was, he said, the best value for $40 to $45 in the shop.”
CB: “Yeah, the Riscal is sort of inoffensive. I can imagine, like…”
MB: “It’s refined though, isn’t it?”
CB: “I can imagine rich, Spanish people drinking the Riscal with dinner. But I don’t think it’s as interesting as the other two.”
MB: “It’s a different kind of interesting from the Murrietta.”
CB: “A different kind of interesting… that’s another good heading. We might need to have lots of crossheads in this review.”
MB: “But… I mean… you know… I think there’s a world apart… myself. But we’ll probably try the Murrieta and go, ‘That’s fuckin’ shit. Eeeuuuuwwwwww!’”
CB: “No, I don’t think so. Not at this stage.”
MB: [semi-coherent] “Well, we’re trying it next. Hmm… Yeah, it’s definitely… yeah… there’s definitely more interest because it’s agricultural. But, you know, it’s got a lot… more… going on. But the Riscal is smart and cleverer and intelligent. It’s like a race between the rich boy and the young boy who wets his bed every night and he has to run home to take the sheets off the line. Do you remember that film?”
CB: “No.”
MB: “So what are we saying? What are we in favour of?”
CB: “Rioja. You drink wine for different reasons than you drink Scotch. But with whisky, the really good ones that I like are the most extreme, you know?”
MB: [mouth full of nuts] “Islay whiskies.”
CB: “Yeah. And the Remellura, to me, is the Islay whisky of the three. I still think the Murrieta is the best, but I kind of think this has got so much character, you forgive the fact that it smells like manure.”
MB: “I think that’s absolutely right. Isn’t that weird? Because the Riscal is the one we thought would fucking knock us over.”
CB: “Yeah.”
MB: “The one with the gold wire on it, third place. How sad!
CB: “I would say it was pretty close, though, between the three of them. As you say, the Riscal is really refined, and I suppose there would be circumstances where that would really work, where you’d want to drink that kind of Rioja.”
MB: “Oh yeah, you wouldn’t want to drink the Rrrrrrrremelllllllurrrrrrri, um, all the time.”
CB: “No.”
MB: “But if you were… yeah.”
CB: “Do the Spanish drink Rioja with dinner?”
MB: [whispering] “I don’t know, really. [On a roll, shouting unnecessarily] They drink a lot, but they drink it over a long period. Like, they’ll drink from ten in the morning until sort of midnight, but they’ll just have a glass here, a glass there, after work, before work… As far as I can tell anyway. They’ll have one in the morning, with their coffee. They’ll have one at lunch. Maybe a couple at lunch. Then they’ll have one after work, then they’ll go out for tapas late, have a sleep, and then their tapas. As far as I can tell…”
CB: “I’m not sure my system would survive that.”
MB: “Yeah, but they don’t drink all the time. Instead of bingeing…”
CB: “Not so much the drinking, but the way they eat, as well.”
MB: “Mmm.”
CB: “Maybe you’d get used to it.”
MB: “I don’t know about the eating late at night. But they do, all the time. Maybe that’s why they get fat when they get old. So are we going to do the Murrieta and then call it a day?”
CB: “Yeah.”
MB: “Now, I think that the Murrieta has the best label, too. Which is no inconsiderable thing. People buy a lot off the label.”
CB: “Although, it has lots of fonts.”
MB: “Yeah. The Riscal bottle is like a woman’s dress after a party: it’s starting to look a bit sad. The wire, you know.”
CB: “The wire’s starting to look a bit sad. And I noticed when you brought it in that the wire had cut through part of the label.”

[Final thoughts on the Murrieta]
MB: “I still think it stands up because it’s got complexity.”
CB: “Am I imagining it, or is the Murrieta actually the sweetest of the three?”
MB: “I don’t know. I wouldn’t like to say. There’s definitely a kind of… it’s got a sort of… there definitely is a like a… a kind of… like a preserved… not preserved… processed fruit thing about it. I’m thinking, like, guava or something.”
CB: “I’m getting guava… I’m getting… pissed.”
MB: [shouting] “I’m getting legless. Legolas!”

Our verdict: The ranking
1. Marqués de Murrieta Ygay Reserva 1999: $42.95 — Glengarry Ponsonby
2. Remelluri Reserva 2000: $39.95 — The Wine Vault, Auckland
3. Herederos del Marqués de Riscal Elciego (Álava) Reserva 2000: $46.95 —Accent on Wine, Auckland

Norton 360 live chat support

The first time I logged in to Symantec Live Technical Support, I was number 2 in the queue. My support agent Kaleem was a fast typist, but didn’t have an instant fix for me:

[23:21] CB: Hi, since installing Norton 360 I’ve been unable to update my internet time settings. I’ve tried disabling the Norton Firewall but I get error messages when I try to synchronise with either of the available Microsoft Time Servers. Does Norton 360 disable this functionality?
[23:21] Kaleem: No Chris, the Norton will not disable the functionality. Before troubleshooting this issue, I need to gather more information about this problem from you. This will greatly assist me in finding a resolution to your problem.
[23:22] CB: No problem. Let me know what you need.
[23:22] Kaleem: Do you have any other Antivirus or Firewall or Spyware programs installed on your system?
[23:23] CB: I have Spybot Search and Destroy installed, but as far as I know, that only scans when the app is open. That’s all — Microsoft Firewall is disabled through the Norton settings.
[23:23] Kaleem: Okay. Please let me know if you can synchronize with the personal firewall disabled.
[23:24] CB: You mean the Norton Firewall? It worked before I installed 360, when I was running whatever the previous Norton internet protection was called.
[23:25] Kaleem: Okay. Please let me know if you had removed the previous Norton programs before installing the Norton 360 program.
[23:26] CB: Yes, Norton 360 removed them automatically.
[23:26] Kaleem: Okay. Please note that this issue can happen if there are remnants left on your computer of the previous Norton programs.
[23:27] CB: Right. Am I able to remove those remnants manually?
[23:28] Kaleem: In order to resolve this issue I suggest that you uninstall the Norton product using the Norton Removal Tool and then reinstall the Norton 360 program.

I did all of the above, which took well over an hour, but to no avail — the Date and Time Properties internet settings continued to return error messages from both available time servers. Next time I logged on to Symantec chat, I was 18th in the queue and it took 90 minutes to get to the front of it. This agent, Suraj, didn’t seem quite as confident and took a while longer to type in his replies, causing a few classic chat post overlaps:

Suraj: Could you please let me know the issue you are facing with Norton 360 program?
CB: I had a previous Symantec Support live chat session, followed all the advice provided in the chat by Kaleem, the support agent (which was to remove old and current Norton 360 software with the Norton Software Removal Tool and then to reinstall Norton 360) but still have the same problem: Even with the Norton and Microsoft XP Firewalls disabled I am unable to synchronise internet time. I have a permanent wi-fi internet connection. Both Microsoft time servers return errors. Any ideas?
Suraj: I am sorry, I was unable to understand. Could you please rephrase it for me?
CB: As I say, Norton 360 won’t allow me to synchronise the internet time (using the clock at bottom right of your screen). I didn’t have this problem with Norton Antivirus. It’s only started happening since I installed Norton 360.
Suraj: Okay. May I place on hold for 2-3 minutes while I research on this issue?
CB: Sure. No problem. I’ [accidentally hits enter key, mid-sentence…]
CB: I’m running XP Pro.
Suraj: Okay.
[Short pause while Suraj does some research…]
Suraj: After uninstalling the Norton program, were you able to synchronise the Internet time?
CB: No. But I reinstalled 360 again immediately after the uninstall.
Suraj: Okay. I suggest you to uninstall the Norton 360 program and then check whether you are able to synchronize the Internet time. Get back to us with the results. All Right?

This turned out to be unnecessary because, after a bit of Googling, I discovered I wasn’t the only person having difficulties synchronising my internet time. Connecting to a different internet time server as described in various group discussions, simply by pasting it into the Date and Time Properties/Internet Time/Server panel (which I hadn’t realised you could do manually) instantly solved the problem and Symantec was off the hook. It was just another of those infuriating internet coincidences. However, full marks to both of my support agents for persevering, and to Symantec for having the foresight to offer live chat as a support option. I’d use it in a heartbeat if I had further problems. It knocks Microsoft and Apple’s support into a cocked hat.

Five minutes with Paul di Filippo

Short story writer, novelist and reviewer Paul di Filippo is the kind of writer other writers love to hate: as if his prodigious output weren’t enough, it’s said he managed to write five of his novels and many of his short stories on a Commodore 128 computer.

He coined the word ribofunk to describe the sub-genre of science fiction in which he specialises, and which uses elements of the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir and post-modernist prose. His manifesto defines the sub-genre thus:

“Speculative fiction which acknowledges, is informed by and illustrates the tenet that the next revolution — the only one that really matters — will be in the field of biology. To paraphrase Pope, ribofunk holds that: ‘The proper study of mankind is life.’ Forget physics and chemistry; they are only tools to probe living matter. Computers? Merely simulators and modellers for life. The cell is King!”

A search on ‘ribofunk’ generates around 20,000 Google hits.

Your biog says you’ve been a finalist for a lot of awards, but have you ever won any?

“I have indeed broken my loser’s streak just once, by winning a British SF Association Award for best short story for 1994’s The Double Felix. The story title was misspelled on the official ballot, and my name was misspelled on the official trophy, which arrived years later and looks like Monty Python’s Holy Grail. I currently use it to hold sticks of incense. All of which is not to negate my gratitude to BSFA.”

Rhode Island: Red state or Blue state, state of denial or state of fear?

“Well, with the recent election the whole country starts to resemble a more regal purple, sensibly blending red and blue. But RI remains more liberal than the average. The citizenry seems more hopeful than fearful, although we do live continuously under the dire threat of colonisation by rich Bostonians to our north.”

You once wrote an exposé of the frustrations involved in having work accepted by Wired, in spite of the magazine briefing its commissioned contributors in detail. Has Wired bought any more work from you since you wrote this article?

“I think a whole new regime has taken over the magazine since my experiences, and with any luck they wouldn’t hold my past outburst against me. And although I have not placed any long pieces with the magazine since that first ill-fated one, I did recently secure an entire page (!) in the November 2006 issue for my six-word short story, commissioned along with almost three dozen others: ‘Husband, transgenic mistress: wife, “You cow!”’”

You’re a prolific author of short stories, particularly of speculative fiction. Good, paying markets for short stories around the world are in decline. How does the market for your own work look in the States?

“The demise of magazines that pay a ‘living wage’ is not good news for me or any other writer whose focus is short fiction. I’m heartened by a prevalence of original anthologies, and classy small-press magazines, but it does become more difficult to sustain oneself by writing just at these lengths for such markets. And of course the invention of webzines is another cheerful development, although their mode of existence is yet shaky. A certain online monetary inflation calculator that I occasionally use indicates that the penny-a-word rate obtained by the pulp writers of the 1930s, once derided as chicken feed, should translate to twenty-cents-per-word in modern terms. So even the top mags that pay, say, ten-cents-a-word are paying half what used to be standard during the Depression!”

You’ve written a sequel to a comic by Alan Moore of Watchmen fame. Was this a daunting prospect, and did you get to meet or correspond with Moore during the course of the project?

“I had almost zero contact with Moore throughout the whole project. But he read my scripts, and I learned of his approval through my editor, Scott Dunbier. I also learned that Moore preferred that I not kill off his favourite character, as I had intended, and that I substitute an adoption scene for a woman getting pregnant by her canine husband and giving birth to some sort of doggy hybrid. Good calls, I say in retrospect, on his part!”

In your essay The Infantilisation, Electrification, Mechanisation and General Diminishment of King Kong, you posit that “seriously intentioned sequels and offshoots of the Original Tragedy … fumblingly recast or attempt to extend the material in such a manner as to rob it of all its archetypical force and resonance”, so what did you make of Peter Jackson’s retelling or, for that matter, Russell Hoban’s?

“Although I thought the Jackson remake was exciting and skilful, in the end it seemed superfluous. What really did it add? The Hoban piece, from what I see online, looks a bit more like a post-modern pastiche than a straight remake, so I have hopes for it, especially given Hoban’s talents.”

If visitors to NZBC only read one book this year, which book should it be?

“For sheer fun and pleasure, if you’re a ‘core SF’ reader, I’d have to recommend The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi. I’ve always been a sucker for Keith Laumer’s Retief series, and [Scalzi’s book] is like a supercharged refashioning of those tropes. But I haven’t yet gotten my hands on Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day...”

What’s on your iPod’s ‘On the go’ playlist at the moment, or are you an iPod refusenik?

“Although a huge music listener, I am an iPod refusenik, mainly because I don’t need portability of music. I take walks ranging from one to three hours every day — trying to do very little driving — and when I’m out and about I like to talk to people and hear birdsong and random conversations and even traffic noise. I don’t care to be insulated in a fake Hollywood soundtrack of my own devising. When I’m home, I like to listen to large blocks of music composed with a scheme by the creator: in other words, entire ‘albums’ or CDs. And actually, when I’m writing, I play the radio! WBRU, the college station associated with Brown University. That way, I get exposed to new music and also experience the serendipity of someone else’s choices.”

E-books would seem to dovetail naturally with the sci-fi genre and its fandom. Might technology, after all, be the writer’s life-raft?

“Certainly print-on-demand, as exemplified by Wildside Press and its imprint, has been a lifesaver for me, allowing publishers to take on books of mine with only marginal sales potential, such as my collection of humour columns, Plumage From Pegasus. I have little experience with e-books, but selling some reprint stories through Fictionwise was a good experience for me. I don’t think, despite all the headwork by such visionaries as Cory Doctorow, that we yet know the ultimate model for the vehicle that will connect writers and readers, to the profit of both!”

What do you use for note-taking, capturing ideas and tracking submissions? Are you a proponent of pencil and notebook; do you favour proprietary software; or is it open source everything for you, even though your initials are PDF?

“I am old-fashioned enough to still stick with pen and paper for my note-taking. I have a pocket notebook brand that I love, Oxford Memo Books, because it’s sewn together instead of employing a metal spiral, and so when you sit on it, it doesn’t imprint your butt like something out of a Re/Search tribal scarification volume.”

What are you working on right now, when is your next book due to be published and what will it be?

“I’ve just placed two books with PS Publishing: Harsh Oases, a story collection, and Roadside Bodhisattva, a (mainstream!) novel. I’m not even certain which one Pete Crowther intends to bring out first, but there will be one in 2007 and one in 2008. My current work in progress is a novel for the firm of Payseur & Schmidt to be titled either Cosmocopia or Cosmicopia (readers, help me decide!), with illustrations by Jim Woodring.”

What’s wrong with my iPod? iTunes 7.0!

Father forgive me, for I have sinned: I spent a lot of my hard-earned on an iPod hi-fi (fans of geek porn, see the 360° view here), a new oPod case… oh, and an iPod Video, 80GB. Well, you know how it is: I ran out of space on my 40GB after only about 1500 tracks because they were all in Apple Lossless format, and iTunes is downloading new podcasts every week for me to find space and ear-time for.

I’m running iTunes Version 7.0.1.8 and so far have had two brand new 80GB iPod Videos, both purchased from the same New Zealand reseller. Each was apparently defective.

Both iPods successfully loaded my music library and played podcasts and music perfectly, both on headphones and on my iPod hi-fi. But when I subsequently plugged the iPods into any of the four USB 2 ports on my laptop, they failed to show up as devices in My Computer (a Toshiba P20 laptop on which I’m running Windows XP, Service Pack 2) or, just as worryingly, in iTunes.

The problem also occurs on a second PC — the iPod refuses to show as a device in My Computer, Windows File Explorer or in iTunes. However, it does show up in Device Manager, and the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon shows on the Windows status bar as soon as the iPod is connected. Even so, when the iPod is safely ejected, the iPod screen continues to show ‘Do Not Disconnect’. So the only way to safely eject it is to reset the iPod — the Apple equivalent of a forced reboot.

I’ve tried restarting the computer, putting the iPod into ‘disk mode’, as well as the rest of the time-consuming remedies listed on the Apple website. Unfortunately, none of them helps because I can’t get the iPod to appear as a device on my computer. It’s therefore impossible to rename the Drive Volume (to another letter instead of ‘E:’) or restore the iPod to factory settings.

I can’t help thinking Apple has created a Catch-22 situation by removing the iPod Updater option in iTunes 7. None of the previous versions of iPod Updater is compatible with iTunes 7, meaning people who have a disk mount problem can’t restore their iPods: if you can’t get the iPod to show up in either iTunes or My Computer, you’re stuck.

The only solution seems to be a downgrade to iTunes 6.x or another, previous version of iTunes, but even this maddening workaround is fraught with problems.

So why isn’t there a ‘restore’ option in the iPod’s own diagnostics menu, some combination of click-wheel buttons that will allow you to reformat and restore the drive to factory settings? Why has Apple chosen to go down this dark and lonely software cul-de-sac?

My previous (40GB) Fourth-Generation iPod mounts perfectly on both my laptop and another PC, suggesting it’s the new iPods that are the problem and not my computer. And, as I said, the new iPod also fails to mount on a second PC, which would tend to underscore this theory.

Both faulty iPods have been set to ‘manually update’ and I also ticked the ‘Enable Disk Use’ option and removed the checkmark from ‘Automatically open iTunes’.

I have no complaints about TotallyMac.com, the New Zealand reseller from which I bought my iPod and which supplied me with the replacement when the first device proved to be defective. The after-sales service was prompt and courteous and both iPods were replaced by TotallyMac.com’s Sean Carmichael without question. He also spent around 30 minutes above and beyond the call of duty going through a range of possible fixes over the phone with me, all to no avail.

There is clearly a more serious compatibility conflict between the new iPods, iTunes 7.0 and iTunes 7.1. There are a lot of worthy suggested fixes to be found online, but none of them solves my particular problem. While I’m by no means an übergeek, neither am I an iPod newbie nor a computing novice. I’ve spent far too many hours researching this frustrating problem when all I want to do is listen to music on my new hi-fi and download the latest podcasts.

On the recommendation of Sean from TotallyMac.com I took the first of the apparently defective iPods in to the friendly folks at Magnum Mac on Newton Road in Auckland, and the service tech there said, “If you’d bought this iPod from us, we’d replace it — we can’t get it to show up on our PCs.” There was nothing in it for them, so I was grateful for their attention and honest assessment.

I never had any problems with my previous iPod, so I’m hoping my experience with the iPod Video to date will be nothing worse than an ugly and expensive interlude — I’ve spent over $30 on courier fees, taxi fares and toll calls, not to mention the high price I paid for the iPod in the first place.

It’s all put rather a large bruise in my idealised view of Apple and its products. It would be good to hear from someone out there who has experienced similar difficulties and who might be able to explain what the problem is.

And if mine is a problem already known to the folks at Apple, some reassurance that it will be dealt with in future iTunes updates would be nice.

Confessions of a sock puppet

I’m not the slightest bit interested in podcasts, I’ve never read a book by Russell Hoban, and I only pretended to have the email addresses of people like Toby Young and Dave Dobbyn so I could interview Pippa Wetzell. OK?

I am a sock puppet. I used Chris Bell as a pseudonym to disguise my true identity. I actually go by the name McTavish of Banffshire, and I’m a West Highland White Terrier (dog shown not actual size).

The good news for you poor duped bastards is that NZBC’s Director-General — a man I consider myself lucky to call “The DG” — has agreed to back me up, on the basis that I’m “brave” and “brilliant”. At least that’s what I think he said at the Coco Club; by then, the music was loud and the cocktail of rohypnol and ketamine I’d dropped in his Lion Red had started to kick in.

Those of you who read my blog posts under the impression that they might be true are to be offered a full refund. The DG recognises you may have been disappointed by my baloney. I know he is. There is a catch: only those readers who visited NZBC before today — the date on which I admitted the full extent of my deceit — will be eligible for the refund. And the DG will want to see hard evidence.

NZBC readers must send us their IP address as well as all photographs of Scarlett Johansson from their temporary internet folders. Readers who have visited this blog from outside of New Zealand (hereinafter referred to as “The World”), must courier a working, flat-screen computer monitor, along with the valid till receipt, to NZBC head office immediately (there’s no need to send us any cables, thanks).

In the meantime, watch out for the soon-to-be-impending relaunch of my website, a site which, according to the Boston Globe, contains “the most lacerating collection of short stories since Darby Larson”. The DG has described my stories as “uncommonly genuine”, which is weird because I made them all up, too.

It’s funny, you know, but at a certain time of the evening, in certain bars, when the light gets low, the DG looks a lot like Oprah Winfrey.

Adios, suckers.

Levy: his feet on my dashboard

A cheery Lord Levy (right) in an unlikely face-off with the late Yasser Arafat.

In what now seems like a previous life, in the late 1970s, I was Michael Levy’s chauffeur. Michael Levy is now Lord Levy and he’s still in the news a lot more often than I am. After selling Magnet Records to WEA, Levy became the British Labour Party’s chief fundraiser. On 22 June, he gave evidence to a committee of MPs investigating party political funding. Levy had been instrumental in raising millions of pounds to help Tony Blair to win a third term. Controversy has arisen because it’s argued that Levy invited the rich to convert political donations to the Labour Party into loans so they wouldn’t have to be registered. And then there’s the matter of “cash for peerages”, covered by the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, which makes it illegal to reward anyone who has given “any gift, money or valuable consideration” with a title of honour.

Levy has said he won’t become Blair’s “fall guy” over cash for peerages. Fair enough, too, since his close friends (such as producer Pete Waterman, of Stock-Aitken-Waterman fame) have said they hadn’t even realised he was a socialist.

It looks as though this one will run and run, particularly since Levy escaped answering a single question about his fundraising role during a recent meeting with MPs from the Commons constitutional affairs committee, and is now being dubbed “the mouse that fails to roar”. Critics blame Levy (along with a few others) for conjuring up the current intensity of “communal derision” for Blair, in a similar way as millions once loathed Maggot Scratcher.

Meanwhile The Sun complains that Levy has “one of the worst work-rates in the House of Lords” and has not spoken in the Upper House since Blair gave him his peerage nine years ago. He has apparently voted only seven times out of a possible 67:

“The PM’s pal — dubbed Lord Cashpoint for his skill at gathering cash — also failed to sit on a single committee or table a question.”

This year, Levy has been lampooned by the former Whose Line Is It, Anyway? impersonator Rory Bremner in a sketch in which he portrayed Levy as Fagin, complete with prosthetic hook nose. Giles Coren of The Times (who, ironically, was defending Levy) called him:

“…a loud, unelected, millionaire smart-arse with a big nose and a widow’s peak and expensive suits and the most Jewish surname imaginable, whose power in the land derives entirely from wealth made in commerce”.

I bet he was happier being ridiculed for releasing Alvin Stardust singles. Which is more or less where I came in: back in the late 1970s, I was yet to turn 20; a shy, wannabe-rockstar who worried about bad skin, wore a succession of silly haircuts and dreamt of a job in an A&R department. I was working for Levy’s independent record label Magnet — which he called a mini-major — home to Bad Manners, Chris Rea and yes, Alvin Stardust.

Levy was the archetypal, 20th Century corporate tyrant. With only one or two exceptions, everyone in the firm was either afraid or in awe of him. This was at a time when the long lunch was king and tabletop Asteroids ruled the pubs. Ozzy Osbourne drank at the Royal Oak (our York Street local), where the ex-Ten Years After drummer held court alongside Den Hegarty from The Darts and other music biz hangers-on, like me. Baker Street was our song and “underground listening” consisted of 12-inch dub-mixes of Night Nurse by Gregory Isaacs.

In my memory, everything from those times is invested with significance. Such as the fact that I once used to drive the man who is now “Lord Cashpoint”, Tony Blair’s major fundraiser and his Middle East Peace Process Envoy, to his meetings with his lawyer at WEA, in Soho’s Broadwick Street. I’d also be sent out to buy him lunch, an experience I previously described here. I liked to think that the smooth running of the company hinged on this task because otherwise, if his salt beef wasn’t hot when I returned with the paper bags of mustard-soaked sandwiches from Reuben’s, the afternoon air would be blue with expletives and resonant with the slamming of doors.

Levy had a reputation within Magnet for throwing ashtrays and reducing his long-suffering PA to tears. I, though, had few problems with the boss — ‘ML’, as everybody called him — and have no axe to grind. He was moody, but the other employees’ complaints about him remained largely hearsay to me. I learned a lot about music and the industry that feeds off it from ML and my time at Magnet and never experienced any ashtray-throwing during my two years with the company. But the “glass-topped table with marble legs”, described in this story, sounds familiar: there was a similar table in Levy’s office in the 1970s and early 1980s — it doubled as the boardroom table and was the scene of many a product meeting shouting-match that would resound through 22 York Street. Also familiar are “the bouffant hair and high heel shoes”, and that wasn’t only our Essex-girl receptionist.

I started at Magnet as the company’s messenger. I ‘inherited’ a beat-up, white Renault 4 van that had been ill-treated by the previous driver. When Peter the ‘post boy’ quit, it became my job to drag the huge sacks of records round to Baker Street Post Office, to refill the franking machine and stick postage labels on thousands of brown cardboard envelopes full of vinyl (there were no CDs then) for DJs, promoters and clubs.

Success at the top end of the British singles charts was on the wane by the time I joined Magnet, but those ‘in the know’ had calculated the firm made most of its money from licensing its master recordings — The Darts’ version of Daddy Cool, or Chris Rea’s Fool If You Think It’s Over, for example — to overseas companies for release on album-length compilations.

The accountant and financial controller would entrust me with wads of cash of a girth bewildering to a mere 20-year-old, for depositing either at a Baker Street bank or Levy’s own, ornately gothic branch on Park Lane. Quite where all this cash came from or for what it was destined I was never to discover, but I remember on more than one occasion carrying well over £10,000 in banknotes, without security, back to the office. My employer must have realised that I was either honest or stupid, or possibly both.

When one day the post-boy and I sneaked out of the office to make a series of mundane record deliveries together, we experienced ML’s wrath firsthand. We’d decided it would be quicker to make these deliveries in tandem — I’d stay in the van while Peter leapt out to deliver envelopes to places like the NME, Melody Maker and Smash Hits. The real reason we went on this mission was for the laughs. And a jolly jape it was; at least until we returned to head office, to find ML apoplectic, fuming that there’d been no one to take him to his meeting, deliver documents, or collect his salt beef sandwiches from Reuben’s.

“I just thought…” I stuttered.

“Don’t think!” yelled ML, in his withering way, “I’m not paying you to think! I do the thinking around here!”

Another abiding ML memory is of a hellish drive to WEA Records in Broadwick Street, Soho, from Magnet’s offices on York Street in the West End. ML had decided it’d be quicker for me to drive him there in the company van than for him to negotiate his Rolls out of the cramped garages in a mews off Gloucester Place, where it and the other company cars were minded daily by a cantankerous old fellow with emphysema who, once he had all the vehicles parked for the day, refused to move them again before close-of-business.

I’d been driving for Magnet for a while by then, and Broadwick Street was one of my regular stops. I’d worked out a number of shortcuts and was reasonably confident I could get us there in 15 to 20 minutes. As was customary, ML sat in the passenger seat with his expensively heeled feet up on the van’s dashboard, occasionally singing boisterously or regaling pedestrians (some of them possibly burqa-clad). Everything was going just fine until we hit a traffic jam on Marylebone High Street. ML was adamant we’d gone the wrong way. It wasn’t long before he had his head out of the window and was bellowing at the traffic and slamming his hands against the dented bodywork.

ML urged me to cut-up the cars in front, pull out onto the wrong side of the road, drive onto the pavement — anything to get him to his meeting. He was intimidating at the best of times, but once he started shouting at you it was no contest — you became a gibbering wreck. “What did you go this way for?! I told you I was in a hurry!”

I protested. I gibbered. I pulled out of the traffic jam and drove down the wrong side of the road. Luckily, I managed to cut back in again, turn down Weymouth Street in front of a taxi, narrowly missing the traffic island, past Harley Street and onto Portland Place. But by now ML’s mood had soured and he leapt out of my van close to his destination on Berwick Street with not so much as a “You’re fired, you idiot!”

I also have an acute memory of ML spending £100 of company money on a dark blue suit, white shirt and black tie from an Oxford Street menswear store for me to wear, so that I could chauffeur him about in style. My first official function in this getup was dropping him off at the then-fashionable Italian restaurant La Loggia at the Marble Arch end of Edgware Road in the company Daimler. (Later, on a regular trip to Pye Studios around the corner, I stopped outside La Loggia to examine the menu and spent the better part of a week’s wages on dinner there, to experience life as I imagined a millionaire would experience it, at least until the bill arrived.)

When a bald tyre caused me to write-off Magnet’s Renault 4 van in the rain near Hampstead Heath one night, it was ML who called me at home over the weekend to make sure I was OK. He didn’t seem to care so much about the van, which now looked like a crumpled Coke can. And ML agreed to see me when, a couple of years later, I bravely and rashly (or so it now seems) asked if he’d invest in a business venture I’d been foolish enough to get involved in.

He was courteous rather than patronising — which he could have been, since I had absolutely no business experience — and listened to me enthuse about my plans for half an hour or so. I remember him being surprised by the exclusively Jewish surnames of lawyers and accountants on the business plan I presented him (I’m not Jewish, but I’d learned to value his brand of business acumen) and his shock that I’d had the cheek to open a bank account at his Park Lane branch.

ML shrewdly declined to invest in my business and a little later, the bank on Park Lane called us to ask us most politely to take our business elsewhere. Even though our modest account was in the black, it was thought that perhaps such a prestigious branch did not quite suit our modest startup. I wondered at the time whether ML might have had a hand in this but, as it turned out, it didn’t matter one jot — the venture soon went belly-up.

I haven’t seen ML since the 1980s. The media has been wondering what’s next for him, now that Blair’s days are numbered; apparently he’s been helping the Prime Minister plan his next career move, although he may soon need some help of his own.

Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking that, if I’d stuck with ML, it might have been him and me delivering that letter from Tony Blair to President Mahmoud Abbas — the one outlining proposals to revive the Israel-Palestine peace process. We’d have approached on the wrong side of the road in a beat-up, white Renault 4 van, with ML munching on a salt beef on rye, his feet on the dashboard, waving pedestrians out of the way as I gibbered at the wheel.

More on “Lord Cashpoint”
Lord Levy on terror alert after home attack
Levy was “against secret loans”
The entrepreneur who proved himself rather good at accumulating money
An exclusive offer from Lord Levy
Lord Levy of the £20 note
The Prime Minister’s “sidekick”
His “skill at extracting cash from businessmen”
The cash for honours inquiry
“You have taken a few knocks — in fact more than a few — mainly on my behalf”
Lord Levy and Opus Dei...?
Levy is said to have collected £7 million for Labour
Middle East Peace Process Envoy “exchanging views” in Kazakhstan and Latin America
Regulators: BBC show not anti-Semitic
No questions for Levy
Giles Coren: “What the Dickens were they thinking?”
An eccentric choice as the PM’s envoy for the Middle East
“How did the party of the poor become the best friend of the millionaires?”
Levy ‘told Labour donor to keep loan to party secret’
Like a brother to Tony Blair

Update 20 July: Levy secretary’s MBE queried (Jean Cobb was ML’s secretary even when I worked for him in the 1970s, so I reckon she deserves at least an MBE, for putting up with him for so long.)

Update 31 July: The cover of Private Eye

Update 18 December: Blair refuses to back Levy in Labour’s cash for honours scandal

Update 22 January 2007: Blair likely to quit if aides charged in loans inquiry

Update 31 January 2007: Levy arrested over perversion of justice

Update 20 July 2007: No one to face charges in cash for honours inquiry