Thanks to the emailers who sent me some tips for viewing Region 1 DVDs on my iBook. Sadly, none of them work, as I’ve got the very last revision of the 12″ iBook G4. This comes with an unfortunately named ‘combo drive’, the Matshita CD-RW CW-8124. I’ve had a look at a few forums online, and this one has yet to be successfully ‘hacked’ with ‘firmware’ (I’m making lots of inverted-comma finger gestures here) for region-free playing. And no, the VLC program doesn’t play Region 1 discs either. No, it really doesn’t. Not for me. Honest. But thanks all the same.
The main advice for this model is, I understand, to replace the entire CD drive. Which would cost over £200, as I’d have to pay for a professional to rip the thing apart and install the drive. Seeing as you can buy a region-free stand-alone DVD player for under £20 these days, changing the drive seems an unnecessarily pricy measure to take.
Enough computer talk. Yesterday, while London sweltered, I sat indoors and finished that little story for the band This Year’s Model, “Rhoda’s Pocket Doomsday”. I tried to do something a little Saki-meets-Borges, in the old songwriting method of aiming for different influences at once and failing, but finding your own voice somewhere along the way. I need to do more.
Popped over to Claudia Andrei’s for tea and Doctor Who. The episode, “Gridlock”, was very 2000AD, very Fifth Element, very Brazil. It looked wonderful, and David Tennant is unquestionably the most energetic and physically fit of The Doctors. Hard to imagine any of the other ones jumping so nimbly between row after row of hover-cars. He also has such a watchable face: all mad eyes and Mr Punch-ish pointy nose and chin, but handsome with it rather than goofy. Perfect for the role, and with Billie Piper gone, he takes hold of the programme’s core continuity.
An email:
Glad you have met Andrew Martin–the Stringer books are fantastic, esp. The Lost Luggage Porter (the new one) despite Faber’s attempt to flog them to the nostalgia circuit with like, old people and that on the covers. Comics: Have you read Chris Ware? The *utter, utter cruelty* of children….
Oh yes, I’ve read Jimmy Corrigan, and found it astounding stuff. It’s sad that even Guardian award-winning graphic novels are still regarded by mainstream readers as something lower than even the trashiest, most formulaic prose fiction. Whenever there’s any piece in the media about comics or even one particular comic, there’s this sense the article has to get defensive. “It’s a comic book, BUT – “.
This prejudice works two-ways. When you’re talking to the converted and the cognoscenti, it seems you have to know everything about the medium itself. Enjoying graphic novels feels you have to belong to a private club, with all the pros and cons that suggests. Graphic novels aren’t a genre, but they’re filed and treated as one. It seems odd to like some comics.
I also note that Richard & Judy’s TV Book Club – the most powerful UK influence on selling books of recent years – still hasn’t featured any graphic novels. They do the cookbooks and the celeb biogs and the chick-lit and the popular fiction that the broadsheets avoid. But not graphic novels. Which I think is a terrible shame.
I was in Waterstones Bond Street recently, and they have a section for visiting authors to recommend their favourite new books. Zadie Smith, of all people, plugged two graphic novels: Epileptic by David B and But I Like It by Joe Sacco. Ms Smith’s little card attached to the books said “Graphic novels take so much time and care to make. The least we can do is read them.”
This Thursday 19th is Beautiful & Damned night once again. Miss Red and I haven’t yet grown bored of it, and she’s now booking live cabaret acts in addition to my selection of silent movies. We also have a MySpace page here:
http://www.myspace.com/thebeautifulanddamnedclub
