Sun Off Switch

I had my hair cut today, and I feel the need to share with the world the wonder of Ashton Studios in Lancaster! We always have ourselves preened there before gigs and photo shoots because Haley is a genius, and always makes my hair smell wondrous with her miracle wax.
I had my undercut very short this time, utilising clippers for the first time in centuries, which was somewhat scary – especially having finally watched This Is England the previous night. I was worried I might end up with a skinhead. (It's fine – I didn't!) I also got to talk to Victoria – who works upstairs – about an exciting idea for a new tattoo. And Kishen brought me Rooibos tea, having escaped Paternal tyranny down south.
You don't need to know any of this, but I'm writing it none the less. I took my shiny hair to Andy's to work on “band stuff”. We're going to Amphifest in Cologne in a couple of weeks, so we're putting together a new promo CD to hand out to the black clad European massive!
But, as we all know, the only thing people are truly interested in is badges. So naturally we decided to make some 19ninetynine badges, and I was suddenly inspired to make some badges in German! It made sense, the only problem was finding out what the German for “Put Out The Sun” actually was. Something “Der Sonne” surely, how difficult could it be?
According to an online translation it was: Stellen Sie Aus Der Sonne, however that translated back into English as “Place Out The Sun”, which was terribly literal and made no sense whatsoever.
I rang my German friend, she was out. I rang my other German friend and she was out also, so we asked people online and got “Sonnen Ausschalter” which meant “Sun Off Switch”! Which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of ridiculous thing you're going to end up with when you attempt to translate a sentence which never made sense in the first place.
It became clear it was much more complicated than we had initially thought – because our reference to “God out out the sun today, and will never rise again” is just an abstract concept! You can't actually “put out” the sun... so should the translation try to portray a similar concept by saying something like “Extinguish the Sun” (Die Sonne Auslöschen)? Or just translate the original words even though the translation won't make sense? Because it's not a sentence, it's an album title! So surely you're not allowed to change it... Who makes the rules regarding these things?!
Luckily Jex also has a German friend who text us a translation, but then sent about five subsequent variations regarding tenses, genitives and nominatives... but referring back to the original lyric “God put out the sun...” surely a God is omnipotent, infinite and regardless of masculine, feminine and time....
So we settled upon a translation meaning “Eclipse The Sun”. But then I thought, that's not right! We could have called the album “Eclipse The Sun”, but was being artsy, abstract, poncey and pretentious, so surely the translation had to be something that implied eclipse, but sounded cool and hinted at something sinister? So we ended up with a version of “Eliminate the Sun”.
I hope it's good enough and not woefully inaccurate – but just so you know, we tried!!

I just checked my email: Hey! Cool haircut. It's 'löschen die Sonne'

Don't worry. We have loads of badges in English...

Chris x

The Following Data Was Lost...

We have a fax machine, and recently it has decided to start receiving faxes again. However, it hasn't done this since 1995 when it belonged to somebody else. Consequently, each time I turn it on a little shiny rectangular bit of paper glides (yes, glides, it has a wonderful sort of clunky elegance) out of the back containing information regarding The Boathouse Restaurant fifteen years ago.

Wonderfully cryptic, needlessly technical and wholly irrelevant snippets of information. My favourite is “THE FOLLOWING DATA WAS LOST: JOURNAL / ENERGY REPORT: THE ELECTRICITY FAILED.”

I imagine The Boathouse Restaurant to be located in Maine – because all Stephen King books are set in Maine – and by a perpetually misty jetty. I fantasise that piece by piece, as these bizarre little messages come through, I'm going to unravel the mystery of The Boathouse Restaurant during the power cut and the alien attack/zombie siege that ensued.

But there's something slightly peculiar about receiving these transmitions from the past, it's like a form of time travel! I'm hoping that it will tie in with me finding a map to some hidden treasure, or the Holy Grail...

Anyway, I love antiquated technology. The clunky fax machine with it's sinister messages reminds me of all the Dharma Initiative stuff they find in Lost. I love it because it scares me. In Lost they find all these huge clunky computers from the 70s, but they all still work and can pretty much do everything that computers do now... they have webcams, IM and all that. Recently I think I've worked out why old technology it scares me – it suggests that nothing ever changes.

Fax machines amaze me, they're such a great idea. Unfortunatley we'd stopped using them by the time I was old enough to need one. I found myself thinking, why don't people send more faxes? But of course, why would we when we have email? Emails seemed so new and impressive and futuristic when we first heard about them, but is there really, fundamentally any difference between an email and a fax?

We're now told that communication is so much easier because everybody has a mobile, but no one had mobiles twenty years ago and they didn't feel a gaping void in their ability to communicate. There were phone boxes on most corners, and kids were given little pre-paid cards to make emergency calls with. Is it really so much different?

Of course, we live in a golden age of iphones which can post on facebook, download films and scan your retina every five seconds (just making sure you're still you!) - but I'm thinking in terms of what current technology is capable of.

Actually, it's perfectly summed up in a song The Future (Isn't What it Used to Be) by my friend Alasdair: “Don't talk to me about the internet and act like I'm supposed to swoon. You're exploring cyberspace, shut your gormless tweeting face, in 1969 a man went to the fucking moon.”

They had spaceships in the 60s! Are we really supposed to feel like an iPad is a major breakthrough?

I'm not saying all this stuff isn't good – but when you just switch your perspective on the whole thing it really does feel like, fundamentally, nothing really changes. The government military/scientists, the vampires, the saucer people or whoever clearly have technology that is incredibly advanced and probably staggeringly more advanced than we're allowed to know, and it's like contemporary technology is ever so slightly tweaked every now and then to give us this impression that things are changing, when really it's pretty much the same. It's like how, when mobile phones first arrived, they kept getting smaller and smaller, and this was in some way good, and now they're getting bigger because they need keyboards, plasma screens and vapourising death rays. Apparently now this is also in some way good. But at the end of the day, it's just a phone and it can't do anything that wasn't possible in 1990. I'm sure Logic 9 is mind bogglingly superior to all its predecessors... and the chasm of difference between the quality of songs composed with 9 and 8 (a mere calculator!) with be colossal, but it's just a tool that makes music, and my favourite piece of music was made in 1801 with a tool called a piano. And no amount of new technology will make Moonlight Sonata any less good or any less valid. Things vary – but nothing ever truly changes.

But why? I suppose the easy answer is that it's a great way of tricking us in to spending more and more money on things we don't need. But, have you noticed that every generation seems to think that it's at the “end”? That it's at the peak of scientific and technological knowledge? We can laugh at people who thought the Earth was flat, or condemn the black slave trade as inhumane, but few of us ever want to admit that comparatively we're just as ignorant. In a hundred years, people will think of chemotherapy as being as ridiculous as using leeches for nosebleeds. Does the belief in the infallibility of modern technology contribute to this ignorance? It certainly does contribute, I think, to the illusion of time. The idea of things constantly changing creates a sense of progression that doesn't really exist. Because we all know that time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so. But that's another story for another day...

We are as old as the universe and more clever than we know.