Mango Pudding Blues 3.0

CELEBRITY BLOG

William Gibson has a blog. Weird. We’re quite fond of some of his novels here at Mango Pudding Blues, although we’re not generally science fiction fans. We enjoy the tense minimalism of his sentences, and we’d take him over your Margaret Atwoods and your Michael Ondaatjes any day of the week. He has a new novel coming out in February, which the blog seems to have been created to help flog. Good. And hey, isn’t Neal Stephenson due for a new one this year too? Nicholson Baker is, and we’re thrilled about that. And also Tom Robbins, whose new one we are predicting will be a return to form that will have appeal beyond his usual early 20s hippie crowd.

And Lou Reed’s The Raven, a double album, a concept album about Edgar Allen Poe, with guest stars, is also due this month. We are gleeful with anticipation over that one, we assure you.

And hey, if you are seeing, at right, the old picture of Barbados, do a little cache-clearing reload for a small slice of the upper east side.

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Thursday, January 09, 2003

THE MIGHTY ENGINES OF JOY

1) Look, here’s the thing; you know when we go quiet for spells of time over here at Mango Pudding Blues? It’s because we are not joyous. It is because something is blocking us. Something is interfering with our joyousness. Because Mango Pudding Blues is driven, friends, by the mighty engines of joy.

2) The worst is boredom. Our nemesis is boredom, and we bore easily here at Mango Pudding Blues. At present, we have returned from NYC, where we burned brightly with excitement, and are now being smothered by the grey wet blanket of unemployment in Ottawa. And when we are bored, we undergo a violent mental and emotional catabolisis in which, horrifyingly, painfully, our brain eats itself.

2b) Catabolism: the physical state one enters when one’s caloric intake is lower than one’s output. When one’s body begins to digest its own tissue.

3) And we always sing to ourselves that Pet Shop Boys tune, Being Boring, which is about boredom being the fault of the bored. And we resent ourselves deeply.

4) And this inevitably carries on until our agent calls and we go off to work. We love working.

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Tuesday, January 07, 2003

WHICH SIDE OF THE BED

For the curious, for fans of fine pop, and especially for the poor fella who wrote in after searching, like we once did, the entire internet for a shred of evidence about the song, we present to you now Which Side of the Bed by the English Beat. Oh, ah, be careful. It's pretty fat, at 6.4 mb or so.

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Sunday, January 05, 2003

WELCOME, WELCOME

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mango Pudding Blues 3.0. Thank you all for coming. Come on in and have a look around. Yes. This is the place. As always, we feel that we ought to have something special for you to read to celebrate the new site, but also as always, we have nothing much at all. You may, of course, scroll down and read the couple of posts below, which came from our recent, giddy trip to New York City. And the posts before that, which are just the usual test pattern posts in which we bitch and moan about our difficulties with the new thing.

No, we have very little for you here. What we do have is only our hopes for the future: that Mango Pudding Blues will continue to attract your attention and your regular visits; that we will somehow manage to surprise you or delight you or in some way please you; that we will humbly, in our bumbling way, move you to laughter and to passing our address on to an exponentially increasing group of friends and family members who will also be moved to do the same thing so that we can ensnare in our ever-widening net a rapidly growing readership that will eventually include senators and presidents and stockbrokers and record company executives and major sporting stars and the like, whose heavy influence will eventually lead the media to catch wind of what we’re up to and dub us a “thought leader” or a “bellweather” or something and tap us for various kinds of television and talk-radio punditry and then, like Oprah or Martha or Rosie, we can realize our final dark ambition, which is to publish a monthly mass-market magazine upon the cover of which we will smirk, monthly, sometimes solo and sometimes with our celebrity friends.

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