Balance.
Interesting. Tracking some of the responses to Channel 4 News' interview with Mark Regev and some of Jon Snow's blogging about the situation in Gaza – as well as some of the reactions to the Beeb's increasingly publicised stance on the DEC Gaza appeal – there are more than a few typed voices singling out issues of bias against Israel and blindness towards Hamas. Some outright slamming of C4 for living in a 'left wing bubble'.
Interesting too is watching that C4N interview again. Mark Regev was for much of it more controlled in his manner than I remember, and I can see how someone rooting for his point of view would read bias into Jon's energy and line of questions.
My point here is point of view. We bring our own filter to everything always.
Even trying to be objective, far away, I came away from Thursday's piece feeling angry – piecing together the scenes of utter destruction with an apparent arrogance of tone from the representative of those who wrought this particular round of destruction. Did I leap a little further than the facts alone, in front of me on the TV, should have taken me?
If I'm doing it, living miles from the conflict with no direct involvement, how much is everyone on the ground filling in perception and fueling passions with their prejudices?
---
Jonathan Miller's report on the misuse of certain weapons in 'civilian' areas had been discussed in that interview with Mr Regev, being cited by the Israeli spokesman as a case of naiivety.
"Of course the people your respected reporter spoke to couldn't say what they really thought – Hamas is an intimidating military regime." He said. "Do you deny that Hamas is an intimidating military regime?"
"So you're saying their injuries, which they told us were from Israeli weapons, were actually from Hamas fighters using intimidation?" Jon replied. "Are you saying Hamas used the white phosphorus and flechette weapons?"
"No, I'm not saying that, you're putting words into my mouth, sir. I'm saying Hamas uses intimidation and you therefore cannot be sure what people tell you in Gaza." Mark Regev replied.
The order and precision of the dialogue I've put here isn't accurate, but this is some of what was exchanged. And in a subsequent report on Friday night's programme, Jonathan Miller spoke to some Gazans who said that Hamas had indeed intimidated their way into some people's homes in order to launch rockets from them – even shooting one witness' son in the leg when he begged them not to turn his family home into a military target.
---
But here's the thing.
My view of either of these people doesn't change their humanity. Doesn't alter it one jot – in the outside world. To the reportable truth. But it does in my head.
In the head of the Gazan Hamas freedom fighter, the Israeli occupiers are genocidal aggressors to be resisted in all possible forms. It is a glory to die in the pursuit of that freedom, all civilian infrastructure can be apportioned for the struggle however it's needed, and anyone from the bitter rival party, Fatah, could well be a collaborator and might well need to be shot in the name of security and the ultimate good for Palestinians.
In the head of the Israeli defender, the Hamas terrorist is an indiscriminate killer, in power by military coup, using civilian areas as weapons caches and human shielding, who will never accept the democratic right of Israel to live in peace and who will never stop mindless murder unless stopped once and for all. However bad the death of children sounds, the Palestinian people either voted for these self-proclaimed extremists or refused to organise themselves a better democratic alternative, and so brought a measure of this on themselves.
So are we stuck forever?
Surely not. The key is still responsibility. Proportionality.
---
Both sides have inculcated some ugly normalities in their views of the other. Enough to hide the humanity and common sense going on, on either side of the wall.
Ultimately, both party leaders appear care little, in tactical terms at least, about the death of children in the struggle – a dreadful thing to say, unhelpfully loaded, but observationally true to the outside world. Yet we can never solve a crisis of passions without asking why each side feels those passions. Why these ugly cultural normalities took root. Why is the word. And that word is only a link word to actual dialogue – because it must be followed by listening.
Democracy and nuclear capability each bestow on Israel an expectation of a high moral standard. But not an empty piety. To an Israeli official spokesperson I would say that if Israel thinks Hamas is beneath speaking to, she should ironically have the superior confidence to talk to them. What would there be to fear? If Israel knows what it's doing, it will know that the superior strategy is dialogue. Winning over your opponent.
Instead it has always chosen military strategy. More than that – and this is, I believe, Isreal's core cultural problem – it has always defined itself by military strategy. Best form of defense is offense.
Occupied land, blast walls, initiated wars, check point choking, daily humiliations. All of it sounds strategically legitimate if you believe you are at war. If you define yourself by the fight. By the enemy. As might suicide bombing, to someone's particularly ugly normality. Hamas' very creed is to destroy Israel – it couldn't exist at all without its enemy. It sends its sons and daughters to blow themselves to pieces fighting its enemy. So we're back to a stalemate of definition. If those understandings of each side are the only truth of them. Back to an ugly balance of pain and blame.
All these political tactics and cultural outlooks do is breed fighters. Angry killers, defending their right to exist at any cost.
Dialogue, on the other hand, means having the guts to see your opponent as human. If you once do that, rather than villifying them into hateable cartoons, the military conviction to kill them begins to break down. If you define your identity by hating them, there's no way you can talk to them. Because you won't know who you are any more.
And you'll be admitting you'll have to live with people who see the world differently to you.
---
If, despite the stalemate of cultural outlooks, both parties really do want to see something other than total annihilation of the other happen, in the game of who goes first, Israel has always held the controlling power. By far.
If I were talking to the UK's democratic partner in the Middle East, I would say to her that Israel needs to depower Hamas by gradually showing its violent methods to be void. Defunct. Out of time.
By opening the flow of movement, by aiding in the rebuilding of Gaza, by ultimately opening talks with Hamas leaders – who are the elected representatives of Palestinians in Gaza right now – Israel will begin to take the heat out of the rockets.
By using its great power to humanise the empoverished Palestinians in its own mind, Israel will begin to build peace. By treating them not as victims or villains but partners in the region, it might start to build real security. By giving back some of the land that is blatently contentious, by trying to build dignity into its dealings with its neighbours, by coming ever closer to being able to say sorry for certain things, Israel will begin to silence its critics around the world.
By defining itself by the fight, by always claiming moral high ground but refusing to dismantle its own war machine – the machinery of intimidation and humiliation and provocation – Israel fuels the militant opposition. And then blames it.
Who shoots a human shield to get at the terrorist hiding behind it? Someone who sees the military victory as more important than the human concerned.
If leaders can one day be found in the Kenesset who will begin to voice a whole new lexicon of dialogue with the situation – rather than voting for spectacularly disproportionate death tolls – less and less people outside the situation will be able to say: 'what is Israel really up to?' Because it will be obvious. Israel will be actually doing something about the situation.
---
But, back on planet Earth, where big dreams begin, the human reality is that tone of voice is as vital as choice of words in communicating. My job tells me this every day. If I were in charge of Israel's security, I might be be keeping Mark Regev away from cameras and microphones.
What matters the label, Left Wing, Israeli, Palestinian, to humanity? Nothing. Not a bloody thing.
Of course the BBC should broadcast the DEC's appeal. It's the DEC, for God's sake. It's children, for God's sake. The decision not to broadcast it has sounded like one of the most partisan, unbalanced things I've ever heard.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
Poppet.
Poppet.
Lilly Allen. Never met the girl.
Don't know any gossip, if there is any. But her new single - let's just agree, shall we, that the more you hear The fear the more meaningful and moving it seems. Pop at it's most articulate. Geist of the zeit indeed. I think I love it.
She's a proper talent, and perhaps a poppet. But nobody's pop pet.
> OK, WHILE WE'RE HERE...<
Puppet.
Check out Thursday's Daily Show. Jon Stuart interviewing Gitmo, the Guantanamo glove character.
I don't know where to go with this.
Lilly Allen. Never met the girl.
Don't know any gossip, if there is any. But her new single - let's just agree, shall we, that the more you hear The fear the more meaningful and moving it seems. Pop at it's most articulate. Geist of the zeit indeed. I think I love it.
She's a proper talent, and perhaps a poppet. But nobody's pop pet.
> OK, WHILE WE'RE HERE...<
Puppet.
Check out Thursday's Daily Show. Jon Stuart interviewing Gitmo, the Guantanamo glove character.
I don't know where to go with this.
Lost.
Lost.
I staggered in from circuits lastnight to catch the end of an interview that Jon Snow was conducting with Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev.
I've never seen Jon Snow shut down an interview before.
It should have no bearing whatsoever on the reporting of facts, but the shouty arrogance of the individual in this case began to take over from any fact finding. Began to distract from the debate. The line he took though, heat of delivery aside, was the real thing to make blood eventually boil.
The flat, outright, F**k You denial.
It seemed undeniably there in the flat words, as well as the fired tone.
Not knowing what else to do, I posted something feebly on Jon's Snowblog at C4:
Lastnight's interview with Mr Regev was a tough one to sit through, and people will make of it various opposing things, I suspect.
But I suspect too, Jon, that you'd say your concern in your work is simply reporting the truth, as far as we can get at it.
Mr Regev's aggression of tone is one thing - we can judge it however. But the responses themselves, transcripted, seem to illustrate Israel's apparently consistent official practice, at least whenever I'm watching - answer direct questions by pointing elsewhere. The question: "Did you do X?" might be met by the answer: "We didn't start it."; "Did you do Y?" by: "What about North Korea?". "Did you do Z" may even just get talked over.
Passion is one thing. It's obviously hard to hold in, in the face of such events and issues. Nor should it always be, I think. But decisions and actions taken are reportable truth. So too should be responsibility.
As ever, thanks for doing your best in the middle of the issues, Jon. It surely says as much about passion as it does professionalism.
Yes, of course it's sycophantic - I want Jim to fix it for me to go to the Channel 4 News offices and meet everyone. I want to stand in front of the big man in bright socks, purse my lips awkwardly, and shiftingly tell Jon I think he's a ruddy hero.
But what I want to know in the real world is: when will a political leader start helping Hamas to stop shooting rockets? And when will a political leader outright condemn Israeli government tactics? Not to do so, on some level, is to not help anyone.
Who knows what I would feel if I were born and raised in an Israeli suburb. But if I was still essentially me, I can only say I'd be very concerned at the way Mr Regev spoke for my country. And insensed at the strategy he represented for my security. I'd be surely be f***ing livid, wouldn't I? ..Wouldn't I?
---
Interesting that many other people expressed similar incredulity on Jon's blog. But it's true to say that Mr Regev's views and tone do represent a lot of people. The comments accusing C4 of bias and clear anti-Israeli sentiment are many.
But they all take the same line, essentially: "You just hate us, and we didn't start any of this." The answer to over 300 dead children, bulldozed infrastructure, a systematically traumatised population and blanket ban on live reporting in the theatre of conflict seems to be: "Hamas is a dictatorial regime that that rules by military coup and fires rockets into Israeli back gardens." Without heat or passion, these appear to be the facts on the ground.
That filter is the thing many people look through at the situation - who they think Hamas, or the Palestinians are. That's enough. They see the rockets land and that's evidence enough for any reprisal. But have they walked through Gaza and seen it themselves? Have they sat down with Palestinians - or, dare I say it, someone affiliated with Hamas - to talk with them about it?
Bloody f***k, this is hard. This is hard to put right.
Harder to hear, however, is the possibility that the BBC and Channel 4 refused to air a Disasters Emergency Committee appeal on behalf of the people of Gaza, for fear of appearing biased.
Could this really be true?
Excuse me being a child, but why can't this be about human need, human suffering and human injustice? What difference should a sodding flag make - Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi or British?
Is the truth completely lost? Can no one speak for it? Because if we choose to hide the truth of one group of people, we surely lose the right to have it disclosed for ourselves.
I staggered in from circuits lastnight to catch the end of an interview that Jon Snow was conducting with Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev.
I've never seen Jon Snow shut down an interview before.
It should have no bearing whatsoever on the reporting of facts, but the shouty arrogance of the individual in this case began to take over from any fact finding. Began to distract from the debate. The line he took though, heat of delivery aside, was the real thing to make blood eventually boil.
The flat, outright, F**k You denial.
It seemed undeniably there in the flat words, as well as the fired tone.
Not knowing what else to do, I posted something feebly on Jon's Snowblog at C4:
Lastnight's interview with Mr Regev was a tough one to sit through, and people will make of it various opposing things, I suspect.
But I suspect too, Jon, that you'd say your concern in your work is simply reporting the truth, as far as we can get at it.
Mr Regev's aggression of tone is one thing - we can judge it however. But the responses themselves, transcripted, seem to illustrate Israel's apparently consistent official practice, at least whenever I'm watching - answer direct questions by pointing elsewhere. The question: "Did you do X?" might be met by the answer: "We didn't start it."; "Did you do Y?" by: "What about North Korea?". "Did you do Z" may even just get talked over.
Passion is one thing. It's obviously hard to hold in, in the face of such events and issues. Nor should it always be, I think. But decisions and actions taken are reportable truth. So too should be responsibility.
As ever, thanks for doing your best in the middle of the issues, Jon. It surely says as much about passion as it does professionalism.
Yes, of course it's sycophantic - I want Jim to fix it for me to go to the Channel 4 News offices and meet everyone. I want to stand in front of the big man in bright socks, purse my lips awkwardly, and shiftingly tell Jon I think he's a ruddy hero.
But what I want to know in the real world is: when will a political leader start helping Hamas to stop shooting rockets? And when will a political leader outright condemn Israeli government tactics? Not to do so, on some level, is to not help anyone.
Who knows what I would feel if I were born and raised in an Israeli suburb. But if I was still essentially me, I can only say I'd be very concerned at the way Mr Regev spoke for my country. And insensed at the strategy he represented for my security. I'd be surely be f***ing livid, wouldn't I? ..Wouldn't I?
---
Interesting that many other people expressed similar incredulity on Jon's blog. But it's true to say that Mr Regev's views and tone do represent a lot of people. The comments accusing C4 of bias and clear anti-Israeli sentiment are many.
But they all take the same line, essentially: "You just hate us, and we didn't start any of this." The answer to over 300 dead children, bulldozed infrastructure, a systematically traumatised population and blanket ban on live reporting in the theatre of conflict seems to be: "Hamas is a dictatorial regime that that rules by military coup and fires rockets into Israeli back gardens." Without heat or passion, these appear to be the facts on the ground.
That filter is the thing many people look through at the situation - who they think Hamas, or the Palestinians are. That's enough. They see the rockets land and that's evidence enough for any reprisal. But have they walked through Gaza and seen it themselves? Have they sat down with Palestinians - or, dare I say it, someone affiliated with Hamas - to talk with them about it?
Bloody f***k, this is hard. This is hard to put right.
Harder to hear, however, is the possibility that the BBC and Channel 4 refused to air a Disasters Emergency Committee appeal on behalf of the people of Gaza, for fear of appearing biased.
Could this really be true?
Excuse me being a child, but why can't this be about human need, human suffering and human injustice? What difference should a sodding flag make - Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi or British?
Is the truth completely lost? Can no one speak for it? Because if we choose to hide the truth of one group of people, we surely lose the right to have it disclosed for ourselves.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Sworn.
Sworn.
Who can work? The boy's about to be sworn in. Number 44.
Hard to take in the humanity of the vibe, apparently everywhere in America. When did we have such a touchy-feely-poeticy inauguration? When did the prayers of a pastor over the new Commander in Chief sound as much like the prayers in local church?
"Our father, who art in heaven..." leads Rick Warren.
"Sweet land of liberty..." sings Aretha Franklin.
"Holy, blubbing cow..." chokes some bloke in Bournemouth.
But let's not forget.
Baz?
This is a guy who's about to define the word 'pressure'.
Who can work? The boy's about to be sworn in. Number 44.
Hard to take in the humanity of the vibe, apparently everywhere in America. When did we have such a touchy-feely-poeticy inauguration? When did the prayers of a pastor over the new Commander in Chief sound as much like the prayers in local church?
"Our father, who art in heaven..." leads Rick Warren.
"Sweet land of liberty..." sings Aretha Franklin.
"Holy, blubbing cow..." chokes some bloke in Bournemouth.
But let's not forget.
Baz?
This is a guy who's about to define the word 'pressure'.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Sand.
Sand.
We traipsed a few grains of seafront sand into London over the weekend. A little symbolism.
The time had come round all too soon to wassail a few hearty hurrahs and bon voyages to Jules and Angela, as they prepare to move life to Bahrain - a country familiar with sand. The capital was suitably wet and windy to wish them off.
Their flat was heaving. And still half full of people wanting breakfast by Sunday morning. But even a hearty Sardinian sausage can't properly compensate for losing your chums to warmer climes. But, in the end, Mr and Mrs CJ had, as ever, simply created another excuse to get a good group together to enjoy themselves.
It's obvious a lot of folk will miss you in London, chaps. If any of our gang in Bournemouth decided to follow a star to the Middle East, or even Middle England, I know it'd be a trauma for the rest of us. Great holiday opportunities not withstanding.
Stiff upper lip, everyone.
---
This week is another one creaking at the seams here. Strategy and branding stuff close to delivery, plus various bits of artwork to get in shape and some more research to do for a music job. No complaints at being kept so reassuringly in shape in such tricky times. My brain may be close to full, but it's a much appreciated problem for as long as it lasts. The problem or the brain.
But it's a challenge coming up with good thinking while being mentally in a number of places at once. You have to keep coming back to things. Hoping you remember where you left them.
With all the GISBBI* running around already this year, though, sad to say that the laptop has been an invaluable way to make the most of time on trains and boats at least, if not beaches (you have to draw a line in the sand somewhere).
(*Gosh I'm So Busy Being Important)
We traipsed a few grains of seafront sand into London over the weekend. A little symbolism.
The time had come round all too soon to wassail a few hearty hurrahs and bon voyages to Jules and Angela, as they prepare to move life to Bahrain - a country familiar with sand. The capital was suitably wet and windy to wish them off.
Their flat was heaving. And still half full of people wanting breakfast by Sunday morning. But even a hearty Sardinian sausage can't properly compensate for losing your chums to warmer climes. But, in the end, Mr and Mrs CJ had, as ever, simply created another excuse to get a good group together to enjoy themselves.
It's obvious a lot of folk will miss you in London, chaps. If any of our gang in Bournemouth decided to follow a star to the Middle East, or even Middle England, I know it'd be a trauma for the rest of us. Great holiday opportunities not withstanding.
Stiff upper lip, everyone.
---
This week is another one creaking at the seams here. Strategy and branding stuff close to delivery, plus various bits of artwork to get in shape and some more research to do for a music job. No complaints at being kept so reassuringly in shape in such tricky times. My brain may be close to full, but it's a much appreciated problem for as long as it lasts. The problem or the brain.
But it's a challenge coming up with good thinking while being mentally in a number of places at once. You have to keep coming back to things. Hoping you remember where you left them.
With all the GISBBI* running around already this year, though, sad to say that the laptop has been an invaluable way to make the most of time on trains and boats at least, if not beaches (you have to draw a line in the sand somewhere).
(*Gosh I'm So Busy Being Important)
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Straight. And Soft.
Straight. And Soft.
Now, I don't know if it's because of being so generally loose and floppy-haired and unshaven and late for things, or whether it's inexplicably at odds with it, but I'm famously one for straight lines and right angles and generally lining things up. Makes me rub my thighs a little.
So at the weekend, away from the studio and normal stuff, I was almost beside myself.
I'll explain, if I can.
Getting lost for hours in over-working the production on a piece of music is probably one symptom of liking considered engineering. Tidying my studio floor or doing the washing up before I can think straight is probably as much a symptom of putting off work I don't fancy doing as any neatness compulsion, but it's there too. But it is, of course, working as a designer that tends to most bring out my nerdy tendency to attach everything to grids.
Lining up, making it match, underscoring uniformity... don't get me started. Why do I love this? I need to sit down.
In practical terms it's all about legibility of course - making an ad or a poster or a brochure or a website intuitive to read. It's about ensuring stuff is easy to use by people.
But I'm hardly a slave to practical, am I? It's more than that. It's some weird, personal compulsion to drool over signage and airport graphics and that kind of strictly uniform stuff that is beautiful, precisely because of its functionality.
Which would sound odd if you'd ever actually seen me. You could starch me into a naval dress uniform and rivet me to a deck ladder and I'd still find a way to lean. I don't usually look right with the top button done up.
But give me the Helvetica family and the colours black and white and a strict No Curves rule and I'm likely to have a ball. A square one.
---
It is, at risk of puncturing my impending profound thesis on the subject, ultimately all to do with a conviction that the very best design makes a single statement. An immediate, instantly appreciable identity.
Logo, website, advert, car - even a pop tune. With the good stuff, you know instantly that it knows what it is. To me, that clarity shows good creative; it's what I'm always trying to do.
And, pertinently to this story, I'd say it's a conviction that certainly applies to one of the hardest but most important things to do this with.
Buildings.
---
First full week of oh-nine was largely about preparing for a particular branding presentation. A client I've been working with for a few years had commissioned Momo to develop the branding for their partners across Europe, and subsequently invited me to present the conclusions to their head office in France, at their annual new year kick-off meeting.
"Hoorah" I remember thinking coolly, as the head of the company was originally rounding on asking me to do this, during his call before Christmas, "..go on, go on - invite me to Paris. Give me an actual reason to say I'm bloody well going to Paris on business..." I don't believe I said any of this out loud.
"This year we're meeting somewhere else for a change" he said. "Le Havre. Thought it would make life easier for you. ..Can you make it?"
"Yee-uh. ..Er, yeah. I can make it. To Le Havre."
"Great. Just great. ..You'll need to catch the overnight ferry. Meeting's first thing and you're on right at the start. See you then" he said nicely, ringing off.
---
Despite the uncomfortably rapid from-the-cabin-bunk-straight-into-the-room-full-of-expectant-French-people-who-are-decidedly-unsure-about-this-whole-branding-business segue that morning, my enthusiastic apologies to the room, en Français, for being able to do nothing more than apologise en Français, seemed to work. I saw a few smiles and a few laughs at my universally understood William Shatner impressions. Which I'll explain some other time. But yes, it was an actual business presentation I was doing.
Caroline was with me on this trip, to prolong the trip into a night away and a subsequent morning properly off, loafing around French cafés. Which is, as you know, largely why I go to work in the first place. We were both welcomed into a friendly environment and fed a smart, friendly three course lunch and encouraged to not worry about clearing off again in the afternoon to enjoy our hotel room without bothering any more about work. I do so love the French.
"Where are you staying tonight?" one of the chaps asked Caroline warmly.
"Le Havre" she answered sweetly. She says his face flickered momentarily.
Given that we were, that morning, in the pretty little seaside town of Trouville, set in the rolling, relaxed Normandy countryside bathed in frosty winter sunshine, he could easily be forgiven for wondering if we were off our bleedin' chariot.
---
But here's the deal. And I mean, who knew.
Le Havre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A whole central chunk of it.
Hard to imagine, as you swoop over the Seine estuary through a forest of lekky pilons and belching refinery chimneys and squatting gas reservoirs, that anything of such impressive-sounding renown should be so well hidden in this busy, traffic-vomitting artery of the channel. But it's there. Unhidden, once you've found it.
Auguste Perret's vision appears to be one of straight lines. Blocks of right angles and perpendicular lines. And I was sort of in heaven, the more we walked around it.
Now, it's not the sort of heaven that most people would get. We would have sounded fantastically like we were convincing ourselves, as we wandered and pondered and pontificated on the ponts and quais. UNESCO badged the the city centre in 2005 for its "innovative utilization of concrete's potential." But fans of Communist social architecture and/or Thunderbirds might understand.
I was obviously weak at the knees.
The 133-hectare space is, according to UNESCO, "an exceptional example of architecture and town planning of the post-war era" - and it really, distinctively, oddly is.
It's rare to come across such a large geographical area that seems so born of a single idea. So controlled and planned. For all the variety of details, the whole seemed wonderfully, to my mind, single-minded. Complete.
Msr Perret apparently once employed a cocky young upstart called Le Corbusier. Who learned from who, I don't know, but wandering around Le Havre is a bit of an architect's wet dream. Not because it's any of the finest individual architecture you've ever seen, but because of the sheer scale of the vision they managed to actually deliver. It's a whole fifties toy town. Vast boulevards, arrow-straight to the sea front, large properly square squares - and all of it low, at only five or six stories. It gives you loads of hopeful sky to look at. (..Mercifully distracting you from all the concrete, perhaps. Cynic.)
The merrits of concrete as a material to actually live with are, yes, debatable. And you might also point out that the entire vision here is really of the motor car - it's all designed to be watched from a moving window, sliding gracefully past in continual, shifting, perpendicular perspectives.
But it feels very airy. And purposeful. With very tall shop frontages, there's plenty to keep the human eye-level occupied, without looking up. But when you do, from wherever you are, you see the looming, moderno-gothic imposition of Saint Joseph cathedral - which looks like it should peel open robotically and reveal a giant rocket with CCCP and a red star on it. To do what, who knows. Who cares? To just show off.
Fantastic.
It's all quite surreal. But in the sunshine at least, all quite something.
The thing is, something about the clarity of the single idea here is comforting. The design places you well - you can always see where you are in relation to something distinctive, but more than that, you feel you are somewhere very definately sure of itself. Somewhere that knows exactly what it is. And this is a surprisingly fundamental human need - to feel placed.
---
Our hotel was an unexpected temple to this modern dream - a recently converted Ministry of Finance building. And as a consequence of all those Fibonace squares and perfect proportions, the rooms were huge and angular and just FULL of straight lines. Square taps, rectangular lamps, risque 'diagonal' throws. And all with a spa on the other side of the choridor. They had to drag us out of the place.
The thing is, as Caroline and I swapped notes - urban designer to graphic designer - the interlocking issues between the disciplines that we'd so often mused (oh the long winter evenings just fly, etc...) were just obvious, writ large all around us. Space, place, legibility, identity.
And most important, after all, was how the space was being used. For right in the centre of town, set in a vast public square, was the Hotel de Ville - the town hall. It had a huge square clock tower you could place for miles around, and a wide open frontage designed very firmly to do one thing - one especially French thing. Encourage people to gather.
As we stood and watched the growing hoards of people with Palestinian solidarity banners, chanting for 'les enfants de Gaza', reminding us of the smashed, chaotic streets and decrepit, jagged, infrastructure of a strip of land so small you can see all it's boundaries from the top of a tower block, yet has a million and a half people living in it, on top of eachother, locked in and unable to leave, I knew the graphic design of the city we were standing in must be working on some significant level. I stopped looking at it.
I stopped thinking about right angles and straight lines and hard materials and got lost thinking about the soft tissue of people.
We came home feeling oddly clear-headed.
Now, I don't know if it's because of being so generally loose and floppy-haired and unshaven and late for things, or whether it's inexplicably at odds with it, but I'm famously one for straight lines and right angles and generally lining things up. Makes me rub my thighs a little.
So at the weekend, away from the studio and normal stuff, I was almost beside myself.
I'll explain, if I can.
Getting lost for hours in over-working the production on a piece of music is probably one symptom of liking considered engineering. Tidying my studio floor or doing the washing up before I can think straight is probably as much a symptom of putting off work I don't fancy doing as any neatness compulsion, but it's there too. But it is, of course, working as a designer that tends to most bring out my nerdy tendency to attach everything to grids.
Lining up, making it match, underscoring uniformity... don't get me started. Why do I love this? I need to sit down.
In practical terms it's all about legibility of course - making an ad or a poster or a brochure or a website intuitive to read. It's about ensuring stuff is easy to use by people.
But I'm hardly a slave to practical, am I? It's more than that. It's some weird, personal compulsion to drool over signage and airport graphics and that kind of strictly uniform stuff that is beautiful, precisely because of its functionality.
Which would sound odd if you'd ever actually seen me. You could starch me into a naval dress uniform and rivet me to a deck ladder and I'd still find a way to lean. I don't usually look right with the top button done up.
But give me the Helvetica family and the colours black and white and a strict No Curves rule and I'm likely to have a ball. A square one.
---
It is, at risk of puncturing my impending profound thesis on the subject, ultimately all to do with a conviction that the very best design makes a single statement. An immediate, instantly appreciable identity.
Logo, website, advert, car - even a pop tune. With the good stuff, you know instantly that it knows what it is. To me, that clarity shows good creative; it's what I'm always trying to do.
And, pertinently to this story, I'd say it's a conviction that certainly applies to one of the hardest but most important things to do this with.
Buildings.
---
First full week of oh-nine was largely about preparing for a particular branding presentation. A client I've been working with for a few years had commissioned Momo to develop the branding for their partners across Europe, and subsequently invited me to present the conclusions to their head office in France, at their annual new year kick-off meeting.
"Hoorah" I remember thinking coolly, as the head of the company was originally rounding on asking me to do this, during his call before Christmas, "..go on, go on - invite me to Paris. Give me an actual reason to say I'm bloody well going to Paris on business..." I don't believe I said any of this out loud.
"This year we're meeting somewhere else for a change" he said. "Le Havre. Thought it would make life easier for you. ..Can you make it?"
"Yee-uh. ..Er, yeah. I can make it. To Le Havre."
"Great. Just great. ..You'll need to catch the overnight ferry. Meeting's first thing and you're on right at the start. See you then" he said nicely, ringing off.
---
Despite the uncomfortably rapid from-the-cabin-bunk-straight-into-the-room-full-of-expectant-French-people-who-are-decidedly-unsure-about-this-whole-branding-business segue that morning, my enthusiastic apologies to the room, en Français, for being able to do nothing more than apologise en Français, seemed to work. I saw a few smiles and a few laughs at my universally understood William Shatner impressions. Which I'll explain some other time. But yes, it was an actual business presentation I was doing.
Caroline was with me on this trip, to prolong the trip into a night away and a subsequent morning properly off, loafing around French cafés. Which is, as you know, largely why I go to work in the first place. We were both welcomed into a friendly environment and fed a smart, friendly three course lunch and encouraged to not worry about clearing off again in the afternoon to enjoy our hotel room without bothering any more about work. I do so love the French.
"Where are you staying tonight?" one of the chaps asked Caroline warmly.
"Le Havre" she answered sweetly. She says his face flickered momentarily.
Given that we were, that morning, in the pretty little seaside town of Trouville, set in the rolling, relaxed Normandy countryside bathed in frosty winter sunshine, he could easily be forgiven for wondering if we were off our bleedin' chariot.
---
But here's the deal. And I mean, who knew.
Le Havre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A whole central chunk of it.
Hard to imagine, as you swoop over the Seine estuary through a forest of lekky pilons and belching refinery chimneys and squatting gas reservoirs, that anything of such impressive-sounding renown should be so well hidden in this busy, traffic-vomitting artery of the channel. But it's there. Unhidden, once you've found it.
Auguste Perret's vision appears to be one of straight lines. Blocks of right angles and perpendicular lines. And I was sort of in heaven, the more we walked around it.
Now, it's not the sort of heaven that most people would get. We would have sounded fantastically like we were convincing ourselves, as we wandered and pondered and pontificated on the ponts and quais. UNESCO badged the the city centre in 2005 for its "innovative utilization of concrete's potential." But fans of Communist social architecture and/or Thunderbirds might understand.
I was obviously weak at the knees.
The 133-hectare space is, according to UNESCO, "an exceptional example of architecture and town planning of the post-war era" - and it really, distinctively, oddly is.
It's rare to come across such a large geographical area that seems so born of a single idea. So controlled and planned. For all the variety of details, the whole seemed wonderfully, to my mind, single-minded. Complete.
Msr Perret apparently once employed a cocky young upstart called Le Corbusier. Who learned from who, I don't know, but wandering around Le Havre is a bit of an architect's wet dream. Not because it's any of the finest individual architecture you've ever seen, but because of the sheer scale of the vision they managed to actually deliver. It's a whole fifties toy town. Vast boulevards, arrow-straight to the sea front, large properly square squares - and all of it low, at only five or six stories. It gives you loads of hopeful sky to look at. (..Mercifully distracting you from all the concrete, perhaps. Cynic.)
The merrits of concrete as a material to actually live with are, yes, debatable. And you might also point out that the entire vision here is really of the motor car - it's all designed to be watched from a moving window, sliding gracefully past in continual, shifting, perpendicular perspectives.
But it feels very airy. And purposeful. With very tall shop frontages, there's plenty to keep the human eye-level occupied, without looking up. But when you do, from wherever you are, you see the looming, moderno-gothic imposition of Saint Joseph cathedral - which looks like it should peel open robotically and reveal a giant rocket with CCCP and a red star on it. To do what, who knows. Who cares? To just show off.
Fantastic.
It's all quite surreal. But in the sunshine at least, all quite something.
The thing is, something about the clarity of the single idea here is comforting. The design places you well - you can always see where you are in relation to something distinctive, but more than that, you feel you are somewhere very definately sure of itself. Somewhere that knows exactly what it is. And this is a surprisingly fundamental human need - to feel placed.
---
Our hotel was an unexpected temple to this modern dream - a recently converted Ministry of Finance building. And as a consequence of all those Fibonace squares and perfect proportions, the rooms were huge and angular and just FULL of straight lines. Square taps, rectangular lamps, risque 'diagonal' throws. And all with a spa on the other side of the choridor. They had to drag us out of the place.
The thing is, as Caroline and I swapped notes - urban designer to graphic designer - the interlocking issues between the disciplines that we'd so often mused (oh the long winter evenings just fly, etc...) were just obvious, writ large all around us. Space, place, legibility, identity.
And most important, after all, was how the space was being used. For right in the centre of town, set in a vast public square, was the Hotel de Ville - the town hall. It had a huge square clock tower you could place for miles around, and a wide open frontage designed very firmly to do one thing - one especially French thing. Encourage people to gather.
As we stood and watched the growing hoards of people with Palestinian solidarity banners, chanting for 'les enfants de Gaza', reminding us of the smashed, chaotic streets and decrepit, jagged, infrastructure of a strip of land so small you can see all it's boundaries from the top of a tower block, yet has a million and a half people living in it, on top of eachother, locked in and unable to leave, I knew the graphic design of the city we were standing in must be working on some significant level. I stopped looking at it.
I stopped thinking about right angles and straight lines and hard materials and got lost thinking about the soft tissue of people.
We came home feeling oddly clear-headed.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Screenwipe.
Screenwipe.
Charlie Brooker. Am I right to be applauding him on?
I'm becoming increasingly unsure whether watching his show is standing against the gradual, erosive downfall of civilisation or hastening it.
Watch the current episode on BBC iPlayer in disbelief.
..Why would they make Konnie Huq do that? Why?
Charlie Brooker. Am I right to be applauding him on?
I'm becoming increasingly unsure whether watching his show is standing against the gradual, erosive downfall of civilisation or hastening it.
Watch the current episode on BBC iPlayer in disbelief.
..Why would they make Konnie Huq do that? Why?
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Pressure.
Pressure.
Technically, we're half way through Week 2 of January. Already. Enjoying being back, so far?
To a background of job losses and teary Woolies employees, my own pressured first full week back in the saddle can only be a blessing. There's a reassuring amount for Momo to be pre-occupied with as the year starts, and it's been nice seeing some of my clients and work chums again already.
But the studio's certainly changed back from a bouncing New Year dancefloor to an arena of plate-spinning. Honestly. ..It feels like Imperial Rome does The Generation Game.
With clever-sounding presentations to write and clever-looking creative to pull out of the air, I fear for my Quality Street-addled brain. And I think the rest of me is still a few per-cent proof - I seemed to keep dropping things in meetings yesterday. Knocks the edge of your winking finger pistol when you simultaneously throw your pen across the room.
---
As I soldier on manfully through a pressured long one today then, as pre-occupied as I am, I can't keep other news out of mind. Isreal. As far away as the situation is, all the usual joke-making here feels a little uncomfortable.
Not that this seemed to affect me when my father died, of course.
You have to get on. Of course.
But. Shit. It's an Orwellian hell out there. Just an ever-worsening madness. I can't compute it. What's anyone, like, doing?
Having to get on with what's in front of us and not think about it, mostly.
We have deadlines.
This post from Iloveravi on Current.com was interesting, I think:
Technically, we're half way through Week 2 of January. Already. Enjoying being back, so far?
To a background of job losses and teary Woolies employees, my own pressured first full week back in the saddle can only be a blessing. There's a reassuring amount for Momo to be pre-occupied with as the year starts, and it's been nice seeing some of my clients and work chums again already.
But the studio's certainly changed back from a bouncing New Year dancefloor to an arena of plate-spinning. Honestly. ..It feels like Imperial Rome does The Generation Game.
With clever-sounding presentations to write and clever-looking creative to pull out of the air, I fear for my Quality Street-addled brain. And I think the rest of me is still a few per-cent proof - I seemed to keep dropping things in meetings yesterday. Knocks the edge of your winking finger pistol when you simultaneously throw your pen across the room.
---
As I soldier on manfully through a pressured long one today then, as pre-occupied as I am, I can't keep other news out of mind. Isreal. As far away as the situation is, all the usual joke-making here feels a little uncomfortable.
Not that this seemed to affect me when my father died, of course.
You have to get on. Of course.
But. Shit. It's an Orwellian hell out there. Just an ever-worsening madness. I can't compute it. What's anyone, like, doing?
Having to get on with what's in front of us and not think about it, mostly.
We have deadlines.
This post from Iloveravi on Current.com was interesting, I think:
"I agree that Israel should go after the Hamas soldiers
launching rockets into Israel.
Fucking right. Go get them.
But if you start killing innocent people including kids
then you loose your moral high-ground. Fast.
Israel has had enough of being afraid of rocket
attacks and has taken action.
Sadly the action they have taken is way, way,
way off the fucking deep end.
They are using weapons that most of the world
has agreed are too horrible to use EVEN in war.
They are using these weapons on civilians.
On children. They are killing hundreds of innocent
people without regret.
This is wrong no matter what your motives are.
Israel has transformed from a people with a
legitimate complaint to a dangerous and violent
monster that needs to be stopped.
I just hope the international community gets their
shit together before it is too late."
launching rockets into Israel.
Fucking right. Go get them.
But if you start killing innocent people including kids
then you loose your moral high-ground. Fast.
Israel has had enough of being afraid of rocket
attacks and has taken action.
Sadly the action they have taken is way, way,
way off the fucking deep end.
They are using weapons that most of the world
has agreed are too horrible to use EVEN in war.
They are using these weapons on civilians.
On children. They are killing hundreds of innocent
people without regret.
This is wrong no matter what your motives are.
Israel has transformed from a people with a
legitimate complaint to a dangerous and violent
monster that needs to be stopped.
I just hope the international community gets their
shit together before it is too late."
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Wirelarse.
Wirelarse.
So anyway. You watch the news and you feel several serious shades of something unpleasant. Angry and pissed off and all that useless stuff. So you write an angry, pissed-off blog, hit Post, and flick on the radio for some light relief.
Next thing you know, in an uncomfortably obvious emotional volte-face, you find yourself being recorded on a hip, electro-beat, youth radio programme, sounding far too pleased to be on it.
Tragic.
Naturally, most people don't expect the phone to ring while doing the washing up of a Friday evening to have Radio 1 ask if they'd like to pop on air with their amusing anecdote-come-obviously-hip-music-choice. But I quietly patted my hands dry, cleared my throat imperceptibly and coolly took the call. Obviously.
We think Annie Mac is a poppet for being nice about some old bloke ruining the feel of her show.
Momo on the Mash Up
So anyway. You watch the news and you feel several serious shades of something unpleasant. Angry and pissed off and all that useless stuff. So you write an angry, pissed-off blog, hit Post, and flick on the radio for some light relief.
Next thing you know, in an uncomfortably obvious emotional volte-face, you find yourself being recorded on a hip, electro-beat, youth radio programme, sounding far too pleased to be on it.
Tragic.
Naturally, most people don't expect the phone to ring while doing the washing up of a Friday evening to have Radio 1 ask if they'd like to pop on air with their amusing anecdote-come-obviously-hip-music-choice. But I quietly patted my hands dry, cleared my throat imperceptibly and coolly took the call. Obviously.
We think Annie Mac is a poppet for being nice about some old bloke ruining the feel of her show.
Momo on the Mash Up
Saturday, January 03, 2009
How the other half live. Apparently.
How the other half live. Apparently.
Picture the scene.
Nice suburban home, nice couple, nice kids playing in the lounge as the family are interviewed by a radio reporter. Birds in the sunny garden keep up a calming chirrup of atmosphere among the citrus trees, through the open patio doors. Fresh juice clinks on a tray as the nice young mum sets it down.
It's a home you want.
"Tell me what it's like to live here" says the radio reporter.
"Well," begins the young lass beside her husband, with a tip of her head and a slightly forced smile, "after eight years, you begin to plan around it." She then laughs a little what-can-you-do laugh. A serious gesture.
"We tell the kids that if they ever go anywhere, they must always run if they're outside. No hanging around. And if they're at home, they must stay downstairs and not stray too far down the garden from the house. We only get about ten seconds warning."
She shrugs. Her husband picks up: " Of course we have some sympathy - they're being brutalised by their leaders. But, y'know, they voted for them. And these same leaders want to see our children dead."
His wife interjects: "Yes, we have sympathy - of course we do. But they had warning of our strikes. We texted them. Our planes ticker-tape dropped thousands of leaflets telling them we only wanted to target military installations and that they should leave those areas. They had warning."
"Then we hear of the family of five children sleeping across the road from a munitions stash... and so, what can you do? When this is over, it will be quiet again for us. At last. My kids will be able to play in their own garden safely."
---
It's hard to imagine anyone sitting by quietly if rockets dropped on Southbourne for eight years. I look out of the studio window at all the homes of decent, moderate people I see around my streets every day, and understand this decent family's honest defiance. It sounds like something anyone around me here would say. What I would say, in their shoes.
This young couple from somewhere like Sderot in the western Negev, heard interviewed this morning on the Today programme, sounded more together and resolved and, well, 'normal' than many of the region's similar residents. They're taking sleeping pills and arguing and seeing their house prices plummet and their marriages fragment. They're worn down by the endless threat of rocket attacks by Hamas, from the Gaza strip just a short drive away. These are people like you and me who want to get on with their lives and not be traumatised.
Who can blame them for wanting something done?
---
The other report, run back-to-back with this one this morning, was from Gaza. On the dawning of Day Eight of the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian enclave, a local radio producer interviewed people there.
It was hard to hear some of the recorded responses over the thumps, roars and sometimes blasts of the fighter planes and missile strikes. Plus, of course, some of them responded in Arabic and so needed the voices of translators fed over the top of their own.
"I am standing here talking to you now," said one doctor, in English, "but I honestly don't know what could happen in the next five minutes."
"We have some supplies, but no electricity. Water has been cut off too. But we have God. He will protect us, and he's all we have. We will be okay."
Another aid worker, English sounding, said: "We brought in a family this morning that had been hit by a missile attack. Little (name) who is four died in front of us from her injuries. Her sister, (name) was brought in dead on arrival. Their brother, (name) we thought would be okay. He was brought in breathing. He died this morning, however."
"Some are calling in the streets for revenge on Isreal. Some are calling for God's mercy." said the Gaza-based reporter calmly, in English. "Hospitals are over-run and infrastructure demolished. The death toll is reported as in the many hundreds now. Humanitarian efforts are being badly hampered by the situation." In the background was the sound of more thumping explosions, and of people wailing and shouting.
---
Ed Stourton was reporting from a cafe on the border. Those same birds from the family's back garden seemed to be with him there, calming the morning sunshine as troops sat around near him, playing cards and laughing.
"It's all very pleasant here" he said. "There's even a promising looking garden centre just over the road." He then added: "Gaza is half a mile away. I can see the planes and I can hear the constant crump of missile strikes."
And I could exactly picture it.
Israel can seem so pleasant, so relaxed. So darned congenial. Everyone, on each side of the cultural divide, can make you so glad you visited. And you can find youself sitting there, in a citrus grove, with a cup of mint tea, birds lulling you, mediterranean breeze caressing you, and not feel the reality of the war zone walking distance away.
This is probably true of many war zones - especially domesticated ones like this.
Gaza is, as Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg put it impromtu on the radio this morning, half the size of the Isle of Mann, with one and a half million people squashed into it. How easy are 'surgical strikes' on such a theatre of operations? However seriously, humanly, the F16 pilots take their role.
It's not just any strip of land though. It's not like someone just declared war on Boscombe. (No jokes, locals. I shop there willingly.) This is a strip of land that's been cut off from the outside world for the last umpteen months. If not years, practically. It's had at best intermittent electricity and water and food. It has been a humanitarian crisis, according to the UN, for a long while. It is a people living in enforced poverty. In enforced misery. In an enforced fucking war zone.
---
The issue here isn't the politics of Olmert vs the Likud in looming Isreali elections. It isn't the politics of Bush's last days of US presidency and his proudly pro-active support for Israel's government. It isn't about Fatah's decades of corrupt incompetence undermining the Palestinian cause, or the PLO's cultural complacency over the same time. And it isn't about Hamas' violent rhetoric against Israel's right to exist.
The issue is about what we are told. And not told. About how we hear stuff. All of us. How it's edited.
So, in Israel, the issue is that decent people can live in pretty houses with their children shelling distance from a war zone and have never seen it. That ordinary tax-paying families can hope for military action against neighbours they've never properly met. Who's anhialated streets they've never walked down. Who's stories they've never listened to.
I can't imagine the fear of living under bombardment in the nice little streets around my house. I mean, somebody text me WTF. I can't imagine what it would do to my thinking, can you?
I can't help feeling though that, once the present flames are out, a practical tonic for some beleaguered Israeli residents might be to walk around Gaza for a day, and share a glass of tea or two with some of its residents.
Now. I'm off to a nice cafe.
Picture the scene.
Nice suburban home, nice couple, nice kids playing in the lounge as the family are interviewed by a radio reporter. Birds in the sunny garden keep up a calming chirrup of atmosphere among the citrus trees, through the open patio doors. Fresh juice clinks on a tray as the nice young mum sets it down.
It's a home you want.
"Tell me what it's like to live here" says the radio reporter.
"Well," begins the young lass beside her husband, with a tip of her head and a slightly forced smile, "after eight years, you begin to plan around it." She then laughs a little what-can-you-do laugh. A serious gesture.
"We tell the kids that if they ever go anywhere, they must always run if they're outside. No hanging around. And if they're at home, they must stay downstairs and not stray too far down the garden from the house. We only get about ten seconds warning."
She shrugs. Her husband picks up: " Of course we have some sympathy - they're being brutalised by their leaders. But, y'know, they voted for them. And these same leaders want to see our children dead."
His wife interjects: "Yes, we have sympathy - of course we do. But they had warning of our strikes. We texted them. Our planes ticker-tape dropped thousands of leaflets telling them we only wanted to target military installations and that they should leave those areas. They had warning."
"Then we hear of the family of five children sleeping across the road from a munitions stash... and so, what can you do? When this is over, it will be quiet again for us. At last. My kids will be able to play in their own garden safely."
---
It's hard to imagine anyone sitting by quietly if rockets dropped on Southbourne for eight years. I look out of the studio window at all the homes of decent, moderate people I see around my streets every day, and understand this decent family's honest defiance. It sounds like something anyone around me here would say. What I would say, in their shoes.
This young couple from somewhere like Sderot in the western Negev, heard interviewed this morning on the Today programme, sounded more together and resolved and, well, 'normal' than many of the region's similar residents. They're taking sleeping pills and arguing and seeing their house prices plummet and their marriages fragment. They're worn down by the endless threat of rocket attacks by Hamas, from the Gaza strip just a short drive away. These are people like you and me who want to get on with their lives and not be traumatised.
Who can blame them for wanting something done?
---
The other report, run back-to-back with this one this morning, was from Gaza. On the dawning of Day Eight of the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian enclave, a local radio producer interviewed people there.
It was hard to hear some of the recorded responses over the thumps, roars and sometimes blasts of the fighter planes and missile strikes. Plus, of course, some of them responded in Arabic and so needed the voices of translators fed over the top of their own.
"I am standing here talking to you now," said one doctor, in English, "but I honestly don't know what could happen in the next five minutes."
"We have some supplies, but no electricity. Water has been cut off too. But we have God. He will protect us, and he's all we have. We will be okay."
Another aid worker, English sounding, said: "We brought in a family this morning that had been hit by a missile attack. Little (name) who is four died in front of us from her injuries. Her sister, (name) was brought in dead on arrival. Their brother, (name) we thought would be okay. He was brought in breathing. He died this morning, however."
"Some are calling in the streets for revenge on Isreal. Some are calling for God's mercy." said the Gaza-based reporter calmly, in English. "Hospitals are over-run and infrastructure demolished. The death toll is reported as in the many hundreds now. Humanitarian efforts are being badly hampered by the situation." In the background was the sound of more thumping explosions, and of people wailing and shouting.
---
Ed Stourton was reporting from a cafe on the border. Those same birds from the family's back garden seemed to be with him there, calming the morning sunshine as troops sat around near him, playing cards and laughing.
"It's all very pleasant here" he said. "There's even a promising looking garden centre just over the road." He then added: "Gaza is half a mile away. I can see the planes and I can hear the constant crump of missile strikes."
And I could exactly picture it.
Israel can seem so pleasant, so relaxed. So darned congenial. Everyone, on each side of the cultural divide, can make you so glad you visited. And you can find youself sitting there, in a citrus grove, with a cup of mint tea, birds lulling you, mediterranean breeze caressing you, and not feel the reality of the war zone walking distance away.
This is probably true of many war zones - especially domesticated ones like this.
Gaza is, as Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg put it impromtu on the radio this morning, half the size of the Isle of Mann, with one and a half million people squashed into it. How easy are 'surgical strikes' on such a theatre of operations? However seriously, humanly, the F16 pilots take their role.
It's not just any strip of land though. It's not like someone just declared war on Boscombe. (No jokes, locals. I shop there willingly.) This is a strip of land that's been cut off from the outside world for the last umpteen months. If not years, practically. It's had at best intermittent electricity and water and food. It has been a humanitarian crisis, according to the UN, for a long while. It is a people living in enforced poverty. In enforced misery. In an enforced fucking war zone.
---
The issue here isn't the politics of Olmert vs the Likud in looming Isreali elections. It isn't the politics of Bush's last days of US presidency and his proudly pro-active support for Israel's government. It isn't about Fatah's decades of corrupt incompetence undermining the Palestinian cause, or the PLO's cultural complacency over the same time. And it isn't about Hamas' violent rhetoric against Israel's right to exist.
The issue is about what we are told. And not told. About how we hear stuff. All of us. How it's edited.
So, in Israel, the issue is that decent people can live in pretty houses with their children shelling distance from a war zone and have never seen it. That ordinary tax-paying families can hope for military action against neighbours they've never properly met. Who's anhialated streets they've never walked down. Who's stories they've never listened to.
I can't imagine the fear of living under bombardment in the nice little streets around my house. I mean, somebody text me WTF. I can't imagine what it would do to my thinking, can you?
I can't help feeling though that, once the present flames are out, a practical tonic for some beleaguered Israeli residents might be to walk around Gaza for a day, and share a glass of tea or two with some of its residents.
Now. I'm off to a nice cafe.
Friday, January 02, 2009
New year re-delusions
New year re-delusions
So, here we are on the second day of a new year - and some things are just scrolling back to the beginning again. Some things don't know how to do anything else.
I don't know about you, but the change in the air at the end of the year had given me a faintly hopeful mood against all the odds looking into '09. About I don't know what, really. But one situation seems monumentally doomed to cyclical failure. Say it with me: Israel.
Oh sodding shit. Oh effing bloody eff. Even were I to spell out all the bitter Anglo Saxon I could think of, I wouldn't cover it. And I don't propose to work myself up into a lathering fit pointlessly.
Fight and strike and hit and hate and blast and fire and smash and choke and punch repeatedly until swollen, broken and split open - use all the simple aggressive verbs you like, Isreal's political leaders keep swelling the dictionary of fear. But they do nothing to solve their problem. When all the jagged, concrete of frail Gazan infrastructure is collapsed, the fear will still stand, a monument. The ignorance kneeling in front of it.
I hate the sound of empty anger like this. People running from the rockets have shouted louder and with more conviction and not been heard. Why bother.
---
A press conference today brought together the sort of uncomfortable bed-fellows that only a truly hideous event can - Annie Lennox at one end and George Galloway at the other. Just speaking up about the military strikes in Palestine.
Somewhere in the middle, Alexi Sayle spoke with customary intelligence about Jewish people's need to speak out against Israel. Observantly, he then said quietly: 'Israel has the mentality of the rapist, the murderer, the bully. It sees itself as the good guy and blames the victim for making it take their life.'
Tragically spot on.
I'm tired of it. Are you? I'm tired of not being able to keep up with it emotionally. Of having to switch off. Of not being able to do a sodding thing. Of it all being so wrong and so far away.
Tonight, there it is on the BBC news homepage: 'The UN warns that Palestinians in Gaza face a serious health and food crisis as Israeli air strikes continue for a seventh day.'
Seven days of airstrikes on a strip of land a mile wide? Over four hundred children, women and men dead? Overwhelming ground forces massed on the border to go in? Tanks queueing up on the scrubby grass like Veedub campers at a festival.
When will Israel understand the very simple, very old truth - dehumanise your neighbour and you both become monsters.
Provocation does exactly what it says on the tank.
Don't state the obvious. Don't. Hamas, rockets, corruption, cultural blindness, blah. And duh. Tell me who has the more pressing moral responsibility - the bloke with the flick knife or the bloke with the sawn-off and six mates?
The thinking of Israel's leaders seems lost; as lost as it's ever been. Just deluded. How many young people are also lost now to the process of talking and listening? Of building peace?
Well, I know there are people in the region who want peace and who recognise the humanity in those around them. Who see themselves in the victims. Israel's leaders have built a culture of blindness - to humanity and to effective strategy. What they're doing won't work. It will do the opposite of working.
As the year dawns, no one can question their resolve. No one can question them at all, it seems.
So, here we are on the second day of a new year - and some things are just scrolling back to the beginning again. Some things don't know how to do anything else.
I don't know about you, but the change in the air at the end of the year had given me a faintly hopeful mood against all the odds looking into '09. About I don't know what, really. But one situation seems monumentally doomed to cyclical failure. Say it with me: Israel.
Oh sodding shit. Oh effing bloody eff. Even were I to spell out all the bitter Anglo Saxon I could think of, I wouldn't cover it. And I don't propose to work myself up into a lathering fit pointlessly.
Fight and strike and hit and hate and blast and fire and smash and choke and punch repeatedly until swollen, broken and split open - use all the simple aggressive verbs you like, Isreal's political leaders keep swelling the dictionary of fear. But they do nothing to solve their problem. When all the jagged, concrete of frail Gazan infrastructure is collapsed, the fear will still stand, a monument. The ignorance kneeling in front of it.
I hate the sound of empty anger like this. People running from the rockets have shouted louder and with more conviction and not been heard. Why bother.
---
A press conference today brought together the sort of uncomfortable bed-fellows that only a truly hideous event can - Annie Lennox at one end and George Galloway at the other. Just speaking up about the military strikes in Palestine.
Somewhere in the middle, Alexi Sayle spoke with customary intelligence about Jewish people's need to speak out against Israel. Observantly, he then said quietly: 'Israel has the mentality of the rapist, the murderer, the bully. It sees itself as the good guy and blames the victim for making it take their life.'
Tragically spot on.
I'm tired of it. Are you? I'm tired of not being able to keep up with it emotionally. Of having to switch off. Of not being able to do a sodding thing. Of it all being so wrong and so far away.
Tonight, there it is on the BBC news homepage: 'The UN warns that Palestinians in Gaza face a serious health and food crisis as Israeli air strikes continue for a seventh day.'
Seven days of airstrikes on a strip of land a mile wide? Over four hundred children, women and men dead? Overwhelming ground forces massed on the border to go in? Tanks queueing up on the scrubby grass like Veedub campers at a festival.
When will Israel understand the very simple, very old truth - dehumanise your neighbour and you both become monsters.
Provocation does exactly what it says on the tank.
Don't state the obvious. Don't. Hamas, rockets, corruption, cultural blindness, blah. And duh. Tell me who has the more pressing moral responsibility - the bloke with the flick knife or the bloke with the sawn-off and six mates?
The thinking of Israel's leaders seems lost; as lost as it's ever been. Just deluded. How many young people are also lost now to the process of talking and listening? Of building peace?
Well, I know there are people in the region who want peace and who recognise the humanity in those around them. Who see themselves in the victims. Israel's leaders have built a culture of blindness - to humanity and to effective strategy. What they're doing won't work. It will do the opposite of working.
As the year dawns, no one can question their resolve. No one can question them at all, it seems.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
r A t.
r A t.
Banksy said: 'imagine a world where graffiti wasn't illegal… where standing at a bus stop was never boring… where the street was like a party that everyone was invited to.'
Think of the colours, the freedom, the entertainment. Think of the justice of it. And think of the architects weeping.
There's a whole book in here, I think. But, if I tried to write it, I would use ten times the wordage with none of the succinct wit and wisdom, or eloquently profound and playful illustration of Wall and Peace. ..See? Just look at that sentence.
It's a book that I think Caroline should have on her Important Urban Design Texts shelf at work, next to Jane Jacobs and Fifty amusing skylines (25th edition).
But the fact that Banky's subversive, stenciled rats speak so cleverly has everything to do with context. ..And the fact that my primary adjective there was 'clever' rather than 'funny' or 'bloody-spot-on-mate' makes it obvious I'm a middle class bloke who got the book for Christmas and has subsequently joined the revolution by idly reading it in the bath and thinking it was marvelous, darling. Plus, I used the word 'context'.
But it is about context. Without the mindless street clutter of signage, Banksy's rats would have nowhere to play. Without the boundaries, we have no way to be naughty.
What fun is football on a tiny stretch of grass in a suburban cul-de-sac without the gloriously sanguine No Ball Games sign rooted quietly in one corner? No fun either way for me, but I'm not getting my own point. Or what about Mark and Lard - they were at their funniest when on Radio 1 daytime, precisely because they hated the playlist.
The designer makes effective pieces of visual communication by setting up fields to work in. Invisible grids to break out of and create dynamism. Ah, grids. Don't get me started on grids. The grid is your friend, subversive graphic designer.
Now, the problem with packaging Bansky into a book is that it becomes a bit of a commodity and something to be consumed in the bath, rather than lived with as a piece of the human environment, challenging the human story. But I don't care, because it's brilliant, inspiring stuff. And the fact that my new copy now has slightly damp, wrinkled corners seems to make it slightly better to me.
But this is all something to do with Christmas.
As Banksy also said, when you are the outcast, the thrown-away and the useless of society, the rat is your rolemodel.
What is art, or design, if it communicates nothing? If it speaks for no-one? Yet the very structures we need to speak up and challenge are often the things we need to hang our message off; the very fabric of our environment the canvas of our communication.
That's why, while we're all rightfully trying to use Yuletide as the time to be with whatever family we can pull together around us, and take time off, and think about what matters, I'll also be trying to remember the little baby at the centre of the Christmas story, Jesus.
Now that quaint manger painting, beautifully rendered, covers a brutal, ugly back street reality that is the genius beginning of a real inspiration.
At least to us subversive rats.
Happy Christmas day.
xx
Banksy said: 'imagine a world where graffiti wasn't illegal… where standing at a bus stop was never boring… where the street was like a party that everyone was invited to.'
Think of the colours, the freedom, the entertainment. Think of the justice of it. And think of the architects weeping.
There's a whole book in here, I think. But, if I tried to write it, I would use ten times the wordage with none of the succinct wit and wisdom, or eloquently profound and playful illustration of Wall and Peace. ..See? Just look at that sentence.
It's a book that I think Caroline should have on her Important Urban Design Texts shelf at work, next to Jane Jacobs and Fifty amusing skylines (25th edition).
But the fact that Banky's subversive, stenciled rats speak so cleverly has everything to do with context. ..And the fact that my primary adjective there was 'clever' rather than 'funny' or 'bloody-spot-on-mate' makes it obvious I'm a middle class bloke who got the book for Christmas and has subsequently joined the revolution by idly reading it in the bath and thinking it was marvelous, darling. Plus, I used the word 'context'.
But it is about context. Without the mindless street clutter of signage, Banksy's rats would have nowhere to play. Without the boundaries, we have no way to be naughty.
What fun is football on a tiny stretch of grass in a suburban cul-de-sac without the gloriously sanguine No Ball Games sign rooted quietly in one corner? No fun either way for me, but I'm not getting my own point. Or what about Mark and Lard - they were at their funniest when on Radio 1 daytime, precisely because they hated the playlist.
The designer makes effective pieces of visual communication by setting up fields to work in. Invisible grids to break out of and create dynamism. Ah, grids. Don't get me started on grids. The grid is your friend, subversive graphic designer.
Now, the problem with packaging Bansky into a book is that it becomes a bit of a commodity and something to be consumed in the bath, rather than lived with as a piece of the human environment, challenging the human story. But I don't care, because it's brilliant, inspiring stuff. And the fact that my new copy now has slightly damp, wrinkled corners seems to make it slightly better to me.
But this is all something to do with Christmas.
As Banksy also said, when you are the outcast, the thrown-away and the useless of society, the rat is your rolemodel.
What is art, or design, if it communicates nothing? If it speaks for no-one? Yet the very structures we need to speak up and challenge are often the things we need to hang our message off; the very fabric of our environment the canvas of our communication.
That's why, while we're all rightfully trying to use Yuletide as the time to be with whatever family we can pull together around us, and take time off, and think about what matters, I'll also be trying to remember the little baby at the centre of the Christmas story, Jesus.
Now that quaint manger painting, beautifully rendered, covers a brutal, ugly back street reality that is the genius beginning of a real inspiration.
At least to us subversive rats.
Happy Christmas day.
xx
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Perky.
Perky.
Q: What do you do when you're thirty-eight and recovering from a rookie's night out with friends? (Don't ask. I'm well aware what the First Step is...)
A: Bay window sequence dance in your underpants to Sebastien Tellier's Divine.
I did the cocktail shaker, the train, the hand jive, the head swoop, the thumbing-a-ride - everything. In the pants. In the window. Tom Cruise style. ..Except, come to think of it, undoubtedly camper.
If there's a better way to feel better about just about anything, I know it not. Doesn't so much do away with the throbbing head and the wobbly tummy as hide them behind a sparkly costume.
Nice. It's been on five times in a row.
..I know.
..I really AM a silly sod.
> 'PLAY' <
Q: What do you do when you're thirty-eight and recovering from a rookie's night out with friends? (Don't ask. I'm well aware what the First Step is...)
A: Bay window sequence dance in your underpants to Sebastien Tellier's Divine.
I did the cocktail shaker, the train, the hand jive, the head swoop, the thumbing-a-ride - everything. In the pants. In the window. Tom Cruise style. ..Except, come to think of it, undoubtedly camper.
If there's a better way to feel better about just about anything, I know it not. Doesn't so much do away with the throbbing head and the wobbly tummy as hide them behind a sparkly costume.
Nice. It's been on five times in a row.
..I know.
..I really AM a silly sod.
> 'PLAY' <
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Momo Chrimbo.
Momo Chrimbo.
Well, so here we are. December 17 and I've put on some CD called Christmas Crooners, all on my own in a fairly jolly, sunny studio. It's Christmas, and there's not much more I can get done in the next day and a half now.
Though, of course, there's loads to get done.
Anyway, hard to care now - because Christmas has come a little early to Momo. I've finally managed to get four new, mastered mixes up on the re-upholstered Momo:tempo website. At last. At long, bloomin' last, I have something that people can point their iPods at.
Yes, Disfunkshun is out there. Check it out at http://www.momotempo.co.uk
It's alluding to the imminent finish of the whole album, I'm alarmed to say. But more of that in January. Let's not spoil the festive calm with deadlines and productivity.
Time for brandy and a mince pie.
(..Sh**t! Is that the freakin' time?)
Well, so here we are. December 17 and I've put on some CD called Christmas Crooners, all on my own in a fairly jolly, sunny studio. It's Christmas, and there's not much more I can get done in the next day and a half now.
Though, of course, there's loads to get done.
Anyway, hard to care now - because Christmas has come a little early to Momo. I've finally managed to get four new, mastered mixes up on the re-upholstered Momo:tempo website. At last. At long, bloomin' last, I have something that people can point their iPods at.
Yes, Disfunkshun is out there. Check it out at http://www.momotempo.co.uk
It's alluding to the imminent finish of the whole album, I'm alarmed to say. But more of that in January. Let's not spoil the festive calm with deadlines and productivity.
Time for brandy and a mince pie.
(..Sh**t! Is that the freakin' time?)
Made off.
Made off.
Oh come on.
Come on.
..Mr MADOFF?
At a time of gigantic economic meltdown, a world-revered investment banker has taken unexpected extra billions from the banks through spectacularly simple swindling... and his name is Bernard MADOFF?
What is this, Dickens?
How bad is it all gonna get?
"Roit, mista Neerly-Madoff, heavens to goodness, the Peelers are roit on me tail to meet out some timely come-uppance. But only in fair response to some very hundreds of tiresome, tightly-type-set pages of detailed human reality and suffering, so it is. I so wish I'd thought abaaht the human condition sooner, so I do, and chosen to value me nearest and dearest over the fleeting fancies and phantom charms of the devil's jingle in me purse. Run, sir."
Well, you need a bit of Dickens at Christmas, after all.
Oh come on.
Come on.
..Mr MADOFF?
At a time of gigantic economic meltdown, a world-revered investment banker has taken unexpected extra billions from the banks through spectacularly simple swindling... and his name is Bernard MADOFF?
What is this, Dickens?
How bad is it all gonna get?
"Roit, mista Neerly-Madoff, heavens to goodness, the Peelers are roit on me tail to meet out some timely come-uppance. But only in fair response to some very hundreds of tiresome, tightly-type-set pages of detailed human reality and suffering, so it is. I so wish I'd thought abaaht the human condition sooner, so I do, and chosen to value me nearest and dearest over the fleeting fancies and phantom charms of the devil's jingle in me purse. Run, sir."
Well, you need a bit of Dickens at Christmas, after all.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Scenes from my life.
Scenes from my life.
1: The typical Momo working week:
Flight of the concordes does the French daydream.
2: The typical Momo weekend:
Top Gear drives the Ferrari Daytona around the Riviera.
>sigh<
..I've been almost fourteen hours at this ruddy Mac.
1: The typical Momo working week:
Flight of the concordes does the French daydream.
2: The typical Momo weekend:
Top Gear drives the Ferrari Daytona around the Riviera.
>sigh<
..I've been almost fourteen hours at this ruddy Mac.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Forward and back.
Forward and back.
The moon was a striking crescent, low in the sky with a single evening star, as I popped out in the car earlier. Looked almost like a special effect, painted behind the silhouetted December chimney pots and roof lines. For yes, it is now the first day of advent - even if the dusky heavens looked more like an Islamic postcard.
Nearly Christmas.
So where did the year go?
Yesterday wasn't the bright, fresh start to the holiday season that today managed all day. It was a day to stay inside with the lights on again - gloomy and wet and windy. But, as I said chirpily to Jules while we head-downed through the chilly sleet of Petty France the other day, I'm still loving the autumn and winter vibe. Don't know why; it seems to fortify somehow.
Yesterday wasn't really a day to be cheerful, though. Yesterday was Dad's birthday.
He would have been 75. And he would have had a fit at what we'd done to his bedroom by the time dawn broke.
Caroline has made it her mission for him and for Mum - while she enjoys the festive snows of Colorado for a couple of weeks - to sort through his spectacularly time-filled room of memorabilia. Mike and Emma even gave over a whole Saturday to helping us strip walls and cart furniture away across town. It was a kind of fab day working together; Mikey hadn't been back to the flat in quite a while. We fed them too much afterwards to say thankyou.
But the weather, the memories, the date. I should have been some shade of maroon blue this weekend. But I don't really deal with stuff in that formal, respectful way. I mean, do I? With all that's going on as the year ends, I know there's plenty to weight the heart a little. And it is. I miss him. And probably only a bit as much as I'm going to.
But what can you do? If I didn't get on with the creative at hand, I might grind to a halt. Which I'm not sure I can do.
So I thought of Dad and I wondered where the year had gone and I thanked him for leaving the room in such an indecipherably dense state back at the flat. And I pulled on my headphones as the rain lashed against the studio windows and spent the day trying not to fall asleep in order to finish the loud, brass-heavy, entirely inappropriate electro madness of the tunes I'm trying to get mastered - figuring that yesterday was precisely the day for pushing on and trying to get things done and trying to prepare for new things.
And prepare for a big fat, jolly Christmas, surrounded by loved ones for as many days as I can get away with it. It was Dad's favourite, kitsch, colourful, loved-up time of year.
And I figured he'd be pretty pleased that I was too distracted with making music to wallow in loss or dwell on his unhappy birthday last year. That's what I figured. You don't sit still and remember Brian - you get on and do practical stuff, or you grin and whistle.
Which is what I continued to figure as I drove to the little studio out in the New Forest tonight, under the last new moon before Christmas listening to Metrophilia - a distinctly whistly, wistful tune - to drop off the final mixes.
The moon was a striking crescent, low in the sky with a single evening star, as I popped out in the car earlier. Looked almost like a special effect, painted behind the silhouetted December chimney pots and roof lines. For yes, it is now the first day of advent - even if the dusky heavens looked more like an Islamic postcard.
Nearly Christmas.
So where did the year go?
Yesterday wasn't the bright, fresh start to the holiday season that today managed all day. It was a day to stay inside with the lights on again - gloomy and wet and windy. But, as I said chirpily to Jules while we head-downed through the chilly sleet of Petty France the other day, I'm still loving the autumn and winter vibe. Don't know why; it seems to fortify somehow.
Yesterday wasn't really a day to be cheerful, though. Yesterday was Dad's birthday.
He would have been 75. And he would have had a fit at what we'd done to his bedroom by the time dawn broke.
Caroline has made it her mission for him and for Mum - while she enjoys the festive snows of Colorado for a couple of weeks - to sort through his spectacularly time-filled room of memorabilia. Mike and Emma even gave over a whole Saturday to helping us strip walls and cart furniture away across town. It was a kind of fab day working together; Mikey hadn't been back to the flat in quite a while. We fed them too much afterwards to say thankyou.
But the weather, the memories, the date. I should have been some shade of maroon blue this weekend. But I don't really deal with stuff in that formal, respectful way. I mean, do I? With all that's going on as the year ends, I know there's plenty to weight the heart a little. And it is. I miss him. And probably only a bit as much as I'm going to.
But what can you do? If I didn't get on with the creative at hand, I might grind to a halt. Which I'm not sure I can do.
So I thought of Dad and I wondered where the year had gone and I thanked him for leaving the room in such an indecipherably dense state back at the flat. And I pulled on my headphones as the rain lashed against the studio windows and spent the day trying not to fall asleep in order to finish the loud, brass-heavy, entirely inappropriate electro madness of the tunes I'm trying to get mastered - figuring that yesterday was precisely the day for pushing on and trying to get things done and trying to prepare for new things.
And prepare for a big fat, jolly Christmas, surrounded by loved ones for as many days as I can get away with it. It was Dad's favourite, kitsch, colourful, loved-up time of year.
And I figured he'd be pretty pleased that I was too distracted with making music to wallow in loss or dwell on his unhappy birthday last year. That's what I figured. You don't sit still and remember Brian - you get on and do practical stuff, or you grin and whistle.
Which is what I continued to figure as I drove to the little studio out in the New Forest tonight, under the last new moon before Christmas listening to Metrophilia - a distinctly whistly, wistful tune - to drop off the final mixes.
Monday, November 17, 2008
You don't 'che.
You don't 'che.
Just touching base here to basically fill you in on a classic. Made my blood run cold, to be honest, but let's be fair, I can run but I can't hide. Mea culpa.
Turns out I talk in almost total cliche. Who knew?
Little survey on the BBC news site has flagged up, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I only know how to talk in the verbal equivalent of a finger pistol. 110%.
Now, you might say: 'No sh*t, Sherlock'. But - not being funny - the full realisation only dawned on me, actually, as I was ticking off the whole nine yards.
Just back from a meeting in a motorway service station - as is only natural in the stimulating and original life of a freelance creative - I can count a worrying number of them from this little online article that I used IN the meeting.
"Songsheet, pipeline, end-of-play roll-out scenario solutions deliverables." Literally. ..Although the day I DO use the word 'scenario', or - heaven forfend - 'solutions' >gaaakkk< I should have something lethal put in my drink, please.
At the end of the day, we're all only human, I guess.
..Although. Hmm. You'd think the least a bloody allegedly-professional writer could do is a rather cleverer job of writing in cliche - when actually trying to write in cliche.
It's no good just talking the talk... (ohshutup.)
Just touching base here to basically fill you in on a classic. Made my blood run cold, to be honest, but let's be fair, I can run but I can't hide. Mea culpa.
Turns out I talk in almost total cliche. Who knew?
Little survey on the BBC news site has flagged up, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I only know how to talk in the verbal equivalent of a finger pistol. 110%.
Now, you might say: 'No sh*t, Sherlock'. But - not being funny - the full realisation only dawned on me, actually, as I was ticking off the whole nine yards.
Just back from a meeting in a motorway service station - as is only natural in the stimulating and original life of a freelance creative - I can count a worrying number of them from this little online article that I used IN the meeting.
"Songsheet, pipeline, end-of-play roll-out scenario solutions deliverables." Literally. ..Although the day I DO use the word 'scenario', or - heaven forfend - 'solutions' >gaaakkk< I should have something lethal put in my drink, please.
At the end of the day, we're all only human, I guess.
..Although. Hmm. You'd think the least a bloody allegedly-professional writer could do is a rather cleverer job of writing in cliche - when actually trying to write in cliche.
It's no good just talking the talk... (ohshutup.)
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Yes.
Yes.
..we chuffing can, apparently.
Overnight, America got its mojo back.
We've grown so used to the Bush administration's incompetence that we've almost forgotten about the little chap that's still apparently to be found in the White House. But the all-but landslide of Obama's electoral victory lastnight has, at a stroke, put America back where it wants to be: inspiring the world.
Now, stick with all this, because I'm not sure that today's a day to get hung about hyperbole.
I'm not sure it's being silly to feel a lump in the throat about it all, some five hours away at nearest landfall. ..I'm not sure it's OTT to shout OMG! out in the bleedin' street, to be honest - and I'm really not sure that words will cover the genuine significance of the symbolism.
Think about it.
America managed to find a man who was not only intelligent and considerate but inspiring ..AND willing to run for public office. And thin. And then it actually chuffing well voted him in to the highest seat in the land.
Oh, and apparently his skin colour's a novelty. Whatever.
Really. Just feel a little lightness about something groovy having just happened in politics for once. Feel no shame about the sentimentality. Because America just said no to the incompetent, narrow-minded, corrupt, basically hateful attitude of old fashioned right-wing Americanism. By one college vote under an official landslide.
Yes.
Whatever the combined circumstances, it did. And Barrack's retort to his well-wishers that this wasn't so much his victory as everyone's, because it was victory secured with countless counting hands and feet mobilising - that's simply true. For once, the rhetoric is kinetic.
Interesting, though.
In America, they've always proudly said that any idiot can get into the White House.
It seems that both administrations, incumbent and elect, have proved it beyond doubt.
..Bloody get in, Baz.
..we chuffing can, apparently.
Overnight, America got its mojo back.
We've grown so used to the Bush administration's incompetence that we've almost forgotten about the little chap that's still apparently to be found in the White House. But the all-but landslide of Obama's electoral victory lastnight has, at a stroke, put America back where it wants to be: inspiring the world.
Now, stick with all this, because I'm not sure that today's a day to get hung about hyperbole.
I'm not sure it's being silly to feel a lump in the throat about it all, some five hours away at nearest landfall. ..I'm not sure it's OTT to shout OMG! out in the bleedin' street, to be honest - and I'm really not sure that words will cover the genuine significance of the symbolism.
Think about it.
America managed to find a man who was not only intelligent and considerate but inspiring ..AND willing to run for public office. And thin. And then it actually chuffing well voted him in to the highest seat in the land.
Oh, and apparently his skin colour's a novelty. Whatever.
Really. Just feel a little lightness about something groovy having just happened in politics for once. Feel no shame about the sentimentality. Because America just said no to the incompetent, narrow-minded, corrupt, basically hateful attitude of old fashioned right-wing Americanism. By one college vote under an official landslide.
Yes.
Whatever the combined circumstances, it did. And Barrack's retort to his well-wishers that this wasn't so much his victory as everyone's, because it was victory secured with countless counting hands and feet mobilising - that's simply true. For once, the rhetoric is kinetic.
Interesting, though.
In America, they've always proudly said that any idiot can get into the White House.
It seems that both administrations, incumbent and elect, have proved it beyond doubt.
..Bloody get in, Baz.
History.
History.
So here I am. Sitting up with a cup of tea, ages after I should have followed my instincts to bed, watching the waffly overtures of the BBC's coverage of the US election. They keep saying it's an historic evening.
First results are in and they're interviewing Ricky Gervais. Right to the heart of the action.
They're also showing squads of bloggers in Times Square, keeping the online momentum of the evening belting along breathlessly. I wonder what they're all banging on about? The concerns of the chap who's really at the centre of this election - Joe the Blogger? That guy speaks for me, sure.
Oh dear, can I face the tedium and adrenalin mixed? If so, it shows I might have coped with being an airline pilot.
I've even been scribbling in my journal, just to prove I was here on this 'historic night'. Like historians are going to be concerned with what I half-heartedly scrawled in my underpants on the sofa on the night the first black president of the USA wasn't elected.
Actually, a little voice whispered in my idle wonderings, while cynicism bellowed in the background something obvious about America 'buggering it up at the last bloody minute', that maybe - just maybe - Obama will win by a landslide. An actual landslide.
If he does, let's just accept it - it would be historic alright.
A president who understands disco.
So here I am. Sitting up with a cup of tea, ages after I should have followed my instincts to bed, watching the waffly overtures of the BBC's coverage of the US election. They keep saying it's an historic evening.
First results are in and they're interviewing Ricky Gervais. Right to the heart of the action.
They're also showing squads of bloggers in Times Square, keeping the online momentum of the evening belting along breathlessly. I wonder what they're all banging on about? The concerns of the chap who's really at the centre of this election - Joe the Blogger? That guy speaks for me, sure.
Oh dear, can I face the tedium and adrenalin mixed? If so, it shows I might have coped with being an airline pilot.
I've even been scribbling in my journal, just to prove I was here on this 'historic night'. Like historians are going to be concerned with what I half-heartedly scrawled in my underpants on the sofa on the night the first black president of the USA wasn't elected.
Actually, a little voice whispered in my idle wonderings, while cynicism bellowed in the background something obvious about America 'buggering it up at the last bloody minute', that maybe - just maybe - Obama will win by a landslide. An actual landslide.
If he does, let's just accept it - it would be historic alright.
A president who understands disco.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Vote.
Vote.
Oh, crikey. Can we really get through this? This last agonising day? Sitting on our hands and wondering.
It's like watching football. Especially from my point of view, as a person who didn't even begin to understand it until he watched an international match - it's all so very real to your adrenalin gland, yet all so practically academic. How will it change my Wednesday either way? Really.
Now, if I was funny or creative, I'd punchline-out with something about the Glenrothes bi-election, and how I've been following it's every move and, oh, is there something happening elsewhere, etc...
But anyway that's on Thursday and I can't be arsed.
I'm just not looking forward to the radio coming on tomorrow morning and, y'know... finding out.
It's academic, you're right. These things are probably more important at local club level, again you're right. And the heroes on the pitch can sometimes turn out to be prize twits without a steadycam running along the touchline beside them. I know. ..I also know the US presidential elections should sooner have a baseball metaphor than a 'soccer' one. I know.
But my point is, we get very excited about England's chances of possibly one day maybe qualifying for an international tournament again, when all they stand the slimmest hope of ultimately winning is a trophy and some sponsorship.
The winner tonight gets to take home the Free World and the keys to our burnt-out, sitting-on-bricks economy.
And I so want that guy to at least have a fighting chance of being able to out-live Sarah Palin's time in the VP's office.
Oh, crikey. Can we really get through this? This last agonising day? Sitting on our hands and wondering.
It's like watching football. Especially from my point of view, as a person who didn't even begin to understand it until he watched an international match - it's all so very real to your adrenalin gland, yet all so practically academic. How will it change my Wednesday either way? Really.
Now, if I was funny or creative, I'd punchline-out with something about the Glenrothes bi-election, and how I've been following it's every move and, oh, is there something happening elsewhere, etc...
But anyway that's on Thursday and I can't be arsed.
I'm just not looking forward to the radio coming on tomorrow morning and, y'know... finding out.
It's academic, you're right. These things are probably more important at local club level, again you're right. And the heroes on the pitch can sometimes turn out to be prize twits without a steadycam running along the touchline beside them. I know. ..I also know the US presidential elections should sooner have a baseball metaphor than a 'soccer' one. I know.
But my point is, we get very excited about England's chances of possibly one day maybe qualifying for an international tournament again, when all they stand the slimmest hope of ultimately winning is a trophy and some sponsorship.
The winner tonight gets to take home the Free World and the keys to our burnt-out, sitting-on-bricks economy.
And I so want that guy to at least have a fighting chance of being able to out-live Sarah Palin's time in the VP's office.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Gore-p.
Gore-p.
Almost-last shot of sharp-tongued Guardian critic Charlie Brooker's gonzo-gore undead mini series, Dead Set:
zombies in soulless shopping centre staring vacantly at zombies in Big Brother house, staring vacantly back out of widescreen tellies in Dixons or similar.
Nice work, mate.
Almost-last shot of sharp-tongued Guardian critic Charlie Brooker's gonzo-gore undead mini series, Dead Set:
zombies in soulless shopping centre staring vacantly at zombies in Big Brother house, staring vacantly back out of widescreen tellies in Dixons or similar.
Nice work, mate.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Planks.
Planks.
I do sometimes think the British media would sink itself if left unchecked. Not that I'm sure who is actually doing the checking.
Vital, dynamic and creative this country's press and broadcast media surely are. Even world-leading they tell me - and after all, who can argue with Harry Hill's TV burp? But so many people manning its armada of little ships seem hell-bent on torpedoing the flagship - that big ol' Thames barge, the BBC.
My phrasing there is something that those with Auntie in their periscope cross-hairs would leap on as illustrating the point - who says the Beeb is Great Britain's broadcasting flagship?
They must resent the implication - and see it everywhere, probably.
"While we have to lash together ad revenue as creatively as possible to vigilantly tar the decks against sinking, the good ship HMS BBC simply pumps out her bilges with public finance. A huge, fat, free tax on the tuners-in. ..AND, while we're at it, they can promote cross-platform like no-one else. Bastards. ..Load tubes One and Two."
You can see their point, though they sound like they've been at sea rather too long. A bit like this metaphor.
Any brooding resentment of the corporation isn't helped by the fact that the BBC does seem to have always reflected the British beaurocracy of its day, like a true institution - middle-heavy, inefficient, even miopically self-cultural. ..And quote me on that, as it sounds dead clever, like what a sniping left-wing critic might column. ..Or is it the right-wing critics who really have it in for the liberal toffs at Broadcasting House? I forget.
Anyway, the point bearing down on us very slowly like a lumbering container ship is that I think this is the wrong way to see the Beeb.
---
The 'brandross beast' - which, incidentally, sounds like a new Sherlock Holmes adventure - may have exposed Russel and Jonathan as pratt-liable twits sometimes, but back-of-the-classroom showing off by the two over-confident popular boys is really a matter for the detention hall. Not the Commons.
Make 'em run round the playing field in their pants once or twice, maybe. Make 'em look into the eyes of the sweet old man they've been rude to and see the two softies blub, sure. Warm their backsides. But fire them? Fire everybody?
One of the most risible aspects of one of these essentially pointless squalls on the waters of popular entertainment is, of course, the personalities who suddenly clamour for the mic. The Unfunny.
We've had a parade of distinctly humourless people passing comment on how to make jokes this week. "A-HA," they light up indignantly, like Dr Alan Statham waving a triumphant finger at a resentfully witty medical student, "THIS is the problem with smirking and smiling and strutting about in funny wigs - it's dangerous. It's uncalled-for. It's... it's... funny. ..And this is where funny gets you. Hm? Who's laughing now? Hm?"
I've long thought that comedy is like sex - as soon as you're trying to describe it, you're missing the point. And the word 'responsible' kills it dead.
---
I think the BBC is an institution, alright. A national one. With all its problems, it's a bally British cultural cornerstone. Maybe filled with uptight, lefty nitwits who forget how lucky they are - though I doubt that's more than half true - but a thing to cherrish.
We should hold those who helm the Beeb to high account. Tell them when they get the chance to work there: "This is the bloody BBC, mate. Don't f**k it up." It's a woldwide brand like nothing else we own in the UK - like nothing else in the world, in fact. An idea of altruism. The ultimate service of communication. And it communicates an idea of Britain better than any tourist board campaign or political diplomatic push, by the way.
And radio without adverts? Sport and drama and movies and factual stuff without breaks? Full hours of content, not forty limping minutes? Surely brilliant that they found a way to do this. It matters to a nation's intellectual well-being that it can access some information without being force-fed consumer society values and pressures.
Adverts help sharpen the creative cutting edge. They're fun, put simply - and they help busineses sell things and build our once-comfy economy. Plus, ad breaks can be welcome relief, of course. But, chuff. Too much turns your brain to soup.
No, I think the good ship HMS BBC may need a sharp skipper inspecting her every winch and block, but she should sail on proudly. Let her navigate uniquely - she is a beacon of difference. If she should be challenged, let it not be by mean-minded pirates trying to break her up, but by the sheer creative excellence of her commercial counterparts, willing her to perform her best for the sake of the whole flotilla.
However romantic it may be, I just think there's something about the BBC that somehow sodding matters.
---
Okay, I'll come clean. The boat metaphor was inspired by an actual Thames barge - one I found myself sitting on, right in the heart of London last weekend.
Our essentially gorgeous former neighbour, Mary, introduced us to her very interesting new chap, Iolo, when we popped up for a night - and Iolo lives on an actual Thames barge. Big bloody thing. A snapshot of working waterways history from blunt bows to snub stern - and a fascinating new perspective on the capital. London does not look the same from the river.
Can't tell you how nice it is to meet people who see things differently to you. We seemed to chat constantly for 24hours straight.
Originality keeps us all afloat.
I do sometimes think the British media would sink itself if left unchecked. Not that I'm sure who is actually doing the checking.
Vital, dynamic and creative this country's press and broadcast media surely are. Even world-leading they tell me - and after all, who can argue with Harry Hill's TV burp? But so many people manning its armada of little ships seem hell-bent on torpedoing the flagship - that big ol' Thames barge, the BBC.
My phrasing there is something that those with Auntie in their periscope cross-hairs would leap on as illustrating the point - who says the Beeb is Great Britain's broadcasting flagship?
They must resent the implication - and see it everywhere, probably.
"While we have to lash together ad revenue as creatively as possible to vigilantly tar the decks against sinking, the good ship HMS BBC simply pumps out her bilges with public finance. A huge, fat, free tax on the tuners-in. ..AND, while we're at it, they can promote cross-platform like no-one else. Bastards. ..Load tubes One and Two."
You can see their point, though they sound like they've been at sea rather too long. A bit like this metaphor.
Any brooding resentment of the corporation isn't helped by the fact that the BBC does seem to have always reflected the British beaurocracy of its day, like a true institution - middle-heavy, inefficient, even miopically self-cultural. ..And quote me on that, as it sounds dead clever, like what a sniping left-wing critic might column. ..Or is it the right-wing critics who really have it in for the liberal toffs at Broadcasting House? I forget.
Anyway, the point bearing down on us very slowly like a lumbering container ship is that I think this is the wrong way to see the Beeb.
---
The 'brandross beast' - which, incidentally, sounds like a new Sherlock Holmes adventure - may have exposed Russel and Jonathan as pratt-liable twits sometimes, but back-of-the-classroom showing off by the two over-confident popular boys is really a matter for the detention hall. Not the Commons.
Make 'em run round the playing field in their pants once or twice, maybe. Make 'em look into the eyes of the sweet old man they've been rude to and see the two softies blub, sure. Warm their backsides. But fire them? Fire everybody?
One of the most risible aspects of one of these essentially pointless squalls on the waters of popular entertainment is, of course, the personalities who suddenly clamour for the mic. The Unfunny.
We've had a parade of distinctly humourless people passing comment on how to make jokes this week. "A-HA," they light up indignantly, like Dr Alan Statham waving a triumphant finger at a resentfully witty medical student, "THIS is the problem with smirking and smiling and strutting about in funny wigs - it's dangerous. It's uncalled-for. It's... it's... funny. ..And this is where funny gets you. Hm? Who's laughing now? Hm?"
I've long thought that comedy is like sex - as soon as you're trying to describe it, you're missing the point. And the word 'responsible' kills it dead.
---
I think the BBC is an institution, alright. A national one. With all its problems, it's a bally British cultural cornerstone. Maybe filled with uptight, lefty nitwits who forget how lucky they are - though I doubt that's more than half true - but a thing to cherrish.
We should hold those who helm the Beeb to high account. Tell them when they get the chance to work there: "This is the bloody BBC, mate. Don't f**k it up." It's a woldwide brand like nothing else we own in the UK - like nothing else in the world, in fact. An idea of altruism. The ultimate service of communication. And it communicates an idea of Britain better than any tourist board campaign or political diplomatic push, by the way.
And radio without adverts? Sport and drama and movies and factual stuff without breaks? Full hours of content, not forty limping minutes? Surely brilliant that they found a way to do this. It matters to a nation's intellectual well-being that it can access some information without being force-fed consumer society values and pressures.
Adverts help sharpen the creative cutting edge. They're fun, put simply - and they help busineses sell things and build our once-comfy economy. Plus, ad breaks can be welcome relief, of course. But, chuff. Too much turns your brain to soup.
No, I think the good ship HMS BBC may need a sharp skipper inspecting her every winch and block, but she should sail on proudly. Let her navigate uniquely - she is a beacon of difference. If she should be challenged, let it not be by mean-minded pirates trying to break her up, but by the sheer creative excellence of her commercial counterparts, willing her to perform her best for the sake of the whole flotilla.
However romantic it may be, I just think there's something about the BBC that somehow sodding matters.
---
Okay, I'll come clean. The boat metaphor was inspired by an actual Thames barge - one I found myself sitting on, right in the heart of London last weekend.
Our essentially gorgeous former neighbour, Mary, introduced us to her very interesting new chap, Iolo, when we popped up for a night - and Iolo lives on an actual Thames barge. Big bloody thing. A snapshot of working waterways history from blunt bows to snub stern - and a fascinating new perspective on the capital. London does not look the same from the river.
Can't tell you how nice it is to meet people who see things differently to you. We seemed to chat constantly for 24hours straight.
Originality keeps us all afloat.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Pep.
Pep.
Hmm.
Have you seen the new Pepsi rebrand?
Not much fizz.
I like the idea of turning the blue-red wave into a smile - positive story, confident playfulness. Sounds nice on paper. . Just doesn't look nice on paper. Not to me, somehow. Looks like a student had a worthy go at it - a bit limp for the real world. Yet all at a mind-bending $1.5Billion roll-out. In the, ah, real world.
It's about execution. Which really comes down to exec caution, I suspect.
I was chatting with Gel over coffee in the Cali this morning, about how recession can claim some good agencies and businesses through really unfortunate timing, but also sometimes through their own lack of proper ideas when it counts. You have to have an idea. Everything is fed by the idea - the message you're strategising with.
Now, here is an idea that's falling down in the execution. And I'll just bet that the artroom guys went through eye-crossing variants on the classic logo to arrive at this boardroom-friendly compromise. They have my sympathy. But the end result - does it add to the brand or detract from it?
As a flat graphic - the core reduction of the brand's key memory-jogger, the logo - it kind of reduces it for me. Tries to add some pep, but takes away from the integrity of the simple classic mark.
I remember when they radically rebranded in the early nineties. One friend at art college memorably said it looked like "Pepsi from Back to the future". Kind of space age. Bold.
This one is just a bit... flat.
Now, if it was me. Yeah.
Daft Russian Constructivist, cold war graphics at spikey angles. Nice. All red and white and black. ..No, forget why. Forget the fizz focus groups. Just aim for the post-communist market. Bold move. New opportunities. If Coca Cola is the US dream, flip the appeal. Yeah.
Bear with me.
..Pepski.
Hmm.
Have you seen the new Pepsi rebrand?
Not much fizz.
I like the idea of turning the blue-red wave into a smile - positive story, confident playfulness. Sounds nice on paper. . Just doesn't look nice on paper. Not to me, somehow. Looks like a student had a worthy go at it - a bit limp for the real world. Yet all at a mind-bending $1.5Billion roll-out. In the, ah, real world.
It's about execution. Which really comes down to exec caution, I suspect.
I was chatting with Gel over coffee in the Cali this morning, about how recession can claim some good agencies and businesses through really unfortunate timing, but also sometimes through their own lack of proper ideas when it counts. You have to have an idea. Everything is fed by the idea - the message you're strategising with.
Now, here is an idea that's falling down in the execution. And I'll just bet that the artroom guys went through eye-crossing variants on the classic logo to arrive at this boardroom-friendly compromise. They have my sympathy. But the end result - does it add to the brand or detract from it?
As a flat graphic - the core reduction of the brand's key memory-jogger, the logo - it kind of reduces it for me. Tries to add some pep, but takes away from the integrity of the simple classic mark.
I remember when they radically rebranded in the early nineties. One friend at art college memorably said it looked like "Pepsi from Back to the future". Kind of space age. Bold.
This one is just a bit... flat.
Now, if it was me. Yeah.
Daft Russian Constructivist, cold war graphics at spikey angles. Nice. All red and white and black. ..No, forget why. Forget the fizz focus groups. Just aim for the post-communist market. Bold move. New opportunities. If Coca Cola is the US dream, flip the appeal. Yeah.
Bear with me.
..Pepski.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
No sex.
No sex.
Not tonight. Not on Channel Four, anyway.
If you missed The Sex Education Show which had been running on Tuesday nights at 8.00pm for six weeks, you'll have missed some scary pictures of STDs, some scarier stories from teenage Britain and some downright punch-drunk bravery in the face of a relentlessly frightening series of indignities foist on the plucky lads of Long Ashton football club.
Was there nothing these brave boys wouldn't step up to do?
I can't even bring myself to list the activities Anna Richardson put them through. Admittedly, I can imagine it would be hard to say No to such a jolly nice lady - but really. After girth confessions, fertility pots, infection swabs and sexual history memoirs, you'd think these Bristol tommies would just stay down. Leave it. Let the bell ring and be done with it. But no.
"Foreskin hygiene, gentlemen - an impromtu inspection with our nice lady doctor specialist here. Who's for it?"
Dunkirk spirit, lads. It was for the country. Makes my bottom lip quiver.
..Eeew. Leave it.
Anyway.
Well-earned night off tonight for the old chaps.
Not tonight. Not on Channel Four, anyway.
If you missed The Sex Education Show which had been running on Tuesday nights at 8.00pm for six weeks, you'll have missed some scary pictures of STDs, some scarier stories from teenage Britain and some downright punch-drunk bravery in the face of a relentlessly frightening series of indignities foist on the plucky lads of Long Ashton football club.
Was there nothing these brave boys wouldn't step up to do?
I can't even bring myself to list the activities Anna Richardson put them through. Admittedly, I can imagine it would be hard to say No to such a jolly nice lady - but really. After girth confessions, fertility pots, infection swabs and sexual history memoirs, you'd think these Bristol tommies would just stay down. Leave it. Let the bell ring and be done with it. But no.
"Foreskin hygiene, gentlemen - an impromtu inspection with our nice lady doctor specialist here. Who's for it?"
Dunkirk spirit, lads. It was for the country. Makes my bottom lip quiver.
..Eeew. Leave it.
Anyway.
Well-earned night off tonight for the old chaps.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Drama.
Drama.
The Southwark Playhouse is a proper London thing.
It's a kind of post-industrial cupboard space under the tube line, tucked behind an old pub on the corner opposite a shining shard of South Bank offices. Arriving there to meet chums Jules and Angela on Wednesday night, I had no idea what we were about to watch.
How to disappear completely and never be found is the kind of metro theatre that simple shire folk like me imagine everyone in the capital goes to see regularly. Tiny venue, five players, energetic monologues and lots of metaphysical angst over modern city life. "You'll like this" Angela smirked, "it's about a brand manager losing his marbles."
It was, and I did. As I have. Too much of the absurd ad-speak dialogue between wide-boy protagonist Charlie and his cartoon clients and colleagues made some kind of sense. Not just to me with my (patently faux) brand consultant's hat on - I think to everyone. We all understand a degree of brandspeak; the issues of impression and idea and perceived value. And, though I've ended up having many serious conversations about it with clients because I think it's about helping people communicate more effectively... really. Doesn't take much to make the real thing sound like a finger-pistoling parody. A bit like Sarah Pallin. Except she uses shot guns.
We all laughed knowingly at the well-trodden themes of work pressures and self worth and public transport in 21st century London. After all, who isn't lost property? Who doesn't feel the ringing in their ears behind everything? The constant eye-twitching throb. "There's a blue sky over me, but the fear is on me" Carl from Underworld drones on their new album as I type. The intermittent grumble of underground carriages passing overhead just added to the performance as I sat there, also simply pondering how the fevering players each remembered so much script. The art of the ack-tor, darling.
It was the gala evening show, and as I sat in the intimate audience and watched the spotlit ideas unfold, grateful for an impromptu seat, I reflected on the shared pains of metro life and the coke-addled pressures of managing ideas - brands - at the expense of managing your own. ..Though chiefly, of course, I reflected on going back to sunny Bournemouth after just one night playing the metro life and feeling the coke-addled pressures of managing blah blah... I live by the seaside and I've never not been VERY grateful.
---
At the after-show reception, I found myself being remarkably restrained. Or perhaps even adult.
I didn't stop conversation with my friends mid-sentence with the words "screw you - there's a bloke off the telly". Nope, not me. I didn't even stop the conversation at the end of a paragraph with some lie about needing the loo. No. instead, I just kept talking to my friends ..and didn't run over to character acting star Andy Serkis to cover him in enthusiastic spittle with my Gollum impression. I didn't do it.
We'd all blagged tickets to this version of writer Fin Kennedy's play because of Julian's friend Kath, who's been a stalwart trustee of the Southwark Playhouse for years. The guys have mentioned trying to catch a production there a few times. I'd written some music for Kath's partner Steve some years back for his London Wall photographic exhibition - culminating in whistly Momo favorite, Metrophilia - and I keep trying to make it to one of their creative social events, often without success. Since Jules finds it hard to out-compliment Kath and Steve after fourteen years of mutual lovelyness, it's always nice to see them all together. Kath's energy at all she does is something Julian has long admired.
"I did well meeting them when I first came to London" he said quietly over a champers flute. I smiled. "Yes, you did." I paused, pursing respectfully - then chin-chinned: " So did they".
As we queued for complimentary scampi and chips, I added in a trying-to-seem-offhand voice: "Like the play pretty much spelled out, we need eachother, mate" ..also successfully not adding, in a bubbly blather, "- so let's hug it up, big boy. C'mon. No, no - c'mon..."
For various reasons, anyway, it turns out that Jules is on teasing terms with Andy.
"So," he apparently grinned at the Lord Of The Rings legend, "the new Tin Tin movie you're shooting - had to do much doggy method prep to play Snowy?"
Mr Serkis obviously knows Jules alright, as he merely shook his head - without saying: "you know it's Captain Haddock...".
I missed all this of course, as I was faithfully chatting up Angela.
---
I came home after a subsequent morning trying to frame a brief with Jules for a mutual client - a brief with no parameters, goals or current information, all of which we had to try to commission a PR guy with - to find a little drama had taken place back home.
The new porch guys have taken away our desperately tumble-down old porch. We're porchless. The house looks like its being demolished, with the sun-tan marks of absence on the exposed brickwork. Poor thing.
It's disappeared completely, never to be found. Thankfully.
The Southwark Playhouse is a proper London thing.
It's a kind of post-industrial cupboard space under the tube line, tucked behind an old pub on the corner opposite a shining shard of South Bank offices. Arriving there to meet chums Jules and Angela on Wednesday night, I had no idea what we were about to watch.
How to disappear completely and never be found is the kind of metro theatre that simple shire folk like me imagine everyone in the capital goes to see regularly. Tiny venue, five players, energetic monologues and lots of metaphysical angst over modern city life. "You'll like this" Angela smirked, "it's about a brand manager losing his marbles."
It was, and I did. As I have. Too much of the absurd ad-speak dialogue between wide-boy protagonist Charlie and his cartoon clients and colleagues made some kind of sense. Not just to me with my (patently faux) brand consultant's hat on - I think to everyone. We all understand a degree of brandspeak; the issues of impression and idea and perceived value. And, though I've ended up having many serious conversations about it with clients because I think it's about helping people communicate more effectively... really. Doesn't take much to make the real thing sound like a finger-pistoling parody. A bit like Sarah Pallin. Except she uses shot guns.
We all laughed knowingly at the well-trodden themes of work pressures and self worth and public transport in 21st century London. After all, who isn't lost property? Who doesn't feel the ringing in their ears behind everything? The constant eye-twitching throb. "There's a blue sky over me, but the fear is on me" Carl from Underworld drones on their new album as I type. The intermittent grumble of underground carriages passing overhead just added to the performance as I sat there, also simply pondering how the fevering players each remembered so much script. The art of the ack-tor, darling.
It was the gala evening show, and as I sat in the intimate audience and watched the spotlit ideas unfold, grateful for an impromptu seat, I reflected on the shared pains of metro life and the coke-addled pressures of managing ideas - brands - at the expense of managing your own. ..Though chiefly, of course, I reflected on going back to sunny Bournemouth after just one night playing the metro life and feeling the coke-addled pressures of managing blah blah... I live by the seaside and I've never not been VERY grateful.
---
At the after-show reception, I found myself being remarkably restrained. Or perhaps even adult.
I didn't stop conversation with my friends mid-sentence with the words "screw you - there's a bloke off the telly". Nope, not me. I didn't even stop the conversation at the end of a paragraph with some lie about needing the loo. No. instead, I just kept talking to my friends ..and didn't run over to character acting star Andy Serkis to cover him in enthusiastic spittle with my Gollum impression. I didn't do it.
We'd all blagged tickets to this version of writer Fin Kennedy's play because of Julian's friend Kath, who's been a stalwart trustee of the Southwark Playhouse for years. The guys have mentioned trying to catch a production there a few times. I'd written some music for Kath's partner Steve some years back for his London Wall photographic exhibition - culminating in whistly Momo favorite, Metrophilia - and I keep trying to make it to one of their creative social events, often without success. Since Jules finds it hard to out-compliment Kath and Steve after fourteen years of mutual lovelyness, it's always nice to see them all together. Kath's energy at all she does is something Julian has long admired.
"I did well meeting them when I first came to London" he said quietly over a champers flute. I smiled. "Yes, you did." I paused, pursing respectfully - then chin-chinned: " So did they".
As we queued for complimentary scampi and chips, I added in a trying-to-seem-offhand voice: "Like the play pretty much spelled out, we need eachother, mate" ..also successfully not adding, in a bubbly blather, "- so let's hug it up, big boy. C'mon. No, no - c'mon..."
For various reasons, anyway, it turns out that Jules is on teasing terms with Andy.
"So," he apparently grinned at the Lord Of The Rings legend, "the new Tin Tin movie you're shooting - had to do much doggy method prep to play Snowy?"
Mr Serkis obviously knows Jules alright, as he merely shook his head - without saying: "you know it's Captain Haddock...".
I missed all this of course, as I was faithfully chatting up Angela.
---
I came home after a subsequent morning trying to frame a brief with Jules for a mutual client - a brief with no parameters, goals or current information, all of which we had to try to commission a PR guy with - to find a little drama had taken place back home.
The new porch guys have taken away our desperately tumble-down old porch. We're porchless. The house looks like its being demolished, with the sun-tan marks of absence on the exposed brickwork. Poor thing.
It's disappeared completely, never to be found. Thankfully.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Town and country birds.
Town and country birds.
I seem to have spotted a number of interesting specimens recently.
Putting them eagerly into my enthusiasts scrapbook I notice a subsequently intriguing cross-breeding of influences forming. Here then, without any in-the-field sketches, sadly, is a short list of birds that have caught my eye.
---
Bird #1
Helena.
Lovely girl. Risen to fame from nowhere, to become every politico-financial analyst's go-to gal. Everyone says we're going to her, apparently. Inevitable, they say.
Yes indeed, Ms Handcart is very popular right now.
So, amid the shrieking hair-pulling, the goggle-eyed blaspheming, the chicken gizzards-reading and mindless fax paper-throwing-around going on in most important office buildings and newsrooms at the moment, we've been looking for a little escape.
---
Bird #2
Andrea.
Another nice lass. Bit artificial.
Geek partner in crime, Chris, bought me - or perhaps the group - a desperately pleasing birthday gift this week. A box set of Star Trek. The original series, with Captain Kirk and pals - but super-geekily remastered with NEW special effects, so the Enterprise doesn't look quite as grainy and wobbly. I love the jobs some people find for themselves in uncertain times.
We've watched too many of them already, naturally. Not least because I spent much of yesterday feeling a bit crook.
We took ourselves out to the forest for a Sunday afternoon stroll and found a balmy summer warmth in the middle of October and squadrons of families in pratty safety helmets riding push-bikes very slowly along very very safe flat gravel paths through the trees.
The New Forest being more Walt Disney than Disney, with twinkling, babbling brooks and mossy carpets of green under dappled silver birch woods and golden autumn leaves flickering gently down through sun beams like confetti, we found a suspiciously stage-managed looking grassy clearing to lie down in. Had to shoo away the unicorns and little purring-winged fairy Kylies but it was okay. We slept under the clear blue sky and watched lazy vapour trails high above for a while, before stopping at a leafy evening pub in one of the many pretty villages on the wending drive home.
..Naah, it was okay.
Though I'd left the Mac up to do some work when we got home, by the time all that lovelyness had had a go at clearing my head and somehow failed, all I could face doing was watching another episode or two of daft, forty-year-old sci fi. Which strangely seemed to do the trick, eventually.
Captain Kirk is wedded to his spaceship, they keep telling us. It's ultimately going to prove to be a giant, alien-chick-porking fib, of course, but you can't blame him. The 23rd century is incredibly neo-sixties. In What are little girls made of, when apparent robotics genius, Dr Roger Korby, innocently tells former flame, nurse Christine Chappel, that he's not tinkered in android love with allegedly feelingless but conspicuously girl-shaped artifical companion, Andrea, you can see Mrs Roddenberry's boof-blonde character none-the-less thinking: "so why'd you give her QUITE so much eye-lash upholstery and heaving cleavage?"
Did find myself humming Everybody ought to have a maid from A funny thing happened on the way to the forum afterwards.
---
Bird #3
Jane.
Now she's a girl who's been on my mind a lot this year.
There was a telling moment on The Daily Show last week. A moving one, I thought. "I'm getting a little tired of certain Republicans telling me that small towns are the only places in America with values" said Jon Stuart, with restraint. "Do you know what New York is? It's ten small towns all piled on top of one another in the same building."
The battle for America's evolving identity does seem to pit town against country - small towns are real America, cities are slick, corporate engines of evil.
Well, it's hard not to scowl at Wall Street right now. And systemic corporate culture is no mere gloss to the American political system. But Jon's heart-felt jab made me think of one author and her seminal book - which is, in truth, a kind of love letter to the city.
Jane Jacobs was no trained city planner or architect. Just a regular Mom, perhaps not so dissimilarly qualified to Sarah Pallin. But, ingeniously using her eyes to look at stuff, she ended up collecting up what she saw into a book of recommendations to planners and people-space designers in the late fifties - The death and life of great American cities. It shook the establishment.
It was required reading on Caroline's urban design course. Except I found myself reading it on holiday in Italy - after Caroline had completed the course, and before she'd read it herself. As we bobbed in the Med, I found myself telling her with great authority about numbers of eyes on streets and the importance of mixed usage.
The main thing to have struck me, beyond the specific, embarrassingly No Shit, Sherlock observations she makes, critisising architects' science fiction daydreams that have little bearing on what people really do in their spaces, is what a love letter to the city it really is. How much the city can support not only life-giving diversity but humanising community. She writes with passion and inspiration. Even pride.
Thinking of all these different ladies here, I guess my point is that when you've escaped for a bit, there are real problems to go back and face. You have to find access to a space that effectively recharges you somewhere - so you can deal with real human being stuff more effectively. Find a little fortified courage to see things as they really are, not how we imagine them to be.
Far away from the stage-managed beauty of the countryside - refreshing and life-affirming as it is - the sharp end of modern human politics may find many of its answers in the city, the solutions to some real human challenges of living side-by-side.
That's Jane's Star Trek future. Once we've all stopped throwing ourselves around at odd camera angles and the financial deck feels a little firmer under feet, I think many American politicians would do well to consult her sooner than Ms Pallin and Helena.
Might stop a lot of us twitching.
---
Bird Appendix
Peregrine falcons.
Did you see the photos of the nesting pair on the Houses of Parliament this weekend?
What they doing there, then?
I seem to have spotted a number of interesting specimens recently.
Putting them eagerly into my enthusiasts scrapbook I notice a subsequently intriguing cross-breeding of influences forming. Here then, without any in-the-field sketches, sadly, is a short list of birds that have caught my eye.
---
Bird #1
Helena.
Lovely girl. Risen to fame from nowhere, to become every politico-financial analyst's go-to gal. Everyone says we're going to her, apparently. Inevitable, they say.
Yes indeed, Ms Handcart is very popular right now.
So, amid the shrieking hair-pulling, the goggle-eyed blaspheming, the chicken gizzards-reading and mindless fax paper-throwing-around going on in most important office buildings and newsrooms at the moment, we've been looking for a little escape.
---
Bird #2
Andrea.
Another nice lass. Bit artificial.
Geek partner in crime, Chris, bought me - or perhaps the group - a desperately pleasing birthday gift this week. A box set of Star Trek. The original series, with Captain Kirk and pals - but super-geekily remastered with NEW special effects, so the Enterprise doesn't look quite as grainy and wobbly. I love the jobs some people find for themselves in uncertain times.
We've watched too many of them already, naturally. Not least because I spent much of yesterday feeling a bit crook.
We took ourselves out to the forest for a Sunday afternoon stroll and found a balmy summer warmth in the middle of October and squadrons of families in pratty safety helmets riding push-bikes very slowly along very very safe flat gravel paths through the trees.
The New Forest being more Walt Disney than Disney, with twinkling, babbling brooks and mossy carpets of green under dappled silver birch woods and golden autumn leaves flickering gently down through sun beams like confetti, we found a suspiciously stage-managed looking grassy clearing to lie down in. Had to shoo away the unicorns and little purring-winged fairy Kylies but it was okay. We slept under the clear blue sky and watched lazy vapour trails high above for a while, before stopping at a leafy evening pub in one of the many pretty villages on the wending drive home.
..Naah, it was okay.
Though I'd left the Mac up to do some work when we got home, by the time all that lovelyness had had a go at clearing my head and somehow failed, all I could face doing was watching another episode or two of daft, forty-year-old sci fi. Which strangely seemed to do the trick, eventually.
Captain Kirk is wedded to his spaceship, they keep telling us. It's ultimately going to prove to be a giant, alien-chick-porking fib, of course, but you can't blame him. The 23rd century is incredibly neo-sixties. In What are little girls made of, when apparent robotics genius, Dr Roger Korby, innocently tells former flame, nurse Christine Chappel, that he's not tinkered in android love with allegedly feelingless but conspicuously girl-shaped artifical companion, Andrea, you can see Mrs Roddenberry's boof-blonde character none-the-less thinking: "so why'd you give her QUITE so much eye-lash upholstery and heaving cleavage?"
Did find myself humming Everybody ought to have a maid from A funny thing happened on the way to the forum afterwards.
---
Bird #3
Jane.
Now she's a girl who's been on my mind a lot this year.
There was a telling moment on The Daily Show last week. A moving one, I thought. "I'm getting a little tired of certain Republicans telling me that small towns are the only places in America with values" said Jon Stuart, with restraint. "Do you know what New York is? It's ten small towns all piled on top of one another in the same building."
The battle for America's evolving identity does seem to pit town against country - small towns are real America, cities are slick, corporate engines of evil.
Well, it's hard not to scowl at Wall Street right now. And systemic corporate culture is no mere gloss to the American political system. But Jon's heart-felt jab made me think of one author and her seminal book - which is, in truth, a kind of love letter to the city.
Jane Jacobs was no trained city planner or architect. Just a regular Mom, perhaps not so dissimilarly qualified to Sarah Pallin. But, ingeniously using her eyes to look at stuff, she ended up collecting up what she saw into a book of recommendations to planners and people-space designers in the late fifties - The death and life of great American cities. It shook the establishment.
It was required reading on Caroline's urban design course. Except I found myself reading it on holiday in Italy - after Caroline had completed the course, and before she'd read it herself. As we bobbed in the Med, I found myself telling her with great authority about numbers of eyes on streets and the importance of mixed usage.
The main thing to have struck me, beyond the specific, embarrassingly No Shit, Sherlock observations she makes, critisising architects' science fiction daydreams that have little bearing on what people really do in their spaces, is what a love letter to the city it really is. How much the city can support not only life-giving diversity but humanising community. She writes with passion and inspiration. Even pride.
Thinking of all these different ladies here, I guess my point is that when you've escaped for a bit, there are real problems to go back and face. You have to find access to a space that effectively recharges you somewhere - so you can deal with real human being stuff more effectively. Find a little fortified courage to see things as they really are, not how we imagine them to be.
Far away from the stage-managed beauty of the countryside - refreshing and life-affirming as it is - the sharp end of modern human politics may find many of its answers in the city, the solutions to some real human challenges of living side-by-side.
That's Jane's Star Trek future. Once we've all stopped throwing ourselves around at odd camera angles and the financial deck feels a little firmer under feet, I think many American politicians would do well to consult her sooner than Ms Pallin and Helena.
Might stop a lot of us twitching.
---
Bird Appendix
Peregrine falcons.
Did you see the photos of the nesting pair on the Houses of Parliament this weekend?
What they doing there, then?
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Sink.
Sink.
So, when we got in from circuits last night, there was a blinking blue light at the end of our street. Some sort of accident, cordoned off with stripey police tape and surrounded by emergency services.
We turned on the telly and there was Jon Snow talking with the controlled animation of a journalist helming a big story.
Then we felt a lurch as the house tipped suddenly sideways, pans clanging against the boiler on the swinging hanger and plates sliding across the work tops as we continued to put dinner together.
So this is a banking crisis.
A chuffing, sodding, frightening, arsing-great big one, apparently.
..Oh well, eh.
---
Yes, the accident was the British - and basically the global - banking system and the blue lights turned out to be metaphorical. ..Although we have had a surprising number of police incidents in our quiet little street over the years (..and they never tell you what's going on...).
They're yabbering on the wire this morning (by which I mean Radio 4, but that sounds WAY less dramatic) that the effective nationalisation of the UK banks announced lastnight is a seismic moment for western business. And it is. ..NATIONALISING the BANKS? The government becoming a major stakeholder in Natwest, Lloyds TSB, HSBC? Owning and controlling the FREE market economy?
Hang on, though. Does this mean, ironically, that in this time of evaporating investments, and governments around the world having to promise ordinary people like me that they'll guarantee a lump of their savings, should the banks just, oh I dunno, lose them, I have just become a major investor for the first time in my life?
As a UK taxpayer, can I go to the AGMs of all the banks now? Eat the free sarnies?
If I can, can I also ask them where exactly ALL THE CHUFFING MONEY'S GOING! Down a sink, or something?
Well, it is, kind of. Value is relative, isn't it; if no-one wants to buy your thing, it becomes worthless. And if banks are too nervous to lend things to each other in case they inherit a worthless thing from an unscrupulous chain of indifferent lending, then the money system grinds to a halt, because no-one can get the petty cash they need to buy things, lubricate things and keep things moving.
Yeah.
So.
..I'm trying to figure out the best way to work in the word 'plunger' here.
So, when we got in from circuits last night, there was a blinking blue light at the end of our street. Some sort of accident, cordoned off with stripey police tape and surrounded by emergency services.
We turned on the telly and there was Jon Snow talking with the controlled animation of a journalist helming a big story.
Then we felt a lurch as the house tipped suddenly sideways, pans clanging against the boiler on the swinging hanger and plates sliding across the work tops as we continued to put dinner together.
So this is a banking crisis.
A chuffing, sodding, frightening, arsing-great big one, apparently.
..Oh well, eh.
---
Yes, the accident was the British - and basically the global - banking system and the blue lights turned out to be metaphorical. ..Although we have had a surprising number of police incidents in our quiet little street over the years (..and they never tell you what's going on...).
They're yabbering on the wire this morning (by which I mean Radio 4, but that sounds WAY less dramatic) that the effective nationalisation of the UK banks announced lastnight is a seismic moment for western business. And it is. ..NATIONALISING the BANKS? The government becoming a major stakeholder in Natwest, Lloyds TSB, HSBC? Owning and controlling the FREE market economy?
Hang on, though. Does this mean, ironically, that in this time of evaporating investments, and governments around the world having to promise ordinary people like me that they'll guarantee a lump of their savings, should the banks just, oh I dunno, lose them, I have just become a major investor for the first time in my life?
As a UK taxpayer, can I go to the AGMs of all the banks now? Eat the free sarnies?
If I can, can I also ask them where exactly ALL THE CHUFFING MONEY'S GOING! Down a sink, or something?
Well, it is, kind of. Value is relative, isn't it; if no-one wants to buy your thing, it becomes worthless. And if banks are too nervous to lend things to each other in case they inherit a worthless thing from an unscrupulous chain of indifferent lending, then the money system grinds to a halt, because no-one can get the petty cash they need to buy things, lubricate things and keep things moving.
Yeah.
So.
..I'm trying to figure out the best way to work in the word 'plunger' here.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Twenties.
Twenties.
So here I am. Thirty-eight today, my passport tells me. As does the entire technical support staff of Facebook, apparently. Can't wait to see what they've all whipped 'round to get me. Those guys. ..Ooh, let's see - now, they know how much I love old funk records... or big books of poster design... or Parisian café culture, er... or sharp shirts - ooh! - or Berlin inter-war, realist cinema or... Dr Who, so it should be easy for them to choose something good...
Actually, I talk of German silent cinema but we did, in fact, spend most of yesterday in the twenties. In celebration of me taking a significant diary-date step nearer the end of my thirties. Hmm. Anyway - Joe May's syruppy gorgeous Asphalt, 1928, followed by Deutsch directorial legend Fritz Lang's M, 1931. Films so closely linked by time, place and production people, yet so different in dialogue - not simply because one's a late silent movie and one's an early talkie.
Won't bore you here, but you should see M in particular - launched the career of Peter Lorre with a quietly startling kangaroo court scene. ..Which you now can't help thinking is because a kangaroo's is a bloody odd costume to put a paedofile protagonist in - in any film. But you're just being silly. So stop it.
Anyway - again - here I am. Apparently older. Apparently almost none-the-wiser.
If you'd like to know, Caroline bought me a nice big book of graphic-type stuff, in a little-veiled attempt to make me stop using bloody arrows in everything I design. To little avail, perhaps, as I found a fair few in it. I'm also sitting here in a birthday shirt, of course, listening to another birthday CD - John Coltrane. Helpful stuff to write to, as I continue with the sumptuous come-to-bed copywriting for Halo's catalogue this afternoon, because I usually employ the clink of Martini glasses, a swinging walk and a wry wink whenever I'm making advances to my poor, beleaguered wife. So I, at least, am in the mood.
Other than that, I'm ignoring the screams of bankers and investment managers echoing from around the world and looking forward to a little mexican dinner at Coriander's tonight with Mater and m'lady. Whether we're facing a second Great Depression or not, I shall aim to stay chirpy in all things - because it seems clear to me that it's all good. It's all good.
However old I'm supposed to be.
So here I am. Thirty-eight today, my passport tells me. As does the entire technical support staff of Facebook, apparently. Can't wait to see what they've all whipped 'round to get me. Those guys. ..Ooh, let's see - now, they know how much I love old funk records... or big books of poster design... or Parisian café culture, er... or sharp shirts - ooh! - or Berlin inter-war, realist cinema or... Dr Who, so it should be easy for them to choose something good...
Actually, I talk of German silent cinema but we did, in fact, spend most of yesterday in the twenties. In celebration of me taking a significant diary-date step nearer the end of my thirties. Hmm. Anyway - Joe May's syruppy gorgeous Asphalt, 1928, followed by Deutsch directorial legend Fritz Lang's M, 1931. Films so closely linked by time, place and production people, yet so different in dialogue - not simply because one's a late silent movie and one's an early talkie.
Won't bore you here, but you should see M in particular - launched the career of Peter Lorre with a quietly startling kangaroo court scene. ..Which you now can't help thinking is because a kangaroo's is a bloody odd costume to put a paedofile protagonist in - in any film. But you're just being silly. So stop it.
Anyway - again - here I am. Apparently older. Apparently almost none-the-wiser.
If you'd like to know, Caroline bought me a nice big book of graphic-type stuff, in a little-veiled attempt to make me stop using bloody arrows in everything I design. To little avail, perhaps, as I found a fair few in it. I'm also sitting here in a birthday shirt, of course, listening to another birthday CD - John Coltrane. Helpful stuff to write to, as I continue with the sumptuous come-to-bed copywriting for Halo's catalogue this afternoon, because I usually employ the clink of Martini glasses, a swinging walk and a wry wink whenever I'm making advances to my poor, beleaguered wife. So I, at least, am in the mood.
Other than that, I'm ignoring the screams of bankers and investment managers echoing from around the world and looking forward to a little mexican dinner at Coriander's tonight with Mater and m'lady. Whether we're facing a second Great Depression or not, I shall aim to stay chirpy in all things - because it seems clear to me that it's all good. It's all good.
However old I'm supposed to be.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Bed.
Bed.
I'm having a bleak, north European moment.
Y'know, the kind of style-life moment that, ah - how do I put it? - uncamouflaged tossers enjoy. People who still buy the Guardian to leave it lying around under a casual Penguin classic, and who feign interest in the US presidential race and who wish they could more easily afford a newer Audi and who have just rediscovered the idea of department store shopping, lingering around the leather Man Bag island. Y'know. People like me.
To be fair, I rediscovered the idea of department store shopping because TJ have recently pulled some all-nighters fitting new branding to every floor of Beales. With a little glow of pride, I stroked the neat, sans serif vinyl lettering and followed their clear signposting to the men's luggage department...
Right now it's raining hard against the studio window and the jelly lamps are pooling low, luminous warmth on the desks while I audition some new, stylishly bleak jazz album. The very cool and also stylishly bleak album cover is sitting beside me, teasing my designer's eye. And I'm sitting here typing a pointless string of thoughts that no one is likely to read, by way of enjoying sitting in this thinly metro atmosphere for ten minutes. And by way of putting off some homework.
I think I first heard one of these pieces on FIP. A station that I usually listen to in the rain, harking back to our last visit to the French capital when it piscened it down all weekend. Leucocyte, by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, is a kind of sparing, jazz noodle with faint echos of Boards of Canada. Faint. And the artwork on the cover is a black and white linear repeat of the title in cascading deconstructions of Helvetica. Like a neat Letraset accident.
Yum.
Of course, sonic noodling about like this might create an atmosphere in which you can begin to consider yourself somehow… what's the word? ..sophisticated, that's it… while simultaneously numbing the thought of people in your home town having to sleep out in this shite Autumn evening. But it can all of a sudden make you throw a shoe at the CD player and want to turn on some ruddy lights. I mean, I'll be in an insomnial stupor before tea time at this rate.
It's good though.
---
The homework I'm putting off is a planning application. You heard me. For signage for a client. ..WHAT a pain in the elevations. I'm having to do drawings of the site and show how we're fixing the lights to the wall. Like I'd have the first clue.
I may, if I get it done in a while, do some more work too. I mean, why not? We're planning a John & Yoko-style bed-in all day tomorrow, to make the most of the gloriously lashing-shite weather with some old movies and a pre-emptive celebration of my birthday. I'll be, they tell me, thirty-eight. ..I mean, come on… so why not get some practical stuff out of the way now? Did I have some other socially explosive plans for my Saturday night?
Tomorrow's plan's an appropriate one, actually. When I haven't been stealing moments to embelish and over-work the branding for Momo's new album - in favour of finishing any actual music, it seems - this week, I've been writing words to get people into bed.
Long-time design chums, Halo, periodically invite me over to politely laugh at my jokes and give me briefs to write flamboyant nonsense. This time it's for a client of theirs that's a bedroom furniture specialist, for whom they're finishing a sharp new sales catalogue. I'm doing the sharp verbal intros.
Of course, I didn't like to say that I've been married for a hundred Earth Years and haven't had to concoct successful words to get people into the bedroom since before I was old enough to really manage it.
Hmm.
Anyway, some of the gang are in Brighton tonight, seeing one half of panto-gothic, vaudeville darlings The Dresden Dolls. I look forward to the Facebook pics. It means that much-loved, much-handed-around Harris mascot, Alice, is curled up in the cosy warmth of the evening's low, studio lighting, in her bed, just at my feet. And she's giving me those big, seductive eyes.
The ones that say: please turn off this bloody arthouse noise and make a fuss of me. Or get on with your homework.
Think I need a lie down.
I'm having a bleak, north European moment.
Y'know, the kind of style-life moment that, ah - how do I put it? - uncamouflaged tossers enjoy. People who still buy the Guardian to leave it lying around under a casual Penguin classic, and who feign interest in the US presidential race and who wish they could more easily afford a newer Audi and who have just rediscovered the idea of department store shopping, lingering around the leather Man Bag island. Y'know. People like me.
To be fair, I rediscovered the idea of department store shopping because TJ have recently pulled some all-nighters fitting new branding to every floor of Beales. With a little glow of pride, I stroked the neat, sans serif vinyl lettering and followed their clear signposting to the men's luggage department...
Right now it's raining hard against the studio window and the jelly lamps are pooling low, luminous warmth on the desks while I audition some new, stylishly bleak jazz album. The very cool and also stylishly bleak album cover is sitting beside me, teasing my designer's eye. And I'm sitting here typing a pointless string of thoughts that no one is likely to read, by way of enjoying sitting in this thinly metro atmosphere for ten minutes. And by way of putting off some homework.
I think I first heard one of these pieces on FIP. A station that I usually listen to in the rain, harking back to our last visit to the French capital when it piscened it down all weekend. Leucocyte, by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, is a kind of sparing, jazz noodle with faint echos of Boards of Canada. Faint. And the artwork on the cover is a black and white linear repeat of the title in cascading deconstructions of Helvetica. Like a neat Letraset accident.
Yum.
Of course, sonic noodling about like this might create an atmosphere in which you can begin to consider yourself somehow… what's the word? ..sophisticated, that's it… while simultaneously numbing the thought of people in your home town having to sleep out in this shite Autumn evening. But it can all of a sudden make you throw a shoe at the CD player and want to turn on some ruddy lights. I mean, I'll be in an insomnial stupor before tea time at this rate.
It's good though.
---
The homework I'm putting off is a planning application. You heard me. For signage for a client. ..WHAT a pain in the elevations. I'm having to do drawings of the site and show how we're fixing the lights to the wall. Like I'd have the first clue.
I may, if I get it done in a while, do some more work too. I mean, why not? We're planning a John & Yoko-style bed-in all day tomorrow, to make the most of the gloriously lashing-shite weather with some old movies and a pre-emptive celebration of my birthday. I'll be, they tell me, thirty-eight. ..I mean, come on… so why not get some practical stuff out of the way now? Did I have some other socially explosive plans for my Saturday night?
Tomorrow's plan's an appropriate one, actually. When I haven't been stealing moments to embelish and over-work the branding for Momo's new album - in favour of finishing any actual music, it seems - this week, I've been writing words to get people into bed.
Long-time design chums, Halo, periodically invite me over to politely laugh at my jokes and give me briefs to write flamboyant nonsense. This time it's for a client of theirs that's a bedroom furniture specialist, for whom they're finishing a sharp new sales catalogue. I'm doing the sharp verbal intros.
Of course, I didn't like to say that I've been married for a hundred Earth Years and haven't had to concoct successful words to get people into the bedroom since before I was old enough to really manage it.
Hmm.
Anyway, some of the gang are in Brighton tonight, seeing one half of panto-gothic, vaudeville darlings The Dresden Dolls. I look forward to the Facebook pics. It means that much-loved, much-handed-around Harris mascot, Alice, is curled up in the cosy warmth of the evening's low, studio lighting, in her bed, just at my feet. And she's giving me those big, seductive eyes.
The ones that say: please turn off this bloody arthouse noise and make a fuss of me. Or get on with your homework.
Think I need a lie down.
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