If you want Ben and The Design Conspiracy to make you an Interesting2007 t-shirt you've got to get your shirts to them by the 13th. Which means putting it in the post now. If not before. That is all.
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interesting help
Nine days to go, more and more of my day is now consumed with a gentle undertow of mild panic about all the things I might have forgotten and all the things that might go wrong. It's like whenever I go on holiday and spend the whole time thinking I've probably left the bath running at home.
Anyway, this post is an appeal for volunteers and help. Many of you have kindly offered to help and this is where I get more specific about taking you up on it.
Friday 15th - daytime
Most of Friday is going to be about preparation, mostly getting goodie bags packed and things like that. The Design Conspiracy have generously offered their fashionable Covent Garden offices for us to do that, anyone who can spare an hour during the Friday will be most welcome. If you could let me know below if you're up for that I'll pass on the precise details, once I've thought of them.
Friday 15th - evening
There's going to be a few people in town specfically for Interesting and Grant McCracken has suggested it would be nice if we had some kind of get together opportunity on the Friday evening. He's right, it would be. Would anyone like to organise/host it? Probably just drinks and chat somewhere? Any thoughts on this gratefully received.
Saturday 16th - morning
We can't actually get access to the hall until 8.30 on the Saturday morning. We can't do anything there the night before. So if we're going to be ready to go at 11 we've got quite a lot to get done. We've got to get the chairs out, get the PA and projector and stuff all sorted, put the kettle on, all that sort of thing. So if anyone wants to help with lugging boxes, moving chairs or pulling cables I'd be very grateful. I also suspect James might need help with the folksy craft stall/installation. (UPDATE: Actually, turns out James is fine, but still...) If you turn up at 8.30 and do something useful I'll buy you a bacon sarnie and a cup of tea at the cafe in the square.
Does that make sense? If you're up for helping out please comment below or email me russell at russelldavies.com and let me know when you might be around.
(PS - I found the picture above by typing Interesting2007 into flickr. I was expecting to find and use another of Ben and TDC's logo experiments but there instead was this splendid punch card thing that Simon's used to make some sounds for us. Marvelous.)
this is hugging
I saw This Is England the other day. Brilliant film. Hugely evocative for anyone that grew up in the British 80s; the 80s of The Falklands and the miners' strike and The Specials. And not just nostalgic of the time, but a charming and scary portrait of the pleasures and terrors of friendship and growing up that should be meaningful for anyone.
For some unaccountable reason Shane Meadows is the only film-maker regularly setting films in the East Midlands, and I for one, am extremely grateful. But one thing kept puzzling me and I'm appealing to anyone else who grew up at the same time to tell me if I'm crazy.
And it's this - hugging. There seems to be a lot of hugging in this film, especially in that affectionate, masculine, back-slappy way that I always assume arrived from across the Atlantic at some point when I wasn't looking. It seems common now, and that's probably a good thing, but if I remember anything at all from my youth it's this one rule - no touching. You might hug your gran, and you might try and achieve physical contact with girl or boy friend, but I do not recall the streets of Notts/Derbys/Leics being full of hugging teenage gangs. Can anyone back me up?
My assumption is that the splendid cast of This Is England are behaving in an authentically youthy way for now, and they're massively convincing, but maybe it doesn't occur to them that twenty-five years ago there was none of that hugging going on. The only thing I can think to compare it to is Gregory's Girl which is a just-about contemporaneous document of the same period, and there's no hugging in there, just authentically awkward distance. I guess it might be a class thing, our streets weren't as tough as the ones in This Is England, but the kids in that film were the kids that bullied us when we hung around up the shops and I don't remember them being all touchy in between. I don't know, I don't want to trivialise the best film I've seen for years but I'm really curious about this now. When did hugging enter the mainstream in the UK? Has it? And, is there anyway to find out? Is there any sort of record of the amount any particular group of people hugs or used to hug? Does someone measure this? Is that what anthropologists do? Anyway. Hugging in the past. Discuss.
UPDATE: The more I think about this, and the more people I talk to about it, the more convinced I'm becoming that Mr Meadows is right and I'm wrong. After all he's a great film-maker with a great nose/eye for authentic detail, and he knows his skinhead culture. And I don't. So if I was going to bet on one of us recollecting this right I'd bet on him. And a few people I've talked to have said that they remember one of the key characteristics of that early, pre-NF skinhead culture was it's willingness to be tactile (in a 'manly 'way). And that this was often a cause for mockery from other youth groups. That makes sense to me. And would mean that I've entirely misread this, and that what seemed to me like a mistake is actually an acute bit of insight. I bet that's true. Which makes an already great film even better.
travel = broken
Matt's put his reboot charts about the splendid dopplr on the dopplr blog. I'm sitting in Richmond airport right now. Looking at a sign. Slide 9 resonates deeply. (I was reduced to playing with photobooth and this picture seemed to capture how it feels.) I look at all the people here, the business travelers, with the wheely bags and bluetooth headsets and the empty hole in their eyes and you've got to believe that as soon as a good alternative comes up they'll take it. Please all you technologists, think of something.
On the other hand, I was hugely cheered by the chatter and thinking and life pouring out of my phone from twitter. Sometimes twitter keeps you going.
