On way to Lift. Very excited. If you're going to be there please come and say hello. I'll be the fat bloke looking lost.
long live magazines 2
Here are the second lot of thoughts from the magazine design conference last week. As I say, I don't know much about this stuff so I can't really do a proper write-up. I'm just reporting on things that caught my eye / ear / attention.
Jeremy Leslie is Creative Director of John Brown and writer of magculture. He was very good. A great combination of deep knowledge worn lightly and an ability to enthuse and inform. Excellent stuff.
Some things that stuck out:
It had never occurred to me before that the UK magazine market is unusually dependent on news-stand sales. In the US, for example, subscription sales are much more important. And it's likely that emergent markets like Russia and China are going to be more subscription based. Their sheer size makes it necessary. And when you have a subscription relationship with your readers you can do different things, take more risks. Your cover can be more elegant and less shouty. And you can be more 'magaziney'.
Magaziney-ness was a great thought from Jeremy - that magazine's response to digital should be to get more 'magaziney'. Do the things that only magazines can do. Things to do with solidity of form, objectiness, to do with the legibility of ink on paper, with the enforced juxtapositions of print lay-outs, the richness of colour, all that stuff. He lamented the fact that mags don't do so many things like posters and pull-outs and tip-ins and things, like they used to.
He also made me realise what a broad church mags can be. Sure, there are the massive circulation things but there are also magazines that are really art pieces. Limited editions. Often critiques of magazines in magazine form. Like the way this One Page Magazine project illustrates the way the logos in Vogue are much more shouty than the headlines in Hello. I like the idea of magazines as art. As per Sound Art.
And last in the afternoon was William Owen of Made By Many. He was very good too. With a great central thought: from magazines as products to magazines as services. He illustrated the idea with some sites (most not from regular magazine companies): stylediary, normal room, instructables and arseblog.
Sometimes it's fantastic to sit in a room and reflect on the fact that something human, spontaneous and funny like arseblog is completely and utterly the right way to do something. And it's something that all the great brains and talents at huge publishing and media empires can't figure out to do. I love that.
Mr Owen left us with a good slide of conventional magazine thinking to ignore. And a few good phrases to remember: Don't Finish and Polish. And Launch and Learn. Excellent stuff.
taking the plunge
A couple of summers ago Arthur and I went swimming at Parliament Hill Lido and saw some excellent photos of lidos and swimming by Ruth Corney. She just wrote to tell me that's she's got a new show on about the lido, bathing pools and general environs of Hampstead Heath. Fantastic looking stuff again (that's one above). The show finishes on January 27th so hurry along. Details here.
light blogging
We went to see the Anthony McCall show at the Serpentine today (as suggested by Ted). Absolutely lovely. My silly picture, obviously, doesn't do it justice.
beards and magazines
I owe you a proper update on the 'going to conferences about things I don't know about' plan. But here are a couple of the more unexpected things that popped up, and that are approaching soon. You may be interested.
The first is a one-day conference on magazine design at St Bride LIbrary on the 25th of January, looks to be very good value at £60.
The second is an evening of dicussion about facial hair at the ICA on the 29th. I feel the need to remain unshaven until at least then.
signs of the urban seasons
One of the joys of city life is the way you're intimately connected to the changing of the seasons, the rhythms of the year. The ebb and flow of the life is marked through thousands of intricate little moments giving us city-dwellers an intuitive grasp on the march of time and the progress of the year, connecting us deeply and intimately to the earth and its immemorial turning. I sometimes feel for the country folk, who must lack these tiny moments of connectivity to the eternal order of change. And while this kind of sensitivity can't be taught, (it flows from an innate connection to the universal cycle of the city) I thought it worthwhile noting, through the year, some of those minuscule details that a city-dweller will pick up on almost unconsciously, but that might pass the rural visitor by.
Let's start with now; the turning of the year, sometimes known as January (literally 'the time when it can be cold') or more commonly Start Of Q1. One of the first signs of January is the way houses start to shed their Christmas Trees, leaving them in the streets to melt back into the pavement. To be renewed and repaired so they can re-appear on the pavement again, and in shops, in December.
The January twilight (or 'lighting up time') is often marked by the twinkling of restaurants who put lights up at Christmas and thought they looked nice anyway and decided to leave them up. Most of these will be gone by February (literally 'the time when it's still cold, but also depressing').
And of course, you have the gyms with amazing, joining offers.
And the umbrella corpses that don't survive the thinning of the herd that comes with the first big wind.
I think this is worth a flickr group. This ancient wisdom must not be lost.
toy hacking - day two
Well, I'm buzzing. I like hacking toys. Not so much because we learned anything specific. But because it opened my eyes to what you can do with these things, and made me unafraid to do it.
Ben and I hit the limit of our technical abilities, and the possibilities of our bits of toys, by lunchtime.
But I'm quite proud of the conceptual leap we managed to make in constructing this. We took a remote-controlled car and turned it into...a remote-controlled car. But one that works far less well and is much more complicated. In fact we turned a cat, a helicopter and a car into this. The helicopter is operated remotely, when you turn the rotors the vibrations set of a contact mic that used to trigger a miaowing sound in a little cat. That's been unplugged from the cat's speaker and connected via relay to the car's motor. We wrapped the mic in cotton wool and tape so it wouldn't be sensitive enough that the motion of the car would trigger it and keep it going forever. It worked quite well. (You know, in a pointlessly stupid, but satisfying to us, kind of way.) Turn the rotors on the helicopter and the car drives off.
tinker machine from russelldavies on Vimeo.
(It didn't start again because the battery kept falling out.)
I can see how you might find that a little underwhelming, but don't just the workshop by our feeble efforts, some people made some rather magical things, hopefully they'll turn up online somewhere. And, I don't think the thing is the point, the point is how we're now looking at the world slightly differently.
toy hacking
Toy hacking was big fun today. We most spent the day dismantling and examining. Nothing useful or interesting built yet. Hopefully that'll be tomorrow.
But it was fantastic to get beyond the nervousness about cracking things open and peering inside. It helps when you realise 'the toys are cheaper than their components'.
phones for me
MAKE magazine have a saying "If you can't open it, you don't own it". I like this idea. And I own this biscuit tin. I can open it whenever I want. Most technology terrifies me though, I'd be horribly worried about cracking open most of the things I own. Which is one reason I'm excited by the toy-hacking workshop tomorrow.
But I recently took a step in the right direction, following the death of my favourite ever phone - the K800i. I had vowed to keep this for as long as I could. Sailed through the upgrade opportunity. Turned my nose up at the N-95 and the iPhone. Didn't need those. Happy with what I had. I'll have this forever. Good old sustainable Russ. But then it died. Thoroughly. I wandered from repair shop to repair shop and they pronounced it un-revivable. So following brief dalliances with various devices generously loaned to me, I went to get another from Orange. Except they wouldn't give me one. They pressed the new one on me. The K850i. How different can it be, I thought, so I said yes. And with remarkable speed it turned up at my door.
And, it has to be said, it's not an attractive phone. Good camera. (Though I preferred the old shutter-camera door to the little button thing.) But otherwise not good. Silly wannabetouch buttons on the bottom and it looks fat and glossy, like a 300ZX with a neon under-body kit.
And the back's not much better. I stuck some playmobil stickers on it, but it didn't make it any better. So, I thought, I can't wait to get rid of this. As soon as the year's up, I'll be done with it. But I realised that was bad thinking, so I wondered if I could get to like it any more by personalising it somehow.
Me and Arthur had been playing a lot of Warhammer, and been painting figures, and we had all this paint and spray around so I wondered if I could paint it. Maybe paint it like a Warhammer phone.
So I taped it up and gave it a good spraying with 'chaos black'. (And it looks good with the tape on. Like some kind of fetish object. That'd be a good aesthetic for a phone.)
And, although, I've not got the patience to do this tidily, it looked a lot better already. So, then I tried to work out how to embellish it.
I was going to just use Warhammer Ultramarine decals, but they look a bit too right-wing and militaristic out of context. Fine if you're playing a wargame, not so good to just pull out of your pocket. I've not solved this yet. Keep looking for the right stickers. I then had a bit of a scare, we had a really cold day and I got condensation in the camera lens, everything was all blurry for a while. And it occurred to me that I was going to struggle to get Orange or SE to fix it if it was all nasty and black. That seems to have fixed itself though, so I don't have to face that yet.
What I've discovered now though is I seem to have created accelerated graceful aging. The worn paint makes it look a lot older that it really is, but in quite a cool way. So I think I don't need to find stickers or anything, I just need to respray it every now and then, in different colours, and before long it'll get that knackered, lived-in, paint-layered, Millenium Falcon look Will Wright so admires. Next I want to work on making my own sounds for it, then I'm going to try and screw up the courage/know-how to do some of this.
naked thighs and cotton frocks
(You'll have to excuse me if too much husbandly pride creeps into this post.)
Anne recently won a short story competition with a fantastic story called Naked Thighs and Cotton Frocks. Her prize was publication in a short story anthology (named for her story) from the smart and enterprising folks at Leaf Books. You should of course buy many copies from Leaf themselves and therefore support small, interesting publishers. But Anne has a few review copies to go to anyone who wants to blog about the book, so if you'd like a copy you can email her: anneshewring at hotmail.com. Or get in touch via her blog. Writers of reviews may well be blessed with reciept of these extremely exclusive limited edition promotional badges.