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.
showing radio working
Partly because of speechification, and partly for work reasons I've been thinking a lot recently about how radio might, and should, change. One of the great and exciting possibilities it seems to me is for radio to show more of its working, to let you peek behind the scenes a little. iPM is doing that very well, and Pods and Blogs (and presumably the presence of Chris Vallance doing both programmes is not a coincidence) but I also have to say hats-off to WNYC's RadioLab for what they're doing with their podcast.
They're not on air at the moment, they're working on series 4, but they're still podcasting, letting you hear some of what would seem to be raw material for the shows they've got coming up. Interviews, features etc. They're not finished and polished with the same Piers Plowright meets Art Of Noise sonic intensity of their regular shows but they're still great little listens, and they maintain your relationship with the show while they're off air. This tiny little feature on what composer David Lang did when asked to write music for a morgue is a perfect, and touching example.
blog all dog-eared pages: at large and at small
I love this book. I love the idea of the familiar essay. I love the lightness with which it's written. And I love the things it's about. I dog-eared a lot of pages, just because I wanted to re-read them, I can't blog them all or I'd copying out the whole book. So here are the bits about which I thought I had something to share.
How's this for an explanation of the Familiar Essay? from the preface:
"Familiar essay" isn't a term one hears often these days. The genre's heyday was the early nineteenth century, when Charles Lamb was dreaming up The Essays Of Elia under the influence of brandy and tobacco and William Hazlitt was dashing off Table-Talk under the influence of strong tea. The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions, he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favorite stimulants in hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover’s intimacy.
That sounds like exactly the stuff I'd like to write. Enthusiastic, conversational, discursive, about something in the real world. It's also a description of the blogs I like best. And the writing seems so natural and smooth. I'm enjoying just copying out. Maybe if I keep doing it I'll learn something, in the same way that Hunter S. Thompson thought he'd learn something about rhythm and style from typing out every word of 'The Great Gatsby' and 'A Farewell To Arms'.
Page 38:
For thirty-three years, Lamb sat on a high stool, identical to those occupied by thirty other clerks, dipped his goose quill into two inkwells, one containing black ink and the other red (he called the latter Clerk’s Blood); and recorded the prices of tea, indigo and piece goods.
It is worth remembering that while he was adding up figures in the East India House’s stygian offices at Nos 12-21 Leadenhall Street (what name could be more appropriate?), his friends – Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Godwin, De Quincy – were rambling in the Lake Country, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, siring illegitimate children, and planning a utopian community in America (@We shall…criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo,” wrote Southey).
I love the way she does this. Those tiny interjections of telling detail (clerk's blood, leadenhall, the Southey quote) are perfect. They give you the colour you need to take something in, without slowing you down. Brilliant. I
Page 72:
During the day, I pop out of my chair a dozen times an hour. The phone rings, the fax beeps, the mailbox needs to be checked, the coffee needs to be brewed, the letter needs to be filed, the Post-its need to be rearranged – and possibly colour-coded – right this instant. How can the writer’s distractive sirens be resisted? John McPhee used to tie himself to his chair with his bathrobe sash. Schiller heightened his powers of concentration by inhaling the fumes from a cache of rotten apples he kept in a drawer.
Have rotting apples popped up in 43 Folders yet? I suffer from all these distractions and all the 2.0 ones too. If I have to write something properly I do it in writeroom but it still doesn't stop me rushing to google stuff every five minutes. I keep thinking that I'll fire up my Mac Classic and write everything on there. The only problem will be getting it off.
Page 112
“One of my unfailing minor pleasures may seem dull to more energetic souls: opening the mail….Living in an advanced industrial civilization is a kind of near-conquest over the unexpected…Such efficiency is of course admirable. It does not, however, by its very nature afford scope to that perverse human trait, still not quite eliminated, which is pleased by the accidental. Thus to many tame citizens like me the morning mail functions as the voice of the unpredictable and keeps alive for a few minutes a day the keen sense of the unplanned and the unplannable."
That's the author quoting her father. Great stuff. I don't find the mail delivers the pleasingly accidental to our house, it's mostly desperately predictable. But the web does. RSS does. Radio still does. I like that.
Page 186
By the most conservative estimates, London had five hundred coffeehouses at the turn of the eighteenth century. (If New York City were similarly equipped today, it would have nearly eight thousand.) These weren’t merely places to drink the muddy liquid that one critic likened to “syrup of soot or essence of old shoes.” In the days when public libraries were none existent and journalism was in its embryonic stages, they were a vital center of news, gossip and education – “penny universities” whose main business, in the words of a 1657 newspaper ad, was PUBLICK INTERCOURSE.
London had a coffeehouse for everyone (as long as you were male). If you were a gambler, you went to White’s. If you were a physician, you went to Garraway’s or Child’s. If you were a businessman you went to Lloyd’s, which later evolved into the great insurance house. If you were a scientist, you went to the Grecian, where Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and Hans Sloane once staged a public dissection of a dolphin that had been caught in the Thames. If you were a journalist, you went to to Burton’s where Joseph Addison had set up a ‘Reader’s Letter-box' shaped liked a lion’s head: you would post submissions to The Guardian in its mouth.
As you can probably tell by now, I don't actually have that much to add about these excerpts. They're so useful and complete in themselves. But if you get the chance to get hold of At Large And At Small I encourage you to do so. It's particularly good on the pleasures and perils of collecting, and on coffee and on ice-cream.
discover and mention
Someone said to me the other day that what I did on here was discover* things and then mention them. That seems fair.
In that spirit, can I mention Shadowplay - 'David Cairns' wilfully eccentric film blog'? I haven't been so startled, amused and informed by a blog for ages. Really smart and enthused writing, splendidly off-centre and lots of YouTube treasure. This isn't film writing like you get in proper media. It's much, much better.
(Bearing in mind that 'discover' in this context is used in the same sense as in Columbus discovering America. ie discover = bumping into something loads of people already knew was there)
dark skies abuse
I walked past this building the other night - 90 Whitfield Street - it's called Qube. It's developed by Derwent London. It seemed rather flagrantly lit; all the lights on in an absolutely empty building. But there was a bloke on the corner with a tripod taking a picture so, wanting to think the best, I thought maybe they've just turned them on for him.
And then I walked past at about 3 o'clock this afternoon and all the lights were on then. During the day. With no-one, seemingly, there. Which is ironic since the website boasts that a "...presence detection system controls the lighting, both on the individual office floors and within the common parts, to ensure that lights are turned off when an area is not in use, to minimise the lighting energy consumption."
It would appear that there's an over-ride while the landlord's trying to flog the building. To give them the benefit of the doubt I guess there could have been someone in there looking around and that could have triggered all the lights. So I went back just now. 5.30 and it looked like this:
Maybe the presence detection system is detecting otherworldly presences.
I also noticed here that "Derwent London announces letting of 18,837 sq ft on 2nd floor to Aegis Media Ltd" and that if it's the same Aegis Media that's part of Aegis Group then their environmental policy says: "Energy efficiency, for example, is a key driver of our relocation and facilities policies."
Perhaps someone from Aegis could call someone at Derwent and ask them to turn the lights off on the second floor.
My first thought about all this is that there should be some way of naming and shaming companies who do this. Developers have long environmental policy papers but I can't find much discussion of this kind of issue. And it's not just empty buildings. But I always think naming and shaming is a bad thing (Let his who is wihout sin..etc) and I presume developers do it because it rather effectively draws attention to their properties. Which means they've got a lot of money vested in leaving the lights on. So they're not going to change easily.
So I wonder if there isn't more of a carrot to offer them as opposed to a stick to beat them with. Could you develop a low-energy alternative to just leaving all the lights on? Something that delivers lots of attention without much energy. That ought to be possible. And maybe it could be re-deployable from one development to another as a particular building fills up with tenants.
I dunno. Maybe that would be a good thing to think about before or at geekgreen.
UPDATE: I just walked past. 9pm on a Saturday. The only lights on were in the lobby. So that's something. And thanks for the comments below, helpful stuff.
tales from the long tail III
I've just been listening to Chris Anderson talk about his 'Free' idea on IT Conversations, specifically about books and how they might get free. I'm not sure I agree with him that an analogue book is necessarily better than a digital one, but I like his entrepreneurialism in using freeness to increase his sales. It's well worth a listen, and it's reminded me that I need to get on with doing something about eggbaconchipsandbeans. More soon.
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.
matter
Mr Tim Milne, who spoke about printing and things at Interesting is trying a little experiment - trying to turn direct mail into something you might actually want to receive. He's running a test programme at the moment and looking for volunteers for the pilot. (I think you have to be in the UK though.) All the details are here, have a look, it might be rather, well, interesting. You might have to be quick about it, the deadline is midnight tomorrow.