Russell Davies

Reading Around The Point

I feel like there's more to say about PowerPoint etc so I've been 'reading around' it - looking for new ways in. This podcast interview with Dave Gorman gave me an angle I'd not thought about.

(For those that don't know he uses PowerPoint a lot in his shows.)

He says one of the things he likes about it is the way he can use it to explore ideas that aren't already in people's heads.

He explains it like this: if he's doing a routine about, say, adverts as a regular stand-up he can only refer to things that he's confident the whole audience already knows about, their common set of references. It's probably going to be hard for him to come up with better jokes than one they've already made to themselves. But with PowerPoint he can show them some Belgian advert they've never seen and point out how it connects to stuff they already know. He can introduce new cultural references. And there's probably something more magical about creating a link between something an audience already knows and something they've never seen before.

That made me think about two things.

One - my favourite presentations introduce new ideas and connect them to ones I already know about. They have a wide range of references.

Two - I wonder if this is why clipart is so deadening. It's almost the opposite of introducing a new and illuminating idea. It's a picture of some money next to a fact about money, and it's the most cliched, simplistic and 'general' picture of money, almost by definition. It signals to the audience - really clearly - I haven't been arsed to think about this.

Harry Bertoia

This Why Computers

I've now listened to all four episodes of Tom Stuart's podcast Why Are Computers. They're very good. I don't understand most of them because they're very computers. Very computers. But I still listen because I like the way computer people write and talk (some computer people, not all computer people.)

There's a precision and care to the language I really enjoy.

There's a passage about Civil Service language in Joe Moran's book about shyness:

"When the Times journalist Michael McCarthy shadowed the Department of the Environment in the late 1980s, he found that civil servants were still using this esoteric code. Its key quality, he felt, was ‘dynamic understatement’. Words that might seem bland to the uninitiated became charged with meaning if you were gentlemanly enough to be able to decode them. Hence the highest accolade was to say that something was ‘rather impressive’, but woe betide the official whose contributions were regarded as ‘unhelpful’ or ‘unfortunate’ or, on rare and heinous occasions, ‘most unfortunate’. Even today, senior civil servants deploy a variant of this evasive vocabulary, with its suggestion that excessive keenness or candour is rather gauche and undignified. ‘I am reluctant to support’, ‘I haven’t formed a view yet’ and ‘I am happy to discuss’ all signify dissent, while ‘I’m open to this line of thinking’ means ‘yes’"

The computer talk I like is like that, but not as evil. It understates things, or, rather, takes care to state them with carefully delineated upper and lower boundaries. There's a suspicion of hyperbole and false promises.

I also enjoy the way that regular English words are redeployed as technical expressions, occasionally yielding such lovely ideas as a 'self-avoiding walk'. I go on those a lot.

And Tom is a really good interviewer. Just does enough to lead the conversation, but knows when to shut up. And he edits it well, keeping it interesting and rhythmic.

It all comes together in episode 4 which has all the tension and whathappensnextness of Serial but is about the self-enumerating pangram problem.

It's got more jeopardy than all ten seasons of Ice Road Truckers.

You should listen.

 

Pencilmas

Back to work tomorrow, after three weeks off. The same for Anne after longer. And for Arthur after ever longer than that. To a new school and all.

It feels like we're missing a festival in here somewhere, I know the school year still anachronistically mirrors the agricultural one but harvest festival is too late. We need some sort of Back To Work festival where we ceremonially burn broken deckchairs and tangled swingball sets and then do an hour or so of ritualistic pencil sharpening.

Useful aspects

of an increasingly meaningless word:

"Authenticity in the standard two categories: to evoke a usable past and to signify closeness to nature."

from

August 2016

August 2016 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Two weeks to go

Interesting is only two weeks away. We've just ticked over into 300 tickets sold, which is testament to the power of not promoting things at all.

It's still at the Conway Hall. It's still the evening of September 15th. 

Here's a rough guide to speakers and timing:

Doors open, milling around: 6.30pm

Announcements regarding toilets and fire exits: 6.50pm

First session: 7pm - 8pm

 

7.00    Abbey Kos - wine tasting - with actual wine

 

7.10    Rachel Coldicutt - 'A close reading of Julianna Margulies' hair and make-up in The Good Wife'

 

7.15    Lucy Blackwell - 'The story of my life through calendars'

 

7.20    Mags Blackwell -  'Do you listen?'

 

7.25    Rujuta Teredesai - 'Agile for Social Development'

 

7.30    Ella Fitzsimmons - Northern Europeans and Gnomes

 

7.35    Sharon Dale - 'What's Next?'

 

7.40    Nat Buckley - "Why flyknit is the most revolutionary thing since sliced bread"

 

7.45    Ade Adewunmi - 'The importance of watching TV'

 

7.50    Tom Whitwell - (Not sure yet)

 

Quick break: 8.00pm - 8.15pm

 

Second session: 8.15pm - 9.15pm

 

8.15    Kim Plowright - 'What it feels like to preserve memories and talk about dementia and death on social media, whilst still occasionally making people laugh (and how her Mum would’ve had her guts for garters if she'd realised what she was up to)'

 

8.25    Tim Dunn - The Sierra Leone National Railway Museum

 

8.30    Lisa Rajan - The story behind Tara Binns

 

8.35    Diego Maranan - Getting "people more aware of their bodies through clothing (and will try to convince people why body awareness matters in the first place"

 

8.40    Alice Bartlett - Tampons and (possibly) Tampon Club.

 

8.45    Craig Smith - his Dad's relatives, including the first person to get convicted for football hooliganism using video evidence and an actor who played one of Papa Lazaru's henchmen in League of Gentlemen and an Ewok in Return of the Jedi

 

8.50    Helen Castor - Digging up Kings

 

8.55    Lauren Brown - (Not sure yet)

 

9.00    Rebecca Kemp - Lipstick

 

9.05    Alby Reid - Polonium Poisoning

For prose is so humble

"For prose is so humble that it can go anywhere; no place is too low, too sordid, or too mean for it to enter. It is infinitely patient, too, humbly acquisitive. It can lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind."

Virginia Woolf: The Narrow Bridge of Art

Do Interesting

Dave wrote a nice Medium post that reminded me of a Do Workshop I did a while back. I'd forgotten about that. It was fun. I wonder if that would stand updating.

Radiophrenia

Science Story Magic - NewsNarrativeStream Q2 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

"Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – a two-week exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium."

It sounds rather excellent.

If you're in Glasgow you can listen on the actual radio, everywhere else you can listen on the web. And, excitingly if you do listen, occasionally you'll catch bits of ScienceStoryMagic all up in your airwaves. Sound Art, ladies and gentlemen, Sound Art.