Some people have taken to describing the Internet’s current state as “the attention economy”, where it’s the attention of the casual reader or browser that is the main earner. The logic states that where we spend our attention is where we will spend our money.
This accounts for the popularity and success of boingboing, digg, and reddit – websites where you see a curated collection of things that you might find interesting. The downside of this is that nearly everything on those websites isn’t something new, but rather something that is on the internet in an easily consumable form. The person version of this could be called attention philanthropy. It’s a form of information that you can slurp down whilst sitting in your easy chair, browsing the internet.
I’m not saying I’m browsing the internet from a chakra-enhancing spike, but it’s important to get out and do real stuff occasionally. Not everything should be something that comes in webpage-sized chunks.
This is one of the reasons I like magazines. Magazines are very much like those attention economy websites I mentioned early, except that they are not bound by the drive for new stuff that can be linked to, and that they can create new things. That’s why I’ve been subscribing to a few different magazines this year, looking out for new and interesting things – the sort of thing I won’t hear about on my favourite online hangouts.
One of those magazines was Aesthetica, a magazine based in the UK which covers a high-end cultural remit. I had some big hopes for Aesthetica, but I ended up cancelling by subscription to it today. I couldn’t work out why, but every issue that I picked up wasn’t that engaging. It just seemed to end up buried under a pile of other stuff. It wasn’t until the most recent issue’s article about a show at the MoMa that I realised why – because the author took the time to describe the concept of a readymade.
I’m not going to waste my time describing what a readymade is to you. You’re smart. You already know what a readymade is, and you’d just be bored by my description. But if you were writing an academic essay, you’d throw that description in for context. In the context of this article, however – in an expensive, high-end cultural magazine? It’s not fun to be dragged back to the classroom. Academic writing isn’t entertaining writing, as Paul Graham pointed out recently.
I’m still keeping my eye on the magazine market. I got the new issue of Coilhouse recently, which seems to have a lot of interesting things in it, and The Believer’s collected essays
The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this fever of writing; everyone must be an author; some out of vanity to acquire celebrity; others for the sake of lucre and gain.
Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)
I wrote this application for the Platform ’09 live art event back before I knew I was ill, but I was definitely suffering from all of the symptoms that would later see me hospitalised. I checked with a few people I knew, and found out that at least two of the people on the Platform judging panel had a sense of humour, but before I could send it off I found myself taken into hospital. I don’t know if I would have been given a place at the event, but the application, I think, stands by itself as a piece of writing.
Not only am I sure that I shouldn’t really be in Platform this year, I’m also sure that if you were to award/chose me to be in Platform you’d only be getting something along the lines of “Pete Hindle is nebbishly funny in a sarcastic manner about an element of geekdom.” This would suck; not that I’m not funny – far from it, the other day I made somebody laugh by putting on a jumper, and I’m pretty practised at making ladies laugh from the other side of the room by wiggling my eyebrows. But the reason that it would suck is that you’ve commissioned it before, I’ve done it already, and frankly, we’re all a little tired of stuff like that happening.
Hey, since Platform… whenever I did my last thing… nerds have taken off. In fact, you better be nerdy these days, since all the other social niches are pretty much played out, giving us this massive glut of homogenised stylish young people (girls: pretty, boys: dishevelled) who will no doubt be applying to do various things at this event. Hoo-fucking-rah; even the audiences at Platform are pretty darn hot these days, and considering that it’s a live art event (the epitome of niche) that’s saying something. I came to Platform last year with the pretty young girlfriend who broke my heart into a thousand pieces when she dumped me in Berlin, and even she was intimidated by some of the girls in the audience. Which is why I left early to go and drink mojitoes with her rather than stare at performance art.
Because, honestly, drinking with pretty girls is far more fun than performance art.
I was actually drinking with a few pretty girls recently when I made my nerd credentials quite clear. I said I was going to go home and watch Star Trek, at which point they laughed. I pointed out that I was wearing a red bodywarmer, and that I really was going home to watch Star Trek. I think they might have laughed some more at that point, but in a good way. I was, in fact, desperate to get home owing to the side effects of carrying around an ulcer in my stomach area for the past few months, such as not being able to drink and creating evil smelling farts out of my bottom. I’m presumably carrying around this ulcer owing to the stress of not working on my thesis, but I’m not entirely sure that having a useless fine art education and nowhere to display my “skillz” hasn’t also played a part in it.
So, if you really want an evil smelling, post-graduate educated sarcastic asshole who would rather be off drinking with pretty girls than making lame jokes about the puerile obsessions of a set of closeted individuals that value gadgetry and science fiction over personal contact and the real world, I’m your man. I do carry around in my head a few ideas that I might be able to turn into performances, so I thought I’d make a note of them in a list format in case you didn’t read any of the above.
• The Quaker Performance: everybody sits in a circle and we have a traditional Quaker meeting, where there is silence for an hour. It’ll be awesome, promise.
• Juggling: possibly with glasses. I can do a three ball cascade for around ten minutes.
• Dialogue: I talk with the people in the audience, making them the focus of the performance. People will laugh.
• The Fleetwood Mac Thing: I explain how I was in the unlikely position of having two girlfriends, and how I adopted the Fleetwood Mac album “Rumours” during that period.
• The Roman Talk: I heart Romans. Did you know that Caligula tried to make his favourite horse a consul of Rome? Romans are comedy gold.
• Full Lock: Somebody puts a car in the full lock position and does multiple donuts outside the venue. Again: awesome, with the added bonuses of illegality and danger of death.
Obviously, rather than fleshing out any of these ideas you’d be better employing another artist and giving them an opportunity that they’d enjoy. I’d probably find the whole prospect of standing in front of another audience gut-wrenchingly fear inducing and it’s not like I care enough to keep my CV updated anyway.
Above: Heaton Park, last weekend.
Like I said in my last post, I was back in Newcastle at the weekend. Luck had it that I came back for a scorchingly hot few days, and the local park became full of people. On one side of the park, there were families playing, a bowling green, and a coffee vendor. On the other side of the park, pictured above, there was a horde of students. These students clustered in groups of between two to thirty, and I felt far too intimidated to sit anywhere near all these young people being all hip. So I sat near the bowling green and read my book.
On Monday the weather changed, and the council sent some men to tidy up Heaton park. I was amused to see the leftovers:
Heaton Park is actually quite lovely, when you don’t have to kick half a dozen students out of the way to see the views. But I felt a little left out; I didn’t feel part of this world of young, lazing students, each posse blithely burning the shape of a disposable barbecue into the grass.
Heaton is a student area now, and for all that the council might talk about setting right “student ghettos”, they are ignoring the people like me who have lived on the edges of studenthood for a while. I chose to live in Heaton to get away from the reverse snobbery that other areas in the Tyne and Wear urban conurbation have; Sunderland might be a city, but it doesn’t have anything like Heaton. There’s no nice area with a choice of coffee shops in Gateshead’s Low Fell. There’s no late-night shopping strip in Fenham.
But that weekend, unable to get out of the house for fear of triggering my fatigue, I spent a lot of time looking out of the window. In the main, the people who live in Heaton have somewhere to go. Something to do. Last weekend, they might have been headed to the park to see their friends, but Monday meant that they were back at work, or back in the lecture hall. For me, it seemed like another day of an ongoing holiday.
Huck Scarry’s book “The World Around Us” has a brief introduction, where he talks about seeing the world from the window of his flat in Zurich. From my flat, I could see the inhabitants of Heaton pass by, sometimes headed out, sometimes headed home. The best seat in the flat is the one that lets you people-watch all the busy lives outside the window.
This final picture is of the watering of the bowling green. It was late on Sunday evening, in the magic hour, but still hot. The smell of the water jetting out over the grass was just right after such a long, dry day. We stood and watched the water droplets as they were whipped by the strong wind. For a little while, I’d got out past the window.
I picked this book up because it has an amazing cover by Don Maitz, which you can see here on his website. I love the look of older SF book covers, which put to shame the cleanly designed lines of more modern books.
Sadly, the plot wasn’t great – one of those confusing 1970s plots which are just a little bit too clever. It tells the story of two worlds, one always in daylight, one always shrouded in night, but unlike Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows (which uses the same day/night world divide) it’s not something I would pick up again. While it’s interesting to see the effect of the great countercultural boom on writers, sometimes (like Delauny’s Dhalgren) it makes for an unreadable mess.
I get unstuck when people say that they think the new Doctor Who is good. The TV program itself is a fairly mediocre production, which lurches from set piece to set piece with some spectacularly bad character development. I think people are so attached to it because it’s one of the few programs that are exist today that you are allowed to be a fan of – you’d look a bit silly in an Eastenders t-shirt, and there isn’t a lot of PM merchandising available at the BBC store. No matter how many letters I write asking for a “Team Eddie” badge set.
This new Doctor Who is guilty of one of the worst things about contemporary TV; it talks down to it’s audience. Whereas really old Who episodes had an educational feel about them, any educational content in new Who is about as didactic as you can get. This isn’t to say that I like old Who a huge amount either; it’s super-clunky and very often boring. What I like about Doctor Who are the things that stray off the accepted TV path.
In the 1960′s, in the first burst of Doctor Who’s existence, the program was very popular. This led to two Doctor Who movies staring Peter Cushing, because there was a common movement of British TV shows being turned into films around that time. The films don’t really follow the accepted story, but all the right elements are there, and I find them amazingly fun to watch.
After the cancellation of the show in the late eighties, the novelisations continued. As there were no new adventures of Doctor Who, writers were allowed to make up their own adventures for the character, which eventually gave birth to one of my favourite ideas in SF: Faction Paradox, an evil time-travelling organisation, who lived in a dimension split off from ours in the spare days caused by the shift to the Gregorian Calendar… complicated? You bet. This is one of those times that even reading the wiki page won’t give you a full rundown.
But that’s what this new Who won’t have: the guts to make things complicated. It doesn’t have the background of Star Trek, or the building of mythology that we saw within Buffy… instead, every episode has a few cursory nods to the in-show history before producing this weeks nifty explosion.
I had Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my iPhone for about 72 hours before I deleted it.
GTA:CW is supposed to be one of the best games out there for the iPhone. It offers an immersive world, with full sandbox features, and it’s a continuation of one of the best game franchises around. So why is it so terrible on the iPhone? It’s not a straight port of it’s earlier incarnation on the Nintendo DS, but a well-crafted rejigging of the game for the iPhone’s particular aesthetic.
What it fails to do is to take into account the situation it will be played in. The most successful iPhone games offer the chance to step out of whatever mode you are in (say “waiting for the bus” mode) and indulge in some frantic button-bashing. Nobody can resist the simple charms of Canabalt (also available online as a free flash game), but GTA:CW is a far more complex affair. And, as a more complex affair, it suffers from needing more complex controls.
It’s been mentioned in other reviews that GTA on the iPhone suffers from control issues. This is true. It’s almost impossible to control the game “in the heat of the moment”, and I struggled to drive cars around corners when not being chased by the police. It was like playing whilst wearing gloves, and led to a lot of aggravation when trying to complete some of the missions.
This game cost me six pounds, and unlike nearly every other game I’ve brought (on any platform) I realised it was a lemon. I think what really did it was the inclusion of mini-games, something I’ve always found annoying. Why would I want to break the flow of one activity I’ve committed to to play another, smaller game? This was an essential flaw in all of the later Final Fantasy games following FF7 – if I wanted to play cards, I’d play a card game. Quit wasting my time. Similarly, if I want to buy molotov cocktails, I will resent any time spent playing the “make molotov cocktails” game. Particularly the little stroking motion required to stuff the rag into the bottleneck.
This is a game that demands attention, but this is the wrong format for that. iPhone games are about distraction, not immersion, and GTA:CW requires you to log in some long hours, focusing on a (simulated) life of crime. If it had an adequate control system, allowing you to rampage across the city (as the earlier console versions did) then I could forgive it and utilise it as a cathartic release. But it doesn’t, and I can’t.
GTA Chinatown Wars might be the iPhone game most likely to appeal to hardcore gamers. For everybody else, it’s a bad introduction to what gaming can be.
Slint are a seminal alternate guitar-rock band from the 1990s. I first came across them on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s Kids, which was one of those albums which promised that the film would be a-fucking-mazing. Instead it was a bit of a bummer, but the majesty of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain”…
Steph Swainston’s Fourlands is the setting for her novels, which are part of the New Weird, an extension to the fantasy genre that allows authors to escape the sword-and-sorcery crap that they’ve been stuck with by certain best-selling
Swainston’s books are set in a world ruled by immortals, who fight an endless war against giant insects. There is no orcish horde to defeat, but instead an unknowable enemy who seems to only operate by instinct – something we can all understand, especially if you’ve ever found a cockroach in your kitchen. Familiarity doesn’t end there though, as despite living in a feudal world, her characters wear jeans and t-shirts, know what serial numbers are, and are generally as badly behaved as us in the modern world.
Slint’s work came at a time when Grunge defined what rock was, but they weren’t working alone. Shellac and Helmet released albums around the same time, opening up rock music to a wider range of textures than the pop-orientated sounds that were prevalent within Grunge. The influence that these bands had opened up the sound of rock music in a post-modern sense, meaning that not only could things be heavier but that they could also sound different.
The New Weird is a similar movement in fantasy writing. Swainston’s work, and that of others who accept the genre, are swimming against the idea of fantasy as ‘epic’, or the introduction of vampire mythology into the humdrum present day (such as the Sookie Stackhouse series). It’s a reinvention that enlivens a creative discipline, and while both Slint and Swainston share a common theme of narrative and flawed characters, the best link between them is to see how revolutionary they are.
