THE DISCOURSE BLOG

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value" - Arthur C Clarke

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Ornithology

Every now and then, something so extraordinary hits you that it upends your version of the world. ‘Bird List Song’ by Michael Nyman has done this.

Recently played on Late Junction, as part of a Cultures + Myths special, this song did not simply catch attention, project a beat or an earworm; it was so sonically intense that, upon its beginning bars, I went immediately to turn up the volume. When later looking to play it again on Youtube, I came across the above video. This song is a creative masterpiece, a list of bird names; so imagine the sheer joy of discovering that someone out there had set images to the words and music. My partner says she’s never seen something that she’s wished she’d made quite as much as this. I’m compelled to agree. My competitive spirit urges me to create a video all of my own, with animated dancing birds of paradise and other exoticism, just to attempt to hold a candle to this majesty. I am overwhelmed. This blog has lain dormant for 3 years, though this birdsong signals that it is time to emerge from hibernation. This is The Discourse Blog’s theme song.

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An art movement for the future.

This could almost be a real scene. It is well composed, the movement of the running soldier carrying his colleague seems natural; the rear leg is so well positioned, and the front leg seems to be holding their weight. The mouth of the shooting soldier opens in rage or fear, as he fires at unseen assailants. Courage under fire.

There are things which seem uncanny, though. Like the miniatures of Ben Hur, where the water behaves strangely due to scale, this mud seems rather too large for the composition. The fabric seems like an overly-large weave. The hand holding the gun doesn’t seem quite.. right. That’s because it’s a model; I beautifully composed and photographed reproduction.

The soldier work is by Mark Hogancamp. Hogancamp was severely beaten by a bunch of thugs in 2000 which resulted in an absolute loss of memory; his post-recovery therapy abruptly ended, and he turned to creating the world of Marwencol to give his life structure. These exquisite miniatures reminded me of the prolific and astonishing Slinkachu, a street artist whose work (above) depicts miniature worlds using live creatures such as snails, bees and ants, intermixed with small architectural figures. Humour and microcosms of social anthropology and cultural history seem to be the defining feature. 

This is an image from Banksy’s Dismaland website. A miniature again, this one making no attempt to disguise its material depiction. It is a rather bad rendition of a theme park. Which serves as the perfect metaphor for the distinctly underwhelming disappointments (intentional, of course) of Banksy’s theme park. Which also featured the work of Jimmy Cauty, formerly of KLF.

Below, of course, is Hell (2000), by Jake and Dinos Chapman. The Angry Young Men of the Young British Art movement of the 1990s, influenced by Goya’s Disasters of War series, the Chapman brothers employed thousands of scale model skeletons and other dark images of death and mutilation to create a neo-Renaissance vision of the underworld. 

The transformation of scale models into bona fide artwork is one that seems to have emerged in the past 20 years. Have Airfix models, collectibles, and the photographing of incredibly detailed models for film and televisual visual effects cumulatively created an admiration amongst the fetishisers of craft? The mass, onerous task of forming, constructing and painting a masterpiece such as Hell defies belief. The spectator loves detail and cleverness. We have left realism in the sense of Renaissance portraiture, Turner-esque landscapes and Chuck Close’s hyper-realism in the past. What remains for fine art? What even is fine art anymore?

A good friend, Ben Long, recently exhibited work at Dismaland. Ben has strong opinions about the theoretical positioning of art; he sees it (and I am paraphrasing) as a vernacular medium, one that should capture the populist imagination and not be some chin-stroking, impenetrable abstraction. He trained as a graphic designer, and brings elements of that training to his work; idea-led inquiry followed by an iterative crafting of his message. And in conversation last week, he said that Dismaland, and Banksy as its author, are the future of fine art markets. If the YBA movement of the 1990s was a ‘movement’ of art, then ‘street art’ is the one that surely follows. Vernacular, based on visual puns and easily-grasped meanings, Banksy’s Dismaland was a series of vignettes whose viewings required little in the way of reflection or interrogation on a semiotic level, and rewarded the viewer’s delight in the craft and utter mistanthropy of the event. It was a big joke, at the expense of ... art?

Gombrich famously said there is no art with a capital ‘a’, only artists. Street art is one of those terms that developed out of the work being made and exhibited, first for free, on walls and bridges, and then increasingly in galleries and museums. It is, indeed, the art movement of our time. Amongst all the other ones. I do not love an ungraspable meaning, and don’t wish to join all the other chin-strokers in galleries and museums. And I do love the craft. I find it easier to consider the construction of a Dan Flavin piece, or a Martin Creed engine. Of course, they are not ‘street artists. But like so many fine artists, their work rests on that presentation, seamless construction. The meanings are deep and dependant on the viewer. I always feel like street art doesn’t share its deconstruction; it already seems to have been done. Like, perhaps, design, the message is so clear and simple that it defies further analysis. Like a joke, or a pun, the nuance is sacrificed for a quick laugh. Is that the hallmark of the movement? Art has always been a paradox of selfishness on the part of the artist, and benevolent in the breadth of its shared viewing. Street Art seems to be the perfect medium for our snarky, post-digital selves.

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Hydro foil.

Ah, coke.

You were having such a good year. Earlier in 2015, I listened to This American Life’s fascinating exploration of Coke’s original secret recipe. It’s a brilliant exploration of what makes Coke Coke, or what makes anything anything. Says the programme’s inimitable presenter;

“...the ingredients to Coke's supposedly super-secret formula can be figured out without much trouble by anyone who wants to, that seems incontrovertibly true.”

Without spoiling the programme for anyone who listens, it is Coke’s original recipe, easily discovered in the archive, but its taste isn’t quite like today’s Coke. The history of Coca Cola is a road map of 20th century consumerism, brand strategy and mass marketeering. It’s linked inextricably to sporting events, music, advertising, product placement, fat children, McDonalds, and my own stupefying nostalgia for hanging out on dilapidated bowling greens on a BMX. The finale of the intricately slow-burning series Mad Men actually culminated in the ‘birth’ of modern advertising... / / SPOILER ALERT HERE / /...not only giving Coke’s masterpiece “I’d like to teach the world to sing” some renewed airtime (and showing how the so-called innocence of the early 1970s could, even then, be manipulated to shift product), but connecting the dark genius of the series’ protagonist, Don Draper, to the modern era. What sticks out the most for me is the small, nearly-imperceptible ‘bing’ moment that Draper demonstrates through his meditative smile. He’s got it all figured out.

Coke’s recent blunder came with their association with EHI. Well, I say association; it’s more a case of them owning it. Coca Cola funded a study at the ‘European Health Institute’ that found, strangely enough, a strong link between the consumption of soft drinks and increased sporting performance. Led by a Professor Ron Maughan, of Loughborough University (and one of the UK’s premier sporting universities..), the EHI published its results at the beginning of October. And of course, Coke has previous form for this kind of thing; they own ‘The Beverage Institute’ which is, at least, proud to show its patron’s logo atop its homepage. Professor Maughan is alleged to have received £1m for his work as a consultant for Coca Cola. Until recently, his name carried a great deal of weight in an advisory capacity for other sports organisations.

So, do Coke, and similar soft drinks, actually aid re-hydration during sports activities? Coke actually launched a campaign only months after the ‘results’ were found, despite a questionable methodology in their scientific basis.

"There is already much confusion over the role of sports drinks, and for the majority of people participating in exercise and sporting activities water is all that is needed for effective hydration," say the Natural Hydration Council in relation to the banning of this Lucozade ad from 2014.

From a design point of view, the hierarchy of this ad is a wonderful distortion of the information, or lack thereof. That the headline uses a clear disinction between two colours should set some alarm bells ringing... initially, we read that “Lucozade Sport hydrates and fuels you” which, of course, it does. Water = hydration. Sugar = fuel. But then, as your eyes adjust to the dominant, but somehow recessive blue that fills the page, you see the extra, killer line “.. better than water”. It almost stands alone. The use of the hastag “I believe”, a confrontational Gareth Bale (not, I don’t think, a scientist) and the wonderful "scientifically proven” cheekily dropped in the bottom right corner all contributes to this composition. Even more than that, the styling of the ad borrows heavily from pseudo-scientific graphic language. Blueprint colourway, strong white diagrammatic linear and isotypes, mathematical symbols. It looks like science so it must be science, right?

Wrong. Of Coke’s EHI study, an independent hydration specialist explained that you had five times more chance of linking Coke’s hydrational benefits in one of EHI’s studies than you did if you were to read an independent study.

Science, like sex, sells. It doesn’t have to be real, it doesn’t need to be well-proven, even; if you throw enough money at the research, the research comes out in your favour. Especially if you are already biased so so heavily toward the answers you want. We call this deductive reasoning. Well, we could call it that; I call it bollocks.

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Honest Abe.

Last week, I brought a Lego figure of Abraham Lincoln into college. It was the first day of the students’ Field Of Study seminars. They had been asked to bring in an object.

Recently, I have been working on a paper that features object-based learning as a learning and teaching methodology. It taps into ideas explored elsewhere, not least those of museums’ and galleries’ schemes to encourage learning within institutions. Our intention was to tie objects into a wider semiotic discussion; to encourage the belief that all objects are interactive. The students brought in something that, to them, represented the core of their Field Of Study.

I brought in Abe. I’d armed him with a musket.

Only two days before than, this had happened. It’s perhaps an easy connection to make. However, my intention certainly wasn’t to emphasise the ease with which Americans can own and fire a weapon, nor was it the regularity of such events as the school shooting in Oregon. Lincoln wasn’t at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the ‘right to bear arms’ had existed long before he was born. He certainly represents an idealised version of the United States, and though that encompasses the ownership of firearms (and the democratic right to do so) I was less concerned with that as I was a representation of civilised ideology.

He is, then, best described as a contradiction. This week, the Pentagon has offered to make financial reparations for its recent attack on a hospital in Kunduz. Obama’s hand-wringing, and truly sincere speech following the school shooting is somehow avoided in the offering of compensation to Medecin Sans Frontieres. “Somehow,” he said of the shooting, “this has become routine”.

So, does Abraham somehow represent America’s hypocrisy, or its ruthless foreign policy? Yes. In some ways. Lincoln was, after all, a wartime president. Obama has been throughout. Bush was, from about 2001 onwards. America has committed its military to overseas engagements almost constantly since the 1940s. The eagle carries arrows but faces the olive branch.

Of course, the real interest I had in Abraham Lincoln’s Lego facsimile is in its post-modern vernacular. Lego is a system, defined by its customisations, its structuralist representations, its ability to render any and every event imaginable. Lego is a toy. A modular toy, of course, and one beautifully designed and manufactured. Lego is wonderful. I make no secret of that fact. Its closest rival in Europe is Playmobil, currently engaged in something of a PR faux-pas thanks to a consumer’s recent tweet featuring this chap:

It’s a conundrum. Ill-advised, certainly, but racist? Playmobil hasn’t taken liberties with history exactly; its defence rests on the supposed realism that rendering one of its figures with what can only be called a ‘slave-collar’. It makes it clear that the character is a ‘freed-slave’, not a captive of the otherwise white pirates. Racist times, then, but these are open-minded pirates. Well, open-minded simulacra at any rate. See, Baudrillard argued that representations of reality weren’t in fact representations, but a new hyper-reality. Abraham Lincoln in the Lego universe isn’t the president who signed the emanicpation proclamation.  He’s just an honest, gruff, slightly funky simulacrum. He’s anything you want him to be. He has a new story, becomes something entirely apart from that on which he is based. Ex-slave Pirate is perhaps the same thing; this is made more apparent when Playmobil imbue him with a meta-history to justify his outfit, which is of course explained more plainly by an error in the design department. As someone who has looked up reference for pirates in the past, such images as the emancipated slave are a feature.

I feel for Playmobil. This is an understandable problem, but I really wish it wasn’t. They are apologising for their lack of authorship, in a way. Meanings are created in the audience. And in this case, the audience wasn’t happy.

Lego Abraham represents my continuing fascination with the contradictions inherent to visual cultures. He represents my understanding of ideologies transferred across items of popular culture, and my belief that culture truly eats itself. He is part of an endless cycle of give-and-take. He can be linked to any of the tangible interests I have in the visual arts, mythology, American- and World-history, politics, gun law and cowboy movies. He is a totem. And the world is built on how we read a totem.

[thediscourseblog]

Once-wasness.

Such is the beauty of destruction; this is a map of the firebombing of Hiroshima. I can’t recall where I found it, who drew it (though the jpeg code came with a US- letter designation, suggesting the American government might have mapped their own destruction) or when; simply, that it is one of those beautiful pieces of info design that maps the horrific. I love the terminology too; built-upness predates the much more modern ‘urban district’ et al. It only takes seconds to reduce the built-up to the once-was.

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Man On Fire | Edward Sharpe + The Magnetic Zeros | 2012 | Brady Corbet

This video has been around for a few years now. 

I’ve read disseminations of Wes Anderson’s style in the past (and this is by no means a Wes Anderson video) which argue for and indeed against his ‘head-on’ style. About Anderson, the website Screenrant says

“The man simply cannot resist the draw of reciprocal arrangement of props and characters in front of his camera.”

Sergio Leone’s masterful Once Upon A Time In The West is well-loved for innumerable reasons. To an extent, Leone pioneered the way the viewer is introduced (and re-introduced) to characters throughout the film through operatic and compositional signatures.. Charles Bronson often arrives into the shot in profile, moving into the frame from off-screen. It is a trick of mise-en-scene that the subject matter can enter from the void.

Anderson has an almost photographic style - he jump-cuts to the character(s). Suddenly, our view is filled with something, or someone new. The video for Man on Fire seems to borrow Anderson’s penchant for quick-cut introductions, and wide shots of Brueghel-esque activity. Somehow, the early shots seem redolent of Rushmore’s opening introduction to Max Fischer’s extra-curricular clubs. The labels, too, reflect something of Anderson’s desire to use witty verbal exposition. Brady Corbet, the director, seems to purposely avoid Futura; upper case Helvetica, jet black and centred, is just as elegant.

The song itself isn’t exactly a dance tune, but it matches the action. The editing is beautiful and rhythmic, and the tracking shot of the lead dancer from the NY Ballet walking into an LA alleyway to find her entire troupe simply waiting for a cue is quietly wonderful. I am somewhat biased - I love Edward Sharpe, I love the majesty and sentiment of this song, and I love how it shows human beings doing things they love with everyday grace and pleasure. But it never seems manipulative or false.. it is a simple, glorious combination of people and uplift.

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Solar eglitch.

A old friend from college, Helen Hendy, posted this photograph on Facebook. It is yesterday’s solar eclipse; somehow, perhaps in the upload, it glitched, and the result is this incredible image. On a day when streams of images were uploaded to social media and newsfeeds of this ‘once-in-a-generation’ type event, this stood out as my favourite. It’s like the eclipse managed to get inside the camera and suck the light out of the exposure. Booyah.

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Directed and animated by Paul Robertson and Ivan Dixon

What I like the most is how they wanted to go nuts at the end. It's like they just couldn't help themselves.

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A nice poster.

The film's probably crazier than a box of frogs, but the poster's nice. Using some Renaissance-influenced illustration, references to Christianity, Paganism and nature, a bit of astronomy and some elegant, centred typography and placing this on an off-white background.. nice. Italics for pronouns, job specs and 'of'.. nice. This is a real anti-Hollywood poster.. the hierarchy is all about compositional elements, and less about actors and directors. There are no stars in the illustration (except for our own sun amirite..), just strange, philosophical mysteries. Malick doesn't play ball with studios, and this smacks of a rebellious uninterest in what people think he should do. It's pure class. It's old school.

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Freeze punks.

Imagine my pleasure whilst perusing Amazon Prime to find Liam and Denzel so focused on shooting the same off-screen goon. Who said there was too much violence in society these days? Not me.

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All watched over by bitter lake machines during a powerful century of nightmares.

In 2002, when Century of the Self premiered on BBC Two, Adam Curtis had already made over a dozen documentaries. But it seems like the one that first clicked into place; that combination of a suggestive, borderline hypnotic narrative, stock footage (a collageumentary, as this clip would have it, a short by Ben Woodham) and short, meandering clips of music from the cooler end of the spectrum. In 2002, coming to the end of my art degree, thinking myself a nascent genius and susceptible to anything that would ostensibly support that position, I fell for Century. If only every documentary were like this.

Woodham's parody came to my attention yesterday as I looked for back-up in my reaction to Curtis's latest, Bitter Lake. Like Century, Power of Nightmares and All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, Curtis's film examines the links between politics, ideologies and the seemingly subtle decisions and happenchance that proves to have immense, all-consuming effects on swathes of humankind. And like his earlier The Trap, he shines most focus on the Arab world, and various incursions and wars into and in Afghanistan.

Watching Curtis is to be seduced. This is the medium of television at its most refined; he uses slab upon slab of metaphor; nuanced language, poetic subtitles; images of abject horror rendered so everyday as to almost pass by before you realise that he has stopped the music, stopped the narrative, and is allowing you to watch as a car of machine-gun-gripping insurgents gun down passers-by in a street. A bullet whips through a body and, like Forrest Gump, it looks as if something has upped and bitten the victim. The camera pans to follow the car. When it returns, the 'bitten man' lies in a pool of blood, motionless.

Power is a dangerous thing. Curtis's films (and I think it makes more sense to call them films, even art films, than it does a documentary) are powerful pieces of factual fiction. Or fictional fact. I frequently use the word syllogism to explain to students how the conclusion they have drawn, whilst being from several true sources of primary or secondary research, might not necessarily hold the same amount of truth when put together. So goes Curtis. He is, of course, an exceptionally clever man, who can construct such persuasive narratives around events that are tenuously tacked together across time and draw you into hours of footage. Fascinated, you let this mind-poetry absorb you. But like poetry, it is much harder to recall than you would think, in the moment, as it feels so vivid and penetrative that it seems you would never forget. I tried to explain All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace to students once. I even showed it during a lecture, in full. It isn't educational. It's a kind of propaganda; not liberal or conservative, not politically-minded; it seems to be thought-tinkering. It doesn't change my mind, exactly, but it is interesting to see it compared to Dylan Avery's Loose Change in this article. Loose Change seems to be the most poorly-predicated 'documentary' ever made; it peddles mistruth and syllogism and has no real conclusion to make other than "isn't this interesting..." and "don't believe everything the Government tells you...". As Facebook increasingly becomes a place for conspiracy theories, anti-political rants and people simply 'telling it like it is' (and as young people move away from what has become a boring dinner party rant about nothing), this idea of 'turning the official narrative on its head' does hold water.. after all, we probably shouldn't trust everything we are told by anyone. 

This makes Curtis valid. I think I was mistaken to initially take what Curtis said as solid fact; it is not intended to be seen as such. It is not news, nor is it rigorously-presented documentary. But then, is there such a thing? Whilst looking at an exhibition of documentary photography at college this week, I realised that the work does something very similar to Curtis; it "poses questions about the nature of truth as it manifests itself in current [photographic] practice". It could be any form of practice. Truth, in any image, is something to be wanted and never found in its fullest.

[thediscourseblog]

Wayback when.

I was seventeen when the word 'internet' first became a regular part of my vocabulary. That was 1997, and of course, the word had existed for quite some time by then. I was still at FE college, and it was mainly used as shorthand for some form of nerdiness. Most of the people that used the internet did so to chat, primarily, to Americans. On Netscape. There to discuss the emergence of a neo-Nirvana, conspiracy theories, to simply do that which other human beings do; to socialise. Except to do so in the nethersphere. My absolute scorn of the internet was cosily adjacent to my absolute disregard and absolute fear of it. It sounded ridiculous, and it also seemed technically unsuperior to reading. And it also seemed a little complicated.

In 1998 I started a Hotmail account. I had to ask around my college library to find out how to do this. Google was not yet a thing; Yahoo was the principal search engine, indeed, it was the 'face of the internet' as Reddit now attempts to be. Even in 1998, as I acknowledged that this would probably be a 'thing', I knew relatively little. I thought it would become an addition to the current range of commuincation tools. SMS was still relatively new to society, mobile phones still expensive to buy and maintain, and the internet a thing only really useful for small transactions of information; bytes, rather than megabytes. Gigabytes of information were untenable and almost unbelievable. Those days seem historic, as distant as Apollo missions might seem to my parents. It is only seventeen years ago -  half my lifetime in fact -  and yet its prevalence is as awe-inspiring as it is - still - terrifying.

This article in the New Yorker is about The Wayback Machine, a gloriously-named archive for deleted websites, webpages, scraps of HTML and forgotten tweets.  Here's what it has to say about the footnote:

"...a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?"

It points out that the obsolescence of web material is inevitable; that sites and ideas are deleted and lost as fast as they are created. It tells us that the web is ephemeral, that records of all kinds of deeds and statements are fragile and must be catalogued for good or evil. We believe that this is a stable place, this internet, and it is not.

Colin Dickey, in Aeon magazine, reports on the way that technology makes the population complacent, removed from the fear of things going wrong. He cites the Western world's increasing suspicion of immunisation, the over-reliance on antibiotics and belief that we are cured of historic disease as a result of technological advancement; this is perhaps best encapsulated by his initial anecdote about a sailboat - then, the fastest ever built - that inadvertently brought smallpox to Hawaii in the 19th Century. This, he points out, wouldn't have happened had a slower ship arrived; the disease wouldn't have survived the longer journey. It eventually killed a fifth of the population.

The same could be said of the internet, albeit in a less fatal sense. It is stripping away our expectations that it might ever not exist and, as Dickey points out, could be utterly destroyed by one good anti-magnetic solar flare. The western world, and increasingly larger portions of the rest of the planet, would simply stop working. It would - could - be apocalyptic. Not zombies, not nuclear fallout, tsunamis or asteroids: magnetic interference. Everyone would be healthy and essentially the same, except all the things they know would not work. Except bicycles. And, I think, Scotland would still work. So people who like riding bicycles in Scotland would be alright... everyone else though... what would you even do in the evenings?

[thediscourseblog]

Tates.

(Diagram from here, I think)

- I've recently been reading about twelve different things at once. Don't worry. I do this a lot. I read through the whole YCN and D+AD brief packs, I read Longform articles one after the other, I dip in and out of the LRB and start Other People's Books. As well as that, I never really stop reading Wikipedia articles and the newspapers. And Metro, if I am on public transport. Last night, I completed a chapter on the ancient kingdoms, duchy and imperial circle of Burgundy in Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies.

"What once seemed impregnable vanishes or crumbles. Kingdoms, principalities and Republics are never as secure as their leaders or their people would like to think that they are" says Nicholas Lezard in a Guardian review.

This is one of those books I can't help but love, despite its love of complexity (or of trying to untangle complexity, which is even more complex than the original complications). Toward the end of the chapter, Davies points out that most, if not all historians, misrepresent the sheer scale and complexity of the multiple-kingdoms (etc) of Burgundy; over its 600-year (give or take) it went through so many changes both geographical and genealogical that it's difficult to get a handle on anything. So much, so history, amiright?

Davies laments, but similarly praises, the useful/uselessness of dictionaries, encyclopedias and, dur-dur-DURR, Wikipedia. Wikipedia, the historian suggests, is not the worst offender - its data is not fixed into an edition. Its editablity means that someone like me, who might observe a mistake based on Davies' book's 'correct' assertions, can get involved, change it until it's a little bit more correct, and then gradually, like history itself, the truth emerges. Or a truth a little closer to the real truth. Or the truth we need now.

I went from this chapter on the Burgundians to an article on Rap Genius. Or Genius, as it is now called, haivng diversified. I have no idea whatsoever how this website has to date escaped my attention. As a millenial, Generation Z data-hound, a digital tourist, obsessed with, but not (entirely) reliant on, the internet, I have found my Ark.

The diagram above describes it well. The article explains its notion and inception better than anything. Annotation, ot 'tating as it might painfully become known, is the name of the game. It seems so dastardly simple; why has this not occurred earlier? After all, this is what ever school textbook looks like. It's what notes from conferences, or exhibition catalogues, look like. Margins, I tell design students, are sacred spaces. I do not go on to say that it is where stupid ideas will find themselves scrawled in biro. Or weird thumbnails. Or phone numbers.

It's far too soon to know if Genius will 'annotate the world'. I kinda doubt it will. In 2009, Wikipedia was Genius. Wikipedia and cockroaches are all that will survive the apocalypse, such is its sheer usefulessness. What I have deduced, from cursory investigations, is that Genius is a time-filler. I would explore this without scrutiny (since it is scrutinous on my behalf) and let its knowledge do what it likes. It's a sort of 'extra' knowledge. Peripheral. Dinner Party Facts.

If someone wants to annotate a history of the Burgundies, though..

[thediscourseblog]

“I probably listened to nothing else. He made me feel like life was an endless Saturday night.”

The Guardian | Vinyl's difficult comeback | 2014

A very clever friend from my MA once made a film called "I told you the future was going to be retro" while another, from those same mid-2000s would say that "there's no stalgia like old stalgia." Both of which resonated in my young head, both of which were intelligent, predicated on years of similar thinking, both of which have not failed to be true.

This post's title comes from Badly Drawn Boy's introduction of Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen's paean to the wild boys and girls of the industrial American dream, and the way life just gives in to being grown up. The endless song and poem cycle of embattled youth, the gradual influx of mistakes and decisions, and the realisation that you are no longer the salad of youth. It might be that I am about to buy my first house, it might be that I have suddenly taken a real job, but the idea of a forgotten youth prevails. Its fingers are on the edge of the cliff, grip slipping. To what do we reach in such times?

It's purely coincidence that this, and the post-before-last, relate to vinyl. But it is not coincidence, is it? Nothing is. I gave a lecture a few weeks ago to a group of foundation students. I was talking about my practice as an illustrator, and how I had stumbled/mangled/clambered/astutely judged my way through each aspect of my career in my late 20s and early 30s to a position of relative happiness and success. But what is remarkable is that the journey, no glorious road when you are on it, suddenly seems so mythical. Springsteen is one of many artists from the 70s and 80s (but perhaps the most fervent) who plugged that gap, of lost youth and foolish reminscence. And as an artist, his medium, that of vinyl, has become the signifier of youth captured; an impossible conceit to which many, rightly, cling. Both historic and seemingly temporary, the vinyl record is a time machine.

The article I read this morning (link above) denotes this process of time travel. It talks of gatherings of aficionados listening to these old records, and being utterly tranfixed on the clarity of sound; it's a phone call to the past. Except, not a phone call; a conversation. If believers are to be believed, analogue is the future. It is not the new digital, nor is digital the old analogue; it is pervasive because it is better. This is akin to every technophobic rant, every luddite's dream; technology cannot solve anything, really. Or, should we say, new technology cannot.

I recently read this article on technology's golden age. It tells us how we haven't really progressed in 43 years; simply, we have accepted and nuanced tech from the mid 20th century, but not supplanted it with new concepts. We look back, rely on the foundations laid decades ago, and aren't moving forward.

So there must be a line, someplace. We want to be renaissance people, looking at the majesty of past civilisations, but we need to move forward from those methods, with idealism intact. Or, we simply need to go back to things that worked perfectly and didn't need improving. Or, a record just sounds good because I used to like records. Bruce's Thunder Road, printed in Japan, is currently going for £800 ($1500) on eBay. That's not a tall price to be young again, is it?

[thediscourseblog]

Lateral pleasures.

This Facebook pop-up for TFL is a pleasure. It occupies a square format without feeling overpowering. The guitar is cream and white, the background a neutral blue-grey. Its composition, with the cable slightly off-centre, is positioned just perfectly. The point is almost immediate, the idea, subtle but quickly understood. Like good TFL ads, it plays with a knowingness in the audience. They know it's the Piccadilly Line, though at a glance, non-Londoners might not. One could debate the necessity of the tube stations' notches on the cable, and there is a small part of me that wonders if the guitar itself could have been used for something as well. Those dials! Couldn't they have been used in some way? Could the lateral thinking have been taken a touch further..?

[thediscourseblog]

Vinyl turnaround.

I really like this website. It is exemplary of the recent(ish) phenomenon for cycling and all things cyclist. This website seems to have certified itself as the spokesman (pun firmly intended) for a generation of men and women who grew up in the wild backwater, or, if they didn't actually grow up there, they certainly took out their mountain bikes in the early 1990s and headed for the backwater. It uses the word 'rad', which is itself a signifier of surf-dude friendly lingo, of supreme skill, speed, of broken clavicles and hi-tops. It is marketed squarely at the Californian-layabout-grown-up. Its point-of-difference is something which isn't seeming all that different, just nowadays, especially not amongst the cycling fraternity.

And today, it just so happened that I noticed it was merchandising the turntable grip. And better still, that it had sold out. We truly live in post-postmodern times. We eke out an individualism based on our wild nostalgia, our remembrance of things past. And the constant stream of items, of small, good value items that somehow enhance our place in this ever-increasingly digital backwater, whilst distancing ourselves firmly outside its ever-reaching grasp, keep us sane. I don't do vinyl. But if I did, then I would definitely want one.

[thediscourseblog]

The noun becomes a verb

GoPro: Pelican Learns To Fly | 2014

It's been a couple of months since Danny Macaskill's Playboy Mansion video was released. Yesterday, I saw that his latest promo shows a return to the form for which I had hoped : That of the skilled adventurer. Diametrically opposed to the mean-spirited false neighbourhood of Hef's place, Macaskill returns to Skye, his home. Ludicrously garbed in sponsorship, he initially seems out of place, but such is life - the man is making money, and indeed, if I was to enter into the marketplace of trials MTB, then I might look into those companies' products. I like sponsorship. As a cyclist, I would use these products. They must be good, right?

Several years ago, my friends and I rode the length of Britain, which is something that everyone does at some point or other, it seems. It is a wonderful thing to do, you engage with the many facets of the island, blah blah blah. Pete, the leader of this expedition, is a meticulous planner and thinker. He works in design and advertising, and at the time was a somewhat early-adopter of the GoPro phenomenon. The film he made, as we covered the 900 or so miles, was very... interesting. To us. It shot a single frame, every 10 seconds, over the 12 days of riding. Each of those frames was edited into a 4 minute promo, and the result is certainly more interesting than the raw footage.

The GoPro is something of a journal, mixed with the point-of-view of a human eye. But it isn't just that. It is, like so many media, the dare to do better; to excel, to demonstrate, to illustrate, to defy death and gravity. It has become the device that captures the exceptional, as well as the mundane. People can buy these devices, affix them to their bicycle helmets, their parachutes, their pets, and show us something commonplace and yet so extraordinary that it bears a repeat viewing. At least.

The pelican video is currently my favourite. Tellingly, it is situated on the GoPro Youtube page, which is some of the most invasively brilliant branding I have seen. The product is beautifully box-shaped, a small grey camera that looks like a child's toy. It is surprisingly easy to use, and can literally work in any environment, provided you use the correct accessory. It is that well-designed. The world comes to expect high-value, relatively priced items. Compared to the costs of digital cameras, it is an expensive toy, but look at the potential. It transcends necessity, becomes a glorious addition to your oeuvre, not unlike the iPhone. You do not need this, but when you see the evidence of its capabilities, how could you not want one? Like most successful products, it benefits from justifying its own existence through sheer desirability. The product becomes the verb.