Acerbia; pith, wit, acerbia

Insert Backbeat

2008-01-22T18:35:24+00:00

Further evidence if any was needed that this place is winding down; it took me four attempts to get the login URL right, nevermind the login details.

It seemed strange to realise that I didn't recognise anyone in the UK top 20 chart. I can remember a time when my life was soundtracked religiously to Cat Deeley enthusing each chart position, the movers and climbers and watching the flashy videos. Music as visuals had more appeal to me and still does, which is perhaps why when MTV Europe rolled over and died and the corpse was raped by a thousand mobile phone icon and ringtone providers I still couldn't face picking and sticking with a radio station of similar cred.

Whereas for a while I was on the pulse, and then for a longer time after that I was discovering on my own, I have discovered that I am now a mainstream consumer of music in that when an anthem blasts out of an Intel commercial for instance I think "gosh, I wonder who that is" instead of branding the New Young Pony Club as insta-sell-outs. I have just ordered their album over Amazon because I want a physical copy.

The last album I bought, I bought because I had been lucky enough to procure tickets to their stadium gig. Have they become so popular since I first heard them on MTV that they now fill stadiums? Apparently so, I guess I dozed off at some point and missed their mid-sized fans-only gigs. The last stadium gig I went to was The Rolling Stones at Twickenham. Their final gig according to them. My mother told me the story of going to their final gig in the late seventies at Parc des Princes in Paris. They pretty much played the same set I think.

I used to consume music, now I hoard it and wear it out. There's more music on my portable device than I could listen to in a week and still vaste swathes of it goes unlistened to, its just there as museum piece. Yay, verilly did I own once upon a time the complete Shag Times, both LPs, and I have the mp3s to prove it. Whenceforth might the vinyls themselves have gone? Fucked if I know, they didn't last the millenium.

Speaking of the works of Bill Drummond, I received "45" as a birthday present, in which he speaks about recording Echo and the Bunnymen tracks in the same month that I was born. God that makes me feel old. And stale. I like the man in the same way that I like Alan Moore; they've both managed to do what I would like to be able to do but I shirk at the thought of going through the difficulties necessary to get there. My playlist throws up Primal Scream and I ought to feel Indie and maybe seventeen again, but I don't. I'm not looking to feel young again, I have just started to understand the look adults used to give me when I would say "you don't know who Suede are?!"

Through fortuitous coincidence I encountered a blast from the past, a track that opened an obscure Jude Law film called Shopping by the Sabres of Paradise and it was like finding a twenty quid note in a pocket of a jacket you haven't worn in years. It also produced the clinging desperation of a man who finds a piece of flotsam in an ocean far from home; yes, I know this, this is good music, surely? I questioned my peers and some glazed over and remembered student squats or shared flats somewhere and smelly pizza and weed, yes, they confirmed, that was good music. Nobody I know listens to chart music anymore.

I Am Entertained

2008-01-07T17:46:17+00:00

Warning, post contains spoilers about I Am Legend, both the book and the recent Will Smith movie.

I saw this last night, I'd been looking at it with lustful desire tinged with realistic disappointment that it couldn't possibly be good for some years, since reading a very old script for it that turned the third act into an escape through a ruined city in converted buses, which I am fairly certain was recycled into the finale of the Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead remake.

Eschatology is something of a passing flirtatious entertainment genre with me; in that I adore bleak survivalist post-apocalyptical scenarios with plucky heroes single-handedly defeating zombie hordes but make it too real like Threads and I actually have a minor mental breakdown. When The Wind Blows also gave me problems.

But damn it, I Am Legend was a fabulous book and for the first hour and a bit of the latest movie adaptation I was absorbed, besotted, adoring of the scriptwriter who had managed to cram so much in. The visuals were perfect (if scientifically implausible) and the atmosphere, the tense solitary existence with only a dog for companionship, only to have the surrounding horrors revealed once we have bought in to this lone existence.

My issue is that Neville is a scientist, and upon noticing and discovering abherent behavior in what he himself has termed as a complete societal breakdown when the leader of the vampires not only bellows in protest but then sets up an identical trap for him, displaying intelligence, creativity, an understanding of Neville's painful lonliness, why God is it then played down into a blip in the plot?!

The lynchpin to returning the movie to the brilliance of the book would be to give the leader dialogue, make the other vampire's chatter and screams coherent enough for us to pick out words as they attack the house, and then in the lab beneath the house, trapped with glass between them explain that the woman and child were exactly what Ruth was in the book; a vampire able to control her lust and with the appearance of a normal human (since we never see her exposed to sunlight I don't see this as being too difficult) sent to infiltrate his laboratory.

The vampire's motivation is that they want to stop Neville experimenting on them, they've accepted their lot, they're terrified of this monster who attacks them during the day, drags them off, kills them slowly and painfully with his serums and keeps polaroids of his victims on the wall. Then Neville becomes the legend he is supposed to be in the title.

Hollywood, should you somehow be listening, it wouldn't even need expensive reshoots. All Smith needs to contribute are reaction shots as his hypocrisy is exposed, his betrayal at the hands of a woman and child that he has latched onto; he's been outsmarted. And when he offers a cure, to be turned down and told that all they want is to create their own society and live in peace, without the fear of the day stalker killing them off one by one, that would provide a far more effective and powerful message; that when the status quo shifts and you don't keep up, you have become obsolete and should not fight tooth and claw to return the world to the way it was.

The film is so close to being that good and true to the book, without a cop-out hopeful upbeat ending that it really did leave me cold that they missed the chance to give the vampires a voice. Also, some tiny bit of information regarding the liquid he keeps poyuring everywhere would be especially helpful, since its left unsaid whether its the garlic solution Neville uses in the book. Calling them night stalkers or dark stalkers or whatever they called them, sorry 28 Days Later already used that trick by calling their super-zombies "Infected", second time around its just not going to work. Why not call them... oh, I dunno, vampires?

Interruption In Service

2007-12-20T11:51:14+00:00

Y'know, I think this site is winding down and probably soon to come to a complete stop; I couldn't remember my password.

Mondegreen

2007-11-27T11:22:05+00:00

I'll never forget when she moved in close and whispered into my ear "there's a heaven above you, baby"

I'd been singing the wrong lyrics the entire time we'd been dancing.

Writer's block

2007-11-23T10:18:13+00:00

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fcuk, fcukfc, fuck, fuck, fcuk,f cukf, ckfufuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fcuk, fcuk fcuk, fuik, fuck, fuick, fcuk, fcuk, fuikkl, fuk, ,fcikl, fuil, fcuk, fcukl, fuck, fuck, fuckfuck, fuck, mfuck, fcuk fcuk, fuk fcuk fukc, fukc, fuck, fukc, fuck, fuck, fcuk fcuk, fuk c, fuk fcuk fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fcuk fcuk, fuk fukl fcuk fukck fcuk fcukm,fc, ufck, fcukfc, fuuck, fuck

Written without the assistance of paste and quote.

The Procedure

2007-11-22T10:58:58+00:00

Time zero-oh-six hours, Dr. Klaus Upton Pickman leading, Director Guillaume Legrasse present, Nurses Mason and Tillinghast assisting. Procedure begins. Temperature 98.6 in host body, pulse 69, blood pressure 120 over 70, breathing shallow but steady. Initial incision reveals sub-dermal clotting around implant.

Zero-twenty-three hours, 400 milligrams of tricephalocine solution injected directly into the host. Extensive excision and suction required to reveal full extent of implanted ova. Temperature rising in host body, pulse up to 94, blood pressure rising, breathing starting to fall off.

Zero-fifty-six hours, nurse Tillinghast notes constricted pupils in the host, sweat glands aroused and repetitive 'gaping' of host's mouth believed to be silent screaming. Inadvisable to increase sedation due to potential risk to implant. Pulse 110, body temperature 105, skin hot to the touch and flushed, breathing jilted and host exhibits sign of choking, recommend putting on a ventilator.

Oh-one-thirty hours, patient stable but visibly suffering from the procedure, several phalanges broken through auto-reflexive response to the pain, hematomas visible occluding pupils, patient has likely lost all vision in both eyes. Buccal cortical plate shows signs of bleeding and lesions, patient might have been attempting to chew own tongue off during early stages of the procedure, reinforced tube put in place.

Oh-one-fifty-five hours, implant not responding to medication, moving instead to electrical stimuli. Delta waves within ova show lucid dreaming ongoing inside. Host pulse 165, blood pressure 190/120, temperature 115, patient struggling and prone to short but violent seizures.

Oh-two-oh-six hours, attempting to revive host with shock paddles.

Oh-two-twenty hours, second attempt, nervous system likely overloaded. Administering ketamine and adrenaline cocktail.

Oh-two-forty-two hours, third attempt, host brain dead, limbs are rigid against the restraints and the host has managed to sever the breathing tube with overwhelming bite pressure fracturing own jaw in the process. Host inert, ova still moving.

Oh-three-oh-one hours, host body clinically dead, all focus turned towards saving the implant. Core temperature dropping, outer shell of implant grey and flaccid, EEG shows cerebral activity within the ova dropping off.

Oh-three-thirty-nine, ova showing visible signs of distress, delta waves have shifted from anterior hemisphere to posterior and Nurse Mason is making preparations for the necessary rituals under orders from Director Legrasse.

Oh-four-hundred hours, abandoning medical science. Ova has been transferred from operating table to a circle of protection chalked onto the floor, host body removed for incineration, Nurse Mason has provided 30 cc's of virgin's blood and sputa, beginning chant of the bloody tongue in ancient Hyperborian.

Oh-four-ten hours, vital signs within the ova have stabilised but remain weak, charnel odour of disposed host body and chanting seems to have curtailed disaster. Circle of protection reinforced with runes and further bloodletting from both nurses.

Oh-four-fifty-six hours, ova hatches stillborn within circle, creature is malformed and under-developed.

Oh-five-hundred hours, Director Legrasse orders disposal of foetus and all records of procedures undertaken. Audio transcript saved for private files.

An Exercise In Frustration

2007-10-26T11:50:43+00:00

So I want to talk about something I can't talk about because it will spoil it for someone else that I know will eventually read this so I'm going to talk about it indirectly and use lots of obfuscation and yet I hope the message will be clear enough and the sentiment will be captured in words because I'm bursting to say this.

There is this small bunch of people who do something very well and I've enjoyed their work on and off for a very long time, perhaps for as long as I have been genuinely aware that I had a choice in deciding whose work I would devote some of my time to over the otherwise lazy way of just going with whatever everyone else said was good. It was gratifying at first when I discovered that everyone else agreed with my estimation that these people were good at what they did and that they were not just good, they were phenomenally good at what they did and well deserved the appreciation and adoration of many.

But as is the way with such things their efforts at providing new and interesting work to enjoy, and saying what they wanted to say muddied the waters and if I'm being frank (which I'm doing my utmost best not to be, but there you go) I sort of stopped liking them as much and paying as much attention to them because what I wanted was what I had fallen in love with all over again, not new iterations of what they wanted to tell me.

Well, they're back and everyone is glad to see them come back and say something. You could argue that if I had been paying attention properly they never went away, they were always out there improving and refining and adding to their work and it is only a defining announcement that has any substance to me, the very public announcement that they are back with a collection of new work that I can spend an hour or so enjoying as a singular experience instead of rooting out the odd word or piece here or there for momentary satisfaction.

I can honestly say that either I am now the right person to be enjoying this again, or they have returned to what they did so well that got me liking them to begin with, or quite possibly we've both evolved down seperate routes and ended up here in a nice period of serendipity where I am particularly receptive to what they have to offer, but its been a glorious revival of all those old feelings and I am glad to be around to enjoy this again, especially track two, thats a stonking good track.

Captain's log, supplemental; Something that just occured to me was that the last time I really, really enjoyed this sort of thing I was also reading a book by the same author I am currently rereading a book by, so in effect I am almost deliberately renewing those old feelings, but it doesn't feel forced because the new contribution is fresh and enjoyable.

Deeper Extraction

2007-10-25T12:23:57+00:00

My writing class has caused me to dust off older entries and continue them. This piece continues as though I have skipped a handful of chapters after writing this post.

Rob had the extractor in one hand and the spiral forceps in the other. He was leaning forwards over Orez who was draped awkwardly over the arm of the couch so that her blank and distant expression looked up at the nicotine-stained ceiling.

"I swear to God Rob, if you go in there you're asking for trouble."

He peered up from his perched position, like a hyena standing over a body about to breathe its last; seeing only the carrion meal and not the dying creature. I half expected him to growl ownership of his prize and bare his teeth in some primal warning

"Don't you feel it, the need to know what it was? Don't you see it on the brink of your memory every time you close your eyes?"

The steel mandibules of the extractor opened as Rob squeezed the bulb in the hilt slowly and he bore down on her closed right eye. With the black patch on he had no depth perception and was being obviously cautious, uncertain how close he was to peeling back her eyelid. I wriggled harder this time and looked for something, anything that I could use to saw through the plastic tie, instead the abrasive sharp edge of the tie sawed into me, gouging into the flesh and causing sharp pain and a wetness to trickle down into the palm of my hand.

One hook connected, then another and with delicate precision Rob twisted his right hand to put all four pads of the extractor into place on her eye. His fingers curled around the flange of the plunger and he pulled slowly, like he was extracting blood with a syringe. His left hand wavered in space, holding the spiral forceps as you would a knife you intended to plunge into someone theatrically. The eyeball audibly popped free and was drawn up into the cradle in the body of the extractor. Orez' optic nerve remained taut and I could see the pale pink stem dappled with red and blue veins.

I felt a swelling of laughter build up inside me as I watched Rob fulfilling every fantasy image of the mad professor, consumed by his work, driven by his own urgency and oblivious to the consequences. What the hell, I decided, I would just let him take the pearl, see whatever it was that had driven Orez insane and would likely do the same to him, like Indy powerless to stop the Nazi's I would allow a greater power to mete out the punishment for dabbling with things man wasn't supposed to. You can only save a suicidal friend so many times before they eventually succeed.

The laughter broke free of my lips as a wave of relief rolled over me and the chair rocked to the vibrations of my hearty laugh. Let him do what he wanted, I couldn't hope to control him, I never could, all I ever did was act as his nagging conscience, trying to keep him from setting the house on fire. My face took on a wide grin and the combination of laughter and the cessation of my pleadings caused Robert to look up from examining Orez's occular nerve.

"Whats so funny?" he asked, his eyebrows arching inwards in a contorsion of suspicion.

"You, Robert. You're so funny. You're like some mad scientist who thinks that his own brand of science isn't going to kill him just as dead as his intended victims, but it always does."

My hands had relaxed now, the fingers no longer tensing and straining to pull free of the plastic cord, instead I rubbed the oozing droplets of blood between the pads of my fingertips, dwelling on the tactile sensation which had eluded us in all the visions and images we had absorbed from the others. We had seen what they had seen, experienced it from the first perspective but we hadn't felt what they had felt; we imprinted our own interpretations over their pictures, there was no way of telling how a traumatic experience would affect a witness second-hand. It slowly dawned on me that the chances of Robert going insane from Orez's experiences was unlikely and I was still just as trapped.

Robert ran the scoop of the spiral forceps along the thick nerve all the way from the chiasma to the back of the bulb, the few pearls left there from the last time were plucked away and tumbled into the tiny stainless steel reservoir bucket beneath the tines. He angled himself differently to try and reach further back, seemingly unhappy with the crop and eventually gave up, releasing the catch on the extractor and gently allowing the eye to be drawn back into the orbit of Orez's skull. In her catatonic state she didn't even blink as the pads detached and the claws released her eyelid. He approached me from the couch, holding the reservoir of pearls like a shotglass.

"Only one in there."

"Bon appetit" I said with a sneer, powerless to stop him. He stalked closer to me and just to fuck with me he drew the eyepatch up and away from his eye showing me the scarred sunken orbit that I had looked behind so many times as a child.

"Oh its not for me" he snarled and with the pearl between thumb and forefinger forced it past my lips. "I'll catch the rerun after I see what it does to you."

Interstellar

2007-10-23T09:48:16+00:00

He had decided that he had had enough; he would break free and find someone else. She had warmed his hemispheres and cooled his polar caps for all of his life but what had she done for him lately? He took a few orbits to think about it and how he would explain it to her but then remembered that she had eight other planets who would continue to spin around her and she would be fine without him, besides in the last eighteen million years at least two other masses had started to circle her that would eventually form full planets.

Shifts in his internal structure, massive tectonic upheaval provided him with the momentum to break free. Using her own gravitational pull against her he knocked his center of gravity off kilter and shifted his orbit until it was too unstable. With a wrenching shift that sheared one of his largest land masses free and clear of his atmosphere he broke free and careened out of her solar system, leaving behind a ragged asteroid belt of fragments from his surface drifting in the path he had once occupied.

Magma flowed into the gap left by his lost continent, plugging the gap and leaving him with a painful reminder of the split, but he soon forgot about it when he spied deep in the cosmic noise a twinkling star in his path ahead. His surface cooled and all life on it died off quickly enough, he focused all his efforts on the now constant burst of light from the far off star.

Through a prolonged ice age where all but his inner core fell inert and lifeless he travelled through the depths of space, through nebula and cosmic clouds, along the outer spiral and onwards, towards the new star he had chosen to woo. She might not welcome him immediately; she might need time and space to become accustomed to his presence but she would warm to him eventually when he had established a firm orbit around her and realised that he wouldn't be going anywhere.

Eventually even the core froze solid and he hibernated for the longest time, his surface giving rise for a few million years to an intelligent silica-based race that unfortunately never achieved anything beyond rudimentary sentience before dying out.

Slumbering and slowly he began to awaken, was this warmth the embrace of his new impending star he could feel warming his surface? His core began to bubble and froth and he sought throughout the skies for the teasing presence of that once-distant star. But all he could see was endless void, a curtain of black, nowhere was there the glowing beacon of light he had journeyed so far to meet.

Had he been knocked off course by some asteroid strike? Surely he would have felt that. Had he perhaps bypassed the star altogether? Caught in a slingshot and propelled away from her in some cruel twist of fate, oversleeping and missing her? No, it finally dawned on him as he approached the area darker than anywhere else, she had expired long ago like a broken dream perhaps even before he had left his last star far behind. What welcomed him now was the gaping maw of a black hole, willing to accept all the time and space he had to offer, and all the matter he was composed of.

Shock and Awe

2007-10-03T16:07:05+00:00

The last time I was excited about reading a piece of my own creation out before an audience I was let down by the audience reaction. Of 20 performers that night only a handful of them were worth the time it took to hear them out or see their piece, some ad libbed painfully badly, and others fell flat on an ill thought-out stunt. I said my bit and the rest was a bit of a let down, I didn't really feel as if I'd done my best.

Recently, in lieu of therapy, I started attending a writing course for short stories. In the first class I volunteered to read out something of mine in the next class and bring in copies for everyone to follow along with. Three other writers also volunteered. Before anybody read anything out on the night, the person running the class asked what sort of reactions would be appropriate. Laughter, said one person, applause said another. Polite, constructive criticism was generally nodded at. Stunned silence, I said.

The first person read their piece, it was a piece about how talented they were. The second person read, it was a piece about how difficult it was to write a piece on spec. Then it was me. I got my stunned silence and it was glorious.

I realised then and there that the reaction I most want to leave people with is an utter inability to put into words their own reaction. I'll shoot for it again now and see how well I score.

Cue Obscure Seventies Music

2007-09-24T10:25:59+00:00

Hi Quentin,

I didn't get it. Can you explain it please? Does it make sense if I watch Robert's part first? Somehow I doubt it.

Sepia Tones

2007-09-06T11:34:49+00:00

We'd made a fair dent in all of the boxes within the first month of moving in, which comes naturally with a need to fill book cases, CD towers, wardrobes, kitchen cupboards. But there were some stubborn boxes left over that had been put aside and left for another day. Within a box within a box I found a handful of memories and childhood fantasies. The box wasn't sealed from the elements so they were showing signs of degrading and some of the colors had run.

I flicked through the pile and paused on a teenage fantasy where I was sitting in an old style barber's chair in KD Lang's place, while Cindy Crawford pretended to shave my face and run her hands over my cheeks. Next to it was a memory of venturing out into central Paris and surfacing from the Metro system amidst a gay pride march. In some cases the fantasies and memories had stuck together with age and the sight of a very young me getting further than second base came as a shock.

The further down the pile I flipped, the more basic the fantasies and memories became. There was one of me on the deck of a boat, the surrounding ocean was blue and calm because I couldn't remember anything more than the boat. Another of my sister and I running alongside grapevines from an unknown shadow. Some memories come with a flush of shame or a burst of soundtrack. I remembered faces and people I had seen but never knew, some pictures were lost entirely but I could still tell who it was supposed to be.

Near the bottom of the pile I found a crayon drawing of me as a dog. There was a big red ball sitting on top of scribbles of green, I looked like Rolf from the Muppets. Distended black V's in the sky stood in for birds and there was a wide empty gap between the green of the grass and the blue of the sky. The next one down showed four people and a house, two parents, two children, we were all smiling. That one was my earliest fantasy.

Wild Horse Wishes

2007-09-01T21:46:43+00:00

Its been an incredibly good day, with a found Tarantino DVD, ice cream in the park, a stack of new books to devour, a secret encounter with industrial urban dinosaur silhouettes, a quiet trip down the aisles of a superstore with no real requirement to buy, and a delectable desert of sweet and fruity creamy macaroons.

We spent the evening watching Children of Men and although I never want children, and indeed my girlfriend can't have them, I found myself imagining what sort of child we could have produced before putting it away, far from my thoughts. Dogs are easier to take care of anyway.

The Old School

2007-08-30T12:26:20+00:00

"The Old School" originally appeared in the July issue of ByteMe magazine

These days it seems that every school kid has an electronic presence, your work colleagues have their Facebook profiles and every book, movie or band you hear about has emerged from the wilderness of the cyber-fringe and staggered out into the mainstream of culture with a fully-formed audience and identity. Somewhen the 21st century arrived and turned us all into icons and pixels and automatic feeds of information about where we've been and who we were with.

But it wasn't always like this. Some people find it difficult to adjust to the changes that a medium they helped pioneer have now left by the wayside.

------------------------

Peter Luxor was one of the first to start a blog when the fledgling Pyra Labs was still finding its feet and sending out personalised greetings mails to each new sign-up. Each new post would be quickly scanned through by the avid audience and linked back to by people with further commentary to make about it. Blogging was not a source of original content and most commentary was about found things, sites, basic games and articles in the popular media.

"People were just less smart than they are now" says Peter, toying with a Lycos beanie puppy, "we couldn't access wikipedia in a few clicks and maintain that we were an authority on the subject like we can now, you were either smart or you were out-smarted."

Originally having spent time in newsgroups, chatrooms and CompuServe USA forums in tightly knit groups of people Peter was in awe of the freedom and unlimited knowledge now available to him.

"We all came from these close groups of interests, the Star Wars fans, the Star Trek fans, and we shared everything amongst ourselves, the ten reasons why Kirk is better than Picard, the ten best movie one-liners, the urban legends and the sort of things you find debunked on Snopes nowadays which turn out never to have been true, everyone knew everyone else on the Internet, we were tight, yo."

Opening the borders and dropping the barriers brought new people with new opinions that would sometimes degenerate into violent clashes of words; flame wars.

"We were used to the occasional forum troll, someone just looking to make some noise and stir up some comments for their own amusement but I can still remember the first night I encountered Godwin's Law"

The now famous law, first coined in 1990 purports that the longer a discussion continues, the more chance that one of the participants or topics under discussion will be likened to Hitler and the Nazis.

"To us that was unheard of, until I found myself making the assertion one night in the Buffy forums about a goth kid who was too engrossed in vampiric lore and Anne Rice novels, it just blew me away to discover I was just like everyone else. I crossed a line that night."

------------------------

Another online denizen, Catalina LaSalle started off with innocent enough online pursuits; "I was just looking for recaps of Simpsons episodes, sometimes its really hard to catch them all"

With printed off text files listing production numbers, air dates, character first appearances and brief episode synopsis Catalina was quickly looking for the next fix. Soon she was downloading transcripts and jpegs from episodes that hadn't been aired on her local channels yet.

"Imagine you've got this hotline to a drug dealer and he never has to say anything, and you'll get everything you ask for without having to pay for anything except the telephone bill, well thats what this was to us."

Now a seeder of all 18 seasons on networks that make the episodes available to download illegally Catalina feels that she is giving something back to the people who never knew of the dark days when the only way to watch the Simpsons was on a television screen.

"There are people in England who haven't seen the season finale yet, and won't for weeks, I take a little pride in knowing that I am freeing them from that hardship"

------------------------

In England I meet with Tim Jackets, now working for the cowboy portal Yehaw! as their specialist on social software in the web 2.0 phenomenon and how best to capitalise and profit from the toilings of the masses. Tim had been a founding member of the community site Bearbarella and witnessed first hand the emergence of sites such as A1pha and PopCunt which now enjoy a huge public following and frequently break out into the general consciousness with hilarious Powerpoint compilations of funny images

"These days its considered a cliche, but back when I started people actually wanted to see pictures of my cat and be kept abreast of my cold situation and the bastard landlord" he pulls out a tiny digital organiser and clicks on a favorites link to show me, "today the cat's got his own MySpace and the landlord blogs about the deadbeats living in his flats"

Tim then turns his attention to the device in his hands, with it he can keep every one of his (at last count) 10,764,882 daily readers informed of what is going on in his life.

"Celebrities leverage gossip rags and paparazzi to let their fans know what's new with them, we've superceded them though; we've gone beyond super-celebrity and passed into super-mundanity" he types in a few characters and moments later my phone pings with an update to an RSS feed I am subscribed to informing me that Tim is being interviewed for a magazine article. It takes me a second to remember that I'm the one conducting the interview.

"Just remember, there wasn't such a thing as a meme or a metareference until we started doing them."

It is not at all uncommon for those few who were there at the start to have capitalised on their presence in the caldera of the blogosphere and turned their sideline passion into a full career as either a technology pundit or a genuine journalist.

------------------------

At a recent conference held for bloggers by bloggers an estimated 86% of those in attendance were in fact journalists trying hard to drown out the attempts of these citizen-writers to render their editorialised and source-confirmed articles obsolete. In this day and age of instant information availability through 24 hour news channels and newsfeeds direct from Reuters, where even the laziest slob in his basement in Tucson, Arizona can add three words of value such as "Greatest. Movie. Ever." and package the entire thing instantaneously to a willing and eager audience how can official and traditional outlets continue under their current model?

"Gone are the days of Cindy Crawford" jokes Robbie Smithson of the London Guardian paper "I think our current model is Kate..." Rumors persist that Robbie's articles are actually authored by his more prolific but socially inept partner Joanna Kirk which Robbie refuses to comment on publicly.

After some polite insistence to continue the interview his expression grows stern and resolute;

"Well I for one welcome our new blogger overlords" he says ominously.

Is this the secret to the silicon tsunami we find ourselves swamped by; to embrace it and go with the flow, allowing it to sweep us past digital content rights, intellectual properties, downloadable podcasts and devices that track and announce where we are and what we are attempting to acheive at all times?

Has it now become our God-given right to know who is where with who else and what they were doing at all times? The people need to know and their voracious appetite for triviality never ceases to expand.

A Giant Leap

2007-08-30T11:50:37+00:00

I am sitting on somebody's front doorstep. In central London you can't normally get away with this, doorsteps are narrow and uninviting. Some of them are wide and very inviting but this one I can sit on for free. As I run one hand along the fine hairs of my arm I notice that more and more of them are greyed through almost down to the root, it makes it look as though the hairs are vanishing into my arm. I think of a doorstep from my youth in Scotland, cracked in half from a minor earthquake, it had been a massive block of stone firmly embedded in the ground, rough all over except for the smooth shard that had shattered during the tremor, impossible to replace.

There was a house I lived in with two cats who were not allowed to venture outside for fear they would be shot by the neighbor or poisoned, or run over, or catnapped. These cats had no faith in their instincts and were timid housecats, fragile fat balls of fur. You stepped past the front doorstep and closed a screen door behind you before opening the inner door, like an airlock, protecting these innerspace cats from the hostile environment outside. There were occasions when I would sit on that first doorstep, steeling myself for the situation inside and taking the time take a few deep breaths. I hated that house.

I've sat on doorsteps for courage, inspiration, or just to pause and think, they seem to embody beginnings well. You can sit on one and imagine that this really is literally the first step.

The weather has turned cold and a breeze cannons down the narrow London street. The hairs on my arms raise and lower like fronds and I decide it is time to stop thinking and time to get back to work. I leave that first step behind and walk away back to my office.