September 2007

On my first weekend in the US, I took a town car from Manhattan to Newark airport. As we hit the Turnpike’s miles of steel and brick and smoke, (think: opening minute of The Sopranos) I joked to the driver, a middle-aged Russian man, that it felt like home. It took me the rest of the drive to explain.

The look and feel and talk of hard industrial graft is deeper in my system than anything the chimneys spewed out. The bridges and old works may be steampunk, but take the trunk road to the coast at night, and the lights lay bare something that forces itself beyond modernity. And, dear god, did we have sunsets.

Which is just to point to this interview with Ridley Scott, in the knowledge that, like him, I’ve seen the first light from the flaring.

What’s so delicious about Stephen Fry’s survey of smartphones, as deep as it is wide, isn’t the unabashed geekery, though that has generated an antiphonal ’squee!’ from all corners of my digital neignbourhood. No, it’s the unconscious connoisseurship of the thing: the sense that you (well, that he) can write about geek toys in a mode that’s neither Mossberg nor Gizmodo nor anything in-between is as exhilarating as the breeze that waves farewell to a stultifying summer.

Speaking of imaginary worlds created by cliques…

Close one eye, and you lose your depth perception, the ability to see behind things. So it is with Monocle, the Tyler Brulé pseudo-vanity project that I continue to buy in spite of itself and myself. Take the carefully arranged global pantry in ‘Shelf Life’:

While we spend a great deal of time sniffing and squeezing the fresh produce at Portobello Road market, we also spend a great deal of money on pantry staples at Globus in Zurich.

Do you bollocks.

Perhaps Tyler Brulé really does nip to Zurich for a half-kilo of coffee beans; if so, it says far more about his airmiles account than his nose for coffee. No matter what, it sums up the particular strain of globollocks in Monocle that both entices and infuriates, like a coke-fiend friend.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a point in certain forms of appreciation where value detaches from the object under scrutiny and attaches to the surrounding milieu, the ability to imbibe augmented by the means to own, the opportunity to acquire, the capacity to describe. In the world of fine wine, I’d suggest that point starts at around fifty quid a bottle; any more is essentially a exponentially-graduated entry fee into an ever more rarefied social circle.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker piece on wine counterfeiting is a case in point, a deliciously understated narrative with hints of Nabakov and Borges. It sketches out the aspirations of one millionaire collector, the intoxicating mixture of glamour and mystery concocted by Hardy Rodenstock, and the collaborative wish-fulfillment of wine masters and Merlot-tinged prose artists for whom the world of untainted vines and Jeffersonian vintages is so enticingly close that one might already have dreamed its taste. Is it surprising that such a milieu would be so ripe for deluding?

Sidling uneasily into the space reserved for unfortunate exemplars, we have the ‘Compare People’ Facebook app, as noted by Sugarrae and reported on by The Reg:

Maksimovic says he has suspended new sign ups of the premium service until he figures out a way to clarify exactly what information is given out.

He’ll have a job on, since Facebook’s third-party apps are seemingly built with components that can’t help but obfuscate. On top of that, he may well be forced to refund the $9.49 coughed up by people who hoped his ‘premium’ service was the equivalent of those old back-of-the-paper X-Ray Specs.

That a naive and clumsy solo developer exposed the opacity of Facebook’s privacy framework doubtless chafes the marketroids working on more insidious ways to procure personal data that can be converted, if you know the right people, to cash money. They’re a new kind of pickpocket, ignoring your wallet to go straight for the loose change, in the knowledge that nabbing pennies from thousands adds up to the same thing as lifting tenners from individuals, but with much less risk of being found out.

I know how much my organs might fetch on the black market. I even have a vague sense of what turning my forehead into a casino billboard would earn me. I have no idea how much my intangibles are worth, and it’s time to start asking.

Two kinds of knowledge are needed to unlock fragment B3 of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. One comes from learning Smart’s life and career, the sad circumstances of the poem’s composition, its implied antiphonal structure and a scintillating range of biblical, classical and contemporary allusions.

The other? From time spent in the company of a cat.

I understand the reasoning behind MSNBC’s rebroadcasting the live NBC coverage of six years ago. The crass rationale is that CNN did it (albeit via streaming) last year, and they had to wait until this year to copycat. Less crass is that after an orgy of replays, the footage was locked away for years, and the chaotic and war-fogged reporting was superseded by a more coherent narrative to suit what followed. Enough time has passed, perhaps, to recall the confusion.

That they repeated that repeat after dark makes less sense. The broken verisimilitude, for some odd reason, makes it feel crass. Or perhaps it exposes the innate crassness of the re-enactment.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this RadioLab segment, artist David McDermott talks about his attempt to live an Edwardian existence in 21st-century Dublin. His decision when young to step back, soak up the memories of much older people — ‘I felt like they knew something I didn’t know’ — and let the bleeding edge vanish over the horizon is likely to prick the curiosity of anyone neck-deep in technological gore:

In terms of time, I do believe that we can travel in time. I’m not talking to you about actual time-travel. I’m trying to talk in practical terms that anyone can participate in, I call it, ‘time experimentation’.

All moments in time are ever-present and coexisting, he asserts: all that’s needed is a conscious choice to step into one. Escapist and contrived it may be, but in some respects our choice of place and space and engagements (and even dress) is a temporal choice, albeit one in finer gradations, like the adjustments of a clock before the railways.

All of which is backstory to this AskMefi question.

Read the rest of this entry »

A more scatterdash followup to the previous, based on a few related discussions and responses.
Read the rest of this entry »

It feels almost arrogant to start a blog by essentially saying everything you know is wrong. Oh well. The long-form title ought to be:

‘Seek permission, not forgiveness: why the web’s fundamental axioms break down when data gets personal’

but that’s a title built for an academic paper, not a blog post.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think this thing is on. Expect me to change theme and fiddle with the styles and add some sidebar content and blah etc blah, but given my usual capacity to do such things, not necessarily in the next 24 hours.