When I was at the Googleplex a few months back I heard that the project to drop a translation service into Google Talk was coming along really well. The idea is that you’ll be able to chat someone on the other side of the world (or even in the same building as you I guess) without the language barrier. So I’d type in English and they’d receive the DM in their own language. Their replies would then also appear to me instantly translated. Not quite there yet, but very fucking cool.
A year or so ago I did a fun interview with Chinese director Zhang Yuan. His replies were often lengthy and yet what the translator passed back to me was often very short. It was kind of frustrating. Now if we’d been able to push the translator aside and stick in a couple of GoogleSpin ear pieces instead… then my English would be transcribed via Spinvox into text then pushed through a Google translate-bot before being sent on to his earpiece as spoken Chinese.
The poetry of these children is born from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings of the adults, who remain offstage. These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters: they are the monstrous infantile reductions of the all the neuroses of a modern citizen of the industrial civilisation
Umberto Eco writing about Peanuts by Charles M Schulz.
Quotation dictated via Spinvox - hell of a time saver.
With Jess, James, Liv, Ben, Mecca and… oh yeah… after a drop of single malt we finally saw Rob’s alter ego: The Hinch
We also saw the Hoxton locals share an expensive looking wheel chair which seemed to be the latest fashion accessory, a guy looking very relaxed waiting for the tube as he filled his shoes with vomit and then we somehow managed to catch the Death Carriage with the puke guy and yet the smell of fresh human excrement seemed to be coming from another part of the train entirely.
Trying to find time to write something about Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Quick review: Go see it for “I wonder if the carpet matches her pubes” and the Dracula muppet musical) is proving difficult. Even now I’m posting here while in a ‘meeting’ on Skype.
In the meantime it looks like I’m seeing Speed Racer next week - not being too familiar with the cartoon (but kinda itchin’ to see the original Japanese version as opposed to the American one because Mach GoGoGo is a fantastically better name) I have no idea what to expect. I am kinda intrigued.
That said, the Sponge version of the theme tune would have really kicked the trailer up a notch:
pick up my phone and dictate the quotes to Spinvox (which after a shaky start seems to have grasped my dodgy accent)
Not quite:
———-
“Hi. I’m just talking with Jesser(?) from Book Slot about Twitter and how it’s evolved and I’ve suddenly started thinking about the transition from silent movies to talking movies. So I need to collect some old staminoly(?) pictures I guess. Cool.”
- spoken through SpinVox.
———-
Not too shabby considering I was on the top deck of a moving London bus. Jesser(?) is of course Jessa from Bookslut (as opposed to Book Slot) who I was explaining Spinvox to.
Being someone who makes up words all the time I like that Spinvox occasionally spits something at me Burroughs style.
Staminoly is fucking fantastic.
I was of course referring to these guys:
That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into, Spinvox…
The quotes in the last post were moved from the book I read them in to the blog via Spinvox. I’ve been using the service for a little while now and have really grown to like the memo feature. The only problem is that I despise the idea of sending myself a memo so have renamed it the Speaking into the Future application.
It works best if you say it out loud, Futurama style.
Yesterday, because I was on the couch with a glass of wine, it was far easier to pick up my phone and dictate the quotes to Spinvox (which after a shaky start seems to have grasped my dodgy accent) and then pick them up from my in-box once I’d crawled back to the desk. Spinvox does have a direct to blog application I believe, but I’ve steered clear of it so far because (Twitter aside) I prefer the stuff that lands on the Interweb with my name attached to be a little more measured. That’s the reason I have yet to play much with Qik.
The nice thing about this stuff landing in g-mail is that it gets indexed and becomes searchable, but I can also tag and then delay using it. Right now I have a bunch of stuff that I’ve Spinvoxed to myself while waiting to meet people outside train stations or lying in bed unable to sleep or simply in order to save myself from a charity mugging. This babble arrives, gets labeled accordingly and some of it is archived for much later consideration - hence the Speaking into the Future part of it.
One of my favourite sequences in film EVER is in Orson Welle’s F for Fake. Put together in 1975 the film has a lot going on it (including Welles mentioning that his infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds may have been something else entirely). The sequence I’m continually drawn to features Welles being interviewed. This is an old, slightly bitter and pretty much exiled Welles - overweight, past his prime and disappointed. The brash young man conducting the interview is the exact opposite - young, slim and giddy with the potential of the life in front of him. At the top of his game as a praised and vibrant new voice he sees the interview as nothing more than a chance at experimentation. He shows little sympathy or regard for his subject.
What makes the interview utterly riveting is that the interviewer and interviewee are one and the same.
Welles as a young man recorded his half of the interview, directing all his questions at a future version of ‘Mr Welles’, and then placed the film in his archive for decades. Welles as a much older man indulges his younger self in a way that he wouldn’t anyone else and the results are moving, funny and tinged with sadness.
Soon after I saw this for the first time I began leaving messages and questions for myself in notebooks. Then one summer I got back from university and found my mother had cleaned out my room and thrown just about all my belongings away.
My mum was kind of a dick.
I still tend to flip to the back of new diaries and jot down a ‘How’s such and such going?’. Usually by the end of the year I have to flip back to January to remind myself what such and such was. But I really do think that Spinvox are onto something here.
It also makes me wonder if any of the real vloggers out there are interested in playing the long game.
It’s important to read outside of your comfort zone*. I know people who love themselves some Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Anything gets published with a spaceship or an elf on the front and they are somehow forced to read it. As if Terry Pratchett’s diminishing faculties are caused by a Firestarteresque ability to push people into doing what they don’t want to - like reading the same tired shit 9,000 times.
I have friends who are fucking experts on warp drives and siege catapults. Some of them even write Sci-Fi and Fantasy and the stuff they send me is every bit as good as Star Nipple or The Book of the Wrym Volume 5: Blood Sapphire’s Apprentice. And by that I mean derivative as fuck and as appealing as the pod thing that gets forked in the greenhouse in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I try and read broadly. Although ironically in this post I’ll be referencing airport bestsellers rather than Beckett and Sartre.
I dip into Sci-Fi and Fantasy from time to time (unless it’s book anything in a cycle of something else - then life’s too fucking short. If Brautigan could craft a perfect short story in two sentences then some long-winded bastards need to tie up their loose ends within 500 pages. That should be a law), haven’t read a good horror novel in a good long while (but live in hope) and still pick up as much sparkling stuff piled high in the new releases section as I do in the dustier corners of a second hand bookstore. I order crap online on a whim and am surprised to see it appear, but also pace near the front door waiting for that one meticulously researched text that I NEED to arrive. I have e books on my phone and laptop, a reading pile by my bed, on my desk in the office and in the bathroom (note to self - remove all references to Nazi exploitation from 70’s pulp magazines before inviting friends over for the first time). There’s not a room in the house that doesn’t have a dogeared mess with a broken spine lying around with it’s dust jacket torn waiting to be put out of its misery. And my bag always has a paperback stashed inside. Sometimes three.
All of them tend to be quite different.
And the great thing is that when your head is in the right place any one of these books can fire things off in directions you weren’t expecting or be in some way connected to the thing you were hoping to be distracted from.
I had a brain freeze today. Like I was eating a Cornetto in an Edgar Wright movie. And so I collapsed on the couch with two kittens and a book entitled The Art of Charles M Schulz. Here’s what I found in the introduction by Jean Schulz:
“The ideas Sparky used are out there in the world. We all know them and that is why we relate to them. It is the particular twist Sparky put to the ideas that described his genius, and that draws us, enchanted, into his frame.”
The wiki page I’d been building and had to close half finished had been about constructing narrative to form what Hugh would call a social object. It seems Jean and Sparky were way ahead of us.
“He understood instinctively the value of the story which illustrates a human truth, and which allows his listeners to take from it what they need at the time. The best stories can be told over and over again - forever new - because the listener changes.”
This is where I began scribbling in the margins. I loath people whose books look unread. My own father had a complete set of ridiculous Dennis Wheatley novels in red faux-leather that he ordered once a month from a book club. He never read them and I wasn’t allowed to touch them. They were bought to match his leather chesterfield reclining armchair.
My dad was kind of a dick.
But I know a lot of people who read books without somehow managing to crease a single page. The majority of my books look like they’ve been fucked and tattooed. Like Mötley Crüe groupies.
“He had to draw what he thought was funny and hope that his audience liked it too. He was always glad to know people liked his characters or a particular storyline, but he knew he couldn’t write to that audience; he always wrote for himself“.
Film studios have still got my dial up to 4 because they can’t make a movie without worrying about some single fuckwit in Nebraska who won’t find anything in the plot to hold onto if they don’t drop some lowest common denominator bullshit into the script by rewrite number fucking 14.
These are the same people who then say sloooooooow down when you have an idea that will only work if you kick it the fuck out of an ever shrinking window of opportunity in the next five minutes.
So before I even got to Charlie Brown’s angst over the little red-haired girl I was back at the desk and writing.
Now I could have taken down an appropriate book - Stephen King’s Dark Shadow of Writer’s Block Volume IV with a foreword by Richard Bachman or Getting Things The Fuck Done by Henry Rollins - but it was the book I went to for escape that turned me in.
Maybe it was scared I was gonna fuck up more of its pages.
*And even more important to meet people outside of that zone. Otherwise the echo can be deafening.
Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.
Letting myself loose this month has been an interesting experience.
I originally freed myself up to continue work on West and Black, but by not worrying too much about work I somehow agreed to get involved in more projects than I just finished. Thankfully not only are all these new gigs fun, they’re all for the most part incredibly interesting and allow me to push forward some ideas that I’ve been mulling over since the beginning of the year.
April so far has also been a month of synchronicity.
These projects overlap, the people involved too. The Tuttle Club has paid a large part, but so has simply expressing an interest in what other people are up to. And not being so short sighted as to hang on for dear life to ideas that are now doing far better out in the wild, than stuck here in never published drafts.
One of these projects just took a tremendous wallop, but I’m far from reeling as I went in knowing the odds. The friend I’m working with on that was good enough to put all the cards on the table ahead of time - very refreshing when working with movie people. Now because we were open and honest we have the opportunity to push the work forward with a slightly different focus.
Disappointing? Undoubtedly. But it’s not a death knell.
Working fast, moving quickly and adapting as we build. It’s actually a lot of fun.
In some instances I’m still working with haughty old institutions and for the most part they are listening, but turning some of these tankers around is a slow, slow process. Thankfully I’m involved in so much right now that it’s quite a relief some of this stuff takes a while to get even close to where we want it.
Some things will happen sooner than others, but I think it should all tie together quite nicely.
Some of this stuff even overlaps into the fiction I’m doing, so the slight complaint on Twitter aside…
… it’s been a pretty good month.
Note: Just got my 1001st follower on Twitter. Mad bastards.
