Out in the Blue

More Black Swannage:

Sir Francis Bacon commented that the most important advances are the least predictable ones, those “lying out of the path of the imagination”. Bacon was not the last intellectual to point this out. The idea keeps popping up, yet then rapidly dying out. Almost half a century ago the best selling novelist Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book about it, aptly called The Sleepwalkers. It describes discoverers as sleepwalkers stumbling upon results and not realising what they have in their hands.

I don’t like the idea of being a sleepwalker. I don’t really like the idea of sleeping full stop. But this accidental discoverer concept is very interesting right about now (and always has been - even when out of vogue).

I’ve been doing a lot of talking with Toby Moores of late which has lead to us working together on a number of ideas. Tomorrow we’re meeting at the Creative Coffee Club with more like-minded folk to talk about creating a Network of Networks. Come along if you’re free and in London - the details are here.

What interests me about Toby and relates indirectly to what Taleb is saying about inadvertent discoveries is the space we work in. Toby likes to think of traditional media as self contained silos - I prefer to call them islands. We have a slightly different vocabulary but we both end up at the same conclusion. Being secluded is not healthy.

This buildings of walls, these self imposed sanctions are ridiculously short sighted, but they do provide a fun space between these islands and silos for some of us to work in. Toby’s company for example, found a way for the music industry silo and the gaming industry fortress to overlap slightly. And everyone benefits. I’m doing my damnedest to bring the film industry kicking and screaming into the social media space. We both operate in the limbo between companies that is often seen as just that. A no mans land.

Here be monsters/flat earth etc… you can see why I prefer the islands analogy. There are even pirates and sharks out here, but the most interesting place to be is on the speedy little boats that operate out in the blue. And like Black Swans every now and again a couple of Black Ships drop anchor offshore and things change forever.

The important thing is to remember what Taleb warns about. There’s a lot of cool stuff out here. It’s difficult to instantly see the benefits of some of this stuff especially when great new apps, platforms and indeed people are added to the mix every day. The trick is not to get sleepy eyed.

Staying awake is a skill.

Better than a Jetpack

Future travel plans aside I wish I’d been in Toronto on Saturday for this:

Steven Shaviro’s presentation “’You Will Never Own a Jetpack’: Warren Ellis’ Science Fiction Comics”:

This paper looks at the science fiction comics of Warren Ellis: Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, and the currently ongoing series Doktor Sleepless. These comics are about the social effects of new technologies. They bring us a wavering and uncertain vision of a highly technologized future, and ponder the possibilities of change in a world pervaded by a sense that the future itself has largely been played out.

I was lucky enough to meet and catch a talk by Steven Shaviro at Goldsmiths a while back. Parts of my brain still hurt.

Warren Ellis is partly responsible for the way I look at and more importantly use the Internet. I met Warren four years ago at what I think was London’s first flash mob. I also interviewed him a while back when Desolation Jones first came out. I’m not gonna mention the Japanese ass eels.

Meeting Warren (kinda indirectly) lead me to hanging out with John Rogers who still makes my fucking head spin (and for some reason known only to him continues to send too much traffic my way by mixing my name with Warren, David Brin, John Scalzi, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow over in the sidebar on Kung Fu Monkey). He of course worked above and beyond the call on the doomed Global Frequency TV show (giving, I think, Michelle Forbes a push into BSG along the way).

Warren’s Global Frequency is still a touchstone for me and the way I work. This month I finally get to work on a project that has Miranda Zero as a kind of guardian angel.

Oh… Warren was the one who called me “nine kinds of wrong” and if you ever read the twisted stuff that Warren comes up with you’ll understand that that’s why it’s on my Moo card. Likewise it was John who outed me as a “tech hipster“. I think those lines in conjunction with Saying The Wrong Thing have landed me a lot of work.

I probably owe the bastards 10%

But seriously, with these guys still churning stuff out we don’t need no stinkin’ jet packs…

We were directors once…

… and young:

The new trailer for Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull popped up before Iron Man on Friday night and it’s the first preview in ages that had the audience cheering through it. There was some of this back before Phantom Menace but the demographic for that was always skewed away from the women folk, who just rolled their eyes at the nerds they were with.

Indy has a more unisex appeal.

In fact just today over lunch it was remarked to me that there’s quite a lot of expectation laid on Harrison’s shoulders from gals eager to see him don that fedora one last time…

For myself the excitement is growing after the initial ‘meh’ of the first trailer. There’s more than a glimmer of the old magic in trailer number two and I’m already tapping into a rich vein of fan excitement over this one.

Just watching the Twitter time line get all nostalgic over a screening of Raiders was a good gauge of the Indy love out there.

Fingers crossed…

Gag me with a spoon

My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn’t realise I was going to get educated.

Moon Unit Zappa

Paint it Black

Slowly building to something that spans numerous projects and oddly enough the colour black is offering a nice meat hook.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Ships that signaled an end to Japanese isolation in 1853 and now (thanks to a nod on Twitter by Ben) Black Sheep:

We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here…

Great article that. Go read it.

Black Sheep have a Long Tail

It is difficult to explain what makes any great work great, and particularly difficult with movies, and maybe more so with Citizen Kane than with over great movies, because it isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a shallow masterpiece. Those who try to account for its stature as a film by claiming it to be profound are simply dodging the problem - or maybe they don’t recognise that there is one. Like most of the films of the of the sound ear that are called masterpieces, Citizen Kane has reached its audience gradually over the years rather than at the time of release.

Pauline Kael, Raising Kane, 1971.

Note: Spinvox initially transcribed Citizen Kane as Sits in the game. I fucking love that.

Shift happens

Thinking a lot about Black Ships and Black Swans.

More to follow…

Spinvox and Googletalk = Universal Translator?

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.

Now add that kind of functionality into Spinvox.

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.

And vice versa.

Is that doable? I should ask James.

Good Grief

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.

Forever new

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.