I’m not a field agent, I read books
I turned down a chance to do some red carpet stuff at the UK Iron Man premiere last night.
Seemed like a good idea at the time…
Now more people have seen it I’ll find out exactly when I can start talking about it.
It would be nice to tell you guys that it fucking rocks, without Paramount punching me in the throat.
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.
I took twenty-four hours off from Twitter so I could bypass all the online hilarity that comes up on April 1st.
Remember how in Buffy the Vampire Slayer the demons and vampires shunned Halloween because it was ‘tacky’? Same deal.
A few years ago I was as guilty of this crap as everyone else (convincing members of a punk forum that Henry Rollins had crushed his windpipe in a weight lifting accident springs to mind), but now I have better things to click on than Rick Astley videos and stories claiming that Bill Gates got an iPhone stuck up his arse.
Normally it’s pretty easy to avoid, but Twitter would funnel that crap straight to me. As it is I’ll have to be careful opening my greader tomorrow. A lot of stuff should be marked FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY, Frank Castle style.
But I am missing Twitter. Without a doubt the single most important online app I’ve had the pleasure to use in the last couple of years. Even though a lot of the time it’s not a pleasure to use because it falls over way to often and hasn’t scaled quite the way I think it should of. Such is life. Still a groovy little tool. Trying not to think of just how productive I’ve been today without it, but that’s probably another post…
So seeing as I can’t Tweet right now and Jess is still out at a feminist screening let me share this here. A note I made in bed the other night when both of us couldn’t sleep and we were chatting while playing with gadgets*:
Jess just told me that she once slept in the shadow of a lunar landing module
We’ve been together since 1999, but she still surprises me from time to time…
*Sony sent me a PSP
I’m a lucky dog because of a lot of things, but mostly because of Jess. Hanging with her each day is a constant surprise and that she puts up with my nonsense is frankly a miracle. Those of you that have met me know I’m a bit of a dick at times and those that haven’t can probably guess as much. Those of you that also know Jess know that she must have the patience of a fucking saint.
She’s smarter than me, prettier than me and a hell of a lot more interesting than me. She has a masters degree in journalism, works a beat that actually matters to her and still has time to edit The F Word and do the occasional freelance piece. Not only am I incredibly proud, but also generally in awe that she fits this all in.
She also makes a kick ass mac ‘n’ cheese.
Here’s her latest piece for The Guardian (more here).
Right now she’s marching in the shitty London weather for International Women’s Day while I sit at home thinking about monster movies.
And speaking of The Guardian, my friend Christian popped up in there today. He and Phil are off doing experiments in Austin as part of SXSW (and with a little bit of luck being picked up at some point by Irina).
If Christian isn’t on your radar yet then he soon will be. The guy just has something.
Since getting a cease and desist from Playboy (never a dull moment around here) and Flickr rapping my knuckles with a first and final warning, I’ve been slow to start uploading photographs again. Pretty much all the photos Flickred in January where thrown there by Jess. Some of them I haven’t even looked at yet. This isn’t simply a reluctance to use Flickr - it remains one of the few services that changed the way I use the Internet - but because I’ve been messing around with video more and more since I got back from NYC my regular camera has gotten kinda dusty.
But the warning from Flickr and in particular the line “further action that may include termination without warning” has given me pause for thought. A lot of the content of my Flickr stream are the only copies I have. We’re talking memories here - not only in the sentimental sense, but also in the ‘I’m an old old man and can’t remember where I’ve been’ sense.
Finding an easy way to back up almost 8,000 photos, the vast majority of which were indeed taken by us, in case another copyright infringement leads to account deletion has proven to be a bit of a headache. One thing I should mention is that the Playboy photos were put up on Flickr in order to find out where they originated from. I was curious as to how such a grim little war movie ended up with a promo shoot involving Michael Caine, Denholm Elliott and a bevy of naked ladies.
Playboy let me know in no uncertain terms that the photos belonged to them. Mystery solved.
So as long as I don’t do anything similar within Flickr I’m OK, right? Well this is still a concern as I get sent promotional photos from movies all the time and rather than get them hotlinked from my own server I stick em up on Flickr and change the copyright to the rights holder. All it takes is one over efficient Flickr/Yahoo employee to put a red flag over one of these photos and there go all our photos.
I should also add I have no problem with Flickr regarding this. In fact I’m involved in two upcoming events with them. But seeing as there isn’t a single elegant back up solution I’m now looking at going into my Flickr stream and relocating all the screencaps and promotional crap from the account. Tiresome to say the least.
I really need to replace all these external drives and towering stacks of DVDs with something tidy (but huge) then I can keep on top of archiving my own photographs and videos. And then there are the boxes of actual photographs that we want to digitise…
The last time I was ‘home’ I found a neglected photo album and saved as many of the photos as I could.
A lot of these are old Polaroid shots of me as a kid - wearing an A Team jumper, Ghostbusters shirt, playing with Lorne Greene action figures(?!), leaning on dinosaurs - so I was a little saddened to read the other day that Polaroid are now abandoning the film business. My favourite camera was always a Polaroid, but the expensive film made sure it was used sparingly over the years. Watching the photograph develop before your eyes was part of the charm of course and it’s a shame to think of that process as now almost obsolete. That said I won’t be heading to eBay to find a ‘new’ camera and the final stocks of film. There’ll be enough geeks doing just that right now.
I did stumble across this video though…
Maybe I’ll have a quick look on eBay.
Weirdly, I am off to Luxembourg in just a few hours.
See you on the other side…
Sometime around 4am on Friday the power into our building went somewhere else.
It finally came back on Sunday.
This is an old building. The lower part of our flat used to be the rafters of a 250 year old tannery building. The upper part of the flat where I’m writing from is a much later pre fabricated edition. It comes complete with an emergency thermostat so that if I ever forget to put the heating on and the temperature drops too low it’ll kick in and stop the place from freezing. Our heating and the emergency system require electicity to do their thing.
By Saturday the only place that wasn’t an icebox was the freezer.
We spent part of the weekend in a hotel just around the corner. That was weird.
I did a little work on Friday from the coffee shop, but not much. I just about caught up, but I’m way behind.
If only I had a spine modem…
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