Jeff Pulver has kindly asked me to speak at the #140Conf in New York in June.

I’ll be speaking about some of the stuff that Twitter has allowed me to do over the last 12 months or so and learning what a whole bunch of other interesting folk have been using it for. I’m hoping to get a better overview of the possibilities that such  a disruptive platform offers and not make too much of an arse of myself.

I’ll also probably talk about some of the people Twitter has helped me work with:

Top image: Sylvester and Tweetie by James Cauty

Bottom image: Steven Spielberg by me.

After having some fun with film types and social media (I think there’s still some Michelle Yeoh footage to surface) I was approached by the publisher John Murray to see if I had any ideas about mixing things up with their authors. Of course, I said, as long as you have someone interesting. How about James Frey? was the reply…

Handily James was already scheduled to appear at the ICA last month and I’d already been chatting to those guys about helping out with what they do since they kindly suggested we relocate the Tuttle Club there. Perfect.

I’d read A Million Little Pieces just prior to its UK release and had actually met Frey before from my time as a bookseller, but aside from the South Park episode in which Oprah’s vagina pulls a gun and shoots a police officer, I hadn’t kept track of his career post-controversy. So off I went to his UK site and was pleasantly surprised to find it was the work of my friend @stml. Small world. Big Jim Industries is well worth a look too.

So the next step was to source some fan questions from Twitter:

In the meantime @blackpooltower (James’ UK publisher) got the word out via his forum which eventually lead to a fun afternoon at the ICA chatting to the author. He was as laid back and interesting as I remember and had a copy of Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock (highly recommended!) tucked under his arm. He turned out to be eager to go past our allotted time and here’s the resulting interview in three parts:

“I don’t believe in inspiration”

“I’m from the notorious Freys”

“I have the same lawyer as the guys from South Park”

What was interesting to me was that while James wasn’t prepared to speak at the later event about the Oprah controversy, he was more than happy to answer questions about it direct from his readers. It was also encouraging to see how quickly John Murray themselves got excited about this kind of thing.

There’s a direct link here between both the innovative stuff we’ve been doing with Reuters and all the film related stuff I’ve had a hand in since the Juno Twitter screening back in ‘07 and hanging out with Spielberg and the Indy cast in Cannes last year.

But more on all that later…

Oh and go read Bright Shiny Morning. It’s a lot of fun.

I vaguely remember watching Shamus as a kid, but like Prime Cut I somehow blanked out the best parts. I remembered one scene where he finds the body of his friend (Burt’s friends in the seventies had it rough – remember Cartetaker and the light bulb bomb in Mean Machine?), but that was about it. How could I forget he slept on a pool table, picked girls up with lines like, “Do you fool around?” and kicked so much ass.

I should qualify that he kicks a lot of ass for the first half of the movie – it goes off the rails towards the end which is a real shame. There’s a great running chase sequence early on that these days would swap realism for some nifty parkour, but instead we get Burt doing all of his own stunt work as he leaps and mostly falls off things. Great stuff.

This leapt out at me too:

I still find it jarring when the Twin Towers make an appearance in a movie, but this small glimpse in particular had me pausing the movie and checking Wikipedia to see how old the towers would have been when this movie was being made. The film was released in ‘73 and has a copyright of ‘72 while Wikipedia has this shot of them going up in ‘70. It’s interesting that the bands of yellow that adorned the construction are still partially in place in the screengrab. I need to make some time to watch Man on Wire I suppose…

When I was a kid the idea of actually going to New York was about as likely as nipping to Moon Base Alpha, but now I’m a frequent visitor (just to the former, alas) it still comes into focus for me through the movies I grew up with rather than the experiences I have there. That said, hanging out with fire fighters at 2am in an honest to god New York fire station probably trumps repeated viewings of Mean Streets.

Private detectives were a bit of a mainstay for me as a kid too. I was talking about the benefits of working freelance just the other day and it struck me that I have almost the same lifestyle as Jim Rockford because of it. I meet interesting people all the time, saunter into bars anytime I damn well like and also make do with off-the-rack, low-budget, slightly tacky clothing.

People try to kill me a lot less, but I tend to see this as an advantage.

There’s a lot of talk on Twitter about rock stars – something that has never sat easy with me as most rock stars are total cunts. What I’m slowly discovering is that we’re a loosely connected group of gumshoes and that suits me fine. I’d rather be a (private) dick than a cunt any day of the week.

One of the TV things I may get to breathe some life into in ‘09 is a police procedural thing. I’m suddenly thinking it makes a lot more sense to make it a P.I. kinda deal…

After hosting some smaller scale Tweetups myself I was very interested to see how last night’s Twestival was going to go. These things can get worryingly complicated, but I’m happy to say that despite an initial bout of confusion (over whether the venue was going to enforce its ridiculous dress code) the whole thing seemed to go off without a hitch.

I’m a little hoarse this morning from having one too many conversations over the ‘music’, but the free beer, wine and grub made up for that. Hell, I even won a raffle prize and did a little jig with a cute girl to Ben’s crowd rousing Twitter song.

As with all social media events though, the emphasis for me was the people – catching up with a few familiar faces and finally meeting some fine Twitter folk for the first time. In that respect the event worked really well and I had a much better time than at the Moo bash a few months back. There was a real sense of moving out of the echo chamber and it was a relief to see and meet so many people that I’ve never crossed paths with before. I had a lot of conversations that I’ll follow up on this week so some interesting stuff should come out of the evening.

I also got the occasional nod about some of the cool stuff I’ve been involved with over the last 12 months – and each time it was my great pleasure to remind everyone that everything from the film screenings to hanging with Han Solo started at events just like this one and through working with people that I’ve met almost exclusively through social media.

Amanda and the Twestival team did some sterling work last night and I’d certainly love to see the Twestival become an annual fixture on the London events calendar.

Speaking of events… I’m off to the Tuttle soon. We’re announcing some big news there this morning, but I’ll be writing about that later…

Twitter remains fucked.

This went up yesterday:

Yeah, cheers for that small cat with screwdriver. Why am I not filled with confidence?

Cheers Mel, but I’m gonna walk.

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

Off to see Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises with hubby:

I don’t mind him having a girlfriend as I serve a different set of needs. Mainly Ukrainian in scope.