I’ve never read any David Foster Wallace, so when he died in September of last year I had one of those weird ‘I should be sad, but I’m not sure why’ feelings.
Then, of course, I couldn’t just go out and buy one of his books because that’s a little too morbid and weird. Plus, I have plenty of books sitting in my To Read pile, and dead guys don’t just get to jump the queue because they died.
But now I have a great excuse, because the brilliant minds behind The Morning News (a website I’ve admired and occasionally ripped off for the past half a decade or so) have created the Infinite Summer project, encouraging “endurance bibliophiles from around the world [to read] Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd.”
It’s the kind of online, social project I like: loose, literate, and a little bit lunatic. It’s a thousand pages over 92 days, and that not including the endnotes.
Just buying the book has made me realise one of the main reasons I am so attracted to online communities: I love doing things with other people, especially if I don’t have to meet any of them.
A 1986/87 Peugeot P10 (the ‘Elite’ model apparently). It was a Gumtree purchase, designed to replace my Giant mountain bike, whch was just a little too heavy for the hills of Crystal Palace. Excuse the crappy pctures, they were taken hastily for a very geeky cycling site, to try and get the bike properly identified.
Short term: Need to take into the brillant Velorution workshop so they can give it the once over. Then start riding it into work at least a couple of times a week.
The good news: I passed my theory driving test this weekend. I know: I’m a late starter. But I’m geting there right? Now comes the expensive, difficult bit.
The bad news: A lovely road bike slipped through my fingers on eBay (I’d even been to see it and tried it out for size - which makes it even worse).
If you haven’t listened to the most recent This American Life podcast yet, go download it now. It was a special live performance which features Joss Whedon performing a song from the Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog DVD extra commentary, and a story read by Dan Savage that is guaranteed to make you cry.
“The anticipation here for the opening of this shop, beyond the usual coffee cognoscente circles, is probably unprecedented. The sort of buzz you might hear around a new restaurant from celebrity chef.”
And finally… I, like many other people, have recently fallen in love with Lizzy Trullie.
This post from Jason Santa Maria really struck a chord with me.
I love the idea of sketchbooks so I get very envious when I look at what people like Alex Milway and Sarah McIntyre can produce without even seeming to think about it (although I know they do think about it quite a bit), and I’ve posted before about how great Mike Rhode’s stuff is.
So why don’t I join in the fun? Well, because “I can’t draw” of course.
Jason has a reply to this, and it’s a very good one:
“Sketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker.
Obviously, some people bring the practice of sketching to a higher art form, but to me it’s always been about visual brainstorming and record-keeping in a format with a ridiculously low barrier to entry. My drawings look like shit, but fidelity doesn’t matter as long as I can convey my ideas to others or to my future self.
We should revel in not caring how good or bad we are, and by knowing that our means for thinking has improved with each stroke of our pencils. The point is to keep doing, it’s how you get stuff done. And most certainly how you get better.”
Of course, “not caring how good or bad we are” is easier said than done (never mind reveling in it), but it’s a very admirable goal so I think this week I’ll make a point of filling a few pages and submitting a selection to Jason’s Flickr Group.
This rather insane but fascinating video clip is from the 2009 World Barista Championship, and show’s the UK champion, Gwilym Davies, becoming World Champion. You can probably skip to the ten minute mark if you’re not that interested.
I love my coffee, but I’m not this obsessive about it (I think few people are). What I love about this video though is the sheer attention to detail shown by everyone involved: the competitors, the judges, the spectators. It’s coffee making as us mortals know it, filtered and concentrated to the Nth degree. Like nuclear espresso.
For the past two weeks my wife has been abroad with work, and when that happens I tend to start working my way through the stockpile of films I have stored in the box marked ‘Stuff My Wife Wouldn’t Watch In A Million Years’. This time around that box happened to contain a bunch of documentaries, so for the past ten days or so I’ve been on a bit of a fact binge, and I’ve loved every minute of it.
First up was Ken Burns’ film about Frank Lloyd Wright. It was actually my mum who put me on to this 145 minute architecture-athon after she caught it on the Sky Arts channel. At 11 years old, it is a little dated but that doesn’t detract from the amazing story that was Lloyd Wright’s life.
Structured in two parts, the first half of the film covers the first 60 years of the architect’s life, at the end of which he has endured horrific personal tragedy, he’s broke, and his career is all but finished. Which begs the question: what the hell are they going to fill the second hour of film with? The answer to that question is what made Frank Lloyd Wright such an amazing character, and what makes this such an engrossing doumentary.
Now I just have to decide whether or not to read T.C. Boyle’s bookThe Women which has received some mixed reviews so far.
Next up was Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell. Arthur Russell was (to quote Wikipedia) “an American cellist, composer, singer, and disco artist,” an explanation which should give you an idea of just what an incredible guy Russell was.
Matt Wolf’s portrait of him is fascinating and incredibly touching (Russell died, aged 40, in 1992). Interviews with Russell’s artistic collaborators are interspersed with contributions from his parents and his long-term partner Tom Lee, who deliver some brilliant insights into Russell’s peculiarly self-destructive brand of genius. If you haven’t heard any Arthur Russell yet, go listen to him on Last.fm or Spotify (or maybe go to a shop and but one of his albums!) and then watch this film, I think you’ll like it.
Last up is You Think You really Know Me - The Gary Wilson Story, Michael Wolk’s attempt to document the life of ‘experimental musician’ Gary Wilson during the late 1970s/early 1980s and the period in 2002 when he staged a comeback of sorts “after two decades of self-imposed exile”.
It’s probably the least accomplished of the three documentaries, mainly because Wilson is a difficult subject to pin down and there’s not a huge amount of archive footage on which to base the retrospective sections. But the film still has some amazing moments, and once you’ve watched it I guarantee you’ll find it impossible to sit through a minute of MTV ever again.
P.S. All these screenshots were taken while watching the films on my iPhone. I love the fact you can just press a button capture the phone’s screen at any time. It’s a great way of snapping certain images that you want to save for one reason or another, and also a nicely visual way to track what you’ve watched.
Towards the end of the article it asks a question that’s been on my mind recently: does the UK need its own Jon Stewart?
The observers asks Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, that question, and he replies:
“Cramer has been attacked by Jon Stewart for being too optimistic after the crisis started in the summer of 2007. The allegation against him and CNBC is that they were taking too rose-tinted a view of what was subsequently going on at various institutions. That is simply not a criticism that I think can be levelled at most UK financial journalists.
If Stewart tried to do that over here, I think he’d look like an idiot because I don’t think there’s evidence for falling down on the job in remotely the same way. I don’t think it’s possible to do it because the evidence isn’t there of a complacent, or self-satisfied, or lazy, or unduly optimistic media.”
That’s all fair enough, but I think Peston comes at it from the wrong angle. I don’t think our journalism is suffering because it’s not aggressive enough, I think it’s suffering because it’s too aggressive.
To be clear, I’m talking about A-List, prime time, journalism here. Earlier in the Observer article Stewart is described as having “the attack-dog interviewing instincts of a Humphrys or Paxman,” and that’s the comparison we need to make. The trouble is that while Stewart pursues those instincts with intelligence, charisma and wit, Paxman and Humphrys are fast becoming caricatures of themselves.
It’s strange that to watch or listen to Paxman or Humphrys in action these days is a form of entertainment that will more often than not raise a laugh or two at the ludicrous veracity of their approach. Humphrys especially seems to have slipped into a default mode which involves him interrupting, talking over people, and contradicting his interviewees for what seems like the sake of it.
On the flip side, Jon Stewart is first and foremost a comedian, and yet what comes out of his “variety show” (to quote Cramer) is the kind of story which captures the public mood, makes the White House sit up and take notice, and could genuinely shift the way financial journalism operates in the US.
I read a comment this week (I’m sorry, I can’t remember where exactly) which criticised Jon Stewart for being too polite, for pulling back when other journalists would have gone in for the kill. I don’t agree. I thing Stewart’s politeness, along with his charm, his humour, and (let’s be honest here) the fact that he looks good on camera, is what makes him so appealing to a demographic who would not respond nearly half as well to John Humphrys or Jeremy Paxman.
So I think the UK does need a Jon Stewart figure. He doesn’t have to replace the journalists we have now, but he would be a fantastic added extra and a very welcome antidote to the tired, cartoonish vitriol of the ‘attack-dogs’ we’re relying on right now.
A while ago my friend and Crystal Palace neighbour Alex Milway (of Mousehunter fame), gave me a big box of old comics to rifle through. I have a suspicion his generosity was somewhat influenced by the fact that he didn’t want them lying around his flat anymore, but whatever the motive it was a great treat for me to be able to sit down and rifle through some classic comicana for a few hours.
I’ll upload a few photos of these over the next few weeks, but in the meantime, as Alex himself has just seen his book advertised in a DC comic I thought it would be nice to look at some of the ads from the Indiana Jones comic ‘The Sea Butchers, Chapter 1 - Island of Peril!’ published in 1984.
This one is quite scary at first glance:
It’s for Revells’ Magic Glo Racers, the idea of the ad being that the “specially customized decals” that glow in the dark are so terrifying to children that your little brother may never sleep again.
Elsewhere there’s a couple of adverts for those bizarre child labour/pyramid scheme operations that were somehow legal back in the mid-80s:
Part of the Comica series, this was a two-parter with the first half dedicated to the ripping yarns of our childhoods (or, at least, the childhoods of certain middle aged men) such as Eagle, Battle, and Rick Random (pictured above); and the second half dedicated to the relatively new British weekly comic The DFC.
Like most ICA talks I’ve been to the format was a little loose and disorganised, but it was still a pretty interesting afternoon, and the opportunity to see some fabulous artwork up close was worth the price of the ticket alone.
Afterwards we were lucky enough to sit down and have a few drinks with some of the panelists while they talked shop and it was great to get an insight into how they work. Plus, it helped that they were all super lovely people. And because they were all so lovely here’s a few links you should definitely go check out if you have the time:
ITV's coverage of Le Tour is way better than Eurosport's. And they're on Twiiter: 
