woobiquity

Warning: Barbed Words

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, Saturday afternoon.

Of buildings that look better in just the right light

Centre Point Tower, London, yesterday evening, having never looked so much like a wedge of spring honeycomb made by industrial bees.

Self-portrait as a salvaged mannequin

Outside Abstriacticus, which often has something thought-provoking on display, Deptford Broadway, London, this afternoon.

The resilience of weeds

Two days ago while sitting in my back garden (ahem) working, I reached over and idly tugged at a weed that had grown up out of a crack in the wall. I didn't manage to pull its roots out, but my tugging left the thing standing straight out at an almost-right angle, like a sore thumb.

This afternoon I found that the weed had righted itself, or half of itself, positioning its buds back where they needed to be to get their necessary bask of sunlight.

If there's a deeper truth or wisdom in this, I don't pretend to know what it is. I just thought it was interesting. The heavenly glow around the open bloom, by the way, is a quirk of my camera phone, not any kind of blessing.

The freedom of the first draft

Here's something for the writers among us. Novelist and story writer Patrick Ness is the first writer in residence at Booktrust. As such he's writing the Writer in Residence blog, and it's briliant. Lots of practical insights into the writing process, including this, which I thought was especially useful to know:

...no one, and I mean NO ONE, ever reads my first drafts aside from me. And knowing that going in, I have a LOT more freedom to try things out, to overwrite where I'm struggling, to fall on my face and fix it without anyone ever knowing it happened.

The retail arts: paper houses

In the designer menswear room at Liberty of London. On a purple-felt-covered billiards table. Zany.

'I love me! Just kidding!'

A devastating, devastating!, take on social networking tools from Nicholas Carr. I don't know when I've read a few sentences that seemed so deftly to sum up what we're doing to ourselves in this modern world.

Narcissism is just the user interface for nihilism, of course, and with artfully kitschy services like Twitter we're allowed to both indulge our self-absorption and distance ourselves from it by acknowledging, with a coy digital wink, its essential emptiness. I love me! Just kidding!

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

Now, do I feel more real for having posted this quote on my blog? I'm going to power down, put down my iPod, walk out the door and not come back until I've thought of an answer to that.

UPDATE: I didn't think of an answer, but I did try on hats at a department store. OMG, silly or what??

Should this photo be destroyed?

Some on London’s police force seem to think so.

Klaus Matzka, an Austrian who says his and his teenaged son’s photos of London transport sites were deleted recently by police officers who approached them on the street: "I understand the need for some sensitivity in an era of terrorism, but isn't it naive to think terrorism can be prevented by terrorising tourists?"

Note to the Metropolitan Police: the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘tourist’ only sounded the same when George Bush said them.

Incidentally, if you are interested in things like freedom or expression or, for that matter, good literature from cultures other than your own, check out the Free the Word! festival. It starts tonight and runs throughout the weekend on London’s Southbank. (As last year, I’m co-editing a blog about the festival at freetheblog.typepad.com.)

Playing the audience, 'like an organ'

Confession: I have suffered from a nearly lifelong phobia of watching the movie Psycho (the original 1960 version, I mean). So much so that I almost turned down the opportunity to see it for free on the big screen recently. 

Thank god I didn't. It's a masterpiece. Who knew that the dialogue was so smart, that the cinematography was so drolly atmospheric, that the underlying comedy was so black or that Norman Bates was so likably All-American? Obviously... anyone who has seen the film knows these things, and yet the reputation that precedes Psycho is one of unbelievable horror. 

'After you've seen it, you'll never be able to take a shower again!'

Well, let me tell you, I came home after the film and took a shower and didn't even bother to lock the bathroom door. Then I logged onto Amazon and bought the pulp fiction novel on which the film was based.

In a 1978 interview, Alfred Hitchcock described the thinking that went into Psycho's cinematic construction. 'You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story,' he said, 'they like to feel they know what's coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts.' In Psycho, this meant a lengthy and essentially irrelevant (but lush, vintage) build-up of fugitive escapism heaped on top of romantic drama, and then the rug is pulled out from under the audience. It also meant clever marketing that conscripted audiences as co-conspirators while reiterating the film's shock value: 'Do not reveal its secrets!'

'I was directing the viewers,' Hitchcock said. 'You might say I was playing them, like an organ.'

The astonishing thing, to me at least, is the degree to which audiences are still being played by the film and its reputation more than 40 years later. Not by the original set-up and shock; most of the film's secrets are common knowledge now. Rather, it's the reverse. Expecting to be shocked (an expectation that can easily be traced from the present all the way back to the initial publicity campaign), instead we get subtlety. Amazing.