woobiquity

When every last word is in play

If one morning soon you leave the house and, as your caffeine finally takes effect, you wake up to the realization that the billboards and posters around you have no words on them, that the newspaper under your arm is a picture-book, that the brochure you're handed at the street corner is a baffling fold-out of Pictionary sketches -- it won't be because all the writers in the world have gone on strike.

No, it will be far worse than that. (Or far better, if the sight of words makes you claustrophobic, or if you're a person who just really, honestly, truly prefers reality TV over a polished, scripted fare, like, you know, a good zombie movie.) It will be irreversible, what has happened. It will be... a good zombie movie. It will be that every working writer in the world has, at last, discovered Scrabulous.

Photo: Magic Screen, Think Shop window, Greenwich Village, New York, last autumn.

Yes, I am a smoker (not)

Internet marketing as subliminal mind games. Go to the Natural American Spirit website (that's the 'cool' brand of additive-free cigarettes, popular these days among indie kids and and indie grown-ups in the States -- how many of them know it's an RJ Reynolds brand is not yet clear).

To get past the website's splash screen, you have to do an age verification. Fair enough, right? Why should kids look at a cigarette company's website? "No additives does NOT mean a safer cigarette," says a box under the surgeon general's warning. Wow, a responsible cigarette company. Who knew?

But to enter the site you must also affirm whether you do or do not smoke.

Are you a smoker: yes or no?

No.

Please, if you don’t smoke, don’t start. We don’t even encourage smokers to smoke more.

Are you a smoker: yes or no?

No.

Please, if you don’t smoke, don’t start. We don’t even encourage smokers to smoke more.

Are you a smoker: yes or no?

Yes.

And you're in. At last, you're in.

And so, even just to check out the Natural American Spirit company, whether for research purposes (i.e. as a financial analyst or because, like me, you're developing a fictional character who smokes them) or as an anti-smoking campaigner checking up on what messages the company is sending out -- you must first, maybe even for the first time, declare that, yes, you are a smoker.

It's a hurdle, but once you're over it you're over it. And as we all know, admitting the problem is half the solution.

Storytelling as child's play

From the lobby of the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, some evidence that Picasso may not merely have been making a clever turn of phrase when he said it took him a lifetime to paint like a child.

The first is a story that begins "Onc apon a tim thar was a lady with twenty hats" and ends "Oh KO lets sing a song: lets serch for a hat lets go this way and that way woooo". (See? Playfulness in writing really is about just doing it, no rules.) Both painters of the rather exquisite artworks above are nine years old. Of The Thorn Bush, left, Cameron wrote: "I could picture the bush in my head." Of his painting, The Big Party, Josh wrote: "I liked this part because the food looked yummy."

Where to write: a suggestion

Where do you write? Or if you don’t, where do you imagine that writers write? In a dark, monastic cell with candles burning? In an ivory tower with no door, the wordsmith’s long, beau-sturdy braids reeled in for months on end, or at least until the client or publisher has the next bundle of prose?

It’s a popular conception – although I may have embellished it slightly. The writer as martyr, sacrificing spinal health, doctor-recommended foods and the social life for his or her art. And make no mistake: it’s not for sissies. But if this is what’s keeping you from doing it, I’ve got an idea.

Don’t lock yourself away, get on a train. I speak from experience. On Monday I sat for several hours on an Edinburgh to Kings Cross train, across a table from a lovely, retired Yorkshire couple (who finished their tabloids in about 15 minutes). Look up from my notebook to ‘ponder a thought’ and the eye contact might start something that wouldn’t be over until Newcastle or beyond. So I kept the pen moving, desperately, no distractions, and by Leeds I had half a short story down.

The other beauty of writing on the go is that there’s no need to take time out for walks or other forms of art-enriching stimulation. It’s right there (in strategically stolen glimpses). The sea! The way the rim of white light around the puffs of steam from the nuclear station makes them strangely transfixing. Snow!

There is of course, a threat of DVT, of chemical poisoning from the trolley-service coffee, of prosecution for fare dodging -- okay, so, the economics of my plan may still need some tweaking. But with planning (some aspirin, a thermos from home) the first two complications are dealt with easily enough. And the last? Well, it’s exercise, and that’s always good for the spine.

My idea of 'a view'

Not because looking at a bustling street scene from this distance gives me a god complex or soothes a certain agoraphobia, but because watching the light change on such a view fills me with a sense of creative possibility, of abundance. AKA 'getting some height on the matter'; and by 'the matter' of course I mean life.

Princes Street as seen from the window of one of the spacious new St Giles Apartments on High Street, Edinburgh, Saturday morning.

If you're thinking of visiting Edinburgh, you could do much worse than to stay in one of these apartments. And while I'm in the business of making commercial recommendations a la A Sentimental Journey, allow me to call your attention to the fine (fine) Edinburgh chocolatier, Plaisir du Chocolat. More than 40 different chocolates, each with a stunning pattern on top and incredibly fresh-tasting things inside (mint that tastes like you've just bit into a leaf from the garden, for example). And each comes with a finely-worded description.

"Antilles. This chocolate was inspired by the French novels of the XIXth century - the first half of which was dominated by Romanticism; an age of exoticism. Our dark chocolate ganache has been infused  with a blend of exotic spices and mixed with a rum from Martinique. To be enjoyed while reading Vicomte de Chateaubriand."

Design, words AND chocolate. Even with a slight aftertaste of pretension it's still nirvana in a box.

Closing Pandora's box

In the myth, once the goodies were out of the box they couldn’t be put back in. But with Pandora, the internet radio phenomenon, the whole point is that the stream of goodies will never run out. (The name choice itself suggests an irreversible offering – a belief that they’d built a better mouse trap – that once people had tried this kind of radio they’d never want to return to radio as they knew it.)

Ah well... as of sometime today if you live in the UK and visit pandora.com, you won’t get anything. The rest of Europe had been shut out already. China, presumably, had long-since banned it from within.

I guess the money men and women in the music industry must prefer the ancient tale, fearing that once their music is out there, actually being heard, they’d never wrest it back. According to Pandora’s management, the industry’s UK gatekeepers insisted on licensing fees that were ‘totally unworkable’ for ad-supported radio. It’s a panicked response. We live in an awkward age. The internet revolution is moving too fast for some. On the plus side: some perspective. I mean, did anyone’s world stop rotating because (shut down by the writers’ demands for fair internet compensation) the Golden Globes were a chiffon-covered lectern, not the usual TV bonanza?

But philosophizing is no substitute for a workspace charged with a hum of instrumental jazz, a new discovery always imminent. And I can’t tell you how many albums I’ve bought because of Pandora’s personalized approach and handy links. At least now I’ll have more money for booze. But this silence! Where will I find another station that greets me with this:

To start things off we’ll play a song that exemplifies the musical style of Thelonious Monk which features a driving swing feel, quirky ideas and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.

Ho-hum, high-pitched hummmmmmmm.

Art on the Underground

At first I wanted to look away. But as I walked along the westbound Piccadilly Line platform at Leicester Square Station a few days ago I became transfixed by the strange beauty of these massive poster boards, which had been stripped of several layers of advertising. I decided it was art, however accidental. Then I was sure it was a teaser campaign for something. Then I leaned in far enough to see that the hanging scraps of paper were real, not a PhotoShop job. Yes, it was art.

See more photos here.

In fact, for me this was one of the most meaningful, even transcendental, artistic displays I've seen in ages. The raw material: layers of in-your-face marketing gloss, the kind that attaches itself to anything in our fair city that won't shake it off, choking the life out of our public spaces. The process: stripping these layers (literally) of their intended meaning. The result: a whirlpool of cubist pop-art abstract expressionist zen for the 21st century.

If I could be mayor for a day I would have these transferred to the Tate and preserved for future generations. It seems inevitable that posters on the underground will go the way of the Routemaster and the red phone boxes on our streets, replaced by some flashing digital hell as soon as the economics are right. This accidental art was made for our moment and time.

And if you ever doubted that the lines between commercial and fine art are now blurred beyond all recognition (or if you are just fascinated by such matters), you'll want to hear this.

Monkey business on the train

If the train service here wasn't such a mess, I might never have spotted this. (This is what's called starting the year with an optimistic, erm, outlook.)

'Rust monkey', as seen from a stalled train outside London Bridge Station this afternoon.

Has Hillary lost the plot?

Or did she just never find it? Now, I don’t mean to be cruel, especially when she’s already getting teary-eyed. But then, this is how she explained her sudden show of humanity yesterday:

“It was just so touching when this woman said, ‘Well, what about you?’” Mrs. Clinton said. “I just don’t think about that, I think about what I can do for other people. I have spent a lifetime trying to help others; I’m very other-directed. That’s maybe why people don’t get me in the political world.”

Or as Bette Midler said, channeling this kind of one finger pointing at you, three pointing back at myself shtick for comedic purposes: “But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?”

If Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president continues to collapse, one big reason may be because she’s pitied, sorry, pitted herself against an unbeatable opponent: Story. And Barack Obama’s sure got story. So this is how Hillary tried to fight back after Obama beat her so badly in the Iowa caucuses, winning support primarily by telling people stories about himself, themselves and America that they felt they could believe in:

“Making change is not about what you believe. It’s not about a speech you make. It is about working hard.” She also said, in the mother of all killjoy expressions, “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.”

The next day she seemed to have had second thoughts about taking on Story head-on. “You campaign in poetry,” she said, “but you govern in prose.” Which is a nice sentiment (borrowed, incidentally, from another New Yorker who failed to win the Democratic nomination for president, Mario Cuomo). But this was just flailing, testing out tactics. And besides, Obama seems to be saying, “We’re campaigning in prose and we’re going to govern in prose.” How annoying must it be to have someone change the rules on you like that without even consulting you first?

The freshest most level-headed commentary I’ve seen about Hillary’s conundrum was by a Bob M, writing, believe it or not, in the dirt-flies, campaign-lies comments section of a Washington Monthly online article.

Since Clinton's last remaining strength vs. Obama lies in the fact that she commands the loyalties of more registered Democrats, she should be telling a story, talking about the history and the accomplishments of the Democratic Party going back to FDR and JFK, and positioning herself as their proper heir, and then sketching out a vision of the future of the party.

But she doesn't do that; she doesn't have a historical narrative to speak of. She also doesn't have a personal narrative that is all that inspiring. And so the only story her campaign is telling is about her personal accomplishments as senator and First Lady. These are fine accomplishments, as far as they go, but they are puny when compared to the accomplishments of the Democratic Party as a whole; and insignificant when compared to the accompishments of the United States of America as a whole, which is what Barack Obama has been talking about.

Hillary's problem then is that she has no idea how to tell a national story, construct a historical narrative; and she is going up against someone who, as all his speeches and books reveal, is very good at that. And the result is that she comes off looking selfish, unimaginative, and small.

As a person who makes his living by working with people’s and organizations’ stories, this armchair advice was one of the most instructional things I’ve read online in quite a while. And the main lesson is: thank God I’m not working for a political campaign. Although being Barack Obama’s speechwriter at the age of 26 must be pretty awesome nonetheless.