woobiquity

Why even tattoo artists need a dictionary

Or perhaps I should say especially tattoo artists:

 

HuffPost rounds up the funniest misspelled tattoos they could find, including one seriously unfortunate variation on the phrase 'sweet pea'. Oops.

'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??

London's new literary salon (it's a hothouse)

A young Faber author reads from his new novel while wearing a cardboard box on his head. Nineteen interested peoples sit knee-to-knee on summery cushions (except for four lucky ones who nabbed the wrought-iron garden bench), and the glass hothouse doors are slid open a crack to let out some of the heat from the little birchwood-burning stove.

Where could such whimsies as this exist? I hesitate to tell you, because then there might not be room for me at the next one. But alright, it's the bookshop (a tiny conservatory) at The Wapping Project, run by the delightful, effervescent Lydia Fulton. Coming up, there's meant to be a different reading every week, though I fear the event may soon outgrow its magical confines. Which would be a shame.

The author in the photo above, taken last night, is Richard Milward, a 24-year-old from Middlesbrough in the north of England. He's funny and strange and brilliant. You might remember his debut, Apples. The book his St Martins-approved headpiece replicates, nearly, is Ten Storey Love Song, a new novel that is a single paragraph from beginning to end. Flick through it, he explained, and every page resembles a block of flats. 

The best bad coffee in Soho?

It's at Maison Bertaux. Where else?

I mean, where else would the properly-vowelled proprietress who took your morning order burst through the tearoom door with a sloshing cup, use the spoon from the saucer to hold back the foam (which has already spilled down all sides of the cup) and say, "You did say 'white coffee', didn't you dahling? See if it's alright. I usually take it black."

(Photo: Cup half empty, Maison Bertaux, London, Monday.)

The Merrier

A fleeting one-act play based on actual, surreal events. Not a musical.

Setting: Selfridges Department Store on a Saturday afternoon in December.

Characters: Claire, a Selfridges Christmas temp, and Jonathan, a bewildered shopper.

People, some angry, some joyous, some chewing gum, mill around in tight rows of Japanese household products, suffocating in the general absence of natural air and light. Incandescent families rage in the walkways, unsure how far they are from Santa’s grotto. Claire stands behind a pulpit-shaped till, looking blankly around the shop floor. Jonathan stands near her, also looking blankly around the shop floor. Their eyes meet.

 

Claire: Hello.

Jonathan: Hi.

Claire: Are you enjoying your Christmas shopping today?

Jonathan: Oh, well, yes, I mean I’m enjoying it more now that I’m in this fairly quiet corner.

Claire (looks at shopping bags): It looks like you’ve done quite well.

Jonathan: Oh, well, I’ve done ok, yes, though it’s mainly stuff for myself. I haven't quite got the hang of this Christmas shopping thing.

Claire:  What have you bought?

Jonathan: Oh, you know, a few things for the house, some stationery…

Claire: Do you have any loved ones?

Jonathan: I don’t know. How do you define ‘loved ones’?

Claire: You know, people you love.

Jonathan: Oh, well, yes, I’ve got one or two of those.

Claire: And would you like to give them the Gift of Self-Indulgence this Christmas?

Jonathan: The Gift of Self-Indulgence… What is that exactly?

Claire: It’s a Selfridges gift card.

Jonathan: Oh, I'm not sure most of my loved ones would quite know what to do with that.

Claire: They wouldn’t?

Jonathan: Er, no. But I could always get one for myself.

Claire and Jonathan look blankly around the shop floor. Jonathan walks away.

Photo: detail from Selfridges Christmas window, December 2008. 

Power-ful words

Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.

- Senator John McCain

What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you. So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other.

- President-elect Barack Obama

We are the world (don't forget it)

Do you ever get the feeling the cosmos are trying to tell you something? Yesterday afternoon I went to see Goodbye Solo at the London Film Festival. It’s a low-key, perfectly formed movie set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, close to where I grew up.

It follows a Senegalese taxi driver as he develops an unlikely friendship with William (played by a wrinkled, watery-eyed Red West, who in real life was Elvis Presley's bodyguard), a man who wants to be driven to Blowing Rock, a natural platform that juts out like an arrow over the Blue Ridge Mountains. And he doesn't plan to come back.

In the Q&A afterward, the film’s charismatic African-born star, who now lives in New York, went out on a limb to explain his take on the underlying message. “It’s the global village,” he said. “I’m a citizen of the world and you are too.”

A couple of hours later (life is short) I was sat in the steel and neo-classical splendor of the converted St Lukes Church for this wonderful concert. The music was flawless, performed by two of today’s classical music giants (though Mitsuko Uchida couldn't be more petite). But the real star of the show was John Donne, the poet who died in 1631.

Donne’s poems formed the text for the evening’s program: lute songs by Anonymous and piano songs by Britten. A watery-eyed Corin Redgrave recited several poems with no accompaniment.

“Let us possess one world,” he read, “each hath one, and is one.”

Yesterday 100,000 people came out to hear Barack Obama give a speech in Missouri, a ‘red’ state. The Observer prepared an article about how an Obama victory could transform British politics. The New York Times prepared an article about the financial crisis reaching Hungary on its Around-the-World burn. 

Meanwhile (Donne: “watch not one another out of fear”) a spokesperson for the McCain campaign tried to drive the wedge between two Americas in a little deeper, to split the "real" America off from... something else. And thousands of Americans answered the phone to a voice equating Barack Obama with "welfare", a racially charged trope.

Two sets of facts. One of them is both extremely current and also echoes a timeless truth.

Read 'The Good Morrow' by John Donne in its entirety here.

What we can't see

Red lights at the dead-end of Metropolitan Line tracks, Farringdon Station, last Tuesday evening. On the platform behind the camera, a bald-headed man in a tired suit pulls a large, very old filing cabinet toward home, while a man with a guide dog approaches an arriving Circle Line train. Boarding, he inadvertently pets the shoulder of a young City-type, who skedaddles, maybe seeing, maybe not that the blind man has no eyeballs, just dark, monsterish craters above a seemingly genuine grin.

Summer solstice

Marigny style. At Sound Cafe on Chartres Street, Saturday evening. A band, trays of party food, plastic cups of red and white wine and people of all ages dropping whatever they were doing to come together and have a good time. This kind of tight-knit community isn't supposed to exist anymore, is it? Not in an America divided anyway.

A tale of two crimes in one city

One of my greatest pleasures at the moment is reading the New Orleans section of the Times-Picayune newspaper every day. I don't know whether it's tragedy plus time or just something in the water down here, but these reporters really have an eye for absurdist detail.

In yesterday's installment: two crimes depicting the slippery slope that is the life of the incompetent petty criminal.

The paper reported that two young women aged 16 and 19 were booked and bailed in Slidell after they tried to steal two kittens from an animal shelter. They'd gone to the shelter hoping to find their missing cat. It wasn't there, but they liked the looks of two of the kittens that were. When staff weren't looking, they sprung the kittens from their cages and ran for it.

Animal control officials tried to chase down the girls, but lost them about a block away... Anti and police went to Foundation Drive and found fliers the girls had posted ["Missing Cat"], which included a home address. The girls arrived home a few minutes later to find police and Animal Control officials waiting for them.

But the bigger crime of the day involved a high speed car chase through central New Orleans that didn't end well (although no one was seriously hurt). I happened to cross the scene as police were standing around at the intersection, kicking bumpers and other car parts absentmindedly in the evening heat. There were several burned-out vehicles, including a charred Hummer.

Apparently the perpetrator was 16 and had a 14-year-old sidekick. There were drugs involved. And underwear:

As the two young men bolted from the Trailblazer to make a run for it, one was delayed because "his pants fell down to his ankles and he had to pull them up before he ran," Salzer said.