taking fire

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I’m back with a vengeance folks.

So I sent Aaron this email which I knew he’d find funny and he replied saying it was good TF material. The thought of posting it had never crossed my mind so blame him for this childish nonsense. If you start reading it and don’t find it funny then stop and go and do something else as the humour certainly does not improve any.

What follows is an exact email thread conducted yesterday by me and some former work colleagues, all professionals in the IT sector.

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So I’ve gone and joined another band…

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Air’s last post made me smile. I love these things. Would you like to know some facts about me? Well, I can’t promise they’ll be worth knowing but i’ll give it a good go.

1. My default frame of mind is bright and optimistic. I have shorter fuse than most though. Not something i’m proud of.

2. My mind absorbs numbers and superfluous data like a fat kid absorbs chips. I know most telephone numbers i’ve looked at a few times off by heart. Al’s old number in Saudi was 00966501613115, Aaron’s old number was 07900423577. I went on a date with a doctor once. She told me I was ‘on the autistic spectrum’. That’s not good date chat.

3. Catchy one-liners and concise phrasing turn me on and always have. I remember clearly standing up in the shopping trolley at pre-school age telling my mum to buy Vortex because ‘It Kills All Known Germs DEAD’. I loved thinking up clever taglines for ads at uni.

4. Being in the sea makes me feel elated. I grew up in the water. It’s the most magical element.

5. I learn most quickly when out of my comfort zone. I’d love to be more prolific with the gifts that I have. Lazyness is less acceptable the older you get.

6. My friend Lauren is always happy. Her philosophy is catchy and concise. ‘People are more important than things, relationships are more important than money’. She is wiser than me.

7. Hearing is on a par with sight. Music is more important to me than most things.

8. Erratic artwork appeals to me most. Pollock, Basquiat, Cabellut. Order terrifies me. I understand that it’s necessary but it freaks me out.

9. I can understand the argument for polyamory. Some people genuinely experience a need to be with more than one partner and are resolute about their partner’s right to do the same. I’m not one of them.

10. I have an irrational fear of the supernatural. It’s very silly but it genuinely terrifies me.

Many, many times I have asked myself what the hell twitter is actually for.

No one you know is interested in it. Your life is admirably succulent without it. Out of curiosity you inspect the main site – perhaps register an empty account – but there are no meaningful clues of any worth. You pull up a few random feeds, and stare blankly at the torrent of worthless bilge.

Executive summary:

• At worst, for the passive user, it’s a cheap way to stalk feel close to a miniscule set of tech-savvy C-list celebrities.
• At worst, for the active but pioneering microblogger, it’s a dispiriting void in which to fruitlessly drain your creative juice.
• The real value only emerges – in a similar way to ‘real’ blogging – when a number of your own friends choose to take part, and you have a mutually interested audience.

Micro-what? STFU

I know. Microblogging is an ugly word but an old concept. It essentially means, lower your expectations. The nuggets here are, for the most part, throwaway comments. Or ideas without time to be developed. Think back to the early days of TF, when a youtube URL and a few acronyms (hmm, to LOL or not to LOL?) constituted a well-crafted post.

Twitter fills the yawning gap of time between TF posts. Sometimes you really do just have a sentence or two to say, and it’s worth ten seconds of someone else’s time.

Look, pussbook does this already

Kind of. Status updates get lost in a sea of sparkly froth. You’ve got hundreds of friends. You only really care about the daily spewings of a small subset.

So, this voyeurism angle. Who could I possibly care to read about?

Good question. As an example, let’s see whose lives I now peer into with freakish ease:

• Stephen Fry. Creatively foul-mouthed and always entertaining. Loves twitter like he loves a generous coating of man-butter
• Kristin Hersh
• Mike Skinner. Pithy and creative
• Russell Brand. Just getting into it
• Jonathan Ross. Loving the attention and ability to disseminate gossip
• Regina Spektor
• Warren Ellis. Bad-brained and darkly funny writer of comics. Best quote on experiencing a hangover, “I appear to have woken up in Stephen Hawking’s body.”
• Neil Gaiman. Avid user

There’s a *nnrgh* reality TV aspect to this. I don’t truly benefit from knowing the details of Stephen Fry’s travels in New Zealand, or the hourly updates on the health of Neil Gaiman’s dog. It’s compelling nonetheless.

The word ‘twitter’ accurately skewers the banality of the medium. But banal events in the lives of those people you care about are important; they’re the fodder of conversations you aren’t having. With enough fleeting glimpses into someone’s life, you feel closer, wherever they are.

You can follow me, and the reliably deviant ms.bean. If you don’t have a twitter-ready telephone – which you will need to get the real addiction – you can also catch my dribbles just on the left there.

Bit of excitement round here from last night. A medium-sized jet airliner took off from LaGuardia (the tinkiest of NY’s three airports) and promptly at 1,000ft made feathery mincemeat out of a flock of birds. Apparently this is not great for the jet engines, which coughed flame, developed spinning Xs over their eyes and lit up all kinds of neat red lights in the cockpit.

The pilot dude is a war ace or something and mumbling obscenity about Baron von Richthofen, managed to glide the powerless plane politely around Manhattan – past my apartment – before dumping it in the river just next to the skatepark that I frequent in warmer months.

You can read things about it in guardianland and see the grubby-vision twitter pic that killed their servers overnight.

Clearly the pilot is to be commended for not killing everyone. I understand he has been granted an unlimited number of blowjobs within the tri-state area. The media coverage is amusing though in spunking the word ‘miracle’ around; as usual we can associate God’s will with the fact that everyone survived, but not presumably to the act of stuffing beaky engine-killers into the aircraft in the first place.

Like any good common-or-garden Alan Moore nerd I have read Watchmen multiple times. However, I’ve always had a slight problem with it.

Each time I consumed it, there remained the completist’s vague sense of unease that every nuance, every reference hidden in every panel had not been fully appreciated. The niggling* feeling was exacerbated by the sheer pageturnness driving me to tear through it in double-quick time. Reading Watchmen for me was like watching Chinatown played at 1.5x speed after four beers. Good, but you weren’t joining all the dots.

So with the film coming out the day after my birthday and the release of the Absolute edition, it’s time to get back on it. This time, the pages are big enough that you can read every headline and graffiti clue hidden away in the panels. This time I’m taking notes.

The artifact itself is huge and weighty and gloriously shiny. Reading it this time is odd for a different reason; the book itself (at least my copy) is toxic. There’s a strong chemical smell coming off the zingy amazingness pinsharp pages of glory, a solvent of some kind that fucks with your head like you’ve left the gas on. I was excited to read Watchmen again, but I didn’t expect to be buzzing off my tits.

My notes now contain insightful observations like, Rorschach is anti-heroic in the sense that the reader identifies mostly with the face the blobs pretty flowers never the sunshine pale horse the eyes owlish and flying skintight…

Let’s hope the film doesn’t spoil it.

* use this word with caution in NYC if you don’t want a David Howard-ing

OK, let’s catch up, you and me. Take a seat. Bourbon and ginger sound all right? It’s my new staple, see if you like it. Some ice here somewhere. Always worried I’ll break these nice glasses (cheers Julie).

Long time since I posted, I know. Let’s see.

Back in the grunge days you’d hear wild tales of Perry Farrell’s Lollapalooza. Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins. An impossibly far-off event. These days it’s hosted in Chicago, a short flight away and hence a no-brainer. Got together with Olivia to form Team Strawberry Blonde and did the Grant Park experience. Definitely and unexpectedly the most civilised festival I’ve ever been to – clean wandering among topiary and fountains and uncrowded open spaces under blazing sun. The only criticism was the amount of stuff crammed together – some British electro band on Stage Obscure drowning out the agreeable pansyschrek noise coming from MGMT.

Chicago itself is much cooler than I expected. It dawned on me that New York is retro, 50s, gargoyled skyscrapers from the end of Ghostbusters. Chicago is neo-futuroid, shiny, full of public art and wall-to-wall contemporary architecture. You can get the idea here.

The end consequence of a sound recommendation from Milnotron several ages ago, I went to a really remarkable Parts & Labor gig in Brooklyn. The ‘venue’ was a trashed up, board-windowed attic space with raw electrics hanging from the walls and evidently no proper licenses. The organiser urged the smokers among us to walk away from the unmarked front door before lighting up outside, in case we drew the cops’ attention to the place. A frantic soak in a bath of noise and whisky.

We saw Rushmore projected in an abandoned outdoor swimming pool. We saw The Shining projected on a big screen under the Brooklyn Bridge with all the lights of the city behind.

I flew home and saw my Gramps for the last time.

There are many ways to get around the streets of Manhattan. Five points for each one you Spy!

• The Gaper. Hapless in shorts, the foreign and the naive amble and pause, pointing pocket cameras at the Chrysler building from three blocks away, flash plinking feebly.
• The Commuter. Roll-sleeved shirts and ties move in straight impatient lines, juggling Blackberrys and maintaining optimum viewing distance from the flimsy sundress walking ahead. Commuters suffer from animosity toward Gapers.
• The Hailer. One arm urgently aloft and the other heavy with expensive shopping bags, the Hailer demonstrates her greater need to be somewhere, chin high and confident. Note: Manhattan only. Cab drivers understand that the Brooklyn bridges are made of wet papier mache and lead to a grim land of flesh-eating zombies, and will sooner sauté their grandmothers’ kidneys than take you anywhere off the island.
• The Shuffler. The downtrodden and homeless shuffle slowly. Loose, worn knitwear and battered sandals. An ancient walkman looping something through earphones shorn of foam. Without destination or focus they make their steady, glassy progress, foot, over foot, over foot, like wind-up toys.
• The Trolley. Bent with weight into their shopping cart, sisyphean. Bags full of the recycleable and dubious. Grim with apparent purpose.
• The Batshit Loonball. The truly mad travel less; the consistency of a neighbourhood some measure of comfort given wild internal weather. On my block, the Japanese lady asks questions angrily of the sidewalk, sharp foreign consonants and a baffled lack of response. She moves off toward 10th Avenue, carefully walking using her right knee instead of the foot; a loping, unnecessary, uncomfortable tribute to John Cleese.
• The Courier. Heralded by the hated blast of car horns, the brakeless courier careens across the junction through another red. No problem, no worries, no fear.
• The Scooter. Mothers on Xootrs wait carefully for the crossing signal and push off, leading their line of helmeted ducklings on wobbly toy-wheeled Razors home.
• The Inliner. Muscle-topped and tanned, the gay ‘liners power their olympic way around the greenway circuit, legs sweeping out, side to side to side.
• The Skater. The hipster hat and sunglasses glide along behind the row of parked cars. The tarmac growls loudly of skateboard wheels. Dogs follow the unnatural noise and bark taut against the leash. On Union Square, the skaters take turns passing up and down in front of the steps like mediaeval jousters, stretching out manuals, kickflipping, cashing in their hours of practice for short-lived glory.