From the squeaky-new release Metals. NYOM.

Caterina’s post has been swimming in my mind for few days, and it came to the surface yesterday as I read this tweet by @jessefarmer:

People don’t want to be convinced, they want to be inspired.

These both come from the same place. As human beans, we all just wanna be inspired. The things that inspire me to make things or make things better are not reading about Y Combinator deals, or going to enterpreneur- sandwiched meetups. It’s not baitlinkings. Or ebooks.

Sometimes the frustration of mangled double-speak on topic of technology makes me want to scream bullshit like I used to and run away like a seven-year girl. If someone is inspired, they’re probably hacking together something rather than speaking around it. They are probably investing their time in things they love making.

My day job necessitates me being a critic all day long. I enjoy this. But sometimes, the doing of trying to make things better gives one a sinking feeling, nay a hesitation, of making things from scratch. 9-5, I plan for gaps. Afterhours, it can be difficult to focus on the making things, gaps and all. It slows the pace of making, as I Hans Brinker my way through. Plugging gaps in designs proactively. And that’s something I have to deal with, and something I’m getting better at. But even then, I’m inspired and led to making things, by the things that made me. Kinda like Caterina alludes to.

In a roundabout kind of way, I suppose I’m saying that making doesn’t have to be profound or released to the public or a straight line or the subject of every greasy-till fumble. And the making of Silly is needed now more than ever.

I haven’t bought a Sunday newspaper in months. And it’s been good. I’m suddenly 16 again.

Divorcing oneself away from the medium slowly while the flames of the News of the World hacking, the sick events of the Utoya shootings and #Aras11 licked our news cycles has been good. There’s more reading, writing and thinking. I’m buying more stationary.

While all this good stuff fizzles away, reengaging with news on Twitter and some online news sites has been a largely empty experience. News in the shape of a photocopy of a photocopy infinity. Don’t you feel like a girl waiting for the Jetsons’ flying car too?

Oh, Glasto…

Euphoria, Take My Hand

For the day that’s in it..

Complexity: The Future of Advertising & Just About Everything Else from bud caddell on Vimeo.

Bud Caddell’s presentation on The Future of Advertising and Everything Else is well worth a look.

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Today is my 1444th day on Twitter.

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Last night’s Culture Show special ‘The Books We Really Read’ on BBC2 presented by Sue Perkins explored popular fiction down the centuries and how today’s bestsellers sit a gulf across from literary fiction. Perkins, a self-confessed literary fiction fan and past Booker Prize judge, decides to investigate the impact of popular fiction on culture across the genres of crime, romance and thriller. She reads Jackie Collins, meets fans of Dick Francis and interviews Lee Child and Sophie Kinsella.

What’s interesting about this is not Child attempts to shrug off the snooty High Art pretentions of the literary fiction as almost a class thing. What was stirred my stones is how he noted that he could do what they (the LitFiction crowd) do, but that they could not do what he does.

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Related somewhat to Child’s I’m currently reading Stephen King’s wonderful ‘On Writing’. This snippet from the foreword really struck a chord:

One night while we were eating Chinese before a gig in Miami Beach, I asked Amy if there was any one question she was never asked during the Q-and-A that follows almost every writer’s talk—that question you never get to answer when you’re standing in front of a group of author-struck fans and pretending you don’t put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Amy paused, thinking it over very carefully, and then said: “No one ever asks about the language.”

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to her for saying that. I had been playing with the idea of writing a little book about writing for a year or more at that time, but had held back because I didn’t trust my own motivations—why did I want to write about writing? What made me think I had anything worth saying?

The easy answer is that someone who has sold as many books of fiction as I have must have something worthwhile to say about writing it, but the easy answer isn’t always the truth. Colonel Sanders sold a hell of a lot of fried chicken, but I’m not sure anyone wants to know how he made it. If I was going to be presumptuous enough to tell people how to write, I felt there had to be a better reason than my popular success. Put another way, I didn’t want to write a book, even a short one like this, that would leave me feeling like either a literary gas- bag or a transcendental asshole. There are enough of those books—and those writers—on the market already, thanks.

But Amy was right: nobody ever asks about the language. They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles also care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper. What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.

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Om wrote a thoughtful post entitled ‘Why the Medium Is Not the Message’. Om’s posts are always thoughtful, but this really stuck out for me me:

When companies can’t really tell the difference between the medium and the message, they get in trouble. Let’s look at the much-hyped photo-sharing service Instagr.am and Flickr, the granddaddy of photo sharing services.

At their core, both these services are about social broadcasting and social validation, not storing photos. But today, Flickr gives an impression of being a staid photo-sharing product. Why? Because mobile has become key component of this sociability.

Instagr.am embraced the medium but focused on what was its core task: social broadcasting and social validation.

At first, it sounds like Om is directly opposed to King – but while in different realms, they both question the hows and whats.

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In the last week Twitter has started to roll out its grand plans to monetise. Hello #dickbar. In a strange way, I’m confused to how they came to the decision of executing on this. Heavy consideration of medium as platform and message as add-on?

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Christmas 2010 and I’m closing Twitter in my browser in favour of old Usenet groups I used to frequent. Anemic and somewhat web-filled. They too have been scooped out and branded as Google Groups.

]]> http://golez.net/2011/03/06/of-medium-and-message/feed/ 0 http://golez.net/2010/12/11/teengirl-fantasy-ft-shannon-funchess-dance-in-slow-motion/ http://golez.net/2010/12/11/teengirl-fantasy-ft-shannon-funchess-dance-in-slow-motion/#comments Sat, 11 Dec 2010 11:23:47 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=4790

.. with Klara.

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The first ten minutes of The Social Network that machine gun you, but the next two hours that make you bleed. We meet young Mark Zuckerberg (Eisenberg) trying to impress the object of his affections, but in typical Zuckian fashion he muddles it up. Except that this really doesn’t seem like the real Zuck. It’s now you realise that you’re in an Aaron Sorkin movie, and his stamps his authority all over the scene before rushing us headlong into his retrospective of Zuck’s rise and/or fall.

The movie is billed as a fast-paced retelling of the birth of Facebook from a socially-aware closed Harvard site to the monolith it is today. But really, it’s not. It’s story about friendship. Sorkin’s eye for detail gives the story of Zuck, an outsider that craves acceptance in the Harvard U’s Lord of the Flies-esque social structure the only way he knows how – by redefining the social experience of love, life and sex in an online community. Yes, sex. It’s all about sex.

Sorkin constructs the story around depositions given during intellectual property lawsuits by Zuck’s former friends and college colleagues on the ownership of Facebook. We skip between the principles’ angles, trying to make out the real Zuck. By the end of the movie, we’re probably further away from that goal but the ride is fun and feels real.

Further away from the real Zuck? From the Winklevii twins’ idea of build Harvard Connection of employing Zuck as a programmer to the early days of incorporation with best friend Eduardo, we see Zuck scheming, ducking and diving. As unrepentant as Eisenberg’s Zuck is, I can’t help feeling that real Zuck is missing. Or rather, Sorkin can’t quite divorce his ambition to breath life and give words to Zuck, that he’s lost the real story in a He Said, She Said.

Eisenberg’s unsympathetic portrayel of Sorkin’s Zuck is refreshing but its missing heartbeat. Pitched against his former best friend, Eduardo Saverin (James Garfield), the first investor and CFO of the company – we’re regaled into hating Zuck and cheering Saverin.

It’s as if Sorkin’s Zuck’s super-human determination to build on the success of TheFacebook.com is mutually-exclusive to his humanity. In the end, we struggle to label the biggest asshat in the movie – Zuck, Parker, Saverin or maybe Sorkin for taking his liberties.

Sorkin is eager to pitch heroes and villains. His broad strokes touch all of the mains, Sean Parker, the Winklevii and Eduardo Saverin. This simplistic iconography is a minor tinny note in a rather excellent movie. The best film I’ve seen this year bar none.

Fincher’s direction is restrained, he stays true to the inventive fevour that programming rewards its maker. The scene of Zuck implementing the Relationship Status feature feels respectful. Almost Jason Bourne-like. The tilt-shift rowing scene is another favourite of mine. It’s cinematography and meaning foreshadowing the Winklevii’s inevitable fate as well as counterpointing the constant intellectual battlefield we’re witnessing, deftly.

The soundtrack by NiN’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is a neat post-modern bow on the package, with the opening piano refrain echoing listlessly throughout the movie, as much as Eisenberg’s Zuck does.

Definitely my movie of the year, it’s not the retelling of the Facebook story, but rather a retelling of it.

You have to love the urbanfaerytale of the new Nissan Juke ad. Bizarre concept. Conceived in a cynical big seed viral advert uterus, no matter. Just enjoy Fredrika Stahl’s cover of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Created by TBWA\London.

Women are devious. Oh yes.

Dude, it’s a fucking tornado. <3. Via Vinny.

Last week, Jenny’s post about the future of bookselling popped into my feed reader and it stuck a chord with me. Independent booksellers are close to my heart. It’s all tied up with family too.

My mother is an independent bookseller. To understand why she does it, you have to understand her.

After raising a third (and surprise) baby to school-going age, she decided she had enough of staying at home with the kids. She likes say she was never a housewife, never married to the house and that her third baby made her younger.

She made choices that perhaps that I would have shook her physically had I a time machine, but c’est la vie. Despite doing well in her Inter Cert in the Sixties and was offered a scholorship to become a chef. She passed on it. Preferring to stay home and become a carer for a relative. Opportunity gone, she settled into shop work. She’s always excelled at everything she’s done. She loved her work, her customers and the little shop she worked in. Fond stories are always at her fingertips.

That’s where books come in. Being absolute book obsessives, our house was always stuffed with books of all types – Mills & Boon, Choose Your Own Adventure, classics, library books, encyclopedias, second-hand tomes, audio books, pre-reader books with magic pens that read out the words, pop-up books, Dick Francis. It was really was Pick Your Poison. The converted cottage we used to live in, had a mini-landing-come-book-graveyard where we’d stack them high.

We’d go to the same bookshops and library trips were once a week. Book people became part of our family and us, theirs. Hearing that one of the bookshops we’d frequent was looking for someone part-time, she jumped the chance. The timing was right, the shop was right.

The shop was a mix of old books and new. Customers were regulars, people who’d pop in for a chat as much as a book. Books were laid away for people. Facebook a social network? Your independent bookseller is ultimate social network. All walks of life come in. Everything in every shape and size.

I dare anyone to spend a day in your local independent bookseller that sells new and *old* books and not be impressed. The old part is important. Second-hand booksellers are social treasure troves. Beat the joy of helping three generations of the same family buy books and leave the shop happy and enthused.

Things have changed in some ways for my mother. The bookshop she worked in closed. She decided that she’d open her own. So with some of the stock of the old shop, she moved up the street and around the corner in a little nook of a shop. She sells second-hand books. Competing with chains is impossible if you depend on selling new books and you’re a small bookshop. The margins you make on new books are just too small. Eason 3 for 2, Amazon and the Book Depository etc make it impossible.

I like to teasingly call her bookshop a drop-in centre. She’ll berate me, I am sure. Customers pop in with coffee for her.  Thieves reselling dubious books in perfect nick. Nurses traveling from Cork in for reads for a holiday in sun.

She’s a massive crime thriller fan. When she isn’t buying books off the Book Depository or Amazon for herself (American editions are treasured as the UK/Ireland publication dates trail US ones significantly), she’s buying books for customers and selling for little more than cost or just passing her reads onto them. It’s important to her that her customers are happy. Customer loyalty is her number one priority.

It seems to me that the independent bookseller has so many lessons for so many other businesses today. The ones that are doing well, are doing well because of their customers. Loyalty goes both ways.

Bookselling has changed in the last twenty years, it’s more than a book on a shelf. It seems to me that the really great independent booksellers will continue to stay in business, because they’ll just do what comes naturally. We could learn a little from their passion.

Swoony fabulousness

I’m sucker for Trent Reznor. How to Destroy Angels is his new post-punk project with his wife Mariqueen and with Atticus Ross who produced recent NIN albums.

War between Lebanon and Israel is being waged, not with guns or butter, but with tahini, as they vie to create the world’s largest hummus dish, observers say.

Lebanon set the record Saturday for the creation of the largest plate of hummus. About 300 Lebanese chefs in a village about 5 miles east of Beirut came up with a dish weighing 11.5 tons. That’s 23,042 pounds of a combination of chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice and olive oil, CNN reported.