Mishaps
I’ve been quiet online for the last week or so, reason being that all the technology in the world has broken for my pleasure. First my laptop power cable died, shortly before I lost battery, then my mobile phone software seized up and insisted on charging when it wasn’t plugged in to charge and turning itself off when it was. Useless. The phone’s going to be gone for a while, off on a journey for repairs and pampering, while the new power cable for my mac took a couple of apple store appointments to procure. But what of my week offline? Any lessons learned, any insight or appreciation gained?
Well, the short answer is “Not really”. I found ways to keep up with bare essentials as far as communication goes, be it through The Lady or thieving internet from work. It frustrated me beyond belief while I was trying to sort out my references for a letting agent though, and that’s really not been cool. It also stopped me posting a few Polaroid Press stories, which mightn’t seem much of a deal but has perversely created a bit of a backlog of material. Was there a link between having a productive week for writing and not being able to scan my RSS feed? Maybe. But I also had a very full week of work, and all of the pieces were written on shift, so it may simply be that I had more time to run riot in my head.
Backstory: Sunday Sketches
Sunday Sketches can be read here.
Sunday Sketches is about as simple as The Polaroid Press gets, it being a collection of word-sketches written on a Sunday. I chopped them about a bit to share a location because they were far too disparate without that in common.
The first segment was written at the Bristol Comics Expo, in the hotel bar, where I’ve had a couple of years of drunken nights and now. The dancefloor in there is profoundly sad: even when it’s heaving and boozy I’ve never seen people stand on it, just around it. The second segment is a couple of weeks old, from The Princess Louise, one of my favourite London pubs. The decor there is quite incredible, and the whole place is broken into booths like an old smoking bar. The last section is a blend of two girls from the same journey home, who were remarkably similar in their torpor.
Backstory: The Pub at The End Of The World
The Pub at The End Of The World can be read here.
In fragments, The Pub at The End Of The World has existed for a little while now. It’s a short piece waiting to a long piece to coalesce around it, along with a few other snippets and ideas, and the shape it might end up in is a long way off from complete. There is a notebook.
At any rate, the story is an immediate response to my early 2008 fascination with my feelings towards Shoreditch, mixed as they are, and a photo I took of The Ten Bells one Sunday in January. It’s a beautiful pub, a wonderful setting for something dark and apocalyptic, so wonderful in fact that I’ve been beaten to it. Freakangels, by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, is part set above it. That came out in February. Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s The Last Sane Cowboy and other stories starts with a short story set in there too, and has been around a little while now.
(As an aside, LSC I picked up at Bristol Con this year, but only got around to reading it yesterday. It’s surreal and at times totally beautiful, thoroughly recommended)
Bastards one and all.
I only realised while typing it up how much The Nu-Rave Vagrant demanded an appearance, so those few lines are the newest in a collection of fragments around six months old.
Microblogging and Burst Culture
Just been on the phone to The Lady being altogether too verbose about setting up The Trawl and why it was important to me that any site I set up included my Twitter feed. She asked, as a few people have over the last week or so, why I actually use Twitter, what do I see in it?
When I first set up The Polaroid Press I used the phrase “Inspiration Engine” to describe it: essentially I wanted a space where one contributor could post a photograph in the morning and by the time evening rolled around another would have posted a poem as a response. It didn’t happen, but I wanted, ideally, a space for artistic conversation that relied on original input to feed a group culture. In the long term I see Twitter – or, rather a Twitter-esque system – as being the easiest and most effective means of achieving that. Once the system, or one like it, can handle packets of data more than substantial than microblogs (i.e. photos, audio, video etc) then you can create a space for artistic discourse that can actually work in the field. That’s important. Social communication is most effective when it’s actually social, when the participants are leading lives that encompass varied pursuits and they can share their experiences.
Now, of course, that particular view is imperfect, broken perhaps, because it runs the risk of forcing the artist/participant into a position where the sharing of the experience becomes more substantial than the experience. Arguably that’s what artists have always done, but never before so immediately, however I have faith that adjusting to the input/output opportunities is fairly easily done: Certainly nobody I’m currently following on Twitter is a filthy lifeblogger.
But there’s another factor that holds huge sway over my faith in microblogging: I’m a firm subscriber to so called ‘Burst Culture’. I first encountered the term in a Bad Signal mail-out by Warren Ellis, which suggested, simply and effectively, that web distribution of material like blog entries and mp3s has created a consumer culture that works at its best through clean, concise distribution, utilising the speed and mass-communication capacity of the internet to its best advantage. I don’t know anyone other than my Mum who isn’t downloading mp3s on an almost daily basis, even my grandparents are doing it, and that’s not killing the appetite for longform works in the least: I’m certainly still part of a literate nation, an album buying nation, who enjoy serialised fiction and cinema as much as viral ads and blogs.
I also believe, nation be damned, that effective communication shouldn’t need hundreds of thousands of words. Far from ‘dumbing down’ I think understanding how to use few words to say a lot is an art form, and a hell of a thing if done well. Not only is The Polaroid Press an exercise in finding some authorial voice but it’s also me trying to say, with a body of work, that it only takes a couple of hundred words to move somebody, or educate somebody, or better understand my own thoughts on something.
I still want to build that ‘Inspiration Engine’ and I still want to see how a group of people can fit into this new cultural model, if it lasts.
Backstory: Adventurers
Adventurers can be read here.
So, Adventurers was a bit of an odd one, because it was conceived for a specific purpose: an entry for the Waterstones What’s Your Story? competition. Brief, strange and eye-catching, the idea for me was to pluck a thought about one of the notebook characters I have and see if I can capture something about her in such a small sketch.
I’m not wholly sure it worked, although it fares slightly better on the entry – which can be found on the WYS Gallery by searching for Sheret – because of the postcard design I built for it. But I still like it. Zia’s still a bit of a mystery for me, and someone I haven’t yet found the showcase for as a character, but this helped to get a sense of how fluid a figure she is.
The polaroid is one of Mark on the rail lines near the waterfront in Bristol from late year. I’ve got fond memories of the visit, which also involved a break in Bath, and I’d been waiting for the right story for this photo for a while. The handwriting is Alice’s – mine’s too spindly.
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