unicorns, ideas & nextness

Thanks to the STW group’s head Curator Of Awesome, and all-round entertaining tweeter @dailydoseofjess, I got an excuse to go sploshing round the internet collecting a list of Top Ten Inspiring Things for Nextness, the STW blog.

It was an interesting exercise, because (especially working in an office where every few minutes someone loads a new bit of can’t-miss entertainment on Youtube) it increasingly feels like there’s so many interesting ideas out there, than any attempt to be exhaustive is doomed before it begins.

It all makes me think of a story book I had as a kid, entitled ‘You Can’t Keep a Unicorn.’ I can’t really remember the details, other than that it involved a terminally ill puppy and other tragically worthy young adult fiction issues, but it was about the futility of trying to hold on to things that are essentially temporary. Ideas online are a bit like unicorns, in this respect; they’re a little bit mysterious, they tend to be immaterial; they flash past for a week or so and then they’re gone. So in an effort to hold on to these moments of inspiration, here is my list of Top Ten Unicorns:

1) Every Country is the Best at Something

I love a good infographic, and this one does both the info- and the -graphic bit brilliantly. Data designer David McCandless has crunched stats from the CIA World Fact Book into a map that reveals the kind of International Number Ones that never appear in geography textbooks. My favourite so far? That the world champion of Brazil Nuts is, um, Bolivia.

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listening at 5km per hour

I’ve been walking a lot lately. It’s bit of a worry, mostly because walking, lots, and alone, is the sort of thing I associate with tall loping homeless men, and professional dog nannies, and guys in tracksuits hanging out in parks.

As a functional adult, I should possess clearly defined goals (shops! market! cafe! bar!), and shoot for them, in straight and decisive lines.

But instead, I’ve been wandering.

And it’s the fault of my iPod.

Radiolab is a series of podcasts produced by WNYC public radio. Ranging in length from about 15minutes (2.5km) to 1 hour (5km, with perhaps a stop for a drink half way), each episode defines and then explodes your preconceptions about something you’ve probably never throught about before. Like the nature of gravity. The cultural history of zoos. Blinking. Or shopping malls.

My iTunes library tells me I’ve listened to 23 episodes in the space of about three weeks. So it’s official: my name’s Deborah and I’m a Radiolabaholic. But for me, the appeal of the series is not the content per se – rather, it’s the way it recognises how the podcast medium is both incredibly intimate and utterly contextless, belonging equally to the the commute, the kitchen, and the aimless suburban wander.

To illustrate, this is my recent playlist:

• The Effect of Zoo Cage Design on Mountain Gorillas [3.2 km; Caulfield back streets; series of hot lunch smells, possibly goulash.]
• The Relationship Between Blinking and Film Editing [3.9km; up Chapel Street to work; blur of bleared commuters.]
• The Nature of Gravity and Vertigo [One a lap of Albert park; 4.5km; dodging under-8 soccer training.]

On each of these occasions, the place defines the experience as much as the audio – and Radiolab seems to recognise this. The show’s sound design is full of bleeps and glitches, full of flubbed lines and jarring segues: in the words of one of the hosts, it’s about “consciously letting people see outside the frame.” The pauses often linger a tad too long. There are silences and hiccups, spaces which invite the intrusion of sounds from your real world, your pedestrian world.

In this way, Radiolab is one of the few podcasts I know that recognises how the very medium of mobile audio lends itself to weird conjunctions.

Decades ago, the introduction of the Walkman made it possible to experience space in a different, sort of doubled way, in which

…the outside world profoundly alters its character; it is perceived like a film … The subject speaks of his feeling of being outside reality while at the same time being aware of living in this reality…

I think podcasts do something similar to the listener, opening up a double kind of listening space, in which pedestrian crossings co-exist with quantum theory, and garbage trucks collect Sanskrit verbs, and a train trip can take up the whole nineteenth century.

It feels like the kind of place where ideas are bound to happen.

And it’s utterly addictive.

I’m going for a walk.

Nice to meet you. Do you come in stonewash?

I bought a pair of jeans yesterday called Jenna.

It was sort of an impulse buy. What actually brought me into the store was my interest in Uma. She was a jacket, and she was 30% Off.

But on the way to the fitting room, I grabbed Jenna, and from that moment on, we were pretty much besties.

The other jeans I tried on just didn’t compare. You know how sometimes you meet someone and you simply don’t click? Yep, Stacey (blue denim, slightly higher butt-cut) and Helena (Japanese selvedge fabric, apparently, which also apparently doubled her price) both left me cold. We had nothing to say to each other. But Jenna, well – Jenna introduced herself to me on her swingtag, in a sassy little screen-printed blurb, and straight away I felt like I knew her:

JENNA. STRAIGHT. Hot in the city. I’m looking for an urban kinda person, with a bit of an edge. I have my finger on the pulse and have been seen with all the right people in Hollywood. I like to mix things up a bit. Just as comfortable with your friends as I am with celebs.

Golly.

Was I buying a pair of jeans or an internet date?

Jenna. Kicking back in my room.

I suppose Jenna simply brought home to me the extent to which marketing is just about making friends. The truism is that we don’t perceive brands as brands. We perceive them as people. Brands are people. Products are people. Which means social media isn’t so much a medium as a mode of thought.

I left the store wondering.

Did Jenna have a Facebook page?

The naming of products, the how and why of it, is a fascinatingly complex business.  And other than IKEA (its own incredible story), and ships (a ‘superstitious tradition,’ which really says it all), fashion brands are probably the most overt in tagging things with human names, employing the magical thinking that transforms mere stuff into people. Clothes, after all, are our skin. They’re arguably “the most intimate objects we own.”

What I wish is that someone would do a study of fashion naming conventions. There’s the celerity genre (Uma, I suppose, and Helena). There’s the stock-character genre (all-American Stacey).  But what about era? Or ethnicity? In one store I browsed, in shoes alone, there’s Ciara, Lotti, Fergie, Raisa, Fernado and Buddy. Add a backing track, and it’s basically Eurovision.

Actually, I need two.

I pondered this on the way home, then got Jenna out of her bag to photograph her for this post. I sat for a moment sadly staring at her.

If only, like a real friend, she had an opinion on this stuff.

But she just sort of sprawled out, and looked hot.

Which I suppose was kind of the point.

no wonder there is no time for reading books

Well, gosh. No wonder we can’t keep still.

The late historian Tony Judt wrote an interesting article about how the development of railways – and particularly, the railway timetable – in the nineteenth century changed the way that people experienced life. “The pre-modern world was space-bound; its modern successor, time-bound…”.

I’d love to know what social media is doing to our experience of time.

Perhaps I’m overinterpreting, but seems to me that these days we’re confronted by time at every turn.

Wherever I look, there’s a kind of clock.

on missing reading

Last night I went to see the American writer Annie Proulx speak about her new memoir Bird Cloud.

The talk was excellent; the readings were beautiful and Annie Proulx in person was as curt and sharp as her flinty, bright sentences might suggest.

And yet the evening was a little bit terrifying. What terrified me was the homogenity of the audience. So many of the same type. Large, billowy women in blouses. Thatchy hair. Sensible shoes. Occasionally accessorised with a funky pair of glasses or chunky beads.

That sounds perhaps a bit noxious, and I don’t mean to be judgmental. Because the fashion isn’t really the point; more the uniformity of it. Except for one weedy Chinese man in a fake Tommy Hilfiger shirt a few seats in front of me, and me, and my friend, the torsos were uniformly female + Anglo + mature. The sameness was staggering. It was like being at a weird kind of nature reserve or special group home.

I wondered, is this what readers look like, these days?

Is this what reading looks like?

It terrified me, because I realise I don’t really read novels these days, and so perhaps I didn’t really belong at the talk anyway. I read status updates. I read essays and articles I download from longform.org or nytimes.com. I read Mia Freeman’s blog and the lifestyle sections of Fairfax digital. Updates tossed into my inbox by Contagious or good.is. Tweets. Emails. Things that come in a long scrolly ribbon on my iPhone.

And when I open a book, I read in fragments. I read before I go to sleep, one thumb wedged under the slice of pages I want to get through; I read a few paragraphs in parks; I read chunks of text, these days, on traffic-bogged trams. None of that obsessive reading I remember from childhood; none of that compulsive book-in-one-hand-toothbrush-in-the-other full-body-immersion in another world.  Everything is snippeted and snatched and stolen. There are simply too many other things to do.

I think last night made me realise that I miss the groundedness of a world without hypertext. A linear world, one not constantly asking me to click on it and go somewhere else.

The concept of nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos (“homecoming”) + algos (“pain, grief, distress”). Literally, the ache of home. In an odd way, I think that what shook me last night was a kind of homesickness for reading. A nostalgia for the experience of reading; wholly, bodily, without regard to time or place.

Proulx spoke about that kind of physical, heavy, immersive experience of books, that experience of books as a force of weather or nature, and it sounds like Bird Cloud preoccupies itself in a number of ways with the demands and possibilities of reading. I haven’t cracked it open yet, but as the jacket tells,

[Proulx] fell in love with the land, and she knew what she wanted to build on it – a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, with shelves for thousands of books and long work tables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps…

I love it when things converge like this – ideas, places, books, moods. I’m going to go read my copy of Bird Cloud now.

And I’m hoping that it’ll tell me what I’m already beginning to suspect – that there is a place for reading, even today – and even and especially if you’re undeniably Gen Y, with an iPhone in your bag and not-very-sensible shoes on your feet.

well that’s a bit personal

I signed up for LivingSocial a while ago thinking I’d get maybe a few discount vouchers.

I didn’t think I’d get, um, free psychoanalysis.

Feels a little presumptuous, but hey, I suppose it’s at least a different way to market spa treatments.

Why not unclog your pores AND your mother issues?

Just goes to show the power of honesty, even when it’s all a bit TMI, to cut through all the marketing bullshit.

Honest ads, eh? Now THAT’s an interesting thought.

the twits

Does anyone remember The Twits?

Mr and Mrs Twit, I mean, from the Roald Dahl story published sometime in the eighties. “Mr. Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever.” Ditto Mrs Twit.

They’re basically a nasty pair of seniors who spend their lives playing disgusting tricks on each other and their long-suffering pets, the Roly-Poly birds and the Muggle-Wump monkeys.

If you wanted to psychoanalyse them, you’d probably say that they’re pathologically lacking in empathy.

Their crime is a total lack of imagination.

Which is why I keep thinking about them when I think about Twitter.

I’ve been grappling with Twitter for a while. I signed up ages ago. Then, like most people, I burbled out a few tweets about Not Knowing What To Say, realised I was pretty shit at being witty in 140 characters, then got bored and forgot all about my account.

But I’ve been persisting. Now that I’ve got an iPhone – a device that makes Tweeting much less effortful, being naturally more immediate and intimate and convenient than a computer – I think I’m starting to get it.

Twitter’s not about narcissim (sic); it’s about empathy.

It’s not about me – it’s about you.

According to Fast Company, Twitter, in fact, causes the brain to flood itself with oxytocin – the ‘cuddle chemical’ responsible for bonding mother and baby, close friends, and partners. “E -connection,” says neuro-economist Paul Zak, “is processed in the brain like an in-person connection.”

I definitely felt this when, after Tweeting for months and months, I got my first retweets, and direct responses, from followers. And that in turn prompted me to plunge deeper into the conversation myself.

Yup, cuddles all round.

But the thing I really love about Twitter is that you get to pick and choose which brains you’re gonna cuddle. You’ve probably never met them, but despite the anonymity there’s a good chance you’ll catch the edge of a thought that’s interesting, inspiring, maybe even brilliant.

It’s like an idea-transfusion, drip-fed direct from a series of foreign brains into your own:

That’s why, when I think of Twitter, I think of the Twits.

Especially how, at the end of Dahl’s story, stuck fast by Hugtite Glue to their upside-down chairs, The Twits collapse in on themselves, “until there is nothing left of them but their clothes.”

Because I’ve been finding that whenever I feel like I’m gonna implode like that – stuck fast in my own subjectivity, maybe bogged with something for work or just scrambling to muster the oomph to actually write something – the best solution is checking out some other, radically different species of subjectivity.

Subjectivities about kids and biz(@deemadigan), “architectural conjecture” (@bldgblog), everyday twenty-something-ness (@marksdodds) and just plain hilarious drollness (@thesulk) are like the antidote to misanthropy.

@RoaldDahl, can you hear me? I think what the Twits really needed was a Twitter account.

 

rage against the screen

Anyone else feel sort of trapped by technology?

For me, having owned an iPhone for only a couple of months now, the honeymoon is pretty much over. My phone goes everywhere with me, sort of like a newborn or an extremely demanding puppy. Even at home or at work, I drag it around from room to room, to the kitchen on the TV. To the bathroom, too, at times. Is that weird? If it’s not weird, it should be.

I feel like if my phone broke, I would just die.

But it’d also, I suspect, prove kind of cathartic.

Recently, in San Francisco, the artist Michael Tompert exhibited a series of photographs of destroyed Apple products. There’s an iPhone 3G blown apart with a Heckler & Koch handgun. There’s an iPad boiled from the inside with a soldering iron. There’s a series of lolly-coloured iPod Nanos carefully placed on a railway track and crunched beneath a goods train.

Seeing these made me swoon.

And whether or not you agree that the photographs are artistically meritorious (and there’s plenty of angry debate about it online), it’s hard to argue that they’re not powerful.

Tompert apparently got the idea after getting his two sons an iPod touch for Christmas. He said the boys fought over one of the devices, which had a certain game on it. Fed up, Tompert said he grabbed one of the iPods and smashed it on the ground.

“It was supposed to make them happy but it didn’t,” said Tompert. “I wanted to show them it was a just a thing…”

Thingness is what technology, by and large, aims to overcome. It allows us to deny the limitations of physics and speak face to face, for example, with a family member thousands of kilometres away, or create endlessly reproducible images of a single scene, or navigate confidently through a place we have never before visited.

Things are physical; technology is not. As Tompert found, many of the Apple products are “practically indestructible.” It’s easy to cause them to malfunction, maybe – this, after all, is one of the things that makes us mad – but physically, technology seems to exist on a higher plane than all the other everyday things that surround us – a chair, a pen, a brick, a leaf.

Hence such awesome satisfaction in smashing it all up.

Apparently, one of the significant social impulses in the coming months (thanks JWT’s Trend Report) will be “de-teching” – “the attempt to re-engage in the offline present”. I definitely get this.The whole idea of an offline world set in opposition to the shimmering promise of total connectivity is one which feels both intuitively correct and dramatically (think The Social Network) fruitful.

I’m reminded of the ‘Will It Blend?’ web videos from Blendtec. Such a simple idea: let’s see if an unexpected object can be turned into a smoothie.  And the most compelling episodes, I think, are those that blend something electronic – a laser pointer or a camera or, indeed, an iPad – tapping into that tension between the function and the form, between the software and the cadmium-and-aluminium hardware that makes it all work.

One day, when my phone dies, I am going to try to transform it back from tech to thing.

Maybe I will turn a crème brulee torch on it, or mash it with a brick, or fillet it with a steak knife.

Blend it, possibly?

Or turn into into an artwork?

What would be the best, most satisfying way to destroy a phone?

iPhones, and the loss of lostness

For the last few weeks, I have been wandering around Melbourne clutching my GPS-phone like a blanky.

Every few paces I gaze at it lovingly, thumbing at the ‘Map’ icon to watch the glowing blue dot creep its corresponding way across the frame.

The other day, I was so focused on the screen that I walked into a pole.

I took this is a wake-up call (and a bruise).

Because it struck me (yes, literally) that navigating through a place with an iPhone is fundamentally different to finding your way the old way, with just a plain old hippocampus and an inner ear.

The old way, you stumbled. ‘Lostness’ was a default. And ‘location’, such as you could define it, pervaded an area hazily.

‘Place’ used to be a cloud.

But the new way is linear, defined in terms of the shortest path between two points – a path generally mapped out for you beforehand by that supreme machine of urban domesticity, the car.

St Kilda. Apparently. Or it may just be a map.

Facebook Places and Foursquare and Gowalla define place as a conjunction of co-ordinates: you go to a place, not through it. You ‘Check In’ somewhere or ‘stamp’ your ‘passport’– metaphors of tourism, interestingly, borrowed from the bureaucractic world of airlines and hotels – without ever really thinking about the constructedness of that “where.”

And that’s strange, because really, maps are selective, and partial.

I’ve been wandering around St Kilda, and most of what I see isn’t in my Map icon.

Like lamp-posts. A chip packet. A leaf on the pavement. A leak from someone’s garden hose. A shadow. A bird.

None of this is there.

Another map. I think.

I suppose the weird thing about navigating with an iPhone is that it sort of sucks the world into it, flattening reality in the process.

Your focus fixes on the map, not the world it claims to represent, which makes things tricky because at that point it can become a bit unclear which place is real and which is symbolic…

I want to know: if you zoomed in far enough, to a scale of 1:1, would the map become the real world?

And would the real world suddenly become the map of the map?

It all reminds me of something I read in a book I found the other day (a lush, strange book – look), titled Atlas of the Remote Islands, by someone named Judith Schalansky:

The two dimensional world map strikes a compromise somewhere between impertinently simplifying abstraction and an aesthetic approximation of the world. In the end, it is simply about grasping the extent of the earth, orienting it towards the north and being able to gaze down on it like a god…

Oh, yes.

I feel like my iPhone lets me gaze godlike on a place without actually knowing what that place means.

It makes me a little bit giddy, really.

And I am much more comfortable being lost.

terracotta warriors at Flower Power Castle Hill

Terracotta Warriors. Xi'an, China. c210 BC

A convergence.

Backyard warriors. Flower Power, Sydney. c.2010 AD.

(In the spirit of Lawrence Wechsler’s Everything that Rises and the associated McSweeney’s convergences collection, which, incidentally, I’ve decided is the best thing since – well – anything strikingly, curiously and thought-provokingly similar.)