When Modest Mouse announced a competition for fans to come up with a video for them, they probably weren’t expecting anything as amazing as this . . .
Wired magazine has the how, why and wherefore.
Archive for May, 2007
Young boy writes book, fails to gain worldwide recognition
Published May 30, 2007 Writing and writers 3 CommentsI wrote a book once. I was 11 or so and my school was holding a competition. Students were encouraged to write a story and illustrate it with our own drawings.
Mine was called Beyond the Stars and was about an astronaut marooned on a strange planet.
Shit, even back then I was casting melancholy eyes at the sky and wondering what it was all about. It’s hardly surprising I’ve turned out the way I have.
But there were a few other pointers along the way.
A year or two later I discovered Sherlock Holmes and obviously decided that I too wanted to be an international supersleuth, and dedicate my life to fighting crime.
Like Holmes, I would master the violin and maybe even battle to overcome a narcotic 
addiction.
I came to be haunted by the image of Holmes standing by the window in his rooms at 221B Baker Street, bow and violin in hand, lost in a reverie of abstracted thought.
Watson arrives home, stares over at his friend and asks if he is OK. Unhearing, Holmes resumes his sad playing and Watson, spying the used syringe, feels his heart sink.
Tintin came next. Herge’s young reporter absolutely fascinated me.
There is something fundamentally unknowable about him that drew me in. Somehow both ageless and sexless, his individualism appealed on a basic level.
Not an outcast exactly, it is as though he inhabits life’s borderlands, eschewing conventional attachments in favour of deeper, albeit more fleeting connections. His friends and acquaintances are all similarly eccentric.
Tintin’s world exists on the fringes of our own. Which was exactly where I found myself. 
These themes are also explored in Frederic Tuten’s strangely disarming novel, Tintin in the New World. By transplanting Tintin from the comic book world to the real one, Tuten gives us a more fleshed-out character, with human weaknesses.
Holmes and Tintin, then, are linked by their aloneness, and their apparent indifference to a life corralled by the everyday trappings that bind the rest of us together.
Not really understanding much about this world, or my place in it, I found solace in the adventures of these two strange fictional characters. It’s alright to not get it, they said. All this is just a game.
I passed out once.
I fell asleep on a hot summer’s day, woke up feeling like I was sinking to the bottom of the deepest, darkest ocean, made it out as far as the patio, and then just fell on my face.
I’d like to think that the sound I heard as my knees buckled and my body dropped was Listened On by Lightning Dust. But I doubt it was.
The song is in the box. You can find more here.
Love lives in memory, I think, personal and collective.
Once, a long time ago, I was reading a magazine and I came across an article with extracts of the letters of a young Cambodian couple forcefully separated by the Khmer Rouge. It was the saddest thing I have ever read.
I can no longer remember the exact circumstances of their separation. Either way, they never saw one another again. We learned at the end of the piece that the man was executed in some squalid Khmer Rouge detention camp, no doubt on the flimsiest of political pretexts.
But the tenderness and beauty of those letters, the depth of feeling of one human for another, has stayed with me.
However fleeting the love of that couple, it lives in those letters, and in me.
There’s dozens of these GI Joe spoofs knocking around on You Tube, but this is my favourite.
. . . spent a few months in a hotel in Mexico City recording an album called Viceroy.
Sad, strange and beautiful in equal measure, the songs are like fairytale paths, leading us over the horizon.
You can listen to elevator, battle, distance in the Box on the right.
There’s more information at his Myspace page, and his official site.
‘A cricket ground is a flat piece of earth with some buildings around it.’ Richie Benaud
I love the reductionist logic of that statement. An infinitely complex sport, cricket is ultimately little more than a group of individuals hitting and pursuing a ball around that flat piece of earth, before repairing to said buildings to eat cucumber sandwiches.
I have spent the last three days watching the first Test match of the summer. The time has passed imperceptibly. Yesterday I was barely away of what day it was.
Cricket carries me into a state of being which is – paradoxically – both deeply contemplative and utterly thoughtless.
Tranquility reigns.
I wrote an awful poem once about how the sight of a dog asleep beneath the boughs of a lemon tree helped me realise that peace of mind might not be as far away as I thought.
Cricket has the same effect. The gentle acts of repetition, the pleasing hum of a crowd come to worship at the same church as me, and the obscure, archaic rituals dotting the day’s play like daisies in a field in June.
Life is full enough of hard, difficult things; cricket is my soft landing.
Google’s universal search has got the tech blog geeks foaming at the mouth with excitement.
But it is a significant step towards some kind of ur-content where the boundaries between text, video, photography etc are not so much blurred as erased.
In a nutshell – as far as my limited understanding goes anyway – previously when you searched on Google, you got text results. For images you had to do a separate search . . .
Actually, maybe it’s best if I let Google explain . . .
‘With universal search, we’re attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results.’
In other words, they are trying to give you everything in one hit.
As my friend Lars says, though, there do seem to be a few teething problems.
Anyway, to get back to my original point, what does this have to do with changes in the way content is presented on the net?
I think it’s indicative of changes in taste. People consume many different types of media now. The simplest example is video. The net lets you show how to do something, not just write about how to do it.
Using the riots over Ungdomshuset as a yardstick, traditional thinking at a news site such as Politiken would have meant a picture at the top of the story followed by reams of text. The sidebar might have links to other pictures or even a video. There is a clear delineation between the media, to put it more simply.
Increasingly, I believe, these different media will merge. Video can be integrated into a story, providing context or background. It doesn’t have to be treated as a separate entity.
The BBC do exactly that here with their piece about the brand new Wembley Stadium. With a story like that – about this gargantuan architectural project – video gives the viewer/reader an infinitely richer experience. People want to see the stadium, they want to know what it looks like, as well as learning the facts.
Jeff Jarvis says something similar over at Buzzmachine.
