Category Archives: words

words

Blogging about blogging, chapter 479

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I don’t like it.  I don’t like writing about blogging, but sometimes it needs to be done to be cleared out of the way.  If I write on paper about writing on paper that seems OK because it’s only here on my table and it might just go in the bin or in that file of many ideas not quite finished enough.

I’m angry about it.  I’m angry about the way we, me too, I have let it slip away, have let others take the form and make it more like what they wanted to do in the first place.   And then decided that I needed to fit in with that.  We’ve made our newspapers into gigantic blog-like content machines, but none of them have much of the spirit of the people who write them, they’re just self-serving self-obsessed web-borgs.

A real person is in here, behind this screen, behind these words you’re reading.  With all the ups and downs and back and forth and painfully, oh jesus, p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y slow learning about life and how to do it and who I might be and how not to be who I’m not.

But even I’ve forgotten that and started to believe that what I write here needs to be a certain way, needs to deliver “my message” to “my audience”, get more hits, trigger more likes, avoid feelings, avoid criticism.  It doesn’t.  And it seems I need reminding of that every now and then.  Maybe you do too.

All right, thanks for listening, go back to what you were doing.

theatre, What I think, words

Theatre Blogging: it’s not what it could be

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I heard recently about a director having the nasty experience of inviting a journalist into rehearsals and then having an unhelpful (I haven’t read it, it’s paywalled) preview article published just before the show opens.

Yuk.

Reading about it sent me back to look at what I wrote nearly eleven years ago (!) about using blogging in theatre.  I was surprised to see what emphasis I put on buzz and PR (that was how the original question had been framed).  And it’s that angle that all the marketing people picked up. I went to see John Berry at ENO because (see the comments on the post) they were doing something like this a couple of years later.  And a year after this first post, I did a little site about the opening of Avenue Q.  It had to be done, and I’m glad I did it, but I don’t read any of the West End theatre blogs or the mainstream journalism that has taken on our blogging form but sticks to traditional writing styles of reporting and criticism.

But I was thinking about more than marketing.

What I was thinking was of a kind of collaborative production journal, where everyone contributes…  think “The Making of…” fly-on-the-wall documentary style, only on the web, and released in chunks as they happen, day by day rather than being stitched together after the show has closed.

I think this points to something much more interesting to do – about using these tools as part of the production, as part of the artistic process, to log progress and reflect on thinking and how things are emerging, for the benefit of the team themselves much more than prospective audience members and to create something bigger and longer-lasting and more networked than traditional documentation or archiving.  It’s “sources going direct”, cutting out the dependence on news organisations (and their sodding paywalls) and making our own media.

 

Podcasts, words

Podwalk 160223 – Soundscape through Paddington Station @NetworkRailPAD

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Download .mp3 (9.4MB)

Oh my, it’s been a while but I did this yesterday. I ended my canal walk at Little Venice and took a phone call and then thought I’d grab this before heading home to “work”.

Seconds after I pressed “stop” I saw that there was some interesting pop-up jazz happening at Old Street and that I’d got a ticket to the People’s PPE session with Ann Pettifor and Yanis Varoufakis. So I jumped on a tube in the opposite direction.

Overall, a day of reminders of how lucky I am to live in this city and be able to go with whatever flow comes along.

Podcasts, What I think, words

Audioblog 160223 – Walking by the canal thinking about @solobasssteve

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Download .mp3 (7.9MB)

Walked by the canal this morning, nice and slow and easy. Reflective, as canals are and encourage us to be. Not much to do except dodge buggies, joggers and duck poo. And think about something Steve Lawson wrote on Facebook this morning.

6m 11s I pass by a jackhammer, mind your ears.
It made me realise how long I’d been talking for, so I finished.

Podcasts, words

Audioblog 160222 – Saved by @ruperthowe

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Download .mp3 (4.4MB)

I started going for a walk but almost turned back after five minutes or so. Then I saw something on my phone that made me carry on and record this.

Some links that might help you understand/remember bits:

lists, What I think, words

Self Care: Things To Do

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This is by no means a canonical list, but I remembered on Saturday that I had it with me and so I shared it with people.  It occurred to me that it might be useful to share here too.  I could add to it, so could you, but it’s just what came out one day when I sat down to write “Things I need to do to take care and resource myself.”

  • Go for a walk – 20 mins to 1 hr (longer on rest days)
  • Have a rest day
  • Go on holiday
  • Walk in the woods
  • Talk to someone, anyone
  • Have a nap
  • Meditate
  • Tidy up and process stuff
  • Time my work periods (25 minutes working, 5 minute doing something different)
  • Do the washing up or some laundry
  • Read for fun
  • Play a game
  • Go to unplugged/tuttle/some other coffee morning type thing
  • Forgive myself for not being perfect all the time
  • Do someone a favour
  • Stop working for free
  • Listen to a podcast
  • Listen to music
  • Play music, sing and dance around the living room
Podcasts, What I think, What I've Been Doing, words

Audioblog 160220 – Why So Serious?

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I recorded this on Waterloo Station shortly after the Devoted & Disgruntled Vaults Festival Open Space on Saturday. The space was opened to discuss “Let’s stop romanticising depression and marginalising other mental illness” and I called a session called “Why So Serious?” about the issue of taking oneself too seriously, dealing with other people’s expectations, the link between adopting a serious persona and depression or burn-out.

I reported like this mainly because I’d called a session at the previous week’s space but had then spent the whole week not being able to write a report.   It’s reminded me how much I like making this format.  Expect more…

words

Blockchain, Public Service, Wealth Concentration – joining the dots

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I went to hear Michael Mainelli talk about blockchains (actually Mutual Distributed Ledgers) at Truphone this morning.  Michael brought the voice of reason and long-term comprehension to the some of the excitable bubble-watchers in the audience.

Over coffee beforehand, the vox populi was excited by the efficiency possibilities inherent in this technology.  The ground I covered a little in “Eaten by Code, Replaced By Robots?” but from the perspective of financial services firms – ie the Banks have all got to do this, because: previously unimaginable productivity.

All that productivity and efficiency also means potential unemployment for a swathe of white-collar paper-pushers/keyboard-jockeys who make up the mass of our Financial Services industry.  But that’s not the Private Sector’s problem, that’s something Government needs to deal with.  This is the view criticised by Mariana Mazzucato at the John McDonnell #neweconomics lecture last week – that Government shouldn’t only be seen as a means to fix things that markets can’t (or won’t) deal with.

But we’ll give public services the problem to solve even though we’re simultaneously taking away the money they have to spend.  Have a look at Evgeny Morozov’s piece in The Guardian on the relationship between tax avoidance and private investment in services like Uber:

To put it bluntly: the reason why Uber has so much cash is because, well, governments no longer do.

 

Follow the money…

What I think, words

[insert celebrity name] died in January what’s up with that?

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We have seen some cultural icons pass in the last month.  And whenever we hear of another individual death, we’re tutting on social media and giving January 2016 a bit of a hard stare.

It’s had me thinking about death, how it’s always a surprise even though we know it’s coming.  How the War Babies and Boomers are getting older and will naturally be starting to disappear and what it also means about our culture.

First of all, January.  Yes January is a bastard.  Even if you’re well it’s long and dark at our latitudes and I think lots of people who aren’t so well decide consciously or not that they’re not up to sticking around for another winter.   From the ONS Winter mortality statistics from England & Wales you can see that January 1st was the number one day to die in the period 1/8/2014 to 31/7/2015 and that January was the peak month for deaths with just under 60,000 people.

image (7)

But what about Bowie, Lemmy, Rickman etc?  Well they’re the early-ish ones of a much bigger trend.  Although life expectancy at birth for males in the UK is currently about 78, back in the late forties it was 63-64 (presently ONS don’t produce life expectancy tables for people who took extremely large amounts of drugs in the seventies like Bowie and Lemmy).  A bit like house prices, most people have come to expect average life expectancy to keep going up even though they realise it can’t keep going forever.  Sooner or later everyone who had a top ten hit during the sixties and seventies will be dead, shortly followed by everyone who bought a copy of said hit.

And during the sixties and seventies we had something that we hadn’t had before and haven’t had since – the primacy of youth.  If you look at the people playing on number one hits during 1965, for example, most of them are aged 25 or under (the youngest was Dave Davies of the Kinks who was just 18, the oldest was Ken Dodd at a venerable 38).  That means we have a bubble of very famous people all around the same age who will probably be dying in the next few years.  We’ll have to get used to losing our heroes.

[Help me improve this.  Can you see better ways to use available data to make the point?  Can you see some more important points to make?  Pointe them out, let’s improve it together.]

 

events, What I've Been Doing, words

First #neweconomics event with @johnmcdonnellmp

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A couple of weeks ago, John McDonnell MP, the shadow chancellor, announced that he’d be organising a series of events on New Economics to “broaden the debate around economics in Britain.”

I booked up for the first four in London straight away. The first lecture was last night at the Royal Institution. It was good, I heartily recommend you getting along to others in the series if you can. I had a few reactions to it that might be expected by regular readers here.

  1. I’m not very good at lectures. Mariana Mazzucato was a great speaker in that unstoppable Italian-American way. And I stuck it to the end, but it was a hard exercise in concentration for me. That aside, I’m left wondering if it was worth it – one person talking for an hour, even jumping around her slides, is something I can watch on YouTube and I get to pause it to have a cup of tea and a think half way through.

  2. I’m not very good at Economics. I spent a good deal of my second year at University rebelling against having to do Economics 101 and I’m very glad to say that last night had no mention of inelastic pricing, but I was on my guard for long explanations of this model versus that model. I’m glad I got to hear what she had to say (big takeaway: don’t forget that all of Silicon Valley’s invention is built on the foundations from large publicly-funded programmes [DARPA, NASA, CERN etc]) but I had to work hard for it (probably a good thing).

  3. I’m really not good at post-lecture Q&A. There may be some people who enjoy it, who get to hear things they didn’t hear before, but I don’t think that justifies the mic-hogging and mansplaining and all of us having to sit through another half (if we’re lucky) hour of one person speaking at a time.

I came away really wanting to know who else was in the room (other than Jeremy Corbyn) and what they thought. And what all of this was doing to “broaden the debate”. I may just be being impatient. Let’s see what the next one (on Tech & the Future of Work) is like. I’d much rather have some Open Space/Unconference events where people really get to talk about this stuff and we all have an experience we couldn’t have had through a screen.

Which ties in conveniently with two evening events I’m doing in February at WeWork on the Southbank! After the Future of Work spaces we did before Christmas, I wanted to continue the conversation but with a more practical angle. So rather than talking broadly about new technologies, I’m asking “What are we actually going to do?”

You can book on Eventbrite:

Future of Work: What are we going to do about Artificial Intelligence?

and

Future of Work: What are we going to do about The Internet of Things?

See you there if not before!