Journal

There’s been some storms of late, but thanks to us being in the centre of this island they didn’t cause much, if any, damage locally. Still, one of the fence posts started showing a bit of wobble so I did the amelioration shown in the photo. The make-do stake is a paint mixing drill attachment which I used to use to mash up stale bread for composting before I got a mulcher. Everything has a use eventually.

It’s also been clock change time, going backwards I think. I don’t really mind the clock change — it’s a bit odd for a couple of days and then I get used to it — but I do get why people complain about the autumn one. It now gets darker earlier? And we do this on purpose?

So it’s definitely autumn. The big jumpers are out, the dehumidifier is on and it’s raining.

CFS stuff has been up and down. I managed to get to a friends house to show them how to use a power drill, which was a lot of fun and brightened my mood, but there was fallout the day after. I’m getting a lot of fuzzy head where it’s not painful or particularly debilitating but everything’s just a bit cloudy or defocused or something. As always, impossible to explain in words.

Archiving news:

I continue to spend my laptop time going through old blog posts. This weekend I spent a bit of time wondering what to do about a short-lived blog I ran in 2007 called Brum Blog. In late 2006 I found myself looking at blogs like Gothamist and, knowing there was a decent blogosphere in London, wondering what one for Birmingham might be like. I did a few test posts on my blog and then spun it off to a bare-bones Blogger blog.

I don’t think it was particularly notable as a blog but it does appear to document the emergence of what became known for a while as “hyperlocal media”, in other words people writing on the internet about their local place.

I started Created in Birmingham around the same time, while Jon Bounds was also reorienting his Birmingham: It’s Not Shit site into a full weblog and loads of other chronologically organised chronicles of the city started popping up.

I ran it for about 8 months before realising I was spreading myself a bit thin and turning it into a gig guide, posting up any flyers for interesting shows I found on mySpace, and then letting the domain expire.

It feels like it’s enough of its own thing to not be rolled into my blog archive but at the same time it’s part of the big story of what I was up to in those years. For now I think I’ll keep it to one side.

Linkage:

• Is microblogging the next big art movement? — I loved finding this in my feed (thanks Ant!) and immediately felt empathy for the author who has clearly had one of those moments where you come across one thing, then come across another, and your mind goes “these are the same things!” I’ve done this. We’ve all done it. Well, those of us whose curiosity and pattern-matching are untethered thanks to our need to know all the things. “This is interesting and this is important!” your brain shouts as your fingers enthusiastically type away, certain that the conclusion will be profound, because of course it will be. And she’s not wrong! Tracy Emin’s mail-art, like so much media that played with the postal network, was very much part of a precursor to early blogging before it got professionalised in the mid-late 2000s, and as we swim in the toxic effluence of 15 solid years of “social media” it’s definitely time to look back at what was lost and try and draft some guidance from it to the present day. Microblogging is back, bitches!
  • For a sense of what the mail art scene looked like in the 1980s and 90s (and which Tracy Emin was inspired by, maybe?) I can highly recommend the late Mark Pawson talking about his mail art archive. Note how much he talks about “the network”. If microblogging is the next big art movement it’ll be about the network as much as the content. Let me know if you’d like me to explain more.
• Screenshot: Billy Wilder — This is my new favourite audio show. The interviews are generously long and the questions they’re asking suitably deep and it really feels like this kind of encyclopaedic overview of cinema is what Mark Kermode is best at. I’ve been skimming through the archives and can also recommend the Twin Peaks episode where Mark works hard to convince skeptical co-host Ellen Jones it’s as good as everyone says. She comes around.
• The one question I can’t stand at restaurants — ‌Then, the hostess stops, Columbo-like, to interrupt with one more question: “And what’s your phone number?” An article about data collection in the restaurant trade which is apparently getting out of hand with some creepy centralisation. But I get how they got to this point — good customer service is about knowing the customer and tailoring to their needs within the confines on your offer, so the more you know the better and a digital tool to do that, especially when margins are so tight, is very tempting.
• What if we made advertising illegal? — I want to live in a society where this question doesn’t need to be asked because advertising has long been outlawed.
• RIP Walter Koenig — This is an interview with him a year ago, ostensibly about Star Trek but really about being a jobbing TV series actor in 60s Hollywood, and all the more fascinating for that.