The Star of the East
There was a pub in Shoreditch…Archive for History repeating
Fat Tuesday
Yes we’re all fed up. The extreme excitement of snow and ice [and days off] has passed, leaving us with grey skies and soggy feet. Even the people with jobs are up against the wall as their employers squeeze every last drop of work out of them rather than hire in any new talent. The big networks are waiting for financial new year’s day but are they sure it will ever dawn?
Of course there’s nothing new. When we lived in a subsistance agricultural society we’d have gobbled all our food at Christmas, or whatever pagan festival it was called, before it went bad and we’d be fighting over mouldy root vegetables.
It’s no accident that the Catholic church thought that this might be a good time to promote a bit of God fearing self denial. Why not take your pain and dedicate it to world peace or something? Give up Facebook for Lent, go on try it. The word Lent comes from the German root of long. The days get longer, or do they just seem longer without tangfastics and tizer?
Meanwhile Governments are vainly trying to feed the floundering beasts of the Banking and Automotive industries in the hope that seeing fatted cows walk through the streets will cheer us up and convince us to spend our way out of recession.
Why don’t we just invent a new religion, throw a party, kill the fatted cows and serve them in a crepe smothered with cream.
Happy Pancake day.
ps. as soon as I get over the Gastric Flu I’ll be back on the beer and pies and feeling begninly philosopical about life, work and online advertising.
Digital Dreams pt 2 (Reality)
But in the meantime we had the pay the rent. We designed and programmed touch screen interfaces for digital information kiosk prototypes.
We discovered Information architecture [5 people, 5 black markers, one very big bit of paper, lots of arrows]. We discovered clients [never knew what they wanted, didn't understand what we were talking about]. We discovered breakdowns in communication.
We discovered the internet. Or at least we had Demon accounts, a 14.4 modem that looked like a Stylophone,
and a lot a patience.
Typography bible
I am a self proclaimed type bore but, having been working with the internet, and CD ROM design before that, for as long as I can remember I have all but given up on type on the web. Various so-called cutting edge designers have messed around with font design, but it’s mainly whizzy nonsense. Flash makes a pretty god job of rendering line work on screen but will bastardise anything other than very simple type designs.
But, as a relative newcomer to WordPress as a tool, I am still astounded by the typographical standards available to the mere novice at the click of a button. Most bloggers are not designers, they are just people who want a good tool to keep their thoughts organised and get them up on the net. They are not interested in the relative merits of Helvetica, Arial, Univers and Akzindenz Grotesque [don’t get me started] or in the various fascinating biographies of Caxton, Baskerville and Gill. They just want to write stuff. And they want people to read it. And that must where the answer lies. The web dude creating a cutting edge microsite for a cool new film or must have brand doesn’t want you to read boring old copy, he wants you marvel at how clever he is, how radical in his use of mash-up photography, 3D transitions, and mysterious intuitive navigation. That’s why he sets the type tiny [no more than 8pt].
But if you want people to read and take notice of what you say, you need good old fashioned typographic values. Go Gutenberg.
Truth, dare, promise
The opinion of any malicious fool who can open a WordPress account [I just did it in 3 minutes on my phone] could be worth millions of pounds of your hard earned marketing budget. You can’t lie about the natural goodness of your biscuits, or the reliability of your computers, or the career opportunities in your company. Some subjects and audiences are out of bounds completely. But I can have a frank and open discussion just about anything, legal or not; about the best brand of fags to smoke behind the bike-shed after a snog with your underage girlfriend, and what flavour alcopop will best help her forget all about it.
Love
I love manual typewriters, I even bought one but I never learned to type until I got hold of an ugly Amstrad PC. I love lightbulbs but I got a bit bored with changing them so now my house is full of those ridiculously shaped low energy ones. I love ice cream vans and stripey kiosks more than I love ice cream itself. I love toy trucks especially if they are rusty, in fact I like anything rusty; just at that point where it’s going to fall apart completely and turn into that intensely dark red powder paint. I love rocking horses because they are scary like real horses, they’re not going anywhere. I love golf balls, but they were better when they 5 miles of elastic wrapped around a sac of deadly poisonous liquid. I hate golf. I love old cookers. In our first house we had 1950’s cream gas one with three ring and an even older electric one which glowed red hot. We’ve still got the pink one that came out of a trailer home in Tucson Arizona but it needs to be converted from LPG. I love sleep. No dreams, the kind of sleep where you wake up and it feels like no time has passed. A time warp which spits you out at the other end wondering what day it is and where you are and what your name is, space in your life, a vacuum. Doesn’t happen often. Nature abhors a vacuum. I love madfashionbitch and the things I love about her are most are also all the things that about her that drive me completely mad.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
No, they dream in numbers. They don’t dream of Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or tears in rain, they dream of:
256 the ‘web safe’ palette
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 The Fibonacci sequence
N51:32:02 W0:03:52 the longitude and latitude of the Star of the East on streetmap.co.uk
±0·6180339887 The golden section
2000 y2k, the year geeks made more money than anyone else and the internet bubble burst; the number of polygons in a single character in ‘The Getaway’ on PS2
9, 26, 30, 31, 38, 45 the winning numbers for National Lottery on my 40th birthday
#FF0099 hex RGB value for Madfashionbitch pink
3016895585 eBay item number for Quad 303 Power Amp Box, empty
911 German sports car, ground zero, my wedding anniversary
66 number of synonyms for the word ‘space’ found at dictionary.com 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679 who ate all the pies?
It was a motley crew of computer game developers, ex-servicemen and performance artists who began to explore the possibilities of the Internet in the early nineties. It’s hardly surprising that the virtual world they created was a morass of sci-fi fantasy art, paranoid conspiracy theories, and arcane scrawl. When venture capitalists drove their sheep into the new world media domain land-grab, they never bothered to learn the culture and language of the digital ab-originals. They just chucked loads of cash at them and hoped they’d behave themselves.
Out went the ASCII portraits of Dr Spock and in came lashings of sumptuous full colour product shots. It was so real you could almost touch it. Well you could touch the screen, and you could see the picture if you waited for long enough, and you didn’t mind seeing everything rendered in the same 256 garish colours. But these were temporary glitches, soon to be resolved by universal broadband internet connections, streaming video, a new flash plug in, and your new superfast dell lap top [bought 2nd hand on eBay].
But even when your video is full screen all you’ve got is TV and it is clear that the more people say ‘Reality TV’ the less real things get. Images on their own will never deliver anything close to reality let alone hyper-reality. It’s the underlying structures that allow the media to deliver a landscape rather than a linear story. Even the most loyal gaming foot soldier will admit that despite the 2000 polygons per character The Getaway is not a world with limitless possibilities, in the way that for instance eBay is: Here’s the proof from a PS2 game cheats site: “Hint: Kill someone easily. After you are done chasing the car at the beginning of the mission, aim your gun at the barrels behind the fence on the platform of the building, and then shoot. Someone will fly out of the door after the barrels explode!” to use the argot, It’s a “kin set up”.
The ‘reality’ of eBay is confirmed by the obsessively detailed item descriptions, the close ups of dents and scratches and the complex personal network of buyer and seller’s feedback. There is no cheats.ugo.com for eBay, just real people trying to sell you an empty box for a fiver [postage and packing not included]. This is true of all my favourite Internet destinations; streetmap, “we know where you live”, dictionary.com “monkeys type Shakespeare”. Even amazon, where that nice assistant who recommends books and music, knows you so well, and has the brain of ten librarians, is just a number monkey. The ‘reality’, the sense of being in a place of infinite possibilities comes from the detail, the facts, the numbers and the connections between them. If a web site hasn’t got those number monkeys behind it, it will be as flat as a pancake and stale the day after it launches.
So what do you do, if you don’t speak the language of numbers? Number Monkeys are notoriously stroppy and impossible to communicate with. This is the clever bit. You know the way Parisians refuse to speak English even though they speak it better than many English people and most Americans? You have to warm up your monkeys with a bit of number first [try any of my suggestions from the list]. Number monkeys love to talk, but they are proud, and so they should be, Chris and Chris, thanks for all the Phish.
Nothing new
Perfect snow: a beautiful white canvas on which to start afresh, a clean sheet on which to write ones new year’s resolutions, a quiet moment to make a plan. This year is going to see digital media regain momentum after a temporary setback and the internet will be lit up by the magic of universal love and broadband. I did all my Christmas shopping online and on the strength of this paper thin anecdotal evidence I confidently predict those fabled revenue streams will be delivering up more gold and funny smells than the three wise men.
But I’m troubled. How is it that my favourite places on the web, google, dictionary.com, streetmap etc, are almost entirely free from design as we know it? Doesn’t mean that as a digital designer I am wasting my time, or worse still other peoples?
And another thing; the snowman I made in Hyde Park in my lunch hour was covered with dead leaves and mud. I had to compete with snowball fighters and incontinent dogs and other sculptors for the best bits of virgin snow. On the way back the pavements were already grey with that slush that seems to crawl up your trouser leg and jump down your boots. After dark it’ll turn into black ice and make cycling home even more suicidal than usual.
This year I firmly resolve to do exactly the same things as last year, the same things that I have been doing for the last 20 years. Writing poetry and playing the curmudgeon. Pedalling to work every day but driving a 4 star gas guzzling 3.0 litre piece of historic scrap at the weekend. Designing web sites with all words and no pictures or just pictures with no captions. Being entirely digital but then spending excessive amounts on printing and postage. Structuring everything around rules and strict grids and then breaking the rules and removing the scaffolding.
If only I could be like Willow and just throw myself headlong into the fresh snow and make angels by waving my arms and legs, but I know too much. New media isn’t dead, it’s just getting older, like me. But we’re not going away. Happy New Year.
road dreams: eastern avenue
The thing about the granada scorpio is that you can get the decks and the entire back catalogue of herbie hancock, miles davis, weather report, shakatak, everything on blue note, talking loud, acid jazz, soul jazz, a good helping of the sounds of philly, some dodgy david sylvian lp’s and a bbc sound effects high fidelity gramaphone record into the back and there’s still room for a couple of birds so long as they’re fairly skinny and didn’t bring their fur coats with them you can burn your boats at the pool of london and say good bye to history as you cross tower bridge and head east along the highway to hell past the early breaking international news and by the time you dive into the lime the girls are asleep and they don’t see canary wharf lighting up the future or the fishmarket stinking out the past the millenium mills are still up for grabs and the city airport doesn’t fly by night but the road soars above the back gardens of the blessed and then lands with a roar alongside the last resting place of a thousand used car dealers mini cab graveyard and the bay windows stare stupidly at nothing wave goodbye to ilford island and shoot into pop oblivion underground underwraps underworld too late to go to hollywood terry you can’t swim with the dolphins or dance with the doves it’s pigeon shit city empty bingo hall last traffic light multiplex pizza burger thank god it’s D.I.Y. huts and out into the open fields of the promised land and on into the flat night of the flatlands outstripping white capris that have seen better days catch the tail of the vomit comet last train out of the smokey joke and rave on you crazy 25 diamond geezer the barns are bursting with corny inbred cockney barrowboy sharks running away from the jungle they built in search of the real thing and across the border into folk land dukes of hazard a guess rock and roll virgins where everything is so very old and so very new where the caravans wait patiently for their summer of misspent youth and when we can’t drive any further we park on the seafront the fish and chip shop is shut so we take off our loafers and feel the sand between our toes like so much talcum powder and taste the long weekender salty soul air and make communion with the sea and we’re born again and one of the girls wakes up and says “you’re fucking mad I don’t normally swear but it’s fucking freezing where the fuck are we and where’s my fucking fur coat?”
I can’t stand up for falling down
I don’t know if it’s still true or even if it was true then, but when I was in Cairo in 1983 they told me you didn’t have to pay tax if your building had no roof. And this was the reason why most of the buildings seemed to be either half built or half falling down. The predominant style was the six or seven storey concrete block topped off with a melange of scaffolding, rubble, piles of unused bricks, flying a tattered tarpaulin as a flag.
When I look at the majority of current web design I get the same feeling. It’s just not finished, or worse still, not even started. Random construction lines carve up the screen shifting and vibrating in a most alarming fashion. Words are still kept in boxes, as if their owners were afraid they might fall off or run away. Words in print graphics haven’t been kept locked up like that since cold composed metal typesetting.
The way they arrange the nuts and bolts and planks at Travis Perkins is more elegant, more logical and indeed more user friendly than internet data. One has to admire the workmanlike way in which technical teams have laid out their tools and their raw materials on a site like Amazon, and you have to admire the sheer range and number of nuts and bolts they’ve got but remember this a virtual world. They can give themselves an infinite number of lives just like Space Invaders in your bedroom on Amiga. [up.down.left.right.select.select.fire, all within about a second and half]. But this way of life has no future; look at the number of geeks spending their hard-earned .com cash on treatment for arthritis. We’ve all ended up living in a shantytown living hand to mouth and it’s our own fault.
There are some lovely hand built sheds on the outskirts, built in quaint html vernacular style and some amusing student experiments that go off with a flash and a bang. But nobody has come up with a large-scale design that does any more ambitious than stitching together several bigger sheds and setting off fireworks on the roof. Stig of the Dump has had to be very hard working and versatile to survive in this post apocalyptic vision of the world but he is used to it because most of Shoreditch used to look like that anyway.
However there’s a Pizza Express on Curtain Road now and girls in combat gear wandering around looking for the delicatessen and somewhere to buy lipstick. It’s a shame that the first big surge of cash was all used up in vain attempts to build the biggest, tallest, dirtiest pile of junk. Nobody thought of putting in plumbing and first fix electric’s, The Radiant City doesn’t exist, only old fragmented, imperfect, improvised buildings. But that shouldn’t stop us from making plans and models and dreaming of the next big thing. A recession.
awards
Top 10 things that people hate about award ceremonies
1. Some people always have too much to drink
2. Ruby Wax
3. They take all night
4. Everybody brings their secretaries, but only if they’re pretty
5. I never win anything
6. You can’t hear what’s going on because everyone’s drunk
7. Saatchi’s book all the taxis
8. Ruby Wax
9. Tripping over the step
10. Everyone’s late for work the next day
Top 10 things people love about award ceremonies
1. Some people always have too much to drink
2. Ruby Wax
3. They take all night
4. Everybody brings their secretaries, but only if they’re pretty
5. I never win anything
6. You can’t hear what’s going on because everyone’s drunk
7. Saatchi’s book all the taxis
8. Ruby Wax
9. Tripping over the step
10. Everyone’s late for work the next day
