Technology and the backlash
One of my favourite writers (and also unrequited love interest) Chris Panks wrote a great article opining the technological corruption of man over at his fantastic blog space at Glasgow Podcart.
Give it a read, especially as there’s plenty more of the likes of this:
But, the Internet’s single greatest capability is to provide anonymity to idiots who fill their days exhibiting their ignorance on forums, dodging anyone telling them to shut up like in real life, or updating the inane commentary on their boring lives with regularity.
I’m off to wash my hair.
This much I know
After quite a low key weekend full of voracious newspaper reading, I spent a bit of time with the excellent Observer Magazine and was quite heavily “observed” in the pantry of my mothers house while reading the “This Much I Know” feature.
The most recent version, on wacky film director Harmony Korine, was particularly excellent. It also got me wanting to do one myself, the narcissistic little tyke that I am.
I’ve taken openers from the past six features and adapted them for myself. So here goes.
The obligatory "this much I know" doe-eyed portrait
If I could give some advice I’d tell everyone not to compromise. I’ve made too many rash decisions in life where I’ve taken the first thing to come along, sometimes it’s worked out, sometimes it hasn’t. Try and think carefully about the next step and don’t be reactive to the point where you take a herbal high at Brighton Pride and don’t sleep again for four days just because you could.
When I was five I wanted to be a paleontologist. I was obsessed with a magazine series called Dinosaurs where every two weeks a new issue came out with a piece of a T-Rex skeleton that you built as you went along. I was so obsessed with them I memorised an entire top-trumps set and attempted to savage my dog like a velociraptor.
When I hear the song “With or Without You” by U2 I remember a college business studies trip to Prague where I got my first taste of absinthe and large quantities of Staropramen. All I remember is the teacher dancing on the table to U2 with his eyes firmly shut, swaying heavily in front of 30 underage teenagers.
I’m very interested in the idea of asexuality. Sometimes the whole sexual urge thing just feels so prehistoric. You get so much more done when you don’t have to worry about washing, grooming or anything else geared towards getting laid.
I used to work in Sainsbury’s and swore to myself I would never work on a check-out handling crusty people’s economy tins of spam again. A year later I ended up at Tesco’s which confirmed my idea that only a strange breed of people can function working in that kind of environment.
Technology means that any kind of mystique is dead. The only people that really interest me (to the point of staying awake at night) are those that maintain no kind of web presence whatsoever. Can you really imagine Ian Curtis updating his status every couple of hours? “Watching Fitzcarraldo. Listening to the Idiot. Going into the kitchen”…
I just can’t get enough of Snickers bars. I have a regularly shifting chocolate addiction. 2006 (my first year as a student) was all about Double Deckers. Ages 5-10 were all about Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles. I can safely say I’ll never get stuck on Picnic’s though, they are satan in candy form. Anything by Reese’s is garbage also.
The last time I cried was only a day ago. I was reading Tony Harrison’s poem “V”. The bit with “when I first came here 40 years ago/with my dad to ‘see my grandma’ I was 7″ gets me every time. My dad got me a signed copy of Harrison’s anthology at Cheltenham literature festival. It’s somewhere.
I wanted, for a long time, to be Axl Rose. Most kids go through this phase between the age of 9-12 shortly after seeing Terminator 2. For me it happened when I was 18. Hair was long, bandana’s were rife, torn jeans were in vogue – then suddenly I realised I, like Axl, had become a massive prick.
I met Bill Clinton once. Well I say met, it was more that I shook his gorilla like hand. He spoke at the University of Miami while I was an exchange student there. Al Gore spoke also. Oh and The Rock. The best I got to see at Sussex was Helene Cixous.
My worst habit is being unable to say no.
So there you have it, hope it isn’t too mundane! Actually I don’t care.
I eat my hat
Forget what I was saying about Mozilla Firefox last week. Arcade Fire (the best band in the world right now?) make using Chrome tantamount to sex, assuming of course you’re into that sort of thing.
Check out this article at Wired which discusses the team-up between Google and Arcade Fire and the power of HTML5.
Then take the experiment, write a letter to your younger self and sit back and prepare to be mesmerised.
Note to self: read Jack London
Everyone needs some London in their life right? Ever since falling in love with Kerouac and Sean Penn’s ace Into the Wild – the story of Chris McCandless, the works of Jack London have been calling out for me to read. 
Strange then that I stumbled across this great article by Johann Hari, award-winning journalist at The Independent and Huffington Post, chronicling London’s life in a broader review of James L. Haley’s biography of the man; Wolf: The Lives of Jack London.
Hari impresses as he gives an overview of London’s seemingly implausible life and his effect on later writers:
If you read his work today, you can see literary semen spraying across the American century as he makes possible some of the most important writers in the United States and beyond. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck rushed to his rawness and imitated it. The Beats followed him onto the road and into a jazzy, improvised style. George Orwell followed him to live among tramps and was inspired to write 1984 by London’s own dystopia, The Iron Heel.
Not only a great review but also a very neat article. I’ll be reading The Call of the Wild soon no doubt. Then possibly running away?
