meish dot org: life, unfolding

News today that visitors to the new Ai WeiWei Turbine Hall installation at the Tate Modern are being prevented from walking on the ceramic seeds, as the artist intended:

“Although porcelain is very robust, the enthusiastic interaction of visitors has resulted in a greater than expected level of dust in the Turbine Hall. Tate has been advised that this dust could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time. In consequence, Tate, in consultation with the artist, has decided not to allow visitors to walk across the sculpture.”

The work is intended to be interactive and to have people walking through it, although some visitors, mainly children, had more fun in the seeds than curators might have liked.

I’m interested in the idea of artworks that you can’t predict: although Ai Weiwei conceived the artwork as interactive, it’s not until 100 million ceramic seeds are being shuffled through by gallery visitors that the true size of the dust-cloud is revealed. That’s art in itself.

Also, health and safety has played a role in visitor interactions with installations at the Tate Modern before….

The world – and the media – is transfixed today by the ongoing rescue of the 33 miners who have been trapped underground for two months in a collapsed mine in northern Chile. As they emerge blinking behind sunglasses, into the desert daylight, we heave another sigh of relief. The unfolding story of their survival and planned rescue has brought hope to a world weary of bad news, and its successful executionn throughout last night and today is a testament to the power of planning, engineering, organisation, politics, money, hope, character, luck, faith…in fact, whatever people want to hang on this moment, they are doing so.

Throughout the morning, as news of the emerging miners breaks, I’ve had an earworm playing at the back of my head, which I’ve been trying not to give focus to, but here we go:

The song is the Ballad of Springhill, originally by Peggy Seeger (the version I know is by Martin Carthy) which was written about a mining disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia, in October 1958. An underground seismic “bump” caused the coal faces deep underground to collapse, killing many men instantly and trapping others. Over the days which followed, survivors slowly made their way to the surface and contact was made with a group:

“After five and a half days (placing it around the morning of Wednesday, October 29, 1958) contact was established with a group of 12 survivors on the other side of a 160 foot rockfall. A rescue tunnel was dug and broke through to the trapped miners at 2:25am AST on Thursday, October 30, 1958…. Of the 174 miners in No. 2 colliery at the time of the bump, 74 were killed and 100 trapped but eventually rescued.” [source]

Thankfully, it looks like all the miners in the Chilean situation will be rescued safely throughout the course of the next couple of days.

Tangent: I think going by their onscreen graphic Sky News will refer to this as “Miners rescued: 33/33 – Achievement Unlocked!” Though people seem to find the count variously tacky and/or helpful, I think there are many who echo the sentiment of this twitter user:

Anyone doubting this similarity is urged to study any Lemmings screenshot, and compare that with Sky’s on-screen graphic.

The 1958 “Springhill bump” was notable for another reason, too: it was the first major international story in Canada to be covered by live television broadcasts — a new service being developed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) [more info]. Then, as now, the media circus camped at the minehead, watching and waiting.

While you watch the rolling news today, and follow the liveblogs and twitter updates, take a moment to watch this archive footage from CBC with interviews and coverage from the pithead. The events change, but the live media coverage is eerily similar, together with questions from the studio to our man at the pithead: “What’s going on right now? What can you see?”

Some things change, some stay the same. Meanwhile, in a Chilean desert, the miners rise one by one, blinking from what could have easily been a tomb. The world welcomes them back.

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I can’t be the only one who’s noticed the similarities between the promo poster for Inception and the “horizonless projection of Manhattan” map made by BERG (here’s a post by Jack Schulze about the design influences for the project):

I’ve got the Here And There (HAT) map prints, and they absolutely deserve further scrutiny because they’re so detailed, plus it’s a really interesting, mind-bending (sorry) way to think about space, and the world.

Are you going to be watching the Eurovision Song Contest (final) tonight? Are you going to be watching it in the company of family or friends? Improve the experience by playing Eurobong-a-bingo!

This Eurobingo PDF file contains ten player sheets filled with random Eurovision cliches and phenomena which may be observed during the show broadcast. Simply check off each as they appear – award spot prizes for completing a line, and the first person to complete a whole sheet wins the kitty (or another prize of your choice).

There are also three additional ways to win: before the show begins, add your best guess for each of the quant questions at the bottom of the sheet. Closest wins!

This game has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike license. Feel free to adapt, remix and share it, but please leave attribution intact.

Thanks and happy bing-a-bang-a-bingo!

Part of my tenth blogiversary series.

1. Reverse-chronological (unless I was Benjamin Button)
2. Permalink (I think Prolific invented or at least named these, didn’t she?)
3. Archives (unless I was a librarian)
4. Publish (unless I was Rupert Murdoch)
5. Blogroll (I don’t have one, though)
6. Blogring (remember them?)
7. Post (unless I worked for Royal Mail)
8. After the jump (unless I worked for the Samaritans)
9. Pingbacks (unless I was Brian Eno)
10. Plugins (unless I was an automaton sexbot)

Addendum: Things I do not say, even though I have a blog

1. Blogosphere, because it’s stupid
2. Blog when I mean blogpost because it’s just WRONG

I missed the actual tenth birthday of this blog/me blogging but I can’t let a milestone like that go unmarked, can I?

Originally started as a place to store and share links, this blog gradually became a place to playfully interact with the world, and over time that turned from introspection to exploration of the world, media, experiences and ideas. I don’t think I’m alone in that kind of journey with blogs.

I am immensely (unreasonably, perhaps even pathetically) proud of having been blogging for so long. I can say confidently that I was in at the beginning, when all this were fields. I was here before many of you young whippersnappers who have gone on to eclipse me, and blogging, and the web entirely in their success and influence. I don’t put my early involvement down to canny prescience about the way the web was turning so much as an inevitability given my proclivity for tinkering with web things, my early academic and personal interest in communicating online and my inability to shut up. Blogging and me; it was only a matter of time and technology before we found each other.

I was there. I remember the start, and the hype, popularisation, commercialisation and ubiquitisation which followed. I couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but my blogging was to introduce me to dozens of interesting people, influence others to start doing it too, cause interesting opportunities (and worrying situations) to develop. Blogging has become part of what I am, what I do. I blog now for the same reasons I did in early 2000: because I can’t not tinker with and publish to the web.

Ten years ago, I was embarrassed to mention having a blog in polite company, because it was so difficult to understand – not just what but why. These days, even both my parents have blogs. It’s not a weird niche oddball geek thing anymore. It’s so normal it’s almost passé. Good.

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On Friday I attended The Story, a London conference about stories and storytelling.

The stated proposition for the event laid it out as

a celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories, in whatever medium possible. We’re hoping to have stories that are written, spoken, played, described, enacted, whispered, projected, orchestrated, performed, printed – whatever form stories come in, we hope to have them here.

The Story is not about theories of stories, or making money from stories, but about the sheer visceral pleasure of telling a story. Whether it is in a game, a movie, a book, or a pub, we’ve all heard or told or been part of stories that have made us gasp, cry or just laugh.

There have never been so many stories, never so many ways to tell them. The Story will be a celebration of just a small sample of them.

It was an interesting day which has already been well documented elsewhere, but after the event I found myself reflecting on the content and which bits I’d enjoyed and craved more of, and which less so.

Throughout the day, I was variously amused, intrigued, distracted, confused, impressed and challenged at points, but didn’t leave feeling overly inspired to create myself – or at least, no more than usual. It felt like a brilliant event showcasing brilliant creators, but with less emphasis on the audience – a room packed full of potential creators – and how they could also play, create, bring stories into existence, either from their imaginations or from life.

Without dwelling on particular contributors and their participation, I tried to think about the wider classifications of activity experienced throughout the day and how I found them, and how they fit together. As I see it, there are four potential story-related events which could have appeared under this banner:

The first is a forum for established, published authors to read their works aloud in public. This is most like “an audience with” and suffers from three potential problems. Namely: that things that work when written down don’t necessarily work so well read aloud; that authors reading their work aloud rarely add anything to the interpretation except their identity (in this situation, their fame tends to compensates for the diminished quality of a live performance of a written text); that the audience can usually read for themselves and don’t need to attend to do so. In this context, the story is subservient to the identity and presence of the author. You are in the presence of a creator. The audience is required to participate only through attention and appropriately-timed ripples of laughter. This kind of event is opaque.

The second is a platform for the telling of original stories. The identity of the storyteller isn’t as important as their ability to tell a good story, and this is only heightened by context-specific or unique stories: tales woven specifically or only for a particular time and audience. There’s a long-established tradition of doing this – think about Fray Cafes for example – and like open mic nights, they require the audience’s support and potential participation. The story is more important than the teller, and the audience tends to want something which doesn’t feel like a well-honed routine, because that makes it seem more like a rote performance and less like an act of engaged sharing. This kind of event is levelling.

The third is an event about the craft of telling stories – via multiple media – from storytellers themselves. In this sort of event, writers and creators share their thought processes, techniques and patterns of working out ideas, and secrets of their industry or approach, while exploring how and why they do what they do. This provides additional layers of context and insight into the stories themselves, as well as positioning the author or storyteller as a skilled and thoughtful creator. The audience is let in on secrets, and gains a great and inspiring understanding of how these artists tell their stories. This kind of event is inspiring.

The fourth is a more theoretical platform for discussion of stories (plural rather than specific), in which the speakers may not be practitioners of storytelling itself but come from related disciplines and fields such as academia, publishing, commissioning, adaptation and editing. They speak about the patterns and particular aspects of storytelling as it relates to wider contexts than the urge to share a particular story, and may reflect on topics such as the art of the cliffhanger, how narrative curves engage the reader, the seven basic movie plots and why the future of stories is games. The audience is challenged to make a mental leap to the semi-abstract, and in the process gains insight into the general activity. They take lots of notes. This kind of event is stimulating.

The Story was none of these events, specifically. It was a combination of several of them – some of the first, a few sessions of the third and one or two of the second with (purposefully) very little of the fourth.

Personally, I’m fascinated by the third and fourth, and would really enjoy a day of them combined with a more relaxed evening participatory cabaret of the second type described above. The first leaves me a little cold, I’m afraid – possibly because while I like hearing from authors, I mainly want to hear them talk about their work and their ideas and their approach and their stories, and less straight reading from the printed page.

I know Matt Locke, the creator of The Story, has already stated his intention to put another event on next year. I look forward to seeing how The Story develops – or, to put it in more appropriate terms, what the next chapter contains.

I am not a sport-loving person, but I make one rather large exception every few years for the Olympics and – more specifically – the winter Olympics.

It started in the early eighties.

In 1984, I watched Torvill & Dean’s winning Sarajevo ice dance performance, and was enchanted.

Inspired by their performance, my older brother and I decided to recreate the performance on the slippy tiled floor of our hallway. We swooshed about in socks, and he grabbed my hands and told me to dive through his legs. At no point did he specify that I should attempt this manoevre feet-first, and the resulting broken nose was a humiliating reminder of the universal folly of letting oneself be cajoled into doing stupid things by elder siblings.

Around the same time – and not coincidentally – I started going ice-skating every Saturday at Queensway ice rink in Bayswater, with my friend Jane. If we got there early enough, we could be first to carve up the smooth surface after the Rolba Zamboni had trundled across the ice. For ten minutes of every hour, they would pump out disco music through the rink speakers which we could dance to in a shambolic sort of way. I couldn’t afford lessons, and so taught myself to do wobbly backwards skating and slow, clumsy spins.

But no matter – I had a pinky-purple leotard-like lycra dress with silver glittery raindrops on it and a skirt which flared out when I twizzled around, even if I couldn’t afford the proper thick skaters’ tights, and had to do with Pretty Polly instead. The cafe there served hot chips with vinegar, and I think I even had a birthday party there on year. Maybe my tenth or eleventh?

This was also around the same time that we got a home computer – a Dragon 32, which was terrible for just about everything – but a couple of years later, we finally got a family computer that could do good stuff.

And by good stuff, I mean games.

And by games, I mean more than just text-based adventures (as good as the H2G2 text game was).

Specifically, I mean Winter Games (Epyx, I think), which was the height of computer gaming brilliance at the time, rendered in woeful graphics and required the player to left-right-left-right-left-right to cross country ski or speed skate; leftleftleftleftrightrightrightrightright on the bobsled and luge; time your smacking of the space bar perfectly to hit the targets as your cross-hairs wobbled in the biathlon; mash various combinations of keys to produce camel toe loops and triple salco stunts (whatever they were) in the figure skating, all performed to a jangly 8-bit rendition of “Waltz of the Flowers” from “The Nutcracker Suite”.

[in German, but you get a great sense of the gameplay]

The game(s) also included a ski-jump simulation. You set off from the top of an impossibly steep slope by hitting the space bar, then hit it again at the bottom to “take off”, then once more to land in an upright position. Not exactly tricky, but sort of puzzling. Why would someone even want do do such a thing? Most perplexing.

In the years that followed, I got into the habit of watching Ski Sunday, which my family were completely bemused by – we were not a ski-holiday type of clan – but tolerated nevertheless.

I just liked watching people do technically complicated things in a seemingly effortless way. I liked the fact it was a solo pursuit, not a team thing. It focused the attention – and the performance pressure. There were brilliant interpersonal battles over hundredths of seconds, and occasional spectacular spills and tumbles. Plus it all happened in stunning apline snowy scenery, with spectators bundled in multiple layers of fleece, sounding cowbells. What’s not to like?

In 1988, I watched the winter Olympics from Calgary, mainly for the figure skating and downhill skiing, if I’m honest, but it was the ski-jumping that got me hooked. I hadn’t realised that the slope was so big and the men and women competing her basically flying. How cool! Can anyone have a go? Where do I sign up? Answer: not in west London.

That was the year that Finn Matti Nykänen won gold medals in both ski-jumping events.

I cut out pictures of a man in flight and stuck them on my bedroom wall. What an idol.

I hadn’t kept up with his colourful career since then, but it transpires that he’s become quite the tragic once-successful now-struggling sporting characte – the George Best of ski-jumping, only more so.

This excellent article by Barney Ronay contains a glimpse of the man behind the headlines, and is definitely worth a read, if only because any article with a standfirst like Matti Nykänen was Finland’s greatest sportsman, winner of four Olympic golds. Since then he has stabbed someone in a finger-pulling contest, worked for a sex phoneline – and found God – surely deserves further attention.

It also provides insight into how Nykänen remains a national hero of sorts, in his native Finland.

Nobody in Finland is excusing Nykänen’s worst transgressions; but it is perhaps to their credit that Finns appear willing to forgive this strangely home-made, ne’er-do-well kind of national hero. Finland is fascinated by the turbulence of his decline, but also sympathetic to his plight.

There was even a sense of a Nykänen revival in train before his latest explosion. In the autumn of 2007 he came out of retirement, then won the ski-jumping-for-veterans International Masters Championship the following year. And last year he moved, tentatively, into a new career as a celebrity chef.

[...]

Perhaps it is this wistful quality that has endeared Nykänen to his people: the man-child ex-superstar athlete with his look of rampaging bewilderment, his middle-aged puppy fat, and his inability to engage sensibly with the world beyond the icy slope and the jump ramp.

Fascinating story. Complete character. Unbelievable sport.

So, in short, the summer Olympics are good and everything, but it’s the winter Olympics which really get me excited. It contains so many more sports and disciplines that I’d like to have a go at myself. Curling! Biathlon! Luge FFS! Who wouldn’t want to have a go at the luge, really?

OK, maybe not. But I’ll certainly be watching it and all the other sports on telly when the Vancouver winter Olympics start in a little over a month’s time.

I. Cannot. Wait.

More snow! More crazy sports! More skintight lycra! More cowbell!

If the usual Christmas televisual extravaganza over the next few days doesn’t tickle your fancy, then you could do worse – much, much worse – than taking an hour out of the commercialised, overhyped seasonal frenzy, making yourself a cup of tea (and go on then, possibly a mince pie or two, too), putting your feet up and watching the wonderful Time Shift on Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films which was shown on BBC Four last night (only available to view on iPlayer for another few days, and only if you’re in the UK, sorry no longer available online, sorry).

The documentary is a delight from start to finish. Lots of archive footage from the Small Films collection (Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Bagpus, Ivor the Engine et al) plus interviews with children’s writers and illustrators like Michael Rosen and Lauren Child.

It also features plenty of gentle, revealing conversations with Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin themselves (and their families), talking about the various inventions, models and hacks, the process and craft of making the films, the secrets of their loving creations and – perhaps most wonderful of all – the socio-political background of the stories and the character concepts. And the famous shed.

Oh, the shed. There has never been a more inspirational shed than Postgate’s, in my opinion.

In the Guardian, Nancy Banks-Smith has a wonderful writeup in today’s paper:

Oliver Postgate, who died last year, concocted a perfect little world in a garden shed. It was the sort of shed you open warily, knowing an avalanche of stuff-which-will-come-in-useful-sometime will flood out. My husband had a shed like that. It contained, among much else, a sea-going compass, which would come in useful if we ever had a yacht. The Clangers, who communicated in the melancholy swoops of a swannee whistle, lived there. The ear of faith can interpret what they are saying, and the BBC was ruffled to decipher in one such swoop: “Dammit! The bloody thing’s stuck again!”

Bagpuss slept there, too, in a cardboard box. The Clangers were pink in order to rise to the challenge of colour television, and because that was the colour of the wool that Joan Firmin, the wife of Postgate’s partner, Peter, happened to have handy. Bagpuss was pink because the proposed marmalade stripes went squiffy in the kiln.

She goes on to relate some early characters in his life:

[Bertrand] Russell later resurfaced in Bagpuss as Professor Yaffle, a self-opinionated old bookend with Russell’s very dry, thin voice. Postgate, whose own voice was soft, warm and, somehow, knitted, voiced all the characters himself, so we know for sure how Russell sounded. Professor Yaffle, by the way, had to be nailed to the floor so that he wouldn’t fall over and dent his dignity.

Her review also contains one of her most delightful turns of phrase, in describing the relationship between Postgate and Firmin:

“…one of those happy conjunctions, like Flotsam and Jetsam, in which people who are individually surplus become jointly glorious.”

Well put, and something many of us can only aspire to.

If you haven’t already got it (and if you can find a copy) I strongly recommend Oliver Postgate’s autobiography (Hardback in stock at Amazon) which came out a decade ago and I’ve read a couple of times since. So many details. So much obvious affection and curiosity about making characters come to life.

Postgate remains one of my biggest inspirations – not because I am a film-maker or have even a fraction of his talent, but because he was a creative tinkerer. He and Peter Firmin used wool and meccano and pulleys and string and wire to make things work; they experimented with techniques and subverted children’s storytelling with politics and humour and silliness that was in no way patronising; their love for what they did (and how they did it) was obvious and infectious to a whole generation of creative tinkerers, like me.

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(Images in this post are screencaptures from the BBC Four documentary)

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In case I don’t get a chance to post again in the coming days as the year ends – heartfelt felicitations of the season to you and yours. Be safe and happy.

Hot on the heels of the fortieth birthday of the information superhighway, it’s time for another birthday: an actual highway, this time: the M1, which today celebrates 50 years since opening by, presumably, having some sort of jam session, or maybe wearing one of those traffic cones on its head.

Motorway, by Darius Kay. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution/Noncommercial license

I can’t say I feel quite the same levels of personal enthusiasm and excitement about the potential of the motorway as I do about the internet….

(Incidentally, I’d link to the interesting BBC Four series about the cultural and engineering history of motorways, except of course you can’t watch it now. Ah well. Here’s a review instead)