from those wonderful folks who brought you mad men

Like the rest of the broadsheet-reading masses, I am currently engrossed in the TV show Mad Men: a show which seems to be the cultural reference du jour, even while remaining a niche interest on BBC 4. From style and fashion magazines concentrating on what the ladies/men wear; to health magazines examining the effect of living the lifestyle of Mad Men (conclusion: not positive); to men’s magazines extolling the lifestyle (GQ/Esquire) or phwooaaaring over the beautiful Christine Hendricks (FHM/Loaded); it seems that no article is complete without a reference to Don Draper.

In the wake of this cultural blitzkrieg of all things Draper, several books have been re-packaged and re-published to cash in on this interest in Madison Avenue. Foremost among these items is the Jerry Della Femina book “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbour”, which just like the others, rides the Mad Men gravy train as hard as it can, right down to the stylistic “man-in-suit-on-red-background” front cover. Unlike the others, it does at least have a tenuous link to the series, as it was this book that inspired certain elements of the show.

Written by an ad-man who lived through that time, it was obviously an invaluable reference for the producers in getting a sense of the boozy lunches and high jinks, as well as the politics of an advertising agency just right. But anyone taken in by the styling of the book, and expecting a full immersion into the Mad Men world will be left very disappointed. There are a number of genuinely funny anecdotes, and the tone of the book as a whole is friendly and chatty. But there is an overall lack of control in the book, and it quickly becomes a chore to keep reading anecdote after anecdote.

Imagine your friendly uncle, coming over and having a drink, and telling you a story about the time him, Tony and Jim had to go all the way over town and something happened. Then imagine him getting drunker and drunker, and the stories becoming less and less amusing, but your uncle becomes more and more insistent that you listen to him. He starts telling you stories about people you don’t even know, and then he starts complaining about work - each tale is delivered with a belligerent poke into the chest. You really want to listen to him at the beginning, and he says a few things that are funny, but as the night wears on, you begin to humour him, and then you slowly stop listening to him and just nod your head and smile in the right place, all the while thinking about how you could slip away without him noticing. This is the book form of that uncle: an incoherent jumble of stories about people you don’t know and don’t care about, only serving the purpose of the glorification of the storyteller, and how great he used to be.

mighty mouse summer mix

http://soundcloud.com/mightymouse-1/july-2010-mixtape-a-summer-in-space-by-mighty-mouse

This is a mighty good mix from the mighty mouse boys: lovely cosmic disco, perfect for dancing in the sunshine.

mark cavendish - 5 stage wins at tour de france 2010

This is an impressive video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K_1Dnl0mdA which showcases just exactly why Mark Cavendish is the top sprinter at the moment. The video includes a lot of top-down shots as well as a side-on view for the last sprint on the Champs d'Elysee, which really show the extra couple of gears that Cav has over the rest of the chasing pack. He wins by a ridiculous margin for most of them, which is an astonishing feat.

I really hope that he can claim the green jersey next year, although Husholvd's policy of going for the intermediate sprints in order to claw back points seems to be a good one.

High-pressure industry standards

The annual wine-tasting extravaganza in Bordeaux must surely rank as one the most high-pressure weeks in any industry. For one week, the great wine makers of France open their doors and allow the critics and tasters into the estates in order to taste their new vintage. A whole years worth of toil and effort, of baking outside in the sun, diligently watching your grapes get ripe enough, yet not too ripe. A whole year of hoping that there is enough rain, but not too much rain, hoping for a gentle breeze, crossing your fingers against an out-of-season frost. All this waiting, and then gentle harvesting, mulching and decanting into perfectly seasoned old barrels - knowing that every single thing has to be absolutely perfect, not allowing any imperfection to get into the process at any stage.

And for all that effort, you are rewarded with a week that will decide whether you make a million or a half-million, or whether in fact you will have a job next year. And on the imprecise science of the tastebuds of critics who have managed to become taste-makers. I can't imagine whether this would work in any other industry - if Apple made their new product, but it's success didn't rely on mass-market appeal, but on the whims of an uber-geek, would they realistically have been able to continue? What if that uber-geek simply didn't like listening to music while on the move: they would have been dead in the water with their launch of the ipod.

The "new" Doctor Who - review

So, the "new Who" era ends, to be replaced with the "new new Who" era. I think that any comparisons with the Russell T. Davies flavoured series will be a bit premature after only one episode, so I will wait until the end of this new run until I give my full review, but the early indications are good.

The episode itself was a bit hit and miss, but such is the way with series openers - you have to introduce new characters, new plot devices for the series as a whole, AND you have to have a decent story that will hold it all together and stand by itself. There were enough interesting things going on to hold the attention, filled with the usual Steven Moffat motifs: the everyday things being subverted into something more sinister, such as the crack in the walls and things just being in the periphery of your vision. It also acknowledged the geekier elements of the fanbase, with plenty of potential clues and/or red herrings to satisfy the internet detectives who will pore over every detail of the series.

The writing was also very good: it wasn't a classic Who (or Moffatt, come to that) story by any means, but it was a very different beast for the executive producer - rather than providing the chillingly terrifying episode, as he normally does, he had to write something else entirely, and to these end it was entirely efficient, with some excellent lines across a lot of the characters.

I do like the new Doctor as well - I had a lot of goodwill for Matt Smith, who I wanted to succeed in the role, and there is enough evidence to suggest that he will be a success. I quite like the fact that he stopped off mid-plot to change his outfit, and I hope that this attention-deficit part of his character continues throughout the series - I quite like the idea of the Doctor being intensely relaxed about the whole "saving the world" thing, instead of being angsty about the burdne he carries with him. In an ideal world, he'd stop off at a newsagent to get a can of coke or a mars bar, before continuing on and demolishing a couple of daleks.

new favorite design blog

http://grainedit.com/



They seem to be able to find a whole load of cool design work - I really like some of the modern shizness they have on there. I'm dranw more towards the really simple design pieces that they have on there - I find them more striking than things that are really cluttered and full of busy-ness

It really makes me wish I had paid attention in Design & Technology a bit more, instead of just tracing words using the font pages we had. And that I had more drafting skill, obviously.

Maps of London

The Londonist is running a competition for maps of London, and this one caught my eye: it is a very cool, esoteric hand-drawn map of London - very creative, with dinosaurs, giant snails and minor landmarks, such as pubs and favourite thai restaurants taking precedence over the more common landmarks of London. As an accurate depiction of London, it falls way short, but as an act of pyscho-geographic* cartography, it is really brilliant.

The original, full-size version can be found here.

*Pyscho-geography: The relationship between pysche and place - rather than simply describing a place, you describe how it feels, how it makes you feel, the memories it evokes, and so on. So a road that you walk down for the first time may be threatening, loud and bustling, but once you have walked down that road 100 times, you no longer notice the groups of men standing outside cafes, the noise, the smells. The road has not change, but your reaction and your relationship to it, has. For more information, you could do worse than read these books: Book 1, Book 2.

ghastly advertising

This is a truely horrendous piece of advertising. I don't really know what is worse - the fact that they extol their piece of clothing as being a key component of getting girls; that they lionise 'JT' as a bad-boy role model, like this is something to be proud of; or that they assume that men actually do think of Terry as someone that they aspire to be. Or in fact, that there ARE actually people who do think he's a bit of a geezer, rather than a selfish, cheating prick, thereby necessitating advertising which is aimed at them.

Too much social media

Great blog article from the guardian about the amount of noise which comes from social networking sites.

The commentary is based around travel tips sites, which are incredibly busy and useful for tourists, who can use those tips to see a side of a city that they may otherwise have missed. I know from my own personal experience of using those websites that they can provide particularly brilliant things to see and do - I had a wonderful walk along a raised, disused railtrack in Paris, which had been turned into a boulevard of flowers. Romantic, great views, and it really felt like you were briefly a part of the city, rather than just visiting.

The same rules apply, whatever the topic of the social media: how do you encourage enough people to use the website, without degrading the quality to such an extent that it becomes pointless to look at?

Magnum photos slideshow

A collection of cool black and white photographs from Magnum photos, the international photography co-operative. In these days of HD, mega-pixel vivid colours, it is still amazing how these monographic images still pack an almighty punch.

Survivors, BBC 1

Survivors has made it to a second series, with decent enough ratings in the first 2 episodes to mean that it will probably be picked up for a third. I have been watching it since the beginning, intrigued by the concept behind the show (killer virus decimates the population, only a handful of people survive), but I have been seriously disappointed with the show, and only continue watching in the hope that it will get better.

Let's get it straight first of all: it's not a bad show by any stretch of the imagination - the concept is pretty strong, and it has some interesting ideas running through the series. For instance, the different types of communities which are being built up by the disparate groups of survivors is pretty well done, and it doesn't lurch into "liberal issue of the week" mode all that often. The acting is passable, the majority of the characters believable, and it has just enough intrigue to keep you waiting for the next episode.

It's an OK TV show. But that's as much as you can say about it. I think the problem is that my expectations of what a series can do, and what it should be about have been raised by The Wire. Actually, not even just The Wire; Lost, for example, helped to raise the bar of what a TV series can be by having long running stories spread across the whole series, with different groups of people being introduced before they actually "interact" with the main group, and with the motivations of those characters being fully realised and shown to the viewer.

This is not the case with Survivors, where characters beyond the main group are merely cyphers to move the plot ever-onwards. They are introduced for an episode, have a bit of plot exposition with the main characters, then are written out at the end of the episode. The repetition of this device is jarring in the extreme, and especially so in the last episode, where we were saw for the first time the wife and child of the "evil scientist". This could have done an amazing amount for this character: it would have given light to the scientist, so that we know that he isn't just evil; we could have explored what it meant to him to discover the vaccine, we could have seen a human side to him. We could also have explored what it was like to be cooped up in a small lab, with no way of getting outside and knowing what was actually out there. Instead, we get the evil scientist still doing his "evil" voice, even to his wife and child. We get the wife suddenly trying to escape, and then helping Abby to escape. She is not developed. She does not develop a main character. She is there merely for plot, and nothing else.

The plots are also becoming more and more unbelievable, and form nothing more than pegs to hang a bit of set-piece casual violence and/or silent brooding from Max Beesley. I accept that there has to be some suspension of disbelief to enable the drama to function, but the plot holes are getting ever larger, and more stupid. How can Abby escape from a high security lab, and evade capture from a well-trained unit with trucks and helicopters, while she is just dressed in a surgical gown.

I guess I am comparing the series to what it could have been: they could easily have stretched the 'Abby missing' storyline over the whole series, with the resolution of them finding each other at the end of the series or something. Instead, it's almost as if the writers got bored with the idea, so decided to end it as quickly as possible.

The bar for TV series has been raised by American studios, who have shown there is a mass audience who are more than capable of handling and enjoying multi-stranded, open-ended story lines that last for the whole series (or longer). The BBC are so far behind the game that home-grown programmes look out of date before they have even finished airing.

grumble, grumble, grumble

It's a well-known fact that when things go wrong, they generally go wrong altogether at the same time. This a cruel joke played by God* to push you to absolute breaking point.

I had to wake up early this morning, as work had a release going out before 8am. I had planned to get the 7.20am train, but missed this by a matter of seconds. For this I blame the traffic lights at the pedestrian crossing by the train station: I waited there for about half a minute before they changed and allowed me to cross. I also blame the guy who tried to beg 20p off of me on the way to the station - if he had not accosted me for 10 seconds, I may have made the pedestrian crossing on the previous change, and hence got on my train. A salutory warning there about the good reasons for ignoring the plight of the homeless.

Having missed the train, and with the next one in 20 minutes (so I would be late) I set off for the tube. Traffic jams meant that I didn't get on the tube until 7.45 anyway, so I should have stayed where I was (although the bus was warm, so I was at least up on that deal).

After struggling into work, the release didn't actually happen: a problem meant that the resources had changed, but that the network wasn't picking them up. I also realised that I had forgotten my breakfast, lunch and my front door keys. Happy days.







*(other omniscient beings are available)

Are you happy?

Love this: the texture, the message, the design. Everything about it is wonderful.

Kitchen Nemesis, Part 1

I have a kitchen nemesis. She does not know that she is my sworn enemy, but her ignorance does not protect her. We are engaged in a fraught and dangerous struggle, and only one of us will win. I am determined to overcome this pernicious individual by any means necessary.

Let me explain. We have a kitchen at work: it is a fairly small space, with enough room for a toaster, microwave, and coffee machine on the sideboard. At best, 2 people can get into this space at any one time - any more than this, and a fantastically complicated jigsaw of pirouettes and avoidance must be performed in order to fit everyone in. This kitchen serves as a central hub for around 30-40 people on our floor.

Most people, having experienced the dizziness of negotiating this small nook of a kitchen, tend to try and get in and out with a minimum of fuss, and spend as little time in there as possible, so as to inconvenience anyone else as little as possible.

Not the kitchen nemesis: oh no. She has decided that this is the perfect place to talk to her colleague about all kinds of things, often for 10 minutes at a time, while she slowly butters a single piece of toast. Rather than having this conversation at her desk (her henchman and partner in crime sits opposite her, anyway), they continue their trivial small talk in the kitchen, preventing anyone else from entering, and generally being a nuisance, and flouting the unspoken rules of the kitchen.

I shall have my revenge. Oh yes, I shall have my revenge.

The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway

I found this to be an incredibly powerful book, one which stayed with me for quite a while after finishing it. I actually read it well before Juliet, Naked, but have only felt able to comment on it now, after careful consideration time.

It is often hard, when you see a catastrophe on the news, to understand how people are feeling and living through that catastrophe. You can empathise with them, and understand that they are suffering a great deal, but the event is so large, and so overwhelmingly different to your every day life, that it is impossible to even try and guess how the people caught up in the middle would be able to get through it. The news is good at giving the background to the conflict: the hows, the whys, the major players, and can give a snapshot or two of what is happening at the current time: a man scurrying across the road under fire, but it cannot tell you what it feels like to be that man.

This book goes some way to attempt to describe the day-to-day scrabble for survival for 3 different people in the ruins of Sarajevo. Their stories are intertwined around the titular cellist, and detail in very simple, stark, language, how they go about surviving while their world crumbles around them. Not only do you get a sense of how difficult simply getting water and bread is, but also how war desensitises and dehumanises all those involved: soldiers and civilians alike.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

I have always tried to make time to read a new Nick Hornby book, and I generally read them with a lot of goodwill and fondness in my heart. The goodwill is entirely irrational, based as it is on the fact that he, like me, is an Arsenal fan, and is therefore surely a sign that he is a good egg and deserving of all good things that would come to him. His unambiguous moral superiority, based on the fact that he supports the same team as me, means that I read his books wishing and hoping that each new tome will be better than the last, and that I will enjoy the book even more than I enjoyed Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, or About a Boy.

After finishing the book, which is effectively a treatise on the nature of fandom, I seriously pondered my (misplaced?) allegiances to him, and the reasons behind why I wanted his books to be brilliant. Like Duncan, a character who's relationship with the works of a once-famous rock star is bordering on obsessive, Hornby's early work struck a chord with me - in the case of Fever Pitch an almost primal chord, and as a result I greedily read and re-read everything he subsequently published. I found a reflection of myself in many of the characters he wrote about, and as such learned a bit more about myself: sometimes an unflattering lesson, but one that I was glad of as a nervous teen/20 year old. Does the fact that I did not enjoy the book quite as much as his previous books say more about Hornby's direction as a writer, or about my own changes in taste? Or does it in fact reveal more about my snobby "fan" character that is satirised so well here?

The book revolves around a long-dormant rock star, Tucker Crowe, who achieved a reasonable amount of success in the mid-eighties before giving up that life in mysterious circumstances. In the intervening years he has developed a cult following, helped along by Internet obsessives and his media silence. The release of the demo tapes of his most successful album provides the catalyst for one of these obsessives, Duncan, to split up with his long term partner, Annie after they disagree about the genius (or lack thereof) of the new album. This also brings Tucker into their lives, after he contacts Annie after she posts a review of the album online.

It was a fine book, and on some level I did enjoy reading it (as evidenced by the fact that it only took me 3 days to finish it), but it didn't grab me as much as it should have done. The observations on men and women and their relationships to culture were, as ever, spot on, especially their relationship with that culture in relation to the Internet. However, the characters never felt real to me, and although their intellectual lives were well rounded, their actual lives were nothing more than sketches. In "High Fidelity", I really wanted Rob and Laura to get back together, and I felt like I knew them: this is not the case here, and although I enjoyed the book, there was no one person that I could identify with, and so I wasn't bothered about how it ended.

In the end then, a disappointment: but only in the way that you wish that your once favorite band would release something quite as good as their debut. The new stuff is still enjoyable, and has touches of what you really liked about them in the first place, but the familiar refrains seem tired and overdone.