From the June 2008 edition of Marie Claire magazine:
Were the earth’s temperature to rise by three degrees, it would cause the melting of the polar ice cap, and sea levels would rise enough to flood London. For such an occasion Natalie Imbruglia would wear a stunning Ginger & Smart red dress with shoes by Christian Louboutin.
I’ve been following the spread of the 8 Random Facts meme. It’s like a blogging chain-letter, you write eight facts about yourself, one of which is completely made up, and then tag eight other bloggers to do the same. The meme grows wildly because very few people, especially bloggers, can resist the narcissistic joy of being asked to talk about themselves for a few minutes.
I haven’t been tagged yet, so as a pre-emptive inoculation I’m going to give you 8 Random Facts about Andie MacDowell:
1. She describes herself as an “actress” but, as she can’t actually act, technically she’s a model.
2. She has been in over 30 films, not all of which were rubbish, but she was consistently terrible in all of them.
3. Sex, Lies and Videotape was pretty good, though.
4. She briefly dated Emilio Estevez, who she met on the set of St Elmo’s Fire.
5. Her scintillating 1995 performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral was nominated for a Golden Globe.
6. She has an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Lander University.
7. She is a spokesmodel for L’Oreal. A “spokesmodel” is a model who also speaks.
8. Her performance in Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan was deemed so poor, her voice was redubbed by Glenn Close in post-production.
So, my tags:
Feel free to either write about yourself, a b-list celebrity of your choice, or both. I offer some suggestions.
Ed Silverton (Hugh Everett III).
Rifa Bhunnoo (Jeremy Clarkson)
Oye Billy (Dory Previn)
Matt Brady (Steve Ditko)
Simon Parkin (Matthew Smith)
Tim Footman (Jean Michel Jarre)
Rachel Dorman (Iestyn Lloyd)
Iestyn Lloyd (Matt Pearson)
If you are a fan of Stephen Fry, and haven’t yet heard his recent venture into the world of podcasting, you really need to get on the bus. The other night I was miserably failing to give my wife a coherent retelling of Stephen’s explanation of the Aesthetic Movement, as spun out of an anecdote of Oscar Wilde’s first visit to America. Safe to say I’m not going to say it any better than Mr Fry did, so I may as well just reproduce it verbatim, below (with thanks to Fryphile for the transcript). But before you read on, you’d probably be better off saving your eyes and allowing Stephen to massage his words into your ears instead - download here.
“Why, Mr. Wilde, do you think America is such a violent country?”
“I can tell you why,” he said. “It’s susceptible readily of an explanation. America is such a violent country because your wallpaper is so ugly.”
Now that seems, you might snort with laughter at first and say, “Well, how amusing.” Part you you may say, “Well this is just a typical peacocking primped camp remark from a shallow and trivial man who thinks it’s amusing to say things like that.”
But actually, to understand what the Aesthetic Movement is all about, one has to take that quite seriously. Instead of judging things as being good or bad, things are judged by whether they are beautiful or ugly. And we may say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but actually it’s a lot easier to judge when things are beautiful than it is when things are bad or good. We spend our time puzzling dreadfully over whether we can interpret something as being wicked or whether it’s virtuous. However, beauty, beauty, beauty acts on us in a very real way, and what Wilde was partly saying was, if we look out of the window into our world, we see things that are universally and entirely beautiful from nature. Whether they be palm trees swaying in an island, whether they be the arctic wastes, whether they be deserts, tundra steps. It doesn’t matter where you look in the world, we see nothing but beauty. Unconditional, remarkable beauty.
Except where man has intervened.
And what Wilde is saying is, imagine belonging to a species where all you believe that all you can do to the world is to uglify it. To make it worse. To despoil it. Which is what we do. We know that now in real and profound and terrible ways that Wilde couldn’t have known about because the science hadn’t yet discovered quite how harmful we are as a species to our planet. But he could see that we were harmful to our planet in terms of its aesthetics. That we were making the earth uglier. Uglier with bad architecture, uglier with badly designed factories, uglier with badly stamped out tin trays and cheap ornaments, ugly with appalling wallpaper. And if you’re someone who grows up in such an environment, who is surrounded by badly made ugly things, then you think ugly thoughts of yourself and world. You think ugly thoughts of your whole species. There is nothing for you to do but to, to, to crap in your own nest. It’s what we do when we don’t believe in ourselves. And so although it seems a cheap response to a question about violence, the aesthetic point if view is actually I think a very valuable one, a very profound one, a very extraordinary one. And it makes people think beyond the knee-jerk reflexes of conventional morality, of revealed texts, whether they be the Bible, the Koran or the Communist Manifesto. It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to think harder than that, Wilde was arguing.
One of the memories I have from my school days is the visit of the “careers advisor”, a strange diplomat from the adult world come to impart her wisdom upon the young. I don’t know whether it still works this way, but in my day careers advice was not a regular part of the curriculum, just an irregular visit by some outside agency. Which is fortunate perhaps because the advice they gave was usually, at best, entirely useless. At worst, dispiriting and psychologically damaging.
“Our records show you’re good at maths. How about working in a bank?”
“Good at art eh? Ever thought about becoming an art teacher?”
Perhaps it wasn’t really her fault that every job I have done in my professional life didn’t actually exist when I was at school. In fact many of the technologies I’m working in at the moment didn’t even exist this time last year, this is how fast things are moving in my field. My career would have been extremely hard to predict, because there was a Black Swan involved – the Internet.
“Black Swan” is a term I probably need to explain before I proceed. There used to be a saying in Medieval England that something was about as likely as “finding a Black Swan”, meaning it was highly unlikely, akin to “when pigs fly”. According to historical record, this term was in widespread use until the 17th Century and the discovery of Australia, which bought with it the first sighting of a Black Swan in 1697. In scientific terms this is known as a paradigm shift, it was a discovery that couldn’t be incorporated into the current understanding, it had to redefine it. And clearly, the metaphor could no longer be used.
Nassib Taleb, in his book of the same name, defines the Black Swan as an event which is 1) hard to predict, 2) highly consequential, and 3) wrongly retro-predicted. The history of human culture is a progression of these Black Swans: the internet, the home computer, the motor car, wikipedia, Harry Potter, Princess Diana, facebook, the Renaissance. World War I was a Black Swan, it may look predictable in hindsight, but prior to it actually happening it was near unimaginable.
Cultural Myopia
If the careers advisor had any imagination about her, she might have talked to me about the job of the Futurist, which is perhaps my dream vocation. It’s basically like being a science fiction author, except better paid and doesn’t require an understanding of character and narrative etc. You basically just dream up big ideas, which is what I spend most nights doing anyway, but instead of losing sleep over them, a futurist sells their ideas to capitalist interests for them to worry about instead. There aren’t many people in this field - Raymond Kurzweil maybe, Bruce Sterling possibly - but if Black Swans are as frequent as Taleb makes out, the very concept of futurology becomes ridiculous. The progression of human culture is about as predictable as the stock market, the weather or any other chaotic system.
Figure and Ground
In trying to predict a chaotic system, a system where there are enough elements for it to be incalculable, we may not be able to accurately predict an outcome, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t still discern patterns. For example, we cannot predict the weather any further than two or three days in advance, but we can still say with confidence that it will be warmer in the summer than it will in the winter. It is by looking at the patterns of the past that we can make predictions for the future.
It is an oft observed phenomenon that every technological leap we make seems to be propelled by either porn or communication, two of the basest human functions, two things it is safe to predict there will always be a demand for.
While the Internet may have been a Black Swan, I’d like to think that a lot of its applications could have been foreseen (which is easy to say with hindsight). The aforementioned wikipedia and facebook for example are the newest of the new (although facebook, a year old now, is already starting to seem like yesterdays news), and weren’t actually possible before the WWW, but the principles behind them - sharing knowledge, keeping in touch with friends - are as old as civilisation.
Marshall McLuhan, sixties cultural theorist, of “the medium is the message” fame, in his later career came up with another epithet which I think is much more useful - “Ignore the figure and watch the ground”. What he’s saying is, when looking at culture and/or technology, don’t be distracted by the phenomenon itself, instead look at what’s going on around it, the effects it is having on the world. This is where the real story is.
While the technological changes themselves might not be easy to predict, the ripples that surround them will likely be quite familiar. Which means we probably can get an idea of where we’ll be in twenty years time, all we need do is look at the past, and squint a bit.
The Invisibles Volume 3 #3 Grant Morrison / Steve Yeowell April 2000
The Anthropic Principle comes in a number of flavours:
1. The Weak Anthropic Principle
definition: the universe is built the way it is because if it were any other way we wouldn’t be here to observe it.
2. The Strong Anthropic Principle
definition: the universe is built the way it is so as to create and support life.
3. The Very Strong Anthropic Principle
definition: the universe is built the way it is so as to create and support us.
In its weak form it makes for some interesting scientific philosophising. But take it two steps further and we’re talking intelligent design. This is how thin the line is between religion and science.
What I love most about the anthropic principle though is the underlying implication, in all its forms, that our reality, with its universal constants, linear time and perfectly balanced physics, is very, very unlikely in purely statistical terms. Which further implies that it is probable the creation of the universe (via big bang, bearded super-being, spaghetti monster, or whatever crazy theory you subscribe to) was not a one shot attempt, instead must have taken many attempts to get it right.
So does this mean there are parallel universes; earlier attempts to get the chemistry right and/or later attempts to improve on the mess made this time around? I read a lot of comic books, so I’m saying YEAH! but I can understand how to many people this idea may take a little getting one’s head around. But, if you follow the latest in string theory, which you’d be forgiven for not doing, you might accept that parallel worlds are actually one of the simpler explanations for the way the universe fits together.
So occam’s razor alone might suggest that there is another world out there where I am the one reading these words off the screen, and you are the one who posted them. In which case, I’ll leave it up to you to try and make a salient point out of this. Thanks.
In 1992, following the success of Twin Peaks, David Lynch was the darling of the US TV Networks. So much so that they gave him pretty much free reign to produce a situation comedy, in the hope he might repeat his inexplicable success. On The Air is one of Lynch’s forgotten works, and rightly so, because it was actually pretty awful. Only seven episodes were made, and only three of those were shown in the US before it was pulled (although BBC2 screened all seven over here). It has never made it to DVD, so is very hard to track down, but there is a low quality VHS scan of the first episode on YouTube, if you need to see it.
The one thing I remember about it though, the one good recurring joke, was Blinky. The show was set in a 1950s TV studio, and Blinky was the blind “Special Effects Sound Engineer”. In each episode we’d get to see at least one scene as the viewer sees it, and then again as Blinky sees it.
Voice Over: “Blinky Watts is not blind. He suffers from Bosman’s Simplex, he actually sees 25.62 times as much as we do. If we were to see what Blinky is seeing right now, it would look something like this:”
I am reminded of this by Rudy, my boy, who’s now 2 3/4, and sees the world in a very different way to the way I see it. So when I’ve had a bad day, and I’m obsessing over something very important and very serious, I step back and instead review the day how Rudy saw it.
Today we made a robot out of lego.
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