Occasionally, one has lunch in the gardens of Gray’s Inn, sitting on a bench, resting your styrofoam-held tempeh curry precariously on one knee, and you listen to EG discuss how, once upon a time, this area was full of barristers and solicitors–all those hopes and frustrations discussed and written and argued within chambers around the square–and the trees stand watch along the lane, other people having other lunches beneath, leaves flashing gold and tumbling in their own occasional space and time the way, sometimes, EG says that she imagines me walking along the streets of London, duffel coat tucked tight, scarf snaking loose along one shoulder, occasionally pulling a hand from my pocket to let the emotions tumble free like leaves along the pavement, waiting.
As mentioned, the London Korean Film Festival occurred recently and among the many wonderful films on display I only managed to see the one, Gyeongju, but, happily, within this one wonder there were many wonders as so often does happens with wonders. One day I may retire the word wonder, but not today.
via: londontree
In Gyeongju, the film (dir: Zhang Lu, a Korean professor living in Beijing (a man played by Park Hae-il returns to Korea, and in particular, the city of Gyeongju after the death of a friend. He is a man bereft. We don’t need to know why. All we need to know is there in the scene when he lands in Gyeongju and removes a cigarette from his pocket but doesn’t smoke it; he holds it under his nose, inhaling what he’s no longer allowed. His wife, it seems, can’t stand the smell.
The city of Gyeongju contains a great many temples, grotto’s, folk villages, and very large hills in which are buried the bodies of a great many former great people that lived and ruled during the Silla dynasty. It’s a small, quiet place, somewhat overburdened by death and time, and such is the film set here. The professor seeks a cafe and a portrait that once hung there, a portrait that depicted something indecent. He finds the cafe. The owner (a woman played by Shin Min-a) tells him she wallpapered over the portrait. She serves him his tea. They spend the day together, from morning to sunrise the next day, having tea, riding bicycles, eating, singing, visiting the hills that keep warm the dead, and listening to messages left on their phones that will crack open your chest and rip out your heart.
Many reviewers say it reminds them of the Before series, and I see what they mean. Gyeongju like those films, concerns itself with conversation and the magic shared between two people trying to understand one another. Perhaps, more than in Before, though, Gyeongju possesses a greater sense of time and sadness, of ghosts pressing up through the earth and mind, altering the contours of things. It’s a quiet film that made me chuckle, smile, laugh, and hope.
via: hancinema
There’s a thing in films I love more than anything, and that’s when a director allows the camera to rest on a scene, allows us to fall inside the moment. No cuts. No extra music. Just people living. Zhang Lu delivers so many moments like this, of such cutting perfection, such careful observance. There’s a scene inside this film, inside of a noraebang, that is a thing of such beauty, longing, and awkwardness, oh, it’s so good. The movie deserves a bit of your time, if nothing else, for that scene.
And that’s not mentioning the thing with the ear touching. Oh! The ear touching.
Happy Wednesday, readers. I’m sure there’s a joke to be made about humps and burial mounds, but I will refrain from such.
On Saturday, ORGCon2014 happened at Kings College in Southbank. It’s an event organized by the Open Rights Group, a UK-based group tasked with campaigning for the rights of individuals on “…issues ranging from mass surveillance, to copyright, censorship, data protection and open data and privacy.” Among other things, it’s patroned by Neil Gaiman.
There’s a lot that could be said, and may be said in the coming weeks, as EG and I absorbed all that to which we listened and which inspired. Right now, what seems most prudent is to be conscious of our digital consumption and our idenity, to, if nothing else, take stock of two basic things.
1) All the data we create, who’s collecting it, and the where’s and what for’s.
2) How much of the stuff we buy is, for lack of a better term, ‘closed’ data? How much art we buy comes equipped with DRM? How much do we spend on Netflix and other such big-data companies that happily share with us content, but work very hard to control the ways in which we are allowed to consume that content?
To address (1), we decided to make a list of the all the ways in which our data may be collected (either in the background or by active choice)–e.g., our internet service provider, the apps we use, the websites we frequently visit, and then figure out what data’s being collected, how it’s being used, and to what degree we would prefer our data not to be collected, or used.
To address (2), Doctorow suggested taking stock of everything you give to the big companies that work so hard to track you, or lock down things you buy with DRM, and give some percentage of that, each year, to organizations like the EFF or ORG, who are working to make sure that, over time, everything we are isn’t tracked, owned, and sold. Or. Heck. Just give money to the artists directly. In the end, that’s the business model we want. The one that puts a large amount of value in the baskets of the people who create the things we value.
Doctorow said something very smart at the end of his talk.
There are a lot of issues more important than a free and fair internet. Refugee rights. Police shootings. Black sites. Torture.
All of those fights, though, he said, will happen on the internet.
Happy Tuesday, readers. Keep your eyes peeled for those data brokers. They certainly have their eye on you.
ttfn.
Doctorow’s three laws being, as follows:
(1) Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won’t give you the key, then the lock isn’t there for your benefit.
(2) Fame won’t make you rich, but you’ll have a hard time making money if no one’s heard of you.
(3) Information doesn’t want to be free. People do. ↩
This could have happened on a Monday. Or it might have been Thursday. Might be it doesn’t matter when it happened, so much as that it did.
What happened was that I came out of my room afraid that my parents were fighting again. They fought a lot. And at volume. As a lot of parents do, each in their own way, with shattered glass or damning declaratives or blusterous sighs. During one argument, I remember being so angry and scared that I threw my toy rabbit at the floor. The toy rabbit wore rollerskates. One of the wheels broke. I was crushed.
But they weren’t fighting that day. They were sitting on the couch, looking at pictures and laughing. I asked if everything was okay. They smiled. Actual grins. And said yeah. I don’t remember what pictures they were looking at. Or what they were laughing about. I must’ve been about eleven. Unless I was six. Somewhere in there, I guess, between those ages when it seemed that if my parents raised their voices it almost always meant something wasn’t okay.
But on that day, and on probably more days than I remember or ever knew, my parents were just two people sitting together and sharing something of the joy of being close to someone.
It’s cold and gray out there today, readers. Stay warm.
Happy Monday.
ttfn.
p.s. Stay tuned for how orgcon2014 changed my life.
p.p.s. I realize people say things changed their life all the time and that the phrase has lost some of its meaning. This is okay by me. Everything changes your life, so I pretty much feel like the phrase means everything it always meant which is that I noticed one part of the everything that changes my life.
Last night, I attended a screening of Gyeongju, shown as part of the The London Korean Film Festival. A full review of that will appear shortly, including descriptions of the crowd what included sparkling converses and spider-haired men that smelled of beer and damp sheets.
The other day, in this post, I described a moment from my life. I enjoyed it. I will most likely do it more, and I will tag each such entry with the tag, ‘moments’. Many of the moments will probably be moments that involved me. Some of them may not. Some of them I might make up. All of them will be real, though, and will have happened to me. Especially the ones I make up.
Happy moments, readers.
ttfn.
p.s. As you go to sleep tonight, try to remember one moment. Could be from today, or yesterday, or from a film, or a story someone told you once. Hold the moment in mind, let it sit on the tip of your tongue. See if it speaks to you in your dreams.
p.p.s. That came out sounding much more romantic and, um, dreamy that I originally intended. Ah, well. These things happen.
At the moment, EG’s up front, getting ready, and I’m taking this moment to draft a blog. I’m sitting on a small, black chair, in a room of small, black chairs, on which sit other people chatting and tapping and munching on popcorn and drinking elderflower cordials, all of us gathered in East London, in a warehouse-cum-office building, awaiting the start of the latest in an ongoing series of events called 300seconds (here’s some video from an event at Facebook‘s UK office) dedicated to putting a diverse set of smart people in front of other smart people and letting the magic happen. Or, in their own words:
300 Seconds is a series of talks by and for the digital community. We believe that digital is better when we can learn from the brilliance of the many, not just the few. With our events we hope to give our peers, and in particular women, a means of gaining confidence and experience in speaking in public.
It is now tomorrow. The event finished. Many interesting people spoke about disrupting art, managing mental illness, Ugandan tech culture, responsible responsive web development, and so forth. On a whiteboard, on the left-hand wall, were written the wi-fi network, password, and a hashtag for the event. Tweeting was encouraged. And people did that. And that was cool. A part of me, at one time, might have avoided live-tweeting out of a misguided notion that it would prevent me from paying attention–which turns out to be the opposite of true! Live-tweeting perhaps forces, nay! encourages, people to listen harder, for those cool quotes and key ideas.
One might consider turning off the Tweetbot bleeps and bloops, though.
The lightning talk style, while perhaps leading some to not quite finish, means there’s never a chance for boredom to set in, nor a chance for speakers to become unduly nervous. After all, you’re only up there for 5 minutes. Considering their mission, in large part, is to cultivate a new and diverse group of speakers who might otherwise not take that first step towards public speaking, it works and works splendidly.
Also. EG talk good. She make people laugh. And go oooh and ahhhh. She wrote about the experience here.
One late night, while walking through a field near Oxford, Mississippi, a friend turned to me and asked, between the shush-shush of our steps through the tall grass, “Do you ever feel like when you look up at the stars you see more than other people?”
We were walking to a pond near a farmer’s house. We were meant to go skinny dipping. A late-night walk, a late-night swim, a return home, a goodnight, a goodbye. One of our friends was leaving the next day for distant mountains and very well known dangers.
I looked up. I saw more stars than I had ever seen. It was so dark and so clear that you could see the dust between the stars. Galaxies caught in the winds of dark matter.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean because we grew up with Star Trek and Babylon 5 and Star Wars, because we read Foundation and Dune, because we care about the multiverse and so when we look up we see aliens and star destroyers and sliders surfing the dimensions. We see stories.”
I knew what he meant. And I said so.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “Stories in the dust.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Now, thinking about it, I suppose I could have said that people have been dreaming into the dust since forever. I could have mentioned Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune, or Dante’s various planetary paradises, or those Hindu epics of flying machines that flew equally well underwater or in outer space. But, that wasn’t what he meant. And I knew what he meant then and now. He meant that we possessed a shared inheritance and responsibility of wonder that had been passed down from forever and, for us, that wonder happened to be populated with Skywalkers and Baron Harkonnens, as opposed to angels and demons, and it would be our job as writers to keep populating the dust with stories of what was and what still might be.
Happy Wednesday, readers.
ttfn.
p.s. Later this month, EG and I will be seeing 2001. It will be her first time. Hopefully, we’ll catch Interstellar, as well. One must never stop re-wondering the imagination.
another, possibly the first, in a neverending discussion of the differences between the U.S. and UK.
Hello, readers.
Sometimes differences between the U.S. and the UK are obvious, but not immediately noticed. Such as the way British people wear jumpers and U.S. people wear sweaters. You would probably not notice this unless you entered into a conversation with a British person while both wearing a ‘knitted garment intended to cover the torso and arms’ and complimented them on their sweater only to hear them say, “This old jumper? It’s good, innit? Nicked it on sale from Somewheretherebe’s.” 1
Sometimes the differences between the U.S. and the UK are not at all exactly obvious, but immediately noticed. Such as the manner in which British doors very often lack doorknobs.
And sometimes the differences betwen the U.S. and the UK seem to conform to such widely held stereotypes that you doubt if what you’re seeing is really happening or if someone has put on a stage play for your benefit.
EG and I attended a recent Q&A between Richard Ayoade and a film critic, in which were discussed, among other things: Ayoade’s career as a writer, actor, and director, as well as a Truffaut film–to be screened after the Q&A–called La Nuite américaine, or, as they say in the U.S., Day for Night. It was a great Q&A. Ayoade being brilliant and funny and not at all ruffled by his being interviewed by a film critic that at times appeared like a caricature of Britishness you might expect to find on the cover of The New Yorker (the closest thing the U.S. has to a British paper, really). The critic ridiculed, fairly straight off, the U.S. title of the film, saying, really, we’ve lost all the romance there, haven’t we? (which, yes, to be fair, but The American Night plastered on a marquee would just as well lead people in the U.S. to believe they were about to see a period film concerning Paul Revere). He also discussed, at length, in the run-up to one question, the particularness of the male psyche, and it’s desire to be loved, and how very unique it is to a boy, this need to be loved. He also very often asked questions to which it seemed fairly clear he already knew the answer, or, at least, the answer he expected or believed correct. Ayoade did not particular engage with the questions along the lines of the special magic of being a young boy, as opposed to being a girl, and, in one of the more memorable exchanges, when the film critic posited a question surrounding whether or not as a director Ayoade’s job was to answer questions, sometimes without knowing the answer, such as to what lens to use for a particular scene, but to still appear to know what what he was doing whether or not, in fact, he did, Ayoade responded, simply and effectively, thusly:
“That’s one approach, yes. You might also say, I’m not sure, and what do you think. Rather than, well, lying.”
So there you have it. British people are snobs. Also, British people are funny and not snobs.
There is a danger, of course, in experiencing a single event outside of your culture and attributing the nature of said experience to the entirety of that culture. For example, once, in England, I walked into someone and that person apologized to me. Would it be right for me to assume from this one experience that English people deploy apologies the way certain other cultures deploy ‘fuck off’? Probably not. But, I do it anyway. I am from the U.S., after all, and we excel at nothing if not the ability to hold fast to our beliefs whatever gusts of fact the heavens might send.
Happy Tuesday, readers.
ttfn.
You should hear my British accent sometime. It’s even worse. ↩
On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, of the one-thousand nine hundred and eighteenth year, the first world war1 ended.
Library and Archives Canada
This would be why, in the U.S., Veterans day falls on the 11th of November. Armistice Day it used to be called, before it became Veteran’s Day, a day for veterans of all the wars, world and otherwise.
A great many of you probably know this. As do I. Sometimes. Other times I forget.
Something I did not know, and have never forgotten, is that in the UK there is a thing called Remembrance Sunday. This falls on the second Sunday of November, the Sunday nearest the 11th of November. On every such day, royalty, politicians, and soldiers gather at war memorials in cities, villages, and whatnots, to lay wreaths of poppies and blow the Last Post for the not-to-be forgotten dead. At 11 a.m., two minutes of silence are tolled by church bells, often muffled. And everyone is silent. At the memorials. Across the entire country. In homes. In shops. In restaurants.
This past Sunday, EG and I met friends for breakfast at Smith’s, a multi-floored restaurant/diner/night club/etc, which sits across the street from the old Smithfield Market where one could, at one time, bring one’s pig for to be slaughtered and sold and eventually eaten. During breakfast, I was quite taken with an old-style train schedule board. The kind with flipping numbers and letters. It was blank for most of breakfast. And then, it flipped. It read.
Remembrance Sunday
11 a.m.
Our conversation changed.
“Is that today?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t understand.
“Is it going to happen here,” I asked.
They said yes.
“Is it going to happen everywhere?”
They said yes.
“That’s crazy.”
They didn’t say yes. They said, “It’s going to be an experience.”
The TV flipped on to the ceremony taking place. The queen, old, burdened with layer upon layer of mourning black, standing, waiting, to do the thing with the wreath.
I said it felt like church.
“Exactly like church.”
Tradition. Ceremony. The stuff that, as a kid, could give me goosebumps and tears, and later, feelings of clausterphobia combined with goosebumps and tears, my ritual and pomp loving soul responding to the magnificent sorrow and awe, my angry, teenage soul, feeling angry at all these old people playing dress up like they believe in heaven and hell when, by their actions, it’s clear they keep using that word but maybe that word doesn’t mean what they think it means.
The bells rang. On TV. In the city around us. Servers gathered by the bar. Some people still ate. Chefs still cooked. No one said anything.
Teenage feelings overwhelmed me. Of being trapped in a culture and a ritual. I thought, if no one built monuments to war, would war stop? No. Probably not. But I was angry about it anyway. And sad. I wanted to shout into the silence, but I didn’t.
What if, instead of a war memorial with the names of soldiers who died, we had one with the names of all the civilians who died? Of all the refugees?
I thought angry thoughts. I thought. No.
No to politicians laying wreaths. No to kings and queens laying wreaths. No. No. No. No. No.
I thought it’s beautiful, but.
The silence ended. People spoke, but hushed. Servers moved. The queen and her husband placed their wreaths of poppies. Others came forward. And then, in the midst of the laying of wreaths, the restaurant’s speakers kicked on, perhaps to a song queued for this moment, something appropriate to the sombre mood of memory. Something to fit with tradition.
Into the hush, in the aftermath of bells, a synth beat bopped its way into the ridiculous and gorgeous opening electronic keyboard riff from a-ha’s Take On Me.
The entire song played over the rest of the ceremony.
I’ve never been so happy to hear 80s synthesizers.
Whoever queued that up in the restaurant should be applauded.
We don’t have things like this in the U.S.
Yes. We have holidays. We have the 4th of July. We have Christmas. We have Thanksgiving. We have, in fact, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But. Really. Is there any regularly scheduled ritual which so grips the nation of the United States that inside every restaurant, year upon year upon forever, at a particular time, all would go silent.
As someone said, this is why they love England. It wouldn’t happen in the U.S. You couldn’t be so serious and so absurd. Which is true. As a country, I’m not sure the U.S. knows how to take things seriously. Individually, perhaps. As a whole. Not so sure. We pledge allegiance. We sing the national anthem. But we have trouble in believing in anything for very long. There’s something to be said for believing absolutely, and also having a-ha queued.
Those are my rambles, today, readers.
Remembering things is confusing.
Love.
and.
ttfn.
Question. Why is it only in the 20th century that we have had world wars? I mean, why do we call them world wars? Were there no wars before those wars in which a great many countries fought? Is it because newspapers and news were such that these were the first wars that everyone felt truly connected to?↩
As the first week of November blusters1 to a close, it seems a good moment to stop and look around, to take a moment and take it all in, before the year itself blusters towards its end2, and share some small part of the all and everything with you.
One part of the all and everything, of course, is this novel, this thing I’m writing, in which feature robots, romance, and revolution, and which, during this NaNoWriMo, I’ve decided to entirely redraft all 120,000 words, or so, which works out to, oh, I don’t know, about 4,5000 words a day, which is ridiculous, but, then again, so is the length of this current sentence and that seems to be carrying on just fine without too terribly much concern about whether or not the thing being done qualifies as ridiculous or silly or what have you.
YouTube. It’s blowing up. Not literally. But literally. Like, oh my god, it’s literally blowing up, in the way the Brits use the expression, which is to mean the opposite of what the word means3. I’ve done a few videos. It’s fun. Other people are doing videos and having fun and also thousands and millions of people are watching. Here are a few of my favorites.
Podcasts. Literally changing the world. Radio is so totally back and not even on the radio anymore. It’s transcended and returned to form. Here are my favorites, organized based on content.
Which I’ve only listened to a few, but figured I better put it on here because I know if it’s awesome and should be listening more and I will. I promise.
There should always be at least two things under a bigger thing. That’s done then.
Where were we?
Books are still awesome. I’m reading Bleak House and Virtual Light just now. Before that, and my favorites this year being, among other things:
anna karenina
tale of two cities
the picture of dorian gray
doctor who: the writer’s tale (the final chapter)
tigerman
daytrippers
strangers in paradise
the girl with all the gifts
I will not link to the books. They’re books. You’ll have to go to your library, or 3D book printer or something.
That is literally 27 links (not counting the one down there in the footnotes).
Happy near year’s end, readers.
ttfn.
Yes. I am quite fond currently of the world bluster. It is what it is.↩
More power to them! Irregardless, for example, a great example of people ignoring what words mean and doing what they want with them. Look at how that turned out.↩
the magnelephant review 