About Theseus

The Ship of Theseus, aka Trigger’s Broom, isn’t quite the same thing as Baudrillard’s simulacrum, but it occupies a similar space. And it does emit some lovely memeage.

About getting it right/wrong

I’ve just come across an article I wrote for the BBC website in 2009, as part of a retrospective of the decade that was drawing to a close. Pretty uncontroversially, I picked the 9/11 attacks and the collapse of Lehman Brothers as the two events that would be emblematic of the Noughties, but also pointed out that they took place within a few minutes’ walk of each other, and people who live thousands of miles from Manhattan might have a different perspective on what’s important.

And then I took a bit of a punt and wondered if, in years to come, the most important development of that decade might turn out to be the launch of Wikipedia, because of its potential to disrupt the hierarchy and control of knowledge itself:

Along with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, blogs and the other manifestation [sic] of Web 2.0, it meant that the final judgement as to what was significant would never again be left to a self-appointed elite of media professionals.

Yay! One in the eye for the so-called experts, the big media tycoons, the smug commentators in their ivory towers! The only difference is, in 2009 I thought that might turn out to be a good thing...

PS: The book I wrote about the Noughties is still available, packed with observations I got horribly but justifiably wrong.

Wikifibs, Jarvis cakes and the memorial scarecrows of Nagoro

Way back when blogging was still A Thing, I’d actually worry if I hadn’t posted in the past two or three days. Now it can slide to a week or more before I get an itch of guilt. Of course, in those olden days, if I couldn’t think of anything compelling enough to use as raw material I’d just put up a few links to stuff that had recently interested or amused me and then maybe top it off with an equally random YouTube clip and I’d feel a bit better.

Well, I haven’t posted anything for nearly a week and I feel not so much worry as a vague sense that if I don’t make use of this thing once in a while that it will atrophy and die like an inactive limb, or I’ll forget the password, whichever is the worse. So, without indulging in any further self-analysis, I offer up: an excoriating review of a project with which I was involved several lifetimes ago, which generously describes my own modest contribution as “entertainingly prissy”; musing on what it feels like to be the original for a fictional character (and I point once again to my own form in this area); the tale of a Wikipedia fib that took on a life of its own; Jarvis Cocker in cake form; a debate on whether the highbrow/lowbrow divide has any particular meaning any more; which leads in a roundabout way to the fact that the new Murakami novel will hit the shelves—digital or otherwise—in a matter of days; and from there, it seems to be a short hop to the Japanese woman who found a new way to replace absent friends.

Seems almost like old times.

Die Hardly

You know, in our (post)modern, virtual, hyperreal world, it’s terribly difficult to maintain any notion of quality. I mean, what’s more impressive? Pretending to be one celebrity on Twitter in order to invent the death of another, as Tommasso Debenedetti does? (Shades of Luther Blissett there, I reckon.) Pretending to be a deaf paraplegic and then killing him? Hiring gamers to (virtually) kill your own son, in the manner of Mr Feng? Or just inventing a whole damn war, which stood undetected on Wikipedia for half a decade? I suppose the body count from the last was the highest. Is that how you measure it, then; the number of people you haven’t really killed?

Hitler at Hogmanay

I did consider ending the year with a strokey-chinny meditation on Maurizio Cattelan’s praying Hitler sculpture in the Warsaw ghetto and wondering whether it was more or less offensive than the recent von Hausswolff painting and guessing that the Chapman brothers are probably a wee bit pissed off that their own Hitler crazy golf effort suddenly looks a little anodyne; and then trying somehow to link it to the fact that the most popular page on the German version of Wikipedia has been revealed as “cul de sac”. But it didn’t hang together and ultimately it’s my blog, not Hitler’s, and as such it’s all about me, isn’t it? So...

And just to remind the various disembodied bots and Charlotte Rampling fans who show up here trying to sell me Ugg boots, my Infinite Jest blog is still twitching occasionally and several of my books remain available in the usual vicinities. Have a good one, people.

Citation not required

So, where were you when Wikipedia went off on its 24-hour strop? The inevitable one-liners about journalists and students suffering emotional meltdown in the absence of their fountain of facts did raise a few questions. I mean, is it OK to use Wikipedia as a source provided you attribute and cite appropriately? Or has the haranguing pedantry of the Wiki editors forced us into a state of neurotic overcitation?

I’ve succumbed to this foible in the past, desperately ploughing through some arcane text that I haven’t really read so as to give a vaguely credible sheen to my inane ramblings. A little Adorno or McLuhan goes a long way. But Simon Reynolds has a better tactic, acknowledging that something is moderately interesting, but not important enough for a full-blown footnote. As he says in Retromania: “‘Plus/and’, a philosophical term of uncertain origins (I’m told Deleuze and Guattari used it), is the buzz concept.” The vague “I’m told...” is the clever bit. The Wikipedants would insist that he identify the person who told him.

He don’t mean Jack

In the intellectual hothouse that is Twitter, Billy has raised a sound point; who is the most famous person not to have his/her own Wikipedia page? Although of course such a distinction might just prod the individual in question to such a level of notoriety that a page miraculously appears. Upon such paradoxes is the modern world founded.

The revenge of the Belle & Sebastian fans

Ruminating about death and Wikipedia and Swells and the various levels of famousness, at Prospect.

Dead links to dead trees

Some bits and pieces, connected only by their location on the cusp of cyber and meat:

• The Times wins the right to unmask police blogger Nightjack, a move that seems to serve no purpose than allowing old media to remind the blogosphere who’s boss. The whole thing makes me exceedingly angry; fortunately, Chicken Yogurt is clear-headed enough to point out the essential hypocrisy of The Times’s position.

• On similar lines, tight-collared reactionary Simon Heffer in the Telegraph spews extraordinary quantities of nonsense about the rubbishness of Facebook, never once questioning the privilege that accords him a platform.

• Graphic design student Rob Matthews prints off 437 articles from Wikipedia and turns them into a book. “It makes people laugh,” says Matthews, “which is good.”

• Ann Kirschner tackles the format question that’s got publishing in knots, by consuming Dickens as book, audiobook, Kindle and iPhone.

• Everett True offers a quantitative comparison between blogs now and fanzines then.

• The whole Iranian hoo-ha raises a number of questions about politics and technology, not least the question of whether we perceive the result to be unjust because Twitter users are more likely to be Moussavi supporters. However, Harvard academic Jonathan Zittrain makes a wider point about this most misunderstood medium, and why it is so successful at times of civic upheaval: “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

PS: More on the Nightjack case from Paperhouse, Anton Vowl and Girl With A One-Track Mind, who suffered similar indignities at the hands of Rupert’s catamites, and also ties the whole grubby affair up with what's occurring in Tehran.

PPS: And the bloggers, inevitably, strike back.

String theory

Still on the theme of Facebook’s apparently desire to become the Dremel Multi-Max* of Web 2.0. The thing is, most of us are capable of using various bits of the interweb, and joining any relevant dots when it feels appropriate.

For example: yesterday I was listening to David Suchet on Desert Island Discs, while reading Shane Richmond’s Telegraph blog. David was expressing his admiration for Joe Morello’s drum solo on ‘Take Five’; Shane, as I mentioned in a postscript to the previous post, was sticking up for Wikipedia in the face of what seems to be a particularly ill-advised rant from someone who is not, repeat *not* the offspring of a former deputy leader of the Labour Party.

Independent of conscious thought, my fingers reached for Morello’s Wikipedia entry, and discovered the fact (although the appropriateness of that word depends on the precise quantity of salt you choose to pinch when referring to Wikipedia) that he actually started as a violinist, playing his first solo with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of nine.

But the bit that really impressed me was this:

At the of age 15 Morello met the violinist Jascha Heifetz and decided that he would never be able to equal Heifetz's "sound", so switched to drumming.

Which supports my contention that only a real genius understands how good he isn’t.

* Only follow this link if the phrase "oscillating tool" does not make you gurgle with merriment.



PS: I think if I ever find myself running a nightclub, “jazz casual” will be the dress code.

PPS:Even cooler Brubeck footage here.

Virgin on the ridiculous

My premier post on Prospect magazine's First Drafts blog. (Awaits collective CiF-style rumination as to whether it's a *proper* blog or not.) Thanks to James Crabtree for the invite. Probably NSFW, by the way:

Before they soundtracked the fall of Communism with the sappy power ballad Wind of Change, the German rock band Scorpions were probably best known for their album covers, which pushed the boundaries of adolescent “ooh-aren’t-I-outrageous?” tedium even by the remarkable standards of European heavy metal...

For full metal mullets and non-ironic lighters aloft, follow this link.

PS: And for a bit of kiddie-porn hysteria that makes the above look entirely sensible, go here.

Holding out for a zero

Readers of Welcome to the Machine will be aware of my fondness for the taking-an-idea-for-a-walk-just-to-see-where-it-goes school of interpretation, and my impatience with the banausic notion that the easiest way to get a definitive explanation of what a song's about is to drop an e-mail to the songwriter. So I am smitten with admiration - and not a little jealousy - at the following paragraph, on the talk page for OK Computer's Wikipedia entry:

Has anyone in the band spoken about the level of intent of the title reflecting a 0K Computer? I think that the theme of memorylessness is prevalent with them (e.g. titling an album Amnesiac) so it seems like the most sensible interpretation of the name as a computer with no memory. Yet in an interview with Yorke when asked point blank about the title's meaning he doesn't bring that up (though he doesn't actually answer the question at all, just kind of says the title isn't that relevant to the musical content). I'd be very suspicious that it wasn't intended as a play on the OK/0K duality—I just can't find it stated explicitly anywhere on the web.

HostileFork, whoever you may be, I salute you.

The truth is in there

Like Nicholson Baker, I love Wikipedia. I know, I know, it's full of mistakes, but that's probably part of the attraction. Here are five things I've learned recently from that vast, sprawling Borg of fact. Unless they turn out not to be facts. Although, in that case, I've still learned them.

1. The Indian football team withdrew from the 1950 World Cup after FIFA insisted that all players must wear boots.

2. TV chef Clarissa Dickson Wright has the middle names Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda.

3. Among the indigenous people of south-east Queensland, the word 'daughter' refers to women of one's great-grandmother's generation.

4. French rugby league player Puig Aubert was nicknamed Pipette, because of his habit of smoking on the field during matches.

5. Zero is the only number that is both real and imaginary.

This could be a meme, if you're so inclined.

(And if you're not a Wiki-fan, you can always try one of its rivals; perhaps the extraordinary Conservapedia. Here's the entry on atheism. Utterly jawdropping.)

This much is true

I've always been quite envious of the one-time NME hack and now Radio 2 DJ Stuart Maconie (and I can remember a time when such a career trajectory would have seemed beyond the realms of feasibility) who was responsible for creating the urban myth that dapper game show supremo Bob Holness played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street'.

In retrospect, it was a brilliantly crafted porky, not least because Holness has several genuine claims to fame, what with him being the first radio James Bond and the father of one of proto-Girl-Power combo Toto Coelo and all; with a CV like that, one more wacky attribute could easily slip through unnoticed. But I can't believe that the story was crafted as a result of such cold-eyed reasoning; it was just the random collision of two cultural phenomena, creating a stopover on the spectrum that links 'surreal' with 'idiotic'. And it happened to work. Actually, I was more impressed by his story that Roxette had to change their name in the Philippines, because it means 'constipation' in Tagalog, but that one didn't have the same sort of sticking power.

You see, in the world of creative fibbery, you just can't tell what's going to last. Which is why my attempt to secure a similar level of vicarious fame has to be a tad more far-reaching. Which is where you come in, people. I'd like as many of you as possible to go to Wikipedia. Select the entry for a random individual, and insert the following piece of text in an appropriate slot:

"He/she was also one of the alien voices in the Cadbury's Smash advertisements in the 1970s."

I suppose it would make sense to restrict yourself to people who were alive at the time, but that's not compulsory. If you like, you can come back and tell me who you've done, but again, you may wish to maintain an air of mystery about the whole thing (which will also make it harder for the Wikipolice to track things down). Please feel free to get your friends, virtual or otherwise, into the project; the more attempts we make, the more likely one is to slip through the Jungian bullshit detector and become a fragment of reality, or the nearest we get to it these days.