I am grateful to James Blue Cat for alerting us to the existence of Irkafirka, which every day aims to pluck one likely phrase from “the massive data deluge that Twitter has become”, and turn it into a deliciously peculiar work of art, along the lines of the one above. Well, I say I’m grateful to James, but to be honest he was hardly going to keep quiet about it, since his was one of the tweets that got plucked.
Aside from the batty greatness of the pictures, there’s a smart marketing idea here; the person whose phrase is selected will inevitably want to shout about it in all available media. It doesn’t feel like bragging, because Nick Hilditch, the pencil-wielding one within the Irkafirka team, is the one doing the real work; it’s like showing off a picture that one’s child has done of “mi mumy”, except that it’s not rubbish.
Moreover, prints of the images are available to buy, and I’m sure that many of the original tweeters will be first in the queue to purchase several. Another comparison; it’s like when you’re on holiday, coming off a boat trip or elephant ride and being presented with a photograph of you enjoying yourself; except that in this instance, the photographer has managed to capture an image from within the deepest recesses of your mind.
With the tributes to Alan Plater still echoing, news comes in that another jazz-loving adopted son of Hull is to be commemorated, with a city-wide shindig called Larkin25. Events include Larkin With Toads, a public art event that is intended to “brighten up working days and holidays alike for Hull visitors and residents alike”; a novel response to a poem that sees employment in a rather less flattering light:
Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison – Just for paying a few bills! That’s out of proportion.
Maybe they should also stage a Larkinesque celebration of parenthood.
The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings.
And for another combination of clanky music and gnomic utterances, from a man who did actually look rather gnome-like, you could do worse than take this for a spin:
A lasting memory from my days at university – one of the few actually connected with my studies – was a tutorial about William Blake which gradually turned into a discussion of the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner. Our tutor, a man who died far too soon, elucidated Blake’s notions of Innocence and Experience in terms of Christopher Robin’s attempt to explain his own Going Away to his friend Pooh:
“I’m not going to do nothing anymore.” “Never again?” “Well, not so much. They don’t let you.”
Which had quite a resonance for a bunch of fresh-faced 18-year-olds, many grappling for the first time with overdrafts and washing machines, but not quite yet in the real world. At least we were still allowed to do nothing. We were studying English after all.
Many miles and years from the 100 Aker Wood, I happen upon a piece about the bloody iPad. The schtick is that the author, Peter Bregman, wants to give his back because “any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment.” And that’s the problem:
But something – more than just sleep, though that’s critical too – is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose. Boredom. Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.
The funny thing is, Bregman isn’t some eternal student, a balding soixante-huitard who still deploys Christopher Robin and Blake and Alice and Syd Barrett and The Wind In The Willows and The Magic Roundabout in an effort to destabilise the military-industrial complex and justify the fact that he never irons his trousers. He’s writing for the Harvard Business Review, for crying out loud. This is work he’s talking about. So the next time your boss catches you staring into the middle distance when you’re meant to be doing something even less interesting, just tell her that you’re brainstorming with yourself, and she can run that one up the flagpole and see who plays Poohsticks with it.
The news that the North Korean barmy army is in fact made up of Chinese actors, and that the Chinese are entirely open about the fact, shouldn’t really surprise us, especially after the gloriously brazen stage management of the Beijing Olympics. But it does raise the question of what purpose the fans – the ones who actually show up to the World Cup stadiums – actually serve.
Clearly, at this exalted level at least, the revenue from ticket sales is pretty much negligible when compared with TV and sponsorship money. Look at the case of the 36 orange-clad lovelies who were ejected from the Netherlands-Denmark match; the objection was that they appeared to be indulging in a spot of ambush marketing on behalf of a beer brand that wasn’t one of FIFA’s approved ‘partners’. The fact that they got in thanks to Robbie Earle’s ticket allocation seems to have been little more than a minor irritation to the tournament’s organisers, and it was down to his employers at ITV to discipline him. Surely we can infer from this that FIFA is more concerned about upsetting Budweiser than any legitimate Dutch or Danish fans who couldn’t get in?
And yet, at one level, FIFA needs fans at the grounds. They provide the atmosphere, the noise, the excitement that enhances what has, for the most part, been a pretty uninspiring tournament so far. And the TV viewers tend to agree; they refuse to dampen those vuvuzelas with the mute button, not because they’ll miss the inanities of the commentators (see here for a particularly savage indictment of the sheer crapness of TV pundits) but because they feel there’s something weirdly sterile about watching millionaires playing badly in silence.
This doesn’t just apply to sporting events, of course. With a few exceptions, most comedy and game shows on TV and radio are still recorded in front of a live audience; supposedly, it makes the armchair viewer feel more involved in what’s going in the studio. And yet, anybody who’s been in the studio while one of these programmes is made knows that the experience can be deeply frustrating and tedious, with constant glitches, hold-ups and retakes. The most enjoyable bit is often the warm-up person who’s sent out to distract the punters from thoughts of mutiny during these pauses; and the TV audience doesn’t know he even exists. Moreover, if the show being made isn’t particularly established or popular, it’s quite feasible that a large chunk of the audience has no idea what it’s about or who’s involved until they’ve taken their seats. Several American sitcoms used to be prefaced with the boast that they were “recorded in front of a live audience” because that reassured TV viewers that they weren’t listening to canned laughter. But the live audience is prompted and chivvied and prodded to give the desired response; and if they don’t come up with the goods, the producer can always tweak the recording afterwards, to make them sound more enthusiastic than they really were.
Which takes us back to those TV viewers, who almost feel as if they’re there because of the ooh-ing and aah-ing and paaaaaaaaaaarp-ing coming from the flatscreen. But if they know that a good proportion of the noise comes, not from diehard supporters of the teams involved, but from actors hired by the Chinese authorities, or models hired by a Dutch brewery, or friends of friends of a bloke who used to play for Port Vale, will they still want to play along?
