A couple of other things have happened against that backdrop. They’re not as serious by comparison, but I think there’s a common thread linking these stories that’s worth pointing out. Everyone else in the country has been blogging like mad about these other things[1], but here’s a brief catchup for those of you that haven’t been around or paying attention.
Last month IRMA (the Irish Recorded Music Association, our version of the US’s RIAA) reached a settlement with Eircom (Ireland’s largest internet service provider) in which Eircom agreed that they would not oppose any court orders filed by IRMA requesting that they block all access to certain websites. IRMA said that they would start with the Pirate Bay and proceed to other sites that they disagree with, and sent letters to all Irish ISPs asking them to follow suit. In effect, Eircom has agreed to censor any website on the internet that IRMA tells it to censor. An online protest group was quickly established and no sites have been blocked so far.
The next one reads like more of a joke. On March 7th an anonymous Irish artist walks into two different Dublin art galleries and hangs his own work on the wall alongside the portraits of Yeats and Bono. The paintings are cartoonish nudes of Brian Cowen, Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Everyone laughs, except perhaps Brian himself, who one hopes is busy fixing the country. On Monday of this week RTÉ, the state-owned broadcaster, runs a short story on the paintings on the main evening news. The following night, having been contacted by a government press officer, the state broadcaster issues an on-air apology for the story and removes it from their website[2]. Meanwhile Today FM, an independent commercial radio station broadcast that they have received emails from the guerilla artist and know his identity. The day after that the police show up at the radio station’s office asking for access to the emails, explaining that “the powers that be want action taken” in response to this piece of political satire. Today FM refuse and are told that a search warrant may be served for access to the emails and that the artist is being investigated on suspicion of committing acts of public indecency, incitement to hatred and criminal damage (for hammering a nail into the gallery wall). The artist turns himself in to the police. Crickets, tumbleweed.
So what the hell is going on here? Well, most likely some unsavoury backroom dealings that we’d rather not think about right now, and a serious lack of understanding of how to deal with new types of problems. On a broader level all of these stories simply reflect changes in our society, but different types of change in each case.
The first paragraph of this post is about the relationship between long-established institutions and the government, both of which are being forced to react to something; they are adapting slowly to unexpected environmental change, and are struggling to steer their extremely large and cumbersome boats. The driving force behind this environmental change, the economy, is a nebulous and somewhat unpredictable beast that changes a bit more readily. In the Eircom and nude painting stories, there’s a similar change going on, but at at a faster pace. A more open culture is forcing change upon the infrastructure of society (media distribution, art galleries, radio stations) by undermining how it previously worked. The agents of change here are large or autonomous groups of people who are starting to operate outside of the normal boundaries that had previously been established for how we access information or think about the presentation of art.
Both of these things — the economy and culture — are a bit like the weather, with many different indefinite signals going into a system, and a tangible result coming out. Sometimes we’re prepared for the changes that this system can throw at us, and our buildings can withstand a storm, and sometimes things get washed away in a flood.
One of my favourite books ever is Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. In it he presents a diagram representing the “shearing layers” of structural change within a building. These layers range from the “stuff” on the inside that can change easily and quickly through to the core “structure” of a building, which resists change and adapts slowly. So a building is really made of a number of different sets of components sliding over each other, changing at different speeds.
I don’t know about a direct mapping of layers, but it seems to me that this diagram could also apply to changes in society.
In the center we have the fast-moving layer of culture, the stuff that changes as fashions come and go. Here anything new like an industry-toppling website or a piece political satire can pop up out of nowhere.
Outside that is the space plan, or how we rearrange this stuff around us individually to be a fun or comfortable part of our lives, such as new ways of easily consuming content or poking fun at politicians.
Another layer out is the infrastructural services like centrally controlled telecommunications networks or curated white cube galleries, which can’t always keep up to contain the fast-moving progression of culture within them. Resistance to change starts to creep in, and hacks are required to make our latest stuff work. Services that fail to keep up will become obsolete before too long.
Structure is a combination of cultural norms — what is acceptable and what isn’t — and the laws that reflect and encourage those norms to be abided by. This is the most resistant layer to change, because it requires a long-term shift in thinking and sometimes a tearing down of old parts of our composition that previously served us well, like laws against stealing property or an unquestioning reverence for our leaders.
The last layer, skin, is more easily changed though. It’s like government, defining our appearance and how we are represented, but it’s really just a public face for what we would currently like to project ourselves as. It is easily changed once we tire of how it makes us look.
The outer layer — site — is the only truly immutable, eternal one. That’s Ireland.
Satire, an essential part of a functioning democracy, has traditionally had a hard time on Irish television and radio: Scrap Saturday was cancelled by RTÉ at the height of its popularity (Dermot Morgan blamed political pressure, and went on to create Father Ted in the UK with Channel 4), and last week the writer of the RTÉ sketch show Nob Nation was told to “go easy” on the Taoiseach. Go figure.
I love Instapaper, except for one small thing. I recently built up a hefty backlog of unread articles, and the prospect of reading them all on a laptop or iPhone screen seemed like more of a chore than a pleasure.
Something had obviously gone wrong. I had personally curated a series of articles, blog posts and essays that I was genuinely interested in, but somehow the resulting collection felt like a to-do list, yet another inbox on my computer waiting to be un-bolded. What I really wanted was a nicer user interface to these articles.
So I copy-and-pasted the text of my unread articles from Instapaper into a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu.com, and ordered a single book. Naturally I thought about scripting all of this but Instapaper doesn’t provide an API to retrieve articles, and I didn’t really want to bother with authentication headers and screen scraping and all of that hackery. I just wanted the book.
I know books are supposed to be old media, but there’s something that feels futuristic about holding this one. It’s imperfect, disposable, personal. I can scribble on it and dog-ear it, and read it lying down. It cost around $10 and arrived in less than a week.
We moved house a while back, and I’ve been gradually getting rid of rubbish that I don’t use any more. It’s almost worth moving house just to force yourself to do this. I decided to try whittling the number of CDs in my collection down to my current age. As completely arbitrary targets go, it seemed as good as any, and yet sneakily still allows for some wiggle room in future.
I got down to 33.
Technology brought me to this place. I’ve honestly never seen the point of hard drive raiders who copy someone else’s entire MP3 collection onto their own computer. I don’t say that in a music snob way, because I take pride in not being a music snob, but because where do these people get the time to listen to all that music? My home computer’s iTunes has got 21GB of music on it which I know isn’t much by some standards but take it from me, that’s an awful lot of music. Songs sometimes even come on that sound familiar but that I still can’t name. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive collection of all the music I know and love, carved down to 12.2 glorious days of continuous playback. Not even close.[1] I’ve loved and lost many times over the years, first to archived records, then unraveled cassettes, then scratched CDs and finally forgotten MiniDiscs, most of which were never replaced. So I don’t even “own” a lot of my favourite music. But that’s the nub of the thing; I would never be able to compile a definitive collection of all of my favourite music ever even if I tried, so as a work of curation any CD collection I tried to assemble would be a failure anyway.
Those CDs that are there have been neglected and slowly forgotten. Anything new that I buy is ripped once and filed away, never to be taken from the shelf again. Sitting there, mocking my foolishness. My CDs have joined the ranks of of all those promising formats that came before them, those others that I also once placed such faith in but have since shuffled off sadly and slowly to obscurity. There’s no denying it, and why should I want to? What a waste of emotional investment doing that again would be. The truth is, I have suffered the very minor misfortune of amassing my modest collection during the brief reign of the least romantic music format that ever was. I know, what a cross to bear. But to hell with CDs. They are crude, plastic, lifeless things, and even the most considered attempts at packaging them in delicate handmade gatefold cardboard sleeves can’t disguise the fact that the compact disc itself is an ugly, finicky object of no beauty or romance.
At one stage I thought I owned all of those albums. Although I primarily enjoyed the music that they allowed me to hear, I admit that I also took a strange pleasure in amassing a collection of these shiny objects that each represented something personal to me. I was equal parts music appreciator, packrat, and showoff. But what a crass, commercial way of expressing a love of music.[2] I still feel like I own those albums today, or at least the ones I eventually grew to love. The difference now is that I’ll continue to own them even after I’ve dropped the CDs off at the charity shop, never to be seen by me again.
They’re all there, laser burned into the quieter folds of my brain, in high-fidelity DRM-free gapless playback, unlimited storage of free and legal music, better than they sound over any overpriced headphones or speakers. Yes, it’s true: music is not actually a physical object! I know, right? Yet somehow I own it all completely, the way nobody else in the world does, bootleg versions that nobody else will ever hear, because when I try to play back a song in my head, the things I love, hate and remember about it — my unique interpretations and associative experiences — are louder and clearer than they are in any other format. My perspective is singular, my appreciation internal. That’s the essence of owning music, surely. In any definition of love, narrow and deep beats broad and shallow.
(While getting rid of other stuff before the move — not CDs, just other junk — I used a “have I used this in the last six months?” metric to force myself to justify keeping something. Here’s a corollary for music evaluation: look at the track listing on the back of a randomly selected CD (or playlist), and think about track four. Can you hear it?)
I must now admit that I ripped a lot of those CDs before getting rid of them, so it’s a bit disingenuous of me to slag off people who hoard MP3s. I suppose throwing out CDs or collecting MP3s isn’t really the point at all. The thing is, music can only be experienced temporally and serially — you have to put in time to actually listen to it! There’s no way around it. It’s like the idea about memory, that when you learn something new an old fact gets pushed out of your brain. Not true of memory at all of course, but completely true of music listening habits; if I start listening to Talking Heads a lot, I have no choice but to stop listening to so much of The Books. There’s only so much time I can spend actively listening to a single artist regularly. If I really want to know and own more than a tiny amount of music, I have no choice but to throw it all away, fall happily into memory, let new stuff wash over me and then stick or float away, and use all that new shelf space for something useful or pretty.
Likewise (and no doubt prompted by my gawping Sontag/Morris fanboyism), I’ve wondered about the value of taking photographs all the time, instead of simply savouring the moment and enjoying the memory, perhaps imperfect but still unfettered. Maybe anything else is a fleeting attempt at bottling lightning. In a cheap plastic bottle that someone is going to try to sell you again in a few years time anyway.
Have you heard of Dunbar’s Number? It’s the biggest number of social contacts (friends, if you don’t spend enough time on the internet) that some sociologist guy decided you can realistically maintain a meaningful relationship with. More than that and your attention becomes overloaded and diluted, and it becomes all too much to keep up with. Look it up on Wikipedia. Mr. Dunbar reckons that number is 150.
Anyway, I am herefore officially coining and defining Connolly’s Number, the largest number of songs that you can realistically maintain a meaningful relationship with: 1,000.
BTW, I’m not knocking commercialism in music; pay money for the music you love.
I know I shouldn’t judge a film based on its trailer. I know this, and in fact, I usually make a point of avoiding trailers (and reviews) of films that I think I might end up liking. More often than not they spoil the actual film by revealing too much in advance, or worse, by subtly altering your expectations through selective editing. When you’re watching a trailer you’re being manipulated, at some level, by the part of the filmmaking process that wants you to part with your money above all else.
Now that we’ve established in advance that I’m wrong, the way is clear to say that there’s something that makes me ever so slightly unsettled about the trailer for Objectified, an upcoming documentary film about industrial design.
Quite simply, the blatant conspicuous consumption on display doesn’t seem to fit with the times. Unfortunately for Objectified, it may be coming out a couple of years too late. The economy has been sliding steadily for a while now, and suddenly the trailer looks like an early artifact of a decade defined by hyper-consumption and irresponsible levels of personal debt. I’m not one to talk, having paid above the odds for the occasional nice Apple and Muji product myself, but from what’s shown in the trailer it seems like the filmmakers are putting forth a narrow view of what design can be.
By focusing on attractive early 21st century product design, the film may be stuck with a field that has not changed its fundamental design aesthetic, has not revised its driving principles, at least since the introduction of the Powerbook G4. The overarching trend since has been ever towards refining the veneer, polishing the surface. Which is fine in itself, I suppose, but there’s something about that resistance to more fundamental change that doesn’t exactly fit with the mood of the day.
It’s a pity, because it may be a missed opportunity. Even in a company like Apple, infamous for attracting an almost fetishistic response to the objects that it creates, the really interesting work has arguably happened around service design. The smartest invention to come out of Cupertino in recent years is not the iPhone (the near-perfect but ultimately obvious execution of the same smartphone approach that has been around for years), but the iPod/iTunes symbiotic relationship. That’s a design that has now changed the face of the entertainment industry, altered how people interact with music, and elevated a computer company to a position of huge power in the media world. That shift to thinking about how people experience design, thinking about the design of service and not just form, stands for a more holistic and mature approach to design.
But apart from a single shot of a potato peeler, everything on show in the ninety second trailer is an extremely expensive luxury item. The insinuated equation of good design with high cost brands is what’s really troubling to me. I’m not saying these are not examples of great design; I’m saying that taken together they define design in narrow and exclusive terms, and now more than ever that’s a lazy way of thinking about design. Solving problems is design; just making things look nice is decoration. Making things that are a joy to behold is an important part of the design process, but is it enough to support a documentary? A film that compliments only the facade of objects is in danger of missing what truly innovative design is.
There seems to be a distinct lack of critical response to the trailer. Most online reactions that I saw were unbiased one-line linkups, devoid of any commentary or opinion; smooth-edged, disengaged, utilitarian, flat, compliant. Where’s the visceral reaction? Yes, this looks nice, but does it really do anything?
In any case, the director is probably being very honest in his approach. The title of the film makes no bones about what it pretends to be. I just hope its not too late to cut in a dash of critical perspective.
Again I feel the need to apologise for jumping the gun or being too dogmatic on this. I have only seen the trailer. Trailers are the objectification of films as fetishistic objects, where we are invited to make a critical judgement based only on the facade of appearance. They fail to convey anything about the real quality of cinema, but rather promote a surface-level overview, selling the promise of an experience just like shiny design does. Good trailers are often by definition dishonest, crafted to appeal to our magpie-like sensibilities.
So it’s not cool of me to say all this based on ninety seconds of footage and assume guilt. Oh, and I loved Helvetica, to which this is pretty much a sequel. In one sense it must be difficult for a filmmaker to see their art reduced to an advertisement, and it’s important to remember that a bad trailer does not necessarily mean a bad film. On the other hand, it may perfectly reflect the full film and make no apologies for that fact.
In tough times, many people are forced to reassess the difference between wants and needs. Objectified may look nice, it just may not be the film we need right now.
In 1957 Orson Welles made Touch of Evil for Universal. The studio disliked the rough cut, ordered Welles off the movie and drafted in another director, Harry Keller, to edit the film heavily and shoot additional scenes.
Before it was released, Welles was given one opportunity to view the revised version of the film. He sat with Universal executives and took copious notes throughout the screening. The following morning he delivered a typed 58-page memo to Universal, outlining the minimum changes he thought the film needed. What a night that must have been! Welles had by then been completely removed from the editing process by the studio, and the memo is a passionate but necessarily civil set of directions on how to treat the film. Considering that he only saw the film once and only had a single night to draft his reaction, the memo is a great piece of technical film criticism, tempered with the need to placate the studio.
By all means retain, in its main lines the edited form of this reel as you now have it put together. Little of the admirable labors of Ernie Nims and his assistants in behalf of clarity need be lost, but let me urge very earnestly that the cutaway from Grandi – in which he was just starting to menace Susan (the scene’s deliberately anti-climatic quality, not at this point, having been established) be retained.
Universal disregarded the memo and released the film virtually unchanged in 1958.
Touch of Evil is famous for its opening scene, a single long tracking shot (remember, this was filmed over fifty years ago). Welles was unhappy with Keller’s treatment, though.
As the camera roves through the streets of the Mexican bordertown, the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting Latin American musical numbers – the effect, that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each blasting out it’s own tune by way of a “come-on” or “pitch” for the tourists. The fact that the streets are invariably loud with this music was planned as a basic device throughout the entire picture. The special use of contrasting “mambo-type” rhythm numbers with rock ‘n’ roll will be developed in some detail at the end of this memo, when I’ll take up details of the “beat” and also specifics of musical color and instrumentation on a scene-by-scene and transition-by-transition basis.
In 1998, working from Welles’ memo, editor Walter Murch produced a “director’s cut” of the film, including a revised version of the opening scene that replaced the theatrical score with street music and removed the credits. Although everything else about the scene remains the same, the difference is remarkable. Welles never made another Hollywood picture after Touch of Evil.
