Small films, big impact

If the usual Christmas televisual extravaganza over the next few days doesn’t tickle your fancy, then you could do worse – much, much worse – than taking an hour out of the commercialised, overhyped seasonal frenzy, making yourself a cup of tea (and go on then, possibly a mince pie or two, too), putting your feet up and watching the wonderful Time Shift on Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films which was shown on BBC Four last night (only available to view on iPlayer for another few days, and only if you’re in the UK, sorry no longer available online, sorry).

The documentary is a delight from start to finish. Lots of archive footage from the Small Films collection (Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Bagpus, Ivor the Engine et al) plus interviews with children’s writers and illustrators like Michael Rosen and Lauren Child.

It also features plenty of gentle, revealing conversations with Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin themselves (and their families), talking about the various inventions, models and hacks, the process and craft of making the films, the secrets of their loving creations and – perhaps most wonderful of all – the socio-political background of the stories and the character concepts. And the famous shed.

Oh, the shed. There has never been a more inspirational shed than Postgate’s, in my opinion.

In the Guardian, Nancy Banks-Smith has a wonderful writeup in today’s paper:

Oliver Postgate, who died last year, concocted a perfect little world in a garden shed. It was the sort of shed you open warily, knowing an avalanche of stuff-which-will-come-in-useful-sometime will flood out. My husband had a shed like that. It contained, among much else, a sea-going compass, which would come in useful if we ever had a yacht. The Clangers, who communicated in the melancholy swoops of a swannee whistle, lived there. The ear of faith can interpret what they are saying, and the BBC was ruffled to decipher in one such swoop: “Dammit! The bloody thing’s stuck again!”

Bagpuss slept there, too, in a cardboard box. The Clangers were pink in order to rise to the challenge of colour television, and because that was the colour of the wool that Joan Firmin, the wife of Postgate’s partner, Peter, happened to have handy. Bagpuss was pink because the proposed marmalade stripes went squiffy in the kiln.

She goes on to relate some early characters in his life:

[Bertrand] Russell later resurfaced in Bagpuss as Professor Yaffle, a self-opinionated old bookend with Russell’s very dry, thin voice. Postgate, whose own voice was soft, warm and, somehow, knitted, voiced all the characters himself, so we know for sure how Russell sounded. Professor Yaffle, by the way, had to be nailed to the floor so that he wouldn’t fall over and dent his dignity.

Her review also contains one of her most delightful turns of phrase, in describing the relationship between Postgate and Firmin:

“…one of those happy conjunctions, like Flotsam and Jetsam, in which people who are individually surplus become jointly glorious.”

Well put, and something many of us can only aspire to.

If you haven’t already got it (and if you can find a copy) I strongly recommend Oliver Postgate’s autobiography (Hardback in stock at Amazon) which came out a decade ago and I’ve read a couple of times since. So many details. So much obvious affection and curiosity about making characters come to life.

Postgate remains one of my biggest inspirations – not because I am a film-maker or have even a fraction of his talent, but because he was a creative tinkerer. He and Peter Firmin used wool and meccano and pulleys and string and wire to make things work; they experimented with techniques and subverted children’s storytelling with politics and humour and silliness that was in no way patronising; their love for what they did (and how they did it) was obvious and infectious to a whole generation of creative tinkerers, like me.

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(Images in this post are screencaptures from the BBC Four documentary)

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In case I don’t get a chance to post again in the coming days as the year ends – heartfelt felicitations of the season to you and yours. Be safe and happy.

On the night train

Sorry for the recent silence: I’ve been on the road a bit – or rather, on the rails. First, a dash around the country, taking in Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh in the space of 4 days, and then a week later, I took the Caledonian sleeper to Fort William, which was a first for me, and highly recommended.

Oh it’s very pleasant when you have found your little den
With your name written up on the door.

And the berth is very neat with a newly folded sheet
And there’s not a speck of dust on the floor.

There is every sort of light – you can make it dark or bright;
There’s a button that you turn to make a breeze.

There’s a funny little basin you’re supposed to wash your face in
And a crank to shut the window if you sneeze.

Then the guard looks in politely and will ask you very brightly
`do you like your morning tea weak or strong?’…

[Poem: TS Eliot's Skimbleshanks, of course]

And this is what you wake up to the next morning:

[The following is from a mail I wrote to someone who asked how I'd booked it and what it was like]

There are four sleeper services to Scotland that I know of, between London and:

– Glasgow
– Inverness
– Aberdeen
– Fort William

The Glasgow service leaves London very late – 11.15pm or so, I think – and arrives into Glasgow around 6.40am. This is a bit of a problem because then you’re stuck in Glasgow before breakfast, so if that’s where you’re going, I’d recommend taking a daytime train. London – Edinburgh is about 4 hours, and Lon-Gla is about 5 during the day.

But if you’re going further north, then the sleeper is a good option, in at least one direction (I took the sleeper up and then a daytime train back down – it’s possible to do the journey from Oban – London in a day, but it’s a lot of sitting on trains!)

The sleeper I took left London at 9.15pm, and arrived in Ft William about 9.45am. Clearly it didn’t take that long to do the journey, but the train was moving (slowly) for most of the time, stopping a few times in sidings for 30 mins or so. It’s one big long train until Edinburgh when it splits into the three sections – Aberdeen, Inverness, Fort William. I was asleep for most of it, though I was vaguely aware of waking up at one point, peering out of the window and finding myself at Edinburgh Waverley station.

I think the route is something like: London Euston – Watford – Crewe – Birmingham – Preston – Carlisle – Edinburgh – Crianlarich – Rannoch – Fort William.

I woke up about 8am with breakfast being delivered to my cabin, which I ate looking out over Rannoch Moor – a stunning bit of the world.

In terms of photos, I took most of the pics through the (rather grubby) window of the carriage, either in my berth or in the seating car a little further down the train. The secret is to take lots and lots and lots of shots, and one is bound to come out well eventually.

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Talking point

At a (media) event in the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago, the organisers were giving out these badges:

Tell me: is this wry self-mocking? Or cold statement of fact?

I genuinely can’t figure out which it should be.

And the temptation to sharpie in the word “only” somewhere is almost overwhelming.

In Edinburgh

Years ago, this city was completely familiar to me.

Nearly twenty years ago, young(ish) and stupid(ish) with emotion, I visited a lot, staying in a top floor flat just off Lothian Rd, from which you could watch the fireworks spilling over the castle roof on Hogmanay, while lying on the sofa. There were wooden shutters on the windows, and I’d bet that now it’s lived in by an insufferable yuppie or two.

We ate at Mama’s on Grassmarket, drank creamy pints of 80/- at the Malt Shovel and Bannermans, browsed endlessly in Fopp and wandered up to Tollcross to buy ingredients in Lupe Pintos to make homemade burritos. Idyllic. Naive. Fleeting.

A year later, I moved up here, rather rashly, leaving behind a decent job in Leeds because I wanted to be closer to that someone, who turned out to be an utter swine.

Suddenly, I wasn’t allowed to stay in the flat handily in the centre of town, so found a place in a dubious flatshare out in Muirhouse, in a terrible block that has long since been demolished. There was blood on the walls of the stair, and the agitated barking of big dogs behind closed doors was a constant soundtrack.

I got a job as a waitress in a cafe in town which paid – I’m not exaggerating here – £2 an hour, before tax, which left me worse off than being unemployed. It came as some sort of relief when they had to let me go because of budget cuts. I signed on (at Torphichen Street) and spent the days looking for work, doing whatever came my way (I once dressed as a penguin at Edinburgh Zoo) and mooching around town, forlornly waiting for The Swine to fit me into his schedule. I took advantage of the UB40 discount to watch films in the afternoon in the plush velvet seats of the Cameo and Filmhouse, and walked the cobbled streets until my soles wore thin.

Soon after, I moved to Aberdeen, and Edinburgh became a place of transition – somewhere I didn’t feel comfortable anymore, wasn’t welcome. It belonged to those who stayed behind, and I’d given up. Given in. Moved on.

And now I’m back, for less than 24 hours, for work.

I’ve been back a few times in the last twenty years, but always somehow very fleetingly, or staying in unfamiliar parts of the city. This time, I’m near Tolcross, in an unexpectedly decent hotel (it’s one of those without many stars but with a lot of class and – mercifully – no stag parties), just metres down the road from where I used to come and stay, live, belong, bimble.

I’m tempted to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow, just to have an old-time’s-sake saunter down amnesia lane.

But some things are best left in the past. And besides, I have a full day ahead.

Looking forward, not back.

Memo to the people at Yahoo! account services

When forcing someone to set security questions/answers in order to log in to a Y!Group, don’t ask them a name-based question (last name of first boss/first name of oldest cousin etc), allow them to provide an answer (sue, kim, ian, bob, tom, sam, jim, ann, etc) and then throw a strop that the answer needs to be at least 4 letters long.

With respect, if that was the case, you should have informed the parents a while ago, because you asked me for their name and THAT’S THEIR NAME.

Alternatively, you could always specify the minimum length requirement at the time of providing security Question/Answer couplets, instead of telling users they’ve done something wrong.

Memo to the women who work at reception at the BA lounge at Amsterdam Schiphol airport

When you try to connect to the free guest wifi in the lounge, a login screen appears, which says – and I quote:

“The username and password to access this free Wi-Fi service is available from the front desk of the lounge.”

So when a “valued guest” goes up to the front desk to enquire what the username and password for the wifi is, it’d be really awesome if you could prevent yourself from getting a big lip on, barking “the information is posted on at least three cards on the coffee tables,” then marching into the lounge, signalling for the traveller to follow, in order to point to one and say “like this one, for example.”

Because:

a) your own site says the username and password is available from the front desk
b) there are only three of those cards in the lounge, and none of them, by the way, are in the second (quiet zone) lounge, so travellers can hardly be blamed for missing them and
c) your attitude stinks: being passive aggressive, rude and mardy with paying loyal British Airways customers seems like a particularly idiotic and short-sighted way to run a hospitality service.

Also, your cheese is warm and rubbery.

Disconnecting from social networks

I realised the other day that I hadn’t even thought about FriendsReunited for at least a year.

I clocked this only when mucking out untended folders within my gmail account, where I’d long ago set up a rule to filter newsletters from sites which I barely ever visited. I suddenly discovered that FriendsReunited had been emailing me regularly, with increasing desperation. The emails hinted at the potential to rediscover lost connections; spy on former classmates, announce things to the world; pimp one’s profile; add photos, reunion notes, avatars.

This was enough to spur me into action. Without hesitation I headed over to the site with the intention of removing myself from it altogether – committing social networking suicide. Long overdue and undoubtedly not the only one to have done so in recent time.

Before I went, though, I noticed this alert box, which sort of sums up the problem with FriendsReunited for me:

Why don’t I add myself to those contexts? Because they’re completely bloody irrelevant, that’s why.

I’ve never attended those institutions or lived or worked in those places, so why would I add myself to them? Just to be more present and “out there” on the Internet? To meet more people? Who I don’t know (yet)? Or in the hope that lurking somewhere in one of those places there may be someone I once knew, waiting to be discovered? Er, no.

FR was a turn-of-the-century novelty: one of the first ways that you could easily, legitimately and contextually hunt down your old schoolmates and peer nosily into their current lives without the need for (or fear of) reciprocation. Socially-acceptable stalking, dressed up as old-friendship-inspired curiosity.

The personal, public, externalising internet made that easier over the years, and experiences with global traction like Facebook soon eclipsed the relevance of FR, even if they came with their own array of pitfalls and social etiquette dilemmas.

Now the internet’s social spaces overlap, with people having multiple accounts across a range of social services, reproducing their social graphs wherever they create an identity. Increasingly, folk are feeding identical information into multiple outlets, to the extent that I’m overdosing on some people’s news, photos, statuses and updates. Twitter updates are fed into Facebook status updates. Notes saved on delicious are fed into Facebook notes. Pics posted on Flickr are rechannelled into Facebook galleries.

This means I sometimes see things twice, three times, from the same person but in different spaces. It has the effect of overwhelming and drowning out the updates of others – the less prolific, less connected, less socialwebbed, less loud.

So in light of that and the increasing noise from all corners, I’ve started a tactical withdrawal from social spaces – or rather, I’ve started to prune the social spaces I occupy to better tune into the signal that is there.

The immediate upshot of this is that I’m unfollowing/unfriending (as if that’s even a word, or at least as if that doesn’t come with all sorts of loaded connotations) a bunch of people on FB, not because I don’t like them but because I already hear them more loudly, frequently and appropriately in other places – like Twitter, or at work, or on mailing lists.

If this happens to you, it’s not about you: it’s about me, and my ability to give you proper attention, in devoted contextual space. I want to keep hearing from you; I just want to hear you – and others – better.

The fallen

Found while walking

Part of the brilliance of a photographic observation game like noticin.gs (which I wrote about the other day in the context of synchronicity and gaming) is that – as the name implies – it encourages you to be observant and notice things when you’re out and about in the context of your everyday life.

Paul Mison wrote about noticin.gs recently saying that it’s “helping [him] to look around” and that’s absolutely the same feeling I have.

I’ve got a long history of capturing random spotted/found/noticed things and moments from my commute and daily wanderings, stretching back many years – and not just photographically, either. Sometimes with the camera, sometimes with words, sometimes just by making a mental note – it’s the habit of receptiveness to the world around that’s interesting.

This relates to something else I wrote a while back about super-noticing:

Super-noticing is something which happens a lot if you’re trained to be receptive and observant, but also if you’re thinking about a particular thing.

This in turn relates to another earlier post about the ethnographic discipline of pattern recognition:

Part of the toolkit of ethnography and anthropology in general is observing patterns. This could be patterns in behaviour, appearance, ritual, language or otherwise. The anthropologist’s job is to spot the patterns and try to understand what (if any) significance they have, especially in relation to social or cultural environment, or other prevailing conditions.

The discipline of noticing stuff is part of what makes receptiveness and observation useful in life, as well as in anthrolopology and social gaming. But it’s good to have a particular outlet (or should that be inlet?) for the activity. As I wrote in the super-noticing post,

“Flickr is great for developing a discipline around noticing, too, and Flickr groups in particular – if your eye is receptive, then every journey out into the world can be filled with potential squared circles and little fellas and malapostrophication and more.”

Well, noticin.gs turns that hyper-receptiveness up to 11, but inverts it – it’s not about seeing the patterns so much as the anomalies – the things you spot which shouldn’t be there, or stand out, or catch the attention because they don’t belong, or are otherwise notable. Noticeable. Noted.

Once you start playing noticin.gs, it’s very difficult to stop noticing things. Above and below are just a few of the things I’ve noticed while out and about, captured with my phonecam, and filed to noticin.gs.

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A work in progress

Back in the nineties, when the web was young…

…most web pages took over a minute to load
…the song of one’s home 14.4kbps modem was more familiar than any novelty ringtone (what’s one of those, then?)
…AOL was a groundbreaking kind of company
…chatrooms were still a non-sleazy novelty
…marquee and blink tags were in common usage
…a web-ring was a social navigational device, not a gang of kiddy-fiddlers
…many web sites had an entire page dedicated to links
…the use of nested tables to layout a website was cutting-edge
…Google, Blogger and Amazon were just a twinkle in the eyes of their founders
…Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter were just random meaningless utterings
…building a web page was something only total weirdos would do

…dear, (now) departed Geocities was a vibrant and bustling place for play and experimentation, consisting of “neighbourhoods” and suburbs with particular themes or personalities, named after real or imagined geographical locations – SouthBeach, TheTropics, EnchantedForest, Tokyo, MotorCity, PicketFence, Petsburgh, Athens.

And each of these was stuffed with hundreds of citizens, tending hundreds upon thousands of lovingly constructed pages, each brimming with animated gifs, eye-bleeding backgrounds and a never-ending stream of scrolling, blinking, neon, capitalised, centre-justified text and badly-compressed, rasterized photos.

Including me, for a short while.

At the time, one of the most common phrases on the internet was “this page is under construction” – a sort of excuse or explanation, I suppose, often accompanied by a representation or parody of the symbols usually associated with road-works or construction sites in the non-virtual world. Strips of black and yellow tape or triangular red, black and white icons of ‘Men At Work’.

But thinking about it, it was a strange statement to make. At the time, the entire Internet was itself under construction; being built and explored and defined and designed and conquered and claimed by users just like me. By definition, web pages could (and can) continue being constructed, built upon, refined and redesigned forever – there’s no end to the work: even now, a redesign is only ever a temporary thing and its unveiling tends to be just a brief resting status in between periods of intense redevelopment activity.

The point is, the Internet can’t ever be completed, at least in the traditional sense of the word. It’s a living work in progress. The constant ripple of activity keeps it being. When it stops evolving, it stops being relevant. That was the point of web pages versus print and then as now, the idea of publishing flat print-like pages without interactivity or hypertextuality or even contextuality and formatting to the web is quite daft.

The web is alive: as long as there is networking occurring – both social and electronic – the Internet will exist and be continuously re-invented, never quite the same from one second to the next.

Back in the nineties, I used the idea of being under construction as the central focus for my (now horribly outdated and quite shuddersomely facile) MA Thesis: Under Construction: (Re)Defining Culture and Community in Cyberspace.

Don’t read it though. You can garner more knowledge about internet culture and community from five minutes on Twitter these days – and if you do decide to plough through it, remember that in the nineties many, many people (including academics) didn’t know what the internet was, let alone a modem, which is why it’s so full of explanations and definitions of terms.

In fact, back in 1997 when I stated my intention to embark on research in this particular area, I was told by senior members of the Anthropology department that there was no such thing as culture and community in cyberspace, and that I should redirect my attentions to something proper instead.

WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, EH?

Ahem.

The phrase ‘Under Construction’ is interesting for Anthropologists and other social scientists, who sometimes theorise that that culture is itself a construction – made and reinforced by the actions of those who show up and participate. In my thesis, I explained that even perception is not a passive experience.

We are constantly constructing the world (through perception, etc.) as much as the world is constantly constructing (shaping, changing and influencing) us. The idea of a ‘passive media’ such as television takes on a new perspective when it is understood that the process of watching a soap-opera requires the brain to unconsciously perform startling feats of interpretation and imagination just to make sense – images – out of the millions of pixels and lines fired rapidly at the screen, not to mention understanding the plot.

Fascinated back then – and still – by the idea that just by showing up, we are causing the net to come into a new phase of being. Leaning forward makes that link even more tangible. That’s still true, of course. Perhaps moreso than ever?

As a sidenote, I was thinking the other day how long it had been since I used the acronym “IRL” or the expanded phrase “In Real Life.”

It used to be the thing we’d say when we meant “not on the internet”, and I’m glad that it has become gradually obsolete over the years, now that the internet is accepted as part of life.

The internet is real life: I am real, sat at my real computer, engaging with the screen and the world beyond that it unlocks, in real time, via my eyes, ears, keyboard, mouse, attention. Online and offline make much more sense, being descriptive of state rather than reality.

(Likewise, I’m glad that we don’t talk about “virtual communities” anymore – as if spending time with people interacting around common interests and deepening relationships over time was in any way less than real. Now we know it can be, and that gets proved and reproved every day.)

So anyway, today’s unplugging of the Geocities life-support made me think about how we shaped it, and it shaped us.

Geocities slowly became unloved, unused and eventually undermined by wave upon wave of new services which helped us to express ourselves; live out loud, on the screen; learn to create/tinker/experiment; play with our identities; find others; experience the thrill of seeing our words, our work in a public “space”.

But for all its faults, Geocities was, for many long-term residents of the web, the first place they called home(page). And because of that, we mourn its passing.

But its spirit lives on. The creative, tinkering itch still runs thunderous and irrepressible through us. Our web experiences – and we ourselves – are still under construction.