Last week I went to The Story 2011, a one-day conference at Conway Hall, London that is devoted to stories and storytelling across all platforms and media. I spoke at last year’s event, so this year it was doubly enjoyable to simply be a punter and soak it all up. Also I was really pleased that the morning session included Matt Adams of Blast Theory talking about Ivy4evr, our interactive SMS drama for Channel 4.
The Story conference came about because, as founder Matt Locke says, ‘There have never been so many stories, never so many ways to tell them.’ Picking up on a conversation had during the day, I’ve just been commissioned to write a longer article about The Story 2011 which will be a good excuse to interview Matt and others about all this; to explore contemporary storytelling in more depth.
Looking through some of the blog coverage of the conference over the weekend, and the #thestory2011 Twitter stream, I was surprised to see this photograph of my boots(!) which had been taken during the morning session. I must have been engrossed to not have noticed the picture being taken at such close quarters. The photographer, digital media consultant Kathryn Corrick, writes:
I arrived late and so ended up sitting on the floor for the first session. I noticed a fabulous pair of brogue boots beside me […] and took a pic of them – sadly I never got the name of their owner, so if you see this set and know who they belong to please let me know. This photo led to an idea and connected in with a project I’d started the week before called Feet on the Overground; that rather than taking people’s faces that day I’d ask to take a pic of their shoes.
I got in touch with Kathryn and asked permission to reproduce her image. Here is her photo essay — The Sole of The Story 2011 — on Flickr. I love the way that from nothing, by taking an idea for a walk, this series of photographs not only tells a lot of new stories about The Story 2011 conference and those attending, to create a whole new layer of knowledge and insight that cuts through the day like a core sample, but also that it so tangibly captures something of the texture and the humour of the day.
I’ll let you know when my article on The Story 2011 comes out, probably in April.
I’m really pleased to be taking part in the opening event on 17 March of the forthcoming Dirty Literature season put together by Fatima Hellberg of the excellent contemporary art agency Electra for the National Portrait Gallery. Doing a project for the NPG has stirred up memories of the Poll Tax Riots; made me think about the regeneration/rebranding of Trafalgar Square and the impact on that of the recent protests. This week has also seen publication of a review by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary on Policing Public Order which includes recommendations on the use of force following the death of Ian Tomlinson and a depressing admission that such recommendations may take years to implement on the ground. More on these related issues below.
All the events in the Dirty Literature series are free but booking is essential. Here is the blurb:
From performative lectures that roam across fact and fabrication to genre-defying plays with storytelling, Dirty Literature brings together artists and writers exploring the boundaries of narrative […] – a form of contaminated literature, unfolding at the edges of coherence. Ephemeral like a rumour, mobile like gossip this is a form of biography that escapes the weight and permanence of the published word and the painted figure alike, a real time portrait.
I’m going to be sharing the event on 17 March with my old friend Tim Etchells, best known for his work with UK experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment but also a prolific and consistently brilliant writer across media. Alongside his writing for and about performance, Tim has also written some great fiction over the last decade or so, including the now sadly ultra rare Endland Stories from 1998 (further background on Endland Stories here, too) and more recently an excellent novel The Broken World. Another current solo project of Tim’s is entitled Vacuum Days for which he is posting a gloriously downbeat series of graphic and satirical, daily playbills (developing an idea first explored in a brilliant free pamphlet he produced a couple of years ago called Events at the Downturn). Here’s the Vacuum Days playbill from 9 Feb:
My contribution to the Dirty Literature event will be to read from two pieces of fiction. One is a completely new commission, the other is CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO, my satirical novel from 1999 (which I’ve blogged about here and here). The novel was amongst other things a fictional response, through the imbecilic monologue of a uniformed goon in a ‘riot van’, to a police force which by the mid-1990s, more than a decade after the miners’ strike, seemed to have become locked into an alienated cycle of violence and prurient self-justification that was exemplified for me at time of writing by the circumlocutions surrounding the failures of the investigation into the murder of London teenager Stephen Lawrence.
CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO is long out of print, following the closure of the novel’s publisher Codex Books getting on for a decade ago, but I’m reading from it at the National Portrait Gallery, because a sequence in the novel riffs (albeit detachedly) on the protests in Trafalgar Square of March 1990 popularly known as the ‘Poll Tax Riots’ and some of the aggressive crowd dispersal techniques — mounted police charges, vehicles driven at speed — that I’d witnessed that afternoon from this same north-east corner of the square and from the elevated area beneath the portico of the National Gallery.
Since the turn of the century, Trafalgar Square has been rebranded via the ‘World Squares for All’ regeneration initiative as a venue for celebration rather than protest. The aim of this was to create ‘a new heart for London’ (a phrase previously used to announce the development of Picadilly Circus tube station in 1928), an ambition that was achieved through major transformations such as road closures and traffic re-directions to create a pedestrian plaza; through rolling, participatory cultural events such as ‘The Fourth Plinth’ sculpture competition; and through regular use of the square for civic and community celebrations such as that which followed the announcement of London’s selection as host city for the 2012 Olympic Games.
The protests of 24 November and 9 December 2010 (the latter I blogged about here) have now displaced the media archive of all that careful work with many thousands of new images that all look eerily familiar, echoing documentation of the Poll Tax riots of March 1990 or the Miners’ Strike, but on a whole new scale. Sites such as Flickr and Youtube host countless photos and videos of the protests and of violent police tactics such as kettling and mounted police charges, and of some now higher-profile incidents involving the use of violence against young people such as Jody McIntyre and Alfie Meadows and the ensuing debates and coverage they provoked.
It is timely then that also published on 9 February is the report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) on Policing Public Order (link downloads as PDF). The introduction notes:
After a few, relatively quiet years, this is a new period of public order policing – one which is faster moving and more unpredictable. Foreseeing the character of events will prove more difficult and, in some cases, their nature and mood will only become apparent on the day.
What seems evident is a willingness to disrupt the public and test police. Police tactics have to be as adaptable as possible to the circumstances to keep the peace for all of us. [My emphasis: note the corresponding, unspoken invocation of them]
Policing Public Order is subtitled, ‘An overview and review of progress against the recommendations of [previous HMIC reports, both from 2009] Adapting to Protest and Nurturing the British Model of Policing.’
The second of these reports from 2009, Nurturing the British Model…, made a series of recommendations on ‘the use of force’, which are divided into three sections: ‘A. Principles on the use of force; B. Training on the use of force, and C. Planning operations which may involve the use of force.’ (Policing Public Order, ‘Annexe D’, p.41-2)
There are six of these principles, and — importantly — they, ‘reflect the law as it currently stands’, i.e. they do not relate to some future legal landscape or aspiration:
1. Police officers, in carrying out their duties shall as far as possible apply non-violent methods before resorting to any use of force. 2. Police officers should use force only when strictly necessary and where other means remain ineffective or have no realistic chance of achieving the lawful objective. 3. Any use of force by police officers should be the minimum appropriate in the circumstances. 4. Police officers should use lethal or potentially lethal force only when absolutely necessary to protect life. 5. Police officers should plan and control operations to minimise, to the greatest extent possible, recourse to lethal force. 6. Individual officers are accountable and responsible for any use of force and must be able to justify their actions in law.
In the same report HMIC recommended that training in these six principles
should not be abstract but should consider the practical application of the use force [sic.] in the public order context, for example, by instructing officers that the use of particular tactics, such as the edge of a shield or a baton strike to the head may constitute potentially lethal force.
However, Policing Public Order this week draws the pessimistic conclusion that, ‘the pace of these changes can be measured in months, if not years.’ The report continues,
These timeframes may not, even then, include the additional time needed to train officers performing the key roles on the front-line, or in command.
This is contrasted specifically with the fact that protesters can, ‘change their focus in minutes [my emphasis] through the use of social media and mobile phones’ [p.4]. A couple of pages later the report then poses the question:
How can police participate effectively in and utilise social media to assist in maintaining the peace?
But the obvious insight that perhaps the police could use social media and mobile phones to train their officers more quickly than ‘months, if not years’ (or to remind them of ‘the law as it currently stands’ in a given situation) is missed.
What Policing Public Order omits to mention is that the tragic death of City newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson on April 1 2009, following this assault by a police officer in the vicinity of the G20 protests was if not the only reason for the commissioning of these reports, at least significant enough that it is highlighted in the opening few sentences of 2009’s Adapting to Protest.
In which case it may seem surprising that as of January 2011, almost two years later, the status of even these key recommendations on the use of force (which reflect ‘the law as it currently stands’) reads:
A position on the use of force has been agreed by ACPO [Association of Chief Police Officers] for public order, but a single overarching set of principles for policing has not yet been adopted. Steps have been taken by individual forces since 2009, but the guidance given to officers in briefings and training centres continues to vary.*
So how long might it take? A press release (opens as PDF) accompanying the review states that HMIC’s recommendations
will be used as the basis for training from Spring 2011. Taking into account the time required to train officers, changes on the ground may take up to two years or more.
§
CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO is currently out of print, but a small number of secondhand copies are available.
Featuring: Samuel Dowd, Tim Etchells, Will Holder, Karl Holmqvist, Tom McCarthy,
Francesco Pedraglio, Sue Tompkins, Tony White. Curated by Fatima Hellberg (Electra)
National Portrait Gallery, London — 17th March – 16th June 2011
* An alphabetised list of links from the epub version of a forthcoming short story commission (due for publication in February 2011). The story will also be illustrated with photos by Diane Humphries.
Sometimes only art will do — a particular book, picture, poem, piece of music. Some people I know can read a book once and then get rid of it, but I never know when I’ll need to go back and look something up.
So it was on the evening of Thursday 9 December 2010. Aghast and increasingly anxious at events unfolding in Westminster, both in Parliament and outside where I knew many friends and colleagues were legitimately protesting against the insultingly perfunctory debate on a transformation of higher education the impact of which can scarcely be guessed at but which will likely be felt by many people for many years, I began scouring the shelves for a particular title, but couldn’t find it by the light of the lamp. I looked again this morning, and found it. Here was a book which had suddenly come to mind for what felt like a whole new aptness in face of the ‘tuition fees vote’, Government ministers’ all-too-believeably crass framing of education as a selfish personal gain that is somehow stolen from the taxpayer rather than a public benefit — let alone a national one, or international — and the kind of baldly choreographed police aggression and provocation that was surely designed to produce the violence or the appearance of violence that it claimed to be a response to but that was reported as if the Battle of Orgreave had never happened. (Then, infamously, BBC News coverage reversed the chronology of footage to incorrectly show ‘shots of miners throwing stones at police before showing mounted officers charging the miners’.)
The book I’d been looking for was not artist Jeremy Deller’s The English Civil War Part II — an excellent published collection of, as the subtitle has it, ‘Personal accounts of the 1984-85 miners’ strike’, which was brought out to accompany his 2001 re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave in Orgreave, an event which I was lucky enough to attend — but the script of the film Wetherby by David Hare. I knew it was there somewhere and I’d wanted to check a line of dialogue that I had (in fact mis-)remembered — if you’ll excuse my paraphrasing — as something like, ‘Right then, those of us who still believe in education, let’s… [something, something, something…]’
If you haven’t seen Wetherby I’d recommend it. It remains one of my favourite films. You might struggle to see it though, because sadly Wetherby doesn’t seem to be currently available on DVD in the UK. The script, too, is out of print although when it seemed that I might not be able to find my own copy I did quickly check to see if any secondhand copies are available online, which they are.
Wetherby is a kind of Thatcher era allegory — from and of the early, mid-1980s — in which an act of unhinged and paranoid Nietzschean violence is visited upon a Yorkshire community as represented by teacher Jean Travers (played by Vanessa Redgrave) and her British Library-worker friend Marcia (Judi Dench). I use the word ‘Nietzschean’ advisedly because the act of violence is tagged as such by several shots of the reading matter of the aggressor, a violent stalker named John Morgan (played by Tim McInnerny). In this much it is such a perfect allegory of the time, of the acts of violence that were perpetrated on communities in Yorkshire and elsewhere during the miners’ strike, that I have to remind myself that given production schedules of course the film must have been written, gone into production even, before the strike even started. In which case it becomes an act of prophesy. It seems scarcely credible now, but looking at the dates today I see that Wetherby premiered in the same week that the Miners’ Strike ended, at the beginning of March 1985. The script lists the premiere as having taken place at the Curzon West End, London on 8 March, although there was also a Leeds premiere at the Hyde Park Picture House, a beautiful 1914, gas-lit, end-of-terrace cinema which features in the film. I remember this because I lived in Leeds at the time, so somehow it has become bound up — as films, music, works of art can — with my own biography (in ways that are both too slight and too convoluted to describe here), but also with my own writing.
In the mid-1990s I was writing a satirical piece of fiction, a short story about a pre-Macpherson police force that had seemed since the early 1980s — with the policing of the miners’ strike, the Battle of the Beanfield, and later with the institutional racism found by Sir William Macpherson in the aftermath of the murder of London teenager Stephen Lawrence — to be locked into a self-perpetuating cycle of alienated violence and prurient self-justification.
Once I’d started writing though, it was hard to stop and that short story became the novel CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO, which was published in 1999 — the same year as ‘The Macpherson Report’ — by the former, now sadly-missed Hove-based publishing house Codex Books. The novel is told in an expletive strewn, phonetic prose style that is structured around a very loose appropriation of the central conceit of Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘The Third Kind’ and features three ‘Retropolitan Police Force’ goons in a riot van whose call-sign is an acronym of my (slightly adapted) phonetic alphabet title. In the period pre- and post-publication I did loads of readings from CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO, often with a live, improvised musical accompaniment from James T. Ford, a former Hammond Organ player for The Jam. We performed at the performance art venue Hollywood Leather, at the ICA a couple of times, the Zap, Cabinet Gallery, Vox ‘n’ Roll, and others I can’t remember; then I put the book away for a decade, had other books to promote. Codex went out of business and the book out of print. There are a very small number for sale secondhand, but not many.
The novel is still out of print, but I did a public reading from CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO earlier this year at a gig in Shoreditch with the mighty Malcolm Bennett of Brute! fame, which was the first time I’d done so for about ten years. Then again in November at Wordplay’s benefit night for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, at a great venue called The Good Ship in Kilburn. That was the night before the previous pro-education protest in Westminster, which seemed to give the reading a whole new kind of currency.
The two things — Wetherby and CHARLIEUNCLENORFLKTANGO — are not unrelated. One short passage in my novel was consciously written as a kind of minor homage to Wetherby. It picks up on a fleeting scene in Hare’s film that appears on page 55 of the script. It would take longer to describe what happens on-screen, but in the script, Hare simply writes: ‘In the middle of the road children have lit a bonfire and are playing around it with sticks, and smashing bottles.’ As it happens, CHARLIEUNCLENORFLKTANGO features what (a confessedly irritated) Christopher Tayler in his review of the novel for the LRB called, ‘a tirelessly reiterated opposition of the lights of civilisation and the “dark playsiz”, [and] ow blokes & birds on Erf can keep the dark dark nyte at bay.’ As I was writing those sequences I thought again of that fleeting glimpse of the bonfire in Wetherby, and so in keeping with my prurient police officer narrator’s endless riffing on the light and the dark I used something similar. Near the end of the novel, as the Sarge drives the van back to his own house to inflict some (unseen) act of violence on his own family, he turns off the main road and they drive past ‘sum kidz dan by the garridjiz awl standin round a fyre wot theyv maid owt a sum ole matrissiz & shit […] & there chuckin stix at the cunt.’ I thought of this again when I saw some of the footage being posted on Youtube of Parliament Square, like this short clip by my friend the artist Chris Dorley-Brown.
There is a small nod to Wetherby in my novel Foxy-T as well, but I’ll leave that for now because I don’t want to overload a post that is already too long, and because there is already too much to digest. I am well aware, for one thing, of just how contingent my own engagement with higher education was. Then there are the brutal police tactics used against students and young people in Westminster on 9 December 2010, the innocent people who were kettled on Westminster Bridge until late at night and the odious likes of Michael Gove, the current Secretary of State for Education. I’d initially seen Gove as a kind of comic Dickensian figure, who came on the radio like Tory grotesques of old to try and feed us a burger about this or that, but there was a link floating around this week to a piece he wrote in the Times a few years ago in which he said that pricing education out of people’s reach is ‘all to the good,’ continuing, ‘anyone put off from attending a good university by fear of […] debt doesn’t deserve to be at any university in the first place.’
It was one of those times when only art will do, when nothing else is up to the task, and this was why I was reaching for my battered old Faber and Faber paperback of the script of Wetherby, and why it suddenly seemed such a good and useful fit; something to be immediately consulted.
Here was violence being visited on a community and being brought into people’s homes.
Here was the rejection of education as fake.
Here the violent desire of an aggressor to take everyone down with them and who blows his own brains out in pursuit of that power.
Here, too — in Wetherby at least — was a policeman who quits the force out of shame.
Most of all though, it was that line that I’d been trying to remember, which comes close to the end of the film (and on pages 90-91 of the Faber edition of the script). The teacher Jean Travers (Redgrave) is back in her classroom where she discovers that one of her pupils has quit school to run away with a boy.
‘Anyone else?’ she asks. ‘Anyone else want to go?’
No one does.
‘Right then, for those of us still remaining — us maniacs, assorted oddballs, eccentrics, folk who still feel that school is worthwhile, I suggest we keep trying. All right everyone?’
Announcements received from or on behalf of the artists Rod Dickinson and Heath Bunting in the past couple of weeks reminded me how much I like each of their work, and that for a while I’ve been meaning to do a post about a short story of mine that features both of them, or which uses each of them as a way of writing about the other. Reason being that the story is set in or after 2011, which when I wrote it seemed sufficiently like ‘the future’ (albeit a very near future) to offer some satirical advantage, so I’ve wanted to quickly mention it before that year is upon us (with the obligatory nod to that great William Gibson story of fictional futures made real, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’).
‘The Lunar House “Re-enactment”‘ was commissioned by King’s College, Cambridge to form part of a report on a series of events called the Arts and the Law seminars which brought people (artists, lawyers, academics etc.) together, ‘to debate and clarify the legal and ethical implications of portraying real people through artistic representation, wider issues of freedom of speech for artists,’ and, ‘how such issues are involved in’ particular art forms: visual arts, theatre, literature etc.
I’ve known about Rod Dickinson’s work for ages, initially via Cabinet Gallery who showed his work in the early 1990s, but hadn’t met him until two or three years ago. For this new work Rod has collaborated with Steve Rushton to produce Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, a video installation which is showing at Alma Enterprises, London, until mid-January. Here is the blurb:
‘two actors deliver a simulated forty five minute press briefing […] composed solely of fragments of speeches and press statements [which] focuses on the way in which similar declarations and political rhetoric have been repeated and reused by numerous governments across continents and ideological divides to justify acts of aggression and state sanctioned violence.’
Heath Bunting‘s work also engages with the production and practice of power, amongst other things, but it is more elusive, low-level and unbounded and it has sort of crept in to my consciousness over the past decade. I think of Bunting’s work like the faint glow of a persistent beacon on the horizon — he works out of Bristol — that seems to relentlessly and doggedly illuminate contemporary practices of politics, power and identity, but which the closer I get to the more resistant to summary it becomes. Bunting is often described as a net.art pioneer, but a project might consist of a real-world action, a collaboration, a book or advice on making a day-planner that will enable you to avoid working. It could be an ‘IT COSTS MORE TO BE POOR‘ poster, or an extensive record of points of engagement (transcripts, legal documents, etc.) between the body(s) or person(s) and any one of the infinity of social, political, geographical, legal multiverses in which we find ourselves to be born and living. In all this teeming beaureaucracy and detail Bunting’s work starts to seem like Borges’s same-scale map of the territory, as if it is identical with his life.
Just so with the work announced by Bunting’s email of 21 November 2010 which — in as far as I am able to locate it, and amongst other things — is just as analytical, botanical, countercultural, dispersed, ethical, fragmented, guarded, honest, idiosyncratic, journalistic, key, labyrinthine, malcontent, networked, open, provocative, questioning, rigourous, satirical, time-consuming, unglossed, volatile, wide-ranging, X-border, yippyish and zealous as ever. The email offers ‘a spare pre-aged anonymous letter box facia’ for sale (pictured left), and lists both secondhand and ‘artist signed’ prices. The email also links to a webpage from 2005, entitled Anonymous Letter Box – Howto, which is at least partly self-explanatory dealing as it does with the siting over long periods of time of anonymous mailboxes in disused street locations around the city. The simple design and the proliferation of texts and pages found here and under the wider Status Project heading is indicative of the approach used elsewhere on the irational website. A new project, slated to run from 2010 to 2020 lists works in the Heath Bunting Collection that are, like the spare pre-aged anonymous letter box facia, available for loan or sale/exchange.
So much for a very limited introduction. With even less to go on and beneath the distracted-looking gaze of E.M. Forster, whose portrait was one of several hanging in the seminar venue, Heath Bunting’s work proved difficult to understand for many of the participants at that Arts and the Law seminar at King’s College, Cambridge. Particularly challenging was a short discussion of Bunting’s arrest in 2001 (documented on irational through a series of documents entitled ‘In defense of the tools of my trade’). In order to explore this further, and to see if fiction might offer a useful approach, I appropriated elements of Rod Dickinson’s practice (thank you Rod) to write a short story which imagined a large-scale work of participatory performance art being convened to mark the tenth anniversary of Bunting’s arrest. That story, ‘The Lunar House “Re-enactment”‘ is downloadable as a free Diffusion ebook pamphlet by clicking on the cover image (right). If you are not familiar with assembling ebooks made using the Diffusion or Bookleteer format, there are some useful how to videos on Vimeo. I have made a number of other short stories available free in this format also, which are all searchable on the Diffusion site, though I haven’t got around to listing them on this website’s Free Beer page.
Also available in the Diffusion format is Heath Bunting’s ‘Single Step Guide to Success — Day Planning’. the introduction to which reminds us that: ‘Rigorously planning your days can minimalise time spent working or waiting and maximise engagement with pleasure, happiness and growth.’
§
Because the Arts and the Law seminar series was conducted according to the so-called Chatham House rule (to encourage openness and the sharing of information within the group at least) I’m apparently bound not to reveal the ‘identity [or] the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant’. So it was initially a bit frustrating when the artist Manu Luksch sent a fantastic panoramic photograph of seminar participants, which I wanted to reproduce at the top of this post. Then I realised that I could comply with the Chatham House rule by anonymising everyone in the spirit of Manu’s excellent surveillance footage sci-fi film of the same year, Faceless.
Middling English explores some of the pleasures and complexities of language use, in and through writing. The exhibition brings together multi-sensory elements – spoken pieces, audiophonic compositions, printed broadsides and the strange memory world of pop lyrics – all presented through a stunning architectural installation. […] Middling English pursues [Bergvall’s] interest in speech detail, language histories and politics, verbal eclecticism and inventiveness derived from various kinds of cultural displacement […investigating] modes of writing, from the printed letter to a loose realm of visual, audio, kinetic and perceptual writing and reading environments. Bergvall combines Chaucerian contemporaneity with bilingual audioworks and spatial structures.
Here (right) is the gallery’s photograph showing a detail of the wall of broadsides that Caroline Bergvall had written and published for the show.
The closing event on 23 October was chaired by Claire MacDonald who also gave a presentation, as did Caroline, Gabriel Gbadamosi and myself.
Claire sent some preparatory thoughts to speakers, which talked about Caroline’s (and our suggested) engagements with the voice and voices through a number of parameters: diversity, the ‘reworking and renewal of the positions from which we speak, the registers and technologies through which we speak, and a cross-fertilization of forms between print, sound and the visual,’ and a questioning of what it means to, ‘push the boundaries of language.’
Presentations were necessarily brief. I chose to pick up some themes that I wrote about on this blog back in July of this year, in relation to my novel Foxy-T and the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson. I wanted to link these also toIvy4Evr, my collaboration with Blast Theory for Channel 4, by focusing on a quite slight yet particular genre of response that emerged in common to all three and which can be described as a projected fantasy of exclusion.
Since notes for a slide show might form a particular mode of writing and a type of ‘reading environment’ in themselves, I wondered if there might be value in sharing those notes in their raw form, as a companion piece to the presentation itself. Here, then, is a quick edit of the notes that I made for my presentation at the John Hansard Gallery, together with screengrabs of some of the slides.
Slide 1
3 key points about Foxy-T? Ephemeral economies; an empty shop unit in a moment of flux (sweatshop, internet shop or gallery); rupture with the identity politics of the 1970s and ’80s.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Exemplified: use of the word ‘Rasta’
Caroline’s comment about ‘writing that is aware of its history’; the Black Atlantic in London.
Read page 1 of Foxy-T
Intro audio: excuse quality. R4 Today Programme; A-Level results day 19 August 2004; 08:10 feature on declining standards; interview with David Milliband then brought me on to defend those declining standards?
In case you missed that, Ed Stourton just said: ‘Mind you it is important that we all understand it, isn’t it. [reads excerpt] It’s getting quite close to the edge that, where some of us are going to be excluded, excluded from the book because we don’t understand the language.’
The voice of a powerful institution — invocation of a normative majority, ‘us’, for whom Ed Stourton was claiming to speak.
Reversal of the then current cultural and social policy language of social exclusion.
Who is this ‘us’ that is being excluded?
Slide 2
Talking of LKJ: interesting echo
Play DVD from start of Chapter 4 i.e. 6:49 to 9:09
Intro over musical interlude/Brixton market scene: An extract of the documentary Dread, Beat an’ Blood, dir. Franco Rosso for the Arts Council (Arts Council Film Collection).
This is from a Japanese DVD but you can get this bundled as a DVD extra in some editions of Rosso’s 1980 feature film Babylon. Well worth getting hold of.
Radio studio reading into interview.
In case you didn’t hear that: ‘It’s not really for my ears, is it?’
N.B. Relationship between poetry/writing and activism — as Caroline said, ‘music as a form of resistance’ — what LKJ called BASS CULTURE (B.A.S.S.)
Slide 3
Ivy4Evr — interactive SMS drama for Channel 4 — Blast Theory — written by me.
PILOT transmitted October 2010 — ran through one week in REAL TIME.
Reasons for SMS: young people no smart phones, rubbish phones but always on.
NOT in so-called text speak “L8r” etc/ despite press clichés. Because our research showed that young people don’t use it.
BUT use: compression, different registers, tones of voice, colour, rhetorical devices, habitual misspellings — plus some hacker/web slang e.g. LOL — carried over into the script as a PATINA of typo’s and abbreviations.
Slide 4
Quick few screengrabs from Ivy4Evr script illustrating some of this texture.
Again we saw projections of exclusion.
e.g. in the week before broadcast a single message went out as a trail, and tech blogger Topfife tweeted: ‘Just got an odd text message, then realised I signed up for C4’s SMS drama IVY4EVR. Very yoof.’
‘Very yoof’? The offending msg? Not very ‘yoof’ at all —->
Slide 5
Ewan McLeod in Mobile Industry Review wrote, ‘The site explains that Ivy has left home because “Lilsis” (is that “Little Sister” or somebody else, who knows? I’m over 30) has “done the dirty on her”…’ [actually that’s not my writing but a phrase that emerged in early drafts of press releases etc and stuck, though it’s probably more archaic than contemporary?] ‘Again,’ McLeod continues, ‘forgive me for not quite knowing that definition […] I only point that out because I’m 30+ And I imagine you are too…’
So again, slight but unmistakeable (as with Ed Stourton on the Today Programme talking about Foxy-T, and the unnamed radio interviewer on Franco Rosso’s Dread, Beat an’ Blood): a projected fantasy of exclusion and a call to — or suggested complicity with — some imaginary majority. In this case those of us over 30.
Here are a few links —
Thank you —
§
Caroline Bergvall’s Middling English exhibition was both generous and generative, as were the closing events at John Hansard Gallery. The conversations continued through the evening, of course, and on the train for those of us who travelled back together. An exhibition publication is promised and I’ll link to this when it becomes available; and similarly if further events emerge from these conversations.
As I write, there is still time to register for the pilot of Ivy4Evr, the SMS drama for young people that was commissioned by Channel 4 Education, created by Blast Theory and written by me. Places are limited and to participate you must visit the actual site at www.ivy4evr.co.uk and register by midnight on 9 October.
In advance of Sunday’s launch there is not really time to reflect, let alone to really write anything and certainly not to discuss the process or any other aspect of the project in any detailed way, but perhaps there will be time to do that later anyway; here and elsewhere. A couple of talks have been offered already. Since I can’t write anything myself I thought it would make a change to string some links together for reference but also to see if anything is emerging in how others are writing about the project.
The blurb for Ivy4Evr promises that: ‘For a week she’ll tell you **everything** but,’ it asks, ‘can she trust you and what will you tell her? Sign up and Ivy will text you about her life. If you text her back she will chat to you.’
The Social Uproar blog (‘Helping charities and non profits use social media’) are typical of much early coverage, giving Ivy4Evr some excellent announcement space. Other writers pick up on the project’s stated interactivity.
Katie Bacon at Youth Work Online (‘Exploring youth engagement in a digital age’) featured Ivy4Evr and one of Katie’s readers responded by using the comments function to ask, ‘who will be on the other end of the phone to talk to [young people] about sex, drugs etc.’ Katie followed up this query by asking Blast Theory for more information. She received and posted a detailed summary which included these two sentences:
The project uses an automated system where SMS messages are generated by the SMS engine. There is no person involved [my emphasis] in the sending of SMS to the registered participants.
Similar anxieties emerge at the Mobile Industry Review where Ewan McLeod also wonders aloud about the nature and the workings of the project:
All you have to do to participate is sign-up to get free text updates from Ivy. Then, I imagine, you can reply to her. Or to the production team sitting watching their SMS console.
It’s a great image, ‘the production team’ at their consoles, thumbing away furiously and replying on behalf of Ivy to every text that comes in. Given the number of potential participants, and the week-long, real-time nature of this pilot episode, for Ewan’s vision to really be the case we’d have needed some vast call-centre with a player:operative ratio of around 1:1. Ewan has signed up and promised to tell us how it goes.
Both writers’ anxieties conjure up visions of Ivy as a contemporary equivalent of Wolfgang Von Kempelen’s ‘Mechanical Turk’ from 1770 — an apparent automaton but one that was in fact operated live and in real time by a person who hid in the rather bulky cabinet beneath.
Ivy is not like that. Not at all.
Some comments that appear following posts about Ivy are themselves automated, like this obviously ‘commentbot’-generated* non sequitur to a post by Carly Bennett that appeared on her blog, Writing from the Tub – My life as a writer in Bath:
‘Dissertation Writing service’ said… Despite the bulk of information online we often fail to get the specific information which is needed this post is good & contains relevant information that I was in quest of .I appreciate your efforts in preparing this post.
Elsewhere Alastair Shortland on Facebook took a more user-centric approach, asking the Ivy4Evr page: ‘Will you also be using MMS [Multimedia Messaging Service]? Will the SMS messages contain links to images or web content? Guess I should just wait and see ;-)’
Some reflect on the fact that texts sent to Ivy are charged at the normal network rates, while others realise that because they live outside the UK they will not be able to participate. We’re sorry about that too.
Last night I had an email from my friend Drazen Pantic. I’ve known Drazen since 2001 when I commissioned various writings to accompany the seminal CODE Conference (‘Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy’) at which he was a speaker. Drazen is a native of Belgrade, Serbia, where in 1995 he founded OpenNet, the internet department of Radio B92 in Belgrade and Serbia’s first internet service provider. In 1999 Drazen Pantic was given the Pioneer Award of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for his use of new media technologies to counter political repression in the former Yugoslavia. He is now based in New York where he continues to explore, promote and create tools for free and open media.
Drazen sent me a link to a very nice online tool called YouReputation, which is,
a viral reputation scanner, based on on [an] innovative mathematical engine and Internet technology. YouReputation scans static and dynamic Web and social networks according to a given query (name, URL, combination of words) and computes viral entropy and viral potential for the query and identifies most viral sources with their Bayesian probabilities.
I will monitor our progress during the week, and try and speak with Drazen to find out more about his viral reputation scanner, how to read it. For now though, the YouReputation engine and accompanying blurb feels like an apt metaphor for a moment that I have come to recognise just pre-publication of a book, for example, when anything might happen, when entropy and potential are poised, entwined and waiting for the moment when the game starts.
For the past year or so I’ve been working with internationally renowned and BAFTA-nominated artists Blast Theory on Ivy4Evr, an interactive text-messaging drama for young people commissioned by Matt Locke at Channel 4 Education. A pilot episode for up to 5,000 users, drawn from marketing across T4 runs for a week starting on 10 October 2010. You’ll need to register to take part.
Ivy4Evr is commissioned by a major broadcaster, but the drama takes place entirely on the users’ mobile phone, enabling them to interact directly with Ivy via text messages (SMS) and substantially influence their experience of the story as they go along.
I have followed Blast Theory’s work since the since the early 1990s. I visited them in Berlin in 1997 as they were conceptualising a new work which predicted the TV innovations of Big Brother by framing consensual incarceration and surveillance as a new kind of drama and celebrity. Since then they have led the way in using mobile technology and high-end, mixed-reality computing to create new kinds of dramatic and gaming experiences across both real and virtual worlds, sometimes simultaneously.
Now we’re all having to think in this way. In recent years I have been actively exploring the possibilities offered by new forms of distribution, new contexts and new platforms such as ebooks. Since 2007 I have pursued this through collaborations with established but innovative institutions such as the Science Museum, London, where I was writer in residence and we revived their disused publishing imprint for a one-off, free giveaway of Albertopolis Disparu, a specially commissioned new work of fiction; and more recently by collaborating with James Bridle and his experimental Artists’ Ebooks site, where three short stories of mine are currently available as free downloads in the EPUB format and (as of last week) from iBooks, too.
Like all writers (and publishers) I’m interested in anything that helps introduce my fiction to new readers in new ways. Colleagues at the Science Museum put it nicely, framing the Albertopolis Disparu give-away as a means to offer ‘a quality experience’ to thousands of visitors. For me it is also about demystifying those developments and getting a feel for them, and alongside that working in innovative ways to reach huge audiences almost instantly — whether through the vast footfalls of the Science Museum or the enormous reach and popularity of T4, Channel 4’s 16-25 scheduling slot and website.
Which is why it has been so exciting working with Blast Theory on a truly interactive piece of writing. For more than a decade they have been exploring not only interactivity but also mixed reality computing and the ways that fictional worlds can overlay the real world around us; creating dramatic potential where the two collide. Tapping into this unique collective knowledge as we’ve experimented with the kinds of stories that it might be possible to tell through an interactive SMS platform has been an incredibly rich experience. It has forced me to think differently about writing and about storytelling. At times I have joked that I feel more intelligent when I’m in the same room as Matt, Nick and Ju; as if by some intellectual osmosis or a variation on the Burroughsian ‘Third Mind’.
I’m wondering if it is significant that this project has been created outside the book trade. In light of our work on Ivy4Evr it was interesting to follow the twitter feed yesterday from The Bookseller Children’s Annual Conference at the British Library. As you might expect there was a lot of tweeting about apps and Matt Locke’s presentation about focusing on content rather than platform is reported in The Bookseller.
With Ivy4Evr though, creatively as well as in terms of making the story accessible to as many young people as possible, it has been essential to forget about apps and ebooks for a while, and here’s why:
Working on Ivy4Evr forced us to acknowledge the basic fact that most young people don’t have expensive smart phones.
Maybe they will at some point, but not yet. Not the groups that Blast Theory surveyed and we ran workshops with.
Their phones were rubbish old hand-me-downs and the kind that you can buy for a tenner in a bundle that includes a ten-pound top-up.
But the phones they do have are always switched on.
We also found out that they answer their phones in class and they (almost) never use cliched text speak (‘L8r’ etc).
Learning from this enabled us to push past current preoccupations with apps and ebooks for this age-group in favour of the familiar and more ubiquitous medium of text messaging. The really exciting thing about Ivy4Evr has come from combining SMS with some amazing new technology so that my script, with its endless permutations and possible pathways, is at the heart of a new kind of interactive and personalised storytelling; one that is created not just by what I have written but also by how participants respond.As it says in the blurb: For a week Ivy will tell you **everything** but can she trust you and what will you tell her?
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We are inviting people to take part in an exclusive preview of the pilot episode of Ivy4Evr, which runs for one week from the 10th to the 16th of October and you could also win an iPad.
To sign up to participate is free, messages received from Ivy are free, SMS messages sent to Ivy are sent to a standard mobile phone number and charged at normal rate. Everyone who registers and verifies by midnight on 9th October goes into the running to win an iPad.
I have posted links to this Youtube video of Alan Ginsberg performing his poem ‘Father Death Blues’ on Facebook a couple of times. The second time because the first one got taken down and thus the embed code had changed. I love the poem and particularly this rendition of it for many reasons, one of which is that I can equally well imagine Ivor Cutler singing it.
The recording is from a BBC interview programme called Face to Face from 1995. A previous posting of the video included host Jeremy Isaacs asking Ginsberg how he would like ‘us’ to remember him, to which Ginsberg replies, perhaps surprisingly, ‘Oh, I think “Father Death Blues”, the poem “Father Death Blues”. Maybe I should sing that? Would it be of interest?’
Ginsberg is thoughtful, generous and insightful throughout. At one point Isaacs asks him whether he is a writer or a performer. It feels like a slightly forced question but actually it prompts Ginsberg to talk about poets who perform their writing; about the ‘dimension of sound’ in his own work, and his use of
‘vernacular rhythms and diction […] So that it is possible to perform, or recite, or orate, or vocalise – I would say – my poems, and have them understood more rapidly, almost instantaneously, as ordinary speech. Or intense fragments of ordinary speech…’
I particularly like the slightly garbled way he introduces the train of thought: ‘And there is the preparation in America of vehicle for idiomatic communication.’ [His emphasis.]
I was thinking about this on Monday when I had an email from publishing provocateur and visionary James Bridle of the excellent future of publishing blog Booktwo.org and founder of the experimental Artist’s eBooks project. He wrote with news that the three short stories of mine he published in the EPUB format at the end of 2009 (which I blogged about here) are now also available free from the new iBooks store, a development which operates alongside iTunes and eases compatibility and functionality with iPads and 4G iPhones.
If like me you don’t have an iPad or a 4G iPhone, you can still download the stories free of charge from the Artist’s eBooks site to read on a host of devices, including a Mac or PC using the free Adobe Digital Editions software. Much much more reliable information on formats etc is available on the help page of course. There is also a very nice one on there by the writer Niven Govinden.
One of my stories, ‘How we made “An American Legend” part 1’, was commissioned by Las Cienegas Projects in Los Angeles to accompany a group show entitled Landscape Memories Revisited. I’ve worked with the artist Steven Hull of LCP on a couple of previous projects — including Ab Ovo, a huge collaborative relay that mobilised the psychiatric testing of visual artists to generate children’s stories — and I love his work, so this was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
It was a timely commission too, since I’d been wanting to write about the California where my own late father had lived. At the time, my father’s friend and executor was still trying with little success to sell his car — a 2004 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS — and wind up the estate, so perhaps it was inevitable that this worked its way into the story:
‘What you get?’ I asked him. ‘An LS?’
‘Nope’
‘SS?’
‘Yup ha ha ha’
‘How much?’ We were looking for fire-sale prices, a dead man’s car.
‘Five three. Dude wanted six nine nine two.’
What we had got for our $5k give or take was a sixth generation 2004 Chevy Monte Carlo SS, two door coupe. Silver with black interior. Good condition. No accidents. Thirty-some-thousand on the clock.
That is SS as in ‘Super Sport’ for any of you non-GM heads. So pretty much a 3.8 liter Buick V6 unit in there. Two-hundred HP. Yes OK I will admit there are better numbers on the SS Super…, but Scott was not complaining. Nice details on the trim too, such as front license plate close-out.
Cool :-)
Never mind idiomatic communication, it crossed my mind as I was writing to wonder, and only half-jokingly, whether I was invoking this particular vehicle as an act of sympathetic magic. As if by writing about a couple of fictional Serbian-American Chevy freaks looking for a second hand car I might help to conjure up some real buyers…
My father was a bit of a gearhead himself and a European migrant though from the UK rather than the Balkans, where Patricia a.k.a. ‘SD Chevy Girl’ the story’s narrator tells us her grandparents hailed from. I don’t think I need to say that all characters and situations in the story are completely fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead would be entirely coincidental etc. I should also point out that the numerous misspellings in the story — including the name of Filippi’s Pizza Grotto — are the narrator’s own. However the locations are real, and included in the story is a plug for Cruisin’ Grand, a classic car cruise that takes over several blocks of Grand Avenue, Escondido, Ca. every Friday night during the summer.
This Friday’s Cruisin’ Grand (24 September 2010) is the last of the season, so if you’re in the San Diego area or even the wider SoCal megaregion you might want to check it out.
There was a great turn out last night for the launch of ATOMANOTES by Liliane Lijn in the wonderful, bohemian surroundings of the barely-converted mews space that is Maggs Gallery. The reception was generously co-hosted by Maggs Bros. Rare Books, to whom I am very grateful. Here are a few photos.
L-R: Rosemary Bailey, Andrew Wilson, Liliane Lijn, Ken Hollings
Liliane spoke briefly and insightfully about the project, reading a short extract from the introduction to her visionary epic poem Crossing Map(London: Thames and Hudson, 1983) that described the genesis of ATOMANOTES.
Liliane also revealed that the catalyst for her to write Crossing Map had been that she was unable in 1968 to find any scientists who were willing to answer the questions she was formulating about human and atomic behaviour.
L-R: Ken Hollings, Richard Strange
There’s something quite remarkable about questions being posed yet remaining unanswered for forty-two years. That’s a long time.
Forty-two years is precisely how long it would take, for example, to send a radio signal from Earth to the solar system known as Gliese 581d (about 20.3 light years from Earth) and receive a reply.
If you haven’t heard of it before Gliese 581d is a solar system in the constellation of Libra. It is also the home of ‘at least two potentially habitable planets and the most Earth-like planet discovered so far.’
I’m not making this up.
In fact, an experiment to do just this was recently launched from the NASA/CSIRO Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla in Australia. Here is what it says on the Hello From Earth experiment‘s website:
At midday on Friday 28 August 2009, the 70-metre main antenna, known as DSS43, transmitted the signal to Gliese 581d at a frequency of 7.145 gigahertz and a power of 18 kilowatts. The resulting signal, repeated twice over two hours, was equivalent to using the combined power of over 300 billion mobile phones at the same time.
There is way more information on the website, including a live counter which shows that there are still (at time of writing) 19 years, 159 days, 21 hours, 8 minutes and 5 seconds until that signal reaches Gliese 581d.
Back on Earth, the working title Liliane used to gather those questions together in her notebooks forty-two years ago was ‘Atom-man Notes’.
L-R: Liliane Lijn, Tony White
James watching 'What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping', Maggs Gallery. Photos at rear are of William S Burrough in Paris.
When we first met up a couple of years ago to discuss what she might do for Piece of Paper Press, Liliane suggested that it might be worth revisiting those Atom-man Notes. I agreed. The questions (prefaced with the directive, ‘See human beings as atomic stuctures obeying the same laws as atoms’) include the following:
If each atom has a certain field of radiation then what kind of field does each structure called a human being have?
[…]
Imagine human beings travelling at the speed of light. Would we then have a stronger gravitational field? What if the mind could function, thoughts travel at that speed, would it exert a gravitational pull?
Now, finally, the questions have been answered by a number of scientists including John Vallerga, Laura Peticolas, John Bonnell and Ilan Roth. Their answers form the bulk of the text in Liliane’s new book. However, the small, roughly A7 format of Piece of Paper Press editions has forced a compression of that original working title to the single neologism ATOMANOTES.
In the here and now of a rainy September evening in London, when Liliane finished her reading we distributed copies of her book. As with all editions from Piece of Paper Press, ATOMANOTES was given away, so everyone left with a free copy.
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I love this picture (above left) of James watching a DVD of Liliane’s 1974 film What is the Sound of One Hand Clappingon the monitor when we were setting up.
Looking at the photo earlier I noticed something; a bit of a happy accident.
If you have seen the film, or know about Liliane’s poem machines, you will appreciate that the probability of such a photograph capturing a recognisable word on screen completely by chance would have to be pretty small. Look more closely and you will see that not only did the camera do exactly that, but, even better, framed and almost perfectly registered on the screen is this (hint: click the image for a nice surprise):
Piece of Paper Press & tonywhite.london 
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