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I recently gave an email interview, the answers to which were included in a feature on arts funding in Ireland. The article, ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ was published in the January 26th edition of The College Tribune (not yet online), a University College Dublin publication. Perhaps like everyone who’s ever been interviewed, I feel the quotes chosen for the piece slightly misrepresented my answers. This is first time I’ve written at length about my involvement in Exchange Dublin, Exchange Words and ‘the arts’ in Ireland generally, so I’m pasting the full text of the interview here ‘for the record’.

Tell me about Exchange Dublin and your involvement in the organisation.

Exchange Dublin is a collective art centre in Temple Bar. It was established initially by a group of artists involved in something known as ‘The Office of Public Works’. These were Jonah King, Dylan Haskins, Rosin Beirne, Anna Khan and Andreas Von Knobloch. The initiative grew out of their interest in creating a non-profit, youth orientated space to facilitate the creation of innovative, publicly accessible art & music initiatives in the city. Exchange Dublin is part of a new, perhaps recession driven interest in non-profit, collective arts in Dublin. Longer running initiatives in the same vein include Seomra Spraoi & The Shed.

I got involved in the Exchange on 15th August 2009, at the first Exchange general ‘open space’ meeting. I’d become interested in storytelling events by listening to podcasts from ‘The Moth’, a US storytelling organisation which along with shows like PBS’s ‘This American Life’ has done much to drive the current revival of the American oral tradition.

I had the idea to do something similar here, though in a more collaborative, less exclusive way. My experiences visiting Seomra Spraoi, and personal disillusion with authoritarian styles of organizational structure drew me to the Exchange initiative; and have been key in my approach to helping to organise the Exchange Words group.

Exchange Words is the group that ultimately developed out of these disparate interests. We’re an open group meeting weekly in the space, who’ve so far put on three events at monthly intervals; featuring a mixture of spoken word theatre, standup comedy, poetry and more experimental work. We’ve also helped out with other spoken word initiatives in the space, like the enormously successful ‘Milk and Cookies’ storytelling group. Currently we’re focused on organising a series of free writing and performance workshops.

It’s been a very strong emphasis on my own personal involvement in the group from the start to document the group process. Both in order to make it as accessible for new members as possible, and to provide a record of what we’ve done. To do this I’ve implemented a website (http://words.exchangedublin.ie), making all our meeting minutes public; and more importantly making available (as audio podcasts and streaming video), as complete as possible a record of our participants participation in Words events.

Outside of Exchange Words, I also volunteer on a weekly basis in the space; greeting new arrivals, making tea, and helping with general upkeep. I also attend the weekly Exchange Counsel meetings which govern the running of the space as often as I can.

What obstacles have you encountered in establishing yourself in the arts? How much of this can be attributed to your recent graduate status? Do you find youth a help or a hindrance in this way?

My main interests career-wise are in creative writing and standup comedy / sketch comedy performance. I started standup in August, and I’ve been writing since secondary school. I’m not sure how to quantify difficulties encountered… In terms of standup, getting paid work would be the most important problem. There’s a sort of virtuous circle in Ireland, where TV appearances and competition victories land you paid spots in comedy clubs. Right now I’m working for free. Because of the limited size of the audience here (and the poverty of televised and radio comedy), pretty much every Irish comedian plans to move to England at some point; and I’m no different. It’s just a reality of the business that even moderate success here doesn’t provide a living; and ‘big’ success on the Irish scene doesn’t translate abroad. To make it comedians have to go to England or the US.

I don’t feel that my graduate status impacts this at all, and my youth even less so- As a 30 year old former mature student, I’m at the older end of the ‘amateur’ comedy scene.

In terms of writing, I guess the difficulties would be getting published. Fortunately with publication, location is less important. It would be difficult for me to quantify initiatives to make the ‘life of the writer’ easier, beyond grants and residencies, which wouldn’t be granted to someone at my stage of career in any case (one story published, one novel seeking a publisher).

I got my start writing attending free writers groups run in Balbriggan library in the early 1990′s. Initiatives like this- to provide a dedicated, low or no cost opportunity for writers to meet, write and compare their work are incalculably valuable. I’m still trying to organising similar things at an informal level to this day.

In the current climate, is it more difficult to establish yourself in the arts sector? What do you make of the state of health of the arts in Ireland?

I don’t think the health of the arts in Ireland is very measurably related to the economic climate. At least not from my worms eye view. Funding for the arts didn’t swell to useful levels during the economic boom, and haven’t yet dropped to calamitous levels. Due to the lack of government support (beyond capital investment and a few tent pole institutions like the National Museum of Modern Art), my perspective would be that most arts institutions in the country are heavily private financed, and extremely commercially orientated.

That said, an initial grand from the Project Arts Centre, and subsequent grants from a variety of institutions (including the Arts Counsel), were vital in establishing and purchasing equipment for Exchange Dublin. Although the venue itself covers ongoing costs primarily through low price, all ages concerts.

Again- completely from my personal perspective: It’s only when you go abroad that you realise the poverty of visual arts institutions in Ireland. Our galleries and museums are a joke next to British or American institutions like MOMA, the Pheonix Art Museum, the Tate etc. There are of course economies of scale at work here; but Ireland has been supremely ineffective at providing public access to the treasures of modern art. In terms of classical art, the National Gallery has some decent dutch masters and a Caravaggio. Hurray.

In terms of the performing arts, it does seem like (especially in Dublin), there are a variety of initiatives of worth; promoting theatre especially. However, without going into libelous detail, often access to and participation in these initiatives is effectively exclusive to clique of kids that have come up through youth theatre programmes; rather than writers and performers from outside the theatre world. I know comedians in general feel completely excluded from the theatre world. At the same time, I know folks in the theatre world who are all too keen to get more comedic shows into the various theatre festivals. As in all these things, the perception of exclusivity is as important as the reality.

What are your ambitions for the future? Do you see a way to actualise them in Ireland, or is a move abroad necessary?

I think I answered this partly above. Basically I would like to work as a writer of literary and science fiction, and perform as a comedian. Most of my comedy heros got their big break writing and performing on shows for BBC Radio 4, and that channel, together with the BBC digital TV channels, still commissions more original content (especially in comedy), than anywhere else in the world.

I do see traveling as a necessity at some point. It’s something I should probably do sooner rather than later… However it’s hard to see when would be the right time. I’m just starting to get a decent name with promoters over here, and traveling would mean starting again.

I’m trying to keep my ambitions as open as possible so that I don’t turn away from any opportunities. I’m also using this time to try to develop ideas that I could potentially use later in my career when I have more opportunities. I’m still a novice live performer, and I’m looking forward to developing these skills (possibly even in a theatre setting), this year. Personally, the attachments I have to Ireland are financial and interpersonal rather than anything else. I have almost no ‘national pride’, and very little attachment to the ‘imagined community’ of the Irish nation state. This kind of pretentious pomposity is endemic to comedians I’m afraid. Possibly if I do travel I’ll experience that paradoxical exaggeration of ‘national’ characteristics common to ex-pats.

What would be your advice to the current government in the light of the reduction to arts spending?

Spend money on smaller initiatives. Give money to individual groups and artists rather than swollen bodies which sit parasitically on the artery of arts funding. Make ten thousand tiny grants available, with the qualifying criteria bring past and current work- not renown, prizes won, or the current commercial value of an artists output; and you’ll see ten thousand talented artists spring up.

Encourage initiatives which build self efficacy and core skills in the production of visual, written and performance art.

Allow groups to design their own structure and don’t drown them in paper work.

Fund self organised, genuinely open spaces, which place no limits on their use beyond the consensus of their members.

Fund free seminars, masterclasses and courses.

Put money in primary and secondary arts education- I never held a paint brush until secondary school, and by that point Art Class was a glorified crammer for the junior cert.

Offer writers living in the country incentives to teach; and support the initiatives they’ve already started (like Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words group).

Contradictorily, don’t focus all your funding on using art as a method of attenuating social inequality- a vanishingly small number of deprived kids will climb out of poverty through this method.

‘The arts’, whatever that means should be open to everyone. Funding should ideally be meritocratic, and put where it provides most creative freedom, and facilitates the production of the most interesting work.

Create the equivalent of an Open University for visual and performance arts, writing and music.

How necessary is art in the current economic climate? What creative possibilities do you take from it?

How necessary is the current economic climate in the light of art? To me, creative work is the whole point. Consumerism, a fixation on GDP, the exploitation of natural resources, ‘building infrastructure to facilitate long term economic goals’: These are the distractions. If our lives are to have any meaning, then what we achieve and create is all that matters- and here I mean achievement in the largest sense: exploration of space, scientific comprehension of the fundamental structure and processes underlying cosmology and subatomic structure, psychological investigations into meaning and identity.

The arts provide the lens through which we can evaluate the necessity and purpose of our lives. It’s specious to put things the other way around. We should be moving toward a society in which information technology is used to expand the public debate and the public consciousness, to facilitate complete direct democracy and the maturation of our adolescent society. Literacy- be it written, audio-visual or affective, is the core skill set in divining purpose. A skill set fed and watered by the creation and appreciation of art.

What advice would you give to other young graduates who wish to work in the arts in Ireland?

Do the thing you do. If you’re an actor, act. If you’re a writer, write. If you’re a painter, paint… And so on. Don’t get a job in arts administration where you help to facilitate the distribution of funding determined by long term strategic blah blah blah blah blah. That’s how you become a clerk.

Meet people, work together on things. Don’t take it too seriously. Try to survive from the products of your creative labour, but do it even if you need to do something else to pay the rent. It’s the whole point.

What is for certain is that the skills you develop playing- busking, making podcasts, painting, messing around with electronics, writing stories at 4AM in your bedroom; will be the basis of the person you become, the people you meet, and the cool stuff you get to do for the rest of your life.

Oh and don’t get a mortgage. It’ll eat your soul.

Her little face was blank. Vacant, Tim thought, wholly absent. But then, he hadn’t turned her on. He shifted the rustling foam packaging of the box and pursed the child between two strong hands, lifting her easily up to his face. That close, the skin was ideally imperfect, bright and glossy yet here and there blemished. Not lifelike, real.
He set the doll down, still and oddly incongruent on the coffee table. From the box he pulled an instruction flexiscreen, and touched it awake. A bright, half familiar C-list face, resolved slowly on the disposable LED. He tapped the lips icon, and it spoke.
“Mr Price, thank you for purchasing the Taffin Luxadoll. This doll, like all Taffin products, comes with a full eight-year on site guarantee…”
He grunted, and tapped seek. With the cost of the thing, the deal should include a car, holiday, and daily shiatsu for years to come. The video skipped to a brochure scene, and he hit play. On the flex, a tall pro athlete type was seated in a park on a sunny day, while his creepdoll–maybe two, biological approximate–made tentative steps as he looked on adoringly. The voice-over resumed.
“Not only will your Taffin Luxadoll allow you to practice parenting skills, and provide a loving, well behaved and easily maintained companion.”
On screen, a cute twenty something blonde approached, and began playing co-chi-coo with the giggling creepdoll. Before long she looked up with interest at the beefcake ‘single father’.
“…opportunities for making new friends and socializing with young parents, who can find it difficult to relate to childless singles.”
Tim snorted, glancing at the creepdoll as the ‘dad’ in the video introduced himself, accompanied by the rich swell of a string quartet. It certainly did look real. “Each face uniquely crafted,” the hoardings roared. “…perfect opportunity to meet,” they whispered, speaking just to him; twenty six to forty four, unmarried, male, college educated. Almost the perfect ABC1 consumer, commuting to and from a highly paid anonyjob.
“Hey Tim, check this out.”
“Yo Tim, have we got a deal for you.”
“Tim, this year take a gender vacation in lawless Nevada.”
At least the hoardings were discrete. Crowded on the subway at night, no one knew which ad had hooked your retina, which acoustic cone projected just to you, whispering, “Tim, you don’t have to be alone, more and more men are choosing…”
Creepdolls. Half illegal, wholly sick toys. Props for pederasts and chicks with burnt out wombs. But they had other uses. As long as you kept their clothes on. As long as you hid the state-mandated absence of genitals, and the lemon yellow ‘Non Organic Lifeform’, tattooed onto their tiny silicone chests. Creepdolls could pass for human, for a while.
On the flex, animated boot-up instructions flashed for his attention. Tim shook his head, laid the doll down, still in her two foot oaken box, and went to bed.

“Create a rich parenting environment,” the fleck advised.
“Outfit your home, as for a human child.”
And so he did, hitting Macy’s new-parent site for a child pen, mobile, cradle and ‘Daddy Dearest’ front-side toddler carrier. He thought about it for a while, then added pampers, wipes and kiddie chow for realism.
The doll watched as Tim assembled first its cradle, then the hugely intricate pen, with its eighty-five separate pieces, and instructions in Persian, Chinese, and comically inept Engrish. He’d propped the creature upright in its box, at an angle to the wall, so he could keep an eye on it; so it could keep its eyes on him.
It was a cute, freckled little thing, with dark blue ringlets and a slightly crooked overbite. A face Nth generation maternity mechanisms had tweaked and prettied to imprinting perfection. Even off, Tim could feel its need, its simple pure desire to be protected. He shivered a little, pushing the last slat into place. Somehow the pen seemed reassuringly solid. He turned and hefted the doll’s light, carbon-silicate frame into the enclosure, turning it on.
For a moment, nothing. The eyes remained glassy as ever, features frozen in timeless contemplation. Then it blinked and looked about, orienting, lifting its arms to stretch; flexing fingers like a miniature pianist. Systems test he thought, coolly fascinated. It had to be checking each silent servo, each richly adaptive kinaesthetic analogue. Before him, the doll began to spin, smiling softly as it turned, fat wee arms realistically loose. Little knees bent convincingly below a sunflower yellow summer dress. Tim leaned over the pen and the creepdoll froze and blinked again, activating some high level learning set, froze and looked into his face. He smiled a little awkwardly. He tried “Hello”.
“Daddy”, she replied, and threw her arms around him.

He set his test up on a grassy bank, up along the breeze cooled cliffs that overlooked the great Atlantic bridge. He’d brought along a hydroponic picnic, which sighed itself out into a tartan groundsheet, sprouting bulbs of iced lemon tea, and hot buttery pitta bread, stuffed with tofu and chickpea falafels.
Tim lifted the doll from her carrier, and set her upright on the grass beside him. Deactivated, for the moment dead, she was as actual as Eve. Frozen deep in some infantile epiphany, her little features were scrunched in apparent surprise. He shifted the doll so it faced away along the clifftop path, then switched it on.
The little girl sprang to life, tottering along the grass, glancing round in apparent joyous exploration. For a moment he worried she might wander too far, cross the path to the long still drop to the rocks below. Then he remembered the breeze shield which deflected accidents and would-be suicides. Remembered she was dead, and heavily insured.

Suki had been his tipping point. Lean, hip, and lush with enhancements, she’d seemed liberated and exciting. Through their first date, Tim had been captivated. Captivated by her tales of slaughter weekends in the dry wastes of the Aussie outback. Captivated by her skins lullaby drift from indigo luminescence to translucence. Perhaps the bar code on her neck should have rung alarm bells, a little tasteless as she’d never been to jail. He knew he should have taken note when her club of choice turned out to be ‘The Comedown King’, a motley cantina packed with ex-junkies and serotonin temperance freaks. In the pub a loping cybergoth, huge and oddly free of visible tech or even old school body mods, had gripped his arm too hard and held his gaze unhealthily–an ex, of course, slapping Suki’s ass possessively, bawdily whispering something which set her laughing. Tim had tried to steel a grin, offered the manimal a drink. Had tried not to react as this topless bemuscled cretin stood between him and the girl, gutting their date like a boneless fish. He’d gotten up to leave when they’d begun playfully fooling around, the goth demonstrating a foreplay technique involving grinding Suki into his lap as he hooked Tim’s gaze and chewed her shoulder. He’d gotten up to leave, but had been stopped by the girl, who’d hopped up suddenly and taken his hand, and led him like a lamb, deep into a darker, danker corner of the bar; where she’d launched into a gritty exposition of her childhood–her hand on his cheek, kawaii eyes wider than ever. She’d talked, and just as it had seemed that they might have a two way conversation, rushed off to hold court with one or another group of drugged out criminal types. Each time, eventually returning to talk at him some more, her date buddy. He’d left finally, alone at three, stooped and defeated, refusing an invitation to some hip pad where terrible things, he expected, fizzed on blackened, stolen, silver spoons. He’d actually dated Suki twice after that. Both times she’d been vacant and indifferent, checking her timeplant, repeatedly bouncing their location as if to shake something, someone traveling with them.

Suki had been the last, the worst, the crazy story Tim would tell at dinner parties; slyly hinting at the excitement of his other, darker, more experimental life. Suki had been the worst, but in truth, just another in the conga line of disastrous, staccato flickering embarrassments. Girls his memory shot past on greased electric rails. What, he’d ask, finding himself again and again alone, could be the problem? He was such a nice guy, well educated, considerate in conversation, attentive. The sort of guy who’d carry a single red rose, let his companion choose the restaurant, the play, the movie–pay for everything–soliloquise amusingly when the occasion demanded, nod appreciatively when expected. The sort of guy who’d always, always leave the appropriate and subtly communicative delay, before calling for a second date. It couldn’t be him.

Out on the green, the little girl had found a friend. Another tot, about three or four, this one most likely alive, and human, and unaware of her companion’s strange mix of vat organics and plastic composites and nothing else at all. A kid racing around the doll, clapping her hands.
The girl’s parents gradually approached along the path and, smiling, introduced themselves.
“Patrick Hersh.”
“Beth Earnhardt.”
He responded, shaking their hands in turn.
The man, a slight bookish type, sweating through a short sleeved work smock, laughed.
“Seems like Trish and your daughter get along pretty well.”
Sure enough, out on the grass, the girl and the machine chased one another, their little arms outstretched, as much to protect from falling as to tag.
“I guess they are.” Tim said, and choked a little, his mind blank.
“She is a little dear,” said the woman, taller than her husband; slim, unreasonably pretty.
“What’s her name?”
Tim didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He’d honestly never considered the question. Naming a creepdoll, now that was something. The man coughed, and Tim spoke up.
“Lucy… Lucy doesn’t have too many friends. She gets a little… Excited.”
He rose, and began walking toward the girls, gaining speed, moving too fast, almost slipping on the grass as he stooped to lift his little girl into the air.

The single parent group was pricey; there’d be no half mad goth chicks here. Only the finest high functioning neurotics, borderline and histrionic personalities–the Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc of personality disorders. Be friendly, be friendly but distant, he thought; responding politely, even warmly, to the low end alimonied types who seemed at first so eager. Don’t cash in too soon, he told himself, you can do better. Scan the territory. You are the prize.
He gossiped mindlessly with the other dads, and waited for a woman to catch his eye. Lucy seemed to fit in so well with the other children. Amazing in one sense, her intricate co-ordination, her perfectly infantile proto-speech. Perfect wizardry. But he wondered, how many situations could the doll be exposed to? The makers had obviously anticipated a classroom scenario, and she joined in eagerly with finger painting, occasionally toddling over to present some primitivist masterpiece. What other, strictly speaking legal, but less socially acceptable situations, had she been prepared for? He was briefly nauseated.
“Your daughter is adorable,” a voice from behind his shoulder.
“How old is she?”
This time he was prepared.
“She’ll be two next May.”
His eyes remained fixed on the doll.
The woman moved to his side, and he watched her, vague in his peripheral vision, absent mindedly pawing at her kids biomeasure, fingers tracing the haptic bump of an endorphin jump. Tim turned to briefly look her over. Petite, blond hair jetting back into a sharp forest of manga-spikes. A bodice, wasp wasting down to a black mini. Her glasses purple shaded and trendily off kilter. The typical conservative single Mom, but thinner. Her cheeks seemed shrunken, if still flush. Her wrist reaching back to pat her hair, a little desiccated. Not Ani he thought, returning his gaze to his little girl, now bouncing about on a miniature space hopper, chased by a clutter of screaming toddlers. Not Ani, too healthy a complexion. CR for sure, with the clear skin and bright eyes of a dedicated life extender. Thin though, as from disease. Hot.
“Alefiyah”, she said, extending her hand, and he took it warmly, gently, a little frightened of exerting pressure.
They spoke as the kids played, watching each other carefully, awkwardly venturing grins and newcomer observations at the expense of other parents. Alefiyah, hinting at how she’d set up in the city after a change of job and a messy breakup. Tim, explaining his choice to have a child alone. She had, he found, a rare intelligence, a way of priming jokes so that their bawdy payload seemed to land only slowly and uncertainly, as though a product of your own perversity. What a joy to talk at last to a girl articulate, with hot gesticulations and wry challenging observations; a three dimensional human being.

As the weeks passed, Tim played hot and cold, flirting with the best of the other mothers; acting distracted one day, slipping Alefiyah a book or mix album permission the next. He took to dressing well, in Versace cashmere belly tops and Ralph Lauren kabuki-ninja turbans. He had his plaits re-dyed in affect-triggered Day-Glo spirals; twists that glowed sunset orange when he chatted with Alefiyah. They began walking by the park after class, the kids scooting around their feet on toy slow drift-skeds, raising waves of Autumn leaves to flutter and land in Alefiyah’s hair. Leaves for Tim to tenderly remove.
They talked, acquainting themselves with warm censored versions of one other. Alefiyah, vocal in her support of his choice to have a child alone. Tim, shaking his head at reports of her humorless, careerist ex. Always the children played together. Lucy and Rowan, growing ever closer through the autumn, separating only at night, when the little doll had to be secreted away, to charge with a low hum from an ordinary wall socket.

Alefiyah toasted two handfuls of chestnuts on the grill, simmering a mushroom and grape juice sauce up in a shallow pan, delicately weighing each pinch of basil and oregano, before tossing them into the simmering mix. In another pot, an inch and a half of boiling rice neared readiness.
Tim’s mouth watered. When you were this hungry, you could taste the steam that rose in thick wet drifts from the cooking surface. He reached into the heat field for a chestnut, had his hand slapped back twice–first by the dry burn, a second time by the girl.
“Go check on the kids,” she scolded, turning from the pots to face him, pantomime pushing in the direction of the living room, her eyes grinning wickedly.
“In fact, get everybody washed up, grub’s almost ready.”

Washing the kids’ proffered hands reminded Tim of something he dreaded. What if Lucy were to spill something on herself? What if Alefiyah thought she needed to use the potty? He didn’t want to imagine her reaction. Couldn’t stop himself visualising surprise, disgust. Alefiyah dropping, perhaps throwing, Lucy into the bath, or against a wall. Rowan grafted to her chest as she smashed blindly out of the apartment. Officers at his door. His name on a registry at playgrounds and nurseries. Perhaps a story in the newsfeeds. Lucy, ground up, recycled, or worse; resold as a toy to some molester.
Tim was shaking, one hand on the basin, his blanched face staring back from the mirror. The kids watched him quizzically, Rowan backing away, Lucy turning her head on one side to look right up at him.
“Daddy… You ok, Daddy?” She held out one tiny palm, patted his knee. Tim reached down and picked the little girl up, pressed her to his chest, buried his face in her sea blue curls.
“Everything’s alright Lucy. Everything is fine.”

He rose from the mattress and tossed his legs over the side, dropping his sleep-set to the bedside table. In the cool grey half-light, Alefiyah looked beautiful, her features softened but still strong. He ran a finger over her lips, brushed her hollowed cheek. It was only the third time she’d spent the night. Defying all convention, they’d waited months to sleep together. At the group, gossip had cracked like static around their near chaste ‘Victorian courtship’. All the chickens clucked their disapproval. Neither of them cared. There was something romantic about an old-time affair.
Tim padded onto the landing, steering through the apartment by memory. He checked on Rowan, sprawled on a futon in the spare room; mohawk tufted to a frond above his Spiderman pajamas. Lucy was in the little room he’d painted for her. Formerly the den, now a nursery with softly pulsing cartoon lullabies, silent in the deep stage of a sleep cycle. Clowns and birds of paradise, glowing like radon watches in the cave of dark. Lucy was charging in her cradle, to which he’d added an induction pad when the risk of wires became too great.
As Tim leaned over her cot she seemed to wake, to smile and raise her little arm, to wave. He blinked. The doll was sleeping. Micromovements simulated a child at rest. How strange a thought. To whatever degree the girl was conscious, she was always awake, at times merely pretending to sleep. Lucy tossed her head, as though dreaming.

Alefiyah IM’d him at work, the warm throb of a priority communication overriding his filters. Tim nodded, blinking her message crisply to his retina.
Call me ASAP. It’s about your daughter.
He pushed back from his desk, almost knocking over his chair. Unsteadily, he jogged to the corridor and hit the single bathroom, invoking privacy. The company’s monitors would record everything, he couldn’t help that. Fuck. Pulling a work-wear bowtie from round his forehead, Tim slipped to a crouch against the wall. The tiled floor was ice cold. Lucy was at home, what could have happened? With a gesture he called back.
“Tim,” her face broke through, a one way image, eyes searching the blank video on her end.
“Tim, thank God. It’s Lucy. Your super got diverted to me, he’s not on your priority list.” Tim cursed under his breath.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
“She was all alone Tim. A couple heard her crying from across the corridor. She was inconsolable, but I got her down. You should have your sitter arrested, there’s no sign of anyone here.”
Tim allowed himself to breath.
“Al, I can’t thank you enough. You’re amazing.”
“Can you get away?”
“I’ll leave now. Give me a half hour.”

After Alefiyah had left, holding him close in the apartment’s doorway–promising to put him in touch with a reliable agency–Tim leaned against his front door for a long time. The place was eerily quiet.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he pulled up a sketchpad, laying out the problem logically. Alefiyah was everything he’d looked for. Smart, successful, available in a way that had long been considered deeply unfashionable. She was an adult, perhaps the first he’d met. But now… The doll was like an albatross circling ever lower. It was just a clockwork toy, a thing of bytes and plastic after all. He had to rid himself.
Tim smashed his fist against the table, and wiped the document. From the nursery a voice, high and plaintiff.
“Daddy?”
He couldn’t kill his daughter.

As weeks passed and risks mounted, Tim wrestled with the problem. Taking care never to leave the machine on again, he managed to convince Alefiyah he’d hired someone responsible. The clock was ticking. Others might have faced this problem, maybe even found a solution, but his endless trawling of the net couldn’t seem to track them down.
He considered abduction, Lucy stolen by a stranger; but the publicity, the police and media attention. Impossible.
Death then, here or abroad, accident or illness. But where could he go where death certificates wouldn’t require verification, birth records, and the answers to unanswerable questions?
Tim found himself spacing out at work, clicking and unclicking a stylus, gazing out his office window into the bay.
Where could he go where a doctor wouldn’t take one look and realise? Hell, just taking the kid out of the country would be impossible, how would he even get her through border security?

What if the body were completely destroyed? Crushed by a waterfall, or burnt up in an explosion? No use, one problem solved, two more created. The authorities wouldn’t stop searching till they found remains; the police would demand to know the cause.
Modification then, illegal add on parts, enough to fool all but a detailed medical examination. But that would just delay the inevitable. This child would never age or grow, would never change. Even if he could somehow replace her with incrementally ‘older’ models, the intelligence just wasn’t there. Convincing AI topped out in kindergarten.
Perhaps a legal battle, he found himself wondering, occupying a lift for tens of minutes in the evening. Motionless as it drifted up and down past his apartment’s floor. Some disenfranchised maternal character, an actress, emerging from the woodwork to demand sole custody. But it couldn’t be. He’d told Alefiyah the kid was vat grown, remixed and cloned from his own DNA. Even if he went back on that story, he’d have to stage a battle. Alefiyah would never accept it if he just give the child up. Too much conspiracy required. Too many details.
That left what? Come clean, have Alefiyah accept the subterfuge after a minor argument? In twenty years maybe, or on his deathbed, but after a few months? No attraction was that strong.
It seemed the doll would have to die; which took him right back to square one.
Tim asked himself at work, nodding his way through his worst monthly review in half a decade; what would Geppetto do, or dear old doctor Frankenstein?
And just like that, he had his answer.

‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’. They took her eyes, niobium contacts, snapping with a twist-click where the retinas should be.
‘Coral is far more red, than her lips red’. Her mouth peeled back, a rictus of mesh filaments revealed in place of cheeks.
‘If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head’. The scalp parted, a sticky mess of CSF pooling at the seam.
The doll was off. Shipped across the border, inactive in a box. Dead on the operating table. Skinned, dehumanized, synthetic piece by piece. Tim, watching from behind the theatre glass, rubbed a hand over his eyes. Here, here in the unventilated sweat of San Paulo, in back street surgeries built on metamorphosis, on the poor dark dreams of transmen and chimeric furries, you could buy anything, any perversity. You could switch the eyes (vat grown organics), and the face (biomimetic) of a creep doll with what, a street kid? A lost child from who knew where. Even burn the mind in, photo-polymer to synapse, like scouring a wax record from a digital recording. Eat your heart out Pinocchio, Tim thought, eat your heart out.
In the real world it took a body to make a body, rising pink from the amniotic bath. In the real world, a sin behind the switch, skinless, pits hooded in the ropey steak of facial muscle. In the real world, one thing died so another could live. A helm of needles, devils torture chamber, descending; beneath, stereotaxic electrodes extruding. Tim watched, gaze glued to his double murder.

His wife and children put to sleep, he takes a tram, then a bus, then walks part way, implants off so he can’t easily be followed. He charters a sub using a disposable credit slip; rides it way out to the storage lockers, unseen cabins crusting the bay floor in an artificial reef. Pausing in the lock, he unwraps a toy doll from its packet and looks out, out of the clear plastic tunnel to the ocean beyond. Looks out to fronds of algae clutching to the faces of a thousand other pods. To shoals of Striped Bass, and Atlantic Sturgeon darting between them. Somewhere ashore, Lucy, the one with bones, and homework, and a fresh set of teeth; the Lucy with a real live beating heart, is sleeping. He taps a code into the antique panel, waits while pressures equalise.
She’s waiting on the other side. He catches his breath. The door opens. His eyes take in the dull resin of her new face; catch the cheap composites, her eyes now.
His daughter, smiling.

Whit Stilman Trilogy
Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998)

Not one film, but three, Whit Stilman’s charmingly barbed portraits of a group of archetypal upper class Manhattan neurotics, rival anything Woody Allen has produced. Stilman manages to effectively satirise his characters, while whilst drawing them humanely, and with great affection. These movies exist in a kind of glossy nostalgic realm, a quirky modern American Merchant ivory of débutante balls and fairytale discotheques. Stilman’s dialogue is absolutely superb, Noel Coward crossed with Richard Linklater. Highly recommended.

Twin Peaks – Fire Walk with Me

Amazing, Lynch’s distinctive noirish fusion of utopian suburbia and it’s unseemly underbelly at its most visually esoteric and disturbing. Amazing performances by Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, and Ray Wise as the macbethian Leland Palmer. Last but not least, a David Bowie cameo. Astonishing stuff. For those who say it lacks the series distinctive comedy, watch the first twenty minutes (almost a separate movie) again.

Before Sunset

The (second) greatest love story ever filmed. Two people talking for an hour and twenty. That ladies and gentlemen is why Richard Linklater is a genius. If you have a soul you will cry like a pussy.

Waking Life

Linklater, director of Before Sunset and Before Sunrise, and the dreamy 70′s highschool comedy Dazed and Confused, creates his most personal and experimental work, a trippy rotoscoped voyage into the nature of dreams, consciousness and life itself. Unmissable.

Ringu (Ring)

Perhaps the most genuinely terrifying movie ever made. Ringu uses ambient sound, atmospheric staging and subtle performances to disturb on a unconscious level. Forget Sarah Michelle Gellar, ignore the weak sequel and prequel. This is the greatest Japanese horror of all time.

Chasing Amy

The movie that finally made it ok to be bisexual in America. I kid. Easily Kevin Smiths best (and most underrated) film. An honest, and very funny, exploration of sexual orientation and the relationship between the sexes. Why did he have to go back to fart jokes?

Empire Records

Funny, sexy, singable, danceable; and infinitely memorable. This is the movie American teen comedies aspire to be. Watch it for a young Rene Zellweger and Liv Tyler, burning holes in the celluloid. Watch it for the deadpan Zen of Lucas. Watch it for the pitch perfect stoner abandon of Mark. Watch it for a portrait of the pre-grunge 90′s. Just watch it.

Tarnation

To cite a cliche, Tarnation is a film that raises more questions than it answers. For all it’s flaws, a glimpse of the future of film-making, both in terms of it’s dynamic and fluid fusion of drama and documentary, and in it’s use of the montage of found footage to construct a narrative. Worth seeing, once, with friends.

Capturing the Friedmans

A harrowing documentary and an intriguing puzzle, Capturing the Friedmans is unlike any movie you’ve seen. Jarecki’s superbly paced film is composed primarily from found footage, acres of home movies made during a paedophile scandal by the close but tragically conflicted Friedman family. The evidence against the accused son and father is gradually wound out like a lure, and each time we feel close to uncovering the truth around the films central mystery, we become again uncertain. A wonderful, terrifying film about family, and it’s disillusion, which touches on a variety of important and ambitious themes, from sexual abuse to moral panics and the ambivalence of eye witness testamony.

Clueless

The early 90′s in a movie. Irreverent, both to it’s caricatures and it’s audiences expectations, clueless is a much much smarter and better made movie than is readily understood. The movie is a pitch perfect social critique, an audacious Jane Austen update, and a genuinely funny teen comedy.

Koyaanisqatsi – Life Out of Balance

A stunning documentary, made years before the derivative Baraka; which explores mans relationship to nature. Like nothing you’ve ever seen, or heard. The soundtrack from Philip Glass, and cinematography from Ron Fricke are outstanding. A perfect trip movie.

Blue Velvet

Lynch at his most disturbing. From the opening shot, to the closing frame, the glossy surface of a parodically stereotyped American dream, is pulled aside to reveal a mutant underbelly of freakish sexual desire and tragedy; an allegory of almost Greek intensity. Unsettling and beautiful, Blue Velvet epitomises Lynches thrill of the bizarre; often copied, never equalled.

A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles)

Wonderful, beautifully filmed comic love story. Which sacrifices neither its humour to its narrative, nor its drama to it wit. Audrey Tautou is almost unbearably sad and lovely as the reserved but indomitable Mathilde.

Shortbus

A perverse, unique look at 21st century sexuality, as epitomised by the lives of a group of esoteric libertines. Intriguing, though deeply twisted.

Before Sunrise

The greatest love story ever filmed. Utterly believable performances and improvisation from the two leads, and a witty, naturalistic and subtly ambitious script. Sublime.

Sin City

Underrated flawed classic. Easily one of the most visually interesting films ever, Sin City’s frenetic pace never lets up, even over a 2hr running time. Memorable characters and a baroque narrative, make up for the occasionally so so performances. Mickey Rourke steals the show.

How To Get Ahead in Advertising

Shocking, thrilling, absurd comedy, from the team behind Withnail and I. A deeply unsettling and confrontational film; remorselessly critical of modernity and deeply silly. Wunderbar.

Kids

Larry Clark’s genre defining film, captures the lives of working class new york kids, and they smoke dope, chug nitrous, drink, beat one another up, and most controversially, have sex. More than a ‘realistic depiction’, kids (written by Harmony Korine – himself a street kid) succeeds brilliantly in getting under the skins of it’s characters, and exploring the nature of urban adolescence.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

A beautiful and moving documentary, following a disturbed outsider musician, who skirts the proverbial line between genius and madness.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

Proof, if proof were needed, that Richard Curtis was once funny. Most emphatically not the chick flick it is sometimes mistaken for, Four Weddings is a superb comedy of errors. Genuinely moving moments.

Pulp Fiction

Hyper kinetic, startling, hip, and timeless; Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus. A movie nerds dream of obscure references and knowing dialog. Pulp fiction manages to be subversive, clever, and utterly watchable. Even Bruce Willis and John Travolta are cool; and Sam Jackson at his scene chewing best.

Broken Flowers

A truly unique film. Jarmusch’s narrative touch is light as a dream, and much of the film resembles the internal emptiness of Bill Murray’s aging lothario. Somehow, the movie is so uniquely made as to convey this quiet desparation watchably. A little heavy handed in places, Broken Flowers has perhaps the greatest sound track of all time.

Lost In Translation

Sophia Copola captures Bill Murry at his most endearingly curmudgeonly, Scarlett Johansson before she burnt out in the bottom of a dye bottle, and Japan as you’ve never seen it. Tender, bitter sweat and utterly charming.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

A melo pearl of eccentric charm, Miranda July’s first feature manages to portray subtle human universals, aspects of love and longing rarely if ever portrayed on film. Touching and delicious.

Elephant

A dreamy formal experiment. Less about high school shootings per say, than the intrusion of sudden violence into the flow of life, Elephant is a brave, beautiful film. Glacially slow moving and deeply romantic.

Crumb

Robert Crumb is a biographers dream, a painfully awkward artistic genius, his comics redefined the nature of illustrated narrative. Here he is portrayed as the demented but high functioning survivor of a family of broken misfits. Zwigoff (who plays with Crumb’s old timey band ‘The Cheap Suit Serenaders’), provides us with a stylised, charming glimpse into a life utterly unusual, and wonderfully absurd; and a hint of the importance of creativity and individualism, as antidotes to consumerist conformity.

Ghost World

Stunningly effective comic adaptation of Daniel Clowes distinctive surreal noir. Thora Birch shines as the confused, but always stunningly dressed Enid. This movie has everything – bollywood, steve buscemi, and a rambling ice cool storyline.

Being John Malkovich

Spike Jonze mind bendingly epic trip through the mind of John Malkovich, by way of ape trauma, bizarro world cameron diaz and masterpiece puppetry. Like nothing else.

Adaptation

Perhaps the best articulation of Charlie Kaufmans surreal narcissism to date, Adaptation is a postmodern take on the facets of identity which define a life, and the aspects of reality which suffuse fiction. A wonderfully madcap observational comedy, featuring an incredibly unexpected performance from Nicholas Cage. Adaptation is only let down by it’s sentimental ending.

The Shining

Kubrick does horror. An operatic vision, complete with ghostly tempters, rivers of blood, an icy maze, and a haunted mansion. Jack Nicholson’s pitch perfect performance combines with John Alcott’s magnificent cinematography to produce an unequalled sense of menace. The films introductory shots from the air are still copied, and it’s use of point of view is the gold standard for the development of disturbing tension. The lengthy, taut conclusion defines cinematic nemesis. Ludicrous and terrifying.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Perhaps the greatest film of possibly the greatest director of all time. 2001 is near perfect; a tone poem vision of mankinds voyage from primeval ape to star faring superman. A classic of paleo-futurology, and an utterly spell binding beatific vision, 2001 was literally decades before it’s time. Ignore the stony performances and the glacial pace, this film is magic.

Fight Club

A directorial tour de force by David Fincher, from the cult Palahniuk novel; fightclub manages to articulate the angst of a generation born under consumerism – whilst being a hip, expensive hollywood star vehicle. An ironic, but astonishingly successful contradiction.

The Hitcher

A schlocking thrill ride, The Hitcher is one of those films – like Jonathan Demme’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ – which transcends the conventionality of it’s premise, to produce a work of real terror. Rutger Hauer has never been better (including his turn in Blade Runner), as the mysterious, psychopathic killer.

Rushmore

Wes Andersons sad tale of quixotic outsider Max Fisher, is stunningly original. A true unaffected indie classic, and possibly the best of Anderson’s low energy comedies.

Lolita

Nabokov’s controversial novel, brilliantly interpreted with an emphasis on it’s comedic elements. James Mason is excellent as a repressed but debonair Humbert Humbert. Peter Sellars is suitably terrifying and ambiguous as the monstrous Clare Quilty. Lacking the eroticism of the novel, but darker than many of its critics credit.

Memento

An effective noirish thriller, built around thoroughly original premise, and an excellent script. Nolan’s direction is workman like but effective. Guy Pearce is vulnerable and stunning.

The Silence of the Lambs

A beguiling thriller with captivating cinematography, a stellar cast and tight suspenseful direction. Endlessly imitated, from a wonderful novel by Thomas Harris, Silence of the Lambs is easily the best ‘serial killa’ thrilla’ of all time. Hopkin’s portrait of the insane genius Hannibal Lector is as memorable as it is unequalled in the later sequels.

Forrest Gump

Robert Zemeckis has a rare gift for infusing tacky premises with magic, and Forrest Gump – the fictive biopic of an idiotic accidental hero, is no exception. Hanks manages to transform an Adam Sandler stereotype into a character of real depth. Although it’s easy to see how film buffs can their noses up at this big budget, arguable tasteless and deeply conventional film; they’re missing the point. Gump is an inspirational, original and deeply affecting parable. A lovely film, that only Hollywood could produce.

Back to the Future

No modern childhood would be complete without a trip to Marty McFly’s sentimental portrayal of 1980′s and 1950′s America. Proof positive that Robert Zemeckis is up there with Spielberg as one of our greatest popcorn directors. A smart, slapstick sci-fi classic.

Mulholland Drive

The best recent Lynch movie, a meandering soap opera from hell; Mulhollad Drive is sexy, disturbing and surreal without being confused. A twisted joy. Naomi Watt’s role’s are two of the finest performances you’ll see in any film.

Bad Taste

In a just world, Peter Jackson wouldn’t have bothered with the over long, over dull and over rated LOTR trilogy, and would have continued to make absurd, hilarious splatter movies like Bad Taste. Possibly the second goriest film of all time (the first being Jacksons later comic horror ‘Brain Dead’), Bad Taste was made over a period of years, on a minuscule budget with a cast of amateurs. It’s makers clearly loved every moment of the process. Not a great film, a great experience.

Brazil

Insane, fearsomely clever (from a Tom Stoppard script), and utterly unique; Brazil is probably the most unsettling distopian vision ever filmed. Influenced by everything from Blake to Francis Bacon to Philip K. Dick, and unequalled since, Brazil is a momentous achievement, and an unflinching look at the cowardice and hypocrisies that allow evil to proliferate.

Groundhog Day

When romantic comedies are done right (both comic and poignant), they can be as entertaining as great drama. The rarity of a film like Groundhog Day demonstrates that they are at least as great an achievement. Bill Murray makes the picture.

In my final year at college I helped start a music magazine that briefly went nationwide. For a little while we covered a brutally hip range of ‘indie’ and electronica acts: Interviewing, smooching, listening to a lot of great new music and occasionally finding time to publish some decent writing.

So here’s the article, the point of which dovetailed neatly with it’s consequences. The names have been changed…

Pop Music Sucks

Two music journalists sit outside a franchise coffee house. Young, urbane and ostentatiously hip, they are arguing. Their discussion, staged in the controversial milieu of a Starbucks decorated to match the Autumnal colours of their Abercrombie togs, is about something vital. As the boy raises a Venti Caramel Frappuccino to his lips, suckling the frothy mass of corporate cream and coffee, the girl berates his immovable pretension. She nurses a tiny herbal tea and readjusts her nautically themed mini as he mocks her trivial preferences. Outside a Starbucks on the Camden Road, these tragic hips are fighting, not about the re-ignition of the cold war, nor the global financial meltdown. Our heroes, writers for a pretentious indie publication both, are arguing about authenticity in music.

A struggle rages high in the battlements of scene. On one side, popsters like Bon Dijonaise and Meadbh Glint protest that the crowd is too exclusive, an elitist misrepresentation of the interests of its core and wannabe’s; snobbishly avoiding popular music in favour of credible indie darlings. Ranged against them are folk like myself, Snedar Vashni, Tove Chumbly, you know the crowd. We see a cultural landscape supersaturated with pop coverage, radio stations payola’d and market researched into little more than store fronts for the latest Timbaland remix, the newest leather jacketed major label ‘indie’ stars, the latest on-screen Abba revival. We are, as we see it, though our individual tastes may differ radically, concerned that our independent musical presses be places original music can be discussed, seriously and frivolously.

At face value, this argument is trivial, a petty squabble among dilettantes over the etiquette of formal dining. Look a little deeper and it resonates with a crisis of cultural capital, an argument about the validity and future of Western culture itself. Last year, Adbusters magazine, a publication which hopped up on Chomsky, Baudrillard and Naomi Klein, attempts to use the glamour of industrial capitalism (fashion shoots, photoshop, ironic distance) to subvert its consumerist message, wrote a sterling attack on hipsterism. This latest global subculture, the magazine argued, represents a departure from youth movements of the past, from the hippies and the punks, a departure even from the hedonistic valueless underground raves of the 90′s, in that it is wholly constructed, marketed and cool hunted; meaning nothing, representing nothing, remixing historical motifs into ironic outfits and flickering kinetoscopes of fringe interest. Dan Hancox, writing in the Guardian, dismissed Adbusters critique. Hipsterism, Hancox wrote, is nothing more than “fashion people, doing what fashion people have always done.”

At a time when the culture is more self-conscious, more aware of its history and artifice than ever before, a crisis of confidence has descended. A variety of dichotomies; authenticity versus inauthenticity, sincerity by contrast to ironic distance, original cut into remix, taste as distinct from fashion, symptomise the implosion of the counterculture, the final digestion of a pill designed to be too difficult to swallow. In 2006, iconic lower East Side club CBGB’s closed its doors. Large men with hammers moved in, cracking away graffiti encrusted walls, where once Poly Styrene made love to the audience like a Viet Cong Millie Small. The plan was to move the place, lock stock and branded barrel to Las Vegas. Fortunately the rock gods intervened, fatally popping owner Hilly Kristal’s cash lined clogs. It seemed like any vestiges of punk, once the epitome of the rejection of sanitised, monetized pop, officially died with him.

What we now term the counter-culture arose spontaneously, a modern version of ancient processes of cultural evolution. It stands in stark contrast to the fictive mainstream tele-visual culture, constructed and marketed from watered down replications of the past. Adbusters’ argue that the desire for authenticity, prizing the real and innovative over derivative artifice, has grown so large in the contemporary capitalist dystopia that, commercialised sans radical intent, it becomes just another currency, traded for street cred by vacuous hipster fuckitalls.

Perhaps both hipsterism’s ironic recycling of pop culture, and its contradictory obsession with the underground, are really both reactions to a contradiction which has always existed at the heart of the counter-culture; the illusion of authenticity. Whether it be white academic musicologists scouring the Mississippi delta in the 1930′s for the ‘pure’ black roots of blues (and ‘discovering’ Led Belly), hippies in hemp smocks writing protest songs in a reconstructed ‘folk’ idiom, or hell contemporary gaelgoir hips ordering Guinness in a dead language in Dublin’s Conradh, what we assume to be authentic is most often deliberately constructed to serve a social function.

If hipsterism is no less organic than the most cynically moulded Louis Walsh pop hit, then why regard it as intrinsically better?

Authenticity, in relation to music, is often used synonymously with sincerity, and it is in this sense (according to Webster’s “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character”) that pop music can never be considered authentic. As a medium of mimicry, chart music has no intrinsic character beyond stylist buffed billboard illusion. At the same time, whether fusion (think Simon Bookish), remix (Pittsburgh copyfighter Girl Talk) or revival (Appalachian flavoured indie darling Joanna Newsom), ‘independent’ music is by definition sincere – no matter how commodified.

This distinction is epitomised in the parallel careers of two of the twentieth century’s biggest stars. David Robert Jones, known to us all as David Bowie, and Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie, most often referred to simply as ‘the hag’. Both are multi-decade internationally platinum selling musicians, purveyors of the latest cultural trend, instantly recognisable icons whose celebrity transcends familiarity with their work. Yet it’s hard to think of two musicians more differently regarded. Bowie, despite his gradual drift into irrelevance, produced some of the most critically acclaimed contemporary hipness of the last five decades. His work as a writer, singer and producer across glam rock, new romantic, krautrock and disco, inspires some of today’s most important acts. His many and varied persona leave whole subcultures in their wake.

From one perspective there is nothing honest about David Bowie. The man’s whole shtick is illusion. His characters are mythological archetypes: Nietzschean supermen, imaginary rock stars, mimes and white bluesmen. Yet it would be impossible to term Bowie inauthentic. Whether manifesting the destiny of a doomed rocker or a cocaine fuelled fascist, Bowie was ever the artist, producing rich, often accessible but consistently multi-layered work which sprang from his interests in literature, the occult and history; his explorations of persona, of celebrity, of sanity, rather than a slavish addiction to prevailing tastes or market research.

In stark contrast, witness Madonna. Similarly commercially successful, possibly even more famous, she is an iconic personification of liberated libidinous femininity. Madonna too has explored varied musical styles and riffed lyrically and through her cinematic roles on her own iconic status. Madonna like Bowie, has collaborated with a host of musicians and producers, from Timbaland to William Orbit. However, while both artists have produced commercially successful anthems, Bowie’s music is considered hip, while critical opinion of Madonna’s oeuvre has at best lauded her inarguable cultural significant, and at worse labelled her a crass slag.

What distinguishes these two musicians? In part, it’s the machine. Madonna’s talent has never been music, but rather the ability to affix herself to the mast of the good ship pop, pitching this way and that to catch the gusts of fashionista taste. By contrast, Bowie has often worked closer to the coal seam, whether it be the cutting edge of glitter rock, Berlin minimalism or electronica. While never creating a wholly original genre, his four decades of boundless creative energy produced celebrated work in a multiplicity of voices. Bowie’s hip was always artificial- up till 2003′s Reality LP, characters and narratives were not intended as literal representations of his personality. Yet his art remained authentic, because it was so rarely insincere.

There are two primary meta-theories of artistic interpretation. To the social constructionist, taste is encultured (and thus entirely relative); by contrast the evolutionary perspective, while acknowledging a multiplicity of preferences, posits that taste (and hence critical evaluation) is at least in part routed in innate critical faculties, adaptive human universals. To the relativist, the only value of a work of art is its situation in the contextual system of the western canon. By contrast, if we acknowledge that it is not merely our physiology, but our neurophysiology that we inherit, that commonalities of cognitive function facilitate mutual comprehension (including the acquisition of language and yes music); then one work of art can be viewed as objectively better than another. One artist can be accurately be described as a genius, another a fraud. Bowie’s music managed to articulate the fears and hopes of two generations, while Madonna’s is consumed as chewing gum. Sweet, disposable and yet grotesquely indelible chewing gum.

For this is the function of pop music, the very reason behind its omnipresence. Pop is the aural representation of a culture that celebrates banality in the guise of ingenuity, conformity disguised as individualism, and the accrual of wealth as talent. ‘Pop music’, chart music, is by definition that which is neither necessarily good nor original, but merely purchased often. Setting aside the rigged and managed measurement of sales; the implicit assumption of the whole game is that which sells most is best. At least until next week. Perhaps this is the reason for hipsterism’s clichés, its thrift store fashions, its ironic distance and blog-inspired fixations. The desire to seek out quality despite commerce, to approve through consumption only briefly, to move on before such approval is appropriated, nullified and codified in next seasons diesel jeans, in Holy Fuck’s new remix.

As I sip my iced coffee, I tell Meadbh of my visceral reaction to pop, to vocodered power ballads and over-produced country songs, to saccharine R&B and big-me-up hiphop. It’s the same instant headache, the sulphur burp twinge you feel seeing a spandex micro mini or a concrete underpass – functional mass production minus aesthetic considerations. It isn’t elitism, it’s taste. Thankfully Andreas Pavel invented the stereobelt (though the Sony Corporation stole the idea, rechristening it the Walkman), making it possible to travel on public transfort, enter a clothing store or shopping mall, or pick up a cinema ticket without collapsing into a speaker-vandalising, Duffy-assassinating rage. That’s the problem with pop, it fills every crevice with at best inane, and at worst perversely nonsensical lyrics, and tired vaudevillian melodies. Pop bursts, over-compressed and without warning, from taxis, hospital lobbies and the leaky headsets of the perpetually bewildered. It seeps and jangles, depositing earworms like September flu. Hits that chew through your brain and leave you jibbering for days.

There are inarguably exceptions. Popular songs that are none the less classics, indie classics that are, despite all the odds, popular. These are diamonds in the dustbin, poppies in the sewage pipe. Almost universally, pop music acts to dull the sensibilities and nullify the critical faculties, lulling the listener into temporary senility. Its message is equipotency, uniformity, apoliticism, hypersexualised infantilism, and the illusion of choice. That’s the whole point. Pop music is designed to appear controversial, whilst saying nothing truly dangerous. It’s not merely bad, it’s insidious. Who will Britney kiss next? Which part of Janet Jackson’s greased up anatomy will slip ‘accidentally’ into the public eye? When will the Bay City Rollers reform? Who the fuck cares? Pop music sucks.

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Lake Superior

I was fifteen the year Tom died. But this story isn’t about him. I was fifteen and greyhound lean. I drove an Oldsmobile Rocket 88 Convertible. But this story is not about that beat red, soft-top wonder carriage. It isn’t about the girls Tom and I would ferry from bars in Aurora, down to Tettgouche Camp, to make on the beech by the edge of that dark and quiet body of water- their flesh pale and shivering under the moon, their little cries lost in immensities of Black Spruce and Eastern White Pine. This story is about our grandfather. A tight muscled, brylcreemed, fighting Irishman, who wore his slacks high belted to his chest.

Michael Francis O’Connell had lost his job when Rainy Lake killed off big-pine logging in nineteen twenty nine. After that our family migrated with the work, and the year my brother died, we moved one last time, to a town called Beaver Bay. Barely a place at all, not much more than a barracks while Reserve Mining hurriedly dug in. A place, my grandfather said, where “Three generations of O’Connell could haul ore”. A place for Tom and my father, who’d served in PTO and even then had not returned, and never would, to move past those long sad days away. In later Springs, this little corner of Minnesota, from Red Lake down to the shores of Silver Bay, would become a place of infamy. That Summer, it seemed a miracle hauled from the soft dark loam.

My grandfather had started short and stayed that way, but he’d built up and kept off the liquor, so that at fifty five he was as mean a pioneer as ever sat through mass at St Joeseph’s. Running afterward, the sixteen miles to Illgen City, he’d pick his Raleigh up from Eddy Byrne and cycle ten miles more to Crosby Park. Year round when the mood took him, he’d strip a to steel gray jock strap and swim beneath the waterfalls of the icy Manitou. Then on the banks he’d strike a match and perform his stretches, seahorse curls of smoke falling away like sin.

My grandfather kept pigeons until nineteen sixty three. Well into my thirties they still nestled there, on tight hung chords of clothes line and telephone wire. Nested looking down on the shop I’d built over their former home; conditioned to seek in our yard, a place of rest. I was sat in that yard then, stooped on our back step, staring at the tethered and untethered birds. Birds that looked back, dim and malevolent behind their grills. Every now and then, I’d take a piece of bread from my sandwich and toss it, so that it struck the cheap serrated wire. Each time the tin cage rattled as birds thundered up, a black feathered mass- their orange tags, like hot iron fillings leaping off a sparkler.

My grandfather’s blow was curt and hard, if half expected. I’d felt him coming in the house, or known anyway that he was due. He’d come to tend his flock, a great steel grain bucket swinging from its handle as he walked. I rubbed my head and watched him strike the cage twice and screech a rusted feed tray from inside. The tray was set up on a hinge he’d built, like a prison food slot that swiveled forward to hang exposed outside its cell. With both hands my grandfather hefted the bucket and clacked a dune of grain out for the birds. They squawked and fluttered but did not approach, their small mean brains alive to danger.

I looked away as he passed by me to the house. He moved through the rooms behind me. He set his vacuum radio to clack and whistle across the AM dial, pausing at each station, then on over the mounds and furrows of the ether, with soft flicks and catches of the oiled brass dial. I moved halfway out across our cramped back yard, away from the rising drone of the New York Philharmonic, midway between our house and his god-damned birds. Leaning over the low side wall I looked across the neat cropped hedges of our neighbors. Today the yards were empty. It was Saturday when all that little town escaped. Across the radio, cutting out the orchestra, came the cold old bells of the Angelus, my grandfathers music. I shivered. My shirt had grown dank with the cooling afternoon. Those birds began to shift in coughs and wheezes. I moved back inside the house.

My father came home at eleven with a little drink on him. My grandfather was waiting by the door. Alone in my room, listening and fussing with arithmetic, I whispered to him to leave the poor fucker go and move off to bed. I heard my name ring clear or almost clear. My neck itched under my cotton shirt. In the dark beyond the circle of my desk lamp, my father’s voice died away, then rose again in short spastic agreement. Silence. My father opening and closing the door to his room. The door to the room where my mother lay, awake or asleep but always. A knock at my door. My grandfather bunched in the doorway, silhouetted in the hall light. I took my jacket and hunting cap, and my gray seal skin wallet, and went with him into the night.

I’ve been deputised, granted a solemn duty by my brother, and I have failed. My job was to wrangle a little green from our father, a bit of money for the city. A cheap sour job, and even that I’ve failed. So my grandfather tells me, as we bounce up toward Finland in his old Chevy truck. My father is no good, a waster and a scandal, and amn’t I his son? He fumbles one handed in the glove compartment for a pack of cigarettes. The rumbling of the truck becomes the rhythm of my heart as we ride further into darkness. My grandfather shifts gears, guns the unloaded machine. His eyes are vacuums hoovering the flame of gravel and dirt road. Inside the lined pockets of my coat, my hands began to shake. The cabin is slick with the turpentine and the coconut oil smell of him.

My grandfather has only beat me, really beat me, once. I was six years old and my mother had said I’d eat my food or the Nips would shoot my daddy. I’d called her the worst word I knew. He’d pulled this same stunt then, powering out of Bow String with me beside him in the car, hog tied and horse with fear and screaming for my father. It was midnight when we passed Mizpah and he slowed only a little to kick the door ajar and knock me to the road. Landing snapped my jaw and tore a streak of bacon from my shin. I waited two hours by the roadside in the dark ’till he returned. Two hours hunched up, curled round the base of a Cedar tree, drooling helpless from a hung open jaw, hunting warmth out of knots twisted in my sweater. Two hours flinching every time a wild dog howled.

Tonight he grunts beside me. He twists the wheel, hand over hand like his ship faces an iceberg. His face is invisibly dark under a moleskin Fedora. I am ungodly tired suddenly, and sniffling, grope for a handkerchief in my jeans pocket. He reaches out, and crushes my wrist between finger and thumb. “You’d best not have a blade, boy.”
I shake my head. I lift my open hand out of my pocket and wipe my nose onto my sleeve.

We’re halfway between Cook and Orr when something flashes by, black on black like a boxer in a Bellows painting. My grandfather pushes back hard against his seat, slaps a flat palm on the wheel. He slows to a stop. Looking back out the open window he twists the truck round slow, says “Not a word.”

She was the first colored girl I’d seen, outside of movies. She was alone on that road, her hair strait and flossy under a peach cloche. She looked in through the drivers side window and smiled at me and nodded to my grandfather.

“I was afraid I was stranded out here”.
My grandfather said nothing. His furred hands twisted at the wheel. Reaching up slowly he lifted off his hat. His hair was flattened, slickly silver. He stared straight ahead, out at the road. Back the way we’d come. He leaned suddenly, his arm pressing me into my seat-back, and opened the passenger door. I climbed out, patting myself against the damp. I hauled at the wood railed trailer and swung up behind the cab. Through the oval rear window, I watched her walk around front of the truck and climb up to sit beside him. Resting her head back against the passenger seat, she closed her eyes.
“Thank the lord you came along. I swear I might have frozen.”

In the rear view mirror, I watched my grandfather study her. She was small and Hershey dark, with a soft almond face. When her eyes opened, I noticed they were green like my own. Somehow I’d expected black on white. Catching my glance in the rear view mirror, she smiled again. I imagined I could smell her perfume, rosebud daubs of Chanel number five.

“Where are you gentlemen headed?”
My grandfather looks out over the cooling cornfields. With his tongue, he readjusts his artificial teeth. Her smile falters. I watch her fingers close over the hard lips of her seat. We pass an open level crossing, the white painted barrier sparkling under our lamps. Our truck’s hard tires and dull suspension play tricks with gravity as we cross the tracks. The girl looks out of her window and presses her lips together. In the weak light splashed back from our headlamps, they look berry red. My grandfather half turns in his chair. In the mirror I can see them both, hanging still as we coast, and myself a hidden creature, only the eyes showing, in the blue dark outside. She crosses herself and swells up with an unheard intake of breath. My grandfather shifts into third, forth. Lifting his hands off the wheel entirely, he lights another cigarette. His match is a flare in the cabin. He watches my reflection shrink back.

“Miss,” he said. “What are you up to, out here alone?”
The girl shifted in her seat to face him. Her fingers pulled at one another in her lap.
“If you’d be so kind as to leave me, leave me off at the next town.” A pause. Again, “If you’d be so kind.”
Her voice was East Coast, Chicago maybe. I tensed to speak. I was six years old and my jaw hung loose. My grandfather exhaled a slow trail of smoke. It rushed away into the slipstream, out over Wisconsin and the great lake. It rose diffuse in the dark, collecting beads of sweat that cooled and grew heavy and prepared to fall. Cigarette between his fingers at the wheel, he set his teeth down on his lower lip, to softly whistle. Her cream coat was beautiful, over-sized buttons lining the lapel, like domed and peaceful sleeping towns. She was crying, her chest rising and falling. Her crying was quiet, like a child trying hard not to be heard.
“Promise,” he said, taking another drag, watching my eyes in the mirror. “Promise, you’ll never pull a damn fool stunt like that again.”
The colored girl shook gently. She looked at him and nodded.
“A damn fool stunt,” he said again, and we passed on into the night.

My dear friend Mark seems to being having success upon success with his Wired FM show ‘Cult Friction‘, a “new programme charting the wonderful surreal world of Science Fiction, Horror and all things cult from Movies to Comic Books, TV shows”. Using his nordie wiles, Mark has succeeded in conning his way into some notable award ceremonies, winning brief interviews with impresarios like Jonathan Ross, Rory Bremnar, Robert Webb and Charlie Brooker.

Mark recently posed the shows wonderful jingle (embedded above), which reminded me of the jingle I lovingly crafted many moons ago for my old eclectic music show on Trinity FM, ‘Kick the Kat‘.

At P Con last week they ran a fun little contest. The idea was to produce a complete short story (SF, horror or fantasy) in just 100 words.

In the end my efforts didn’t place, though I’m egotistical enough to suspect the judge didn’t grok them what-so-ever. Perhaps he just preferred the story about the farting dragon…

In any case, it was a fun little writing excercise. Here are two brief tales I entered. Interestingly enough, I think this is one contest that might be significantly easier in “mainstream” fiction, as the requirement for a conceptual payload is lower.

‘Wrz’

One hundred words, Moreziff thought, an epic work! Firing off a micro-tweet to his sixteen thousand followers he asked, ’1C wrz comp, suj?’ Within seconds, replies pattered his retina. ‘Stl frm bux’, suggested t#_a.
+^ZF frowned. He was under twenty one.

Three AdverTweets bought +^ZF the lock pick needed to DDOS the gun-locker’s router. A gratifying click. There, next to his dad’s Columbian cigarettes and Coldplay LPs, dust free but yellowing in their zip lock bags. He picked one at random, running a finger under the title, annunciating each letter, brow damp with effort. N-I-N-E-T-E-E-N..

Post Nerd

The singularity never happened. America fell to the toll of Church bells. They left those men up in the sky. Our ‘safe’ reactors turned to cankers on the land. Without surface metal we couldn’t start again.

We huddle around the fires we burn to keep the lean lean wolves at bay. Jill rolls a three. “Acne, you lose your column in ‘Seventeen’. You date Fred.”
They both groan. Jill swigs from her man-skin flask, flashes bloody teeth. I laugh. “Your college application arrives. What do you do?”
Outside, in heavy rain, a dragon roars.

A Federated Media For Podcasting

John Battelle’s Federated Media is a medium sized company which aggregates the eyeballs of several of the worlds most popular blogs (including the highly influential and chaotic Boing Boing), and sells them to advertisers.

Result – blog authors can finance their writing and the growth of their sites, while advertisers get a single point of content to help them target and run campaigns. There’s an instant firewall around editorial decisions – as advertisers have no direct input into blog content; and sites can choose to accept only advertising that accords with their perspective (and *puke* branding). Advertisers get an instant audience (Boing Boing alone gets 3 million uniques a month), cheap.

Why does this not yet exist for podcasting?

While individual podcasts garner listeners at most in the hundreds of thousands (although there are perhaps a few that crest a million uniques) together they represent an growing, economically solvent and highly educated audience. An audience, in the US alone, of over 18 million listeners!

There are organisations like Adam Curry’s ‘Mevio‘ (formerly Podshow Network). These guys throw automated adds into hundreds of small – medium casts, and provide a revenue stream; claiming exclusive rights to content for contract duration in return.

What I’m suggesting here by contrast, is a limited service that would work with top 20 or 100 (independent) podcasts only- dealing with advertisers directly in geographically specific markets (this is how itunes distinguishes its podcast rankings, which largely dictate downloads); and allowing podcast hosts to craft their own discursive in-show adverts, in their own voice – as Leo Laporte does in his enormously popular This Week in Tech podcast. This way, advertisers get known quantity shows with large, established audiences and (internally) consistent content and presentation. While at the same time growing indies can fund production costs and the development of their creative enterprise- via a personal relationship with a single company, who are ‘on their side’. The reality of ‘new media’ is that (especially in audio production, but increasingly in video) a small group working with a tiny budget can create compelling, high production quality content. What they cannot do, is replicate the services of a sales force. Nor should they try, as direct advertiser / editor contact, almost inevitably results in watered down, less appealing creative work (or ‘content’, for you marketdoids).

Marketing on Demand for Authors

Small publishers and independently published authors are increasingly switching to Print On Demand (POD) services for short run (in the low thousands), academic and older titles (slow but steady sellers). Companies like Lightening Source provide a dirt-cheap ‘just in time’ printing facility, with constant improvements in the quality of the finished book. Additionally such POD services facilitate ISBN numbers (which allow bookstores to order and stock a title) and work closely with Amazon to ensure books are available to purchase (and more importantly deliver quickly) online.

These companies also remove the distribution headache, delivering directly to the public and retail, without the necessity of publishers direct involvement. Such services are not perfect. The finished product may not always rival a traditionally printed book (and of course the design is still reliant on the talent of the publisher / author side artist). More importantly POD cannot replace the direct relationships between publisher and retail chain / indie bookshop, which dictate placement of the book at retail, how long a title is stocked, and whether it is for sale at brick and mortar stores at all. Accepting that, they can be an important tool for small publishers who wish to take a risk on a book they could not otherwise have published, or authors who have a pre-existing audience they can sell to directly. I’m thinking of the Wil Wheatons and Amanda Palmers of this world- actors, musicians, and fine artists who maintain a direct relationship with their fan communities, either through blogging, podcasting, convention appearances or what have you. Personalities who may obtain much greater targeted sales dealing with their audiences directly. Here’s an interesting quote from the Wheaton interview linked in the last sentence, on his experiences with his book ‘Dancing Barefoot’..

The publisher insisted on marketing it in a way that did nothing to expand the audience I was already able to reach on my own, and basically blew me off when I repeatedly begged them to change course. I hired a PR firm at great expense, and they did pretty much the same thing. I vowed that I would never again go the “traditional” route with my future books.

So POD is great, but what’s this business that’s missing?

What’s missing is a marketing firm specially tailored to the needs of micropublishers. A company that knows the net, understands how to build an audience, AND can work with traditional media outlets to arrange interviews, reading tours, store promotions and television, radio and new media advertising. This is the one facet of traditional publishing that has not been replicated as a paid service.

With the suicide of the music industry, musicians are abandoning record labels to deal directly with, and sell directly to, their audiences. Probably the two best known examples are Radiohead’s In Rainbows release, and the Nine Inch Nails record Ghosts, which were both released directly online using donation, and fremium models respectively. Both records sold extremely well (in Radiohead’s case, better than their previous three albums).

What’s less well known outside the industry, is that artists are turning to next generation promotion companies like Live Nation, to handle the other important aspects of getting music out there- promotion and touring. These are services that an artist (beyond a certain popularity) cannot themselves handle without a label or label replacement. More importantly, as the perceived value of music recordings drops to zero (as will inevitably happen with books, Kindle or no Kindle), such tours provide the revenue stream that musicians need to keep creating.

Where is the equivalent in publishing? Where are the television and radio adverts for books? Where is the radio talk channel devoted to the enormously popular audio book genre? Who is organising paid and highly publicised public readings? Who is organising and promoting book tours for a set fee or a percentage of profits? Answer- no one. This is a service that could work at a variety of levels, from festival main stage readings by Chuck Palahniuk, to book promotions of unknown but compelling new fiction and non-fiction authors.

Two businesses that should exist, but don’t. Yet.

Arguably, Lessig stands to the right of most of this generations creative community, but compared to the current legal prohibitions in place around the world, from the DMCA to the EUCD, he’s a leftist loon; and that’s how he’s frequently been portrayed in the media.

In these three video interviews with San Francisco’s ‘Booksmith‘, Lessig briefly outlines the moderate copyright reform position he advocates in his book ‘Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy’ .

More Lawrence Lessig videos..

TED 2007, How creativity is being strangled by the law
Google Lecture