Longform

I suppose this is just a quick post for myself as much as anything else. I'm sick of the shortform. I have always written, jotted, mused and pretentiously purged out my thoughts. Sometimes more consistently than others. Reading this back there is an irony in calling this a quick post. If anything I want this to be the opposite of a quick post.

To elucidate a little further I will list the social media forms with which at various times I have taken up, dabbled and abandoned, just to give texture to the many forms (I will put this at the bottom). I will go back as far as I can muster and maybe include some adjunct items too (for example Spotify. Is that social media?). This is on top of the writings I have done in notebooks, sketch pads and journals throughout my life.

  The list at the bottom might not be by any means exhaustive but gives a flavour into just how disjointed and pervasive social media can be. The thrust of my argument - if there is one - is regarding not just social media but media in general, and society at large.

  I'm not an Academic (no shit Sherlock) so this is not going to be replete with citations from academic works a la Sam Harris and other losers. This is just a bullshit discourse / things I've thought about.

  Stolen directly from Wikipedia (I have donated £10 on more than one occasion I'll have you know)

"And so the title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were, and the general roughing up that any new society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended in that title".

It means that the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message. Or if not more important than perhaps has an invasory aspect or quality on a subliminal level.

McLuhan tells us that a "message" is, "the change of scale or pace or pattern" that a new invention or innovation "introduces into human affairs"

I feel that pace and pattern change is stronger now than ever. The pace of technological change. The pace of communicationary change. Following the Law of Returns (apparently) the pace of technological progress—especially information technology—speeds up exponentially over time because there is a common force driving it forward (according to Singularityhub.com). 

The main message that I want to get across is that the contemporary mediums are so transitory. If the medium is the message then the message that's being told is you can just scroll through, flick over, swipe again.  

I've found this with social media in general. Just look at Twitter, or Facebook or Instagram. They are all formatted, embedded into them the idea that you can just graze maniacally. If something doesn't interest you then the next thing is moments away. The very physicality of it. How you just scroll habituates and ingrains itself within you. And it filters down to all our interactions and our relationships.

  For example, dating apps, more specifically in my case ... Hinge - on a few different levels and its something I'm complicit in. Firstly when it comes to a match .... which is something I've engendered, something I've positively contributed towards in that I have "liked" this person ... and many times I'll then take a second look and feel its not for me and just not respond. I'll respond if directly asked a question but if its just an invitation to chat then I won't pursue it often. Even then ... sometimes after I've engaged in a chat I will stop abruptly. Its happened to me more times than I care to comment on. I think it goes without saying that it happens to me, a lot. So even at the initial stages, and many say that the initial stages set the tone and tempo for the whole thing, the meter is one of transience. As my esteemed flatmate Johnny says ... there's just always someone new. Something new. 

  This then transfers into the dating itself. We've all seemed to have turned into Jerry and George. 

 Even when we find perfection its never enough. There is so little scope for error. If its not perfect, if its not the one straight away, then you know there is another one round the corner, a swipe away. Its the BBD. Bigger Better Deal. Its turned us all into gamblers thinking that the next hand is gonna be the Royal Flush. And that's a fucking shame, but its the nature of things these days.

 I suppose the dating app to actual dating is particularly apposite, as it shows a direct link between the medium and the outcome.

 I don't want to make a value judgement about all of the above. Clearly i have valanced the discussion towards a negative reading but I'm sure there are many positives that came out of the above. Maybe. Perhaps. A linear progression view of History. But thats a whole other story.

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Matthew Tammaro

Just to continue a theme. Actually I find this photo very meaningful. Its that point in time of ambivalence or decision. Is the man drowning or surfacing?? The stillness of the water is also at odds with the perhaps uncomfortable nature of the scene. Well that's how I see it anyway. Without trying to get too wanky (too late), the dual interpretation of the scene is mirrored by the reflected head. The more I think and view this photo the more I like it.

Heros - Studs Terkel

I'll get to the point. A few weeks ago I asked my office buddies whom their Hero's were. Not one person actually had a hero that they could name off the top of their heads (myself included). I found this a little saddening, as I think its good to have people and figureheads to admire and aim to replicate. So here's one of my hero's to start things off.

Louis "Studs" Terkel (May 16, 1912 – October 31, 2008) (Lots just cut and pasted from Wikipedia/ Obituaries etc.)


Studs Terkel — master chronicler of American life in the 20th century, veteran radical and vibrant soul of the midwestern capital of Chicago. To register him as "writer and broadcaster" would be like calling Louis Armstrong a "trumpeter" or the Empire State Building an "office block". Strictly and sparsely speaking, it is true.

Born in New York to Russian Jewish parents, Studs moved from New York to Chicago when he was 6. He was to become synonymous with this city until his death, aged 96. From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house that also served as a meeting place for people from all walks of life. Terkel credited his understanding of humanity and social interaction to the tenants and visitors who gathered in the lobby there, and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square

."I used to listen to their stories for hours and hours. The good and the bad, coming through my own house, and I couldn't hear enough of it."

By 1939, he had grown to adulthood, marrying Ida Goldberg (1912–1999) that year, and the couple produced one son, Dan. Although he received his law degree from theUniversity of Chicago Law School in 1934, he decided instead of practicing law, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel, and he soon joined a theater group.

Terkel received his nickname while he was acting in a play with another person named Louis. To keep the two straight, the director of the production gave Terkel the nickname Studs after the fictional character about whom Terkel was reading at the time—Studs Lonigan, of James T. Farrell's trilogy.

Terkel was acclaimed for his efforts to preserve American oral history.He is best known to Americans as the voice that asked the questions on the Studs Terkel Show which ran for 45 years, syndicated from the WFMT radio station of downtown Chicago. His 1985 book "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two, which detailed ordinary peoples' accounts of the country's involvement in World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize. For Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Terkel assembled recollections of the Great Depression that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, through prison inmates, to the wealthy. His 1974 book, Working, in which (as reflected by its subtitle) People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, also was highly acclaimed.

Terkel's obsessive interest in the propulsion of people's lives was at its most curious and passionate — and his subjects at their most brilliantly articulate — when he was dealing with everyday people, from whatever background: carpenters, judges, hub-cap fitters, priests, admirals, sharecroppers, models, signalmen, tennis players, war veterans and cooks. His book Coming of Age: the History of our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995), was made up of interviews with elderly people. It is a vivid record of an America which, for the most part, is now distant if not passed away along with Terkel himself.Terkel harvested not only the most complete American history of this century, but the most compassionate.

In a way, Terkel's story is best told through that of Hobart Foote. When one asked Terkel which of all 9,000 interviewees he valued most, the answer was this one, which made it into a book, Working (1974).

Foote lived in a mobile home near the Illinois-Indiana state line with his wife, a Bible and little else but "the clangor of trains, Gary-to-Chicago bound". The area is a great mesh of railroad lines, criss-crossing the roads. And so Foote talks about the "train problem" he has getting to work, since his journey is punctuated by so many railway crossings and long waits for lumbering freight trains to pass, and if he arrives a minute after nine, he gets docked for the whole hour.

And so Foote's drive to work is a daily adventure, driving at speed to a detailed but flexible system across the assault course of railway crossings, changing the route according to which train is late or on time, which crossing shut and which open. "It's a game you're playing," he tells Studs. "Catch this light at a certain time, and then you've got the next light. But if there's a train there, I take off down Cicero Avenue and watch those crossings. And if I make her okay, you've got a train just over on the Burnham line you gotta watch for. But it's generally fast ..."

Why does Terkel remember this especially? "Because it's a great suspense tale. An adventure thriller through the railroads every morning, so this man doesn't get docked for the whole hour. The principle is that ordinary people have extraordinary thoughts — I've always believed that — and that ordinary people can speak poetically. Also that no one else speaks like that and that there is no other person like that in the world."
In August 2005 Studs underwent successful open heart surgery. At the age of ninety-three, he was one of the oldest people to undergo this form of surgery and doctors reported his recovery to be remarkable for someone of that advanced age. Terkel smoked two cigars a day until 2004.

In 1998, Terkel and WFMT, the radio station which broadcast Terkel's long-running program, had donated approximately 7,000 tape recordings of Terkel's interviews and broadcasts to the Chicago History Museum. In 2010, the Museum and the Library of Congress announced a multi-year joint collaboration to digitally preserve and make available at both institutions these recordings, which the Library of Congress called, "a remarkably rich history of the ideas and perspectives of both common and influential people living in the second half of the 20th century." "For Studs, there was not a voice that should not be heard, a story that could not be told," said Gary T. Johnson, Museum president. "He believed that everyone had the right to be heard and had something important to say. He was there to listen, to chronicle, and to make sure their stories are remembered."


Ultimately though, I believe that Studs was a hero because he saw an element of the heroic in every person he met. He recognized the universal in the particular of these peoples lives and as such treated everybody with the reverence and respect that most human beings deserve to be shown, a sentiment and value system we would all do well to emulate.

For more info on Studs visit this site www.studsterkel.org

Francoise Hardy

Isn't she lovely?? Da Womans (insert French Canadian accent) really knew how to do the whole cute, shy, natural beauty thing back in the day. This particular lady (don't know much about her - never heard of her or anything) is probably the best example that I can find (apart from the Mrs of course) of why natural is best. I will say however that it doesn't really look like she knows how to play the guitar nor does the snarling really work for her. Not really coming across that Bad Ass.

INS KINO

Met a nice girl who shares a studio with Captain Daniel Heath who has this blog and clothes label called INS KINO. Super Sweet stuff. Just wanted to bring attention to someone making nice new stuff. If it were done for men I'd be all over it.

In sypathy - The Greater Tsores Jewish Mother

Not the most original - and I'm pretty sure that I'm not adding anything here, but I thought I'd wade into the whole Jewish Mother syndrome conversation. I came across (via my delightful and gorgeous fiancée Maya) the following website about some yenta who leaves the most hilarious Jewish Mother messages to her daughter. The web site only has a small selection, but if you look around there are more available. Here it is.

My own more specific addition is a tale from Israel last year. Its high time this particular beauty was identified. Me and Maya (yes, me and Maya, not Maya and I. If you have an issue with my use of the English language then too bad or huglin (delete as you see fit)) were in an Israeli version of a corner shop looking for Mike and Ike's sour Candies - no I'm not a yank, thats their proper noun- when in walks in a middle aged woman, dumpy looking, microphone hair and a son with a look on his face that said 'why god, why me, why this life, why this mother?'

She approached us and enquired in her whiny New York pitch 'excuse me - how far a walk is it bak to the Daniel Hotel?' to which i replied 'I dont know - 10/15 minuet walk?'

She snapped around, looking semi accusingly at her teenage son

'I told you Noah - it's too far to walk back'

So we offer her a ride in our car as it cannot be more than a 2 minuet car journey, with my brother Sam at the wheel, me next to him, and the happy family of Maya, Miriam and her increasingly despondent son Noah ( he knows whats coming).

We ask where is she from -
' Do you know LA? I'm from a place called Beverlywood - its very very faaanceee.'

Cue Noah groaning audibly.

The conversation continued, littered with the now common family catchphrase of 'its so faaaanceee', including the now classic:

'I went to England once - I went to a Synagogue where they all wore top hats - it was very faaanceee'

and with each passing minuet her son realizing that was not some horrible dream but in fact he was stuck in this life for the rest of it, with the same mother for most probably a good portion of it.

We made our goodbye's and immediately placed the episode into the collection of all time favorite encounters. We spent the rest of the holiday trying to locate this particular pristine example of the Greater Tsores Jewish Mother (lives in the USA, UK and to a lesser extent Western Europe - Migrates to Israel annually for Pesach).

We thought we glimpsed her over a breakfast - but before we could confirm the sighting, she'd gone. We know she's out there somewhere, so if you do happen to be in Beverlywood LA, and a Jewfrowed Yenta, with a pale son in tow named Noah should approach you for directions/estimated journey time - hold her there, give me a call and I'll take it from there.

Evi Lemberger

Loving this girls work. Very sharp. I hate the splash page at the front of the site - but its worth the wait eventually. It takes beards for the pictures to load, but once they are up they are a fantastic evocation of a way of life. Lots of old people - which is always a good thing.

also - i know i said that i was finished with this blog (e.g.its moved to my web site - but I think I'm going to try going back to this for a bit. See how it all works out).