blog 
The Watchmen is often noted as the first intelligent, thoughtful, adult comic. In it, the mythology and psychopathology of superheroes is analysed and the implications of such power being aligned to dubious politicians is dissected. With every compelling frame of the comic you are drawn to think and reflect on what it all means. It is a piece of serious art, the Dark Side of the Moon of the graphic novel genre.
So, as you can imagine, turning it into a film was always going to be difficult. From the start it was clear that the brilliance of The Watchmen was so interwoven with its form that a movie was always going to be difficult. All that space for thought that you get from a book, the ability to put it down and imagine what it all means, this is lost with juggernaut of the cinema. It goes on for a long time, but there is never any time to stop and take it all in — it is just grotesquely detailed, aesthetically enhanced action or slow, ponderous philosophical conversation — the rhythm of cinema is wrong for story.
Director Zack Snyder’s previous movie, 300, was a brainless war movie about the battle of Thermopylae. It was exotic, hyperrealist, and quite dull — three attributes that he inevitably brought along to The Watchmen. The Watchmen opens with an incredible set-piece fight; you can see every splinter of glass move when it smashes, every punch that lands is depicted in high detail, blood drips with amazing viscosity . . . so why does it all feel so sterile. Partly it is the hyperreal computer enhanced aesthetic — which you can admire, but never be affected by — but mainly, I think, it is because the characters themselves are so flat and 2-dimensional. For, whilst this may be an exact shot-for-frame remake of Dave Gibbons’ artwork, Snyder seems incapable of eliciting the same level of emotion from his actors.
Ultimately, one is left sympathising with Alan Moore, the original author of The Watchmen, who refuses to have his name attached to any adaptation of his work, refusing even to collect any of the millions of pounds that they want to pay him. For Moore, who is disciplined enough to avoid even watching the films, the principle of being faithful to the form is absolute. Not because cinema is inferior but because it is not possible to do in it what he wants to do. The Watchmen doesn’t — and couldn’t — change that.
18 Mar 2009
blog I appear to have lost all ambition. If you told me that I would exist and live more or less as I am now for the rest of my life then I would be fine with that. At the moment. None of my desires are “burning”, I don’t need to impress, there is no mission that I feel impelled to complete. I am happy being, content to live whilst enjoying conversation, love, friendship, etc. Of course, you might argue that if I was more ambitious and achieved more in life I might be able to have better conversation, love, and friendship but I doubt it is worth the aggravation.
I like the taoist phrase, wu wei, meaning ‘to act without doing’. It implies a wonderful effortlessness, when there is no barrier between yourself and what you are doing. Ambition is a barrier, it gets in the way. It is far better to be contented than full of strife and strivings.
Goals are a contract with the future, without them we worry that we will end up disappointed at having wasted time. Goals help us to to focus our energies towards things that we consider more worthy than others. Everyone has goals, even if they are not consciously stated. What do those people who say they want nothing want? Are they conservatives who want everything to remain the same? Or do they really aspire towards having a mind like water, reacting appropriately to every stone or rock dropped in, then reverting to placid stillness.
There have been quietists in the past. People who have taken an attitude of non-intervention in all things. I sympathise with them, but wonder if is it responsible to do nothing when the possibility of global ecological collapse seems so close?
17 Mar 2009
blog Traditionally, the best fertilizer in which to grow flowers has been shit. Excrement in, beauty out. But, I wonder, does the same thing hold for human beings. If you consumed nothing but shit culture would it — could it? — flourish prettily in your mind?
In the past, when we only had four channels, you did something else if there was nothing on. Now, with hundreds of channels, you flick through until you find something worth watching; and if there’s still nothing worth watching, you watch a DVD or play a video game or go on the internet — just so long as there is a screen between you and reality. Tom told me that he worried that by stopping his son from watching telly he might be stifling the next Adam and Joe, a duo who have made a career from talking about rubbish films and television. But for every Adam and Joe there are a thousand bores in the pub talking about Rainbow.
Perhaps I am easily led astray, but I have found myself severely affected by Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night and it makes me wonder what other effects my cultural consumption might be doing to my soul. Celine’s nihilistic classic is a pleasure to read, but I wake up feeling bleak and nasty. Should I stop reading it and turn to something more wholesome? If so, what is the best fertilizer for the mind?
While I decide, I have gone on another information fast — no internet, no news, no books. It feels like breathing fresh air after being in a confined space for too long. The geek maxim is true: garbage in, garbage out.
16 Mar 2009
blog On Wednesday I was seriously questioning whether I should carry on writing this blog every day. Clearly I have nothing to say, yet for some reason I feel obliged to say it. As a minimalist, I don’t want to add even more crap to the world, even if it is virtual crap that people can choose to ignore.
Then it occurred to me that I was being self-important, which in turn reminded me of the spirit in which I started writing here in the first place. If I remember correctly I wanted to experience the thrill of writing without care or responsibility.
With writing you are usually bound to the things that you say. If you state an opinion it becomes a rod for your neck and a millstone for your back. Anyone who presents themselves as an example or displays an ideological allegiance cannot change their mind without creating some cognitive dissonance. Perhaps this is a good thing. It might make people think more about what they say, but I think the mind is too multifarious to be pinned down.
Aligned to the desire to stop writing, is the desire to not reading. I keep meaning to resume my information diet but get tempted back by the infinite distraction of the internet. This isn’t assisted by my current night time reading of Celine’s The Journey to the End of the Night, which is written in a brilliantly lively fashion but has at its core a terrible nihilistic contempt for humanity.
15 Mar 2009
blog To the Mitchell Library last night to see Tom Hodgkinson and Ed Mayo discuss parenting and the way in which children are being corrupted by consumerist messages.
I hadn’t heard of Mayo before, but his CV is very impressive; all those committees and think tanks he has been on have evidently helped shape him into clear, insightful speaker. Mayo looks like one of those very rational, analytical people with steel-rimmed spectacles and a bald head full of statistics. Thankfully, he was relaxed and witty with it, discoursing on the ways that advertisers get into the child’s mind.
With his shaggy hair and freewheeling speech, Tom Hodgkinson was the opposite of Mayo. Rather than rely on data and research, Tom uses anecdote and literary quotation. His message is one of contempt for TV, iPods, the internet, and Nintendos, whilst wearily acknowledging that it is impossible to deny children these things altogether.
The audience seemed slightly more receptive for Hodgkinson’s radical practicality rather than Mayo’s policy-based approach. Tom summed up the potency of capitalism in the insistent propaganda on every billboard and TV show, saying: spend more, be inadequate, become fulfilled by consuming, don’t think, look beautiful, work hard, do more. Against this onslaught it is virtually impossible to get an opposing message to stick in people’s brains for long.
13 Mar 2009
blog Transformers, Michael Bay’s curiously flat, big budget version of the 80s cartoon is the story a young man (Shia Le Boeuf) who finds himself at the centre of the battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons. It is, many ways, quite dissimilar from Michael Fengler’s documentary-style satire of the bourgeois Why does Herr R. Run Amok?, wherein a man (Kurt Raab) who can no longer bear the crushing nullity of his life kills his wife and young son. Perhaps the only connection is that I watched them both recently.
Here is a quick comparison:
One is mass culture; the other is minority culture.
One adheres closely to the action genre cliches; the other is outrageous in its lack of concern for conventions.
One is full of pop-culture jokiness; the other is deadly earnest and quite tragic.
One is inhuman, computer-generated and vulgar; the other all-too-human, realistic and quiet.
One is predictable and cliched; the other is bizarre and shocking.
One is pure escapism; the other unbearably real.
Can you guess which one is which? The world of Transformers is all about potency and power, Herr K. is all impotency and the the futility of all attempts to assert yourself within the confines of a bourgeois existence. I’m not sure which one I found more dispiriting.
12 Mar 2009
blog Just as there are war buffs who drone on about the war, I wonder if we will ever see Britpop buffs reminiscing about the exploits of Blur, Suede, Pulp, Oasis et al. I remember going to the Imperial War Museum as a student and being told by the archivist there that they have to reject hundreds of war diaries and memoirs every year because they were already overwhelmed by them. Perhaps the same thing will happen to Britpop — with the publication of biographies by Luke Haines, Alex James, David Barnett, and John Harris the shelves are filling up. So here are some brief, inaccurate and unrepresentative reminiscences of the era.
In the summer of 1993, whilst Luke Haines was being feted by the music press, I was 14 years old and getting into music for the first time. I had taped songs from the top 40 rundown on Sundays, but I had no sense of music as being important; it certainly wasn’t as engaging as Atari, Sega, and Nintendo.
That August I went to a new school where, crucially, you didn’t have to wear uniform. Suddenly, your music preferences were everywhere — on peoples T-shirts, in their hair cuts, even in the way they stood. Without any questioning, we all slotted into our groups: townies had their vapid dance music, ravers had their hardcore basslines, metallers their greasy long hair and headbanging, and the alternative crowd had slightly shorter hair and earnestness. I leaned towards the latter and, that year, listened to things like Nirvana, Cypress Hill, Pearl Jam, The Lemonheads, and The Wonderstuff.
By 1994, I had learnt how to play the guitar and started going to band practices where we played cover versions of any song that had four chords or less. What we discovered was that if you knew the tablature to Lithium by Nirvana then you could also play Married with Children by Oasis. Until I started playing in a band, the bubble the music press meant nothing to me, then I started thinking about the competition that stood between us and fame.
We ignored the success of Blur, Pulp, and Oasis who were all too well-established and focused on the later, more decadent phase of Britpop. Bands like David Devant and his Spirit Wife, Gretschen Hofner, Jack, Nilon Bombers, The Karelia, and Bennett — these represent were the apotheosis of Britpop for me. A time when it seemed that any band could get a record deal. But not, alas, mine.
By the time I left Leicester in September 1997 to go to Sheffield (home of Speedy and Baby Bird), Labour were in power and Oasis had released the dreadful Be Here Now. The new generation of bands celebrated in the weeklies — Bis, Kenickie, Dweeb, Tiger –were even more slight than the last and everyone had realised that it was time to move on. My dreams of Britpop stardom were snuffed out. The End.
11 Mar 2009
blog At work I have been investigating whether usability testing would be beneficial to the development of our websites. Unlike user acceptance testing, where people from other departments ensure that the site works prior to release, usability testing can be conducted at any time in a project, whether at the start with paper prototypes, before a redesign, or even whilst development is ongoing. At whatever stage it is done, the intention is to give designers, developers, and stakeholders key data which they can use to improve the next iteration.
By observing people performing simple tasks you gain a whole new understanding of a website. Rules of thumb about users preferring simplicity are made concrete when you see them visibly frowning over a multitude of different options. You realise that every superfluous image and link is perceived as noise by viewers and causes confusion. Problems that would have been tolerated in a user acceptance test can be observed, fixed, and, hopefully, not repeated.
Users tend to be very good at ‘satisficing’ (choosing the first obvious solution rather than analysing the web page to get an optimal solution); therefore usability testing provides an excellent way of analysing the intuitiveness of an interface.
10 Mar 2009
blog Despite giving myself a stomach ache after munching on a dodgy crabstick, it didn’t stop me from making my way to Offshore Cafe for another exciting, if low-key, installment of OMG.
One of the problems with OMG is that it is unsustainable. Teenage diaries and poetry are the peak oil of the confessional comedy world, once they’re used up that’s it (unless you’re Wringham whose supply is suspiciously inexhaustible).
This time around I resorted to reading from my high school reports. Every year we were asked to write down a list of what we considered our achievements. Unfortunately, between the ages of 10 to 13 my achievements were rather limited and they wouldn’t let me write things like “Completing Super Mario Kart” or “Touching J_______ S______’s boobs”. Instead, I wrote things like being in the Cubs and raising money (£1.30) for charity week.
For me, it was enough just to take part. As Woody Allen says, 80% of success is turning up. Well, I did a lot of turning up, being a member of countless teams and clubs, including: chess, Spanish, football, rugby, hockey, computer, German, badminton, basketball, athletics, library, and gymnastics. There were few, if any, barriers to entry to any of these, so why did I imagine that it was some kind of achievement?
I would argue that there are two types of achievement: those which are self-contained and those which are stepping stones towards something greater. For instance, writing King Lear or walking on the moon are self-contained achievements, whereas playing sport for the County or having an article published in a magazine is more a step towards a greater goal. The ones in my report were neither. Of course, language is a funny thing, we can also talk about achieving focus or achieving orgasm. These may feel like an achievement at the time, but you wouldn’t put them on your CV.
The laurels for the evening go to Ryan Vance for his surreal fridge poetry, inspired by what must be the worst holiday ever. Briefly, he went to New York to meet up with a girl he’d been courting on the internet for four years only to find that she had just become attached to a new man. He thus spent a week as a gooseberry, being undermined, ignored and rained on. It sounded horrific.
09 Mar 2009
blog In the modern age, it isn’t what you know or even who you know — it’s how you filter out what you don’t want to know that makes the difference. We live in an era of unparalleled choice and infinite distraction. It is a hypertextual world, where one thing leads immediately onto the next. We collect thoughts in our heads like tabs in our browsers, until we become overhwelmed, leading to stress and a gnawing sense of vagueness.
Vagueness is fatal to the man of action. He needs clarity and sharp wits — otherwise he risks falling into the intellectual wasteland of default behaviour. To avoid such a calamitous end, I have put together a handy guide to regaining your focus in the age of distraction.
1. Get enough sleep
When it comes to sleep, people are different. Albert Einstein slept 11 hours a night if he was working on a difficult problem. Buckmister Fuller, by contrast, slept three hours a day. Both did pretty well in their respective fields. Personally, I find a solid 8 hours to be sufficient for maximum clarity, anything less and I find myself indulging in default behaviour.
2. Avoid default behaviour
The definition of default behaviour is where you do something you don’t particularly want to do without thinking about it. This could be checking email, reading your rss feeds, watching television or scanning the news. You do it just because it’s one of those things you do.
Unfortunately, it sends a message to the unconscious to focus on distraction and before you know it you’ve spent a whole day idly pressing f5 in the hope that some site will have been updated. Instead, make a conscious decision to make a good start and do what you really want to do from the off.
3. Create the right conditions
It sounds paradoxical, but unless you can focus it’s impossible to work out what you want to focus on.
- If you are in a noisy environment, find quiet or wear earplugs.
- If you are working on a computer, close all extraneous programmes.
- If you are in a messy environment, clear a space.
- If you are hungry, have some fruit.
- If you are thirsty, get a cup of tea.
- If you are cold, put a jumper on.
Don’t worry if it is still too noisy/messy/cold etc, it’ll never be absolutely perfect, just write down the annoyance on a note pad and get it out of your head.
4. Clear the mind
The conscious mind is an incredible thing, but it can only hold the equivalent of seven bits of information at one time. If your mind is cluttered with things you need to do, you’ll never be able to focus. Write it down on a notepad. Make an agreement with yourself to think about it later. Get it out of your head.
5. Choose a project
Now that you have calm, now that you can hear yourself think, what are you going to do? There are probably a million things you could do, each one competing for attention, you just have to decide which one is most important. If it is a project that you find overwhelming (like, say, writing a book), break it down until it isn’t.
6. Break it down
Breaking a project down into doable sub-projects is the essence of focus. It allows you to stop worrying about the irrelevant. Breaking the sub-project down into a physical next action is the essence of flow. Now you can do something, rather than just thinking about it. You can throw the full force of your mind behind doing one thing really well rather than not doing lots of things badly.
7. Flow
Everyone has had that feeling of being absolutely absorbed in an activity. You forget about the clock, forget about other stuff you need to do, forget about tiredness, and simply lose yourself in the moment. This state of flow is the highest form of focus. In flow, we are happier and more intelligent, any sense of self-doubt or lack of self-esteem disappears. The easiest way of obtaining it is to remind yourself of a previous flow experience. How did you feel? How did you hold yourself? The more vivid your memory, the closer to flow you are, and the closer you come to being truly focused.
Let me know whether or not they work for you in the comments box below. And send me your tips for achieving focus.
08 Mar 2009