This kind of moment has been happening more and more often. The most encouraging part of it is that it doesn’t seem to matter what the content of the scene is, only whether I’m aware enough to absorb it without assessing its implications to my personal interests. When my interests and preferences aren’t informing the picture — when I am not looking at it in terms of what it’s adding or taking away from me — it’s like I can watch it without being there. I am alive and aware without the normal heaviness of being a needy, self-obsessed human being. And that is where beauty is found. — (raptitude.com
This reminds me of the massive amount of data that floods into our brains every second. Every sense is pumping information that gets translated by the mind.
I have this fantasy of waking from a coma with no memory and being bombarded by this… tsunami? … of data. The light, sounds smells hitting my consciousness as if for the first time. What would that be like? Could we survive it?
Our minds (brain?) would throttle it back to something that would not make our heads explode. But what if we want to go the other way? Take the throttle off. Let the data come streaming in. But that’s not right. The data IS streaming in. We’re just not really experiencing it. What if I want ever photon? Every 1 and 0?
It seems logical that we have that capability. The hardware is the same. It must be the software that has robbed us of seeing all the world has to offer.
Yesterday we had a nice chat covered lots of topics. I asked them about their infuences, aspirations, etc. They asked me about The Basement Diaries.
I rambled on a bit and the conversation stretched to about 30 minutes, so I put it on YouTube in three parts. [Part 2 | Part 3]
My interviewing skills were never very sharp and have only gotten rustier over the years, but that’s okay. It was fun to talk with the band (Pete Conway, Angie Fletcher, Theresa Wrigley, James Finley and David Bigg).
If we’d had the internet in 1963 or ’64, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles would have been doing chats like this and making videos and all the rest. What a treasure that would have been.
Who knows if FISTS will soar to such hights, or be one of thousands of “bedroom bands” who make their music for the sheer joy of it.
UPDATE: To call my Skype visit with James and his friends an interview was reaching a bit. Fortunately, they’ve been kind enough to provide some of the information I failed to get:
Fists are myself and Angi (long term partners), Theresa is our old friend who we’ve known forever. Angi, Theresa and myself all live together. Our bassist Dave is our most recent addition replacing our old bassist Joe Wrigley who is Theresa’s brother. Dave lives practically next door on the same street with his girlfriend Kiri. We have a fifth member Peter Conway but he was sadly unable to be there for the interview and we neglected to tell you this!? Sorry about that. Pete lives in a co-operative with his wife and two children about 10 minutes walk away.
Our jobs are pretty wide ranging. Angi is currently working as a freelance graphic designer for a software company called Serif, she’s also a lecturer and tutor at the local university teaching Design and Visual Culture amongst other stuff to undergraduates. Theresa also works at Nottingham Trent University as an administrator for the Fine Art Department. Dave is a postman for The Royal Mail. This was a major headache when we recently went on tour and Dave didn’t book the time off work. He was getting to bed at 3-4am after the shows and getting up at around 6:30am for work for the whole week. He was very tired! Pete runs and owns an ethical screenprinting business with his wife Hannah called I Dress Myself. They source their t-shirts from ethical fair trade suppliers. They are made from biodegradable bamboo and their inks are all waterbased. They are one of the very few companies doing this in the UK at the moment. His business is pretty handy for our own band T-shirts! I’m a PA to a Professor of Gastroenterology called Chris Hawkey at the local hospital (Queen’s Medical Centre).
This is where we rehearse.
This is a little video of us performing at the record launch party for our first single which had the gorilla boxer on the front.
Here we are at the Glastonbury Festival last year.
Here we are performing at our second record launch party for the EP with the cool group shot on the front. There’s a whole series of videos from this show on Youtube.
This is a video our friend Dan Toporowski did for us for the first single. Dan is a genius who makes these beautiful animations at home on his battered, old, PC. Dan’s day job was working in a factory until he got made redundant. I’m pretty sure there’s an excellent job out there for Dan doing this stuff professionally but he refuses to do it as a job! It’s also worth checking out his excellent Franklin’s Haunted House.
And there you have it!
Once again, massive thanks for all your support and kindness over the past couple of years. You have always been a very positive, enthusiastic and useful ally of the band and we are very grateful indeed.
“Many people are still focused on Twitter as a tool for promoting movies or TV shows, or see it as a toy that geeks and their friends play with to amuse themselves. The real power in what Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone created (and what Ev Williams later financed and built into a company) could well be that it is the simplest, the easiest and arguably one of the most efficient forms of mass publishing — or at least micro-publishing — ever invented.”
My favorite line from the post: “… a tweet can be passed around the world and back before newspaper reporters are even getting their shoes on.”
Here are the last 10 songs I listened to on Pandora:
Treat Me Right – Grace Potter
I Rather Be Blind, Crippled and Crazy – Derek Trucks
Voodoo Chile – Eric Clapton and Steve Windwooed
Maps – Yeah Yeah Yeah
Whatever You Like – Anya Marina
Beat It – Pomplamoose
What I Wouldn’t Do – A Fine Frenzy
Hotel Song – Regina Spektor
Smile – Lily Allen
Momma’s Boy – Elizabeth and the Catapult
Before Pandora, I had never heard of any of these artists (except Winwood and Clapton). What I’d like to know from those of you who regularly listen to terrestrial radio stations, would I hear these songs there? How about this particular mix?
I pay $36 a year for Pandora One, which gives me unlimited listening with no commercials. What is that, a dime a day?
I’ve been working almost 40 years (more if you count high school and college jobs) and a lot has changed in how I work; where I work; and –obviously– the work itself. Smarter folk than I are thinking about this, too:
“In the same way that high-speed Internet access disrupted the corporate IT market, creating a “cloud” of web-enabled infrastructure, the human cloud is shorthand for how the web has disrupted the way we work. Companies rely on dispersed teams to get the best talent available regardless of location (or price) and many are using crowdsourcing and other innovative means to achieve their goals.
Meanwhile, many people who work in this new cloud have lives that look nothing like they would have even10 years ago: they may have contracts with a variety of clients, outsource themselves and their skills through a third-party service like Elance or ODesk or collaborate with coworkers in opposing time zones. The companies they work for, and with, may not even know what they look like, or where they live. This is the reality of the human cloud and it is changing us (and the companies we work for) in ways we may not fully realize yet.”
Given the “webby” nature of my work, I have a good bit of contact with the “human cloud” and find myself wondering how I would function there.
“If you were in the news business in the 20th century, you worked in a kind of pipeline, where reporters and editors would gather facts and observations and turn them into stories, which were then committed to ink on paper or waves in the air, and finally consumed, at the far end of those various modes of transport, by the audience.
What’s going away, from the pipeline model, isn’t the importance of news, or the importance of dedicated professionals. What’s going away is the linearity of the process, and the passivity of the audience. What’s going away is a world where the news was only made by professionals, and consumed by amateurs who couldn’t do much to produce news on their own, or to distribute it, or to act on it en masse.
We are living through a shock of inclusion, where the former audience is becoming increasingly intertwined with all aspects of news, as sources who can go public on their own, as groups that can both create and comb through data in ways the professionals can’t, as disseminators and syndicators and users of the news.”
A couple of things. I don’t think I would have listened to this presentation (10 min?) without the animation. Because of the animation, I listened much more closely. Focused. Much better than watching the speaker at a podium or –god forbid– Powerpoint slides.
Secondly, I am really grateful my nephews and niece were home schooled. Well done Blane and Tonya. If you have children in school –or plan to– you should watch this.
The full quote (by MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle) is: “We think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.” I came across it near the end of Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants. (More on that in a later post.) Mr. Kelly beautifully captures my own feelings about technology:
“I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it’s the web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars proves. Our first encounters with the internet/web portrayed it as a very widely distributed electronic dynamo –a thing one plugs into– and that it is. But the internet as it has matured is closer to the technological equivalent of a place. An uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I’ve entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of hits human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images creates an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smell like life. It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than I am, wider than I can imagine; in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger, too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.”
“In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown.” Who can ask for more.
