July 2nd, 2008
The F-word, in the right context (or more accurately, the wrong context), can be comedy gold. But use it in a GCSE exam paper and it is worth two marks out of possible 27. This is the guideline set by chief examiner Peter Buckroyd.
The exam was GCSE English, the question was “Describe the room you are sitting in”. The answer given was “Fuck off”.
To gain minimum marks in English, students must demonstrate “some simple sequencing of ideas” and “some words in appropriate order”. The phrase had achieved this, according to Mr Buckroyd.
The chief examiner, who is responsible for standards in exams taken by 780,000 candidates and for training for 3,000 examiners, told The Times: “It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for – like conveying some meaning and some spelling.
“It’s better than someone that doesn’t write anything at all. It shows more skills than somebody who leaves the page blank.”
…
“If it had had an exclamation mark it would have got a little bit more because it would have been showing a little bit of skill,” Mr Buckroyd said.
(thanks to Cultural Snow)
Posted in culture, literature, philosophy, society |
July 1st, 2008
I haven’t yet written about the two years (2006-2008) I spent on trial, falsely accused of drug offences, and the life changing effect it had on me and my family. I was only finally cleared this February, which marked the end of a highly traumatic process, one I had waited a long time to put behind me. February was time to start forgetting, which is what I did, but I think now, despite many reasons why I should not do so, it is time to start remembering again.
Criminal proceedings, even those to which you are found not guilty, are one of a number of traumas (mental illness being the other that springs to mind) which, for societal reasons, are not easy to talk about. In part this is because some people like to pretend these things just don’t happen. They only happen to bad people on TV. But it is mainly because, in many eyes, regardless of whether the protagonist of the tale is innocent or guilty, just the association with the subject matter is enough to taint them. Even if this is a minority opinion (and I’m not sure that it is), the disdain of the Daily Mail set is not something anyone deserves, irrespective of their crimes.
A trial consists of two halves, prosecution and defence, and is heard before a jury of 12. In my case the prosecution took three days to make their argument, wheeling out a parade of sordid “evidence” that painted a phantasmagoric view of Brighton’s criminal underbelly. My defence, which lasted only a matter of hours, did little more than point out that just about everything the prosecution had presented, fascinating though it was, had only the most tenuous connection to me, the guy in the glass box. On this, quite correctly, the jury found me not guilty. But not unanimously. Of the 12 jurors, there were two who, despite the void of evidence, would have sent me to prison for something I didn’t do. Guilt by association.
I make my living as an ActionScript freelancer, which means I have a large number of clients who come to me as someone they can trust to do a job they often don’t fully understand. This trust is essential to good client relations. If 10% of my potential clients were to see me with the same narrow minded prejudice as these two jurors, that my association with such horribleness alone means I am of poor character, it would effect my business. So, for purely financial reasons I am discouraged from ever admitting publicly to what Sussex Police put me through. This is before I have given any consideration to the reactions of my parents, former employers, my boy’s teachers and the old dears chattering at the bus stop.
But I’m now thinking bollocks to that. I was wholly innocent of the three charges Sussex Police tried, for reasons I will later explore, to pin on me. And the personal violation of their actions in pursuing me was a crime that far outstripped the societal damage of the trumped up charges. The charges would have resulted in a long term of imprisonment, while the actions of Sussex Police don’t even warrant an apology.
Obviously this is a very long story, so I am not going to tell it all in one blog post, but I will attempt over the coming months to go public with my experience and write a number of posts under this heading about the things I learned on my journey through the British Justice system. On this path I learned a lot about morality, society, concepts of right and wrong and an individual’s place in the system, so it is something that should hopefully make for interesting reading.
I’m still here anyway, so you already know the story has a happy ending.
Posted in introspection, philosophy, society, zen |
June 26th, 2008
I was at The Great Escape last month, Brighton’s annual new music festival, where I saw a long string of young talents. But of the 20+ bands I saw that weekend the one act that utterly beguiled me (and I’ve had on heavy rotation since) was Norweigan singer/songwriter Ane Brun.
On the final night of the festival, local gig merchants Melting Vinyl hosted a Norweigan night at The Duke Of Yorks, featuring Ane Brun, Nils Bech and Silje Nes. The line-up may not have met the “new music” criteria of the festival (Brun is on her fifth album), but all are little heard of in the UK. And as an antidote to all the nu-rave, electro and indie pop of the previous three days it was a perfect come-down gig.
My colleagues that night (you know who you are) insisted on sniggering all the way through Brun’s set, thinking it was “a bit Dolly Parton”. I can’t say I agree. You can decide for yourself with these three tracks from a recent Amsterdam gig (c/o the wonderfully named Dutch service FabChannel):
Full gig here.
Posted in culture, music, video |
June 21st, 2008
She pointed at the beige hardware. “How come this old shit is always that same color?”
His forehead creased. “There are two theories. One is that it was to help people in the workplace be more comfortable with radically new technologies that would eventually result in the mutation or extinction of the workplace. Hence the almost universal choice, by the manufacturers, of a shade of plastic most often encountered in downscale condoms.” He smirked at Chevette.
“Yeah? What’s two?”
“That the people who were designing the stuff were unconsciously terrified of their own product, and in order not to scare themselves, kept it looking as unexciting as possible. Literally ‘plain vanilla,’ you follow me?”
All Tomorrows Parties - William Gibson 1999
Posted in culture, literature, retro, tech |
June 10th, 2008
The Uncanny X-Men #123 Chris Claremont / John Byrne July 1979
Posted in comics |
June 9th, 2008
Don Quixote, Cervantes’ hero and great favourite of Borges, was an adventurer, explorer, pioneer and most of all, a fantasist. His story is a great one, surviving many generations. But his character would make very little sense today.
It is still possible to have adventures, to discover new places, and do great things, but it is now much more difficult to exaggerate those experiences in order to spin a good yarn. There is so much information in the public sphere that any and every claim can be verified, cross checked and challenged. Locations can be found on Google Maps and examined from the air. Eye-witness accounts can be sourced from the closest bloggers. Financial transactions are logged with global banking systems. Our faces are recorded on CCTV.
Our tales, and our life-stories, are no longer our own. Wherever we go, and whatever we do, we leave a data-trail behind us, which, if anyone cares enough to follow it, is writing our life story for us.
Autobiography is something that, typically, is only first considered in one’s twilight years, when the inevitability of death heightens the urge to leave some kind of posthumous personality imprint for the sake of one’s descendants. But for citizens of the 21st Century, there is no shortage of evidence of our time here, and if we were to leave it until the end of lives to attempt to construct our story, it will be too late. Because by that time it is already written.
We are carving our life stories via our data-trails. We are drawing our shapes on the face of the planet with the GPS psychogeography of our daily movements, tracked by the phone in our pocket. We write patterns with our money movements and express our tastes through the points earned on our loyalty cards. This is how our thoughts, opinions and emotions are recorded. This story, written in dry, explicit detail, is unlikely to correspond with the self image we carry in our heads, but it is irrefutable and permanent and will be how we are remembered. Unless we decide to do something about it.
One approach may be to attempt to remove your traces from the public record, or state your claim on every piece of data stored about you. But this would be a fools errand, and nigh on impossible. The more reasonable approach for the techno-savvy is to simply to write your own data trails, and write them LOUD, so that they are more obvious (i.e. more googlable) than any other data out there. Personalities are writ large on blogs, mySpace pages, Twitter streams, Facebook profiles, message boards and anywhere else data can be created in the public domain. This is what they call “user-generated content“, or what the ponses call “Web 2.0“. It may appear to some as a deep well of mindless chatter, but it is more than that. These are personalities, struggling to define their individuality in a world that has suddenly got very big.
The author and mathematician Rudy Rucker has a concept he calls the “Lifebox”, which is what he sees the blog evolving into. As we live our lives we fill our lifebox with content - images, words, video, audio - the more we add, the more accurate a simulacrum of the individual it becomes. After our death, if search software continues to evolve at the rate it has over the last ten years, it would be possible to converse with a lifebox just as you would another living being. Autobiography becomes a living construct, one to which we can ask questions, spend time with and get to know.
But even if we haven’t set out to build a lifebox, we are building one anyway. We can’t help but write our stories, just by being out there and interacting with the world. If there is more to us than just a string of financial transactions or public records, for the sake of posterity it is up to us to seize authorship and to own it.
Posted in philosophy, society, tech, web |
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