plasticbag.org

Ok – I’m in the middle of a big deadline at the moment, so all my thoughts are necessarily truncated. But still – the biggest thing in my head at the moment is my father. He and my mother got divorced when I was two or three and I haven’t seen him or heard anything from him since I was about four or five. My mother had a couple of conversations with him when I was about six or seven, but that’s it. No more.

I’ve never really been even the slightest bit interested in finding out about him – all my friends seemed to think that I should seek him out – but why? What possible connection could I have with this man? At least that was always my position. But now I think it’s changing. The easiest way to tell what’s on your mind is to see how often you find yourself confronted by it everywhere you look – in the books you read, the TV shows you watch. It’s like with theories – if you get attached to a theory about the way the world works, then you see evidence for it everywhere. It’s not so much that you’re making up the evidence, but that your mind is hoovering up associated material left, right and centre…

Anyway – at the moment everything I touch seems to be about absent fathers and having a sense of your own history and about memories. Things as random as Paul Auster novels, films like Memento and TV shows like Sex and the City have all (over the last few days) made me think about my past and my parents. And my father particularly. He’d be in his sixties now – he might be dead. I think maybe I just need to know whether or not he’s dead. Head’s too full of crap today. Will think about this in more depth later – maybe next week.

my %guy;
$guy{type} = ‘underwater guy’;
$guy->control_sea;
kill $guy, “10 million pounds of 
                  sludge from NY and NJ”;

foreach my $monkey (@monkeys) {
    $monkey->gone(heaven);
}

$creature{sky}->suck_into_hole;
$sky->put_in_hole;
$ground = ‘not cold’;
if ($ground ne ‘cold’){
   burn $everything;
   next $turn;
   $mine->too;
}

foreach my $monkey (@monkeys) {
    $monkey->gone(heaven);
}

$joe->rock($me);

if ($man == 5) {
  if ($man == 5) {
    if ($man == 5) {
      $devil = 6;
      }
    $devil = 6;
    }
  $devil = 6;
  $devil = 6;
}
if ($devil == 6) {
   $deity = 7;
   $deity = 7;
}

foreach my $monkey (@monkeys) {
    $monkey->gone(heaven);
}

A while ago I linked to an article about old TV shows having new opportunities for product placement because of the potential for digital alteration before rebroadcasting. But it seems that this is only the beginning of the ‘touching-up’ of the past (for both reasons of ‘taste’ and money). In a recently rebroadcast movie in the US, underwear was digitally altered and indeed completely added on a young lady kissing Mr Bond. The Smoking Gun has the full story.

Oh and if you want to know what I did on Saturday night, then go and read up about it over at Brainsluice. He leaves out how precisely grumpy I was all evening. That’s why he’s my best friend.

The last couple of days have been fairly strange exotic beasts – the job disappointment as ever knocked me for a loop for a good twenty-four hours. It’s always difficult to be rejected, I think, and I wonder if anyone ever really gets used to it. They always say that as one door closes another opens – but this seems to have been happening so regularly recently that after a while you have to start wondering, is this a revolving door? And am I trying to go through it the wrong way? Anyway – a couple of new possibilities have emerged – one of which looks particularly promising. So I guess I’ll just have to try and relax and go with the ride for a little longer…

After lunch yesterday with Cal, Matt and Phil, I ended up wandering around Central London trying t get a bit of perspective on things and finishing off my copy of Moon Palace – which stirred up a lot of thoughts about my father and my (vaguely) impending thirtieth birthday. I went for a brief drink with a friend who was celebrating his birthday and returned home, weirdly satisfied.

Today I’m in much finer form – I’ve got lots of work to do, lots of things to think about. Part of the cheeriness I’m feeling has to be due to the gift of Fahrenheit 451 that I received today from an anonymous donor as well as the delightful irony of having Sauron (from the Barbelith Underground) buying me a copy of Lord of the Rings from my wishlist. Thanks to everyone!

One of the funniest transition pages I’ve seen in forever – Might Big TV is now Television Without Pity…

Sing it with me, children…

When are you gonna come down?
When are you going to land?
I should have stayed on the farm.
I should have listened to my old man.

I’m having a minor moment about an article on the BBC’s news site which is very interesting and everything, but also completely ‘give away the twist why-don’t-you’-ish. The article is about the next Harry Potter movie, which makes me think that you probably should only click here if you’ve already read the book…

A good article on the state of the American music industry: Looking Grim at the Grammys. I don’t know how long it’s going to take contemporary culture to figure out, but fragmentation is the new monolith – cultures are separating along the lines of interest groups – and people belong to several over-lapping fragmented cultures rather than to the mono-culture. Technology will continue to get more adaptable and less expensive, and that means that the overheads of running a media operation should now be dropping as well. And that in turn means that a variety of entertainment product – small bands, small films, for small markets – some of which may go huge – should return to prominence. The internet is making people weirder. When will you people realise this?!

I’m going to say this quickly and get it over with. I didn’t get the Community Producer gig at the BBC, I am gutted. If you want to make me feel better about it then buy me something.