The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
Friends, Bloggers, Countrymen ... lend your ears to these people. I come not to bury them, but praise them.
This is Not a Test
Now posting to Twitter, Facebook, and Daily Blah combined. Have joined Dark Side. Facebook, or rather a Facebook app called Blog It, offered me access to all three if I would enter via Facebook. Also, Facebook now offering Chat application. Yes master ... I shall migrate my online life to Facebook ...
Bitter? You're damn right we're bitter ...
After seven years of Bush, in the midst of a tanking economy, who wouldn't be?
So glad to see Hillary's desperate decision to attack Obama's comments about "bitter voters ... clinging to guns and church" blow up in her face. First she gets heckled when she tries to bring it up at a campaign event. Now this grassroots website has sprung up: Bitter Voters for Barak, a nifty collection of responses from avowedly bitter voters.
We're getting savvier. We have the Internet. We won't get fooled again.
Burning a Hole in Our Pockets
3Trillion.org is a nice idea for a website. It takes the premise that the Iraq war will end up costing the U.S. three trillion dollars -- a conservative estimate, if Mr. McCain keeps us there for 10,000 years -- and presents this startling fact in a way any web dweller will understand. To wit: if there were an Amazon-style site where you could spend $3 trillion in any way you choose, what would you put in your shopping cart? For example, I picked up the entire city of San Francisco for $100 billion. (That's the combined value of all its real estate, though I have to imagine I'd get some sort of bulk discount.)
It's almost impossible to max out your cart. I snapped up a private Carribean island, constructed a moon base, ended world hunger for a year, funded universal literacy, took over Google (a bargain at $20 billion), built infrastructure across the U.S. for solar power and hydrogen cars, and in a kind of impulse decision at the checkout stand, bought the world's most expensive book (a $20 million Benedictine Bible). And still, I hadn't even broken $2 trillion. I had to pay back all of Social Security's debt, fix the Katrina damage, replace all U.S. agriculture with sustainable organic farming, give one dollar to every human being on the planet. Even then, I only maxed out my cart when I tried to buy Yahoo as well.
Wild Endings
Lest you think I simply praise any movie I see to the high heavens, let me first tell you about the ho-hum flicks I've seen recently. This is England: no it wasn't. A very incomplete, lazily-ended slice of life about skinheads in 1983, it spent too much time trying to draw some unexplained connection to the Falklands War and not enough tying up its characters' loose ends. Sweeney Todd: not bad, a nice cameo by Sasha Baron Coen, but again, it squandered itself in a lazy ending. U23D: could have been great, probably was great on a digital IMAX. The analogue version made me go a little cross-eyed behind my outsize 3D glasses.
Okay, critical duty done. Now excuse me while I rave about Into the Wild, which just came out on DVD. (Yes, I know I'm a little behind the curve on this one). Most movies of this kind of length -- 2 hours 30 minutes -- tend to drag by the end. But this one, the (mostly) true story of Chris McCandless, a Thoreau-reading graduate who fled his family, gave his college fund to charity and walked the land, ending up in the Alaskan wilderness, could easily have been longer. Emile Hirsch, an astonishing fusion of Jack Black and young Leo DiCaprio, gives an incandescent performance as McCandless, and Hal Holbrook's bit part as an equally lonely old man brought me to tears. But the real star of the movie is the great American west: the vast deserts, the cornfields, the Colorado river, the ocean, the Pacific Coastal Trail, the eagles, horses, moose and bears; none have ever looked so beautiful on film. Nor is it tame or pastoral; it simulataneously manages to look rough, dusty, raw, and feral. It's more red in tooth and claw than any late-night National Geographic documentary.
I was enraptured for every minute of the movie. There was so much life in this ultimately mortal voyage that it was hard not to feel the way you feel when you've been out in nature for a week or so: a little more free, a little more grateful, a little less "civilized" in all the right ways. I was reminded somewhat of Burning Man, but substantially more of the trips I took on the Green Tortoise at McCandless' age. Those communal bus adventures were, in many senses, the opposite of his one-man wanderings, but they shared his disgust with American cities and suburbs, and his Emersonian devotion to truth in nature. And of course, he ends up in Alaska in a "magic bus" of his own.
The film didn't mention this, but the bus was heartbreakingly close to food, shelter and a river crossing at the end, according to this Outside article by the author of the book the movie is based on. McCandless didn't know this, as he had neglected -- or shunned -- the carrying of a map. Getting back to the wilderness is all well and good. Informing yourself about it, as Emerson and Thoreau and Burning Man and the drivers of the Green Tortoise would all agree, is the only thing that stops the journey being suicide.
Bush Clinton Bush Clinton
For a brief, shining moment, all was right with the world. Hillary's increasingly desperate attacks on Obama were like water off his back, and the press took a faintly bemused attitude to it all. She's the one to fix healthcare? Um, right. She has tons of foreign policy experience because of all those trips she took as first lady? Okay. Ready on day one? Gotcha.
Then came Ohio and Texas, and it appeared that the constant Clinton barrage of negativity had worked. Now, it seems, anything goes. Hillary's advisers compare Obama to Ken Starr because he said he'd start scrutinizing her as intensely as she was looking at him, and the press reports it uncritically. We're back down the rabbit hole, still living in the years of Bush insanity. Black still equals white. We have always been at war with Eastasia. A tiny bomb in Times Square is the end of civilization.
This, you see, is why I never became a political reporter. I burst enough blood vessels just reading campaign news. It feels like we're stuck in a timewarp: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. No escape.
Swede the Internet
Since I got back from Paris and London, I've been encouraging everyone I meet to see Be Kind Rewind. It's a must for anyone who likes movies, or electricity, or pizza, or being silly. Like the pathetic video shop full of outmode -- worse, erased -- video tapes which it depicts, it needs help. It's in danger of becoming one of those movies banished to VHS -- not literally, but you know what I mean. A "lost classic." But the truth is, this is Michel Gondry's best film since "Eternal Sunshine," and may even surpass that masterwork.
At its core is the can-do, cardboard-cut-out-and-string spirit of childhood. A movie for the forthcoming Obama era, it declares: yes you can remake a video library of hit movies using nothing but a camera, cheap props, and pluck. Gondry goes so far as to suggest this spirit can save the world, or at least a video shop threatened with compulsory demolition. Be Kind Rewind, for such is the name of the New Jersey store, is the center of a sad, run-down but also blissfully innocent world; a building reputed to be the birthplace of Fats Waller, a building whose owner takes an old-fashioned train journey to do some old-fashioned industrial spying on a competitor who sells 'em newfangled DVDs.
A tinfoil conspiracy nut and a man-child accidentally erase the entire stock while the owner is away, and feel responsible enough to film their own utterly sincere attempt at a remake of the first film requested by a customer. This is the kind of community where a customer is patient enough to wait until 6pm that day, allowing the pair to shoot twenty minutes of film as a replacement. The result, of course, charms the town. They're not fooled, but who could fail to be won over -- or prefer this heartfelt amateurism to the prepackaged dreck you pick up at a regular video store?
You can almost hear the Web 2.0 crowd cheering (and booing when the Hollywood copyright lawyers come along and destroy the stock). This is the world if it were run by Flickr or Wikipedia or YouTube. "Sweding" is the term Gondry uses; it's a nonsense word gabbled by one of the video makers when asked to name the process by which these Hollywood movies were made so good. Sweding: A tacit admission that mainstream dreck has been entirely perverted, and redeemed, through the filter of outsider art.
You can see it on the Be Kind Rewind website, which adapts a great Eddie Izzard joke about technofear -- "I've deleted the Internet?" --and replaces said Internet with a cardboard-and-string version -- beginning, of course, with Google. Your search results will be sweded.
So, Dear Blah reader, here is your meme of the day, possibly the meme of the year. Go forth and swede yourself.
Big Google is Watching You
We at Daily Blah continue to be excited about the street view feature on Google Maps. It's like taking a vacation in a city without actually going there. It continues to inspire the younger generation, too. We remember leading a class of kids in journalism brainstorming at 826 Valencia, and the story that most inspired interest was one about the privacy aspects of street view. "My neighbor was caught on his doorstep in pink furry slippers," said one kid excitedly. When we dialed up a contact at Google to discuss the story over speakerphone, a once rowdy class became suddenly still, like they were listening to the voice of God.
At first, we were saddened that Daily Blah world headquarters was not really featured in street view -- you can sort of see it from the main road, but because it's on a cul-de-sac, the Google van evidently did not come to visit. But after watching this video, we're actually rather glad. Easily the most disturbing thing I've seen in months.
Aphorism of the day
The first thing we should do with the future is learn how to respect it, then how to please it – and never dare presume we are so worthy as to predict it. -- Future Boy
I feel a new slogan coming on: the only blog written by word-of-mouth
Many of you may be wondering whatever happened to my plan to write a novel by voice recognition software. Well, you're listening to it.
That's right. Daily Blah is now being composed by word-of-mouth. For one entry only, unless this blasted thing starts working better.
You see? It responds to threats. I say "unless this blasted thing stops working better" after 15 wrong words or so. I get angry. I get genuinely angry at how little the software lives up to its promise. And lo and behold, it suddenly seems to understand the tone of voice. This, I surmise, is an honesty machine.
Only the things I am supposed to write, that seem clear and forceful, words that are supposed to be there, emerge from the other end of this microphone. It is, you might say, an exact replica (in the real world) of my inner censor.
This makes it a hideous device to write a novel with. A novel requires searching sentences, sentences that don't quite make it, that spring from the mind half-formed, half-baked. And yes, sometimes stillborn.
I am however having second thoughts on the overall worthiness of this software. An honesty device might be a pretty good thing to write a blog through. It might not produce a blog with much literary merit. It would be a blog very much in my own voice. A blog very appropriately titled Daily Blah.
Problems with Dragon NaturallySpeaking persist. I have been unable to write 50,000 words in a month. Part of the problem is that I'm laughing all the time. For instance, when I just tried to write "in a month", the software wrote "in her mouth". I was rolling on the floor for several minutes at this.
But the largest part of the problem is the deadening effect it has on creativity to have to have your left brain so focused on whether its language is being understood. You see, even now I am writing clunky sentences like the one above, which, like the rest of this blog, I refuse to edit by hand. Actually I spoke that last sentence slightly differently, in the past tense. Dragon NaturallySpeaking heard the present tense. I prefer the present tense. This would be a good device to write a letter, and the letter-like essays I call my blogs. I'll try it for now, and let you judge the result.
So what fate befell the novel? It languishes still. I got much further using the excellent Google docs and spreadsheets, and simply typing a stream of consciousness description of my day and my inner thoughts, Mrs. Dalloway style. There- Dragon NaturallySpeaking redeemed itself by understanding Mrs. Dalloway on the first try. My own Mrs. Dunaway got to a very respectable 25,000 words before fate intruded space in the form of my girlfriend, who flew all the way from New York to surprise me for my birthday. It worked. I've never been so surprised, no so unable to keep my resolve stuck on any noble efforts of my own. Nor have I ever had a happier birthday.
Start Writing Purple For Me Now
It's beginning to look a lot like my birthday. And should anyone be interested, I was recently pointed to a site called The Purple Store, where many of my obsessively purple needs are met.
From whence comes my deep abiding love for all things twixt red and blue, you say? From the Gogol Bordello song, Start Wearing Purple For Me Now? From the Jenny Joseph poem? No, from somewhere in the depths of my college days, when I started writing in purple ink in purple notebooks, and found I couldn't stop. There's something so soothingly authoritative about cursive script scrawled in imperial purple. Whoever came up with the derogatory phrase "purple prose" to describe overly florid fiction owes this particular part of the spectrum an apology.
Ah. Well,according to Wikipedia, it was Horace, as in one of those Roman geezers so venerable as to not need a last name, a practice not revived until the arrival of Cher. Horace was critiquing a pupil's poem, I assume: "Your opening shows great promise, and yet flashy purple patches." That is, of the kind that Rome's wannabe hipsters had sewn into their robes to create the appearance of wealth.
But hang on a minute. Purple patches sewn on robes? That would have so obviously fake that I find it hard to imagine they weren't worn with a sense of irony. Nor is it easy to imagine that some of the most florid examples of purple prose in literature -- such as the one everyone knows, the "it was a dark and stormy night" opening of Baron Lyton's novel -- were not written a little bit knowingly. It is time to reclaim the phrase "purple prose" -- therefore I declare my birthday, November 22, to be Purple Prose Day. On that day, I call on every Daily Blah reader to write something they would have written anyway -- an email to a functionary, a letter to a bank manager, a note to the milkman -- in a deliberately over-the-top style, with as many unnecessary syllables and adjectives as you can manage. Take that, Horace!
Have the Germans learned nothing from Art Spiegelman's Maus? Do they not realize, in the context of that book, how this looks? Perhaps the mouse skin web store belongs to a neo-Nazi group that is taking Maus -- and another disturbing website, Cats That Look Like Hitler, a little too literally.
