You know, Becky and Josh from Ghost World? Well according to Michael Holden’s All Ears column in the Guardian Guide last Saturday (15/10/07) they moved to London and recently went on holiday to the Greek islands…
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the pictures below are from Dan Clowes’ masterwork Ghost World:
I can’t have been the only one to notice this. I mean it just totally jumped out the page at me.
If you haven’t read Ghost World you really should. I read it again on Sunday and it just gets better each time I revisit it, new subtleties showing through the ostensibly simple artwork each time.
OK, I promise I’ll shut up about The Wire soon but just kind of following on from the post the other day… This post is also partly an excuse to post the lovely maps from Jan Morris’s Hav.
This lack of plot and characters is common in the conventional Utopia, and I expect academics and other pigeonholers may stick Hav in with Thomas More and co. That is a respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying that Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social - ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. Hav exists as a mirror held up to several millennia of pan-Mediterranean history, customs and politics. It is a focusing mirror; its intensified reflection sharply concentrates both observation and speculation.
(Also it’s got maps and books with maps = sci-fi /fantasy)
This seems to me to correlate closely with some of what Jason Mitell is saying about the wire in his The Wire and the Serial Procedural essay; i.e. taht The Wire’s about observation and speculation, about urban planning, about law, about organisational structures, basically its science is human geography. Geo-fi.
Maybe the idea that things like video games and other procedural simulations are, on some level, doing the same thing as science fiction, explains why there’s such a strong intersection between sci-fi fans and computer programmers/gamers.
Last night I read this draft essay on The Wire (which has a few 1st season spoilers, the author suggests that the “The Wire operates in a plot-driven mode that can easily be ’spoiled’ by any revelations in this essay” but I disagree)
For many critics, bloggers, fans, and even creator David Simon himself, The Wire is best understood not as a television series, but as a “visual novel.” … I believe that television at its best shouldn’t be understood simply as emulating another older and more culturally valued medium. The Wire is a masterpiece of television, not a novel that happens to be televised, and thus should be understood, analyzed, and celebrated on its own medium’s terms.
Which is totally right. Having said that the author goes on to have some fun by comparing it to a video game…
David Simon has suggested that the show’s goal is to “portray systems and institutions and be honest with ourselves and viewers about how complex these problems are” (Zurawik). While Simon imagines that the televised novel is the form best suited to accomplish such goals, in today’s media environment, videogames are the go-to medium for portraying complex systems. As Janet Murray writes, “the more we see life in terms of systems, the more we need a system-modeling medium to represent it—and the less we can dismiss such organized rule systems as mere games” (quoted in Moulthrop 64). If novels foreground characterization and interiority in ways that The Wire seems to deny, videogames highlight the complexity of interrelated systems and institutions that are one of the show’s strengths.
…
Many videogames are predicated on the logic of simulating complex systems, modeling an interrelated set of practices and protocols to explore how one choice ripples through an immersive world. We might imagine The Wire’s Baltimore as the televisual adaptation of the landmark game SimCity.
(obviously I take issue with the phrase mere games) Interestingly one of my first thouights when I started watching The Wire was that it really reminded me of Police Quest.
Anyway if The Wire is a show about the city of Baltimore and it’s structures and institutions rather than about any individuals (which I totally agree that it is) surely an excellent point of comparison is with Judge Dredd. As any 2000AD reader will tell you, that strip isn’t so much about Dredd as about Mega City one. Dredd, Anderson etc. are just our window into the structures, institutions, architecture, culture and society of that sprawling metropolis (and the wider world in which it’s situated). Having said that, the pacing of the two series couldn’t be more different. I’m always pleasantly surprised on returning to Dredd that it really is as densely inventive and manically action packed as I remember.
Our plans for a quiet Friday evening were hijacked by a group of crazed indie fans (including a and b) who forced us to drink cheap pink cava on Old Compton Street before dragging us off to a basement to listen to painfully nostalgic and occasionally nostalgically painful (is there really any need for anyone to play a Cast in 2007?) records and drink too much, unfortunately we had to leave early as we had Saturday morning chores to do South of the river.
Strangely going to clubs and gigs sometimes has the effect of making me want to listen to completely different music, as chance would have it this inevitable reaction coincided with Woebot pointing the way to this 4.5 hour long mix of 90s hip-hop. Which is bloody great. The amount of energy and drive in the music and in Flex’s enthusiasm for it (he uses explosions as punctuation; full-stops and commas) is truly amazing. It’s all vinyl too so you get records jumping and crazy raw and fresh feeling to the whole affair (like eating a particularly funky grapefruit).
It’s kind of interesting the way hip-hop history is told in re-used samples and quoted lyrics and in mixes like this, a properly oral/ performance tradition in contrast to rock, and particularly punk’s, obsession with written self documentation, fanzines, the idea of important rock critics, it’s all about cannon, specific moments when bands did specific things with hip-hop it’s all about texture, the whole culture in the mix, constantly retold and re-interprested (of course it wasn’t always thus, early hip-hop was interprested with rock’s rules, the act of creation myths and venerated individuals). Or maybe I’m just talking crap. Anyway, 90’s hip hop is my favourite era, and this mix is a great argument for it being the true golden age of the genre.
We finished the weekend (after 2 days of record of record breaking meat eating) with a double bill of the wire (2_5 and 2_6) which turned out to be a pretty depressing end to the weekend with D’s story arc coming to a dramatic close. Not that it wasn’t good, it was as good as The Wire ever is (i.e. the best thing on tele™), the high point was Omar finally getting his day in court and being totally amazing. One of the highlights of the whole thing so far, a perfect mix of fuck you sartorial grace, and devil may care romantic anti-hero. Suck on thet Levy!
I’ve been waiting for a new iPod to come out for a while now and I was going ot pick up a nano to replace my creaking 2nd gen model while we’re in New York in a couple of weeks (having decided that the stability flash memory is more important to me than a a hundred gillion bytes of storage) but how can i stick with that frugal plan in the light of this motherfucker. Obviously the gadget-geeks are complaining that it only goes up to 16 gig but for me that’s more than enough given that my typical listening patterns are to completely play a single record to death. Damn you Steve Jobs.
So I hardly ever really watch TV these days, C4 news and Newsnight (incidentally the new 4+1 station where C4 news is on at 8 is brilliant) occasionally something with some cooking in it or some trash on a Saturday evening but normally it’s a DVD box set or a film or something. Last night I watched the Nationwide Mercury Music Prize (I love the fossilised trace of the old telco preserved in the name, maybe if it gets a new sponsor it will be something like the Microsoft Nationwide Mercury Music Prize). Anyway, it was a bit rubbish, I didn’t really like any of the bands, though I was surprised to find myself warming to Young Knives in their nice suits and Dizzy not at his best is still great. I’d forgotten how bad an interviewer Jo Wiley is. Jools Holland constantly emphasising what a great voice Amy Winehouse has in order to detract from potential tabloid nonsense was really funny though.
Not sure who I’d prefer to have been nominated. All my favourite records of the last year are by foreigners.
Mainly because I’d never uploaded something to YouTube before and wanted to give it a go (it was quite easy).
I made the video in October last year. It was a Saturday and I spent pretty much the whole day fighting an epic Civilization campaign on the largest map available.
I added music this morning. In the spirit of the internet, totally without permission. It’s an old Bristol local radio session by War Against Sleep and I chose it as it was the same length as the video clip and I downloaded it free from Duncan’s web site ages back so the chances of a law suit are slim.
[EDIT: I’ve noticed if I’m not logged in the video doesn’t ever seem to load. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that I set it as private….]
[EDIT 2: …yes that does seem to be the case, so if you want to see it you’ll need to be a friend of my youtube account which is tomgp]
