• BNP member proximity search
  Enter your Post Code to see if there are any fascists in the vicinity.
• Why Were Still Looking At You (from The Herald )
  Alternate headline: Why do the Herlad keep crediting me with James Mottram's work, and he with mine?
• Publishing Google docs to your blog
• On the Death and 441-Year Life of the Pixel
• russell davies: speculative modeling
  Modifying Hornby model buildings to look like they might in 2050. I can't wait to see what people come up with (I'm too cack-handed to participate, sadly).
• Jonestown 30 Years Later
• Run Mac OS X on an Eee PC - Wired How-To Wiki
  I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu Eee, really, but this remains very tempting.
• Aquarium Drunkard: MP3 Blog, Music Blog » Bob Dylan/Johnny Cash :: 1969 Sessions
• Europa Film Treasures

<— http://www.fishmech.net/bnp/ —>

Sometimes, when things get sufficiently weird, subtlety no longer works, so i’ll be blunt: The gleaming device I am staring at in the corner of a machine shop in San Rafael, California, is the most audacious machine ever built. It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do—run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

More on the Long Now Foundation:

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide [a] counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

The term was coined by one of our founding board members, Brian Eno. When Brian first moved to New York City and found that in New York here and now meant this room and this five minutes, as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we are trying to stretch out what people consider as now.

I’ve been reading bits and bobs about the Foundation, and Eno’s involvement with them in particular, for years, without ever bothering to look more closely at their ideas. Fascinating stuff.

Update: without realising it, I chose a rather apt topic for this, the 1,000th post at Submit Response, almost coinciding with the site’s 4th Birthday on October 10th (which I forgot all about).

This morning in the shower, I heard something on the radio and thought, ‘Oh, I must remember that!’¹ and at the same time my left hand formed the shape required to hit Shift+Ctrl+S, which is the command key combination I use to launch the del.icio.us Firefox extension.

In the future, this will, of course, be a completely reasonable response. The Spinex 9000 OmniLogPuter embedded beneath the skin on the back of my neck will respond to such a gesture by automatically scanning my recent thoughts, linking the desire to remember to the timecoded BBC Radio 4 stream, recording the audio snippet in question and its associated URLs, adding a huge array of metadata, and placing a new item in a queue for later review so that I can choose to post to either my private todo list or my public MegaWebLifeWorkEntertainmentFilterLog (which will be called Submit Response for nostalgic reasons).

Just now, though, it is a sign that I really need to get out more.

1 - Lacking both an embedded Spinex 9000 OmniLogPuter and a working short term memory, I’ve forgotten what it is I wanted to remember. ↩

When I last had a spell in hospital, the thing I noticed most, aside from the agonising pain and sweet, sweet relief provided by morphine on demand, was the flow of patients between departments, which was far from smooth. For example, I needed at least one chest X-Ray a day, and this involved a painful transfer from bed to wheelchair (top tip: don’t get your chest tube caught on the bed rail) followed by a wait for a porter, followed by another, usually lengthy, wait to see the radiographer, with many fellow patients, most in worse nick than I was, followed by another lengthy wait for a porter to return me to the ward. This is not good - keeping patients with serious conditions in a waiting room is dangerous, compared to the safety a bed, surrounded by lovely nursing staff and handy life-saving equipment.

With a full patient-, and, for that matter, staff-location system, combined with software tracking the status of each department, the time a patient spends away from the safety of the ward could be minimised: is there a backlog in the X-ray dept? Then don’t move patient X off the ward, and move patient Y back to their bed. Is the surgeon’s RFID tag still on the golf course? Then stop pumping anaesthetic into the arm of patient Z, summon up the nearest RFID-tagged porter pusing an empty RFID-tagged trolley-bed, and pop her back to the ward.

Spending money on technology like this certainly seems a better idea than, say, pushing it out of the NHS and into the hands of private sector.

(Just after posting the above, I spotted a more frivolous health-related use of RFID, at RFID In Japan, surely the geekiest feed I read. It’s a talking doll that aims to foster a caring mentality in children by occasionally coughing and sneezing, then responding to treatment with RFID-tagged syringes, sweets and medicine.)

As the major labels move toward music download services like the iTMS, they’re beginning to look a lot like the high street. Just as one might now drop a few quid in Top Man on gear that isn’t designed to last beyond the season, so the majors may well begin punting mainstream music as a semi-dispoable commodity; small, lo-fi files unencumbered by packaging for a few pence a pop.

Then there’s the independents. Like a designer’s prêt à porter line, they’ll serve customers willing to shell out a little more for the musical equivalent of a decent cut and quality cloth - the pretty sleeve wrapped around high-fidelity media.

Last - but obviously not least - come the specialist imprints, like our example label Rune Grammofon. These are the couture houses of music distribution, catering to a dwindling band of die-hards who demand the highest quality, most beautiful packaging money can buy.

Okay, so the parallels aren’t exact and I’m using woolly words like ‘mainstream,’ but it does seem to be the way things are headed.

Please feel free to return, laughing, to this post in 20 years time, brandishing a lavishly hand-crafted three-LP marbled vinyl edition of Now That’s What I Call Music! Vol. 7826.

Denying the claims of the Forrester consultancy group that the CD is bound for obsolescence in the face of ubiquitous downloading, and Tony Wilson’s assertion that the iPod has invigorated the packaging of music, Dan says:

Poppycock. While the iPod itself may be kinda coquettish, the idea that digital downloads are the only way forward ignores the important work of several small labels who produce packaging which truly adds to the experience of listening to music; who realise that if you’re going to make something to accompany the music, you do it with the same care and loving attention to detail as the musicians themselves; labels that truly make a physical artifact worthwhile (and incidentally offer a way out for the music industry.)

At the moment, I’m working my way through Dust to Digital’s Goodbye, Babylon, a six CD compilation of religous music that comes in a cedarwood box packed with raw cotton, and an accompanying booklet full of essays, potted biographies and photographs of the collected artists. Taken together, the music, packaging and book offer an experience that goes far beyond listening - the thing even smells lovely - and this is why I happily spent £70 on it, waiting a month for it to arrive in the post, rather than downloading the lot on the day of release.

I do think, however, that this idea of music as an artform to be consumed with attendant artifacts is having a hard time crossing a generation gap.

Maybe Dan’s parenthetical aside is on the money, and packaging will return to the fore as a means of justifying the expense of buying music when it is so readily available free and gratis.

But I doubt it.

My generation’s understanding of music and the way it ought properly to be consumed is inextricably linked to growing up around our parents’ LPs. These were precious things, to be held gingerly by the edges on the way to the turntable, with lyrics on the inner sleeve to be learnt, and cover art to be gazed upon while listening. My introduction to the American civil rights movement came from the inner sleeve of Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July, I had an understanding of Pop Art from Blake’s cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band before I set eyes on a Warhol or Lichenstein, and so on.

I don’t know any teenagers to ask, but surely those raised on CDs - with their illegible liner notes and cramped 5” square covers, not to mention their supposed indestructability - cannot hold the package in such high regard. Those growing up today, who consume music in discrete chunks as MP3 files, tracks burned to generic CD-Rs and - God help us - ringtones, might well raise children of their own to whom the term album will be wholly meaningless.

Even folk my age have music collections that ossified with the advent of broadband. They now buy external hard drives, iPods and streaming MP3 jukeboxes, but fetishising these things is analagous to drooling over shelves, crates and boxes. It is not, as Tony Wilson would have us believe, akin to appreciating the mixed media art object that is the record album.

I’m not saying all this is a bad thing, per se. Freeing the music from it’s packaging could, at a stretch, even be seen as a liberation of sorts. But it is, I think, a sad thing.

Call me old-fashioned, nostalgic and resistant to change if you like, but I don’t want music to become something served up naked and alone; I want it to be framed, contextualised, enhanced and made whole by its packaging.