Sustaining imagination

The third Narnia is out, thought I’d watch the first one to recap but couldn’t manage all of it. I cant’ help but note that the acting is poor, and although there are a few good scenes, it hardly lives up to the version I envisaged when reading the books. You loose half of the script and all of the description. I can hardly agree it is reflected intently enough to fairly replicate Lewis’s words.

This is the issue that a less booksmart generation will face. Theirs is a computer literacy; a digital and technological comprehension that is in its own right can be an artistically filling meal to digest. But this isn’t a rant about people not reading anymore, people still read - no it’s just a few thoughts on the need to re-adjust imagination, redirect it and keep it alive. Children don’t play ‘pretend’ so much now, they play WII and ps3 and fair play, because the imagined world is transformed in to an actual visual, a world can be realised through technology in such a way that it is arguably as engaging as reading and imagining it for yourself. The problem with that is we’ve lost that process where you read and build up the characters and the world yourself based on the ingenuity of the writers ability. Instead we’re just spoon fed it by a director. It’s a bit like being drunk, all this choice and tecky redevelopment of literacy, it gets a bit fuzzy sometimes and you tend to forget the string of occurrences that got you to where you are.

However, as long as the director hasn’t skipped this step its all good, and there are some thriving examples, I don’t just mean special effects, but take Avatar, it wasn’t just visually stunning and beautifully filmed but the creativity within the detail of the plants, animals and backdrops is a positive salute to the wanderings of a creative mind being put to good use.

So I think my point, obviously as an advocate of enjoying a good book and hoping to make writing a career, is don’t stop reading!- and secondly, the digi. revolution was a good thing as long as the creatives driving it sustain their imagination and keep chasing that hunger for inspiration. Technological advances may be able to keep spitting out the goods but you’ve got to put something worthwhile in to begin with.

Let’s keep it short.

I've neglected the blog for a while, kept busy with other projects - so here's something I wrote earlier -

________

It has slowly come to my attention that I find myself on the cusp of a generation that cannot be bothered; to cook, (order fast food) to read, (skim the net) to wait for a film, (instant access online) to write, (just text) to talk, (just email) - it goes on, and the underlying thread of all this impatience is technology. What has fast paced living done to our language? What of the habits it has induced in an entire generation that no longer even care to articulate a full word, let alone a full sentence?

I certainly have caught a little of this language lapse and put it down to lost hours spent on social networking sites, where this mentality of fast information exchange has transferred in to a very acceptable and widely used social language. I was familiar with the old school abbreviations you know? Where we perhaps missed a letter out or use a number as a substitute, when we had the credit to text a friend on our brick-sized Nokia. If you were really skilled, you could type using ‘predictive text’, barely enunciating the first few letters before its finished for you. Yet this was tame stuff compared to the length in which we cap our words today. When abbreviations become a daily occurrence you begin to learn that ‘brb’ is ‘be right back, ‘rofl’ is ‘roll on floor laughing’ (obviously) and so on until you have a completely different communication system, with only a hint at previously belonging to the English language. Yet if we consider, I taught my Nan to use her phone, this is a woman who back in the day, could type one hundred words a minute and take an entire books-worth of dictation with her eyes shut, but give her a phone and the option of predictive text and she stares at me blankly asking 'why the phone is deciding what her message will be?' As a secretary in the eighties shorthand was a highly essential skilled for her and to this day she can remember how to read and write the strange flicks and curves of her own generations abbreviation system. But ultimately its hardly unusual that through the ages people have developed and experimented with making language quicker and more efficient to communicate and mutations of words in sub-cultures have formed colloquialism that have stuck. So as technology got quicker so did our need for shorter word and faster signifiers.

But what happens when this habit leaks out from instant messengers and text messages and in to our writing and even our physical conversations? I am now hearing people actually say ‘LOL’ instead of laughing! So what, now we are short-circuiting our emotions? But don’t think it’s gone unnoticed, a majority of the time someone actually says ‘LOL’ it is more of an ironic poke at their own subculture than a genuine replacement. Abbreviations are now words in themselves and the sound a word in itself! At what point does an abbreviation cross over from a colloquial shortcut to a feature of modern English language?

It isn’t just abbreviations, even when we do speak English, the ‘tweet-teens generation’ have soaked up a social environment of fast technology, fast living and instant everything, that there is certainly a skewed focus steering their latest colloquialisms. At the moment the fad in my social circle and overheard pub conversations is ‘really?’ Pronounced with a sarcastic intonation, an edge of pseudo disbelief, with an over dramatic inflection that can be thrown at almost any comment. Used to not only enquire validation over a point but as a statement and winning retort on your behalf to cut short the conversation. We have adopted our ‘online’ tone of short, brief answers and abrupt endings in our real conversations and this ‘really’ business is another extension of our supposed disbelief, really indicating non-committal mentality to delve in to a topic.

Writing has developed in tone as well, even noticeably in the highest circles of authors, a conversational tone and direct flow of consciousness in style engages the modern reader’s newly moulded and notoriously hard to focus ‘interest radar’. They connect with it as if it were a more sophisticated and evolved version of the statuses and stories they read all day for leisure and this is surely a notable observational to writers wishing to engage an ever more reluctant audience, who are easily torn away by the flicker of the television or pop up chat.

Destroy Art

check out amazing norweigian photographer Bjørn Venø http://www.bjornveno.com/

Bjørn Venø is a London based photographer who grew up in Norway on a tiny island inhabited by twenty-four others. He spent his childhood exploring the beautiful farms and countryside, building a raft with his friend and playing out adventures as an explorer. Mainly working on self-portraits, he explores topics like male identity. His interest lies in deconstructing the different characters the male identity takes on which he adopts through performance in his photographs. His latest project entitled ‘Destroy Art’ has caused a stir in the contemporary art world and seen him escorted from the Tate Modern. I asked Bjorn about his new project and this was his response: Read my full review for www.artshub.com here --> http://bit.ly/9tPYBz

World Adventure Association

I work as journo/editor for WAA, an awesome website - It's aim is to work as a platform for adventure travelers and expeditions lovers, allowing them to network and share their trips, news and media. Site due to launch early 2011, until then join the Facebook group for previews and news.

These boots are made for loving

I won't lie it was love at first sight. There they were, perched seductively on the shelf edge, leather dark and supple and hook eye's glinting under the fluorescent lighting.

If you want to find your true love - The one.(or rather two)If you want:

Leather.

Vintage.

Italian.

*head to MARSHMALLOW MOUNTAIN -the home of vintage.

Kingly COurt (off Carnaby street) London W1

http://www.marshmellowmountain.com/

There's no where to hide for the i-kids

I was unfortunate enough to find myself on the nightmare train to Victoria recently. It's not usually a nightmare, usually I read, daydream or write. But this train was befitting of a nightmare considering it had fallen victim to collecting all the unruly kids from each dank corner of England. I could laugh along with the hairy-nostrilled businessman opposite, at the toddler next to us yelling "Look mummy a pig!" at a passing herd of cows.

But the school kids - it was like sitting in a cage of chimps that had inhaled half a ton of M&M’s.

Still, I couldn’t help but turn my ears to the little snippets of conversation that were forcing themselves in to my personal space.

Mediocre popular kid/greasy hair: “Well we are gonna egg ‘em on Friday, I think it’s Friday, we’re be on half term?”

Lead girl/bit spotty: “Yeah, but check Facebook though yeah, ‘cos it like right near Emily’s birthday thing, she said to invite youz lot, in half term yeah,? Check the events list.”

Class clown: “We have half term?”

{General squawking laughter.}

These kids have so much room for social manoeuvres. Their diarys fill up over half term; they check dates, plan meetings and negotiate clashes. It might be for drunken birthday parties, shopping or even egging (Seriously?) but social media is giving them the chance to get to grips with juggling their personal life from a young age. Not a bad thing up to a point.

The build up to the event is significantly more important than the event itself. A head count of who is attending and the expectant commentary of the potential ‘carnage’-(apparently this is another new addition to the i-kids vocab. – I had to check at Urban dictionary before I felt suitably informed enough to use it)

These guys should stop and think though. All those you tube videos, Facebook photos and infuriatingly detailed statuses will come back to bite their eventually grown up, highly embarrassed arse.

I appreciate hugely that I am on the cusp of the MTV /Tamagotchi generation. I can still indulge in suagar coating the horrors of being a teenager. I can forget the questionable clothing during my hippy faze (purple flared cords, fish net tops and beaded trainers) and the dippy high school boyfriends who you never really saw ( guy at bus stop/ ‘stud muffin’/one with a yellow fetish). I can erase the bitchy girls that called me names, the uncomfortable feeling when your best friend is off sick and the constant immature banter. I can almost look back fondly. i have a few faded photographs and an agile memory.

But these i-kids. Man. They are going to have the stark, unforgiving video footage and photos, a documentary of all the bits in life you stumble through hard and often before you learn to tie your laces and re-route. Good luck to you. I reckon now might be the time to de-tag and delete accordingly.

vinyl love

Had a bit of a record raid through my dad's collection, pretty much my childhood in music. There was some true cheese (a bit of peggy sue and hotel california) but some epics you should only listen to on vinyl. Picked a few based on covers. The digital graphic age should take a look back, the Marilion cover in particular - detail is insane, and The Drifters- genius!

*No I'm not a fan of Wings, but the geek in me loves the font.