Considering lobsters

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I really need to have another crack at reading Infinite Jest. But until then, Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace’s essay on the Maine Lobster Festival will have to do.

It’s pretty much amazing, effortlessly crossing from travelogue to treatise on the science and ethics of causing pain to animals to food writing to grumbles about tourism. Written for Gourmet magazine, it’s colloquial, personal, expansive, humble (maybe falsely, but hey, who’s judging?), but it conceals a the powerful payload of trying to get gourmands to think about what their food really is.

No single quote can possibly sum it up. Taken in pieces it seems to casually ramble, but as a whole it’s finely balanced and disciplined. It somehow reads as if he just tossed it off, as if anyone could have written it. But its light style brilliantly masks extensive thought, research and breadth of interest.

And to round it off, there are a couple of little barbs at Gourmet magazine’s editors. Yeah, I know, very indulgent, but hey.

Shock of the new

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“A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak.”

Vanity Fair recently published an article by Kurt Anderson about American culture slowing its rate of innovation, pointing out that in many ways there’s far less difference between the fashion style of today and that of 1992 than the difference between, say, 1992 and 1972, or 1972 and 1952.

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A history of haunting

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“Do you enjoy upsetting this family?” [Two knocks.] “You do. Well, now will you please go away? Because I think you’ve had enough of your jokes.” [Two knocks.] “You won’t go away. I would like you to go away, and go away because I think you’ve been upsetting this family long enough.”
A ‘psychical’ investigator on BBC Nationwide in 1977 attempting to get rid of a poltergeist haunting the above room of a house in Enfield.

Documentary maker Adam Curtis wrote a blog post just before Christmas about the changing depiction of ghosts and hauntings on BBC TV, tracing the way during the 1970s it moved from ancient piles to suburban homes, bringing the haunted house from the aristocratic to the domestic.

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Google Image Search search search search…

Aside

Vimeo user kingcosmonaut3000 has created a video which plays a succession of the images returned by Google Image Search when it’s fed its own results. It flicks through 2951 images displayed at 12 frames a second.

Starmaps become dark photos of men at conferences become an LA Noire interrogation scene becomes a shot from Pirates of the Caribbean. They cycle through similar subjects, then matching colours, then shapes.

What’s amazing are the spurts of innovation after periods where the image stays fairly constant – they’re sort of like flowerings of culture after long periods in which everything has stayed uniform. Like the Renaissance, or LOLcats and Y U NO Guy.

Sometimes, like at 1:54, a pattern’s completely disrupted by an apparently dissimilar one – a bug? Or is Google seeing something we’re not? And that bit where it gets stuck on the Google homepage – evidence of a self-regarding machine?

Party games

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Since New Year’s Eve I’ve been quietly wondering whether there’s a really good game you can play at a dinner party with a good variety of friends. You know, both game players and not. Jocks and nerds – the mix.

To end 2011, we took part in a murder mystery dinner party at a friends’ house. It was based on a boxed game called Death By Chocolate. A prominent American chocolate maker called Billy Bonker has been found dead, and for some reason a peculiarly colourful set of characters have gathered for dinner, and one of them did it.

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The assassination of Rodrigo Rosenberg

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You know those magazine features in which the very first paragraph reverberates throughout their lengths? The ones that you realise have seeded clues from their outsets that flower into revelation after revelation by their ends? The ones that tell stories about places and people you’ve never heard about before, and wonder how you never did until now? The ones that sweep from the personal to the national so naturally that one feels as consequential as the other?

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Ruins

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United Artists Theater, Detroit, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Ruins are fetishes. Ancient structures are romantic, no matter how mundane their previous functions. Modern ruins are poignant, laced with reminders of impermanence and folly. And for all this they’re powerful.

Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, who he’d had employed to design the third Reich’s triumphal city, were fascinated by the idea of ‘ruin value’. Inspired by the picturesque weathering of Roman structures, they wanted to create structures which would still proudly stand a 1000 years on. As writer Lee Sandlin says in his essay Losing The War:

“Arches or pediments or rows of pillars could be reinforced far beyond the requirements of the load they would carry, so that they would still be standing after the rest of the structure was dust – ensuring that even the wreckage of the Reich would inspire awe.”

Fast forwarding and inverting this idea, we have Detroit, once the model of American might, which has become a fetishised ruin. Witness photographs like these, taken by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. They seem to depict the incredible – newly dead buildings, left to rot by a society that’s had to leave them behind – often seemingly in a hurry.

What they make, though, is denounced by locals, according to John Patrick Leary in his essay Detroitism, as ‘ruin porn’. Among various attitudes Leary identifies reportage about Detroit having to its subject, he focuses on ‘Detroit lament’: “mournful in tone – elegiac at best and sanctimonious at worst.” It’s a depiction of a city that emphasises emptiness, and in doing, edits out the fact that people still live here.

Leary calls Julien Temple’s 2010 documentary on the city, Requiem for Detroit?, quintessential Detroit Lament, and locals clearly don’t like his attitude. A small Facebook group called for the film to be boycotted, quoting his Guardian article to promote the film:

“Approaching the derelict shell of downtown Detroit, we see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted skyscrapers. In their shadows, the glazed eyes of the street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the car. Our excitement at driving into what feels like a man-made hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief that what was once the fourth-largest city in the U.S. could actually be in the process of disappearing from the face of the earth.”

Zombies. But this really isn’t Dawn Of The Dead: Detroit is still a living city, a point that seems inconceivable in photographs which look like they’re torn from lurid post-apocalyptic films. The Facebook group’s description continues:

“Yes, Detroit has problems, indeed major problems, but the city is far from this post-apocalyptic wasteland described by the writer. I do not support this project and suggests that the writer revisits and engages with citizens for a realistic depiction of our city.”

And that’s exactly the point – you won’t find reality in ruins, only fictions that were written both when they were built and when they fell.

WikiGeeks

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Both The New York Times and Guardian have now published accounts of working with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, providing fascinating insights into their working practices and the cultural clash of two very different types of organisations. Both also take the opportunity to attempt to describe and explain Assange, and one word, though only used once in each article – and obliquely at that – stood out to me: geek.

Geek’s a pretty amorphous sort of a word, used both as an insult and as a badge of honour. And commentary on WikiLeaks and Assange has regularly used it to describe the nature of the person who lead this extraordinary set of events.

I think Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, and Bill Kelner, executive editor of The New York Times, both used the term as a crude and rather dismissive way of describing the character behind their frustrating and difficult experiences with WikiLeaks.

Rusbridger “From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geek conferences he was suddenly America’s public enemy number one. A new media messiah to some, he was a cyber-terrorist to others. As if this wasn’t dramatic enough, in the middle of it all two women in Sweden accused him of rape. To coin a phrase, you couldn’t make it up.”

To paraphrase, in their natural state geeks are harmless and utterly peripheral to the important things happening in the world. They’re hardly the type likely to rattle sabres – but this Assange somehow bucked this trend.

Kelner “The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports, using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material … They had run into a puzzling incongruity … A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan.”

This one’s rather more dismissive, as if Assange, at root, is just that guy who knows how mail-merge works.

In both, the word is a mark of otherness, used to express a kind of surprise that someone so lowly and marginal could have had such influence. Both also go on to show how it took the partner newspapers’ attitude to proper process to disseminate WikiLeaks content and make it into the story it’s become. Not that I disagree with this analysis per se, but the subtext here seems to be that Assange is just a geek with a windfall who got lucky enough to have help from the big boys in putting it out to the world.

Clearly, neither article is focused on Assange himself, but writing his culture off as that of ‘geek’ fails to get anywhere near explaining the crash of worlds that occured when he originally approached the Guardian.

Contrastingly, we get rather better insight into all this from Bruce Sterling, who looks rather deeper into what geek, as it pertains to Assange’s culture, really means. Sterling sees WikiLeaks as “most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever”, and draws a line between it and early 1990s anarcho-crypto culture.

Having read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon a couple of times, I’m fascinated by that culture. And Sterling’s point of view on the subject of geek is fascinating, too:

“Crypto guys — (and the cypherpunks were all crypto guys, mostly well-educated, mathematically gifted middle-aged guys in Silicon Valley careers) – are geeks. They’re harmless geeks, they’re not radical politicians or dashing international crime figures.”

“The geeks who man the NSA don’t look much like Julian Assange, because they have college degrees, shorter haircuts, better health insurance and far fewer stamps in their passports. But the sources of their power are pretty much identical to his. They use computers and they get their mitts on info that doesn’t much wanna be free.”

“The scale of [WikiLeaks] is so big that every weirdo involved immediately becomes a larger-than-life figure. But they’re not innately heroic. They’re just living, mortal human beings, the kind of geeky, quirky, cyberculture loons that I run into every day.”

“While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, his too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag – I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena.”

Geek culture is sprawling and nuanced, then – as computers have a greater influence on the world, geeks are having a greater influence, too. And that means that it’s time for mainstream culture to attempt to understand it all.

Verbatim and the facts

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I heard a fantastic interview with the journalist Gay Talese on the New Yorker Out Loud podcast recently, about his article on the soprano Marina Poplavskaya. With the likes of Tom Wolfe, he was one of the proponents in the 1960s of new or literary journalism – reportage with narrative flow and subjectivity that strives to express truth in a deeper sense than simple facts.

His craft was formed in a very different environment to the one in which we as game journalists work today. We have very few staff, we have a very wide remit, we must report immediately, we must bow to the strangling restrictions of PR departments, we do not have fact-checking departments.

But I think he has a lot to teach us, especially about our responsibilities to represent the truth. I guess I’m getting at some recent controversies about reporting individual quotes from interviews as news.

Talese spent six weeks researching and interviewing Marina Poplavskaya – an impossible luxury for the likes of us. He does not record his interviews and conversations with his subjects. He doesn’t even make notes at the time; rather, he puts them together later from memory, and then checks with the subject that he has it right. Here’s what he said at the end of the podcast – obviously, there’s an irony to quoting this, but hey:

“I will then go to that person: ‘I heard you say this, is this what you meant? Do I have this right?’ I’ll do that if it’s verbatim. I don’t usually go much with verbatim because I’m more interested in trying to understand them. Sometimes word for word isn’t what they mean. It’s a first draft – when I write a first draft, you wouldn’t understand it, because I don’t get the sentences right. I polish and I rework.

“A person who’s being queried by someone who’s sticking in their face some end of a tape recorder, the tape recorder unfortunately gives you the sense that you’ve done your job because you have a lot of verbatim commentary. You’ve got something on tape and you can say that they’ve said it and it’s true. But it isn’t really fair. I don’t think you can hold people accountable on verbatim at that point. So I don’t. But I’m very confident that I’ve done justice to what they’re saying or what they represent.”

As game journalists we get a lot of Q&A interviews with subjects who are fully briefed and locked down to avoid saying anything controversial. We transcribe the interviews and publish them as is. We never really understand the creative minds that produced the games on which we report, nor the business sensibilities that form the environment in which they’re made. All we get is words. First draft words.

In the absence of that richness and depth, we eke some kind of interest for our readers by finding odd lines that are a little controversial and report them as news. And in doing that, we erode trust in our subjects and make them fear talking with us. And so the cycle continues, making it harder for us to report.

Trust is the key to breaking it. And I think Talese’s method shows us how we might gain it: by checking with our subjects and making sure we understand what they’re trying to express, beyond what they actually say. Because if our subjects are interesting enough to report on, they’re deserving of respect. And if we respect them, they will respect us. That’s a much more virtuous circle.