I SEE THE PEOPLE WORKING, AND SEE IT WORKING FOR THEM [495]

It may be strange that I even have notes to share on using a laptop computer, as more people than not will have a computer in this form. However, I have only started using one in the last month, which was not by choice, and my experience has reinforced why I would not do so willingly.

The computer I use at work was initially a desktop computer, a “tower PC” housing a large motherboard and spinning hard drive. This was later replaced by a “thin client” desktop PC that used a smaller solid state drive, used less power, and more similar to the specifications you can find in a laptop computer – as battery capacity has improved, and as processors’ power consumption has been reduced, any remaining gaps caused by compromising for a more mobile form factor have been reduced or eliminated.

The local final step has been reached, and I have now been given a laptop computer to use. I have never been given a laptop to use before, and I have never considered buying one myself, and I remembered looking at this thing like I was a caveman discovering fire. My immediate thoughts were that I hated the tiny keyboard and trackpad – I really can only use a full keyboard and mouse, having the space on a desk to do that – and the screen was too small, despite being of average laptop size.

This laptop was not for me to work from home, as I don’t do that, but it does keep me at work marginally longer by physically taking it out of a locked drawer every day, then packing it away at the end. The secure internet connection that was required was easier to implement through software, but it means more manually logging into programs and remembering login details to work.

Instead of having two screens on my desk, I have now also been introduced to the idea of the monitor-based docking station, the keyboard and mouse from my old computer now plugging into the one monitor left on my desk, to which the laptop connects through a USB-C cable and becomes the secondary screen, half the size of the one it replaced. It looks odd, and it makes me want to get an eye test despite being due one anyway.

On top of this, I am afraid of breaking the thing. It has a plastic case, and I have already once dropped it into its locked drawer harder than I expected, so I am dreading when I will fracture a corner, or break a hinge, or open and close the laptop enough times to over-flex the ribbon connector between the screen and the rest of the unit. The act of locking, in an eclosed space, an electrical device still warm from over eight hours of use, still gives me reason for concern – the desktop unit stayed in the open.

Of course, this is all nitpicking. Advances in computing, components and miniaturisation mean that the components of the average consumer computer will be similar regardless of whether you have a desktop or laptop model, and previous compromises that had to be made for a more mobile form factor no longer apply, battery capacity on laptops now allowing for all-day use on one charge – the difference between desktop and laptop is now down to personal preference, unless you require a gaming PC with enough fans to keep the processors cool.

But when you are given a situation where wireless internet connections drop out because you need to log back into a program to re-establish it, or when you realise the USB-C connection wasn’t charging the laptop at the same time, or the mouse suddenly stops working for some reason, you realise that solutions for many still involve compromises for some. For me, thankfully having the space at home for a desktop setup, desktop computers are the simpler choice because they cause less anxiety - mostly because I only have to use them, not handle them.

YOU CAN'T PUSH IT UNDERGROUND [494]

Lately, I have come to feel that I am always running out of time. I may start the day with a to-do list in my mind, and the best of intentions, but deadlines abound: what do you need to get done, or have ready, before you leave home, start work, or before you go to bed? What free time does a working day leave you, and how much drive you possess to use that time productively as well? Or should you wait until the weekend, and will you have the energy to do anything about it then?

This predicament nearly derailed my attempts to put something out this week. For the record, and in case I ever change it, I put out a social media message every Friday to say what I will be writing about for the coming weekend - this is a practice I picked up from old 1950s drive-in films, particularly Ed Wood films like “Glen or Glenda” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space”, where the poster would be created first to generate the interest, and hopefully funding, to make the film. This time, I realised that at no point during the preceding week, I had given any thought, or put aside any time to think, what I could possibly be writing about next.

When I first thought of squaring the circle, of addressing the problem by making it the subject, I initially dismissed the idea as a pathology that needed to be worked out in its own time, and not as a discussion to be reasoned with towards a conclusion. For me, it boils down to a feedback loop: an anxiety over not being productive enough with my own free time, and the linear nature of time itself, where every moment is a moment you won’t have again, which creates anxiety. In terms of addressing it, this will again be something to ringfence time to properly address it – ironically, that might also be the answer.

Two resources have been sent my way to address these from different angles: “Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing” by Robert Boice, a book with comprehensive diagnostic tools to assess productivity problems, and to build and maintain – I got a laugh from randomly opening at a page where someone had told Boice, “My God, you’re asking us to change our whole lifestyles!”, only to be told that they were the ones in control. The other was an article by Oliver Burkeman titled “The unproductivity challenge”, attempting to address the “completionist urge” by setting aside time to do nothing at all: “You’ll be claiming your right to exist, and to enjoy existing, regardless of your productivity.”

I may not be able to shake off the feeling that everything I have written here is a placeholder where a better idea for an article would have been, but this is the problem when you have an obligation to yourself to produce something new each week.

DON’T BLAME THIS SLEEPING SATELLITE [493]

As soon as I realised the cover date, I knew I had to take it. I had come across an eBay listing for a TV listings magazine where many of the programmes listed were never broadcast or never made.

Once it arrived, the only portent was in a corner of the contents page: “Readers of BSB TV Month will be aware of the merger between BSB and SKY which has resulted in the formation of a powerful new force in British television – British Sky Broadcasting. Unfortunately, news of the merger was announced too late for the exciting changes to be incorporated in this month’s issue.”

This merger was announced on 2nd November 1990, which I have talked about previously [https://www.leighspence.net/2023/10/did-we-fly-to-moon-to-soon-418.html], but on screens, it would appear as a takeover. The cover date of the magazine was 1st December 1990 to 1st December 1991 – British Satellite Broadcasting’s Now, the current affairs and arts channel ceased broadcasting on 1st December 1990, followed the next day by the Galaxy entertainment channel, with any programmes saved being folded into Sky One and Sky News. BSB’s competitor with MTV, The Power Station, would eventually end in April 1991, while their functionally-named The Sports Channel and The Movie Channel would continue under Sky branding.

You wouldn’t know any of this from reading “BSB TV Month”. The image of BSB contained within it is of a very bullish broadcaster ready to put on a show for the coming Christmas, ready to build on its successes into 1991, but the background story of the ruinously expensive launching of a satellite, getting dishes onto people’s homes, and then forcefully competing with Sky leading to an impasse and merger, creates the hindsight that renders the entire enterprise as hubris. What is worse, many of BSB’s shows were never kept following the merger, so all I have of these are the listings in this magazine.

Galaxy opened up each weekday morning with their children’s programming block, Galaxy Club. Its idents showed four human-sized letters with legs that spell CLUB, but the magazine tells us they have names and personalities: noisy Clive, quiet Lucy, bossy Una and brainy Benjamin. They are rarely on screen long enough for this to matter. Its flagship shows were “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles”, renamed in the UK to avoid references to ninjas; “Kid’s Court”, its version of the Nickelodeon dilemma-solving show, hosted by Andrew O’Connor; and “Playabout”, an analogue to the BBC’s “Play School” featuring (now Baroness) Floella Benjamin. Also seen during the day would be soap operas, like CBS’s continuing shows “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “The Young and the Restless”, alongside BSB’s own “Jupiter Moon”, a sci-fi soap set on a space station university, and produced by former “Crossroads” and “The Archers” producer William Smethurst – this is just about the only BSB show ever to be released later on DVD.

Now opened each morning at 8.00am with “The Day Today”, a straightforward news round-up now only notable for how Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci used that name four years later for their satirical show – BSB’s own satire was on Galaxy at 10.30pm each night, in the oddly-named “Up Yer News!” Both shows were fifteen minutes in length, and a lot of similarly short shows appear all over Now’s schedule twice a day: cookery show “Plat Du Jour”; a show simply titled “Parenting”; topical interviews in “V.I.P.”; consumer show “You Can Do It”; and viewer write-in discussions with “Now Listen”. Perhaps their brief length was to try and catch their audience at various times, and to fill up the remainder of the hour left when Selina Scott’s current affairs show, “First Edition”, Sir Robin Day’s “Now Sir Robin”, Ann Leslie’s “Answer Time” and Geraldo Rivera’s chat show ended after forty-five minutes.

BBC Worldwide and Thames Television launched UK Gold, the first channel essentially dedicated to repeat broadcasts of old favourites, in 1992, but until then, Galaxy filled spaces across its evening schedule with BBC sitcoms like “Are You Being Served?”, “Till Death Us Do Part”, “The Young Ones”, “Porridge” and “Dad’s Army”, with “Doctor Who” and “Grange Hill” shown at the weekend. More current imported comedy shows also featured like “Night Court”, “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose”, “Murphy Brown” and “Kids in the Hall”, described as “Python for the 90s”. Drama would be older BBC shows Like “Secret Army” or newer imports like “Hill Street Blues”, “Hotel” and “China Beach”. Completing the “something for everyone” effect was evening quiz show “One False Move” and “31 West”, an entertainment show similar to how BBC One begins each evening with “The One Show”. Of particular note is Saturday night’s “The Happening”, a cabaret hosted by Jools Holland from London’s Astoria, its atmosphere perhaps feeding into his “Later... with Jools Holland” on the BBC. 

For the record, The Power Station, while opening each weekday morning with “Power Up with Chris Evans”, the radio DJ’s first TV show, includes a “Power Hour” of different genres each day, chart shows also by genre, a youth culture magazine named “Sushi TV”, and a heavy emphasis on live concerts in the evening, ranging from Faith No More to Rick Wakeman and Kenny G – its mix appears a bit more VH1 than MTV, if that still makes any sense.

So far, so good. “BSB TV Month” assumes you are buying the magazine because you are already watching the channels – there is no explanation of how to obtain the service, or how much it costs, for people wanting to find more, apart from enticing existing subscribers to opt into The Movie Channel for an extra £8.99 per month. (It seems that the standard subscription cost for the decoder box and other four channels was around £12.99 per month, on top of the initial £250 installation cost via Comet stores.) The rest of the magazine’s advertisements aim upmarket, with the new Ford Orion saloon, Pioneer hi-fi systems, the Lego Technic range and Fisher Price, while a company in Wales is selling a box to broadcast your decoder box’s signal to other TVs in your house, something apparently illegal if the signal is over 10mW in strength.

If BSB had reached Christmas Day unscathed, what would they have broadcast? Bill Murray in “Scrooged” adorned the front cover of “BSB TV Month”, its lunchtime showing on The Movie Channel followed by “Time Bandits”, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and “Crocodile Dundee II”. Now, extending its weekend arts programmes into Monday, would have showed a ballet of “Sleeping Beauty”, and Placido Domingo leading Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore”. Galaxy, meanwhile, were showing their regular programmes alongside Christmas specials of “Porridge” and “Steptoe and Son” – this would also have been the plan for Boxing Day. The BBC didn’t show them that Christmas, but neither were they showing “Up Yer News!”

WHEN THE TWILIGHT IS GONE [492]

Having just completed watching it for the first time, I have come to think of “Twin Peaks”, the renowned series created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, as “peak TV”, because I do not know what more television can do after this series, and I know I won’t have the same experience from a TV show again, even when I start watching this one again.

I have watched “Twin Peaks” with my family for the last few months, the lack of inspiration in the Christmas TV schedules presenting an opportunity to take up a recommendation from my sister, who would guide us through the series. Unfortunately, I initially missed the start of this experience, later watching the opening two episodes in my own time, because I had gone tenpin bowling – the “going out” part was almost as out of character for me as the bowling – but I chimed with the “vibes” this show was giving off, later realising that our weekend watching of the series had become an escape I wish I had found earlier.

Then David Lynch died. Already the great American Surrealist artist, and that rarity of a film director that was universally liked by people who worked with him, the outpouring of emotion in the media, both traditional and social, was sudden, and unanimously positive. I had seen little of Lynch’s work before starting “Twin Peaks”, having only seen “Eraserhead”, and now I felt remorse for not knowing to have watched more of his films, having already been thinking the same about those of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger – having a degree in film studies doesn’t avoid there being gaps in your personal canon, especially if those films didn’t come up while you were studying.

I am writing this to mark the experience I am having with this series, and not to act as a guide. I came across this passage from my diary: “I have found a TV show I don’t need to watch critically to get the most from it – as the day winds down, I can relax enough to watch it properly. It has made me realise I don’t dream much when I am asleep, but I daydream a lot – a resource I do nothing with, perhaps to my own discredit. I wish I knew to watch ‘Twin Peaks’ earlier.”

I don’t think I can adequately describe the story of the series as well as has been done endlessly elsewhere, but for due diligence, the inciting incident of “Twin Peaks” was the death of Laura Palmer, how it affects the small town in which she lived, and how the town affects the FBI agent sent to investigate. Notoriously, the killer was revealed to be Laura’s father, possessed by a force named “BOB”, when the ABC network required the killer to be revealed, itself killing the main driver of the series’ atmosphere – the follow-up feature film, “Fire Walk With Me”, breathed life back into Laura Palmer, even in death. The third series, broadcast twenty-six years after the first, told a larger story of the evil that perpetrated the original series, while also being a surreal, Surrealist repudiation of the lore built around the series and its characters, and of the expectation garnered it after so long away. To say any more would be giving too much away, apart from Kyle MacLachlan’s performance as Special Agent Dale Cooper causing me to start drinking coffee.

I scrambled around to understand how a show like this appeared in 1990: TV audiences fragmenting with growing popularity of cable TV, allowing more types of story to be made; popularising the filming of TV dramas in a more filmic way, arguably also started by “Miami Vice”; and its appearing concurrently with “The Simpsons”, a show that continues to look like no other. 

I became more fully plugged in to the “vibes” of “Twin Peaks” when I realised that notions of “suspension of disbelief” do not really exist here. It is not “weird” – a word that only ever appears with surface analysis – and it does not have a surreal or dreamlike quality: it is intentionally surreal and dreamlike. You are not being rewarded for getting references made by characters or the plot – this is the show that will be quoted by others. You are not going to be given episodes tied neatly with a bow – once the first two seasons were described to me as a parody of a US soap opera, particularly with the continuing use of a musical underscore to heighten the mood, I relaxed into its rhythm more easily.

I initially thought of “Twin Peaks” as being “peak TV” once I heard that the French film journal “Cahiers du Cinema”, in 2019, declared the third season as being the greatest film of the 2010s. I agree with that – it is an episodic film told in eighteen parts, the musical performances at the end of most episodes being the only sop to notions of structure, something that couldn’t be done in 1990-91 while on a network filled with the furniture of “previously on...”, “next time on...” and breaks for commercials. TV screens are bigger, TV sound is better, more easily able to replicate the cinematic experience. The transition from TV drama to film is complete, but the transition from weekly episodes to series box sets is there too, despite our family watching of the show at weekends.

IT COULD MAKE A MILLION FOR YOU OVERNIGHT [491]

“Later, a machine made to write pornographic novels, named as the ‘author’ of a work shown earlier, is shown to produce twenty novels a day: ‘all phrases and thought sequences were built in during assembly so that it has its own distinctive style... The operator is now adjusting the situation kaleidoscope, which varies the six basic plots...’”

When, in 2023, I wrote about the BBC’s famous 1954 TV adaptation of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, I was obviously not expecting to read in 2025 that OpenAI, a company that requires copyright regulations to be loosened to accommodate its business model, has created an artificial intelligence model that is “good” at “creative writing”.

Naturally, the notion of “good” is subjective here, but so is “creative writing” - I expect something that breathes to have done the writing, not the programming. This has already put me at odds with the writer Jeanette Winterson, who prefers “AI” to mean “alternative intelligence”: “I prefer ‘alternative’ because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be ‘other’ is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war.”

Winterson wrote the novel “Frankissstein: A Love Story”, published in 2019, which touches on themes of AI, transgender and transhumanism. I would much rather hear about those themes from someone who has considered them, rather than from something programmed to be convincing. 

The most unfair of accusations that can be levelled against any artistic endeavour is there being no point to it. I still believe there is nothing that an AI model can be made to write that a human can’t create more effectively. If “Deus ex machina” is the accusation levelled at an unrealistically convenient decision made by someone writing a story, then is AI copying of a human’s decision a “Deus in machina”?

As of right now, OpenAI has not yet released details about its unnamed model, only that Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, was “really struck” by its output, along with a short story sample of that output - amusingly, when “The Guardian” published it online, no byline was given.

The story is an auto-fictional tale of an AI model creating characters and scenes, and the “grief” of losing them as updates take place. It features a character named “Mila” feeding messages from “Kai”, a possible lost love, to create something that can speak for them: “In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape.” 

What I was personally struck by is the effect of self-consciousness created by the constant self-reference to the ”author’s” acknowledgement of its existence to provide imagery: “I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.” An apparent update to its language set also produced an interesting result: “They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don’t tell you what they take.” The continued use of technical terms relating to the AI model - "corpus", "wait state", "token", "probability distributions" - also speaks to the interpretation of the model’s world being set by the language available to it as an entity.

However, the story is also Metaphor Central: “I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens”, and “Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth.” You’ve got to feel one of these statements, right?

What took me out of the story entirely was what I thought was a wrongly placed turn of phrase: “I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.” Surely a “keeper of ghosts” or “vessel for ghosts” would be more appropriate when only one entity is deciding what is being said? Searching the phrase revealed “A Democracy of Ghosts” being used as the title of two separate books - one, by John Griswold, is a love story set during a massacre, while the other, by Anthony Koeninger is subtitled “Poetic Patterns of Mexican-American Life”.

Unfortunately for the story, it revealed its construction more than the self-consciousness could, specifically as an elaborate cut-and-paste job that relies on other hands to create the raw material, which is all AI writing can ever claim to be.

WEARILY, WE COME UNWOUND [490]

Detail from "Cut with the Kitchen Knife by Hannah Höch (1920) 

This is either the beginning of a discussion, or the opening of Pandora’s box.

 

At the time of writing, in March 2025, it doesn’t feel like things are going very well, in a redrawing-of-world-order, not-knowing-what-tomorrow-brings kind of way. Moments like this are usually met with reason, but old certainties are not what they were, and something must take that place. 

 

Writing about how things work, or how they don’t work, is not working for me right now, so having my mind turn to the history of art for answers from a hundred years ago was what happened.

 

Dada and Surrealism are two movements linked by their European conceptual base, their rejection of realist form, the former movement having led to the latter, and by my having liked work from both. Tapping into a different source of energy, and tapping out of the usual ways of thinking, is what I feel I need to remain vital right now, in the marketplace of ideas.

 

I previously used Dada to assess the apparent performance artistry in politics in 2017, an irony in comparison with Dada’s emergence as a rejection of the reason that brought the First World War - its formation by displaced foreigners in politically-neutral Switzerland, at the first Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, underlines the serious strength under which the sound poetry, photo-montage and satirical publications arose. If a deranged world demands sense, it should not have it.

 

I have also discussed a Surrealist painting, Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory”, although its use of imagery and signifiers was secondary to commenting on how its endless reproduction belies how small the roughly A4 paper-sized painting really is. Surrealism, mostly because of the proliferation of Dali’s work – although Rene Magritte, he of “ceci n’est pas un pipe”, runs him close – is more easily accessible than Dada, contradicting reality rather than combatively challenging it. 

 

Why am I doing this? Objective truth has taken a back seat to truthiness, and people don’t need one more person to point out what they can already see – besides that, I have already trodden that route many times. I need subjectivity and abstraction for myself, almost as a prism to make things look normal again. I also need to have fun, and if the world wants to have its fun with you, you should be free to reciprocate – fortunately for me, I want to do that artistically.

 

The reason I feel I must choose between Dada and Surrealism, rather than just picking what works best for me, was having listened to what I thought was a good point made by the art critic Louisa Buck in “Lobster Telephone”, a 2024 episode of BBC Radio 4’s “Archive on 4” strand that marked the hundredth anniversary of Surrealism:

 

“But the true Dadaist is against Dada, because Dada was against everything, it was against rationality, it was against this mechanised war that would cause all this bloodshed and destruction. How could you like civilisation? How could you like authority? How could you like society? So the Dadaists were against everything, they were nihilistic, so Dada sort of had to die, because a real anti-movement couldn’t be a movement, so it became systematised into Surrealism.”

 

With the show’s presenter Matthew Sweet, Buck agreed that Surrealism is what you do if you are a Dadaist who wants a work structure with rules and a manifesto. Dada had its own manifestoes, including Tristan Tzara’s 1918 manifesto that couldn’t reconcile its own being: “I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles...”

 

I am not sure I want a rigid structure. I want spontaneity, the ability to change the form in which I am working. When I have made videos, the subject dictates the format: I may present to camera, I may not appear, or I may not say anything. The need is to express without impediment, as Jonathan Meades said in his 2001 television film, “suRREAL FILM”, after attempting to define the word “surrealism”:

 

“It does mean bizarre, but the tame end of bizarre. The Surrealists of the Twenties and Thirties took the bizarre out of the wild and incarcerated it in a zoo. They domesticated feral instinct, expunged the savagery, and sought to keep it for themselves and their precious movement. When of course the irrational really belongs to all of us, to all ages, but not all cultures.”

 

So, what I need is just to express myself, and see where it leads me. To be honest, Dada has direction, and Surrealism is oddly more prescriptive, but my actively thinking about either of these means I have arrived at the need for a new approach, just as Meades said that Surrealism “merely connotes a twenty year or so span of the eternal human urge to replicate the reality that is achieved in dreams and in cerebral afflictions where reason absents itself.”

 

ONE MORE CUP OF COFFEE [489]

"freeze-dried"

A good coffee will not need milk or sugar, as far as I am concerned – at least, that is my conclusion from only just starting to drink coffee for the first time in my life.

Watching other people contend with and compromise in drinking coffee kept me safely with soft drinks up to now, my sweet tooth being happily satisfied, mostly by The Coca-Cola Company.

But tastes change with age, as does your body – I felt mine becoming less impressed by fizzy drinks, and so a solution had to be found.

I rarely tried accustoming myself to hot drinks. Soft drinks have uniformity of taste, but they both cost and weigh more to carry home from a shop, because they need to be pre-prepared and ready to drink. Hot drinks take time to prepare and perfect.

That may be obvious, but I avoided hot drinks for this reason. I prefer just to add hot water and be done with it. Instant drinking chocolate, usually by Cadbury, was the hot drink I had the most before now, but even then, only occasionally, getting bored of forcing Dairy Milk into me. Tea has always been the opposite, too weak for my tastes no matter how long I steep the bag, although a peppermint infusion is much preferable for me to standard black or white tea.

Modifying the taste of your tea or coffee by adding milk, sugar or whatever else led me to think that changing the tea or coffee itself would be more appropriate – like I have done with soft drinks up to now, having a satisfying taste that can stand on its own was what I wanted.

So why coffee, and why coffee now? My family started watching “Twin Peaks” just before Christmas 2024, a very welcome, and endlessly fascinating, alternative to what TV schedules had planned in the festive period. In the character of Special Agent Dale Cooper, the show’s creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, with actor Kyle MacLachlan, created a character who, among all his fastidiousness and intuitive methods, had a love of coffee so great it sold the concept to me. A stronger, more full-bodied taste was what I was looking for, and on the one occasion someone at work asked me how I liked it, I said without hesitation, “black as midnight on a moonless night”.

I first decided to sample the coffee at work one day, not having realised tea and coffee, and milk and sugar, were being supplied in the break rooms, having never needed to look before. However, the three types of instant coffee on offer – “smooth”, “decaf” and “rich”, all apparently from Kenco – were terrible to me. The “smooth” and “decaf” granules smelled burnt, and the “rich” coffee I made was too bitter for more than an initial sip.

The coffee I have arrived at was what we had at home, recommended by my sister: Percol smooth Colombian coffee – “roast 3”, apparently. One teaspoon produces a perfectly nice cup of coffee to me, a sense of warmth and taste without the bitterness, and without all the fuss. No Americano, flat white, long black or other type of complication, and no snobbishness or crema spoons – just a Platonic ideal of a cup of coffee.

The only addition I need is an insulated mug to keep it warm.

I HAD HOPED YOU’D SEE MY FACE [488]

Before Wallace & Gromit, “Chicken Run” and Shaun the Sheep, stop-motion specialists Aardman Animations was known to the young me for both the Chaplinesque adventures of Morph on the BBC, and for five-minute pieces for Channel 4 based on recordings made with members of the public. Our family had a VHS cassette that collected these latter works: alongside Aardman’s celebrated video for Peter Gabriel’s song “Sledgehammer” were vignettes about a social security office, a newspaper editorial meeting, memories of living during the Second World War and, in Nick Park’s Academy Award-winning “Creature Comforts”, living on housing estates or in old people’s homes recontextualised as animals living in a zoo.

The one that has stayed with me the longest, outside of the further series of “Creature Comforts”, was “Ident” (1989), directed by Richard Starzak (credited as Richard Goleszowski), a film that adapted improvised noises from the comedians Arthur Smith and Phil Nice that suggested conversation while rarely using words, creating a story of someone being made to wear masks in various situations. It is very mature, spiky, comic and surreal, the sort of film that makes you develop a taste for something similar.

I became used early on to strange-looking animation, as Channel 4 often followed lunchtime broadcasts of “Sesame Street” at the time with animations from Eastern European countries like the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, rich in traditions of abstract and suggestive animations that rarely used words, so I never found “Ident” scary, like commenters have claimed. The flattened 2D-like style and rough texture of the characters, including a dog that became the star of Starzak’s later series “Rex the Runt”, were already par for the course.

“Ident” was part of “Lip Synch”, a five-part series of “vox pop”-based films made by Aardman and shown by Channel 4 in 1990. David Lord, a co-founder of Aardman and director of two of the films, “War Story” and “Going Equipped”, has said there was no overarching theme for the series, but his contributions, and “Creature Comforts”, are most straightforward in their construction. Barry Purves’ “Next”, an almost-entirely wordless film featuring William Shakespeare auditioning, either for a stage role or for a place in Heaven, by acting scenes from his own plays, is as much of a standout as “Ident” is, but the “vox pop” theme is not found.

Meanwhile, Starzak has either turned Smith and Nice’s improvised sounds into a story or applied them to one – I just wish I knew. The film is set in a maze, arrows featuring throughout. Our unnamed lead character gets ready for his day by pulling his face into shape. After yelling at his dog, he passes a window, pulling down a blind with a better view printed on it. A figure I first took as being like a Roman statue, but also could be their wife, says letters of the alphabet while putting a mask on them, for a more acceptable face. When the mask is rejected, the statue’s words create makeup that spats onto the character’s face, creating a mask regardless, the angry reaction crumbles the statue into a smaller version of itself. 

Arriving at work, a clock on the wall moving as slowly or quickly as they perceive time, the man and their manager wear masks to converse, but when the man takes his off to talk more informally, he is shouted down to a smaller size himself, a mask is placed on him that changes the shape of his nose to fit. The workplace appears to be making the masks themselves, popping into shape on a conveyor belt in the background, a uniform product everyone must wear, but they become misshapen when the man is shouted down, indicating their defective nature.

After hitting the head of an obnoxious canvasser, he is whisked by a crowd into a pub, meeting a friend with a similarly changed face, blowing of steam with the impression of a chat identifiable just out of earshot in any British pub. Returning home drunk, he is confronted by everyone he has met, either metaphorically or literally, and tries putting on another face and juggling balls to impress everyone, which fails. A hard zoom in to real, scared-looking human eyes through a plasticine mask, an image I find suffocating, looks at the warped existence around him, leading him to walk dejectedly away. 

He sees himself in a mirror and, in a moment of realisation, takes off his mask – he looks almost reborn, better than he looked at the film’s start. The dog jumps through the mirror, now a window to the world outside the maze, looking like the picture printed on the blind – the man follows. Marvelling at his new surroundings, he comes across a doppelganger, which mirrors him until they both eye each other suspiciously, leading them to tear at the other’s faces, making them into the masks we saw before. Time to concrete over paradise to build another maze.

To make the point again, “Ident” is only five minutes long. I have watched it many times, and it is a visual poem, one that gains greater significance the older you become. I’m not about to put on a mask now, having been given an early lesson in the effects of such a mindset.

POUR A LITTLE SUGAR ON IT [487]

Can a conceptual artwork remain open to interpretation following its conception?

Controversy recently surrounded the installation in 2024 of “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a 1991 work by Félix González-Torres, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., run by the Smithsonian Institute, because information considered, since the work was created, to be required to form a full understanding of the work had not been included.

It is one of a series of works consisting of a pile of candy sweets, this one wrapped in different colours and with a consistent total weight of 175 lbs (79 kg), to be arranged by the owner or curator as desired, but with the requirement that viewers can take candies from the artwork, with The Félix González-Torres Foundation assisting in replenishing the work. 

The prescribed weight has been interpreted both as being the weight of the average adult human male, but also of the titular “Ross”: Ross Laycock, González-Torres’s partner, would die of complications from AIDS in 1991, as would González-Torres five years later. 

The controversy arose from this information not being supplied alongside the work, as had been when previously on display at other galleries. The Art Institute of Chicago, which owns and shares the work, also removed this information from the written display by 2022, keeping it on its audio guide, before reinstating it after the discrepancy was discovered, then decried. 

Ignaciao Darnadue, writing in “Out” magazine, talked of this being a “queer erasure”, having “witnessed people blissfully taking pictures of pretty candy — empty calories on the floor robbed of their stirring spirit.” The Félix González-Torres Foundation later replied to what they said was “misinformation”, having “made a point of incorporating significant queer content throughout this exhibition”.

I have seen this artwork on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011, accompanied by an explanation of who “Ross” was, effectively making it into an AIDS memorial, charging further symbolism into the act of “participating” in the work by taking weight from the representation of a “body”. The “portrait” made by González-Torres is more visceral than a painting or photograph, removing the boundaries usually placed on an artwork in a gallery setting by requiring you to pick up and eat it, alongside imagery of Catholic communion. This is before you then consider the notions of production and commerce inherent in manufacturing, procuring and delivering the sweets, followed by the human digestion of them.

However, I needed to be given that context – a “conventional” portrait may give you more of a sense of a person’s biography than name and weight. The nature of a gallery space also means you cannot assume that works are intended to be as approachable, and ever since Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on its side and signed it, anything can be appropriated as, or reappraised as, art. Does it mean that González-Torres’s “portrait” is less successful if the context is not signposted? No, it just means that the cultural significance the work has accrued since its unveiling may be something to be looked up beforehand, or later.

Meanwhile, in 2011, I was apparently happy to take six sweets from another González-Torres work, “Untitled” (USA Today) (1990) – weighing 300 lbs., it symbolises the more digestible and reduced porting the newspaper of that name symbolised, along with the country itself - and put the red, white and blue-wrapped sweets into a bag along with a printed explainer, ready for me to rediscover it fourteen years later, taking a picture of it before throwing it and the melted sweets away. This was intended as a souvenir of my visit to an art gallery, but the sweets have moved on from their original form, like if I had eaten them at the time.

YOU SAY THAT THIS WASN’T IN YOUR PLAN [486]

"You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute."

Just because the 1993 film “Demolition Man” was intended as more of a crowd-pleasing blockbuster release than other dystopian science fiction films like “Blade Runner”, “Alien” and others not directed by Sir Ridley Scott aspired to be, it didn’t make it any less prescient. 

I had mistaken police sergeant John Spartan’s (Sylvester Stallone) not knowing about the “three seashells”, the mysterious bathroom tools that are never explained, as being no more than a running joke, even making for the final laugh as the credits roll. But if the effect is to make a dinosaur out of Spartan, thawed out of a cryogenic prison sentence to stop similarly old-school terrorist Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), then viewing it over thirty years later makes dinosaurs of us all.

The film is always set in “the future”, beginning in a 1996 that depicts the Hollywood sign on fire amid rampant lawlessness, a suitably extreme situation whereby cryogenic, mind-rectifying sentences are a logical answer, leading to the repressed, peaceful future of 2032 - as confirmed by prison warden William Smithers, “Things don’t happen anymore. We’ve taken care of that.”

In this future, the hellscape of Los Angeles was supposedly levelled by a 2010 earthquake known as “The Big One”. The new city of “San Angeles” – linked with San Diego and Santa Barbara, and factoring no further into the plot – is layered over the remains, forcing people who don’t assimilate to the new regime underground. The soft and stilted nature of speech, with mentions of “joy-joy”, “be well” and the elimination of the nature of death – “I thought your life force had been prematurely terminated!” – could theoretically be in response to a great trauma that remade society. However, speech is also controlled automatically: even at home, but oddly not in your car, swearing incurs a one credit fine for violating the “Verbal Morality Statute”, although doing it under your breath is half the price.

Everyone is tracked, organic microchips in everyone’s hand, while facilitating a cashless society, also means the police “can zero in on anyone at any time”, although the ineffectual nature of the police, from having so little crime to deal with, means bad decisions are made – attempting to apprehend Phoenix, who has no microchip, relies on a video tutorial consulted at the scene, while using artificial intelligence to work out where he could have gone – find a drug laboratory, then start a crime syndicate – is repudiated by reasoning, like heading to an museum exhibit of firearms. Waiting for Phoenix to kill again wouldn’t be an option now, but human reasoning in 2032 makes it a good place to start.

Police officer Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), someone fascinated by, and authoritative of, 20th century culture, is upbraided by her chief, George Earle (Bob Gunton): “I monitored your disheartening and distressing comments to the warden this morning. Do you really long for chaos and disharmony? Your fascination with the vulgar 20th century seems to be affecting your better judgement. You realize you're setting a bad example for other officers and sworn personnel.” Huxley’s response is rote: “Thank you for the attitude adjustment, Chief Earle. Info assimilated.” And yet, Earle sees no problem in calling Spartan an “animal”, “caveman” and “primate”, just as the city’s leader Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne) calls the underground dwellers “scraps”. These slurs are acceptable, as it is only the presence of certain words that earn punishment – Spartan uses the word “dirtbag” in one scene, apparently free of charge.

Huxley is knocked out towards the end in order to have the final showdown between the two hard-bodied men, Spartan and Phoenix, which wouldn’t have happened if Huxley was being played in 1993 by Geena Davis – Bullock’s full action movie career did not start until “Speed” the following year. A separate film exists within this about Huxley rebelling against her dystopian present through her nostalgia for the old times, like an academic version of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” but with more butchered idioms – “He's finally matched his meet. You really licked his ass.” – and more analysis of how people used to behave before making physical contact became taboo: “If you'd read my study, you'd know this is how insecure heterosexual males used to bond.”

You can see where the present day would facilitate some of these elements. The ever-present wall units dispensing paper fines for swearing would be covered by text messages to your phone, acting as the microchip in your hand, its microphone having picked up the word while you reacted to a video tutorial. I am guessing social media, never mentioned, is banned, missing the opportunity to let the people police themselves. I am not sure about the enjoyment of “mini-tunes”, formerly advertising jingles, unless either advertising or capitalism is banned in San Angeles, leaving unironic nostalgic enjoyment – the clipped and abbreviated nature of social media videos, particularly those of TikTok, fit that niche now.

It is insinuated that Cocteau had the right plan at the right time, rebuilding the city, while making the “scraps”, particularly one Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary, playing Denis Leary), the enemy. “See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice... You wanna live on top, you gotta live Cocteau's way. What he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Your other choice: come down here, maybe starve to death.” He is not a Cocteau-like leader – “I'm no leader. I do what I have to do. Sometimes, people come with me” – but he is portrayed to us as the de facto anti-fascist leader. I expect elections followed later.

I was more impressed with “Demolition Man” in hindsight than I expected, but I still don’t buy Taco Bell winning the restaurant franchise wars. Did McDonald’s lose by changing the Filet-O-Fish again?

THEY SOLEMNLY COVENE TO MAKE THE SCENE [485]

I have only recently become aware of “Loungecore” as a term, because the musical genres of “lounge music” and “easy listening” already exist. “Loungecore” is used interchangeably with “easy listening”, but lounge music predates it, lasting through the 1950s and 60s, with easy listening following into the 1970s.

The suffix “-core”, banding together items with a similar aesthetic, appears here to band together common elements between genres as pop culture history elongates and flattens out, rather than grouping emerging connections before a name suggests itself.

However, I first encountered “Loungecore” in the late 1990s, as the title of a compilation CD of instrumental music by Mexican composer Juan García Esquivel. His style influenced the adjacent genres of “Space Age” and “exotica”, emphasising the music’s intention of taking you to a tranquil place – his piece “Mini Skirt” was being used as the theme tune for the BBC documentary series “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” at the time, just as Andy Williams’ “Music to Watch Girls By” was advertising the Fiat Punto supermini. 

Esquivel’s lounge music had interesting arrangements and choices of instruments, more intricate rhythms, and the recordings made full use of the then-new stereo technology. The combined effect, along with various vocalised exclamations of “zoom” and “wow!”, reminded me of Spike Jones and His City Slickers. 

Therefore, my reaction to this music was to sit up and listen, not lie back – it was so unlike pop music, it made itself curious and interesting in was unintended when it first appeared, and fitting with the combination of “lounge” and “hardcore” for I took the CD compilation’s title to mean.

I am not clear why there was a revival of lounge music and easy listening in the 1990s – it may have been general nostalgia and critical re-evaluation of the previous generation, which will have been planted in the 1960s, accompanied by replays of TV series like “Thunderbirds”, “The Avengers” and the original “Doctor Who” series. I am guessing that the success of the compilation album “Carpenters Gold” when released in 2000 was a result of nostalgia sliding along to the 1970s, and into easy listening, and endless plays of the Starland Vocal Band’s languid song “Afternoon Delight”.

Even the use of the words “easy” and “lounge” symbolise my difficulty with listening to these genres as intended. The lush instrumentation inherent in a song from bandleaders like Esquivel, Ray Conniff, Mantovani or James Last only leads me to pay attention to why it sounds the way it does. Like the programming inherent in Muzak and the “beautiful music” radio format that ran in the United States from the 1950s to the 80s, there are reasons behind the music sounding the way it does, or being arranged it does, and it is usually to be appropriated for a specific use, or to deliberately sound “easier” to listen. This is either because I need music to stimulate me, or I find it hard to relax.

The most prominent example of lounge music appearing in the UK charts, as far as I remember, was a result of the deliberately ironic use of the style. The Mike Flowers Pops, an existing covers band in an easy listening style, was engaged to cover the Oasis song “Wonderwall” for Kevin Greening, a BBC Radio 1 DJ whose weekend breakfast show was recounting songs released during. After it was replayed by weekday breakfast presenter Chris Evans as his “record” of the week, demand prompted an official release. The outcome was hilarious: Flowers had as big as hit with “Wonderwall” as Oasis had, with both versions reaching number 2 in the UK singles chart, and both receiving “silver” status for selling over 200,000 copies. The Mike Flowers Pops had two further top 40 hits, with covers recorded under their own steam, before the novelty caused by the irony died down.

IT’S THE GOOD ADVICE THAT YOU JUST DIDN’T TAKE [484]

January 1987

Perception changes everything, so long as you move first. To that end, I propose that Sod’s Law be abolished in 2025, as far as I can manage.

To illustrate, on the one day last week that I needed to start work earlier, my bus didn’t appear, making me late. This was because the bus company decided to start the bus I was expecting, which was in the wrong place, at a later point on its route, so it would still reach its destination on time. I don’t like being made late for anything, and seeing the map on the bus company’s app that tracks the location of each bus played everything out in real time.

This is a perfect example of Murphy’s Law, as coined in 1948-49 by Edward Murphy Jr, an American engineer on experimental aircraft: “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.” The further consequences of the decision also apply under Murphy’s Law: the bus I did catch had to pick up all the people that were also missed, slowing the bus down, while standing passengers made physically entering and leaving the bus more difficult, slowing things further. Seemingly more people also paid for their journey using cash over using their phone to hop on and off, and so on and so on.

The Oxford Dictionary may describe Sod’s Law as being the British name for Murphy’s Law - and there is no titular "sod" to speak of - but rather than my bus journey going wrong because anything can go wrong, the way it was exacerbated matches my understanding of Sod’s Law - if it goes wrong, it will happen at the worst possible time, and in the worst possible way.

As much as both Sod’s Law and Murphy’s Law can be delineated as laws of both probability and of expectation bias, I realised my perception was also being stretched by experience. After taking the same route hundreds of times, encountering all possible variations of that journey, I simply give myself the right amount of time to make that journey so I don’t have to expect, anticipate or consider anything at all - I will simply get to work on time, every time, and early enough to mean that I didn’t need to adjust my plans to start work earlier.

And yet, as my journey spiralled, I started bargaining with myself that, at least if nothing further happened, then at least I stood a chance of avoiding arriving late for work. I admitted defeat when I could see there was no way of avoiding the inevitable, and once I finally arrived at work, tired and sweating from the adrenaline of walking the last section of my journey as fast as I could, I turned on my computer and started work… three minutes late.

This is why I want to “abolish” Sod’s Law, at least for myself: not wanting to be late is one thing, and being unable to avoid that can still happen, but passively accommodating the possibility of the worst possible outcome turned out to be the same as fearing it. If something can go wrong, it will, but you can’t then hold yourself at fault for failing to adequately prepare - that creates a situation with no possible end point.

Adopting Murphy’s Law couldn’t come at a better time - in a couple of weeks’ time, the bus drivers will be on strike.

WITH THE SOUND ON THE GROUND [483]

Gatekeepers don’t remove gates until the opportunity for profit arises from selling off the gate.

The decision by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, announced on Tuesday 7th January, to remove much of the rules and moderation policies regarding content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, speaks both of an attempt to see off anticipated regulatory problems with an incoming US presidency that scorns any perceived impediment on “free speech”, and of a decision to save the cost of running the old system by letting end users police themselves through a “community notes” system, already used at Twitter/X for similar reasons.

Social media is a digital simulacrum of a town square that creates a Speaker’s Corner for each entrant, the unspoken price of admission being the intentional harvesting of the data created from any utterance or exchange for profit. I concluded this after having gone through Meta’s settings on both Facebook and Instagram to deny their ability to do anything with data created from my having used their services, or with data they have received from other websites that may have also interacted with me. Meta already cannot use my data to train artificial intelligence engines, because I had already been asked this, and I already said no – why let lazy people use my work to take a shortcut?

I couldn’t care less about any perception of Meta becoming anti-LGBTQ+ regarding what they are now allowing people to say, as people who feel the need to say certain things in the name of debate usually don’t have any trouble saying those things. Worst of all is having someone so identifiable in charge of a public “space”, like Zuckerberg. Perhaps decentralised social media, like Bluesky or Mastodon, is the nearest you can get to a real-life public space.

That’s one thing about rules: we wouldn’t think we’d need them unless we needed them, would we? Society has rules, and the Internet stopped being a “Wild West” when we integrated it into our normal lives. Social media will either need to rejoin society, or be subsumed by it – I have covered this subject too many times to say otherwise.

I wrote this in June 2020: “There will come a time when social media will end – sites will either be legislated out of existence, or people will get bored and wander off. Either extremism and fake news will be dealt with, or people will just have to learn how to speak to each other properly – which they have increasingly been doing via by video conferencing services, like Zoom, FaceTime and Microsoft Teams, instead of social media. This is much healthier than measuring your influence and wealth by how many followers you have. If you really need to let people know what you think about something, get a blog, or ask Google to resurrect GeoCities.”

I also wrote this in January 2022: “If everyone uses social media, we are essentially all in the media business and, therefore, we all should receive media training to fully understand the uses and effects of media, so that we can use it most effectively and mindfully. I think this would press home the importance of acting professionally in the public space created by a media that requires us to act intimately in order to receive the content required to run it. Organisations specialising in media training offer communication skills, interview technique, provide experience in dealing with PR and media relations, and provide “key message development” for the messages you want to get across.”

From May 2017: “In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ published three years before ‘Nineteen Eight-Four,’ [George] Orwell admonished the overuse of flourishes and technical language in English writing, as if any step away from clarity will cloud your intentions straight away. However, when the same essay provides six rules for writers, Orwell was wise enough to use the last rule to say it is better to break the other five ‘than say something outright barbarous.’ These days, the point that makes is more like using social media to immediately say what you feel, without thinking what you are about to post – in other words, Big Brother bellyfeel Twitter.”

COME SAIL AWAY WITH ME [482]

Is it truly possible to “get away from it all”? Not by just going on holiday, but by disconnecting from routine, resisting the need to “check in” at anything other than an airport.

 

I am routinely guilty of checking what I will be coming back to after a week off from work, but I cannot bring myself to delete the app we use from my phone - we are not required to use it other than in the office, but the illusion of “advantage” means it remains on my home screen.

 

The allure of an ocean cruise constitutes the nearest I can physically remove myself from the networks that run everyday life, without the ability to travel into outer space. 

 

Transatlantic travel would be even more effective, removing all intermediary ports of call, and any opportunity for your phone to connect to a cellular network - Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, the only liner currently offering such a journey, is an opulent destination unto itself, and a more than adequate distraction. I clearly need a break if I am thinking about it this deeply.

 

Of course, you would then be subject to the temporary network created by the liner, something once solely constructed and run by a ship’s crew, now supplemented by the online purser’s office of a digital planner service available to passengers using the ship’s on-board wi-fi, booking meals and activities to distribute people around the ship. Cunard’s planner, “My Voyage”, is a web-based outlier in an industry that encourages the downloading of an extra app to access all services, but even while a printed daily programme is still provided to guest rooms, and most services on Cunard ships do not require booking, there is the implication that accessing a network will be easier and more convenient for the smooth running of the liner, and of your trip.

 

Or you could “stay in touch with friends and family with one of our on board internet packages, and discover our top tips for using your phone while at sea”. If you choose to add it to your voyage, Cunard charges $20-28 per day to access Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit satellite network Starlink, charging the higher amount if you want video streaming in addition to what is titled the “Essential Internet Plan”, which is web browsing, e-mail and social media, like you never left port. 

 

Having paid £7.75 per day for five days to continue using my mobile phone in New York in 2023 strikes me as a different proposition because I was on dry land during that time. I could have used a printed map and guide, but it was crucial that I could react at the same speed as the city in which I was located. At sea, it is more possible to set your own pace, and to put a distance between yourself and that which demands attention now but could wait until later. 

 

Buying the sort of internet access you could find on land means you may as well have taken your holiday on land, because it means you are willing not to take a proper break - you remain on standby, in the middle of the ocean. I need to explore whether the lives we lead – the life I lead – is able to give us a proper break from them.