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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
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Daily Blah for... Sunday, February 26, 2006
Stuff and Nonsense
I do love me a bit of Terry Gilliam. The Brothers Grimm, which I brought over on DVD and just this minute screened for a delighted audience, my Camden flatmate for the week, is another one of those terrific and grusome Gilliam riffs that probably won't be fully appreciated for the genius they are until the director dies. True, Heath Ledger and Matt Damon do distract with their fake British accents as much as they help with their madcap Brad-Pitt-in-Twelve-Monkeys-ness. But the tale they enact is strangely scary (in classic Grimm style; just about every phobia you can think of is stuffed in here somewhere), a nice mash-up of the elements of every Grimm tale into a fantastically fantastical tale of the tale-tellers as they most definitely were not.
It's also packed with delicious metaphor for the modern world. Cold military logic, in the form of Jonathan Pryce's Napoleonic general, is ruthlessly attacking the forces of imagination and enchantment embodied in a folkloric forest in occupied Germany. We, the inhabitants of the age of reason, burn down forests. We set fire to folklore. And we lose. The spark of storytelling triumphs.
Quite a preachy tale to swallow? It would be, in the hands of anyone but Gilliam, who can't resist poking fun at anything and everyone, a list that starts with himself. In every frame, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so, is the kind of Fellini-esque grotesquerie that makes the world around you look such an eye-openingly laughable place after you stagger away from the credits. Stuff and nonsense, says he, is key to the whole picture. That message is just what I need on a taking-stock vacation like this. Don't forget the spark, the stuff, the nonsense, when envisioning your big picture.
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