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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.
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Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Swede the Internet
Since I got back from Paris and London, I've been encouraging everyone I meet to see Be Kind Rewind. It's a must for anyone who likes movies, or electricity, or pizza, or being silly. Like the pathetic video shop full of outmode -- worse, erased -- video tapes which it depicts, it needs help. It's in danger of becoming one of those movies banished to VHS -- not literally, but you know what I mean. A "lost classic." But the truth is, this is Michel Gondry's best film since "Eternal Sunshine," and may even surpass that masterwork.
At its core is the can-do, cardboard-cut-out-and-string spirit of childhood. A movie for the forthcoming Obama era, it declares: yes you can remake a video library of hit movies using nothing but a camera, cheap props, and pluck. Gondry goes so far as to suggest this spirit can save the world, or at least a video shop threatened with compulsory demolition. Be Kind Rewind, for such is the name of the New Jersey store, is the center of a sad, run-down but also blissfully innocent world; a building reputed to be the birthplace of Fats Waller, a building whose owner takes an old-fashioned train journey to do some old-fashioned industrial spying on a competitor who sells 'em newfangled DVDs.
A tinfoil conspiracy nut and a man-child accidentally erase the entire stock while the owner is away, and feel responsible enough to film their own utterly sincere attempt at a remake of the first film requested by a customer. This is the kind of community where a customer is patient enough to wait until 6pm that day, allowing the pair to shoot twenty minutes of film as a replacement. The result, of course, charms the town. They're not fooled, but who could fail to be won over -- or prefer this heartfelt amateurism to the prepackaged dreck you pick up at a regular video store?
You can almost hear the Web 2.0 crowd cheering (and booing when the Hollywood copyright lawyers come along and destroy the stock). This is the world if it were run by Flickr or Wikipedia or YouTube. "Sweding" is the term Gondry uses; it's a nonsense word gabbled by one of the video makers when asked to name the process by which these Hollywood movies were made so good. Sweding: A tacit admission that mainstream dreck has been entirely perverted, and redeemed, through the filter of outsider art.
You can see it on the Be Kind Rewind website, which adapts a great Eddie Izzard joke about technofear -- "I've deleted the Internet?" --and replaces said Internet with a cardboard-and-string version -- beginning, of course, with Google. Your search results will be sweded.
So, Dear Blah reader, here is your meme of the day, possibly the meme of the year. Go forth and swede yourself.
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