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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:
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Daily Blah for... Friday, March 07, 2008
Wild Endings
Lest you think I simply praise any movie I see to the high heavens, let me first tell you about the ho-hum flicks I've seen recently. This is England: no it wasn't. A very incomplete, lazily-ended slice of life about skinheads in 1983, it spent too much time trying to draw some unexplained connection to the Falklands War and not enough tying up its characters' loose ends. Sweeney Todd: not bad, a nice cameo by Sasha Baron Coen, but again, it squandered itself in a lazy ending. U23D: could have been great, probably was great on a digital IMAX. The analogue version made me go a little cross-eyed behind my outsize 3D glasses.
Okay, critical duty done. Now excuse me while I rave about Into the Wild, which just came out on DVD. (Yes, I know I'm a little behind the curve on this one). Most movies of this kind of length -- 2 hours 30 minutes -- tend to drag by the end. But this one, the (mostly) true story of Chris McCandless, a Thoreau-reading graduate who fled his family, gave his college fund to charity and walked the land, ending up in the Alaskan wilderness, could easily have been longer. Emile Hirsch, an astonishing fusion of Jack Black and young Leo DiCaprio, gives an incandescent performance as McCandless, and Hal Holbrook's bit part as an equally lonely old man brought me to tears. But the real star of the movie is the great American west: the vast deserts, the cornfields, the Colorado river, the ocean, the Pacific Coastal Trail, the eagles, horses, moose and bears; none have ever looked so beautiful on film. Nor is it tame or pastoral; it simulataneously manages to look rough, dusty, raw, and feral. It's more red in tooth and claw than any late-night National Geographic documentary.
I was enraptured for every minute of the movie. There was so much life in this ultimately mortal voyage that it was hard not to feel the way you feel when you've been out in nature for a week or so: a little more free, a little more grateful, a little less "civilized" in all the right ways. I was reminded somewhat of Burning Man, but substantially more of the trips I took on the Green Tortoise at McCandless' age. Those communal bus adventures were, in many senses, the opposite of his one-man wanderings, but they shared his disgust with American cities and suburbs, and his Emersonian devotion to truth in nature. And of course, he ends up in Alaska in a "magic bus" of his own.
The film didn't mention this, but the bus was heartbreakingly close to food, shelter and a river crossing at the end, according to this Outside article by the author of the book the movie is based on. McCandless didn't know this, as he had neglected -- or shunned -- the carrying of a map. Getting back to the wilderness is all well and good. Informing yourself about it, as Emerson and Thoreau and Burning Man and the drivers of the Green Tortoise would all agree, is the only thing that stops the journey being suicide.
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