A Very Long Dark Knight

All right, I’m just going to say it – I wasn’t wild about Dark Knight.

Don’t let me wrong, parts of it were superb. Strong imagery supported powerful themes; the entwinement of Bats and Joker, the order/restriction/heroism interplay with chaos/freedom/passion, twisting thoughout the film – iconised by the (sadly brief) addition of the much under-used Two-Face. A smartly self-referential narrative rather skilfully veered away from several classic genre clichés (the girl died – yay!) and the array of gadgetry was strongly visual, yet wasn’t over-used – and managed to keep its cool.

Sub-plot points for the realisation that the all-powerful Bruce can’t achieve this stuff alone. Any Bat-fan knows the brains belong to Alfred and Fox added a level of technical support worthy of Bond’s Q – extra bonus for the ultimate sonar gadget. Plus the young Commissioner Gordon kicking bad guy butt with a ‘Pow’!’ and a ‘Zap!’ – if this can be echoed by an equally potent whiskey-swilling Chief O’Hara in the follow-up, I may just change my mind about the whole thing.

However.

Faced by the awesome curtain performance of Ledger, flanked by Caine and Freeman, Christian gets bunged in with the lions – and doesn’t stand a chance. Out of armour, he’s outclassed – but add the appalling and predictable ‘gravelly rasp’ and the Joke really is on him. It didn’t quite ruin the film – but it did undermine Bats’ credibility and make me wonder if Brucey hadn’t made his trust fund providing new soundtracks for bad 70s porn.

Which brings me to the point.

There is such a thing as a climax that goes on for too fucking long. Another explosion, another confrontation, another hostage situation, another wave of tension-and-release… that’s enough. Faced with yet one more end-of-level showdown, I’m drained and no longer seeing the funny side.

Two-Face, though iconic – was wasted. The realisation of the character was thrown away, lost in a rising tide of detonation. The smashing of the Bat-symbol was a childhood memory over-turned – and, by that point, long over-due. When something that powerful and reminiscent is lost under a bad case of auditorium-wide fidgets..? Looks like everyone’s about climaxed out.

Why so serious? Because there are some Knights that just never seem to end.

Qik Thinking: Social Media and Visual Orientation

At the weekend, I took my Cub on Hyde Park safari – we went on manoeuvres, enjoying the many tourist temptations that lie in wait, basking in the London sun.

Ranging up the Serpentine, we surprised upon the just-completed Pavilion installation by Frank Gehry – and this is where words, and blog, fail me. I’m not usually taken with ‘contemporary art’, but this was dynamic, dramatic, powerful; a creature of glass, wood, angle and sunlight that stood bright against the sky.

I took pictures with my little cam and found myself wishing I could share my entrancement, the wonder the work created. I wanted to do the Qik thing – I needed to be ‘live and streaming’; the passion and immediacy of the visual was the only way to express how I felt.

Fiction writers – particularly in science fiction and fantasy – paint incredibly powerful visuals with words, imagination, experience, ardour. Done right, these visuals don’t come to you, the reader, from the page, they’re powerful enough to spontaneously ignite in your mind’s eye. But they take time – and editing – and proof-reading…

Social Media is of the ‘NOW!’ In the flesh, communication is about body-language and eye-contact more than it is voice – and this holds true on the web; we perceive more by image than word. Recently, the loss of the S3 server deprived Twitter of both avatars and backgrounds – and we were instantly disconcerted. Like faces, we need patterns for immediate recognition.

A magical moment, wherever you find it, is there-and-gone – if we want to share it, it’s up to us to choose the best tool and platform. Blogging needs focus, both reading and writing take time; we can instant-hit-upload our images to twitpic, utterz or flickr – or we can, quite literally, see though each other’s eyes by sharing the optical experience.

Walking round the Serpentine Gallery really brought that home to me for the first time.

One might say: a Qik-ture paints a thousand tweets?

People Like Us

In 2004, on the occasion of his first official signing at one of his favourite stores, Simon Pegg asked what had become of the ‘original’ Forbidden Planet poster. He remembered it from the store’s Denmark Street days, from spending his pocket money as a kid.

When I first stuck my nose into social media, I came face-to-screen with a history of the company I’d been aware of – but had never witnessed the strength of first-hand. So many people; so many memories… and always, always attached back to one particular design.

‘People Like Us’, drawn in 1978 by a then up-and-coming artist who’s gone on to become one of the most famous names in comic book history. He is, of course, Brian Bolland.

From cult comic beginnings, Forbidden Planet has grown into the icon of Geek Chic, setting the trend for the new age of cool. This year, as the company hits 30, it remembers who it was – and celebrates who it’s become – by rediscovering Brian’s original art.

Thanks to Mister Pegg, to Nik lamenting the loss of the Denmark Street site, to a particular tee found on Welchtoon’s Flickr, and to many others, ‘People Like Us’ is due to make a formal re-appearance.

While we’re waiting to get our hands (claws, tentacles or other appendages) on it, though, we can show off how much we know about 30 years of science fiction here.

Place a vote for your favourites from the worlds of sci-fi, fantasy and cult entertainment – and be in with a chance to win £300 worth of vouchers.

And make sure you keep them in a safe place… you never know what they might come in useful for…

Don't Lose Your Phreadz

I've been meaning to give the video blog thing a go for a while, but my new involvement in the 'closed beetroot' testing of Kosso’s ‘Phreadz’ has given me the boot up my butt I needed to get me started.

Phreadz has appealed to me as marketeer, as retailer and as customer; it illustrates how well constructed something can be when it’s strategised from the outset with a clear model in mind. I can’t offer you insight on its technical expertise – but, in this concise overview of my initial thoughts, I can explain why I feel it’s had such a strong impact.

The relevance of Phreadz to a retail business is tied up in its use of channels - of course - in the same way that online retailers channel their products into departments, and their newsletters into demographic relevancy. We all know that successful marketing is about targeting your information - and here is a way that we can do that within a video forum.

Tightly streamlined, and moving ever-forward >>




One of the marvelous things about social media is that you never cease to break new boundaries – wherever those boundaries may be for you personally, they’re still there to be broken.

I guess that’s called making phread-way?

The Joy of Six

It’s taken me almost three months to add a further chapter to the rewrite of Khamsin – rather tragic, when I share that it’s beginning was written almost a year ago.

But it’s completed at last – an exploration of culture shock to bridge a chasm between two classic expressions of genre.

This one’s for anyone who’s tried to secure creative time against the demands of home, family and work. It’s for everyone who clings to a dream that ‘one day’ they will return to their chosen art – and it’s for everyone who’s woken up and gone ‘fuck it’ and dug their paintbrush out of the attic anyway.

It’s for the people who have helped me rediscover my confidence in this – particularly Mousewords, Teeg, and IAmKat. And it’s for words of encouragement from some unexpected sources.

My average word-count is worse than piss-poor.

But my imagination is awake and firing once more; images tumble, plot-lines weave, conversations develop. All I lack is time.

Learning how to write again is painful and an absolute pleasure... and I know that the more I persevere, the easier it will become.

The new chapter can be found here.

West End Grrl

So, what happens when you take the High Altar of Geek and plonk it in the very heart of mainstream, high-culture London?

Aside from a personal visit by the Mayor (who once collected Marvel comics, so he said) and an amazingly rude anchor girl from a national news team (I don’t care if you’re ‘on the telly’ luv, you’re not using my display as a dressing table), a great deal of fun, frolics and photographs.

Yes, Westminster City Council invited Forbidden Planet back to West End Live.

You know I’m intrigued by the nature of geekdom – the marketeer in me labels it the customer-base of my company – but I’m still a fangirl at heart and Forbidden Planet’s people are less statistic and more friend. Not so the milling hordes in Leicester Square last weekend! Busier than even the organisers expected, the shoulder-to-shoulder crush was sightseers, tourists, families, theatre lovers and luvvies; the urban(e) heart of the West End who stand outside my demographic and who don’t give Star Wars so much as a sniff of disdain.

Yet we were busier than we’ve ever been.

Aside from our giant Spidey, we took with us a dressing up box – masks, helmets, hats and props from now-hot comic book culture. Unsurprisingly, the guys wanted to don The Hulk mask-and-hands and roar at camera-wielding girlfriends; unsurprisingly, the Who voice-changer was a massive hit with every kid of ten or younger; unsurprisingly, the Indy hat-and-whip caused much amusement among the ladies. The ‘surprisingly’? The appeal was universal.

Dressing up is one of those things we never grow out of. It breaks our boundaries, transcends the faintly bitter taste of ‘role-play’ and embraces the sweet allure of ‘stage and screen’. With us, once again, were our friends from the UK Garrison – this time clad in a variety of movie-class costumes – and fronting the ‘come-as-you-aren’t’ theme of the FP tent. They epitomised what the packed throng of visitors were teasing at the edges of – the desire to be the legend, the hero, the star.

Returning to my personal mission statement about the new age of geek credibility, it seems that West End Live blurred the ever-fading line between geek and chic even more… On a weekend where the Mayor collects Marvel and the ol’ comic store becomes the new green room, there’s no limit to how cool a geek can get!

Focus

Last weekend, I returned to a place of haven and refuge – Holland’s Wood, Brockenhurst, New Forest.

The forest is glorious, an easy place to abandon yourself in air and trees and sky and sunlight. It makes a tranquil resting point from which to venture outwards.

The tourist-friendly gravel paths are all very well – but I’ve done those. This time, my weekend’s biking was a shimmering, superheated cross-country fight that had me facing pathless, treacherous heathland; mud and mosquito, slope and shingle, rut and ridge – and one apparently spontaneous river.

Rattling loud protest at the pounding it was taking, my bike showed me something I haven’t seen in a long time.

Focus.

Somewhere outside Ringwood, the sun blistering my shoulders, my entire attention sharpened down to a perfect, searchlight-like beacon illuminating the forward motion of my front wheel.
My knees still absorbed the shocks, my feet still pushed, my hands still gripped the handlebars like they were a white-knuckle ride… but all I could see, feel, think, the only thing in my head, was the next metre of upcoming ground. Everything else had just… ceased.

One thought.

Created by apprehension, it came with confidence and complete control. It was timeless, intense, white-hot – and unbelievably freeing.

As the ground levelled out and my concentration receded, I found myself laughing – relief or release, I don’t know – but its sheer force brought an insight.

Our lives are increasingly about multi-tasking – in the home, on the web. How many Social Media sites do we maintain; how many tasks do we complete while we schedule more, while we write, draft, chat, code, listen to Last FM? On Twitter, we continue multiple conversations; on FriendFeed, we flick from tab to tab. We group our friends into sets just to keep track of ourselves and we jump dementedly from URL to URL like we jump between the brightly-manic stepping stones of Plurk.

Every day, our minds range outwards along so many lines - our attention is scattered and we rarely bring the full force of our concentration to bear on a single thing. When extremity pulls all those lines, hard, in the one direction – it’s astounding what you can achieve.

Sometimes, it's good to take your head out of the screen. It reminds you what else you can do!