The Unforgiving Minute » life

Hands in the machinery

Paul Currion — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:08:37 +0000

There’s a lot of truth in Matthew Crawford’s article The Case for Working with your Hands, although although the attempt towards the end to link it to the financial crisis is a little clunky. His general points about the value of manual work still stand, particularly where he implies¹ that the education system in a modern economy is little more than a delivery system for office workers. The best shot comes towards the end of the piece, though:

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make.

The “visceral experience of failure” is not something that people enjoy facing, but it’s essential to experience it for exactly the reasons that Crawford describes. Those who haven’t been through that aren’t the sort of people I’d trust, but unfortunately wealth and power tend to protect you from the impact of those those experiences – you might experience failure, but you won’t necessarily experience it viscerally. In the information economy, this is multiplied by the fact that the distance from failure is increased; Crawford suggests all students should learn a trade before they begin work, but it would perhaps be simpler (if less politically acceptable) to simply hold people accountable for their actions.

And now I’m going to plaster a wall.

Only implies – this is the New York Times, after all, where one may rock the boat only within carefully-defined parameters

Saturday night under the stars

Paul Currion — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:29:46 +0000

As I sit on the terrace looking up at the night sky over the Mediterranean, what’s going through my head?

1. I don’t do demonstrations any more – I’ve been charged by horses, clubbed with batons, narrowly avoided a lungful of something nasty and it didn’t really achieve much, to be honest. If I was out on the streets, I’d be stunting like this.

How to Protest

2. History always favours the winners. There’s a fairly obvious connection between this and my lack of demonstration-ing, but it doesn’t really matter that much. It occurred to me only because I was listening to the mix “Recollections from Old London Town” on the HAFTW blog (direct download on mediafire). Best listened to with the windows open so that the noise outside and inside bleed together.

3. I sent a list of Things To Do to an American friend who’s visiting Old London Town for a few days. Trying to think of things that would be a) worth doing, b) not too obscure / alienating and c) not too obvious / depressing, I realised how much of London I miss and how much I don’t, and how long it’s been since I spent any time there. Everything could have been swept away by recession for all I know, although that would probably be an improvement on the non-dom hard currency package tour that it had become.

4. What am I doing, sitting on my terrace on a Saturday night after yet another action-packed week? Ah, but it wasn’t action-packed at all – they rarely are these days. I’m in exile, not just from London, but from a way of life. Did you know that? Probably you didn’t. I’ll tell you all about it some other time, although you’ll have to buy the drinks unless that UNICEF contract comes through. Nobody can give me any performance indicators for returning from exile.

5. It’s very difficult to distinguish between self-destructive behaviour and self-constructive behaviour. Right now there are no clouds in the sky to derail thought, the dogs have quietened for the night, the lights across the bay are ghosts on the water. Put your troubles to bed before you lay your own head down, and good night.

Bruce Sterling on the Design of the Balkans

Paul Currion — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:36:38 +0000

I never realised that Bruce Sterling had married Jasmina Tesanovic and lived in Belgrade for a few years. Well done Bruce. In this talk, he reflects on what Balkan society can tell “us”, by which he means of course the West. There’s a lot of good observations (if slightly obvious to anybody who’s spent any time in the Balkans) but towards the end he veers towards meaningless. Apparently the Balkans doesn’t have tragedy, but it does have fratricide – and here was me thinking that one of the cornerstones of (Greek) tragedy was slaughtering your own relatives. The division between “us” and “them” starts to look particularly odd when he starts talking about the Roma, who constitute a “them-them” – doubly alien because he sees them through the eyes of his Serbian peer group. It’s still worth watching, if only for his riff on the heroic nature of Yugoslav design.

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPDATE: Wow, that Vimeo embedding link really sucked. Fixed now!

Time under water

Paul Currion — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:30:10 +0000

“What’s that coming over the hill? Is it a monster? Is it a monster?” – The Automatic

You think of these migraines as something outside yourself.

When you wake from an afternoon hibernation, you think to yourself, “Is it gone yet?” No, it hasn’t gone yet; it throbs and writhes just beneath the skin of your scalp, leaning against your eyeballs. It makes you weep when you accidentally look out of the window into the bright sunlight, it rides you like guilt, bearing you down. It’s a monster, announcing itself early in the morning with that faint ache around the eyes, that nausea on an empty stomach, that thirst that you feel too late and now cannot be quenched in time to stop it.

When it eventually hits you, you lose the day. You can’t hope to beat it; you just have to survive. Survival means what survival has always meant, curled into the fetal position in warmth and darkness, reliving memories that take you away from that place, from the pain. The migraine turns you into a monster – a vampire, seeking the darkness, sleeping during the day; a zombie, shuffling around the house when you become desperate for food, for fuel to get you through. It wants nothing more than to make you a monster like itself.

When it’s especially bad, you pray that you might die (and sometimes you even mean it), but you always survive. Your mind keeps working all the way through, running away at a pace until finally you fall asleep. The sleep is not refreshing – you wake up with ashes in your mouth, feeling as if your skull has been hollowed out. You are light on your feet, finally, after that zombie shuffle you had before, but only because your brain is still reeling from the impact.

It doesn’t kill you, but it doesn’t make you stronger either; instead it only reminds you that you are at the mercy of the monster. It wants nothing, it’s just a reflection of the brain misfiring, somehow. The monster is your own mind, and the only lesson it has is that you are at its mercy. You’ll forget that lesson, of course. You always forget that lesson, until the next time, when you wake up with that faint ache around your eyes, and the monster eating the precious day straight from your table.

Planet Suicide

Paul Currion — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:22:43 +0000

First:

A teenager in the US state of Florida has committed suicide in front of a live internet audience. Abraham Biggs, 19, from Pembroke Pines, near Miami, killed himself hours after announcing his intention to do so on his blog.

Second:

A former police chief in Argentina, wanted for alleged crimes against human rights, has shot himself dead in front of television cameras. Mario Ferreyra was giving an interview on top of a water tank at his home in the northern province of Tucuman… pulled a pistol from his boot and shot himself behind the ear. The Cronica television cameras were still rolling, transmitting live, as the distraught family gathered round.

Third:

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea’s broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods.

Some argue that communications technology has been driven by Eros, but surely Thanatos must have his turn?

Unbearably Alone in Moscow

Paul Currion — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:21:55 +0000

The New Statesman presents findings from the Fear in the Mega-Cities survey (so far, so Dredd), which I’m afraid simply aren’t very interesting, and only one thing stood out for me. In Paris, Rome, London, New York, Cairo and Sao Paolo, “Losing loved ones” features in the top five fears, but not so in Moscow, where “Remaining alone” takes its place. That shift in emphasis – from future loss to present lack – tells of a thousand lonely lights in a thousand crumbling apartment blocks, and also makes me less likely to move to Moscow in the near future.

Call me Ismail

Paul Currion — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 09:23:10 +0000

This week, legendary sports journalist Rod Curtis was my guest at the building site that I call home. Rod lives in Tirana, and drives the only car currently available in Albania, a black Merc. It’s been a pleasure having him here, except when he wakes me up at 4 in the morning staggering around the house in a drunken stupor trying to turn the lights out by punching them.

My neighbour Adrian was in our local supermarket last week. The nice ladies who work there informed him of their suspicions that the Muslim who lives in our village is a member of al-Qaeda. Adrian was naturally puzzled, since there are no Muslims in our village, until he realised that they meant me. Breaking it down:

Beard + Albanian car = member of al-Qaeda

I’m fairly certain that I’ll never be able to shake their suspicions, no matter how much evidence we present. On the plus side, it’s unlikely that anybody in the village is going to try anything funny if they think I might carbomb their house.

the words to describe what it was

Paul Currion — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:32:49 +0000

I try to explain to him what it means and how it feels, and while I’m talking I wonder whether those two things are the same.

Imagine that you speak a language that only one other person in the world speaks. You don’t even think about it as a language – it’s just the world you inhabit together. One day you wake up and that person is gone, and that means that your language is gone, as if it never existed. You can’t capture or call it, and words start to fade from the pages of your memory. People tell you – there are other languages in the world. Losing this language – why, that gives you the opportunity to learn one of these other languages instead! It’s true, you can learn another language – but it won’t be the language that you’ve lost, and your tongue will still be silenced. The worst knowledge of all, though, is that as the language leaves you like rain soaking back into the earth, you’re also losing the memory of the person that you spoke it with, the one person who shared that world with you.

I watch his face to see if he understands, but it long ago ceased to matter. I’m dreaming of words that I will never hear again, and inside I weep for the voice that is gone forever.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Paul Currion — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:01:08 +0000

Many technotopian scenarios can be described as “the geek will inherit the earth”. The most recent example of two rich white men wearing heavy-rimmed glasses pontificating about how indispensable they’re going to be after the apocalypse recently appeared on boingboing and worldchanging – two sites which have a lot to recommend them but also have a vastly inflated idea of their own importance. I’m going to quote a big chunk, because I like making myself angry.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.¹

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good at adaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

Yeah, just imagine! Actually reading about how development works² would reveal that what they’re describing is one of Doctorow’s barely-readable novels rather than the real world. The model of sending out experts to tell the ignorant masses how to do things right (which the ignorant masses welcome with open arms, if they know what’s good for them, etc, etc) has been almost completely discredited as a vehicle for meaningful development since the early 1990s, making it deeply ironic that they would project their their self-aggrandising futurism onto such a retrograde screen.

This is a really uninspired, inaccurate and embarrassing title.
They could start with Duncan Green’s excellent From Poverty to Power, which is as good an overview of mainstream development thinking as you’ll find.

You are what you eat

Paul Currion — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:29:08 +0000

So while I was plastering around an electrical socket, I thought to myself, “Gypsum. I wonder what gypsum is”. Gypsum, my friends, is calcium sulfate dihydrate, a naturally occurring chemical with the chemical formula CaSO₄·2H₂O.

Calcium sulfate is also “The traditional and most widely used coagulant to produce Chinese-style tofu. It produces a tofu that is tender but slightly brittle in texture.” Wikipedia claims that “the coagulant itself has no perceivable taste”, but I still appear to be eating my own house.

This makes me sad.