The Right Tool for the Job

There is a school of thought that the medium makes, or helps make, the message.  For instance, a movie starring Tom Hanks released in ‘theatres’ (more likely multiplexes, places to buy cola and starch snack ‘meals’ with a projector booth or ten bolted on to the side, often located in a sort of leisure industrial estate) is better than a straight-to-video movie ‘starring’ ‘Tom Guttenberg’, which in turn is better than anything on Youtube, which in turn is oddly enough not better than your old home movies.

Which means good means film stock?  Maybe.  Just as the medium makes the message so there is a school of thought that the instrument making the message is important.  What else explains the continued existence of Mont Blanc pens in the age of the Bic?

Moreover, ‘stationary fetishism’ is a thing, and not the perverse desire to shag a statue you might think it is.  Rather, it’s the, in my opinion very reasonable, desire to use rather nice notebooks and so on for writing, well, notes on.

No doubt having a good notebook is important.  Anyone using one ‘in the field’ meaning surveyors, farmers, scarecrow spotters, appreciate a notebook with a good stiff cover that supports excited scribblings.

It’s when the notebook becomes a ‘journal’ that definitions become important.  A good stiff journal is invaluable if you are travelling somewhere that lacks wifi or Christianity.  You will need good quality paper that absorbs ink but repels damp, of sufficient weight to swat any winged pest but light enough to be portable and thick enough to stop a dart from a blowpipe.

Back in the day, foreign correspondents used to pound out copy on a vintage (or as they called it back in the day ‘a’) typewriter, and a manual one at that.  At least they did in the movies.  Hacks of all descriptions would hammer at the keys and the mechanical levers would pound the paper.  This, one thinks, is the sort of tool that you need to write about the rise of Hitler, the Blitz, the D-Day landings, the Moon landing, JFK’s rise and fall.  Not all such typewriters would come with optional ashtrays and beverage holders, but if they did it wouldn’t be a bad idea.  A serious instrument for a serious composer of prose, like a Wurlitzer of words.

The manual typewriter survived so long as field kit because, unlike its electronic cousin, it didn’t need to be plugged in.  And so things remained until the advent of the laptop.

Early laptops shared important characteristics with manual typewriters.  They weighed an immense amount and they could stop not just a dart from a blowpipe but just about everything short of a depleted uranium shell.

Laptops endured even beyond the advent of tablets, with their fairy-weight and their Methuselah-like battery life because as soon as you bring up the keyboard on the tablet screen, you have more keyboard than screen and the space left is fit only for the composition of postcards of Haiku.  Or modern news reporting.

However, you can now purchase clip-on keyboards for your tablet.  In fairness, you have been able to purchase lightweight and long lasting laptops for some time now, but they are so svelte that they barely pass the ‘stiff enough to lean on to write a note’ test, never mind the all-important blowpipe dart test which is not only important but also the reason I am not allowed in any branch of PC World in the possession of a length of bamboo.  Such keyboards are marketed as ‘robust’, meaning designed for angry bloggers who hammer at the keys like an enraged gibbon.  Is means that when attached to your tablet they make the ensemble a comforting weight, but still about 1/10th of that of a vintage laptop.

Ultimately, it’s probably not the instrument that’s important, but the message.  the instrument and the medium should not prevent the message being recorded, and that’s about it.

That said, ink on paper has more prestige than pixels on screens so, unless the museums of the future exhibit the flash drives of the famous, notebooks will always have a place.

Typewriter 2.0

I am once again in a hotel, and I am once again thinking about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.

It’s a rather pleasant hotel.  It’s in the centre of London, with a view out over the docks to the city (and there is almost everything you need to know about London, if you wrote that on the back of a postcard from the past anywhere else in the world, you would have the mental image of a place of transit smelling of desperation and mackerel, populated by wanton types with earrings, and that’s just the sailors.  The only boats bobbing in the dock here are Sunseekers and the city is the City, proud to leave all the lights on in their huge office blocks to create the impression that everyone is still hard at it after dark, shouting into telephones, Like In The Movies).

The air conditioning is hidden and efficient, there is no lazily rotating ceiling fan that can cross fade to become the rotating blades of a helicopter.  Maybe it’s stealth?

Nevertheless, there’s something about being in a hotel and not being on holiday that makes me think about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.  I’d like to say it’s the mutual incompatibility of pool toys and AK47s that make any holiday hotel a haven, but sadly that’s no longer true.

So on the strength of my previous post about ambient soundtracks, I should probably be putting together the faux war correspondent soundtrack, era by era.  Let’s start with the 1970s.  Busy traffic, foreign murmuring, farting scooters, the occasional mooing of an ox, the whup whup whup of a Huey passing overhead and the clackity clack (‘don’t talk back!’) of the typewriter.

Vietnam was, I have read, the first televised war.

There have been plenty since.  I remember ITV reporting Afghanistan.  Film reports of Sandy Gall sitting in a cave somewhere in Afgan, breaking (unleavened) bread with the Taliban, who were off to beat back the Russians. 

And of course the Falklands.  ‘I counted them all out, I counted them all back’.  A Union Flag waving from the top of an aerial as a squaddie yomped to Port Stanley and Victory.

Gulf War I and Gulf War II.  Gulf War I was night vision cameras on tanks streaking across the desert.  Gulf War II took things to the next level, that next level being vertical as we were treated to footage of the nosecone cam of a bunker buster.  Not to mention the ‘shock and awe-shit there goes that little place that does great falafel’ of the opening night bombardment.

Gulf War II was the last television war.  Now, conflict plays out on snapchat and Twitter, barbarism on Youtube.

What the medium of the next Big One will be I’m not sure.  Possibly when the nukes start flying, the next war will be recorded by the cave paintings of the survivors but actually I think a more realistic prospect will be that the next major conflict will be reported by ABC when it’s a throw down between the Red and the Blue, rather than the Grey and the Blue.  I think Blue won last time?

Vietnam was certainly a reporters’ war.  It also produced memoirs and collections of reportage and, of course, a load of great movies (although the greatest war movie ever made is ‘Where Eagles Dare’, followed by ‘The Eagle Has Landed”, followed by ‘Heartbreak Ridge’.  Basically, if it has ‘Eagle or Clint, it’s all good).

As previously reported from the front line in Salisbury, I’m pretty sure that my ancient Powerbook could stop a .303 round that would take down a Decepticon, but I would rather like it if the keyboard sounds could be set to different themes.  Obviously ‘space’ and ‘rainforest’ or similar would be popular, but I’m attracted to the idea of ‘quill’ and, of course ‘Imperial typewriter’.

For the (written) record, I once owned an electric typewriter, a Brother, once plugged in and placed upon a table, typing generated a report like a fucking artillery barrage.  Hardly the sort of thing to write tender love poetry upon, that ladies could then read, and frot themselves senseless to.

Man up

Dave Barry, the straight man’s David Sedaris, once wrote about the ‘Martian Death Flu’*.  A funny column I seem to recall, and an excellent example of the gender that does not have to give birth hugely over-reacting to minor health inconveniences.

Documentation of illness has, naturally enough, evolved over the years, like germs developing a resistance to Lucozade, a bubbling coppery liquid guzzled by wan tots in my youth and, if my colleague who told me this the other day is to be believed, loaded with caffeine, which would explain its restorative effect on the metabolism of a seven year old in 1970, if nothing else.

Dickens wrote movingly of poxes and ailments.  Operas trade in consumptive maids, oddly able to sing about their condition for three hours at a stretch.  In the 1970s there were a lot of films like ‘Love Story’, where a happy, handsome couple started a new life together, until he or she got something cinematic.  Luckily this trend ended with a bang in the 80’s when family members were killed not by a virus but by terrorists, enabling 110 minutes of bloody retribution by the Slow One, the Austrian One or the Balding One.

Journalism has cultivated a reputation for sensitively chronicling illness, and anyone that does so is to be applauded and rewarded, by getting better.  This is because when you feel under the weather, the last thing you feel like being is creative.  I’ve had a cold for the last two days and the only thing I have crated is a mound of crumpled tissues next to my bed that would put the floor of a bedroom of a teenager in a house with no parental controls on the internet to shame.

In the age of social media, people are able to share their experiences of being ill in the short, medium and long term and get support and sympathy.  A word of warning though, if you start reading any post titled ‘does this look normal?’ think twice before scrolling down.  Then don’t.

One of the worst things about being ill is that one cannot enjoy it.  Normally if somebody were to suggest to you that you should spend a few days in bed watching TV† and being brought sustaining broths, you might show an interest.  However, if the quid pro quo is a tickly cough that really gets going a few minutes after you want to get to sleep, you might be wondering if finally getting to see every season of ‘Will & Grace’ is actually worth the cost.

It’s not.  When you have a cold you suffer the double whammy of feeling ill, but not having the flu, the one everyone takes seriously.  Even the name ‘Common’, means that it’s undistinguished.  Best thing to do is hunker down and plot vile revenge upon all those bastards who still insist on soldiering on into work, on public transport, your public transport, instead of taking a couple of days to get better.

And frankly, anyone with the fortitude to successfully write about, photograph, paint, draw, etch, stain glass window or otherwise document their ailment deserves plaudits for being able to condense a cohesive thought in a medicated mind, even if that medication is simply caffeine and about 800% of the RDA of sugar for an adult, courtesy of ‘Lockets’.  This on top of the disturbance to the mental processes brought about by the constant consideration you are giving to spraying your hands with sanitiser, and the face of anyone who sneezes near you with CS gas, the next time you leave the house.

Having learned never to Google symptoms, the internet is, I suppose, a decent place for the snotty and the coughy to exchange supportive messages and a sure sign of mankinds’ advancement to a point beyond issuing anyone afflicted with anything with a pot of paint to mark their door and a bell to ring to advise others of their condition.  Insert topical joke about underfunding of NHS here.

Ironically, it marks a healthy relationship with illness that is very British, such as is not exhibited by tourists you see wearing surgical masks on London’s streets.  Not many haiku about snot.

* Don’t know where he wrote this originally** and for those who have not read the rest of the blog post before skipping to this footnote, can’t be arsed to research it.  However, I can tell you that it’s collected in the Pan paperback ‘Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits’.  This was published in 1988 when the only way to access transatlantic written humour was to go to the US or to buy collections such as this one, lovingly put together by an editor.  This was before the internet, and meant there was a lot of quality control.  The two conditions may not be entirely unrelated.

** Miami Herald most likely, just looked at the introduction to the book.

† Or as it’s known these days, ‘Netflix’.  Being in bed for a couple of days offered an excellent opportunity to catch up on all those documentaries that I have taped‡ and had hoped to catch up on when I had the time.  However, I have discovered that the perfect sickbed viewing is actually horror, specifically anything with a zombie in it.  I love a gory special effect as much as the next man, but nothing I’ve seen on screen compares to the contents of my tissue bin when it comes to biohazard.

‡ Should this be recorded?  Fuck it, I’m going to carry on using ‘taped’ until everyone stops using ‘dialled’.

Write on Beer II

I’m writing this in a hotel room.

It occurs to me that in my 2014 blog entry about writing on beer, I described the fiction writing process.  If I recall correctly, drinking ‘wifebeater’, as Stella is loving known, in a pub in the daytime drove me to outline a not-entirely-original idea of a series of books based on a martial family.  The idea has, ahem, never got beyond development stage.

But it did make me think that I was unjust in entirely overlooking a class of writers who drink, and drink beer.  Journalists, particularly, war correspondents.

This may not be entirely unconnected with the fact that I am currently drinking warm beer from a bottle in a hotel that is in a place I have never visited before and which I arrived at after dark.  If I had arrived in a Hercules transport firing off flares to distract surface-to-air missiles and then jumped from the tailgate thingy to a dusty desert airstrip, the picture could not have been more complete.  I am even toting my laptop, an ageing Apple Powerbook G4 that weighs about as much as a fucking manual typewriter (maybe even less because although those old Imperials may have been made out of steel and gravity, they didn’t have batteries that are apparently constructed from the same stuff they make black holes out of), in an canvas camera case.

An Imperial is probably better at stopping a WWII sniper round (other ballistic armour includes a notebook, but nothing beats a Bible) but I’m betting my Powerbook could be used to swat away incoming up to an including depleted uranium rounds.

As it is, I’m in Salisbury, but can assure you I am very much on the front line of civil unrest, as the town had its Christmas festival thingie tonight and there are loads of road closures and angry motorists.  Nobody has let rip a burst of AK47 fire from the back of their Toyota pickup, yet, but I noticed some pretty serious tutting going on in at least one Range Rover, which might sound innocent enough but to those in the know is as sure an indication that things are about to kick off as that fuse opening credit sequence in Mission Impossible.

Anyway, drinking warm beer (‘Brooklyn Lager’, got hooked on the stuff in NYC), is redolent of foreign correspondents.  That and secretly despising the locals, the warm beer selling fuckers.  Not really, big shout out to Salisbury, woo hoo! love your Tesco Metro).

Bars, back in the day before wars moved to places where the combatants don’t drink alcohol (hence, you know: wars), were places where you went to speak to the generals, the gun runners, the generals selling guns to the gun runners, also freedom fighters, terrorists, and other journalists.

Especially journalists.  Especially the Wall Street Journal correspondent shagging the local consulate girl, because he had great local information and because he was always, always, C.I.A. and hence could always afford to get a round in.

Also, anyone freshly arrived off the ‘plane who had British or American cigarettes.

Of course, that was back in the days when journalists stole stories off of one another and fact checked by getting in a jeep, and thought nothing of driving three days through swamp and minefields, rather than getting their stories off Twitter and their ‘fact’ ‘check’ off of Wikipedia.

A lazily rotating ceiling fan, so much like the rotor blades of a Huey, curling cigarette smoke (Christ, those were the days), cigar smoke, pipe smoke (Telegraph correspondent) and booze, and sweat.  Because the great thing about war in the tropics is that you sweat the stuff out as fast as you can drink it.  You could sit in the bar at the Choi Choi Mai from lunchtime to deadline and never have to go to the loo, thanks to the climate.

Not like now, tweeting ‘being shot at, LOL’ from the front while running like hell for the rear.

If being shot at in a war zone is an occupational hazard, but you are not a soldier and are hence allowed to booze, then who wouldn’t reach for a beer or two with lunch?

Iain Banks - ‘Troubled teens, turbulent atheists and really, really big guns’

It's been a year since Ian Banks passed.

Did he not get the memo?  His job was to turn out two books a year, one science fiction, the other of a genre of his choosing, until further notice.  Unfortunately it would appear that the universe had other ideas.

I bloody loved his books.  How does one judge what one’s favourite book is?  How about the number of times tou have re-read it?  Or how much you identify with it?  Or maybe you just happened to read it at a special or important moment in your life?  Or maybe reading the book was the special or important moment in your life.  Certainly, my copy of ‘Espedair Street’ looks well loved, as does my copy of ‘The Crow Road’.  Knowing that there are not going to be any new novels published, I’m going to have to slow down on the re-reading.

And god how I loved the sci-fi stuff.  Science fiction as it should be, with spaceships the size of, well, huge space ships, sardonic robots with loads of ordinance packed away in them, and proper aliens, and cool weapons and robots too.  There was probably some stuff in there about using the art form to examine the human condition but fuck that, I’ll save the introspection for the re-read.

I even loved ‘Raw Spirit’, where Banks essentially drives around distilleries, takes the tour, loads up his boot with scotch and, as far as I can work out, bills the lot to his publisher and writes it off against tax as ‘research’.  Cheers!  There’s probably more to it than that  but I’ll save it for the re-read.

I’ll miss Iain Banks.  I met him a couple of times at book signings and, despite the fact he was hugely popular and had probably been signing books for sweating fanboys like myself for days if not weeks, he had great charm and always seemed flattered that somebody was interested in his writing, and wanted a book signed.  And a hardback at that!