30 October 2009 – 4:47 pm
There’s a lovely new site doing the rounds called Glum Councillors it’s dedicated to collecting:
“images of councillors looking glum whilst pointing at holes in the road, wearing hard hats or presenting oversized cheques.”
Sites like this and Lolitics are parodying the politicians (and wanabees) — but the poses and the tone are those of the local newspaper. It’s the language that the politicians want to use.
And it’s now not just politicians, “local paper poses” seem to be universal. One of the early big hits on the web was the Framley Examiner, which took it’s cue from very local newspapers and got them spot on — but reading it now, not much seems to have changed.
What are the new local paper clichés?
9 October 2009 – 11:00 pm
hooves up! Originally uploaded by bounder
23 September 2009 – 8:53 am
Got this today from CoTweet (which I like, it’s really the only CRM service for Twitter):
“CoTweet is not for everyone. It’s designed for teams who are managing the front-line of the real-time web for their organizations. It’s for people committed to engaging customers in authentic two-way conversations, rather than just broadcasting messages to followers.… If you’re interested in engaging with your customers in authentic, two-way dialogs, you really should give CoTweet another try.”
22 September 2009 – 10:00 pm
Not that the Manics aren’t now for the over 30s too. Think about it, long complicated sentences that struggle to fill the available time, politics references you don’t get first time — AND Bradley Whitford looks a bit like James Dean Bradfield.
I think we know this already,
“Suits make a corporate comeback,” says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.
just like “Birmingham is still vibrant”. But it’s worth keeping in mind.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6115666[/vimeo]
Le Nombrilisme from bounder on Vimeo.
A little film I made for this.
One of the quirks of news reporting that amuses me most is when things are “hailed a success”. It a lovely phrase to report on all sorts of projects, especially where the success or failure conditions weren’t laid out before-hand or, in my suspicious mind, for projects that the numbers show weren’t that successful at all. Big government or quango projects get this treatment a lot.
Because “hailed a success” just means that someone said it, not that anything actually succeeded. Often the person doing the hailing is the organiser, minister, councillor, officer or administrator responsible. how convenient.
I wish I had the time to check for actual success every time the phrase comes up, or the technical nous to make it happen automatically – it would make a great failcamp project. For now I’m contenting myself with a little Google News search for the phrase, so I can giggle at the most outrageous collusion.
From the graph it seems that success peaked in 2004.
When I organised the 11-11-11 eleven hours on the eleven bus day I didn’t make it too clear to people that it was art — it tends to put people off. But I’ve had a slightly different version of the idea, one that’s simultaneously easier to get involved with and has a wider remit.
The End of the Line
Get on the bus by your house and go the opposite way to the way you usually go (out of town for most people), stay on to the terminus. Record your experiences.
That’s it.
It takes time to organise though, so I thought I’d attempt to get a bit of funding behind it — to give myself some time to do it properly, to pay myself the going rate for what I wanted to do. This seemed like a good place to start, so I cobbled together a funding proposal and sent it off on Sunday (for Monday’s deadline). Just (Tuesday night) got a rejection — to tell you the truth I’m not so bothered about being rejected (it doesn’t stop anything happening), but the speed of rejection makes me worry it’s been rejected without any consideration [EDIT: I’m sure that isn’t true, but that’s what goes through your head] — if that’s true then I’d like to know so I don’t waste any more of my time with arts types and just get on and do stuff.
Bid thing after the jump in case you want to send me the dosh ;)
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The Future of Reality TV
Channel 4 have announced that they’re giving up with Big Brother after the next series — although a dedicated web show for 2011 would be my guess — they’ve tried fiddling with the format, bunging more and more people in, making more and more stuff happen. They’ve cut the “my god, who wants to watch them sleep” live stream — either on the assumption that no-one wants to watch a TV programme where not much goes on, or because of the sheer cost of keeping it legal.
But I’ve a theory that it was the “not much happens” “dip in and out” long arching narrative thing that was what got people interested in the first place — much like how Twitter works (unless you’re obsessed), or much like how the Australian soaps were a revelation in low-impact TV. I think that by making it too hard to watch they killed the format.
Reality TV, when you define it as pointing a camera at people having real emotions, is much broader than Big Brother — and most of it is edited to be as action packed as possible. It’s tiring, only the committed can keep it up. Live football is reality TV, although the Olympics – three weeks of lots of coverage, unknowns and new stories evolving is more like what we’ve come to know as staples of the genre.
I’m not of the opinion that “reality TV” is dead, but I think people want two different things; either the slow “nothing much happens” – but it happens for a long time — or the tight visceral shared experience (the way the big X-Factor finals, or even important elections do).
Reality TV commissioners — let’s face it Channel 4 in this instance, they’ve got the money — you’ll want more “event TV” that has that endurance aspect. So here’s my pitch — you want something like live uninterupted coverage of Gimpo’s 25 Hour M25 Spin or this.