2012 · 1.01.12
Less heat, more light.
the closest I'll get to a post about X Factor · 11.12.11
I’m not going to embed a Coldplay video here but the centrally-controlled LED glowing wristbands at their concerts/X Factor appearance are both technically brilliant and slightly disenfranchising (and completely useless and dormant after the concert). Weirder still, Coldplay bought a stake in the electronics company behind it. Which queers the use in X Factor somewhat. Stop this New Aesthetic, I want to get off.
companies companying · 30.11.11
I love this. I often bang on about how there’s no better marketing that showing a company companying – showing what they do, how they do it, what that does. It might seem very old fashioned (“we make a lot of these”) but it somehow makes the company and product more tangible. I’d‘ve never have predicted that over 260 million Tunnocks Caramels were made a year. That’s brilliant.
I think it’s why Kickstarter is successful too – big numbers, constant updates about making the thing. Weeknotes. Companies companying.
Anyway.
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Londoners · 24.11.11
Londoners is a lovely little book. Stories told at whatever length they need to be by an interested ear.
I think it’s easy to tell if you’re a Londoner. Read the introduction and the prologue (an interview with Simon Kushner, a former Londoner, now living in Cape Town) and see if you’re smiling like a loon.
From the introduction:
From the prologue:
…
Stratford 2031 · 23.11.11
If you walk round Westfield Shopping City, you’re struck by the odd design: a curve in a rectangle that abruptly stops, and several spokes linking to a weird outside bit with lots of shops wondering why there’s no footfall.
There can only be one explanation: they’ll keep building until the circle is complete.
There’s just about room. The Aquatics Centre will need to be relocated/demolished, but that’s fine, it’s been strictly for the fish for years.
A 1.5km circle; over 10km of shops. 1500 in fact – including 4 “compass” Starbucks (not including roaming franchised coffeebots). Infinite mall.
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equal opportunities · 16.11.11
I bought the Lego Education community minifig set last week for a workshop. It’s a good set – several figures from their recent collectible figure range, a few bikes, a baguette. But something struck me about the heads.
There are male and female heads (none of the original “blank smile” heads). They’re both smiling.
But turn the heads around and the female head is… angry. Displeased. The male head isn’t. And that strikes me as a bit wrong.
I know there are some practical arguments – the female hair styles sometimes hide the back of the head – but surely both sexes should have both happy and angry expressions?
you can always sleep in work tomorrow · 6.11.11
There’s one kind of TV Britain just can’t get right: late night talk shows. Graham Norton, Jonathan Ross – they’re all more fawning, less funny, just less entertaining. There’s no team of writers at the top of their game. There’s no presenters where doing a talk show is what they’ve dreamed of for 30 years. The Americans just do it better: David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Craig Ferguson (Never Jay Leno. Never. Jay. Leno.)
Here’s three brilliant clips from Conan O’Brien’s recent week visiting NYC:
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Tampopo · 24.10.11
I’d never seen Tampopo until yesterday. I know. I know! It’s brilliant. But never have I had a stronger urge to both visit Japan again, and open my own ramen joint.
(PS. not dead, just tongue-tied)
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raw · 19.06.11
If you follow me on Twitter, I’ll have banged on about NRK’s live broadcast of an entire 144 hour Nordic coastal voyage on the Hurtigruten ship MS Nordnorge. It’s brilliant. Entrancing.
But what I really really like is their tone of voice. They’re happy to just let the ship tell its story by being and doing. Occasionally they’ll interview someone, or show some archive footage (I particularly love the map which has the archive mapped to a place rather than a time), or they’ll play some music, but most of the time it’s just you and the view from the ship. It’s relaxing and beautiful TV. It’s raw, only just curated and edited. Port docking becomes an exciting experience, just as it must be onboard, especially with local residents all turning up.
The tone of voice is echoed in their blogging. They describe the experience as “like watching paint dry”. It’s sharp, self-effacing, witty and smart on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. The attitude to media broadcasting and content is revolutionary and their interaction with the audience is exemplary.
I don’t want it to end. I’m already sad that it’s halfway through, but the 24 hour sun keeps me happy.
Paul said to me that only a public state-run broadcaster could try something like this. It’s true. I wonder what the BBC could do if it turned its attention to breaking new ground and trying new things.
(all photos by NRK, and in its spirit this post is CC Attribution-ShareAlike licensed)
Interesting 2011 · 19.06.11
The Interesting 2011 conference? happening? gathering? happened yesterday at Conway Hall. The theme this year was “less yammering, more hammering”, with various individuals, including myself, curating an hour of hands-on doing.
Everything was great. The way Russell frames the day – low expectations, lots of clapping, be willing to participate – means that everyone pitches in and there’s an incredibly low level of cynicism for an event in London.
I presented “sketching in food”, hopefully destroying a little of the molecular gastronomy myth – we’ve been playing with food for a long time, and there are always new ingredients and new processes, and also it isn’t about precise micrograms of this and that, it’s about trying things out, seeing how they taste, failing and sometimes succeeding.
The nature of the day was participatory, so instead of doing a presentation on stage (as I did at Interesting 2007), this time I attempted to get all 200ish people in the room trying, making and tasting things. By-the-by, this is also one of the hardest things I’ve done in years – scaling to 200 people took an awful amount of thinking and prep. Apologies if I’ve seemed scatty in the last few weeks.
Here is the tasting menu du jour:
We started with two chemical coated strips – sodium benzoate, a preservative used in lots of food that a significant percentage of people can taste (interestingly in different ways, sweet, sour and bitter). Secondly was a chemical known as PTC that about 70% of people perceive as bitter, and a smaller number perceiving as really really horribly bitter. This was to show that taste is genetic, and different people perceive the same food differently. What was great about doing this with 200 people was that you could see if it worked, and people really did taste the strips differently (I had no idea if the sodium benzoate strips actually worked, as I can’t taste them).
Then we went through some of the senses, tasting tomato powder, MSG, and for sound, pop rocks. To explore texture, everyone spherised tomato puree into tomato caviar.
photo taken by Roo Renolds
The finale (and a bit of planned coup de theatre) was miracle fruit. This changes your perception of taste so that sour things taste incredibly sweet. Lemons, limes and grapefruit taste amazing.
I asked for the slot before lunch because the miracle fruit sensation lasts for about an hour, so it affected the taste of people’s lunches. Apparently salt and vinegar crisps were rather sweet and odd, and I ruined several people’s sandwiches, beer and fish and chips. It’s very rare to be able to (legally) change the way people actually experience the world, and I hope it opened up the doors of perception a bit.
Here are places to learn more about modern food:
Ideas In Food (and their amazing book)
Egullet
Khymos
Cooking Issues
ElBulli
Alinea Mosaic (and the Alinea cookbook)
London Gastronomy Seminars
Cooking for Geeks
(and if you’re serious, Modernist Cuisine)
And here are places to buy things from:
Infusions4chefs (UK)
MSK (UK, including Crispfilm which I made the tomato soup crisps from)
MCC (Germany, a good source of the Sosa flavours and powders)
Indigo Instruments (US, for genetic tasting strips)
sour2sweet (EU, for the miracle fruit tablets)
Everything else: Ebay. You can buy anything on Ebay.
Thanks to James and Tom for stepping into the breach and helping distribute things (a far bigger task than I anticipated), thanks to Alby for last-minute loan of a remote control for my presentation, thanks to Dentsu London for putting up with the tens of deliveries needed to make this happen, and thanks to Russell for inviting me to do something, for chauffeuring all my equipment and for putting on an amazing day. Also thanks for everyone who came and participated – it’s great that everyone played along and trusted me enough to taste things without knowing at all what they were or what they would do.
My photos from the day are here.
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