01jun2003:
Has this weekend been a turning point for the Blair government?
I sense something in the air: the patience of the British people has
just gone over the edge. A majority opposed Blair's drive towards war; this
is now being borne out with the continuing lack of WMDs down Iraq way. He
had a chance, when the battle was won, to turn back to Britain and concentrate
on the things a Prime Minister should be concentrating on: the bloated health
service, the appalling school system, the crumbling state of transport, the
change in the police force from being protectors of the public into agents
of the state, the sidelining of parliament as the UK becomes a quasi-presidential
system without checks or balances, Number 10's obsession with secrecy and
spin, the intimidation of journalists, the strangling of small business in
red tape, the ever-higher taxes for ever-lower social returns, the gutting
of local funding and centralisation of power in Whitehall.
You'd think Blair would want to devote a little more time to the people
who elected him. But no.
Where's Blair this weekend? Out in Iraq, preening for the world's cameras
again.
And this weekend, I just feel something's different: Britain lost patience
with the grinning fool. This weekend, Blair lost the next election. Damnit,
Tony, shouldn't we be just a bit more important to you than kissing Bush's
oily ass?
31may2003: Among the Enrons and Worldcoms and Tycos,
one story of corporate greed sounds more like poetic justice to me. On Friday,
all 2500 employees of the The Accident Group were sacked by text message,
following the company's descent into administration the previous week.
Harsh? Yes. But hardly unexpected. TAG was a 'parasite' company - a
bunch of ambulance-chasers who make money by persuading people to sue their
employers. And now, after extracting money from thousands of companies who
- shock horror! - let their employees fall down a step, or stub their toe
on a paving slab, or spill coffee on themselves in the office - its employees
have been dismissed. On payday. Without the 'pay' part.
I have zero sympathy. Work for a parasite company, and you shouldn't
be surprised if it starts treating you as its host. Those who live by the
gun, die by the gun.
31may2003: Sitting at West Indian Quay Browns
after an enjoyable morning at the London
Museum in Docklands. Which has made me redefine what a museum is.
The museum catalogs the history and development of the London Docklands
- from Roman times, to its heyday as a working port, to today's boomtown of
riverside apartments and Canary Wharf. Thing is, the museum itself is a warehouse
- one of the dock buildings it tells the story of. And several exhibits aren't
technically being exhibited: marks on the stonework, old timbers, even a tidalmark
plaque, are in situ, part of the original building. Making them exhibits just
entailed putting a frame and notes around them.
Is a museum really a museum, if the exhibits got there a hundred years
before it?
But despite this postmodern feel - in keeping, anyway, with the Docklands
itself - the museum is terrific. On one level, the narrow alleys of old 'Sailortown'
(the maze of brothels, alehouses, chandlers and flophouses that grew up around
London's docks) have been recreated, extra redolent since the walls housing
it were themselves part of the story. (The West India Quay, where the museum
is sited, was once the biggest brick building in the world, around a kilometre
long.) There are large sections detailing parts of London I'm intimately familiar
with - I live on one of the Rotherhithe docks, and seeing what it looked like
at different stages in history is incredible.
It's also given me a new appreciation for the vision of those
80s planners that wrenched the region away from squabbling local councils.
The Jubilee tube line, for example, strings together new stations that are
equal to any great transport nexus of previous centuries: Grand Central, Waterloo,
the D'Orsay... North Greenwich and Southwark stations for example, designed
by Norman Foster, are awesome assemblages of glass and steel that anchor fresh
communities and make the stoniest heart soar.
So if in London - check out the Museum in Docklands. It only opened
a month ago, but it's well worth a visit.
28may2003: So Philippe Starck is designing Eurostar's
new first class carriage. It's about time.
The amazing thing about Eurostar - the London-to-Paris rail link -
is that its first class carriages are less comfortable than the standards.
The headrests jerk you forward as if in a Chinese torture cell; the lights
are at precisely the angle to glare; and the free food is worth exactly what
you pay for it.
Eurostar's directors profess ignorance about why the service's passenger
numbers have fallen by 14% in the last three years. After all, this is an
amazing bit of engineering - a tunnel! Under the sea floor between Britain
and France! A simple train ride gets you from central London to central Paris
in three hours! I used to ride this thing almost weekly and I'm still over
there several times a year.
But the reason it's sliding is simple, and it's nothing to do with
the comfort of first class. Eurostar is too expensive. Turn
up without a ticket and that journey will cost you £290. When the low-cost
airlines are selling a 45-minute flight for about a twentieth of that. (The
bus ride into town is painful, but not extra-£250 painful.)
Convenience sells, guys - but only up to a point. Drop your prices,
fill those seats, and get Eurostar bustling again. This is the 21st century;
nobody pays just for the excitement of travel anymore.
18may2003: Major fmcg wants video script for
a convenience foods brand. For the last few days, I've been roadtesting their
products. It's the stuff you'd find in most (A)BC1 households - pasta sauces,
toppings, soups in cans and jars. The sort of stuff harrassed Mums use to
turn chicken into six varied meals.
Trouble is, this stuff is garbage. Sweetened, E-numbered, overpreserved
and goopy slop I wouldn't feed to my dog if I had one. It's gross, and yet
this stuff is in 98% of German households, so who am I to argue? I'm a jobbing
copywriter, and I'm hungry (although not for this stuff.)
Got to twist my mind into something that values the product enough
to write meaningfully about it. I decide: I am not the target market.
I have no kids, I cook with fresh ingredients, and I'll cross London
to find a particularly basilly focaccia. The packets and tins aisles of the
local Tesco are enemy territory to me, yet I'm on first-name terms with the
fresh fish and deli counters. This jar of gloop doesn't speak my language.
So once again I think myself into another body: that of a housewife
with two kids on a blue-collar budget. I imagine what an advantage it is to
buy twelve shrinkwrapped chicken portions and three different screwtops of
gloop and consider your shopping done until Saturday. And I start to write.
15may2003: 'Hitchcock
Blonde' at the Royal Court Theatre.
The play revolves around some lost footage taken by Hitchcock, and
it's among the best plays I've ever seen - every minute enjoyable. Stage direction,
pacing, and dialogue all top-notch. Great stuff.
The two strands of the play take place in 1959 (Hitchcock himself and
a blonde actress he's auditioning for 'Psycho') and 1999 (a college film lecturer
and a student he takes on holiday to clean up some 'lost' Hitchcock footage
from 1919.) As the play progresses, the two strands weave closer and closer,
the great director with his art, the pathetic film professor trying to get
a student into bed. It's done by making the cuts shorter and shorter, until
in the last scenes all 4 actors are on stage at the same time (the 1930s standing
still while the 2001 characters are speaking, and vice versa) - the four characters
talking to each other across the decades, each duo a fogged mirror of the
other's emotions and actions. Throughout the film, the 'lost footage' is projected
behind the actors as they review.
As I gaze upon the same breasts 007 recently cupped (the 1959 blonde
is played by Bond girl Rosamund Pike, who carries the seven-minute nude scene
with great maturity for her 24 years) the play's central conceit becomes clear.
Like Hitchcock and the pathetic Alex, we're all looking for our 'original
blonde', the one person who made an impression on us early in life. The rest
of life is just an attempt to recover that perfection.
The final shot is of the classic Hitchcock shadow on a screen (huge),
with a smaller Hitchcock shadow looking up at him. As the screen rises, we
see the small Hitchcock is just the pathetic lecturer, tiny in comparison
with the great director.
14may2003: Revealed - the last words of the late singer Adam Faith:
'Channel 5 is complete shit, isn't it? Christ, the crap they
put on there. It's a waste of space.'
I'm not sure whether I find this sweetly iconic, or terrifying. Terrifying
because it shows it's possible to die without having THE SLIGHTEST BLOODY
IDEA it's about to happen!
Faith's is right up there with Bing Crosby: 'That was a great game
of golf, fellas.' And my personal favourite: Pitt the Younger. 'My, I could
eat one of Bellamy's veal pies!'
(Aside: the pie shop must have heaved a sigh of relief it wasn't
'My, I could eat another of Bellamy's....')
Famous last words walk a fine line, much like the moment they're part
of. Too perfect and they sound planned or, worse, edited by someone after
the event - like Emperor Vespasia, 'Alas! I think I am becoming a god'.
The best deathbed lines are those that can't be planned - like Henrick Ibsen,
whose nurse had just said, 'Mr Ibsen is feeling better'. He managed to blurt
out 'On the contrary...'
Not sure what my line should be on the big day. I'm divided between:
'See you in thirty years, and don't spare the ice, doc' (if I make it safely
into the cryonics tomb) and 'Sorry girls, this bed only sleeps six.'
13may2003: A great month for nanotechnology. Japanese
researchers have proved a fundamental tenet of nanotechnology - in the
proper, Drexlerian sense of the word:
full control of materials at the atomic level.
Abstracting and re-bonding a single atom from a surface has happened
before, but only by using electrical current - meaning atomic control could
only happen with conducting materials. This work shows that ultimate control
over matter is possible, even if it's a bit slow right now.
Nobel prizewinners like Rick
Smalley have expressed doubts about the feasibility of molecular nanotech,
citing 'fat finger' and 'sticky finger' problems when picking and placing
things as small and excitable as atoms. (Smalley once had the room next to
mine at a conference, making for an interesting late-night corridor chat.
Some people collect stamps; I collect scientists.) While valid, this research
puts such doubts to rest. If we can grab a single atom with something as big
and unwieldy as a scope tip, it'll certainly be feasible with machines that
are at the molecular scale themselves, like
this manipulator.
The next step: instead of putting that abstracted atom back, hold it
in place, then attach another atom to it. The beginnings of molecular machine
parts, like this pump that
sorts and streams individual atoms by selectively complexing (i.e. recognising)
them without needing to covalently bond. If this sounds boring, imagine a
1m x 1m square of these things built to process H2O - you could put the fithiest
seawater on one side, and get the purest freshest water out the other. Or
built differently, extract the gram or so of gold a cubic metre of seawater
contains instead. None of it needing additional power input. (Breaking bonds
liberates more energy than it needs to initiate.)
I've built a few conceptual molecular machines using the chemist's
equivalent of Microsoft Office, Chem3D.
This software lets you click together atoms in standard covalent patterns
and relax the completed molecule, calculating how the bonds would behave (i.e.
if it would be stable.) It takes serious computing horsepower to model anything
big - my PC starts blubbing when I show it that 6000-atom pump - but hey,
finding larger amounts of computing power isn't exactly an insurmoutable problem.
If interested, get hold of Nanosystems
or Engines
of Creation. The latter's a pop science book covering concepts and possibilities;
the former's a technical treatise, full of equations and diagrams of atomic
manipulators, manufacturing systems that dance on the head of a pin, and molecular
gears that spin at a terahertz. Engines was my entry point into nanotech;
I read it in a single breathless night back in Singapore around 1996.
Looking ahead, this moment will perhaps be the point where mechanics
started to compete one-on-one with biology. Where biology has DNA, nanotech
has designs; where bio has protein folding, nanotech will have (my guess)
origami-style crease axioms; assemblers take on ribosomes, eukaryotic cells
look up to molecular factories. Both are molecular technologies. It's a level
playing field at last.
