Notes on Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, 2011.

“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.” 

Despite the occasional dud product and brink-of-death corporate experience, it's impressive how Apple systemised the creation of excellent products and services. They do it by being brutally focused, by simplifying, by pursuing high quality and emotionally resonant products over short-term profit, by vertically integrating and tightly controlling the components, processes and experience as much as possible. All qualities to inspire.

The great products raised the design and desirability bar, uniting consumers in a high-end version of Warhol's dictum about mass-manufactured products - you know that Liz Taylor drinks Coke too ¹. There's a fair bit of honesty about earlier hardware products that weren't so insanely great, but less on the recent - there's nothing on the horrible spaghetti that iTunes bloated into ².

There is something interesting in the way that the act of selling is concentrated into Jobs himself ³, into his deal-making with Gates, Disney et al, and later the one-last-thing-ing at Apple's events, and to a lesser extent into the product itself, the adverts, the Apple stores. We don't read much about the analysts in Apple's sales and marketing organisations. But all that's to be expected in a biography.

Because its lens is the individual, a biography inevitably supports the great man theory ⁴ of management, in which a hero single-handedly achieves great things, often against the odds. The theory is common in management analysis today - Jobs the visionary - but is problematic: Asymco has a nice trio of posts querying the structural integrity of the great/stupid manager theory: Apple, Nokia, RIM. And indeed even within Apple the hero narrative rankled. Ive: "it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs" ⁵.

People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty.”

Jobs was a very talented and driven man, but he was also capricious and troubled, and must have been very unpleasant to work for at times.

“He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence.

Ive again:

there are other times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. 

Now that we know the full story - the roller coaster and triumph at work and his illness and unfairly early death - it's tempting to re-interpret the narrative, to read Apple's products as the Freudian (solid state) death drive rendered in glass and aluminium, a collective memento mori in the cloud, the thanatological sublime. Or as the opposite: to describe his project as an attempt to make products that utterly transcend their ephemerality, denying their and his ultimate end-point ("I am here."). But neither would be correct: this was simply an intense man who believed in and for most part achieved the consumer electronic products he wanted.

Jobs's epiphany, 2005:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

But how terribly sad to have spent so little time with your wife and family. In pouring so much energy and attention into the work, a deficit was surely felt in life, at home.

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said.

.

The footnotes:

1. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), 1975: "What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
   Incidentally, Warhol and Keith Haring tried MacPaint at Sean Lennon's ninth birthday party in 1985 - Jobs had brought Lennon a Macintosh as a present. Warhol: "Look! Keith! I drew a circle!", but we don't know if the circle was perfect.
2. I'd hoped for but didn't get insight into the conversation about the apparent design disconnect between minimal hardware design and kitschy software design. A guess then: either Apple isn't as integrated and consistent as we'd all believe, or Apple unashamedly aims for that emotional resonance over a strict truth to the material.
3. Not from the Isaacson book, but Mossberg: "He could sell. Man, he could sell." - from Myslewski's The Life and Times of Steven Paul Jobs, 2011.
4. Heroic pre-history starts with the Greek myths, but Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes develops a theory of great men in 1841, Herbert Spencer's criticism of it fifty years later in The Study of Sociology is that the theory is obviously massively reductive, and he suggests that society maketh the man before the man can remake his society.
5. Although compare Tim Cook: "I've never given a rat's ass about that." 

If you like science fiction, these are very well written books you might like - some of them SF, some not.

• Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness or Dispossessed
• Faber, Under the Skin
• Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt
• De Abaitua, The Red Men
• Mitchell, Number9Dream or Cloud Atlas
• Ballard, High Rise or Supercannes
• Calvino, Cosmicomics or anything he did really
• Ings, Weight of Numbers
• Borges, all of it
• Bester, Tiger Tiger (The Stars My Destination)
• Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
• Gloss, Dazzle of Day
• Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan
• M John Harrison, Light
• Zamyatin, We
• Disch, Camp Concentration
• Delany, Babel-17 or Dhalgren

(Note to self.) If I were in London now or in the next few weeks, instead of Frieze I'd probably be getting to these shows:

Saatchi/C4's New Sensations' show The Future Can Wait, with James Jessop, closed 17 Oct. I was at art school with Jim, he's a strong painter.

Charles Avery at Pilar Corrias, til 12 Nov. It's a small but very good show - he's such a great and careful draughtsman. The gallerist told me that the big drawings take him a year and are all pre-sold. His world-making reminds me of Paul Noble (another good draughtsman - see below).

Charles Matton at AVA Annex, til 16 Nov (although the website since implies that it has already closed). Thanks to Tom Armitage for the pointer.

Friend Stuart Buchanan at Modern Artists Gallery (nb which isn't in London), til 19 Nov.

Martin Westwood at Stanley Picker, til 26 Nov.

Paul Noble at Gagosian, 10 Nov - 17 Dec.

Wilhelm Sasnal at Whitechapel, til 1 Jan 2012 (and while there see the Rothko paintings, til 26 Feb 2012).

Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern, til 8 Jan 2012 (and while there see the Tacita Dean turbine hall installation, until 11 Mar 2012).

A Piece of Paper (group show) at Madder 139, 16 Nov - 14 Jan 2012.

John Martin at Tate Britain, til 15 Jan 2012.

Malicious Damage: The life and crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell at Islington Museum, til 21 Jan 2012.

Leonardo Da Vinci at National Gallery, 9 Nov - 5 Feb 2012. Leonardo doesn't make me gibber the way that Velazquez does, but this is a truly rare event - it's the first time both Virgin of the Rocks paintings have been shown together, and probably the only time in your lifetime. You will need to book tickets.

Suwappu is by Dentsu and by Berg.

What happened next.

• Fox: <Zzzip> Look at what they make you give
• Deer: <Ping> We're running out of time - please help. Badger's dreams are getting worse!
• Fox: <Zzipp> OK! We need the others @bear @owl

They turn to go, sunshine and lamplight glinting from the dust hanging in the air at the crossroads.

In a clearing stands a Bear with teeth and a Rabbit who looks like a gentleman-pirate. It is always raining on Bear, but Bear is from the mountains and doesn't mind.

• Bear jumps <Thrummm!>, silently, points. But says nothing.
• Rabbit: <Ting> Yass. Lets go to work
• Rabbit: <Ting> betimes the tube

Bear and Rabbit tap their Oyster cards as they enter the tube.

Owl and Raccoon are together by a river. Raccoon is the trickster-fixer. Owl is a mentat with his wings carefully folded behind his back. Owl pauses, thinks.

• Owl: <chirp!> His fears, the eyefires threaten us all. We will help.
• Raccoon: Oh @badger! Tiger's blood! I can fix it! <Nangg!>
• Raccoon: <Nanng!> I found this boat - lets get going! Quik!
• Rabbit: <Tong!> Tube broken. Stupid warrens in ground.

Bear sighs and waits quietly, but Rabbit simmers impatiently.

• Bear 8X8 Rabbit
• Rabbit-bear: Dig to freedom! <Ting!>
• Bear-rabbit: <Thrumkmkm!>

Owl and Raccoon are in the boat, drifting down the river.

• Owl: <fwirp!> @raccoon remembrys me of a pussycat I once knew
• Raccoon: Shut it Iggle Piggle <NANG-NAHHHNG!>

They fall into a pointed silence.

Time passes. 

Owl and Raccoon's boat gently runs aground as the river widens out onto a vast plain with a settlement to one side. On the shore are Deer and Fox.

• Raccoon: Ho @Deer @Fox
• Deer: Can you help Badger?
• Owl: Will there be compensation? <chirp>
• Deer boggles: He *needs* us.
• Owl: <chirp> You should let us wet our beaks a little

Deer frowns. Then Owl blushes.

• Owl: <Meep>

The ground shudders, and Bear-Rabbit and Rabbit-Bear spring from a hole.

• Deer 8X8 Raccoon
• Raccoon-Deer 8X8 Owl
• Raccoon-Owl 8X8 Bear-Rabbit
• Bear-Owl 8X8 Raccoon-Rabbit
• ...
• All: ha!

It's quite a party. Eventually, they all swap back.

Badger, despite some recent unsettling news, is starting to feel a bit happier because he can see that the others love him. Perhaps these lasers can be put to use fighting crime.

A database built to hold the fingerprints and personal details of millions of ID card holders has today been publicly destroyed. Around 500 hard disk drives and 100 back up tapes containing the details of 15,000 holders have been magnetically wiped and shredded. They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process. [Home Office, 10 Feb 2011]

This story - the decommissioning of the ID Card database - immediately reminded me of Derrida and Freud. Bravo, Home Office. But here's one of the problems with data, databases and assurance: when the data itself is intangible and easily copiable, it's hard to evidence its destruction with any certainty. You might essay a metonymic evocation of the database with the material the data was stored on (and here's another example) or hold up a talisman:

Or place the means of destruction on stage. Better: ritualise the moment of destruction - with a gloved middle finger, Immigration Minister "Damian Green presses the button". ID confetti:

And then you'd need to destroy them again with a purifying flame, rendering pieces of disk platter jewellery into smoke: "They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process."

Freud might call that the governmental mute death drive, attempting to destroy memory's archive, but without leaving any archival trace of its own (see Derrida on Freud, Archive Fever, 10). But the remainders are cinders or shadows, the ghost of the archive, smoke from its incineration, memory of the identity carte postale, and a new archive is immediately created.

Wilhelm Sasnal, Peter Peri, Lorna Simpson, Frederick Kunath, Robert Longo, Ged Quinn, Alex Buldakov, Stas Volyaslovsky, Keiichi Tanaami, Charles Avery, Thomas Struth, Seb Patane, Ariel Schlesinger, Walton Ford.

More here.

Notes from David Mitchell's talk on his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet at the Brighton Festival, 6 May 2010. 

Gremlins in the system... ooh I have a God-like resonance tonight [the audio is erratic, by turns echoing and then cutting out]

[Dejima as C18th] cultural cat-flap

The Dutch named their warehouses.

For a priceless coin of time, their hands are linked by a few inches of bitter herb [...] I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket. [...] Crickets scritter and clirk in the garden's low walls of stone [The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, p122-3]

Elmore Leonard's dictum that readers skip description but not dialogue, as if the quote marks catch the eye.

all of my book [a slip of the tongue but appropriate since they are all one book in some senses]

inability to say what you want [is the interesting bit in dialogue/communication - this reality of miscommunication present in much of his writing, eg the stammer in Black Swan Green]

Use of one, then two then three narrators to gradually dial up intensity and pace.

floor became the wall [lifted from a shot in Donnie Darko, and an attempt to avoid cliche]

On developing characters: starting with their autobiography - their relationships to the key people in their life, and attitude to money, love, work, sex, death, etc.

Film as the guiding/organising metaphor of perception/experience since the second half of the C20th. Thinking in terms of camera angles and shots.

Questions on William Golding from the floor: acknowledged as an important influence, and similarly jump from one style to another "like a human flea"

The book's published next week but they're selling at his author talks already - I've only dipped into it so far, but it looks great.

Related: How we work: David Mitchell.

At the talk: Andrew Lycett - Fleming's official biographer; Simon Winder - author of The Man Who Saved Britain: a Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond; and Rowan Pelling - broadcaster, journalist and former editor of the Erotic Review. (Lycett is knowledgeable but seems a bit uncomfortable to be there. Winder is clever, entertaining, and his book is very funny.)

AL: IF was getting bore at the point of writing FRWL

SW: Bond's absence from the first half of the book - mythologising

RP: description of Red Grant: creepy, sexy

AL: Ann described IF's work as "pornographic nonsense". Didn't encourage IF, who wanted to write literary novels. Most successful is Casino Royale [really?!]. IF always felt he was competing with Ann's circle of literary writer friends.

SW: FRWL is for small stakes

Pleasingly ordinary, mundane. 

Is there a link between higher stakes and higher consumption? - Bond's consumption of drinks, cigarettes and food is extraordinary. The drinks mark him as a functioning alcoholic, the smokes must have announced him to his targets as the assassin with the tubercular cough, and the food... he'd be unable to move.

AL: FRWL shows a domestic Bond: jams at breakfast, fussy, camp

SW: IF obliged to be a tough-guy - bluff? 

SW: IF died alcoholic.

Fleming-Bond, wish-fulfilment.

SW: Gypsies in FRWL: "naked, trying to bite each other's breasts" - couldn't be portrayed in the film

AL: Bond as "blunt instrument of a government department" [and so very, very blunt!]

SW: structure of the books: great setups which then deteriorate terribly - often as if he reached a self-imposed page limit and then became indifferent

Leitmotif: the steady and inglorious decline of books, Fleming, empire, Bond...

AL: it's as if the process of writing the Bond novels directly contributed to his death [a weakening, dissipation] of old age [before his time], of smoking, drinking, of the emotional energy the books took [of the marital fights; Winder: "a thousand impacts"]

AL: Was writing FRWL as his marriage cracked up - had met his girlfriend Blanche in early 56

SW: Bond appearing to die in FRWL is unnecessary to the plot - so IF is toying with the idea of stopping by plotting Bond's demise...

SW: write from the point of view of someone in the catering office of the volcano lair in YOLT

RP: relates the drinking to that in Mad Men

And the timings fit: Bond, eg You Only Live Twice in Aug 1962 and Mad Men, series 2, in 1962. Imagine Bond as an ten-years-older Don Draper missing meetings, fretting about the missile-crisis era, drinking himself to death, slumped in the stalls of the executive floor toilet...

AL's biographic scoop was the revelation of IF's sado-masochistic whipping. 

AL: some say "M" is Mother 

Although Lycett sounds unconvinced of that, it perhaps chimes with the thread of sado-aberrant sexuality running through the books: sadism passim, what appear to be faint hints of homosexuality here and there, and the curious fact that all of the girls he really wants he can't keep.

Related: All that is solid melts into lair, The name's Bourne, Jason, Bourne, Jason, Bond, James, Bourne, I'm not angry.

Last year, I talked to Kim and Matt about doing some twittery fiction, started writing some, got bogged down in trying to make it good, and then abandoned it. But this is the year of getting more work done, so I went back to it briefly and brutally, and here’s something over-long, with gaps in it, definitively unfinished.

One of the characteristics that interested me most about Twitter is pacing – the frequency between messages, and their speed. I wanted to explore that rhythm, and to try write within the Twitter’s natural scene – that of the mundane commute, meetings, coffees: office-desk rather than kitchen-sink realism. Or rather: I wanted to start from that realism, because no-one, when they write “running” on Twitter, is actually running. They’re reporting after the fact, announcing an intention, or fabricating. Which is the second interesting thing – Twitter’s performativity. Twitter is as much theatrical performance as conversation. Un-realism.

So: a story empty of character and reasonable plot, and a blank-sheet MacGuffin. A story for an audience of 85, and a tentative use of direct messages that only a few of the audience will receive.

The story takes place over a single daytime, and was pruned down from 100+ messages to a slightly more wieldy 25 odd, but that’s still too many for the recipient to eyeball. But here, this was it, with the times I scheduled (with Twaitter) the messages.

0815 (direct message to c.6 people) / Something scary happened - I'm sending you these messages in case something happens to me

0818 / From an empty seat on the morning tube I’d picked up some blank sheets of paper – they’d be good for drawing on

0821 / As I left the train, a dark suit bumped into me heavily. He grabbed at the sheets of paper in my hand but I pulled free.

0824 / I started walking up the escalator. After a moment he followed, taking the steps two at a time, rapidly. Two others followed him. 

0827 / I went faster as he closed in. I fell, landing on my elbow – 3 cuts matching the step’s teeth. http://bit.ly/972qjr

0832 / When I flex they re-open sharply as if re-cut every time the escalator step completes a full circuit. Have I left skin on its teeth?

0838 / But then – no sign of the men as I got to the train station. The next train was leaving in a couple of minutes. Just made it.

1000 / Relaxed a bit. Late commuters respecting social space and taking seats evenly spaced from each other. None of them look out of place.

1010 / The escalator climbs a mile and a half hourly for about 19 hours every day. 

1030 / Why grab the sheets of paper? – they’re blank, scrap, empty. And did I see a weapon? This isn't real.

1040 / The sheets of paper aren’t new. No printed, written or distinguishing marks. Nothing except creases - minimal evidence of my fall.

1110 / I hold them up to the window. The train and the sunlight turn them to overlapping, translucent panes. Fluttering drafts.

1330 / I think those men are now in this carriage some seats away. They arrived separately, but all watch me without eyes ever alighting.

1345 / Tried to call the office and home, but voicemails everywhere. And what message could I whisper? The police wouldn’t believe this.

1430 / The watchers are alert at each station to see if I leap off: they tense, ready to spring up.

1500 / I imagine attacking: sitting next to them. But none of us can move – we’re trapped between the protocols of commuting and of the chase.

1530 / Again I think: is this happening? My mobile buzzes with a sender-less message: RT []: @rod keep the papers from them!

1534 / I look up. The first man is standing, at last looking directly at me, unblinking. I shiver, frozen.

1600 / The train is slowing. Two other men step up and flank him, move forward as one. I stumble backwards, towards the end of the carriage.

1605 / I step into the vestibule between the carriages. It twitches like a huge gullet - a sudden sense of scale dropping away from me.

1608 / They grab my arms, snarl "Paper now!" Pull free as train lurches. Free hand waving madly in front of the door sensor.

1700 / In the last carriage, last door. Train pulls in. Again we ape commuter behaviour: ignore each other during the pause before the door opens.

1705 / I hurry out fearfully, they saunter. One pursuer remains on the train, his face distorted and delayed in glass.

1710 / Called police – on hold. No time. Run away from the station - empty streets. They let me run, then make ground without effort.

1715 / Sun setting, shops shut. A building ahead – lit. A library. Run up steps and straight into the ranked shelves.

1719 / They soon follow, well drilled, fanning out. Look back – shadows among the dim stacks.

1726 / I'm in shelves of files - thrust the sheets of paper into an un-labelled sheaf, and quickly move on

1729 / Silhouettes approach. White smiles and dark weapons. I raise my empty hands -

1745 (direct message to c.6 people) / My skin on the escalator will now have travelled fifteen miles, rotating inexorably, catching me up and leaving me behind.

Reception ranged from concern to enthusiastic encouragement - many thanks to those who kindly commented. I had got so wrapped up in the journey/chase that it hadn’t occurred to me that the sheets of paper themselves would be of interest. I also forgot that a story should really signal its ending clearly if it is going to be dropped into a reader's constant flow of twitter messages. Perhaps a second chapter might be conceived, in which the protagonist teams up with librarians and information taxonomers to turn the tables on the pursuers... (Update: I should add that the difference between the story as printed on the page and as performed into the twitter flow was as much a revelation for me too, only the other way round - this slab on the page was what it looked liked in the writing, though I did make some frequency charts to make sure that its U-shape looked ok. But it felt very different watching it go out. And the feedback was very gratifying and exciting: it was tempting to re-write on the fly to respond, but I had a busy day at the office, so I let it play out as originally written.)

Related/influences/inspiration: Novels in three lines, Ian Bogost’s Bloomsday, Will Ashon’s Trundlespike, Tom Armitage’s Twit4Dead, very short fiction passim, David Markson, ‘The Purloined Letter’, Duchamp meets spy fiction - particularly Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, Jonathan Safran Foer's collection of blank paper, Candida Hofer's libraries.

When does a something or a person properly come into being? When it is physically present? When it is imagined, or when it is imaged? When it's provably detectable? When an impression is left, a picture or scan taken?

Tomorrow we go to have the twelve-week scan for our first child. Discounting the twin lines on a pregnancy kit (the doubled twin lines, for it seems that everyone does two tests to be sure), if all goes well this will be the first of many times our child will be seen and imaged.

The first visual evidence of a growing foetus will be a live sound-movie: noises, echoes, translated into images for the comprehension of our savannah-bred eyes. I imagine a heart purring, throbbing, a four-limbed animal growing into a child, tucked calmly into bed inside an amniotic sea, inside its mother.

It suddenly occurs to me that, for all my talk of art made and seen, this will be the most important image we have ever seen, or at least the most important since we first opened our own blurry, euglenoid eyes to imprint on the shapes and sounds of our own mothers. All of the other "most important images" we'll ever see will be dominated by the same subject or its siblings. As parents, do we fix or imprint in the same way? Seeing is believing.

Is there any other type of image that bears such a broad as spectrum of response - of meaning and significance found - as the ultrasound picture? Yours is a blurred, pixellated field of shadows, ours clearly heralds the arrival of a deity among men.

29 January 2009

We are up early, nervously giggling, and take the 326 TK bus to the hospital, managing to arrive half an hour early. We have a coffee and pretend to read the newspaper. We go to the ultrasound unit which, confusingly, isn't near the maternity unit. We get to the right room, announce ourselves, sit, wait. Opposite us, a dark-haired woman there for a twenty-week scan, holding the hand of a mini-me daughter. To the right a young couple. Wait.

Now. J gets onto the bed. Next to the bed is a large ultrascanning machine. It's called the GE Volusan E8, and has a flat screen on an articulated arm, above a control panel that could be the offspring of a keyboard and a flight deck. "We've only had it for two weeks", says the sonographer proudly.

The gel goes on the abdomen, the paddle is dabbed into it and the screen suddenly flickers. Movement, chunks of black and white drifting across the screen, he and we watching avidly. Focussing the machine, focussing the eye.

A black and white sonar image of the maternal sea-bed. Shape, contour. We're above it.

Then the sonographer changes the angle or adjusts his position, and something snaps into view. And it is thrashing.

Happy imageday, Ada.

Nick Cave/Will Self, 30 Sep 2009

This was my first trip out to an art event. Nick Cave has shiny hair and is dry (not dark), and Will Self is funny and is becoming the same man as that grumpy Jack Schulze. I like them. Nick read from his scary book, which Mummy said was good. Silly questions from the floor were indulged by the men, then despatched. Strangely no-one mentioned that Bunny sounds like a Keith Talent who'd suffered hard times - I haven't read Nick's book so I'm not sure. I got bored after a while and took Daddy outside for a cry. We missed something, then we went back in. Daddy thinks he saw some people called Adactio and Mrs Adactio some rows ahead, and he says you should go to the bookshop that organised the event. Nick sings songs, maybe he has some lullabys for me. It was good art.

Brighton Art Fair, 1-4 Oct 2009

This was another trip out, it was OK. Lots of people. It was too hot and bright - I cried a bit, but there were things to look at. The photos by Andre Lichtenberg were nice, as was a little bird clinging to the wall by Guy Holder. The most adventurous arts were some strange mummy bits by Sally Hewett. I tried to sleep through the not-good art. Many of the pictures were middle-age-crisis abstraction, which is a bad thing and makes us unhappy (see photo). Lots of women wanted to talk to me about being a baby but Daddy shot them down with his bloodshot eyes. Mummy and I bought for my room a little print of a bird, and a painting by Jude Hart.

• space: metal, ozone and gunpowder
• time: sickly
• books: classic musty
• Medieval England: smoke, herbs and roses
• contemporary England: gardens, sponge cake, campfires and cricket balls
• death: fatty and other acids, bad

We hate fingers, tools inside our heads - they're the locus of our private selves. A quietly nervous waiting room, as if a crime had been tacitly hushed. The dentist's reassuring patter. His optics glued to glasses lenses. Yellow safety glasses. Maps stapled to the ceiling to distract the patient. Teeth everywhere on the map - buildings, gardens, dental rectangles. The piers looking like decayed roots in the sea. Injections felt deep in the jaw, a tingling on the lip. Half the tongue numbed. Even so, the tongue going where it wants, involuntarily. The high-speed multi-fluted drill. A mist of air, water and matter. Tungsten-carbide dental bur. Grinding out decayed material. A foul taste at the back of the mouth. Gutta percha rubber obturating the root canals. Glue laid down onto the excavated tooth, a sudden smell of stag beetles. Resin and silica composite. Repeat in layers. A phenylpropanedion initiator and blue beeping light polymerise the resin, curing it to concrete. Tzank cheque.

[Émail aimé, laser-print on A3, edition of 10, 1996 (nonsense-French which means something like "loved enamel").]

Marcel Duchamp is the king of art's last hundred years, its trickster-saboteur. In 1993 Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont's 'Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968' appeared in a Thames and Hudson monograph that's unfortunately quite hard to find now. The Ephemerides is a brilliant work of inframincean research: choice cuts of biography ordered by day, in which a note about chess from 12 July 1924 might sit next to a quote about the Large Glass from 12 July 1936. Reading it, you follow several stories in parallel.

Selections of those morceaux choisis - mostly quotes - are now going out on twitter at twitter.com/marcelduchamp.

Dada has also come back. Double-barrelled, second shot. It's a phenomenon peculiar to this century [interviewed by Hahn, 1.7.1966]

If I am to tell what my own point of departure has been, I should say it was the art of Odilon Redon [to Torrey, 2.7.1913]

Bravo! [watching the speedy progress of the masons on the fireplace in Cadaqués, 2.7.1962]

I admit that it's a new and immense pleasure to piss like everyone else, a pleasure that I have not known for 25 years [to Roché, 5.7.1954]

I who am doing nothing, I want you to work - Dada logic [to Gleizes, 6.7.1921]

For the glass, in principle I have no objection... the pieces are only held together by the lead wires and the colour! [to Roché 8.7.1951]

if she wants to discuss the price in order to please Arne, me and herself at the same time, my suggestion would be a price around $500 [of Belle Haleine to Hamilton, 12.7.1964]

Intimate relations with no one. That's one of the advantages of my situation [15.7.1920]

An exceptional rendezvous [15.7.1959]

we have very little contact with the Germans. They are chiefly occupied in finding and taking petrol for their cars [to Wood, 17.7.1940]

The main thing is to die without knowing it, which incidentally always happens that way; but to avoid the fears and physical suffering [to Roché, 17.7.1950]

Perhaps you know already that I have been here, for two months already, I am repairing my broken glass and the repairs are coming to an end [to Roullier, 21.7.1936]

The readymade is a consequence of the refusal which made me say: There are so many people who make pictures with their hands, that one should end up not using the hand [to Hahn, 23.7.1964]

Même does not refer to anything [...] neither denigration nor a joke, but a humour which amplifies. Somewhat the 'Ha ha' of Jarry. [to Hahn, 23.7.1964]

I am against the attitude which consists of reducing painting to a retinal emotion. Since Courbet, it is believed that painting is addressed to the retina: the retinal titillation. [to Hahn, 23.7.1964]

Introduce the martyr idea; suffering from not acquiring the needed, the desired. How much the martyr is unbearable [to Dreier, 27.7.1938]

• Norton Integrated Systems » Sherpa
  CCTV product which climbs lamp-posts etc and can be controlled remotely by eg mobile over gprs, wifi. (Can it broadcast cctv video feeds to devices too?) Via http://openeyecommunications.typepad.com/openeyechat/2009/04/not-about-twitt.html
  (tags: police cctv surveillance mobile)
• The Highways Agency takes the Sepura route again - Bapco Journal
  Sepura Tetra radios, running atop Airwave.
  (tags: airwave sepura transport)
• Bapco Journal: "Do you know what applications and functionality your hand-helds will offer?"
  33% say yes. The other polls are interesting too.
  (tags: police emergencyservices bapco)
• 37signals Product Blog: New in Basecamp: Export your account in easy-to-read HTML format
  Hmm, wonder if this might be a nice way to generate flat (installable) html documentation files...
  (tags: basecamp documentation)

• thirteen opens (tecznotes)
  thirteen "open"s - "When you hear the word open they may be thnking about any one of these 13 things while you're talking about 1 or more of them..."
  (tags: opensource migurski dev)

Well, I read a fair few web pages between 12th February and 19th March, but as it turned out, half of those were spent in work's ticket-tracking website. But still, 1,700+ of them.

Did the manual tallying work? Initially, yes. But then I began to sense that I risked adding a new habit that would amplify the original one: it was starting to become a game of feed the tally-list, a delicious chore-ladder. It's like that thing of putting items on your todo list that you've already done, so you can have a tiny and immediate quantum of un-deferred GTD-pleasure of ticking them off. (I do that too sometimes.)

So I've stopped doing the tallying now, and am reading a bit less. And I have started writing a little bit more.

One technique for managing paperwork that's fairly common in productivity circles is the Noguchi filing system, in which files are always re-filed on the left of a shelf. This results in a gradient of freshness, with old or stale files naturally sorting themselves to the right, whence they can be discarded or permanently archived.

It's a nice system, but the archiving/discarding triage takes such effort doesn't it? Once those files have made their way to the back or the bottom of the filing cabinet, wouldn't it be nice if your filing system automatically and judiciously took care of that for you.

And kept you warm.

Tate Britain's Altermodern is a mixed bag. Some of it is great. Darren Almond's full-moon long-exposures in China are beautiful (he's always good), and Tacita Dean's photogravures of shipwrecks and war landscapes reportage are lovely novelistic storyboards.

Mike Nelson's The Projection Room (Triple Bluff Canyon) (2004) installation slowly draws you in by presenting an obsessive's study, every detail placed precisely. Gustav Metzger's Liquid Crystal Environment is a remake of a 1965 piece that uses liquid crystals and rotating polarising filters to create a mesmeric/brain-washing kaleidoscope. For a moment it looked like we'd lost Antimega to a chroma-coma.

The find of the show is an excellent draughtsman, Charles Avery - his drawings have the confident graphic line of comics, and his island world is an interesting story machine. He's like a cross between Paul Noble and Barry McGee. One to watch much more closely.

Some of it is very poor: Franz Ackermann, Spartacus Chetwynd, Marcus Coates, Rachel Harrison... tiresome. And some of it is in between: Simon Starling's second- to fourth-generation copies of a desk Francis Bacon made - ok, but as with antiques you get only so far with repro furniture. Nathaniel Mellors's excremental installation raises a chuckle. Subodh Gupta has a striking borderland mushroom cloud of stainless steel domestic implements.

The theoretical underpinning is confusing though. Here are three of Bourriaud's descriptions of "altermodern". On the show's website, behind a friendly EXPLAIN button, is a manifesto:

Second, altermodern as translation and trajectory:

Thirdly, as post-historicist era:

(Oh and there are some more here, critiqued.) So Bourriaud proclaims that the post-modern era has ended, and been replaced by a post- (or is it hyper-?)globalisation, anti-commercial, post-geographic, post-historic ("heterochronic"), rootless, nomadic altermodernism. And this is the bit that confuses me: if the theoretical positioning is an attempt to confidently stake out a new territory and era, wouldn't that gesture immediately undermine the claim that the altermodern sweeps aside specificities of space and history? But perhaps I don't understand it - my art-theory synapses are atrophied. Maybe I should read Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics or his new book Radicant (whose organising metaphor is surely a rhizomous echo of D&G?).

Most of the show doesn't look like a new new thing, which is the other thing complicating the claim to a different trajectory.

Afterwards, we nipped around the Drawing show. Some lovely stuff: Blake's Flea, a tiny Cozens landscape, this Tyson facing three Nobles in a room, a lovely Bill Jacklin.... great stuff.

An October 2008 revision to the tube map adds a few distance markers to the map. It's 250m between White City on the Central line and Wood lane on the Hammersmith & City. And to the right, 100m between Shepherd's Bush Central line and overland. There's a similar thing at Canary Wharf Jubilee line: it's 200m from Canary Wharf DLR and 150m from Heron Quays DLR. I particularly like the angle they're drawn at - like an elegant version of the walklines I was trying out a long time ago.

But this isn't quite so successful: there's 100m between West Hampstead overland and West Hampstead Jubilee line, and the latter also has a comment that West Hampstead Thameslink is 200m away from the tube. The tube map used to simply show the tube and overland stations as a single node on the map, which I think was better.

Previously: Tube Map with walklines showing when it's quicker to walk. See also Walk the Tube to get healthy, Walkers Tube Map and Adjacent stations.

We do scrum. We are nice people and have a shiny office in the middle of Brighton.

We're also looking for a good QA person in Brighton.

Ping us with your story at hello at mobbu dot com.

I read 50 books this year, fewer than in the years before. Notably these:

• Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, 2003 - a rather beautiful and moving novel on memory, anticipation and loss.
• Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, 1997 - Hickey is funny and provocative on music, art and aesthetics, lightly excavating truths that, once they're in front of your eyes, feel utterly self-evident.
• Ian Fleming's James Bond books, 1953-66 - as a body these comprise a great double-portrait of Fleming the self-exiled, nostalgic author and his self-loathing, consumption-addicted and often incapacitated character Bond.
• James Wood's How Fiction Works, 2008 - like Hickey, Wood is a great handler of words. As a critic he's sometimes accused of privileging psychological realism above all else, though the last sections of his book address this fairly directly.
• JM Coetzee's Disgrace, 1999 - extraordinary and pessimistic post-colonial novel of relationships tested, torn and abused, of the costs of wielding power, of cultural and gendered difference.

Going forward I plan to consume ever fewer books, and instead to create more writing, art, and other stuff.

(Elsewhere in 2008: Matt Webb's, many others', and books I wish I'd read.)

Keith Tyson's 2004 project History Paintings comprised fifteen paintings, each with 49 vertical strips of powder-coated aluminium in black, red and green - the colours of a roulette wheel (Tyson has always liked gambling). The three larger ones are reconfigured each time they're shown. The dozen smaller ones are tied to the months of the year. Michael Archer (of both Ruskin and Guardian) wrote: "In their bringing together of time, geography and randomness, the History Paintings address the question of how the individual relates to, participates in and attempts to make sense of historical events." I'm not quite feeling that, much preferring his scrappier drawing work from years previous, but they look ok.

(An aside: "history painting" generally presents man at the centre of the universe in order to yoke scenes of historic, religious or mythic narrative to an intellectual or moral message. Joshua Reynolds prescribed something "in the action, or in the object, in which men are universally concerned, and which powerfully strikes upon the publick sympathy [...] the painting of man". It was usually done in a grand, heroic, archetypal style. Félibien and the Académie française had identified it as the grand genre of painting among a list of others: history, portrait, genre (scenes of everyday life), landscapes, and, last, still-life. The hierarchy gets killed off with Impressionism in the 1860s. Anyway.)

A couple of days ago, Tyson did a spin-off (or spin of the wheel, we might say) project with The Guardian: a free edition of 5,000 pdf files, each delivered to the website visitor as a customised file. The arrangement of the coloured strips is partly determined by the location typed into Tyson's website: you can't tell if each is unique, or merely potentially-unique. Once experienced as the flat colour of a downloaded PDF file on your desktop - rather than as photographs of aluminium - the image hints at the bureaucratic ephemera of public transport and tube diagrams.

Another aside: they immediately recall Duchamp's imitated/rectified readymade Monte Carlo Bond of 1924: an unfinished collaboration between Duchamp, his alter ego Rrose Sélavy and Man Ray, an art-financial work that parodied company stock certificates and speculative get-rich-quick schemes. "The annual income is derived from a cumulative system which is experimentally based on one hundred thousand rolls of the ball; the system is the exclusive property of the Board of Directors" its verso proclaims. Of course, it never achieved his aim of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. Later editions of the same work sometimes come up: here's one of the 1938 edition for $4,000.

What value has an art work that was free, is potentially unique, was distributed first-come-first-served, and in the form of a digital file with no physical instance? (on which topic, Danny Birchall reminds us that reproducability at zero marginal cost comes more naturally to the internet than does the concept of inherent value via the limited edition.) At the time of writing, some of them have gone onto Flickr (where they will hopefully be geotagged), and sellers on Ebay value them in the £10-£1,000 range, though none have bids yet. And there's a Facebook group that aims "to create a piece of crowd sourced internet art with the community of winners that we can gift back to Keith Tyson". (My own view is that if the resident artist doesn't like them, we might stick them in the office.)

Regardless of the dubious value of trying to dubiously value the art, one thing is immediately clear: in a reversal of casino logic, we value the rarity of the green stripe: 0, house wins.

See also: Danny Birchall's Unlimited.

From the same article:

See also: Calatrava, Niemeyer. More How we work.

See also: Jensen Button and Fernando Alonso. More How we work.

(Never apologise for weak puns when writing about Bond.)

It was very annoying to notice the Ken Adam discussion with Christopher Frayling at the V&A too late to attend, but it sounds like it was good. In Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture, Matt Jones noted that Frayling (his book on Adam is very good) commented in passing that "the modern Bond villain (and he might have added, villains in pop culture in general) is placeless, ubiquitous, mobile".

Matt entertainingly explores the idea of the grand architectural gestures - under-volcano bunkers, sub-swallowing ships and other "gantries and Baroque" - de-materialising and dispersing into networks, mobile phones, briefcases, go-bags, spreadsheets, etc. And perhaps also into the sports franchises and art objects so loved of those who are as rich as supervillains. It's good stuff.

But a problem remains for the film-maker: how to show us multiplicity, power and scale (Mr White in Quantum of Solace: "we are everywhere") - and how to do it with Adamian grandeur and spectacle - in a world whose secret mountain redoubts and dark-side moon bases have been somewhat disappointingly replaced by the physical objects of ubiquitous computing and the ubiquitous metaphoric objects of power...

So satellite imagery abounds, and those terse-but-narratively-essential phone calls beloved of 24 get added to the mix. The villain becomes the panopti-cratic eye; you see much re-working of the conspiracy thrillers of the 70s - Enemy of the State, Bourne passim. And, picking up on Dan's work on wi-fi shapes in public spaces,  the use of menacing penumbral aurae would have been a more effective visualisation than the distracting touch-table that M16 toy with. But more is required. Plot also drives forward quickly, the edit is much faster - see Bourne, and the godfather of the edit, Murch the gun-slinger.)

One solution in the Quantum of Solace film isn't bad - the many members of the villainous organisation conduct a board meeting hidden in plain view in the audience of an opera, its set a monstrous eye staring at them. They mutter managerially about logistics and financing on earpieces, and Bond's immediate job is to reveal them against the camouflaging ground of hundreds of fellow evening-weared Euro-elites. It's the best sequence of a good film, though it's a little disappointing that both Bond and the villains are disciplined enough not to be distracted by the opera they're attending.

Though they're often sneered at these days, you could argue that the use of gadgets in previous Bond films represented an acknowledgement of this globalising, dispersing effect: Q is everywhere, Bond in some sense became his magnetised watches, exploding pens and performative quips. But the books didn't go in for gadgets much, and generally the Quantum of Solace film also turns away from these and back toward the architectural. Steve Rose notes that the recent films have seen Bond visit and destroy as much villain-architecture as ever ("The villains are the creators; Bond is the destroyer. He's basically an enemy of architecture"), and suggests this can be traced back to Fleming's difficulties with Modernist architects.

Previously:

• The name's Bourne, Jason, Bourne, Jason, Bond, James, Bourne
• Jones has previously mused excellently on the Bond villain of the long now

We are at Frieze, looking at an excess of art and spectators. We will see a couple of thousand works in the space of a two or three hours - this plenitude means that the works that are visually arresting are necessarily privileged as we scan the corridors. This is no bad thing though: having mulled on Phil Gyford's question about the opacity of art and artists, I'd have to say that the intentions and ideas of the artist and the wider context of the art work don't really matter unless there's an aesthetic response first. You have to like looking at it, or experiencing it.

Generally it felt as if there was a retreat to safer, more saleable work from name artists (though not much from the old school names of the 50s and so on). Fewer monstrous installations. Lots of paintings and easily installable work. Less video than in previous years. Tillmans, Shrigley, Ruff et al at multiple galleries.

Lots of photographs, but too many porny ones. Lots of painting, much of which has either strongly representational elements together with the abstract, or representation appearing to operate at large and small scales. But too much faux-naif painting. Quite a few works which comprised aggregations of smaller framed pieces, some of which were signed, faked celebrity photos. There's a resurgence of coloured pencil drawing, perhaps displacing monchromatic trend of the last few years (it's very foolish to attempt trends from a single show).

The media are (finally) in no doubt that the art market is in trouble. The Art Newspaper reported sales down and buyers haggling in its free daily at Frieze, and auctions since Damien Hirst's celebrated £95m Sotheby's sale in September have been getting low bids. Speculation in young artists is over. UBS head of art banking: "Every gallery and auction house is trying to leverage quality". Small dealers are feeling the pinch, large dealers are getting squeezed by auction houses. Interesting times. Despite the exodus to the private sector in the last couple of years, will there be a return to power for public museums, curators and critics?

My photos are here. These are the ones I liked the most:

The Approach's space was brilliant: Martin Westwood, John Stezaker et al. Westwood is new to me, and very strong: assemblages of drawing, collage, sculture, cut paper, iconography of 1980s corporate culture. I need to come back to Westwood, but in the meantime: at The Approach, Strange Flowers, Art Now at the Tate, Approach show 2007.

Sea Hyun Lee at Gagosian (well, it looks like Sea Hyun Lee but Gagosian annoyingly don't identify their artists). Paul Noble at Maureen Paley. Peter Peri (as ever) at Carl Freedman. Darren Almond at Matthew Marks - the thing about Almond is that his work is always solid.

Leslie Shows (painting and collage) and Ajit Chauhan (ink drawings) at Jack Hanley. Also, Ged Quinn at Wilkinson. Felix Gmelin at Vilma Gold had some beautiful atomic explosions in clay. Thomas Bayrle at Barbara Weiss anthropomorphises graphs and data. Dr Lakra at Kate MacGarry.

Previously: Year_07, Zoo 2007, Frieze 2006, Frieze 2005, and Sandpaper for the eye: Frieze 2004, London.

Henry VII passed a law against "maintenance", the keeping at hand of too many male "servants" - contracted men-at-arms, private armies financially retained by powerful noblemen in the power vacuum after the Wars of the Roses. (The word maintenance derives from the Latin manu tenere, to hold in the hand, ie: to keep in a condition of effective functional condition: keeping at hand functionally.)

The visual evidence of this surplus and illegal retainer was the overuse of a nobleman's livery (whereas the visual evidence these days of maintenance, seems to be a spanner - a tool rather than an emblem). In legal terms at least - "retaining", "livery" and "maintenance" seem to have had the same meaning. And the term livery derives from the French livrée, meaning delivered: typically the object or a servant/messenger bore the livery of the noble that owned, retained or had sent them.

Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance.

The Cabinet Office is providing £75m to get 25,000 mobile devices in the hands of police officers, the funding being managed by the National Policing Improvement Agency. It's quite hard to find consistent coverage of the story in the mainstream press, so we're tracking the story on the Mobbu blog as it unfolds:

• June: 27 Police forces will get £50m for 10,000 mobile devices
• July: Part of the £50m will be spent via NPIA's mobile data accelerator programme
• Sep: More background on the NPIA funding (and of Airwave's investment in Kelvin Connect, and BlackBerry having hit the 20,000 devices mark in UK policing).
• And any day now funding announcement is expected from NPIA for the unallocated £25m. And in the last week, 15 police authorities have revealed that they have money held by embattled or defunct Icelandic banks.

And Alex is starting to post some useful tips on device and application management with BlackBerry Enterprise Manager:

• Application updates not recognised on new BlackBerry devices? - on the benefit of keeping your device and vendor XML files up to date
• Always keep older versions of your Java apps on BES so that your BES can still perform remote management upon those devices that happen to update later then you expected.