Monday, April 26, 2010

ON ADHD













I'd like to say this is because Blogger is a pain to edit a lot of the time, and it is, but mainly, it's because I've been having fun playing with Tumblr and new, shiny things are always more exciting.

So, from now until I change my mind again, new posts will be at airhotair.tumblr.com. I'm not going to delete this blog, though. Importing all the old posts into Tumblr was only moderately successful and to be honest, I'm still a big fan of how Blogger deals with archives.

But how and ever. Come and visit, won't you?

Thursday, April 8, 2010

ON PUBLISHING

Will return to regular posting imminently, but this poster should explain what I've been doing with my time:

(apart from the sitting on couches and staring out windows, of course)













































by the very talented Anna Hurley

and available to buy at 826 National

The answer, of course, is 'gosh, I hope so'...

Monday, March 1, 2010

ON TOY CARS

When I was four, we didn't have Super Mario Kart. We had to content ourselves with the sort of Matchbox car collections that these days you'd be more likely to see as part of the set design in the next Wes Anderson movie. One guy had the Lotus from The Spy Who Loved Me, in full underwater mode. When he pulled that out it was like the business card moment in American Psycho. If we had access to a chainsaw, Phil Collins and a Manhattan apartment in that moment, we'd have known what to do.

I had a Pontiac Firebird. It was red and the front wheels were mashed in such a way that you couldn't roll it properly. Still, Knight Rider, right?

Anyway, when I saw this, my four year old self jumped into the front of my brain and demanded we go Ebay surfing. He also wanted candy, but screw him, I've got a beer to finish.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

ON PERVERTS

SCIENCE, with the aid of its little brother, PIE CHART, explains everything again:


chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Friday, February 12, 2010

FRIDAY LINK PARADE


I always knew Oliver Stone was a beautiful human being

RIP Lee

Fleshbot or Facebook? You figure it out. I'm not going near this.

Even though I can't see how this will work, these guys get a free pass. Not you, Lucas.

Bet you didn't know he was one of the good guys.

Creative: Unblock thyself.

Daily blogging quota achieved. I claim my prize.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

ON GRASSY KNOLLS

"Here's my argument in a nutshell. People are too much at cross purposes with each other, too stupid, too self absorbed to ever effectively conspire to do anything."

- originally published in The Believer

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

ON THE PERILS OF FREE TIME

Putting pictures of books online is almost as good as writing one. Certainly, they're more satisfying in the short term. So here are a few examples of how I spent my free time in January:

BOOKS ABOUT THE TRUTH, MAN















BOOKS I PROBABLY SHOULDN'T ADVERTISE, IF I WANT PEOPLE TO THINK I AM DEEP AND MEANINGFUL











BOOKS I FINALLY GOT AROUND TO READING AND WAS IMPRESSED/INTIMIDATED BY

























BOOKS I HAVEN'T FINISHED READING YET




























BOOKS I HAVE BEGUN TO READ TO MY ALMOST NINE YEAR OLD SON. THUS FULFILLING MY PURPOSE ON EARTH (SOMEONE ELSE CAN SHOW HIM HUNTER S.).















BOOKS WITH GREEN COVERS














BOOKS ABOUT MATHEMATICS















COMIC BOOKS. OR, THE BEST BOOKS I HAVE READ THIS YEAR

























BOOKS I AM WRITING

Are at just over 40,000 words.

ON BEAKER

I've been thinking of making some internet videos in my copious spare time, but I fear public humiliation. I probably shouldn't have watched this, then:


Tuesday, February 9, 2010

ON DISTRACTIONS

Want to write a screenplay? Wondering what's the next few years of films might be like?

Preparing for disaster

Stepping over your grandmother's grave: Oscars 2010.

The scaredy-cat guide to success: Gladwell on entrepreneurs.

You shouldn't be reading this. I shouldn't be typing it. Oh, man, I'm so depressed.

No, actually, now I'm depressed.

Monday, February 8, 2010

ON ADVERTISING

This ran during the Superbowl last night. It is (apparently) the first time the 'Don't be evil' gang have advertised on TV.




All I'm saying is: if you changed the soundtrack to the Arcade Fire and had the tagline: 'from the mind of Spike Jonze', you'd be in hipster heaven.

Or if the camera pulled back and John Hodgman was typing on the screen, we could be looking at the new Apple iPad ad.

I'm not saying you should, or that every advertiser chasing the hipster dollar is doing the same thing. I've just got too much time on my hands.


Thursday, February 4, 2010

YOUR DAILY WODEHOUSE


"A melancholy man, [he] had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle."

- PG Wodehouse, (from The Man Who Disliked Cats in The Man Upstairs)

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

ON INFORMATION

Too tired and too behind to write a blog post tonight. You know what that means, ladies and gentlemen...

EMBEDDED VIDEOS! LINKS! LOLCATS! PRON!

Productivity Corner
Here's a great talk by Clay Shirky on why our problem is not too much information, but our inability to filter effectively:







Some people might say: 'Hey. This is just a loose collection of impressions.'

To which I reply: 'So's your face.'


Sunday, January 31, 2010

ON ART & WORK & LIFE

"Joyce hated being called a middle-class writer. For him this was the greatest of all insults, to which he responded jocosely by saying that 'nobody in my books has any money'. But he maintained at all times a strictly bourgeois distinction between his art and his life: for instance, he might write four letter words, but he would on no account utter them. This distinction was lost by many after his death in 1941, so that what had once been permitted only in the imagination might now be enacted by individuals intent on proving how free they were. By substituting the search for sensations for the making of art, these people confused art and life - but Joyce knew that real art required hard work. Among the bohemians he had noticed a culture-worship that rejected the idea of an art devoted to everyday life. Hence his famous put down of the young man who wished to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses: 'No, that hand has done a lot of other things as well.'"


(italics: blogger's own).

Saturday, January 30, 2010

ON SOCIALISING

So, you know how, as you get older and accumulate friends, relationships and so forth, you stop being the architect of everything you do?

(Let's disregard the probability that you were never really independent - it was just an illusion that you allow to flatter your sense of self).

What happens is: you start having obligations. 'I've got to go to this thing because X has Y connection with A, B & C.' At first, they're small blips in an otherwise self-directed life. Then one day you turn around and notice: going to parties/things with people you barely know is your only social life.

Moreover, you realise you have known these people for a very long time and see them more regularly than people you're ostensibly closer to. Then you think: 'But I'm not actually close to any of them. These are just familiar faces in a room. I'm not even sure I like this room. I prefer the one at home. Just because I recognise these people doesn't mean we have anything to talk about. In fact, I think we exhausted our conversational reserves sixteen years ago, when we met. Oh God, I'm hungry. Better drink more. No, that's not a good idea. Too late.'

So what I'm saying is: does anyone else ever find themselves thinking: 'this is like going to a Christmas party for a job I left five years ago'?




IN DEFENSE OF PHONIES

So there's a lot of this about:

"I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."

And that's fair enough, I guess. I liked Catcher second time around. My first reading was aged 12 or so, alongside a proto-misery memoir called The God Squad. Between the pair of them I decided when you were in your teens you were either an asshole or got treated like one. Later, when I was twenty-one and housesitting for a summer, I read it again.

At that point, I could look at Holden with the rueful eye of one who had known heartbreak, drunkenness and poor grooming choices. Ten years later, with my cataract-beset eyes, I think Salinger's fiction worked best as a hymn to past lives, as a romantic aide-memoire to experiences we had or almost-did and feelings we didn't realise were comforting at the time.

I didn't like Holden when I was 12 because he was such a vivid representation of the sort of kids who tyrannize younger ones - meaning he was like every boy older than I was - and I had no interest in empathising with someone I instinctively knew would have pummelled me for any reason at all. I held fast to that impression even as I inhaled the book over a weekend and called it up every time being intellectually cynical about literature came up in my life in the next 9 years (not enough for my liking but certainly much more than anyone else could have done with - I was the type of teenager who dismissed the Bluetones as 'derivative'. Didn't get away with that). It served me well when I spent fifth & sixth year being sniffily dismissive of Stephen Dedalus, another teenage disaster I would revisit in later youth. Basically, I disliked Holden first because I couldn't be him, ignored him when he informed every part of who I was, then was sucker-punched by a nostalgic reading of him when I was 4 years older than him. A phony, if you must know.

I haven't read Catcher since, but I will fight anyone who says From Esme With Love & Squalor isn't one of the best short story collections ever written (By 'fight', I do of course mean 'write something snarky on the internet but run away if I ever see you on the street').

The thing is, my earliest connection with the Salinger name came earlier and in the soup of my subconscious, could well be just as significant. I first saw it in Oscars, a small video store, when I was 10(?) or so. Never rented it. Which is strange, because normally anything with costumes went straight to the top of my must-watch list. I think even then I must have had some sense of how awful it might be - bear in mind I watched and LOVED Nicholas Hammond's Spider-Man - so I never saw more than the video cover (which I could probably draw from memory, stills and all. I was/am very sad).

So, something more cheerful. Here you go:



He may have been crazy, a shut-in, a Zen Buddhist, had problematic relationships and/or many other things. I don't know. I don't care, really. But his work has stuck with me, for better and worse. And his kid was in a schlocky B movie. What's not to like?



Tuesday, January 26, 2010

QUESTIONS

"There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself 'Do trousers matter?'"

"The mood will pass, sir"


THE PROCESS

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Monday, January 25, 2010

THINGS I COVET



A lot of blogs are basically lists of things to buy. Which is great, but I'd like to add the pronoun 'me' to the last sentence.

What I covet at this hour, in no particular order:





Success

Like all young artists nowadays, he had always held before him as the goal of his ambition the invention of some new comic animal for the motion pictures. What he burned to do, as Velasquez would have burned to do if he had lived today, was to think of another Mickey Mouse and then give up work and watch the money roll in.
(from 'Buried Treasure' in Lord Emsworth and Others)

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

NO ESCAPE FOR ALL



Someone do the blasphemous version of this post for Irish readers...

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Welcome to my blog. I'm a freelance writer/journalist/researcher/editor. I write about education and ideas I've had for the Irish Times. I also research, write and edit for writers, publications and websites. Here I put things that tend not to fit anywhere else. Enjoy.

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