This feels like one of those posts where I should really do something clever with the format, to reflect the subject matter and outline its possibilities. But I suspect that is beyond your humble correspondent’s capabilities, particularly as he tries to squeeze in a blog post in an already truncated lunch break, and oh the excuses! Anyway, let me tell you about whiteandwhite, an algorithmic noir movie.

What the hell is an algorithmic noir? Well, the film-makers essentially produced a series of scenes, voiceovers and stills for a dystopian noir film – then tagged those items, fed them into some funky computer programme and allowed an algorithm to determine how the film actually played out. This happens each time the film is shown, so the same film is never shown twice. There is no real set beginning, middle or end.

From the clips alone, the method works. It is very much a noir in the sense of mood, if not in the sense of plot. As so many noir plots are kind of plup-y and formulaic anyway, this doesn’t seem to matter. Considering the plot (if there is one) concerns a man trying to understand a dystopian world it makes a strange kind of sense to present that in a confused, fragmentary and determinedly non-linear fashion.

This kind of storytelling reminded me of the A Visit from the Goon Squad app, which allows readers to reorder the chapters randomly, or the 1969 novel The Unfortunates, which consisted of 27 sections in a box that could be read in any order.

The Unfortunates shows playing with linearity and randomness isn’t necessarily new. And even mainstream audiences seem able to cope with non-chronological narratives pretty easily and have been able to for some time  – Pulp Fiction anyone? Yet, this concept does still feel particularly modern.

Our worlds, and our understanding of the wider world, feel less and less linear. Take a Major News Event of your choice. One hundred years ago we would have had the event explained to us in a chronological manner through our morning newspaper. We would experience a Major Event in a similar way fifty years ago with the TV evening news. But now? Now, we’re just as likely to piece a major news story together from all manner of disparate sources, and not necessarily in a chronological fashion, in order to understand what happened. This is often in ‘real-time’, but that’s not to say we are there at the start of the story, or even understand it is a ‘story’ right away, as we don’t necessarily have the filtering or mediation of the traditional media.

Or take research – where once we might have consulted the encyclopedia, or visited the library, now we have those resources plus Google, immediate word-of-mouth advice from social media etc.

And not only do we piece together these elements as they come to us in a non-linear and non-chronological form, we also make judgement calls along the way in terms of reliability and usefulness. whiteonwhite, and whatever other projects that have preceded it or now follow it, feels like a strong method of representing the confusing, complex world we live in. It might not make sense of our lives, but it might make us think about how we do communicate and consume knowledge, and perhaps how we fail to make sense of our world. I think there could be a lot of fun to be had taking some of these ideas forward and developing them further.

So, the Mets won on Opening Day, beating the Atlanta Braves 1-0, and going 1-0 for the season. By my advanced sabermetric calculations the Mets are now on course to go 162-0 for the year and be the greatest team in baseball history. Apparently they are something like 33-18 for Opening Day games, which while showing they often start well, seems one of the more redundant stats baseball has to offer – and that is coming from someone with a high tolerance for obscure, esoteric and downright daft stats.

For once, I missed the start of the game and caught the end. My routine is often the other way around. If I’m catching a live game quite often the time difference means my sleepyhead lets me down for the later innings. If I’m listening to an archived game the next day at work I’ll quite often get to the fifth or sixth inning then have a meeting/talkative colleague/rare-piece-of-work-that-requires-my-undivided-attention get in the way of the rest of the game.

So, it made a nice change to watch the game from the seventh inning onward, for the Mets to still be in the game, and then see the Mets cling on to a victory. As much as the team is all about a “Ya Gotta Believe” philosophy, and I love the romanticism and optimism behind it, I’m enough of a realist to know that if recent seasons are anything to go by, a 1-o lead isn’t enough for the Mets.

And here is where the shiny, new bullpen came in, and for one game at least, proved me wrong. The Mets had some pretty appalling relief pitching numbers last year, and have brought in some new faces to shore up those key late innings. And yesterday, the plan worked. Relief pitching seems to need a mix of ruthless efficiency, unflappable calm and just being good consistently. I’m sure it’ll go wrong a few times this year, but Rauch, Francisco et al generally calmed me down as they shut down the Braves.

Jon Rauch seems a scary fella, and as such I think I’d rather have him on my team than against it. I shall endeavour to find out what his scary neck tattoo is too. Frank Fransisco is a big, burly closer, and endeared himself to me immediately because of that. I like a good sportsman that doesn’t look like a whippet.

A good start – bring on Game Two on Saturday, with, I believe, my favourite pitcher and all-round nice guy, R.A. Dickey.

So, after a brief hiatus I thought I’d quickly post to mark Opening Day. That is, the first day of the new baseball season. Well, that is discounting a couple of games that took place in Japan last week and a game in Miami yesterday, but still, let’s not be picky. Everyone else, including my team – the Mets, are starting their season today. So Opening Day it is.

And while we’re marking Opening Days, it is the first day of the English cricket County Championship – the most traditional, and perhaps best, form of the game.

If much of the appeal of sport comes from the symbolism, the relevance to real life and the representation of daily struggles through an ordered game (probably a discussion for another time, but bear with me here), then Opening Day surely has some more meaning that just the fun and anticipation of the start of the new season.

It is a new start. It is last time of unbridled hope, before the inevitable disappointment that sport dishes out so well. Or, if you’re feeling optimistic, the last innocent moments before a welcome surprise. I’m sure there is something about renewal, rebirth in there, it is Spring after all, but I don’t want to get too pseudo-whatever too soon.

There is certainly something invigorating in a new start, and sport offers us a fresh slate every season. If only life were so straightforward – but perhaps the ebb and flow of sporting seasons are as much an anchor in our lives as the seasons of the year. I already recall years according to sporting events, mark the passage of each year according to what sport is being played, what sporting event is coming up.

Anyway, there’ll be more posts to follow. Spring, new starts and all that. Then the inevitable disappointment!

Play ball!

Image from the Library of Congress, via Flickr

Last week we saw Lambchop at the Barbican. Halfway through the set Kurt Wagner had an epiphany, “I just realised something  – this song sounds just like all the other songs.” He was probably on to something, but on that night’s evidence it is not necessarily a bad thing.

There is almost a meditative quality to Lambchop musically, as the songs move at a slow, steady pace, with subtle, recurring motifs – a melody picked out on a guitar, a gentle flourish on the piano, a stirring of the pedal steel. Every song seems simple, pared back and built to wash over you, each song a variant on the last. Yet all those subtle touches are enough to draw you in.

The detail is certainly found in Kurt Wagner’s lyrics – impressionistic, oddball, oblique one minute, disarmingly frank the next – Wagner the storyteller telling you the strangest tales you’ve ever heard. And the voice – not a great voice in the traditional sense maybe, but I think there is an argument that Wagner’s is one of the great voices. Bear with me here.

His phrasing is perfect, bringing his lyrics alive and giving movement within the confines of often otherwise repetitive songs. His restraint offers a quiet drama – he goes from a calm, almost apologetic tone that draws the listener in, then hits you with a gentle falsetto or a change in volume or rhythm that takes you out of your reverie, keeping the song and story interesting, compelling. And all without the fireworks or showboating that you might think is necessary to be great singer. Throughout the evening I was pretty much transfixed.

——-

A couple of nights prior to all that we saw The War on Drugs, as previewed last week. There was a similarly key moment to Kurt Wagner’s “song sounds just like all the other songs” comment. Adam Granduciel called for someone, anyone from the audience to join the band, and play acoustic guitar on their song ‘Brothers’. It was a nice gesture and certainly was a pretty good attempt at breaching the gap between band and audience. Granduciel had to sell the gig though – “You only need to know three chords!” – and then it struck me.

Now forgive me, because clearly I’m pretty slow, but it confirmed that quite a few of the songs on Slave Ambient are pretty simple and pretty similar in structure. Granduciel’s comment made that plain, but so did the rest of the performance. The songs were very much jams – and jams in that old sense (as opposed to the ‘This is my jam’ meme, for example, that seems to cover any sort of song) of a band playing around with a simple structure, improvising and playing around with the song. Their Twitter handle of @warondrugsjams never seemed more apt.

And again, much like Lambchop, while the songs were of a piece, it was the frontman bringing the light and shade. Granduciel toyed with the vocal melodies, contorting them and chopping them up, much like latter-day-live-Dylan. With this and his guitar work, it felt at times like he was jamming with himself, as the rest of the band played back-up, shoring him up.

They played a few songs from their first record, and they were much more crafted, far less jam-my. It offered some welcome light and shade to the evening, but also highlighted just the sort of direction they’d headed with Slave Ambient. It was a lot of fun to watch, and I think will make me revisit their records and listen to them in a different way. Another great evening.

——-

Repetition was taken to its natural conclusion at a gig I didn’t attend, what with it being thousands of miles away and all. After a heckler yelled for them to play ‘My Sharona’, Atlas Sound’s frontman, Bradford Cox, got the rest of the band to play the song…for a full hour. Cox stalked the stage in a balaclava, yelling out all manner of stuff and getting the heckler onto the stage and ordering him to strip off. Certainly made me think twice about ever calling out for a song.

From the YouTube clips, it is pretty compelling stuff. A very different form of repetition from Lambchop or The War of Drugs, but in its own way just as entertaining.

There aren’t enough frontmen, or musicians generally, willing to be challenging, confrontational and punk. It’ll never happen, but Bradford Cox would make a great Bowie-esque pop star. His response to the furore over the gig pretty much confirms he is one of the most entertaining and brilliantly weird characters in rock right now. I’d love to see a One Hour My Sharona at number one in the charts, if the charts mattered again.

——-

I’m aware that it would make sense for me now to tie up all of these threads into some sort of thesis on repetition in rock. But instead, what with me being very lazy, I’ll leave that for us all to mull over, hopefully in the comments. In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, The Four Tops…

So, it is my birthday. I am a year older but not necessarily a year wiser. I figured I’d post today in order to guarantee millions of adoring comments from my billions of readers and, more to the point, to share this wonderful photo. What a cake. Normal service will resume next week…

Image from the Reanimation Library

The other week marked my first wedding anniversary – an opportunity to look back on a wonderful day and a wonderful first year of marriage. And my wife, being the awesome wife that she is, bought me a great anniversary present. Two tickets to see The War on Drugs was the perfect present for two reasons. Reason one, Slave Ambient was my record of 2011. Reason two, the tickets were obviously made of paper[1], paper is the symbol of a first wedding anniversary, and so here was a present that was both incredibly thoughtful, and incredibly apt.

So, Tuesday night saw us head out on the town. Now, I’m not used to being out late on a school night so this was both an incredibly exciting prospect and a bit of a worrying one. What if I got really tired when I was out? What if I fell asleep at my desk the next morning? But I threw such pretensions to responsibility out of the window, and went for it. In a sensible way, of course.

The gig was in Camden, we were meeting after work, and pretty much every music venue in London has awful and expensive beer, so it seemed a good idea to head for a pre-gig drink in a half-decent bar. And luckily, the perfect candidate was right around the corner.

I’ve wanted to go to BrewDog Camden since it launched late last year. This is BrewDog’s first bar to open in London and is a showcase not only for their range of beer, but also a wide selection of other craft beer from around the world.

So, it was on course to be my ideal bar. Yet there was a degree of trepidation. BrewDog do court a fair amount of controversy and can be a bit gung ho in their approach. I didn’t particularly want an in-your-face drinking experience. I also worried that the staff might not be entirely approachable. I think there are parallels to be made between craft beer bars and your more elitist record shops[2]. Knowledgeable staff are in a position to either educate the customer, or look down upon them and make the whole experience an intimidating and even humiliating one[3]. Plus there was also the risk that a cool new bar could attract a hipster/annoying crowd. As I have an aversion to the general public anyway, I was worried about the potential clientele…

I needn’t have worried[4]. The bar was sleekly designed, small, but a perfectly welcoming space. However, I think a quiet Tuesday evening was a good time to check it out – I imagine it is pretty difficult to navigate on a weekend. The staff were friendly, happy to answer questions, and ready to offer samples of beer[5]. It also, at least on a Tuesday night, still seems to attract the beer geek crowd[6] and friendly, smiley professionals. The cool set haven’t found out about it just yet. And perhaps craft beer isn’t that cool after all.

Oh, and the beer is fantastic. We started with BrewDog beers, Hops Kill Nazis for me, and a Prototype for my wife. I haven’t got the most sophisticated palate, so I won’t go too beer-taster-heavy on you, but my beer reminded me of many of the Kernel IPAs, with an almost tropical fruity taste amongst all the hops. The Prototype was a little harder to pin down, but seemed to have almost a pine-y or fern-y aroma to it. Second beers were an imported Hop Stoopid for me and a 77 Lager for my wife. The former was super hoppy, as you’d kind of expect, but perhaps a little too syrupy and boozy as it warmed up. The lager was sold to me by the barman as lager as it should be made – and it pretty much lived up to the bill, refreshing, approachable flavours and not a preservative in sight.

All four beers were on draught, as part of a wide selection. Recommendations on glass size were offered, which was really helpful – ranging from pints for the weaker beers, to 2/3 pint glasses, 1/2 pint glasses, 1/3 pint glasses and finally shot glasses for their strongest brews. There were no handpumps but plenty of bottles.

So, essentially something for everyone, and presented in a sensible and reasonably easy to understand way. One issue, however, was the lack of beer under the 5% mark. Clearly BrewDog as a brewery and the bar as a craft beer destination don’t prioritise session beer, but for anyone wanting a less boozy option there wasn’t a whole lot of choice, which was a shame. It would be really interesting to see more craft brewers producing interesting beers with a low ABV and seeing what they can achieve with such limitations. BrewDog have managed it themselves with their Edge beer – I’d have loved to have seen that on tap, but it was not to be.

As the bar filled up it was time to head off for the gig itself. And I’m afraid, dear reader, that will have to wait, as this post is already too long…but stayed tuned for future instalments!
________________________________________
[1] Well, I say “obviously” yet ignore the variety of digital delivery methods for tickets these days – emails, text messages etc. Luckily, there were your proper perforated paper tickets, that can be kept forever. I guess there is a chance that one day they will revamp the anniversary material-stuff list and digitalise it, in which case married couples may well exchange text messages, emails, blog posts, videos etc. Or it may go up in memory size – a 5MB gift one year, a 10GB the next etc. Although that would be pretty silly.
[2] What ones that are left, that is.
[3] You’ve all seen/read High Fidelity, right?
[4] This could well end up my epitaph. If I’m lucky.
[5] This really should be a given in any bar, but in my experience rarely is. Considering the price of some of the beers this seemed entirely sensible (in order to help customers make an informed decision and not get pissed off with spending a fortune on something they don’t like) and rather generous.
[6] Including your correspondent, obviously.

I seem to have been doing more than my fair share of hand-wringing over the ol’ curation versus creation debate, worrying that there is too much sharing and not enough making of stuff to share. Yet here I am, after dabbling for a while, expanding the Wait Until Next Year empire and starting an off-shoot Tumblr blog. Hypocrite, fence-sitter or latter-day renaissance man? You decide, reader!

It is by no means a replacement for this place – this is still very much my online home. However, it is some sort of depository for whatever doesn’t make it onto the blog here. That may mean less filler here, or it may just mean I foist even more crap onto the internet, just from multiple places.

Or perhaps it is best to view it as an online scrapbook or teenage bedroom wall, full of stuff I’ve found fun, or entertaining, or pretty, but that will generally on the whole not have a great deal of substance. Or just doesn’t warrant me waffling on about it for ages. Kind of the mid-point between this place and my Twitter account. Because you just can’t get enough of me, right?

In the best case scenario it will sate any urges of mine to curate or collect online, and free me up mentally for more proper blogging here. Worst case scenario, it dies a death as I quickly grow tired of maintaining multiple online presences and this place returns to sporadic filler and little else amid my general online malaise. Time will tell, folks.

Anyway, check out the Wait Until Next Year Tumblr Festival of Crap by clicking this here link.

Image from The Library of Congress

Really sad news coming through this morning that Christopher Reimer, the guitarist in the band Women, has died. Thoughts obviously with family/friends at this time. Women are/were one of the few truly exciting bands to emerge in the past few years, a band not afraid to be abrasive, uncompromising and to have a little mystique around them. They could be challenging, but were nearly always rewarding if you put in the effort. Their last album was sequenced in a way that took more than a little work – some pretty difficult songs upfront, then the most accessible song kept right until the end. Reimer’s guitarwork was integral to the sound, weaving nagging melodies, adding strange textures. A very sad loss.

Here’s something interesting for you – the BBC transcript to be used in the event of a nuclear attack, that would have most likely been used if the bomb had been dropped on Britain in the seventies or eighties. It is chilling stuff, but also pretty sensible advice. I guess clarity, authority and calm would be of utmost importance, in the circumstances.

My degree dissertation was on the BBC Wartime Broadcasting Service – the radio service that would have come into operation in the event of a nuclear attack. It was clear that any such service would have limited, if any, success. First, there was no guarantee of getting a broadcast out. Secondly, there was no guarantee there would be anyone left to listen.

However, my favourite discovery was that they had in mind to protect certain key entertainers to use on the service post-attack. I never found out who they had in mind, but the thought of a bunch of BBC showbiz types holed up in a nuclear bunker beneath the British countryside added a certain note of bathos to proceedings, and was enough of a bizarre and mundane detail to make the whole situation feel a little more real, if not entirely imaginable.

After reading the transcript today I realised that the PC I’d saved my dissertation on has been destroyed and I’d never printed out my own copy. All that effort, gone forever. For a moment I felt sadder about that than the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, which shows just how self-centred I can be.

——

To return for a moment to The Resentment Machine, as referenced in my last missive, because heaven knows I’m not afraid of bludgeoning a subject/text to death, wringing out every last drop of meaning. There is a key point made around the online distrust of creation, in favour of criticism and curation.

“For those who are writing the most prominent parts of the internet—the bloggers, the trendsetters, the über-Tweeters, the tastemakers, the linkers, the creators of memes and online norms—online life is taking the place of the creation of the self, and doing so poorly.“

Now, I wouldn’t pretend to be “writing the most prominent parts of the internet” by any stretch of the imagination, but this still stopped me short. I know that online I am in some sense a critic and a curator. And taking a step back I do realise that online curation/criticism can be something of a cul-de-sac. Retweets, embedded YouTube links, reblogging on Tumblr etc don’t generally offer much sustenance.

Online curation can feel fun in the same way that sticking posters and pictures on your bedroom wall as a kid was fun, but much like that poster display, it ain’t art. Criticism seems an easy and natural default mode. I’ve experienced something, I’ll report back. But is being purely responsive to others really that constructive? Alternatively, can anything really exist in a vacuum? Isn’t everything a response to what went before? Is the point not that criticism per se is the problem, but that poor criticism is?

The curation/criticism model may well lead to online stagnation. It certainly makes an already ephemeral medium feel more so. Yet what is the alternative? Better curation and better criticism? Or something different – something the mainstream, traditional media can’t/won’t offer? How do we move on?

——

So, today would have been David Foster Wallace’s fiftieth birthday. I won’t go into much depth about his work because the internet is full of it, especially today, and it is all written in a much more informed way than I could achieve. There’s  lot of good stuff out there, check it out. Or check DFW’s work out if you haven’t already. You really should.

DFW is already well on his way to literary canonisation, but one interesting (if minor) influence he appears to have had is in the style of writing of many bloggers, as the New York Times picked up on last year. I’ve certainly been guilty of it on many occasions and have seen it to a greater or lesser extent in many other bloggers’ work. His conversational, tangential and self-deprecating style of writing seems a natural fit for the medium of blogging with its freedom, informality and immediacy. I’m sure there are plenty of bloggers who haven’t read DFW but write like him, either because it comes naturally as they pound out ideas as they come to them in their own internal voice, or they have been influenced by the prevailing trends in blogging writing style.

Yet, like any homage (for want of a better word) it has its limitations. DFW could get away with a lot more than most because with a perfect grip on grammar rules he could write a million word sentence with a billion qualifiers and it would still make sense. Plus, he was one of the finest writers of his generation.

Us bloggers don’t fit that bill, obviously. Writing like a third-rate DFW isn’t that satisfying, but so many tenets of the style are. There must be a way forward, right?

——

I’ll still be a lazy blogger, still post pretty commons images and fun YouTube videos, still bounce off others’ hard work rather than shape my own ideas, still use comfortable and well-worn stylistic tics and tricks, still turn everything (even nuclear war) back towards my navel. I don’t think I’ll make any grand statements, or proclamations on The Future of Blogging but I’ll continue playing with the medium because there is no editor, or paymaster, or audience to tell me not to. It will probably be awful in parts. It certainly won’t be art. But hopefully it will be something.

Image from the Reanimation Library

Amongst all the goodness in the first issue of the New Inquiry magazine, one article in particular stood out – The Resentment Machine, by Freddy De Boer. It is available in full in that link back there, so you should probably read that rather than this, but anyway, it challenged me in all number of ways (I should probably offer some sort of summary here, but even after multiple readings I won’t do it justice and you’d be better off just reading the real thing, or failing that reading what follows in the next paragraph…), but one quote near the end particularly got to me.

“There is a problem, though. The value-through-what-is-consumed is entirely illusory. There is no there there. This is what you can really learn about a person by understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, media, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing…There are no Apple people. Buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a Budweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are differences here is only our longest con.“

Undoubtedly, on first reading this it felt right. We shouldn’t define ourselves or others by what we consume. There is more to life than consumerism. Society shouldn’t be so shallow to judge on cultural tastes, when that neglects people’s character, courtesy and values. Cultural consumption has little, if any, meaningful worth or value.

And yet. And yet on second reading it struck me more plainly that I was that guy – Mr Cultural Consumption Man. To at least some degree I define myself by my cultural consumption, and have almost certainly been shaped by it.

Getting into indie music in my early teens helped me define myself as someone different from my peers. I had my music. Then Britpop happened and everyone around me was suddenly into similar music, so I moved on to (what I thought, and probably still think) was better stuff, and definitely more obscure. I kept my music to myself, the eternal inverted snob. If I gave too much away, a little bit of me would be gone too. Which is pretty sad when you’re talking about  a bunch of middling indie records. But still.

In a broader sense that music moulded me. The early nineties was the last golden age of music journalism in the UK. The music press was still weekly, still vital and didn’t talk down to its readership. It brought in critical theory and wider cultural concerns to discussions about pop and rock music. It not only pointed to great bands, it pointed to great films, books and art. And so did the bands themselves. The Manic Street Preachers would have literary quotes in their sleevenotes, Suede would talk of art and arthouse film. Old Smiths articles and record covers would lead me to Oscar Wilde, 60s kitchen sink dramas and Warhol. Chances are I wasn’t growing up a sexist, racist pig, but having role models in indie music certainly led me on a path away from that and towards the vaguely left-leaning position I take today. They definitely widened my reading and viewing habits, opened up new worlds and new perspectives.

Even beer has defined me. Or I’ve defined myself by beer, I’m not sure which. In my youth, most of my contemporaries would be swilling lager, or alcopops. My friends and I gravitated towards the beer and ale. At first, it was probably because it was cheap and the pub we went to had a decent selection. But it also felt a little bit like a statement – we weren’t the lager louts, we were probably old men in training. Enjoying good beer probably helped shape my appreciation of good food, or of any proper craft. My experiences, through consumption, have for better or worse help make me, given me a certain worldview.

But of course I still get the argument above, and still feel a little guilty about it. Defining myself by what I consume is probably at best foolhardy and at worst a little dangerous. There is a deeper me than what I watch, or listen to, or drink. Just drinking good beer and listening to good music won’t make me a good person.

And however I may define bad taste doesn’t guarantee that someone is a bad person. I shouldn’t judge them. But naturally I do. I have matched certain tastes to certain behaviours, and have sometimes been right. I’ve met angry, inarticulate lager drinkers listening to awful bands, for example, but I’ve also met some great people with terrible tastes (by my definition). I’ve met Mac bores, and met lovely people who iWorship. While I suspect cultural consumption can be some sort of societal barometer, I know I shouldn’t trust myself to use it. Sometimes taste and character are coincedental, sometimes they reflect one another. It is difficult to decide which, so probably isn’t a helpful social strategy. It also makes me a terrible snob, inverted or otherwise.

But I do find it interesting that the article doesn’t really touch on cultural consumption in terms of reading books. I suspect that is just as much of an issue. I find it odd when I go to someone’s house and don’t see any books. I love to see what people are reading on the train. Perhaps to digress a little, but nevermind, one reason e-readers are so popular has be that you can read what you want without anyone judging you.

I don’t really know what the answer is, or what conclusion to make. Feel free to help me out in the comments. But, I think I’m leaning towards thinking that definition-by-consumption isn’t so bad when we define ourselves, providing that we don’t see it as a get-out – we don’t automatically become a good person because we read great literature, listen to wonderful music and drink fine beer. Surely to some extent we are the result of our experiences, and cultural consumption does colour those. We see society and humanity as much through books and films and music as we do through face-to-face interaction, for better or for worse.

But maybe we shouldn’t be so ashamed of what isn’t so cool or whatever. The whole guilty pleasures phenomenon seems built on saying publicly, “I might like this awful song, but because I’m aware that is it awful and that I shouldn’t like it please don’t judge me, it doesn’t make me a bad person.” Or maybe I’m just overthinking (or even underthinking) that one.

But defining others by what they consume is more problematic, albeit something pretty hardwired. At least for me. It will be a while before I can stop myself sighing at the guy playing on his iPad sipping a light beer from a large corporation. But I’ll keep trying. And I’ll keep trying to grasp this argument, because I suspect I’ve missed the point, or at least overlooked some key elements of it. Further installments may not follow, but I’ll keep on thinkin’, dear reader.

Image from the Nationaal Archief, via Flickr