You may have noticed this hasn’t been updated in many moons. That’s because my new website is www.oliverjfranklin.co.uk. It’s swankier, and contains my professional writing (and slightly more professional blog posts, sometimes) rather than this old stuff.
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My laptop is broken (again) but as soon as I get it back, I’ll be blogging again. It has been too long.
Sorry about that.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
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Only a short one today. I know that it’s been a while, but I truly have been swamped. What do you mean that’s no excuse? Ok, so maybe it isn’t – but trust me, starting now, That Really Tall Guy is going to be back, more relevant, more frequent, and of a higher quality. You lucky people. Anyway, I’m distracting you: get reading!
Earlier this week, I got lost in the West End in the drizzling evening rain. I had left work, and wandered up to Oxford Circus only to find a army of umbrellas had amassed at the entrances. There was an ambulance on the corner of the crossing – so I assume someone had had a nasty incident. Rather than follow the crowd and spend an unforeseen amount of time damp of cloth and damp of spirit, I decided, optimistically, so have a wander down to Charing Cross to get the Northern Line back to Oval.
Right. Before I continue with this anecdote, I think some contextualisation is in order. Life isn’t real enough any more. You’ll soon catch my meaning.
My senseless sensibilities were roused this week by an interview in i-D magazine (a spectacular publication, incidentally: pick one up) with Hans Feurer, a photographer, adventurer and general man-to-be-admired. He said “We are slowly moving towards disaster. Nature has almost disappeared because we’ve trampled her down. Virtual reality is replacing the real world, our kids are growing up with computers and virtual reality. I’d be deeply sad and I don’t think life would be worth living if it wasn’t for the wonderful physical world we live in.”
Doesn’t the raw truth within that comment cut like a knife (ostensibly into an endangered forest somewhere)? But wait. Hold on a minute – I don’t want you thinking this is going to turn into some namby-pamby green campaigning. No, I’ll put that aside for now. We’ve all read enough of it, thankyou. Instead, let me foray back into that anecdote that this rambling aside segued from earlier in this story. Right, so there I was. London. Night time. Drizzling. Umbrellas. (I’m starting to notice that this is starting to sound like the screenplay of an old Cary Grant film, without the cool or quality). As I ambled through the sodden, orange-lit streets of central Soho from Oxford Circus down towards the Strand, my senses were brought alive by the people and places of the city. While the suited and coated workers plodded home (or, most likely, stayed in the offices above my head until late) I arched my way through the streets looking in book shops, record stores, tiny (and obscenely expensive) shopping boutiques and bars heavily laden with singletons trying to squeeze a date into their busy week.
This meandering journey took me from the urban cool of Soho, past Ronnie Scotts and over to Foyle’s bookshop (a national treasure that I had never previously been to), down amongst the music shops on Tottenham court road, down to Gerrard Street and the heart of China town. From there, it took me through Leicester square, down past Trafalgar Square and finally up the Strand to Charing Cross, where I hopped onto the Northern Line exhausted and headed for home. The journey in total must have taken a good two hours, for what should essentially be a 15 minute walk. But I don’t care. I got lost by choice – I knew exactly where I was going, and how to get there. I could have jumped on the Bakerloo at Piccadilly and gone to Charing Cross that way. But where is the magic in that?
I, as faithful readers (and to their chagrin, most of my close friends) will know. I have an iPhone. I could (and, sometimes would) have just cracked out Google Maps and let it plot my course. I could have let it show me inch-by-inch using street view. I could have Twittered my location to friends, used some App to see an augmented reality view of my route, or something equally soul destroying. But I didn’t need to. Twice I became unsure of my surroundings and a little direction confused. So I did something almost unheard of. I asked someone, and a lovely young woman happily pointed me in the right direction.
That trip was the highlight of my week. You see, Hans Feurer was absolutely right. A friend of mine, a student at Imperial College London, recently divulged that a course-mate had been handed a 0 in an essay – despite handing said essay in perfectly on time. The issue was, that the student hadn’t uploaded the digital version, and as such was deemed a fail. What the hell has happened to people? The electronic, the computerised, was once a thing of convenience – a compliment to the real. A tool to cut desk time and facilitate more time bonding in a meaningful way. Yet we spend so much time trawling Facebook, so much time Twittering back and forth, that when the real world finally disappears we will have no idea what it looks like. The is a moment of astonishing clarity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in which the man tries to conjure for his child a picture of how the world once was – but he knows it is a lie. A construct. How long before we are sat at our desks, grey-hair and ashen-faced, Tweeting about the same thing?
One final recommendation. The next time you are looking for something to read (I hope you, like me, still have a soft spot for the real thing) head down to Foyle’s and pick up McCarthy’s novel. Oh, and a copy of iD. It’ll really fill you with a passion and desire to restart living.
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You might notice – or might have already – that lately this column has become more focused on world outside of Cardiff student life. This is probably because writers tend to focus on what they know, and as a final year the mind tends to dwell on the big question mark that is next year. It also might be because this week I’m not even in Cardiff at all.
Nope, I’m perched on a sofa in fairly central London – the sofa that is my bed in the coming weeks, whilst I’m here in the big smoke on work experience. And though my bereaved wallet and I desperately miss Cardiff, there is something gloriously eye-opening about leaving the cocoon of Cathays and facing real life.
The big city after a hard day's work
It’s hard not to get wrapped up in the awe of city life. Commuting on the tube in the morning wandering down Oxford street, through Soho and into the vibrant hub of the city – it fills you with a sense of excitement that after three years, Salisbury road Tesco just doesn’t. What is perhaps most striking though is the lack of students. Suddenly, the appearance of Superdry trackie bottoms becomes a rarity, and at 7am the streets are full of life. Life, jacked up on coffee, in an awful hurry, and – crucially – wearing a suit.
The suit is important because perhaps no other uniform is as synonymous with success. If Don Draper from ‘Mad Men’ has taught us anything, it’s that you’ve not really made it unless you’re wearing an incredibly nice suit. Just as Bond, or Barney from ‘How I met Your Mother’. Strolling down the street to work in the mornings, with impeccably suited men and women bustling past, has made me think about success, and what a peculiar beast it is.
Peculiar and elusive. It seems these days, all we really care about is success. Success, defined by having lots of nice things, or having been all the places we want. Success that is defined by being the boss with a big office, or by being so rich you don’t have to work. Success, it seems, usually comes in cash form.
And it certainly dwells on our minds. Those of us graduating this year will leave during perhaps the toughest jobs market in a generation – although the UK has officially left recession, unemployment remains high, particularly amongst young people. For many, the graduates of last year and those made redundant during the crisis will be competing for the few available jobs.
Recently, I was doing a bit of part-time work taking one of the big student surveys. Although I can’t reveal any results, I did notice from talking to people that almost every student is worried about their future career. Not about what they will do, or whether they will get a job, but whether they will be successful.
The inimitable style of Don Draper.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be as worried as we are. Admittedly, the current financial situation is worse than it has been in a long time – but you already knew that. But lest we forget the cyclical nature of modern economics dictates that a recession in some form takes place every 10 years or so. Indeed, it was only in 2001 that we saw the Dot Com bubble collapse. In the 1980s, the country was plagued with unemployment – yet twenty years later, the graduates of that generation have just seen the end of one of the most bountiful decades of growth in history. Admittedly, times are going to be hard at the moment, particularly for those graduating this year. But, counterintuitively, that is good news for success.
Here you are probably saying ‘Eh?’ and for that I don’t blame you. But consider the state we all got into in the Noughties amid all our high-flying excess. Our country is now mired with an unfeasible amount of government debt – £848billion, according to the government. Personally, we also saw debt become the norm, as we tricked ourself into the aura of success through credit cards, mortgages and loans aplenty, despite our productivity not actually going up. Perhaps the suits are a bluff after all.
What a recession means then, is hard work. It also means a hell of a lot of failures, redundancy, bankruptcy, and a whole lot of desk clearing. But amongst all this sadness, there are some benefits. First of all, although it makes it harder for companies to succeed, it tends to be the best ones that do grow and thrive. It’s like evolution, but modern and less offensive to silly religious people. Win.
But more than that, it means that people will perhaps start to reflect on the meaning of success. Just like I am now. You see that? Ahead of the game. Because, and here comes the honesty bit – success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. No, really. In fact, it’s a bit shit.
In a recent survey by Esquire, 40% of men said earning more would improve their happiness. That means 60% think it won’t. For once, I’m going with the crowd in this one. The Beatles got one thing right – Money Can’t Buy Me Love (incidentally, Michael Bublé’s version is better).
Consider this. Über billionaire Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is irrefutably the pinnacle of materialist success. His personal wealth is so massive, even the genie from Aladdin couldn’t top it, least of all the rest of us. Yet he has now almost entirely left Microsoft to focus on his charitable enterprise, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has set out to try to cure AIDs and Malaria and help millions of sick people. And, according to interviews, he has never been happier.
I’m sure I needn’t tell you this. I should probably be preaching through a megaphone like that religious zealot at Oxford Circus, trying to convince the suited masses the error of their ways. But no. We, the students, are the future. And I for one don’t want that future to be ruined by an obsession with money, power, success. I’ll still wear a suit, mind. Capitalist iconography be damned, they’re just fucking cool.
I think I’ll finish by recalling a little anecdote, which I’ve purloined from an interview in GQ. In discussion with a dying friend, the author Martin Amis recalls a discussion on success. He asked his friend (another writer whose name escapes me) did he wish he’d done more, travelled more, earned more money?
“No,” came the reply. “I just wish I’d had more sex.”
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I apologise for my recent lack of postings. I’m currently dwelling in the big city, doing a bit of work experience on a big men’s magazine, and as such have been rather overworked, overtired and underpaid (or rather, not paid at all). Still, it’s enormously enjoyable, so I shan’t complain.
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Before we get into this, I have some admissions to make. And trust me, a lot of you aren’t going to like it, but it’s the truth, and I’m not ashamed.
Ok, here goes. I have an iPod. Perhaps not a big thing, you might say. After all, according to Apple a quarter of a billion people do too. But there is more, much more. I am typing this on a Macbook. Ok, not the worst thing in the world, again, but a lot of people will be sneering at me right now. A Mac? You might be saying. What kind of pretentious artsy twat is this guy? You may continue. Well, to you sir I say glance an eye upwards. That’s a picture of me with some pretty zany doodles – that’s right, zany. For fuck’s sake, I’m a journalist of all people. I take photos and draw and write a blog and spend my student loan going to jazz nights or Mr Smith’s. The phrase ‘pretentious twat’ was actually coined to describe me.
Ok, so perhaps I’m going a little far. But it’s all part of the plan, you see, because I’m buttering you up for something. Here goes. I, like some of you, own an iPhone. That’s right. I’m sorry.
Ok, so now I imagine you are either scratching your head and thinking, “Hey, what’s the big fucking deal, slow news week?” Well, yes, but that is rather besides the point. The point is a whole load of people will now be seething with unjustified rage.
Yes, I have an iPhone. To many people, perhaps yourself, that makes me a pretentious, mainstream, mindless, unoriginal, ignorant… well you get the picture. But if you are running out of ideas, feel free to break out the thesaurus. Me? I don’t need to: there’s an App for that.
Incidentally, if you are going to call me anything insulting, I prefer ‘blaggard’: I’m bringing it back. The Apple naysaying has hit fever pitch after the recent announcement of the iPad: Steve Jobs’ new tablet computer that will undoubtedly be the final stage in his pursuit of total Skynet-esque global domination. Predictable feminine product jokes having all been now thoroughly exhausted and the hype has died away, and the world is decidedly underwhelmed. A whole host of satirical groups and wittily (read: nerdily) photoshopped pictures remain floating about Facebook and Twitter.
There is little doubt that the device will be a huge commercial success and that in two or three years everybody will wonder how they survived without them. That to me doesn’t seem that big an issue, but then again why would it, I wanted one straight away – finally, my transformation into a social stereotype will finally be complete, as I sit in Starbucks twittering on my iPad and working on my novel.
But then, in the middle of all this fiasco, something hit me. Well actually it was an inebriated girl who I’d been lightheartedly mocking in a poorly veiled attempt at wooing, but that’s another matter entirely. No, what hit me was when said female and I were stood at the bar in a nightclub and she broke out her Blackberry. Texting, I thought. Harsh, considering I was standing there, but still, we all do it. But no. I glimpsed over her shoulder and noticed, to my horror, that she was actually checking Facebook. In a club. Whilst I was wooing, wooing my little cotton socks off.
Needless to say, I was a bit taken aback to say the least. That is, until in some mystical moment of karma inspired coincidence, I look around and saw a mop haired guy doing exactly the same thing–on his iPhone. A wave of realization hit me like an Asian tsunami (what, too soon?). We have all become a massive bunch of c*nts. Pardon the language.
It got me thinking about our postmodern society: about the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter and their importance in our modern lives. Be honest, how many times do you check Facebook a day? If you have the iPhone, or a Blackberry, or any of the increasing number of high-tech phones around these days then I’d bet you can’t even keep track.
We check Facebook in clubs and bars. We check it in lectures, on the bus, on trains, planes and in automobiles. It’s often the first thing we check in the morning and the last at night. It’s even become what we talk about when we aren’t even on it.
Ridiculous, you say? Listen to this. An evening last week, a friend and I had frequented a few bars and clubs in a typical evening of debauchery before popping into the delightful eatery that is T&A at some ungodly hour of the morning for a cheeky bite to eat. Whilst we were sat there drunkenly smearing chicken over our faces and down into our mouth holes, a pair of young ladies sat down at the table next to ours. In my beer soaked state they seemed devilishly attractive and so warranted a subtle second glance (read: ten seconds of swaying, moronic stares). That was until I heard what they were talking about.
They were conversing – very loudly – about another, absent, young lady. In laymen terms, they were bitching their slutty little hearts out. That wouldn’t be much to talk about were it not for the particular details of how. One of them was obviously very upset with one of her friends’ activities…on Facebook.
“Honestly Shaz she’s such a slut. Every time he updates his status she’s commenting and liking all over it.” When I heard that I suddenly felt a little sick. Is this what we have come to?
I shudder to think of the implications of how I actually live my life. I remember a while back having a late night conversation with a friend about the increasing importance of Facebook in everyday life. He was in staunch opposition, whilst I played the devil’s advocate and sung its praises as a useful organizational tool and communication link. I’m starting to realize how wrong I was.
Particularly with new changes that have taken place in the last few weeks, I hate it (and by extension, myself) more and more. Gone is the ability to just catch up on status updates. Now we are forced to be stalkers, as potentially invasive insights into other people’s private lives are forced up in front of our eyes. I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t fucking care what he said to her just then about whatever, fuck off Mark Zuckerberg you creepy twat.
I have come to realize how empty, pointless and frankly disturbing this social networking craze has become. The days of ringing people up for a nice long catch up are over, instead it’s done through a series of public wall posts or private messages.
And the worst thing is, Facebook is killing romance. In a loving relationship? Not if Facebook doesn’t say so! Now having a profile picture together is apparently a ‘big step’. Not in a relationship? Well there’s no chance for you, because before you have a few dates to get to know someone they have already stalked you extensively, gone through all your profile pictures and checked out what you have been up to. Tastes and interests? They know it. Previous girlfriends? Stalked, profiled and assessed. Friends, and behaviour? Checked. And they’ve almost definitely seen the last few pages of tagged photos too. Scared? Yeah, me too.
I don’t even need to write a conclusion. It speaks for itself. Think about it the next time you log on to your computer. You’ll probably find you don’t even realize you are doing it. It proves my point, doesn’t it? As for me, I’ve realized the error of my ways. Fuck it, I’m off to asphyxiate myself with my iPhone cable. I deserve it.
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Phew, I bet you sighed a relief just now, didn’t you? I know I did.
No, I’m not dead, nor have I given up on this glorious blog – quite the contrary, in fact – but I’ve been so laden with essays and getting back into the swing of Uni life that I haven’t had chance to post in the last few weeks. I’m sorry. Really.
I’ll be posting some new stuff in the next couple of days (excited, aren’t you? No? You bastard. Why shoot me down like that?) so essentially, this little quasi-post is just mindless filler. That’s right, I’ve wasted your time. Again, sorry.
In my defense, I’m absolutely riddled with clubbing-flu. That’s the kind of flu that you get after a weekend heavy in hedonism and light on the lie-ins, or any shuteye of that matter. You know when you wake up the next day and bam, you are up to your ears in tissues (no, stop snickering) and beechams all-in-ones. That kind of flu. Glorious. Still, pity me not, good reader, I shall pull through and provide you with wise and banterous words quicker than you can shake a lamb’s tail. That’s actually a wager. Ready? Go.
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