Category Archives: Just James

Anything I feel like putting online that may or may not relate to anything.

Phone Alone

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Photo by some random in my house.

Three years ago I left my mobile phone charger in a B&B on the Scilly Isles. A replacement charger was £12 so instead I bought a new phone from Asda for a fiver. It has been a constant source of amusement and mockery ever since. Why? Because it doesn’t have the internet and it can only hold a maximum of ten text messages. It also has a personality of its own and regularly switches itself off if I’ve been talking for more than five minutes. This does have its benefits but it can also cause unnecessary offence. It might have something to do with the four cracks on the screen.

The phone was purchased for its functional rather than aesthetical qualities. It had this amazing app that meant I could call people up. Joking aside, I wanted a crap phone because I didn’t want to become one of those wizards you see at bus stops swiping across their screen as they scroll through pages, creating the impression they’re casting magical spells. A crap phone meant instead of getting weighed down and distracted by emails and surfing I would do more productive things such as read, think or listen in on conversations: There are some great conversations on Nottingham bus journeys.

Yesterday I decided it was time for an upgrade. Orange, my provider, said I had to see out my contract which finishes in December. I explained very patiently that I was currently paying £7 a month and I would like to give them more money. It took a long, long time but eventually I was able to convince someone that this was a good move for their business.

I’ve been fending off this moment for yonks but finally succumbed for the following reasons: 1. I need a camera so that I can take photographs at events I’m reviewing. I’m sick of trawling through the web for accompanying images or having to rely on people to email stuff over which is always late and means I miss deadlines. 2. It has an inbuilt Dictaphone so next time I bump into someone of interest I can do an interview there and then. 3. The Space. How on earth can I possibly edit together a multimedia project and check content is working across platforms when I don’t even have the device the project is trying to target!

A big feature of The Space project is utilising QR codes. Which is not possible on a £5 phone from Asda…

Although I’m sure that having the option of an electronic diary will be useful, I think I’ll stick to the one pound page-a-day diaries because I love flicking through these every now and then and seeing what I was up to. I’m sure that once I get the phone tomorrow I’ll quickly be converted to all of the gadgetry and gimmicks but I’m hoping I’ll have the willpower to resist. Those listened-in conversations on buses are priceless….

What’s the Alan Moore?

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Original image by Fimb – Alan Moore, CC BY 2.0 at Wikimedia. Design James Walker. 

It’s been a truly mental and surreal week, with each night worthy of a blog. But I just haven’t got time to document my life with such precision so here’s just one thing that happened and it happened on the bog. Monday night I popped over to watch the footy with Jared Wilson (LeftLion Editor-in-Chief) as I haven’t got a telly. This basically entails both of us sitting on the couch with laptops perched on our knees, occasionally looking up at the screen when the commentator sounds a bit excited – which wasn’t often. Later on that evening I was sat upstairs on the toilet when I heard this booming voice coming out of a telephone on loud speaker in the other room. It was Alan Moore who had very kindly agreed to do an interview with LeftLion. This is an amazing scoop as he very rarely gives interviews to the media but agreed to this one as he respects the LeftLion ethos e.g. we do it for free because we love it and we take the piss whenever we can.

Prior to the interview, Jared asked me to have a look at his questions. I just laughed. Having seen Moore give a spellbinding talk at the Contemporary a week ago it was clear there was little point worrying about wording because the minute you asked him a question he would go off on one. At the Contemporary he made a particularly salient point about the dangers of turning art into a commodity (Saatchi). Art, he said, is there to offer an alternative view of reality, and that it should challenge the establishment to enable things to change. When art is reduced to a commodity it dilutes in purpose and reinforces the norm. He also talked about reclaiming pornography in Lost Girls so that sexuality becomes natural and beautiful again rather than the aggressive, male-oriented perspective that reduces this communion to the clichéd world of Nuts et al.

Having heard him give these long, eloquent observations at the Contemporary I knew it would be very difficult for Jared to pin him down to the punchy responses that are required of a 1,200 word mag interview.  The medium is the message after all. This is the problem with doing phone interviews over email. But there was no way you could cut Moore off in midsentence given his suspicion and contempt for the media. The role of the journalist here is to take those wonderful, lengthy provocative observations and break them down by interjecting questions in the mag piece so that the article has a natural flow and rhythm. The next issue of LeftLion will take a poke at the Olympics and it would have been great to ask Melinda Gebbie to redesign the Olympic rings in the style of Lost Girls as the shape lends itself to the curves of the human form. But we didn’t want to push our luck given Moore’s generosity in agreeing to the interview.

But back to the toilet. I knew Jared was going to speak to Moore that evening, I just didn’t realise he would start when I was in his bathroom. Joe Orton once said the toilet was the last refuge of the male, in Chapter 16 of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe described a corporal who found the toilet ‘marvellous’ and a place for gathering thoughts, but having inadvertently experienced this with Alan Moore booming his shamanic wisdom out in the distance, the toilet has taken on a whole new realm of meaning, an experience that will never be bettered. I suspect that the devilish Moore would find the whole episode amusing.

For info on future talks and lectures at the Nottingham Contemporary, please see their website