What I did on my mini-holiday from the internet

[imomus]

1. The internet has been down in my apartment since about 7pm on Thursday evening.

2. Deutsche Telekom are "working on it" and tell me normal service ought to resume today.

3. Network diagnostics on all my various internet devices show the red light appearing between ISP and internet; in other words it's their fault.

4. Yes, this has happened before.

5. Yes, I have paid my bills.

6. I am posting this from an open signal I discovered out by the front door. For some reason this signal works only with my first-gen iPod Touch (not Hisae's second-gen).

7. Before addressing my technical problem, the DT helpline tried to talk me into signing up for a two-year contract with a cheaper monthly tariff.

8. I talked to a New Zealander who's just moved in next door. He told me he uses Kabel Deutschland. When I checked their site it became clear that the deal DT had offered was a copy of KD's deal, expressly designed to stop me leaving.

9. During the 40 or so hours I've been without internet at home I've had to do an email interview with Art Asia Pacific and submit a text to a magazine. I did one standing in the corridor, the other will have to wait.

10. Because of the outage I didn't blog on Friday and am blogging today only with difficulty.

11. The thing I most wanted to do online was continue watching The Story of India, a BBC documentary on Veoh.

12. My behaviour patterns have changed somewhat, and not completely for the worse. For instance, I went out to the Turkish market twice on Friday. Usually I just go once.

13. I've been playing chess more, with the computer and with Hisae.

14. I spend more time with my girlfriend and our rabbit.

15. I've been skipping baths, because I have to get dressed as soon as I wake up and head out to the street to check my email on the portable.

16. I potter around in the garden with a kick scooter and the rabbit, which means chatting to neighbours more.



17. I read more books: I'm reading Memoirs of the Forties by Julian Maclaren-Ross.

18. Also listen to more music and have more ideas for creative things I want to do.

19. Chatting with Hisae about living in Japan in future, which is a conversation we've been avoiding somewhat.

20. Watching lots of DVDs from the local library: short films by the Brothers Quay, NHK kabuki DVDs, Japanese film about a girls' rowing team in Naoshima, and so on.

21. Planning the bi-monthly film evening I'll be curating at Staalplaat starting next month.

22. Big curatorial project that I shouldn't talk about in detail yet.

23. On balance, my mini-holiday from the internet has brought as many positives as negatives. But if it's not back up by Monday morning I will be seriously rattled, and Deutsche "vorsprung durch technik" Telekom can kiss my custom goodbye. Fur immer.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Magenta sucks.

[(Anonymous)]

Just imagine all the other things you've been avoiding, "somewhat." Sounds like you're better off being less of a slave to the virtual world. At some point, to address our collective post-post-post hypocrisy, we're all going to have to turn these damn machines off and start really living again.

[(Anonymous)]

Amazing what life there is outside of teh internets.

18. = yayz!

- Mazie.

[writewrongs.livejournal.com]

I go to the Turkish every Tuesday and Friday. That place rocks.

[(Anonymous)]

julian maclaren-ross, the post-war ronald firbank ?

unfortuanely i can not find much pictures of the fitzrovidandy online....

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If you do find any images, they won't look anything like the man on the cover of the book, for simple reason that it's me, not Maclaren-Ross!

Jacket designer Thomi Wroblewski found it amusing to put me on there because I was a Fitzrovia Bohemian myself at the time (circa 1990).

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

without persmission?

I am reading hadrian the seventh again. the dutch edition has put a francis bacon pope on the cover.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, with my full co-operation! I dressed up and posed for him at Soho Square, raising an empty wine glass.

Hadrian the Seventh is great, but I don't think putting Bacon on the cover is right at all. You need something much more calm and quirky and stately to capture the feel. A picture of Neil Tennant at home in Victorian surroundings, stroking a yellow cat, perhaps.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Okay, connection restored 12.30pm Saturday. 41 hours outage-outrage, with no explanations, apologies, or assurances that it won't happen again!

[(Anonymous)]

Those rich bastards, get Ian Bone onto it right away!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, now they have called back to ask for "positive feedback" from me. I told them it was working again, asked what the problem had been, and whether it wouldn't happen again. They admitted it had been their fault, said something about "localisation of the problem" which I didn't understand because my German isn't up to it, and wished me a good day.

[dogsolitude-v2.livejournal.com]

I stopped watching TV ages ago, and found myself playing chess more. I've become somewhat obsessed with it of late, even to the point of watching the computer recreate chess games from the 18th century (as you probably know, both Fritz and Chessmaster have huge databases of games bundled with them).

Someone, I cannot recall who, once described chess as the graveyard of many an intelligent mind - I can see why...

As an aside, it's quite fun to watch films which include chess games as a motif, perhaps to portray a particular character as intelligent, and point out that they've got the board the wrong way round. :)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I just watched again what is -- for me, anyway -- absolutely the best chess film ever: The Chess Players by Satyajit Ray. Adore it!

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[dogsolitude-v2.livejournal.com]

Will give that one a look. Thank you!

[(Anonymous)]

Pfft chess. You should be playing Baduk/Go, watching The Go Master(s) and recreating ancient games from before the white man gave chess polio and syphilis.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi there - could you talk about the details of the bi-monthly movie night you just mentioned? Where is this going to be (a private affair or something in public, like at a café)? And what kind of movies will be aired? Do you limit yourself to movies you can find on sites like archive.org? The thing is, I've been trying to do something like that in the smallish town I live in, and I've run into so many walls while trying to find a place to host it and a sponsor to pay for the GEMA fees. I'd be thankful for any advice or information.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Your point is well-timed, because we're talking today about the benefits of meatspace versus cyberspace, and you seem to be describing a meatworld where the cultural flow we take for granted on the internet simply can't happen, thanks to archaic, baroque, expensive and tedious paper work.

I completely agree with your implied point that we shouldn't allow meatspace culture to flow more slowly than cyberspace culture currently does. I think we need to get off the internet and get out a bit more, but for that to happen there needs to be a sort of Web 2.0 ease of use out there in meatspace that we aren't currently seeing. It needs to be as easy to set up a cultural event as it is to set up a blog.

There'll be more details of my event nearer the time. Good luck with yours!

[(Anonymous)]

archaic, baroque, expensive and tedious ..Socialism! Since when is not paying people for their work progressive? Wouldn't it be refreshing, just for once, to talk to an entrepreneur who DIDN'T dress their refusal to pay bills up as something zappy, lightweight and modern?

We are entering a ultra-exploitative world where no-one is paid for anything. Seb Coe's Olympic 'jobs', work-for-free interns, Pirate Bay. A thing of the left it ISN'T.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jul/31/mps-graduate-interns-pay

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're being too extreme here. There's a balance of interests between the creators-and-disseminators of culture and its consumers -- who are, many of them, also likely to be its creators-and-disseminators, and perhaps better at that than the professionals. I don't see, in your comment, any sympathy at all for the plight of the original Anon here, who's trying to set up a film night and coming up against a brick wall made of paper: licenses, fees, zoning issues. When it gets to the stage that people are discouraged from setting up grass roots cultural organisations, things have clearly gone out of balance. The culture at large is not served by the property rights of a few.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus,

Your next album should be MOR britpop done with a full band and a union jack Epiphone Sheraton. Pick top 10 songs from different years and rewrite them with a slightly Beatles-ish tinge. One track will have the vocals in a very narrow range with a country feel. That will be your Ringo track. If the album hits, your being able to live in Japan is almost assured financially. If it doesn't hit, you can pass it off as a gag.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Wait, guys, don't shutter the store just yet! I've got an idea that will ensure the supremacy of commercial music for the next hundred years!"

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Crappy about the internet. I don't think I ever had to wait that long for an outage to be fixed in the US, and customer service is typically horrible there.

One of the things I love about Korea is how service is a really, really big deal. Right when I first got into my apartment here, the landlord called up the internet provider and they were there literally in 10 minutes to install the modem.

[(Anonymous)]

I've spent more time online over the last year than offline. When I am far from the computer, I'm pretty sure I can feel physical withdrawal (it feels like a subtle anxiety). This is is fixed by having the computer open and connected to the internet in the same room, even if I'm not actually at the keyboard.

It sounds to me like you've also got some sort of addiction to the internet. Do you think this is a similar/better/worse pathological condition than being addicted to mariguana/alcohol/etc?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's definitely an addiction! I'm even on the internet in my bath (via the iPod Touch)! But the best thing I can do is just indulge this appetite to the hilt, knowing that excess will make it start to cloy. I can already feel that starting.

Then again, things are addictive because they're good. We should only start worrying when the internet doesn't feel good any more. When it gets to the stage that you need your fix just to feel normal, rather than to feel great. And again, I can feel that stage approaching, and with it some kind of liberation. Because there's a part of me that really rails against habits, when I feel them beginning to imprison me.

[(Anonymous)]

Same here ole Momesy. The internet just started feeling that way to me a few months ago and I've been rebelling against it since. Lately I'd rather just sit around in the sunlight reading or with a little notebook to write ideas in. My new mantra: "the internet is boring now."

It isn't really, but I guess you rebel when you find things in your life feeling the same. Surprisingly, an endless source of global and historical culture can get that way. But cities like New York get boring, too, after a while.

[(Anonymous)]

marijuana is not addictive. the studies on this widely known, and have been for many decades now.

[(Anonymous)]

I want you (and your rabbit) as a neighbor to chat with :(

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

no cafes with wifi?

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

If you think about the dominant forms of electronic media over the last century -- radio, tv, internet -- each successive form has come to demand more from mankind rather than less (a kind of reversal of the labor saving devices such as washing machine, clothes dryer, etc...) Radio, in the 20s through 50s was the least demanding. The least dehumanizing. While listening you could cook dinner, dance, play cards, drive your car, make love. The tv , 50s through 80s, demanded that you sit still to observe it and its constant flow of visual data, and thus the couch potato was born. Computers from the 90s through the present day are the strictest taskmasters of all, forcing you to touch them to communicate, to sit even closer than you would with tv, with your face just inches from the screen, your fingers affixed to the plastic keys... clicking, clicking, clicking.

[(Anonymous)]

You're right. Even cell phones and other gadgets (iPod Touch's, etc.), take away from social interaction time. Some friends in a group will just sit by themselves, completely immersed in the media they have on their portable devices. I think to myself, "why are they even here?"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Jeez, those scribes so absorbed in their papyrus scrolls, why are they even here? Everything was so much better before they invented Linear B!"

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

"Jeez, those scribes so absorbed in their papyrus scrolls, why are they even here? Everything was so much better before they invented Linear B!"

Yes, but were those scribes at social gatherings while they were scribing away? Or were they in scriptoriums? And is it perfectly acceptable for the kidz, say, to send a load of "Where U at?" texts to their friendz while sitting in a seminar or lecture room, paying no attention to the seminar or lecture which they are ostensibly attending and for which their parents or the taxpayers have handed over piles of money?