Trainspotting

Trainspotting ...

It is unavoidable that a book and a film of the same story will have some dissimilarities, if only because they are two distinct media with two different audiences. The book and movie I have chosen is Trainspotting one of my all time favourites.

In the movie the plot is linear in the main, where as in the book the time line is not as straightforward. In fact, the book is more a collection of sometimes very dark short stories with the different storylines loosely linked. However, the film plot is tied together far more tightly, and overall is a fairly traditional narrative structure. The movie is not anywhere as near as dark as the book.

Although much of the witty dialogue that peppers the movie script comes directly from the pen of Irvine Welsh, it is used in different scenes that they appear in the novel. For example the 'it's shite being Scottish' speech takes place in the pub where Begbie tosses the pint glass into the crowd below, in the movie this monologue takes place when the boys head out to the countryside for the day ... (this bit of the movie always did bother me, why were they out in the country? dinnae makes sense, likesay.)

With music, for me, it is all about the songs; as your average A&R man will tell u. Likewise with movies or literature, its all about the story. A good plot is imperative, regardless of the medium. And in this particular case of adaptation, I would so far as saying that the film ever surpasses the original work and stands on its own two feet as a genuine work of art, regardl

Punk Archives

Although there seem to be no web pages devoted specifically to Belfast punk, sites such as punk77.co.uk and the Punk in Derry pages provide me with some very useful background. Band web sites SLF.com, theundertones.com also provide some useful background. More relevant sites exist on myspace.com for some of the less well know bands, many of whom were far more important to the story of NI Punk than Stiff Little Fingers or the the Undertones ever were. That being said, the Virtual Pub discussion board on SLF.com is extremely useful, as here one can make contact with some of the old punks who were involved in the very beginnings of the North's most successful period in modern music.

For context the CAIN web site (http://cain.ulst.ac.uk) provides all sorts of demographic and socio-political data which is very important to highlight the economic and social conditions during the relevant time period. Population/census data, for instance, paints a clear picture of a society in decay as thousands fled the dole queues and sectarian violence to seeks better lives in mainland UK, the US or Australia.

Writing Machines II

Electronic literature works in a fundamentally different ways than print and thus requires a new critical framework for analysis. new paths can be forged by the reader between the different lexias.  E-lit is not necessarily about reading the words from beginning to end, but can make use of navigation to follow many different paths to discover background documents, maps, letter & journals that serve to possibly enhance the reader's experience, making it a more interactive environment that the normal print one.  E-text has its own properties and should be viewed as a medium rather than a transparent interface.

In traditional literature the author's voice is privileged, however, it is my opinion that with e-lit the voice is no longer solely that of the writer.  The graphic designer and programmer now also have a voice that was not originally there. This will obviously dilute the voice of the writer, something that has left the traditionalists agasht. But this also may perhaps elevate the work of the programmer/designer to the level of art, which in some cases is long over due. 

This new medium has lead some writers to explore and experiment with the new form, embracing the technology and making it part of the narrative.  The example cited is Lexia to Perplexia. The author here actually creates a creole in which computerspeak and english are intermingled and it all become part of the story. He continues to integrate humans and computers further. 

The wordiness of this book makes me wish i too could use a more powerful tool to navigate the reading, skipping her little life adventures and getting straight to the point.

Drupal Rocks.

Not normally one to get excited by software, but this is cool.

Got to learn about Content Management Systems (CMS) last week.  Amazingly powerful stuff. The one we looked at in particular was Drupal, which is open source (free)  .. sweet.  Already used to to jazz up my own web site ... take the pain of HTML away, which is a good thing.

How to Write Fiction

while working on the market on saturday i came across a guide to writing a novel in the Guardian (a paper i never normally read) ... this might be handy for a certain class i thought, so i brought it home with me.

Richard Harris, author of Pompeii (a novel i read in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvio) had an interesting piece of advice when starting to learn how to write and that is; write any sort of crap (his word), but just start writing and that a page with any sort of crap was better than a blank page. u can always edit, spell/grammar check later and by polishing up some of it u may in fact be able to use it, if not there and then, possibly later on. 

in other words, just start writing and don't throw anything away.

Punk: Beyond the Wire

A documentary chronicling the punk movement in Northern Ireland from 1975-1983, and its lasting legacies.

This is a human interest archive piece documenting those times in Ulster's troubled history, when the much maligned punk culture was in fact one of the very few positive lights, bringing people together regardless of their background (religious/class etc).

We have no political agenda, and see ourselves as apolitical storytellers, nothing more. The piece itself is aimed mainly at music fans and social history buffs, and of course those who have an interest in the history of this island, particularly the bit with the good roads ;0)

When we talk of 'fans' i am using the term (maybe wrongly) to indicate fans of punk, who may or may not have been involved in running fanzines, managing, promoting, running indie labels, playing in bands, all of which represent the DIY ethos of punk. In other words, the people who got off their arses and did something. We're not terribly interested in talking to SLF, or get into the 'rockstar' bullshit feuds they had with the Undertones. We talk to the guys and girls that started bands and got up on stage just to have a bit of craic, or promote their anarchistic political agendas, or just to relieve the boredom. We wish to highlight that DIY attitude, and indeed applaud it. We also wish to tell people's interesting stories of battle with the spidermen (local hoods), paramilitaries, the army, cops etc. We will be focusing on the Clash's aborted gig at Ulster Hall in 1977, that seemed to inspire people to get together as one of the opening points of the story. We also wish to tell the story of lasting friendships that grew between people in this most improbable of environments across the sectarian divisions, because of punk.

The story will be told using contributions of people that were involved in the beginnings of Northern Ireland's infamous punk scene. We will be interviewing, filming and recording all using digital media. Archive footage and music from the era will also be used to propel the story along all of which will be mixed using a digital editing suite. Research for the project will be almost entirely an on-line effort, using bulletin boards, web sites and email to contact these old punks.

Production will require the use of a data base management system in order to store all data relating to the project; interviewees, time code, index, transcript and the audio files themselves broken down by subject and cross referenced. This will speed up the editing phase considerably.

Animation, graphics, old documents, concert and other archive footage will form the basis of the visual aspect of the project (expand)

A web site will also need to be created for both the marketing of the program and also to provide more information on the bands who's music was played in the show, the people interviewed and further background on the subject. The show should be available either as a vod/podcast, or else streamed from the website.

Blake

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is Blake's take on morality, and his satire on organised religions.

Where as the text itself written in poetry and prose in a manner similar to some of his contemporaries, it is the engravings and images he uses to help propel the text along that for me is most interesting part. Here he is using more that one media to tell his story, which would have been very unusal for its time.