Offline #1

Whenever I come across a very long article or blog post online that sounds interesting, I tend to bookmark it, then set it aside. Presumably I am imagining that at some point the Internet will run out of amusing comics, inexplicable film trailers and crazy goddamn optical illusions, that Cute Overload will suffer some kind of Cute Outage, and suddenly reading long form writing on my monitor will seem like a fun way to spend my time and my eyes.

Not that I don’t read a lot on-screen (I do) but the longer something is and the more interested I am in it, the more frustrating the idea of reading it in a less than ideal form seems. And even well designed websites tend not to be ideal reading environments.

Happily, while I am a man only with problems, other people offer solutions. At blog.thoughtwax.com, rather than continuing to stockpile long online articles for a day that would never come, Emmet Connolly decided to take them and put them into the more ideal reading environment of a one-off edition of a print-on-demand book: the ‘Instapaper (analogue edition)’.

So following his lead, after a bit of typesetting, some hasty cover design and a wait of just under a week for printing and posting, I had me a copy of Offline #1:

I’ve been very happy with the result. In carting it around the cover’s unpleasantly shiny laminate has already started to separate at the edges – I can’t say I’d want to buy a real book from Lulu – but it served its purpose extremely well. Being conscious that these were articles I could have been reading online made me aware of the way my eye moved around the page, and the pleasure of proper typesetting. And as I assumed they would be, a lot of the things I had filed away for future consumption were a lot better and more enjoyable than the things I often read when it’s just me and my feed reader killing some time.

It cost about £6 to print and about £4 more on postage. Some more pictures follow.

And now my bookmarks folder of things ‘to read’ is not a gloomy, waiting chore, but an opportunity for another pleasant offline read, just as soon as I have enough for volume 2.

This post was 392 words – thank you for reaching the end.

at 10.33 on
10 June 2009

books
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online and in print

Advertising Will Eat Us All · vol. 2 · Pablo Ferro

Just to reiterate, this is an occasional attempt to trace the work of creative minds as it is adopted, reused and transformed by those that follow them, and (either sooner or later) ingested by the hungry maw of advertising. Only because the attempt might be kind of fun, not because referencing or being influenced by previous creative work is necessarily a bad thing.

Here’s the trailer for the American release of Armando Ianucci’s implausibly funny and just as clever political satire In the Loop.

Trailer for In the Loop on Funny or Die

The frenetic cutting of the trailer calls back to the work of Pablo Ferro, who was recruited by Stanley Kubrick to make the trailers to Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and A Clockwork Orange. The In the Loop trailer also refers to the Clockwork Orange trailer in its choice of soundtrack: both use a disturbingly insistent electronic version of the William Tell Overture (in the grip of madness, or when woken by them first thing in the morning, all mobile phones sound like this).

Trailer for A Clockwork Orange on Google Video

Trailer for Dr. Strangelove on YouTube

As well as working with Kubrick on these two trailers and on the opening credits for Dr Strangelove, Ferro’s work includes the titles and the iconic split screen editing in The Thomas Crowne Affair.

However, Kubrick apparently initially approached another master of quick cuts to produce the trailer for Dr Strangelove – Arthur Lipsett, whose short film ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ Kubrick much admired. Lipsett declined the offer, and Kubrick got Ferro. (You can see ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ here, if the National Film Board of Canada’s website is working.)

Whether Ferro was influenced by Lipsett when cutting his trailers together isn’t clear. But this is the tradition the makers of the In the Loop trailer built on to convey a sense of the film without including any of its impressive, inventive and near-fucking-constant profanities. Which is a pretty miraculous feat of editing.

at 12.00 on
4 June 2009