Toby brought me this back from SXSW this year. Proper glad I am too because, apart from it being a limited edition (and I do like limited editions), and hand numbered, and A NEWSPAPER (something that still excites me a lot about Newspaper Club (who made it)), and full of great writing and images, it’s also got a lot to say about time and stuff…

“What Charles Darwin did for all life through time, Vernadsky did for all life through space. Just as we are all connected in time through evolution to common ancestors, so we are all – through the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and these days even the ionosphere – connected in space. We are tied through Vernadskian space to Darwinian time.”

- Foreword to Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s The Biosphere. via Matt Jones‘ article on the sun, Solar Storm Watch, Chizhevsky’s ‘Heliobiology’, and the numinous experience.

“…what newspapers are really good at: understandable, highly portable, physical objects that make digesting certain kinds of information easier. Like magazines, they can get you to read things you would never usually be interested in, simply through clever design decisions.”

- Bobbie Johnson on newspapers, and how they are constantly evolving, always in beta, and how they’re not dying – they’re just changing.

Where people congregated in Texas at different times of the day.

Time-sinks. Beautifully arranged, as always, by David McCandless at Information is Beautiful (who did one of my favourite things here).

“The most invaluable resource any writer has is time.”
- Warren Ellis, in the midst of thinking about print, publishing, notebooks with rulers on them, and it not hurting to value the physical…

“Capitalist newspaper names, then, are either temporal or political – and what is politics, but an attempt to freeze morality in time?”
- James Bridle, on the naming of newspapers.

Quantum Opinion #1

I was once walking down Sadlergate (more about Sadlergate later) and, I think it was the butcher’s shop that had just closed down and was becoming one of the high-fashion shops (that are now closed down, but more about that later as well), and the ugly eighties plastic hoarding had been ripped out to make way for a new pretty wooden/plaster one. Underneath you could see the old Sadler’s hoarding from god-knows-when-ago, all old tar coloured wood with faded gold letters. Someone’s initials and surname, almost definitely a dealer in some horse related paraphernalia from when the street would have smelt like a hundred horses’ arses, from all the horses arses shitting all over the place as they got their hooves and saddles and whatnot seen to.

It was a kind of Proustian rush back to a time I’ve only seen one faded photo of in a book about old Derby. I go in search for those sights a lot. The bits that have never changed. Even restored building are enough, so that all you have to do is squint to see back to before cars when there were trams, and before trams when there were horses and the roads were soil…

Quantum Opinion #2

Having thought about it all day, I can still say that this is a good idea. But a few things strike me as odd, and these things make the ‘good idea’ come apart at the seams.

Take the previously mentioned Sadlergate. It’s a beautiful street that’s up there in old beauty with York. The shop fronts are all very nicely done up and for the most part the buildings are really well maintained. One thing that strikes you at the moment about these shop fronts though is that they’re empty. There are no shops in them. There are still shops open on Sadlergate, but the ratio of open ones to closed-down ones is getting more even every week. So, if one part of town that already looks nice can’t attract business as it is, how is making another part that doesn’t look as nice look as nice as the one that already looks nice going to attract any more?

By travelling in time, the council are trying to retrace their steps to before they signed off on Westfield building what Charlie Brooker perfectly described as a “hollow, anaesthetising capitalist moonbase”. Business in the actual city centre has been going downhill pretty steadily since the Big Grey Block appeared on the skyline, and will continue to do so until someone pulls it down/blows it up, or better: until businesses reject it for what it is and move back to somewhere with a soul. I’m not ignorant, I know rents are high outside of the moonbase, I know the footfall is less than half that of in there, but venture into the sunlight one by one and see how much better lunchtime is in the market square that in Logan’s Run’s food hall.

So, rather than spending a million on architecture, maybe spend a fraction of that on some consultancy between landlords and businesses. Strike up some deals. Make some introductions. The age of the bricks won’t attract business if the books don’t balance on paper. Fix what you’ve broken before building something new, because going back in time aesthetically is not time travel.

“Marty! I didn’t invent the time machine for financial gain. The intent here is to gain a clearer perception of humanity – where we’re going, where we’ve been, the pitfalls and the possibilities, the perils and the promise. Perhaps even an answer to that universal question: ‘Why?’”
- Dr. Emmett L. Brown, Back To The Future II, 2015

Tonight, QUAD are showing The Time Traveler’s Wife. They contacted us lot at Time Travel Opportunists to put on a night of words to follow a literary adaptation (of which there are a few kicking about at the moment). Now, The Time Traveler’s Wife is looking like it might disappoint a bit, but it’s still about TIME innit, so we’re putting on a night all about time to follow the film that should either extend the enjoyment (if the film is as good as the book that it’s based on) or flood it out (if it’s not) with time themed wonders from the worlds of short films, fiction, and music.

Here’s what the evening is looking like:

WORDS:-
Time Travel Opportunists – me, Nathan Good and Emma Lannie, reading our original fiction.
Dr. Paul Hammond OBE – local actor, entrepreneur and savant shares his theories of time…
MOMO – We’ll be reading selections from Michael Ende’s classic throughout the evening.

FILM:-
‘On Time’ by Ted Chung – an incredible short film made in 24 hours at the 2008 Berlinale Talent Campus.
‘Back To The Future The Musical’ – one-man, one-theme tune. That’s all that needs saying.
‘Chronos’ by Ron Fricke – a visual journey through time (we’ll be playing this ambiently throughout the night)

MUSIC:-
Time themed musical journeys will be spun throughout this merry evening by DJ Emmett L. Brown. Great Scott!

All this is FREE as well. Seeing the film isn’t (it’s the usual price of about five or six quid), but the whole night afterwards is. We’ll start at 8:30pm, after the 6:10pm showing of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Join us. JOIN US.

Right in so many ways, in case it’s not immediately obvious (and it might not be at this scale, so click on the image to see a bigger version), this is a beautiful visualisation of all travelling in time done in film and television. Pay close attention to the legend when looking at certain trilogies though…we ended up discussing/arguing whether the Doc, at the end of Back To The Future II when he gets struck by lightning in the DeLorean, travelled temporally by Time Machine or by Force Of Nature. After about 25 minutes we realised that David McCandless had made the right choice in declaring the answer ‘Unknown’. Or should it be ‘Unknowable’?

There’s a couple of blog posts here that throw some light on the process, and also put questions like “What about Primer?” to bed. As well as it being about Time Travel, it floats my boat in other ways though…as David says:

“What I really love about this image, though, is the idea that this information has never been seen before. Despite the fact that it exists, in some way,somewhere, wrapped in various plots, it’s never been given form.”

I’ve e-mailed David to see if I can buy a print or print-res file of this from him. Apart from wanting it in my house, I think it’d make a perfect visual centre-piece for the Time-themed night (which I really need to write about soon as it’s next week).

“And along with indifference to space there went an even completer indifference to time.
‘There seems to be plenty of it,’ was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.
Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of perceptual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.”

- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

This book is magic. It really is. So glad to have finally got myself a copy. This book has stayed with me since I first read it in a library in 2003, and since then it’s been one of the books I always look for when in charity shops. A week ago I finally found it, for 29p. Less than a pound for a journey into symbol systems, infinity, Mind at Large, the Not-self and, my favourite, chair legs:

“A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St Michael and all angels”

“Time was so valuable that one felt one should never spend it for any purpose which was not useful.”
- Erich Fromm, The Fear Of Freedom, 1942

This book is incredible. It covers so much that I’ve been wanting to explore – pseudo thinking, freedom (what that means, rather than ‘how to be free’), capitalism, and time. Fromm doesn’t touch too much on time, but this quote set me off wanting to research the rise of time as we know it:

“Significant changes in the psychological atmosphere accompanied the economic development in capitalism. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life towards the end of the Middle Ages. The concept of time in the modern sense began to develop. Minutes became valuable; a symptom of this new sense of time is the fact that in Nurnberg the clocks have been striking the quarter hour since the sixteenth century.”

Written in 1942, most of what Fromm describes in this book is alive and well and, with the exception of the Nazi party, thriving in 2009. The same can be said of the next book, written in 1973…

“Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, it seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time.”

There’s so much in this book that I could quote here. Entire chapters. I’m putting forward Chapter 6 ‘The Timesaving Bank’ for someone to read at the Time Travel Opportunists night at QUAD on 15th September (more about that soon), as it nails the stuff Fromm talks about in a way that only a book written for nine year olds could. I’ll be buying copies of this book for people, lending out my copy to anyone that wants it, and recommending it to everyone for a long long time…

“Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem an eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.
Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.”
- Michael Ende, Momo, 1973