cityofsound

A simulated Baltimore

The Believer published a fascinating interview with David Simon, creator of the magisterial TV show The Wire.

Among the many intriguing insights delivered in the interview, the following passage struck me as particularly interesting, in the context of a day job increasingly concerned with formulating simulations of cities, and particularly urban models which begin to layer in the more intangible aspects of city life, such as culture and creativity.

"The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception of the drama, Ed Burns and I—as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created the visual template for The Wire—conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed."

"First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components."

"Did we mention these grandiose plans to HBO at the beginning? No, they would have laughed us out of the pitch meeting. Instead, we spoke only to the inversion of the cop show and a close examination of the drug war’s dysfunction. But before shifting gears to the port in season two, I sat down with the HBO execs and laid out the argument to begin constructing an American city and examining the above themes through that construction. So here we are." {David Simon, The Believer, my emphasis]

A constant theme here has been how the cultural aspects of a city inform the sense of what a city is, and can be. Hence my interest in films about cities, songs about cities, writing about cities, games about cities, music scenes in cities, and so on. These all seem to be useful - or at least evocative - in terms of understanding a city, and are usually lacking in any analytical models of cities, and certainly from most urban planning and governance processes. Something we're trying to change. But it's fascinating to hear Simon describing his particular art as "constructing an American city."

Interview with David Simon [The Believer]
[via TAFKAB]

Monocle: design notes

It’s a year or so after launch of Monocle and things are going very well, both in print and online, so it's time for me to move on. Having worked with Tyler Brûlé and the rest of the Monocle team to breathe life into the project, creating the first volume of the magazine and iterations of the website and steering it through its first successful year of operation, I decided to leave, and departed at the end of March 2008. The project is up and running, with good solid foundations. Thus, others can run the daily business from here on in.

With that, I thought I’d pause to reflect on some of the design and strategy choices I made with Monocle.com and share them here. I’ve often tried to be ‘transparent’ about the work done on projects here, in the hope that it stimulates useful thought or conversation in other projects elsewhere, and partly to facilitate my own reflections on work. None of what follows is rocket science, and it’s not the place to look for thoughts on 2.0/3.0, social software, or urban informatics. That would be in the accounts of different projects. But if you’re interested in the honest craft of website work, almost deliberately old-fashioned ‘classical’ web design - and how to ally this with innovation in magazine publishing - the following should provide a decent account of several of the key decisions in this particular project.

During the course of an insanely busy year there are many other key decisions that just occurred and aren't noted here - most of them, in fact. And of course some that are confidential. Nor is this particularly structured. Nonetheless, it contains early sketches, outlines of strategic thinking and some insights into decision-making, tool choices and design practice. I hope you find what follows to be useful or interesting.

Context
As someone put it, Monocle was probably the most blogged about magazine last year. It was written about offline a lot too, but I won’t dwell on the magazine specifically here, except where it relates to the design and production of the digital services. (For a bookended account, Monocle's editor Andrew Tuck wrote about the launch and Tyler and Andrew were both recently interviewed a year on.)

Many were too quick to judge perhaps,  but others were less so and considered responses emerged throughout the year. Reception varied wildly, as one expects, but leaving aside the reception for the magazine and brand overall, the website itself often received much critical acclaim, for which many thanks. The likes of Eye, Print, BusinessWeek, MagCulture and Design Week all suggested we were onto something with our integration of print and web specifically. I’ve mentioned the Eye article before, but the Print piece by Andrew Blum was particularly sharp in identifying the Monocle.com difference. While the new media commentators often mistakenly looked for a 2.0 platform play, Blum noted our attempt to bring quality back to the table, trying to use a new platform to reinvigorate broadcast journalism itself. Similarly BusinessWeek spotted that the “web component (is) more like TV than print”. It actually feels somewhere between the two, but that was the intention.

Perhaps more importantly, the user figures have grown healthily throughout the year. Unique users and time spent on the site are all doing fine, but I knew from the BBC that getting the broadcasts into iTunes would be the thing that really extended the viewership of the programmes, our primary purpose. When we added BBC radio podcasts to iTunes they really thrived, and sure enough, since November 2007, viewing figures have been doubling month on month for Monocle’s movies, driven by iTunes’ ease-of-use. We’re now shifting terabytes of editorial each week. If you have audio or video material, the value of iTunes at this point cannot be stressed enough. It’ll be interesting to see how that platform develops.

Best of all, we hit number 1 in the iTunes News & Politics chart just before Christmas 2007. It’s hardly the most rigorously calculated chart in existence, but still an achievement, I think, to have the likes of the rather more well-funded and well-established Economist, Guardian, BBC, Reuters and Sky trailing in your wake through December, even temporarily (with the first four there having an average age of over 100 years or so, and our brand barely 10 months old at that point.)

So for an entirely new non-mainstream brand, with a no-celebrity policy allied to serious global coverage of subjects that are often little known before we cover them, I’m very happy with the favourable response from readers and viewers. We’ve covered e-Sports in South Korea, the animated title sequences of Kuntzel+Deygas, Narcotecture in Afghanistan, Tezuka architects’ Fuji kindergarten, Lexus’ brand issues, Paula Scher on Brand America, the train from Istanbul to Van, the CEO of Lego, the Tällberg Forum, the 2007 Salone industrial design fair and Frankfurt Motor Show, slow food in Turin, our top urban design solutions, mayoral summits in New York, photojournalism from Murmansk, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe and Abkhazia, and much more besides, Plus, we got name-checked by Lupe Fiasco.

Jobs at Monocle

Please excuse the work-related post. Just a quick note that there are a couple of vacancies at Monocle at the moment, working across the magazine and website. Both jobs are based at our London HQ in Marylebone. Drop a line to the people named below:

Photo editor
Monocle is looking for an experienced photo editor for a nine-month contract starting in March. We are looking for someone who understands the style of the magazine and is happy to work with our existing team of photographers as well as finding new talent around the world. You will need to be able to commission everything from news to fashion and be willing to work irregular hours, including some weekends. This is a fast-paced, demanding and rewarding position. Send applications, including a CV, to Rose Percy at this email address: rp at monocle dot com. Closing date for applications is 14 January 2008.

Producer, Monocle Web
Commercially-orientated web producer required to continue the development of Monocle.com, with editorial responsibilities across the website, and particular responsibility for creating and procuring bespoke advertising and sponsorship opportunities, and with potential for syndicating Monocle's services onto mobile and television platforms. As ever, we're looking for innovative ideas, beyond simple sponsorship and banner advertising. This key role would entail developing such ideas, representing Monocle at pitches with clients, working alongside our advertising team, so commercially-orientated experience is a must. In-depth knowledge of both broadcast and new media industries is ideally required, with particular emphasis on emerging models for sponsorship and advertising. The successful candidate will have a passion for new media and share Monocle's mission to 'raise the bar' in terms of quality for online editorial. Send applications, including a a CV, to Dan Hill at this email address: dh at monocle dot com.

New Monocle; one Eye satisfied

Surfacing briefly to note a couple of things. Monocle issue 05 is out now; a double-issue for summer, focusing on improving the quality of life in cities.

I'm personally pleased as it's the first issue of the magazine that I've helped shape a bit, albeit no more than subtle nudges and suggestions here and there. I'm particularly proud that there's a fine article on security in cities by Jonathan Raban; we've been in touch since I reviewed a talk he gave at the LRB Bookshop a few years ago, and I'm a huge fan, as regular readers will know. I also suggested Charles Landry to write about the practical side of shaping cities, and contributed a few items for our 'top 25' urban design ideas. It's a cracking issue, I reckon, so get thee to a newsstand, or subscribe online. Well done to Andrew Tuck and the team.

Speaking of which, we produced a few related broadcasts at Monocle.com around this issue. First up, a short news report on the recent C40 convention in New York. The C40 is a kind of 'G8 for cities' and features most of the world's city bosses in one place. That in itself is an interesting thing - and lends credence to the 'global federalism/city states' ideas discussed here and elsewhere. Indeed, my future mayor, Sydney's Clover Moore, even mentions the city states thing in our film. This year, of course, the subject of the convention was climate change, and it's interesting to observe mayors articulate the role they see for their cities in affecting change globally.

Our other two videos are more illustration-led, featuring some of the gorgeous illustration you see in the magazine (some of which is actually drawn by a Japanese monk, but that's another story). We've a rendering of Monocle's 'Perfect High Street', which is a retail-led exploration of the urban precinct idea, and a great collection of urban design solutions, from the scale of park bench up to entire precincts, via wi-fi and trams.

We also have the sound of the Tokyo Airport Limousine Lady, having acquired the audio from the Airport Limousine bus service. I like this item, small as it is, as it complements our earlier Afghan radio piece - both are the sound of other places, presented without fanfare or unnecessary levels of context. They speak for themselves. Check our 'Premiere' programme brand for more. On that front, watch out for some amazing ident sequences from South Korean TV soon.

Thanks to our team of Gillian Dobias and Aleksander Solum in producing these pieces.

Back to the magazine, where Monocle drew up a list of the 20 most liveable cities in the world. London's not in, of course, but many of my favourite places are. The 'winning city' is Munich, followed by Copenhagen, Zürich, Tokyo, Vienna, Helsinki, Sydney, Stockholm, Honolulu, Madrid, Melbourne, Montreal, Barcelona, Kyoto, Vancouver, Auckland, Singapore, Hamburg, Paris and Geneva.

You may have seen some press about it. We tied up with the International Herald Tribune over this, with both print and online version of the IHT carrying Monocle articles and videos respectively (e.g.). I think that's quite a neat way of spreading the message, and it's worked well for both titles. It was the fruit of several day trips to their Paris offices in the last couple of months. Thanks to Nick Stout and the team there.

Finally, it was good to see Monocle in the latest Eye magazine, one of my favourite publications. In one article, Rick Poynor lays into the magazine (somewhat unfairly I think, but hey). Whereas Monocle.com gets a more positive write-up in a good article summarising a state of play in contemporary website design, with the majority of comments tending towards the positive. I'm pleased that Erik Spiekermann finds it "a clever Web equivalent of a magazine I haven't quite made up my mind about", and John O'Reilly enjoys the "genial content spread" (!) though finds "the design more forbidding in its horizontal logic" (?). Brendan Dawes doesn't appreciate it much though, saying "it looks like a straight export from Quark or InDesign files slapped on the Web." In response to that, I can only say that I wish it were that easy.

Most of all, though, I'm delighted with the comments from Anne Burdick and particularly Adrian Shaughnessy, a man whose opinion I trust. Burdick writes

"At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I find it immensely satisfying and refreshing to encounter a clear and intelligent editorial point of view online. Monocle's consistent quality runs throughout the design, the reporting, and the use of media. Whether or not the "international jet set" mentality suits your tastes, it is a well thought-out experiment in the relationship between print and Web, a kind of TV-print hybrid with text and videos perfectly suited in size and substance to Web viewing and reading."

Adrian Shaughnessy writes:

"If the aim of 21st-century publishing is summed up in the dreary phrase 'cross platform', then Monocle hits the target. But the magazine is eclipsed by the website, which is a triumph of confident and unclichéd design. It boasts broadcast quality video and audio, and functions as a genuine expansion of the magazine and not the usual online dumping ground."

While the idea isn't to "eclipse" anything as such - except lazy thinking elsewhere - many thanks to both for those comments in the Eye article. Shared kudos to the team of Richard Spencer Powell, Ken Leung, Maurus Fraser and Paul Finn working with me on that interface between magazine, web and broadcast. Ditto Rufus Leonard, our excellent developers.

It's funny for me, as I've been focused on the editorial side - commissioning and producing those pieces mentioned above - and simultaneously on the design and build of Monocle.com v2, which has just emerged, rather than the v1 they're referring to. (Hence my ability to deep-link to magazine articles above.) Either way, Shaughnessy and Burdick managed to nail exactly what we're trying to do with Monocle.com. What the next release tries to do is keep the best elements of the hastily-built v1 whilst extending it significantly, giving it a bespoke yet scalable architecture yet retaining its clarity. Stay tuned for more on this, and check out the new site in the meantime. Then it's straight into v2.5, which ties up some loose ends and extends the navigation with a few key aggregation points around place and keyword - and then v3, more programmes etc. But all via a few big life-changes first ...

Postopolis!: Robert Krulwich

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here.

Krulwich is a journalist working across numerous arenas - an ABC Nightly News correspondent, also NPR's Science Desk, and many other shows, conducting a form of anthropological journalism, and often on the media itself, and the way that journalism works. Smart, articulate, and funny, he was an excellent speaker, as well as a devoted reader of quality weblogs.

Much of his talk concerned 'framing', and the way the media handles inclusion and exclusion, and how it creates spaces of framing. Also political campaigns uses and abuse spatially, in order to portray a different sense of space. For example, Krulwich showed some great footage from the early 90s, of Bush the Elder's campaign of the time, and the various tactics involved in building a crowd i.e. hire a 354-person band; hand out tickets to locals, imploring them to come by calling them VIPs. And then, most interestingly, creating a smaller space downtown by fencing off areas - as the rally organiser says "it makes the crowd bigger". By closing off streets, building a large stage, creating barriers as illustrated in the following photo, taken from a tower block overlooking the event.

In this way, the crowd is malleable concept, because of the space and the framing of the space. Bush's campaign reported 20,000 people present. The local police reckoned 5-6000. Onsite, Krulwich's team counted 2000 people. Once you subtract the band, staff and journalists, there were only 1400 'actual people' in the audience. But framed on the news report, it looked massive.

Krulwich describes this space as "essentially a piece of faux-architecture" ... "we will create the space - and frame the space". Which is how political campaigns and media create an image.

Using footage that I'd heard about but never seen, Kruiwich then went on illustrate a more recent example of this, based around the iconic images of Saddam Hussein's statue being toppled in Baghdad. The news report Krulwich broadcast for ABC shows how this situation came about; how the image was framed; how journalists were rather too embedded, perhaps; and the important role of the US Army in this event.

After a couple of guys started to climb the statue with a ladder found somewhere (somehow?), the US Army appear to step up and use an APC to effectively pull the statue half way, as if loosening the lid of a bottle, such that it can be pulled down by the crowd. We actually see a US soldier shooing away locals, and climbing up to put a US flag over the face, covering the head, with ropes around it, as if a noose; an image of US conquest. We then see the soldier being told to take the US flag off, by someone off camera, and instead place an Iraqi flag around the neck, as if a scarf. When the statue comes down. no flags are visible at all, and Krulwich indicates how a good half of the crowd kicking the statue along the ground are in fact journalists ... It's fascinating and brilliant reporting.

So framing the space is something the professional media does, not just architects and urban planners. He thinks it's "schoolyard learned behaviour" - it's an emergent behaviour within the news media. There is no 'architect of framing'. It becomes dangerous to break the rules around these things, so they reinforce each other.

(I wonder if citizen-based mobile phone journalism changes this? i.e. the Virginia Tech shootings, 7/7, and mobile footage. That creates a form of multi-perspectival space, which could be considered almost like a photo-montage - akin to David Hockney's ? Framing may be altered by this, if one considers the reporting of an event over time, and from multiple sources.)

Krulwich then talks about creating a news story on the anniversary of the 9/11. Of course, the main news item was a clichéd piece featuring a solitary trumpet, images of the President with hand on heart, tearful fire service widows etc etc. But a day later, Krulwich managed to create a piece covering the memories of the WTC from a different angle. He talked to a scientist who had been monitoring the sun's movement across New York, and who'd noticed that the sheer size of the WTC meant that, you got an extra 2 minutes of sunlight at the top of the WTC. You could watch the sunset move up the WTC at a rate of one floor per second. They were, in effect, "giant sunset clocks". And that's what he missed. A great example of reporting from an oblique angle, which has way more resonance than the more clichéd presentation.

Aside on bloggers: "They will show you everything but themselves". This is somewhat ironic, considering the warts-and-all attention seeking often associated with blogging, but I know what he means when it comes to more serious weblogs.

I hugely appreciated Kruliwch's stance, as a political voice within the media. Not separating and criticising from the outside, but reporting with great effect from the inside. He recognised he was part of this machine but attempted, as he put it, to "walk with dignity" through that. That he does.

Lest that sound pompous, as a form of encore, he showed an unbelievable video of how octopus and cuttlefish can hide by mimicing their surroundings, and how he'd managed to smuggle this footage into a new story about Saddam Hussein in hiding. Not his proudest moment, he says, but hugely entertaining.

Recent work at Monocle.com

Been working on a new wave of material for Monocle.com. Over the last week, we published a few features which relate to stories in issue 02. For each issue, we try to take a some stories online, twisting in a new direction, or providing further context. For instance, issue 02's Andrea Lenardin Madden profile expands into a little feature about her collaboration with the Sprinkles cupcake empire.

So, related to our lead story on Norway, we were extremely privileged to be granted an interview with HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. He doesn't often do them, and proved to be an extremely engaging interviewee. Progressive, intelligent, diplomatic yet involved - everything a modern monarch should be.

Additionally, we'll cover material which isn't mentioned in the magazine. Regular readers here might enjoy the brief documentary on Swiss robot bricklayers - yes, really - in which we discuss mass customisation, digital fabrication and architecture, talking to the profs at DFAB, ETH Zürich.

Back to issue 02, where we created our ideal broadcaster (other than Monocle of course): the 'Nordic News Network'. So, we got architect and designer Anders Nord to render a quick fly-through of the imaginary studio set, and we also quickly worked up an identity and soundtrack. Behold NNN.

See also our first infographic work - rather straightforward but clean, I think, and presenting new data on projected freshwater resources worldwide to 2050 (again, a link from the Norway story.)

Oh, and I hope you saw the lovely Kuntzel+Deygas work we posted up previously, such as these title sequences, music videos, character animations etc. There's more there, and much more to come of course. We're simultaneously working on reworking the site - and a million other things - particularly for subscriber-only material.

In other news, I managed to slip a QR code into our manga for issue 03 - fun! Sneak preview:

Hopefully a lot more of that kind of action to follow. Next week, off to Osaka and Tokyo with Tyler to explore this and more.

Vacancy now closed: Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast

UPDATE: Vacancy now closed.

Please excuse the work-related post, but we're hiring. Do pass this on to anyone/anywhere you think might be interested.

Production Assistant, Monocle Web & Broadcast
    
Monocle.com is the broadcast arm of Monocle, producing high-quality audio and video related to subjects covered in the magazine. The website, and corresponding mobile channels, aim to 'raise the bar' for internet-based video, both in terms of editorial and production values.
    
Monocle is looking for a highly motivated, skilled all-rounder to join our core team in London, helping with the creation of both the website and the new broadcast-led formats it carries.
    
Main responsibilities:

• Planning and executing the logistics of broadcasts, and broadcast acquisitions.
  
• Creation of audio/video material for Monocle.com and its related interactive channels.
  
• Editing and encoding of Monocle broadcast content.

Required experience: 

• Experience of creating and producing high quality audio-video material.
  
• Experience with Final Cut Pro, within a Mac-based digital video environment.
  
• Basic video production skills (handling cameras, mics etc.).
  
• Basic skills in Photoshop, Illustrator etc.
  
• An in-depth understanding of contemporary web content and internet-based and mobile platforms.
  
• Good understanding of international current affairs, business, culture, design, as covered in Monocle.
  
• Languages an advantage.

Reporting to Director of Web & Broadcast (that's me), and working as part of Monocle's core team at our London HQ in Marylebone.
     
All applications and enquiries to dh [at] monocle [dot] com. Thanks.

Binge Watching contemporary TV

Mark Lawson recently wrote about the joys of watching DVD box sets. Always a delight to see the popular press turn up late to the party (lurching towards the table with a cheap bottle of plonk, leering at guests with a lopsided grin). This mode of consuming TV, which I prefer to call binge watching, has been on the rise for years now. It's certainly the preferred method in this household, and in many others we're familiar with. We don't watch TV on a TV anymore, basically. The contemporary 'TV guide' looks pretty much like a shelf of DVD boxsets; as Lawson has it: "box sets are stacked high and wide in a Manhattan skyline of old programmes". Lawson is pretty good, as ever, on the basic and self-centred delights of watching TV shows via DVD boxsets. It's not really the extras, despite the occasional illuminating commentary, Watching bloopers and deleted scenes serve only to reinforce why they were deleted in the first place. It's certainly not the god-awful 'quirky' interfaces DVDs often have. It's basically the ability to mainline a show, episode after episode, at a pace that suits you, rather than a broadcaster's schedule. It should also be noted that Bittorrent-based TV watching provides the same basic promise, yet Lawson doesn't. Whilst fiddly and not as instantly gratifying, the same level of control is there, to watch show after show, sans-ads and disaggregated from increasingly irrelevant global release dates. It produces the same effects.

Binge watching may well become the preferred mode of consumption for any episodic TV (outside of soaps, where a daily rhythm seems more apposite.) Certainly, for the higher quality shows or documentaries - the usual set of multi-threaded narrative dramas dissected best in Steven Johnson's 'Everything Bad Is Good For You', with the odd non-US drama like 'Bleak House' or 'State Of Play' chucked in - the rush of watching 2 or 3 on the trot is seriously addictive. We've even constructed terminology for aspects of this experience, such as 'The Bridge', in which you watch the last episode of one season and go straight into the first episode of the next, the Ashtanga-like language indicating the sheer physicality of experiencing a cliff-hanger and resolution directly after each other.

So what's going on here? I don't think it's just the instant gratification that clicking play on the next episode affords. When binge watching really kicks in, the form of the content itself is implicitly involved, as I'd suggest that the tighter the 'universe' the show inhabits, the higher the levels of intensity involved. In other words, with a show like 'The West Wing' - of which more later - the same set of characters inhabiting largely the same few spaces of the same location over seven seasons creates a gravitational pull which is difficult to escape from. Similarly, 'Lost', in being confined by an island, builds up a fictional universe one is immersed for most of the episode, with flashbacks off-island simply a counterpoint to the resolution of returning to that natural prison. Arguably, most successful TV shows have attempted to create a tightly defined universe, whether that was Albert Square or Seinfeld's apartment. Yet combined with an ability to stay immersed in this world by simply clicking 'next episode', the binge tendencies are surely heightened.

(Reminds me of my latest business-idea-never-to-be-realised: a beautifully produced 'coffee table' book featuring cutaways, scale plans, projections, sections, maps of the fictional architecture and locations from popular TV shows. Rendered with the same loving detail that this book lavishes over Villa Savoy et al, this book would have richly-detailed spreads and diagrams of, for example: the horrendous houses, restaurants and offices of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm', surely the most consistently appalling architecture and interiors ever seen on screen; the 70s concrete brutalism of the bunker systems from 'Lost'; the actual layout of 'The West Wing' building, which we really only see in fragments of tracking shots; the layout of the 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip' theatre and studios; a cutaway of the ludicrously constructed Bluth House from 'Arrested Development', and so on. Maps of Seinfeld locations and The Simpsons' Springfield already exist online, but I'm also thinking of the amazing Sketchup of the Brady Bunch house, rendered as if real even though it only ever existed as a set. This would be as a counterpoint to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater being rendered by video game engines - a real house treated as if fictional game architecture. This would be treating fictional architecture as if it were real. This, subsconsciously inspired by Geoff Manaugh's brilliant post about architectural criticism needing to address the built environment of video games, now I come to think of it. So should architectural publishing. Of course, a book featuring increasingly sophisticated video game maps and architecture would be equally appealing.)

There is something perfectly-formed about the length of TV shows - often between 20 and 45 minutes, particularly when stripped of adverts as they are via DVD or Bittorrent - which also facilitates this binge watching. This seems a particularly natural rhythm, the ability to take a breath in between episodes enabling 2 or 3 to be stacked effortlessly. Stopping and starting when you like is appealing too, enabling Wikipedia/IMDB lookups either during or inbetween episodes: "What's this OEOB they keep talking about?" "What's she been in?" ... In this sense, the control over playback also means that DVD/torrent-based watching fits into almost any gap. However, Lawson mentions that these shows, often originally made to host several commercial breaks, seem oddly disjointed when glued back together without the adverts:

"When you watch The West Wing, Lost or Shameless at home, each episode seems to have a false climax or cliffhanger every eight to 12 minutes, which is resolved or resumed too quickly."

So we're OK with disjointed playback when we're doing the disjointing; will TV increasingly be made with boxset or torrent in mind rather than advert-supported TV, to the extent that it flows properly without adverts?

There was an angry, fascinating article by Nigel Andrews in the FT magazine a couple of weeks ago ('The Guess Men', 11 November 2006) on the form of contemporary mainstream film, suggesting this mode won't simply be confined to TV shows:

"Tomorrow we will watch films, or moving images with sound, in the same way that we read paperback books. We will do it on the bus or train. We will do it in the bath, the guym, the fast food restaurant. We will snatch and snack. We will develop as an evolutionary attribute the ability to stop and start viewing, just as we stop and start reading books, without losing the story momentum."

This is a rather bleak thought for those of us who enjoy the immersion and discipline of the two hour movie, watched straight through, with focus. But it seems this other mode may be hard to resist. A warmer thought about boxsets is that at least it's a transaction where people are paying directly for content. Lawson's piece is pretty good on the fundamental economic shift behind the boxset; Johnson's book also talks about this - about how the increased complexity of shows increases the potential for repeated viewing, and therefore the ability to re-sell shows direct to consumers as a boxset, having already sold it once to television networks.

Anyway, binge watching reached an apogee chez cityofsound when we ploughed through the entire series of 'The West Wing' in a matter of months. The pressure-cooker intensity and claustrophobia of the White House is perfect binge-fodder. And boy did we binge. It is, of course, utterly majestic television, even though the entire series could be seen as 'Democrat porn', creating a (Second) life-like alternate universe in which a good Democrat president resides in a well-meaning White House throughout much of George W. Bush's real world reign. It's as if Democrats viewers could shut out said real world and watch President Bartlet generally Do The Right Thing, enabling them to abdicate responsibility for the actualité going to hell in a handcart. Even the final Republican contender in the show, played by lovable Hawkeye, is pro-choice and essentially a decent guy. A Republican a Democrat could like. No hawks here. When storylines drifted from the real universe to the fictional one, refracted through the scriptwriters' prism to shift a conflict a thousand miles to the south or an issue a few degrees to the political right or left, they generally resolved in ways we could live with, entirely unlike the contemporary reality. However, leaving this aside - for it is not necessarily the show's fault - it is certainly one of the greatest television dramas ever produced, with immaculate writing, generally superb acting and no fear of setting the intellectual bar high. So coming off 'The West Wing', having watched 155 episodes in relatively quick succession, is something akin to TV cold turkey. So it's with great pleasure that we've started to watch Aaron Sorkin's latest venture, 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip', which is essentially a methodone-based substitute for 'The West Wing's' smack. Thus far, it's a bit lite in comparison, despite a superb 'Network'-style outburst by Judd Hirsch setting the tone, and the considerable presence of Bradley Whitford, Ed Asner, John Goodman and others. Yet the quality of Sorkin's writing and thinking still shines through.

Finally, you might note that many of the above references are to American TV shows, which might appear odd in our Anglo-Australian household. There are British TV shows which produce similar effects - see some of the list at the bottom of Mark Lawson's article, for example. However, you don't need me to tell you that American TV is extremely good at the high-end of this medium, particularly the long-running serial drama. It's also particularly bad at the low- and mid-range. But there's possibly something else going on here too - and that's that the art produced by a declining empire is often pretty compelling.

Don't hold the Gherkin

Armando Iannucci is a comedy genius. Fact.

Another one: Time Trumpet', the new BBC series by him and his team, is bloody funny. The show "looks back on events of the first 30 years of the 21st Century from the perspective of a nostalgia show in the year 2031." Hilarity ensues.

Yet it's the subtlety and detail in Iannucci's work that is truly rewarding. After several interviews with an aged 'Natasha Kaplinsky', I noticed a lovely detail in the evolved London skyline behind her, far right. See below. As with everything about Iannucci's satire, it's only one micrometer beyond believable. Or, it's funny because it's nearly true.

Why Lost is genuinely new media

Notice: If you care about that kind of thing, many of the following links will feature spoilers, particularly for those watching at the pace that Channel 4 dripfeed the UK releases of 'Lost'.

I've been as impressed with the way that the creators of Lost have enabled interaction around the show as with the show itself. Perhaps 'enabled' could be replaced with 'coordinated' or even 'manipulated', but strategically, the call-and-response relationship between the form of the show and the unfolding interaction across varying platforms would appear to indicate a very sophisticated understanding of contemporary media indeed. To aid communication, I've attempted to illustrate this process with a hastily-produced graphic score (below), but first, some set-up ...

A while ago, I wrote about a theory of using the ripples made possible by new media, to enable a trackable 'social life of a broadcast', based on our work at BBC radio. What Lost has done is far beyond that, truly raising the bar for much mainstream media. Again, it's ever clearer - frankly it was at the time - that all those late-90s Flash experiences, grown out of early-90s CD-ROM experiments, were largely facile attempts at 'new media experiences'. Lost is a far more ambitious piece of media, which uses the entire web as its canvas and its entire audience as its creators. I'd suggest this piece of work - Lost, when viewed in its entirety - is truly new.