A couple of weeks ago I was included in a short series of ‘culture diaries’ during this year’s Birkbeck Arts Weeks – plural because for the first time it was more than a single week, in fact five, transpiring entirely online. I’d really enjoyed reading the contributions that preceded my own from Joanne Leal, Marina Warner, Keith Jarrett and Akane Kawakami.

Do check out all five of the diaries in their original context. But I also wanted to repost my own entry here because, well, I actually enjoyed writing it. I especially enjoyed being ultra-pedantic about it being five entries of precisely 100-words, including the header.

---

Rules

This week was to include my first visit to policy institute Chatham House. My imagined scenario: a perfectly sunny day; Victoria Line to Green Park, arriving early and perambulating through the actual Green Park; then ambling towards St James Square, envisioning myself to be a seasoned specialist of international affairs. But you know where this is going: the visit was cancelled. And you know how it was replaced: inadequately by a Zoom call. Online, the Chatham House Rule still applied. Though this doesn’t prevent me from detailing the reason for ‘visiting’, reaching 100 words for this diary entry does.

Newsround

Watching CBBC’s Newsround has become a daily ritual. I’ve been struck by how, through such (digital) television programmes, younger people connect fleetingly with a public world. Roger Silverstone once observed that televisual public connection creates ambiguous relationships between awareness and responsibility. This week Newsround reports about the murder of George Floyd, and the protests in the US and elsewhere. My older son has more questions than I can answer. For him it’s a largely-unknown world of systemic racism and unequal treatment by police of which – I try to explain – some of his teachers and classmates will have first-hand experience.

Newts

I’m learning lots about newts, at least the plenitude thriving in one marshy pond near my home in Walthamstow, East London. Crested and smooth, with and without frill, male and female, large and small, spots and orange bellies. This learning isn’t particularly hands-on. I’m reclined barefoot on the grass, watching two children, my children, on the newt hunt. They draw much attention from passersby. Not just in producing abundant specimens for their publics – it’s also that their whole getup is pleasantly absurd. Both in child-sized waders (yes, these are available), nets aloft, one inexplicably wearing his cycling helmet.

Plots

A book chapter I’m writing on social media images and the city is egregiously late. It comes out of a mixed-method, collaborative project on how such platforms help mediate experiences of urban change. I’m not late just because of the lockdown, but also because of my slowness in learning ImagePlot, an open-access ImageJ-based tool through which one can create large-scale image visualizations. Learning this has definitely been helpful analytically, but I’m also just struck by aesthetic beauty of these visualisations, plotted onto an X-Y axis, along cartesian or polar coordinates. Akin to waterfalls, crystalline formations or impact debris fields.

Loops

I’ve long dabbled in sample-based music production. It’s not something I talk much about around College. And somehow, someway, I’ve squeezed in just a little more time for this during lockdown. For years, I’ve been mildly obsessed with chopping and playing samples using newly-low-cost tools modelled on the classic Akai MPC, famously ‘humanised’ by J Dilla and others. But in recent weeks, I’ve settled in rather comfortably with the vitality of the simple loop. As Joseph Schloss observed in his ethnography Making Beats, looped samples recast music anew, establishing repeated juxtapositions of beginning and end. Wonderfully hypnotic, inexorable compositions.