The Play Ethic

Tom Waits for no man

Got one of these usual Wednesday-for-Friday commissions I get from my old colleagues at the Sunday Herald, which - because it was a 1000-word review of the new Tom Waits album - I was completely delighted to do. It doesn't seem to be online, so I'll put it in extended post below.

What is online is a superb piece from another old colleague, Brian Morton, on why we are so interested in 'classic' culture rather than innovative new artists. I especially like this point:

If the root meaning of “nostalgia” says something about pain, we are caught in a curious pathology where pain is both imminent and feared – the bus bomb, the random slaying – and yearned for as a sign that real feeling is still possible. Any psycho analyst will tell you that remembering an event is therapeutically important as long as it brings back the sensations and emotions associated with it. The same is true of our current malaise, except that what we are trying to recover is feeling itself, and the un-self-conscious hedonism that went hand-in-hand with real feelings of social engagement.

(BTW, I must pay tribute to my darling 12-inch silver Powerbook, which allowed me to write the thing while travelling on bus, plane and train to London, and even gave me ten minutes to correct punctuation before its three hours of power gave out. Cult of Mac, I cleave to thee).

Opium in the livingroom

Just written a short-ish column for the Guardian comment pages about the forthcoming PS3 game console - an example of the hyper-real cul-de-sac that computer games are heading into, where verisimilitude becomes as important as the gameplay itself. They've edited it a little too neatly for their slot, so I'm putting the original copy in extended post below, along with a whole load of hyperlinks to references that aren't in the Guardian original.

UPDATE: Conducted a very nice interview with an alternative radio station in Australia, Radio Adelaide, about this column. You can download the clip from here, for the next month or two.

To infinity and beyond

Finally broke my blogger's block on Comment is Free yesterday, with a piece that wrote itself - about the crisis of physics studies in the UK, and how my beloved daughter is bucking the trend.