It’s Official; I’m Writing the Biography of Octavia Friedman, CEO of Octo. (See you at Transmediale…)

Well, this is my big news for 2013. (I had to keep quiet till all the contracts were signed.) Where do I start? A traditional biography would probably begin, “Octavia Allende Friedman is the CEO of Octo. She plans to transform the world. (And her plan is right on track.) Octavia was born in Venezuela, in 1970, to a mathematician and a dancer, and learned binary before she learned the alphabet…”

But if you've been reading the news recently, you will already know all about Octavia. Wall Street Journal: "Octavia Friedman is the next Steve Jobs." (Paywalled). Wired: “Octavia Friedman, and Octo, Build The Internet Of Things.” TechCrunch: "Octavia Sues Samsung and Manolo Blahnik For Patent Infringement." National Enquirer; "Red-Headed Female Billionaire Accused of Pushing Bankers Into Volcano From Helicopter."

Many details of Octavia’s life are in the public domain. But the full truth is waaaay stranger. If I get it right, this is going to be one hell of a book.

Of course Octo hasn't transformed the world yet, but seasoned veterans of the tech wars, and her celebrity friends, give her a damn good chance of succeeding. (Robert Scoble: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Friendfeed." Cory Doctorow: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Github.” George Michael: "I haven't been this excited by a startup since Grindr.”)

The story of her extraordinary company is inextricably tangled up with the story of her extraordinary life. A role model for millions; a powerful woman at the top of a male dominated industry; an occasionally controversial figure (though the deaths of her former associates were, eventually, ruled accidental); and the most glamorous CEO of the modern era; it is unsurprising that her biography is predicted to be the number-one non-fiction book, worldwide, this Christmas, even though it hasn't actually been written yet.

So, yes, I'm pretty pleased to have been given the gig of writing it. And I’m not just saying that because one of her minders is standing behind me with a gun. (Ha ha! (Just joking. (Honest.)))

PHOTO: The view (straight up) from the bottom of the well they threw me down 

I can't say much more about this now (even the UK and US publishers want to keep their names under wraps until certain subsidiary rights deals are signed), but I can tell you that the contract to write the book is now firmly in place. The rumour that I was required to sign it in blood is entirely false. (A couple of drops may have got splashed on the contract during negotiations, but it was nothing, really.) The book will be fully illustrated with candid shots and family photos, plus specially commissioned portraits by Katy Grannan and David LaChapelle, and will come out in hardback and e-formats on November 21st this year, in all markets.

To be totally honest, I wasn't sure if I had time to do this (I have my own novel, screenplay, and computer game to write), but it turns out Octavia is a big fan of my story "The iHole", which recounts the history of a new technology; and she and her associates were very persuasive. They flew me to Austria last week (very hush-hush: I had to pretend I was going there to give a talk at the University of Vienna), and we talked terms in her little Mittel-European pied-a-terre, Schloss Octo, just outside Vienna.

PHOTO: The view (straight down) from the window they dangled me from.

So, there you go. I'll tell you more as it becomes legally possible. Meanwhile, Octavia will be launching a proof-of-concept of Octo's new product at the transmediale festival in Berlin this week; I'll be there, covering the launch, and interviewing Octavia for the book. If you bump into us, say hello...

Twitter, Death, and Football

A football, yesterday

I note, with interest and a little unease, that I have posted four hundred and fifty three (453!) tweets on Twitter since I first had a poke at it last month. In that time I think I've put up two (2!) blog posts here.

Given that the occasional bazooka rounds of my blog have been replaced almost entirely by the countless shotgun pellets of Twitter... if anyone has any interest in what I'm blasting away at, please feel free to follow me here.

Something I didn't mention yet on Twitter is that a top-floor neighbour of ours was carried out of the building on Sunday evening, wearing an oxygen mask, strapped to a stretcher, and accompanied by eight paramedics (two ambulances turned up). She had been very, very sad lately.

Cast rather a pall over the week.

Anyway, let us turn our face away from sorrow, if we can't comfort it. And we can't... Football is back, back, back on Saturday, when the English Premier Division ("See the most overpaid young men on earth kick an imitation pig's bladder!"), QUITE LITERALLY kicks off. I have selected my unstoppable team (Bike Dynamo Berlin), and will be playing in my usual Fantasy Football League (The Stoney Battery... full of friends who live, or once lived, in Stoneybatter in Dublin). If you would like to join our league, or would like my mighty warriors to play in your league, contact me through that unobtrusive "Mail Me" button on the right hand side of the page...

I Thought I Saw Johnny Massacre Last Night, As Alive As You Or Me

I was crossing Torstrasse about an hour ago, round midnight, and I thought I saw Johnny Massacre coming across the road towards me, wearing a big green gansey. I was mildly but very pleasantly surprised. Always a joy to meet Johnny. As he got closer, I was about to say hello, and then,

A) I realised it wasn't Johnny, and

B) I remembered that Johnny was dead.

The last time I saw him, if you can call it seeing him, he was being lowered into the ground in a coffin in Longford in 2003. Ming the Merciless (Johnny's great friend Luke Flanagan) gave a speech at the graveside, a good speech. And then Ming the Merciless urged us all to give Johnny Massacre (born John Doran, and only 27 when he died, in a car crash), the parting gift he would have most appreciated - a huge round of applause. We did, oh we did.

(Mike Casey had filmed Johnny's street show in 2002, and put this tribute together after Johnny's death.)

Update on 2009-06-29 01:42 by Julian Gough

Allan Cavanagh (who comments below, hi Allan!) has posted his own memories of Johnny Massacre's funeral here on Caricatures Ireland, his blog. There's a lovely moment with Johnny's mother, a mighty, mighty woman...

I Didn't Do It

I'm not going to say anything about this, because it's more interesting, and more fun (for you and for me), if I don't tell you anything. Yes, the buildings look suspiciously German. No, I am not the player on the left.

I'm reading in Kaffee Burger on Wednesday

Just a reminder that I'm reading in Kaffee Burger, on Torstrasse, this Wednesday (March 25th 2009), at 9pm... Five euro in, and there's a band on after (a New England electrofolk trio called Erving).

I will extend to you the offer I just extended to my Berlin friends by email: If you'd like to come and you're broke this week, give me a shout and I'll try and get you in free... (There's an "Email me" button lurking somewhere on the sidebar.)

(Er, this offer is going to collapse into ignominious chaos, failure and bitter recrimination if more than three of you ask. But, this being Literature, that's not very likely...)

Not sure what I'm going to read... I might read The Orphan and the Mob, because it's won prizes, and it works well live, and I haven't read it here before. But it is also the opening section of Jude: Level 1, so some of you will be bored sick of it already.

Anyway, more information here.

And here.

And there's a charming picture of the magnificent venue here (it's not known as the Taj Mahal of Torstrasse for nothing).

See you down the mosh pit...

Do Not Approach This Man. He Has Just Finished Writing A Novel, And May Be Dangerous.

I have finished writing Jude: Level 2. Thus the depraved and hideous face you see above, exhausted from months of writing and rewriting. (Twenty drafts of the toughest sections... though of course by the last few drafts you're just tweaking, or - to use the more accurate technical term favoured by the serious novelist - disappearing up your own hole). Exhausted, in particular, from the final weeks of staying up till 5am every night, with no days off or weekends. By the end I wasn't entirely sure what year it was. (1987, by the look of the shirt and stubble.) I look like a released prisoner, bewildered by his freedom. Which is appropriate, because I am.

With three days to go, I developed stigmata. The skin on the backs of my hands began to break down as I wrote. I was quite pleased when I noticed. Oh you know you've given it everything, by God, when you develop stigmata in the final furlong. You haven't cheated the book by selfishly holding anything in reserve, for yourself, or those you love, or the future.

In fact I finished on Oscar night, but I've been too knackered to post until now. When I finally, finally, finally finished, at 5.30am, and hit send, and it vanished from my screen in a swirling stream of zeros and ones down the phonelines to my agent and my publisher, I ran out into the street and danced and sang and sprinted through the melting slush.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Berlin is the city that doesn't have to get up in the morning (because it doesn't have a job), so there's always something on. And so I ran, singing, around the corner to the Babylon Kino, where they were still screening the Oscars, live from LA - nine timezones away - on the big screen. I arrived in the middle of Kate Winslet's acceptance speech, stayed till the end, and talked to friends afterwards. There was a great buzz in the cinema, as the crew for Spielzeugland / Toyland were there, and it had won an Oscar for Best Short Film earlier in the evening, to mighty cheers and screams. So, between them snaffling an Oscar and me finishing my book, there was a bunch of very happy people jumping up and down on the pavement on Rosa-Luxemberg Strasse at 6.30am, as the birds on the roof of the People's Theatre across the road cleared their throats and thought about singing.

Spent the last few days recovering, and dealing with the backlog of a life that has been on hold for months. Visited the doctor with my stigmata (they are beginning to heal). Today was the best day yet, I had a brilliant plan and I carried it out: I stayed in bed all day, dozing, reading, drinking coffee, and eating chocolate.

So, now, back to work. Radio play. Screenplay. Poetry. Life.

...And now I'm reading in Kaffee Burger, on March 25th (...2009)

Well, my first reading in Berlin went so well that I'm going to do another one, dash it. And this time my Berlin friends will get more than a day's notice.

I'll be reading in Kaffee Burger, on Torstrasse (just around the corner from my house! Why, my butler and pantry staff will be able to attend!) on Wednesday March 25th 2009. That's the regular monthly English language reading sponsored by Ex-Berliner, the rather funky English language magazine. The evening will kick off at 9pm...

I love Kaffee Burger, and have been to some great readings there (in both English and German), so I'm delighted to be invited. Kaffee Burger used to be the home of the semi-underground DDR poetry scene, and not all the stains have been cleaned from the ceiling. (Nor have they bothered to remove the old DDR price list, which still quotes you the one, fixed, national price for a cup of coffee across the socialist paradise. Doesn't CHARGE it, sadly, just quotes it.)

Great, great place, and host to some mighty club nights too (it's still home to Wladimir Kaminer's legendary Russian Disco).  And do stop to admire the building itself - a superb example of East Berlin architecture, in which the pre-wall-fall DDR aesthetic (a knackered concrete building made with sand and no cement) has been enhanced by the best of post-wall-fall Western urban street art (illiterate graffiti and some dogshit).

East Berlin architecture at its finest

I'm reading in Berlin on Saturday

Phil Rose took this picture of me in Berlin a while back

I'm reading a new piece from my next book (Jude: Level 2), this Saturday, January 24th 2009, at 4pm, in the Johann Rose in Kreutzberg. Why? Because the magnificent Nikola Richter asked me. Only a fool would say no, and my mamma didn't raise no fools. (Her Wikipedia entry is in German, but here she is in English.) I gather I'll be reading in the Hinterzimmer Salon (in the back room... I'll be everybody's darling...)

There will be cake. (In fact, I am being paid in cake.) This is, bizarrely, my first reading in Berlin. And I've never read this piece live before, so it may suck. But it may not. Anyway, it's free, so no whinging. Here's the address:

CafeBar & Lounge
Johann Rose
Forster Str. 57
10999 Berlin
U1 Görlitzer Bahnhof

Tel.: 0049 (0) 30- 55 10 35 90
news@johannrose.de

Elis will also be reading... Heck, read all about it in German (the key phrase is "Eintritt Frei"!)

Herzliche Einladung zum ersten Hinterzimmer-Salon im Johann Rose im neuen Jahr!

Come visit!

24. Januar: Wild komisch

Bei Kuchen und Kaffee und Musik vom Plattenteller geht es im Januarsalon am Samstag, den 24.1., darum, wie man eigentlich das Lachen in Texte hineinschreibt. Die Gäste sind:

Julian Gough ("Juno and Juliet", "Jude: Level 1"), Gewinner des BBC National Short Story Awards 2007, Sänger und Texter der literarischen und legendären irischen Band "Toasted Heretic", die mit "Galway and Los Angeles" einen Top Ten-Hit in Irland erzielte. Hier kann man erfahren, was er über den satirischen, lyrischen Autor Clive James denkt: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10530 Julians eigene Webseite findet man hier: http://www.juliangough.com/

Und Elis, Mitglied der Berliner Lesebühne LSD (Liebe statt Drogen), die jeden Dienstag im Lokal auftritt. Berühmt sind unter anderem seine McGyver-Geschichten bei der leider nicht mehr existenten Lesebühne O-Ton-Ute. Er liest neue Texte und vielleicht singt er auch eines seiner "Lieder für Kühe". Mehr hier: http://www.myspace.com/eliscbihn und hier http://www.liebestattdrogen.de/

Eintritt frei, Hutspende erbeten

----

Eine gemeinsame Lesereihe von Nikola Richter, René Hamann im Johann Rose, http://www.johannrose.de

Happy New Year

Back home in Berlin, and sick as a dog. My gang came down with a selection-box of diseases over the Christmas in Ireland. Returning half-conscious to Berlin - coughing and hawking our way through airports, train stations, cafés and public toilets - we spread our plagues in a mighty swathe across Europe. So if civilisation is consequently snuffed out, sorry about that.

(The Plain People of the Internet: Ah! Is that a rare reference there to the five wives and forty children he is rumoured to  have stashed away in Berlin? Make a note...)

So on a human level, I and all I love start 2009 utterly banjaxed. But as a writer (far more important, natch), my year has got off to a nice start. The New York Times has just printed a piece by me. The piece is probably funnier if you have read all of US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's official bailout statements over the past six months. (But, you know, don't. It's too high a price to pay to get a gag.)

I'll put it up on the site here, once the New York Times has had a fair run at it. But meanwhile here's their version. They even commissioned a cartoon from R. O. Blechman, which is a heck of an honour. (Blechman is seventy-eight now, and won an Emmy for his animated film of Stravinsky and Ramuz's theatre thingy, The Soldier's Tale.)

Oh, and a happy, happy, HAPPY, HAPPY New Year to you all.

(The eloquent photo above is borrowed from PawsAroundChicago.com. They give pets lifts. Oh you laugh and call it decadence, but it is only through such - not entirely necessary, yet welcome - innovations that civilization advances. I don't know the name of the photographer. A haunting picture, suffused with empathy and a deep understanding of suffering, it is possible it is a self portrait.)

The Great European Competition Hurdles - and they're off!

Ah, now, look, that's cheating. The Irish Government have robbed me of victory in the The Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes. And I'd put my last eleven euro on the favourite!

Here's the Irish Times, talking about the Irish Government's meeting in the early hours of Tuesday morning:

"The option of allowing one particular bank to fail and then moving to nationalise it was seriously considered, but it was decided that legislation to protect the entire banking system would have a better prospect of achieving long-term stability."

I'm pretty damn sure the bank was... well, I'm saying nothing. No point making things worse for them. (But, in one of those crazy coincidences no doubt, I got a huge number of hits over the past 48 hours from people who'd googled: anglo irish bank collapse.)

Incidentally, Anglo Irish shares soared 67% immediately after the announcement of the Irish Government scheme.

I'm still not entirely sure how a government as small as ours can "guarantee" the debts of a banking system as big as ours. As a number of helpful commentators have pointed out, the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, and finance minister, Brian Lenihan, have just promised to back liabilities that are ten times greater than our national debt. And, though the two Brians have postponed the Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes, they still have the EU Competition Hurdles ahead of them. (The job of running Ireland is a veritable pentathlon lately.) The British (and others) are furious at this move, as it gives Irish banks a huge competitive advantage, and could suck money out of fragile English banks. (AIB have a big presence in the English business sector, Anglo Irish do a lot of UK property loans etc.)

And the English, Dutch, Belgians and Danes all own banks in Ireland (Ulster Bank, ACC Bank, IIB Bank, and the amusingly named National Irish Bank- it's Danish), which will not be covered by this scheme, so they're afraid they'll lose all their depositors to Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, and - God help us - Anglo Irish Bank. There's now a strange, competitive, nationalist element to bank bailouts in Europe, as each government bailout or promise destabilises the banks of its neighbours. We need a unified EU response. And in a pig's hole will we get one, not till a few really big banks go under. Try getting twenty-two finance ministers to fly to Brussels this week, when they're all up till 5am every night, fire-fighting the collapse of their own national banks.

Of course, national banks have grown to become European banks, all over Europe. Many countries now face the problem of trying to save banks that are bigger than the country that, technically, controls and regulates them. The Financial Times has a beautiful overview of this. You'll see from it that both AIB and Bank of Ireland have liabilities that are almost exactly the same size as Ireland's entire GDP...

Well, on a lighter and more entertaining note, Momus has written a wonderful piece on the pleasures of having nothing. He did me the great honour of including some video of me in this intriguing meditation on Brecht, Wilde, and the end of the world as seen from Berlin.

We've been through all this before. It's not so bad. Nicht so schlimm...

"There is no money in this town! The whole economy has broken down! Oh, where is the telephone, is here no telephone, oh sir, goddamit, no!" - Brecht

Update on 2008-10-01 13:39 by Julian Gough

...And here's the latest on the Great European Competition Hurdles, from the Irish Times twenty minutes ago. Will Brian Lenihan even make it over the first hurdle?

Choice quotes:

The European Commission (EC) today confirmed that Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is in contact with the Government and will examine under state aid laws the move to guarantee all deposits in Irish banks.

“It [the Commission] will look at any state aid involved as a a matter of urgency. It expects notification from the national authorities and will take decision under the state aid rules soon afterwards.”

And yes the British are very annoyed:

British banks compete with Irish banks both in Britain and in Ireland and have voiced fears they could lose out competitively to Irish banks that enjoy the full guarantee.

The Irish pledge on Tuesday to underwrite the country's banking system triggered a flood of cash from British businesses to Irish banks, a senior Irish stockbroker said.

"We just want the Irish government to look quite closely at the arrangements they are putting in place to make sure they comply with EU competition law," the British government spokesman said. He added Britain was in contact with Irish authorities at a high level over the issue.

The Long Night of the Museums in Berlin

Tonight was the 23rd Long Night of the Museums, here in Berlin. I came home in the early hours of the morning with a couple of sixty-million-year-old shark's teeth, bought off a palaeontologist in the Natural History Museum for a euro.

What a great city. Of course, Lange Nacht der Museen has been so successful that cities all over the world now do it. But it started in Berlin.

If you're ever here when it's on, check it out. Well over a hundred museums stay open till 2am, and put on special events (including prehistoric shark's tooth jumble sales). One ticket gets you in to everything, and fleets of buses will take you around any of ten nicely designed routes. It starts with a party, at 6pm in the Lustgarten (er, no, it just means Pleasure Garden...) and ends, as does everything in Berlin, with a bangin' techno party, near the Brandenberg Gate.

Most of Berlin's immense, world class museums of art, culture, history and science take part. But so do the smaller museums, including the Hemp Museum, (Hanfmuseum), the Gay Museum (Schwules Museum) and the Garlic Museum (Knoblauchhaus... no I haven't got the German names mixed up. Knoblauch means garlic in German. Though, yes, the English-speaking world is crying out for a gay nightclub called Knoblauchhaus).

There's a little history here, and this year's program in German here...

And if you can't make it to Berlin, at least check out the great 1996 coding of the Hemp Museum website. Only The Man ever updates code.

Croatia 2, Germany 1

Well, if that ain't symbolic.

(For the benefit of my North American readers, Croatia, with a population of four million people, just beat Germany, population eighty two million - and the 1954, 1974, & 1990 world champions - by two goals to one in the group stage of the European Football Championship Finals.) 

Ah, the pathetic fallacy. Back when Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth were lads, it was the weather in their poems that reflected their moods. Now, it's the football scores in our blogs. That's progress.

 Actually, my mood is more Croatia 9, Germany 9.  I hope Croatia and Germany both go through.

Nikolina just wrote from Zagreb, "Everybody here went crazy, if we get to the final, I foresee a baby boom in March '09."

The silence of the streets of Berlin is  one heck of a big, gloomy silence. They've all gone to bed early, but baby boom? Germany has lost its erection.

Blau Blau Blau

What do you mean, what does it mean? Must I explain everything? Can't we have a little mystery between us? Every relationship needs a little mystery.

 It's a Blau Blau Blau thing, you wouldn't understand.

Blau Blau Blau. 

My Enormous Gherkin

As I passed through Orly airport on Saturday (about to fly home to Berlin), the woman running the x-ray machine frowned. She signaled to the man beside her. He frowned, and  signaled to the second woman, further along the conveyer belt.

The second woman grabbed my rucksack as it came out of the X-ray machine.

"Is this your bag?" she said in French.

Oui, I said.

She frowned, perhaps at my pronunciation, and began to pull on her black gloves. I tried to think what the heck I was carrying, that could look so suspicious on an X-ray. The woman plunged her gloved hands deep into my rucksack, and rummaged. I remembered what she was going to find just before she found it...

 Let us pause a moment, while I give you a little backstory.

I had spent the previous few days just outside Paris, working on the stage version of Jude: Level 1. I had wished to bring my noble co-workers a gift from Berlin, to give them strength for the coming ordeal, but there is no point bringing wine to France, chocolate is a problematic present, and what else is there? In duty-free I had almost despaired when I saw the discreet pile of cans marked in big letters Get One!, and in little letters, 1 große echte Spreewälder Gewürzgurke.

The perfect gift from Berlin! A huge local gherkin, in a can. "The gherkin snack from the homelandplace for gherkinfans" as the can said. ("Der Gurken-Snack vom Heimathof für Gurkenfans.")

 So I loaded up with enormous gherkins, one to a can, and brought them to France. We had one each. However, I was so busy I forgot to eat mine, and thus it was that on my way back through Orly airport this refined French lady now found herself holding my enormous gherkin, canned, in her black-gloved hand. "What," she said in elegant French, "is THIS?"

I was distracted from her question by the dawning realisation that I was living through a postmodern, canned version of the great moment in the rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, when bass player Derek Smalls sets off the metal detector at an American airport by walking through it with a cucumber, wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed down his pants.

Blinded by this vision, I couldn't remember the French for gherkin. Our conversation got increasingly surreal as she tried to guess what the lurid, warty, green thing, pictured on the can, might be. "Get One!" didn't really help, and she couldn't read German. At one point you could see her thinking "Glow-in-the-dark vibrator? Dildo?" In French. ("Vibrateur phosphorescent ? Dildo?")

Seconds from disaster, we finally communicated. "Cornichon!" I cried. "Ein große, er sorry, c'est un grand cornichon."  "Ah!" she cried, enormously relieved. "Un cornichon!" All smiles, she handed it back to me, and I was able to bring meine große Essiggurke home to the banks of the Spree.

(An aside: I am shocked to discover that, according to Google, nobody in the long, rich, and well-documented history of the world has ever, before this glorious day, used the phrase "My Enormous Gherkin" on the internet. This seems to me extraordinary. Hardly a day goes by when I don't say it at least twice.)

Bombs and Blocks

Well, that bomb was dealt with immediately. The guy with the toothache probably still squezz in his appointment at the dentist's.

I said, weeks ago, that I was about to put up my next Great Book for Teenage Boys. Well, I've been trying. But for some reason I am blocked like crazy. I've written the damn thing three times, and not posted it. 

Whaddya do? Writers are crazy. And the book is a head-wrecker, so no wonder it's somehow still wrecking my head. Great book...

I'll try again tomorrow. Bombs won't stop me. Blocks won't stop me.

Something new will stop me. 

(I took the image from HERE. Not sure if they drew it themselves... 

A Small Bomb in Mulackstrasse

 

Great excitement. They've found a World War II bomb around the corner, in Mulackstrasse, and evacuated the locality. The Rosenthaler end of Mulack Strasse has been blocked off! The dentist on the corner of Mulack and Gorman Strasse has been evacuated! Men with toothache wander about behind the barrier, disconsolate! Mighty entertainment.

 Of course, as Silvio (the gifted hairdresser who works in Denny Gehrke's of Steinstrasse) sternly points out, there's hundreds of bombs buried in Berlin, so it's not really a big deal. But for those of us not born and bred here, it's a bit of craic. 

Being around the corner, and thus protected from any potential blast, we haven't been evacuated, so we get the best of both worlds. Nothing like relaxing with a cup of coffee, with one ear cocked to hear the neighbouring flats lifted a hundred yards into the air. (Should they be so lifted.)

Ah, there’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned bombscare to add a little zing to city living. And what could be more old-fashioned than a World War II bombscare?

 
Retro, yet chic. Very Berlin.

Elephants Ate My Christmas Tree!

 

Recycling is boring. It turns people off. If the future of the planet depends on recycling, we're screwed. It might be good for the climate, but it's anticlimactic. You go to all the trouble of carefully sorting your rubbish into categories - a lid here, an eggshell there - and what do you get for your trouble and pain? Depressed men grab your bin, haul it to a lorry, and tip it in. They don't even look at your rubbish! And you spent all that time arranging the orange peels, coffee grounds and old tagliatelle to look like a Jeff Koons oil painting! It's a slap in the face.

No. Recycling needs glamour. It needs danger. You need some sort of immediate reward, a payoff, for bothering. What it needs is something like, oh I don't know,  wild animals, say, tearing apart your rubbish, and eating it before your very eyes.

 
Well, Germany has been leading this exciting new field for quite a few years now. Here in Berlin, you leave out your old Christmas trees on specific days in January for collection, and the Berlin council workers bring the trees to the Zoo, and feed them to the elephants.

 

As Ragnar Kuehne of Zoo Berlin told Reuters last January,"Elephants around the country will enjoy a delicious lunch today consisting of about five Christmas trees each."

Apparently, pine resin is good for their digestion. The camels and deer also get to join in the January feast. It's been a huge success, with public and animals alike. Indeed, there are rumours that soon, for a little extra, they will bring a baby elephant to your house, where it will eat your Christmas tree, live, in front of your cheering children.

Once the private sector gets involved, there'll be no stopping it. Across Prenzlauer Berg, wild, proud mountain goats will leap from bin-top to bin-top, pausing only to eat your old cardboard and newspapers. Already, in certain high-class restaurants here in Mitte, hyenas are being trained to lick your plate clean after the meal.
 

This is the future of recycling.

I love Berlin.

Outsourcing My Blog

I've grown bored with my blogging style. My policy, recently, has been to say only nice things about nice people, which means I can't mention two-thirds of the people I'd like to, or say three-quarters of what I'd like.

(You will notice I said nothing at all about the recent Booker Prize, even though the winning book was written by a fellow Irish novelist, I used to share an agent with at least one of the judges, my brother knows another judge, and I had potential gossipy stories coming out my every orifice...)

So while I rethink my blogging style (what do you think, should I revoke the only-say-nice-things rule? Or can anyone think of a new rule that would liven things up?), I've decided to outsource my blog to someone who's much better at blogging than me...

Because this is Berlin, I found myself admiring sculptures of foetuses last Saturday while drinking whisky with Momus. Which led me to visit his magnificent blog, Click Opera. I hadn't been there for a while, and had forgotten how great it is. Much, much more interesting than mine. Go have a wander round it, while I build a new persona.

Meantime, feel free to make recommendations for my new personality, and blog style. What do you like in a blog? This blog? Other blogs?

What does nobody do with their blog, but should?

Pornography and Literature

(OK, this one is going to be as short and snappy as a stepped-on daschund...)

I finally finished editing my porn film at seven o'clock this morning, having worked on it all night without a break. Which was great, except the deadline for delivery of the finished edit had been midnight...

But hey, this is a Berlin  porn festival! Transgression is where it is at. BREAK that rule. SPANK that buttock. OK,  DON'T spank that buttock...Deadline? What deadline? It turned out several other film-makers had missed it too.  A couple of phonecalls, and a drop had been arranged. All was well. Then, just trying to output a finished edit took all day (looooong technical story), and I missed two more deadlines. A new record! I am the champion! I finally handed the tape over to Gaia outside Kotbusser Tor U-Bahn station, near midnight, in a scene gloriously reminiscent of any spy film you've ever seen set in Berlin. There had been a lot of urgent phonecalls, changing trains, running up steps, searching the darkness for someone in a specific outfit... then the hurried handover, and away she rushed to put tomorrow's programme together...

So my little film will be shown tomorrow (well, later today...), Friday 26th of October, around 6.15pm, in the Kant Kino 1, on Kant Strasse, as part of Cum2Cut's Kurtzfilmprogramm. It's called The Last Porn Film, it's five minutes long, and I'll tell you more later. All part of the big Berlin Porn Film Festival.

I am stunned and gutted that I'll miss the screening, but it coincides with my reading in Loughrea at the Baffle festival. I console myself with the thought that missing the Berlin festival screening of my porn debut because I'm in Ireland reading from Jude: Level 1 at a distinguished and eccentric literary festival at least shows that I'm wasting my days in interesting ways.

Is that the time? Bed... 

Off to Baffle in Loughrea (and shoot porn in Berlin).

On Friday, October 26th, 2007, I'll be reading at the Baffle literary festival in Loughrea, Co. Galway, Ireland. Baffle (BOWES' ACADEMIC FELLOWSHIP AND FRATERNITY OF LITERARY ESOTERICS) was formed in Bowes-Kennedy pub in Loughrea, back in 1984. The pub is no more, but Baffle, like the universe, continues to expand.

The annual festival is an offshoot of Baffle's regular, year-round, pub-based poetry slam, which has generated five books of poetry.

I'm greatly looking forward to it, and will be wearing a clean shirt especially for the occasion.

Meanwhile, I went out last night, to Club Velvet on Warschauer Strasse. As my friends all know, I hate going out, and never, ever do, because if you go out you have adventures, and things happen, and you don't get any writing done for a week, and I'M BUSY, and I have to wash my hair, and where would world literature be if Shakespeare went out every night, eh?

Sure enough, after about ten minutes I found myself talking to the delightful Tatiana Bazzichelli and the utterly charming Gaia Novati of cum2cut, and next thing I knew, I was signing up to direct an amateur porn film. Bloody typical.

I have four days to shoot and edit a five minute film, and if I do get it done in time, it'll be shown as part of the second Porn Film Festival Berlin. The festival is a very Berlin mixture of art, film, dancing, theory, furrow-browed lectures and dirty sex.

As of now, though I have a camera, I've no cast, no crew, no script, no time, and I can't remember how to use Final Cut Pro. I have, however, shot some deeply erotic footage of the little finger on a woman's right hand. You've got to start somewhere. (Thanks, Anca, for signing the release form!).

Meanwhile, if anyone has any friends in Berlin who want to be kinky indie film stars, or can edit on Final Cut Pro, tell them to mail me in the next three days...

I've had some ideas for it, but the safest thing to say is that it is unlikely to be a normal porn film.

I'll keep you informed.