Eleanor flew out to Monaco this morning for a business trip. I guess I can hardly be jealous having only come back from Colorado last week - but there's something about Monaco that appeals to me in the extreme. I think it's because in my head, it looks exactly like all those great scenes in To Catch A Thief.
That's me right there in my - I think - Sunbeam Alpine. Word on the street is that it's raining out there right now, but that can't be right. The sun always shines out there otherwise, what's the point of it looking like that? (Edit - just got a phone call saying that it's a nifty 28° out there, so the word on the street is a lie - my dreams are intact and far from shattered).
Meanwhile, back in the real world - and being as I find myself with more or less an entire week to myself - it's time to get constructive. This means late nights, extra large post-it notes stuck to cupboards, walls and doors - a real dumping out of the contents of the head. Normally, I try and keep it all in there because it makes a mess but never look a gift horse with an open mouth and all that.
So today, I have a few articles to write for the mag, a metric tonne of email to catch up on but come this evening, I really need to finish a proposal I started on a little while back for an agent out in Manhattan that I think will work well for me if I can get it right. They do cool things with cool people, it would be a blast to a part of it, but that horse with the gifts... let's not do that thing that has something to do with the stable door and a bolt - or is it the cart and the horse saying I was looking for?
Whatever.
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
What else have I got for you today? Well, doing what I do here, I sift my way through a fair few blogs in an average day. Some are good, most are bad. Very, very few are great - despite awards being handed out seemingly for no reason to some of them and worse still, really fucked up statistics being flaunted around like party bags. All you can do is identify this meaningless stuff and move along the bus, never to return or get off at that stop again. But it keeps coming back - there are even courses out there that will teach you how to 'write for the web'. What that really means is for a handsome stack of cash, you can learn all the secrets the world has to offer about hammering out one word sitting next to another to gain that holiest of trophies: the google ranking.
That's not writing. It's mathematics using words instead of numbers.
Which is kind of like thinking that naming your company something beginning with the letter A - even though it had no bearing on what you do for a living - was a great idea back when the Yellow Pages meant something. Everybody wants to be on page one of the 'google page ranking system' even if it means nothing when you get there. Using these rules, it's all about the money, it's all about the posture, all about the name-dropping and 'prestige' but it has nothing whatsoever to do with being great at what you do.
Being great at what you do means that when somebody wants to find you, they know where you are. Online or otherwise. It doesn't mean filling every inch of copy with meaningless keywords because you know what - regardless of what you think will happen and the increasing notches on the counter, we walk away if there's nothing to see. It's really hard to find great independent blogs out there that are readable for their content - and by blogs, I'm also including any newspaper and magazine columns at places like Salon and Rolling Stone - places that built their entire reputation on fine writing.
Why is this bothering me? Because sometimes, people ask and as the days go by and the internet gets bigger and smarter, there are actually less and less great places to go. There are no niches anymore. Nothing is special. It's not hard to find anything out - and a hundred other reasons too. The world has become flooded with knowledge that nobody really knows anything about.
Do you think we'd miss it if the people behind the power switch turned it off just for a week or so?
To wrap: here's The Tea Party at their mellow best:
And if you really want to get with the programme, here's an acoustic version I hadn't seen before and love very much: