intercourse with biscuits a modern miscellany

In September, I was called to the director’s office. I was online news editor at Stuff.tv and truly enjoyed my job. I had previously worked at Stuff as news editor on the magazine and had felt part of a family there. The online team were (and still are) an amazing bunch of people. My job was challenging but the first one I had ever had that actually meant I could generally finish on time. But on that Thursday, I was headed up the stairs to a director’s office, the work equivalent of being called the headmaster’s office.

When I arrived I was met not just by the director but by a representative of HR. Anyone who’s worked in a big organisation knows that’s big trouble, the work equivalent of seeing a hangman outside your cell. They sat me down and activated their serious faces. “I put it to you,” said the director, “that you have written an article for Wired magazine, one of our competitors.” He had the tone of a man who has watched too many episodes of Columbo. I admitted it straight away.

I had but the piece had been commissioned before I rejoined Stuff and had I informed the Haymarket brass, I would have been stopped from completing it. It was the longest piece I had ever been commissioned to write – 5000 words – on a subject that fascinated me. And the big kicker – it paid as much as a whole month’s wages in my current job. Directors can talk about loyalty and commitment to the company because they are paid serious amounts of money to push that line. I wasn’t. To turn down that money was impossible.

Having admitted that I had written the piece, I was told that I was to be suspended on full pay. I would need to leave the building immediately and would not be allowed to return to my desk to collect my things. The rest of the team would be taken in to a meeting while someone collected my stuff. I handed over my badge and joked that I couldn’t hand over my gun because, well, I haven’t got one. They weren’t amused by that.

I took the situation seriously but already felt angry and humiliated. I had bent the rules, some would say broken them, but I had also been an extremely committed member of staff – I had been asked to come back to join Stuff.tv and had been the first one in and the last one out on numerous occasions. Now I was being marched off the site.

The next morning as I waited at Gatwick for my girlfriend to arrive from Dublin, I wrote and sent my resignation letter. I didn’t want to return to a company that would have me escorted out of the offices I had once felt so at home in.

As I walked down the road to the train station that afternoon I felt like my career was in tatters. They were conducting an investigation. At best my reputation in the firm would be unfairly tarnished, at worst I’d be fired. I was gutted. Utterly gutted to be leaving a team of people I loved working with. But it was not the end of my career (I’m only 25). In fact, it was the start of a brand new part of it.

Contacts at other publications immediately started emailing me about new projects and my editor at Wired invited me in for a meeting to discuss future commissions. I started to realise I had done the right thing in resigning. The Wired piece had meant a great deal to me. It’s a fantastic magazine which I have admired for years. To have the leeway to research and deliver a real story felt like one of the first true bits of journalism I have ever done. Gradually, over the next few weeks more work began to arrive.

As I write this, I’m at the end of a week when I’ve written pieces for Q, Electric Pig (who I write news for on a daily basis) and Wired. I’ve also started writing my own blog with more focus and drew over three and half thousand hits with my piece on the Stephen Fry Twitter controversy. I don’t think I’d have been brave enough to do this without the push of being made to feel unwelcome at Stuff.

The director who pushed me to resignation is a good man. He’s a sharp thinker about the future of the web and a talented man. But my mum and dad have taught me the value of self-respect and standing up for yourself. I’ll walk out before some tries to have marched out.

Some might say that it’s a bad idea to write a piece like this, to expose the underbelly of my professional life and reveal one of my biggest mistakes. But I don’t think it is. It was a valuable lesson for me and something that has been on my mind a lot since leaving Stuff.

I think Stuff Magazine is a brilliant product with an amazing team making it. I’m sad I won’t write for them again and this is also almost a goodbye to the time I spent working with those people. But it’s also a celebration of the fact that you can stand up for yourself and, if you’ve generally been an alright bloke, things are likely to work out OK.

Mannequins pose in the dusty factory, lines of Polaroid images spread before them, their careers as test subjects for batches of film seemingly over. This factory in Enschede, Holland, was for 20 years Polaroid’s main European base, a complex of six buildings dedicated to making the iconic instant film. Today it is home to a team of just 15. Their mission: to bring instant film back to life.

Read the rest at Wired.co.uk and do buy the mag as the photos (all shot on large format Polaroids) are phenomenal.

Oh now will you look at that, it’s another day and I’ve found another article on the Internet that’s got me kicking the rubbish bin with frustration. Don’t worry though, it’s not Twitter-induced rage this time. Nope, it’s Luke Lewis’s attempt at puncturing the “myth” of Nirvana and Nevermind.

Now clearly Luke was set a task here – this is a slaughtering the sacred cows sort of piece but it really tweaked my pips. The central contention is this:
I think it’s puzzling how quickly those songs have been leeched of their power through over-exposure. It’s a weirdly time-bound record – which, I’d argue, exposes an inherent shallowness in the songwriting.

I can’t stress how wrong I think Lewis is here. He’s more wrong than a banana and broken glass sandwich, more wrong than the thought of John and Edward winning X-Factor, more wrong than the vision of Margaret Thatcher in suspenders and a peep-hole bra. Yes, that wrong.

And I’ve got two main ways of proving that his first point is that wrong. Take Nevermind to any indie disco in the country on a Friday or Saturday night. Throw on Come As You Are, Lithium, Smells Like Teen Spirit, even Territorial Pissings and something alive and visceral will happen. The crowd will go mad.

Secondly, look to Unplugged In New York and its stripped back versions of Come As You Are and Something In The Way. The essential strength of the songwriting shone through even with the much discussed production stripped back.

And on the subject of that production, Lewis does the classic rock critic thing of obsessing about it without truly giving Kurt Cobain for writing those melodies in the first place.

No sooner had the album hit Number 1 in the US than Kurt Cobain was claiming to be “embarrassed” by its slick production. “It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record,” he complained. Like so many Kurt declarations, this was profoundly disingenuous: Butch Vig recalls him practically cart-wheeling with joy across the studio floor when he heard the final mix of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.

Kurt Cobain was an intensely conflicted individual when it came to “fame” and the trappings that came with it. He did love Abba and Scratch Acid, Celtic Frost and The Smithereens. That duality is part of what means he’s still a baffling and fascinating figure. 

When Luke quotes clearly ironic comments (“I’m a rock star. Give me blow jobs”) as  proof of Cobain’s mad egomania, he’s doing him a disservice. We’re talking about a guy here who killed himself because he couldn’t cope with the idea of being somehow inauthentic.

Next we get on to the lyrics which Lewis dismisses as “pseudo-medical gibberish”. Rock writers, enamoured as they are with words and myth and legend, often have this attitude to lyrics.

Unless they tell a simple story that they can latch on to, they are dismissed. At points Nevermind’s lyrics can seem hackneyed but at others like on the haunting Polly or Lithium’s evocation of deep depression, they are still genuinely affecting.

And as for the now traditional attack on Cobain’s myth-making tendency (the bridge of Something In The Way is a fictional construction, he almost certainly did not sleep under a bridge ever) is a cheap shot.

Myth has always been a part of rock’n’roll, self-created or otherwise. Joe Strummer went from the son of someone in the diplomatic service to a rock insurrectionary. His deception does not reduce the worth and power of the Clash.

Finally, Lewis’s anger at the claims that Nirvana and Nevermind “changed music forever” is not unwarranted but Cobain never truly claimed that he had achieved that. And while it’s possible to point to a wave of grunge-lite bands like Nickleback, acts like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden are as guilty for their existence as Nirvana ever were.

The entire concept of “sweeping away the old guard” is a hold over from punk and it is entirely bogus. Punk didn’t kill off prog or the Rolling Stones, it simply created an alternative.

If Lewis no longer feels a rush when listening to Nevemind, that’s a sad thing for him. It is still a classic record (though arguably less powerful than its successor, In Utero) and the hundreds of teenagers who ever year discover the anger and energy of Nirvana show that they remain relevant.

If Lewis truly believes Nevermind and Cobain are no longer relevant, he’d better lobby against the next time NME decides to give them a cover.