Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: General

  • On the road again: upcoming appearances

    My career as a musician never really got anywhere, but that doesn’t mean I don’t end up touring…  

  • The medium is the message: why I’m sick of Twitter

    I’ve been thinking a fair bit about McLuhan’s famous aphorism lately, and I’ve decided it explains why I am, in a very literal sense, sick of Twitter. The point of McLuhan’s riff as I understand it isn’t that the content delivered by any given medium is irrelevant, but that the way in which any given…

  • Year’s End / Year’s Best

    Year’s End / Year’s Best

    Well, this has been a memorably weird and hectic year. I’m tapping out this post in an old apartment in the middle of Cambridge, Mass., US of A, having decided (for diverse reasons) that I’d rather be here with friends for the holiday season than back in Blighty, stuck out in the Sheffield badlands with…

  • The Naked Lunch: Christmas and capitalism

    Here’s a great opening ‘graph for a seasonal cyberpunk satire: “I heard my first Christmas music of the year in District 1. It was the 1st of August, 27ºC outside and All I Want For Christmas was drifting out of a market stall dedicated to selling Santa hats.” Only it’s not from a piece of…

  • Dancing about architecture

    So yesterday I was at the Birmingham School of Architecture, playing guest reviewer for Masters-student group and individual project-work for one of the four school “studios”. Reason I got the invite is that Mike Dring and Rob Annable are apparently both fans of my Infrastructure Fiction talk, which they’ve included in their studio syllabus; the current…