Why live, when you can livestream?
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Version 0 of 1. The other day I read a description of a crowd outside Buckingham Palace: “fifty percent selfie sticks, fifty percent Periscopers”. I still don’t own a selfie stick. But I have an awful feeling a fledgling Periscoper is what I am. Related: Up Periscope! Twitter's live-streaming app is exciting us, but here's how it could be better Periscope is the livestreaming app sold to Twitter for $100m. With your smartphone camera you broadcast anything you happen to be doing to the world, and watch the ridiculous things other lost souls are doing, live at that very instant, when they should be working or having meaningful relationships with other human beings. The resulting footage can be saved for 24 hours, but the real-time experience is the point. It sounds silly. And it is. But the aftermath of doing Periscope for the first time is like placing the crack pipe down, exhaling, and thinking: “Hmm. Quite more-ish.” Who knows how it will develop? Enterprising theatre groups could pioneer live Periscope vérité-fictional events. Citizen journalists could nab wrongdoers in the moment, like the South Carolina patrolman charged with murder after a passerby videoed him. Meanwhile, I just Periscoped myself wandering through the Guardian offices and it was awesome. Larkin’s homage to Yemen Listen carefully: that’s the ghost of Philip Larkin scratching away, rewriting one of his most famous poems. In Yemen Britain is supporting the military action on behalf of the deposed Saudi-supported president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels from the north. We can’t rule out the involvement of American and indeed British military personnel. The situation is reportedly becoming a humanitarian calamity in the port of Aden, a British crown colony before troops were withdrawn at the end of the 1960s on cost grounds. On the last evening of colonial rule Denis Healey, then defence minister, is said to have shared a thoughtful drink with the governor, who said that the British empire would be remembered there for two things: football and the expression “fuck off”. It triggered masochistically rage-filled gloom in Larkin, who wrote his Homage to a Government in 1969: Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home / For lack of money, and it is all right. Perhaps Larkin’s spirit is getting to work on a new version: Next year we will probably send the soldiers back / As part of a US-Saudi-led coalition, and it is financially feasible. A hook-up that won’t date Any future BBC one-off drama about the brief but fateful relationship of Stephanie Flanders and Ed Miliband will surely have to star Lena Headey and Eddie Redmayne. And it would probably have to be titled “Dating” – with quote marks. Flanders, a former BBC economics editor now with the merchant bank JP Morgan, delivered a tweet with a certain irritable hauteur to dismiss newspaper gossip: “We ‘dated’ fleetingly in 2004. V costly few wks, it turns out.” Of course, it could be that Flanders’ resentment of press intrusion and general sense of lese-majesty is greater than Miliband’s. But why the disdainful inverted commas? Related: Stephanie Flanders criticises press 'raking over' Ed Miliband relationship She may have wanted to downplay the importance of the relationship, with a self-consciously quaint and rather innocent term. Dating makes it sound as if Ed invited Stephanie to a high-school prom in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1961; he showed up for his “date” in a velvet dinner jacket and bow tie and made uncomfortable conversation with her parents while she got ready upstairs. Tom Wolfe wrote that “dating” is passe and what the kids do now is “hooking up”. That sounds a bit too casual and intellectually underpowered for the connection made by Flanders and Miliband. But I don’t think Stephanie should be annoyed at the idea of “dating” Ed, which has an old-world charm – but it hasn’t dated. @PeterBradshaw1 |