10 June 2006

Postcards

It did not occur to me at first, my brain not working until sufficient caffeine is placed piping-hot into my bloodstream. It was about the hundred and twenty-third minute of the waking morning that it dawned on me that this is a day of special significance for Socotra Enterprises.

It is five years since I wrote a piece called “Mr. Fifty” and began to contemplate life in my fifth decade on the planet.

It is not far to the awful anniversary of the fifth year since the world changed, and five years of near-daily publication trying to document how it is happening.

The stories used to contain three elements, by design. What the weather was like, since we are connected to the earth, even if we try to ignore it. A note about what signal events have happened in the past, and a link to something that was happening in the present.

The voracious appetite for content developed into an irregular gig with Bush House, the headquarters of the venerable BBC. That makes me part of the legion of irregulars in the guerrilla media war, too. Most of us indies are bloggers, which is not precisely what this is about.

I used to bristle at the categorization, but my stuff is goes out rough and I rarely go back to clean the stories up. The Daily Socotras are a rough first draft on what life means here, and I suppose that is close enough to a web log to be called that.

By mixing reality with a certain sly irony, I have found a product that the producers of the BBC World Update show seem to like. Their mission is to penetrate the American market, and thus the words of the show now begin:

“It is 10:00 in London, 5:00 on the U.S. East Coast.”

I am always awake for the beginning of the show, and mostly stay that way. The show is measured in minutes, and the hour actually amounts to 53 minutes. So I tend to count out the day that way, and use the remaining seven minutes in each hour for human factors issues, like smoke breaks and head-calls.

Sometimes I am lucky, and my content is useful to fill up the 53 minutes. I got a call from one of the staff on the show to record a piece for the Friday show based on the killing of the thug Zarqawi.

That meant heading for the BBC offices are located across town, on M Street, south of Dupont Circle. It is an eight-dollar cab ride, if I have the cash in my wallet.

On a nice day it is a pleasant walk. Sometimes I stop at one of the hundred Starbucks and sit outside to look at official Washington go by. Men and Women dragging roll-around luggage, convention people with carts carrying their advertising, most looking a little frazzled.

The city is a rolling aggregation of one-issue lobbyists, a constantly changing stream of conventioneers.

On this particular day, I was scheduled to record at 2:00pm, or at approximately minute 477 of the day. The pert girl from the reception desk showed me back to the recording booth, dialed up Traffic in London, and left me to my devices. If it was 2:00pm here, it was nearing 7:00pm in London, past happy hour and into dinner. The producers from the morning show were long gone.

It is quite existential, along there in the booth. A television screen, volume muted, showed a man being interviewed in front of a picture of the capital. I realize I had passed him in the hall, emerging from the rest room.

Eventually the voice from Traffic came back to me, under the headphones. I dealt with Trisha, a woman with a wonderful warm voice, and an anonymous young man from one of the dozens of news desks in the building. I did the read in one take, and I was fairly pleased with it, though neither Trisha nor the young man had any comment on the relative merit of its content, and I suspect that is largely irrelevant.

It is a soap bubble. Because it appeared on a Friday, you can hear it right through the weekend, if you have a spare minute. It is located, briefly, on the BBC World Service World Update at minute 29.28 of program, at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/worldupdate/

The link to the streaming audio is at the bottom of he second column ("Listen again"). It is ephemeral, since the Friday program is only available until it is replaced by the Monday morning show.

I suppose I should figure out a way to capture these things, but that is the nature of the medium. I hate to call them “blogs,” and the BBC has given them a nick-name I like a lot better.

They call them “postcards.”

The term reminds me of things that use to come in the mail, with a picture of a giant trout on the back, or a depiction of the cement Wigwams of a Motor Hotel off Route 66 in the New Mexico desert.

I like the image. "Having a wonderful time," I write carefully. "Wish you were here!"

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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