uncool

boynton's been feeling a tad culturally uncool today, and let's face it, she is. Although aware of the movements in blog lingo, the buzz words, the short hand, the megatrends, the word bursts of the verbal zeitgeist etc, there are certain words she'll never use. (And we're not talking rude, more your dude. ) A bit of if the slang don't fit feeling, but also a fear of the old built-in obsolescence factor. Like the rapid turn-over of technological speak described in this article (via Wood s lot)
once smart-sounding words and phrases now out of date but staggering on, vestigial techno-anachronisms of a wired world...
In fact, "phone" and "telephone" are so past-it that using them almost constitutes a form of swinging anti-cool.
Attatched as she is to telephone that's probably about the best boynton can hope for - a kind of swinging anti-cool. Why else would she find herself returning to the 20's in the Kraft virtual decades series. She is particularly taken with the third act of the flash movie, afternoon tea, where you get dialogue like this over the tea-cups:
Hello Bob
Hello Angus
and
Oh what a lovely day
This is interactive. You move on when you're ready. It is hypnotic. It can go on for ever.
There is something compelling about such banal beauty. Like Pinter the pauses become fully charged. There is great drama lurking within that parlour, under the surface, you just know it.
So as readers probably know by now, a side of boynton is actually happily trapped inside a false memory of the 1920's, drinking tea with Bob and Angus and remarking kindly on the weather. Uncool.

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Comments: uncool

"A pint a pauses." That's hip collective noun talk y'know.
Posted by Tony.T at July 18, 2003 07:12 PM

or good pub theatre?
sounds like a pinch-a-ble title for an anthology of short plays.
Posted by boynton at July 19, 2003 12:45 PM