20:27, Saturday 5 Oct., 2002 Link

Splendid. Stepford Lives just now on Channel 4, described far too briefly in The Observer here. Think: Low key photography, stills changing on the screen only every second or two, images recollecting suburbia and product catalogues. The voiceover narrates the normal days of a handful of people, the extremes understated - a drawbridge outside Ted Baker being accidentally activated by a mobile phone, a woman leaving her family to live in a show home - interspersed with oh-so-believably statistics: "23% of all rice cakes are eaten by people with low self-esteem" (quoted in today's Guardian). Think suburban Blue Jam. Think: the infographic music videos we've seen recently. Think of the vivid, visual nature of radio, hinted by the almost hypnotic suggestics of the images. (Radio, I tell you, is an ascendant media, more coherent with the memebulletry of the writing and the interconnectedness of this age than television, which attempts to ignore the bullet, pretend the viewer is in the programme, and confuse the map with the territory.) Wonderful.

In other news today I bought a pair of trousers, a shirt, a tshirt, a jumper and a new pair of trainers that, when I'd cleaned my ankle at home, fortunately fit on both feet, the right shoe untested earlier because of the blood from my blistered foot from my long walk from the tube strike on my sock [while] in the shop. The cd I meant to buy I didn't. I forgot.