1.
I want to make a film (first of all, yeah, I just want to make a film) about architecture and time. For me it feels easy to think about a building, or especially about "architecture" as an art-form, as being timeless - I mean, it has a time, but that time is the moment (moment!) it was built, and it's like it is stuck in that time forever, as a sort of fossil, right? But that's not, of course, true, because buildings are always changing along with everything else around them. They really do exist in time. They get altered or extended or revamped, deliberately, or they get rained on and worn away, and covered in soot, or struck by lightning, or flooded. The trees in their gardens grow enormous and begin to undermine their foundations, as well as block out their light. Ivy and other climbing plants climb them. And so on. So, yeah, I want to make a short film about architecture (which is something I kind of love, but don't have any formal knowledge of at all). I think it could have great music.
2.
I also want (and this is, basically, a lot less realistic even than the film idea; I mean, this is something that I might do in, say, ten years time) to write a cultural history of email. Not the whole internet, although someone should definitely also do that, I'd read it. Just email, and its relation to other forms of communication, its birth and (perhaps?) decline, its variety, its power. A history of email would also, of course, be a history of the nineteen-nineties and the two-thousands, and it would be a history of business and networks, rhetoric and friendship, love and the evolution of grammar. Not to mention spelling and punctuation. The Wikipedia page for email doesn't list any books of this kind already out there. In ten years someone could get there first, I suppose. And if they do I'll read it. In a way I think the history of how we talk to each other is the history of everything. Well, maybe not. But it's something.
