In the meantime, there's plenty going on at http://www.egoboss.com/ and http://www.ensembli.com/ ... Happy Christmas/New Year (or Happy Holidays, if you prefer) to everyone!
Saturday 15 December 2007
Purdah time for Wifiwabbit
With so many other commitments I spend less and less time posting news and views here, so I have decided it's purdah time for this blog - for now at least.
Saturday 24 November 2007
The Daily Telegraph | Amazon Kindles the Flames for Books?
"As the old saying goes: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'. It's an adage that could have been invented for the book. It's more than 500 years since Gutenberg first pioneered moveable type, yet the book is still to be bettered in terms of design and usability.
It's lightweight, portable, robust, inexpensive. Novel approach: The Kindle can store 200 books and access thousands of newspapers It's so ingeniously simple that the actual book itself - the pages, the glue, the binding, the sleeves - go unnoticed to the user. They are simply the raw materials that allow us to enjoy the most important part of the book - the story it tells."
But with our very modern desire to over-engineer even the most clever designs, it's little wonder that technology companies have been talking for years about the day that "traditional" books will die, and the day that "electronic books" (known as ebooks) will become our preferred reading format.
The death of the book has been mooted for the last decade, but still people stubbornly cling to their dog-eared classics. Amazon, the online retailer, this week launched an audacious bid to change the way we read, with the release of a new ebook reader, called Kindle. Ebook readers are nothing new - Sony's Reader and the iRex iLiad have both been available for a while - but it's the first time a big book seller has thrown its considerable weight behind an ebook project in this way.
Continues ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/11/22/dlkind22.xml
It's lightweight, portable, robust, inexpensive. Novel approach: The Kindle can store 200 books and access thousands of newspapers It's so ingeniously simple that the actual book itself - the pages, the glue, the binding, the sleeves - go unnoticed to the user. They are simply the raw materials that allow us to enjoy the most important part of the book - the story it tells."
But with our very modern desire to over-engineer even the most clever designs, it's little wonder that technology companies have been talking for years about the day that "traditional" books will die, and the day that "electronic books" (known as ebooks) will become our preferred reading format.
The death of the book has been mooted for the last decade, but still people stubbornly cling to their dog-eared classics. Amazon, the online retailer, this week launched an audacious bid to change the way we read, with the release of a new ebook reader, called Kindle. Ebook readers are nothing new - Sony's Reader and the iRex iLiad have both been available for a while - but it's the first time a big book seller has thrown its considerable weight behind an ebook project in this way.
Continues ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/11/22/dlkind22.xml
Tuesday 20 November 2007
The Daily Telegraph | And the best war film of all time is...
I agree with #1 ... not with the rest of the list, however ...
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Well, the results are in, and there’s been a surprise victory for the Germans: Das Boot has been voted the best war film ever made by Reel Life readers.
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Well, the results are in, and there’s been a surprise victory for the Germans: Das Boot has been voted the best war film ever made by Reel Life readers.
The film’s realism was commended above all: “You can almost smell the Diesel,” commented ‘retired’.
The subject of realism divided opinion in the case of Saving Private Ryan, with ‘aeiou’ saying it’s “the most reallistic war film that has ever been made” and ‘BlackArrow’ objecting that “those guys walking out in the open yakking away would have been cut down before the film was half over”.
Films from the World Wars featured heavily in general (though oddly very few people voted for popular classics such as The Great Escape and The Bridge on the River Kwai), but Vietnam only just made it into the top five.
There were also questions raised about what exactly constitutes a war film, with a couple of votes for films like Casablanca and Gone with the Wind thrown in. I counted these, as war certainly does play an important part in them, but there can be no disputing that the films that made it into the top five list are ‘war films’ through and through:
1. Das Boot
2. Zulu
3. Saving Private Ryan
4. The Dam Busters
5. All Quiet on the Western Front and Apocalypse Now
And the best war film of all time is... : November 2007 : Reel Life : Arts : Telegraph Blogs
Saturday 17 November 2007
The Economist | Banksy - NOT American Graffiti
THE phenomenon of Banksy, an English graffiti artist, seems to have got out of hand. Banksy, who trades heavily on his anonymity, began drawing on walls alongside streets in north London and Bristol, his hometown.
But his stencils—often of rats making mordant political jokes—have come in from the cold streets to the prosperous warmth of London galleries and auction houses. Record prices for Banksies have been repeatedly set and exceeded over the past nine months.
The rush began in February, when Sotheby's sold seven of Banksy's works in oil, enamel, acrylic and spray-paint. Bonhams took up the baton, and set the pace in April, selling Banksy's “Space Girl and Bird” for £288,000. This autumn, Bonhams has auctioned another 11 Banksies, and Bloomsbury no fewer than 21.
But his stencils—often of rats making mordant political jokes—have come in from the cold streets to the prosperous warmth of London galleries and auction houses. Record prices for Banksies have been repeatedly set and exceeded over the past nine months.
The rush began in February, when Sotheby's sold seven of Banksy's works in oil, enamel, acrylic and spray-paint. Bonhams took up the baton, and set the pace in April, selling Banksy's “Space Girl and Bird” for £288,000. This autumn, Bonhams has auctioned another 11 Banksies, and Bloomsbury no fewer than 21.
Sunday 4 November 2007
The Daily Telegraph | Look to Tesco to see the real Britain
Think of "Tesco Towns" and you tend to think of places like Truro, Twickenham, Cambridge or Perth: postcodes where, infamously, more than half the local housekeeping money passes through Tesco's tills.
But the real Tesco Town is not decked out in vine-ripened tomatoes and cocktail beetroots. There is a windswept office park outside Cheshunt in Hertfordshire which looks like the land that hummus forgot. It is here, in deliberately drab company headquarters, that a small clique of capitalists holds up a mirror to modern Britain.
The reflection we see is not pretty. Our fear of Tesco is almost as endemic as its blue and red signage. Barely a day goes by without a fresh delivery of accusations: that this rapacious retailer is pillaging our farms; homogenising our diet and ethnically cleansing the high street.
Continues ...
Look to Tesco to see the real Britain - Telegraph
But the real Tesco Town is not decked out in vine-ripened tomatoes and cocktail beetroots. There is a windswept office park outside Cheshunt in Hertfordshire which looks like the land that hummus forgot. It is here, in deliberately drab company headquarters, that a small clique of capitalists holds up a mirror to modern Britain.
The reflection we see is not pretty. Our fear of Tesco is almost as endemic as its blue and red signage. Barely a day goes by without a fresh delivery of accusations: that this rapacious retailer is pillaging our farms; homogenising our diet and ethnically cleansing the high street.
Continues ...
Look to Tesco to see the real Britain - Telegraph
Friday 26 October 2007
The Economist | Twentieth-century music - Music, war and politics intertwined
WHEN Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” had its première in 1924, at a concert in New York that was billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music”, the audience included Rachmaninov and other big names from the classical world. By all accounts, the experiment was a success. It established that jazz could be worthy of the concert hall. Four years later in Europe, Gershwin met more of his new admirers, including Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev and two composers of the revolutionary Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and Berg. Awed by Berg, Gershwin hesitated at the piano one night, nervous about playing his catchy songs before one of the deconstructors of conventional harmony. Berg sternly encouraged him: “Mr Gershwin, music is music.”
If only it were that simple, writes Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, in his history of music in the 20th century. He notes that musical life in the past 100 years has “disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon.” The cultures may sometimes meet on affable terms, but the results can be comic in their incongruity. In the 1930s, when much of the European artistic elite was holed up in Hollywood, Fanny Brice, a comedienne, strolled over to Schoenberg at a dinner given by Harpo Marx: “C'mon, professor, play us a tune.”
Continues ...
Twentieth-century music Music, war and politics intertwined Economist.com
If only it were that simple, writes Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic, in his history of music in the 20th century. He notes that musical life in the past 100 years has “disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon.” The cultures may sometimes meet on affable terms, but the results can be comic in their incongruity. In the 1930s, when much of the European artistic elite was holed up in Hollywood, Fanny Brice, a comedienne, strolled over to Schoenberg at a dinner given by Harpo Marx: “C'mon, professor, play us a tune.”
Continues ...
Twentieth-century music Music, war and politics intertwined Economist.com
Saturday 20 October 2007
The New Yorker | NYCs $$$ via Wall St or SoHo/Chelsea ...?
Any discussion about New York City’s economic well-being tends to start and end with one phrase: Wall Street. As the Street goes, we assume, so goes the city, which is why politicians will do almost anything to keep the brokerages and investment banks happy. But in a new book called “The Warhol Economy” the social scientist Elizabeth Currid argues that this fixation is misdirected, and that it has led us to neglect the city’s most vital and distinctive economic sector: the culture industry, which, in Currid’s definition, includes everything from fashion, art, and music to night clubs. In other words, it’s SoHo and Chelsea, not Wall Street, that the politicians should really be thinking about.
Continues ...
If You Can Make It Here: Financial Page: The New Yorker
Continues ...
If You Can Make It Here: Financial Page: The New Yorker
Friday 19 October 2007
BBC NEWS | An interview with Alan Coren (RIP) ...
Just heard on BBC Radio 5 news that Alan Coren has died ... very sad news indeed; a wonderfully erudite, witty and charming man.
Punch magazine was hugely influential on my life, and it introduced me to the theatre, art, satire, cartoons, and anarchic thnking in general.
Punch magazine was hugely influential on my life, and it introduced me to the theatre, art, satire, cartoons, and anarchic thnking in general.
RIP.
"The pen isn't actually mightier than the sword - the sword will destroy all pens in time - we don't lie in our beds trembling in case Iran gets hold of a bottle of ink." - Alan Coren.
No obituary as yet, so linking to this recent past profile of the great man ...
--
Alan Coren - that affable raconteur was born in London in 1938 and has been a part of that institution of laughter and satire for many years.
After an education that spanned Wadham College, Oxford, Yale and the University of California he became a firm part of the BBC's News Quiz and Call my Bluff.
But it is with his editor's hat of Punch (from 1978 - 1987) that he spoke to the Politics Show...
"The first thing to say is that political cartoons aren't important and are important, David low says, wonderfully, 'I never drew a line that made a difference.'
Continues ...
BBC NEWS Programmes Politics Show An interview with Alan Coren
Saturday 13 October 2007
The New Yorker | Dept. of 9 to 5: Stressbuster ...
When an American businessman calls upon a guru of the Eastern persuasion, he is generally seeking to be abused for his attachment to success and worldly goods while also learning how to acquire more of both. Swami Parthasarathy, eighty years old, a native of Chennai, India, having renounced a lucrative career in the family shipping business and the Rolls-Royce that came with it, and founded the Vedanta Corporate Academy two hours southeast of Mumbai, has a deep understanding of this delicate role.
In the past, he has harangued and soothed supplicants at Microsoft, Ford, and Lehman Brothers, and has been invited by the deans of Kellogg and Wharton to instruct M.B.A. students in the use of the Sanskrit Vedas for purposes of serenity and profit. On a recent visit to New York, he appeared at “21” to instruct members of the Young Presidents’ Organization (to join, you must be younger than forty-five and run a business) in the management of self and stress.
Dept. of 9 to 5: Stressbuster: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker
In the past, he has harangued and soothed supplicants at Microsoft, Ford, and Lehman Brothers, and has been invited by the deans of Kellogg and Wharton to instruct M.B.A. students in the use of the Sanskrit Vedas for purposes of serenity and profit. On a recent visit to New York, he appeared at “21” to instruct members of the Young Presidents’ Organization (to join, you must be younger than forty-five and run a business) in the management of self and stress.
Dept. of 9 to 5: Stressbuster: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker
Saturday 29 September 2007
Official Shoot 'Em Up New Movie Trailers: Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci Upcoming New Movie Releases
I advocate radical, strict gun control laws but can't deny this was an innovative, thrilling, and visceral film ... hypocrisy? I guess so ...
Official Shoot 'Em Up New Movie Trailers: Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci Upcoming New Movie Releases
Official Shoot 'Em Up New Movie Trailers: Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci Upcoming New Movie Releases
Saturday 22 September 2007
The New Yorker | The Art World: Turner and Extremes ...
Poor old Turner: one minute the critics were singing his praises, the next they were berating him for being senile or infantile, or both. No great painter suffered as much from excesses of adulation and execration, sometimes for the same painting. “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On” had, on its appearance at the Royal Academy, in 1840, been mocked by the reviewers as “the contents of a spittoon,” a “gross outrage to nature,” and so on. 
The critic of the Times thought the seven pictures—including “Slavers”—that Turner sent to the Royal Academy that year were such “detestable absurdities” that “it is surprising the [selection] committee have suffered their walls to be disgraced with the dotage of his experiments.” John Ruskin, who had been given “Slavers” by his father and had appointed himself Turner’s paladin, not only went overboard in praise of his hero but drowned in the ocean of his own hyperbole. In the first edition of “Modern Painters” (1843), Ruskin, then all of twenty-four, sternly informed the hacks that “their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years; but to impress upon the public the respect with which they [the works] are to be received.”
Continued ...
The Patriot: The Art World: The New Yorker
The critic of the Times thought the seven pictures—including “Slavers”—that Turner sent to the Royal Academy that year were such “detestable absurdities” that “it is surprising the [selection] committee have suffered their walls to be disgraced with the dotage of his experiments.” John Ruskin, who had been given “Slavers” by his father and had appointed himself Turner’s paladin, not only went overboard in praise of his hero but drowned in the ocean of his own hyperbole. In the first edition of “Modern Painters” (1843), Ruskin, then all of twenty-four, sternly informed the hacks that “their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years; but to impress upon the public the respect with which they [the works] are to be received.”
Continued ...
The Patriot: The Art World: The New Yorker
Sunday 16 September 2007
Rock reunions | Turning rebellion into money | Economist.com
DINOSAURS might be revived in one of two ways. Fiction suggests applying the techniques of genetic engineering to DNA extracted from bloodsucking prehistoric insects trapped in amber. To resurrect the dinosaurs of rock, however, all you need is a fat cheque and a block booking at a vast stadium. The biggest bands in the history of rock‘n’roll now reform with the metronomic dependability of their own rhythm sections. The latest rock legend (and one of the greatest) to announce a return to the stage is Led Zeppelin. The band said this week it would stage a one-off gig later this year, nearly three decades after its last one.
Continued ...
Rock reunions Turning rebellion into money Economist.com:
Continued ...
Rock reunions Turning rebellion into money Economist.com:
Saturday 15 September 2007
GigaOM | Vanity Fair (Re) Discovers Tech
You know things are getting downright frothy when Vanity Fair rediscovers technology and starts giving way too much attention to technology titans by including them in its annual New Establishment list. The bible of frivolous has out done itself this time; it has also included a new micro-list, The Next Establishment. Perhaps it couldn’t fit in more tech types in the big list.
Vanity Fair (Re) Discovers Tech « GigaOM:
Vanity Fair (Re) Discovers Tech « GigaOM:
Saturday 8 September 2007
Daily Telegraph | Why the Gambling Act is such a Loser
Last Sunday, the Blair Government's Gambling Act 2005 came into operation and by Monday lunchtime I received my first email from an online casino site.
"Join today and we'll give you a 300 per cent bonus on your first deposit, worth up to 300 euros!" it said. "We have a huge range of games, including the biggest progressive jackpots online, giving you the chance to win millions of euros in a single spin!"
I didn't fancy my chances. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I got more, and by Friday, I was shouting: BLOODY Gordon Brown! This is your fault!
Since I keep a very tidy email inbox, which is assiduously reinforced by my friend the IT geek, I was rather cross about being invaded by casino emails and rang him up. "Do they look like legit sites?"
No. Nobody has yet sent me an email from William Hill, Ladbrokes, Stan James or any other recognisably British name. Nor have I had one from PokerStars (which is not a British company, but is, I happen to know, run by Mohawk Indians from a reservation in Canada. Still - perfectly legit.) Anyway, he cleaned up the inbox.
Now, I don't blame Big Gordo for my inbox invasion. But I do blame him for his pompous spin about whether or not Gambling is Good for You. Since he was Chancellor of Exchequer for the past 10 years, he shared equal responsibility for the not-very-good Gambling Act with that yesterday's man who went to live in Jerusalem. And he now has sole responsibility for it.
When Tessa Jowell first dressed up as Blackjack Lil and lay across a roulette table to place her poker chips for the cameras, the Gambling Act was spun (by Blairites) as all about freedom. The Blair Government wanted to license super-casinos all over Britain and allow online gambling sites to be registered in the United Kingdom. (Unlike puritanical America, where gambling sites are illegal.)
The support for the Bill came from libertarian types who think gamblers are grown-ups: they should be free to choose how, when, where and how much they gamble.
The opposition was from kindly shepherds who think gamblers are the poor, halt and lame: they should be removed from temptation, lest they get addicted to losing their wherewithal - and won't someone think of the children?
The funny thing was that the Parliamentary Labour Party is somewhat short on libertarian toughies and long on kindly Methody preachers - and loads of them hated Blackjack Lil's Bill. Obviously including Gordon, who is becoming more holier-than-thou with every passing day.
The fact that he suddenly said he wasn't going to let Manchester have its super-casino didn't worry me: I've lived in Manchester. Its unique quality of life is not going to be improved any by having a super-casino, and, anyway, I was more of a Blackpool girl.
What does fret me is the muddled thinking over the e-casinos. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (no longer run by the witless Jowell, who can't even cope with her own mortgage forms, let alone the billions wasted by the department) has spent a shedload of my money on a website explaining how it will regulate online casino and betting sites.
The website offers operators based in the European Economic Association the opportunity to apply for a British licence. This licence will prove to the punter that the site is legitimate, lawful and effectively regulated. It will make sure that he is over 18. It will tell him (should he find himself becoming worryingly addicted to online gambling) how he can obtain caring and non-judgmental help, via links to Gamcare, the online helpline.
It will also mean that the e-casino operators can run television advertisements for the first time actually showing grown-ups playing poker. (However, the actors must all be over 25 and the ads must not link gambling to sexual success.)
The point of the British licence is to encourage the world's casino websites to base themselves here, where they can be diligently regulated night and day by 50 compliance managers newly recruited for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. But of the thousands of online casino operators worldwide, only a handful - 14 the last time I looked - have applied for one.
Why? Because Brown decided to tax all British-based betting and casino sites at 15 per cent of gross profits. Not surprisingly, they have chosen to be based in much lower-taxed places, eg Malta, which taxes at a very acceptable 2.5 per cent.
Ladbrokes has not signed up for a British licence, nor has William Hill, which used to be based in Curacao, but now has moved to Malta. Oh - and since Malta is in the European Economic Association, it will be allowed to advertise on television.
So now we have the most caringly protective online betting regulatory system in the world, hurrah. But none of the big boys will sign up to it. Boo. (The Isle of Man is laughing its head off.)
Of course, the companies that do sign up will be taxed at 15 per cent gross. But there aren't enough of them even to pay the salaries of the 50 new compliance managers recruited for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Funnily enough, anyone who looks up the department's website to get help for his addiction to online gambling will find that the United Kingdom's only (free) residential treatment centre for addicted gamblers is called Gordon House. Piquant, eh?
Why the Gambling Act is such a loser - Telegraph
"Join today and we'll give you a 300 per cent bonus on your first deposit, worth up to 300 euros!" it said. "We have a huge range of games, including the biggest progressive jackpots online, giving you the chance to win millions of euros in a single spin!"
I didn't fancy my chances. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I got more, and by Friday, I was shouting: BLOODY Gordon Brown! This is your fault!
Since I keep a very tidy email inbox, which is assiduously reinforced by my friend the IT geek, I was rather cross about being invaded by casino emails and rang him up. "Do they look like legit sites?"
No. Nobody has yet sent me an email from William Hill, Ladbrokes, Stan James or any other recognisably British name. Nor have I had one from PokerStars (which is not a British company, but is, I happen to know, run by Mohawk Indians from a reservation in Canada. Still - perfectly legit.) Anyway, he cleaned up the inbox.
Now, I don't blame Big Gordo for my inbox invasion. But I do blame him for his pompous spin about whether or not Gambling is Good for You. Since he was Chancellor of Exchequer for the past 10 years, he shared equal responsibility for the not-very-good Gambling Act with that yesterday's man who went to live in Jerusalem. And he now has sole responsibility for it.
When Tessa Jowell first dressed up as Blackjack Lil and lay across a roulette table to place her poker chips for the cameras, the Gambling Act was spun (by Blairites) as all about freedom. The Blair Government wanted to license super-casinos all over Britain and allow online gambling sites to be registered in the United Kingdom. (Unlike puritanical America, where gambling sites are illegal.)
The support for the Bill came from libertarian types who think gamblers are grown-ups: they should be free to choose how, when, where and how much they gamble.
The opposition was from kindly shepherds who think gamblers are the poor, halt and lame: they should be removed from temptation, lest they get addicted to losing their wherewithal - and won't someone think of the children?
The funny thing was that the Parliamentary Labour Party is somewhat short on libertarian toughies and long on kindly Methody preachers - and loads of them hated Blackjack Lil's Bill. Obviously including Gordon, who is becoming more holier-than-thou with every passing day.
The fact that he suddenly said he wasn't going to let Manchester have its super-casino didn't worry me: I've lived in Manchester. Its unique quality of life is not going to be improved any by having a super-casino, and, anyway, I was more of a Blackpool girl.
What does fret me is the muddled thinking over the e-casinos. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (no longer run by the witless Jowell, who can't even cope with her own mortgage forms, let alone the billions wasted by the department) has spent a shedload of my money on a website explaining how it will regulate online casino and betting sites.
The website offers operators based in the European Economic Association the opportunity to apply for a British licence. This licence will prove to the punter that the site is legitimate, lawful and effectively regulated. It will make sure that he is over 18. It will tell him (should he find himself becoming worryingly addicted to online gambling) how he can obtain caring and non-judgmental help, via links to Gamcare, the online helpline.
It will also mean that the e-casino operators can run television advertisements for the first time actually showing grown-ups playing poker. (However, the actors must all be over 25 and the ads must not link gambling to sexual success.)
The point of the British licence is to encourage the world's casino websites to base themselves here, where they can be diligently regulated night and day by 50 compliance managers newly recruited for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. But of the thousands of online casino operators worldwide, only a handful - 14 the last time I looked - have applied for one.
Why? Because Brown decided to tax all British-based betting and casino sites at 15 per cent of gross profits. Not surprisingly, they have chosen to be based in much lower-taxed places, eg Malta, which taxes at a very acceptable 2.5 per cent.
Ladbrokes has not signed up for a British licence, nor has William Hill, which used to be based in Curacao, but now has moved to Malta. Oh - and since Malta is in the European Economic Association, it will be allowed to advertise on television.
So now we have the most caringly protective online betting regulatory system in the world, hurrah. But none of the big boys will sign up to it. Boo. (The Isle of Man is laughing its head off.)
Of course, the companies that do sign up will be taxed at 15 per cent gross. But there aren't enough of them even to pay the salaries of the 50 new compliance managers recruited for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Funnily enough, anyone who looks up the department's website to get help for his addiction to online gambling will find that the United Kingdom's only (free) residential treatment centre for addicted gamblers is called Gordon House. Piquant, eh?
Why the Gambling Act is such a loser - Telegraph
Wired | Best of Burning Man: Fire Dancers, Steampunk Tree House and More ...
Giant steampunk installations, fire dancers and an assortment of crazy characters make Burning Man a one-of-a-kind event each year. These images offer a glimpse of the artistic activities that unfolded at the gathering Aug. 27 to Sept. 3 - "Best of Burning Man: Flames, Art Cars and Discos."
Kinetic Steam Works' Case traction engine Hortense (above) glows on the playa. The art vehicle was named in honor of the artist and mother of Cal Tinkham, the steam enthusiast and railroad engineer who originally restored the engine.
Best of Burning Man: Fire Dancers, 'Steampunk Tree House' and More
Kinetic Steam Works' Case traction engine Hortense (above) glows on the playa. The art vehicle was named in honor of the artist and mother of Cal Tinkham, the steam enthusiast and railroad engineer who originally restored the engine.
Best of Burning Man: Fire Dancers, 'Steampunk Tree House' and More
Saturday 1 September 2007
The Daily Telegraph | Arts | Shanghai: Art Deco capital - for now
Say Art Deco and everyone knows what you mean: sharp geometry, cool curves, an effortless marriage of style and function. Where to find it, though, is a different matter.
Shanghai sprawl: Greg Girard's Shanghai Falling #1, Neighbourhood Demolition:
Shanghai sprawl: Greg Girard's Shanghai Falling #1, Neighbourhood Demolition:
Dotted around London and New York are palaces of 1920s and 1930s modernism - such as Senate House in Bloomsbury and the Chrysler building on Lexington Avenue - their straight lines and sweeping curves dominating their historic sites or looking almost quaint amid the higher, newer skyscrapers now surrounding them.
But London and New York are not Art Deco cities. The 1930s, the movement's peak decade, were not great years for the West, and while apartment blocks from the period still punctuate the suburbs, they suffered from the Second World War and post-industrial decay. Too often, they look shabby and forgotten beside the sturdier homes of previous eras and the bright convenience of the present.
Continued ...
Shanghai: Art Deco capital - for now - Telegraph:
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Founder of US punk club CBGB dies
Hilly Kristal, founder of the New York punk club CBGB which is credited with discovering Patti Smith and The Ramones, has died at the age of 75.
His daughter, Lisa, said he died from complications arising from lung cancer.
Kristal founded the club in 1973. The venue lost its lease last year after a dispute over rising rents.
In a statement, Marky Ramone of The Ramones, said Kristal was an "integral part" of the punk scene, and was always "supportive" of the genre.
"In an era when disco was the mainstream, Hilly took a chance and gambled. The gamble paid off for both him and for us. We are all grateful to him and will miss him," he added.
Born in 1932, Kristal became a concert violinist at the age of nine. He went on to manage New York jazz club, the Village Vanguard, before opening CBGB in a derelict bar in East Village in 1973.
The venue, whose full title CBGB OMFUG stood for 'country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandisers', was originally launched to showcase country music.
Instead the club became a breeding ground for punk rock.
Johnny Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls, who first played CBGB in the late 1980s, said: "So many bands would have never have made records unless they came to CBGB."
The club's final shows, in October last year, featured Patti Smith and Blondie's Debbie Harry.
Lenny Kaye, a longtime member of the Patti Smith Group said: "He created a club that started on a small, out-of-the-way skid row, and saw it go around the world."
"Everywhere you travel around the world, you saw somebody wearing a CBGB T-shirt," he said.
"He wanted the club to survive him," his daughter Lisa Kristal Burgman said. "He is survived by the fans and bands that played there."
A private memorial service is planned, with a public memorial service expected sometime in the future.
BBC NEWS Entertainment Founder of US punk club CBGB dies
Saturday 11 August 2007
Thursday 2 August 2007
NME | Arctic Monkeys frontman to record surprise album this month
Alex Turner teams up with old friend for new project
Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner and The Rascals' Miles Kane are set to record an album together later this month.
The pair became friends when Kane's first band The Little Flames supported Arctic Monkeys on their early tour.Kane contributed guitar to Arctic Monkeys' second album 'Favourite Worst Nightmare' and has joined the Sheffield band live frequently this summer to play '505' with them, including at the weekend's Old Trafford gigs (July 28-29).
Now the pair are set to head to France to record an album together in mid-August."We're there for two weeks and we're going to try to get the majority of it done," Kane told NME.COM. "James Ford is producing it and is going to play drums, he's a really boss drummer.
Me and Al will do all the bass and guitar and vocals, and try to the get the bulk of it done in two weeks. We're going to record it quite live to tape I think. Then whenever we've got weekends off at the same time we'd like to get some strings on it and probably do all that back home.
That's the plan anyway."The singer added that the pair were still trying to work out what their project will be called. "We were thinking Turner & Kane but everyone says it doesn't sound too serious," he explained. Kane is currently recording The Rascals debut EP in London - due out in October - with Blur and Elbow producer Ben Hiller.
He expects the pair's album to come out in the first half of 2008, after The Rascals have released their debut album."We want to have a bit of everything on there," said Kane of his own band's forthcoming album. "Some of the tunes do the same job, if you know what I mean, so we'll only have a couple of them on. So when we do it we will have everything."
Arctic Monkeys frontman to record surprise album this month News NME.COM
Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner and The Rascals' Miles Kane are set to record an album together later this month.
The pair became friends when Kane's first band The Little Flames supported Arctic Monkeys on their early tour.Kane contributed guitar to Arctic Monkeys' second album 'Favourite Worst Nightmare' and has joined the Sheffield band live frequently this summer to play '505' with them, including at the weekend's Old Trafford gigs (July 28-29).
Now the pair are set to head to France to record an album together in mid-August."We're there for two weeks and we're going to try to get the majority of it done," Kane told NME.COM. "James Ford is producing it and is going to play drums, he's a really boss drummer.
Me and Al will do all the bass and guitar and vocals, and try to the get the bulk of it done in two weeks. We're going to record it quite live to tape I think. Then whenever we've got weekends off at the same time we'd like to get some strings on it and probably do all that back home.
That's the plan anyway."The singer added that the pair were still trying to work out what their project will be called. "We were thinking Turner & Kane but everyone says it doesn't sound too serious," he explained. Kane is currently recording The Rascals debut EP in London - due out in October - with Blur and Elbow producer Ben Hiller.
He expects the pair's album to come out in the first half of 2008, after The Rascals have released their debut album."We want to have a bit of everything on there," said Kane of his own band's forthcoming album. "Some of the tunes do the same job, if you know what I mean, so we'll only have a couple of them on. So when we do it we will have everything."
Arctic Monkeys frontman to record surprise album this month News NME.COM
Saturday 28 July 2007
“The Simpsons Movie” | Dysfunctional family on the move | Economist.com
AFTER 18 years on prime-time television, “The Simpsons Movie” brings to the big screen all the qualities that have made the Simpson family superstars. That should reassure pundits who have been fretting over the question Homer Simpson poses at the beginning of the film, after viewing an especially Aesopian episode of “The Itchy & Scratchy Show”, Bart Simpson's favourite ultraviolent cartoon-within-a-cartoon: “Who's going to pay for something they've been getting for free?”
The answer is another question: how many smart, satirical, uproariously witty comedies did Hollywood make this year? “The Simpsons Movie” fills a niche in the major studios' release schedules that has lately become a void.
Critics were shown the film just before it opened to keep the audience's enjoyment of the rococo plot twists from being spiked by internet killjoys, a policy deserving of support. Briefly, an ecological disaster befalls the town of Springfield, brought about by Homer's involvement with a new love and his weakness for doughnuts.
The dysfunctional cohesion of the Simpson family is put to the test. Bart starts wishing he had a father like Ned Flanders next door, who practises family values with a wise serenity that is horribly off-putting. Marge doubts her love for Homer. Lisa meets a musician named Colin whose green politics is matched by his lilting brogue. And baby Maggie breaks 18 years of silence by speaking her first word, which audiences will have to stay through the final credits to hear.
But it is Homer who really evolves, after an Inuit medicine woman teaches him his “throat-song” and sends him on a spirit journey to an epiphany about human interconnectedness based on enlightened self-interest. Strangely, we come to care deeply about all of them.
“The Simpsons Movie” Dysfunctional family on the move Economist.com
The answer is another question: how many smart, satirical, uproariously witty comedies did Hollywood make this year? “The Simpsons Movie” fills a niche in the major studios' release schedules that has lately become a void.
Critics were shown the film just before it opened to keep the audience's enjoyment of the rococo plot twists from being spiked by internet killjoys, a policy deserving of support. Briefly, an ecological disaster befalls the town of Springfield, brought about by Homer's involvement with a new love and his weakness for doughnuts.
The dysfunctional cohesion of the Simpson family is put to the test. Bart starts wishing he had a father like Ned Flanders next door, who practises family values with a wise serenity that is horribly off-putting. Marge doubts her love for Homer. Lisa meets a musician named Colin whose green politics is matched by his lilting brogue. And baby Maggie breaks 18 years of silence by speaking her first word, which audiences will have to stay through the final credits to hear.
But it is Homer who really evolves, after an Inuit medicine woman teaches him his “throat-song” and sends him on a spirit journey to an epiphany about human interconnectedness based on enlightened self-interest. Strangely, we come to care deeply about all of them.
“The Simpsons Movie” Dysfunctional family on the move Economist.com
Friday 20 July 2007
The Hair - Disco/Retro | Single | Record Box
The Hair have been making big waves in Leeds for well over a year now building a strong following and wowing crowds with a number of brilliant support slots, before recently stepping out at The Faversham as headliners themselves for the launch of debut single Ghosts.
As with Ghosts their follow up single Disco / Retro is an ultra limited edition 7” release and download only, so you’d be advised to move quickly to get hold of one as these four Yorkshiremen are likley to be hot property over the coming months.
Disco / Retro is a a four minute salvo of electro dance hooks mixed with indie guitar and vocals that remind you of why you fell in love with The Rapture when they released House Of Jealous Lovers. Also worth checking out is Sidney Betts on the b-side, again it’s another punk funker, which is if anything even more raucous than the a-side.
The single is out on the 23rd July through Louder Than Bombs Records.
The Hair - Disco/Retro Single Record Box
http://www.hairmusic.co.uk/pressCuts/
As with Ghosts their follow up single Disco / Retro is an ultra limited edition 7” release and download only, so you’d be advised to move quickly to get hold of one as these four Yorkshiremen are likley to be hot property over the coming months.
Disco / Retro is a a four minute salvo of electro dance hooks mixed with indie guitar and vocals that remind you of why you fell in love with The Rapture when they released House Of Jealous Lovers. Also worth checking out is Sidney Betts on the b-side, again it’s another punk funker, which is if anything even more raucous than the a-side.
The single is out on the 23rd July through Louder Than Bombs Records.
The Hair - Disco/Retro Single Record Box
http://www.hairmusic.co.uk/pressCuts/
Thursday 19 July 2007
This year's dozen best albums? - Telegraph
The 12 acts on the shortlist for this year's Mercury Prize were revealed this week. Neil McCormick assesses their chances ...
A leading contender of course being these lads:
Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare - Melody, wit and rhythm again prove an unstoppable force. Last year's winners, the acerbically cynical Sheffield quartet consolidated their position as band of a generation with this more muscular, energetically syncopated and passionate follow-up. Even music-biz prizes, multi-million sales and Gordon Brown's endorsement can't dent their counter-cultural cachet.
Watch interviews with the nominated artists
This year's dozen best albums? - Telegraph
A leading contender of course being these lads:
Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare - Melody, wit and rhythm again prove an unstoppable force. Last year's winners, the acerbically cynical Sheffield quartet consolidated their position as band of a generation with this more muscular, energetically syncopated and passionate follow-up. Even music-biz prizes, multi-million sales and Gordon Brown's endorsement can't dent their counter-cultural cachet.
Watch interviews with the nominated artists
This year's dozen best albums? - Telegraph
Sunday 15 July 2007
Business.view | A Tiger in the boardroom | Economist.com
HIS firm may have been flirting with disaster, but that did not stop James Cayne from playing his usual round of golf. Last month, as the boss of Bear Stearns pondered launching the biggest-ever hedge-fund rescue, which ultimately cost the investment bank $1.6 billion, he did so from the fairways and greens of the Hollywood Golf Club in Ocean Township, New Jersey. According to the New York Times, during the summer he regularly flies there from New York in a helicopter that has permission to land at the club.
At key moments during the crisis—during which Bear Stearns says he remained in “constant contact” with his office—Mr Cayne shot rounds of 96, 98 and 97, reports the newspaper, citing scores posted on an online database, GHIN.com. That is impressively consistent, although given his handicap of 15.9, “his scores during that stressful time certainly ballooned a bit higher than normal”, says law and golf blogger, Tom Kirkendall. “But think how bad this could have gotten for Bear Stearns if Cayne had not been able to get his golf therapy.”
Indeed. Golf Digest has published a 200-strong list of the top golfing chief executives in the Fortune 1000. Perhaps, to add value to this, every chief executive should be required to post his or her golf scores, for unusual volatility could be a useful indicator of trouble at work. On the other hand, a relatively calm performance like Mr Cayne’s might reassure investors that though things are worse than usual, they are not getting out of hand.
The central role played by golf in business life is under-reported—except maybe in Japan—perhaps because journalists can’t afford the green fees let alone the membership dues of the swanky clubs to which chief executives belong. Nor are bosses exactly rushing to draw attention to yet another perk.
Yet, “no matter how sophisticated business becomes, nothing can replace the golf course as a communications hub”, argues a new book, “Deals on the Green”, by David Rynecki. “It’s where up-and-comers can impress the boss and where CEOs can seal multibillion-dollar deals. Its no coincidence that many of the most admired people in business—Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Sandy Weill—always carved out time in their busy schedules for golf.”
“Golf brings out a person’s true character”, argues Mr Rynecki, who then provides various business lessons illustrated with examples of famous bosses “at work”. Messrs Gates and Buffett deepened their friendship by playing golf, not least because (perhaps in contrast to when they play bridge) “they don’t take themselves seriously when they are on the course”.
Stan O’Neal, now the boss of Merrill Lynch, got noticed because “some of the more influential Merrill people got to spend time with [him] on the course and saw a different side of him”, enabling him to go on to be the first African-American to lead the firm.
Mr Welch, arguably the best golfing chief executive ever, is the “patron saint of corporate golf”, argues Mr Rynecki, stripping the traditional holder of the title, John D. Rockefeller, of his halo. Rockefeller took up golf when he was nearly 60, and played nearly every day for the next 33 years, even claiming (wrongly) that his quest to shoot par would enable him to live past 100. But although he played with such corporate titans as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, he banned all talk of business from the course.
Mr Welch, by contrast, regarded golf as a key part of his managerial armoury, which he deployed with great success during his long, glorious reign at General Electric (GE). The firm was already known as a “golf company” when he took charge. But under Mr Welch, “golf became an essential tool for any manager looking to move up”. Golf “was a litmus test for character. It showed whether a person had the guts to work in Welch’s GE.”
Not everyone is convinced. The other week, reports DealBreaker, two veteran Wall Street tycoons railed against the game. Hank Greenberg, the former boss of AIG, complained that golf was a distraction from business: “A lot of people like to get away from their work. You have to wonder about whether they like what they’re doing.” Carl Icahn, the legendary corporate raider, sees golf as a symbol of all that is wrong with the clubby higher echelons of American business: “These guys would rather play golf, slap each other on the back. I want a guy running a company who sits in his tub at night thinking about the challenges he faces. The guy who can’t let it go. The focused guy.”
But enough about guys.
The most troubling aspect of “Deals on the Green” is that women are almost entirely absent from it—except as wives, girlfriends or even groupies—until chapter 16, which is all about how corporate golf may hold back female executives. The chapter makes a strong case that the biggest obstacle to women getting to the top in business is less a glass ceiling than a “grass ceiling”. On the rare occasions when women get to golf with their male counterparts, they play off a different tee. Augusta, Pine Valley and most of the other prestigious male-only clubs, says Mr Rynecki, are “like majestic, genteel proving grounds for business deals”.
John Mack, the boss of Morgan Stanley, “has made a habit of appointing golf friends to the board”, says Mr Rynecki. Apparently more open-minded than most bosses, Mr Mack, then boss of CSFB, organised a series of events to introduce female executives to golf as a tool for business. Yet his enlightenment proved quite limited. When they arrived, the women found themselves confined to the driving range and the short course “while the men played the real course”.
There are currently only 11 female chief executives of Fortune 500 firms, and, tragically, nobody thinks that number will increase much any time soon. Could the male monopolisation of corporate golf be to blame? Mark Twain famously dismissed golf as a “good walk spoiled”, but sadly for many promising female executives a more apt definition of the game may be “a good career spoiled”.
Business.view A Tiger in the boardroom Economist.com
Saturday 7 July 2007
Cinquecento reborn | Test Drives | Motoring | Telegraph
I. WANT. ONE.
--
--
All that drinking and dancing celebrated one little car. Dante Giacosa's new Fiat 500, or Cinquecento Nuova, was first presented to the Italian premier 50 years ago on July 4, 1957. Like Britain's Mini, Germany's Beetle and France's 2CV, the Cinquecento was the Italian "People's Car".
But the celebration must be a uniquely Italian thing, because I don't recall reading about an all-night party in Birmingham to celebrate the original Mini in 1959, or a 24-hour Mardi Gras in Oxford to wassail BMW's new MINI in 2001. Perhaps Italians celebrate their industry more than we Brits do - go on, tell me something I don't know. Anyway, happy birthday, Cinquecento.
Fiat might be almost back in the black these days, but it doesn't just throw massive parties out of teary-eyed nostalgia for a much-loved car that provided most people of a certain age with some sort of amazing adventure - mine involved a blonde, a bottle of Haig whisky, a sunny afternoon on Dartmoor and a pig… (That's enough - Ed)
In fact, Fiat has another nuova Cinquecento to sell. With the possible exception of the first Audi TT, the new 500 is the most successful transmogrification from retro-styled concept car (the Trepiúuno, shown at Geneva in 2004) to production model. Just look at it - from its wide-eyed headlamps to its pert bottom, doesn't it just remind you of whisky and a pig?
(Full review via link, below)
Cinquecento reborn Test Drives Motoring Telegraph
Saturday 23 June 2007
Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin | Music | Arts | Telegraph
Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin
Tom Horan is washed away by the music
Video: Fun in the mud at Glastonbury
Audio: Christopher Howse on the magic of Glastonbury
In pictures: Glastonbury 2007
Glastonbury videos, reports, reviews and blogs
Christopher Howse reports from the Glastonbury Festival
Tom Horan is washed away by the music
Video: Fun in the mud at Glastonbury
Audio: Christopher Howse on the magic of Glastonbury
In pictures: Glastonbury 2007
Glastonbury videos, reports, reviews and blogs
Christopher Howse reports from the Glastonbury Festival
Christopher Howse: The only man in a tie among 144,000 revellers
Zac, 11, was pulling Josh, nine, in a sledge, with sloppy Glastonbury mud in place of snow. "Again! Again!" Josh shouted. Then the thunderstorm started.
Away from the mud, with teepees at £1,600 and ridiculously bulky, shiny white camper vans filling the fields, the three-day festival has never been so comfort-seeking.
"In the past eight years I've been here," said the gate steward to the family camping field, "there's more money, less drugs, less crime and no fear of it."
In the first 24 hours, among 144,000 visitors there were only 33 arrests, mostly for drugs.
"And there's less of the hippy thing. Not so much naturism," says a woman volunteer, delicately. "It's the wall that's made the difference," says the steward. The wall is prefabricated, solid and high, disturbingly like Israel's wall.
Michael Eavis, the founder of the festival, is proud of it. "Apparently you can see it from the Moon," he says.
The festival is not at Glastonbury at all, though the cone of the tor breaks the horizon. It is held at Pilton. Perhaps the mystical number of 144,000 here make up a new breed, Pilton Man, which never grows out of a youthful urge to unite ritually each year.
But Clare and David from York, who have "just got our bus passes", are not veterans from the first festival 36 years ago. "We got interested after our children left home," she says. "Dave likes world music, but it's more than that. I like the performance art. It's amazing."
Among the 30,000 cars in the car parks, there are plenty of Audis, Volvos and BMWs. Ten thousand, almost all young, came greenly by train and then chugged the last miles on dirty old buses.
"We're doing a dance degree at Greenwich," says my 20-year-old neighbour, pointing to her fair-haired friend. But now they're spending the weekend working in a vegan cafe, hoping to slip out to see Bjork. Bjork has been here before, she just can't remember.
If for some Glastonbury is joining the social season with Ascot and Henley, its style is still young and grungy. At Henley gentlemen must still wear ties. Here I spent 24 hours without seeing anyone else with one on. Ascot cocktail dresses and feather hats can look vulgar. Here the middle class come in muddy disguise.
The mud was shaping up nicely yesterday - slopping under reckless reinforcements of rain. Nearly 2,000 years ago, an Iron Age tribe built a lake-village near here with huts raised on a solid pile of brushwood clay. This skill has been lost.
Tents in the rain cover the slopes like a swarm of crabs in a nature documentary - their carapaces jostling. The maddest camp next to the giant speakers. Hayley Evans, with her 20-month-old boy, found a quieter family field, behind the open-air cinema. "My baby slept through. But they had Ghostbusters on, and every time there was a scream, I woke up with a jump."
By night the noise and stalls turn the site into an endless funfair. A neon red dragon spews real fire. Chewing on burgers or Mexican veggie wraps, "newgers" or neo-punks mill past Blendavenda (juices and smoothies), Magic Shoes (For Happy Feet), Fairylove (The Place Where the Fairies Get Their Wings). A child cries for a fake tattoo - three scorpions for a pound. "The kids love it," says Miriam Kandis, of north London, as her six-year-old daughter, Bea, grizzles against her sleeve. Well, it was 10.45pm.
The site is so big and the crowds so sluggish that it seems many arrive at the Jazz World stage just in time to miss Toumani Diabate and then slug back to the Dance stage in time to miss Courtney Orange.
The place has its own smell - firelighter smoke, fat from burgers, bacon, Thai food, beer-tent swill, rubbish bins, rubber boots, chemical lavatories. It is not true that Glastonbury is unfashionable dress-wise. Everyone is dressed in a way that would turn heads in the street. Leopardskin wellingtons, a leather kilt and tattoos make a man stand out at home. Not here. Some of the G8 protest tendency can even look frightening in a pixie hat.
A festival-goer dives into the ubiquitous Glastonbury mud, encouraged by a crowd of revellers
A field is given over to disabled camping. A woman in a tricycle wheelchair whizzes downhill towards the Pyramid stage, where Kasabian were to play last night. As a first-timer to Glastonbury, I found it more friendly and more disorientating than I expected. In a way it is an immense babysitting venture. The 144,000 are fed and kept safe. Security men swap radio messages through the night.
Just after dawn at 4am the music abates and a thrush sings. Otherwise nature does not get much of a look-in. Outside the site, honeysuckle smothers a hawthorn, and bramble blossom chokes the ditches. Inside, the grass is trodden into mud. For the locals with houses in the lanes around, this weekend is like August bank holiday for Notting Hillers - noisy and crowded. But at Glastonbury only 13 thefts from tents were reported in the first full day.
"Come back when Mr Eavis's cows are in sole occupancy," says an earnest young man with an interest in the National Youth Orchestra, who perform tomorrow. "You'll be able to see the Four Evangelists carved on the old tithe barn."
Thanks, George, I might just.
Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin Music Arts Telegraph
Saturday 9 June 2007
Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker
Went to the Hopper retrospective at Tate Modern, London, a couple of years ago. Stunning.
Go see ...
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Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.
A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.
The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper’s greatest hits—each a world, created ex nihilo—that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including “Pennsylvania Coal Town” (1947)—a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car—and “Office in a Small City” (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist’s death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show’s curators, Carol Troyen, has deëmphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper’s long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator.
While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled—with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water—Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.
There isn’t a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper portrayed himself and Jo in “Two Comedians” (1965-66), a late painting which is not in the show, as commedia-dell’arte clowns taking a farewell bow.
A good way to grasp Hopper paintings is to sketch them—never mind if, like me, you can’t draw. Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian. (He didn’t so much hold back from modernism, from which he took what he needed, as see beyond it. He objected to abstraction only as Picasso did, for its limits on emotional engagement.) Hopper’s means are light and shadow, which establish the masses and the relative locations of forms. Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.
Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive. His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. Another mistake that some observers make is to quibble with Hopper’s crudeness, notably in his renderings of flesh and foliage. His insults to taste are even instrumental to his art, focussing attention on what matters, which is drama. Clement Greenberg got it right when he remarked that if Hopper “were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”
Art: COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
“Ordinary People” continues
Next >
Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker
Go see ...
--
Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.
A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.
The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper’s greatest hits—each a world, created ex nihilo—that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including “Pennsylvania Coal Town” (1947)—a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car—and “Office in a Small City” (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist’s death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show’s curators, Carol Troyen, has deëmphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper’s long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator.
While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled—with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water—Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.
There isn’t a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper portrayed himself and Jo in “Two Comedians” (1965-66), a late painting which is not in the show, as commedia-dell’arte clowns taking a farewell bow.
A good way to grasp Hopper paintings is to sketch them—never mind if, like me, you can’t draw. Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian. (He didn’t so much hold back from modernism, from which he took what he needed, as see beyond it. He objected to abstraction only as Picasso did, for its limits on emotional engagement.) Hopper’s means are light and shadow, which establish the masses and the relative locations of forms. Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.
Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive. His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. Another mistake that some observers make is to quibble with Hopper’s crudeness, notably in his renderings of flesh and foliage. His insults to taste are even instrumental to his art, focussing attention on what matters, which is drama. Clement Greenberg got it right when he remarked that if Hopper “were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”
Art: COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
“Ordinary People” continues
Next >
Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker
Detroit spinners | Saturday Magazine | Arts | Telegraph
An electrifying stage act coupled with a teasing behind-the-scenes relationship has made the White Stripes the most thrilling and intriguing rock band of the past 10 years - Ben Thompson separates the art from the artifice
Son House was one of the greatest of all blues singers. Born on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1902, he died 86 years later - a long way north of his birthplace, amid the urban decay of Detroit, Michigan. The White Stripes: 'We know that making the kind of music we make is inherently ridiculous because we were born in the 1970s, we’re white and we’re from Detroit'
Just across that blighted city, in the predominantly Hispanic district of Mexicantown, a 13-year-old high school student called John Gillis (later to be known as Jack White) was wholly unaware of the old man's passing. Yet White's subsequent attempts to cross the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the ancient black blues singer and the young white rock fan (he once stated his artistic goal as being 'to trick 15-year-old girls into singing Son House's lyrics') would prove astoundingly successful.
The White Stripes, the band he formed to spread the electric pulse of excitement he felt on first hearing House's song Grinning In Your Face in his late teens, would introduce a whole new generation to the dusty delights of the blues, and establish them as the most consistently thrilling rock group of the 21st century. How these things came to pass is a story with as many twists and turns as a grizzled bluesman's biography.
But the central thread of the narrative is the relationship between Jack and his hard-drumming namesake - and lone bandmate - Meg White. Although she is invariably referred to within the clearly defined borders of the White Stripes' world as his 'little sister', Meg is actually Jack's ex-wife. And while this fact is now firmly in the public domain, it is very much off limits in on-the-record situations.
Absurd as the White Stripes' ritualised avowal of a demonstrable non-fact might appear in an era of remorseless accessibility, there is something intensely refreshing about Jack and Meg White's conviction that there are some questions that should not (or at least will not) be answered. And their unfashionable commitment to the preservation of their own mystery has certainly paid dividends.
As the White Stripes pull up beside Nashville's Blackbird recording studios (in which they recently completed work on their new album) it is hard to think of any pairing in pop who could make a more instantaneous and dramatic visual impact.
As brightly coloured songbirds flit and swivel in the magnolia-scented southern spring air, Jack, 31, is at the wheel of his immaculate cream 1960 Ford Thunderbird, with Meg, 32, seated demurely by his side.
Both are dressed in their habitual black and red - a routinised garb which the latter sees as being 'like a school uniform: it means you can just focus on what you're doing, because everyone's always wearing the same thing'. Yet this improbably glamorous duo could not be more fastidiously styled if they were Johnny Depp and Parker Posey starring in a Tim Burton remake of American Graffiti.
The marked contrast between the White Stripes' aura of old-school Hollywood glamour and the earthy spontaneity of their music is in no way accidental. 'Probably my favourite thing that's ever been written about us,' Jack White avers genially, having sat down in a sumptuous cerise-flock-wallpapered reception room, 'was that the White Stripes are "simultaneously the most real and the most fake band in the world".' He breaks into a Woody Woodpecker cackle. 'That's a high compliment - to be top of both those charts...'
Continued
Next page
Detroit spinners Saturday Magazine Arts Telegraph
Sunday 3 June 2007
Sheffield Theatres - Dylan Thomas: Return Journey
Dylan Thomas: Return Journey has enjoyed international success and worldwide acclaim and played both London and New York seasons. Blending beauty, humour and passion, Dylan Thomas' electrifying presence is brought to life by award-winning Welsh actor Bob Kingdom.
This is an incredible tour-de-force performance for the 21st anniversary farewell UK tour of this revisited legendary production that has been internationally acclaimed around the world. ‘I could have listened to his spell-binding, word wizardry for hours’ The Times ‘Thomas' intense love affair with language transmitted with hypnotic-beauty’ New York Times ‘He creates an actor/author partnership to match the very greatest’ - London Evening Standard
Presented by Richard Jordan Original Direction by Anthony Hopkins with Bob Kingdom as Dylan Thomas.
Sheffield Theatres - Dylan Thomas: Return Journey
This is an incredible tour-de-force performance for the 21st anniversary farewell UK tour of this revisited legendary production that has been internationally acclaimed around the world. ‘I could have listened to his spell-binding, word wizardry for hours’ The Times ‘Thomas' intense love affair with language transmitted with hypnotic-beauty’ New York Times ‘He creates an actor/author partnership to match the very greatest’ - London Evening Standard
Presented by Richard Jordan Original Direction by Anthony Hopkins with Bob Kingdom as Dylan Thomas.
Sheffield Theatres - Dylan Thomas: Return Journey
Saturday 2 June 2007
To die for | Saturday Magazine | Arts | Telegraph
Damien Hirst may have mellowed since his hellraising days, but his capacity for the sensational has not waned. As the artist unleashes a new exhibition, crowned by a diamond-encrusted skull worth £50 million, Will Self is granted a very high-security preview ...
In pictures: For the Love of God
In pictures: Selected works
Richard Dorment's review
Thursday, May 10, 2007. We are in Newport Street, London SE11. To one side is a non-descript row of light-industrial units, to the other the railway viaduct along which the Eurostar trains slow-sway their way through the somnolent southern suburbs bound for Paris. This bit of Lambeth seems like a scrag-end of the metropolis: implausibly close to the Neo-Gothic power station of Westminster and the Brutalist cultural blockhouses of the South Bank, yet a world apart.
Damien Hirst: 'We can't be humping about steel and glass when we're old; we'll have to make little wooden things'
Still, cities have long memories, bred in the brick. Within yards of here the Lambeth Pleasure Gardens once spread, with their contrived grottoes and pseudo-sylvan groves, their lightshows, water features and hidden string ensembles - a 17thcentury exercise in special effects. Near here, too, was Tradescant's Ark, London's first museum, where the eponymous antiquarian amassed a great wealth of animal bones, stuffed birds and exotica from far-flung cultures.
We are also in purlieus of Elias Ashmole, the alchemist - and collector - who's buried under a black slab in South Lambeth Church that proclaims his name will endure as long as his Oxford museum. And, of course, Lambeth is William Blake's London: the garden nudist, the visionary who drew the angels he saw doing synchronised swimming in time-goo. Blake, of whom it was once said, 'His work shows what a bad artist would be like, if he happened to be a genius.'
There, walking beside the railway arches in a knitted helmet - complete with earflaps - wearing a leather jacket with an iridescent skull across its shoulders, an off-white T-shirt with a dove motif on its breast, and half-arsed black bondage trousers (they look capable of confining only the seriously febrile), is the lineal descendant of Ashmole, Blake and Tradescant: Damien Hirst, the curator of his own museum, the artificer of pleasurable torture gardens, whose self-professed alchemical aim is to cheat death through the sheer chutzpah of his creations and his collecting. He's on the phone.
And stays on and off it for the remainder of the six hours we spend together. Interviewers remark on Hirst's phenomenal energy: his gourmand's attempt to ingest the world, quite as much as he vomits his art into it. Others who've met him have been bamboozled by his bewildering shifts of persona: from mechant Machiavellian, to ingenue, to idiot savant, to - in their purview - surprisingly well-educated discourser on the history of art and his place within it.
But I greet none of these, only Damien, whom I first met in 1994, then knocked about with a bit during what his friend - and art dealer - Jay Jopling describes, not a little ironically, as 'the glory years'; that heady period in the mid to late 1990s when, so far as Hirst and his peers were concerned, the kaleidoscope had been shaken and the pieces were in flux. Before they settled, Hirst et al made to re-order the London art world. And they succeeded.
If I'm paraphrasing Tony Blair's notorious sound-burp, eructated after 9/11, it's for a reason. Blair and Hirst were the polarities of this era: nodal points around which the energies of our very metropolitan society have flowed for a decade. If Blair had the hubris to seize upon the destruction of the World Trade Centre as an opportunity for a Nietzschean re-evaluation of all values, then Hirst had already got there, with his call for the perpetrators of the atrocity to be viewed as artists. This statement he later apologised for - although never retracted.
Now, May 10, 2007, Blair is on his way out. As Hirst and I sit drinking tea made by the artist himself in the studenty kitchenette of his London atelier, his nemesis is fighting back the tears in front of his constituency party in County Durham: 'Sometimes expectations were too high,' Blair moans, 'but at least I had a go.' It's a mea culpa we can never conceive of Hirst making; nor can we imagine him committing the moral solecism of describing the bloody flux of Iraq as 'blowback'.
No. Blair is on his way out, off to the US lecture circuit to pay his mortgage, taking his religious belief with him. Meanwhile, Hirst is on his way up, with his first show at Jopling's White Cube since 2003's Romance in the Age of Uncertainty; a show that may have received a critical excoriation but garnered prices that made him the highest-paid living artist in the world.
Blair and his apparatchiks may have come to power in 1997 saying that they were seriously comfortable with the seriously rich - but they were never comfortable with Hirst; and the very cynosure of the Great Wheel of Spin they tried to rev up around 'Cool Britannia' was a dark and numinous hole, for the artist's work exposes that which underpins all capitalism, including Blairism, namely - to quote the anthropologist Mary Douglas - that 'Money is only an extreme and specialised form of ritual.' Or, as Hirst himself sums up the Antihirst's premiership: 'The lying c***. I hated all that spin. I just looked at him and thought, you're a fraud.'
Continued
Next page
To die for Saturday Magazine Arts Telegraph
In pictures: For the Love of God
In pictures: Selected works
Richard Dorment's review
Thursday, May 10, 2007. We are in Newport Street, London SE11. To one side is a non-descript row of light-industrial units, to the other the railway viaduct along which the Eurostar trains slow-sway their way through the somnolent southern suburbs bound for Paris. This bit of Lambeth seems like a scrag-end of the metropolis: implausibly close to the Neo-Gothic power station of Westminster and the Brutalist cultural blockhouses of the South Bank, yet a world apart.
Damien Hirst: 'We can't be humping about steel and glass when we're old; we'll have to make little wooden things'
Still, cities have long memories, bred in the brick. Within yards of here the Lambeth Pleasure Gardens once spread, with their contrived grottoes and pseudo-sylvan groves, their lightshows, water features and hidden string ensembles - a 17thcentury exercise in special effects. Near here, too, was Tradescant's Ark, London's first museum, where the eponymous antiquarian amassed a great wealth of animal bones, stuffed birds and exotica from far-flung cultures.
We are also in purlieus of Elias Ashmole, the alchemist - and collector - who's buried under a black slab in South Lambeth Church that proclaims his name will endure as long as his Oxford museum. And, of course, Lambeth is William Blake's London: the garden nudist, the visionary who drew the angels he saw doing synchronised swimming in time-goo. Blake, of whom it was once said, 'His work shows what a bad artist would be like, if he happened to be a genius.'
There, walking beside the railway arches in a knitted helmet - complete with earflaps - wearing a leather jacket with an iridescent skull across its shoulders, an off-white T-shirt with a dove motif on its breast, and half-arsed black bondage trousers (they look capable of confining only the seriously febrile), is the lineal descendant of Ashmole, Blake and Tradescant: Damien Hirst, the curator of his own museum, the artificer of pleasurable torture gardens, whose self-professed alchemical aim is to cheat death through the sheer chutzpah of his creations and his collecting. He's on the phone.
And stays on and off it for the remainder of the six hours we spend together. Interviewers remark on Hirst's phenomenal energy: his gourmand's attempt to ingest the world, quite as much as he vomits his art into it. Others who've met him have been bamboozled by his bewildering shifts of persona: from mechant Machiavellian, to ingenue, to idiot savant, to - in their purview - surprisingly well-educated discourser on the history of art and his place within it.
But I greet none of these, only Damien, whom I first met in 1994, then knocked about with a bit during what his friend - and art dealer - Jay Jopling describes, not a little ironically, as 'the glory years'; that heady period in the mid to late 1990s when, so far as Hirst and his peers were concerned, the kaleidoscope had been shaken and the pieces were in flux. Before they settled, Hirst et al made to re-order the London art world. And they succeeded.
If I'm paraphrasing Tony Blair's notorious sound-burp, eructated after 9/11, it's for a reason. Blair and Hirst were the polarities of this era: nodal points around which the energies of our very metropolitan society have flowed for a decade. If Blair had the hubris to seize upon the destruction of the World Trade Centre as an opportunity for a Nietzschean re-evaluation of all values, then Hirst had already got there, with his call for the perpetrators of the atrocity to be viewed as artists. This statement he later apologised for - although never retracted.
Now, May 10, 2007, Blair is on his way out. As Hirst and I sit drinking tea made by the artist himself in the studenty kitchenette of his London atelier, his nemesis is fighting back the tears in front of his constituency party in County Durham: 'Sometimes expectations were too high,' Blair moans, 'but at least I had a go.' It's a mea culpa we can never conceive of Hirst making; nor can we imagine him committing the moral solecism of describing the bloody flux of Iraq as 'blowback'.
No. Blair is on his way out, off to the US lecture circuit to pay his mortgage, taking his religious belief with him. Meanwhile, Hirst is on his way up, with his first show at Jopling's White Cube since 2003's Romance in the Age of Uncertainty; a show that may have received a critical excoriation but garnered prices that made him the highest-paid living artist in the world.
Blair and his apparatchiks may have come to power in 1997 saying that they were seriously comfortable with the seriously rich - but they were never comfortable with Hirst; and the very cynosure of the Great Wheel of Spin they tried to rev up around 'Cool Britannia' was a dark and numinous hole, for the artist's work exposes that which underpins all capitalism, including Blairism, namely - to quote the anthropologist Mary Douglas - that 'Money is only an extreme and specialised form of ritual.' Or, as Hirst himself sums up the Antihirst's premiership: 'The lying c***. I hated all that spin. I just looked at him and thought, you're a fraud.'
Continued
Next page
To die for Saturday Magazine Arts Telegraph
Sunday 27 May 2007
Lisa Lindley Jones - Road To Nowhere | Single | Record Box
A very interesting approach to a classic song ... love it.
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This is the first thing i’ve heard from Lisa Lindley Jones so I don’t really have anything to compare this track to as far as knowing if this is her usual style or not. Road To Nowhere is another one of the Audi TT Remastered series that can be downloaded from the site.
It is comfortably one of the best tracks in the series, it’s got a breezy effortless cool to it, turned from the quirky pop of Talking Heads into this chilled out version. I’ve done a search online to try and find an album by her but alas no success. Shame as I do like her voice on this track, so i’ll be keeping an eye out for any future releases.
--
This is the first thing i’ve heard from Lisa Lindley Jones so I don’t really have anything to compare this track to as far as knowing if this is her usual style or not. Road To Nowhere is another one of the Audi TT Remastered series that can be downloaded from the site.
It is comfortably one of the best tracks in the series, it’s got a breezy effortless cool to it, turned from the quirky pop of Talking Heads into this chilled out version. I’ve done a search online to try and find an album by her but alas no success. Shame as I do like her voice on this track, so i’ll be keeping an eye out for any future releases.
Saturday 26 May 2007
A VC: David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job
Must be nice to be perfect, Mr Farber ...
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David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job
The Washington Post ran a story about email bankruptcy yesterday and featured my post declaring bankruptcy at the top of the story. The writer Mike Musgrove ended the story by noting that I did not return calls or emails requesting a comment. That's true, but it's not because I didn't see the emails and phone calls. Email and voice communications for me is a triage. For every call and email that I return/reply, there are probably two or three that I don't. I had to make a decision about whether talking to Mike and his colleagues Sabrina Valle and Richard Drezen was more important than all the other incoming calls and emails. I didn't particularly want to be associated with this story and so I decided not to get back to them. I got into the story anyway.
And as a result, I got to see a guy named David Farber, who runs an email list called Interesting People, say in the same piece that if I can't manage my email load, I should "get out of the technology field."
That pisses me off. I am a hypercommunicator. I send and receive hundreds of emails a day, I blog incessantly, I instant message, text message, and twitter all the time, I do calls on my office phone, cell phone, and home phone all day and night. I bet I communicate at 10x the rate that David does. It's exhausting frankly.
My problem isn't that I don't spend the time it takes to reply to every email. My problem is my incessant emailing, blogging, texting, twittering, etc allows me to touch thousands of people every day. And many/most of them write back. And I do my best. Which is not good enough. At least for David Farber.
Guess what. I am not quitting. My job. Or my hypercommunicating.
A VC: David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job
--
David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job
The Washington Post ran a story about email bankruptcy yesterday and featured my post declaring bankruptcy at the top of the story. The writer Mike Musgrove ended the story by noting that I did not return calls or emails requesting a comment. That's true, but it's not because I didn't see the emails and phone calls. Email and voice communications for me is a triage. For every call and email that I return/reply, there are probably two or three that I don't. I had to make a decision about whether talking to Mike and his colleagues Sabrina Valle and Richard Drezen was more important than all the other incoming calls and emails. I didn't particularly want to be associated with this story and so I decided not to get back to them. I got into the story anyway.
And as a result, I got to see a guy named David Farber, who runs an email list called Interesting People, say in the same piece that if I can't manage my email load, I should "get out of the technology field."
That pisses me off. I am a hypercommunicator. I send and receive hundreds of emails a day, I blog incessantly, I instant message, text message, and twitter all the time, I do calls on my office phone, cell phone, and home phone all day and night. I bet I communicate at 10x the rate that David does. It's exhausting frankly.
My problem isn't that I don't spend the time it takes to reply to every email. My problem is my incessant emailing, blogging, texting, twittering, etc allows me to touch thousands of people every day. And many/most of them write back. And I do my best. Which is not good enough. At least for David Farber.
Guess what. I am not quitting. My job. Or my hypercommunicating.
A VC: David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job
Grayson Perry - Pottery - The Saatchi Gallery
November seems an awful long time away ...
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The Saatchi Gallery is moving to Chelsea, and will open again in November 2007. The Duke of York's HQ, Sloane Square, offers an ideal environment to view contemporary art, with very large well-proportioned rooms and high ceilings. The Gallery will occupy the entire 50,000 sq ft building giving the gallery scope for a book shop, educational facilities and a café/bar. It is ideally located in a central London location on Kings Road, Chelsea. The Triumph of Painting will be on hold until the new Gallery opens.
Grayson Perry - Pottery - The Saatchi Gallery
--
The Saatchi Gallery is moving to Chelsea, and will open again in November 2007. The Duke of York's HQ, Sloane Square, offers an ideal environment to view contemporary art, with very large well-proportioned rooms and high ceilings. The Gallery will occupy the entire 50,000 sq ft building giving the gallery scope for a book shop, educational facilities and a café/bar. It is ideally located in a central London location on Kings Road, Chelsea. The Triumph of Painting will be on hold until the new Gallery opens.
Grayson Perry - Pottery - The Saatchi Gallery
Wiki Altruism | Wallstrip
I can't work out why I cannot embed the video frame here - increasingly I find this a very poor blogging tool - anyway, have a look at the link below ... good old URLs, they never let you down ...
A very interesting - and funny - interview:
5-18-07 Jimmy Wales Wallstrip
A very interesting - and funny - interview:
5-18-07 Jimmy Wales Wallstrip
The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com
The YouTube Election
The "Vote Different" anti-Hillary ad, Newt Gingrich's Spanish apology, Mitt Romney's trail of flip-flops—this is the mouse-click mayhem of the 2008 campaign, in which anyone can join. It's the end of the old-fashioned, literary presidential epic, and the dawn of YouTube politics.
The presidential epic is poised to become a quaint relic, like the concept album and the comic operetta. Those who love words and lots of them will miss its dramatic heaves and reverses, mourn the loss of its grandiose scale. The presidential epic dramatizes the race for the White House as a cattle drive, with all the cunning intrigue, betrayal, coloratura, tainted ambition, and bluster of a Shakespearean saga.
The 2008 presidential campaign had barely cracked its first yawn when a mischievous imp created a sensation with an update of the famous 1984 Apple TV commercial showing a buff, blonde Über-babe shattering a giant screen with a sledgehammer, liberating the slave drones from their indoctrinated trance. Only, in this revised version it was Hillary Clinton hobgoblinized as the looming commandant in the Orwellian nightmare, her bossy specter hectoring the flour faces of the bedraggled inmates. I didn't find the "Vote Different" ad particularly inspired or persuasive as anti-propaganda in its invocation of Fascism, but the whoosh it caused in the media fed off the Hillary fatigue felt by many, that calcified, sanctified aura of lockstep inevitability.
More creative involvement in the democratic process—how can this not be healthy? "Citizen journalists" and "citizen ad-makers," united in idealistic purpose—what's not to like? Yet inwardly I groan. Speaking for Me-self, the last thing I need is more crap to watch, no matter how ingenious or buzz-worthy it may be. I spend enough zombie time staring at screens without access to a supplemental pair of eyeballs. Between cable-news chat shows, regular news shows, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent reruns, I already clock so many hours watching TV on my TV that watching even more TV on my laptop is like giving myself extra homework. We're reaching the saturation point of what the social critic Paul Goodman called "spectatoritis."
The "Vote Different" anti-Hillary ad, Newt Gingrich's Spanish apology, Mitt Romney's trail of flip-flops—this is the mouse-click mayhem of the 2008 campaign, in which anyone can join. It's the end of the old-fashioned, literary presidential epic, and the dawn of YouTube politics.
The presidential epic is poised to become a quaint relic, like the concept album and the comic operetta. Those who love words and lots of them will miss its dramatic heaves and reverses, mourn the loss of its grandiose scale. The presidential epic dramatizes the race for the White House as a cattle drive, with all the cunning intrigue, betrayal, coloratura, tainted ambition, and bluster of a Shakespearean saga.
Consider the gargantuan gulp of What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer's thousand-plus-paged, tunnel-visioned account of the 1988 campaign, a rollicking Tom Wolfe–ish probe of the political right stuff with a cast of characters (Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Robert Dole) that in lesser hands might have come across as painted dummies; the spewing, drug-lashed delirium of Hunter S. Thompson's influential Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72; Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, with its high-definition portraits of Richard Nixon as a jerky robot out of rhythm with himself, Eugene McCarthy's Jesuitical face ("hard as the cold stone floor of a monastery at five in the morning"), and the brute force of Mayor Richard Daley's jowly constituency; and the one that started it all, the granddaddy of the tarmac chronicles, Theodore H. White's The Making of the President: 1960.
Consider, too, those classic tributaries to the presidential epic, instructive treats such as Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus, Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President: 1968, and Joe Klein's bacon-flavored roman à clef, Primary Colors. If the old-fashioned, bookish presidential epic depended upon intimate access or hovering proximity to the candidates as they work an endless series of rooms and stages, the newfangled campaign narrative is a peep-show collage—a weedy pastiche of slick ads, outtakes, bloopers, prankster spoofs, unguarded moments captured on amateur video, C-span excerpts, grainy flashbacks retrieved from the vaults, and choice baroque passages of Chris Matthews venting. YouTube, the free video-sharing bulletin board founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, is where it all happens. Mouse clicks and video clips, they go together like a nervous twitch. Where the presidential epic entails reams of psychological interpretation, novelistic scene setting, and historical placement, YouTube puts politics literally at one's fingertips in the active present, making it a narrative any mutant can join.
The 2008 presidential campaign had barely cracked its first yawn when a mischievous imp created a sensation with an update of the famous 1984 Apple TV commercial showing a buff, blonde Über-babe shattering a giant screen with a sledgehammer, liberating the slave drones from their indoctrinated trance. Only, in this revised version it was Hillary Clinton hobgoblinized as the looming commandant in the Orwellian nightmare, her bossy specter hectoring the flour faces of the bedraggled inmates. I didn't find the "Vote Different" ad particularly inspired or persuasive as anti-propaganda in its invocation of Fascism, but the whoosh it caused in the media fed off the Hillary fatigue felt by many, that calcified, sanctified aura of lockstep inevitability.
After a speculative tizzy in the political chatsphere as to the secret identity of the "Vote Different" auteur, Phil de Vellis surfaced at the Huffington Post to take credit and have his personal say. A supporter of Barack Obama's and a staffer at Blue State Digital (a pro-Democratic technology firm, from which he departed after the ad was sprung), de Vellis laid out his rationale for the mashup, insisting that he intended Hillary Clinton no disrespect. With a Nixonian clearing of the throat, he wrote, "Let me be clear: I am a proud Democrat, and I always have been. I support Senator Obama. I hope he wins the primary. (I recognize that this ad is not his style of politics.) I also believe that Senator Clinton is a great public servant, and if she should win the nomination, I would support her and wish her all the best."
What's less clear is how you can portray Clinton as totalitarianism's dour answer to Miss Jean Brodie, plugging into the right wing's witchiest caricature of her, and insist there's no ill will. It'd be like depicting Rudy Giuliani as Mussolini on the balcony, a malevolent bullfrog exhorting the masses, then disavowing it by saying, "Hey, don't get me wrong, I dig the guy." The most salient point in de Vellis's fess-up was not why he did what he did but how easily it was done: "I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs." No muss, no fuss, no brainstorming sessions with the creative team, no sending out for coffee and Danish, just a little quality time on the computer and voilà. Given the editing tools available to even a modest laptop and the ultra-low point of entry into the YouTube marina, de Vellis is no doubt correct when he signs off, "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What's "You" about this? It's a MeTube, for me. —Christopher Hitchens, Slate, April 9, 2007.
I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What's "You" about this? It's a MeTube, for me. —Christopher Hitchens, Slate, April 9, 2007.
More creative involvement in the democratic process—how can this not be healthy? "Citizen journalists" and "citizen ad-makers," united in idealistic purpose—what's not to like? Yet inwardly I groan. Speaking for Me-self, the last thing I need is more crap to watch, no matter how ingenious or buzz-worthy it may be. I spend enough zombie time staring at screens without access to a supplemental pair of eyeballs. Between cable-news chat shows, regular news shows, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent reruns, I already clock so many hours watching TV on my TV that watching even more TV on my laptop is like giving myself extra homework. We're reaching the saturation point of what the social critic Paul Goodman called "spectatoritis."
Not only do we (especially Me) face the dismal prospect of being bombarded by professional spot ads every time we turn on the radio or TV until the '08 election, but now, for fear of not being in the loop, we're compelled to keep up with an inundation of personal commentaries, fake ads, newsclips set to music, and homemade amateur guerrilla sorties from the Tarantinos of tomorrow.
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The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com
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The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com
RED HERRING | The $6M Buzz on Buzznet
Just about every web site loves buzz, but perhaps none so blatantly as Buzznet, a social networking site built around music and other pop culture brands, which on Thursday announced a $6 million round of funding.
The two-year-old site lets users post blog entries, videos, and photos revolving around specific musical artists and other popular personalities. The site has seen some buzz of its own of late, growing its users from 2 million to 6 million in the span of six months.
Redpoint Ventures joined the site’s original investors, Anthem Venture Partners, in the second round. Buzznet’s founders plan to spend some of that money to establish a separate social networking site focused on other topics, breaking away from the more music-oriented site.
“All these venture guys, they’re looking at what gets organic traffic, looking at the real DNA of things that are growing,” said Buzznet chairman Tyler Goldman. “We were getting inbound calls from all the top venture capital firms. We thought that since Redpoint had also been a big investor in MySpace that they understood the next evolution of the model.”
Mr. Goldman went to great pains to distinguish his site from MySpace, the social networking behemoth that also attracts plenty of attention from the music community. Mr. Goldman asserts that Buzznet provides more of a “programming” eye towards its content.
It culls from user-generated additions, expert blogger contributions, and professional contributions from popular personalities, such as the popular Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, to create what it hopes comes across as an authentic, engaging, controlled environment for users.
Mr. Goldman said that model offers a safe, lucrative space for advertisers to create their own mini-social networks for targeted demographics, as Honda recently did on Buzznet for its Civic campaign.
But a lot of folks are attempting to build branded media sites right now. Yahoo, for example, recently introduced its branded universe initiative that brings together content around specific, popular themes, such as the television show “The Office.” Traditional media companies themselves, meanwhile, are trying to hang on to some of their own buzz with social networking sites they run themselves, as NBC recently began doing.
Bill Woodward of Anthem Venture Partners, who was on the board of MySpace and the now-Yahoo-owned Launch Media, believes branded media networks are only in the “second inning”, poised for rapid growth.
“Making brands the key part of driving demographic traffic, there’s a lot more that can be done there,” said Mr. Woodward.
RED HERRING The $6M Buzz on Buzznet
The two-year-old site lets users post blog entries, videos, and photos revolving around specific musical artists and other popular personalities. The site has seen some buzz of its own of late, growing its users from 2 million to 6 million in the span of six months.
Redpoint Ventures joined the site’s original investors, Anthem Venture Partners, in the second round. Buzznet’s founders plan to spend some of that money to establish a separate social networking site focused on other topics, breaking away from the more music-oriented site.
“All these venture guys, they’re looking at what gets organic traffic, looking at the real DNA of things that are growing,” said Buzznet chairman Tyler Goldman. “We were getting inbound calls from all the top venture capital firms. We thought that since Redpoint had also been a big investor in MySpace that they understood the next evolution of the model.”
Mr. Goldman went to great pains to distinguish his site from MySpace, the social networking behemoth that also attracts plenty of attention from the music community. Mr. Goldman asserts that Buzznet provides more of a “programming” eye towards its content.
It culls from user-generated additions, expert blogger contributions, and professional contributions from popular personalities, such as the popular Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, to create what it hopes comes across as an authentic, engaging, controlled environment for users.
Mr. Goldman said that model offers a safe, lucrative space for advertisers to create their own mini-social networks for targeted demographics, as Honda recently did on Buzznet for its Civic campaign.
But a lot of folks are attempting to build branded media sites right now. Yahoo, for example, recently introduced its branded universe initiative that brings together content around specific, popular themes, such as the television show “The Office.” Traditional media companies themselves, meanwhile, are trying to hang on to some of their own buzz with social networking sites they run themselves, as NBC recently began doing.
Bill Woodward of Anthem Venture Partners, who was on the board of MySpace and the now-Yahoo-owned Launch Media, believes branded media networks are only in the “second inning”, poised for rapid growth.
“Making brands the key part of driving demographic traffic, there’s a lot more that can be done there,” said Mr. Woodward.
RED HERRING The $6M Buzz on Buzznet
Saturday 12 May 2007
A rule that isn't set in stone | Visual Arts | Arts | Telegraph
A controversial new building has the denizens of Bath in a lather, writes Ellis Woodman
Prior to settling in Bath in 1815, where he amassed one of the great private art collections of the 19th century, Sir William Holburne led a less sedentary life.
He joined the Royal Navy at the age of 11, fought at Trafalgar before the year was out and then in Brazil, the West Indies and the Mediterranean.
Prior to settling in Bath in 1815, where he amassed one of the great private art collections of the 19th century, Sir William Holburne led a less sedentary life.
He joined the Royal Navy at the age of 11, fought at Trafalgar before the year was out and then in Brazil, the West Indies and the Mediterranean.
One likes to think that on the darker days during their five-year campaign to extend the museum that today houses Holburne's collection, the trustees have been able to draw strength from their founder's fondness for a battle.
For a battle it has certainly been. The idea of extending one of the country's best-loved small museums was always going to be contentious.
Given that the building is Grade I listed and occupies one of the most prominent locations in a world heritage site, for many Bath residents - the most vociferous of whom have instigated a "Halt the Holburne" campaign - it is little short of criminal.
So why have the trustees committed themselves to this thankless venture? In short, because the museum's future depends on its success. At present, space is so tight that 70 per cent of the Holburne's holdings (predominantly Old Masters, bronzes and decorative artworks) have to be kept in storage at any time.
Still more frustratingly, there is room to host only the smallest of temporary exhibitions - a situation that has stymied all attempts to increase annual visitor numbers above the current 33,000.
Eric Parry Architects' scheme, which has recently been submitted for planning permission, promises an 80 per cent increase in display area. If built, it is anticipated that attendance figures will more than double.
The Holburne stands at the end of the ramrod-straight Great Pulteney Street - arguably the grandest street in a city where there is plenty of competition for that title.
Dating from 1796, it was originally built as a hotel and gaming house, but doubled as a gateway to Sydney Gardens, the pleasure ground that lies behind. Passing under the building, visitors would emerge beneath a raised bandstand to discover a bucolic landscape dotted by freestanding "supper boxes" (dining huts).
Having bought the building in 1910, the trustees of the museum commissioned Sir Reginald Blomfield, the architect of London's Regent Street, to remodel it. The two grand galleries that he created on the upper floors are magnificent.
However, if Blomfield's scheme has a failing, it is the poor relationship that it establishes to the park. His recast garden elevation is dominated by a central bay, accommodating a new staircase, which carves the building into two. More problematically still, this staircase blocks the passage from the street into Sydney Gardens.
Parry's project will correct this, re-establishing the building's significance as a gateway between city and park. His plan is to take Blomfield's staircase and move it a couple of metres off the central axis, enabling visitors to pass directly through the café that occupies the ground floor of the extension and into the garden beyond.
Supported above the fully glazed café are three floors of largely windowless exhibition space, giving the building something of the appearance of a casket. The external walls will be faced in large ceramic elements, glazed to a colour that the architect describes as "cobalt over olive".
This choice is designed to reflect the colour of both trees and sky: it is with the natural environment of Sydney Gardens rather than Bath's Georgian architecture that the building seeks its alignment. The play of shadow and reflection where the ceramic fins weave into the lower level glazing should be particularly rich, giving the building an ephemeral quality that resonates with its verdant setting.
Nevertheless, the fact that the scheme contravenes the one sine qua non of building in Bath - all projects have to be in Bath stone - has proved a particular source of outrage to its opponents. The material homogeneity of Bath's architecture is undoubtedly one of the city's great glories, and should not be sacrificed lightly.
However, on this site if nowhere else, one can make a powerful case that the normal rules should be suspended. The experience of passing into Sydney Gardens via the Holburne stands to be a charmed "through the looking glass" moment, in which Parry's building will seem the gateway to a new world.
A rule that isn't set in stone Visual Arts Arts Telegraph
For a battle it has certainly been. The idea of extending one of the country's best-loved small museums was always going to be contentious.
Given that the building is Grade I listed and occupies one of the most prominent locations in a world heritage site, for many Bath residents - the most vociferous of whom have instigated a "Halt the Holburne" campaign - it is little short of criminal.
So why have the trustees committed themselves to this thankless venture? In short, because the museum's future depends on its success. At present, space is so tight that 70 per cent of the Holburne's holdings (predominantly Old Masters, bronzes and decorative artworks) have to be kept in storage at any time.
Still more frustratingly, there is room to host only the smallest of temporary exhibitions - a situation that has stymied all attempts to increase annual visitor numbers above the current 33,000.
Eric Parry Architects' scheme, which has recently been submitted for planning permission, promises an 80 per cent increase in display area. If built, it is anticipated that attendance figures will more than double.
The Holburne stands at the end of the ramrod-straight Great Pulteney Street - arguably the grandest street in a city where there is plenty of competition for that title.
Dating from 1796, it was originally built as a hotel and gaming house, but doubled as a gateway to Sydney Gardens, the pleasure ground that lies behind. Passing under the building, visitors would emerge beneath a raised bandstand to discover a bucolic landscape dotted by freestanding "supper boxes" (dining huts).
Having bought the building in 1910, the trustees of the museum commissioned Sir Reginald Blomfield, the architect of London's Regent Street, to remodel it. The two grand galleries that he created on the upper floors are magnificent.
However, if Blomfield's scheme has a failing, it is the poor relationship that it establishes to the park. His recast garden elevation is dominated by a central bay, accommodating a new staircase, which carves the building into two. More problematically still, this staircase blocks the passage from the street into Sydney Gardens.
Parry's project will correct this, re-establishing the building's significance as a gateway between city and park. His plan is to take Blomfield's staircase and move it a couple of metres off the central axis, enabling visitors to pass directly through the café that occupies the ground floor of the extension and into the garden beyond.
Supported above the fully glazed café are three floors of largely windowless exhibition space, giving the building something of the appearance of a casket. The external walls will be faced in large ceramic elements, glazed to a colour that the architect describes as "cobalt over olive".
This choice is designed to reflect the colour of both trees and sky: it is with the natural environment of Sydney Gardens rather than Bath's Georgian architecture that the building seeks its alignment. The play of shadow and reflection where the ceramic fins weave into the lower level glazing should be particularly rich, giving the building an ephemeral quality that resonates with its verdant setting.
Nevertheless, the fact that the scheme contravenes the one sine qua non of building in Bath - all projects have to be in Bath stone - has proved a particular source of outrage to its opponents. The material homogeneity of Bath's architecture is undoubtedly one of the city's great glories, and should not be sacrificed lightly.
However, on this site if nowhere else, one can make a powerful case that the normal rules should be suspended. The experience of passing into Sydney Gardens via the Holburne stands to be a charmed "through the looking glass" moment, in which Parry's building will seem the gateway to a new world.
A rule that isn't set in stone Visual Arts Arts Telegraph
Books: The New Yorker - Technology, Where Old meets New ....
I’m writing in the kitchen, surrounded by technology. There is a cordless phone, a microwave oven, and a high-end refrigerator, and I’m working on a laptop. Nearby is a gas range, a French cast-iron enamelled casserole, and a ceramic teapot. Drawers to my left hold cutlery—some modern Chinese-made stainless steel, some Georgian sterling silver. In front of me is a wooden bookstand, made for me by a talented friend and festooned with Post-it reminders of things to do (a method I prefer to my digital calendar). I’m sitting on a semi-antique wooden chair, though when my back is hurting I tend to switch to a new, expensive ergonomic contraption.
Perhaps you think I should have said that I’m surrounded by things, only some of which really count as technology. It’s common to think of technology as encompassing only very new, science-intensive things—ones with electronic or digital bits, for instance. But it’s also possible to view it just as things (or, indeed, processes) that enable us to perform tasks more effectively than we could without them. The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are.
The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.” Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest. Even the older items were once innovations—like my Brown Betty teapot, whose design goes back to the seventeenth century but which is still produced in England, not having been significantly improved on since. And even the newest items contain design or functional elements from the past, such as the QWERTY keyboard of my laptop, patented in 1878.
The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it seems, an innovation—the steam engine, electricity, computers—brings a new age into being.
In “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls “the innovation-centric account” of technology.
The book is a provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same—indeed, a given technology’s grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives.
Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”
Consider the Second World War. When we think about the technologies that figured large in it, what comes to mind? Perhaps Germany’s V-2 terror weapons, with their emblematic role in Thomas Pynchon’s “A screaming comes across the sky.” Or the triumph of theoretical physics and metallurgical engineering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the things that capture the imagination, and yet Edgerton offers an arrestingly different perspective, calling German investment in the V-2 project “economically and militarily irrational.” One historian wrote that “more people died producing it than died from being hit by it.” Edgerton estimates that although the Germans spent five hundred million dollars on the project, “the destructive power of all the V-2s produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a city by the RAF.” Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money, “it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s, one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other military output, would have done to Allied fighting power.”
So what forms of technology really pulled their weight in the war? Horse-powered transport, for one. Long past the age of steam—and well into the age of automobiles and aviation—the power of horseflesh remained critical. In the Italian campaign alone, the United States Army’s 10th Mountain Division used more than ten thousand horses and mules, and the great tank general George S. Patton wished he’d had many more: In almost any conceivable theater of operations, situations arise where the presence of horse cavalry, in a ratio of a division to an army, will be of vital moment. . . . Had we possessed an American cavalry division with pack artillery in Tunisia and in Sicily, not a German would have escaped, because horse cavalry possesses the additional gear ratio which permits it to attain sufficient speed through mountainous country to get behind and hold the enemy until the more powerful infantry and tanks can come up and destroy him.
The Germans were better supplied: at the beginning of 1945, the Wehrmacht had 1.2 million horses in its ranks, and, altogether, the Germans lost some 1.5 million horses during the war.
Even today, horses aren’t quite history. In Afghanistan, the American Special Forces have had to rediscover how to use them. “Horses are actually an ideal way to get around there,” one correspondent embedded with the Green Berets has said. “No manual has ever been written on how to coordinate horse attacks with B-52s, so the Green Berets had to do OJT”—on-the-job training. “Early on, there was a cavalry charge with about three hundred horses where they had cut it so fine that as soon as the bombs hit the ridge the horses were riding through the gray smoke; it was quite an impressive sight.”
What Else Is New?: Books: The New Yorker
Perhaps you think I should have said that I’m surrounded by things, only some of which really count as technology. It’s common to think of technology as encompassing only very new, science-intensive things—ones with electronic or digital bits, for instance. But it’s also possible to view it just as things (or, indeed, processes) that enable us to perform tasks more effectively than we could without them. The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are.
The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.” Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest. Even the older items were once innovations—like my Brown Betty teapot, whose design goes back to the seventeenth century but which is still produced in England, not having been significantly improved on since. And even the newest items contain design or functional elements from the past, such as the QWERTY keyboard of my laptop, patented in 1878.
The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it seems, an innovation—the steam engine, electricity, computers—brings a new age into being.
In “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls “the innovation-centric account” of technology.
The book is a provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same—indeed, a given technology’s grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives.
Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”
Consider the Second World War. When we think about the technologies that figured large in it, what comes to mind? Perhaps Germany’s V-2 terror weapons, with their emblematic role in Thomas Pynchon’s “A screaming comes across the sky.” Or the triumph of theoretical physics and metallurgical engineering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the things that capture the imagination, and yet Edgerton offers an arrestingly different perspective, calling German investment in the V-2 project “economically and militarily irrational.” One historian wrote that “more people died producing it than died from being hit by it.” Edgerton estimates that although the Germans spent five hundred million dollars on the project, “the destructive power of all the V-2s produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a city by the RAF.” Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money, “it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s, one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other military output, would have done to Allied fighting power.”
So what forms of technology really pulled their weight in the war? Horse-powered transport, for one. Long past the age of steam—and well into the age of automobiles and aviation—the power of horseflesh remained critical. In the Italian campaign alone, the United States Army’s 10th Mountain Division used more than ten thousand horses and mules, and the great tank general George S. Patton wished he’d had many more: In almost any conceivable theater of operations, situations arise where the presence of horse cavalry, in a ratio of a division to an army, will be of vital moment. . . . Had we possessed an American cavalry division with pack artillery in Tunisia and in Sicily, not a German would have escaped, because horse cavalry possesses the additional gear ratio which permits it to attain sufficient speed through mountainous country to get behind and hold the enemy until the more powerful infantry and tanks can come up and destroy him.
The Germans were better supplied: at the beginning of 1945, the Wehrmacht had 1.2 million horses in its ranks, and, altogether, the Germans lost some 1.5 million horses during the war.
Even today, horses aren’t quite history. In Afghanistan, the American Special Forces have had to rediscover how to use them. “Horses are actually an ideal way to get around there,” one correspondent embedded with the Green Berets has said. “No manual has ever been written on how to coordinate horse attacks with B-52s, so the Green Berets had to do OJT”—on-the-job training. “Early on, there was a cavalry charge with about three hundred horses where they had cut it so fine that as soon as the bombs hit the ridge the horses were riding through the gray smoke; it was quite an impressive sight.”
What Else Is New?: Books: The New Yorker
Sunday 6 May 2007
Peter Kay puts fun in Formula One | Tv And Radio | Arts | Telegraph
Talking of Great British comedians ...
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Peter Kay is excited. He has watched the first four episodes of Roary the Racing Car, his sunny new preschool animation series, with a group of small children and is very hopeful that the show will have genuine staying power. “I love the idea that it may have longevity. When those children were so clearly loving the show, I started getting all emotional, thinking that their children could be watching it in thirty years’ time.”
Roary the Racing Car drove up at exactly the right time for Kay. “I’d always wanted to do a children’s series. I love the idea that if something is a success, your voice is preserved for decades.
“Think of Arthur Lowe doing Mr Men or Michael Hordren doing Paddington Bear or Bernard Cribbins doing The Wombles or Neil Morrissey doing Bob the Builder or Ringo Starr doing Thomas the Tank Engine. Those performances are all classics and have already lasted for several decades.
“Children don’t mind when something was made – they don’t discriminate in that way. I tape very early episodes of Rainbow and Trumpton for my son and watch them with him. He loves them. Trumpton was made in 1967, but he still watches it like it’s brand new. Children love the innocence of those fables, and it’s great to see the excitement and wonder in a child’s eyes as he listens to Brian Cant’s voice. I was exactly the same when I was his age in 1977. If something really works, it can last forever.”
To talk to, Peter Kay is engaging, effervescent and entertaining. It’s qualities such as these that have helped make him the most popular comedian at work in Britain today. His last live tour, Mum Wants a Bungalow, was seen by more than half a million people. His book, The Sound of Laughter, has shifted a million copies, making it the biggest-selling British autobiography ever. He’s also had two No1 singles for Comic Relief: (Is This the Way to) Amarillo and (I am Gonna Be) 500 Miles.
The 33-year-old, who is currently starring in The Producers at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, voices the character of Big Chris in the series, while racing legend Sir Stirling Moss narrates. Kay says he has been bowled over by the standard of the series, which is produced by Chapman Entertainment, the producers of Fifi and the Flowertots, and animated by Cosgrove Hall Films, responsible for Danger Mouse and Chorlton and the Wheelies.
Roary the Racing Car, which will be launched on Five on Monday and Nick Jr in June, was originated almost a decade ago by David Jenkins, who spent four years working in senior management at Brand Hatch and Goodwood Race Circuits. He had the idea of making the series whilst watching the Grand Prix on TV with his son, Tom, who at the time was 18 months old.
Set among the big personalities and highly-tuned egos at the Silver Hatch race track, the programme centres on Roary, a novice, bright-red, single-seater racing car whose enthusiasm and curiosity often lead him into trouble. Underneath his bonnet, however, beats a heart of chrome.
Kay almost whistles in admiration at the care with which Roary the Racing Car has been assembled. “Watching the series, I’ve been blown away. They’ve combined CGI with stop-animation and it’s so well done, you can’t see the join. The attention to detail is extraordinary. For the last four years, people have been working on this round the clock, producing just a few seconds of footage a day. The animators work through the night in a converted mill, playing Canadian thrash metal. They’re really intense as they move these figures around.
“But all that effort is absolutely worth it. Chapman Entertainment and Cosgrove Hall have a great track record in animation. Their costume department is amazing. You can see the tiny ironing-board Postman Pat uses to iron his shirt. It’s like The Borrowers!”
Kay plays the chief mechanic and father figure to all the cars. “It’s basically me,” he chuckles. “I’ve done a lot of ad libbing because that makes the character more three-dimensional. Ad libbing is sometimes seen as forbidden fruit in animation, but the producers are delighted because it brings a freshness to the series and gives them more to play with.”
The comedian, who has written and starred in such acclaimed, multi-award-winning C4 sitcoms as Phoenix Nights, Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere and That Peter Kay Thing, says he is motivated by an almost childlike desire to bring pleasure. “If you can be involved with something like Roary the Racing Car, it’s just bliss,” he enthuses. “It may sound like a cliché, but you’re bringing happiness to people when you do a project like that. That innocence of Trumpton from 1967 – maybe that’s something I’ve taken from my own childhood into my work.”
That urge to spread fun has characterised Kay’s entire career. His humour has always traded in warmth rather than cynicism. “No one gets slagged off in my comedy,” reflects the comic, who was born and bred in Bolton. “It’s not the comedy of hate. I hope it’s a breath of fresh air for audiences.”
Kay thinks that his gentler comic style has come back into fashion. “Comedy has swung away from those panel games where the comedians are vicious about everybody,” he says.
“Audiences want comedy that has no venom. They want to have a laugh without it becoming twee. There are not many things that people can watch these days with both their children and their grandchildren, but maybe that’s what I offer. I’m not the sort of comedian who wants to make audiences think about politics. I’m not clever in that way. But maybe I’m clever in a different way because I can bring up things that make people think, ‘oh, we do that, too’. The best comedy – like The Royle Family – holds a mirror up to its audience.”
Unlike many of today’s comics, Kay keeps his comedy clean. “When I do stand-up, I never swear because if I did, my mum would batter me! That’s how I ended up with this style. Comics like Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks were estranged from their families and could talk about anything they liked., but I’ve got to think about my nan, my mum and my sister. My act is about my life, and my life is my family. I have to treat them with respect.”
Kay is not immediately planning to hit the road again. However, he says that he has not stopped collecting material. “I’ve continued writing down funny things that I hear from day to day – I must never lose them!
“You need to live life in order to build up a new act. All the best material comes from real life. Last week, for instance, I was trying to persuade my nan to get Sky Plus. I was telling her that if you want to go and make a cup of tea, you can pause the telly. She looked baffled: ‘But what about everyone else?’ ‘You’re not controlling TV throughout Britain,’ I explained. ‘You’re not going to prevent someone in Devon from watching the end of Midsomer Murders just because you’ve paused your Sky Plus!’”
Now Kay is considering an offer from his publisher to write another book. For the time being, he still seems overwhelmed by the success of his first one. “When you’re told something like you’ve written the best-selling autobiography ever in this country, how can you possibly, possibly comprehend it? The British way is not to gloat. You don’t whoop or jump off lamp posts. You just say, ‘Oh, OK. Right then, what shall we have for lunch?’”
'Roary the Racing Car' launches on Five’s Milkshake! on Monday 7 May at 7.15am, airing every weekday, and on Nick Jr from Saturday 2 June at 4.00pm, airing every weekend. Nick Jr Video will premiere the series online from Monday 21 May, when episodes will be available on www.nickjr.co.uk
Peter Kay puts fun in Formula One Tv And Radio Arts Telegraph
Roary the Racing Car drove up at exactly the right time for Kay. “I’d always wanted to do a children’s series. I love the idea that if something is a success, your voice is preserved for decades.
“Think of Arthur Lowe doing Mr Men or Michael Hordren doing Paddington Bear or Bernard Cribbins doing The Wombles or Neil Morrissey doing Bob the Builder or Ringo Starr doing Thomas the Tank Engine. Those performances are all classics and have already lasted for several decades.
“Children don’t mind when something was made – they don’t discriminate in that way. I tape very early episodes of Rainbow and Trumpton for my son and watch them with him. He loves them. Trumpton was made in 1967, but he still watches it like it’s brand new. Children love the innocence of those fables, and it’s great to see the excitement and wonder in a child’s eyes as he listens to Brian Cant’s voice. I was exactly the same when I was his age in 1977. If something really works, it can last forever.”
To talk to, Peter Kay is engaging, effervescent and entertaining. It’s qualities such as these that have helped make him the most popular comedian at work in Britain today. His last live tour, Mum Wants a Bungalow, was seen by more than half a million people. His book, The Sound of Laughter, has shifted a million copies, making it the biggest-selling British autobiography ever. He’s also had two No1 singles for Comic Relief: (Is This the Way to) Amarillo and (I am Gonna Be) 500 Miles.
The 33-year-old, who is currently starring in The Producers at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, voices the character of Big Chris in the series, while racing legend Sir Stirling Moss narrates. Kay says he has been bowled over by the standard of the series, which is produced by Chapman Entertainment, the producers of Fifi and the Flowertots, and animated by Cosgrove Hall Films, responsible for Danger Mouse and Chorlton and the Wheelies.
Roary the Racing Car, which will be launched on Five on Monday and Nick Jr in June, was originated almost a decade ago by David Jenkins, who spent four years working in senior management at Brand Hatch and Goodwood Race Circuits. He had the idea of making the series whilst watching the Grand Prix on TV with his son, Tom, who at the time was 18 months old.
Set among the big personalities and highly-tuned egos at the Silver Hatch race track, the programme centres on Roary, a novice, bright-red, single-seater racing car whose enthusiasm and curiosity often lead him into trouble. Underneath his bonnet, however, beats a heart of chrome.
Kay almost whistles in admiration at the care with which Roary the Racing Car has been assembled. “Watching the series, I’ve been blown away. They’ve combined CGI with stop-animation and it’s so well done, you can’t see the join. The attention to detail is extraordinary. For the last four years, people have been working on this round the clock, producing just a few seconds of footage a day. The animators work through the night in a converted mill, playing Canadian thrash metal. They’re really intense as they move these figures around.
“But all that effort is absolutely worth it. Chapman Entertainment and Cosgrove Hall have a great track record in animation. Their costume department is amazing. You can see the tiny ironing-board Postman Pat uses to iron his shirt. It’s like The Borrowers!”
Kay plays the chief mechanic and father figure to all the cars. “It’s basically me,” he chuckles. “I’ve done a lot of ad libbing because that makes the character more three-dimensional. Ad libbing is sometimes seen as forbidden fruit in animation, but the producers are delighted because it brings a freshness to the series and gives them more to play with.”
The comedian, who has written and starred in such acclaimed, multi-award-winning C4 sitcoms as Phoenix Nights, Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere and That Peter Kay Thing, says he is motivated by an almost childlike desire to bring pleasure. “If you can be involved with something like Roary the Racing Car, it’s just bliss,” he enthuses. “It may sound like a cliché, but you’re bringing happiness to people when you do a project like that. That innocence of Trumpton from 1967 – maybe that’s something I’ve taken from my own childhood into my work.”
That urge to spread fun has characterised Kay’s entire career. His humour has always traded in warmth rather than cynicism. “No one gets slagged off in my comedy,” reflects the comic, who was born and bred in Bolton. “It’s not the comedy of hate. I hope it’s a breath of fresh air for audiences.”
Kay thinks that his gentler comic style has come back into fashion. “Comedy has swung away from those panel games where the comedians are vicious about everybody,” he says.
“Audiences want comedy that has no venom. They want to have a laugh without it becoming twee. There are not many things that people can watch these days with both their children and their grandchildren, but maybe that’s what I offer. I’m not the sort of comedian who wants to make audiences think about politics. I’m not clever in that way. But maybe I’m clever in a different way because I can bring up things that make people think, ‘oh, we do that, too’. The best comedy – like The Royle Family – holds a mirror up to its audience.”
Unlike many of today’s comics, Kay keeps his comedy clean. “When I do stand-up, I never swear because if I did, my mum would batter me! That’s how I ended up with this style. Comics like Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks were estranged from their families and could talk about anything they liked., but I’ve got to think about my nan, my mum and my sister. My act is about my life, and my life is my family. I have to treat them with respect.”
Kay is not immediately planning to hit the road again. However, he says that he has not stopped collecting material. “I’ve continued writing down funny things that I hear from day to day – I must never lose them!
“You need to live life in order to build up a new act. All the best material comes from real life. Last week, for instance, I was trying to persuade my nan to get Sky Plus. I was telling her that if you want to go and make a cup of tea, you can pause the telly. She looked baffled: ‘But what about everyone else?’ ‘You’re not controlling TV throughout Britain,’ I explained. ‘You’re not going to prevent someone in Devon from watching the end of Midsomer Murders just because you’ve paused your Sky Plus!’”
Now Kay is considering an offer from his publisher to write another book. For the time being, he still seems overwhelmed by the success of his first one. “When you’re told something like you’ve written the best-selling autobiography ever in this country, how can you possibly, possibly comprehend it? The British way is not to gloat. You don’t whoop or jump off lamp posts. You just say, ‘Oh, OK. Right then, what shall we have for lunch?’”
'Roary the Racing Car' launches on Five’s Milkshake! on Monday 7 May at 7.15am, airing every weekday, and on Nick Jr from Saturday 2 June at 4.00pm, airing every weekend. Nick Jr Video will premiere the series online from Monday 21 May, when episodes will be available on www.nickjr.co.uk
Peter Kay puts fun in Formula One Tv And Radio Arts Telegraph
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