From the depths of time, an obituary for Kurt Cobain by Stewart Lee that may or may not be entirely true.
via SOTCAA’s Twitpic account and copied to my server purely because Twitpic delete stuff after a year or so and that wouldn’t be a good thing to happen.
Rorschmap is a neat thing with some brainjuice behind it. Yes, there’s more to it than just making vaginas out of your neighbourhood.
It is 65 years since Buckminster Fuller patented the Dymaxion Map, designed to show, and only show, the whole earth. Fuller’s map forced less distortion than contemporary projections; it also, having no ‘right way up’, embodied his idea that the only directions in the universe were ‘in’ and ‘out’.
The plane of Google Maps has an up and a down; it also has an in and an out: the zoom between tile layers, the moment of transference, of refocussing and resolution. What if we could fold digital maps like the dymaxion, go truly into them?
Above is the Bullring in central Birmingham. Below is my local park and allotments in Stirchley.
I’ve seen the above before somewhere, probably in the late 90s / early 2000s when a lot of cartoonists of this style were being rediscovered and appreciated. It’s from a book, What Am I Doing Here, which has been scanned at a gloriously high resolution by the What Things Do collective. They’ve also included some writing on Dean.
At first these pictures look like gag cartoons (there’s a funny drawing, and then a caption that might provide a laugh) but on closer examination they reveal themselves to be a different animal. In a gag strip, the caption usually puts the image to a full stop — the joke has been released from the image, and so the image has been “used up” — disposable as the burnt rind of a firecracker. With some of Dean’s images, the caption can indeed provide a laugh, but the image, instead of coming to a full stop, begins to spool out in disquieting directions…
This one was picked out by Andrew Simone at Clusterflock (from whom, via) and it’s a nice example of this disquiet. At first it’s a sweet image of a young couple in love, but there’s something else lurking there, something unspoken, undrawn even.
Nice piece of amateur psychogeography from Londonist, also marking the first interesting thing I’ve seen about the bloody Olympics that isn’t someone slagging it off.
(Obligatory note: by “bloody Olympics” I don’t mean the sporty bits – those are cool. I mean all the other bullshit.)
via Husk
Messers Danny Smith and Jon Bounds, a couple of good friends of mine, are attempting to visit the 56 functional pleasure piers in the UK in a fortnight and write about them. To do this they’re doing one of those crowdfunding things. As you’d hope, the pitch is as entertaining as the end result promises to be.
Birmingham is not a coastal city. An Englishman’s blood tastes of lager and salt, but those that live in the shadow of the Bull Ring are landlocked; non-swimmers in a nation of mermaids. Even the city’s proudest claim is an open joke amongst its residents: “more canals than Venice,” we say with a grim smile, knowing the difference between the breathtaking tragic romance of Venice and our banal doom but leaving it unsaid like a shopping trolley sinking beneath the water’s surface.
The still brown water of the canals is metaphorically a million miles from the sea, but Birmingham is only 100 miles away from the nearest beach. The irony from our disconnect to the sea is that in anywhere else in the world Birmingham would be considered ’coastal’. Australians talk about driving four hours to get to the beach like it was popping to the outdoor for ten fags, and Americans that live in the mountains own jet skis.
Those from Birmingham are perfectly placed to write about an ephemeral British seaside because that’s what the seaside is to them: a ghost, a Vaseline-smeared Shangri-La cobbled together from Carry On films, hazy childhood memories and nostalgia for a bygone era.
Nice to see the incredible amount of coverage Home of Metal has been getting is trickling down to the Supersonic Festival mothership with this nice spotlight in the Guardian’s “Pop music’s mavericks” feature.
Like many great events, Supersonic came about by not so much ignoring the rules as not knowing them. Meyer and a friend had enjoyed small-scale all-dayers in Leeds and Nottingham, and wondered if they could host a much bigger version. So they started emailing their favourite bands, using the computer at an arts centre. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” Meyer says. “We’d get really excited if we went back the following week and someone had actually replied.” Perhaps intrigued by how innocent enthusiasm bypassed accepted channels, people did reply.
Here’s a great example of why Supersonic is the best festival: Tony Conrad is playing this year. Tony who? Precisely.
The art of layering multiple recordings of one person’s voice is probably as old as the multi-track tape recorder, and was certainly being done in the 1960s, but the art of coupling this with video recordings of the person making those sounds as they are being made is a relatively new thing, I think, and has become something of an online video phenomena.
I like these because they’re one of those “YouTube artforms” that don’t really work as well outside of that context. It’s also a nice mix of analogue – there are frequently no instruments involved at all – and digital, using technology to defeat the limitations of time and create a choir.
There’s lots of chatter about “digital” agendas in the arts at the moment with, from what I can see, very little clarity as to what that really means. I think something like this might be a clue.
It’s also rather beautiful, of course.
Here’s Alaa Wardi’s website and he came to me via Meg.
Is that the original of the photograph by Lawrence Schiller of Neal Cassady used on the cover of The Soft Bulletin? I rather think it is. via PJ
I haven’t read this yet so caveat emptor, though I can be pretty sure it’s worth it. I’m posting pre-read because it’s apparently “online in its entirety for a limited time” before being locked away in the print version of Bomb magazine. via J Couthart.
The Gregory Brothers moved on from Autotune The News into a “songifying” any old YouTube video a while ago now and have hit a bit of a gold seam of late. After the glory of Hug Every Cat comes this Nascar prayer.
I still think Autotune The News is the more important work. It was parody, court jester style, whereas these are just entertaining.
YMFY posted this piece identified as Kaikai, Kiki and Me by Takashi Murakami. I haven’t been following his work for a few years and this looks different to the Superflat stuff that was being show circa 2000. Or maybe it isn’t. I can’t be sure. As will all good art, I start off thinking I understand it completely but the more I explore the more I discover how little I actually know.
A good starting point for your own exploration would be the Wikipedia article on him.
