This painting, Born with Every Bright Morning by Chris Murtagh, is a delight for anyone familiar with the streets of Digbeth, Birmingham.

Click through for more details.

Why is it that women wearing men’s clothes generally look okay but men wearing women’s clothes frequently look ridiculous? I’m not talking about the different sizes. Is there something inherently weird about ladies clothing? Is it a patriarchy thing? Is it me projecting some kind of masculine gaze value?

This is the question I find myself with after scrolling through Hana Pesut’s extensive project.

Nice geodome, by the way.

via Kottke

I love this for many reasons, mostly because I wish I’d thought of it. Fantastic stuff.

via Waxy

Lovely find this. When he was a struggling writer in the early 80s Martin Amis wrote a piece of hackery about the booming arcade video games scene for some barrel-scraping publisher. He’s reportedly disowned it and literary types have sought it high and low. This review dives in head first.

Curiously, for a writer so deeply preoccupied with stylistic refinement and playful innovation — who elevates the pleasure principle to a sort of aesthetic moral law — Amis favors a no-frills approach to gaming. The following piece of Polonian advice pretty much encapsulates his whole arcade ethos: “PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.” I’m no expert, I’ll admit, but I’ll go out on a critical limb here and suggest that this might be the sole instance of the use of the mock-heroic tone in a video game player’s guide.

via Kottke

Apparently it was the b-side to These Boots… which dates it as 1966. But there’s also a version by The Shacklefords on YouTube also dated 1966.

It’s not as good but it’s definitely the same song, and from the same year. How odd that seems now.

The Nancy track came to me from the Songs The Fall Taught Us compilation although be warned their version, done for a 1995 John Peel session, is pretty terrible.

Not wanting to mark Obligation Day (see sexy comic Oglaf for the origin of that term) but bacon always trumps cynicism.

Instructions on Instructables.

via my one true bacon

Black Slate Books continue to establish themselves as a UK publisher of note with the announcement of Hugo Tate, a 192 collection of Nick Abadzis‘ wonderful comic strip from the 1990s. It’s due in April and I heartily recommend it.

The Composites is an art experiment that takes physical descriptions of characters from literature and feeds them into police sketch software. Above is Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon:

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

Fascinating stuff on a number of levels, most relevant to me being the intersection of artistic intention and computer algorithm. I wonder what living authors would make of this?

There’s an in-depth interview with the artist Brian Joseph Davis at The Atlantic.

via Kottke

Etsuko Ichikawa takes molten glass and swirls it around on paper. The end results are beautiful, like the finest of brushstrokes rendered in carbon, and the process itself is entrancing. This is a lovely film by Alistair Banks Griffin.

via Clusterflock

“A white 500 pixel square JPEG with its colour data replaced by “lorem ipsum” in a hex editor“. Paul talks more about his methodology.

I put some money into CASH Music, a Kickstarter project, last night. The tagline is “what WordPress did for bloggers, we’re doing for musicians” and that doesn’t just mean free versions of the current crop of tools out there. It means taking the “if no-one owns it everyone owns it” ethos of free software and building something that can’t be sold to Sony at the end of the day.

I do feel sorry for musicians. Music was the fuel of a lot of what we call the Internet Revolution because it was easy to digitise and because people wanted to share it. Music is the lubricant of culture which is why it generates absurd amounts of money for the corporations that control it. Yet musicians, the people who actually make the stuff, have been consistently screwed since the mechanisation of music and probable before. This is an attempt to make the Internet work for them like it was supposed to.

The other thing that excites me about this is it rejects the toxic venture capitalist model which fuelled the social media boom with oddles of free money and will soon be demanding it’s money back. Sure, it’s neat that Tumblr can be all free and stuff but at some point they’re going to have to sell up, probably to exactly the same corporations they were supposed to be an alternative to. And just look at how sustainable selling Flickr to Yahoo turned out to be. Imagine if it had been turned into a non-profit. (I’ve been toying with a campaign to get the founder to abandon their game and buy back Flickr but it’s not really fair since Flick was an accidental byproduct of a game in the first place.)

So yeah, lots of practical good things and lots of ideologically sound things. Well worth $25 for a t-shirt.

via Steve Lawson.

In 2007, filmmaker William E. Jones came across an hour of surveillance footage of men cruising for gay sex in a public toilet in Mansfield, Ohio in 1962. The footage, taken through a mirror, had led to 30 prosecutions for sodomy, then a crime. Jones now shows the footage, unedited and without sound, at film festivals under the title Tearoom.

It’s both fascinating and sobering to see evidence that within such recent history people could not only be imprisoned for consensual fucking but that they would be caught in such an elaborate way. It also explains a lot about why, despite huge leaps in civil liberties, massive amounts of bigotry and discrimination still exist in our so-called enlightened societies, and serves as a warning that we could so easily slip back there.

There’s a great MetaFilter thread on this with some good debate on the rights and wrongs on cruising. This comment, starting “In 1960 my great uncle Henry got nabbed in a Baltimore restroom in flagrante delicto” is particularly touching. William Jones talks about his motivation for showing it here and you can download the whole 421 MB film from this link.

via Matt Haughey

This hits so many of my buttons it’s untrue. As you probably know, Google have undertaken a program of digitising libraries full of books. Those which are out of copyright are available to search through online. As with any massive undertaking, and this one is really massive, there will be errors. And some of those errors will be really interesting.

The Art of Google Books is similar in many ways to John Rafman‘s 9-eyes and other experiments in searching Google Street View for that which can be considered “art”. I’d go so far as to say it’s similar to panning for gold – ploughing through endless pages of perfectly scanned books looking for that unique error, that glitch in the sand, the place where the mechanised system produced something wrong or different to the norm and the algorithm let it through.

There are currently 54 pages of Google Book Art to browse through. Here’s a small selection that caught my eye.

Torn page, partially digitized in color.

Links (added by Google) through tape

Distorted Text

Black-and-white printed plate of the Aurora Borealis, photographed in color with rippling neon effect.

via Bruce Sterling, I think

Raiding the Lost Ark is something of curiosity. These edits of all the “bonus features” that litter a DVD release of a film put into sequential order by a fan to create something new-ish are a relatively recent trend. Star Wars Begins, Building Empire and Returning to Jedi were the first by Jamie Benning and he just released the Raiders one this month.

I say curiosity because they exist in an area of copyright infringement which seems pretty clear. The entire piece is made of footage where the ownership is pretty clear and which has a fairly undisputed value. This is such an entirely illegal piece of work that it’s somewhat incredible that Vimeo are hosting it (the Star Wars ones were removed from YouTube a while back).

But despite this the fans go on and make them, presumably because they know the hodge-podge of rights ownerships and legal nonsense dictates it can’t be made above board. The only option is to do it, don’t make a profit and seek forgiveness should it draw attention. Waxy talked about this in his post No Copyright Intended.

Meanwhile, despite not being a fanatic about the Indy films I did enjoy this. It was nice to see clips from making-of docs I remember being broadcast at the time and the editing is slick and enjoyable. Worth a couple of hours of your time for sure.

Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table is a delightful Tumblr in the spirit, if not the style, of Unhappy Hipsters. It’s like a quiet rant, possibly a list-song. The above made me spit.

via Woodrow

We tend to forget that “The Universe” isn’t just stars and planets, it’s the small stuff too. This reinvention of Powers of Ten, seemingly from Channel 4, is incredibly comprehensive, going from quantum foam to the limits of the known universe.

via Flatpack Festival

It feels like this has been in production since forever and a day but finally Iron Sky has got a release date, February 11th at the Berlin International Film Festival then 4th April elsewhere, and a trailer.

It’s look terrible in a most fantastic way. I can’t wait.

Darryl’s book, which he’s been serialising as a work-in-progress on his blog over the last year, is out in April. You can pre-order the UK edition from The Amazon from today.

Darryl Cunningham turns his questioning mind and sharp intelligence to de-coding the myths and lies that have shaped some of the most fiercely-debated issues of the past fifty years. A graphic milestone of investigative reporting, Science Tales takes on controversies surrounding climate change, electro-convulsive therapy, the moon landing, the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine, homeopathy, evolution, the tobacco industry and science denialism.

Rather enjoyed this video for St Vincent‘s Cheerleader even though it’s a complete appropriation of Ron Mueck‘s work. I guess it just adds enough not to be an annoying ripoff. Nice tune too.

via Clusterflock

In amongst the bluster about Warner Brothers’ announcement of another Watchmen cash-in product, Alan Moore was quoted as saying “As far as I know there weren’t that many prequels or sequels to Moby-Dick.” To which Tom Ewing masterfully retorts “HOW SOON WE FORGET!”

It does sound quite… interesting…

In his novel The Wind Whales of Ishmael (1971) the sole survivor of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick falls through time into a future Earth when the oceans have dried up and primitive people have taken to the skies in airships powered by gas-filled animal bladders.

If that description is accurate we can assume the cover artist didn’t go to the trouble of reading the book first. And for that we must be grateful.

On a sidenote, did you know that Philip Jose Farmer wrote a novel under the name Kilgore Trout with the title Venus On The Half-Shell? Fans of Kurt Vonnegut might find that rings a bell.