Did You See the Words
This is the archived, old school version of anglepoised. The latest version can be found at anglepoised.com.
I Was Everything You Wanted Until I Quit
Posting continues at del.icio.us/ohskylab/top until there's time to sort this site out.
1642 Try 621
Many thanks to the kind person who sent me a copy of 37signals' Defensive Design for the Web. One question, though: who are you?
Mar I Terra
Yes, indeed.
Related: Conde de Osborne.
If the library burns down, you get a first
The Guardian on urban campus myths and the annual ISCLR Conference:
There was this student who flipped during his finals and killed himself by shoving two sharpened pencils up his nostrils into his brain. Death was instantaneous, apparently. No really, it happened. And did you know that the tower of Durham Cathedral is closed during exams ever since a student from the university chucked herself off the top...?
Barbed Redux
Mystery solved. You didn't need to flee the country to escape repercussions though, punk.
Barbed
Turned my phone off for the first time in weeks to ensure uninterrupted afternoon kip and noticed on switching on again that someone has changed the welcome message to "Get that twig out of your helmet". It spreads!
Anyone like to own up to this, by the way?
Clearing Up Music
It's been high havoc round these parts during the past few weeks; so much so that a few situations have got a little out of hand. As soon as the relevant parties have been told to get that twig out of their helmet I'll be right back on replying to messages and sorting stuff out.
Also, I've finally had to kill my main ohskylab.com address after 5-odd years. You can now reach me by using my first name at this domain. If you have problems (for example, you don't know my first name) you can use this contact form.
There Is No There
Anyone want to be at Loggerheads with me? Staffordshire or Denbighshire; your choice. Actually, I'll be near Staffordshire next week. You bring cash and I'll bring the bone of contention.
Doom Doom Doom
Ooh, Invader Zim on DVD:
Invader's blood marches through my veins like giant radioactive rubber pants! The pants command me! Do not ignore my veins!
Ah. Also, Dungeons and Dragons. You only thought it was good because your brain was half-grown, mind.
Earworm
The Chap: (Hats Off To) Dror Frangi.
The Chap's Clissold Park EP should be out at some point on Artrocker.
Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again
Double Fold, an album from Scanner inspired by the Nicholson Baker book of the same name.
Sourcing sounds from his own domestic tape archive and processing them digitally Scanner explores his own brittle sound diary, producing a series of contrasting moods that slip and slide around one another, yet never losing grip of the measure. Double Fold scatters beats into a warm seductive groove, hard digital lock grooves melding into rhythms that edge under the floorboards whilst pixellated abstraction tattoos it's way across the surface.
The Holiday Song
Just back from Sónar2004 in Barcelona. Well, bits of Sónar, anyway; turned up a few days late due to back trouble and so only caught the Saturday evening events. The Fira Gran Vía M2 is an impressive space (especially when filled with 7000 maniacs dancing to Jeff Mills) and somewhere above street level on the Nou de la Rambla makes an excellent location for people-watching.
Underneath the Yellow Lights
Worked in Westbourne Studios for a bit, before moving to less cramped quarters.
The roof is all the more remarkable when the penny drops: this is not some late-flowering work by Le Corbusier, or even Erno Goldfinger, architect of nearby Trellick Tower, but the underside of the Westway. Celebrated in song by the Clash, the Westway is the elevated A40(M) that, since 1970, has sent heavy traffic snaking in and out of central London.... The [developers] are hoping to go one step further: they are seeking permission to create a roof garden for their tenants. The views from the top of Westbourne Studios are spectacular. Here, the London skyline, in all its messy glory, can be experienced in the round. Traffic scythes through the core of the building; main-line and tube trains make pincer movements around it. The sky is laced with jets whirring into Heathrow at two-minute intervals. A vision of hell for some, perhaps, but an urban rhapsody for young creatives responding to the capital's around-the-clock buzz.
Still haven't figured out why so many people took their dogs along, though.
No UFO's
Who would have thought that the universe sounds like a game of Defender? Moon Cresta would've been better, mind.
Earworm
Keep It On Ze Rinky-dink
Time passes. Things happen. Beer is drunk. No functionality is added (to the weblog, at least). Re-design? Don't even go there. Just get that twig out of your helmet and unpeel a fresh C90 cassette tape.
OK, proceed.
Universal Opaque Escape Clause
Can't post at the moment, I'm afraid.
Haggis reasons.
You know how it is...
Some Machines Have Big Knobs
The video for Rock and Roll is Dead (WMV, 3.5 meg) by Kings Have Long Arms and Phil Oakey, in which Phil has his head attached to a robot and destroys a selection of rock luminaries with his laser eyes.
Related: Cursor Miner's Library video by Cheeky Beef (which you really should watch if you haven't already).
Lave Trader
An edited extract from the Elite/Braben/Bell section in Backroom Boys: The Secret Return Of The British Boffin.
Related: Ian Bell's Elite pages; Frontier Developments; and The Elite Club downloads.Perhaps the reason they kept going was that they wanted the universe they were building to feel solid: like a science-fiction novel that rings true because all its inventions are consistent with each other. But allied to this was an idea of the pleasure they wanted to give the player. They kept asking: "Will this be fun?" They didn't want the fun to be presented to the player as a set of arbitrary demands, a series of hoops you had to jump through just because that was the game and your score went up every time you got it right. They wanted the flying, the shooting and the trading to be fun in a way that respected the integrity of the experience you'd have when you were playing, that went with, rather than against, the deeper grain of your imagination. It's a wish that might sound modest, but what made it cumulatively radical in its effect on the game was the indirectness it made necessary. Most video games stipulated the experience the player was going to have. They said: you stand here and we'll throw aliens/dragons/humorous frogs at you. Bell and Braben's sequence of inventions amounted to a gradual refusal to do anything of the kind. They were arriving at a game that left what to do and where to go entirely up to the player.
Stay Loose
Earworm: The Divine Comedy's Lost Property.
Urban Style Music
Fällt Publishing's Invisible Cities installation "offers the opportunity to experience an intimate series of portraits of the world's cities painted with sound".
All contributions are available as .mp3s from Fällt's Invisible Cities site.A series of artists were invited to contribute a five minute audio work inspired by and utilising the sounds of the cities they cherish. Their contributions range from quiet and contemplative to noisy and frenetic with styles ranging from the pristine digital crackles of Washington DC based artist Richard Chartier (Whitney Biennial, 12k, LINE) to the near-silence of Tokyo based ultra-minimalist *0 (Nosei Sakata).
We Float
Kyoichi Tsuzuki's Happy Victims is on at The Photographer's Gallery until Nov 16th.
Two stand out in particular:Tsuzuki photographs some thirty individuals who have turned the act of shopping into an indefinable obsession, lying somewhere between artistic expression and an unusual kind of fetishism. Worshipping one individual designer, these men and women consume religiously their chosen labels - Jean Paul Gaultier, Anna Sui, Vivienne Westwood - often at the expense of life's other necessities.
Related: Kyoichi Tsuzuki interviewed at Metropolis Japan and Shift.Comme des Garçons:
He leads a busy life as a buddhist monk in a temple up in Ibaragi, but once a month he comes to Tokyo and uses his condo as a base for shopping and having fun. At the temple he wears monk's robes, but in Tokyo he wears nothing but Comme Des Garçons.Anna Sui:
Behind a suburban railway terminus, in an archetypal middle class "family condo minium" is this "hers-and-his" love nest. The thoroughly handcrafted interior decor is all her doing, and the closet is filled with her Anna Sui collection... The clothes are rock-loud, venomously stylish, and infused with Anna Sui's own distinctive spirit that fits perfectly with her own lifestyle.
You Like This Machine
Been busy and having connection issues but back in the game, for all that's worth. Highlights of the past few weeks:
- Hung, Drawn and Quartered, including Cursor Miner's storming set with Fuel Records at The Pool and Si Begg, u-ziq, Cylob and others at Aquarium.
- Kings Have Long Arms (whose re-recorded version of Rock and Roll is Dead with Phil Oakey on vocals seems to be going down well) supporting I Am Kloot.
- John Hegley, Simon Munnery and friends doing drunken, impromptu comedy at The Old Red Lion for Peace One Day.
- Our flatwarming.
- Food and cocktails at the bizarre and empty LMNT (lack of patronage may have been something to do with the extreme heat that day, but could've been absinthe-related delusion).
- Bill Bailey.
- Max Tundra, Mouse on Mars and Fourtet for the Domino Records Worlds of Possibility at The End.
Hello Sunshine
Earworm: Super Furry Animals' Do Or Die.
Plug Myself In
Have been busy with work one, work two, work three, setting up a company, moving flat, getting slightly older and sundry other bits. Thanks for being patient; normal patchy service will resume as soon as the Telewest man comes round and sorts the plumbing out. Normal social operations will resume after this month's eagerly-awaited Smith-Calder nuptials.
Have You Really Thought About Utopia?
Side-by-side review of two recent Orwell biographies in The Times:
Side-by-side review of two recent Orwell biographies in The Guardian:He might have turned into a frustrated "literary man", a medium-sized novelist or essayist, if it were not for his journey to the north of England at the beginning of 1936. He was by no means a committed socialist before this pilgrimage, and in fact seems to have had no coherent political philosophy at all. He seems only to have been led by curiosity about the conditions of an area badly affected by economic depression and by some instinctive belief that you can see a civilisation more clearly in the shadows which it casts. The Road to Wigan Pier is in many ways instructive, therefore. He regarded the victims of the world with a certain sympathy, derived in part from self-pity, but he never felt in any sense close to them.
What both authors amply demonstrate is the overwhelming importance of their subject. Despite all the blemishes Orwell really was, as VS Pritchett said, the "wintry conscience" of his generation. He was, in Paul Potts's phrase, "Don Quixote on a Bicycle", the knight errant of fair play pedalling nobly through the "bloodstained harlequinade" of his age. He was the saint of common decency who would in earlier days, said his BBC boss Rushbrook Williams, "have been either canonised - or burnt at the stake".
RU.ELECTRONIC
The Birmingham-based Default Response network have a selection of mp3 recordings taken from their live events, including sets the excellent Russian duo EU, Brothomstates and a mix from Yokoda.
Self-annulation
Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art:
Consuming Bodies explores the themes of sex and consumerism in contemporary Japanese art and how they connect with the wider historical, social and political conditions in Japanese culture. Essays by writers, historians, curators and artists, plus diary extracts of a sex worker, engage with a range of artistic practices, including performance, digital media, painting, sculpture and installation. Together the contributors examine the contradictions and ambivalences embedded in the Japanese experience of modernity, and the effects of commodification on the individual and the nation state.
Eines Morgens im November
Quint Buchholz postcards (including One Morning in November).
Related: cards and books from Inkognito.
Lady In Red (Is Dancing With Meat)
V/Vm Test Records are one of those nice record labels, the kind that publish the bulk of their nutty back catalogue as mp3s after they've been deleted. Artists include Kid 606, Boards of Canada (under their Hell Interface moniker), Goodiepal and the wonderfully named Alien Porno Midgets.
Impossible Deadline
Something to keep your bandwidth occupied when the slsk server goes down: a startlingly large collection of Douglas Adams mp3s including the complete Hitchhikers and Dirk Gently, Starship Titanic and Last Chance to See.
Majestic Seven Fingers
Yup, the winners of the Nerve Bad Erotica Contest have been announced."My name is Julio, Julio Gottstein," he said, his smoldering eyes aflame in the victory he would soon celebrate. "And soon, I shall have you."
Her heart pattered and swayed with passion as his rough hand took hers, and led her from the bar to her sparse, yet highly sexual studio apartment upstairs. Her eyes, clouded in lust, could see nothing but his strong, opulent frame - though he was easily four inches shorter than her, he seemed monumental in all aspects of his being.
Box Elder
Pierced man told to wear box on his head:
This was front page news in Harpenden this week. I'm not sure why it makes me laugh so much, but it's kind of like having The Framley Examiner as a local rag.The accountant said he would only reconsider if Mr Lynch wore a cardboard box over his head, did something about his smell and donated £100 to Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Christian Aid or the Tear Fund.
"If it made him feel any better, I would wear a box over my head too", added Mr MacDougall.
Accidents Don't Happen
Thomas Pynchon on Orwell's 1984:
The article is an edited extract from Pynchon's introduction to the Plume Centennial edition.Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own - the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour party - like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?
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