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.