Anna and I are beginning to settle into our new life in Worcester. The city might be a little less roomy than Brighton, but it’s perfectly charming and, surprisingly, far more cosmopolitan than its provincial reputation led us to expect. Our latest discovery is Bolero, a lovely, little Italian-flavoured cafe tucked away on St Nicolaus Street. It’s all leather sofas, free Sunday papers and shelves full of hardback art and design books for you to peruse. It’s got Blue Note and Liberty record sleeves on virtually every wall, a delightful bedecked back-yard where the smokers hang out, and table service. Not to mention this very lovely cup of caramel-flavoured hot chocolate that I devoured this afternoon.
Just love these classic album covers set out as a set of postage stamps. Particularly delighted at the inclusion of New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies which was designed by the great Peter Saville. Inevitably there’s some great covers missing. At least two odd choices too: the inclusion of both Pink Floyd’s the Division Bell and Led Zeppelin IV (top left and bottom centre respectively). To my mind, neither sleeve is a classic while Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin would seem much better choices. It’s still a nice set, mind. Sure to be as successful as last year’s British Design Classics when it’s released in early January.
According to the Royal Mail:
This issue celebrates the work of the album sleeve designer, not the music. Royal Mail began with very extensive research of existing lists and polls of ‘Greatest Album Covers’ in books, music press and the web. This trawl of literally thousands of albums uncovered many that were common to most lists.
The editors of three of the UK’s most influential music publications together with a number of graphic designers and design writers were asked to independently list the most significant album sleeve artwork used on records by British artists.
Royal Mail reviewed all the research to assemble a shortlist of albums that spanned the decades from the 1960s. Some albums could not be included for operational reasons (for instance, designs that were too dark), after final deliberation the ten albums were arrived at.
I enjoyed watching Nick Griffin flounder of BBC Question Time last night. David Dimbleby handled him beautifully, like an experienced barrister might toy with a petty rogue. He snared Griffin about 14 minutes in, using a speech the leader of the far-right British National Party made (alongside David Duke, leader of the KKK) in the US, where he said:
“If you put that [expelling non-whites from Britain] as your sole aim to start with you are going to get absolutely nowhere. So instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity. We use saleable words: freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can attack you on those ideas.”
It was over 50 years ago that George Orwell (right) in Politics and the English Language remarked how such words were often used by politicians with the intention to deceive:
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
I have been sailing through Peter Hook’s The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club his account of the decline and fall of the Factory empire. Although he is not exactly Tom Wolfe or Nick Kent he tells his tale with some wit and much stoicism. The legendary club nearly ruined him and the rest of the band, as they sank in many millions of pounds to keep it going. Hooky reckons that for every person who came through the door of the Hacienda, it cost him and the rest of New Order around £10. So buy him a drink next time you see him.
The books full of anecdotes and quotes from many famous factory figures (Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Mike Pickering et al). Here’s the club’s former DJ Dave Haslam on the Hacienda’s wonderful music policy:
“Whereas music in clubs is now pigeion-holed and segregated, in those first years of acid house, the dance floor was open minded. In retrospect DJs have tried to convince us of thier purist underground credentials; that wasn’t really the case. In the acid-house era you would have heard hous, and techno, but also hip-hop records like ‘know How’ by Young MC, New Order and Euro-disco tracks by Italian production teams.”
Thought it might be nice to mention the launch of Council, spearheaded by my sometime collaborator (and all round top man) Rob Van Kranenberg. He describes as a “thinktank for the Internet of Things”. Rob’s been building a formidable network for this for ages and will officially launch in Brussels on December. According to Rob:
“The Internet of Things (IOT) is a vision. Yet it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start. The European Commission published its action plan for IOT in June of this year. In hundreds of years our real needs have not changed. We want to be loved, feel safe, have fun, be relevant in work and friendship, be able to support our families and somehow play a role – however small – in the larger scheme of things.
So what will really happen when things, homes and cities become smart? The result will probably be an avalanche of what at first looks like very small steps, small changes.
Currently IOT applications, demos and infrastructure are rolled out from negative arguments only. For logistics, it is anti-theft. For ehealth it is the lack of human personnel that requires the building of smart houses. From a policy view it is the ensuring of safety, control and surveillance at item level and in public space. For retail it is shelf space management.
Council thinktank aims to grow into a positively critical counterpart to these negativities in focusing on the quality of interaction and potentialities of IOT for social, communicative and economic (personal fabrication, participatory budgeting, alternative currencies) connectivity between humans and other humans, human and things and human and their surroundings.
The wrestling with ambient technologies – the noise – is rapidly going out of corporate memory. A new young generation growing up at ease with ‘total’ connectivity, will enter IOT territory as simply another layer, another iteration of something they are comfortable in.
Therefore the launch of Council will highlight a personal history of locative media & hybrid spaces, by professionals of the i3 (Intelligent Information Interfaces) days, as well as the latest tools and applications, workshops on key issues short keynotes and time for debate and discussion.
Where: Imal, Brussels
When: December 4 2009 0930:2200 (public evening from 20:00)
Workshop 185 (including lunch and dinner)
Register: here
I recently returned from a weekend in London where Anna and I found this delightful pair of black swans in St James’s Park. They are beautiful birds, as tame as pets, with long, looping necks and bright red beaks the colour of post boxes. They reminded me of the poem by the late James Merill:
Illusion: the black swan knows how to break
Through expectation, beak
Aimed now at its own breast, now at its image,
And move across our lives, if the lake is life,
And by the gentlest turning of its neck
Transform, in time, time’s damage;
To less than a black plume, time’s grief.
I’ve always thought that the libel lawyers Carter-Ruck sounded like a euphemism or, perhaps, a piece of forgotten cockney rhyming slang. Anyway, I’m delighted that they have dropped their attempt to prevent the British media from reporting on the proceedings of parliament. It is in part a victory for the chorus of twitterers that defied the ban yesterday, as only hours after the ruling was announced the full report as made available on Wiki leaks and transmitted across the internet by hundreds of users of the microblogging site Twitter. Carter-Ruck, acting on behalf of the oil firm Trafigura, were attempting to prevent the Guardian reporting on a question tabled on Monday by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly.
The rule of prior restraint has been gaining ground in recent years, despite misgivings from European Court of Human Rights, as judges seem more willing to allow last moment injunctions against the publication of exposes. But the kind of injunction used on Monday (a so-called super-injunction) not only prevents publication, but also makes the injunction itself secret. It is a type of censorship that recalls Apartheid-era South Africa, when newspaper editors were not allowed to leave pages blank or blacked-out when they had been censored by the government.
Interviewed in the Guardian, Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, said:
“The injunction against the Guardian publishing questions to ministers tabled by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly is an example of a chill wind blowing more widely through the press. In increasing numbers, aggressive lawyers, who used to use libel law to protect their clients, are now using injunctions to secure privacy and confidentiality. They have found it is a legal technique which shuts stories down very quickly so that now it is not a question of publish and be damned, as it used to be: we are now finding that we can’t even publish at all.”
Nice to see Harold Evans back at it. The 81-year-old editor, who has a new book to promote (left), is interviewed into today’s Guardian. I’ve been re-reading his Newsman’s English recently, which includes this prize catch: “There is a joke about a fishmonger which makes the point [about the need for economy in writing]. It is an old joke, but perhaps we can regard it as sanctified by custom; and say it should be recited as initiation ceremony for text editors. The fishmonger had a sign which said:
FRESH FISH SOLD HERE
The fishmonger had a friend who persuaded him to rub out the word FRESH – because the naturally he wouldn’t expect to sell fish that wasn’t fresh; to rub out the word HERE – because naturally he’s selling it here, in the shop; to rub out the word SOLD – because he isn’t giving it away; and finally to rub out the word FISH – because you can smell it a mile off.
My new job, as a journalism lecturer at the University of Worcester, started in earnest on Friday with a field trip to Hay-On-Wye for our new cohort. We set the students the task of tracking down two well known faces in the town. Lucy Powell, (above, centre) the former landlady of the oldest pub in town and Richard Booth, (above, left and right) the self-proclaimed King of Hay.
It was great, in particular, to meet Richard Booth (my new colleague Claire Wolfe spent the more time with Lucy Powell), who is widely credited as being the instigator of the world-famous “book town”. Now well into his seventies the King is still in possession of a keen mind full of lively ideas. His latest is to give away over 200,000 books to anyone who fancies establishing a book town of their own. On Sunday the town staged a mock execution an proclaimed that the Independent Kingdom of Hay was now an independent commonwealth instead. And the King’s reaction to all this? He stayed away but was seen drinking with Royalist sympathisers in the Crown. Where else?
Bjarke Ingels of Danish architects BIG talks about three impressive projects. The third, a plan to design an island full of man-made mountains, blew my mind a little (via).
Concept for Zira Island, Azerbaijan by BIG architects
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