“Believe it or not, the Internet is a tougher town than New York; fewer people make it here, but no one there seems to make it for long.” – Bill Wasik

Big lights, big internet, New York TImes

Jon Savage on Looking from a Hilltop by Section 25

Section 25 • Looking from a hilltop FAC108

Originally uploaded by 4mediafactory

Have been enjoying Jon Savage’s occasional column on the Guardian Music Blog. Lately he’s been celebrating the best of early eighties dance music. Here he is on Soft Cell’s Bedsitter and Fingers Inc’s Mystery of Love, here on Cybotron’s Techno City. Today he chose Section 25’s simply wonderful Looking from a Hilltop (megamix) remixed by New Order’s Bernard Summer and A Certain Ratio’s Donald Johnson. He’s right, but the vocal mix was always the one for me.

“In the end, Looking from a Hilltop (Megamix) is all forward motion. At eight minutes, the track isn’t a second too long: all the elements are subordinate to the irresistible Moroder-esque modulations, which give a framework over which the group and the remixers pour backwards synths, wailing rock guitar, and all manner of ambient noises. With this epic – one of the best tracks from a great year for electro – Section 25 finally achieved the grandeur that they had always sought. Released in June 1984, the 12″ – with a bright orange sleeve – made waves in the UK and was a club hit in New York. It was also picked up by black radio stations in the Chicago area, and consequently fed into the early house scene.”

While rummaging around for a print of Bridget Riley

EPH_10__155 Bridget Riley

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Glasgow School of Art Archives & Library

My latest best find: Glasgow School of Art’s Archives and Library flickr feed. Including this very handsome poster of the great Bridget Riley (right). But also posters for David Hockney; Patrick Heron and George Melly (as the King of Spades). I found this while rummaging around for a print of Riley’s Late Morning (1968/7) currently on show at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery which I stared at for some considerable time at the weekend. I can’t find the print online, which is probably a good thing.  A lot of nonsense is talked about art, so I will be careful and I’ll keep it short, but there is little else on canvas that can quite move me quite like the straight, simply painted, lines of a Bridget Riley painting.

“We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.” – Michael Foot

(heard on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service)

Smashable brands – Coke, Guiness, Harley Davidson’s – light up the same part of the brain as religious imagery. Fascinating in itself. David Finklestein in the Times tries to claim that the tories are also a similar “smashable brand”, but a party isnt a company, Fink, and politics isn’t commerce.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article7055713.ece

Judge this book by its cover

Nice to see my good friend Rob Van Kranenburg’s excellent essay, on the Internet of Things, given the design treatment. Here’s the alternative cover by Wendy wan der Waal. We should hire her for a second edition, Rob.

For graphic design we got the assignment to design ‘The Internet of Things’, a book by Rob van Kranenburg, a writer and researcher.

The most important was that you gave your opinion about the subject through the design of the book. I found all his theories about ambient technology … very interesting … you can look at the subject in several ways, and that causes confusion. That’s why I started playing with the reading direction. Every direction has a particular color, and at some points it overlaps. In this way it becomes more abstract.

I created the book in a completely ‘off-PC’ analogue manner, on a photo copier. Using colored sheets for the separate reading directions.

Tarnishing the reputation of the great Ryzsard Kapuscinski

Hearing that the legendary reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski routinely made stuff up is a bit like discovering that Henri Charrière, author of Papillion, was a model prisoner. According to Kapuscinski’s biographer, Artur Domoslavski, the great polish journalist tended to embellish the truth. It would cause me some sadness if this proves to be true. Kapuscinski (author of The Emperor: the Downfall of an Autocrat, above) is charged with inventing his friendship with Che Guevara; lying about his father’s time in a Soviet prisoner of war camp and inventing the story about his near escape from a firing squad (never mind the other three times he was said to be sentenced to death).

It is worth pointing out that many of these criticisms have been around since 2007 and doubts about the veracity of his reportage from have existed at least as far back 2001, five years before his death. Kapuscinski’s legendary status has always attracted suspicion and no little jealously. The reaction in Poland to the latest attacks on his credibility have been most bitter. The former Foreign Minister Vladyslav Bartoshevski yesterday compared the biography’s publishers to “purveyors of brothel guides”, while others have said that the claims are all about selling the new biography, other defenders of Kapuscinski have always pointed out that many of his stories were allegories, often of Soviet-era Poland. Does it matter? Yes, very. If we are going to view Kapuscinski’s work as journalism it matters a great deal. Think how you might feel if you suddenly learnt that Orwell had never fought in the Spanish Civil War. If it is true that Kapuscinski invented situations as a matter of routine, we can only ever enjoy the stories as works of fiction. Which is how we now read Papillion.

The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but Joanna Newsom’s new album takes you somewhere else entirely

I have just got hold of the new Joanna Newsom album, Have One On Me. Four years in the making, it spans two hours, four minutes, three discs and 18 tracks. A doubling of the number of songs in her oeuvre in a single stroke. It is, I confess, as overwhelming as a Tolstoy novel, and as yet a little early to say if it’s as satisfying. The song, In California, with its key and tempo changes, sweeping strings and suitably cuckoo intonations, suggests that it might be: it is as nimble and beguiling as birdsong.

Critically, the album is being treated, as ever, with a gentle patronisation, even by its admirers. The Washington Post describes the the song Good Intentions Paving Company as sounding “like what would happen if the renaissance fair had a disco”; and notes that her voice has grown more “natural and assured” and, somewhat erroneously, that, “she no longer sounds like a 16th-century kewpie doll”.

Kitty Empire in the Observer commends “the awesome arc performed by [the song] Baby Birch packs in innovations: handclaps, furtive blares of electric guitar and a strange eastern origami coda that neatly folds a bit of Japan into a bit of Bulgaria. It is nine-and-a-half minutes long and yet you curse the fade-out”.

Listen to a stream of Have One on Me

William Burroughs’s typewriter

New baby + new job = so very little time to blog. So here is a quick nod towards the the work of art photographer Peter Ross who was recently given access to the New York apartment of William Burroughs, which has been preserved, like some beat version of the Blue Peter time capsule. since his death in 1997. Burroughs lived in the former locker room of a Bowery YMCA in a windowless space known as “the bunker”. His friend, the poet John Giorno, has kept the apartment exactly as it was, leaving many of Burroughs’s possessions sitting where he left them.

The very overdue return of Reverie Sound Revue

Have been listening a lot to Reverie Sound Review, the Calgary-based offshoot of Broken Social Scene. They remind me of the Cardigans, around the release of Life, for all their bittersweet melodies and delightful wistfulness. The five-piece have left it nearly seven years since the release of their début EP and the recorded the entire album without once being in the studio together. You can’t tell.

Thanks to Chromewaves for the following links:

MP3: Reverie Sound Revue – “An Anniversary Away”
MP3: Reverie Sound Revue – “Rip The Universe”
MP3: Reverie Sound Revue – “Arrows”
Video: Reverie Sound Revue – “An Anniversary Away”
MySpace: Reverie Sound Revue

Why revenge is a wild justice

of empire by francis bacon

Originally uploaded by daniel arnold!

Quick word on the release of Munir Hussain, the rich businessman who was jailed for severely beating an intruder who had kidnapped his family at knife-point, but has now been freed on appeal. I stumbled across this quote from Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan philosopher, which questions the popular perception that Hussain might have suffered rough justice the first time around. Although I have sympathy with any man who tries to defend his family, I though thought the wisdom of Bacon to be apt.

“Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong, putteth the law out of office. Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior …”

The Guardian’s technology supplement finally goes to the great online archive in the sky

Another break from blogging (this time to make way for the birth of our lovely daughter) which meant that I missed commenting on the passing of the Guardian’s Technology supplement in the week before Christmas. It was a sad day, for me, to see the paper section finally go offline, not least because it had been given my first big break in journalism. Without the section (pictured, right) I might never have enjoyed many of the opportunities to develop my journalistic career; might never have seen quite so much of the world; and, by extension, never have met my darling Anna one fateful day in Helsinki without the network of contacts the section gave me access to. It’s not the end of an era, but it is the passing of a part of my life that proved pivotal. It was, however, really sweet, or more accurately bittersweet, to be remembered in the final issue, mind. This following comment by the section’s last editor, Charles Arthur, unexpected as it was, made me giggle when I stumbled across it one morning in the university library:

“Of the thousands of words that I’ve edited in Guardian Technology since November 2005, none has delighted me quite so much as the opening of Sean Dodson’s article in May 2006: “In 1824 an English bricklayer named Joseph Aspdin rediscovered one of the great secrets of the ancient world.” It has it all: mystery, storytelling, and most of all it’s about the sort of technology that you can drop on your foot. (Don’t quite recall what he rediscovered? Find out online).”

The section will continue online and in different parts of the paper. But it will be missed. Thanks to Vic, Jack, Neil and Charles for all the help you gave me.

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The Severn subsides

worcester 040

Originally uploaded by seandodson

The river returned to the river this morning. For a week it has been camped out, swollen and brooding, on the riverside walk, spilling ominously over the barriers and threatening to flood the whole city. I am ashamed to admit that I was rather fascinated by the prospect a real life flood in Worcester, being recently moved to the city and the resident of a hill.

But by this morning the Severn had subsided. Fresh on the south parade, which yesterday had been under water, was a thin layer of river sand, red and muddy, like a beach after the rain. The swans were back reclaiming their rightful place on the river after a week of hiding on the higher banks or mooching around the flooded racecourse ground. But this morning they were back centre stage, so to speak, taking excitedly to the river like children skating on newly frozen ice. They stretched their wings, now flapping, now gliding, and searched hungry for food until a nice lady pulled up in her car and sprinkled a bag full of crumbs for them.

I looked back on to the foreshore. Everything was coated in dust, in the fine silt, rusty and smooth, as if autumn itself had been pummelled into powder and spread, like the breadcrumbs, right across the scene.

Exhibition: Birmingham Seen

Just returned from a fascinating exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG). Apart from a few nights out to Snobs (when it was a house club in the early 90s) and one visit when I was at University, for which I can no longer recall the reason, I’ve never really known what to make of Birmingham. I’ve recently moved to the West Midlands, however, and been dragged, like some unsuspecting meteorite, into its gravitational orbit. Birmingham Seen is a really excellent exhibition, a perfect primer to the city for an outsider like me. It’s full of urban landscape paintings, some very detailed old photographs, Balladian photos of the abandoned Longbridge car plant and (above) Barbara Walker’s lovely paintings. I saw the city as a native might, at least for an afternoon

* Birmingham Seen: Birmingham City Museum and Gallery Until 3rd January 2010. Admission Free.

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Ben Kelly: Hacienda silk prints recall the clubs halcyon days

Ben Kelly, the architect of the Hacienda, has released this stunning pair of limited edition prints (above) of the legendary Mancunian club. They are not photos, nor paintings but digital renderings from a full-scale digital model being produced to celebrate its 25th anniversary. £600 each, £1000 the pair (via the excellent Cerysmatic Factory)

Why I love the recordings of the Middle East

There was a time in my life when I could blog more frequently and thoroughly than this. So I need to be brief. The Middle East, from Queensland Australia are the best new band I’ve heard all year. They’ve just released their debut EP. The Recordings of the Middle East. You can download it from their offical site. What do they sound like? Like shoegazers with better melodies. Like the Arcade Fire’s over-sensitive younger sibling. Like Surjan Stevens without the religion or naivite. Take my word for it or listen for yourself.

The Middle East: The Darkest Side
The Middle East: Blood