Bookmarks for April 13

Simon Callow laments the “bibliocide” of Charing Cross Road, London’s celebrated book village. Fastly becoming an extension of Chinatown or an annexe of Oxford Street. Regular readers of the blog will recall that we like a good bookshop at the Northern Light and we regret the street’s passing too.

+ The Guardian went to town with its analysis of the G20 riots, noting that the rise of the “citizen cameraman” is changing the relationship between protestor and police. Ian Jack offers some awesome analysis on how powerful the photograph has become, but warns that at best they only offer a half truth. Elsewhere, Paul Walker reports on how the shock of Ian Tomlinson’s death was felt around the world; while Martin Preston , a press photographer, gives a vivid account of what it feels like to be at the business end of a police baton.

+ The great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm admits that socialism has failed and that capitalism is bankcrupt. He asks, what’s next?

+ Not a Neverland built on the never-never. Johann Hari on the dark side of Dubai: “a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing into history”.

+ If Dubai’s vision of the future is now obsolete, what comes next? John Geraci, founder of DIY Cities thinks that open source applications could lead the way to a new kind of urban planning. “The conversation about the future of our cities should involve the people living in those cities … it should be about how to reinvent these services as modern, efficient things, how to make them work at a fraction of their current cost, and, while we’re at it, how to make them better than they are now.” My vote would be to work out a way that hisoric quarters selling, say, books, shouldn’t be left to fade away.

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Huddersfield’s Queensgate Market trades on its architectural heritage

I’m a couple of clicks late on this, but I’ve just noticed that the 20th Century Society recently named Huddersfield’s Queensgate Market (above) as its Building of the Month. The Society, a charity which lobbies to protect modernist architecture, describes the market as “one of the finest post-war buildings in the north of England”. And so it is.

For the last few years I’ve had an ongoing debate with my Father about the beauty of Queensgate Market. Growing up in the 1950s, Dad has always been a lover of the town’s old Market Hall, which was demolished in 1957. I never got to see the old building, but I’ve some splendid memories of the newer market thanks to my Grandmother taking me there on Saturdays. It’s still got this amazing roof, comprised of an asymmetric lattice of concrete shells, that floods the place with natural light even on the most cloudy days. Believe you me those Pennie skies can be very overcast indeed.

Despite its unique architectural heritage, it’s the only building of its type in the UK, the local council is threatening to demolish the market to make way for a new development, that will build a new market hall, while adding a number of residential units and a department store to the mix.

Luckily a campaign to save the building is underway, led in part by the 20th Century Society and local conservationists. Here’s how Jon Wright, the Society’s senior case worker, sees it: 

“It comes as a shock when a twentieth century building that is widely admired, not just by the Society or by architectural and design enthusiasts, but by the general public and its every day users, comes under threat. When the building in question is also listed, has a concrete roof structure unique in the country and contains extraordinary artwork, proposals for demolition seem outrageous.”

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Expo 2010: UK will be working the car wash

Is it just me or does plan for the UK pavilion at next year’s Shanghai Expo look exactly like an enormous car wash?

Work has just begun on the winning design, by Heatherwick Studio. The brushes in the picture (above) are actually pixels and can be pre-programmed to display several different designs. The symbolism seems wholly appropriate, mind, as if to say to the world that, honestly, we can clean up our mountains of debt.

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Kill Your Darlings: biopic to revisit the birth of the beat generation

I’m intrigued to learn that the life of Lucien Carr is to be made into a film. Carr was the man who introduced writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (to be played by British actor Ben Whishaw).

Kill Your Darlings revisits an infamous night in 1944 when Carr stabbed his friend David Kammerer to death. He was later convicted of the manslaughter. Kerouac spent a night in the clink for helping Carr dispose of the knife.

It’s difficult to gauge how good it will be; films about the Beat Movement have been so uniformly dire, which is strange because you’d have thought that the movement would be made on the silver screen. All that great music; those wide open roads; the scenes of bohemian hedonism have somehow never been successfully translated to the cinema.

+ Incidentally there is a decent-looking Kerouac documentary is doing the festivals circuit.

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All the best projects start with a blank canvas

Taking a cue from the Royal College of Art’s annual Secret Postcard exhibition, students at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design have come up with an equally  inspired way of funding their degree show. Short of funds, but rich in ideas, the students have clubbed together and bought a number of second-hand pieces of bric-a-brac (above) from various charity shops and then sent them to a number of their favourite illustrators and designers to be re-designed.

The list of designers is impressive in itself, including the likes of Jonathan Barnbrook, Michael Beirut, Paula Scher, Airside, NMo Design, David Carson and Kozyndan and many more. What’s more, most of the designers seem to have acquiesced with the request and the resulting re-designed items will be auctioned at the Vibe Bar in Brick Lane in London on April 30.

• More details here: Blank Canvas Event

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Bookmarks for April 06

Some quite shocking video footage of police aggression at the Climate Camp, held in Bishopgate in London last week. Admittedly this is taken from the partisan Indymedia network, but, even so, the most telling thing about it is that none of the protesters appear to be throwing punches or stones at the police – even though they are being charged with shields and beaten with batons. Seen from this angle, the attack appears unprovoked.

+ Richard MacManus of the New York Times looks at the latest attempt to map a city using mobile phones. Mentions MIT’s WikiCity ambitious open source mapping project. Nice visualisations of urban data.

+ Music streaming: enjoy it while you can, says the Guardian’s Chris Salmon.

+ Michal Migursk: the end of online monoculture. Excellent critique of “recommender” systems (LastFM, Amazon et al) that help us chart the web.

+ Why Amsterdam is becoming both a greener and a smarter city.

+ Cathy Curtis: How the web made me a better copywriter

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C

Channel 4 News is asking if the G20 summit makes for a good day to bury bad news?

Katharine Ainger: the time is now for anti-capitalism

J18 hydrant party

Originally uploaded by mm-j

Interesting piece on the 10th anniversary of the anti-capitalist movement by author Katharine Ainger on today’s Comment is Free. How times catch up with you. I was at the original J18 “Carnival Against Capitalism” (right) in June 1999. It was one of my first assignments for The Guardian. Although, alas, the original seems to have been removed or lost from the database. Anyway Ainger states that in the face of a recession, the arguments of the anti-capitalists, far from being marginalised, are actually move valid than ever. She writes:

“The movement, which was essentially demanding democratic control over the global economy, wreathed summit after summit of the G8, the WTO and the World Bank with protest and teargas. It was wild, infuriating, diverse and sometimes incoherent, as only a network that encompasses indigenous peoples, radical environmentalists, workers and kids in hoodies could be. The movement was like the child in the crowd as the emperor of global neoliberalism wheeled by, pointing out that his cloaks were woven from financial fictions and economic voodoo.”

Anyone fancy a free all-expenses-paid-trip to Denmark?
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Future of newspapers is all about public trust

Really good piece by Polly Toynbee in this morning’s Guardian on what is to be done about failing local newspapers. The first paper who ever paid me (a fiver for a band review), The Holme Valley Express, went bust a couple of months back. Many others are in navigating similar straits. But maybe, just maybe, argues Toynbee, a new business model, one based on the idea of a public trust, could save local papers.

“Bring in the money available from awful ITV local news. Add in some BBC money: their local news is shamingly bad too, partly because the area covered is too wide. Then oblige local councils to stop wasting money on their own Pravda sheets, and to buy space in clearly defined zones in their local news trusts. It might need a small subvention from council tax, too. Roll all this into a local trust with an obligation to good reporting, fair rules and open access, and you could have independent local news across web, print, radio and television offering a genuine community service. It is on the table.”

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Bruce McCall: tomorrowrama never dies

Tomorrowrama

Originally uploaded by amphalon

Bruce McCall might not own a mobile phone and paint of paper with paint. But he’s always been obsessed with the future. I’ve enjoyed his recent talk at Ted Conference where he pontificates about the notion of “faux nostalgia” a yearning, he says, for imaginary futures that never happened.

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The future of news: doom or boom?

Just thought you might like to read these two important essays, published in the last few days, on the future of news:

1) Clay Shirky: why newspapers are doomed:

“Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”

2) Steven Berlin Johnson: the future means more news, lot less:

“There is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports.”

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Why the recession means boom time for free software

Forgive the self-linkage, but I want to direct you to my recent feature in this week’s Guardian Technology supplement. It examines the recent growth of free software around the world and wonders if the recession is the main reasons for its surge in popularity:

“Richard Stallman once wrote that the point about free software is it is “free as in freedom, not free as in beer”, meaning that people should be at liberty to do as they pleased with software, rather than subscribe to its restrictive licences. As the recession takes hold, the stress may be on the second half of his now-famous aphorism. To the millions downloading free software in a recession, the point is that it is free – as in free beer.”

The dazzling graphic art of Edward Wadsworth

Just love this print of Edward Wadsworth’s Drydocked for Scaling and Painting (Liverpool). It’s a picture of one of his “dazzle ships” from World War I, so called because they deployed a “dazzle camouflage” in an attempt to mess with the minds of the German navy. The technique could disrupt the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery; so making it more difficult for the enemy to detect a be-dazzled ship’s precise distance and speed. Amazingly, the design exploited Wadworth’s experience as a vorticist painter, a British brand of cubo-futurism, that used bold, abstracted lines that similarly tricked the eye.

* A painting of his dazzle ships hangs in National Gallery in Ottawa and it celebrates the dazzling ships with equal boldness.

** Incidentally, the dazzle ships also served as an inspiration for the Factory Record’s Peter Saville, who used the technique to design a sleeve for an OMD album of 1983.
(via ffffound).

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Catching up on things I may have missed last year. Pitchfork’s best 100 tracks of 2008 via a Spotify playlist. A super way to listen to new music.

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Billy Bragg: musicians need to sing from the same setlist

Billy Bragg
Originally uploaded by
tobyadamson.co.uk

Billy Bragg and Dave Rowntree (from Blur) will help launch the Featured Artists Coalition in London tomorrow (March 11).

Responding to Google’s decision to remove music videos from YouTube after an argument over fees with the Performance Rights Society (which represents the rights of artists), the pair wrote a joint call-to-arms over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog. They wrote:

“Whether we like it or not, the old business model is broken and the decline in sales … has not been helped by the determination of the big labels to protect themselves at the expense of both artists and fans. Record shops have disappeared from our high streets and the big labels may go the same way, passing into the hands of asset strippers whose only interest is the bottom line. Yet, there is still clearly an audience out there for good music, and plenty of young musicians hoping to find them.”

This is why we need to find our voice now – to ensure that the next generation of artists are able to earn a living in the new digital music industry that is busy being born.”

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