Booty, as in treasure, not boo-tay

My significant udder and I have recently come into a mass of crockery, cutlery and furniture. No, no one had to die; this was a case of surplus. Like a farmer with a bountiful crop, my friend Craig, now happily married and head of tech at blah blah blah, found that his tenants back in good old LDN were moving on.

‘Oh, what’s this? There are cups everywhere. What’s this? Knives and spoons to spare!’

I should have been in musicals. Anyway, the excess loot is only the setting for our story. The real tale begins with our attempt to get it back to the flat.

For this mammoth task we hired the services of recent St.Martin’s graduate Reuben. Not since Han Solo or Sinbad have you ever met a more charming rogue. He was the captain of a van as battered and bodged at the Millennium Falcon, with another Van’s engine and modified doors to boot. Apart from the credits this artist from the emerald isle would be receiving for his trouble, we throw in a brand new washing machine, Romani style.

Reuben, a man of multiple talents as we would discover, managed to unhook the washing machine from a maze of tentacled pipes, with little effort, all the while talking of waster pipes and other things that someone as genteel as I am ignorant of. Next, we moved the fridge, again Reuben worked a new set of skills, this time disconnecting the live wires, cutting and taping them. Awesome.

The most entertaining part of our adventure came during the journey home. Reuben regaled us with tales of moving furniture and sculptures alike. The best story involved a trip to Hampshire where his van broke down three times. Each time the same A.A mechanic was called out, until, finally, the van gave up the ghost and Reuben had to be towed from Hampshire back to Ireland. A singing endorsement of the A.A if ever there was one.

All this man crush aside, it made me realise that in the here and now, the age, of geeks and metrosexuals, these ‘real world’ skills have been lost. Who can boast, fixing an engine, knowing how to wire a fridge and detach a washing machine without flooding? None of us. We have become like the kryptonians, hiding away behind our talk of social media and the digital age, skin with the consistency of porridge, chasing after the recognition of our contemporaries

And to give this post a nice bit of symmetry, we'll end on a musical:

Artverse

To celebrate my significant udders completion of Dante's very own art inferno, we're doing a look back at the past four years worth (actually this blog is barely a year old) of galleries, shows, blockbusters, you name it I probably scoffed at it.

I'm both shocked and awe-somed at the power of persuasion evoked to drag me to all these cathedrals of culture. Good times, good, arty times:

Darren Almond - Fire Under the Snow

Double Agent - ICA

Matthew Barney - Drawing Restraint

Bridge Art Fair 07

Louis Bourgeois and Doris Salcedo

Lynette Wallworth - Hold Vessel 2

Everybody's gotta grow up sometime, bum, bum, bum

I've moved in with my significant udder, got a permanent job and have governance, both physical and spiritual, over the cat. It's all competing for geek out time. I've even started to contemplate some sort of geek schedule.

Fitting in an hour of Battlestar every week shouldn't be too hard. And, lets Cylon it, once that's over I'll have already rounded up all the episodes of Deadwood and tapped every series of The Wire. Maybe I could buy the Cracker DVD box set? After all, I was only a wee one when the series originally aired. The only episode I can remember, with any clarity, starred Robert Carlyle as a Liverpool supporter who moonlighted as an anarchist bomber. I still duck and cover whenever I hear a scouse accent.

Graphic novels: a friend of mine works at Forbidden Planet, so there's a social excuse to fit that in. I've got some time before the next volumes of The Walking Dead, Fables and Ultimates get released. There's no rush to venture into the BO steeped caverns. They really need to give out deodorant to the more 'special' patrons.


Films: I watched Iron Man on das interweb recently. I also made the mistake of going to see the latest Indy film at the picture house. I thought this time, this time it'll be different. No idiots' mobiles going off in the back row, no middle class twits mindlessly twittering away (in the old fashioned sense) about the price of organic Soya beans. But every time, every bloody time. Cash and time I'll never get back. Still, the significant udder has a free pass to the Mezzanine. I'm gonna go all art house on your asses.


That leaves games. Its officially my job to keep up with what's going on in the gaming world, so maybe a new console isn't such an outlandish concept. I dunno, maybe I should wait till winter and then I can justify staying in with the sweet sounds of the console fan, as I shower fiery death on whatever.

Nutters on ice (and boats)

After the unsuccessful ‘week of snobbery,’ I found myself on the opposite end of the duhhhh, spectrum. This week, apart from moving to west LDN, I’ve become an avid fan of ‘The Deadliest Catch’ and ‘Ice Truckers.’ Both are set in the Northern wastes of America where even berserkers would have a hard time coping.

‘The Deadliest Catch’ is my favourite though. Real men, (with beard growth and everything) embark on an insane journey into the Baring Sea to catch King Crab. No white whales then.

Watching the same labour intensive process of baiting cages, chucking them overboard, only to come back a few hours later is hypnotising. Rinse and repeat. It’s surprising and maybe a bit worrying, how baited my breath becomes when each cage is pulled up. The difference between riches or rags is directly equated to how many snappy claws are housed within each metallic coffin.

The rewards can be great. One of my favourite directors, Richard Linklater financed his first film working on an oil rig. And I can see the monetary incentive to work on an oil rig, ocean trawler, ice truck etc. Still, you’d have to be pretty nuts and a real man. Having a blog about geeky pop culture references means I fail to muster the right musk.

My girlfriend, the (specific) gamer hater

A look of disgust, no, that’s too strong, maybe its pity. I don’t understand it. Its not like she doesn’t enjoy playing games. We’ve ignored many a clock face exacting vengeance on Burnout, Mario Kart and Soul Calibur.

Racing, fighting and intense competition, these are her purveyors of pleasure. She is the personification of competition. Nail clawing, controller throwing competition.


To understand the look of pity, I needed to analyse what I was playing that could be so offensive. RPGs and FPS games mostly. To the uninitiated, mowing down waves of Nazis, picking the opportune time to use a health potion or the satisfaction as you bing a character (level up) might be lost.

And I can see how it could look unproductive. After all, what are the lives of my fellow WW2 buddies, the denizens of Ivalice or the world for that matter, when there are trips to the fortress of Home Base to be undertaken?

Still, it could be worse. You might find yourself trapped in a game, Tron style.

Belated post

A whole week without posting is inexcusable... I might have an explanation, if you’re willing to listen. Often times, when I can’t think of a geeky or quasi-political rant, I tend to submit a post consisting of a paragraph and maybe a video or a picture.

Nowadays I’ll simply post that kind of frivolous discovery straight on to Twitter. This might well be the shape of things to come. Never fear, you can follow these slap dash updates here.


From now on, I'll try to post the really, really good, Twitter filtered stuff, on here. I’m hoping this filtering process will give me more time to write posts such as these: me, you and this guy too

Retrospective, why not?

I was talking to Richard today and we both agreed, people don't spend enough time exploring blog archives. So, I've done it for you:

The Stars My Destination

City 17 vs London

Beowulf, Folklore and Fables

Paul Barnett vs the industry

Wild Gourmets aka idiots

Supreme geekdom

Digital life and times

It was my birthday recently and among the gifts, ranging from a 'Ghetto Stars' colouring book to a History of Street Art, my significant udder broke the mold and made a video collating our fives years together.


It's really good, if some what personal, but I might post it still. Anyway, it got me thinking about the history of 'me.' The recorded history of my parents, amounts to a few pictures, school essays and old passports. What became obvious from watching the Ben 5yr video was the intricate detail my life has been captured in, thus far.

If and when, I have spawn of my own, I can offer them a vast amount of imagery and exposition to try and sum up my life. Everything from this blog, tweets, tumbles, pictures, videos and work, will all combine to leave a Ben like imprint. I could offer them a back log of all my Friend Feed activity, but what's data without emotion.


At one point, we might only have drawn conclusions from diaries, historical accounts and raw data in the form of financial/medical records. Now we have a more personal and possibly, eternal, means of doing so.

A bank holiday weekend with no Internet

What I learned:

I can finish an RPG in two days vs the initial week and a half it took the first time around:



The Internet was developed with the sole purpose of satiating my need to know about any infinite spectrum of subjects whenever the mood takes me.

The longer you go without connectivity the choices of what sites/services you would have used had Virgin Media been less shit shrinks.

Reading a book is great but painful for your arms if its 1221 pages long.


Watching three generations of fish in a pond isn’t as lame as it sounds.

Coffee in Crouch End is silly expensive. There’s no world shortage of beans, its rice you’re thinking of.

Face to face interaction still trumps MyFace and Twit tweets.

The Million Word Project

I once had this idea to make a website for fictional stories like Flickr is to photos and YouTube is to videos. The main objective of the ‘Million-Word Project’ was to enable the creation of one thousand stories in one thousand words.

The stories themselves could be of any genre as long as they contained one thousand words exactly. I tried writing a couple stories just to see what the difficulty would be like. Hard, basically.


The rating system for the MWP would be known as ‘championing.’ A user would have the option to champion a story, which would then appear on their user page as a badge or symbol (like a dug on Digg or thumbs up on StumbleUpon).


The badge would be created/submitted by the author of each story (hopefully you’d build up a network of fans who might design one for you). If the author could obtain ten champions (start small) for their story, it would be submitted to the Library of Fame (this is all starting to sound a bit too RPG land).


The author could then see which users had championed their story and read their comments and feedback (a bit like your Digg or StumbleUpon page), while users who had championed a story would be able to interact with other fans and the author too (duh). I didn’t know about things like Twitter back then but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a ‘writers process’ feed or something.


Partnerships with the BBC, British Library, NESTA, the Arts Council and other organizations would have been a good source of initial financing and medium to communicate to an already established audience(s). You could throw in regular workshops both physical and online to help establish an understanding and enjoyment for writing fiction too. Oh well, it never happened.

ProtestR

What a bizarre Sunday. I woke up to the BBC’s live coverage of the Olympic torch marathon. Images of Konnie Huq being accosted coupled with her own disembodied commentary of what was happening.


I had intended to go down and protest somewhere along the route but feeling ridiculously comfy in bed, I was warming, both in body and mind, to the idea of pouring my outrage, joy, hunger and cat attack updates via Twitter.

I felt capable of doing as good a job as the current BBC reporter who was essentially mouthing what appeared on their auto-cue. I was moved to attend.


From seeing the Spartan-esque formation of torchbearer, the blue circle of torch supervisors, ring of yellow police and larger ring of black ninja suited police on my TV screen, I found them suddenly in front of me.


The protests from the South Bank onwards turned into a game of ‘bulldog’ (a game played across UK schools). The game cycle would go: multi-coloured group of torch protectors run for a bit, a shout comes for them to form up. The protestors then encircle them. The police would push back and breakthrough, run for it and the whole thing would start over.


It’s a strange sensation to see something that feels distant and almost unreal via a screen and then be in the thick of it.

If I’d been cooler and had a web capable phone I might have been able to provide my own, running commentary, uploading pics, videos and messages to Flickr, YouTube and Twitter respectively. My significant udder got some really nice pics though.

Grimey

I was stumbling the other day when I came across the poetry of Joe Dunthorne. It’s urban and topical in theme and wouldn’t be out of place on say, an episode of Skins but, oh wait, they’re all stage school kids, d’oh. Therefore the most grime they will have seen is under a fingernail.


Apart from the poems, Dunthorne has bizarre sketches littered around his site. The artist is someone called Alastair O’shea. I did a search for O’shea and came up with Fatking Productions. It turns out he designs web games. Its weird how the web works.

You might not be a fan of the poetry or the sketches but I’d challenge anyone to ‘gats’ at dawn if they don’t find this particular puzzle game simultaneously sickeningly cute and finger bleeding addictive.

That was scary

I met a friend today in (achingly trendy, thanks a lot Simon Pegg, you’ve ruined it) Crouch End. We went for tea at Hot Pepper Jelly, one of the last bastions of non-smugness left in the area. Apart from nearly exploding after drinking, what was advertised as a ‘large pot’ of green tea but turned out to be a bladder and half worth’s, we reminisced about stuff we’d watched as mere amoebas.

I confirmed I'd watched Dark Crystal by involuntarily shouting ‘Gelfling’ really loudly, in what is a fairly small café. The Storyteller with, (how many fingers am I holding up?) John Hurt and sibling rivalry taken to the extreme with Labyrinth. What have they all got in common? That’s right, nerd herd, twas Jim Henson.


The Dark Crystal is still a pretty scary film even now but Jim Henson’s works are darker than the endless dark that occupies the void under the garden decking. You can discount the Muppets obviously, unless you have an irrational fear of talking animals and who doesn’t, have you ever seen a furry up close?

Anyway, my friend and I both admitted to being scared if not unsettled by watching these puppeteered performances as children. Which lead on to another question. What will I show my own hell spawn? I settled pretty quickly on Miyazaki over Disney. I think Miyazaki has just the right level of poo your pantsness but deals with adult or what are essentially real life themes like, love, death, taking a stand, fighting monsters both metaphorical and physical, in a universal way that both adult and child can understand. After all, none of us really grow up. So, big love to Jim Henson and Miyazaki (his son is a bit rubbish though)

I just discovered that Genndy Tartakovsky is making a sequel to the Dark Crystal. Geek out!

Darren Almond, Fire Under Snow, Parasol Unit

Two pieces at Darren Almond’s new show transfixed my philistine mind: ‘Tide’ and ‘Bearing.’ You encounter the first as soon as you walk into the Parasol Unit. A completely bare room greets you with large white walls, in a gallery? No way. Taking up one of the vast walls is a sea of clocks. Not the friendly clocks with hands but those evil ones that clack. They’re not intrinsically evil but fill me with the horror of being forcibly pulled from a pleasant dream or the soul-destroying nature of working at some large corporation as a temp.


This ‘Tide’ of clocks sound off every minute with a near deafening ‘clack.’ 600 clocks clacking in unison is one of the more disturbing noises you’re likely to hear off Hoxditch. Almond has succeeded in managing to isolate abstract time but whether it was his idea to put the receptionist in the same room facing this ‘sculpture to inevitability,’ is uncertain. Probably a sadistic curator was involved.

‘Bearing’ takes naming to a new level. You sit in a dark room with only the glare of a large protection illuminating the inquisitive faces of the public. You watch as a worker in an Indonesian sulphur mine makes his way up, what seems like a never-ending mountain, with only a rag to cover his mouth from the toxic air. It’s as real as recorded reality can get.

His climb and the shot are relentless. A camera is constantly fixed to the worker’s face. You hear the strain of his breathing, the creaking of the bamboo carrier, loaded with large sulphur rocks. Its easily one of the most intense things I’ve seen in a recorded format. I’d not noticed how much an effect watching commercial films, TV, ads etc makes on a subconscious expectation for fast cuts, commentary, feedback, something.

You could see the viewers’ distress when they realised it was going to remain one unflinching shot. Every once in a while the worker stops and lays his load down and peeks into the distant height of his destination but as viewers you have no idea of the true distance left. The film lasts 30 minutes.

It reminded me of a new religion in one of Phillip K Dick’s short stories, ‘The Little Black Box.’ People watch a ‘man’ named Wilbur Mercer on 'Empathy Boxes.' Like the Indonesian worker, Mercer traverses a never-ending desolate landscape. No one is quite sure why he’s doing it, but all who watch empathise with his struggle:

"N-nothing." Ray continued to grip the handles. On the screen, Wilbur Mercer walked slowly over the barren, jagged surface of a desolate hillside, his face lifted, an expression of serenity - or vacuity - on his thin, middle-aged features... To Joan, he explained, "This is the empathy box, my dear... when you take hold of these handles you're no longer watching Wilbur Mercer. You're actually participating in his apotheosis. Why, you're feeling what he feels."

Homemade Jelly

For the last few months I’ve been freelancing and whilst this does have some benefits: not getting on the evil tube crush, being able to work in a dressing gown, popping out to see friends for tea etc there are some serious drawbacks. The lack of (during the day) social contact comes top.


I’m lucky to have the opportunity to meet friends for lunch, as they live near by, but if they didn’t, I’d see no one…for days.

I have no illusions that I will become Jack Nicholson in The Shinning after a day or two, but other ‘workomers’ and their psyches might yet be saved via Jelly:

For the love of Skype

Love and relationships can be tricky at the best of times but with the advent of SMS, Skype, social networking etc completely new levels of love ratdom can be achieved. Below is a pod from Current TV:

School's not cool but it could be

Digital protesting vs physical protesting

It’s the fifth anniversary since the start of the Iraq war, or at least it will be on Thursday. No doubt you will have caught one program in the plethora of Iraq, ‘where are we now, that’s right, just showing you this so you can keep tabs,’ season.

I went on a, what should have been called ‘Leave the Middle East alone, they all cool’ rally but was in fact called, the less catchy, 'Troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, don’t attack Iran and stop the oppression of the Palestinian people’ rally. Phew. I think my name is better. Anyway, it was a miserable day, raining and freezing but there was still a pretty good turn out.


Speeches were made, some better than others. I took particular offence at a speech given by ‘the girl that organized all dem walk outs at schools before the invasion and ting.’ She sounded as if she’d just been pushed out on stage rambling on about, ‘nukes were bad and so was America, yeah, that’s right, cos, eeer, um, they’ve got like a military industrial complex init.’

That evening I had a discussion about the effectiveness of public protests. I went on the million people march before the war and here we are reflecting on the five-year anniversary. Since that time, Green Peace, Amnesty and others have petitioned me via the interweb.


Click here to add your name to a petition to stop such and such. And lo, a few weeks later I’d receive an email explaining that the petition was a big success and bill x was passed in the House of Commons. Wow, direct, digital protest and it works.

Despite the meagre coverage the protest on Saturday got, having pictures of Parliament Square packed with protesters still makes the hairs on my hunch back stand up on end. The moment it looks like people don't care enough to take to the streets will be the day that those who have the power to change something will have nothing to convince them to do so. The only difference now is there are two mediums to get your protest across, each feeding the other. Protesting in the flesh is still more fun...for now

A brief history and future of the interweb

The voice over in the Epic video is ultra cheese but more worryingly, the tone sounds very similar to the Zion mainframe...the robots are coming.

EPIC 2015



Zion

Double Agent at the ICA

Oh noes, its time for another I’m not dead art review, if you’re a connoisseur prepare to inflate your philistine poison sacks. Of the five-ish years I’ve been indoctrinated into the art world, via my significant udder, the ICA has almost uniformly proffered up wank. I’ve never been one to complain, it is, after all, only two pounds to get in. So, given my history and prejudice towards the place, I thought Double Agent was going to be equally lame. But lo, it was actually surprisingly thought provoking, imaginative and enjoyable.

Take Dora Garcia’s ‘Instant Narrative’ well, I say Garcia’s but she wasn’t actually there, she hired writers in her stead (sneaky). You walk into a large white room. It’s completely enclosed apart from the doorway you came through and what looks like a slim exit on the far side. A projection of prose immediately grabs your jaded attention. New text is constantly added as you start to read, so far so arty but then in a Truman Show/Stranger than Fiction epiphany you realise the text is about you.


“Two people walk into the room. One has a three quarter length jacket. They look ok, better than the last lot. I wonder if they’ll kick up as much of a fuss. He’s laughing nervously, she’s enjoying the spotlight.” And so on. It’s a bizarre and unsettling experience. Becoming the unwilling subject feels like the reverse of the jubilation felt by accepted reality TV candidates. I unconsciously stepped backwards so I’d be out of the line of sight of the now identified writer hiding the shadows of the next exit.

The other piece of note is Artur Zmijewski’s video, ‘Them.’ Zmijewski organises a paint workshop to which he invites four groups: Christians, Jews, Young Socialists and Polish nationalists, who are then encouraged to respond to each group’s symbolic depiction of its values.

This starts off civilly enough, each group being tentative about what they change. Initially a young socialist cuts open the doors on the polish church the Christian’s have painted. The Christian’s like the idea of the church doors being open and more welcoming. The Polish Jews rap rainbow tape over the sword that represents the Polish nationalist’s symbol and so on.

It’s not until the fourth day by which point the Polish Nationalist’s symbol has been torn, stamped on, painted over and the Young Socialist’s symbol saying ‘freedom for all’ has been painted over to say, God, Fatherland, Strength that things invariably start to go into meltdown.


I expected but was still surprised to see natural alliances form between the Christians and Polish Nationalists. What surprised me even more was the reverence the Church painting had. It was only in the last heated ideological battle fought with paint and fire that the church painting had the words, ‘we demand tolerance’ strewn across it. In any case, I usually never sit through a full video in a gallery space so that alone should encourage you to go see it.

Double Agent runs till the 6th of April