2. 2014-03-09

    There’s been a little flurry of le Carré activity in the British press this week , following on from release of MI5 archive files that indicate that an MI5 agent, known as Jack King ran a network of UK nazi collaborators during WWII. Highly fortunate timing for the British spooking establishment to garner some positive press, some might say. The last couple of months the news reports about them have mostly been about illegal mass surveillance techniques attempting to record and analyze all internet traffic at source , and creepy write ups of mass automated collation of private video chats . Some of them intended to be particularly private , no doubt.


    Journalists had a bit of fun trying to retrospectively finger the real Jack King . The Telegraph decided King was probably John Bingham, Lord Clanmorris , whose name is usually mentioned in passing in press stories about ‘le Carré’, itself a pen-name for David Cornwell , who often mentions that Bingham is one of the component inspirations behind his super-famous fictional master spycatcher, George Smiley. The Telegraph also span off an article about Bingham’s sense of disapproval of his protégé's literary exploits . Mr Cornwell, writing under his given name, sent in a marvellously succinct letter by way of reply.



    Bingham was of one generation, and I of another. Where Bingham believed that uncritical love of the Secret Services was synonymous with love of country, I came to believe that such love should be examined. And that, without such vigilance, our Secret Services could in certain circumstances become as much of a peril to our democracy as their supposed enemies.John Bingham may indeed have detested this notion. I equally detest the notion that our spies are uniformly immaculate, omniscient and beyond the vulgar criticism of those who not only pay for their existence, but on occasion are taken to war on the strength of concocted intelligence



    Navigating around the little flurry of reportage about this little back and forth, I found this engrossing older Q&A with le Carré , from the Paris Review , held at the time of the US publication of “ The Tailor Of Panama ”, back in the late 1990s. It is a marvellous read, concerning the mechanics, circumstances and techniques of his fictional writing, and touches into politics. This quote leapt off the page at me.



    My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.



    Quite. He’s quite a writer, that Mr. le Carré. If all you know of his work are the mostly excellent TV and motion picture adaptations of his more famous works, you might do yourself a favour, and read a few of the source novels . They work best tackled in publication order.

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  4. 2014-03-01

    They actually did it! And amazingly enough, close to my old gaff , down in Bexhill-on-sea, home town of Q, and one of my favourite buildings, the De La Warr Pavilion . In my day, I chiefly associate the De La Warr with local dance and dog shows, ropey touring comics, and humdrum seasonal panto. It seems to have fully reinvented itself in recent years, as an contemporary arts centre  after a face lift from the usual lottery funding raffle committee.


    The story leading here; Ceramic artist Keith Harrison, as part of his residency in London’s V&A museum  last spring, created a "an experimental sculptural sound system” out of a ceramic tile sculpture, and invited Napalm Death to play a high volume live set through it , potentially involving the destruction of the sculpture through sonic assault.


    So far, so awesome... It sold out quickly, and then the museum curators suddenly came to their senses/got cold feet and chickened out, as they realised they were about to stage a grindcore gig at volumes deliberately intended to destroy sculptures in their museum full of fragile objet’s d’Art, many of which are kept in darkened chambers as they’re too fragile to expose to strong light.


    Aboo. So, I felt slightly better about missing out on tickets, and forgot all about it. 


    I subsequently discover with glee, they relocated it to the De La Warr in November, and completed the show without any particular mishaps to life or property. The installation/gig was called Bustleholme, which is the name of a degraded housing estate outside Birmingham. The sculptural components of the installation, through which the band’s amplified output was channelled, were ceramic tile structures loosely based on the dimensions of the estate. In the words of Keith Harrison...



    The Bustleholme estate in West Bromwich was where I was born and lived until I was 8. Located in the Black Country, the heavy industrial centre of the Midlands, three tower blocks depicted overlooked the estate and their vivid blue and yellow ceramic tiles are one of my earliest memories. Despite the subsequent poor reputation of the blocks, at that time in the late sixties and early seventies they symbolised the optimism of a radical approach to social housing rising out of an urban landscape of motorways, canals, polluted rivers and railway lines.



    The quote is taken from a short interview with the sculptor and band over at the vinyl factory  where there is a fascinating short documentary film about the whole event. More of this kind of thing, please.

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  12. 2013-10-26

    I've been using a set of superman covers I scraped from Superdickery.com  as a screensaver on my Mac for a couple of years. I just dropped them all in a folder, and pointed the built in "slideshow" saver at it. Set to "Shifting Tiles" with 'shuffle slide order' it makes a nice regular grid of comic books that zip in and out regularly.


    Last week I had a notion. I dusted off my old Canon LiDE A4 USB scanner , fired up VUEScan and set about scanning a couple of boxes of my own comic book collection. It was a suprisingly therapeutic couple of hours mechanical work to scan a few hundred, and the result is a more pleasingly personalised slideshow, with a larger number of member images. 


    After running with it for a couple of days, I'm really pleased with the results. It could do with a little more variety, because I scanned from boxes where the material was alphabetically organised by titles (what am I, some kind of nerd?). Some other observations - the 90s were really dark, both in the stupid post-Watchmen 'gritty heroism' sense, but also more literally in the colour palettes. This is really obvious contrasted against the four poster colour silliness of the classic Super titles I've switched from. Ironic that high grade reproduction technology and digital colouring options, as well as the shift to fully painted illustrations seems to have lead to a more muted spectrum of offerings. Perhaps this says a little about my youthful tastes. Also, what was I thinking sticking with that second run of ' Mage ' ("The Hero Defined"). That book was pretty terrible as I recall, and I've certainly got no urge to reread and check my assumptions. I'm leaving them in the set, because it seems dishonest not to. 


    I've got another dozen or so boxes to scan. I should do some sums to work out what the storage implications of that represents before I commit to bunging the rest of them on my 256GB SSD though. 


    As a side thought, I realised that everpix had diligently uploaded all my scan jpgs, so I can present a  public gallery of the work so far for your bemusement.

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  14. 2013-09-01

    Heliotrope : This German rotating building design, was the first building in the world to generate more energy than it consumed.

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  18. 2013-07-06

    Top Skaters


    This is what my final day at last.fm looked like.


    In the morning, this.



    Last.fm 720° team


    <p> In the evening, this.<p>

    Yes, I'm working on getting a MAME cab smuggled into Moonfruit.

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  20. 2013-07-06

    Self cleaning eggs : Guillemot eggs have a surface microstructure that makes them self-cleaning eggs, like a birds egg, EGG.

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