1. 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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  2. 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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