Category: Reviews

Dracula

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2007-01-17
2 Comments on Dracula

Over Christmas & New Year I read “Dracula”. It’s very good, with a sense of the uncanny and the other that Lovecraft learnt nothing from. The TV movie of Dracula shown in the same time frame was a classic example of making something less sexy by trying to make it more sexy. Dracula for cultural studies lecturers, with none of the horror or intrigue of the original.

Reading the book I was struck by how the Count is a threat to the whole of civilization. In the films I’ve seen he is more of a personal threat to those who face him. Possibly I just missed this, or possibly this is how film worked in the second half of the twentieth century.

And now I have some Hammer films of the Count to watch. They are very hard to get hold of, which is a shame as they are such a foundational part of contemporary British culture whether contemporary British culture likes it or not. 😉

Free Culture Reviews

Promises To Keep

I read “Promises To Keep”.

It’s a fact-tastic read, crammed with data and diagrams, and a very well argued thesis, with the two places where the argument doesn’t follow from the examples sticking out like sore thumbs (these are minor parts of the argument, I mention this simply to emphasize how coherent the rest of the book is).

I still have a problem with ACSes, although that is one less problem than I had before reading the book. The balance of privacy and accuracy that the system must strike seems much more plausible from Fisher’s description, but someone like me who listens to old Art & Language songs, fantastically obscure electronica and people with cellos and digital delays won’t be reflected by any system that tries to be representative by sampling rather than by monitoring the entire network.

The problem is that an ACS is still phrased in terms of “incentivisation” and of replacing lost revenue. Comparisons to a “pizza right” aside, I think this argument needs recasting positively and progressively rather than in its current reformist mode. Present it to the record companies as compensation by all means, but let’s see if it can work and take it forward as the first genuinely democratic form of patronage.

Aesthetics Generative Art Reviews

Last Night’s Talk By Harold Cohen

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2006-11-16

Harold gave an excellent presentation of how and why AARON’s new colouring system works. I’ve just about hacked up an implementation of the system for draw-something from my notes in a couple of hours, so you can tell that Harold is a thorough speaker as well as an insightful and sometimes humorous one. 😉

AARON’s new colour system uses three lists of numbers, one for hue created from an additive series with a random start, one for saturation generated randomly and sorted into low/medium/high ranges, and another for value created the same way. AARON then chooses the hue according to the kind of object, and the saturation and value from the low/medium/high ranges according to the probabilities assigned to them. There’s some error correction and some mach-band-like generation of slightly lighter and darker colours for edge adornment but as Harold said it is a very much simpler system than AARON was using before.

It is also a strikingly successful system aesthetically. The colours and the contrast of the images are pleasing and interesting, sometimes mellow, sometimes dramatic, always “creative”. Perhaps this has to do with the new system matching our cognitive perceptual system’s preferences in some way.

I asked a question, badly, and got an answer with some interesting details about how AARON handles intersecting objects. A Furtherfield reviewer was there so hopefully a review will be up on Furtherfield soon. Many thanks to the excellent Computer Arts Society and Imperial College for arranging the talk.

Reviews

I Recall A Time But It’s Long Gone

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2006-10-31
1 Comment on I Recall A Time But It’s Long Gone

First and Last and Always, Floodland and Vision Thing by The Sisters of Mercy have been reissued on Rhino Records. The albums all have additional tracks (b-sides, cover versions, and demos), new liner notes, and new typos on the covers. You can, and should, buy them from any online record store.
The stand out addition is the full version of “Never Land” on Floodland, a track that lead singer Andrew Eldritch has always denied the existence of. Their cover version of Hot Chocolate’s “Emma” and the First & Last era B-Sides are welcome additions as well.
This is music as it should be. Wildly, vividly, stupidly brilliant. Ironic and cynical yet heartfelt and entertaining. Timeless yet possible at no other time. It has, it must be said, a good beat to it. Even Vision Thing sounds better second Bush round.
If any record companies have been considering paying Eldritch the large sums in unmarked notes he’s demanding for another album, now would be a good time.

Reviews

ElectroNonny

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2006-10-27

“The Owls Map” by Belbury Poly is very good. It’s the synth music you almost remember from your 1970s schooldays (even if you didn’t have them) but with undercurrents of The Wicker Man. Tangerine Dream, Jarre, Kraftwerk, they’re not English but they are from the same logical universe as Tomorrow’s World and complement the incidental music-style warmth and whimsy of some of the other reference points of this sound. There’s also hints of the evils of morris dancing and just a dash of real old folk sung by real old folk . The production is cleaner and less radiophonic workshop this time. I preferred the more analogue sound quality of “The Willows” but this is good stuff. Music with its own mythology and a rich, nuanced sound. Ghost Box are definitely onto something.

Reviews

Castle Waiting Is Great

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2006-08-21

Linda Medley’s “Castle Waiting” is a wonderful graphic novel. It looks like a hardback novel until you open in, when the gorgeous art and engaging characters threaten to wipe out your evening. It’s a feminist fairytale, a look at what happens after happily ever after, a multi-layered mediaeval soap opera with daemons, talking animals, and bearded nuns. The first third is the best version of “sleeping beauty” you’ll ever read. Then there’s Lady Jain’s story, which is the narrative and emotional heart of the series. The end of the book is a long but enjoyable diversion from the main story. Now the regular series is starting again we may find out more about some of the questions that aren’t answered in the graphic novel.

It’s page-turningly fantastic. Go and get a standing order for the regular series afterwards.

Here is the cover:

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Here’s an interior page:

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Reviews Satire

jPod – Douglas Coupland

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2006-07-30

I used to avoid anyone who’d read Generation X. I still haven’t ready it myself. Microserfs was an amusing and insightful short story bloated into a pointless schmaltzfest.

But BoingBoing plugged jPod so I bought a copy. And it’s very good.

jPod is uncomfortable and hilarious reading. Most critics seem to have missed the point of it. They complain about the intrusion of pointless lists, 418 spam, and pages of sparse typography into the text. They complain about the ironies all the way down. They complain about the pointlessness and coldness of the characters existences and the blankness of the characters themselves. And about their amoral world.

They complain, in other words, about the accurate portrayal of geek culture after the gold rush and its genuine ironies and insanities. This is something that needs demistifying not romanticising, a jPod not a Microserfs. It’s telling that many prefer the warmer, fuzzier, happy-ending-land of Microserfs. Shooting the messenger is a mistake, particularly when he’s a character in the book himself. Better to listen to what he’s saying, because it has needed saying for far too long now.

Aesthetics Reviews

Kathleen Kucka

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2006-07-24

Kathleen KuckaEngaging painted low-dimensional abstracts. Good stuff.

Personal Reviews

I Heart My Roomba

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I like my roomba. It actually works. Occasionally it gets stuck under the sofa, but that’s only because I don’t use the light barrier thing. The kids are a lot happier tidying their rooms for the robot to vacuum than for me to vacuum.

There was an old Isaac Asimov story about the introduction of humanoid robots. People couldn’t handle them, so the company scaled back to selling little fruit-fly catching autonomous flyers and other obviously beneficial non-threatening devices to socially engineer attitudes towards robots. I think that the roomba is just such a project. iRobot, the manufacturer, also make military robots.

Reviews Satire

Ultraviolet

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2006-06-29

In Zoolander, the joke is that vapid, model-beautiful people make excellent assassins.

In Ultraviolet, it’s not meant to be a joke.