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Crap Comedy On The BBC

Tittybangbang

The comic equivalent of pulling your pants down, sitting on the photocopier, and breaking it.

Hyperdrive

“So we’re not going to get another series of Red Dwarf until they do the film. Which isn’t going to happen. So let’s copy Red Dwarf. What is Red Dwarf about?”

“Well, boss. It’s a group of slobbish English people on a starship a million light years from earth some time after the end of the world who make a series of classic science fiction scenarios comic due to their ineptness and personality defects.”

“So that’s a group of slobbish English people on a starship, their ineptness and their personality defects. Right, film it!”

The Comic Side Of Seven Days

Smug failure to amuse or shock from people you’d punch if you met them at a dinner party, but are unlikely to because you’re not usually invited to the same dinner parties as bourgeois RADA refugees on the BBC comedy equivalent of the Restart scheme.

Categories
Aesthetics Generative Art Reviews Satire

NKOS FOAD

I like the pictures in A New Kind Of Science but it’s low on my list of things to actually read. I think Wolfram is going to be digital art’s Baudrillard. Shudder. My least favourite part of NKOS is the New Kind Of Copyright License Wolfram has at the start of the book. Hint: Wolfram either doesn’t know about, or is choosing to ignore, fair use/fair dealing. Actually that’s not true, his treatment of Matthew Cook makes that pale into insignificance.

Anyway, this brings us to the most wonderful review of NKOS that I’ve read in a while:

A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity.

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Paul Miller: Rhythm Science

Paul Miller’s “Rhythm Science” is a book about the history, the culture and the potential of remixing. Having read it now, I wish I’d picked it up earlier when I saw it at the ICA last year.

Miller finds the historical roots of remix culture in the history of the slave and immigrant classes of America, shows how the most avant-garde strategies of 20th century high art have passed into the DJ’s toolkit, and explores how this continues and opens up the history of cultural expression in the digital age. And Miller’s treatment of his own writing and his sources as a rhythmic mix of voices, from Marcel Duchamp to Grand Master Flash, Coldcut to Deleuze, brings his ideas alive in a way that would be lost in a more academic mode.

You’ll have to filter out the page-count-doublingly-awful graphic design. But if you do, the reward is a text with a depth and richness that is belied by its free-flowing style. The big picture of a digital, remixable, rhythmic culture that this book paints and the points where it touches on aesthetics and art hisory (Miller is an artist as well as a DJ) will be of interest to artists as well as to musicians, and to anyone interested in the origins and potential of remix culture.

Highly recommended.

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Mackenzie Wark: A Hacker Manifesto

This is the book-length version of an essay that has appeared online in several versions over the last few years. A little red book in a clear acetate wrapper, the design is portentous and, with its grunge-type titles and drop caps, slightly irritating. The book consists of some four hundred numbered paragraphs in a dozen chapters.

It is a hacker manifesto, applying class analysis to intellectual property. It’s about time someone did this. Brand and Big Media critiques like “No Logo” would have been so much better if they’d used the tools of class analysis that cultural studies’ fashionable postures denied them. Wark is a Marxist, well a crypto-Marxist, so he has no such limitations. And this allows him to get to the heart of the matter from the word go.

Wark identifies a new “vectoralist” class as successor to the capitalists and pastoralists that have previously made up the ruling classes. He never really defines all his terms, but you get the hang of them as the book goes on.The vectoralists seek to dominate the production and distribution of information, creating a new kind of property; intellectual property. The vectoralists rely on the creative classes, the hackers, to hack new abstractions form nature to create new value, releasing nature’s “virtuality”. But intellectual property denies hackers the fruits of their labour, and so we see why hacking and intellectual property are at odds.

There’s much, much more to Wark’s investigation, but it emerges from, and supports the idea of, the vectoralist class’s creation of and exploitation of the idea of intellectual property and how this is against the class interest of the creative class.

Wark comes to call for a recognition of shared class interest amongst the world’s hackers (one that my own experience shows is lacking between hackers sat in the same room, never mind on different continents) and an expressive politics to escape the representative politics that is all to easily commodified by the vectoralists. He also shows how this shared interest has come about, and how all the productive classes (agrarian, industrial and technological) can benefit from and be of benefit to the Hacker class.

Any book that name-checks Art & Language and Rhizome in the endnotes can’t be all bad, and despite the excesses of its design, its sometimes florid prose style and its occasional vagueness, “A Hacker Manifesto” isn’t bad at all. In fact it’s a watershed. The critique Wark provides is urgently needed, incisively argued and far-reachingly applied.

Hackers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your NDAs…

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Dr Who: Father’s Day

I cried. Apparently I’m not the only one:

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20228

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Hitch Hiker’s Guide Movie

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy has one or two things to say on the subjects of films made of popular books.

The film, it begins, will be nothing like the book. This is because a film is a succession of projected images and sounds whereas a book is pulped vegetable matter smeared with coloured hydrocarbons in patterns that may or may not make any sense to the average sentient being.

It continues in this vein for a while.

The original version of the article was more informative, and centred around the adaptation of the guide itself to a film, but that version contained too many complaints about poor visual editing and script editing, some possibly libellous anecdotes about one of the executive producers, and some tiresome recollections of the author’s time working on the abortive project to turn the guide into a 3D adventure game at the turn of the 21st century.

However this was rather unfair, as despite NOKIA the film NOKIA starting out NOKIA poorly, it finds its feet on Vogsphere and builds to a genuinely effective and touching conclusion that works Douglas Adams’s love of endangered species into the plot. The romantic subplots are quite bearable, and there is at least as much good as bad, if not more so. Hopefully a sequel will improve matters still further.

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Dr. Who: Dalek (Spoilers!)

That was terrible.

It couldn’t have been worse if they’d given the Dalek a baseball cap.

Yes, it tied into lots of old stuff and was a good basic idea. Production was good (apart from the usual crap music). Doctor slipped a bit, Rose good as ever.

But a single Dalek, a floaty Dalek, and a melancholy Dalek, doesn’t work. And a cute little Dalek enjoying a moment of sunshine really doesn’t work. Dredd doesn’t remove his helmet, a Dalek doesn’t pop its top off…

Not so much an opportunity missed as one surrounded by glowing craters.

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Bear

Bear

I laughed until my stomach hurt. Then I laughed until my face hurt. Then I had to stop.

“Bear” is a comic book by Jamie Smart, published by Slave Labor Graphics. Jamie seems to be from Norwich, just along the line from here. I’m told Slave Labor usually cater for the Goth market, but Bear is just generally funny, if dark.

Bear is a teddy bear, Looshkin is a psychotic housecat and Karl works in a record shop. Looshkin tries to kill bear. That’s usually it, and what more do you need? Issue 7, the first I read, features Bear finding love, a 1960s gangster movie spoof, too many embalmed brains bought over the internet, a minor TV personality moving in next door, and Looshkin finding a flamethrower.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Read and enjoy.

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Airport Extreme

I got an Airport Extreme brick. It’s very good. “Regret” by New Order is playing over my old speakers plugged into it at the moment. And I’m posting this from my iBook over the other side of the room.

As always, the network didn’t “just work”. It pretended to, but I had to tweak the settings. This would be beyond many users, and isn’t what I expect from Apple.

“Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before” – The Smiths.

I think Apple should invest in some pretty major AI. I just want to turn on Airport and have a daemon exhaustively try to make the network work. Surely that’s doable?

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New Order: Waiting For The Sirens’ Call

Very, very good.

Some guitar, some synth, some nods to classic New Order songs, some side-project riffs, some awkward lyrics, and some songs that you’ll be haunted by before they hit their first chorus.

Much, much better than “Get Ready”, and much better than the more anally retentive reviewers have hinted. This will be your summer and your autumn, too.

Highly recommended.

Try http://www.neworderonline.com/ for a fan site with lots of listening and reading resources.