Years ago, probably late 2002, early 2003, I, along with nearly every other blogger in the world, set up a CafePress shop, creating a few mugs and t-shirts with a few photos and my own cack-handed designs. I ordered a couple of things for myself and then, like nearly every other non-US blogger with a predominantly non-US readership, I promptly forgot all about it.
Today I got an email from CafePress. Apparently one of the images I'd uploaded and was selling as a mug was guilty of copyright infringement. Which was odd as I'd only uploaded my own photos, the BugPowder logo and a painting by my second cousin Ben. Was Ben about to sue me?
Turns out it was this photo, taken on the South Bank in London in 2002 of what I assumed was a piece of Banksy stencil graffiti, although it wasn't signed as such. I actually don't have much love for that photo. It gets a lot of views and faves on Flickr but it's not one of my best, just part of a record of London at that time.
CafePress have a pretty good system for dealing with alleged infringement. Rather than buckle to the lawyers they simply mark the image as "pending" and encourage the two parties to sort it out for themselves, so I was directed to contact Finers Stephens Innocent, a London based law firm with 80 lawyers who represent Banksy's intellectual property rights. Needless to say, not having any love for the image and not really being bothered about the integrity of my CafePress shop I simply deleted the mug.
Couple of things interested me about this though.
Firstly, Banksy has employed a rather impressive seeming law firm to trawl the net looking for people making a buck off his work. To be honest my interest in Banksy is peripheral at best and I'm not outraged at any perceived betrayal of ideals he may or may not hold but after the Paris Hilton CD prank this is highly amusing.
Secondly, I took a photo of a piece of illegal art in a public place that may or may not have been done by Banksy and that had no copyright notice attached to it. Can "they" really stop me selling reproductions of this? And could they prove in a court of law that Banksy executed the work? And if they did, could the owner of the building he defaced then sue him? (Okay, it was a hoarding rather than an actual building but the point remains.)
Like I said, interesting.
Entirely unrelated to this, I did enjoy Charlie Brooker's mean-spirited attack on Banksy a few weeks ago.
Artsfest is this weekend in Birmingham. I'd never noticed it in previous years which was, in retrospect, somewhat foolish of me. Given that the Birmingham Flickrmeets group is officially photographing the event (photos will go here) this year I've naturally been somewhat more attentive and By The Gods there's a lot on! The program, which you can pick up in town, runs to 60-odd pages and it's jammed full of events covering an absurd gamut of mediums, styles and genres. I'll be there for all of it from Bangrafest on Friday night to the post-event Flickrmeet on Sunday evening.
I can't begin to recommend most of it as there's so much to get my head around but there are a few live music events I'd like to point you towards. In Chamberlain Square (the steps outside the Library) you can catch post-rock noisesmiths MotherTrucker at 1pm on Saturday, which should be wonderfully context-warping. A little later at 4pm in the same place I can also recommend The Devil And Casey Jones who are a lot of fun in fucking mental kinda way. Actually most of the bands on that stage should be good. On Sunday in Centenary Square (outside Symphony Hall) I'd urge you to witness The Destroyers at 2.30pm who, quite frankly, kick monstrous ass with their 16-piece gypsy-folk-esque extravaganza.
On Saturday, over in the-area-now-known-as-Eastside, Capsule and 7 Inch Cinema have gotten the keys to the old Curzon Street Station.
Sorry that needs an emphasis.
They've got access to THIS BUILDING:
Which alone is fantastic but they're also putting on loads of interesting stuff inside including the aforementioned Destroyers playing along to "traveling film shows" from the 1900s and Modified Toy Orchestra member Mike In Mono doing what I believe the kids call "a set". Details of Platform 9 are here (and worth printing out as it's not in the booklet.)
Above all, all of the stuff this weekend is free. That's free as in no-strings free. God bless socialism!
Now if you'll excuse me I need to finish work on TTV Contraption 2.0 (shorter, sturdier, more productive). There's a bit of a light-leak in my top-camera slot.
Just a quick plug for chum Gareth's Viewer Magazine, issue two of which is now available to download.
Andy Luke has been a chum of mine for a number of years now. His comics were once described by Ralph Kidson as "like something a deranged serial killer would draw in his death row cell" which was aesthetically accurate even though Andy isn't a deranged serial killer. Well, he's not a serial killer anyway.
Anyway, he's recently posted a few single panels on his Flickr account and I was most taken by the one above. This one's also pretty keen.
This kind of art, most famously practiced by one David Shrigley, is very hard to describe because by most criteria it's not "good art", just little doodles done by someone who can't draw "properly" which if you're after clean, anatomically correct art that looks pretty is fine. But I find myself drawn to this sort of thing again and again and I can't really describe why. In fact if I could describe why it'd probably ruin it - the mystery is what makes it work, or something.
So I think Andy Luke's single panels should be printed in a big fat art book and sold for chunks of cash. And they should be blown up to poster size and displayed in galleries. That would be a good thing.
One of the most potent criticisms of 'conceptual art' is that you have to read the short essay stuck next to the piece in order to understand it. I remember a good cartoon in something like Private Eye or the New Yorker showing three paintings. The first is a detailed traditional landscape with a tiny card. In the middle is a somewhat abstract piece with a few paragraphs next to it. The final piece is a blank canvas accompanied by a block of dense text larger than the work itself.
Ha ha. Stupid conceptual artists. We're on to you.
Coming, as I do, from a comic strip background visual art tends to be pretty functional to me. It serves to tell a story, to express an idea and most importantly, to move the reader on. The meaning of a comic book panel comes not as you might expect from the dialogue or caption but from the other panels surrounding it. Context and juxtaposition gives sense. Without them you just get a pretty picture.
So when I approach a piece of Art art in a gallery sitting there all alone on the wall with acres of white space surrounding it I'm looking for the context. I expect the piece to work for me, to trigger in my brain some synapses that make it move. I'm not saying I need it to move in a top-left to bottom-right action kind of way, but it has to take me from somewhere to somewhere else. If I don't get this then I find myself looking at the technique and craftsmanship which a fair amount of contemporary artists lack because that's not the point. So what is the point? We're back to the short essays.
I've come to the conclusion that these essays aren't actually a bad thing in themselves. A painted landscape is a functional piece of work. Yes, it can be beautiful and inspiring but it everything you need to understand it is there in the work itself. Trees, hills, a few cows, a delicate sunset - it's self contained and refers to things easily experienced. Conceptual art, on the other hand, is like the single panel from a comic book separated from it's neighbours. It needs context, to be juxtaposed against something, be it other works by that artist or the ideas and processes that led to its creation. In other words, it needs that essay.
You could argue that if it cannot stand alone then it it doesn't deserve to be displayed (and most irksomely sold for vast sums of cash) as a solo item, but I'd argue that it's not standing alone. It's part of an intellectual dialogue, feeding from previous works and ideas and informing future ones. The essay serves to point the viewer in the right direction, to give it context and juxtaposition.
Of course it doesn't help that a lot of conceptual art is devoid of substance and that those cards are mostly self-serving inane twaddle, but the principle is there. To take a current example, critics of evolution decry it for being "just a theory" to which sane people reply that the notion of "theory" in science is a quite different beast from everyday parlance. The God-botherers are looking at it out of context, blinded by their myths, but it doesn't help that the scientists have written their explanatory cards to preach to the converted. It seems absurd to attack something because you don't understand where it's coming from yet even perfectly intelligent people do this all the time with modern art.
Remember, the panels don't stand alone. You've got to read the whole comic.
Every so often you stumble upon something on the web and wonder "what mad fool is this?" as you gasp at the enormity of time and effort they've put into some massive archive of stuff. It so happens that I know one such mad fool. He's a very good friend of mine. Annoyingly his name is Andy, like so many of my friends, and doubly annoyingly he refused use his real surname, or any surname at all. When in the mid 90s he appeared on the small press comics scene, which already had more than its quota of Andys, he was given the name Andy Konky Kru after the title of his comic. Since having a rather odd pseudonym is not that weird amongst cartoonists the name stuck and no-one thought any more of it. But Andy didn't just do cool little comics, he was also something of an academic, holding forth in debates about the origins and minutiae of comic strip art and backing them up with a somewhat encyclopedic knowledge base.
When Andy discovered the internet he did what a lot of people did and started cataloguing it. But being Andy he was incredibly focussed, concentrating on cartoonists he thought were good (he can be very specific about this) and looking for examples of early comics, early for Andy being pre-20th century, an era when most people don't think comics really existed. Of course the internet is a cruel mistress and despite his blinkers the tunnel of information was infinite and ever changing. The huge lists of links Andy would painstakingly produce and send to mailing lists would quickly go out of date as link rot set in, but Andy would go back and update them again and again. And these lists were huge things. Andy would present them to you and you'd feel obliged to visit every site, which of course you didn't so you felt a little guilty. But when you needed a reference to some cartoonist or publisher the lists pretty much always gave you a quality pointer.
Link rot was starting to bug Andy so, since I'd given him a directory on BugPowder to host the lists, he started posting the images he'd found directly on there so they couldn't disappear. Alongside this he started scanning and uploading samples from his early comics archive running from prehistory to 1900 which began to dominate the site, plus some samples of his own (excellent) comic art. Jez and myself just left him to it and were somewhat astonished one day to discover he'd used up over 100mb of space, back when 100mb on a website was a hell of a lot. Bear in mind these are generally not huge files. He was very conscientious, compressing the jpegs as much as possible and only uploading the essentials, but even so we quickly checked BugPowder's capacity, concluding that we were okay but that Andy had to slow the fuck down, which he did, but even Andy slowed down is still a force to be reckoned with.
While I appreciated what he was doing I must confess I never really got it, putting it down to Andy's somewhat obsessive nature. The site got some good plaudits but they tended to be from other obsessive comics historians. At the end of the day we could accommodate his work and it was obviously good work. People I respected raved about the site and that was good for BugPowder if nothing else. I finally fully got what Andy had achieved at Caption 2004, the annual convention for us small press and art comics types. With an laptop powered OHP display and a large piece of pipe (photo) Andy talked us through his history of comics and I, along with everyone else in the audience, was rapt. Beyond any embarrassment I felt for not noticing this earlier I was immensely proud of what Andy had achieved here. He, of course just shrugged it off but I was struck by the realisation that he hadn't just collected a bunch of images and stuck them online - he'd created a huge narrative that meant something and taught something new the rest of us high-brow comics nerds who thought we pretty much knew it all.
That's not to say he's not an obsessive loon. One look at his directory with it's thousands of carefully named files but no subdirectories confirmed that. Each of the hundreds of HTML files was carefully hand coded and cross referenced with no database backing it up. I toyed with the notion of automating it for him but it was so huge and complex I quickly abandoned that idea. The methodology behind its creation lay in Andy's brain alone. Us mere mortals could not comprehend it.
However, Andy's page had become something of a ball and chain for BugPowder. Currently the site lives on a server that is very cheap with lots of space but not overly reliable. Or rather it's reliable if you're prepared to keep up with updates and changes. If you just leave it be it'll occasionally b0rk big time, as happened the other week. We could move to somewhere less techy / more reliable but the issue of hosting Andy's increasingly massive subsite always put such notions on hold. Andy had mentioned that his uncle had a mass of storage available to him but he didn't want to change the URLs from BugPowder and since we were happy enough staying with the current host for now nothing more was thought of it.
That said, when BugPowder went down the other week a lot of people noticed, and the majority of them were looking for Andy's stuff. So to cut a (very) long story short Andy now has his own site at AndyBleck.com (No, this isn't his real name. I'm one of only two people in comics who knows his real name and I've toyed with killing Mardou to reclaim my exclusivity in that regard.) All the images have been moved to his uncle's site while the HTML pages are mirrored, pretty much, on his new site and on BugPowder. Nothing major has changed on the surface but we're now pretty much free to move BugPowder should be want to.
The whole process of uploading everything allowed me to accurately quantify exactly what Andy has built here. There are 5,369 images weighing in at 396mb. 3,185 (240mb) of them are history related sitting on 645 pages. These took 12 hours to upload. In his defense this has been built up over many years but even so!
Do have a look at Andy's site. It's a marvel to behold even if you're not interested in comics. Start off with the Early Comics Archive where each thumbnail takes you to a readable page of comics. If you fancy something a little more academic, check out the Speechbaloons in Comics and Evolution of Speechbaloons pages (the former being comic-specific, the latter looking at art generally). There also Andy's big find, Lenardo and Blandine, a comic from 1783 which blew the "first ever comic" stakes back a good 75 years. Andy's old linklists still survive in a slightly reduced but still comprehensive form here along with his selection of 90 Comics Without Words featuring mostly contemporary cartoonists. The first two issues of his tiny A7 anthology Flickermouse are online along with his own minicomics Konky Kru, Mumpitz, Unspanned and some of his more abstract works. Then there's the main focus of his creative output these days, the Realistic Drawings (for want of a better term). These really need to be seen in their full size glory and there are so many of them but this is a personal favourite. Finally there's his photography, the "best of" selection is here though there are many more, along with some sculpture and related abstract pencil drawings.
Phew!
Reactions to the momentous occasion of the British Broadcasting Corporation screening a recording of Jerry Springer - The Opera as performed on the London Stage at 10pm of a Saturday night on BBC2.
- Opera is stretching it a bit. More a musical I'd say.
- The swearing was the funniest aspect, though swearing often is, especially when sung in an operatic style on stage and broadcast on television.
- There wasn't enough swearing in my view. I was led to believe there would be more usage of the word cunt but it only really appeared in one scene with a brief cameo in another.
- Mucho points, though, for the phrase "three nippled cousin fucker."
- We're in South Park territory here.
- That Klan stuff was a total rip-off of The Producers, but I think that was intentional and, thinking about it, what else could you do with a troupe of dancing Klansmen. Also, they're both spoofing the same thing (see my first observation).
- I wasn't aware that Jews don't go to Hell, so I learned something new, unless it's wrong.
- Having Kirsty Wark read the warnings at the beginning of each act was inspired and lent a certain frission to the evening.
- On the whole, I enjoyed it, but not hugely. It was kinda silly, not that poignant where it wanted to be and didn't feel like it got to the meat of the matter. It probably works better seen live rather than from the sofa, but it was nice to see the mind of Stuart Lee projected on such a scale.
And regarding the furore that preceded the broadcast from certain persons of a religious persuasion masquerading as guardians of decency and fair play in the broadcasting arena...
- Now they've burned their license fees they won't be able to watch any television at all. I hope they find this as liberating as I did. However, it should be noted that you don't need to actually burn it. All you need to do is just not buy one in the first place. Cheaper that way too. And you can always watch the 2 or 3 programs a year that you can't do without at your mate's house.
- That wasn't blasphemous. And if it is, why is that a problem? I'm offended by most of the ill informed, blinkered, anti-intellectual garbage that comes out of broadcast media. You're offended by two hours of off-peak arts programming on the minority-interest channel. And you're offended because it uses your beliefs (that is, something you believe in, rather than something you know to be true) to make a point about society in general. And because it has lots of swearing.
- There should be comedies that take the piss out of Islam along with Sikhs, Hindus, all the myriad variations of Christianity and any other belief systems that take themselves far too seriously. If you can't figure out why this is a good thing then you're taking yourself far too seriously. And it says a lot about your faith if it's so fragile that you can't take a frikkin joke.
- This is a secular country. Deal with it.
I'm loading a pallet onto the shrink-wrapping machine and the radio news catches my ear. I turn to the guy in the booth. You what? "Some people are going to be pretty upset about this" he says. Yeah, me being one of them. As Teenage Kicks starts it's unexpected stint as most playlisted song of the day I find myself slightly stunned, unable to compute this information. He'll never broadcast again. I'll never hear his show live again. Kids discovering music now and in the future will not have his guiding voice. It's over and it's too early, far too early.
I continued my work in a daze, making little mistakes and bumping my pallet truck into things, as it sunk in. I sent a couple of text messages to people I guessed hadn't heard and got bemused replies. Is this a wind up? A little later some guy is singing raucously along to Teenage Kicks obviously oblivious to why it's being played. That phrase, "some people are going to be pretty upset about this" is flowing through my mind. I'm probably the only person in this warehouse who's affected by the news.
I can't remember when I first heard his show. It was probably around 1989. I was 17, had just discovered The Pixies and was making up for some seriously lost time music-wise. Up until then my music taste had been pretty terrible, growing up in Croydon and listening to Capital Radio. As I moved to Winchester Radio One moved to FM and became my chosen station. At the time he was playing music in trios. A guitar track, a dance track, a world track, a guitar track and so on. I loved the guitar stuff, hated the dance stuff and was bemused by the world stuff, but I stuck with it. Soon I came to tolerate and eventually love the whole show, which is kind of the point.
Throughout the 90s I tended to be the only person in my immediate group of friends that listened to him. As time has progressed this has changed as when that identification is made one tends to have made a friend for life and this evening nearly every weblog I read has a post like this on it. I don't think he has fans as such or followers. Rather he made a certain frame of mind acceptable and this, I think, is his real legacy.
In fact I'll go out on a limb and say it's not really about the music. The music is a conduit for something else, something quite intangible which I think comes down to that fucked up sense of juxtaposition he imposed on us. He made having an open mind cool, which is saying something when you think about it. Once you'd accepted that you could listen to every form of every form of music and appreciate it on its own merits then you could apply this to everything else in life. Any form of creative endeavour is worthwhile. The fact that someone, anyone, is doing something different and interesting becomes vital.
On the whole fans (for want of a better word) of him tend to be sensitive folk who just want things to be nice, who feel beaten down by the relentless enforcement of mediocrity. He not only provided a place on the radio for us to retreat to, his spirit encouraged others to do the same. Every small club, fanzine, website, setup of any description that implicitly encourages people to just do stuff owes him a debt, and they know it. The generation, generations really, that grew up with him learned something important and it stuck with them. We're the ones who smile when we see enthusiasm, who know that there is so much more to life. We're the ones who get it.
John Peel, thank you.
My good friend Dave Early recently decided that after working in the film industry for many years it was about time he knuckled down and made his own movie. Filming has started and it all seems to be going frighteningly well.
My very small part in all this is managing the web presence, and the holding page went up today.
The fact that it's called The Street Cleaner and that I'm currently a street cleaner only occurred as I was ftping it up...
[Update: Dave on IMDb]
This whole controversy over The Passion has me rather confused. I can see that Mel Gibson is obviously a close-minded bigoted Xtian with a sense of righteousness blinkered by his susceptibility to confuse myth and storytelling with reality, and while that's a shame (I always liked Mad Max) it's sadly all to common. There are enough idiots in the world that this film is probably not going to help the cause of peace love and understanding, that much I'm sure about.
What's confusing me is this whole "Jews killed Jesus" malarkey. Surely in order for the whole Jesus thing to work he has to die? My understanding of the Easter story was that he knew he was going to die and that everything and everyone around him was, essentially, manipulated by forces unknown (God?) to make sure this happened. That whole thing about Peter disowning him to save his own skin and so on. Surely the only reason the Jews killed Jesus, if indeed they did, is that there were a hell of a lot of Jews around at the time. And more to the point, if Jesus hadn't died then, well, that whole thing about "he died for our sins", which seems to be the cornerstone of mouthy Xtian theology, it kinda wouldn't work. "He grew old for our sins" doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Surely the Jews did the Xtians a favour and should be celebrated by Mel Gibson for making sure that this rather fundamental cornerstone event in his religion actually took place?
But what do I know. I'm just a hell-bound heathen on the fast road to damnation.
I was going to LinkFarm this one but it's just too good. Artists buys 61 used Tickle Me Elmo dolls off eBay. Artists decapitates each doll and mounts heads on plaques. Artist then skins dolls and makes coat from pelt. After the obligatory exhibition artist then sells everything on eBay again. Photos here, eBay auctions here, link gratefully found on Boing Boing.
Last week at Caption Bryan Talbot gave his very illuminating slide-show talk about the creation of The Tale Of One Bad Rat. In it he recounted taking reference photographs around Westminster Bridge in London and getting seriously questioned by the police because he obviously wasn't a tourist. We all laughed as he showed a photo of a police woman radioing his driving licence details to check he wasn't as terrorist planning to bomb the houses of parliament.
Same thing happened to me today. Well, kinda.
Permalink | Posted in A Life of Pete, Art, Photography, Politics on Sunday, August 10 2003 | Comments (8) ?subject=[Weblog] 100803: Don't do anything abnormal" title="email me about this specific post">Email
Had a lovely week in London but no time to write about it all now. However, one thing anyone who's in the area must go to is the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller sound installation at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. They've recorded a 40 piece choir with each singer having their own mike. These are then played back through 40 speakers at head height arranged in a circle. You can either sit in the middle and have the ultimate surround sound experience or wander around getting right up to each 'singer'. It's very intense and somewhat emotional - an older guy actually started crying while I was there. Go check it out. Now.
Children Books of the Early Soviet Era - some wonderful graphic design and art. There's currently a mad room in Tate Modern full of Soviet posters which has a similar effect. Lovely.
If you've been following the date-stamps on my posts over the last few days you'll know that my sleep patterns have gone all hat-stand again. No job, no structure, a computer - all to be expected and it's not worrying me. I know that in a couple of weeks I'll be on the farm with no possibility of sleeping in or staying up all night, so I'm kinda enjoying it for the last time in a while.
That said, I've been trying to correct it before the weekend by staying awake all night and then keeping myself going through the day. Unfortunately it normally ends up with going to bed at a reasonable hour and then sleeping for 12-14 hours straight, but no matter.
Anyway, what happened today was I decided to watch a movie. Digging through my old collection of tapes I found Miller's Crossing taped off the telly years ago. On the same tape following it directly is Barton Fink. Half an hour into Miller's Crossing I fall asleep. I'm woken up by a phone call a few hours later, by which time Barton Fink is about half way through. As well as both being Cohen Brothers movies they also share a lot of the cast. John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, okay, at least two. And I got Judy Davis and Marcia Gay Garden confused for a while there And those three (or two and two halves) just happened to be on screen when I fell asleep and when I woke up. Very confusing!
Wandering around town with Anna on Saturday we passed a gallery/shop on Museum Street which had these mad photo-montage things in the window. I was so taken with them I got the camera out and took shots of every one, on the off chance they wouldn't be on the net. Of course, they are. The pictures remind me a lot of Wouter van Oortmerssen's (fixed link) compositions and I really do admire this kind of work a lot. One of these two people is inspired by French cubists and sells his prints for hundreds of pounds. The other did it because it seemed like a good idea and stuck it on the net. I like them both.
My mum came up to the big city yesterday for a few hours and we popped into Tate Modern to see the Anish Kapoor sculpture. It really does bring out a sense of childish wonder is everyone who sees it. We decided that, while it is big, it is necessarily big and not gross, which was a good thing. Mum said it reminded her of Spiderman which I found odd because it had never occured to me, or Anna for that matter, and we're both comics nerds It really bears repeated viewing as from every angle it looks different. Anway, photos were taken...
Permalink | Posted in Art, Photography on Thursday, December 12 2002 | Comments (1) ?subject=[Weblog] 121202: Kapoor, with parent" title="email me about this specific post">Email
_16.gif)
Permalink | Posted in Art, Photography on Sunday, November 10 2002 | Comments (4) ?subject=[Weblog] 101102: Graffiti on Bankside" title="email me about this specific post">Email
Some lovely manga-esque art here with a French twist. Quite sensuous in places but with a sense of humour, especially with the animations.
Can't really describe it other than WOW. It's big. Very big. And fleshy. We were impressed.
Check out the, rather inventive, I must say, webcams (needs Shockwave).
There's a spraycan murial just by Southwark Bridge on the south bank of the Thames that could well be one of Bankys' but isn't signed as such. Having perused his site for a good half hour I must remember to get some photos of it next time I'm there.
