Blue Lines Revisited

treblekicker: Carry on X-Men poster. Words fail...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:33:47 +0100

Carry on X-Men poster. Words fail me.

Auto-reblog for this Chris Weston masterpiece.

"Hurry up with my damn croissants"

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:22:00 +0100

“Hurry up with my damn croissants”

- I really hate this line and its impending memeification at the hands of over-entitled dudes yelling at under-paid serving staff and thinking it makes them hilarious. It kind of half-works in song because “I Am A God” is all frustrated little man syndrome impotence but Kanye’s knowingness isn’t enough to stop me either picturing bankers being wankers to baristas or to stop them from doing it. (via alexmacpherson)

Yeah… my very very VERY early impression of Yeezus is that it’s a record that’s brutally honest about power and wealth, the day-to-day workings of power (the ways in which KW is powerful, the ways in which he isn’t and isn’t allowed to be). And its visceral appeal is part of that, the direct emotional transmission of that - this has always been the appeal of ‘heavy’ music of course, it’s horrible and exciting because power is horrible and exciting.

At a gut level I think it’s important that a record like that is widely heard at this moment in history, when the trappings of legitimacy around power are more threadbare and unneccessary than they have been in decades. But then I have to ask myself, why do I think it’s important? I remember reading people back in the 80s who were really into Swans, say, and it seemed like there was a moral high ground or maybe even enlightenment to be gained by being into this music which was Unflinching and Truthful. Not that Yeezus is as single-minded or unintentionally comical as old Swans, but there’s some sort of similar “DON’T LOOK AWAY” impulse in there. And I ended up laughing at Swans because I was frightened of them. But even so twenty years on I suspect the people who flinched and the people who didn’t and the people who never listened in the first place are in the same boat.

Phil Spector in the locker room, from Nik Cohn and Guy...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:09:42 +0100

Phil Spector in the locker room, from Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert’s Rock Dreams. (Peellaert’s celebrity-mythological cut-and-paste style in this, the best history of rock music, reminds me a tiny bit of comics artist GREG LAND.)

Just started reading this - I wanted to read it because it was...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:02:12 +0100

Just started reading this - I wanted to read it because it was highly recommended by the late Martin Skidmore, but was also slightly put off by its being, er, an 8-volume, several thousand page manga life of Buddha.

Anyway, 200 pages of sword-fights, tiger-fights, slave revolts, philosophy and betrayal later - and the Buddha hasn’t even been born yet! - and I’m adding all the other volumes to my wishlist. I’ve by no means read a lot of manga - five or six series, almost all quite modern - so this is my first exposure to an older series (and to the legendary Tezuka!) and his style is, for someone raised on Western comics, bewitchingly hard to parse. The hard-coding of the humour/cartoony and serious/detailed dichotomy in most Western comics from the 70s/80s onwards makes the tonal palette of Buddha come as a shock: wonderfully fluid, funny, kinetic cartooning in the service of a gripping, unflinching adventure story.

boyofbadgers: I am reading Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus at the moment, which...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:24:09 +0100

boyofbadgers:

I am reading Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus at the moment, which amongst other things is reminding me how rusty my pure maths brain is. It’s unsettling reading a book written in a breezy bloggy style about the intersection of compsci and physics (the two things I have actual degrees in), and then get pulled up short when I actually have to slowly reason my way through a quickly stated proof.

This need to grind through some system 2 thinking did trigger off a half-formed thought about a couple of the ideas I have a problem with in philosophy of mind (and AI in particular). The first of these ideas is that thinking is essentially conscious manipulation of symbols. The second is that the working of the mind is potentially entirely transparent to introspection on the part of the thinker.

Now, the theoretical computer scientists and philosophers who spend their time thinking about AI are exactly the sort of people whose entire occupations consist of expounding very deliberate, slow, logical arguments at each other. If you are trained to do this, then there is likely a general bias towards thinking that the important business of the mind is that self-same slow, logical, system 2 conscious consideration of ideas.

So, it’s interesting to me that both the above ideas fit rather neatly with that bias. If you spend much of your time sitting there logically working your way through a proof by manipulating symbols, then of course thinking looks like that. Similarly, if you value conscious thought far above unconscious then you are much more likely to regard thought processes as being susceptible to introspective investigation.

At work when we talk about Kahneman’s stuff we often get asked “Are some people System 1 and some System 2?” (a la left-brain, right-brain) or actually it’s simply assumed that by marketers that of course the customers of Our Darling Brand have made deliberate conscious choices in favour of it, etc.

So we added a few mental maths problems - the ones Kahneman includes in the book, like the Bat & Ball and Lilypad questions - into a standard omnibus survey, and therefore got a robust representative sample answering said questions, and the ONLY group (by age, gender, ethnicity, profession, education level, anything) to score significantly better on these System 2 questions were…. male computing/IT professionals.

Plastic Yielding of An Edge Cracked Section in the Presence of Shear

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:01:00 +0100

Plastic Yielding of An Edge Cracked Section in the Presence of Shear:

Plastic Yielding of An Edge Cracked Section in the Presence of Shear: Amazon.co.uk: D.J.F. Ewing, J.N. Swingler: Books

I recently discovered that my own Dad (who is a fine Dad) has a load of books auto-listed on Amazon - all the engineering papers and reports he published when he worked for the then-nationalised electricity industries in the 70s and 80s. I am not really competent to assess their contents but this, at least, has the best title.

Cultural Dads

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:02:00 +0100

Before I became a Dad I was really sure and hopeful that I wasn’t going to be the kind of Dad who spends his time pushing his taste - music, films, books, whatever - on his kids. At the same time my own memories of being a kid are a string of disconnected experiences and moods and a lot of the good experiences were cultural. For better or (often) for worse you draw on your own childhood a lot when you’re a parent, so that stuff is what I know.

So inevitably there’s certain daydreams you have about reading this particular book or watching this certain film with your kid, and ultimately the urge to Pass On Your Wisdom is timeless even if now “your wisdom” is about Clash albums rather than snaring a mammoth.

Whether I was right or wrong, I still think I haven’t quite been that kind of Dad. I’ve tried to be honest and enthusiastic about the things my kids like, and take an interest, and not push them out of stuff they’re into or into stuff they’re not. There will come a time when they won’t thank me for “taking an interest” and I hope I have the awareness to notice when that time comes. You only find out the ways you’ve been a good or bad parent later on and even then you might not actually be able to - or have time to - internalise that.

(Here’s something I didn’t realise, though: the massive, enormous advantage bestowed on you when you have the Internet and they don’t (can’t read it, whatever). You can become an absolute oracle on anything very quickly - it’s a terrible power.)

Anyhow when I come across the more full-on cultural Dads who are all “my children will only EXPERIENCE THE BEST OF HUMANITY” and play them a Nick Drake album before bedtime, I feel they’re not being honest about the moments when you do that and your kids are just not that into it. It’s like a generational version of the Bad Ears - this magical thing from your own childhood or adolescence just doesn’t resonate because, no shit!, these people you’ve helped create aren’t just extra vicarious versions of you. Or because it wasn’t all that great in the first place and you charged it up with magic yourself. Secondhand wonder isn’t wonder at all.

(I wonder if the really hardcore Cultural Dads - or the ones who bluster about it - are also the guys who would only get into relationships with people who had “great music taste” i.e. their music taste, so they’ve perhaps not that experienced in accommodating other people’s feelings about culture? But that’s probably unfair.)

BUT what prompted this whole train of thought is that on some rare occasions you play your kids That Film or read That Book and it actually IS exactly as great as you think it’s going to be. Today I watched My Neighbour Totoro with my 4 year old and it was as quietly wonderful as I could ever have wanted. So thanks to him and thanks to Miyazaki and thanks to the rest of my family, and happy Fathers’ Day to those who want to mark it.

cureforbedbugs: Tom writes “It’s obviously my Mark Pitchfork day cos I also bought Vision Creation...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:56:20 +0100

cureforbedbugs:

Tom writes “It’s obviously my Mark Pitchfork day cos I also bought Vision Creation Newsun!” — Now THAT’S what I call 2002!

Pretty sure I bought Vision Creation Newsun in 2002 via Pitchfork (and likely Mark’s recommendation, too, though not this one). Did it show up on their albums of 2000 list or something? Was there a column about it

The curious sequel to this is that I waited 10 years to play it!

Throwing Muses - House Tornado. I was going to put something...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:03:01 +0100

Throwing Muses - House Tornado. I was going to put something from this on This Is My Jam but couldn’t find the track I was after (“Walking In The Dark”).

Q Magazine’s one-star review of this was something of A Moment in my relationship with the music press / desire to be a critic.

On the train home tonight I idly considered pitching a Teardrop...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:16:51 +0100

On the train home tonight I idly considered pitching a Teardrop Explodes week to One Week One Band. But a few moments reflection made me realise I actually had almost nothing to say about them. They came, they took drugs, they made music, it’s all there on the records.

Some psychedelia is very layered and deep, ritualistic even, designed as ritual music has always been to accompany various forms of action and exploration. Other psychedelic music is - it seems to me - more like a travel diary, a beautiful record of strange things uncovered and sketched: full of surface textures and unusual ideas. The Teardrop Explodes were more of the second kind of group, despite Julian Cope’s obvious later interest in the first kind of activity.

Almost everything in this song is surface - the lyrics are eerily evocative but in the kind of ways that interpretation damages; the sound-world is creepy and beautiful but there’s nothing you won’t get on first listen. It is what it is. It’s really good, though. When this album came out in 1990 - cobbled together from a third Teardrops LP abandoned 8 years prior - I remember a guest singles reviewer in NME angrily denying that one of its tracks could possibly have been made in 1982: it must be a more recent put-on. And this song sounded still more unexpected, a transmission from some rotting, ancient alien rainforest, both very old and hard to catch up to.

Does Whatever An Iron Can

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:05:26 +0100

It makes me happy when I scroll down and see posts from both Kieron Gillen, writer of Iron Man*, and isabelthespy, greatest critic of Iron Man**.

*the comic
**the film(s)

toffeemilkshake: this makes me (almost) wish I’d stayed at...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:16:33 +0100

toffeemilkshake:

this makes me (almost) wish I’d stayed at the BBC.

Never search the BBC tag on tumblr, it’s not what you think! (or maybe it is, I don’t know. But whatever, don’t do it at work on the second day of your new job).

Tabloid campaigns against the BBC and tabloid scare stories about “accidental porn” are two stories I’m frankly astonished haven’t collided yet.

Meanwhile, cats.

‘Piece of Me’ by Britney SpearsPlayed Blackout for the first...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:47:04 +0100

‘Piece of Me’ by Britney Spears
Played Blackout for the first time in a year or so. Still wonderful, this one is aging especially well.

Too Busy Thinking About My Comics II: “Twenty Two Comic Books Alan Moore Is Looking Forward To This Year”...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:40:46 +0100

Too Busy Thinking About My Comics II: “Twenty Two Comic Books Alan Moore Is Looking Forward To This Year”...:

colsmi:

“Twenty Two Comic Books Alan Moore Is Looking Forward To This Year” (Part 2 of 2)

From the interview with Mark Thompson printed in Amazing Heroes #145, 1988

12. “Nemo”, edited by Rick Marschall

13. “Eddy Current”, by Ted McKeever

14.“Taboo”, edited by …

This (and the previous half of the list) is such a memory rush back to the World Of Comics As Once I Knew It. I think the only thing on this list I never read is Mr Monster (I may also not actually have read the Carol Lay book but it’s the kind of cover that stays with you).

An amazing comics moment captured here - a mix of hardy underground survivors, an open-to-ideas mainstream, the best of the B&W boom, and new wavers both established and breaking through. And Cerebus, obviously. About the only things I remember as critical indie darlings which aren’t on the list were Tales Of The Beanworld, Zot! and Nexus.

Zot and Nexus are, of course, also kinda sorta superhero books, and this being Alan Moore in 1988 it’s very much a “I am NOT just a SUPERHERO GUY” positioning statement, but also a list put together by a writer who is aware he has a wide and respectful audience and wants to educate them a little. I may have read this list, more likely I just absorbed the names a bit later from the comics. music and style press, but this was also (of course) an amazing time to be an inquisitive teenager into comics, and a couple of years later when I did jump from the nascent Vertigo comics into the independent scene this list might as well have been my guide.

"I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and..."

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:01:27 +0100

“I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and forward-thinking and broad-minded and in the end what he cares most about is winning more Grammys. That’d be like some self-professed great chef aspiring to get a sandwich on the McDonald’s menu.”

- Sorry, work head on here. Kanye is pretty good at marketing, yes, and pre-release campaigns are the new music videos (or something), though how many of them make a success of records which wouldn’t have been highly anticipated anyhow?

(via tomewing)

A great point. Music-as-design/advertising/brand isn’t done “on spec” like marketing for other (aspirational) consumer goods frequently is, but happens after the music(ian) is already established? Related to Tom’s music video comparison, how many “event” music videos broke a star, rather than reaffirmed said star’s starriness?

(via marathonpacks)

The one that jumps to mind is “Take On Me”, back in the 80s - I don’t think anyone knew/cared about a-Ha before that video (and no doubt they fell back into obscurity in the US, but they were properly boyband big here).

Actually the best “break-a-star” pre-release marketing I can remember was an 80s thing too - Tiffany’s “shopping malls” tour, it was the only thing anyone knew or knew to write about her and it really helped define her image. It was then ripped off by everybody, IIRC.

(Pre-release marketing trickery is powerful whether it can or can’t break anyone, of course. I don’t doubt the publicity created by the Daft Punk campaign made the difference between it selling 200k and 400k in its first week.)

Big Data And Terror

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:20:00 +0100

I was thinking about the whole NSA / Prism / GCHQ thing at the weekend, in the context of data and decision-making.

Let’s take everything the NSA says at face value - the purpose of collecting data is to prevent terrorism, i.e. detect and stop terrorist activity (however defined) before it happens. I don’t necessarily believe that’s all they want the data for, but let’s assume it.

We know that having a lot of data doesn’t inevitably lead to better decision-making, because people aren’t generally good at making decisions (data-led or otherwise), or framing data in the right way, and because an awful lot of luck is involved in making right ones. But let’s also be extremely generous and assume that collecting ALL data cuts the number of terrorist incidents by, say, 50%. There are already very few, and under this hypothesis there will be fewer still.

This will save lives. (A few lives.) But terrorism doesn’t really work by lives lost, the clue is after all in the name, it works through the effect of lives lost. So the number of successful terror incidents doesn’t necessarily matter in terms of their potential for instilling terror. My very subjective feeling is that people are far more scared of terrorists now in Britain than in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was growing up and when irregular but (relative to today) frequent acts of bloodthirsty terror had become more or less normalised, part of the mental furniture. If an infrequent terrorist event can cause the same horror, fear, and psychological impact as 10 frequent ones, then reducing the frequency of terrorist acts doesn’t seem the best way to counter its impact.

But with fewer events, won’t people feel safer and trust the government and security agencies more?

The problem is that after a successful event we find out who did it, and the question is asked - how could this have been prevented? So all sorts of counter-factual scenarios are played out in which the terrorist act did not happen, and the fact that it did makes certain decisions seem very poor in hindsight. Among these are always the decision not to monitor (and, implicitly, stop) the eventual perpetrator, since they are always “known to” intelligence agencies.

And the more data the intelligence agencies have, the better “known to” them the terrorists will be, because EVERYONE is better known. At least potentially. But after a terrorist act, that potential is all that matters. What the intelligence agencies COULD have known becomes what the agencies SHOULD have known - this is the same thing that happens after every apparent failure, in business or marketing or choosing to sign the Beatles to your record label or rejecting Harry Potter or anything.

So, the psychological impact of terror isn’t proportionate to its frequency, and people assume that available data is also useable data. Which means that collecting more data with the aim of reducing the frequency of terrorist acts isn’t a great strategy for the NSA or GCHQ to pursue, even from their selfish point of view - it probably won’t have an impact on the effect of terror and it’ll end up increasing the seeming culpability of the agencies when terrorist events do happen.

It’s also, unfortunately, the only thing they can do, because the post-terror outcry over them having data and NOT using it is matched only by the post-terror outcry about intelligence services NOT having the right data, let alone them refusing to collect it. This is the curse of big data, an unfair but hard-to-escape problem: the existence of potential data makes ALL wrong decisions seem worse.

"I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and..."

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:29:49 +0100

“I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and forward-thinking and broad-minded and in the end what he cares most about is winning more Grammys. That’d be like some self-professed great chef aspiring to get a sandwich on the McDonald’s menu.”

- — ILX weighs in on the NYT interview. (via nedraggett)

It’s tacky to “us,” but I think it makes perfect sense if you consider that Kanye considers himself a “professional creative” more than he considers himself an “artist,” and says as much in the interview. He namedrops Gil Scott Heron and Dead Prez, but via that interview, he’s thinking of his process and cultural positionality more in the lineage of designers and “image people,” aka the advertising, design, and branding worlds. Those people think of themselves as artists, too, only their work has a functionality and foregrounding of style that they can easily reconcile with the more romantic, “outsider” perspective we ascribe to transcendent artists. They also love rewarding each other for their brilliance in creating art-with-a-function. There’s nothing tacky about seeking the highest award your chosen industry has on offer if you choose this perspective, which Kanye clearly has. I bet he’d love to get a Clio for his pre-release projection stunts.

(also, I love how he puts David Stern in his Mount Rushmore of legends including Anna Wintour and Walt Disney. Honestly, I really love it.)

To the extent that the ‘function’ disappears. There are ad awards which are specifically ABOUT “effectiveness” (how well an ad drives sales) in which effectiveness is actually a mighty 33% of the judging criteria.

Sorry, work head on here. Kanye is pretty good at marketing, yes, and pre-release campaigns are the new music videos (or something), though how many of them make a success of records which wouldn’t have been highly anticipated anyhow?

Nice Kobold Cave: maggotmaster: baronessvonbullshit: how is the healthcare system funded...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 23:08:14 +0100

Nice Kobold Cave: maggotmaster: baronessvonbullshit: how is the healthcare system funded...:

timocraticyouth:

the pokemon world’s economy is eccentric, but there are clear signs towards the existence of state power: ie, the fact that there are police. imo, all signs point to a utopian post-capitalist society that has only operated under its current mode for perhaps two generations. this reorganization of society was not precipitated by any revolution or even conscious political action, but rather the natural result of reforming the pokemon leagues and the systematic cataloging of pokemon and their capabilities …

this shit is next level

Terrific stuff. (I’m writing about the Pokemon games at the moment so this is also extremely timely.)

Photo

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 08:44:18 +0100

Avengers Comics Mount Rushmore addendum - this is written by my...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:23:35 +0100

Avengers Comics Mount Rushmore addendum - this is written by my brother, monthly from September.