The Times profiles the newly-refurbished St. Pancras station in London, opening in November 2007 as the station that will handle passengers on the international Birmingham-London(St.Pancras)-Paris-Brussels route. We can apparently thank the old poet laureate John Betjeman, for saving this fine neo-Gothic station from demolition. “Gilbert Scott and Barlow didn’t just build a mechanism for fast […]
Archive for July, 2007
Oxford Internet Report 2007
Just published, as a free 80-page PDF: the Oxford Internet Survey 2007 Report : The Internet in Britain. “Dial-up connections have almost disappeared, with 85% of Internet households accessing the Internet through a broadband connection.”
Pay to play
Nice one; PaperClipGuy is trying to trade up from a paperclip to a live-aboard canal narrowboat (about £60k+ for something decent, and add £10k for first-year expenses). So far, he’s on trade No.9 and has just swopped a speedboat for a Porsche. It’d be cool if Gordon Brown’s proposed “classroom lessons in economics” could include […]
“Music for nothing, but the gigs ain’t free…”
27 Jul 2007 at 18:12
David Haden
Creative industries, Entertainment
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The new edition of Prospect magazine has a long lead article on the new economics of the music business. If you haven’t been following the rather tedious decline-and-stagger of the music industry, it’s a useful up-to-date 20-minute overview.
“All your Cultural Studies are belong to us”
27 Jul 2007 at 15:45
David Haden
Creative industries, Entertainment, Gaming, Nerds, Robotics, Teaching, Techie
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Fab academo-geek conference alert: GikII, 19th September 07 in London. “[last year saw] the first workshop in the world where the worlds of law, technology and popular culture came together. We want to discuss whether geek law exists; by the end of the workshop we had created it. Topics covered at the first workshop included […]
Heavy Midlands
Daniel Trilling reports on the recent evening symposium on heavy metal music, held at the New Art Gallery, Walsall… “the West Midlands is rightly celebrating its place as the epicentre of a cultural movement that has swept the globe” … and we might also mention that heavy metal’s fey brother, glam rock, had significant Birmingham […]
Lago bookcases
A swish range of modular bookcases from Lago.
Mediamatic on cosplay otaku
21 Jul 2007 at 21:51
David Haden
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The latest Mediamatic has a quirky article on the increasing reach of otaku cosplay (kosupure), offering an analysis that might have been faintly laughable if it hadn’t been presented at a time when the Japanese shinjinrui otaku seem to possess the planet’s only genuinely meme-powered youth culture. “Today in Tokyo there are streets where cosplay […]
Fire-fighting in the arts
21 Jul 2007 at 20:27
David Haden
Artist(s), Creative industries
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Bloomberg
Flickr flood
Flick’s range of pictures of the ‘great flood’, including Newbury railway station looking like a canal. This bloke seems to have the right idea, since he recently finished building a giant wooden ark… …which currently looks like it could be rather useful for navigating the M5 in the Midlands. Still, it could be worse. What […]
Oral History of British Photography
21 Jul 2007 at 09:33
David Haden
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The British Library has placed the Oral History of British Photography online, for free to those in higher education (via Athens). It looks like it might be complete; it had 170 recordings the last time I heard of it. The site currently offers audio files only, with very few searchable transcriptions yet, and no user […]
Meleonn Ma
Fantastic-surreal photography from Chinese photographer Meleonn Ma. (Flash required). I looked for his work online last autumn, but could find nothing; so it’s nice to see an abundance of big images arranged in comprehensive galleries. Pig Mag blog has an English-language interview with Ma.
Tentacle-tastic!
Fab; Doctor Who -style side tables by Gareth Neal. The image was originally on urban FIELD, but has since vanished. You can tell I’m in a science-fiction mood… 🙂
Transport Futuristics
Mmmm, take the monorail to the heli-car pad! Future dreaming at the Transport Futuristics galleries.
Artists in their Studios
20 Jul 2007 at 22:58
David Haden
Artist(s), Creative industries
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Just published by the Smithsonian, a new book of historical photographs; Artists in their Studios.
Chug
Tom White’s Chug : a narrowboat journey is an impressionistic 9-minute documentary about life on England’s canals, combining interviews, field-recordings and visuals… [ Hat-tip: Granny Buttons ]
BJP on Szarkowski
Some of the elder statesmen of British photography — Bill Jay, Gerry Badger, and Mark Haworth-Booth — are asked to comment in the British Journal of Photography, on Szarkowski’s legacy… Haworth-Booth [says, of the UK] “On contemporary college photography course reading lists, there are many recommended readings on the theoretical approach to photography. Almost completely […]
Av’ an avatar
Second Life as portraiture tool.
Robotarium
The Robotarium, kind of like my idea for a “phone playpen” from two years ago.
Hand-made maps
Molly Maps collects and shows a select handful of her beautiful hand-made maps… “Since 2000, I have made over forty custom maps, with fieldwork in ten countries…”