Spike Eats Pear
Banbury, October 24th
Back.
Tired.
Later.
Archive for October, 2006
This ad will vanish when you reload.
West Midlands Hard Core. I set this group up on Flickr recently for people in the West Midlands who “like to fuck about with photography” because there seemed to be a fair number of us around. It’s gathering pace nicely so consider this a launch of sorts.
On the Edge of Blade Runner - 50 minute doc presented by Mark Kermode on Google Video. Lovely! (via)
Thumpculture is a new webcomic by Neill Cameron. I think Neill Cameron is a very good cartoonist who has recently made some serious leaps into becoming an even better cartoonist. Only one page up so far but it’s a very nice page. (via)
The Joseph Sturge Monument at Five Ways. A photo essay from the Connecting Histories project detailing the history of a much overlooked statue in Birmingham which features some of my photos. I should really write more about Connecting Histories since I know people involved in it but for now have a browse around their still evolving website.
The return of TV Go Home, Charlie Brooker’s legendary spoof TV listings (”in which Martin Jarvis and Peter Egan, stripped to the waist inside a barbed-wire thunderdome, take turns to bellow children’s fiction through loudhailers”) looks like it’s become a regular feature in the Guardian. Also, Brooker moves to Mondays and appears to have more space. I’m half tempted to buy the paper to find out. Half tempted mind.
Pixies to begin work on new album due sometime next year. Kinda inevitable but superb news all the same. (via)
Video: Multi-touch interface demo from Adobe’s research lab. I’ve seen these before but this takes it to a new level. The future, ladies and gentlemen. Wow. (via)
Peter Bradshaw, film critic, on his addiction to YouTube. “Where straight cinema and YouTube come more closely into parallel is the use of the continuous shot: the persistent, unjudging, almost uncomprehending gaze; an unedited, deep-focus scene in which our attention as audience is not coerced or directed.” (via)
Fast Glass - neat article on wide aperture prime lenses, what they do and why it’s a good thing. I understood everything in this piece. That midly worries me. (ta)
The Autumn Store is a club night in Birmingham at the Sunflower Lounge run by this nice chap Dunc I met at the Misty’s gig last week. Next one is November 16th. I suspect it’ll be along the same lines at the Robot vs Dinosaur nights I enjoyed earlier in the year only more indie based. Perhaps. Should be worth popping along to anyway. (Rumours of the Retro Spankees playing there on Dec 14th abound too).
Charlie Brooker on Torchwood “It’s like tuning in to watch Deadwood, only to discover they’ve replaced Al Swearengen with the Honey Monster.” Now that I’d like to see. (via, though I would have gotten to it eventually)
Going Deaf For A Fortnight 2006 has started with your host for this year Russ L. Two nights down, another 12 to go and he’s already feeling the effects. Of note, however, is the madness of combining two gigs in one night. Please pop over there and give him your support - I suspect he’s going to need it!
Scientist says Vampires a Mathematical Impossibility but I think he misses a rather significant point. Vampire bites don’t automatically create new vampires. In order for that to happen the victim has to drink the blood of the vampire what bit him, known in the trade as “siring”. Vampires don’t do this very often, presumably for the reasons outlined by said Scientist - too much competition for blood, so most victims simply die. They’ll sire a reasonable number to form hunting packs and the like but no more, thus, presumably, keeping everything sustainable. Now werewolves on the other hand… (via, and no, I don’t really take this seriously. Please.)
Shuttle Launch as seen from International Space Station. W’Ellis has a couple of photos. It’s so small! It’s so big!
KateGoes
Really couldn’t make a decision on where to go tonight based on the bands so I went for the “who else is going” system which pointed me towards Misty’s and Kate Goes at the Barfly. I’m sure Schwervon et al at the Jug were superb but one can only be in one place at one time. Anyway, met up with Matt M and posse and naturally Andy Pryke was there.
Top gig. KateGoes are really tight now, streets ahead of the last two times I saw them yet still completely out there (for want of a suitable term). Hard to believe they’ve only been going for less than a year.
Misty’s Big Adventure, as ever, were tremendous. Every time I see them they seem to improve and they’ve been at the top of their game for a while now. New songs were great and some of the old ones have had a rocket shoved up their arses, especially A Dog Like You which fucking rocks now.
Photos were taken TTV style.
– — –
One of the advantages of living in a shared house is you can announce on your blog that you’re going away safe in the knowledge that you’re not leaving an empty honey pot for web surfing burglars. My sister and her brood are moving to New Zealand next month (yes, my family is slowly transferring itself to the other side of the planet) so I’m going down to Banbury to help them sort shit out. Not sure if I’ll have much net access or time to do anything so things might be quiet for a week. I also expect another wave of spam returns to clog up my peteashton.com email when I’m gone making webmail impossible so use the gmail.com with peteashton in front of it if you need to contact me.
Andrew Rilstone on the mildly absurd veils controversy: ‘Why can’t the politicians see that every time they say ‘We should have a sensible debate about veils’ a large proportion of the electorate will hear ‘Muslims are terrorists with dirty lavatories’? What we need right now is not a debate, sensible or otherwise. We need Tony Blair and Jack Straw to stand up and say, very loudly ‘Muslims are Britons. Muslim Britons sometimes dress in a way that some other Britons aren’t used to. Just like some Britons wear kilts and some Britons have their tongues pierced. And if you find kilts, pierced tongues and veils a bit strange, then that’s your problem, and you should try to get over it.’ Why is that so hard?”
Man with Car
Birmingham, October 20th
Extremely cool inline comments system. It’s a prototype but I think it’s the future. Readers can leave comments on any section of an article (paragraphs, images) that can be read within the context of that section (rather like footnotes) or as a whole. Try it out by clicking on the yellow arrows on the left hand side. (via)
Making Moo-gnets. Meg takes her Moo MiniCards and makes magnets out of them.
Tangerine is just what I’ve been waiting for. A Mac app that analyses your mp3s and figures out the BMP. It’s still chugging through my music (seems to do one a second on my old G4 and I’ve got 15,000+ files) but so far it seems very accurate. Also, the BMP-centric playlist window is very cool. (via)
Issue three of VIEWER, chum Gareth’s PDF art magazine, is out.
Infringing the Bankster
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.
Fall
Selly Oak, October 18th, Dawn
The amusing story of the new Misty’s video. In short, Misty’s Big Adventure write a song, Fashion Parade, about all the crap bands who sound the same. They then have a crap band supporting them at a gig called The Teats. They put 2+2 together and manage to get said band to perform in their video as the crap band in the song. A little later The Teats realise what’s happened and it all kicks off. Yeah, I didn’t get it at first either. (via)
Gigs, gigs, gigs
Gigs can be like busses sometimes.
This Saturday, the 21st of October, there are two I’d like to attend.
In the centre of town at the Barfly venue you will find Misty’s Big Adventure with support from Kate Goes. Both of these acts I’ve seen before but not for a while now. It would be good to see Misty’s again and to catch up on the recent development of Kate Goes.
In the suburb of Moseley at the Jug of Ale venue you will find Schwervon, who I caught as part of GDFAF last year, along with a couple of acts I know nothing about - Toby Goodshank and Lisa Li-lund - but who sounds pretty keen from their MySpace pages. I’d also really like to see Schwervon again.
I’m erring towards the latter. Perhaps. Sometime I’m erring towards the former.
Is anyone planning on attending either of these?
Mildly related to this, the mighty Andy Pryke emails with a tip for tonight:
“There’s a good band on at the Sunflower Lounge on Thursday called Defiance Ohio. I saw them this summer when I was in Reykjavik and they really got the audience going - stage diving, ball room dancing, singing along etc!”
My sleep patterns are all over the shop right now so I might not be awake for this but it does seem rather good.
Other upcoming gigs of note in Birmingham include Tunng at the Glee Club on Sunday, an intriguing event at the MAC called The Photophonic Experiment featuring Pram on October 28th and Enablers (previously reviewed) at the Hare and Hounds on November 3rd. I’m ranking these three as Maybe, Probably and Definitely in that order.
Print Shop
I present to you my latest venture, Pete’s Print Shop, where you can buy photographic images transfered onto pieces of paper using technology.
Some notes.
It’s still kinda beta. Let me know if anything doesn’t work or make sense.
The actual selection of photos on there is pretty random right now but it’ll change over time. There’s an RSS feed which monitors new additions and I’ll probably subtly mention them on this blog too. I welcome suggestions as to which photos would make good prints.
I’ve set the price at £15.00 per print including postage which seems reasonable based on other online print shops I’ve seen. I may be wrong about this. Time will tell.
Only 16 photos will be on sale in the shop at any given time but all photos from my Flickr stream can be ordered on request.
Order fulfillment is done by Photobox on demand. This means actual processing of orders will take a couple of minutes, if that. This is important for scalability reasons. Payment is through PayPal for the same reasons. I want to commit to this long term so it mustn’t become a drag.
If this works I plan to expand the shop to sell prints by other photographers.
Feedback is welcome. As, of course, are actual orders!
The Viewscope. A nicely written up guide to building a contraption that, while similar to a TTV machine, is more like a lens and allows for interchangeable bubbleglasses. via
This is the personal blog and main internet hub-thing for Pete Ashton. What you'll find here is a seemingly random collection of stuff I want to talk about and share. 
RSS feed
Email
Twitter
Flickr
Facebook
Last.FM
LJ feed
Pete Pipe
