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Articles

Rebuild it Piece by Piece by The Johnny Parry Trio & Chamber Orchestra

Lost the plot? From the wonderful Brain Pickings.

‘In 1894, French critic Georges Polti recognized thirty-six possible plots, which included conflicts such as Supplication, Pursuit, Self-sacrifice, Adultery, Revolt, the Enigma, Abduction, and Disaster. In 1928, dime novelist William Wallace Cook, author of Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, did him one better, cataloging every narrative he could think of through a method that bordered on madness. His final plot count? 1,462.

Plotto, reissued last month by Tin House, was a manual that aimed to mechanize the entire narrative trade. In his introduction, Paul Collins recognizes that Cook was something of a plot machine himself, once writing fifty-four novels in a year, more than one a week. Cook’s methods were developed into a Plotto Studio of Authorship in New York City, his book hailed as “an invention which reduces literature to an exact science.”

While still a young director in England, Alfred Hitchcock requested the book from America, and the creator of the courtroom drama Perry Mason claimed he had learned a great deal from it. The success of Plotto inspired other write-for-pay miracle workers. In 1931, screenwriter Wycliffe Hill declared that he had invented a “Plot Robot,” which turned out to be nothing more than cardboard wheel of options that would help you choose a plot in the same way you might choose a color for your living room.’

London is covered in dead butterflies. There is a Damien Hirst retrospective on at the Tate, and if you travel under or overground through the city you will not be able to avoid the exhibition posters. Whoever thought a cropped section of Annunciation II (comprised of hundreds of dead-on-display tropical butterflies) would work well as promotional material was probably right. This is an exhibition that seeks to desensationalise the unhelpfully - some would say undeservedly - notorious artist. Great Whites tend to make a meal of modesty.  

The poster is caught in a current aesthetic tailwind, too. Butterflies can be spotted in current advertising campaigns from O2, Edun and Aubin& Wills. It feels relevant that in 2010 the BBC’s Natural World series featured a program arguing for the butterfly as a ‘very British obsession’. The claim seemed to center around the fact that large numbers of British women have tattoos featuring the creatures. This does seem a bit of a leap, but is borne out by Aubin & Wills whose current retail display features thousands of red and blue butterflies which have assembled, presumably with the jubilee in mind, to form a Union Jack.  

As far as metaphors go, butterflies are typically called up in adverts and elsewhere to indicate freedom or the desire for it. The meaning behind Henri Charriere’s Papillion seems a case in point. Brands like VW and Puma have given us butterflies in the past to suggest something similarly aspirational. Perhaps this is a reflection of the creatures’ rather careless global peregrination. Monarch butterflies caught in strong winds can find themselves helplessly migrating hundreds of miles (incidentally, butterflies stripped of their antennae - which are GPS systems, and not just used for smelling - are unable to orientate themselves at all). 

That said, what is perhaps more interesting is how often the imagery of the butterfly is tied to death rather than freedom, and associated not with serendipity but with grim inevitability. We are familiar with the notion of ‘the butterfly effect’, of the fallout that can result (or so it is claimed) on one side of the globe from something as insignificant as the flap of a butterfly’s wings on the other. In this case butterflies have a sort of doom-laden premonitory function. Hirst’s butterflies signify the unmistakeable curtailment of life, not its flourishing. They suggest there is beauty in death, but offer nothing to lift the spirits by way of life after it. Think about that the next time you buy a mackintosh from Aubin and Wills.

Mail-order blues, from Reason -

‘The first Sears, Roebuck catalog was published in 1888. It would go on to transform America. Farmers were no longer subject to the variable quality and arbitrary pricing of local general stores. The catalog brought things like washing machines and the latest fashions to the most far-flung outposts. Guitars first appeared in the catalog in 1894 for $4.50 (around $112 in today’s money). By 1908 Sears was offering a guitar, outfitted for steel strings, for $1.89 ($45 today), making it the cheapest harmony-generating instrument available. Throughout the 1910s Delta blacks routinely ordered a wide assortment of goods from Sears, Roebuck, including the instrument that would define them…

…Guitar quality kept improving while the price kept going down. Soon sharecroppers throughout the Delta were ordering guitars from Sears in hopes of supplementing their income on weekends. The catalog is frequently mentioned in the biographies of Delta bluesmen. In 1930 Muddy Waters purchased a used Stella, most likely originally purchased from the catalog, and began playing gigs. He quickly earned enough money to order a brand new guitar from Sears. B.B. King learned the rudiments of the instrument through an instructional book he ordered from the catalog. And of course, blues musicians weren’t the only ones to profit from the availability of cheap guitars: White country artists such as Roy Clark would get their first instrument from the same catalog that black bluesmen like Son Thomas would.’

‘I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes’. William Gibson on the Anglo-Japanese ‘special relationship’, and why your coat hanger is a triangular portal into a serene otherworld. 

     ’London, being London and whatever else, eminently assured of its ability to do whatever it is that London’s always done, can reflect Japan, distort it, enjoy it, in ways that Vancouver, where I live, never can. In Vancouver, we cater blandly to the Japanese, both to the tour-bus people with the every-present cameras and to a delightful but utterly silent class of Japanese slackers. These latter seem to jump ship simply to be here, and can be seen daily about the city, in ones and twos, much as, I suspect, you or I might seem to the residents of Puerto Vallarta. “There they are again. I wonder what they might be thinking?”

     But we don’t reflect them back. We don’t have any equivalent of the robot sushi bar in Harvey Nichols, which is as perfectly ‘Japanese’ a thing as I’ve seen anywhere, and which probably wouldn’t look nearly as cool if it had been built in Tokyo or Osaka. 

     We don’t have branches of Muji interspersed between our Starbucks (although I wish we did, because I’m running out of their excellent toothpaste). Muji is the perfect example of the sort of thing I’m thinking of, because it calls up a wonderful Japan that doesn’t really exist. A Japan of the mind, where even toenail clippers and plastic coat hangers possess a Zen purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced. I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes. I would vacation there and attain a new serenity, smooth and translucent, in perfect counterpoint to natural fabrics and unbleached cardboard. My toiletries would pretend to be nothing more than what they are, and neither would I. (If Mujiland exists anywhere, it’s probably not in Japan. If anywhere, it may actually be here, in London).’ 

The curious history of crowd-sourced brand names, from the Creative Review.

‘As long ago as 1890, a Macclesfield breadmaker called Richard ‘Stoney’ Smith launched a national competition to find a name for his new flour and breadmaking business. The winning entry came from a student called Herbert Grimes. And it was ‘Hovis’.

Like Mondelez [the crowdsourced name for Kraft’s new snack management company], it comes from a contraction of two foreign-language words. In this case, it’s the Latin ‘hominis vis’, meaning ‘strength of man’.

It’s a great name, for which Herbert Grimes won £25.’

And if you’re really interested, you can visit the grave of Richard ‘Stoney’ Smith. He’s buried in Highgate Cemetery, North London, alongside Karl Marx, Ralph Milband, George Eliot, Jeremy Beadle and most of the Dickens family (sans Charles).

digital arts

Although practically immeasurable, there are at least 5 trillion megabytes of information on the internet. 

How do we keep the resonance of a single word or image in the digital age?  Most online texts and image archives are reductive, compressing works into bytes.  Margin notes, editing and translation and curation become fixed where they once were fluid. 

Digital artists, curators and scholars are collaborating to explore how the intersection of digital science and humanities can allow us to tap into the materiality of knowledge and experience.  The fluidity and interactivity of digital enables us to explore ephemeral processes of composition and creativity and enter the virtuality that artistic practice has always produced. 

Birdsong Compliance by John Sparrow, is a series of digital poems where two texts overlap to create shifting meanings and tone. One forms the background while the other ‘performs’ over it.  Follow the link for a ‘live’ performance…


http://itchaway.net/poetry/birdsong-compliance/#null

Vanishing Points is a joint digital installation by Micheal Takeo and Dr Hugh Denard.  Takeo’s visual installation uses semi-translucent film to bring to life Denard’s research into how Roman Fresco art created immersive imagined worlds within architectural space.


Digital culture digest:

- Coca Cola have launched a tumblr page. (And so have The Guardian).

- and why 3-D TV still hasn’t caught on, from Wired:

‘So what’s to blame?

The content, for one.

“We have disappointed our audience multiple times now, and because of that I think there is genuine distrust — whereas a year and a half ago, there was genuine excitement, enthusiasm and reward for the first group of 3-D films that actually delivered a quality experience,” Dreamworks animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

After “Avatar,” a string of unsuccessful, rushed-to-market 3-D flicks — we’re looking at you, “Clash of the Titans” — zoomed to theaters hoping to cash in on the craze. Moviegoers were left with a bad taste in their mouths (and oftentimes headaches, too, as 3-D viewing can cause eyestrain).’