Life Archives
January 02, 2006
Bowbrick Country
How did I manage to live in Stevenage (Saxon settlement and blighted Sixties new town) between the ages of seven and twenty without ever learning that E.M. Forster wrote Howards End there and that they call the country to the North of the town Forster Country? In the Seventies, when I was growing up there, The Sun called Stevenage 'the glue sniffing capital of Great Britain' which we all thought was pretty funny. Punk exotic John Cooper Clark lived opposite my school (why?) and they used to make gorgeous Vincents like the one in the picture in a shed next door (but they stopped doing that in the 1930s). I have Radio 4's Open Country (which is rapidly becoming my favourite programme) to thank for this new knowledge about Stevenage's spurious literary heritage.
September 05, 2005
I told you they were weird
This suit – not a new one, quite worn in fact, and with a very lairy pink tie over the hanger – spent a while in the hedge over the road from our house at the weekend.
July 16, 2005
40° coloureds/cottons
This is how you kill a Sony Ericsson K700i.
May 13, 2005
Archaeology
'Storage' is very 'now' isn't it. Everybody seems to be storing something and it's obviously a boom business. There are all sorts of reasons for storing stuff, I suppose: you married fashionably late and neither of you can bear to throw away your precious stuff. You divorced and now you have to accommodate the crap accumulated over decades as a couple. You move house all the time and with each move you shed another skin of pointless possessions. Those giant sheds at motorway junctions labelled 'self storage' are actually melancholy graveyards of memories, of stuff abandoned and forgotten (and, I fantasise, thrillingly packed with contraband, alien artefacts and sacks of used fivers).
Anyway, we just emptied our storage unit in lovely Watford. Quite an exercise. So now we're busy trying to reabsorb the thousands of inconsequential items we seem to need so badly even though we were able to do without them for years. Here's a good one: three horrible blue shirts, still in the dry cleaner's bags they were put in in 1989...
February 04, 2005
Azeem's babies
I'd like to mark (a bit late, as usual), the arrival of two babies. First, Salman, a son for Shen and Azeem, nine weeks early (impatient, like his Dad...) and, second, Rising Slowly – a weather blog and latest output from the UK's only proper nanopub business, Mink Media. Both lovely, of course. Welcome!
October 12, 2004
Britain's only PHP celebrity
A productive day in town – meeting with interesting people: lunch at Blacks with my lawyer, top secret discussions with a Guardian journo in Farringdon, a chance meeting with a top PERL geezer in Foyles and an expensive glass of wine with the esteemed Phil Gyford. Outstanding.
October 10, 2004
Murphy and Pope
A week ago, Paul Murphy took Ivan and myself on a tour of his favourite East End art galleries. Of course, this involved walking past quite a lot of my favourite East End pubs so it was quite hard work. Anyway, I've put a few pics up at Flickr.
October 07, 2004
help reproducing fairies
It's like this: I want to photograph some embroidered fairies (bear with me). They're embroidered on paper for framing so they're pretty flat but have lots of flounces and beads and other pretty stuff that sticks up – this rules out scanning (I've tried it – it's horrible). So I've bought a proper copy stand and some lamps and I'm using my brand spanking new 6MP digital SLR to take the pictures. Here's the thing: the results are crap.
The best pics (and they're really good) are the first ones I ever took, using a kids' easel, my old 35mm SLR and hit-and-miss natural light out in the yard. I can't get anywhere near the same quality using my new set-up, despite lots of tinkering with lighting, white balance, contrast and every feature my new camera offers. If you're an expert on photographing flat(ish) artwork for reproduction (or if you know anyone who is or if you know of a good book or a good forum for this sort of thing), then please drop me a line!
September 26, 2004
Buy a t-shirt, help the UN's Refugee Agency
A while ago I made a 'No. I do not have a Nectar card' t-shirt for those situations when you just can't bring yourself to say it... again (for you foreigners, Nectar is a huge UK multi-vendor loyalty card scheme – they claim that one-third of the UK population has a card). You can buy a t-shirt at CafePress for $19.99 (plus delivery), which is practically bugger all (a bit more than a tenner, in fact), what with the favourable exchange rate and all that. The amazing thing is that, unaccountably, I seem to have sold a few lately and UNHCR is somewhat better off as a result. So, instead of sitting there clicking aimlessly (what are you doing exactly?), why don't you buy one. All profits (a chunky $6 per shirt) go to UNHCR.
September 16, 2004
A Burma veteran at Foyles
John Giddings was at Foyles the other day for an evening of poetry and literature from the war in Burma. I took his photograph in the coffee bar – you can't sit and ignore a man with a row of medals like that! The one on the left is an MBE, by the way. Mr Giddings told me a lot of amazing stories from what seems like another age (click the small pics for bigger ones).
August 06, 2004
Buy my stuff...
I bet you need a powerful, versatile flash gun for that old manual focus Nikon of yours, don't you? Here's a good one.
July 19, 2004
Through the looking glass
When I was a kid I used to lie in bed at night with my crappy Sanyo radio and roam the shortwave bands. I loved those voices from distant places. My favourite was Radio Tirana. On the nightly English-language news a male/female duo with the plummiest RP delivery imaginable (accents presumably acquired at Oxbridge and barely inflected by their utterly unknowable lives in the most isolated nation on earth) read the latest tractor production figures.
The other-worldliness of Hoxha-era Albania was intoxicating for a curious fourteen year-old. I wrote to the address provided. My dad was sure my letter would never get there. As a stamp collector (and former postman) he knew that, in the 1970s, Albania was the only nation on earth not to have signed the various International treaties on the exchange of mail. He was wrong. Not only did my letter get to Tirana (I remember the address: Radio Tirana, Albania) but I got a gorgeous reply in a massive dun envelope of such crude construction it had practically dissolved in transit. I wish I could remember what was in it...
I do remember that the Albanians didn't actually bother to print stamps at the time so I got a brilliant, smudged rubber stamp mark instead – even better. Kept it for years. Anyway, that's really a very roundabout way of saying that I got a similar tingle of mystery and general oddness from my visit to what is, according to Slashdot, North Korea's first official web site.
By the way, I think you should really take the trouble to sign up for the site (although I can't be sure what the privacy/security implications of getting an official North Korean webmail address are). Once registered you'll get access to a lot of North Korean music by artists like The Korean People's Army Merited State Chorus and The Wangjaesan Light Music Band and also some streaming movies. You'll be invited to provide your profession (just select 'worker') and choose from a list of password reminder questions that includes: 'how will Korea change after reunification?'
(And here's a lovely gallery of old transistor radios – not my Sanyo, though...).
July 14, 2004
Got Bokeh?
I sold a lens on eBay the other day and my buyer wrote to tell me he'd seen the pics on my weblog and that I have 'great Bokeh'. So now I can confirm that Bokeh is not a Japanese sexual practice but the word photographers use for those blurred discs you see in the out-of-focus areas of photographs. Fascinating. Ken Rockwell has a pretty good explanation. Mike Johnston says he's the man who added the 'h' to the end of the English transliteration and has some good examples. Some test images here are really quite lovely in their own right and here's a technical explanation from Harold M. Merklinger.
July 05, 2004
Reading
Aidan Rankin's gripping piece from The New Statesman about his experiment with being right-wing. He joined UKIP and spent a couple of years working on policy and campaigns until the nastiness overcame him. Thankfully, the experience worked like an inoculation and Rankin is now back on the left (or, at least, somewhere in the middle). Lovely review of a scientific critique of the Rorschach test from the NYRB.
British, amateurish, brilliant...
Thank you to the eight staff (I counted them) of the marvelous Circus Ricardo who entertained us Saturday afternoon. An almost perfect treat – artless, funny, very British – the polar opposite of hyper-finished, totally slick (and equally wonderful) Shrek 2.
Those eight staff, of course, did everything, so we bought our candy floss from the tight-rope walker and watched the juggler pick up litter afterwards. Click the small pics for bigger ones.
June 30, 2004
More camphone pics
More pics from one of my regular traverses of the West End, including one of the many electric cars popping up all over the congestion charging zone and a Portuguese snack... Click here for a few more.
June 26, 2004
Domestic disorder
Everyone has their favourite button on the microwave. Here's mine.
June 25, 2004
Rembrandt?
Sometimes the crappy little pictures from my Camphone are really gorgeous – like this little Rembrandt from Blacks yesterday (and a few others from the phone).
June 23, 2004
Badges? Badgers?
I bought a big bag of 1970s and 80s badges from eBay (click the little pics for bigger ones). "I vote for I.I.C.C. Shooting Stars of Ibadan"?
June 17, 2004
Pauperism: 339. Anatomy: 611. Butter: 637. Dancing: 793. Greenland: 998. Mortality: 312
A long time ago, I worked in a library and one of the joys of the job was the Dewey Decimal classification system – a Victorian wonder of such arbitrary beauty that it often left me speechless in awe of Mr Dewey's simple ambition: to assign all of human knowledge (with some room for growth) a numeric classification. David Galbraith is obviously also a fan (but I can't tell where he stands on the religious wars of Dewey vs. Library of Congress). I also find myself wondering what happened to an effort I remember (from eight or nine years ago?) to classify the web using Dewey – Wakefulness: 135; Turkish baths: 613; Swedenborgians: 289; Shrubbery: 716; Embalming: 390; Locks and Keys: 683...
June 14, 2004
Cafe fame
The lovely New Piccadilly cafe in Denman St, W1, beloved of students, tourists and formica fanatics alike (and, of course, Russell "Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans" Davies), makes it into the sidebar of a piece about Gordon Ramsay's favourite greasy spoon in The Observer. Russell and I met there only last week – me: steak, chips and peas; Russell: egg, bacon, chips and beans. Outstanding.
The wisdom of the EPG
Admirable prescience from someone at Tivo about last night's England France game.
June 13, 2004
So sue me...
Listen, I'm a parent. I'm going to do this from time to time: three pics of my beautiful children.
June 12, 2004
Going to the zoo...
Yesterday I cold-called London Zoo about their online marketing. We love the zoo round here – we have an annual pass – best private club in town, if you ask me – and I think these guys could really make good use of some decent online marketing. I can't think of a better way of promoting annual memberships and animal adoptions than with some clever digital work aimed at broadband families in the South East (and the super-glamorous Komodo dragons are arriving this summer so there's your hook). Anyway, Natalie in the PR department told me there was no point calling because the Elephants handle marketing these days and they've been relocated to Whipsnade so they're really really grumpy...
By the way, we'll be hanging out with the creatures this Friday evening at London Zoo's open evening, which looks like a lot of fun...
June 10, 2004
Vine again
We got to Stella Vine's opening at Transition early enough to meet the artist properly and to see all the work before the celebs showed up. Brilliant. I took some polaroids. Jules wrote about it and edited some of my other photos into a 3-minute movie – Quicktime: 640x480 (11.3MB), 320x240 (8.4MB), 240x180 (4.1MB).
June 09, 2004
Stella Vine at Transition
This evening we're going here to see this and we are very excited (we don't get out much) – and last night we watched this video from French telly (or is it Swiss telly?) too.
June 04, 2004
Firing myself
This is the kind of thing you find when you're cleaning out your storage unit: my P45 from Webmedia, given to me (by me) when I finally closed the doors in October 1998. The first time I made myself redundant but not the last...
May 24, 2004
Ivan lives
Ivan and I were partners for years – we started a web site design firm called Webmedia together. Later he went mad and spent three or four years in a bath chair spitting and making inappropriate suggestions to the nurses. Apparently the electric shocks have been working, though, because he made it to Blacks for lunch a couple of weeks ago. Still crazy, though, as you'll see if you play the video (1.7MB Quicktime)...
May 13, 2004
My Mother-in-law
I'm not saying she's strange, but it turns out she's been keeping a collection of battered 1970s American license plates in the loft. Nobody knows why...
And while we're on the subject, here's a marvelous license plate site.
May 06, 2004
Kitchen sink ethnography
There was something on the radio the other day about mantelpieces. An academic has been making a close study of what people keep there – she reckons they're a good way of understanding the way we order our lives. I'm sure she's right but I wonder if we couldn't learn more – especially now – from other, busier parts of our homes: our kitchen counters, for instance. Here's a 4MB MPEG of ours. Go on. Upload yours. Let's start a project! Don't be shy...
April 29, 2004
The return of Shock and Awe
I remain (queasily) supportive of the overall aims of the invasion of Iraq and even (implausibly) optimistic about the likely outcome but I'm certain that AC130 gunships, first used to terrorise civilians in Vietnam, subsequently improved upon in Grenada, Panama and GW1, are not the kind of weapon an occupying power should be using anywhere, let alone inside a crowded City like Falluja. The AC130's awesome and concentrated firepower was part of the Americans' Shock and Awe strategy – an instrument of terror as a deliberate tactic – the polar opposite of 'hearts and minds'.
April 26, 2004
Sharing recipes
Foodster is a lovely idea but shouldn't it be a Wiki?
April 25, 2004
On two wheels
If you're a parent (or if you've ever been a small child), you'll understand the significance of this picture. Olly, 5, learned how to ride his bike without stabilisers. We missed out on our soft-focus moment of parental joy, though ("You won't let go will you Daddy?") because Olly somehow figured out how to do it on his own...
April 24, 2004
Misguided spam warrior
If you're the Northern gentleman who calls me on my mobile at all hours of the day and night (01:15, Saturday morning, for instance), withholds his phone number and then asks me "how's the spam business, Steve?", I'd like you to know the following (I figure you're clever enough to find my mobile phone number so you're probably clever enough to find this weblog):
1) the nasty, pornographic spam you're receiving is not sent by another.com (or by me, for that matter) but by someone spoofing an another.com address. If you would do as I have suggested and send me an example (with all the headers you can muster) I might be able to help you figure out where it is coming from – I, like you, have small children and don't think much of pornographic spammers.
2) and most important, really, I don't work at another.com any more and haven't done so for about 18 months. These days I'm not even a Director or a shareholder. Even if another.com were sending you pornographic spam I couldn't do anything about it – about as much as you could, in fact. Come on, help me out here!
April 13, 2004
Images of the lost
Beautiful and melancholy images from a profoundly lost era – Irwin Klein's photographs of hippy settlers in New Mexico in the late Sixties. The kids in these photos would now be my age – I'd love to know what became of them. Link from Sharpeworld via Things.
April 07, 2004
Philoflagellationism
If I were a proper Catholic and not the miserable unbeliever I am proud to be, I might be upset with the way Garry Wills links Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ with the history of out-of-control sexual abuse in the Church and especially within the ultra-secretive, right-wing Legion of Christ in this review from the NYRB. Since I am not a proper Catholic, I find it very interesting, Among other things, I learn that The Legion are big fans of Gibson's film and that they get a mention in the movie's credits (so Wills' connection is hardly spurious). Also, that Gibson believes almost all of us are going to hell, including his own wife and the current Pope. Oh dear.
Evan Parker on Radio 3
My friend Steve Shepherd used to produce Radio 3's Jazz flagship Jazz on 3, then he moved to Wales with his family – nobody knows why but we assume he's on the run from the triads or trad jazz buffs (triad jazz buffs?) or something. Anyway, he's just made a kind of come-back with a really interesting three-part series about improviser Evan Parker for the station's Jazz File slot. Steve's interviews with the saxophonist are gripping. If you get a move on you can catch the second programme online but the third in the series will replace it Saturday (and whoever pressed the record button did so a bit late this week so you'll miss the first couple of minutes!).
Update: you should tune into episode three even if only to hear Vic Reeves shouting 'pack it in Parker' as the saxophonist improvises on a track they recorded together for a forgotten Reeves album (also, it looks like someone at the BBC doesn't like you linking direct to Real Media files (why?) so you might need to listen to the programme via the Jazz File page).
April 06, 2004
Murphy triumphs, Hackney lives up to its reputation
Paul Murphy's opening at Transition in Hackney (London's Brooklyn) was brilliant. APU150 is a really mature show – coherent, clever, beautifully worked (even quite nicely hung). I expect great things – provided Paul's advanced age and scary appetite for very old Cognac don't get in the way, naturally
Paul's priced the work to sell (he's too modest). I don't want to make it sound cheap but the piece we bought cost us quite a lot less than replacing the rear window of the car which someone helpfully smashed while we guzzled the diabolical white wine (was it wine? Cider? Turps?) laid on by Paul's shadowy 'gallerista'/Svengali Cathy Lomax.
If you want to get your BritArt collection off to a flying start I'd get down to Transition sharpish and hoover up a few Apus.
March 23, 2004
The next Stella Vine
The near-legendary Paul Murphy has a show opening on 3 April at the cheeky Transition Gallery in Hackney (London's Brooklyn). Transition hit the headlines a few weeks ago as home of notorious pole dancer-painter Stella Vine, set for international stardom since Charles Saatchi bought her small primitivist painting of Jade from Big Brother Princess Diana for £600. Murphy's show is called APU150 and features 150 drawings of Apu, the convenience store owner from The Simpsons.
The show is rumoured to climax with a huge laser projection of a naked Apu as Mephistopheles inside the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. A plan to moor the terrifying, three hundred-foot, lottery-funded 'Apu Blimp' to the roof of the London Assembly has been shelved pending a safety review by the Mayor's Office. Murphy may be twice the age of most of the trendy young artists currently making waves in the top Thames-side galleries but I'm confident he'll be able to smoothly follow Vine onto the international stage if he can stay off the gargle for long enough (Paul, take this picture to the opening for recognition purposes. You never know).
March 11, 2004
Dyson, Diamond, Didion
Two very good reviews from the New York Review. Cheeky polymath Freeman Dyson on the paranormal and trendy geographer Jared Diamond on Easter Island. Two beautifully-written excerpts (first, second) from Joan Didion's melancholy Californian memoir (actually, Diamond is professor of geography and physiology – how does that work, then?).
March 01, 2004
Pictures to set a small boy's pulse racing
Lovely 360 degree QTVRs of aeroplanes (and rockets, of course) from the Smithsonian's collection and a gallery of equally lovely photos of old tractors and trucks from Antique Power and Vintage Truck Magazines. Someone gave me the Smithsonian link but I can't remember who. Sorry!
February 29, 2004
Colour photographs from a B&W world
These colour photographs from pre-revolutionary Russia are beautiful and strange. The Library of Congress has made handsome digital images from the three-part glass negatives left by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to the last Tsar. BBC4 ran a documentary about him this evening. I expect they'll run it again.
February 27, 2004
Thank you Faruk!
Andrew Murray at PCM – sponsors of this weblog – delivered my new Mac the other day – my third G4 Powerbook and probably my tenth Powerbook in all. This one was a dud, though. Wouldn't boot at all or booted and then showed me a lot of nasty debug code before it passed out all together. I assumed the worst and dropped Andrew an email late in the evening of the day it was delivered. The remarkable thing is that by lunch time the next day, it was fixed. A friendly and utterly competent engineer by the name of Faruk Norat, a twelve year PCM veteran, took a longish diversion and came round to my house in Hertfordshire, replaced some dodgy RAM and bob's your uncle. One happy Powerbook and even happier owner. Another good reason to buy your Mac kit from PCM, I reckon.
February 26, 2004
Picturesque Disneyland
We spent the weekend in a sort of 19th Century Disneyland – staying in a gorgeous, completely bonkers, self-consciously rustic cottage by a placid (and artificial) pond, hidden in the greenest (it's February for Christ's sake!) valley I've ever seen surrounded on all sides by the sound of rushing, tumbling streams. The cottage is on a rugged estate in West Devon – turned into a fantasy alpine tableau by the then Duke of Bedford in 1810 (he insisted that a fire was kept burning in an empty cottage to contribute a properly rustic plume of smoke to the skyline – his descendants kept this up until 1940). The estate's a landmark for the Picturesque Movement – a uniquely English antidote to the chilly French cult of neo-classicism that dominated the previous century.
This is my first proper exposure to the picturesque – a shambolic movement that never quite made it into the history books – and I find myself in unexpected patriotic sympathy with its messy artifice. This is the same unfashionable, cantancerous strand of English decorative culture that produced the folly – unmotivated, capricious, fantastic.
I'd tell you where Pond Cottage is, only I'd have to kill you in case you decided to go and stay there – it's already hard enough to get a booking. Thanks to Simon for the tip, by the way.
February 02, 2004
Saturday Morning Pictures
I took Olly, 5 and Billie, 4, to The Barbican's Family Film Club – a sort of middle class mirror image of the Saturday Morning Cinema of your youth. We watched Harold Lloyd's Safety Last and sat on the nicely-carpeted lobby floor to make wobbly clock towers from card and pipe cleaners in a friendly workshop beforehand.
Islington dutifully decamped to the Barbican for the occasion – it was wall-to-wall Jocastas, Luciens and Bellas in gorgeous ethnic knits. In fact, I reckon it would have made a lovely opening scene for the next Richard Curtis Rom-Com (University-educated single Mum working in art gallery/charity/library catches the eye of eccentric, widowed Antiquarian bookseller/vintage Bentley restorer while crafting pointless cardboard gewgaws for ungrateful, distracted children).
Anyway, Safety Last is brilliant and the awesome final ascent of the 'Burton Building' produced exactly the seat-clutching, bouncing-up-and-down hysteria it probably did in 1923 (did you know that Lloyd lost one hand in an on-set accident six years before Safety Last was made and produced more than a hundred films with a clever prosthetic replacement? Me neither. How did he hang on to that clock exactly?).
I was really pleased that the kids were able to slot this eighty year-old, silent, black & white comedy easily into their movie landscape alongside Elf and Brother Bear and the Thornberries (they took the poor man playing the piano at the front totally for granted – do they think there's always a piano player?). Pictures are from the ABC Minors Saturday Morning Cinema Club I attended as a kid.
January 24, 2004
Optimistic caller
The phone rings at home. "Hello". "Is that Abbott's Engineering?". No, it's not. I think you've got the wrong number." "Never mind. Do you sell welding spares?"
January 22, 2004
Huh?
Billie, 4, made this at school today. What is it? No idea. I'll ask her in the morning and let you know (click the small pic for a bigger one). Update: it's a Barbie Car!
January 21, 2004
Nix the upgrade
I was sort of idly thinking of upgrading the teeny tiny hard drive in Juliet's original, Blueberry iBook (too small even to upgrade to Panther, now) but then I read this terrifying account of the sixty five-step operation required to do so.
January 20, 2004
Still repulsive after all these years
The Fall were a kind of mysterious, twitchy, paranoid fixture at the edge of my early adult life – at least once I'd sold all those Genesis albums. I've got a lot of their records (can't play them any more, of course) and they were all thrilling but also impenetrable and often repulsive. I seem to remember thinking this meant they must be proper art – unlike, say, Tears for Fears, who were just repulsive.
From The Guardian I learn that scary, driven founder Mark E Smith has chewed up over 40 band members in 25 years – some of them leaving and rejoining the band half a dozen times. Also, I learn that old codgers' label Sanctuary Records – home of King Crimson, Joey Ramone and Kiss – has picked up The Fall's early back catalogue for re-release (here's a handy Fall timeline).
January 08, 2004
Best book this Xmas
We're huge fans of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler round here. Their The Gruffalo is one of our favourite picture books and was turned into the best bit of children's theatre I've ever seen by Tall Stories Theatre Company last Xmas. This year's favourite Xmas book (with Olly, 5 and Billie, 4. Rosie, 8 months, likes books – but mostly for chewing) is their latest: The Snail and the Whale which is written (like The Gruffalo, Monkey Puzzle and Room on the Broom) in verse so effortless and so enaging that you'll barely notice it rhymes and illustrated with the same kind of deceptive ease – immediate, friendly, open – that the kids love. Donaldson and Scheffler prove that kids' books can be important books. My kids take this magical stuff for granted but I really wish there'd been such great picture books when I was a kid, instead of the crop of dry-as-dust improving yarns and patronising illustrated rubbish that we had to put up with in the Sixties.
January 05, 2004
Pop culture gewgaws
Over in Hackney (London's Brooklyn), at the trendy Transition Gallery they're developing a nice line in twenty-first-century wise-ass barrow-boy pop culture irony. In fact, I think Transition is likely to become the epicentre of London's emerging twenty-first-century wise-ass barrow-boy pop culture irony scene. They even have some handsome merchandise, including some lovely 'car collector plaques' by Paul Murphy (pictured). I don't know how you actually buy them – I couldn't find anywhere to enter my credit card details. They should accept PayPal.
December 30, 2003
Bam, World Heritage Site
Heartbreaking photographs of beautiful, pre-quake Bam (link from Bruce Sterling). Two-thirds of these buildings have been flattened by the earthquake. As I write the apparently well-organised Iranian authorities are announcing that they've already buried 30,000.
You can donate online to Oxfam's Iran appeal here (they'll help with water and sanitation) or to Unicef's here (they'll help with sanitation and health, principally for kids).
December 22, 2003
New York City and all-you-can-eat
I wanted to write about eMusic six weeks ago, when they switched off their all-you-can-eat subscription package ($9.99 per month for unlimited downloads) but I waited for some press coverage – which didn't show up. Now I've been listening to my last downloads – three amazing walking tours of The Bronx in New York City (yes, walking tours). I expected there to be a lot of fuss about eMusic's momentous change but it seems to have gone almost unremarked. It's a pretty big deal for the music download business. eMusic, admittedly a tiddler next to the big players – but with hundreds of indie and specialist labels on its books and some amazing stuff in the catalogue – from Sam Cooke to The Fall and John Cage to Woody Guthrie – was sold to shadowy Dimensional Associates by Vivendi Universal in October (presumably for a fraction of the $24.6M they paid for it.
I suppose I should admit I was convinced that eMusic's all-you-can-eat subscription model was the coming thing and that the music industry was about to slowly reconfigure around the kind of annuity income you get from subscribers instead of the disastrously unpredictable business you get from fickle High Street blow-ins like you an me. Wander down to your local HMV or Sam Goody's right now if you want to see the brutality of old-fashioned seasonal retail in action.
But the classical, one-at-a-time model ($1 per track, $10 per album at iTunes, for instance) seems to have legs. I guess that the industry's formidable 'forces of conservatism' are working overtime to preserve the model, the jobs and the infrastructure that go with it. After all, replacing an entire retail supply chain, from manufacture to distribution to marketing and accounting is hardly a trivial matter – and selling CDs online is not the solution – in the long-term that's just the same old supply chain with knobs on (maybe 5% more efficient?). I'm still pretty sure that the music industry has to move to new charging and distribution models within the next few years or face the slow collapse of the retail model.
It's unavoidable – music retail looks increasingly messed up. There has to be a big win available to the first player to make a different model work and that model is going to contain some kind of all-you-can-eat element. Trying not to be too apocalyptic about it, physical retail and one-at-a-time sales are unlikely to go away all together but the recorded music ecology will get richer (wider, not deeper) as it stretches to accommodate subscription services of different types.
The Bronx CDs are funky audio tours by local experts, produced by a company called Soundwalk (who also produce tours of other parts of the City), designed to be listened to as you walk the streets of the borough. I've been to New York many times but never set foot in The Bronx. Me and my iPod will take the plunge next time I'm there. While you're at it, tune in to two programmes by Richard Niles about Manhattan's pop legacy at BBCi – very good stuff (and if you can find the RealMedia streams on the Radio 2 web site I'll owe you a Xmas drink).
December 10, 2003
Go on. Buy my old stuff
You'll be wanting one of these – a bargain-priced super-compact, Nikon APS SLR. Ideal Xmas gift. I still think APS (Advanced Photo System) is pretty neat and this camera is excellent (especially if you have Nikon kit already cos it'll accept all your lenses) but I'm mostly digital these days so I'm unloading this very pretty Nikon on eBay. What are you waiting for? I bet you haven't bought a single Xmas present yet...
December 08, 2003
Hijacking license payer-funded audio
Audio Hijack Pro is a nicely put-together OS X app for capturing sound from any application, including stuff you might not strictly be allowed to record, like the BBC's RealMedia streams, but since these are public service radio shows, funded from a compulsory license fee, and since many BBC programmes are not archived properly at all, I'd be surprised if anyone (even the people whose job it is to commercialise this stuff at BBC Worldwide) would pursue you too zealously for saving a few shows to your hard drive.
The $30 Pro version allows you to save audio in the MP3 format, which will be handy for playback on your iPod, but the Basic version also looks pretty useful and is only $16.
November 24, 2003
Looks like a bow-tie to me, mate
Yeah. Definitely a bow-tie. Click the small image for a forensic enlargement.