Added to the wishlist: A Crisis of Brilliance

[Book] A Crisis of Brilliance, by David Haycock, courtesy of a review in the Guardian:

“The particular cauldron of intensity into which Haycock plunges is the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture…  and the students who experience this ‘crisis of brilliance’ – a phrase coined by their bristly, austere professor of drawing, Henry Tonks – are Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash and Dora Carrington. All studied at the Slade between 1908 and 1912. Their fate was also decreed by a trial of fire, the first world war, that would define their art for the rest of their lives.

“As their names became known, so the artists were swept into the orbit of avant-garde movements such as Wyndham Lewis’s vorticists, the craft work of Fry’s Omega Gallery, and the ‘Georgian painters’ patronised by the stylish, monocled civil servant and collector Eddie Marsh.

“The war smashed into their lives as well as the old order. Haycock follows the hostilities with powerful economy, while tracing the artists’ own splintered trajectories… Haycock’s narrative of this entangled, war-defined group is so strong that it often has the force of a novel, hard to put down.”

Update: You can download the preface and first chapter [PDF] from the author’s website.

The Rolling Stones and The Brussels Affair

The Rolling Stones have released several live albums, and the recording from their peak period, 1970’s Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, has recently undergone a deluxe re-release. In the original review for Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs said that “I have no doubt that it’s the best rock concert ever put on record.” He might have been right at the time, but just a few years later, the Stones went one better with the release now known as The Brussels Affair. For some reason, it’s only available as a bootleg, but it’s absolutely worth downloading.

It was recorded in 1973, following Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St, so the setlist is terrific. You get Brown Sugar, Angie, Honky Tonk Woman, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Street Fighting Man and Tumbling Dice. It’s the version of You Can’t Always Get What You Want which stands out though; it’s 10 minutes long, so, yes, it’s indulgent, but then melancholy is. It features guitar-work that puts the studio version in the shade, backing the verses with sad-but-bright descending notes. If you’re a guitarist, or just a fan of rock guitar playing, the whole gig is packed with highlights, and listening to it, I can almost convince myself that that evening Keith Richards and Mick Taylor played practically every sound you’d ever want to hear an electric guitar make.

The Brussels Affair is convincingly involving and completely silly. It’s all summed up in the second track, Happy, which Jagger introduces with a ludicrous lawks-a-lummee cocker-nee accent:

Mick: Keith’s gonna sing a song for yer called ‘Appy…

Keith then proceeds to start singing with a voice that sounds like the Cookie Monster singing the blues having gargled TCP, while the music rolls along brilliantly; despite seeming to contain a hundred guitar solos and campfire chorsuses, the song is over in at just over three minutes.

Afterwards Jagger says, sounding camp and drunk:

“Merci Keef, that was a good one. Woo hoo. Shake-amonay. God a mama.”

It’s rock n’ roll.

The best DVD commentaries

When it comes to books, games and music I’m often happiest away from the bright lights of the charts, exploring dark, dusty corners of the catalogue. Film, though… I never seem to enjoy going beyond big budget megahits. I’ve fallen asleep in every single one of Pedro Almodovar’s films.

These three threads (one, two, three) on the always excellent Ask Metafilter feature people recommending their favourite DVD commentaries, and sound like they might inspire me to be a more considerate and appreciative student of film. The posts are worth reading in their entirety, but the following were consistently recommended:

  • Spinal Tap ( “This Is Spinal Tap is pretty excellent- the cast does their commentary in character, complaining about how the movie was a hatchet job. It’s sort of like having a whole new Spinal Tap movie” – COBRA!)
  • Ghostbusters
  • Roger Ebert’s commentaries on Citizen Kane and Dark City
  • Various seasons of The Simpsons and Futurama
  • John Carpenter and Kurt Russell on both Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China

I can’t stand Wes Anderson’s films – tedium that mistakes faux-depressed self-regard for genuine self-revelation – but I liked thirteen’s description of how to listen/watch a film with commentary:

“I find the commentary tracks on the Criterion Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaum DVD’s to be very relaxing. I know the movies backwards and forwards, and Wes Anderson’s voice is good company when I am drawing late at night. Plus his observations are often things perpendicular to the movie so it feels more like what you would talk about at a party than what he is trying to do in a scene.”

The difference between a Latte and a Flat White

flatwhite

A Flat White is an excellent coffee to start the day with – and just as you can identify a typography geek if they can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, it’s the real coffee geeks who know the difference between a Flat White and the more common Caffe Latte. Lokesh Dhakar put together a nice, simple graphic that demystifies these and many other coffee drinks.

Who would win in a fight? The Mummy or the Wolf-Man?

“In the future, if your children ask you, “Who would win in a fight?  The Mummy or the Wolf-Man?” please refer them to this list, as it will save a lot of time…. Monsters are rated according to how dangerous they are against each other, and then according to how dangerous they are to all the other monsters on the list. Only if all other metrics are equal is the relative danger to the average human considered–because, let’s face it, they’re all dangerous to the average human.  They are monsters.

“Now, here’s the thing about regular vampires:  they’re fucking lame.  They sneak around in the dark and drain blood from people.  They talk a big game, sure, and everyone thinks they’re sexy.  But is sexy going to protect you from the Wolf-Man?  No.  The Wolf-Man is going to tear your god-damn head off.”

Don’t miss the author’s follow up in the comments, addressing why Godzilla isn’t in there.

The only thing I would add to this is:

14. Chuck Norris.

Grmmr advice from Twitter

You might not think Twitter is a great place to go for grammar advice, given that every message has a maximum character count of 140, but you say that before laying eyes on FakeAPStylebook:

Bonus points for spotting the writer uses Birdhouse, the semi-ridiculous iPhone app which allows you to save your draft tweets so that you can re-read, re-read and refine your work. If you did want actual grammar advice, you could always try following ThatWhichMatter, but it’s not quite so much fun.

Novels written by dictators

By definition, dictators can do anything they like, so why wouldn’t the mad, bad and crazy men at the top of tinpot regimes want to write novels?

“Some recent examples have been Saddam Husseins’s last publication, Be Gone Demons!, sales of which suffered due to bomb damage, despite the author’s previous million-selling form; and Radovan Karadžić’s The Miraculous Chronicle of the Night, written while on the run from the UN’s War Crimes trials yet still nominated for Serbia’s highest literary prize, the Golden Sunflower. Neither, unfortunately, are available from Amazon.”

Thomas Keneally (author of Schindler’s List) wrote a novel about the literary ambitions of a dictator, called The Tyrant’s Novel, which I read in 2006. It’s worth a look, but I remember it being a little restrained and dry.

8-bit trip: Lego bricks as pixels

This video comprises “1,500 hours of moving Lego bricks and taking photos of them.” It’s not particularly coherent in terms of theme, unless you call “8-bit games and music rule” a theme. Which maybe we should. Worth it for the chiptune soundtrack, the use of Lego as pixels and the particularly nice Pacman shots, which put you right into the maze.

Utility Pole T-Shirt

Been a while since I posted a new t-shirt design, but this Japanese design is clever and certainly deserves a mention. The wires of the utility poles are both printed and stitched onto the shirt. (One thing I found surprising when I first visited Japan – a place you mentally associate with clean, minimal design and neatness – is the fact that there are overhead wires everywhere).

utilitypoleshirt

Available at Tokyo Art Beat.

(via Jean Snow)

Stop Safari always opening new tabs

I’ve moved away from using FireFox as my browser – it’s too slow to start, too fond of updating – and now have Google Chrome on my PCs. It’s not properly available for the Mac yet, so I’ve switched to Safari, which is reasonably quick to start, and gives you more of the web to look at than FireFox. However, it does have an annoying habit of spawning new tabs EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. YOU. CLICK.

Glims is a very useful free add-on that enables you to fix that, plus you can easily add Google UK as a search engine, and there’s a nifty full screen mode too.