BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Galloway joins Big Brother house

Ah – showing either his ironic sense of humour and the ridiculous, or his disregard for the small matter of turning up in parliament to represent his constituents (he’s my MP, apparently) Gorgeous George enters the BB house.

Of course, I may grow the love his roguish charm. Or I might just remember his performance in parliament as a part-timer…

Interestingly, now that he’s a party of one he doesn’t rebel.

Mark Espiner, who’s been doing very interesting work with his theatre company “Sound and Fury” has a new play in preview.

The play is written by Glen Neath, entitled The Highs and Lows of Owning your own Home.

Mark’s full announcement follows the ‘more’ button, but he introduced it as follows:

I had mentioned this to a couple of you and if you’re free you
might like to sample it. It’s a showcase of the first act of this
fine new Beckett/Pinter/Kafka-esque play with a bit of Magnus Mills
thrown in and is about three 30-something men struggling over a
property and a woman. With the writer I’ve cast it with some fine
actors in their late-70s which really adds to the petty squabbles –
which have a linguistic undercurrent of international politics and
the war on terror.

THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF OWNING YOUR OWN HOME
Directed by Mark Espiner
Performed by John Ringham, Godfrey Jackman and Patrick Driver
Designed by Lizzie Clachan
Costumes by Charlotte Espiner
Lighting by Chris Umney
Produced by Jo Carr

A house. A garden. Three chairs. And an ancient grudge.
Three men squabble over the ownership of a house, a woman and each
other’s attention.

PLACE: The Hackney Empire Bullion Room, Mare St, E8 1EJ
DATE : Friday January 13, 2006
TIME: 7.30pm
PRICE: £12/£8
Box Office: 020 8985 2424

For more details see www.rotozaza.co.uk/joyride.html

Craig Murray – Damning documentary evidence unveiled. Dissident bloggers in coordinated expos� of UK government lies over torture.

How interesting. In the week that Vicky’s reading the vapid, preening tosh that passes for insight in DC Confidential (think Vanity Fair meets Wonkette with no trace of irony or appreciation of breach of confidence) here we have a principled stand by another former civil servant, exposing the (alleged!) lies and hypocrisy of the British (New Labour) Government in respect of the use of information gathered under torture.

Whatever the view on Iraq and Britain’s involvement, on terrorism and the changes to our laws and customs, all democrats must hold dear the fundamental principles that underpin our world view. Without conviction that simple maxims are true (eg torture bad; free speech good etc) then the high-fallutin comments about the ‘British way of life’ and ‘fighting for our freedoms’ are without foundation. If relativism is our creed (torture ok if done by nice white males in the cause of freedom; free speech ok provided it’s trotting out the comfortable orthodoxies) then people should at least be honest that this is what they mean.

Craig Murray has ‘gone public’ with his allegations and, in addition to appearances on the Today programme, Craig’s looking to harness the network effect of commentators in the Blogosphere. It’ll be interesting to see whether a vast quantity of TrackBacks will be enought to protect him from the govmint’s lawyers.

I for one hope that the governement will spend some time answering the substantive allegations. We’ll see.

Macworld: News: Yahoo buys social bookmarking firm Del.icio.us

Just as I was wondering how delicious, one of my favourite web services, could remain independent, along comes this announcement.

On the basis that all you need to know about people in the web age is what they write (blog) and what they bookmark (delicious) I can understand Yahoo’s interest.

When added to Flickr, Yahoo’s all of a sudden acquired a purpose in life: shared categorisation and linking of “stuff” online: images, blogs, content.

In addition to the explicit, didactic taxonomy of “the search engine” there’s now a social, emergent aspect too.

Most importantly, Yahoo has acquired millions of contributors, editors and exponents.

While I’m sad to see Delicious gobbled up by BigCo (even if that’s A Good Thing for the founders) it’ll help “keep Google honest”, and that must also be A Good Thing.

There’s an interesting article here on Business 2.0 too.

Flirtomatic – Public Beta

Well well well. Two and a half years ago I commented on NowEurope.com rather tetchily about the various business networks that were the rage at the time. I noted that they were no better than “business flirting”, thinking in particular of Ryze and it’s “be my friend, leave a comment, tell me weekly how many doggies sniffed my lamp-post” brand of ‘networking’.

Curious and amusing therefore to see Flirtomatic.com
looking for all the world like Manga-meets-Ryze.

At least F-o-M has a business model: hardly any more than a text to flirt with Carrie, Playgirl, Stuart, Warren and Hammersmith… Good luck to them: could be enough of a laugh to get the teenies to part with the equivalent of a text or two a day.

Joho the Blog: It’s getting harder to hide from your customers

Go to Google Base and search for “gold’s gym” (no quotes required). (Clicking here will perform the search for you.) The first entry, at least today, is from Mark Dionne who provides Gold’s corporate address, information that Gold’s Gym doesn’t like to make public, perhaps to ignore letters from unhappy customers such as Mark.

Hadn’t thought of the “democratic” angle Google Base. I’d seen it simply as a promotional vehicle, but this is neat.

For good companies, yet another place to monitor for reputational attacks. For crap companies another way for activist, hacked off customers (ex-customers?) to promote their disgruntlement even higher than you promote the empty promises of services…

However you view this it’ll be interesting to see how Google plans to moderate this or offer redress…

https://www.hyperorg.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/3807

Barbican – Araki: Self•Life•Death

Vicky volunteered to put the girls to bed last night so I nipped in to the Barbican to see a major exhibition of Araki’s work.

Araki’s one of those photographers that one doesn’t “like”: his mix of porn, food-that-looks-like-genitalia, his haunting photos of Tokyo (curiously de-peopled) alongside very intimate (friendly and humourous) views of people, all however remain in the mind. One remembers Araki’s imagery long after the context (in one of his 400 books? a small exhibition?) and this exhibition at the Barbican was wonderful in showing the whole range of his work, sensibly themed.

The exhibition covers phases in his work I’d not known (eg the work around the death of his wife, the ‘invention’ of “i-photograpy”, matching the Japanese “i-novel” – a form of first-person literature, based on experience, and requiring a dedication to photographing everything that borders on obsessive).

Indeed, the impression I was left with (after hundreds of photos of flowers, food, women, genitalia, bondage, cloudscapes, cityscapes etc) was a weight of obsessive documentation and focus on the pleasures/engagements of life. I was surprised to find that the plentiful nakedness did not feel pornographic, but rather had an aspergic, quizzical and playful aspect to it. This surprised me. From the (excellent) notes, and the arrangement of the images, one felt that this was his life through a lens, rather than voyeurism.

There’s an interesting and informative overview, btw, of pornography in Japan – from middle ages to now – that gives some of the background to the formal allusions and structures that were otherwise lost on me.

As I left the exhibition I felt that I’d reconnected in a funny way with two other artistic influences: Bukowski and Atget. I can remember the impact that Bukowski’s work had on me: by turns foul and foul-mouthed, depraved and debasing, yet also self-aware, unafraid, open and uncompromising. Equally, Atget’s Paris is an encapsulation of a love affair with the city’s streets. I mean “streets” – there are barely any people in the 800 pages, except when they’re pulling a cart or somehow ‘part of the scenery’.

Araki’s work, seen in retrospect comprehensively, is a visual fusion of the obsessive but loving catalogue of the landscape of Tokyo, women, food, cats that’d do Atget proud; allied to the narrative impact (shock, revulsion and compulsion) in Bukowski’s work.

Not that I wish to pigeon-hole him – heaven forbid! – I’m just surprised at my own response to his work.

The Londonist’s comment on the Guardian’s “Been There” service caught my eye.

Just looked at Been There service looks neat: a contributive travel guide – think of a personal Time Out guide, meets urban pub directory meets the Londonist.

Initially, it’ll be sketchy and thin. Then it’ll blossom and be full of crap, marketing crap and contributions that’re impossible to evaluate…

What’d be nice is to link this with a FOAF approach so that I can filter my view of a city to a given type. This could be liberating: the annoying museum geek who ordinarily would bore for britain would all of a sudden be the ideal person to have recommending obscure cultural haunts. Surely, with Web2, it’s only a matter of time until someone adds this 🙂

Scary!

The Conrad Digital site dishes the dirt and shows the secret ‘before and after’ images behind current advertising work.

The page is a hefty download, but the wait is worth it.

Check out the Tylenol Ad: click on the image and then mouse over the pop-up image. You’ll see a larger version of the “finished” article and the original, untouched version. A pretty face is pulled, given a nose job, new skin texture, different eyelashes… All to get a ‘perfect’ look.

Even more scary is the Paul Mitchell ad: what a transformation. Bingo wings ‘shaved’, cellulite removed, colours changed, new hair…

The Photoshopper notes that the:

image was pretty demanding as EVERYTHING needed work. I had to create hair where there was none which is often quite a feat when you don’t have a similar image to pull from. Her legs were in need of some smoothing(dare I say excerise) and the overall image needed some attitude. Not a HUGE difference from the original, but once the cast was removed and the problem areas dealt with, we had ourselves a wonderful little image.

Problem areas? Goodness – imaging what he’d say about us mere mortals!

Just trying to remember what the point of photography was: the starting point for cartoon-like manipulation?

What can I say?

I turned 40 this week and – not wishing to make too big a deal of it (denial? moi?) – I “suggested” to a good friend, Ian Worley, that we just hang out and do a barbeque (an allweather barbeque, that is: raincoats and headtorches in the garden, that kinda thing).

Ian’s barbeque activity is legendary and I recall many wonderful BBQs which introduced me to tomales, chicken in the chocolate and chile mole… Sigh.

Anyway, before I know it the idea’s gone from “slob around and scoff straight off the grill” to a “posh” dinner (more “Tux-Mex” than “Tex-Mex”). Vicky’s got us organised into a Mexican Theme and Ian’s now “been volunteered” to create a veritable Mexican Feast. Think “Babette’s Feast” but with lots of chile, no turtles and bucket of Mojito per person.

The first indication that this was a non-trivial undertaking came on Saturday as Ian and Karen hit Borough Market like crack Navy Seals on a food mission. The next was this amazing menu.

Leaving aside Karen’s photoshopping skills (that moustache? the smiling donkey?), just look at that menu!

Update later with some pics on the evening’s activities, but right now just an immense “thank you” to Ian and Karen for effort above and beyond the call of friendship 🙂