antipopper

Antonio Negri is free.

D’oh — so distracted by X2 buzz that I forgot to check out Apple’s new music products announcement. Interesting: we’re handling the local launch of all this shit, and Apple wouldn’t even tell us what the product was. We found out like everyone else in the world. (We were making very educated guesses, though, and there were no surprises.) Most interesting: Apple Australia swore black and blue that they didn’t even know what the deal was. I know Apple’s been into secrecy these days, but fuck, that’s simply loopy. We’ve got to launch a product in the next few weeks, and we have to resort to crystal balls and geek rumour sites. Lucky the geek rumour sites are usually on the money. Still, it’s quite exciting doing stuff for Apple.

Went to the museum last weekend to see the Two Emperors exhibit, and to the art gallery this weekend just past to check out the Archibald Prize show. Two Emperors, which featured some fairly recently unearthed Qing and Han Dynasty artefacts from imperial tombs, was terribly designed and packaged — really unimaginatively put together. In some ways the film we managed to catch in the theatrette was more interesting, and this tells us a lot about the state of the exhibitionary complex — it has leaked out of the oldskool authoritarianisms of spectacular presence (“roll up, roll up!”), and into the spectacular distractions of more mobile media. But the doco was also so patronisingly racist — all these white men wax on (wax off) authoritatively about the quaintly superstitious Chinese. Lena wrote a very long complaint about the whole package in the guest book. I was so embarrassed — the pages were ruled for one comment per line, and she stood there intently, writing a page and a half of radical invective.

Oh: the exhibit, which touched interestingly on the State’s drive to territorialise space by violently standardising measurements, implements and uh, everything, reminded me that I’d lent Brian Massumi’s First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot to a friend ten years ago, and never got it back. And I also remembered the whacky idea I had years ago for an exhibition of my own — The Entombed Warriors of Industrial Design, in which rather than having terracotta soldiers, you’d be presented with a tableau of terracotta spaceships of various fictive renown: the Enterprise, an Imperial Star Destroyer, etc, all rendered in unlikely detail. It’s a reference to those wonderfully physical prototyping processes that involve the sculpting of putty shapes that will eventually be reproduced in metal or plastic. The juxtaposition of the crafty and the illusive slickness of “technology”. Yhe craftily constructed army, designed in the past but from the future. (Physicality is great in design: you can CAD your way endlessly through the design of a motorbike in a computer, but someone eventually has to sit on a physical prototype to gauge how it feels. Introducing this early in the design process opens up a wonderful batch of feedback loops.)

This link between craft and virtuality brings to mind the best thing I saw at the art gallery, which wasn’t the stuff in the Archibald. (Which, BTW, was unbelievably crap all round — the only good thing was the portrait of Mr Squiggle. The show wasn’t even proudly reinscribing the reactionary aspects of painted portraiture; it was simply lame.) No, the coolest thing was a huge reproduction of an envelope for a library fine, about three metres tall and an apparently black and white image, but finely dithered in simulated RGB pixels. And every pixel was hand painted. Went with Claire, who has moved to Sydney and is sceptical of my capacity for artwank.

Back from the preview screening of X-Men 2. {smug smirk} No cinematic intensity here (and I don’t mean furrowed brows), but damn pleasing all the same. It makes no bones about its calculated franchiseness — witness the comfortable referentiality that this first of probably many sequels can indulge in, and the flush of joyous, slice’n'dice setpieces in the first half to compensate for the misjudged whimper of a finale in the last film… and then there’s director Bryan Singer’s very deliberate characterisation of X2 as his Empire Strikes Back. But I think that comparison is partly misdirection, masking the film’s ballsy homage to another second chapter of an sf film series: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Hell, it didn’t ring emotionally true, but I found myself with a wide smile, thinking, this guy’s such a fanboy, and for once in sf movies, that’s a good thing.

Grant Morrison took much of his lead from the first movie on his current New X-Men run, and while neither of the films sings the outrageous operatics that only Morrison can, fans (and Morrison) can rely on them for the basic stuff that blockbuster franchises seem so unable to deliver these days: a stylishly packaged setup (of characters, of milieu, of whatever), with multiple explosions, that’s modular enough to return to for repeated pleasure. Go, children of the atom!

Niggles: nobody seems to be able to write, direct or act in a cockpit scene these days. (During the lamely desperate flicking of dip-switches, I wanted to yell out, “would it help if I got out and pushed?”. Whaddaya mean, “Magneto disabled the hyperdrive”?) And Halle Berry, go away.

Oh, everybody cheered at Hank McCoy’s “cameo”. Yay!

I’ve heard that during his Etech conference presentation this week, Alan Kay showed video excerpts of Doug Engelbart’s mindboggling demonstration, in 1968, of a system of information technology that included a mouse, hypertext and video collaboration tools. I’ve been hearing about this for years, but never knew that bits of the demonstration were available as streaming video on the web. The stuff is uncanny. Reading about the history of hackerdom is all well and good, but actually watching the buttoned-down Engelbart explain in antique, clipped tones as he uses a mouse to cut and paste text on a metaphorical “sheet of paper” is another thing altogether. I feel as if I’m looking into a bizarre alternate universe, almost as strange as the one in Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine, or more recently, Warren Ellis’ Ministry of Space comic, which charts the history that could have developed if the dying British Empire, and not the Americans, had stolen the Nazi rocket scientists at the end of World War II. If MoS is, as Ellis perversely asserts, “the story of how we could have gone to space… maybe the way we should have gone to space,” then what is the spectacle of Douglas Engelbart’s largely unfulfilled vision? Perhaps something like an issue of Ellis’ Planetary, in which the secret history of the 20th Century, so full of heart-rendingly hidden inventions and weird supermen, is excavated piece by piece.

I was shopping in HMV the other night, turned the corner and jumped in surprise to see Trey’s new album, which I designed, right in front of me, prominently placed on a rack.

Cor. (Accidentally coming across my own work isn’t something that happens much for me these days, since I’m all web-based.) And Trey got a great review in today’s Herald:

Demonstrating potentially the biggest leap forward for Australian hip-hop, Tapastry Tunes covers a lot of ground and does so with style. With almost cocksure rhyming, MC Trey takes on flamenco-flavoured hip-hop in the form of “Supercede”, skanking dancehall in “The Ultimate”, gospel-soul in the glorious “Take Time Out” and shamelessly retro electro in “Arcade Warrior”. Every time, she comes up trumps. Koolism’s DJ Danielsan is among the local producer types providing deft scratching and behind-the-scenes expertise on a release that oozes class and leaves you wanting more. While Latifah’s off conquering Hollywood, all hail the new queen.

Nice one, Trey.

How geeky is Tom Coates? Here’s his industryevilaresponsetorheingold.shtml”>live blogging (he was adding comments as he thought of them) on Howard Rheingold’s paper at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. Coates is dead wrong, BTW.

Finally got round to fixing those stylesheets for Windows IE6, so everything bloggish is now under control — and using Kung-Log, I can post in style…

I can’t explain how excited I am by this:

(It’s gonna be the best thing since Deadenders and Blue Monday. Yeah.)

And today, the boss left his Lambretta downstairs, unguarded, in the foyer of the building. I was this close to saying fuck it, I’m riding off into the sunset.

From Baxter:

(Photos by moz.)