Politics:—The UK political blog directory (hand-edited, and seemingly up-to-date) // The first International Symposium on Neo-censorship, Holland, 18th-20th Sept 08. It will examine the rise of “censorship-like phenomena” exercised by private groups; ranging from religious extremists to cults, from campaigning pressure groups to international corporations // An MI5 intelligence-gathering aircraft regularly circles high above Birmingham //

Gaming: A Birmingham team win the world’s videogame Olympics, and $500,000 in prize-money // Console turf-wars, the profits table. When you see the table, you’ll know why Nintendo can afford lush Wii demonstration road-shows in what would seem to be every shopping centre in the UK // Elite 4, on the shelves in 2010? Braben says the v4 game-engine is “almost finished” // The official patch and free expansion pack are finally available for Mass Effect (PC). Warning: it replaces your BIOEngine.ini file without asking and removes all your in-game settings. If you’ve tweaked your .ini, you’ll need to do so all over again // Beyond Good & Evil 2 is announced. Let’s hope the PC version manages to escape from the inevitable dumbed-down console hell // The Geek Hierarchy, version 2.0 //

Artists and writers:— Kris Kuksi’s huge new “Imminent Utopia” model // The loss of traditional skills in art & design at British universities // Shapeways, a new 3D-printing online print-objects-on-demand service. I’ve no idea if they offer international shipping or not, since (stupidly) you can only see their FAQ if you first sign up for an account // The UK arts & design magazine Icon test-drives Ponoko, a DIY 3D-objects laser-cutting service // Further evidence of the decline of British newspapers. The Times arts pages throw simple fact-checking out of the window, in order to promote a dubious new book // Do all UK arts producers still have the same terms of reference? // Need a cheap fake guard dog for your studio? // Definitely an artist to invite to Birmingham city-centre’s forthcoming Light Night (brochure) // European Comic Art, a new scholarly journal from Liverpool University Press //

Forgotten things:— Tailor’s shops // The Children’s Film Foundation // Mobile shops // Enamel metal badges // Young children’s street games // Bubble cars // Victorian back-slang // Paper moon portraits // Recreational tickling //

Quirk (the tyrannical state version):— CCTV cameras with a Wall.e -style ‘personality’ // No lolcats in Saudi Arabia. Because, no cats — they’re now officially banned // Along with seemingly everything else, chunky SLR cameras are banned for the duration of the Olympics //

“The Birmingham Salvo pro-gaming team has shocked the world of computer gaming by winning the 2008 Championship Gaming Series World Final in Los Angeles. As well as the kudos and the $500,000 first prize, the Brits also picked up the two Most Valuable Player awards … In fact they kicked so much ass in the final that they won four out of the five events, totally dominating their opponents”

Superb. Team portraits at their website.

Fanzines & small press:— There was a time when a small newsagent’s kiosk could be amply filled with various types of paper fanzines produced in Birmingham + area. But there are still a few, even omitting the football zines and the couple of students union mags. Such as Black Velvet; Eccentric City; Things We Love; Jack Kirby Quarterly (new issue promised soon) and Crikey! And the acclaimed Doctor Who zine Shooty Dog Thing is from Coventry. Are there more? // A welcome repeat of the two-part “Zine Scene” documentary, Jarvis Cocker’s history of British fanzines. ‘Listen again’ online // Photos and reports from the recent London Zine Symposium // Do people still make poetry chapbooks? Find out at the London Poetry Festival. London, 8th-11th Aug 08 // Caption 2008: ‘Timewarp’. An annual convention for British small-press and self-published comics. Oxford, 9th-10th Aug 08 // The Anarchist Book Fair. London, 18th October 08 // Small Publishers Fair. London, 24th-25th Oct 08 //

Creative production:— Ability to project soft power, restored. The British Council scraps all its restructuring plans, doubles the arts budget, and the Arts Director is now an ex-Director // The British Council has a new scheme, ‘International Placements for Creative Entrepreneurs‘. Deadline: 19th Sept 08 // A new July 08 NESTA report and working paper, “Hidden Innovation in the Creative Industries” // The report “Creative Futures: building the creative economy through universities” (PDF link), blogged about previously on D’log, is belatedly available online // Has Paris died as a place of creative production? // What the digital classroom looses // Eno and David Byrne will give away their next album free on the net. Sadly, Eno doesn’t sing on it //

Foto:— A two-day course in lighting for photography. 16th & 17th Aug 08, 10am-4pm. Cost: £180. West Midlands // Rhubarb Rhubarb photobooks award // An alpha of a script for Adobe Bridge that turns Bridge into a geotag maker/editor for photos // Columbia Journalism Review ponders the likely future of newspaper photographers // Soundings from the Estuary, photosets and texts from London // Due to go live this week, the Internet Archive has acquired more than twenty important NASA image collections, and has merged then into one searchable archive // Vintage Strange Fictions Flickr group, in which I particularly liked some of the work by HaggisVitae, M-Evolve, NHungsta, and Crowolf //

Quirk:— Gay car blog // A blog for starship concept art and designs // Frog museum // A science of magic // Traditional porn in recession // Rock musicians — what exactly is the sex appeal? // Pencil Rebel // The first major New York show of steampunk arts & crafts (Hat-tip: Birmingham’s Brass Goggles blog) // Google is now indexing more than a trillion unique web addresses. And Wikipedia is fast approaching 2.5 million articles //

One of my childhood haunts, where I was first introduced to pinball tables, goes up in smoke and flames. Birmingham’s Deb feels the pain.

Quirk:— A day in the life of a cat-cam // Listening to Birds, a two-year AHRC project to examine how we understand birdsong in the UK. And with strange synchronicity — “Sunbeams giving the air a kiss”: Birds in contemporary art runs from 25th July – 6th Sep 08 at Southampton University. This follows the similarly-themed 2007 show The Parrot in Art: From Durer to Elizabeth Butterworth at the Barber in Birmingham // ‘Whoniversal’ Appeal: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference on Doctor Who. 14th-15th November 08 at Cardiff University // Kinky brits //

Publishing:— The wraps come off Google Knol. Google’s expert-powered closed-source answer to Wikipedia goes public today // Blog search, still crap? Perhaps not — Twingly holds out hope // The book Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine?: The Art of Making Zines and Mini Comics // Another new UK steampunk zine, Gatehouse Gazette. It’s free online (6mb PDF) // MapJack //

Futures:— 2154: the future of time design // The collected artifacts from the future, from Wired magazine //

Games & worlds:— Fantasy cartography blog, featuring scans of maps from fantasy and science-fiction novels, role-playing packs, and videogames // Dare To Be Digital picks a West Midlands team for the finals. They’ll design a new videogame for the Wii // Warwick is to double the size of its new digital lab, making it a £120-million project //

West Midlands:— Dave Harte has more information about how Channel 4’s 4IP investment fund will operate // The top 5 best & worst shops in Birmingham // WordCamp UK reports: a long one from Simon Wheatley plus Blog Relations, Holly, Daily Novel, RKW, and a photo from Masterpiece // WordPress UK Midlands, anyone? // WordCamp UK 08 on Flickr // Probably one of the many “all mouth and shaky funding” government proposals, but there’s to be a Birmingham HEFCE consultation event on 23rd-26th September 08, on where and how to set up 20 new ‘higher-education centres’ by 2014 //

“The game is still available at a rock-bottom cost of ten dollars, yet the player base hasn’t improved. No-one’s playing the current versions”

But now, eight months after release, an important breakthrough seems to have happened. It’s the June-released WAR-Torlan Winter map, created by some blessed mod-maker by the name of Sanch3z. Unzip his Torlan Winter into your My Games folder, load it up — and you have a well-polished UT3 Torlan map that’s orb-less, river-less, has the same linked node set-up as Torlan does in UT2004, and is generally as close to the original UT2004 single-player map as we’ll probably ever get in UT3. And his Torlan is deliciously snowy, reminding me of the best UT2004 map (Arctic Stronghold). Wonderful. Suddenly UT3 is worth its current budget price, just to play this one map.

Oh, and if you do play UT3, you might want to choose to be the red team rather than the blue. Why? Because the red team wins more often, it seems…

“In an analysis [ in the journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior ] of 1,347 matches between elite teams playing Unreal Tournament 2004, researchers at the University of Denmark in Copenhagen found that the red team won 55 percent of the time.”

Darn. I always play the blue team.

And while I’m on the subject of patching up the PC version of Unreal Tournament 3, and generally trying to rescue it from dumbed-down console-port hell — there’s a new free Community Bonus Pack (8 new fan-made levels) from the same people who made the Community Packs for UT2004. There’s even a sophisticated pseudo-mod (in beta) that attempts to junk a great deal of the horrible console-oriented menu system, and to make it more PC-centric.

Even Epic Games seem to be showing some corporate responsibility for their ill-formed game. A new official v1.3 patch is due early next week. And Epic are putting $1-million toward the Make Something Unreal community competition, phase one of which has just finished. It promises a shed-load of new fan-made maps, maps that can’t help but be better than most of those that shipped with UT3.

Maybe we’re finally starting to move towards an overhauled UT3 that’s actually fun and has some genuinely exciting maps to play — like UT2004 was and still is. Let’s hope so.

West Midlands:— I hear that Culture West Midlands is to be scrapped within the next 12 months, and their remit is to be absorbed into Arts Council England: West Midlands and partners // The East Midlands and West Midlands offices of Arts & Business have been merged // Wolverhampton’s Light House has a new FLIP Animation Festival blog. FLIP is calling for proposals for participation in the 2nd ‘Drawing in the Digital’ one day-symposium // Birmingham’s Hunt Emerson brings Edward Lear’s famous nonsense poem “The Owl & The Pussycat” to The Beano in comic-strip form // Couldn’t get a ticket for WordCamp UK? You might just be able to lig the pubmeet social-event // BIAD is currently validating a fab new M.A. degree in Queer Studies in Arts and Culture, although it seems it’ll be taught wholly within Fine Art at Margaret St. // Walsall Council is listening // Back when I was reading weekly Judge Dredd strips in 2000AD I never imagined that Mega-City One was located in a near-future West Midlands // The geo-located M6-motorway comedy sketches from “230 Miles of Love” are being made available shortly for the iPhone2.0, through iphonetours.com // Quel surprise! The Jewellery Quarter is not on the list of new UNESCO World Heritage Sites // The 2nd West Midlands Meadow Gallery, of landscape/outdoors art, will be staged at Attingham Park in Shropshire, in September 08 // “The best day out I ever had in Birmingham city centre” (video) // The 2nd Open University Creative Writing Workshop in Birmingham, for advanced creative writers. “Going Further, with Tim Reeves” is at the Central Library, 26th July 08, from 10am to 3pm. It seems to be free, but your ticket is dependent on submitting some quality scribblings beforehand // The Midlands Textiles Forum biennial exhibition “Common Threads” is now accepting submissions. Deadline: 31st July 08 // I finally found Birmingham’s “Play Me, I’m Yours” website // Flatpack unpacks £70k of development funding // I’m told that Walsall New Art Gallery will open seven days a week during August. No more turning up on a Monday only to find the place shut and bemused tourists knocking politely on the doors. Although the Walsall-Wolverhampton train service that would get me there is to be axed // British Design Innovation: West Midlands // I saw the Juginder Lamba retrospective exhibition a few days ago. He’s giving a free carving demonstration in Birmingham on 7th August 08 // New fears for The Public’s ongoing funding // No.17 Temple St., Birmingham city centre // Imaginary cultural cross-pollinations No.1: it could be interesting if Brummie Hair + Brummie Bonsai = Bonsai Hair? // Five new arts venues in the Midlands (sadly, not in our half), at a cost of £90-million // A sci-fi fan visits Birmingham for the first time. “It’s as though you know that there’s a proper city under there somewhere, you just can’t quite see it any more.” // Birmingham(Leamington?) photographer Ben Sutton: 26 Found People set, 50 Women in Their Cars set, and 37 Games Developers set // Very ’serious games’ at the The Flight & Train Simulator Show, at Birmingham’s Millennium Point, 8th Nov 08. You can knock me down with a feather if there’s more than three women there who are not booth-babes //

Knowing Cities:— The Arts Council has cancelled all the Architecture Week events across the UK — but London has still managed to put on a very vibrant-looking Festival of Architecture. It’s on now // GeoPress, a geo-tagging plugin for WordPress weblog postings. Now working on D’log, and working well — see a few test-use postings below. To be reserved for postings about less obvious places, or specific “hard to find” venues // Not Yet There, a blog by Emma Cocker, a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. She’s the author of, among others, the new review article on mapping and walking-based art practices in the UK, “Wandering: straying from the habitual path” // The first lengthy report on Manchester’s recent festival of psychogeography // Shrinking cities. The UK has 27 such cities, it seems. Although some of the ‘loss’ is probably because an illiterate underclass is binning the census forms // There’s to be a special themed issue of the Journal of Location Based Services, on neogeography (PDF link) // A comprehensive noise-map of all outdoor places in Paris // “Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture” (2008) (PDF link). “It is clear that modernity, reason, and the notion of progress itself have come under intense attack from those disdainful of the humanist aspiration to transform the world.” // GeoTourGuide has a beta automated GPS audio-tour generator // Interesting use of Microsoft Virtual Earth to enhance a crime report from West Bromwich //

Publications:— Enemy of The People (PDF link), by Maurice Saatchi, wittily sets out a range of charges against New Labour // art.signal, a tasty free PDF art magazine from Spain. Five issues are available, with articles in Spanish and English. The latest issue is especially strong and promises great things // Colophon 2009 // Seen in W.H.Smith, the U.S. Extreme Weather magazine. I’m looking forward to the British version, Extreme Drizzle // Handmade blank leather books // RIP Michael de Larrabeiti, author of the Borribles trilogy //

Foto:— Old 35mm colour slides of early 1950s America, scanned by one person and placed on Flickr // The 3D renderings of Natalie Shau // The Saudek-influenced Russian photographer Sergey Belov // “Glass Photography for Dummies” is one of the many workshops and talks that are part of the British Glass Biennale in the Black Country. 23rd and 24th August 08, £35 // Big Mosaic unveiling event, 23rd Aug 08. Millennium Point, Birmingham // Wolverhampton photographer wins mountain photography gong // A new British GPS chip, AirWave1, should be in new digital cameras from spring 2009. It’ll auto-tag every photo with location information //

The game’s U.K. cover art is now on Amazon, and the pre-order price has been reduced a little. And Matthew Bennett (who I know is local; he teaches videogames in Worcester) has written an Amazon review of the well-reviewed U.S. version of the game — although his review does have some plot spoilers.

Update: The day after I posted this, and with not a jot more publicity than my posting, it’s gone up to No.5.

Update: By noon on Saturday, the day after release, and sales are holding up well. It’s at No.6, and yet a search of Google News and Google Blogs for news/reviews of the game doesn’t even show up a basic press release. It’s entered the Amazon Top 100 of all videogame sales across all platforms, at No.94.

Fight!:— Birmingham’s twitter-fight // The Airship Destroyer (1909), a silent short in which fleets of German naval airships invade the British Isles // The history of contemporary water-pistols //

West Midlands:— Jake at MADE calls for a Birmingham datacentre to rival London’s Telehouse. Apparently, they don’t need to cost billions — a new Telehouse Europe data centre of 2,000m² recently opened in Paris, costing just 10 million euros. Although it reportedly requires the same electricity supply as “a town of 35,000 people” — perhaps something of a stumbling block // A potential new studio/gallery in Digbeth, Birmingham, called Moo Studios… “are looking for committed artists to rent space and exhibit together. The rent will be £35, all inclusive.” Interested? Submit a bio and pictures of some of your artworks to: moostudios *at* rocketmail.com // Congratulations to Deb, who’s been invited to design an “edible garden” for the autumn Malvern Show. My LOLcat-ish suggestion for the name:- “I haz a fud!” // Grab a Multipack; their next pubmeet is Sat 12th July 08 // A new EU-funded High Definition (HD) production studio in Coventry // Yet another local ‘monsters & fabulous creatures’ themed exhibition to add to my list. “Seeing Dragons In The Clouds: the art of imagination” is now on at the Bilston Craft Gallery, until 9th August 08 // RIPE Showcase at The Light House in Wolverhampton (there are publicity photos on Flickr), featuring the work of 16 West Midlands photographers. Until 7th August 08. There’s a tasty 12-page colour booklet for the show, but it doesn’t appear to be online as a PDF. Get networking at the “RIPE Party” on 1st Aug 08, from 7pm // Ben Neal reports on being Fluxed and flummoxed in Birmingham // The magnificent “St. George’s Horse” sculpture, part of a Flickr set of Michael Sandle’s September 07 exhibition in the grounds of Ludlow Castle in Shropshire // BINS blogs a well-informed letter in favour of keeping the present Central Library — although I can’t help weighing it against this plea from someone who worked there // The International Festival of Glass and British Glass Biennale 08, in south Staffordshire at the end of August 08 // Gigbeth music industry one-day conference, 6th Nov 08 // Want to deliver Birmingham’s Cultural Strategy? You have until 21st July 08 to apply for the job. A tip for the first day in the job:- put the existing Cultural Strategy document online, so we can all read it // I’m told the 4IP fund should open sometime in late July, which will allow Midlands new media companies a chance of between £20,000 to £1.5m of project finance. Adam Gee at Channel 4 has described it as… “quick and dirty seed money” // Moodle Wrestling, a horrible blood-sport in which puny academics are forced to battle against a wild Moodle. Free techie event on how to manage such bouts, on 7th Aug 08 in Wolverhampton // Birmingham’s IXIA is considering putting together an artist-led “Supplementary Planning Document” for Eastside. I’m wondering if this could be done in the form of an open-access wiki? // Rescue Geography: Exploring Eastside with mobile technologies, part of the lead-in to something called “LabOne: October Laboratory” in the Autumn // Rescue Geography blogs that the… “Big Plan for the city is currently being finalised” by consultants Turner Townsend and others // Rescue Geography also blogs that… “Richard Clay, one of my colleagues over in the [University of Birmingham] History of Art department, has just pulled in a big grant to work with archivists and curators in the city on the [architectural? history? of the] development of Birmingham’s suburbs” // Play Fair 08 is the UK’s main trade-fair for play. Yes, play is an industry and it’s booming. Play Fair is on 15th-16th July 08 at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire. “This highly focused, two-day event has free seminars, organised by Play England” // The Public gets an extra £3-million //

Objects and machines:— The Science Museum has a wiki that’s the seed of a universal dictionary of objects, although there are only 133 at present // A map of the future of making new objects (PDF link) // Sid Check’s “Machine Age” (1952), complete. For its original audience, this must have been a gripping bit of epic storytelling, compressed into just a few pages. I owned a copy (filler in some circa-1980 B&W Marvel reprint) as a child, lost it, and have been looking for it ever since. I think the Kirby-style machines in the first frame must have been a big draw for me, but now I find that the strip was originally published in 1952. So does that mean that Jack Kirby’s approach to drawing machines was inspired by this strip by Sid Check? // A blog with a heart. Literally // Big Executive Balls (video, 50mb) // MIT has a cloud //

Educashun:— I’ve long been deeply skeptical about most structured and test-based “e-learning”, especially for the post-14 age groups. The research shows that e-learning projects nearly always fail, although I admit that £1m+ high-budget ’serious games’ that seek to convey complex and tacit knowledge might be a very different matter. Tara Brabazon expresses her own doubts about e-learning, in the THES newspaper. Although, as an old leftie, she predictably and somewhat bizzarely blames… Mrs Thatcher. One might more plausibly suggest that the rise of a certain kind of dumbed-down “e-learning” (from the late 1980s onwards) was a by-product of Thatcherism’s historical failure to wrest state education from the iron grip of the “all must have prizes” brigade // “Schools kill creativity” (video) (hat-tip: Joanna Geary) // Simon Woodroffe says the paranoid “cotton-wool culture” in our schools… “will rob Britain of the next generation of entrepreneurs” // A report by the Children’s Commissioners said that Britain is failing children in numerous key areas — who knew? Including cutbacks in the arts services and youth clubs. As the DEMOS think-tank reported in 2006… “79 per cent of local government arts officers were expecting their budgets to be at standstill or to be cut. Eighteen English local authorities - one in 20 - have dispensed with their arts services completely since 2002″. Then in early 2007, and without any consultation, Arts Council England cancelled all arts match-funding agreements with all local authorities. Then the Spring 08 cuts hit // The declining birth-rate has already caused thousands of schools to close and there are hundreds of thousands of empty desks in schools that stay open. Now the same trend seems set to cause serious recruitment problems at British universities by 2020. And this will come on top of: increasing overseas challenges; variable quality of university management; ever-more rapid changes in industry requirements; the lure of the private sector for under-valued lecturers; and the ongoing retirement of the ‘baby-boomer’ generation of lecturers //

Censorship:— Loopy new legislation in Russia seems set to ‘ban’ goths and sundry other teenage subcultures, Halloween, St. Valentine’s Day, and the sale of toys that look like monsters, among many others. Should a nation spinning into a demographic death-spiral (U.N. figures: 148 million people in 1992, 100 million by 2050) risk massively accelerating the process by encouraging the more imaginative kids to psychologically “pack their bags” for a better life in the West? // Blog or die? How about blog and die? A new law in Iran would punish those setting up a weblog — with the death sentence // Following the recent legal ruling on a censorship case there, an Australian artists’ magazine tries to turn Prime Minister-baiting into a national sport // In The Guardian:- “censors were once sent packing. But now they’re back”. He’s talking about the UK // Tate Liverpool has pinned up a notice suggesting under-18s shouldn’t see some of the Klimt paintings on show at Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life //

Knowing cities:— “A short enquiry into the origins and uses of the term neogeography” (PDF link) // A new Birmingham blog, Rescue Geography + interactive map // Ctrl-N slow-blog // Your personal clip-on urban sonar kit // Flickr neogeography pool // “Me, My Spouse and the Internet: Meeting, Dating and Marriage in the Digital Age” // Rethinking Space and Production: Henri Lefebvre today conference; Delft, Holland, 11th-13th Nov 08 // Playing shooters may improve your spatial orientation skills; or so says one of those dismal bits of psychology fluff that rests on a sample of a mere 20 people, all of them U.S. students // A computer can automatically geo-tag any photo by comparing it with those on Flickr // Still time to catch the 2nd international OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference. Limerick, Ireland, 12th-13th July 08 // Google Earth in a holographic? touch-sensitive interface (video) //

Foto:— At last! Nu-real photocompositing meets LOLcats. I buyz print-on-demand photobuk, plz? // How to open and flex a newly-arrived oversized print-on-demand photobook // An exhibition of Japanese photography monographs (aka photobooks) at the British Museum // The UK’s make-it-up-as-we-go-along ‘laws’ on photography get Boinged // “Eminent Domain: contemporary photography and the city” in New York // Iran launches missiles Photoshop //

Perfect holiday reading for your isolated cottage:— Having seemingly slipped out-of-copyright in the U.S. and Canada (?), the Midlands novel Cold Harbour (1924) has been reprinted as a fine new limited-edition hardback of only 400 copies. Cold Harbour is a macabre psychological horror novel set in the Black Country to the west of Birmingham, and the novel drew praise from no less than H.P. Lovecraft… “told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the several characters … an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated … approaching absolute perfection.” Sadly, it seems that while the old copyright regime (life+50) saw Cold Harbour out-of-copyright in the UK by 2004, the new regime (life+70) means it’s back in copyright until 2024. // The author, Francis Brett Young (1884–1954), also set a long series of other novels in the Black Country, south Staffordshire, Birmingham, and the Welsh Marches. // More information from The Francis Brett Young Society // There’s a decent entry on the man on Wikipedia.

One work in particular gave me a physical shiver — the magnificent large canvas “Black Country Night” by Robert Perry (7′ x 6′), although the frame was mediocre. Jessica Callan’s semi-interactive sculpture “Portrait of a Living Dog” also raised several chuckles. The rest of the works noted below only worked for me intellectually, but work they did. By the entrance, David Miller’s large photograph “Doom 3″ sums up both the ‘chrysalis’ essence and the ’shut-away’ conformity of the goth subculture. Also take a look at Miller’s “Theatre” series on his website. Caroline Ali’s “Bee and Fly Studies” is magnificently detailed, and evokes the best pencil & watercolour nature studies of the 19th century artists who took Ruskin’s dictum… “go to nature in all singleness of heart” to heart. Unsurprisingly, Ali was shortlisted for The Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2007. Her “Bee and Fly Studies” is neatly paired with Sandra Masterson’s large and deliciously-earthy hanging “Haldon Forest (Soil Samples)”.

It was good to see a half-dozen works with strong pop surrealism / lowbrow leanings, fitting choices for a gallery with perhaps the strongest collection of Pop Art outside London. Ryan Patrick Everson’s fabulous painting of a boy and his monsters (6′ x 5′) was for me the most impressive of the lowbrow works, and it repays close attention to the details. Amazingly, Everson’s distinctive name is almost completely unknown to a Google search — someone please get this artist a website.

The show also squeezed in some video art and installation, but so far as I could tell there were no interactive / computing-powered works. Of the two installations, Sabrina Stumberger’s “Memories No.2″ was the most intriguing — a tiny room with a wall of glass rods, onto which was projected a beautiful video loop of an almost-never-glimpsed face.

I went around the show twice, and was very pleased I went — although I don’t think that Wolverhampton have the lighting-design in their impressive and newly-built extension quite right yet.

West Midlands:— My Flickr photo-set from the opening day of the £55m Public art gallery in West Bromwich. More pics here // The Custard Factory’s ‘Rhubarb Radio’ station (from Dynamic Arts) seems to be firming up. I met Dan at the Public opening, and he tells me it’ll include interviews as well as music. A handy Created in Birmingham posting later filled in the rest of the details // Work has started on building Worcester’s new £60-million library and history centre. I’m guessing it might have a corridor or two serving as an arts exhibition space? // The Telegraph rounds up the multi-million new-build property developments in the West Midlands, although a slightly over-ambitious sub-editor has slapped on a headline declaring that we’re… “the new Beijing”(!) // The Artists’ Access to Art Colleges scheme now has places available at Wolverhampton, Hereford, Worcester, Derby, and Birmingham City University // West Midlands allotment holders notice more thefts of food from allotments, as poor families become even poorer // Killriculum, a proposed new £175k horror/sci-fi feature-film that seems to originate from Hereford, and is pencilled in for a premiere at the October 09 Birmingham Film & Media Festival // The Ansel Adams exhibition is now on at the The New Art Gallery Walsall, and the West Midlands Open 8 biennial exhibition opens at Wolverhampton tomorrow // Rousette has blogged about attending the annual ‘Happiness Lecture’ at the University of Birmingham, this year given by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion // The new Custard Factory website is live now, and very nice it looks too // Birmingham International Comics Show invites writers to pitch an idea for a Tharg’s Future Shock. The final three will face an audience vote at BICS 08, with a prominent 2000AD artist illustrating the winning idea for publication. The winner will be paid at 2000AD’s commercial rate. To enter send full contact details, the title of your story, and a one line description in less than 8 words to: shane *at* thecomicsshow.co.uk // A report from the London launch of Channel 4’s £50m 4IP media production fund, a chunk of which is set to be spent in the West Midlands // Submerged magazine is in development by Emma Wooley, and it plans to cover electronic music in Birmingham and thereabouts // Edward Burne Jones: Magnificent Dreamer, a two-hour walk around Birmingham’s famous son, with Antony Clayton. It’s on Sunday 6th July 08, starting at 3pm // Birmingham websites seem to be sprouting faster than dandelions in a wet summer — another three this week, Digbeth.org: Digbeth is Good (goodly creative doings in Digbeth), LOLitics (dull Birmingham local politics photos, enlivened with LOLcat captions), and Eclectic Connections (images of beautiful young models from the Midlands and beyond, by a BIAD graduate). Many more, of the blog variety, at birminghambloggers.com, which is currently mailing out a survey for local bloggers to complete // Take a peek at the fine 2006 street-art murals inside Birmingham’s Gamestation shop // Yes, that looks like Broad Street to me… // Following the major 2006 report Making it to Market: developing the market for contemporary craft, the support org Designer Maker West Midlands now requires a freelance consultant/researcher to research the potential for the development of markets and showcasing activities for West Midlands designer makers. Pay is £11k for “approximately 35-45 days work” during Aug 08 to Jan 09. Deadline: 18th July 08 // Starting on 1st Aug 08; the annual photography competition at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens // Birmingham’s annual Poet Laureate competition is now open for nominations. Deadline: 31st Aug 08 // Wolverhampton: gleaming city of the future, or so says a narrator who sounds deeply unconvinced (video) //

Publications & films:— Ten years too late, plans for another UK-localised version of the tired Wired magazine // The definitive book-length history of curry, now in paperback from Oxford University Press // A copy of the long-lost ‘long version’ of Metropolis appears to have been found, in South America // The three winners of the Jerwood Moving Image Awards, chosen from “a longlist of 30 films”, Sadly, no interactive media such as websites or games ever seemed in prospect // A new book, weighing in at 450 pages, Dungeons and Desktops: the History of Computer Role-playing Games //

Apparel:— The anti-paparazzi, anti-CCTV pair of sunglasses (video) — possibly a spoof? // Damir Doma menswear: I’ve blogged the fantastic Autumn/Winter 2008/9 collection before, and now here comes the Spring/Summer 2009 collection // Given the likely costs of fuel next winter, you may want to stock up on some of these //

Foto:— Covering photography examines the use of photographs as book-cover illustrations // The emoti-camera which only takes pictures when you’re, er… aroused // Photographers looking for backup storage could do worse than a portable terabyte (i.e.: 1000Gb) USB 2.0 hard-disk from Maplins, for £139.99 // The re-education police want to outlaw airbrushed photos in the UK // UK Press Gazette reports that police officers and community plods are still routinely ‘exceeding their powers’ with photographers. And in London the police are building a secret database of photographers (I can think of better uses of police manpower during wartime), which the courts have apparently just had to rather-too-hastily square with the Human Rights Act // Useless CCTV cameras //

Arts policy:— Conservatives outline their initial arts policies, including “a review of Arts Council England to clarify its role” and an “Arts and Parliament Trust” as a sort of cross-party think-tank to inform MPs about the arts // Lottery organisations ’sit on £1.7bn surplus intended for good causes’ // Following a Facebook campaign, The English Heritage Blue Plaques committee met couple of weeks ago and… “have agreed to undertake further research into potential locations where they can honour Kenneth Williams” // A summary of the new report “Creative Futures: building the creative economy through universities”. UPDATE: The report itself is now online // The many hidden costs of art attendance. Consider, also, the 2006/07 taxpayer subsidy that averages at £5.19 for each arts attendance (excluding nationwide events) // “Patterns of Arts Attendance in England” (2008) (PDF) // The Creative Scotland Bill crashes and burns under the weight of its own jargon // National Audit Office concluded in June 08 that… “Arts Council England does not have a clear understanding of the costs or efficiency of its grant-making” // The Progress on
Public Service Agreements review concluded in June 08 that… “The DCMS has failed to meet eight out of its 12 targets for culture and the arts” //

Knowing cities:— Will Google-style applied mathematics replace theory? // The Hidden City Symposium: Mythogeography, Writing, & Site Specific Performance (University of Plymouth, 4th October 08) // “Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People” (2008) (PDF link) // Unimpressive websites for early geomicroblogging tools: ByNotes and Yahoo’s FireEagle // An abstract for “Wayfinding with a GPS-based mobile navigation system: a comparison with maps and direct experience” (2008) — the… “ineffectiveness of the GPS-based navigation system [ for urban walking in Japan is ] discussed”. Yes, you read that right — ineffectiveness //

Structures in landscapes:— Imagine if Andy Goldsworthy worked with artificial light, and was German // “I am so sorry. Goodbye” //

Typographica blog — which once sported a nameplate I designed for them, hem hem — chooses “Our Favorite Typefaces of 2007″ // Elastic lists demo (some Documentation) and Elastic tags demo // Lassie, a no-programming alternative to the excellent Wintermute adventure game engine, with Flash output and pre-built Director modules to handle the required game code. I’m thinking this could be useful as part of an introductory game design course, hiding most of the scary programming from newbies. No parallax scrolling, though — you need Wintermute for that // Memory-mapping with Silverlight //

Wired reviews a new book on videogames, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. It examines: the London game mod scene; the Icelandic developers of the free-market EVE Online science-fiction universe; and South Korea’s fervent StarCraft fan culture (it’s their national equivalent of “football + gambling”) // The UK’s Retro Gamer magazine // Birmingham’s ZX Spectrum orchestra // Gamasutra has fresh European statistics on videogame players // “Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World” (PDF link) //

The Public, the new £55m+ arts centre in West Bromwich, finally opens to the public on Saturday // Birmingham’s Fused magazine has used the Issuu service — which was blogged on D’log a few weeks ago — to put Fused No.35 online for free // Now the dust has settled…. an unsurprising vacancy for Head of Performing Arts at Arts Council England: West Midlands. Deadline: 7th July 08 // Birmingham’s Electric Cinema pushes steadily toward its 100th birthday (31st Dec 09) with a £100k refit and a new sound system, with the second screen re-opening on 4th July 08 // Ballet Hoo! presents “Wrosne: an Underground Experience” (20th-25th July) — a unique new piece of local theatre, performed in the ancient caverns and canals beneath the town of Dudley // Four places are now available for the media strand of Insight Out. West Midlands applicants need 18 months of solid work experience in producing moving-image media, to apply. In March 09, trainees will have a chance to pitch for funding to complete their film. More info from: helen.brown +at+ bcu.ac.uk // Birmingham Central Library is again being mooted for ‘listed building’ status. There’s a blue-sky suggestion that it could be turned into a museum of modern art, and that the neighbouring Conservatoire / Adrian Boult Hall be demolished instead. Personally I think the ugly, cramped, stuffy and crumbling Library needs to be demolished asap — but I fear we’ll get a gimmicky and dumbed-down replacement, and sad pictures of skips full of ‘no longer wanted’ books // A new Custard Factory website “goes live on Friday”, writes Pete // Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter Arts & Designer Crafts Festival, 5th July 08 // Daden mashes Google Earth (Birmingham) into Second Life (video) // Birmingham’s Ben Neal has a brilliant new door // Laundry has new Creative Laboratories bursaries on offer to West Midlands’ artists // BINS reports on the recent “Birmingham: Second City?” debate // An American’s view of the 119th West Midlands Show. Cue the LOLsheep! //

Architects have erected a giant aggregator for their collective bloggery. No doubt they’ll soon clad it with brutalist concrete and plate glass, then scamper off to their dinky little cottages in the countryside // Telephone sex-line operators: what do they really look like? // How nerds are treated by I.T. managers, and why it has to change // France to tax the internet… to pay for… the mass digitisation of knowledge prime-time TV — “Internet companies will pay a tax of 0.9 percent of sales to finance public television”. Which is no doubt planned as a stalking-horse for 1.5%, then 2.5%, then 5% and beyond // The silent decline of school and college libraries // The coming talent-crunch // Philip Longman’s lecture on “The Depopulation Problem” (direct MP3 link) //