A Leased Line to the Collective Unconscious

We went to the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park yesterday to see Modest Mouse (sadly they didn’t play), Queens of the Stone Age (they rocked) and White Stripes. White Stripes were magnificent - one of the best times I’ve seen them and they’ve always been good. To come on after a full on rock band like QotSA, with just a guitar, keyboard and drums, and to make a bigger sound was frankly amazing.

We managed to catch another band - a New Zealand band we’ve never heard of called Connan and the Mockasins who were absolutely bonkers but who turned in a great performance. Very entertaining and I’d very much like to see them again.

I managed to record a teeny tiny clip of the White Stripes playing “Jolene” on my camera. I can’t say as the audio is that great but it gives you a great feel for the atmosphere at the festival. Enjoy.

I’ve just got my hands on a new* web browser, Flock. It’s built on the Mozilla core (Firefox, Camino etc) but boasts a number of interesting and innovative features, such as in-browser Flickr viewing and uploading and in-browser blogging.

Lets see if it works…

(you can get Flock from here www.flock.com)

Blogged with Flock

I had the pleasure of visiting Walsall’s New Art Gallery at the weekend (to go and see an exhibition about the art of the graphic novel) and was stunned into submission to see a lifesize replica - it’s about 12 feet tall - of this amazing piece of work by Jacob Epstein.

The story goes that Epstein sculpted this in 1913 as a celebration of man’s embracing of technology and the bold optimism of the future.

As he became drawn into the Vorticist movement and with the onset of the First World War, Epstein’s opinions changed; he saw that technology was being bent to the purposes of war, cruelty, abuse and destruction and this lead to his destroying his own piece of work.

I can’t explain what kind of impression this piece made on me, save to say that an image does it no justice. It really is awe-inspiring.

Update: I’ve just noticed the similarity between this and the battle droids in the last three Star Wars films. I guess Jacob wouldn’t have been too impressed with his creation being armed with laser rifles and told to Kill on Sight.