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Rockin’ The Rockabilly Scene :

Rockin’ : The Rockabilly Scene was a photographic exhibition at the National Theatre, South Bank, London. Featuring the portraits and reportage from the contemporary Rockabilly scene – a stylistic diehard that weathers fads and trends with its sta-prest uniform and regulation style code.
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The photography exhibition by Andrew Shaylor is insightful to the shuttered circle of Rockabilly, a retro-throwback calling on a world that never was. Taking it’s style cues from Coca-Cola advertising, Johnny Depp in Crybaby as gospel and sweet dreams from Back to the Future part one.

At first glance this is all style over substance – what can a modern take on a denim clad fairy tale teach us? How can such a deliberately stunted movement justify it’s reason for existence in the modern world?

To find the answer we were drawn not to the laboriously studied hairstyles, the Archie comicbook caricatures or the mock-American rock n’roll band – (although they had their admirers, especially one old Teddyboy who rocked in his chair more than rolled with the band).

It was out in front of the gallery that the Rockabilly movement made it’s suckerpunch claim on cultural evolution.

Parked in the ‘lot’ were lovingly maintained examples of mid-twentieth century mobile Americana – all chrome lining, leather upholstery, custom engine parts: fans, “Big Daddy” Roth skulls, low-brow modifications, the essential Coca-Cola bottle opener where one would expect to find the filler neck.

These were vehicles that were built to last. The antithesis of modern consumerism, with its engineered obsolesence. These beasts heralded the time when consumption was meant to improve the world, not destroy the planet.

By understanding the old fashioned values that is inscribed into these vehicles, one is able to comprehend the continued existence of Rockabilly. It’s the idea of simplicity, rigidity and faith in the unsullied values that America was founded on… exported to the UK. When men were men and women were real dames. Clearly defined roles with little of the ambiguity of modern life, splintered families and rampant consumerism. A pair of jeans built to be buried in, not just for one season. A time before feminism eroded mens ideas of masculinity, bubbly soda water was a health tonic not a global obsesity concern, when fridges represented the pursuit of increased leisuretime not a guilty generator of climate change. Perhaps even when patriotisim didn’t feel like apologetic fascism.

It doesn’t matter what I feel for a movement that is so staunchly defiant of the entire world, so locked in it’s ways, with it’s studious heirarchies of ‘cool’. A movement so utterly desperate for a time that never was and stagnant in it’s views. In a world that seems in the permanent thrall of change for change’s sake, that’s a refreshing choice.

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Cory Arcangel: Beat The Champ :

Music for Stereos & Beat The Champ at the Barbican

(Article originally appeared on motherboard.tv, sub-editted by Sean Yeaton)
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An awkward ‘performance’ of five pop tunes and a trip down memory bowling lane proves why a great digital artist doesn’t necessarily make a great live show.

To celebrate the launch of ‘Beat The Champ’, a new exhibition of modded bowling video games, digital artist Cory Arcangel gave a gruelling thirty minute exercise in sublime pop music ridiculousness.

With a Q+A introduction to allow for reasons as to why playing burnt CDs on mail order hi-fis qualifies as a performance, an awkward Arcangel gave his excuses like a schoolboy who had forgotten his homework.

Something to do with following his ‘artistic compass’ to recreate the dizzy heights of YouTube audiophile test videos and a desire to challenge a paying audience’s reactions lead the way to a slow unpacking of stereo equipment and a drawn out three minute ditty. Bearing in mind that the selected tunes all owe a debt to the production talents of Ace of Base and you have an idea of what the reaction might be…

Vague, indifferent, bored were the adjectives in order. Audience response highlights included someone lending him a safety pin earring to clean a power supply. Someone else offered to plug in a cable. A missing lead prevented the fourth movement of the act. Two people left. Transcendental moments were characteristically fleeting and the remainder had the charisma of a Napoleon Dynamite Show and Tell.

Afterwards, in response to being asked ‘if life is too short to spend it watching such a performance’, an embarrassed Arcangel said he felt like ‘going back to his room and crying. In the shower”.

Meanwhile in the gallery downstairs and in stark contrast to the events three floors above, fourteen screens show why Cory continues to be a digital artist kingpin.

Games systems from the Atari 2600 through to Gamecube via Neo Geo and Super Nintendo play obscure bowling titles. The twist being that the games are hacked to ensure the virtual bowling balls always roll into the left gutter.

One joy of the exhibition is that the sequence of games is a chronological exploration of the transition from Promethean innovation through to the later polymath polygon crunchers. The other vague effect is that of a kind of amusement arcade transcendental moment. This comes not from the memento mori futility of the permanent gutter ball, but from the dim gallery lighting and the cacophony of digital bleeps, farts and whistles that transports the observer to a twentieth century world of Ballardian entertainment. Through the video projector displays, vast hidden mother-of-pearl spectrums are revealed in the previously monochrome Atari hardware. The Starbucks coffee-beige and oatmeal palettes of nineties bowling software sparkles in an RGB rainbow flicker.

The curve shape of the art gallery had me hoping that the show would never end, a bent lane of low level synaptic interrogation in ten pin existentialism. The strike at the end of the curved alley was a long table of the hardware running the machines. The hacked circuit boards hanging out of each controller like a circuit board stoma.

Maximum likes to Cory for having the nerve to present songs that an audience would rather pay to not hear, but sometimes it goes to show that super-mundane consumer transcendentalism is better presented with an off switch.

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Michael Jackson’s Life in Videogames :

What parallels exist between the MJ and his digital avatars?

(Article originally appeared on motherboard.tv sub-editted by Sean Yeaton)
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With the news that Michael Jackson: The Experience on Wii has recently topped the three million sales mark it would appear that MJ still has the rhinestone magic sales touch long after he moonwalked off this mortal coil.

Besides featuring in several other Jackson endorsed video games (Moonwalker of course, Space Channel 5 as Space Michael, buff-boxing iron-Mike in Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2, and the obscure Sega AS-1 Shuttle as Commander Jackson) he is rumoured to have been one of the world’s biggest collectors of video games, spending over $500,000 on his amusement arcade. It’s suggested that his collection began after being denied playing games whilst in the Jackson 5. He more than made up for lost time…

In April 2009, and allegedly short of a few quarters, MJ put the amusement arcade up for auction. The 242 page catalogue of the sale makes for interesting reading. At the last minute, the whole auction was cancelled perhaps because the games were too special for Jackson to part with? If that’s true, then it might be worth speculating if the games reflected anything about MJ beyond him being a hardcore games buyer? The machines were generally in a pristine condition which suggests they didn’t get a lot of use.
In a highly unscientific analysis it seems they run some curious parallels.

(1979-1983) The Golden Era classic years

It’s the first stage of his collection that is most iconic. The collection begins in 1979 with the Atari trilobyte, Basketball, and the same year the legendary album Off The Wall came out. The arcade hall of fame are all present: Ms Pacman, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Super Mario Bros, Karate Champ. All this at a time when Thriller and the Moonwalk pretty much defined the world.

(1984-88) The Insert Coin Years

Not much change in the arcade, since MJ was too busy recording commercials for Pepsi and and shifting 30 million copies of Bad. 
However, the film Moonwalker was to change all that…
To furnish his $100million Neverland bachelor pad, a decent amusement arcade must have seemed a basic neccessity. Thus begins the return to gaming with the release of Moonwalker video games. In the auction catalogue, Moonwalker was a glaring omission. It’s rumoured MJ owned three or four full sized cabinets but being of utmost importance, these were never considered for the sale.

(1989-1992) The Next Level Years

During the early nineties the gaming collection enterred the next level. All the key 16 bit consoles are accounted for. Specialist display rigs of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and the big bad Neo Geo sat alongside the biggest gaming cabinet of all time, the gyrocopic Sega R360. It’s the perfect superstar game: so big it needs a metre exclusion zone and an attendent present at all times because it could “easily kill… or decapitate”. 1992 also saw the purchase of the first of three Konami Lethal Enforcers games. Luckily, the 32 million selling Dangerous was adequate to fund this gaming splurge.

(1993-1994) The Big Boss Years

With the allegations of child abuse in 1993 and a marriage in 1994, MJ took his eye of the A-list releases when poor choices appeared in his arcade including Midway’s Time Killers, a doomed 3DO, and a brainstraining VirtualBoy to play with.

(1995-2002) Continue Play Years

With the release of HIStory, a two part-greatest hits album, MJ must have been reminiscing over a better time. His purchase of Ultracade, a MAME based arcade of the greatest 1980’s hits is a sad psychological mirror. The arcade grew most rapidly in these withdrawn years or perhaps the new role as father unleashed his inner child? He obtained twenty more cabinets – including the first of three Crazy Taxi cabs. Most of these were the deluxe/sit down versions as befits a man who had recently closed a deluxe/sit down $95 million upfront music deal.

(2003) Game Over

The collection finishes abruptly in 2003 when MJ decided to leave Neverland, in order to better spend his time between Las Vegas and Bahrain shopping for gaudy furniture and toying with Islam.

Conclusion

Seven years later, and eighteen months after his death, Ubisoft’s Michael Jackson: The Experience was released on the Wii. Much like the final years of MJs life, a lukewarm critical reception seemed insufficient to deter fans. Singlehandedly (single glovedly?) reviving the dance game genre, it is being released for PS3 and Xbox 360 in April 2011.

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Poetics of Surveillance Culture :

Under the watchful eyes of Roehampton University’s alien parakeets, psychogeographer and author Iain Sinclair, discussed the poetics of surveillance culture. Here’s what we learned…

(Article originally appeared on motherboard.tv sub-editted by Sean Yeaton)
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Currently, there are over 150,000 cameras keeping watch over the city of London. “This city has eyes and it’s watching itself, a giant panopticon”. The visual nerve centre, it’s cameras “abuse the past and fragment the present”.

Interviewed by Sinclair, forty years ago, Allen Ginsberg predicted that with the arrival of networked security cameras, history would soon be over. He felt that a new kind of truth would soon emerge, when all secrets and perversions were made public.

In actual fact, new kinds of secrets and perversions blossomed. From Wikileaks, (the website and the ensuing soap-opera), via mobile phone snuff movies, to airport carpark porn-tableuxs, these recording devices opened up new avenues of shadowy reality reconstruction.

Maybe the cameras herald the arrival of a new kind of avant-garde cinema, an electronic meditative device, where watching silent footage becomes a reverie? Or a benign voyeurism? Anonymous storage facilities full of recordings patiently await the day that the next Jill Dando will transmute their base material into primetime gold. In the case of the James Bulger murder, the blurry supermarket footage has come to represent the crime itself. “CCTV isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about turning the events into a film”.


(Above) Not only does Big Brother watch everything, in East London he even speaks like Ray Winstone
Old-style cameras are like awkward architectural mantraps, “mean grey boxes”. In a post-surveillance age “it’s stranger, closer, more total”. A reference perhaps to the tracking of London’s ‘Boris bikes’ or the way we hand over our most sensitive information to marketing tools like Facebook. TV shows like Embarassing Bodies, desensitize our notion of privacy and personal space. “Those ideas have become antiquarian. It’s a fast twitch world of soundbites and downloads that disintegrates the city. London ceases to exist. It disintegrates, it dissolves. It becomes virtual. A gate and a fence appears somewhere around Essex onto which movies are projected. The movies show a paradise that will never exist”.
Ironically, Sinclair has, in the past, been arrested for photographing the cameras that were recording him.

Asked if CCTV cameras on buses which display their footage in realtime might be a step too far, he replied, “Aesthetically I was taken with it. The quality of the image, seeing myself, the configuration and colour of the upholstery. Better than any inflight movie. But I didn’t feel any safer.”

In a talk that was refreshingly free of explicit commercial motivations, Sinclair remains the illuminator-in-chief of the the daily subliminal, a vigilant eye on the optic vigilantes.

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Angelheaded Hipsters :

Modern hipsters trace their ancestry back to a photo exhibition of counterculture legends.

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Allen Ginsberg is the grandaddy of all hipsters. His prose poem, Howl, caused a furore back in the fifties with its taboo trashing statement of intent.

It also featured the lines: “Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.”

He was also a prolific photographer, capturing his friends and acquaintances who just happened to be the ones who redefined youth culture, poetry, stories, art, magic, drug use, western spiritual enlightenment, music and whatever else they could lay their soiled hands on.

(Above, John “Hoppy Hopkins”)

Much has been said, written and sold in the name of these counterculture heroes and an exhibiton at the National Theatre, London, which opened last night celebrates the facts as much as the myths.

In attendence was a number of aged, but still groovy, British psychedelic entrepreneurs and artists including Burroughs-biographer, Barry Miles and John “Hoppy” Hopkins who were glad to share some curious anecdotes about the luminaries in the photos.

For example, did you know that William Burroughs, in a fit of righteous anger, cast a ‘tape-recorder curse’ which closed down a Soho greasy spoon?

The influence of these characters lives on. It can be felt as in both the prepacked lifestyle consumer goods that reference their misadventures as it can in the genuine spirit of adventure of young nascent artists and wanderers.

The photos contained in the images here belong to Corbis and The Allen Ginsberg Trust.

(Below, Barry Miles)

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