England Art And Culture

Crosstown Lightnin' played their first gig in a while, the first of many more the way things are looking.Charles Shaar Murray, Buffalo Bll Smith, Marc Jefferies and Pete Myles were tight as a gnat's bum and rocked the swanky new W14 venue, Black Velvet, with their punky blues. Bex Marshall headlined with her 4-piece blues band. She has an amazing textured voice — from gravelly and snarling to sweet and melodic, and she wields a mean resonator. It's an awesome full-blooded BIG sound from a home-grown Brit.Special mention to her backing singer who gave a soaring gospelled up acapella "New York, New York".Some pix here. Videos of Crosstown Lightnin' to come.Madam Miaow says ... visit Anna Chen's website here: http://www.annachen.co.uk/ Anna's food blog here: http://annacheneats.blogspot.com/

TV Where do we start? Let’s start with Alien Bodies. Alien Bodies is an Eighth Doctor novel by Lawrence Miles. I’m about to spoil the book so if you haven’t read it and have any intention, I’d shift your gaze downwards five paragraphs. As you know, or you will by the end of this sentence, Alien Bodies is about the Doctor attending an intergalactic auction with its single lot of a relic containing his final remains. As with The Name of the Doctor it’s a very funerary piece of work that’s also extremely funny and ultimately changes our view of the character because it gives him a finite end albeit one that’s presumed to be very far in the future. Like The Name of the Doctor it also references a Time War, one which is revealed in future novels to include the destruction of Gallifrey, an act which actually negates Alien Bodies from happening in the same way because it stops the Doctor’s relics from existing in quite the that form. Part of the story arc involves an alternative version of the Time Lord, the Grandfather Paradox, who has a coincidental resemblance to the Ninth Doctor, but whose actions in actively continuing the war are what the Eighth Doctor is fighting against when he destroys his own planet (as it turns out for the first time). Why that’s interesting in the context of The Name of the Doctor, is that it too features an alternative version of the Time Lord, the one, we must assume now, who destroyed Gallifrey, and because as we know now he can't be an old version of Eighth or Ninth (see far below), absolves them of the action in quite the way it’s been portrayed over the past eight years on television and in some of the books. In AHistory, Lance Parkin makes a pretty good argument for both destructions of Gallifrey being the same space-time event seen from different points of view, that perhaps the Grandfather Paradox regenerated into the Ninth Doctor. Even now the climax makes me giggle. Not since The Stolen Earth's surprise regeneration have we had a conclusion this “sexy” and so much metafictionally about the language of tv though in this case it’s one based on we the audience finding out a piece of information rather than something particularly happening to the Doctor who knew about this all along. The fact that John Hurt is somehow playing the Doctor has been heavily spoilt in advanced already, thanks to a tasty set photo ala those early shots of Rose from Partners in Crime and the words coming out of John Hurt's own mouth. It’s the somehow which is interesting (again see below). Was Alien Bodies and its ensuing arc in the novels rattling around Steven Moffat’s head when writing this series of Doctor Who? Let’s look at the evidence. As I noticed in 2008 when coincidentally reviewing The Forest of Dead (of which this is a semi-sequel), Moffat was an avid reader of the books including the Lawrence Miles material. Alien Bodies also includes the concept of the Doctor’s then companion Sam having alternative versions and in the Time/Space sketches, the Doctor talks about the TARDIS entering “conceptual space”, a Lawrence Miles invention from Alien Bodies (see this review of that here). So if you want to infer all of this, you can. But and this is a big but, designed especially for those of you who skipped the past five paragraphs (hello again!), The Name of the Doctor is one of those episodes. A glance at the TARDIS Datacore page for it shows that like similar season finales, and more-so thanks to it being an anniversary year, narrative stuff from across the franchise’s half century of existence, and although most of it’s on the nose animated gifs and wav files, some of the underlying html, java and python is notable for those of us who spend more time than we should pouring over Lance Parkin’s AHistory, TARDIS Datacore pages and other reference “works”. See also something Paul Magrs has noticed from his own work. Did I enjoy it? Yes! Is it any good? Well … I suppose having sai

Another pub at the heart of a community is closing its doors. Mark Whittle (@markvsmedia) visits The Owl in Rodley. Shouldn't we be stopping this?

A few pictures of the market on Briggate I took this morning. Well worth a visit, some lovely stuff.

Nigel Farage was given a rough time by a few members of a group called the Radical Independence Campaign when he came to Edinburgh the other day, to host a press conference in a pub in support of Ukip’s candidate in the Aberdeen Donside by-election for the Scottish Parliament (a body, incidentally, which till recently [...]

While looking through the programme of the ongoing Sight and Sound Festival, i found out about The Pirate Cinema, an installation that makes use of a data interception software of the same name to reveal in real time the hidden activity and the geography of peer-to-peer file sharing but also the aesthetic dimension of P2P architectures. The video installation relies on an automated system that downloads continually the most popular torrents. The intercepted data is immediately projected onto a screen before being discarded. The flows appearing on the screens constitute a sort of 'surveillance' of the peers as fragments of the files that they are exchanging can be visualized during the transmission or the reception. The remote users are, unknowingly, composing an endless collage determined by what they chose to download. The work was devised by Nicolas Maigret and developed with the help of Brendan Howell. I caught up with Nicolas while he was putting the finishing touches to the installation. Hi Nicolas! The description of the work says "In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, "The Pirate Cinema" makes visible the invisible activity and geography of the peer to peer sharing network." ?Could you explain with more details? The geographical aspect of the project is key in activating the imagination, but also in developing a critical view of consumption areas by file. A text indicating both the geographical origin of the peer who issued this fragment, and the geographical destination of the peer who received it is overlaid on each video excerpt. When the system focuses on a single file, we obtain a kind of portrait of the file through its geographic distribution. We could almost speak of following the geographical spreading of "cultural" products. Or in the case of a TV series like "Homeland", we could speak of following the diffusion of ideological propaganda. For an exhibition like this one, which is based on the most traded torrents, the vision is voluntarily an ultra-reducing one, it is a form of "greatest common denominator" of media on a world scale. We can, in some ways, navigate through what is consumed at a particular moment. Are images appearing randomly? How does the system work? This version monitors exchanges of The Pirate Bay's top 100. Each computer selects a few torrents from this list and monitors them for a minute, before switching to new file. To present the project clearly, I often talk about the context, the imaginary and the functioning of the P2P architecture. In the '80s, VHS brought cinema into the living room. Today, P2P and Internet bring it into personal computers and mobile phones. Through these modes of distribution, a wide-ranging reflection opens up about the media, the medium and what it specifically vehicles. The P2P sharing protocol is based on the fragmentation of the files in small samples, it is an exchange unit. This fragmentation loosens the exchanges to different recipients. A file can then be recomposed sample by sample until it is complete, from snippets emanating from separate users and in a disorderly manner. From a cinematic perspective this preliminary fragmentation of the media is also a fragmentation of the film material and of the narration. These "broadcasting mechanics" come with specific formal opportunities: mashup cinema, random editing, weaving together different films frame by frame, glitches and merging of different fragments. This installation suggests a way to perceive the digital filmic medium as a stream, or rather as streams distributed on a global scale. In other words, The Pirate Cinema intends to re-explore films through the logic of cables, which is unique to each connection and location. Since you're French, i can't help asking you about the French legislation, they have the reputation of being pretty intolerant towards P2P culture... In France since 2004, the year of the first conviction for illegal download, P2P

Impressions Gallery is seeking a Learning Manager responsible for the development and delivery of learning and audience development programme. The successful candidate will also play a role in progressing Impressions digital ambitions and developing new funding streams.

I was merrily starting this blog post when I noticed that the bottom right hand corner of the picture contained the artist's signature.  Whoops!  It doesn't any more!  Isn't Photoshop... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Peter Doig's prices are as abstract as his paintings. Attempts to verify this picture – and boost its value by millions – show the art market has survived the recession with easeThe strange case of the parole officer, the painting and the LSD is a bizarre perspective on the value of art.A former parole officer claims that when celebrated painter Peter Doig was a teenager spending some time in a Canadian correctional facility for possession of LSD, he did a landscape and sold it to the claimant for $100. Doig says he was never in a correctional facility (though he happily admits to taking LSD), never visited this part of Canada and has never met the man, let alone sold him a painting. As for the work in question, he denies painting this so-so landscape. It looks nothing like his mature style. The signature says "Peter Doige". A lawsuit has been brought by the parole officer in an attempt to authenticate the disputed painting.One fascinating thing is that Peter Doig, a talented, imaginative painter who has little to do with the look-at-me school of celebrity art, is now so famous that someone is making such a claim involving him. Once, people forged Vermeers and stole Rembrandts. Now they make fiercely contested claims to own paintings by Peter Doig.It may just have something to do with money. Whatever the truth of the case (I am not prejudging it) the claimant apparently wants to establish the value of the work by proving it is by Doig, whose paintings sell for healthy amounts of millions. This week, art sales in New York once again confirmed the contemporary market is booming – it was apparently impervious, at the top level, to the financial crisis, and now that America's economy seems to be bubbling happily away, collectors are more enthusiastic than ever. Any day now you will be reading about the plutocrats cruising into Venice for the Biennale. And so it goes.We can talk all we like about beauty, the sublime or the meaning of art, but for the majority of people the pricetag is what matters. This is true from the Antiques Roadshow to Frieze.Doig's art is dreamy and haunting; it invites meditation. But mercenary realities make the world go round. To love art for itself often seems an eccentric and marginal enthusiasm.Peter DoigThe art marketPaintingArtJonathan Jonesguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

TV Although Silver Nemesis was intended to be the 25th anniversary story for Doctor Who, celebrations began earlier in the season with Remembrance of the Daleks which, with its return to 1963, to Totters Lane and Coal Hill School is arguably the more celebratory of the two. The acme of that is the announcer on the television in the living room of the boarding house, which at the close of scene is heard to say, “This is BBC television, the time is quarter past five and Saturday viewing continues with an adventure in the new science fiction series Do-“ The shot changes before the walls of this fictional reality entirely breakdown (ignoring previous asides to camera), but the intent is clear. Within an episode of Doctor Who we’re supposed to be nearly watching the broadcast of An Unearthly Child. On first seeing this, I probably didn’t notice the implication. I was too young and well into my period of Transformers fandom. On the second occasion, on video later, I was terribly excited because it suggested to me that as in the comics universes of Marvel and DC where superheroes spawned their own comic series dramatising their exploits, the BBC of the Whoniverse produced something similar. Until it occurred to me that if indeed the BBC was producing a series called Doctor Who in the Doctor’s universe, whenever he turned up subsequently, people should be saying, “The Doctor’s a fiction character off of the television. Who are you really?” But narrative abhors a vacuum and in the ensuing wilderness years, the Doctor Who universe did indeed get its own version of the series, thanks to Paul Cornell’s Virgin novel No Future with Professor X. The TARDIS Datacore inevitably gathers together the ensuing references that have appeared in other stories to Professor X, spanning the BBC Books and Big Finish, of this television series which ran from 1963 to 1989 featuring “a mysterious scientist who travelled through time and space inside a TASID, a ship which resembled a pillar box on the outside.” So perhaps this is the series being announced in Remembrance. Perhaps the announcer’s not about to say Doctor, but something else with that opening syllable. Perhaps. Unsurprisingly for a franchise that has been rolling on for fifty years it has attracted a number of these internal references designed to comment on its existence, admittedly in the spin-offs. Dr Who in the Head Games, a fictional version of the character based on the figure who appeared in the TV Comics. Iris Wildthyme, whose own history runs as one long feminist or camper rewrite of the Doctor’s own (“But that’s me, I did that” as he’s often heard to say in the Eighth Doctor novels). The One Doctor’s Christopher Biggins shaped imposter. There’s also Robert Sheerman’s Unbound story, Deadline in which Derek Jacobi plays an old Juliet Bravo writer who has hallucinations about the Doctor and his companions. But the Remembrance reference is arguably the most potent because it leaves so much unsaid (or at least two syllables), and so much to our imaginations.