See you on the flipside of the stroopwafel

And so the end is nigh, its the end of another semester, my last in Australia for a year.

Having a blog has been like having an outlet for every thought that comes into your head, if you want it to be let out that is. Some of my thoughts should stay in the bottle.

While I cant compare with Evie’s scandophilia, this blog has occasionally been an outlet for a sneaky bit of Dutchophilia (?) as I am off to the land of tulips and windmills in a mere one and a half months. My Dutchophilia isn’t as explicit as Evie’s scandophilic side tho, because I’m half Dutch and I think that may be illegal.

While in the Dam I hope to continue blogging, if only so friends and family at home can be reassured I haven’t suffocated on spiced gouda and stroopwafel sandwiches. A secret childhood delicacy…no, I was not a svelte child.

If any Dutch people read this (i.e my mother), I am deeply apologetic for the stereotypes that I am perpetuating. But stroopwafels are seriously off the hook.

Sadly, The Analogical in particular will be coming to an end, for now. But nostalgia is the name of this game, so I look forward to being nostalgic about this too. Just like my beloved cassette collection that I foolishly traded for Space Jam trading cards in Primary School, I will reminisce over this blog while looking at shiny pictures of Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. And listening to the Space Jam Soundtrack on CD, which was the bomb.

It was a steep learning curvature, and I couldn’t have hoped for a better companion than ye old faithful wordpress. She saw me through the highs and the lows of my first ever blog, picked me up when I fell, taught me that your tag cloud will look like vomit if you don’t have any overlapping tags, and so on and so forth.

Not having the net at home for that majority of this task has been a challenge. I have become closely acquainted with the Frank Tate Reading Room and those luscious green sofas, the Group Study Area in Frank Tate where a strange and illusive group of mathematics students keep a microwave hidden in the Fire Cupboard. I’m sure they would have let me use it if I’d only asked…I like warm pies too guys!

Its good to know that at least a couple of people per day have been checking out my blog, even if I know exactly who those people are, and I have heavily prompted them into doing so. The wordpress views statistics could easily make a maniac out of me if the future, I’m grateful that I only discovered how to use them about a week ago.

My only regret is I wish I could have done more. More photos, more writing. Working almost full time hours and studying full time is something lazy people shouldnt do!

Writing regularly has been a challenge, reading regularly has not been. People have produced such great blogs, with such unique ideas, such great writing, procrastinating has been a real pleasure this semester.

Niche Biscuit

I love nice biscuits. A lot.

There are lots of people around in the blogosphere who have passionate love affairs with inanimate objects.

I’m not talking about an I Love Lamp blog (although come to think of it, that would be freaking awesome), I’m talking about people who have found love with old magazines, old book cover designs, old cameras, old records, old anything and have chosen to express this (presumably) unrequited love in the form of a blog.

This blog as it states is about ‘Comics. Old Comics’ and is pretty much pictures of Comics. Old Comics.

This blog, while the name ‘I love old magazines’ might mislead you, it is actually about loving old magazines.

And this one, another faux amis, is about book cover design, while the name ‘Book Cover Design’ might have you thinking something absolutely wacky.

They have the design down pat, I think. They all seem to have recognised that their audience really just wants to see pictures of old stuff. They are all simply lists of pictures taken out of old comic books, old magazines and so on. There is no analysis, no contextualising, no ‘this comic book is from America’s post-war love affair with the Microwave era’ disclaimers. Just pictures.

Because, lets face it, when it comes to showing off your collections of cool old stuff, any writing has a tendency to make you sound like, what the French would call, a complete wanker. Like the guy who made a youtube video to show off his vinyl collection and titled it: ‘My vinyl collection. Watch and be jealous.’ And the first two records were James Taylor and Barbara Streisand. Yeh guy, you rock.

So heres how the afore mentioned blogs do it and they do it swell:

(The Analogical apologises profusely for the amount of scrolling necessary to persevere with this train of thought)

Lomography, a website dedicated to Lomo cameras, takes this to another level. It has become a site where people come together, in a community like fashion, to share their analogue photography from all over the world. And while it has much more than photos, its main drawing card is its endless libraries of amateur and professional photos.

The fact these extremely niche blogs exist is testament to Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory. While I’m a fan of all of the above mentioned blogs, I can’t imagine that they are drawing in a mass audience daily. Even though I like them, I’m not going to go back daily, weekly, or even monthly, to look at more pictures, because that’s all they are really.

But enough people will be like me, coming across them and think they are slightly interesting, and visit them a few more times. And for each little niche about some thing that people love, there will be the I Love Lamps out there who love them a little more than the regular amount, who will go back to the site on a regular basis.

One thing I cant find in the blogosphere is a blog like these, but one with a voice. With someone talking about why they feel this passionate affinity with post-Depression era instruction manuals/enlisting pamphlets/boy scout badges, or what have you.

Maybe its because something like that is completely unnecessary in the era of the long tail. You don’t need to put effort into drawing a lot of people in, and become a widely read blog. The power of blogging lies in the long tail, that is, the multitudes of blogs that are getting a couple of views per day.

The Analogical will probably be at the looong end of the longtail, unless my dog learns to read, and I think it sits nicely in the niche of having pretty photos of some interesting stuff with minimal analysis and meaningless chatter.

GEGEGE NO KITARO ORIGAMI! JUST FOLD!

The unsuspecting box

Okay so I’ve had a few sick days recently and, not to get too Sadako and the Thousand Cranes on you, I thought I’d cure my sickness with some origami.

For those that didn’t have my childhood, Sadako is the girl who made a thousand cranes to try and cure herself of cancer. It should be noted that I do not have cancer, I have the flu. And while Sadako’s illness came from nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima, and her mission to fold a thousand paper cranes symbolises a message of hope for a nation, my flu and my mission to make origami versions of all the characters from Japanese cartoon Gegege No Kitaro should be taken just as seriously.

The instructions were in Japanese, and I can not read Japanese, so really, if you want to look at the specific hurdles each of us had to climb, I probably climbed the bigger mountain here.

What I thought was going to be around half an hour of relaxing origami healingness time, turned out to be me, trying to wish death upon the family whomever was responsible for these highly inadequate pictorial instructions, which consisted of arrows, dotted lines, and freaking zig zags.

In the end, it was worth enduring, if only so I could see Concrete Slab Man in all his 3d origami glory.

Zombie vampire schoolgirl lady

Umm...Crying eyeball in a bathtub?

Schoolboy...I think this is Kitaro

Gegege No Kitaro in Origami Form!

You can watch the cartoon on youtube, it has been around for over 30 years, this is the opening credits from an 80′s version…

One for the Books

Print media across the world are looking to the iPad to save them. Apparently, marketers think people will be willing to pay subscription fees to access newspapers and magazines online on their iPad, therefore saving print culture worldwide! Hurrah.

Perhaps I can see their logic. If I was so inclined to pay money for  a broken in half laptop that has that certain ‘I am definitely a douche‘ quality to it, surely I’d be willing to pay more money to access content that is already free on the laptop that I already own.

Time Magazine is working on an iPad application that will be the same price as the hard copy version, but with extra advertising. I’m not sure if the super branding of Apple is really enough to distract people from that fact this guy wants to make sweet love to your bank account:

Rupert Murdoch

Yes, that is Rupert Murdoch, and yes, that is his ‘making sweet love’ face.

Leon Gettler of The Age, in Digital revolution not about to close the book on print gives an intelligent critique of the hype surrounding the iPhad.

But its not only about the practical side of the argument, its about nostalgia.I dont see how people think eBooks are the same as books. Books last forever (sort of). iPhads dont (sort of). eBooks are just the text of the book, there are other components of a book than the text, that make a book a book.The look, feel, smell, weight, cover art, etc etc…Maybe kindle will learn how to emit an old-book smell one day. But I think not.

There would be nothing nostalgic about rereading a book you read when you were a kid if the action consists of opening it as a pdf file, or whatever it is rather than something like so.

There would be nothing nice about keeping all the books that your mother read in school -

There would be nothing nice about reading the books your parents were read when they were kids -

No inscriptions to read -

I love books, and I collect old books. Anything dusty and pretty will do. Although addictions to the hard copy can have their drawbacks – i.e storage and expense,especially when you live in share house city and every corner of your room looks like this -

or lets be honest usually worse.

Made in India

In Mumbai earlier this year, I wandered into a market called Chor Bazaar. What Chor Bazaar actually was seemed to get lost in translation at some point on my trip there, and upon arrival I quickly realised it was mostly pieces of hardware and open air slaughterhouses.

Luckily for me, somewhere between the dead animals and the loose screws, there was a tiny stall selling old cameras and stray kittens. While I do like kittens, I had to opt for the cheap old camera option. These are some of the photos that those old cameras managed to take in Mumbai. They fell apart by Chennai.

Pfft…Amateur

Amateur design, that is!

Ah, word play at its finest and most misleading.

This is a story of Detroit Techno Movement Underground Resistance and Amateur Web Design. An analogue analogy, if you will…

To begin, a short doco on UR that is worth watching:

Using analogue equipment is not done out of convenience. Listening to mp3s is easier than carrying a crate of records around. Writing an email is easier than using a typewriter. Using a digital camera is easier than working with film. The choice to go analogue is usually a design choice.

I guess what I’m getting at is that its very unusual for someone to use an old machine, that has been surpassed technologically many times over, for practical reasons. On the surface it seems to be an impractical choice.

However, in the case of Underground Resistance the choice to start using equipment like the TR-909 Rhythm Composer and the TB-303 Bassline Synthesizer was based on practical reasons. Namely that the equipment was rejected by the mainstream music industry, and was therefore cheap and easy to come across.

Leo Merz writes in Comic Resistance about how Chicago House duo Phuture came across the TB-303 in 1987, 3 years after it had gone out of production (on account of it sucking as an electric bass replacement):

“Not knowing how to program it, they used random patterns that already existed in the sequencer’s RAM. With some tweaking of the knobs, and a drum machine beat under it the Acid House Genre was born, and spread out to Detroit and the rest of the world” (in Comic Resistance, 2009, page 6)

DJ Pierre from Phuture says “We don’t use the machines the way he intended them to be used. It was his work of art, and we degraded it with this new weird, high-tech-influenced music!”

The ‘inappropriate use’ of technologies and equipment draws attention to how amateurs can reinvent professional technologies through their use of it. Especially online, where amateurs can take anything and run with it, we can see plenty of examples of everyday people turning something around.

Professionals play around with amateur aesthetics too.

Talking about amateurs, I certainly place myself in that category. Talking about design, I suck at it. But I have nonetheless attempted to reflect the ideas and content of this little webblog in its’ design.

I have used two pieces of analogue technology to create a header, a typewriter and a lomo. Then a scanner, and the miraculous internet have played a part in getting that onto the screen. Most of my posts will relate to some imagery. I try to use tactile images, such as printed photos or pictures out of a book, and scan them in, and if one looks closely you can usually see evidence of a scanner or page fold or whatnot.

The rest of my page can only be described as ‘non-professional’ looking (read shitty), pretty blank, not very spiffy, trying to focus only on examples of non-digital medium. So, one could say that I am using the wordpress, a digital platform, to celebrate the non-digital.

You could put it down to that, an active intent to convey meaning through an amateur design, or you could put it down to just being an amateur.

Hand Made by Machine

Machine is an Amsterdam-based group of designers who do all kinds of graphics, mixing digital graphics with hand made designs. Among many other projects, Design does the artwork for one of the best record labels to come out of Holland, Kindred Spirits.

Machine gets crafty with the Kindred Spirits record covers and mixes old and new mediums to create an ultimately analogue aesthetic. The covers use coloured pencil, watercolour paint, knitting, quiltwork and even a freaking bedazzled denim jacket in the name of mixed medium.

In amongst the crafty arts, they do things like theJackson Conti cover that uses images of homeless guys, banana peels and street trash to make pretty flowers.

For more designs and an interview with Machine see nutriot.

The bedazzling of the denim jacket for Jneiro Jarel's Three Piece Puzzle

Red Nose Distrikt Cover

Trash Aesthetics for the Jackson Conti cover

Loco for Lomo

So as far as analogue cultures go, Lomography is a biggin.

Lomography as we know it began in the early 90’s when people in Vienna began playing around with old Russian cameras like the Lomo Kompakt Automat. It evolved quickly from a Viennese underground art movement into a worldwide and instantly recognisable aesthetic.

While Lomo is more popular today than it has ever been, it uses technology that hasn’t changed for decades.  Like all analogue cultures, Lomo Culture hinges on the idea of people revisiting a piece of outdated (in terms of technological finesse) equipment  because the idiosyncrasies of the old medium outweigh the convenience of the new.

That said, a picture tells a thousand words…  Here are some Lomo visuals courtesy of my little friend Le Bron and her little Holga and her little ActionSampler.

A compromised set of ethics

My ethical standpoint when it comes to downloading content was probably born out of convenience and laziness… and out of really awesome tv shows coming out of America that are way too expensive to legally obtain.

I don’t really feel okay about unashamedly downloading everything for free.

There are certain things I have no problems about. Any good tv shows, from say HBO, I don’t have a problem with. HBO is a paid subscription channel in the US (and possible here, I don’t know because I would never pay for television), so they have muchos money and don’t need mine. And I am not paying over $300 for a box set of The Sopranos! It have calculated that it has already taken over 72 hours of my life away from me, plus the finale episode left me severely traumatised and without any sense of closure, and I don’t wish to financially reimburse David Chase for messing me around like that. I know, I could have picked a much more 2010 example, but I was a late bloomer in terms of my Sopranos addiction.

Technically I have never really got my hands dirty. All my downloaded movies and tv shows comes from friends who did the downloading. This could be seen as my moral stance, or my technological illiteracy and lack of decent internet access.

So, things that I am happy to download aside, there are some things that remain worth buying in my eyes.
If an artist (musician, director, writer or what have you), goes out of their way to bring their fans something new and unique, and of a higher standard than say [insert craptastic content here…umm Hot Tub Time Machine?], then they deserve to be rewarded for that in some way. (Full disclosure: I secretly wouldn’t mind seeing Hot Tub Time Machine.)

But at the same time, entire economies can run on piracy. In Nigeria, pirated movies distributed on VHS have become so popular and so abundant they have named their own industry Nollywood, and it makes more money than Nigeria grosses as a country per year. A typical Nollywood video has a kind of, soap opera on pregnancy hormones quality to it, and is usually so cheaply produced that tapes are resused many times over and the editing and plot don’t even nearly make any sense. Sort of like The Young and the Restless meets The Room meets home made movies from my childhood.

But while piracy could be framed as a victimless ‘crime’, and even creates economies in some instances, it has been pointed out to me that as it is technically illegal, its an unregulated industry. This means that piracy businesses, in South East Asia for example, don’t have any laws to abide to and this often results in illegal labour conditions. I remember seeing on an episode of Fakes on ABC, that the fake garments industry runs on children and slave labour. I’m just speculating here, but I’m guessing fake dvd economies don’t exactly pay employees award rates.

re: ccMixter

Recently I’ve been looking at ccmixter. Basically it’s a site where music artists and producers upload their tracks, samples and stems under a Creative Commons License. This means that everyone is free to download, remix, sample or do whatever they want with this music. With some conditions.

Its interesting to find a site where the artists themselves are promoting free sharing of their intellectual property.

Now, while free culture can promote a lot of amateur content, ccmixter gets some pretty big names on there who share along with the rest of them.

Last year, DJ Vadim was a special guest in ccMixters fifth anniversary event where members uploaded their content, in a lucky dip sort of situation, with the chance the DJ Vadim would make a track out of it.

Vadim is a good example of a recording artist who has adapted to today’s free culture. For years, Vadim has shared full studio stems and a cappella of his albums on ccmixter, that people still go out and buy!

I’ve also heard that producers like Timbaland are involved, not that I’m rushing to access those gems, but at the same time its really interesting that such a commercial name is involved in such an anti-commercial project.

Thinking about Aaliyah?

DJ Vadim says: “…releasing music is communication. Nowadays, that means participation and that is what ccMixter offers. It is a combination of the two, letting fans and music people participate and communicate together, with you, with me and create new music and ideas.”

Theres no doubt the producers featured on ccMixter are impressive, and their open-mindedness and community spirit goes along way. But the question remains, how do up and coming musicians make a living out of a system like this?

In other words, if your not Vadim or Timbaland, who is going to sell records and get royalties no matter what you do, how do you get rewarded when you create something great?

That is something Dymtri Kleiner asks in Mute Magazine, in Copyfarleft and Copyjustright. Kleiner writes of licenses like the ccMixter licensing system: ‘Copyleft licenses guarantee intellectual property freedom by requiring that reuse and redistribution of information be governed by ‘the four freedoms,’ the freedom to use, study, modify and redistribute.’

Its also an argument I took into account when deciding whether to licence this blog with a creative commons license. But for me, it is a different type of decision entirely because I’m not hoping to make any money from any of the content of this blog, and mostly I present the work of others on here anyway.

Honestly, the main reason I decided to go with a Creative Commons license was a bit of a why not train of thought. I don’t see the content of this blog as my property and don’t see it as valuable in an exchangeable sense. Actually on that note, to any of my friends whose photos I have used…I hope this is okay?

Its when people who actually make what they do for a living free, then that is more of a statement. Like people that write books about free culture, then expect people to pay for the book, thats making a statement. A statement thats either ironic, or just openly hypocritical. But when people like Lawrence Lessig, ex CEO of Creative Commons, write books and hand over any copyright,  like in this case, put their money, or lack thereof, where their mouth is, so to speak.

The Analogical by Pip Pillion is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.