The Staufenberger Repository

Goodbye Beat Street

For a hip hop fan no trip to New York was complete without visiting Beat Street. You could easily spend an entire afternoon in that Brooklyn record store cultivating thumb blisters as you flicked through what felt like mile upon mile of vinyl in the basement. Beat Street's basement actually stretched for an entire block.

Some have greeted the closure of the store as one step closer to the death of vinyl. A fatal blow delivered by the rise of the likes of Serato. In the case of music formats this is another instance where I think endism doesn't strictly apply (see The Future of Magazines). Many other things may have contributed to the downfall of Beat Street, from the gentrification of Brooklyn, the building of the Brooklyn Nets stadium in the area or perhaps just plain old bad business.

Anyway this is great little film about the passing of Beat Street with some footage of Serato in action.

Dance with meme

French groovers Nouvelle Vague have stepped up the meme count with the video for their cover of Dance With Me (I know it's a while old but it's new to us):

Film buffs and francophiles might recognise the source material: Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur dancing in Jean-Luc Godard's Bande a Part:

I guess the lesson here (though I don't think you need to understand memetics to get it) is that for a thing like a song - call it a meme if you must - to spread or replicate itself, you have to allow it to do so in the first place.

Obviously, in this instance licensing fees (for both the tune and the film) help free up the replication process. But in allowing mash-ups like the one below to live, the respective copyright holders are showing they get it: 

So there we have it: a collision of of the post-punk/new wave meme, the (erroneously translated) bossa nova/new wave meme and the Godard et al/new wave meme. Not to mention the fact that Tarantino showed this dance scene to Travolta and Thurman before they shot the dance contest in Pulp Fiction (that's another meme, isn't it?). And - although I may be imagining this - Tarantino based Thurman's Mia Wallace black bob hairdo on Anna Karina's look in an earlier Godard film. That makes meme number five. Oh, and Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart. Is that six? My head is beginning to hurt.

OK, no more memes. Promise.

Vinyl Video

Not sure what it means - beyond questioning our need for continual technological progress, perhaps - but this art project made us smile. (It's a few years old so apologies if you've seen this elsewhere).

What is Vinyl Video? Exactly what it says: willfully lo-fi video pictures from vinyl records, of course.

Invited artists, including video art heavyweight Nam June Paik, have contributed pieces to showcase the patented Trashpeg technology. You can find a bit more background here.

Because it's a few years old, the web-based video of artist's contributions is not brilliant. But this infomercial is a good place to start:

Sehr gut, ja?

Via Schulze & Webb's Pulse Laser.

Meme meme meme

There's been a lot of talk about memes recently. There must be something in the air.

And in similar territory, our recent thoughts on making things happen (in particular, the utility of reinterpreting existing ideas) got me thinking about standards. Not web standards but standards standards: jazz numbers, show tunes, rock and pop anthems. Songs and tunes that become famous through repeated reinterpretation.

It seemed the perfect excuse to talk about a music blog I discovered a while back, Music For Kids Who Can't Read Good, and a great post there about the numerous cover versions of Gnarls Barcley's Crazy.

But in returning to it now, I find that the MP3 links are all dead and - via the tune's Wikipedia entry (I know, it's, er...crazy. Sorry.) - that Slate has written about it more fulsomely and in far better fashion than I could have been bothered to attempt, let alone pull off.

The Slate article appeared a few months after the Music For Kids post and in that time, even more artists have covered the song and lots of fans have uploaded videos of those performances to You Tube. My fave, from The Kooks, is here:

Clearly, Crazy is the music meme of 2006.

But all this talk of memes leaves us Staufenbergers slightly perplexed. Beyond providing a rationale for basing communication activity on existing (film, art, tech) ideas, what use is there in the concept?  Leland has made a good case, but we keep coming back to a but: memetics is great for explaining a phenomenon in retrospect, but how can it help provide direction for future work?

All contributions, constructive or otherwise, gratefully received.

Making things happen

Recent comment from Scamp on the possible (probable?) inspiration of the Bravia commercial is a good prompt to share something that we've been debating over at Staufenberger Towers. Namely, the process of selling ideas. To colleagues, to clients, to whomever.

This all started a few months back when we saw pictures of a rather good exhibit on the Honda stand at The London Motor Show. It was a 3D "exploded" view of an F1 car. According to the press release, it was a collaboration between the Honda F1 team and Dutch artist, Paul Veroude, who has exhibited "deconstructed" vehicles in the past. Here he is working on the Honda:

(Here are some more pictures of it in situ, courtesy of glediator).

The question that has been exercising us is this: could an idea like this be "sold" without the evidence of it having been done before?

In theory, anyone could have the idea: we'll take the car apart and suspend the bits from the ceiling so it looks like a 3D Haynes Manual. The hard part is making it happen. Would the client go with it without the reassurance that there's someone out there (in this case Paul Veroude) who knows how to do it, who has done it before and who can do it again without making the mistakes that you inevitably make when you do something for the first time?

I suspect that Honda is perhaps one of the exceptions and may not have needed the reassurance. But most clients would, understandably, be uncomfortable committing to something without knowing how it was going to be executed. That's natural.

Which brings us - rather longwindedly - to the same conclusion as Mr Scamp: perhaps we shouldn't be quite so precious about originality. However, we get there for the equally pragmatic, but slightly more self-interested, reason that it's easier to convince people (clients, colleagues, and so on) if you can point to something and say: look, it's been done before and it looks like this.

And like it or not, the process of convincing/reassuring gets harder the further you move away from traditional forms of communication. It's natural.

It's just wallpaper

Shamelessly stealing Martin's idea of the day, er, idea...why don't wallpaper manufacturers provide desktop wallpaper files of their designs?

I've had a quick hunt and the best I could find is at Timorous Beasties. But their examples don't tile properly.

So I dusted off my Photoshop tool belt and had a go at making usable desktop tiles out of two of Timorous' most fetching designs.

Problem is, my Photoshop skills leave a lot to be desired and I couldn't for the life of me get the whole tile thing to work. So as a workaround, here are two ready made desktop-sized backgrounds of Iguana and London.

They're a bit big, it's probably not brilliant IT practice but hey, it works OK on my steam powered Powerbook. And just like those fab Ray Fenwick tiles, they're tidy-inducingly busy.

All I have to do now is persuade the wife to let me put one of these in the spare room.

What is a brand?

A while back, we gave The Repository a makeover: less thinking and theory, more doing and action. Since then we've tried to post more about the practicalities of making stuff happen. Not sure if we've delivered on that intention, but anyway...

However, that said, I've just found another Stephen King paper entitled, you guessed it, What is a Brand? I scanned it for a journalist a while back and promptly forgot about it. So as a break from the new theory-free Repository 2.0 - and in the interests of sharing the wisdom - here it is. (The same caveat to our previous King/Bullmore post applies: if anyone has a problem with this being here, please drop us a line).

As you might expect, there are loads of ideas that seem prescient. I won't bother highlighting anything as it's a pretty brief read and it would be interesting to get people's views. (There's a link at the bottom of this post where you can leave comments.)

Apology 1: my original photocopy clipped a number of the margins so you'll have to guess a few words on some of the pages. I like to think of it as an interactive element.

Apology 2: it's a bit big (2.something meg). I could probably get it smaller. But I'm lazy.

Normal service will resume shortly.

From the archives

The British Film Institute has made available a whole heap of film from it's extensive archives. It really is a fantastic service. Members can download a free film every month (membership costs a mere £35 per year). And anyone can access the selection of archive footage. [CAVEAT: it appears that these services may be available only to those in the UK].

I've just downloaded the introduction to Between The Tides, a public information film from 1958:

As someone who grew up by the sea, it warmed the cockles.