IMS_Blog

The Bright New Gateshead

Anyone who follows along at home will know that I’m pretty sceptical of Gateshead Council’s ability to take the town forward in any sort of visionary way (see A random post, or another post, or an edifice of a post. They’ve just trickled out the some more information on where they’re supposedly taking the “regeneration” of the town centre. It got a bit of national news coverage and the local paper’s take is here but both those essentially regurgitate the press release, complete with watery, non-committal, generic illustration. Hardly inspiring (if anyone can find an actual copy of the mentioned report I’d be interested. I’ve just gave up looking…one might have thought they’d link to it from the press release).

While talking about the car park in a round about way, it was interesting to note that in the last of the blog posts linked above, I included a very quick mock-up of a glowing car park (these days I’d probably do that in Dialux or something!). The funny thing is that as part of the Glow Festival the council essential did something similar, as shown by this photo on Flickr.

Oh, and in the time of this post being in draft, they’ve started to pull things down. The car park itself was still there last I was up, they could still stop. Though the news that Owen Luder’s other brutalist Gateshead piece is to be demolished makes that pretty unlikely (many moons ago, as part of a school project, I helped paint a mural in which the “rocket” was taken to be one of the major symbols of Dunston, the area of Gateshead in which it stands—the amazing things you can find out about my life right here folks!)

Ill Wilki

Talking about Gateshead, the big shop by the transport interchange is Wilkinson, which has looked a bit ill. I actually tried taking more or less the same photo one night in December while walking past it with Janet but my version was too blurred. It was still like that when I was up last weekend!

Wave Wave Wave

I was slightly surprised that I don’t think I’d ever came across the Third Wave until this Metafilter post, particularly given the obvious links to Milgram and Stanford Prison. I always find that stuff fascinating (if I wasn’t such a “hard” scientist I might have liked getting into the strange ways people act). There’s obviously a lot been said about how people react to these situations to become so dehumanised, but I wonder how much has been looked into those who don’t.

Find The Postbox

I don’t seem to have ever mentioned on the blog (though I could half swear I had) but ages ago I thought what was really needed was a nice Google Maps mashup showing the locations (and collection times) of postboxes. Turns out there are now a couple of sites doing essentially that:

• Postboxr
• Dracos: Locating Postboxes

Apparently even the Royal Mail couldn’t supply detailed data of postbox locations—so how do they know where to collect from?

Holiday Activities

Yoko Ono @ Baltic

Went with Janet to see the Yoko Ono exhibition at the Baltic (third time she’d been!) Some of it I don’t find that interesting (I much prefer it when she bothers to realise her instructional pieces for instance) but I added my wish to the Wish Tree and have a piece of sky

Films

Saw a few movies recently too:

Changeling

Very well put together and acted but overly long (it’s quite hard to make something of this ilk not a little plodding) and tried to force in the sentimentality a touch too much on occasion (one lingering shot of a child’s drawing particularly urked me as unnecessary except in Hollywood saccharine world).

Dean Spanley

Quirkely brilliant, and a joy to behold. Easily my favourite cinema experience in quite a while!

The Tale of Desperaux

The best part was when one of the restless children in the audience shouted out “It’s finished!” at the end. That says it all.

Slumdog Millionaire

Good, but as Janet said, difficult to get emotionally involved with the characters for some reason. It’s a film made by the visuals of India more than anything else. And what the last question would be was so obvious

Egg Cups

It’s amazing how hard it seems to be to find egg cups to buy (a problem encountered after I’d cooked soft boiled egg, and discovered my lack of cups…)