Newsletter Central

A retrospective art exhibition featuring art from BLAB! is opening tomorrow, August 1, at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art on the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. I wrote an essay for the show’s catalogue about BLAB!’s creator, Monte Beauchamp.

The exhibition, organized by the Beach Museum of Art, will be on view through November 2, 2008. It is the first American museum exhibition devoted to the work of BLAB!, Monte Beauchamp’s periodic anthology of sequential and comic art, illustration, painting, and printmaking. The exhibition, which focuses on BLAB! #8-18 (1995-2007), features the work of forty-six artists and includes 150 objects from thirty-nine collections. All of the work in the exhibition has appeared in BLAB!.

Artists in the exhibition: Michael Bartalos, Gary Baseman, Richard Beards, Tim Biskup, Stéphane Blanquet, Calef Brown, Greg Clarke, The Clayton Brothers, Sue Coe, Don Colley, Brian Cronin, Nicolas Debon, Douglas Fraser, Charles Paul Freund, Drew Friedman, Geoffrey Grahn, Steven Guarnaccia, Ryan Heshka, Peter Hoey, Tom Huck, Teresa James, Jeffrey Kamberos, Nora Krug, Peter Kuper, Mark Landman, Laura Levine, MATS!? [Mats Stromberg], Walter Minus, Christian Northeast, John Pound, Archer Prewitt, Chris Pyle, Helge Reumann, Xavier Robel, Jonathon Rosen, Marc Rosenthal, Sergio Ruzzier, David Sandlin, Spain, Bob Staake, Fred Stonehouse, Mark Todd, Chris Ware, and Esther Pearl Watson.

The accompanying 128-page, full-color catalogue was designed by Monte Beauchamp and contains contributions by David A. Beronä, Mark Frauenfelder, Matt Dukes Jordan, and Bill North.

BLAB! retrospective art exhibition

Watch-Cufflinks is the webstore for Etsy seller Edmdesigns, whose work I’ve featured here before. There’s some really lovely stuff here — I’m partial to this wingéd watch movement badge. Makes me wish I had more shirts with French cuffs!

Watch Cufflinks

See also: Clock-y, steam-y jewelry and such

The Guardian’s just published my latest column, “Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry” about the insanity of the latest record-company salvo in the copyright wars, a cozy deal with British ISPs that will have them spying on and degrading the connections of subscribers accused of infringing downloading:

So no, I don’t think this is going to have any appreciable effect on filesharing. However, it will succeed in driving music-swapping even further underground, to encrypted protocols and offline hard-drive parties and private swapping networks. These are every bit as efficient at getting music into the hands of kids, but they’re a lot harder to monitor and charge money for.

The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter. After all, they had the fastest-growing technology in the history of the world at their disposal, 70 million internet users in 18 months, and they’d found that the average American user was willing to spend $15 a month for the service. The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead, and out of the ashes of Napster arose dozens of new networking technologies. Each one was more hardened against monitoring and disconnection than the last.

These days, if you wanted to charge a flat fee for access to all music (something that consumers all over the world would be eager to accept), you’d have to do stuff that’s a lot more complicated and funky to get anything like the clean reports we’d have gotten off of Napster 1.0.

And yet that’s just what we’re going to end up doing. It’s historically inevitable: whenever technology makes it impossible to police a class of copyright use, we’ve solved the problem by creating blanket licences.

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Raketentim sez, “The Halo Corpse Alphabet is a rather macabre project with the goal being to represent every letter of the alphabet by the twisted, curved, stretched, and otherwise dead Spartan and Elite bodies from Halo 3. The Halo community was clearly up for the challenge as they miraculously managed to capture every single letter, number, and even some punctuation in the form of screenshots.”

Halo Corpse Alphabet

(Thanks, Raketentim!)

Some of Queen Victoria’s giant and comical undergarments were up for auction, but we are not amused.

A pair of her bloomers, a chemise and a nightdress went under the hammer at Mackworth in Derby for 13,500 pounds ($27,000).

The cotton bloomers are monogrammed with a VR (Victoria Regina) and attracted bids from as far as Brazil, Russia, Hong Kong and New York. They finally went to a lady from Canada for 4,500 pounds, according to auctioneer Charles Hanson.

A London collector snapped up Queen Victoria’s chemise for 3,800 pounds. Her nightdress sold for 5,200 pounds to an American collector.

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