Artistic Consolation - Craig Mulholland, 2004

I’ll update this post with an extended version of my review for The List, after the issue comes out next week. Since Craig gave me a CD of slides of the show, I couldn’t resist jumping the gun by posting an image.

Update: And here’s the wee review - I haven’t had a chance to expand on it as promised.

Plastic Casino is a dense thing. To simply list the influences and allusions Craig Mulholland has drawn together at Sorcha Dallas and in a former sewing factory space would take up most of the current issue [of The List].

In amongst the paintings, sculptures, murals and video works, though, there are recurring elements that provide a clue to the underlying structure of the show.

First comes a pair of paintings - Grey Ecology and Circuses & Bread - both depicting stubbed out cigarettes. The ashtrays are rendered in a knowingly ham-fisted photorealist style, the ash is Cubism-by-numbers, and fat Pop outlines are thrown in for good measure. Then there’s the artists’ palettes, painted over with hints of art history, from Suprematist geometrics to cartoonish speech bubbles. Finally, an arrangement of blocks is reworked, formally linking dystopian cityscapes seen from above, architectural maquettes and the agency of the human hand.

Add to that the presentation of paintings on squat plinths that practically ooze irony, and it begins to look as if Mulholland is sticking up two fingers in the face of a century of art history and saying, ‘Hey, Painting! Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!’

There’s much else to think on besides, from nods to the unconventional space’s status as a former sweatshop to a queasy examination of consumerism, but this show is about an artist engaging with his influences, mixing allusion and cynical appropriation.

There’s a fine line between hubris and chutzpah, and Plastic Casino is just on the right side of it.

It’s a neat little utility, and pretty - Panic are past masters at making applications that are as easy to use as they are good to look at - but, I thought, an utterly useless one.

After running it for a week or so, though, I’ve found it pretty handy.

On my 15” screen, the Menu Bar is incredibly cluttered, what with the built-in battery status, Airport signal strength monitor, clock and script menu; plus third party Menu Bar items, from the Salling Clicker to Audioscrobbler to MenuMeters.

Extracting some of these semi-useful bits and bobs to my Desktop in the form of Stattoo ‘capsules’ turns out to work wonderfully well. If the Desktop isn’t hidden by windows, I can, for example, see what’s playing in iTunes, or the next three appointments in iCal at a glance; if it is, tapping a user-configurable command key combination brings Stattoo to the front for a second, before it (very gracefully) fades away.

Some reviews have identified Stattoo’s main competition as Konfabulator. Panic developer Steven Frank doesn’t see it that way, and I’m inclined to agree. For one thing, Konfabulator is a framework for user-contributed Widgets, which range from simple clocks to daft puzzle games, while Stattoo provides a small selection of genuinely useful tools hard-coded into the application. For another, Konfabulator widgets tend to be interactive - site and web search modules are popular - and it feels like an application, whereas Stattoo simply displays information, and feels like a part of the OS (which might well be its downfall - Apple aren’t exactly shy of aping utilities that integrate so seamlessly). Aside from these intrinsic differences, for me there’s no competition, for one reason: on a small screen, Konfabulator is incredibly intrusive; even Mini Widgets are huge hulking things, and most Widgets share a rather OTT dayglo bubblegum aesthetic.

All that said, Stattoo needs work: some capsules just don’t work - the one meant to display recent emails seems to pick old messages at random - and it has a tendency to freeze up from time to time. With that in mind, and much as I like this little app, I’m not sure Panic can justify the $12.95 shareware fee. At least, not with the current set of capsules - if a future, more stable, version adds a CPU meter, network traffic monitor and a display of new messages in Mail that actually works, I’m pretty sure I’d pony up the cash.

For now I’ll take advantage of the generous unlimited free trial. You should too!

Last week my house was struck by lightning, and, with a rather exciting burst of blue electro-gubbins that made my hair stand on end, my ADSL modem blew up. It was, as far as I know, the worst ADSL modem in the world ever: the dreaded Speedtouch USB supplied by BT as part of a sinister bid to test Mac users in much the same way Our Lord tested Job. So the lightning strike was a boon.

Not having internet access to research the best replacement, I nipped to PC World and bought the first ADSL modem and combined wireless router I could find that said Mac OS on the box, a D-Link DSL-G640T.

It is brilliant.

Set up is beyond simple: First, connect the box into your ADSL line, switch it on, and fire up Airport. Then point your browser at its IP address, which gets you a simple web-based interface to enter the username and password for your ISP. That’s it.

Or, rather, that should’ve been it. I hit a snag at this point - I could ping the external IP address of the router, and connect to it and the other computer on the network, but had no joy when it came to accessing the world outside. This leads me to the real reason I’m shilling for D-Link: their technical support.

Usually, when I ‘phone tech. support, the person on the end of the line will run screaming at the mention of OS 10.3.3, even at the mention of Macintosh. Not so my man at D-Link, who, before I had a chance to explain the problem in full, said, ‘OS X? You set it up with Safari, I bet. Try Internet Explorer.’ I did. It worked, and we had a brief but illuminating chat about the shortcomings of Safari’s javascript engine.

Today (and this is the real real reason I’m shilling for D-Link), I had to ‘phone again, because I was having trouble with port forwarding. I serve up a little website from my old laptop, for when I’m out of the house, with my todo list, an archive of pieces I’ve written recently and the latest posts to Submit Response; but since I installed the DSL-G640T, it was nowhere to be seen, replaced by the router’s configuration interface. When I called to find out how to fix this, D-Link’s support person pointed out that I was being a bit of a thicko for not realising I couldn’t access the site from my local network by pointing at the external IP address (news to me) and offered to check whether the port forwarding was working as intended.

I told him my IP address and, after a brief pause, he said, ‘Why are you mirroring the Submit Response weblog? Do you read it a lot?’

So there you have it. Who cares if the DSL-G640T is a great, easy to use product? Who cares if the company’s technical support staff are helpful and well-informed? Not me, I just like them for giving my weblogging ego a colossal boost!

At last, something to fill the gaping void in the comedy schedules left by Little Britain: I Am Not An Animal. Written and directed by Peter Baynham (who has has a hand in almost everything funny on the television since 1995) and voiced by Simon Pegg, Julia Davis and Steve Coogan, it tells the story of a troupe of talking animals.

Bio-engineered in a sinister vivisection lab, the poor loves are doomed to live a life of loft-apartment luxury, with Heat magazine as their cultural barometer and an endless supply of Chianti fuelling dreams of visiting London. By the close of the opening episode, the gang have been freed by bungling animal rights vigilantes, left to find their way in the world.

As you might expect from a long-standing Chris Morris collaborator, the humour veers between sledgehammer bum-gags - two ‘My poo smells of sugar puffs’ scenes in one episode - and tickly little feather-duster subtleties, as in the titular nod to The Elephant Man.

The characters are wonderful, too. There’s Philip, a pompous intellectual horse, with endless gadgets allowing him to live the humanoid life. And Mark - my fave - the closet case sparrow with designs on the pop charts and an obsession with shoe trees. And a slutty self-styled femme fatale bulldog bitch, Winona, who has a crush on ‘the actor Tim Robbins.’

God, it’s just fabulous. View a short clip, right here.

Festival founder Sergei Teterin showed selected submissions from last year’s festival. The best of these was a piece that consisted of some simple instructions for setting up a default Windows screensaver, which bounces text around the screen. By choosing the lowest resolution and largest text size, and setting the text to a single full stop, the screensaver becomes a huge square that tries to bounce around the screen, but is too big to manage more than a few twitches. It doesn’t sound like much but this inventive ‘programming’ within the constraints of the default screensaver package was neatly matched by the frustrated, constrained square on screen. Unfortunately, I can’t find the submission details on machinista.ru, so can’t give credit to the artist(s).

Also of note: IXI’s set of music performance tools with novel interfaces. Lauki (screenshot) is the best of these. It allows you to manipulate and trigger samples by clicking and dragging coloured boxes around, affecting the pitch and timbre of the sounds. Seriously addictive.

Last but not least, Sergei showed off his latest piece: Mincer. It’s a table-top kitchen mincer modified to serve as an input device. Winding the mincer’s handle scrolls through images, turning a laptop into a hand-cranked projector. Fittingly enough, Sergei used it to screen excerpts from Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man With A Movie Camera, which prominently features the titular bloke furiously cranking his camera. It went on a bit, to be honest, but the concept is an interesting one.

For those who haven’t been bitten by the Launchbar bug, the utility allows you to launch applications, open files and display contact information from your Address Book, all with a couple of keystrokes. It even learns as you use it, quickly working out what application you want when you type a couple of letters, with an efficiency that is almost creepy.

Now, there’s competition in the form of Quicksilver, a free application that works in the same way as Launchbar, but with greater flexibility, more features and a choice of display options.

At first glance, this makes Quicksilver seem unwieldy in comparison to the elegant simplicity of Launchbar, which you can use out of the box, intuitively. After a few days use, and a bit of tweaking, I think I’ll be pimping the new kid on the block from now on.

Here, in no particular order, are a few reasons why:

• iTunes integration

  This is just amazing. Whack the command key combination you have set to invoke Quicksilver, type browse or itunes and up pops a listing of all your iTunes playlists. You can then browse them by typing initial letters, and hit return when you find a playlist you want to play, or move down a level to look for a particular song. That sounds a little complicated written out, but in practice, it means you can be playing a song within a split second. (The same applies to iPhoto Libraries too, if you use that to manage your photographs.)

• Window, Menu and Bezel views

  You can choose from three display modes for Quicksilver. The Window option is default, but makes the app feel more of a standalone thing, lacking the tightly integrated feel of the other options. For now, I’ve been switching between Menu, which layers the Quicksilver interface over your Menu Bar - a nice, neat option for those of us lacking screen space - and Bezel view. I’m leaning towards the latter, which is not unlike the centered pop-ups you see when changing volume or brightness settings, or Liteswitch X’s interface for tabbing through open applications. (Although the fact that many icons end up looking ugly and pixellated is putting me off a little)

• Clipboard Viewer, the Shelf, and Finder replacement

  Hit your Quicksilver command key combination, then Command-L and you get a view of the last ten items you copied to the Clipboard. I don’t need to explain how handy this can be. The Shelf is a feature I haven’t used much, because the slickness of the basic features almost render it unnecessary, but with Quicksilver running, tap Option-Command-S and you get a little place to keep stuff: just drag whatever you like there - files, folders, apps, contacts - for easy retrieval. Lastly, I hate using the Trackpad on my laptop, and there’s no room on my messy desk for a mouse, so I like to do everything from the keyboard. Quicksilver makes browsing the Finder as quick as navigating from the command line, but with all the advantages of graphical cues. You can, say, type a forward slash to start browsing from the top level, and find what you’re after by typing initial letters, or using the arrow keys, very quickly indeed.

• Launching URLs

  I can’t quite put my finger on this, but I quickly disabled URL launching in Launchbar, finding that the thousands of bookmarks available cluttered up results. With Quicksilver, and its little window displaying lists of choices, finding what you’re after is an easier proposition, and it seems to learn more quickly than Launchbar, figuring out immediately that when I type s I want to launch Safari, and when I type sr, it’s this website I’m after. A subtle difference, maybe, but one of several deft touches that are persuading me to switch.

• It’s cute!

  When I invoke Quicksilver, and type the first couple of letters of a friend’s name, up pops their photograph from Address Book. With a click or two of the right arrow key, I can launch their homepage, send them an email, or display their ‘phone numbers. It’s not more functional than Launchbar, but it’s a nice little touch, and shows the attention to detail the developers have put into maintaining the familiar look and feel of OS X.

So - and it almost pains me to say this - Quicksilver is the new essential OS X launching utility, and Launchbar is unlikely to keep its place among my Startup Items. I should say at this point that comparing the two is, perhaps, unfair: Launchbar is still the better simple launcher, but the extra features of Quicksilver just about make up for the fact that the learning curve is a couple of degrees steeper. And, where Launchbar is as stable as can be, there are still a few bugs in the Quicksilver beta, not least the annoying window layering quirks when using the Clipboard Viewer or Shelf.

The fact that it’s free and soon-to-be open source is not a clincher for me, as it might be for some. But, that said, having replaced Photoshop with the Gimp and installed OpenOffice in place of Word some time ago, if I now ditch Launchbar I’m fairly sure my computer will be completely free of commercial software and shareware, either stolen or paid for; exclusively running bundled Apple applications, freeware, donationware and open source software instead.

Even for someone who isn’t a raving open source evangelist, this feels pretty good. The open source underpinnings of OS X aren’t just a boon in terms of making for a vastly improved operating system. They allow those of us too fond of shiny, pretty things to move completely to an open source platform - however much we know it is, politically, the right thing to do - a chance to claw back all the cash those capitalist pig-dogs at Apple grub out of their users for hardware and software upgrades. Which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, A Good Thing.

Update: In a timely fashion, Quicksilver now has preliminary documentation, which reveals that it’s even more sophisticated than I thought, including features allowing you to move files around, manipulate them, even compress them. Wow.

First, Nudge is a Contextual Menu that lets you give the Finder a kick up the arse when you suspect it’s displaying out of date information. Handy.

Next, Ecto, the application formerly known as Kung-Log, has reached version 1.0. It’s a desktop weblogging client with some neat features, including full previewing of draft posts, integration with Address Book for managing notification lists and support for everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to remotely controlling a Movable Type installation. As I type this post in Ecto, I don’t think it’s worth a tenner, but by the end of the two-week trial I suspect I’ll be relying on it.

Finally, there’s Unison, a slick Usenet reader from Panic, the makers of Transmit, the fabulous FTP client. With four browsing options (one each for viewing messages, files, images and music), streaming MP3 previews and a lightening quick search it makes wading through the vast Usenet archives a doddle.

One does wonder where developers get the names for their products - ecto is Glasgwegian slang for those little pills so popular in the discoteques, and it’s hard not to think of the public service union when double-clicking on Unison.