Paperjam

What with me being about six months late on everything you may well have come across this already.

It shouldn't be all that funny cross-breeding pseudo-nasty Guy Ritchie gangster banter with Star Wars footage. However the excerpt here that involves Peter Cushing and an intercom has that stonehenge-esque power to make you piss yourself even on repeated viewings...

I lost many hours to the Amstrad CPC version of SimCity as a kid. Now that I don't have so much time to waste, what a brilliant idea to buy it all over again, for six quid off the Apps Store? Probably not.

By all accounts it's pretty much a version of SimCity 3000. Here's quite alluring office-y type woman from the tutorial. Oooh, she looks kind-of pissed off at me. Mmmm. Give me a slap, go on.

Slightly crappy typography but we'll let that slide for now - and not that I'm in a position to criticise.

During the tutorial dragging over the map is a bit of a, um, drag - your finger seems to get in the way. The secret seems to be to zoom in a bit more by pinching or double tapping. Here's me trying to shut up my demanding Sims by shoving in a bit of precious road - the circled arrows are the buttons you drag out.

Zoom right in and you get some detail, although it gets pixellated at the extremes. There's smoke stacks, traffic, mysteriously disappearing trains, and this Flea Market in the Commercial Zone.

As usual, Shitsville quickly started to fall apart when I took my usual hippy approach of building a public transport system alongside the road infrastructure. Briefcase wielding chappy looks unimpressed with my rail system. He goes on to say "personally I'd go with roads". Dammit, I'm trying to build the ideal town here.

SimCity ran impeccably, if a bit slowly on my 1st gen iPod Touch, which is reportedly the bottom of the bunch when it comes to performance. Other users have reported crashing on iPhones. The recommendation is generally to reboot your device before crying your shiny little eyes out in forums and blog comments. Zooming is a bit laggy, the pinch method is a bit slow compared to the double tap.

But it's great, if, you know, a bit pointless. There's already been a bit of whinging about the price being too high at £5.99, but how does it compare to the average DS game?

Also there's a whole load more; schools, water pipes, recycling, lots of advisors, taxes, ever increasingly ornate parks - all with the feeling that whatever you do, it's going to shit either way. It feels deeper than yer average quick and dirty iTouch game and it's worth it.

In a life full of glittering achievement (highlights including my cycling proficiency test, sitting through all of Revolver and the evening I spent with that foxy Iranian waitress who fortunately turned out to not be a bloke after all) one feat towers above the rest: If you whack “Animals That Swim” into Google then an article I wrote ages ago appears quite near the top. I realise this isn’t on the scale of solving the energy crisis or isolating the Higgs Boson, but it does make me happy.

In the five years or so since I posted that article a small but select group have left comments in support of my theory that ATS are indeed the most underrated band of all time. We even heard from the band too, which is almost certainly the most showbiz thing that had ever happened to me until I had occasion to enquire “You alright mate?” of a thoroughly bemused Henry Rollins a couple of months ago.

Relatively speaking the last eighteen months has seen a whirlwind of Animals That Swim related activity, so in dragging my lazy arse to the keyboard to actually write something, I thought what better way than to provide a bit of an update for any ATS acolytes that find their way here. Remember; they haven’t actually split up – they just haven’t recorded anything for ages.

- Hank Starrs appeared on the Art Brut single Direct Hit in a duet with Eddie Argos.

- Hugh Barker published a book called Faking It about authenticity in popular music, theres also an associated blog right here.

- A chap called Alex set up an actual proper ATS website with decent writing, a discography and everything - hasn’t been updated in a while, but dead good.

- Someone updated the band’s wikipedia entry to state that they had asked to play gigs in London in 2008 but, tantalisingly, “They declined, for the time being.”

- Hank Starrs made mention of a possible MySpace page while also mentioning that former bassist Terry De Castro had a page with a really very cool cover version of East St O’Neill on it.

- Someone known as Craydee75 actually slapped the video for Faded Glamour on youtube:

Now that my patience for film photos has waned, mostly due to the sheer cost of it - medium format is essentially a quid a shot - I'm liking this little photo-grunger-upper application called Poladroid. It's Mac-only for now, but they're promising a Windows version soon enough.

Here's the original photo, Emma outside the Old Bell Tavern in Harrogate (which by the way, is a fine pub...):

...and here's the vignetted, messed-up Poladroid-ed version.

So it's a bit daft and all and dead retro-y/regressive, but when digital seems so clean, it's understandable why people are going back to these effects. I half wonder whether in 40 years time todays' youth will be tightly JPEG compressing their photos down to get that shitty, blocky phone camera look.

We've seen these flyers lurking about the Tin Angel and been a bit mystified, but it's becoming clear.... A Thing About Machines is an audio/visual arts festival in dear old Coventry, happening from the 19th to the 21st September.

Artists include Andy Votel, Frog Pocket, film heroes 7inch cinema (who are running an all-day event in honour of electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire), Talking Birds, Modulate and more, all playing and arting about in some unusual venues, including The Crypt of St Mary's Guild Hall.

Tickets are £12 for the 7inch cinema/Sonic Boom events, get them over 'ere.

I went to see a load of art by the Chapman brothers a few years ago, the upshot being that it ended up annoying me quite a lot. However, I was definitely nowhere near that warehouse when it went up.

Jake Chapman has now partially redeemed himself in my eyes (yes, I imagine it will be quite a weight off his mind) with the video for You Lie You Cheat by Spiritualized. It seems to combine the attempted suicide from A Clockwork Orange with that Polanski film The Tenant. It also calls to mind that sketch in Jam about the man jumping out of a low window repeatedly rather than throwing himself from the top of the building - in case he changed his mind halfway through.

Whatever the antecedence of this camera-abusing short film, I really like it. See what you think. Great song too.