Paperjam

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.

If only Rover had thought of this, maybe they would still be making cars at Longbridge. Yes, we are really going to attempt to drive this around Europe next week. Painting the car involved the following meticulously planned and executed steps:
1. Heated artistic conversations on what was going to look good splattered across a burgundy Rover 620 bonnet in the cheap gloss section of Do It All.
2. Trying to put down wafer thin plastic sheeting in a force ten gale - at one point Ray did a fairly good impression of Laura Palmer.
3. Freezing our collective tits off covering all the vulnerable bits of the car in a chaotic mix of masking tape and old newspaper.
4. Me throwing paint all over the car, my shoes, my trousers and, in a final act of punk nihilism, my hair - the others daubed in a thoughtful and all together more sensible manner.
5. Running away like kids when anyone turned up in the rather private looking car park where the operation was carried out. The CCTV tape will be hilarious.

Once the second snow storm began we retreated to the warmth of the pub, but not before I enjoyed a happy half hour in the shower, scrubbing my head with fairy liquid - I got some funny looks later, probably people who work in kitchens.

Returning to the scene of the crime several hours/pints later, we were amazed at our artistic prowess. Returning to the scene of our amazement the next morning I was impressed at how much of a crime we had committed.

Get yourselves over to http://www.justgiving.com/nickjimrayinarover if you haven't already.

The latest in the Unilever series of big art installations at the Tate Modern (which has also included the amazing - yet fucking hippy behaviour inducing Weather Project, the spooky Raw Materials and the big slides that I never got to have a go on) is Shibboleth by the Columbian artist Doris Salcedo.

It is a big crack that runs the length of the mighty turbine hall and as far as I can tell does two things:

1) Creates a imperfect and slightly disturbing flaw in what is a huge and imposing formal space. A reminder that anything no matter how big or grand is subject to physical laws of stress and decay.

2) Provides an area for kids to trip over and fall partially into, while their parents say things like "Tarquin! Wilhemina! don't do that" while making no attempt to stop them at all.

From checking up on the Tate web site the work is actually about "the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built" which you can sort of see. However it is also said to address and comment on issues of racism, which I must admit I am struggling to get my head around.

Still, it is quite interesting and worth dashing in to see if you are knocking around the south bank in the next six months. Not nearly as affecting as some of the previous entries in the series though. The dozen irish blokes who turned up with a crate of Guinness and an accordian player looked particularly confused.

Modern communications technology is growing at an astounding, almost exponential rate and the effect it is having on society is both profound and exciting:

• The incredible take-up of digital TV means extra choice for viewers. It is estimated that every 28 seconds a new channel is launched featuring people who failed to get on Big Brother fronting for premium rate phone competition lines.
• High speed broadband advancements means that a broader and better defined amount of hard-core pornography is instantly available to anyone who wants it. The state of the nations hedgerows has improved immeasurably.
• Social networking web sites are bringing people of all ages, racial and religious backgrounds together in unity to trash house parties on a scale that was previously thought unworkable.
• The abstract and depersonalised nature of E-mail, SMS and IM mean that people who have historically found it hard to develop relationships (such as animal fiddlers, nonces and sexual harassers) are now able to express themselves freely and without fear of society's ridicule.
• Multimedia phone messaging allows the immediate expression of ideas and news, such as me finding out that my constant procrastination regarding going on the big cool slides at the Tate modern has finally meant that they have taken the fucking things down before I got to have a go. Shit.

I can't think why I've never been to the Electric Cinema before.

Well, I can actually - years back it used to have dummies strapped to the windows high up on the front of the building - which made it look like a rather diseased fleapit.

Anyway, it's a rather lovely old fashioned cinema, with two screens. The most important bit is that you can take beer into the auditorium with you, important for the Flatpack shindig last Friday, Hocus Focus.

First up was hairy man Andy Votel playing a fabulous selection of blasting funk from the non-English speaking world. We've love a playlist, it was outrageously good, and happened to fit in nicely with the random visuals, including Serge Gainsbourg creeping around some young lady, as per.

Now then, now then. I can't speak for Jim, particularly as now it's likely he's ponced off to model for Storm given some of the recent photos he's been taking of himself, but this half of paper-jam likes stuff that straddles the art/pop divide. Voice of the Seven Woods take on soundtracking Armenian film "The Colour of Pomegranates" came down on the art side, and felt heavy going. It didn't help that the film was heavily chopped up, so it made possibly less sense than it might've - although the patina of the film and the photography was lovely.

Talking of perfect art/pop, Broadcast were on next, and blipped and blooped their way through their DJ set with a radiophonic selection, including Delia Derbyshire's tapelooped alien chantathon "Zi-weh zi-weh zi-weh oo-oo". Trust me, it's a space-drone-pop winner.

The final thing on the bill was "Valerie and her week of wonders", the tale of a rather lovely young girl who has her first period, which then leads to a surreal world of sex, adventure, vampires, getting burned at the stake, magic earrings, yknow - the usual stuff.

Again, it looked great, the soundtrack was great in parts (could see why Broadcast had been inspired by it), but even at only 73 minutes long it dragged, and had us lost in parts. Particularly the lesbian scene with the "married" woman, what happened there? Afterwards we found out that the actress that played Valerie in the film was in fact fourteen at the time, which made me feel rather dirty.

All in all, we'd have to stick our necks out and admit it was hard going at times, but we wouldn't change 7 inch cinema's aesthetic for the world, we need them around.

A big, dual-thumbs-up from paper-jam for the rather vertiginous Patrick Hughes exhibition at the Waterhall Gallery over in Birmingham.

The above photo isn't really going to help you appeciate it any, but the canvasses are 3-dimensional in such a way as to complement the image, and give it the effect of real depth. It can make you feel a bit queasy as you walk up to a painting of a room, only to have it swing around violently as you move your head.

Also we recommend watching everyone else in the gallery looking at the pictures, bobbing around and looking generally confused. Try and avoid going when there's a bunch of bloody schoolkids though, they kept walking up to the paintings and touching them, which broke the illusion somewhat.