Given the Gran Turismo team have spent upwards of 5 years digitising cars in hideous detail and that they seem to have extended the remit of the game from the racetrack to all aspects of driving, it’s strange that they haven’t been a bit more ambitious in terms of the cars they’ve chosen. Here are some cars I’d like to see in any impending update.

African Technical ‘War Wagon’

Generic African Technical. Not sure how the suspension would deal with recoil at 100mph plus

Recipe. Take one flat bed truck of some sort, favourite brand usually some kind of Isuzu, and add an unusually powerful anti-aircraft or anti-personnel ordnance. Garnish with a host of extraneous militiamen casually draped off the sides and drive at indiscreet speed all over the place.

It seems to me that the GT boys have missed a trick in failing to include any vehicles with offensive capability. It would certainly add spice to those awkward dodgem-like starts where autonomous cars attempt to run you off the track. Imagine running around one of the banked oval tracks blowing holes in the opposition.

German WW2 Half Track

Easy commuting for the German soldier. Notice the lame attempt at camouflage. Or maybe they're Xmas decorations.

Having spent many hours building Tamiya models, I am intimately familiar with the German half track or SD.KFZ.251/1. Given the team has already included the Kubelwagon typ 82 and Schwimmwagon typ 166, it seems obvious to extend the range of their WW2 offerings. Should add interest to the dirt and snow track racing. All in all it’s a bit like sprinkling Gran Turismo with a little bit of Call Of Duty‘s guns and ammo stardust.

American DUKW

Half Car, Half Boat. All I want for Christmas is the DUKW-la Prague Away Kit.

Continuing the WW2 theme, I’ve always liked the amphibious DUKW, which is surely one of the most unlikely cars around, kind of like the Duck-billed Platypus. This would add a whole new dimension to the GT world, allowing a range of steeplechase-like races with additional water features. Watch out for the hidden underwater mines.

Big, Big Monster Trucks

If you're going to have trucks, make mine a monster

Given the hell I had actually finding any kind of truck in the 1,000 plus used car lot, it seems obvious that what Gran Turismo is really missing is trucks, right proper monster trucks. The bigger and more monstrous they are, the better. Ideally we should have super armoured, grotesquely over-accessorised behemoths that we can run at one another in some kind of pit-like racing circuit. Forget laptimes and concentrate on ramming your truck into all the others like a bunch of demented Walruses on heat.

And While We’re On The Subject

If you're going to go down the idiot boy truck route...

If we’re going to be all macho American idiot boy about the whole truck thing, then we might as well have the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill. Imagine roaring around the online tracks armed only with this, most moronic of vehicles.

Being Serious For A Moment

Classic Grand Prix cars. Those were the days eh?

I always loved the classic Grand Prix of the 1960′s, with the cars shaped like crude guided missiles with go-kart wheels. These were epitomised by the movie Grand Prix starring James Garner of Rockford Files fame. The Gran Turismo team should extend its remit to the classic racing cars of these days. Almost like the reverse of the success CoD had in updating their WW2 setting. Kind of like a Grand Prix regression kit.

And Naturally There’s Bond

No well-dressed Englishman should be without one

Surely what GT5 is really missing is a whole pile of Bond related cars, some of the most recognisable on the planet. Take the Aston Martin from Goldfinger, with all the trimmings naturally. The oil-squirting defensive weapons would cause chaos behind you, while the ramming units mounted in the bumpers would add a certain je ne sais quoi to the AI’s bumpercar mentality.

And Bond

Dirt racing would never be the same again.

Or how about the moon buggy from Diamonds Are Forever? That would be class. Obviously it has a top speed of about 5mph, which isn’t that great, but the funky arms would be useful for taking out any of the opposition.

I vaguely recall a poster for Natural Born Killers that looked almost identical to this

Bloody Predictable Or What?

That Don Winslow, what a bastard. Just when you thought you were free of him, along comes another brutally compelling book to sink you for a day. I don’t think you really appreciate compulsion in an author until you’ve got a Winslow in your hands. They’re like a race. Once you start you’re committed. You just have to continue reading, even if it’s 4am, even if your eyes start feeling like they’re being grated, no make that have already been grated and you’re using just the stubby end bits of your optic nerve to tear meaning from the pages. It’s that satisfyingly painful.

Knowledge Is Power

Steve McQueen once said, ‘I don’t want to be the guy who learns, I want to be the guy who knows’, and Winslow obviously knows. Everything he writes is suffused with knowledge, places, people, cultures. Once you start reading you start believing. Not just that he’s been there, but that you are there. I once had a friend who was fixated on Lovejoy books (crap antique dealer as mystery solver drivel) because they came away from each book having learned something. Coming away from one of Winslow’s you don’t feel like you’ve learned something as much as been there and experienced it for real, that it’s as much a part of your life as it is part of his characters’. Whether it’s the surf culture of the West Coast, the Mexamerican drug cartels or the mysteries of the insurance investigation process, you come out of a Winslow feeling like you’ve been there, done that, got the expertise.

Unlike so many crime writers Winslow doesn’t pack his pages full of action, they’re not frantic races around seemingly arbitrary destination points. Neither are they filled with ever more bloodthirsty victim porn, with crimes ramped up to ridiculously sadistic levels to satisfy readers’ lusts. Instead there’s background, depth and character. Winslow’s heroes are true American heroes. They are the men who know, whose knowledge and commitment places them to the side of society, half outcasts through their own expertise.

California Fire & Life burns with arson, murder, revenge and a justifiable contempt for property developers. It’s a tale of playing and being played, of international crime and local intrigue and down at the end a smoldering passion. It will light you up in a second.

Over on the East Coast, David Simon pulled together some of the best modern American crime writers, men like George Pelecanos, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane and Ed Burns, and came up with The Wire, simply the most real TV show I’ve seen. If he was doing a West Coast version his first stop would be Don Winslow.

Crazy title, great book

In a world full of drugs, where obsessed readers gorge down on Lee Child, Michael Connolly and James Ellroy like they were amphetamine coated candy pops, discovering Don Winslow is like getting your first sniff of crack cocaine. It’s fast, it’s all encompassing and when you’ve finished voraciously cramming The Power of the Dog down you just can’t wait to get another hit.

This is a two and a half day book, which isn’t to say it’s short, just that it’s compulsive. You’re totally hooked on Don’s decades long epic on the rise and fall of the Mexican cocaine cartels and the attempts of the authorities to put them out of business. There’s corruption a-plenty along with lashings of claret and more containerloads of coke than you can shake a nosespoon at.

But it’s not the subject matter that’s so compelling as much as it is Don’s ability to craft real, believable characters, each of whom speaks with a wholly unique, identifiable voice. You sympathise with each of them, whatever their status, and their hopes, ambitions and fears all seem thoroughly real. In this way it reminds me of Ellroy’s LA Confidential, a grand, sprawling behemoth of a novel that interlinks story after story into a powerful narrative that evokes both time and place and gives you a sense of really being there in amongst the action.

This is one of those books you just devour and, having finally consumed it, immediately want to  begin again if only to recapture the sensation of reading it once more. Depending on your character, you’re torn between immediately lending it out to your very best friend so they can share the experience and never mentioning it to anyone and hoarding it all for yourself.  I’m of the former disposition and have already lent it and by god I’m almost regretting it. There’s only one thing left to do and that’s to get stuck into all Don’s other work. Like crack, one dose is not enough.

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Terrifyingly, these are the people who you want to run the government rather than the people who do

I mention this only because I’ve been getting into The West Wing – all seven series of it – and it’s been an interesting ride. It seems to start off almost as if the original pitch meeting was “it’s like Friends, but in the White House and with fewer laughs” only for it to develop into a Runyonesque political commentary. So there’s the spunky, irritating John Hughes chick who’s a little bit kooky, but somehow endearing and lovable (not lovable or interesting enough to make it to Season 2 though); the President who initially comes off like a cartoon Dubya Bush, but ends up redefining American politics, getting things done and achieving stellar approval points; the various policy makers who amazingly also manage to get things done and who seem to shed their initial personality quirks (like inadvertently sleeping with hookers for instance) as the seasons progress and somehow manage to make the country better; the ‘comedy couple’ who initially start as a parody of husband and wife and end up representing the humanity of the series; and the Press Secretary, who starts off all spin and flippancy, but ends up Chief of Staff, thereby defining the show’s move from spin parody to political seriousness.  By the end of Series 7 you’re left with a profound sense of the importance and gravitas of American politics. So much so that the entire final season, way the best of the bunch, is devoted to the campaign to replace the President. And it’s so enthralling, that you’re happy that one entire episode is a televised debate between the two candidates and that two are devoted to the election day itself.

But the moment that cracked it for me, the moment I saw through the glass and into the disturbing, reality blurring space beyond, was when characters from The Wire began to bleed through into individual or multiple episodes. Cedric Daniels, in a moment of pre-Wire policing, is a detective who is supervising a death scene. His wife (or possibly ex-wife by then) Marla is apparently moonlighting as the principal of an elementary school (could this explain her frigid relationship with Cedric during the early series of The Wire?). Assistant State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman obviously cut her teeth working for the Republicans up on the Hill, doing deals to secure appropriate legislation and judicial appointments prior to banging McNulty and then Cedric Daniels. Maurice Levy puts in a pre-corrupt lawyer appearance as a harassed White House adviser (obviously showing that eventually the profits of crime do entice individuals away from the honest legal system). Not even the Barksdales are immune from a little moonlighting from the running of their drugs empire. In case anyone was concerned about Brianna’s exact role in the Barksdale’s ever-expanding criminal empire and what she spent her time doing, it’s clear that she spends most of her non-crime minutes organising secret polling for political parties – the political equivalent of  highly deniable black ops missions.  I was relieved that the likes of McNulty, Bunk, Snoop and Omar didn’t make appearances otherwise I really would have been confused (or the plot of The West Wing would have taken a seriously violent turn).

It’s not that the appearance of characters from one series in another is that disturbing, after all Marcie from Alias and Commander Adama from Battlestar Galactica also make appearances (and we don’t really think it is Commander Adama), it’s just that you could believe that the rarefied world of Washingtonian politics and the crack-fuelled underbelly of Balitmorian law enforcement could collide in just such a surreal way. After all, if Major ‘Bunny’ Colvin can almost get a job running the security at Johns Hopkins (before incinerating his career prospects by attempting to legalise drugs) and President Bartlett’s daughter Ellie can study there, it’s not a great leap of faith to imagine that the two narratives could somehow link and intertwine.

The Roundhouse playing piana

We went off to see the David Byrne ‘Playing The Building’ installation at the Roundhouse during one of its ‘bring your own tambourine’ evenings, which had the potential for both awesome spectacle and truly painful knitted raffia music. The reality was a bit half and half. I felt a little let down by the installation. While it’s a great idea – a kind of artistic Einsteurzende Neubauten (go google them) without the full on destruction – I thought it veered too far in the direction of installation rather than an actual functional experience. You can see that the single piano-cadavered instrument sitting in the middle of the Roundhouse makes a fantastic image, stark, empty and a fusion of ancient and modern, but it would have been far more interesting to have more instruments controlling the sounds made by the building. Certainly more people would have been able to interact with it than were allowed for by the single piano and you’d have had a much more exciting, cacophonic experience.

It was, however, a genius idea to allow people to come in on certain evenings with their own instruments. Again, this could have been a recipe for disaster. Instead it was somehow incredibly touching and polite as bunches of people with guitars, tubas, those mouthy blow organ things that the guy in Gang of Four had, toy instruments and a variety of other wind and percussive things strolled around the space playing their own things, while trying not to overwhelm anyone else. And while it could have gone all Glastonbury porridge field, it somehow didn’t. Not my usual thing, but really good.

View from Arundel Castle

Meanwhile in my search for the perfect iPhone app, I’ve discovered two really sweet ones. The first is the carefully hidden tilt-shift filter in Photo FX (find it in Lens fx /depth of field). Tilt-shift being the effect that makes everything look like it’s a teeny weeny little model as exemplified by my favourite Monster Truck videos (see this post). While hardly perfect, it’s pretty good as you can see from these images. I would like to be able to alter the blur areas but that’s just being picky.

The other great app is iDrum Underworld. A bunch of Underworld tunes, including Cowgirl, Born Slippy and King of Snake, which you can mix up and use to create your own stuff. Really compelling and pretty addictive. As one review said, ‘This steals your life’.

I’ve also started to get back into running using my favourite social media site (or at least the one I’ve been most active on), Nike+. I’m using their now-working-pretty-well Coach facility, which has me doing very simple daily runs, although that will ramp up as the weeks progress. You can follow my attempts to get one leg in front of the other on Twitter.

Very, very blue. Roger Hiorns' Seizure.

Having managed to be nominated for a Turner Prize, or at least being responsible for having its creator Roger Hiorns nominated, it’s no surprise that the council who wanted to demolish this old council house block somehow haven’t quite got around to breaking it up. In fact you get the feeling that if they could only find a way to levy a charge on this it would cover the building of a few new decent homes.

Still, Hiorns’ Seizure, a copper sulphate encrusted house that’s well worth seeing, has been reopened (until October 18 2009). It does make you wonder what they’ve been doing with it since they closed it at the tail end of last year. Anyway, it’s great and you all should go and stand in line to get your feet into the now probably very scabby festival gumboots you have to wear to get inside. You won’t be disappointed (foot infections aside). More info on Shapeandcolour and here, oh and here too.

Frankly if Hiorns doesn’t win the Turner Prize, then the art people need their heads examined.

Squire Jules in his new headgear

Went out to see the medieval jousting at Arundel Castle, where the Boon were able to equip themselves in a style they could only previously have dreamed about – real swords, super-vicious gauntlets and some quality headgear such as this forward thinking child encasing unit – simply place the unit on child and watch them bimble about merrily for the next ten minutes heroically bumping into stuff left right and center. For double amusement equip child with a finely made longsword and back off quickly. We thought the Boon would be enthralled by the fine exhibition of olde worlde sword fighting and jousting, but it turns out they really raved over the castle, which was “A proper castle just like I wanted”. Best bit obviously being the Tower Guards’ outdoor toilet.

Meanwhile, the Lairds of Scunthorpe album has been developing at a pace over the summer. Currently there are 10 – 12 tracks being worked on, from material developed solely on the fantastic Beatmaker on the iPhone, to fully Logiced up songs with some neat beats. I want to get it to about double that before I start working out which ones to focus on.

As if this wasn’t enough I’ve been rewatching The Wire (like anything else is worth rewatching alright). Only this time I’ve added a new twist. I’m watching it in French with English subtitles. That way when I go over to France I’ll be able to talk in authentic Baltimore French, which I guess is a bit like McNulty’s genuine English. Spot On eh.

Daedelus and his magic box thing

Off to the ICA in Pall Mall to enjoy a night of Ninja Kicking madness with VanCam and Marie. When I bought the tickets for Marie’s birthday, I really didn’t know what it was going to be like other than it was a Ninja Tune evening and it was at the ICA. The latter is obviously a big plus point as it was here that I saw Einsteurzende Neubauten doing their now-infamous concert for machinery way, way, way back in the old days (like 1984 or something). They filled the stage with lots of plant machinery (cement mixers and the like) and proceeded to throw milk bottles into the concrete and tried to drill through the ICA floor with a pneumatic drill. When they finished after about 20 minutes, the audience were so excited they attacked the stage, destroying half of it and then escaped and went mad running up and down The Mall for the rest of the evening. It was brilliant and the nearest thing to a beautiful riot you’ll ever see.

So, nothing for the Ninja Tune team to live up to then. And plenty for it to live down because it could have been another two turntables and a cello catastravaganza like the last time.

First up, DJ Food. Pretty fucking awesome. That great mix of really kick ass beats and killer sounds, like the best bits of Pulp Fiction. A melange (and I don’t use the word lightly) of great sounds and rhythms. Sounds to cut shapes to. I was on the floor dancing for the whole hour.

Where to start with Daedelus? Well first off he’s got this box that is reminiscent of my favourite maschine (see past grazillion posts on the desireability of said Maschine), only his looks as though it’s a 16 x16 box, which is kind of like Maschine squared. Fuck knows how it works, but I’m guessing that it’s the same kind of sampler trigger/display thing. Anyway, this is what he plays. And it’s killer. Remember when Chemical Brothers just started and block rocking beats were new and exciting. That’s like child’s play compared to this. This is like bullish, ferocious, beat love. It’s half DJ, half performance, only there are no turntables, no records, only samples and this one guy. He’s like the Johnny Depp of music, half caricature, half genius and completely unlike anything else. I mean remember all those great sampler/synth bands and then remember how rubbish they were live, plinky plonking themselves through their tracks trying to be live bands (Depressed Toad) or DJs (Orbital). This guy is like a maestro in comparison. It’s samples, and beats and live and it fucking rocks.

Bus stop for Ninjas

So, phew. Ninja Tune pull it out of the bag and totally make up for poncing bloody cello woman and her rubbish DJ friend. There was a load of weird synchronicity going round too, something to do with the Plinth in Trafalgar Square or the like. London had gone into one of its collective periods of municipal madness. It reminded me of late nights after gigs when all the real people had gone home and the streets belonged to strange people (and that’s strange in every sense of the word). That kind of magic, this isn’t really a normal city feeling you only get on really special occasions. I got off the bus on the way home and saw this. I stood in the middle of the road taking pictures as the night busses tried to kill me. Never seen it before in my life. Next morning it was gone. I shit you not.

For one night there we were all Ninjas.

Large copper sulphate crystal from Roger Hiorns Seizure installation

The Kids Who Do Art were obviously very, very clever. Having had the contents of last year’s Turner Prize substantially dissed, they decided to ensure that this year’s nominations at least produced some interesting, albeit highly exclusive, art, rather than tedious monologues of string and manikins.

This time instead of nominating some oververbal, cliche ridden artphags, the Turner Prize people have nominated personal favourite Roger Hiorns (along with three other lucky losers). Hiorns, who poured anything between 60,000 and 90,000 gallons/litres/bathtubs of copper sulphate into a council flat to ‘see what happened‘, is everything the Turner people need after the tedium and torpor of last year. Most essentially he gets noticed outside the patronisingly oblique little artworld that the Turner people inhabit. Seizure, the copper sulphate council house, is fantastically compelling and emphasises that the most extraordinary, most relevant art today is taking place outside the confines of the galleries and museums the Turner people live in. The demand for spectaculars, whether it be Seizure or the recent grafitti under Waterloo station, far outweighs that for most retrospective showpeice exhibitions. Admittedly, at least one of the other nominees, Richard Wright, is interesting, but for my money it’s Hiorns’ to lose. I particularly look forward to seeing the Little Artists’ lego version.

Meanwhile, I’ve been adding to my overbearing web presence. In particular I’ve been forced (forced you understand) to upgrade my Flickr account. You can see all my pics from the copper sulphate house, along with a whole load of other stuff, most of which has been taken by and manipulated within my iPhone. I can’t wait for Apple to put together a halfway decent camera lens for it in the next release.

I was super happy to find out that after what seemed like three or four lifetimes worth of waiting, Powers volume 12 is out. I had worried that, as with many comics, I might have got bored during the interval and it would be a hideous disappointment, but I needn’t have wasted the worry. Powers 12 is the best volume yet, finalising the Deena Pilgrim story arc along with a bunch of in-the-wings characters. Overall it feels as bittersweet as the final episode of The Wire series 3, it’s hugely satisfying, but I’ve no idea where they’re going to take the series now. Pilgrim sitting on a beach somewhere feels very reminiscent of McNulty swinging a baton as he’s returned to the beat. Still in Bendis we trust. Like David Simon, he seems to have his finger on the pubic bone of the police procedural and is capable of playing it about at will.

Take the last Turner Prize, which supposedly reflects a body of work exhibited over a year. At least three quarters of that was unmitigated super-pretentious art wank (see the fine close up of the truly uninspiring Mannikin and String diorama from Cathy Wilkes). Even when it was explained by people from incredibly erudite art magazines who seem to still believe in the sort of pseudo-communist politico drivel that launched the Baader Meinhoff group it was still rubbish. At least the winner, Mark Leckey, had included a half hour movie in which he attempted to explain what the hell he was up to and was able to relate it to Road Runner cartoons.

So we’re left with the thought that actually most modern British art is pretty cruddy. And certainly if you drop down to the Tate Modern that’s pretty much what you’ll find, some pretty crud art that’s not very inspiring, set in a gallery that, the Turbine Room aside, is ill prepared to display art. Its rooms are too high and not wide enough and badly lit and I still can’t figure out why the escalators don’t go to all the floors.

In contrast the Saatchi Gallery is great. It looks like it’s been designed to show art, rather than just cut up to make a bunch of rooms. The space doesn’t attempt to overwhelm the art and it feels like it’s been intelligently lit. There are also multiple points of views in some of the rooms, with space to view the art from floor level and from above. And the art is, frankly, a lot better. Admittedly it’s not up to the class of personal favourites like Shark (see fantastic Lego version by The Little Artists (John Cake and Darren Neave)), Blood Head (more fab Lego) or, best of all, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s HELL (see super video), which single-handedly validates the many, many hours I spent ineptly making Tamiya models, but when it’s good, it’s a cut above Leckey.

The current Unveilled exhibition at the Saatchi gallery is challenging not only in terms of its opposition to Brit Mod, but also in terms of our perception of Middle Eastern culture. Installations like Ghost, with its ranks of space-blanketed worshippers, slowly bowing from the back of the room like a tsunami of genuflection, are both powerful and hilarious. Powerful in the sense that they demonstrate the scale and majesty of communal worship, a theme reiterated in Neal Stephenson’s latest novel Anathem (go read it); hilarious in so far as it looks like a host of Star Wars Jawas oogling the latest piece of technology they can steal.

And while there’s a lot that’s pointless and rather tedious in Unveilled – most of the paintings and the really childish Hey Look Here’s Palestine diorama – there are some great pieces. I enjoyed the plastic scultures of Diana Al-Hadid, which reminded me of City of Lost Children, the uber-detailing of Laleh Khorramian’s Eden, the architectural bits n bobs of Marwan Rechmaoui and the wild hairstyles and gowns of Hayv Kahramen. I wasn’t so keen on the disturbing dubious sexuality room.

There’s also the bonus of Will Ryman’s The Bed (a proper papier mache slap in the face to Tracey Emin) and the mad geezers who rule the world from the comfort of their wheelchairs. Could you want anything more?