WFMU

Even though I am always talking about the cool apps I have - the general consensus on them tends to be people telling me that they suck.
But! I think I finally found one which is really amazing.
WFMU radio.it's free.and it's non-commercial.
You can listen to their live stream straight from New Jersey or listen to a bunch of their podcasts. I'm particularly enjoying the antique phonograph show.
If you want to waste a whole lot of time then start reading their blog.
Or go explore the Free Music Archive.

PRE SERVE

'Not I' by Samuel Beckett was introduced to me by my artist friend Alastair Frazer in a cafe in London that stocked copious amounts of preserves.
The monologue is an outburst mimicking as closely as possible the natural flow of consciousness of an elderly woman who was abandoned by her parents and has gone on to lead a loveless, lonely and traumatic existence.
The first time I watched it I found it really difficult but since seeing it then it has popped into my head over and over again. It's definitely haunting.

It'snotTHATbad

Private View #1

Check out the first in a series of blog posts written by two of the best people you could ever know.

http://betterneverthanlate.blogspot.com/2012/01/private-view-1.html

Their reviews of London private views and the Vyner Street 'First Thursday' party scene will no doubt be insightful, scathing and hilarious.
Keep following and Enjoy!

Egyptianreggae

Somebody who is definitely embracing his European frame of mind is Jonathan Richman. Kerry and I took my little sister to go and see him play in Cardiff this month. He may be 60+ but he can still dance better than any of the kids I know.

EuropeanFrameOfMind

When my friends and I are feeling kind of stressed out by life out we always say to each other 'you've got to get into your European frame of mind'. By that I think we mean the nonchalance, family values, passion for the more organic kinda things in life - like trees, food and sunglassess... I haven't summed it up very well and there's definitely some nostalgia in there to a time we weren't alive - but basically if you've seen any French new wave movies you know the kind of cool I'm talking about.
Shelley sent me this quote the other day and I think Umberto Eco makes a valid point about encouraging a European Sexual Revolution that encompasses all different communities:
"I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate."
So marry a French man and don't let the little things bother you. Remember, you can always just play your records, have a little beer, steal a cool car and take a walk on a beach somewhere.

Pina Dead Class

Shelley told me about the film Pina by directed by Wim Wenders in tribute to the choreographer Pina Bausch.
I'm not usually into dance related movies - mostly because the dance related movies I've seen happen to consist of 'Honey' and 'Step Up'...
This however is a whole other experience. The trailer lets on at how breathtakingly well it is shot and arranged.

It reminded me of the Polish artist Kantor's stage work called 'Dead Class'. The characters don't exactly dance in his work but they convey so much emotive dialogue through their actions and it is acutely choreographed by Kantor. The video is surreal verging on absurd but if you read around a little you can figure out what's going on well enough to realise it's brilliant. The concept behind the Dead Class is intensely profound but visually I think it corresponds to Pina well.

check an extract of the Dead Class here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7iuty_tadeusz-kantor-la-classe-muerta-dea_creation

DAYbroughtbackmyNIGHT

A new friend introduced me to the work of John Milton recently.
You can find different analyses of his sonnets online. I had to check out some essays to get the meaning down.
This one was recommended to me and is my favourite so far:

Sonnet XXIII
Methought I saw my late espoused Saint 
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave, 
Who Jove's great Son to her glad husband gave, 
Rescu'd from death by force, though pale and faint. 
Mine, as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint 
Purification in the old Law did save, 
And such as yet once more I trust to have 
Full sight of her in Heav'n without restraint, 
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind; 
Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight 
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin'd 
So clear, as in no face with more delight. 
But Oh! as to embrace me she enclin'd, 
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night. 

i can't care bout anything but you (lol)

A video comparison outlining the importance of the tape player in modern culture.

W.A.R

Women Art Revolution, 2011, dir. by Lynn Hershman Leeson, is an exploration of the underexposed feminist art of the twentieth century. It's a view into the 1960s feminist movement against the anti-war and civil rights movement. It's a collation of feminist actions against major cultural institutions. It's the older generation of women artists sticking it to the man.

Inspired by the film I'm going to write a post about each of the 39 women who sit at the table of Judy Chicago's installation 'The Dinner Party', currently in Brooklyn Museum.

the richness of our own neighbourhood is the exception

Ray and Charles Eames - Powers of Ten, 1977

Influenced by Kees Boeke's - Cosmic View: the universe in 40 jumps, 1957

Analysed by Mark Dorrain 'Adventure on the Vertical', Cabinet Magazine, Issue 44, 2012

'Beyond its ostensibly educational function, the film does two somewhat contrasting things. Firstly, insofar as it is a dream sequence - a monstrous sleep of reason or perhaps even a 4 dimensional nightmare -it pictures a kind of vertiginous, abyssal collapse of the everyday reality with which the film begins....On the other hand, when we see it within the Cold War corporate and national context in which it was conceived and developed, Powers of Ten with its visual rhetoric of voyaging through scales, across outer and inner space, aimed ultimately at the core of the atom - might also be read in terms of the domination and control of the realms that it pictures....Here we can experience why it is important that we first go outward.'

Reminds me of Ilya Kabakov, the man who flew into space from his apartment, 1985

The hero with cosmic visions is restricted to the power of fantasy. Only sometimes does the wish to escape allow us break through even the most concrete of confinements. The beauty of the escape is soon dampened when one realises that if the hero lives within a totalitarian stricture then his mind's fantasy will only ever be prescribed by what has been shown. The Utopian limbo that the hero travels to is only a montage of what he has been shown to him in movies/books/television. Therefore the hero's vision of utopia is a controlled and controllable escape space.The freedom is a facade as the fantasy is always transient and uninhabitable. The hero will always fall. No matter how far in or out we go we are still consumed by a powerful other, in some shape or form.

FullyInappropriate

I'm helping the Swansea Women's Centre and the Swansea Feminist Network in what is currently a written protest to stop the council from allowing a fully nude table dancing club to open in the city centre.

Rates of rape and sexual harassment around areas where there are clubs like these are significantly increased. Their plan to open this club right near to Swansea's biggest underage drinking street is completely ridiculous. Women shouldn't have to avoid an area in fear of verbal or physical harassment. It also provides a predominantly male only zone in which women are projected as sex objects. Job prospects in South Wales are low - a woman shouldn't feel like the best way of making money is to strip. It's demeaning and societally digressive.

Here is the page where you can download a template letter:
http://swanseawomenscentre.co.uk/2011/blog/nude-dancing-club

and here are some email address you can send it to:
evh.licensing@swansea.gov.uk
julie.james@wales.gov.uk
geraint.davie@parliament.uk
jamessc@parliamnet.uk
chris.holley@swansea.gov.uk
erika.kirchner@swansea.gov.uk
alan.lloyd@swansea.gov.uk
david.phillips@swansea.gov.uk
keith.marsh@swansea.gov.uk
planning@swansea.gov.uk

Please pass the message on to anybody you know who will oppose this. Even if you agree with what happens inside the club, think about the location and the danger it puts mothers, daughter, sisters, girlfriends etc in.

Just Kids

Everybody I know who has read this book can only comment on its life changing quality.
Patti Smith lived free and feral. If you need some justification on following creative instinct, even if it's leading towards poverty then this book will justify all your inherent yearnings to continue.
Here's a couple of extracts to tease:
(Patti on her early days with robert Mapplethorpe)

'We got the subway out to Brooklyn found the key and let ourselves into the apartment.

We both fell shy when we entered, not so much because we were alone together as that it was someone else’s place. Robert busied himself making me comfortable and then, in spite of the late hour, asked if I would like to see his work that was stored in a back room. Robert spread it out over the floor for me to see. There were drawings, etchings, and paintings. Paintings and drawings that seemed to emerge from the subconscious.

I had never seen anything like it. We looked at books on Dada and Surrealism and ended the night immersed in Michelangelo. As dawn broke we fell asleep in each other’s arms. When we awoke he greeted me with his crooked smile, and I knew he was my knight.

As if it was the most natural thing in the world we stayed together, not leaving each other’s side save to go to work. Nothing was spoken; it was just mutually understood.'

'I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realised it was a tremendous stroke of luck to wind up there. We could have had a fair-sized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. A week or two after we moved in I waltzed into the El Quixote. It was a bar-restaurant adjacent to the hotel, connected to the lobby by its own door, which made it feel like our bar, as it had been for decades. Dylan Thomas, Terry Southern, Eugene O’Neill and Thomas Wolfe were among those who had raised one too many a glass there.

I was wearing a long rayon navy dress with white polka dots and a straw hat, my East of Eden outfit. At the table to my left, Janis Joplin was holding court with her band. To my far right were Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, along with members of Country Joe and the Fish. At the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendrix, his head lowered, eating with his hat on, across from a blonde. There were musicians everywhere, sitting before tables laid with mounds of shrimp with green sauce, paella, pitchers of sangria, and bottles of tequila. I stood there amazed, yet I didn’t feel like an intruder. The Chelsea was my home and the El Quixote my bar. There were no security guards, no pervasive sense of privilege.'

Don't you want me BABY?

Dead To Me - Bangers - Nozzle - Human Project
Mozarts - Swansea - 26 February - £5 adv
Here's a poster that I designed to be screen printed for a gig at the end of Feb.
The face on the left is a drawing of the eighteenth century sculpture by Austrian artist Hans Xaver Messerschmidt which I wrote about on this blog a while back.
You can buy the poster at the gig and probably online somewhere eventually too.
I originally wrote Human League instead of Human Project on the poster - what a bloody crazy mistake.

Miss E

Sophie Percival is one of my best friends.
She graduated from Chelsea in 2011.
She's the only person I know to have ever recreated Dream Theme Hospital as a performance/interactive installation.
All her photographs are available to buy, you can contact her through her website:
www.sophiepercival.com

QUEENIE

beetBEATbeetBEAT

san ya ee vek o vitch

A Sanja Ivekovic retrospective titled 'Sweet Violence' is on at the MoMA, NY, until 26 March 2012.
I'm pretty excited to have the oppurtunity to go and check it out next week.

Here is an extract from my undergrad dissertation that briefly sums up Ivekovic's work from the 1970s:
'Pretty Vacant: Narcissism and Feminist Activism'
Iveković’s most powerful works address the issue of the representation of women in the ‘public’ sphere and the way that this affects a woman’s behaviour in her ‘private’ life. She demonstrates an acute awareness of the way that mass media and systems of power can manage behaviour and influence identity. As a politicised female artist she harbours a sensitivity to the influx of images from magazines, newspapers and television that confront women daily. Using her own body and life experiences, Iveković shows the viewer how her own identity has been, often unconsciously, defined by these systems of power. She develops her work to show the ambiguity of these prescribed public concepts of what is ‘desirable’ and ‘normal’, thus revealing the subtlety and absurdity of their influence on gender identity. As well as addressing the many influences on the construction of a feminine identity, she confronts the issue of how a woman is then supposed to behave in the ‘public’ sphere and how this can cause anxiety in the ‘private’ life; a continually bouncing reflection. Iveković creates a dialogue between the social and political circumstances of her country and contemporary societal pressures felt by her generation of women, unveiling the inequalities that all women suffer under patriarchal systems of power.
Artworks created by Iveković in the 1970s often subverted the notion of the perfect female by revealing the lack of control that women were asserting over their identity and behaviour. They revealed how a former socialist Yugoslav society, newly saturated with mass media images, celebrity pictures and no exemplary female role models, threatened to produce a generation of unoriginal, narcissistic and idle women. Iveković chose to confront, rather than escape these problems. In playfully conceptual artworks the artist subverts messages from the cosmetic advertisements that visually saturate a woman’s life. She manipulates the intended use of actual beauty products in order to show her condemnation of their identity-forming potential and reveal the absurdity behind a woman’s fascination with such objetcs.

The key to the impact of her work, for me, is the confrontational aspect of her feminism, rather than the escapism I think we see from so many artists today.