made in china '69: life and culture in east london

A day of fantastic art in Central London: Bianca Brunner, Mona Hatoum, Diana Thater

2011-03-15T13:53:00.008Z

On a rare day off work [as a freelancer you take the work when it's there] I went to see three art shows in Central London. The choice of galleries was determined in a large part by proximity as I had a limited amount of time and galleries two and three were close by the one show I definitely wanted to see. As a criteria it seems as valid as any other.

The first show was Diana Thater: Chernobyl at Hauser and Wirth on Piccadilly. I only went in as I was passing but I like the way that the overlapping video projections montage themselves in the space that's been constructed for them. By placing the projectors in the space, cross-projecting so to speak it's almost impossible for the spectator to not be in the space of the work. I didn't really understand the work itself, the loaded title is hugely suggestive of some kind of meaning, but I loved the mix of static video shots and hand held travelling ones. This is taken from the press release I didn't read:

A new video installation by Diana Thater fills the interior of Hauser & Wirth's Piccadilly gallery with images of the post-nuclear landscape of Chernobyl. For this work, Thater spent time in the 'Zone of Alienation' which surrounds the site of the nuclear disaster, filming the eroded architecture and wildlife of the one-hundred mile wide radioactive territory. The animals she films have managed to survive amid the devastation of the only existing post-human landscape, demonstrating a wilderness of man's making. The installation focuses on the rare and endangered Przewalski's Horse. Once facing certain extinction in its native habitat in central Asia, this sub-species of the wild horse now roams freely in the 'Zone of Alienation'.

The desolate remains of an abandoned movie theatre in Prypiat, a city founded to house the Chernobyl nuclear plant workers, form the backdrop of Thater's installation. The city's decomposing architecture is juxtaposed against the footage of the wild animals living in the 'Zone of Alienation'. Through this installation, visitors experience a world where a man-made catastrophe has abruptly halted all progress and animals inhabit an irradiated landscape. Overlaying physical and filmic spaces, Thater confronts the successes of civilisation with its profound failure.

I think the show is actually better than the press release lets on. The second show was Bianca Brunner as 401 Contemporary in Mason's Yard which is the show I'd planned to see. There are lots of shows you can talk about and make them sound good, there are few shows that you go and see and they completely blow you away and at the end of it nothing really needs to [or perhaps can] be said. I admit that unless you saw the show or know Bianca Brunner's work then that isn't much help. The show mixes a few colour shots with black and white ones. Pithy, not usually a word seen in art show reviews, is probably the best description of seemingly simple images doing a lot. It's a difficulty the press release struggles with. So what would I say? Brunner's pictures make you aware of the act of looking at photographs, how it differs to the kind of seeing we do in our day to day lives abstracted from the ordinary and the tangible. There's an essay available from Brunner's website [Brian Dillon 'All That is Properly Perceived', Bianca Brunner, Gap in the Real, Published by Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG 2010] that may help or you'll just have to take it on trust. The work really is that good. This is my favourite [Bianca Brunner Sky, 2008, Silver Gelatin Print, 50 x 35 cm, Edition of 5 + 2 AP] from the show [my not very good camera phone pic will have to do until you get a chance to see it]:

The last show, just a brief mention, is the Mona Hatoum at White Cube Mason's Yard. I'd seen Hatoum's equally stunning piece at the Whitechapel the week before and the cumulative effect and the idea of the these pieces co-existing in different parts of London is something that really appeals to me. The works play with location in a way that's unique to installation and sculpture.

BTW, there's a piece on the ArtsDesk website that's talking about the Hatoum show but is how I felt about the Brunner show. In summary it's arguing that the twaddle that gets issued as the accompanying press release to shows like this does the art no favours draining the poetic space away from the viewer's relationship to the work. It's the reason I generally don't read them.

Central Line, 13 September 2010

2010-09-14T18:36:00.002+01:00

Heading home on the tube I've taken a leaf out of Rockmother's book and started taking pictures of fellow travellers. This is Hipstamatic on the iPhone.

Even a klutz like me takes good pictures with Hipstamtic (sung to a 'fifties US TV jingle).

Eastside projects, Birmingham: Cerith Wyn Evans

2010-08-12T13:22:00.002+01:00

Artist Cerith Wyn Evans (from Llanelli) looking like a demented James Ellroy (if such a thing is possible). To be fair to the artist hearing him talk on the video the still's taken from he sounds a lot like a demented James Ellroy.

Here's a picture of James Ellroy, one of my favourite authors. You decide.

Good Reads: The Big Sleep (or Le Grand Sommeil as Guillaume would call it)

2010-07-01T16:43:00.002+01:00

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
There's a very reasonable chance that any page of this book is better than the book you're currently reading. Genius.

So way only 4 stars instead of 5, you may ask? As I get older I'm less sure than I was that books can transcend the limitations of their genre. Crime is a great genre and this is a great book but it ain't Updike.

Discuss.

View all my reviews >>

Wednesday 26 May 2010: Toby Young is a Mitchell brother

2010-05-26T16:09:00.007+01:00

Arseholes. Fucking arseholes, fuck the lot of them.

Haircut.down.the.market.

Toby Young on last night's Newsnight looked like a Mitchell brother. I was going to say a posh Mitchell brother but I realised he looked worse than Grant, so like the middle one. Not the poshest but not the scumiest. No one does lowlife like Phil Mitchell.

Not today's link, yesterday's, and then it became last night's. The girls next door made it and brought it round. How good is that? I love my neighbours.

Moctezuma at the British Museum

2010-01-21T14:11:00.001Z

Moctezuma
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Probably not worth £12, worth £6. If you don't go, wait a bit. A lot of the best stuff (like these masks) are actually in the British Museum collection and will reappear there eventually.

My friend Maria's FashionvFashion site

2009-12-10T19:58:00.004Z

I've been looking at my friend Maria's new fashion blog: fashionvfashion. She's been asking me for tips on how she should make it more search friendly as it doesn't show up in any search engines. We had a long conversation and then I realised she'd only just made it. I explained how Google's elves probably hadn't got round to looking at it as yet.

She has pics of Brooke Shields on her blog.

Viggo Mortensen at Bafta Q&A with Francine Stock

2009-10-18T11:15:00.001+01:00

Viggo Mortensen at Bafta Q&A with Francine Stock
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Went to a Q&A with Viggo Mortensen (well, I went with Yol actually) at Bafta last night. What a nice man! Generous in praise to his colleagues, thoughtful, self-deprecating. We're going to have a small Viggo Mortensen retrospective in his honour round at our place later this year.

Tom Ford, Colin Firth and Jason Solomons at Bafta

2009-10-16T15:45:00.005+01:00

Tom Ford, Colin Firth and Jason Solomons at Bafta
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Saw Tom Ford's quite amazing debut feature A Single Man at Bafta last night. It's based on a Christopher Isherwood story following a single day in the life of a ~~lietrature~~ literature professor at a Los Angeles university. The film's magical and most reminded me of Steve McQueen's Hunger and Julian Schnabel's Diving Bell and the Butterfly in that all three were made by non-directors who're hugely successful in their own fields. There are moments of real freshness of vision that it's hard to imagine them coming from a battle-hardened Hollywood director.

There was a Q&A with Colin Firth who plays the university professor and the director Tom Ford. Sadly it centred too much on the fact that it's Ford's first feature and the problems that might have created. When a film's this good you know it's no fluke and the result of a real determination and vision.

The other slightly irritating thing was the near constant returning to the idea of it being a gay story rather than one of loss, loneliness and how we might find redemption which far overshadows the sexuality of the cast. Similarly, there were several questions to Firth about a straight man playing a gay character and how that works. Er, he's an actor for fuck's sake - they pretend, it's what they do!

There was an interesting moment when in describing the fact that Nicholas Hoult's mohair jumper need Tom Ford's constant attention with hairspray to stop it fluffing up (fashion tip!) Colin Firth said something like "You can see from that Nicholas is very secure in his masculinity." What caught my attention is that he said "masculinity" when I think he perhaps meant "sexuality". So not "heterosexuality" versus "homosexuality", which is the usual binary opposition that is made, but one of "homosexuality" versus "masculinity". Does this mean that male homosexuals can't be masculine?

Finally the beautiful John Lautner house (more pics) that was used in the film is for sale.

Flying to Perpignan

2009-10-14T14:25:00.001+01:00

Flying to Perpignan, originally uploaded by Catfunt.

Ryanair flying near to the ground. Apparently it uses less fuel.

Grayson Perry book signing at Victoria Miro, 2009

2009-10-13T18:03:00.002+01:00

Grayson Perry book signing at Victoria Miro, 2009
Picture byCatfunt - no stealing!

Went to Grayson Perry's opening at the Victoria Miro gallery last week. He'd had some insane tapestries made and he signed some books.

Fossils radically alter ideas about the look of man's earliest ancestors

2009-10-02T17:58:00.000+01:00

From the LA Times. Looks like she had a good night out.

Matthew Barney by Elizabeth Peyton at the Whitechapel

2009-09-25T17:33:00.001+01:00

Matthew Barney by Elizabeth Peyton at the Whitechapel
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Saw this a few nights before it closed. I'd never really thought about Peyton's work before and I'd never seen a lot of it together which means I'd never properly realised how influential her work is. Looking at it made me want to go home and paint and I think that's probably the highest accolade I'm giving out at the moment.

Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges - Farocki (1989)

2009-09-23T17:43:00.001+01:00

Harun Farocki

Catfunt Wordle Twitter: Three giants of the internet

2009-08-28T15:08:00.003+01:00

Fuertaventura

2009-04-10T16:41:00.002+01:00

Back from holiday I decided to try and make the pics a bit more interesting by mashing them up with some Lomo and Holga effects scripts. The scripts (available here) are pretty good and the guy who wrote them has said it's OK to mess with them. I did tweak them for each picture otherwise you do get Donatella-ified: totally overdone and distracting from the thing you're meant to be looking at. Pics here.

Glenn Ligon at Thomas Dane

2009-03-06T16:54:00.007Z

Typically for me and disappointingly for you I went to see the excellent Glenn Ligon show at Thomas Dane the day before it finishes. It's a small show consisting of one room with a film-transferred-to-video projection; a larger room with a single large scale neon light and a corridor space with two small neons and three drawings made of oil stick, coaldust and gesso on paper. The central piece and the one that offers the most clues is 'The Death of Tom', the 24 minute long video set to a jazz piano soundtrack. It's based on the final scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin, Edwin S. Porter's 14 minute silent made for the Thomas A. Edison studio in 1903. Ligon had set out to recreate Tom's death scene where Tom lies on the floor of the woodshed while visions of the future pass over his head. However, after the film was processed the images were both blurred and degraded but Ligon, liking the chance effect pressed on and transferred the 16mm film to video and added a commissioned score by pianist Jason Moran based on the vaudeville song 'Nobody'. The video is very dark, an all-black screen interspersed with flashes of light, so dark in fact that there's a real likelihood of falling over the viewing bench in the middle of the floor. What could be pure visual abstraction is held together by Jason Moran's plaintive soundtrack and the darkness of the room becomes a place for contemplation of what the gallery notes, quite correctly, call 'unfinished business'.

Private Eye: Kangaroo

2009-02-19T12:00:00.004Z

From the mighty Private Eye.

The end of the project

2009-02-05T16:01:00.002Z

There's something strangely sad and a little poignant about seeing a stream of meeting uninvites pop up on your screen in the last days of a defunct project. It's the bit they don't show you in Downfall.

The smartest journalist in town

2009-02-04T17:25:00.006Z

Killing the Kangaroo: a bad case of analogue thinking in digital Britain

"Killing the Kangaroo project is a perversely stupid move which begs the question whether anyone on the Competition Commission has ever actually used the internet.

Viewed from one direction, the project looks enfeebled: the commercial video on demand service for the UK terrestrial broadcasters excluding Five seems like a somewhat lightweight offering compared with the global well of video output currently freely available online."

Read more>>

By way of some resolutions

2008-12-27T18:14:00.003Z

Having some time off work leads naturally enough to spending some time thinking. Not necessarily high quality thinking but this is what I've come up with so far (somewhat spontaneously and more for my benefit than yours and in no set order):

* The Modern Defence as the universal answer to any move by white (Steve, that's 1...g6 regardless of what white does).
* Read a book about the Modern Defence (or just make it up as I go along - the jury's still out on this one).
* Persist with The English as the universal white opening but with a more aggressive bent.
* Look at endgame play. Basically if I haven't won (or lost) when there's still a reasonable amount of material on the board then I will once we get into the endgame.

* Read more books.
* Read less shit books.

*Watch more films.

*Spend more time painting.

So this is what I have so far. Should I surmise certain facts from the fact there are whole areas of life that aren't covered? There's no mention of relationships, friendships and social stuff. So should I assume that all these areas are OK or just that I'm ignoring them? Maybe I'll go and think about these things next.

The picture, BT, is of Mikhail Tal.

Things I like today

2008-12-10T18:20:00.004Z

Because I'm essentially a very very ~~lazy~~ busy person I've started a much smaller bite-sized blog on Tumblr that you can have a look at. it's called 'Things I like Today' and the idea is that it makes me do something nice everyday or failing that think about the things that I like doing or even just things that make me happy (sometimes).

Check out 'Things I like Today'.

Awopbopaloobop, Transition

2008-12-01T23:00:00.001Z

Awopbopaloobop
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

This is the painting that I did for the current show at Transition. This is what the website says about the show:

The synthesis of music and art has a long history from pop to post modern, with particular songs becoming integral to the making of individual pieces of work. As Peter Doig recently remarked when asked if he listened to music whilst painting, 'don't all artists?'

Lyrics can develop a particular artistic poignancy and with this in mind Transition have asked over sixty artists to make a new work inspired by a favourite lyric for the show Awopbopaloobop.

My lyric is from Robert Johnson's Rambling on my Mind: "I got mean things, I got mean things all on my mind."

Things I like today...

2008-12-01T17:38:00.003Z

The Wrestler: Mickey Rourke has the hair to end all hair (think David van Day meets Nicola big-tits-whatever-her-name-is) and is stunning as an aging wrestler in this new wave-ish Darren Aronofsky film.
Places to eat: Tre Viet near me and Soho Japan (for the lunch specials) in town.
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill: mostly for the cricket and Trinidad in New York.

It's Rod not Rob, Campaign

2008-11-21T10:58:00.002Z

Campaign gets the name of Kangaroo's new CEO (and my new boss) ex-Channel 4er Rod Henwood wrong. Nice quote about Ashley though.

Charlie Brooker is like a god to me...

2008-11-20T14:34:00.001Z

I just read CB's piece about The Tatler's Little Black Book supplement. Genius.

JG Ballard in French with my pic of the man on the cover

2008-11-06T18:15:00.001Z

JG Ballard in French with my pic of JG
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

A really cute French publishing company, called Tristram (after Shandy), asked me a while ago if they could use a picture I'd taken of JG Ballard. They sounded really nice and I liked the stuff that they did (as well as the translation of JG they were doing Lester Bangs) so I let them use the pic for free. I then forgot about it. But the other day three copies of the book arrived in the post and it looks very fine too. Not surprisingly they reversed the image so JG point out rather than at the spine.

Brand, Ross, Sachs and The Daily Telegraph

2008-10-30T17:24:00.006Z

I was a bit worried about the lack of coverage of the Ross, Brand and Sachs affair so have waded in despite having no first hand knowledge of what's going on. There's an excellent piece at the Telgraph's website by Neil McCormick where he points out amongst other things that Brand's listeners on Radio 2 are also license fee payers:

The notion of the BBC as a public service broadcaster is being much cited, with rather old fashioned concepts of how it should be upholding some kind of moral code. But everyone pays the license fee, including Ross and Brand's vast legions of fans. Some people actually want edgy, reprehensible humour on their radios and TVs, and would be more offended by the stuffy blandness of most BBC output. Maybe we should start emailing Jonathan Dimbley, and demanding he get a bit more saucy?
My favourite bit though are the comments, some are relieved that some journalists are prepared to keep the whole thing in proportion, see the other side and so on. The others are patently nutjobs (the best bit "If you think they are acceptable you shouldn't be writing for the Daily Telegraph."):

They shouldn't have been engaged by the BBC in the first place - at any price - not even if they paid to do it. If you think they are acceptable you shouldn't be writing for the Daily Telegraph.
As for your infantile remark about the off switch, where is the off switch for the licence fee, where is the off switch for the hundreds of millions of pounds that are poured into the BBC from the taxpayer's coffers.
Catering to the puerile cretins who appreciate and applaud such behaviour is not my idea of public broadcasting.
Good riddance to Brand and, with luck, to the other moron, Ross.

That told them.

Business Quote of the Day, 22 October 2008

2008-10-22T15:57:00.001+01:00

“It’s not about having shitloads of shit.”

I work in a very classy place.

Alexa Chung and Gary Hume

2008-10-22T11:16:00.003+01:00

So we went out with Maria making the schoolboy error of not ordering out and staying in to watch Arsenal take Fenerbahçe apart in the Europen Cup, in the process missing Adebayor's transformation from Saturday's donkey but with a worse first touch to last night's near Henry-like prefect finisher. Anyway on the upside in the dodgy but local Cat and Mutton not only did we run into (Yol says you use this in preference to "spotted" or "saw" as it implies an intimacy that patently isn't there) the extremely talented clothes horse and TV presenter Alexa Chung but also the fabulous Brit artist Gary Hume. For those or you who know Alexa's work but not Gary's here an interview with the man himself.

Chess, game 1

2008-10-17T14:35:00.002+01:00

I played my first game for Hackney Chess Club last night. Playing fourth board (there are only four) for Hackney against some team whose name I never learnt I lost to someone we shall call "John" (mostly because that's his name). I'm looking for some way of embedded a PGN viewer on the blog so you can play through the game but haven't found one that works with my current technology set up. In the meantime you can (if you can be bothered) play through the game and groan at my mistakes. I will add some proper notes when I get a chance (not that many games sell on the fact that they've been annotated by the loser). In the meantime some top level thoughts:
* I dicked around too much in the opening failing to develop my pieces and castle- John may not have "known" the generally-seen-as-being-good moves in this opening after move 6 but he developed his pieces fast and castled early.
* I wasn't flexible enough in my opening play
* I failed to see his threats early enough and then i underestimated them
* I blundered at the end when I might have saved a draw
I think I need to do some more work on the middlegame (and endgame and opening...)

John v. Me
16 October 2008
League Game
Golden Lane Community Centre

1. e4 c5
2. Nf3 e6
3. d4 cxd4
4. Nxd4 a6
5. Nc3 Qc7
6. Qf3 Nf7
7. Bd3 Nc6
8. Nxc6 Nxc6
9. Be3 b5
10. 0-0-0 Bb7
11. Bf5 e5
12. Be3 Ne7
13. Qg3 Rc8
14. f4 d6
15. fxe5 dxe5
16. Rf1 Ng6
17. h4 h5
18. Nd5 Bxd5
19. exd5 Qd6
20. Bxg6 fxg6
21. Qf3 Bc7
22. a3 Kd8
23. Rd3 Be7
24. Qg3 Rf8
25. Rxf8 Bxf8
26. b4 Be7
27. Bc5 Rxc5
28. bxc5 Qc5
29. Qe5 Qg1
30. Rd1 Bxa3
31. Kd2 Bb4
32. c3 Qxg2
33. Qe2 Qd5
34. 1-0

Arriving in New York..

2008-09-19T00:37:00.008+01:00

Arriving in America properly was delayed by the zealousness of the US Immigration service who decided to send me into a small over crowded room to await review. From out flight there was only a black man with dreadlocks, a white guy who turned out to be an actuary and me. Most of the people in the room seemed to be older ladies from Eastern Europe who shared hairstyles and taste in clothes with my mother-in-law. My wife who retained the right to wait with me while I was reviewed said it was probably because in my passport photo I look a) very dark-skinned and b) more importantly, like a serious jihadist. I can kinda see what she means by the photo but I suspect it was the fumes from the unlikely cocktail of beer, wines red and white, bloody mary, beer and brandy that I unwittingly breathed all over the immigration lady while I was being electronically finger-printed that set the alarm bells ringing. The room reminded me most of the dole office in Birmingham where I used to sign on as a teenager. But here they had guns and were more smartly turned out. They seemed to really buy into the idea that they're protecting the homeland. Anyway, once they'd reviewed my case I was allowed to leave without questioning so I never found out what the problem was.
The thing that I noticed first is that Yellow taxis don't look like they used to - but it is 18 years since I last came to New York. Instead of the menacing death machines of Travis Bickle they look like a cab would in a Disney film.

Things done so far: ate in the diner round the corner (twice); hung out in Central Park (twice); Frick collection (twice - once to see in they had cafe only); tea from place on corner (twice); Bloomingdales; Pylones; walked around a lot.
I kept seeing the Frick in NY's best kept secret-type lists so it obviously isn't that much of a secret. It is an amazing collection amassed at the start of the 20th century by old man Frick (aka "The most hated man in America"). For your money ($15) you get an amazing Bellini, an amazing Duccio, Cimabue, a couple of very good El Grecos, two excellent Holbeins, a couple of Titians, a very nice Ingres, a great Velazquez and others I've forgotten.

Unité d'Habitation, Marseille

2008-09-10T17:16:00.003+01:00

This is part of a series of pictures of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in the south of France. I made my family visit Marseille specifically so I could go and see it. I first saw it in slides as an 18 year-old on an art history A level course in Birmingham. It's the sort of thing you don't forget. Years later I got to live in Trellick Tower for a year due to the kindness of Chris Collins. Not the same but not bad. Maybe tower blocks need sunshine to fully work.

George Bowbrick aka Warren Mitchell in The Saint

2008-09-08T17:37:00.012+01:00

I was watching The Saint on itv.com as you do when you're writing the entire copy for a website that hasn't been built yet - maybe you don't but hey, I don't go around criticising your working methods - and came across a bit that made me go 'Fuck me' (as you do when you're watching old episodes of things with Roger Moore in). It was an episode called The Charitable Contessa and although set in Rome was patently shot in the same place as all the other epsiodes (somewhere in West London I suspect) and had a cast of kids and British actors playing Italians with duff accents. My favourite (so far, I'm only halfway through the ep) is Warren Mitchell playing an Italian taxi driver called Marco de Cesari. With a name like that he could also be the hero of a very steamy Mills and Boon. That's Warren in the picture above. But more than that my very first thought was 'Fuck me doesn't that Italian taxi driver look like Steve's dad'. Then I thought 'Oh. It's Warren Mitchell.' Anyway, I've been thinking about George (Steve's dad) because I'd been looking at pictures of his much belated funeral on Flickr recently. Anyway, I guess I'm writing this all here because for every story you ever told George he always had one to tell back at you.

This one's for George Bowbrick aka Warren Mitchell aka Marco de Cesari.

Richard Prince at the Serpentine

2008-09-06T17:05:00.008+01:00

In keeping with tradition we go to see a show that's been on for months on the final weekend. I love Richard Prince but the show is disappointing. There isn't enough work for a start and what's in there is pretty patchy and tries to explain the Prince phenomena within the traditional language of art production, namely a selection of different pieces from different bodies of work. I saw some of the nurse paintings at Sadie Coles in 2003 as well as the earlier Publicities and one of the things that struck me is Prince isn't simply about appropriation but about serial appropriation. He doesn't just borrow something the once, he borrows it over and over again which makes the impact all the greater. Publicities in particular is for me an archetypal Prince show - he does almost nothing that sits in the realm of what we still think an artist does: he chooses some pictures from his own stash, has them framed and in a few cases embellishes them with (almost certainly faked) celebrity autographs. This isn't to say that there isn't an acceptable face to Richard Prince - he paints as well as anyone and there's a reassuring intelligence at work - it's just that this isn't the most interesting one.

Tates Modern and Britain: Street & Studio versus The Lure of the East

2008-08-31T22:12:00.008+01:00

Typically, despite the fact that a walk down Vyner Street at this time of year reveals that most galleries are closed for the summer or in the hands of private hires, I still manage to miss or near miss the summer blockbusters I've been promising myself to go and see for the last three months.

Orientalism at Tate Britain promises much, largely inspired by the Edward Said connection implied by the title, and sadly doesn't deliver. The revelation for me on coming across a small oil on paper picture of Sarajevo from 1922 by Stanley Spencer in the very last room was that most of the stuff I'd been looking at before didn't have any great artistic merit. Even from an anthropological point of view the show doesn't engage. The imperialist values that seemingly imbue Orientalism have never really express themselves in the purely visual and the show struggles to get to the heart of the matter. The show opens with portraits of Victorian orientalists in arab outfits, the white boy wannabees of their day, moving through architectural studies of Cairo, a very disappointing room showing what the western imagination thought went on in the harem (dull) before petering out in the early twentieth century. The whole thing did make me wonder how things might have played out differently had there been no islamic prohibition on self-representation during the western explorations of the middle-east.

Street and Studio at Tate Modern which you've now officially missed is great because as well as the stuff you'd hope to see like Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans the curatorial team have pulled out some seemingly slight but equally powerful pieces you're less likely to have seen. Coming a few days after my visit to Tate Britain Ed van der Elsken's five pictures of a Hong Kong woman again highlighted what was missing for me from the first show. What had appeared to be a set up sequence of a model in the crowds turns out to be way nastier. As Elsken's is quoted in this extract from the Tate gallery notes:

Ed van der Elsken’s tactics were more aggressively voyeuristic. He followed an anonymous woman around the streets of Hong Kong, creating a sequence of pictures that is reminiscent of a tracking shot from a movie. ‘I followed this babe around for a while. She knew I was doing it, and didn’t like it one bit’, he confessed.

Polish-born (but now based in Germany) Timm Rautert's 1974 sequence 'Germans in Uniforms' made me laugh as did Cindy Sherman's 'Bus Riders' from 1976. Sherman's reconstructed the look and poses of a series of people observed on the bus and taken self-portraits. For half the pictures she's blacked up and here's my drawing of one of these black bus riders. Here's my drawing from a sequence of anonymous street photos from 1960s Berlin where passers by posed with a man in a bear costume. I made a list of photographers/works to find out more about (some I'd never heard of):
Lewis Hine
Arnold Genthe's pictures of San Francisco's Chinatown
Martin Chambi
James van der Zee
Yva
Arturo Ghergo
Malick Sidibé (I never followed up last time from the Barbican show)
Laurie Anderson's 'Fully Automated Nikon [object/objection/objectivity], 1973 and the stuff it's inspired that's happening now.

Rght at the end of the show is Rineke Dijkstra's two screen video projection 'The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL' 1996-7 where young club-goers, much the worse for wear in several cases, dance in front of a white screen to a techno soundtrack that seems to be coming from an adjacent room. Larger than life on the wall it's a powerful piece about inhibition, control.

The Real Tuesday Weld at St Pancras Church, last Wednesday

2008-08-31T21:40:00.001+01:00

The Real Tuesday Weld at St Pancras Church, last Wednesday
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

There was a book launch or art show or something and the a band playing called The Real Tuesday Weld. We liked them a lot - they were laid back and looked like mature art students. I liked them because they didn't have to try too hard. They played in a corner of the crypt and it was very dark. There may be none of the band members in this picture but it's a good representation of the gig.

If you look hard you can see...

2008-08-29T13:27:00.006+01:00

Me and Yol took Leon and Betty to the Grant Museum of Zoology which, as I tell anyone who'll listen, is one of my favourite places in London. We also managed to see the Skeletons show at the Wellcome Collection and visit Ultimate Burger, Maplins, Paperchase and Robert Dyas (aka Bobby D's). The picture above is of one of the squid specimens from the Grant. If you look at it carefully you can see it looks like an old Chinese man in traditional gear.

More pics from the Grant here.

Great Yarmouth: The Camel Race

2008-08-14T16:06:00.002+01:00

Great Yarmouth
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

We spent the day in Great Yarmouth with the outlaws. While waiting on the pier I was watching the camel racing arcade. Basically you pay some money and you get a bet on a mechanical camel that races (albeit quite slowly) along the tracks and the winner gets something. Then I realised that the names for each of the camels were meant to be reflective of the desert setting for the game but in piece of latterday Orientalism they came out as:
Mohamed, Abdul, Bogieman, Kismet, Gobi, Sultan, Yasmin and Bagdad.

The world is a very strange place.

Black Power Salute: BBC4

2008-08-14T15:23:00.002+01:00

There's another chance to see on iPlayer the BBC documentary about the Mexico '68 Olympics and the events around the black power salutes delivered by Olympic medal winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos and the anger and reaction it provoked.

Publish and Be Damned, 2008

2008-08-05T16:10:00.011+01:00

I hadn't been to P&BD for three years - I hadn't realised that it was so long but it moved to Rochelle School a while ago and I'd never been to the new venue. Inside it was hot and very very crowded. What I love about the event is the lack of explanation and any kind of conventional sales material: most people just lay their wares out of a folding table and that's all the explanation you need. At one end of the market there are publications that ape various commercial magazine conventions like a fixed format and logo but usually with unrelentingly non-commercial content (the copy of Mono-Kultur that Yol bought me on the Wu Tang and chess) and at the other the one off artist books, like the map of Hackney with a CD of Ridley Road market traders talking about property prices. In between you get the very fanzine ones that vary from Harry Pye's The Rebel to plain B&W photocopies that look most like Sniffing Glue but with lower production values.

More pics here

My first thoughts on leaving the show were that although it's not that well known an event it is very inclusive and very participatory which has remained pretty much the case since the first fair. The other thing I've been thinking about since then is to wonder what effect the internet has had on self-publishing and in particular the low-end fanzine part of the market. While you'd believe blogging, free webspace and free software to manage your blog would have killed off publishing as a mode of self-expression Publish and Be Damned seems to demonstrate the opposite is actually true. Pushing through the crowds with the their carrier bags full of dead trees and ink or waiting 15 minutes to get to the front of a particularly busy stall you realise that there is something quite special about stuff written, montaged, scrawled, copied and printed on bits of paper that are then (in many cases) lovingly folded in half by hand and stapled especially when it's as good as Calvin Holbrook's Hate Magazine.

Family

2008-07-31T14:47:00.003+01:00

My family
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

There isn't really much to say about this except that I love it.
(L to R) Myron, Yolande, Hilton, Pat and Bert.

It puts a lot of pressure on me coming from a family as cool as this.
;-)

I think I opted out with black Converse, chinos and black t-shirts as my default position.

If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be v. Popbitch

2008-07-24T19:03:00.005+01:00

I went to see the Chapman Brothers' show at the White Cube (If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be) the other week and I realised that what they do - yes, everyone else realised this a long time ago, I'm just stupid - is they make mash ups. I saw the show, marvelled at the small watercolours by Hitler that they'd bought and modded (and made much more palatable) and largely forgot about it. That's the problem with art, like evil and booze, you quickly become inured to it.
What made me think about it again was a link in Popbitch today to graffitied pictures of Keira and Sienna on Flickr. I'm not sure what it means, if anything, but when I looked at the Keira pic about 30 minutues after Popbitch arrived it had some 400 views. A couple hours later it's reached over 8000. Maybe it means something about art in the gallery versus art in the street. Probably not. I also noticed that I'm the only one so far who's favourited it. Maybe all that means is Popbitch readers don't have Flickr accounts...

The Seventh Seal on 4oD

2008-07-22T15:43:00.002+01:00

The Seventh Seal on 4oD
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

While in all honesty it probably isn't a career defining moment for me I have to say how happy I am to see Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal make it onto 4oD, Channel 4's VOD service. Although my colleague Alma is effectively running 4oD these days and I am a secondee over at project Kangaroo (a secondment that is in a temporary hiatus) I am happy to take any credit that is available for this.

New insults around the office

2008-06-26T18:31:00.002+01:00

Yol's picture for Cathy's Arty
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

My current favourite:
"You taxi-hailing media wanker"
Courtesy of Jody, directed at Tim.

Perpignan: The Dragon

2008-06-21T12:18:00.001+01:00

Perpignan
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Olympic Posters: Canada

2008-06-19T11:42:00.001+01:00

Olympic Posters: Canada
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

At the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood there's a very good show of Olympic posters through the modern age including this detail from the Montreal Olympics. (Full poster here). I was standing in front of it with my niece Betty. She looked at it shaking her head and said "That's not right." I'm not sure if she means the kid doing gymnatics with the man dressed only in green underpants or the general air of desperation that pervades these badly lit, badly shot and badly styled pieces of 70s memorabilia

Bird Scarer in the fig tree

2008-06-04T22:38:00.001+01:00

Bird Scarer in the fig tree
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

My father-in-law, Egidio, makes these fantastic bird scarers to put in the fig tree to stop the birds eating the figs. The figs don't get eaten but I think it's probably the grumpy looking man constantly peering out the window giving them "male occhi" (literally 'bad eye') that keeps them away rather than the plywood cats with luminous green eyes and red triangles for noses.

They're builders, what do you expect?

2008-05-22T13:57:00.001+01:00

Looking down
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

In the foyer of the Stassi-style building (apparently I can't call it 'The Stassi building' anymore in the same way that M&S can only sell Moroccan-style chicken) where I sometime work there was a lady with too much make-up complaining to the security guard and the head builder about the language the builders who are refurbishing the block have been using. This is made worse by the fact that they're 'working in close proximity to my staff' as the lady put it and that they're saying things that are 'totally unacceptable'. The self-same builders have been drilling directly above my desk for the last three months three times a day. Personally I'm happy if they swear all they want as long as they stop with the fucking drilling.

Posh and Becks, Scarecrow Festival in Martham, Norfolk

2008-05-06T23:33:00.001+01:00

Posh and Becks, Scarecrow Festival in Martham, Norfolk
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

These were my favourite scarecrows. The Posh is *genius*.

Scarecrow Festival in Martham, Norfolk

2008-05-06T23:29:00.001+01:00

Scarecrow Festival in Martham, Norfolk
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

The Elvis was my second favourite. The best one is Posh and Becks.

Steve (or is it a Russian dissident?), circa 1988/9, Chantry Point,

2008-04-25T15:07:00.003+01:00

Steve (or is it a Russian dissident?), circa 1988/9, Chantry Point, London.

My wife was going through some of the old shit I keep in the house and one of the things that fell out was a contact sheet from the old days. Taken around 1988 or '89 the pictures are of people I was at college with, taken around the flat I lived in half-way up a tower block on the Harrow Road. This one's of Steve (who is most decidedly still around); there's another one of me and Guillaume (now in Los Angeles landscape architecting) and one of Jojo. I've no idea where Jojo is now.

Goldfrapp

2008-04-19T17:07:00.001+01:00

Goldfrapp
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Went to see Goldfrapp with the excellent Chris who'd spent the last month phoning up the Royal Festival Hall to see if they had any returns. Finally they did and we ended up in a box on the right hand side of the stage, hence the weird view in the pics. They was a multi-instrumentalist with a beard and lank hair dressed in baggy white shorts (he has his back to us in this shot) who seemed to do all the music despite the presence of a harpist, keyboardists and a small string orchestra. Biggest cheer was for 'Strict Machine' (maybe it's not called that but you know what I mean).

Asparagus at the plot

2008-04-18T17:01:00.001+01:00

Asparagus at the plot
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Our asparagus should be ready soon although the frost did get some of the emerging shoots. I noticed M&S was selling English asparagus today when I was in there buying pork (outdoor reared too) to go with some bean curd and the salted black beans I'm cooking at the weekend.

Pretty in the snow

2008-04-14T20:03:00.001+01:00

Snow
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

As my wife says even Hackney looks good in the snow. Me, I like Hackney whatever the weather. Check out Snow White in the white snow. Yowsah!

You dig the tunnel I'll hide the soil: White Cube

2008-04-09T17:57:00.003+01:00

You dig the tunnel I'll hide the soil: White Cube
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

I always imagine I'll write long lyrical posts like Andrew or Steve. In joyful anticipation I put the words, page and images together while riding the big bus from home down to Bethnal Green or Hackney, foolishly imagining I'll have the time at work to put these imaginings together. The reality is this, a picture by Harland Miller from the show he co-curated at White Cube and instead of poetry a series of bullet points:

The show's based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe

It's in the basement of Shoredtich Town Hall as well as White Cube.

The Town Hall stuff is better.

At first I thought having Poe in a dusty disused basement was too twee for Poe's work. Actually it gets the humour pretty well.

The best work in the show is funny. The worst overly gothic.

The Raven

Lenore

Cardiff aka Karloff

2008-03-31T23:39:00.001+01:00

Cardiff aka Karloff
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

She's called Karloff. That's what the people who gave her to us called her. We call her Girlie or Cardiff - much better names for a cat.

Hand

2008-03-31T23:33:00.001+01:00

Hand
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

I've been taking pictures again. I even went to see the Deutsch Borse prize at the Photographers' Gallery. We wandered round for ages and then I said to Scotia "I know who'd I'd like to win" to which she replied that they'd announced the winner already and it wasn't my guy. "How do you know?" I said. "Well, the big banner they have over the doorway is a bit of a giveaway," she said.

The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of Understatement

2008-03-21T10:21:00.001Z

Track Listing for the album due out in April:

1. "The Age of the Understatement"
2. "Standing Next to Me"
3. "Calm Like You"
4. "Separate and Ever Deadly"
5. "The Chamber"
6. "Only the Truth"
7. "My Mistakes Were Made for You"
8. "Black Plant"
9. "I Don't Like You Any More"
10. "In My Room"
11. "Meeting Place"
12. "The Time Has Come Again"

What do you do in the Studio?

2008-03-19T15:08:00.001Z

I was hanging around the studio the other day and decided to photograph the most recent work. I'm not sure even if this is that recent - I just haven't been there that much this year. I'll post some more on Flickr when I get round to it.

Allotment: The Fox

2008-02-06T12:26:00.001Z

allotment: The Fox
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

There's a very tame fox at our allotment.

The first year we were there one of our pumpkins disappeared over night. The very nice and hard-working chairwoman for the allotments suggested it might have been a fox. I said "Don't be silly, foxes don't do anything for Halloween."

Peter Doig at Tate Britain

2008-02-04T20:01:00.000Z

Went the the tail end of the press view for Peter Doig's show at Tate Britain. By then all the serious journalists had left (probably off for lunch at Black's) leaving just me and Sarah Kent and the very nice guy who told me I couldn't take pictures because I wasn't a proper photographer. I was, like, how did he know I'm not proper?

We bumped into Peter (see what I did there?) on his way in as we were leaving. He was his usual charming self and despite being in an obvious hurry stopped to chat. He'd helped work out the room layouts as he had very specific ideas about the way that one picture should be visible in the corner of your eye or the way that the diagonal sight lines are very long. He was also really pleased to be at Tate Britain rather than Tate Modern. Having been there the day before with his dad he said that it was for people going for a nice walk rather than going to look at the art. I think the default position for many visitors to London is to go to Modern simply because so much fuss has been made about the building whereas (within their own remits) Tate Britain has a much better collection.

I don't know why I'm promoting these bad people

2008-01-30T14:51:00.000Z

I took some pictures of the artist Peter Doig's studio in Trinidad last year. I then let Design Week magazine use them in the print version of their magazine on the condition that the pictures were credited and I retained copyright. They didn't pay me but as the writer of the piece is my wife I figured it was fair enough. Now it transpires the pictures are on the Design Week website but without the credit I asked for, and as far as I'm concerned without my permission as I only supplied them for print. Anyway, Peter's work's great so make sure you have a look before the feature, with or without the pictures, disappears under Design Week's subscribers only archive.

Peter Doig at the Saatchi Gallery
Peter Doig on Wikipedia
Peter Doig at Victoria Miro
Studio Film Club: what's on

Me by my niece

2008-01-27T20:56:00.001Z

Me by my niece
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

This is a more up to date view of me (see two entries previous for me in my prime) by my niece just over two years ago. I prefer Paul's (although my niece is obviously incredibly talented).

Dad and me

2008-01-27T20:52:00.001Z

Dad and me
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

I like this one.

Me by Paul Clarke

2008-01-27T20:49:00.001Z

Me by Paul Clarke
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

From around 1990 or possibly earlier. Thinking about it I was still living in Chantry Point so 1989 or even earlier. He did it from memory and got most things right: I smoked, I had (and still have) round glasses, a penchant for black, not shaving and hair cropped at the sides. If only I looked this good now...

Car near Brick Lane

2008-01-07T18:25:00.001Z

Car near Brick Lane
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Apparently it's a Honda Z600 or so my friend Steve says. It was a very nice day, clear and dry with the sun coming in low from the south the way it does in the winter in England. We went to the Beigel shop and had herring (for me) and a cream cheese and smoked salmon for the wife. We walked down Cheshire Street afterwards carrying our stewed cup of tea looking at the pirated sportsgear and being accosted by gangs of chinese selling pirated porno. It's Brick Lane, everything's knocked off.

4oD over Christmas

2007-12-22T15:12:00.001Z

21_12_07_blackbooks
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

I spent most of yesterday putting together the pages on 4oD for the Christmas break. Do you promote the Catch Up stuff that's on telly or the huge amount of archive that we've just added - what will people want? You run through the different scenarios of how people's TV consumption changes over Christmas alongside questions of whether they'll have broadband access and the like. I had an argument with nice guy Charlie, the 4oD marketing guy, about the rates of broadband penetration in the UK ("Will people have broadband access if they're at their parents?"). The head of new media operations overheard us bickering and suggested as it was past 6pm on the channel's last working day maybe we should just head home. Anyway, I've gone for promoting the archive up to Boxing day and after that it's the four free series of Shameless on 4oD in anticipation of the new series that starts 1 January.

Back in the day when there were only three channels people used to complain about the number of repeats. Now we have whole channels that are effectively the repackaging of repeats (any channel with the word 'gold' in the title). I guess the other way of looking at video-on-demand services is that they're just repeats on demand or repeats that you missed the first time around. Happy Christmas.

Arctic Monkeys at Ally Pally

2007-12-10T17:01:00.000Z

Went with my sister-in-law, my niece and my wife to see the Arctic Monkeys on Saturday night. My niece (I guess being 12) is deeply uncynical and originally wanted to get there as soon as the doors opened at 6pm so as not to miss any of the action and the promised "Special Guests" supporting the Arctics. I managed to convince her that this would be deeply uncool so we compromised on 7pm. My actual choice (as is my wont these days) would have been to arrive 5 minutes before the band came on when the bar's nice and quiet and you're less likely to get in any fights with drunks.

The upside of being there so early is that there were no queues at the booths were you get your drink tokens. One token cost £1.75 and a pint of Carlsberg in a self-destructing paper cup that allows you 10 minutes to drink your beer before it starts leaking on your shoes costs 2 tokens. Soft-drinks are a token each. I didn't look any further than that. So with drinks we went and stood near the stage just as the lights went down for what turned out to be the first of the two support acts.

Alexandra Palace is as big and grand as the name suggests and also slightly shit as a venue to see bands. Cavernous and lacking in any charm on the inside, it could actually be worse in that it could all be seating but then you might actually be able to see what's happening on the stage without resorting to the giant video monitors on each side of the stage. If I wanted to watch a band on TV I'd go to Glastonbury or stay home. The first band were like a sixties Arctic Monkeys: singer/guitarist and some mates on drums and bass and northern floppy haircuts. Pretty entertaining I didn't know who they were until later as their name was written somewhat incomprehensibly on the bass drum. It turns out they were The Rascals and you can hear their tunes on MySpace or buy their EP which is out today.

After they left there was another long pause while we jostled down the front with the crowd. This wasn't just my niece's idea, I think her mother was also keen on spending the next 90 minutes or so by the stage waiting for the main show to begin. It gave me a chance to survey the crowd who were (to me who doesn't get out too much) an interesting bunch. The large group of lads immediately to my left reminded me most of football fans in the 'eighties: smart casual, little animal logos on their polo shirts and jumpers, sharp haircuts, plain white trainers. They popped some pills, smoked in a vaguely surreptitious fashion cupping their hands around their cigarettes and drank beers with spirit chasers and looked at me menacingly as I clocked their outfits. By way of a total contrast there was a young group of boys, maybe on the verge of starting shaving, all colourful T-shirts and Oasis hair who I figured to be a bunch of posh school boys dropped off by parents for the evening. I liked them, they weren't scary and they apologised when they pushed into you. Elsewhere there were couples, small groups of girls who'd dressed up - nothing terribly remarkable. And then the second support act came on.

Even as they took to the stage I could see that this wasn't necessarily the greatest idea a promoter could have. Black skinny jeans, goth hair, biker jackets, hairspray, Dayrl Hannah's make up from Bladerunner. The Horrors (because that's who they were) seem like a reasonable bunch of guys, the usual mix of Bowie, art school and Penguin Classics made palatable by the fact that they do it with a certain style, humour and irony. Back in 'eigthies Birmingham, probably the last time I saw Satan worshippers this close up, Goth and Irony just didn't go in the same sentence. You can see their videos here and to be fair I find the more I hear them the more I like them. Vast swathes of the crowd, led I suspect by the casual throwbacks, spent the entire set chucking coins, beer, paper beer cups and pretty much anything else they could find at the band. They really didn't like them and booed loudly between songs. The Horrors remained undeterred (for which I admire them greatly) and engaged in some lively banter with the crowd. The Horror's singer Faris Badwan* between songs: "Boo. That's B-O-O isn't it. Add a K on the end and you might learn something." More rounds of beer and coins. Enough about them.

The stage and kit was reset behind a big billowing curtain and around 9.25pm the Arctic Monkeys came on to huge applause and pogoing down the front. I didn't last long down there and disappeared with my wife to stand by some huge speakers at the side where we could vaguely see. The sound had improved dramatically and I guess top bands stipulate with their record label and management that however good the support bands are that they have to have their sound mixed by a deaf blind man.

The crowd turned into a mass of sweaty bodies, waving hands clutching mobile phones as they recorded the gig for posterity. I loved the people who were recording or videoing the gig and would singalong with Alex Turner into their phone. YouTube's full of these. All the geeks I knew back in the 'eighties who used to record and bootleg live shows (Joy Division, New Order, Bowie, even the Au Pairs) made a habit of standing as still as possible so as not the mess with the Sony Professional recording Walkman they had in the folds of their trenchcoats. How things have changed.

The Arctic Monkey's success seems to be reflected in a better diet (they've put on a little weight and some muscle) and skin care regime (less spotty) but the music is as good as ever. Live the Arctic Monkeys are a high energy act with the crowd singing along to everything except the newest tunes.

*They all have stupid names: FARIS BADWAN, TOMETHY FURSE, JOSHUA THIRD, COFFIN JOE
and SPIDER WEBB

being vegan: The Last Day

2007-12-04T17:52:00.000Z

I had meant to write everyday about my 30 days of self-imposed veganism, about how it had affected my day-to-day routine, my health, moods, weight and happiness but the truth is that after the first week it really wasn't that big a deal. Not eating fish, meat, dairy and eggs (are eggs covered by "dairy"?) was surprisingly easy, largely I suspect because I'm quite a fussy eater anyway in that I don't eat a great deal of processed food and tend to cook from scratch.

The biggest potential change will be my attempt to extend the care I've been taking in planning what I eat and examining food labels back to my non-vegan diet. I've said that overall I'll eat less meat and when I do I'll *try* to make sure it's free-range. By and large this probably means not eating out or just not eating meat when I'm out as I have yet to find a Chinese restaurant offering organic or free-range products. Quite a few times I've looked at the food labels on processed food in the super-market to see whether I could eat it and not and although they may have passed the no eggs, no dairy, no animal product tests the sheer number of additives has put me off buying them.

Maybe the most useful thing to write about going forward is how I get on trying to be a more ethical eater following my bout of veganism. Watch this space.

Some films: I'm not there, 3:10 to Yuma, Brick Lane

2007-11-22T17:49:00.001Z

I've been kinda busy so here's a brief rundown on what I've seen and what I made of them. It's mostly for my benefit as my memory, long and short-term, is shot to hell. The pic is from Todd Haynes' I'm not there, his Bob Dylan bio-pic (sort of). So in what way isn't it a bio-pic? Well, the Dylan character is never named as being Dylan and is played by a bunch of different actors including Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale and Marcus Carl Franklin. The whole thing is fairly entertaining with some great high-points but does go on a bit. My favourite bit is Cate Blanchett's stoned Dylan and Allen Ginsberg heckling a life-size statue of Christ on a cross and she chucks out the fantastic Dylan-esque line: "Play one of the early ones!".

3:10 to Yuma proves that Russell Crowe is in much better films than his somewhat limited acting range deserves but in his defense it must be said that they're never less than entertaining. Christian Bale is the stand-out presence here in this hugely entertaining Western.

The Kite Runner, based on Khaled Hosseini's novel (which I haven't read) is probably my least favourite film here. I found the film overly manipulative and nasty (which isn't something I would normally hold against a film). Great performance by Homayon Ershadi as the father of the feckless Amir which is probably worth the price of admission on its own.

There are lots of great things about Brick Lane, not least that fact that I found it way more engaging than the book and visually it does some interesting things, especially in the way the almost exclusively non-white cast are shot in a sympathetic way that emphasises their ethnicity that places them at the centre of the film. Having said that the film is almost too gentle and doesn't fire up the passions. Again I think the best piece is the portrayal of the father, Chanu, by the legendary Satish Kaushik.

Holy Fuck! Lo-fi geniuses at The Social

2007-11-15T16:36:00.000Z

Went to see Holy Fuck at The Social last night which was without doubt the best gig I've been to since I can't remember when.

Flickr pics here (not mine)

Holy Fuck on MySpace

Holy Fuck on Wikipedia

Being vegan: Day 11

2007-11-15T16:15:00.000Z

Not a great deal to say except I'm enjoying my newly found (and temporary) veganism, my wife is less angry and I've had some very nice meals. Friends fed me a vegetable soup thing with sweet potatoes, Yol made chick peas and macaroni, I made sour chick pea curry with ocra and tomatoes and rice and yesterday I had a Pizza Express Giardana without cheese. I've been drinking copious quantities of vegan wine, spirits and vegan society-approved beers. I think I've lost a small amount of weight but feel pretty good all round. Sunday I went for my longest swim so far.

Being Vegan: Day Five

2007-11-09T23:28:00.000Z

The thing about not eating meat, fish and dairy is how expensive it all is. I had so-so vegetarian sushi and a miso soup from Pret for lunch yesterday which came to £4.25 and today I spent £17.50 in Holland and Barett on pumpkin seeds, cashew nuts and the like and I still haven't got enough to make a meal.

Being Vegan: Day Three

2007-11-07T14:16:00.000Z

I've eaten a lot of hummus so far: Falafel wrap with salad and hummus for lunch yesterday from a sandwich joint round here and today a home-made roll of hummus and salad. Last night was a vegetable stir-fry with rice noodles and a salad. I've been eating lots of fruit but probably not as much as I usually do - I think this might be that the food and portions I'm eating now are much bulkier than my normal diet.

Things that annoy me: loads of products that you'd expect to be animal-fat free aren't. Here I'm thinking of margarine. Yesterday in Sainsbury's I went through all the margarine tubs and they all had whey derived from cow's milk. Dirty fuckers.

My fellow diet-alterer, Maria, who's foresaken booze for a month is, I suspect, having a much worse time. Her plan is not going out after work for a month. I think the bit she hasn't accounted for is the solo home drinking she used to enjoy.

Being Vegan: day one

2007-11-05T17:34:00.000Z

"I appear to be drinking a cup of warm piss," I reflect on leaving the kitchen area at work. It's pale yellow-green in a white cup. It's green tea.

It's part of my on-going war of attrition with my friend Maria brought about through drinking a bottle of Turkish red wine each in Mangals and then initially taking a vow that for 30 days she wouldn't drink any booze while I wouldn't eat meAt or fish. My part of the bet was upgraded (such is the way of drunks) to "leading a vegan lifestyle" and then lately, after I'd done some research (and decided I wasn't going to buy a) vegan shoes and b) a wool-free suit), downgraded to "eating a vegan diet" for 30 days.

So far it's going well but then all I've done so far is eat porridge with soya milk for breakfast, a baked potato with margarine and baked beans for lunch and two apples and a sharon fruit ion-between. I went to the local health food shop and bought a box of "Fruit, Nut and Seed Bars" this afternoon ("gluten-free; wheat-free; dairy-free; vegetarian; vegan") which were a) pretty horrible and b) very expensive. Luckily they also seem to be quite filling as tonight is the-place-I-work's 25th anniversary staff party. The posh one for the high-ups and the industry bigwigs was last week, this one is (I imagine) a drunken booze-fest fuelled by Breezers, slammers, shots, vodka fountains and other assorted niceties. I won't be eating at the do as I can't guarantee the provenance of the canapes and my sketchy research reveals that spirits are safe for vegans but the use of animal-derived fining agents in much wine and beer rules them out without more detailed work on my part.

Lust, Caution

2007-11-01T17:38:00.000Z

Ang Lee's new film Lust, Caution has been previewing around London having first screened at Venice. It's long, it's very beautiful to look at, it has amazing costumes and outstanding performances, not least from its two leads the masterful Tony Leung and newbie actress Tang Wei. So why wasn't I more impressed and why did the whole thing leave me feeling pretty cold?

This is from Geoffrey Macnab's piece in the Guardian:
The film tells the story of a young drama student, Wang Jiazhi (Tang Wei), drawn into a plot to assassinate the shadowy Mr Yee (Tony Leung), a collaborator with the Japanese in the Shanghai of the early 1940s. Mr Yee is a cold and brutal man. While his wife (Joan Chen) and her friends play Mah Jong and discuss their favourite restaurants, he oversees the torture and killing of resistance fighters. Wang is ordered to get close to Mr Yee in order to prise him out into the open. In the end, they begin a very violent, sado-masochistic affair. Their feelings for one another teeter between love and utter loathing. They instinctively distrust one another but can't hide their mutual fascination. At times, it is as if they hope that through their extreme and acrobatic sex together they can finally work out each others' motives and true personality. This is as much a tale of amour-fou as it is a thriller.

I suspect my problem lies here: what is described generally (not just by Macnab) as a relationship where they "can't hide their mutual fascination" where their feelings "teeter between love and utter loathing" seems to me more like an abusive relationship instigated and conducted by the stronger partner over the weaker one. While I get Mr Yee's initial lusting after her (hey, she's young and gorgeous) I really don't get what she's meant to see in him. Is it his cruelty or simply that he's Tony Leung and as an audience we're not meant to see much further than that?

While many won't see past the athleticism of the sex scenes The New York Times has an excellent review that sees past this to the flaws in the characters and the story. My view is that Lust, Caution while beautifully shot and acted is still pure hokey.

The barbershop from Eastern Promises

2007-10-26T10:30:00.001+01:00

The barbershop from Eastern Promises
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Regular readers will know that David Cronenberg's new film Eastern Promises is currently my film of the year despite Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly's best efforts to dislodge it. I was probably swayed by the fact that Cronenberg came across very well in the Radio 4 interview with Mark Lawson (no longer available on listen again) and Schnabel didn't when I saw him Q&Aed at Bafta. I found his name-dropping irritating but only because of his failure having mentioned Marty (Scorsese) or Harvey (Keitel) or David (Bowie) to delivery an interesting anecdote about them. Schnabel's a name-dropping celebrity cock-tease.

The worst bits of Eastern Promises are pure B movie (which isn't such a bad thing to be in my book) but the good bits are jaw-droppingly good. Both movies are flawed: the resolution in Promises isn't all it could be and the last third of Diving Bell drags a bit but both are definite ones to see.

Anyway, the point of this post was that the barbershop in the opening scene of Eastern Promises is the barbershop on Broadway market where I get my hair cut (£8.50). When I went in yesterday the nice barber pointed out some of the things they'd done to his shop for the filming including painting the sign you can see here which he's left on the window. And at the time I just thought he'd redecorated.

Louise Bourgeois: Le Suicide Threat

2007-10-25T18:30:00.001+01:00

Louise Bourgeois: Le Suicide Threat
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Louise Bourgeois at Tate Modern, October 2007. This one's called "Le Suicide Threat" and it's one of my favourite pieces in what is an excellent show. The show covers Bourgeois's painting, drawing, sculpture and installations in a career that covers most of the 20th century. Bourgeois's like Picasso but more relevant and less celebrated.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le papillon): Hot ladies and the rest

2007-10-24T13:30:00.000+01:00

Went to a screening of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel's adaptation of the autobiographical book of the same title by Jean-Dominique Bauby which recounts his life after suffering a stroke that left him almost totally paralysed. "The guy who dictated his book by blinking his eyelid" is how everyone refers to him and while that in itself is a remarkable achievement, what's best in the film is the simple but visually stunning way that Bauby's experience of locked-in syndrome is recounted. By all accounts the book is quite something (I haven't read it) and gives fuller rein to Bauby's attempts to deal with his state through humour (according to my wife). The film is definitely worth seeing and the opening 15 minutes or so are pure cinema, the story seen quite literally from Bauby's point of view as he first comes round out of his coma post-stroke. (All the effects were done in camera, often using a movable back on the camera resulting in the blurring of the action). There are some nice quirks to the film that made me smile not least the fact that this being a French movie all the women in it from the girl-friend and mistress to the speech therapist are all really hot (and not just Emmanuelle Seigner).

There are a couple clips on YouTube of Schnabel talking about the film:
Reasons to make the film (including fact that Johnny depp was in line for part of Bauby originally)
Biographical aspects of the film

Schnabel did a Q&A after the Bafta screening where he gave TimeOut magazine's film editor Dave Calhoun the runaround and generally came across as a bit of a prick. I like to think that the YouTube clips above are more indicative of what he's like in real life (but he's still an inveterate name-dropper).

Spectrum Art Auction: specialist autistic care and support

2007-10-23T16:43:00.000+01:00

Following the charity art auction for Bethan's Fund that I helped out with a while ago I've been asked by the organisers of the Spectrum art auction if I can mention it here. Below there's the blurb from the website about the charity's work but the first thing I noticed is the fantastic range of artists who've donated work to the auction which includes the piece by Stella Vine here, a signed book from Damien Hirst, pieces by Eine, Paul Insect, Chris Levine, Immodesty Blaize, Katiejane Garside, Gary Lucas, Gerald Laing, D*Face, James Jessops, Lucy Mclauchlan, Cher, David Arquette, Architects such as Lord Norman Foster, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw and Top LA Architect Matthew Stokes. There's a full list here. Some of the work is being auctioned online and some at an event on 3 November. All the details are on the website.

From the Spectrum website:
"Spectrum is a provider of specialist residential, respite and educational services based in Cornwall, UK. From the small beginnings of a residential service at St. Erme, Truro, Cornwall, for ten young adults cared for by seven members of staff in 1982, Spectrum has developed into a recognised leader in the field of specialist autistic care and support. Currently nearly 100 service users referred from all over the UK are cared for by 350 staff in 23 homes and a small special school situated in the beautiful county of Cornwall on the south west peninsula of the UK."

Eastern Promises: My new film of the year

2007-10-20T22:10:00.000+01:00

So Control only got to be my film of the year for a few weeks (like buses, there's dross for months and then two great films come along in a matter of weeks) to be replaced by David Cronenberg's new thriller, Eastern Promises, which is set amongst the Russian gangster class of contemporary London. Excitingly (for me at least) a lot of the exteriors were shot round Hackney with the opening shot featuring the Joy Tandoori, our local curry house, on fashionable Broadway market. By way of a warning to the squimish it does feature several scenes of extreme visceral violence (which are quite amazing) but if you liked A History of Violence then you're in for a real treat and yet again Viggo Mortensen is outstanding.

Banned Brands no. 1: Vauxhall

2007-10-06T21:55:00.000+01:00

Having just watched France beat New Zealand in a very exciting Rugby World Cup quarter-final (which would have been better if we had more than a very rudimentary understanding of the sport) we then were assaulted by one of the most annoying adverts around: the one for the Vauxhall Zafira where the two fat kids act like the parents and say pompous po-faced shit. Yes, it's been around for a while but I've decided to keep a list of so-called banned brands - brands whose marketing is so offensive that I refuse to buy any of their products. So Vauxhall is entry number one on our Banned Brands list. This was swiftly followed by BT broadband for the fuck-awful one where the wife has lost her files and folders on the laptop (including the pics of her kids when they were little) and the bloke says "It's OK we can make another one" and she makes weird "I'm not sure what to think" eyes to camera until he says "It's all backed up so we'll just make another folder".

She looks mightily relieved at not having to shag this obvious nonce who's only with her to get near her kids. I digress somewhat but I notice on YouTube that there are many spoofs of the Vauxhall ads. They all seem to be done by teenagers and are of varying degrees of funny. I've chosen this one mainly because it doesn't have the racist overtones of the re-dubbed version of the asian family moving in next door (also to be found on YouTube) and its implications that they're drug-smuggling bombers.

Another Control entry

2007-10-06T09:26:00.000+01:00

One of the comments for this YouTube Joy Division video - about John Cooper Clarke ("Who the fuck is the prick talking about 'bloody queues' at the beginning?") - reminded me about something that happened at the screening we went to the other night. Yol pops out of the cinema just before the film starts and the 20-something barmaid asks her what's on. Yol says 'Control'. The woman looks blank. 'A film about Joy Division,' says Yol. 'Ian Curtis?' The woman shakes her head more blankly, the words passing over her head meaninglessly. Young people, eh? They know nothing, happy to wallow in their ignorance.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw agrees with me: Control is the film of the year

2007-10-05T17:08:00.000+01:00

Not so much about Control not being The Commitments part 2 (that was all my work), but about being the best film so far. I also noticed that sneaky Peter Bradshaw (one of the best film writers around) has upgraded his star rating for Control (Four stars at Cannes in May, five out of five for the UK release).

Ugly Betty Returns

2007-10-04T17:26:00.000+01:00

Ugly Betty returns to Channel 4 this Friday with each episode TXing a week after it's aired in the States. I'm not sure how much of an anti-piracy move this is but ultimately TV distribution will move towards a cinema model with simultaneous world wide releases. The upside is that we won't find ourselves watching Christmas specials in late-July. You can also watch Ugly Betty for free on the now award-winning 4oD service.

AVOD and TVOD: I'm so wasted in this job

2007-10-02T15:05:00.000+01:00

I get an email littered with the terms AVOD and TVOD. Nothing on Google. So to help out the rest of you:

AVOD: Advertising-funded Video-on-demand
TVOD: Transaction-funded Video-on-demand

There you have it. TVOD=PPV; AVOD=free with ads

Control: it's not 'The Commitments II"

2007-10-01T23:03:00.000+01:00

It's probably the best film I've seen so far this year with excellent performances by Sam Riley, Sam Morton and pretty much all the cast. I wasn't expecting a huge amount from the film as I'm always suspicious about most films made of true stories, particularly music biopics, but this was the honourable exception and succeeds in making the telling of Ian Curtis's short life hugely resonant and deeply touching. Yol said she found the look of the film too dour and oppressive. I pointed out that she'd spent the years in question in London and that Birmingham at least pretty much looked and felt like that. Other good things include the cinemascope, the understated camerawork (it would have been easy to mimic director Anton Cobijn's photographic style that was such a defining part of the look of the early 'eighties NME), the quality of the music (the original plan had been for the band to mime but they actually play while Riley sings and it's wholly convincing), John Cooper Clarke now playing himself 28 years ago, and my favourite bit - Joy Division's manager Rob Gretton (Toby Kebell) offering Crispy Ambulance's singer twenty quid to go on stage to sing vocals to a hostile crowd after a depressed Curtis has been unable to go on.

Channel 4 clips

2007-09-26T13:35:00.000+01:00

Channel 4 (Full disclosure: where I work - allegedly) have launched what looks at first testing an excellent clips viewer full of Channel 4 programmes. This is a Brian Potter from Phoneix Nights clip. Where most TV companies fail in putting their videos online is that they make it harder for people to watch them than it would be to go to YouTube etc. Maybe a corner has been turned.

John Humphrys on Facebook

2007-09-12T14:21:00.000+01:00

Pretty much every morning I listen to the Today programme while I lie in bed drinking tea. I switched on today in the middle of an item about Facebook. The report was fine - my take is that it's a slow time for news so we're getting lots of Facebook items (they're easy to do) - but the best bit's back in the studio after the report. John Humphrys is handing over to the sports reporter Gary Richardson, and asks him if he's on Facebook -
JH: Are you on Facebook, Gary?
GR: No. Are you?
JH: (The briefest of pauses) What do you think?
That'd be a no then.

William Gibson on BoingBoing Podcast

2007-09-05T16:29:00.000+01:00

Regular readers will know that I went to see William Gibson talk about his new novel Spook Country. There's an excellent interview with Gibson on BoingBoing that you can find here.

Atonement: includes mild plot spoiler

2007-09-04T16:06:00.000+01:00

Director Joe Wright's adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement is beatifully made and probably fully deserves the standing ovation it received in Venice. Having said that while I enjoyed seeing it - it's a much better film than most I'll see this year, an experience that was enhanced by the intelligent Bafta-organised Q&A with the director, Keira Knighley and James McAvoy, the over-riding emotion for me on leaving the cinema is one of detachment. So why is it with some films, when all the film elements seem to be more than in just in their place - the characters, the storyline, the acting, the camera-work are flawless - the whole isn't quite the sum of its parts?

I don't really have an answer, but here for me, the interior monologue and motivation of Briony wasn't sufficient. The first half of the film feels like Cecilia and Robbie's film with Briony an incidental character but the second part makes a radical shift, focusing on her tortured existence living with what she's done. I think the issue for me is that it's her single mistaken action that determines the course of these people's lives and there's just not enough put into this moment.

O Dreamland: William Gibson in London

2007-08-29T17:33:00.001+01:00

O Dreamland
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Went with Steve to see William Gibson talk at the awesome TUC building on Great Russell Street. Favourite quote of the night (and it gives you a pretty good idea of the audience) was this question from the floor: "If you got in a fight with Neil Gaiman, who would win?"

This picture, as you would have gathered already is nothing to do with the Gibson talk. This was the equally excellent but less geeky 'O Dreamland' show in Romney where I spent most of the weekend.

For pics of the Gibson talk visit Steve's Flickr and Matt's Flickr.

Bethan's Art Auction: update

2007-08-19T16:22:00.000+01:00

Bethan's Art Auction made over £10,000 for Cotlands, a South African charity working to help children affected by AIDS. The tactic of plying the punters with drink and getting them to buy things for more than they intended worked a treat, particularly on me as I ended up buying four things. I'm very happy with them all and as soon as I've paid my overdraft will be getting them framed. Pictures soon.

Charity Art Auction: Bethan's Fund

2007-08-17T09:00:00.000+01:00

I'm in a charity auction that's being held at Transition this Saturday. It's three pieces from the APU 150 show a few years ago. I've deliberately set a low guide price as there's a lot of very very good work that's likely to raise a lot of money (Julie Verhoven, Tom Hunter, Dick Bruna - he of Miffy fame, Maurice Broomfield, Stella Vine and more) but I wanted something that my chavy friends could afford. Now I just need to persuade them to buy it. The money's to help children in South Africa whose lives have been affected by HIV and AIDS. Check out the auction site (it's too late to bid online) but do come along on Saturday.

Stella Vine: another story from the opening

2007-08-08T17:05:00.001+01:00

Stella Vine
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

I'd meant to tell you this when I blogged the Stella entry before. (It's probably only funny if you know David and Cathy. Cathy told it to us over dinner after the show).

David met us straight from work and he's taken to wearing some very nice suits to go to his day job. His office is at Vogue House so he looks pretty smart with some nice fashionista touches that all the boys will be copying next year. So David and Cathy are looking round the show just as the invigilators are clearing people out. This woman comes up to Cathy and says "Is this your husband?" while looking at David. Cathy says "Yes" (because he is). "Oh," the woman goes, but undeterred turns to David and says "I just wanted to say you look *amazing*." (I'm guessing David was feeling pretty smug by now, I would have been.) There's a moment's silence. Then the woman turns to Cathy, looks her up and down and goes "You look OK too," before disappearing where she came from.

If you're that rude woman contact us and we'll tell your side of the story

BA fined £121.5m for price fixing | | Guardian Unlimited Business

2007-08-01T10:42:00.000+01:00

BA fined £121.5m for price fixing | | Guardian Unlimited Business

My wife reckons she'll never fly with Virgin again as it's worse to be a grass than a criminal. She grew up in Cardiff and that's how they think.

BOWBRICK AND YANG SEIZE VICTORY AT OXFORD UNION

2007-07-25T11:14:00.000+01:00

Poking around, but mainly through Steve's Del.icio.us, I found this story from 10 years ago (Friday 25 October 1996, 13:41 GMT to be precise). The good old days, eh?

Yahoo and Webmania join forces to slay the opposition

Steve Bowbrick, managing director of Webmania, proposed the motion at the Oxford Union this week, that "This House believes that the Internet heralds the rise of a global community" and won his case.

Supporting bowbrick was Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, and Sam Greenland, Treasurer of the Union. Opposing the motion was Tim Kirkhope, Parlimentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, Paul Ross, broadcaster and writer, and Malcolm Hutty of Internet Vision.

Arguments from the opposition centred on the alienating and isolating effect of computers and the internet, encouraging a lack of physical contact, attacking the idealism of those supporting the motion that the internet is akin to the coming down of the Berlin Wall. Bowbrick and his supporters successfully demonstrated that the internet is, in fact, a tool for connecting people and can only increase the richness and plurality of communities.

Bowbrick commented: "It is great compliment to be asked to speak at the Oxford Union. I see it as a indication of the seriousness with which the internet is beginning to be taken. The internet is moving away from the perception of being a toy and taking its rightful place as serious commercial tool for the wider business community."

Stiff Little Fingers - Nottingham Rock City December 1987

2007-07-24T21:58:00.001+01:00

Stiff Little Fingers - Nottingham Rock City December 1987
Originally uploaded by 1970IronMan

I never saw Stiff Little Fingers live but I spent a large chuck of today listening to a bunch of their stuff. Here we go:

Alternative Ulster
==============

Nothin' for us in Belfast
The Pound so old it's a pity
OK, there's the Trident in Bangor
Then walk back to the city
We ain't got nothin' but they don't really care
They don't even know you know
Just want our money
And we can take it or leave it
What we need is

(Chorus)
An Alternative Ulster
Grab it change it it's yours
Get an Alternative Ulster
Ignore the bores and their laws
Get an Alternative Ulster
Be an anti-security force
Alter your native Ulster
Alter your native land

Take a look where you're livin'
You got the Army on your street
And the RUC dog of repression
Is barking at your feet
Is this the kind of place you wanna live?
Is this were you wanna be?
Is this the only life we're gonna have?
What we need is

(Chorus)

They say they're a part of you
But that's not true you know
They say they've got control of you
And that's a lie you know
They say you will never be

Free free free

Get an Alternative Ulster
Get an Alternative Ulster
Get an Alternative Ulster

Bettany Hughes on Stella Vine

2007-07-24T15:45:00.000+01:00

Apparently Bettany Hughes was at Stella Vine's show at Oxford. I didn't see her but then I probably wouldn't recognise her unless it was on the telly. I'll look at my photos again.

"My week: Bettany Hughes

...Suitably steamed-up (uncharacteristic, I'm pretty much a Pollyanna), I drift to Oxford for the opening of Stella Vine's show at Modern Art. The competing merits of concept and process always interest. There are many good ideas in the world and a handful of successful executions.

The crowd buzz around with excited, brittle smiles. But these gauche canvases genuinely seem to move their audience. As Diana's lips bleed and Courtney pulls off her panties in the back of a cab and Nigella tempts the vicar they remind me of the world's first created woman - described by Hesiod as the kalon kakon. The beautiful-evil thing.

After the garish glory of Vine's paintings, squalling London looks very cold in the light of day..."