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.
14.8.08
Black Power Salute: BBC4
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.
5.8.08
Publish and Be Damned, 2008
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.
31.7.08
Family
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.
(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.
24.7.08
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be v. Popbitch
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...
22.7.08
The Seventh Seal on 4oD
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.
26.6.08
New insults around the office
21.6.08
19.6.08
Olympic Posters: Canada
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
4.6.08
Bird Scarer in the fig tree
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.
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