4oD Homepage 11 June 2007

4oD Homepage 11 June 2007
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

'The Hole' with Thira Birch has been added recently to the film section of 4oD. "Weirdly" almost all the pics supplied are of Keira Knightley who isn't even mentioned in most of the reviews of this 2001 thriller. Bizarre.

Billy Bragg's Big Busk at the RFH

Billy Bragg's Big Busk at the RFH
Originally uploaded by Catfunt

Lots of not very good events to re-open the RFH. Things we learnt: people will go to anything with free in the title; I don't like crowds; Yol's not a fan of Bulgarian choirs singing on the river; £5 is a lot for a cold chorizo baguette; you can get a bottle of OK white wine for £12.50 in the RFH; there are a lot of food joints at the South Bank; Billy Bragg is actually OK; the interior of the RFH looks fantastic. Bragg busk was OK but they didn't do Wonderwall which Yol reckons is a busking classic. She tips Mardy Bum to be a busking classic of the future.

Harland Miller and Jarvis Cocker

Harland Miller and Jarvis Cocker
Originally uploaded by Catfunt.

Went to see Harland Miller ("International Lonely Guy") chat with Jarvis Cocker at Tate Britain with interventions by some slightly incompetent journalist who was conducting her first live interview ever (why else was she so crap?).
www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/harland_miller_jarv...

My Father-in-Law's 80th birthday

 
This was pretty early in the evening before I'd brought a punishing regimen to the Proscecco with brandy chasers. After that things got a bit blurry but I sat with these guys (very little English despite 50 years each in the UK) and we chatted in Italian (me nodding mostly) about a wide range of things I didn't understand.

A little bit of power (and Channel Mixing)...

A little bit of power (and Channel Mixing)...
Originally uploaded by Catfunt.

...is a very dangerous thing. The cool band in Paris, in the Hotel
Amour, de-coolified with the Channel mixer to make it look like a faux
old postcard (except for the clothes, the outdoor heater, the CD
cases...).

Bernie Rhodes: what a lune

Went to see a talk about The Clash, clothes and culture last night at the Cochrane Theatre, just by Central St Martins. It was chaired by the excellent Paul Gorman, author of The Look, with a panel of Alex Michon and Krystyna Kolowska (the two Clash seamstresses who designed and made their clothes from the White Riot tour onwards) and Sebastian (he didn't have a surname but designed and printed their T-shirts). There were a bunch of models inclusing Alex's mate Majid who showed some of the clothes so it was a pretty interesting talk with an audience that was half twenty-something fashion students and haggered 40-somethings who were on the White Riot tour. About halfway through the alloted time Paul Gorman invited the Clash's manager Bernie Rhodes up onto the stage. The first warning sign should have been that he wasn't in the auditorium and someone was dispatched to find him. Then you could hear him before he appeared on stage (radio mics), then he proceeded to pace the stage dropping bombs and bon mots that was only hindered by his inability to focus on one story at a time and the occassional stumble on stage. Some of it was good (the story about how the first time he met Kevin Rowland "I couldn't listen to anything he was saying 'cause he was wearing these fucking awful trousers - at least he wasn't wearing a dress"), but most of it sadly incoherent. He roamed the stage doling out his "punk philosophy" and how Malcolm McLaren had been a Rhodes copyist, he'd been the one who put Lydon into the Pistols and kept trying to take his jacket off but as the radio mic was clipped to it he'd have to put the jacket back on until one of the models helped him out. You wondered when someone would step in and stop him - Paul Gorman tried to get him to answer some audience questions but Rhodes used this to launch into a critique of the UK ("This country is so fucked.") - what ended it all abruptly was Rhodes use of the N-word (do we say "the N-word" nowadays or do we say "nigger" in reported speech?): "You want to sort out crime in London, then you need to sort out all the niggers in Peckham." The booming disembodied voice of the head of college over the PA system: "I think that's enough", the house lights come up in a hurry and a very loud clip of the Clash projected on the screen above the stage blasts away as people shuffle out to the free bar.

Whitechapel Library (old style)

Whitechapel Library (old style)
Originally uploaded by Catfunt.

Took this one from a moving bus on the way to work this morning. I have the excellent Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers by Martin Evering out of the equally excellent Westminster Library at the moment and have been messing with the channel mixer.

BBC - Radio 1 - Musicubes - View

Charlie (who I work with) claims to be responsible for this in his previous life at Radio 1.  It's pretty impressive. This is my musical profile:

Link to BBC - Radio 1 - Musicubes - View

Pigeon Point: Tobago on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Testing out some Microsoft Live Windows blogging tool (PJM: Sticking up for the little guy since 1980!) that RDH recommended on his blog. Actually, looking around the window it's called Windows Live Writer (Beta). Is Beta it's surname or a nickname and it must have a large family because there are a lot of Betas out there. I think the thing I like about it most is that it's got a strikethrough option on the tool bar. I've also added a picture of Jonathan Peachey to test out the insert a pic tab. More later... (Update: it won't let me publish the pic except via ftp, so no pic today).

Link to Pigeon Point: Tobago on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Hindu Temple, Trinidad

Hindu Temple, Trinidad
Originally uploaded by Catfunt.

Being on holiday feels like such a long time ago.

Last night we went to the Jamaican High Commission in South Kensington for a Caribbean tourism event. As an all-inclusive it was pretty good: rum punch and wine to drink; mini chicken roti, peppered shrimp, BBQ pork, duck wraps, potato fritters and a few other dishes I forget. Some nice tourism officials and a miniature commemorative cricket ball to mark Courtney Walsh's 517 test match wickets. I think they've been handing those out for a while.