Matthew Barney by Elizabeth Peyton at the Whitechapel

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)

Harun Farocki

Catfunt Wordle Twitter: Three giants of the internet

Fuertaventura

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

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

From the mighty Private Eye.

The end of the project

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

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

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

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'.