Monday, April 27, 2009
More Orientalist Action
A while back I mentioned seeing the exhibition of Orientalist art in the Tate Britain in that London. Now the BBC reports the exhibition has travelled to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, where the locals can see how crazy Victorians imagined their lives. Interestingly, the BBC also reports that vintage Orientalist art is carrying ever increasing prices in the art markets of the world - you can never really go too wrong with eroticised pictures of dusky native ladies.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
An Unoriginal Thought
Celebrity culture is vile, but people who shite on about its vileness are not part of the solution. Likewise, there is nothing more vulgar than respectable news organs covering what others are saying about celebrities as a way of serving up inane celebrity gossip themselves.
Friday, April 24, 2009
"Under the Guns of the Red Baron"
Under the Guns of the Red Baron: The Complete Record of Von Richthofen's Victories and Victims Fully Illustrated, by Norman Franks, Hal Giblin, and Nigel McCrery
I picked up this book in the Central Library. It is an interesting but grim account of the eighty kills of Manfred von Richthofen, the First World War flying ace better known as the Red Baron. It includes Richthofen’s report on each plane he shot down, notes by the authors on the particular engagement, and then a biographical sketch and photograph of the men who crewed the aircraft downed by Richthofen. The biographical sketches are the grim bit. Most of the crews were killed when their planes were shot down (this was an era before parachutes, so only those who were able to make and survive crash landings lived to tell their tales). There is a certain “tally ho” excitement to accounts of First World War flying, for all the horrific death rates among air crew. Seeing a succession of 20 year old men stare out from black and white photographs brings home the human cost of warfare – they make their own squadron of men who would never return to their homes again.
Richthofen himself met his end while chasing his 81st kill. He had been offered the chance of retirement after downing his 80th enemy plane, but he stayed on, perhaps hoping to reach 100 kills. On the day he died, he made the fatal mistake of chasing an Canadian-crewed plane for too long on the British side of the lines, and was killed either by ground fire or the intervention of another Canadian pilot (we do not know who fired the shot that killed him). He was just short of 26 years of age.
One thing I did not really get from this book was how Richthofen managed to notch up so many kills. His own accounts are a bit vague on things like tactics or manoeuvres, saying instead things like “I saw an enemy plane, I chased it, I shot bullets at it, it crashed into the ground”. He may have been helped by having better planes than his victims (some of the allied aircraft really do sound like flying coffins). He was also helped by poor organisation on the allied side, with vulnerable observer or bomber planes often heading over to the German side of the lines without fighter escort. But it is hard not to believe he had a certain something that allowed him to kill and kill again.
I picked up this book in the Central Library. It is an interesting but grim account of the eighty kills of Manfred von Richthofen, the First World War flying ace better known as the Red Baron. It includes Richthofen’s report on each plane he shot down, notes by the authors on the particular engagement, and then a biographical sketch and photograph of the men who crewed the aircraft downed by Richthofen. The biographical sketches are the grim bit. Most of the crews were killed when their planes were shot down (this was an era before parachutes, so only those who were able to make and survive crash landings lived to tell their tales). There is a certain “tally ho” excitement to accounts of First World War flying, for all the horrific death rates among air crew. Seeing a succession of 20 year old men stare out from black and white photographs brings home the human cost of warfare – they make their own squadron of men who would never return to their homes again.
Richthofen himself met his end while chasing his 81st kill. He had been offered the chance of retirement after downing his 80th enemy plane, but he stayed on, perhaps hoping to reach 100 kills. On the day he died, he made the fatal mistake of chasing an Canadian-crewed plane for too long on the British side of the lines, and was killed either by ground fire or the intervention of another Canadian pilot (we do not know who fired the shot that killed him). He was just short of 26 years of age.
One thing I did not really get from this book was how Richthofen managed to notch up so many kills. His own accounts are a bit vague on things like tactics or manoeuvres, saying instead things like “I saw an enemy plane, I chased it, I shot bullets at it, it crashed into the ground”. He may have been helped by having better planes than his victims (some of the allied aircraft really do sound like flying coffins). He was also helped by poor organisation on the allied side, with vulnerable observer or bomber planes often heading over to the German side of the lines without fighter escort. But it is hard not to believe he had a certain something that allowed him to kill and kill again.
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Suicide Machine
I was going to write about J.G. Ballard dying and stuff, but then I remembered that I have not actually read anything by him, apart from one short story. It featured cars and strange eroticism, and was generally a bit weird, so I suppose it works as summary of his life's work. Apart from having seen David Cronenburg's film adaptation of Crash, I am more familiar with music inspired or based on Ballard's writings. Hawkwind's 'High Rise' and The Normal's 'Warm Leatherette' & 'T.V.O.D.' are the real stars here.
I feel like I should actually read one of Ballard's novels sometime, so will probably push for 'High Rise' or 'The Atrocity Exhibition' at the Science Fiction book club tomorrow.
More:
What pop music tells us about JG Ballard (why are all the comments by people called Ian?)
JG Ballard: The music he inspired
I feel like I should actually read one of Ballard's novels sometime, so will probably push for 'High Rise' or 'The Atrocity Exhibition' at the Science Fiction book club tomorrow.
More:
What pop music tells us about JG Ballard (why are all the comments by people called Ian?)
JG Ballard: The music he inspired
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Brave Dog Wins Award for Chasing Away Burglar
Toby the Labrador lives in Barnoldswick in Lancashire. One night, he found that a burglar had broken into the house. To defend his home and family, Toby attacked the burglar. The intruder fought back with kitchen knives, stabbing Toby four times, but the brave Labrador stood his ground, forcing the burglar to flee. Now Toby has been awarded with the PDSA Certificate for Animal Bravery. Toby's owner, Jonathan Morton, was quoted as saying: "Toby is our hero".
More
Friday, April 17, 2009
A Trip to the Niland: Part Two
What am I talking about? Maybe you should read Part One
Upstairs the exhibition had a sudden attack of non-video art – a couple of posters and models depicting crazy conspiracy theory stuff. I like the mysteriously true end of conspiracy theories (you know, Bohemian Grove, Gladio, that kind of thing). This promiscuously mixed in all that kind of thing with more outlandish stuff about secret rulers of the world and so on.That is maybe the problem with reading about this kind of stuff in an art gallery rather than a book – artworks typically do not feature footnotes.
They did have some video pieces upstairs. One that I liked was people in Baghdad making the noise that Tomahawk cruise missiles make when they fly by and then explode in the distance. They should have sold CDs of this, it was great. There was also a conceptually interesting piece in which separate interviews of an Israeli tank crews were shown in screens laid out to show where they would be relative to each other in a tank. It was conceptually interesting, but once you got the idea it was too difficult to really engage with what they were saying, so I left them to it.
The last piece I looked at was again more like a film than an artwork, but it was pretty interesting. It dealt with Auschwitz, and told the story first of all of the first people to break the story of the death camp. They were two inmates who had something to do with the gas chambers (I missed the intro, but they might have been the guys who checked the bodies for valuables; the Nazis disposed of these people every couple of months to keep word of the gas chambers to as few people as possible). They escaped from the camp, and after an arduous journey they were able to get word to the allies, who then basically did nothing about it. Various prominent Jewish figures begged the allied leaders to have the gas chambers or railways into Auschwitz bombed, but Churchill et al. took the line that the best way to help the Jews was to end the war as fast as possible. The film implies that not bombing the camps was Wrong; I believe that this is a more morally ambiguous question. Whatever about that, the aerial photos of the camp (taken by a reconnaissance plane that had no idea what it was flying over) showing the gas chambers with a line of people about to be murdered marching to them was rather affecting.
The lay out of the exhibition is such that it was only by chance that I ended up with Auschwitz, but it works well as an end-point. It maybe also works well that (for me) the exhibition ended with a fairly straight film on this awful subject. It got me thinking also about the whole business of visiting Auschwitz, a place that is now a major tourist attraction in Poland. I am interested in history, even bad history, and I could imagine the camp being a fascinating place to see. But I could imagine two possible downsides to going there. First of all, the place could be so depressingly awful that a trip there would feel like immersion in the pornography of horror – a place you visit not to learn more about the past, but to get a vicarious thrill from contemplating the terrible things that people can do. Or, contrariwise, it could turn out to be a case of Holocaust kitsch, a packaged experience so tacky that it becomes a theme-park of death, distancing the visitor from any understanding of the events that took place there. Has anyone reading this ever been to Auschwitz? What did you make of it?
One final thing - I did not take notes on which artists produced which pieces in the exhibition. The exhibition's website gives the following names of the artists:
Maja Bajevic (Bosnia) Bureau d'etudes (France) Paul Chan (USA) Köken Ergun (Turkey) Harun Farocki (Germany) Omer Fast (Israel/USA) Kendell Geers (South Africa) Johan Grimonprez (Belgium) Jamelie Hassan (Canada) Kristan Horton (Canada) Abdel-Karim Khalil (Iraq) Anri Sala (Albania) Sonja Savic (Serbia) Sean Snyder (USA/Germany) Ron Terada (Canada)
See if you can match them to the described artworks.
Upstairs the exhibition had a sudden attack of non-video art – a couple of posters and models depicting crazy conspiracy theory stuff. I like the mysteriously true end of conspiracy theories (you know, Bohemian Grove, Gladio, that kind of thing). This promiscuously mixed in all that kind of thing with more outlandish stuff about secret rulers of the world and so on.
They did have some video pieces upstairs. One that I liked was people in Baghdad making the noise that Tomahawk cruise missiles make when they fly by and then explode in the distance. They should have sold CDs of this, it was great. There was also a conceptually interesting piece in which separate interviews of an Israeli tank crews were shown in screens laid out to show where they would be relative to each other in a tank. It was conceptually interesting, but once you got the idea it was too difficult to really engage with what they were saying, so I left them to it.
The last piece I looked at was again more like a film than an artwork, but it was pretty interesting. It dealt with Auschwitz, and told the story first of all of the first people to break the story of the death camp. They were two inmates who had something to do with the gas chambers (I missed the intro, but they might have been the guys who checked the bodies for valuables; the Nazis disposed of these people every couple of months to keep word of the gas chambers to as few people as possible). They escaped from the camp, and after an arduous journey they were able to get word to the allies, who then basically did nothing about it. Various prominent Jewish figures begged the allied leaders to have the gas chambers or railways into Auschwitz bombed, but Churchill et al. took the line that the best way to help the Jews was to end the war as fast as possible. The film implies that not bombing the camps was Wrong; I believe that this is a more morally ambiguous question. Whatever about that, the aerial photos of the camp (taken by a reconnaissance plane that had no idea what it was flying over) showing the gas chambers with a line of people about to be murdered marching to them was rather affecting.
The lay out of the exhibition is such that it was only by chance that I ended up with Auschwitz, but it works well as an end-point. It maybe also works well that (for me) the exhibition ended with a fairly straight film on this awful subject. It got me thinking also about the whole business of visiting Auschwitz, a place that is now a major tourist attraction in Poland. I am interested in history, even bad history, and I could imagine the camp being a fascinating place to see. But I could imagine two possible downsides to going there. First of all, the place could be so depressingly awful that a trip there would feel like immersion in the pornography of horror – a place you visit not to learn more about the past, but to get a vicarious thrill from contemplating the terrible things that people can do. Or, contrariwise, it could turn out to be a case of Holocaust kitsch, a packaged experience so tacky that it becomes a theme-park of death, distancing the visitor from any understanding of the events that took place there. Has anyone reading this ever been to Auschwitz? What did you make of it?
One final thing - I did not take notes on which artists produced which pieces in the exhibition. The exhibition's website gives the following names of the artists:
Maja Bajevic (Bosnia) Bureau d'etudes (France) Paul Chan (USA) Köken Ergun (Turkey) Harun Farocki (Germany) Omer Fast (Israel/USA) Kendell Geers (South Africa) Johan Grimonprez (Belgium) Jamelie Hassan (Canada) Kristan Horton (Canada) Abdel-Karim Khalil (Iraq) Anri Sala (Albania) Sonja Savic (Serbia) Sean Snyder (USA/Germany) Ron Terada (Canada)
See if you can match them to the described artworks.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
A Trip to the Niland: Part One
The Model Arts & Niland Gallery is this place in Sligo where they show modern art stuff. In all my time visiting Sligo I somehow managed to miss its existence until very recently. Now a trip to the Niland is one of the highlights of any visit to Ireland's north west.
At the moment, the Niland's normal location is in the middle of a renovation, but the institution is showing stuff in other locations. Their current show seems to be some kind of touring exhibition based on war, terrorism, and that kind of thing. Most of the exhibition is video work of one sort or another. The first piece you see is four screens showing footage taken at two big events in Turkey. One is some kind of army passing out parade, featuring loads of soldiers marching around and declaring their intention to kill anyone who opposes a certain narrowly defined vision of Turkishness. The other is some kind of youth congress, at which a series of cute as a button small children make similarly blood-thirsty promises. Happy is he who is a Turk!
The second piece was by a Bosnian artist. She filmed herself making a series of emphatic statements while in a voice-over the artist repeats the same statements. Sometimes the voice-over is in phase with the on-screen comments, sometimes not. The statements range from the ominous (“I kill people who think differently from me” or “I like to rape women”) to the surreal (“During Ramadan I do not smoke or drink alcohol, but I take ecstasy”) to the somewhat banal, all delivered in more or less the same tone. There are obvious resonances here with the troubled history of Bosnia, the various references to sexual violence or exploitation of women gaining an extra frisson through being said by a woman, albeit one at that point speaking in the persona of a man.
The Bosnian's piece was refreshingly short, unlike the nevertheless fascinating piece that followed, which was a series of three films by another artist. Actually, I only saw part of one of these films, as it was too long to watch all of. It was a series of everyday scenes shot in Baghdad on the eve of the US invasion, a poignant vision of people living lives of a normality that would soon be shattered. The footage was fascinating; shots of two sisters dancing was an image that will live with me for some time. As an art piece it was however a bit problematic. The footage might have been better used as the raw material for a TV documentary rather than something to be shown in an art gallery. I strongly suspect that no one who chanced across this piece stood there to watch the whole 51 minutes, let alone hung around to watch the other long films by the artist that were showing.
The next room had a big sign telling you in English and French that you are now leaving the American Sector, set up so that it was visible through glass windows to people in the street. Although it looked like something you would see in divided Berlin, it was actually placed initially on the border between the USA and Canada. It stood there for just under a week, until complaints forced its removal.
That room also housed a piece by another artist, the accompanying notes for which indicated a certain ambivalence on his part about the theme of the exhibition. The exhibition's broadly post-11-9 sensibility irritated him, as it is not as though extremism and political violence was conjured into the world on that 2001 day – in much of the world people have long had to live with the fear of sudden violent death. This is, surely, an agreeable sentiment, but I am not so sure I liked the art-work that went with it – footage from apartheid-era South Africa of a suspected informer being tortured to death, sound-tracked by Magritte (or was it Matisse?) talking about art.
The next piece was another video piece, consisting of cut together news footage of various terrorist events, intercut with all kinds of funny stuff. The gang was all here – the Mogadishu rescue, Sadat's assassination, lots of footage of planes blowing up, and so on. I was particularly struck by footage of an airplane coming into land, missing the run way, flying into trees, and then (just when you thought that just maybe they might have made a hard landing that some people would get away from) exploding, sound-tracked by disco classic 'Do The Hustle!'. Again, though, it went on a bit, but an art gallery was probably the best place for it, as it was plainly too weird and tasteless for TV. And I now find myself singing 'Do The Hustle' to myself whenever I take a plane.
THUS ENDS PART ONE. PART TWO TO FOLLOW
The second piece was by a Bosnian artist. She filmed herself making a series of emphatic statements while in a voice-over the artist repeats the same statements. Sometimes the voice-over is in phase with the on-screen comments, sometimes not. The statements range from the ominous (“I kill people who think differently from me” or “I like to rape women”) to the surreal (“During Ramadan I do not smoke or drink alcohol, but I take ecstasy”) to the somewhat banal, all delivered in more or less the same tone. There are obvious resonances here with the troubled history of Bosnia, the various references to sexual violence or exploitation of women gaining an extra frisson through being said by a woman, albeit one at that point speaking in the persona of a man.
The Bosnian's piece was refreshingly short, unlike the nevertheless fascinating piece that followed, which was a series of three films by another artist. Actually, I only saw part of one of these films, as it was too long to watch all of. It was a series of everyday scenes shot in Baghdad on the eve of the US invasion, a poignant vision of people living lives of a normality that would soon be shattered. The footage was fascinating; shots of two sisters dancing was an image that will live with me for some time. As an art piece it was however a bit problematic. The footage might have been better used as the raw material for a TV documentary rather than something to be shown in an art gallery. I strongly suspect that no one who chanced across this piece stood there to watch the whole 51 minutes, let alone hung around to watch the other long films by the artist that were showing.
The next room had a big sign telling you in English and French that you are now leaving the American Sector, set up so that it was visible through glass windows to people in the street. Although it looked like something you would see in divided Berlin, it was actually placed initially on the border between the USA and Canada. It stood there for just under a week, until complaints forced its removal.
That room also housed a piece by another artist, the accompanying notes for which indicated a certain ambivalence on his part about the theme of the exhibition. The exhibition's broadly post-11-9 sensibility irritated him, as it is not as though extremism and political violence was conjured into the world on that 2001 day – in much of the world people have long had to live with the fear of sudden violent death. This is, surely, an agreeable sentiment, but I am not so sure I liked the art-work that went with it – footage from apartheid-era South Africa of a suspected informer being tortured to death, sound-tracked by Magritte (or was it Matisse?) talking about art.
The next piece was another video piece, consisting of cut together news footage of various terrorist events, intercut with all kinds of funny stuff. The gang was all here – the Mogadishu rescue, Sadat's assassination, lots of footage of planes blowing up, and so on. I was particularly struck by footage of an airplane coming into land, missing the run way, flying into trees, and then (just when you thought that just maybe they might have made a hard landing that some people would get away from) exploding, sound-tracked by disco classic 'Do The Hustle!'. Again, though, it went on a bit, but an art gallery was probably the best place for it, as it was plainly too weird and tasteless for TV. And I now find myself singing 'Do The Hustle' to myself whenever I take a plane.
THUS ENDS PART ONE. PART TWO TO FOLLOW
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Glasgow records
So here are the records my beloved and I picked up in Glasgow. All purchased on CD, unless otherwise stated.
Monorail:
Es A Love Cycle
v/a La Belle Epoque: EMI's French Girls, 1965-1968
Shop Assistants Will Anything Happen
v/a Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974**
Mary Weiss (with the Reigning Sound) Dangerous Game** (vinyl)
v/a La Belle Epoque: EMI's French Girls, 1965-1968
Crystal Antlers Tentacles (vinyl, with free download)
v/a Planet Lollywood: The first wave of plugged-in pop at the Pakistani picture house (a Finders Keepers production)** (vinyl)
v/a Waking Up Scheherazade: Arabian Garage Psych Nuggets from the 60's and Early 70's** (vinyl)
Fopp:
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan Sunday at Devil Dirt
Broadcast Tender Buttons
Oxfam:
U2 The Joshua Tree
U2 War
The Breeders Pod
Mysterious:
v/a Smalltown Superupersound On Fire (free with some magazine)
Further discussion of these records to follow in due course.
**My beloved bought this one
Monorail:
Es A Love Cycle
v/a La Belle Epoque: EMI's French Girls, 1965-1968
Shop Assistants Will Anything Happen
v/a Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974**
Mary Weiss (with the Reigning Sound) Dangerous Game** (vinyl)
v/a La Belle Epoque: EMI's French Girls, 1965-1968
Crystal Antlers Tentacles (vinyl, with free download)
v/a Planet Lollywood: The first wave of plugged-in pop at the Pakistani picture house (a Finders Keepers production)** (vinyl)
v/a Waking Up Scheherazade: Arabian Garage Psych Nuggets from the 60's and Early 70's** (vinyl)
Fopp:
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan Sunday at Devil Dirt
Broadcast Tender Buttons
Oxfam:
U2 The Joshua Tree
U2 War
The Breeders Pod
Mysterious:
v/a Smalltown Superupersound On Fire (free with some magazine)
Further discussion of these records to follow in due course.
**My beloved bought this one
Monday, April 13, 2009
v/a "Play Safe"
This is a compilation by Frank's APA pal "Paul". Interspersed among the tunes are snippets from public information films, while some of the tracks themselves seem to use samples from those relics of the 1970s. There are, sadly, no samples from Irish information films, so no "Oh me achin' back!" or "That’s' a sick way to live!" action, but it is great to hear the UK ones again. The Donald Pleasance one in which he is a malign spirit trying to trick children into drowning remains as creepy as ever, but the more comic ones are also entertaining (like the one about how if you polish your floors and put a rug on it then you are asking for trouble ("I'll just go put the kettle - Woaaaah!" ).
The music is mostly of the primitive electronic sort you got back in the 1970s – BBC Radiophonic Workshop stuff and people like Belbury Poly knocking them off. The title music to Children of the Stones gives Donald Pleasance a run for his money in the race for maximum creepiness, but a shiver of nostalgia went up my spine when I heard the music for Words & Pictures again. Maybe the next disc in this series will include some of the songs from this programme ("Chicken and chips! Chicken and chips! Everybody here loves chicken and chips. We eat it all day, never throw it away, we all love chicken and chips" etc.)
Incidentally, it you are interested in public information films, check out Staplerfahrer Klaus. It is a German public information film about forklift truck safety, but it carries a message we can all live by.
The music is mostly of the primitive electronic sort you got back in the 1970s – BBC Radiophonic Workshop stuff and people like Belbury Poly knocking them off. The title music to Children of the Stones gives Donald Pleasance a run for his money in the race for maximum creepiness, but a shiver of nostalgia went up my spine when I heard the music for Words & Pictures again. Maybe the next disc in this series will include some of the songs from this programme ("Chicken and chips! Chicken and chips! Everybody here loves chicken and chips. We eat it all day, never throw it away, we all love chicken and chips" etc.)
Incidentally, it you are interested in public information films, check out Staplerfahrer Klaus. It is a German public information film about forklift truck safety, but it carries a message we can all live by.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Extremely Important News Item
President Obama has picked his puppy, a Portuguese water dog named Bo. However, Bo is reported to have been a gift from Senator Edward Kennedy, and is thus not a rescue dog.Bo has apparently made no "toileting errors" nor has he gnawed on any White House furniture, thanks to extensive conditioning from Senator Kennedy's army of dog trainers.
more
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