life recorded by nine eyes

since google streetview launched, accidental images of absurd, beautiful and shocking moments have been immortalised by this roving, nine-eyed machine - and then, inevitably, isolated and forwarded around by internet memesters.


but for 9eyes curator and artist jon rafman, it's opened a pandora's box of questions about photography, privacy, art and basic humanity.


he's penned a much more articulate explanation of his project than i possibly could right now, so i heartily suggest heading thataway for a proper background.


it reminds me of that robert rauschenberg quote i love so much:

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

beauty in the ordinary. wonder in the ugly. yes, please.

make it beautiful

it's everywhere at the moment, but troika's 'shoal' installation is really very lovely.

TROIKA_SHOAL from Troika on Vimeo.

love is the message

life; confounding, ecstatic, banal, repetitive, jolting, exhausting, gorgeous, putrid sublime life.

yes.



from radiolab, which makes me think all things are possible and work is simply what you plough your curiosity into.

glowing a little less brightly

harvey fuqua, motown legend, genius producer and marvin gaye's mentor, died yesterday.

he was 80, and he managed to wring so much juiciness out of life, so it's difficult to be sad. after all, not many people get to leave behind songs like 'your precious love', 'ain't no mountain high enough' and 'if i can't have you'. we should all be so lucky, no?



so long, harvey, and thanks for the music.

daily poetry

i would like to kiss the face of the person responsible for poetry daily, especially today's edition:

Cutting Apples

My father always carried a penknife
to pare his green apples, raising their skins
in perfect spirals. He never drew blood
slicing his bananas for breakfast,
their dark-seeded cores like little faces
dropping into the milk, one more item
in a life of a thousand chores,
one more notch in a life advancing
by millimeters or inches, not seconds or days.
I watched him turn himself as carefully away
from violence as a lathe on a table leg,
cutting each curve and flourish
from the flat face of a block
clamped in his hand. His hand and its thumb
never shied from the blade; he knew
that what you do with any tool gives it its value,
like a life—not too eager or afraid.

Michael Salcman

plucked from places obscure and obvious, they're always sparse and wonderful.

a love letter for you

i first came across stephen powers' philadelphia mural project, 'a love letter for you', about six months ago. i was waiting for the right moment to show it to someone, but there's no point waiting for the right moment (unless you're hatching an egg, maybe); there's only this moment.


so, here it is.




some are hip hop lyrics, some are sweet nothings; all of them are stunning.


cockle-warming...


go see.

dance dance dance

sun is shining, weather is sweet...

tug off your shoe prisons, peel off your sock sarcophagi, and get dancing. because i said so.

mitjili napurrula

i'm currently having my mind blown by mitjili napurrula's work. a pintupi, from the northern territory, she apparently only started painting aged 48, but she's now shown in the NGV and the Australian National Gallery.


they're so expansive, full of mystery and story and red earth; and i love that she thinks of them as the product of her family: "My mother taught me my father's Tjukurrpa; that's what I'm painting on the canvas".


i can't stop looking at them.

and it's spring

yesterday, all the signs that i needed to believe were all there...

lunchtime squinting into the sunshine in regent's park:


the flowers were in full petal explosion:


the council workers were semi-naked:


...hallelujah.

is 5, Four, VII

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis

(ee cummings, of course.)

birds

birds and a les paul? this is on my list.

also, i love how much icelandic sounds like birdsong.

in six weeks' time

for elena and nic, and for kate and david, for being brave.

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back.

from wendell berry's 'the country of marriage'.

coveting

the empire of wonder that is it's nice that just keeps growing with the launch of a brand new zine 'if drawings were photographs'.


from the website:

The brainchild of designer Rob Matthews and Illustrator Tom Edwards, put simply – “Tom gave drawings to Rob and Rob tried to make them into photographs.”

keep an eye on goings-on over at it's nice that towards the end of december, when sanky will be rummaging about in his bag of tricks for a special series of guest posts. yay!

while on the subject of pretty things, present and correct is brimful with goodies making my credit card itch.

this has my name all over it:


maybe i'd be better at remembering what day it is if i had this calendar...


and anyone who watched last night's installment of david attenborough's 'Life' series will have a whole new appreciation for this no-nonsense educational poster:

goosebumps

happy friday, pals. go get yourself a beer from the fridge. you've had a tough week and we're proud of you.

heaven can wait

deliriously weird and wonderful new video for charlotte gainsbourg & beck's new song:

a series of small cheers

let's hear it for wooden soldiers!
i want this little parade of wooden soldiers an unreasonable amount.

let's hear it for mat bickley!
anyone who can carry off a corduroy blazer while swearing like a sailor on shore leave, do his own dentistry, discuss miranda july and then send you on your way with a massive bearhug is a-ok with me. he's like a gold-toothed, foul-mouthed bill ackroyd circa 1986. also, his blog is marvellously weird.

let's hear it for throaty colds!
i can momentarily sing brian jonestown massacre's anenome roughly in the same key as mara keagle.


let's hear it for obsessive consumption!
the art project by kate bingaman-burt, not the pasttime. although lord knows i've done enough of the latter of late...you'd forgive me if you could see the cobalt blue skirt of wonder, though. ANYWAY. the obsessive consumption project documents the artist's personal daily purchases - and credit card statements - illustratively. must really turn the brief sting of a rash purchase into a slow ache. act in haste, repent at leisure, etc.

i'd consider giving it a go if it didn't make me apoplectic just to think about. i can't work out whether i'd be more self-conscious about my extravagances (another bottle of red! taxi!) or my scrimping (another tin of beans for lunch. 3 for £9 pants.).

binge. purge. repeat.

in the queue

when the filmmaker richard rogers ('dick' to his friends) died in 2001 he left behind countless reels of film for the one project he couldn't find a way to finish - a documentary examining his own life. his wife asked his former student, alexander olch, to make the film her husband couldn't - he was just too close to the subject to see the story. turns out that making the autobiographical documentary required actors, scripts, and more than five years of olch's own film-making time.

it looks like it was worth it.



via the marvellous hollister hovey.

the peckham experiment

following on after a fashion from the last post, i'm going to check out the peckham experiment, which rewards the audience for further economic tanking. do you want crisps or a job? hmm. what flavour are the crisps?

from the exhibition website:

Ellie Harrison’s Vending Machine [...] will distribute free bags of crisps throughout The Peckham Experiment – this largesse is, however, dependent on the machine receiving bad news about the UK economy via an internal BBC information-feed. This basically means that what’s bad for the rest of the country is good for exhibition-goers! (although the actual crisps are probably quite bad for you….)

it's part of a 'social health project' called The Peckham Experiment. and as i'm currently conducting my own peckham experiment i'm definitely going to have a poke around...

circles. philip glass. sesame street. 1979.

hyponotic, philip glass-scored awesomeness for kids. 'nuff said.

much marvellous

peter broderick last night was mesmeric, deft and genuine and kind of - what am i trying to say? - kind of like that sweet pre-sleep state where you're bobbing about on the surface of sleep, stringing images and thoughts and sensations together like beads, content. like that.

he was followed by the fourteen-legged musical party that is efterklang.



the last time i saw these guys was in a field. the rain was coming down sideways - literally horizontally - and it had been for hours. it was a summer festival. i wanted to go home. and then efterklang came on dressed as sort of danish matadors, all in white except for their swishy green capes. they played their hearts out and i stayed and forgot all about the rain.

they're coming back in october to play at the barbican with an orchestra. so much yay.