37 posts from 2006

Books, movies films, music; what's in your top 5 right now?

Oh, I'm crap at all-time best-ofs, so I'll just list some good things I've read, heard and seen in the past week:

Books:

1. The Slaves Of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton is a really absorbing novel. It's a portrait of a wartime English petit bourgeois boarding house, but I'm only halfway through, and suspect it's turning into a mildly hamfisted allegory of WWII (the nasty-yet-charming German woman and dim, unpunctual American 'lootennant' are the giveaway characters).


2. The Recording Angel: Explorations In Phonography by Evan Eisenberg is a good-ish read, but in his exploration of the philosophical implications of listening to recorded music, Eisenberg relies too much (for me) on classical and jazz examples, which sometimes makes it hard to grasp his points, which are loose enough to begin with. Anyone who can mention Marx, Glenn Gould, Plato and the wee dog from the HMV logo in one semi-colon strewn sentence is fine by me, though. Nice character sketches of record collectors and music-listeners, too.


3. One Place After Another: Site Specific Art And Locational Identity by Miwon Kwon is something I'm reading for work, because I've never known enough about the history of this kind of work, and obviously it's something that crops up fairly often. I'm getting a headache from raising my eyebrows at the artspeak, but still interesting.

1. Brick is a right giggle - American high school melodrama filtered through noir. Amazing dialogue. And the boy from Third Rock From The Sun has growed up to be a fantastic actor.
2. I also saw a great South Korean film, which was batshit insane. Ran from hilarious lesbian prison slapstick to really grisly paedophile revenge drama (like, footage of bound toddlers screaming for their mothers), with a brief stopover in Australia, and a recurring tofu-eating motif. Will find out the name of it in the morning.

Music:

1. Folk Songs And Instrumental Music Of The Southern Mountains is a sweet 5 LP box set I picked up the other week - '50s recordings of jug bands, storytelling and folk songs, all but one previously unrecorded. Weirdly excellent sound quality.
2. And I'm still loving the RRR Records California and New England sets -  not exactly easy listening, but at times they have more in common with the mountain folk stuff than you might expect (Amps For Christ could probably do a gig with Miss Margaret Purcell of Albermarle County, Virginia. If she weren't dead.)

And, even though you philistines didn't ask about the art: Mark Raidpere, an Estonian video artist, is showing at Tramway at the moment. Bloody great. (800 words in the Herald tomorrow, should anyone Scottish be reading. Distressingly the third thing I've given 4 stars to in the last three weeks. Note to self: see something shit soon.)

Yoinked from Flickr user cherrycan. You can buy them here (but I can't tell if they ship to the UK).

Cary Grant's Suit, by Todd McEwen:

North By Northwest isn't a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it's about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are 'woven' together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there—he gets knitted into his suit, into his job, before our very eyes. Indeed some of the popular 'suitings' of that time ('windowpane' or 'glen plaid') perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary's suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also arms him, protects him: what else is a suit for? Reflects and Protects - a slogan Cary's character, Roger Thornhill, might have come up with himself.

I love the warning given below work shown on Artfacts.net: Please be aware that the images can be assigned wrongly!

Good to know, on a website whose raison d'etre is to document work by artists.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten? 
Submitted by Megan.

I've never eaten anything really weird, but since my favourite restaurant is St. John and I will always order offal or unusual cuts of meat if they're on the menu, I've chowed down on the bone marrow, hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, brains, intestines and stomach linings of various animals. Oh, and the adrenal gland of a monkey, which I suppose is pretty weird.

The bone marrow on toast with parsley salad at St. John is probably the most memorable 'weird' dish I've eaten - texturally sublime - closely followed by a heart, lung and tripe stew I ate in Budapest (much to the dismay of my vegetarian dining companion).

The only food I can't stomach is chicken gizzards - they smell of death and taste worse.

An interesting method of evaluating work:

Art-O-Meter is a device that measures the quality of an art piece. It bases its evaluation on the amount of time that people spend in front of an artwork compared to the total time of exhibition. The measurements are graphically represented by comments and a 5 star rating system.

That is not substance.

And that is not what we stand for.

Do you know what I think?

I think that when some people talk about substance, what they mean is they want the old policies back.

Well, they're not coming back.

We're not going back.

What's the most memorable building you've lived in?
Submitted by Shelly.

The Round House, where my Mom and Dad still live. It's not round, it's octagonal, with a flat roof. Apparently it was a wedding gift, and designed to match a tier of the wedding cake of the first owners.

Reading that back, I sound like I'm making this house up, but it's real, I promise!

holst
forsaken gene picnicked
schelling ballroom
deluge burp
tedium
prorate adjunct handstand sear cartel
spoon infect
clarke butadiene accredit
haze herr pariah
ablate

Best spam email I've had in ages.

Additionally, we've listen to you guys about HTML in posts. We still believe that most of the people coming to blogging *don't* want to edit HTML but we understand that after years of being on the web, many of our users can't help but type an "href" time to time. So now when you enter HTML, Vox asks you if you'd like to translate it.

Thank crikey for that.