Weather lousy but whether too lousier....

Yesterday: Drizzle, mist, murk, dull, damp, cold.

Today: Rain, dull, misty, cold.

Today is therefore cancelled. Not just my plans but the whole day.

If any of you are having a Saturday at the moment you should exit it carefully at the nearest door and prepare to move straight to Sunday instead. Hopefully that one will be a little more encouraging.

I'm off to catch up on film watching, album ripping, PC cleaning and general under the roof type things.

If you are forced to be outdoors in similar conditions at the moment then be careful how you're reading this - your PC will get wet.

Kienholz: Retrospective.

Art is a strange thing.

The same piece of work can invoke a myriad of reactions in people, possibly with no two people quite seeing the same thing the same way. Some art brings out the thoughtful scholar whilst other boils the blood of the hateful mob.

I think I have a pretty liberal view where art is concerned. I'm just as at home with paintings, prints, sculpture, installation, performance, modern or classical, direct or oblique. I can enjoy a Dali, a William Blake, an Enim, a Hurst or a Kapoor.

I think the thing that keeps me curious and interested about this sort of thing is that I realised many years ago that not liking or understanding a piece doesn't make it bad or wrong - just that it's something you don't get. To my mind all art is created from the artists subjective view of things so it's no surprise that it's hard to truly take an objective view of what it is or where it comes from.

When I see art I like though, I know it.

This brings me to today, and my visit to the Baltic Centre for Comtemporary Art.


The Baltic - today.

I'd actually gone there to mainly see part of the "History of Disappearance", a selection from the Franklin Furnace archives. Taken from live art ranging from 1975 to the present it included something I'd seen many years ago that had long since stuck in my mind - a work called "The Pedestrian Project" by Yvette Helin. Of course, at the time I had no idea what it was, just that it was people dressed as those figures seen on washroom doors - very odd but very memorable.


The Pedestrian Project

Moving through city streets, mixing prearranged routines with spontaneous movement, they stood for the anonymous nature of people, how things merge into one in amongst the bustle of daily life. The twist is, of course, that when you put a style of figure seen every day in an environment known like the back of your hand it stands out and becomes extraordinary.

It was really good to watch the whole piece finally, including some behind the scenes footage of the suits getting prepared and fitted.

As good as that was, though, it wasn't the thing that really caught me. What did was one of the best things I've seen in many years and has really fired me up to find out more. I'll most likely go back agin in the next week or two.

Over two floors, also including a viewing gallery overlooking one of them, is the Kienholz exhibition - work from Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz.



I'd heard the name before but never seen anything by them. Now I have I'm very glad - there was stuff in there which I'll remember for a long time to come.

How to describe it, in theme and style, is very hard. As I mentioned before I find art to be a very subjective thing so my view of it is just that - what I've taken from it.

Imagine a mix of 50's circus sideshow, the beauty of found art, sharp sexual and political comment and a capturing of both a zeitgiest and nadir of Americana as viewed from the inside. It is really, truly tough to explain what some of the pieces feel like or the emotion they seem to invoke.

There are a couple of pieces which draw you in and implicate you into their world. One - "The Bear Chair" - turns a childs teddy bear into a figure of sexually predatory menace over a small female figure made of various doll parts. When you first enter the small room it's located in you are somewhat let down and it seems nothing special - the full situation is only realised when a sentence scratched into the desk is read on moving in close to the piece. By that point you're there, in amongst it, and too late to get away again. It goes from being an initial let down to horribly chilling - even now the hairs are standing up on the back of my neck as the thought of the actual subject matter it covers hits home again.

I can't bring myself to include a picture here but just knowing the phrase used is enough in itself:-

IF YOU EVER TELL I'LL HURT YOUR MAMA REAL REAL BAD

Other pieces include 73 versions of Jesus on the cross, spanning a whole wall of a gallery, each made of pram parts and other found objects from around the world.


76 JC's Led The Big Parade

A large number of the items over the many areas are war related, stretch from the first world war through to Vietnam, and Hitler through to the nature of war itself.


The Big Double Cross

"The Ozymandias Parade" is a huge tableaux mounted on a giant flashing arrow, skeletal bastardised figures of a generic President and vice-President caught up in a chaos of a bolting horse. Tiny third-world figures flank them and within the melee there are allusions to nuclear threat, US poverty and futility.

It sounds bleak and disaffecting but totally captures your attention and holds you, much like every other piece there.


The Ozymandias Parade


{detail}

A skewed fairground ride, "The Merry-Go-World Or Begat By Chance And The Wonder Horse Trigger", saw me spinning a wheel and once inside seeing my possible other life have being that of a small black girl in bleak poverty. You go in chuckling at the lights and come out with a totally changed mood. This is work as both art and comment, but with neither getting in the way of the other.


The Merry-Go-World


The Caddy Court

"The Caddy Court" sees a version of the US supreme court lodged in the middle of, as the name suggests, a 1978 Cadillac. Odd touches are subtley hidden around the car but pulling aside the curtains on the court itself sees you face to face with nine justices in skeletal and animal form, dark and merciless. Again you find yourself drawn in on one pretext and spat out with another, implicated into the Kienholz world without recourse.


The Hoerengracht


It's Not My Fault

These are only a small part of what is on offer and those in the northeast of England should take the chance to go and experience this slice of other peoples heads before it finishes at the end of August and relocates to Sydney, Australia, in December.

Sometimes you seek art out because you know it's what you'll like.

Other times, like this, it finds you and grabs you.....and I'm very glad it has.

The one where Carpathian lies on the couch.....

So, last night I met my match.

I should, all things as they are, have been talking to somebody after an enforced break of a couple of days. Only a couple of days but after regular conversation it was a long time and it really would have been nice to catch up on the events of those 48 hours. They know how I feel about not doing this straight away, and were wonderful about it, but still I should have been there sooner.

That isn't the point of this though. Although it is. A little.

Instead I spent some time helping a friend troubleshoot his home network setup to work out why he was having a few glitches. Turns out that he needed to alter his NAT to drive a certain IP through the DMZ.

Again, not the point of this, but just helpful associated info towards why I'm sitting at my desk at work typing this into a blank notepad ready to blog later.

The point is that I didn't manage to work a solution for him and, this morning, I still feel very low about it.

I realise that I'm not some sort of super-brain and can know everything to do with every electronic device out there, nor am I trying to say that I'm some sort of know-it-all that can solve everything the world puts in front of him with a snap of the fingers and a witty catch-phrase. Well, maybe the catch-phrase bit. Mostly.

Usually though, over a day or two, I can suss out the right things to try and make my way via a few dead ends to a solution. I liken it more to detective work that any sort of techie knowledge. I've done it for nearly 20 years now and have got an instinct for sorting things for friends, family and my job at the time.

This time though, I bailed out and suggested they call tech support.....and it's really got to me.

Unless you know me really well you're probably thinking "What's the problem ?" and wondering why I cut up enough about it to be posting a blog about it. After all, I don't normally post internal turmoil on here - I'm the one that does pictures of boots and comments about wacky Japanese snacks.

I guess that it's my turn to use the blog format to expel a demon rather than let it fester internally - most of you, at least in my little current circle of BlogFriends, do it at some point and it seems to be a therapy that works.

It's the realisation of defeat so easily that pains me. The fundamental inability to help that person in the end that I'd set out to do. They're the feelings that needle me still from last night. Helping people do stuff is a great thing and I thrive on it. Always have. Setting up timers on videos, working out why somebody can't install "Super Whizzy Thing #3"

For the most part it's being an ear there when a friend needs somebody that is where you'll find me. Even if that friend tells me they don't want to talk I'll force them in a subtle and underhand way to let the stress out somehow. It's as much a part of me as the little beard or the love of music. People make my world go round and helping them puts a nice little 1% tilt on it's axis.

So bailing out on something geeky is very poor show to me as it's failing to help them - not the silicon side but the human side.

Is this making any sense at all to anybody but me ??

Carpathian enjoys a little sun......

What did you expect, shorts and sunglasses ??

"The public gets what the public wants, but I don't care........."

I really have no sympathy for people at times, I really don't.

For ages now those of us that watch TV, yet have diverse interests and a thirst for knowledge, have wondered why primetime doesn't put in more stimulating shows. You know things that entertain but also inform or cause a person to question or go off to find out more.

I was therefore dismayed to find that BBC2 has lost three million viewers in the past year after cutting its number of lifestyle and entertainment shows. The decision to replace them with more arts and current affairs in peak time has led to a 'significant fall' in audience, the BBC admitted."

This worries me.

It seems therefore that we now have a viewing public that no longer wish to stretch their brains but would rather see this years 'in' paint colours or whether somebody will get on better with another persons wife.

As people like Ray will tell you, we don't need TV in our lives. The sad thing is that used well it can be an aid, a tool and a route for discovery.

People don't now seem to want this though and the implications for a general mood change in the thirst for the new don't bode well.

Chicken nuggets and house-swapping anybody ?

Random questions yield very random answers....

So, I got tagged - in return for that I'll point my magic 'blog tagging' finger (no, it really does exist) at the dwellings of 'Livewire', 'Luke' and 'Onkroes'. I've used apostrophes around their names as, surprisingly, they're actually all anagrams of their real names !

Anyway, on with the fun bit - me getting tagged.


(1) Imagine it’s 2015. You are visiting the library at a major research university. You go over to a computer terminal (or whatever it is they use in 2015) that gives you immediate access to any book or journal article on any topic you want. What do you look up? In other words, what do you hope somebody will have written in the meantime?

This question has so many possible answers that I'd need to look up if the QWWW (Quantum World Wide Web) had been invented. I'd then have a look at all the answers I could have used, check the comments for the most popular one and use that....thus proving the paradox of self-fulfilling things.

(2) What is the strangest thing you’ve ever heard or seen at a conference? No names, please. Refer to “Professor X” or “Ms. Y” if you must. Double credit if you were directly affected. Triple if you then said or did something equally weird.

I'm not a conference goer, per se, but have frequented training courses and expo's in the past. I'll choose from one of those, if I may. The people I tag will have to stick to the rules though - whoever said life is fair.

Travelled from Shropshire down to Cirencester for some database software training. I'm purposefully keeping the techie side down to save boring you before the punchline. So, it seems an average bunch - couple of lookers, an octal of geeks and a handful of others including myself: part led by knowledge and part driven by beer paid for on expenses.

So, we sit down in front of the admittedly shiny training room PC's and the instructor/trainer/boffin pushes his switch to take control of all out monitors.....and nothing. Black as you like. A frantic call is made by him to get 'the fixer' up to sort it.

Door opens and in walks one of my best buds from college, a guy I've not seen for about 9 years !! This is the guy that could rig free credits on arcade machines with a kitchen gas cooker lighter, a guy who got me into remixing via Depeche Mode on a 4 track reel-to-reel....the list goes on. Needless to say much falling down water was drunk on the nights there and bad heads were learnt through.

(3) Name a writer, scholar, or otherwise worthy person you admire so much that meeting him or her would probably reduce you to awestruck silence.

It's somewhat ironic that I'd pick Jeff Noon, a man with his own style that makes words feel like slithery things that you never quite feel you have control over. The thing with the Noon is that whilst others attempting this loose fluid style can often come unstuck he manages to always keep a heavy thread running through, something to hold onto like a safety rope. His first two books, Vurt and Pollen, are probably the books I've read more than any other. I actually own three copies of the former, one signed, and would still buy another if an unusual one comes around.

The irony comes from the fact that his way of writing has, over the years, done more to inspire not keeping within the dotted lines in many written or spoken ways and yet if I got the chance to speak to him I'd clam up and become the user of language as wild and swervy as a plastic chopstick.

Any writer worth his or her salt, of any genre or style, should check out his Cobralingus project. Imaginary word-circuitry that takes and re-forms language into something it is yet never was - a genius yet simple method for encouraging thinking outside of the style you normally fall into. Regular readers will know of the results when I applied the idea on Ray's "Big Blind" - still one of the things I'm most pleased with results wise.

(4) What are two or three blogs or other Web sites you often read that don’t seem to be on many people’s radar?

Every now and then I pop over to WWiTV, a collection of streaming TV from around the world. Fast connections help but there are some for most speeds. Anything that features amongst it's ranks such things as Latvian fighting sports or Mongolias first commercial TV station is worth a dabble.

Another love is JBox - a site where you can buy or, in many cases, stare with disbelief at pretty much anything Japanese. Food, drink, clothes, toys, novelties, films....you name it. I've ordered from there, as previous blog posts have testified, and it's very efficient. Where else can you buy things as diverse as muscat grape juice gummi sweets, a Chronological Table of Rice Prices as a wall hanging or, wonderfully, a tshirt bearing the slogan "You must be 20 Years Old to Purchase Tobacco and Alcohol".

You're it.

'The Banks' of TheSaturdayBoy fame has 'tagged' me in an ongoing game of Blog Tag.

I shall be posting the fetid, over-ripe fruits of this at a hopefully close point, once finished and polished such that it shines like a left handed frog.

It's been a long, hot day at work - forgive me a little oddness.

Art, film, oriental drinks and the prelude to counting sheep........

I'm keeping this short today as I'm basically really, really tired and meant to be heading to bed to get some z's. I fell asleep watching the tv this afternoon which is something I never do so I'm taking my bodies advice and only burning the candle at one end.

Just chance for a quck round up of the last few days:-

Go and look at some of the art created by Livewire over here and more recently, alongside a musing of hers, over here. I'm hoping to see more as time goes on.

Get your hands on the "DiG!" rock-doc - seven years in the lives of the Dandy Warhols / Brian Jonestown Massacre. Even if you don't like the bands or, as is possible, have never heard of them then it's a hoot of a watch and one of the better examples of the genre. Watch the human condition, both good and bad, unfold by turn. Also some great drug-addled oneliners and fights.

Seek out bottles of "Honey Green Tea" - found a new Oriental shop (surprisingly NOT in the Chinatown part of Newcastle) and tried one icecold from the fridge on a stupidly hot day. Wonderful. The store also sells Pretz and Koala biscuits as seen is this earlier post of mine and a whole load more things I'm curious to try.

Oh, and you'll notice I've not commented on the obvious news from the week after the events in London. Enough has been said already by many more qualified than I and anything else, especially from this end of the country, is somewhat redundant.

This Carpathian is now heading to bed.

Goodnight one and all, even if it isn't night where you are........

Everything she touches turns to Gold(frapp)

Carpathian is happy.

No. Strike that.

Carpathian is really rather excited.

Both a new Goldfrapp single and a new Goldfrapp album in August, and a live date in Newcastle in October.

While I run around the room and calm myself down, here's a picture of the owner of one of the sexiest voices in music, always a captivatingly coutured vision and one of the few women to make severed wolf heads intensely sexual - a certain miss Alison Goldfrapp.



The album, "Supernature" seems, from the samples I've heard, to be more in line with the bands previous ("Black Cherry") - funked-up electrosexual sleaze pop. See, they now even have their own genre description due to my happiness.

Here's the oddly alluring cover - however sensual she always is , it always manages to be something slightly wrong where 'Auntie' is concerned........



Head over to the new version of the bands website for sneaks of all the tracks on the album, the full video for first single "Ooh La La" and a menu built around a semi-naked bird-headed creature riding a horse made of white light.

Oh, come on, you don't get that every day, do you ??


:o)

explodingdog 2005

Another period of time goes by and, as predictable as ever, my link to 'explodingdog' comes round again.

For those unitiated into the madness it's a guy that invites words or phrases to be sent to them and draws something....in their own very, er, unique style.

So if you want to see how the phrases "remember back when we were small?", "how do i look in your eyes" or "did you know, cats can read?" look in somebody elses minds-eye then go and have a look.

As an example, this has frequently been my works PC desktop over the last year or so:-


the glass is half full

For poverty think Pink.....

Will the Live8 idea help with the triple whammy of debt relief, fair trade and elimination of political corruption ?

Who knows - seems there's already been some rumour of movement during the day but the real results could be years off.

What I do know now is that the old hippy in me, the one that hides behind loud music and crazy goodness knows what, is sitting here just mesmerised by the Floyd, playing live in public as the original line-up for the first time in about 22 years.

"Wish You Were Here" nearly had me in tears - the emotion and atmosphere there is tangible.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee............. !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Excuse me if I'm a little off-target this morning.

Tried a stick of the "Black Black" Japanese chewing gum while walking into work this morning. A warming taste somewhere between cinnamon, pepper, root beer and antiseptic cream. Shouldn't work but does.



Only problem is that I literally have the shakes now and finding it hard to concentrate. Couldn't work out why I just wanted to keep chewing.

Searched online and found the why - it's loaded with caffeine..............