Absolute Zero

You & Me

2012-01-12T04:07:00.000-08:00

You & Me by westlake72

Bizarre Love Triangle (Westlake 72 Re-Edit)

2011-12-30T05:35:00.000-08:00

Bizarre Love Triangle (Westlake 72 Re-Edit) by westlake72

Strings Of Life (westlake72 remix)

2011-12-22T03:56:00.000-08:00

Strings of Life (westlake72 Remix) by westlake72

Spaceboy Aug 2001 (analogue mixtape)

2011-12-22T02:55:00.000-08:00

Deep House, Deep Disco and other Grooves including New-Wave, Old School Hip-Hop and Go-Go!!!

Includes Eric Kruper presents K-Scope, Liberty City, Norma Jean, Chic, Greg Diomends Bionic Boogie, Talking Heads, The Human League Orchestra, Sugar Hill Gang, The Junk Yard Band and lots more...

From 2 x Technics 1200s to Sony Cassette tape via Numark mixer/ from Marantz tape deck to Macbook pro.

Art After Art

2011-10-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Art as an institution (as opposed to a term simply bestowing praise on creativity or skill, or a term referring to man made objects of cultural interest better described as: artefacts) is a construct centred on artists producing artworks.

It is not a natural, timeless or universal phenomenon, but a specific geo-historical construct that can be traced back to Cennino Cennini's writings on Giotto di Bondone in 1390 at the birth of the Renaissance.

It is a construct that has been skating on thin ice since 1917 when Duchamp entered 'Fountain' for the summer show of the Society of Independent Artists. With *‘Fountain’ Duchamp applied a razor to all but that which was essential to the process of art making, leaving only the selection of objects to be shown (i.e. to bring to the attention of the ‘other’).

Though initially rejected it could be said to exist today, iconic, as a signifier of contemporary art i.e those that except as a given that it is an Artwork may be considered inside the institution – while those that doubt its validity: outside.

Fountain broke the link between art and (physical) skill or (hand-) craft that had previously appeared axiomatic. Problematically though If any 'thing' can be an artwork, (and the ‘dematerialization of the art object, that later followed dispensed even with the necessity of an artwork to carry material form), the concept of 'art' as a term delineating a specific, differentiated, field of creative practice, becomes unstable.

When neither technique nor form can any longer identify that which is art from that which is not art, the entire construct becomes entirely contingent on the specialized status of the artist, who holds a privileged position whereby only he/she possess the unique, alchemic, power of nomination.

But as the artist can no longer be clearly identified by any specific skill or technique his/her status as such, i.e this role, which enabled him/her to declare ‘X’, an artwork, becomes entirely dependent on the fiat of arts triumviri of institutions - its galleries and museums, critics and theorists, and: educational institutions.

The End of Art
Art relied on artworks, artworks relied on Artists, and Artists relied on the validation of arts institutions in the form exclusive access (to knowledge, means of production, and dissemination networks).

In the Information Age we see the dissolution of these 3 signifiers that maintained the status of the Artists as the holder of the power to produce (i.e nominate) artworks:

1) Specialised knowledge: the Internet has democratised access to information - physical books, needed physical space to store them, and physical space can be policed in a way that soft space can not.

2) Specialised skills and equipment: Until the
ubiquity of affordable (or free) creative software,

many means of creative production where expensive in themselves and also required expensive training to be able to use. In the Information Age, user-friendly software has enabled the completion of the de-skilling (actually a de-crafting or de-technique-ing) that began with the readymade - thus enabling the democratisation of the means of creative production.

3) Exclusive dissemination spaces and networks (e.g. galleries/museums and arts publications): The Internet, a free network enabling the dissemination of creative output to a potential audience of millions, is available to all.

The 20th Century idea of the Artist, upon which Art as an institution was dependent is no longer sustainable as the special privileges of access, to A) specialist knowledge B) means of production and C) sites of dissemination, that previously delineated the artist are no longer specilised but available to all.

Digital Communication and Infomation Technology Technologies have enabled an absence of speciality that has robed the term 'artist' of any real meaning (if everyone is an artist - then no one is an artist), and without Artists there is no more art. Game over.

Dan Westlake ©2011

Re-edited extract taken from:
The artist In the Age of Digital Reproduction:
Creative Practice In A Post-Guttenberg Galaxy

full text availble at: www.artafterart.co.uk

Why David Cameron May Have to Resign

2011-07-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

It has been established beyond all doubt that the News Corp regularly and systematically broke the law by illegally tapping (pinging, bugging etc) the telephone and email correspondences of celebrities, members of the public and, crucially, politicians. It has also now been established beyond all doubt the closeness of News International to David Cameron and his inner circle both professionally and socially. In fact the bonds where/are so close that it is not so much a case of connections between the two camps but of the News International/ Cameron Inner circle being single clique AKA the Chipping Norton Set.

This begs leaves the BIG QUESTION: This systematic illegal tapping of politicians emails and phone calls must have thrown up much that would have been absolute gold dust to the Conservative Party in the run up to the last general election, so did any the News International people ever pass on any of this information to either Cameron himself or any other member of the Conservative party? With, for instance, Andy Coulson ACTUALLY EMPLOYED as David Cameron's spin doctor, in the run up to the election, the idea that non of the information illegally obtained by News International, who's dishonesty has been highlighted again and again during this scandal, was never passed onto the Conservative party would appear absurd. To believe this never happened one would have to believe these people (who A) had access to such illegally gained information B) have been proven to be systematically dishonest & C) were working for a Tory election victory) when coming across such information made a decision every-time NOT to pass it on to Cameron or the Conservative Party??? Now if the passing of a single piece of this illegally gained information from News International people to David Cameron or others in his inner circle can be proved It would all be all over: Cameron would have no choice but to resign and would probably be facing criminal charges. This is our Watergate.

PS. look out for plenty more laptops to 'misplaced' in the carparks of Westminster and the fields of Chipping Norton in the coming weeks...

Westlake 72: Come Over

2011-07-12T03:22:00.000-07:00

Come Over by westlake72

The Evil Rebekah Brooks

2011-07-07T03:15:00.000-07:00

Rebekah Brook’s famous, weird, obsession with pedophiles is that they may have represented the one group she felt able to posture from a position of relatively moral high ground. The recent revelations - her disruption of the investigation of a child murder for one - take even that away from her. We should not though get overly obsessed though with the vileness of Wade/Brooks. The real issue is the deep links between the Murdochs, Brooks, Camerons, Coulsons, Yateses of this world (and the previous Brown/Blair regime) and the cowardliness of the current opposition - with a few extremely honourable exceptions (Chris Bryant, Tom Watson, John Prescot), respect to Norman Fowler too (that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write).

BTW We have set up a Facebook group here: Withdraw Rebekah Brooks UAL award now! to get the University of the Arts to withdraw the Award of an Honoury fellowship to Brooks for 'outstanding contribution to journalism’ (LOL).

The Artist in The Age of Digital Reproduction

2011-05-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

http://futurenowexhibit.org.uk/thesis/index.html

Anti-Production:

2011-05-09T04:20:00.000-07:00

"The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more" Douglas Huebler - 1969.

1) In advanced capitalist societies we experience the triumvirate fetishization of progress, production and representation as total ideology mediating all sites of social exchange including art's institutions. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is absurdly still viewed by the mainstream media, the most powerful manifestation of what Louis Althusser termed the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), as the key indicator of a nations well being - that is production, regardless of what is that is being produced, is in and of itself viewed as a good thing - while the former ruler of The Kingdom of Bhutan Jigme Singye Wangchuck's sensible and pragmatic concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) is, in an example of advanced capitalism's power to pervert, patronised as eccentric and quirky.

2) In the modern city where the phenomenological terrain is dominated by simulacra and the hyper-real we are constantly confronted by advertising and other forms of seductive capitalist propaganda creating the illusion of need for yet more product. Strategies of distraction deny us the space to contemplate the emptiness, what Hegel termed the ‘dark, shapeless abyss’, that exists silently lurking behind the shiny facade of our consumer driven society as it does behind all things. An ideology based on spectacle succeeds because we fear nothingness and wish it to be kept at bay so are grateful for any distraction.

3) In such a society free non-contaminated space paradoxically becomes the most valuable of substances. In a terrain of hyper-stimulation designated art-spaces can provide a site where an individual may for a period of time inhabit a zone free from the pressure to either produce or consume. Unfortunately this experience is often denied us by the actual art objects placed in this precious arena. A valuable experience is thereby denied by ‘needy’ art objects demanding, like infants, our attention.Thus art provides yet more of the spectacle and distraction that denies us the opportunity to simply experience the essentially empty nature of being.

4) From Moses to Marx the problem of idolatry - the worship of false idols - has been a consistent feature of the human condition. We appear hardwired to search for existential redemption and whether we put our faith in monotheistic Gods, technological progress or a sports team we do so to deliver us from the void of a meaningless existence and into a indefinitely deferred promised land. Marx warned of the error of commodity fetishism - the worship of things - while himself fetishizing production and exhibiting a messianic faith in progress through dialectic materialism.

5) In advanced capitalist societies we don’t actually worship products themselves but the abstract concepts they represent such as youth, beauty and wealth. The relationship between consumable products and these abstractions is mediated through the use of lens-based imagery by the ISA in the form of advertising and entertainment. The seductive gloss of these images is an ideal so far removed form all possible realities of youth, beauty and wealth that finally it is not even these abstract concepts themselves we worship but their actual representation. Such is the all-pervasive ubiquity of this image lead spectacle that the possibility of artworks based on lens-based imagery, even those produced as explicit critiques of it, ever resisting its cooption is negligible.

6) Production is the intended outcome of labour a word that's etymological root derives from the Latin laboro: to suffer, carry burden or experience dis-ease. That which is laborious is something other than that which is pleasurable. In advanced capitalism labour is eulogized to such an extent that in the popular press its absence is portrayed as sinful. The most pronounced self righteous vitriol of the ISA in the form of the popular press is reserved for the two groups who are perceived to not labour enough; celebrities and the unemployed more than any others including even economic immigrants who may be grudgingly accepted as long as the are perceived to be 'hard working'. With the advance of globalization this originally northern European ideology - the Protestant work ethic - spreads like a virus until universally normative. This 'work ethic', now virtually ubiquitous, is essentially the fetishization of suffering acting as an alibi for exploitation. Only a masochist or sadist would celebrate such dis-ease.

7) The common denominator shared by ALL artists is that they select items to be exhibited. Duchamp's fountain applied a razor to all but that which was essential to the process of art making leaving only the choosing of objects to be shown, and the dematerialization of the art object that followed further dispensed with the necessity of the object to carry material form. The creation of art is then in essence an act of choosing and exhibiting, and where choice is exercised there is individuation. As an artist brings to the attention of others these acts of individuation that need not serve any utilitarian purpose it would appear that the primordial drive to create art is the affirmation of self through the gaze of the other. Art then is not a project born of altruistic intent but an existential need for self affirmation.

8) If one's primary drive to produce artworks is an altruistic intention to improve society the institution that is art may not be a site particularly conducive to such a project. While Duchamp (in)famously stopped producing artworks to concentrate on playing chess Laurie Parsons, a sculptor working with found objects in the 1980's who appeared genuinely free of this need for self affirmation, stopped producing art work or calling herself an artist and became, instead, a social worker and advocate for societies most vulnerable

9) Though the drive to create art is not primarily altruistic that does not negate our ethical responsibilities as human beings. While to create art is always to produce more (however 'post' this production may be) even if the work is virtually immaterial, to not be reflexive and take responsibility for our contribution to a world already overloaded with objects and images is an ethical negation. Ethics should be grounded in the Hippocratic principle: Primum non nocere (first do no harm). Is our work merely going to add to the spectacle, co-opted by makers of designer labels to produce yet more pseudo-desire - more false need - in order to sell yet more pointless products using up yet more of the worlds resources?

10) In the production of artworks: if less is more, *nothing* is absolute.

Dan Westlake - ©2009

Art After Art

2011-04-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

The Beginning of the End:
Art as an institution (as opposed to a term simply bestowing praise on creativity or skill, or a term referring to man made objects of cultural interest better described as: artefacts) is a construct centred on artists producing artworks. It is not a natural, timeless or universal phenomenon, but a specific geo-historical construct that can be traced back to Cennino Cennini's writings on Giotto di Bondone (see above) in 1390 at the birth of the Renaissance.It is a construct that has been skating on thin ice since 1917 when Duchamp entered 'Fountain' for the summer show of the Society of Independent Artists. With ‘Fountain’ Duchamp applied a razor to all but that which was essential to the process of art making, leaving only the selection of objects to be shown (i.e. to bring to the attention of the ‘other’). Though initially rejected it could be said to exist today, iconic, as a signifier of contemporary art i.e those that except as a given that it is an Artwork may be considered inside the institution – while those that doubt its validity: outside. ‘Fountain’ broke the link between art and (physical) skill or (hand-) craft that had previously appeared axiomatic. Problematically though If any 'thing' can be an artwork, (and the ‘dematerialization of the art object, that later followed dispensed even with the necessity of an artwork to carry material form), the concept of 'art' as a term delineating a specific, differentiated, field of creative practice, becomes unstable. When neither technique nor *form can any longer identify that which is *art from that which is not *art, the entire construct becomes entirely contingent on the specialized status of the *artist, who holds a privileged position whereby only he/she possess the unique, alchemic, power of nomination. But as the artist can no longer be clearly identified by any specific skill or technique his/her status as such, i.e this role, which enabled him/her to declare X, an artwork, becomes entirely dependent on the fiat of arts triumviri of institutions - its galleries and museums, critics and theorists, and: educational institutions.

The End of Art:
Digital Communication Technology has now made this 20th Century idea of the Artist, upon which Art as an institution was dependent, unsustainable. In the Information Age we see the dissolution of the 3 signifiers that maintained the status of the Artists as the holder of the power to produce (i.e nominate) artworks.

1) Specialised knowledge: the Internet has democratised access to information - physical books, needed physical space to store them, and physical space can be policed in a way that soft space can not.

2) Specialized skills and equipment: user-friendly software has enabled the completion of the de-skilling (actually a de-crafting or de-technique-ing) that began with the readymade – (until the ubiquity of affordable (or free) creative software, many means of production where expensive in themselves and also required expensive training to be able to use) - enabling the democratisation of the means of creative production.

3) Exclusive dissemination spaces and networks (e.g. galleries/museums and arts publications): The Internet, a free network enabling the dissemination of creative output to a potential audience of millions, is available to all.

Therefore the special privileges of access, to A) specialist knowledge B) means of production and C) sites of dissemination, that previously delineated the artist are now available to all. Art relied on artworks, artworks relied on Artists, and Artists relied on the validation of arts institutions in the form exclusive access (to knowledge, means of production, and dissemination networks) that is no longer exclusive. The absence of speciality robs the term 'artist' of any real meaning (if everyone is an artist - then no one is an artist), and without Artists there is no more art. Game over.

Theoretical Physicists: The real artists of the 21st Century

2011-01-25T16:31:00.000-08:00

Art & Science Are Theoretical Physicists the only true artists left in the 21st Century? Conceptual jester Jonathon Keats has suggested that the science fiction of the future will be written in mathematical equations but sci-fi, speculative fiction and futurism are all now things of the past: We are the future and the romantic idea of the artist is dead, politics is a fiction, and the only space where the Absolute, the Sublime and Beauty remain possible is within the theoretical micro equations of the quantum physics.

Jail Rebecca Brooks and Andy Coulson, now!

2011-01-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

Politics Irrefutable evidence from Channel 4’s Dispatches that both the two main political parties and the police are in the pocket of the Murdoch Clan/News International. Former NOTW editor Andy Coulson and current NOTW editor Rebecca Brooks (Wade) were/are engaged in systematic criminal activity including blackmail, phone tapping, illegal payments to police, and perjury. Those in a position to expose News Internationals criminal activities have been threatened, either explicitly or implicitly, with retribution using the very tactics that are currently destabilising our Democracy and legal system. If British Democracy and the rule of law are to be seen as anything but farce Coulson and Brooks should face criminal prosecution and ultimately jail.

Private View: Thursday 27th 6:00pm - 8:30pm

2011-01-19T08:43:00.000-08:00

Central Saint Martins’ MA Fine Art - Interim Show 2011
Description: Showcasing the work of Central Saint Martins’ MA Fine Art students
Continues: 28 January - 30 January 11am to 6pm
Location: Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse St, South Bank, London, SE1 9PH

020 7021 1686
http://www.coinstreet.org/

Transport: Tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo; bus: 45, 63, 100

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five: Live on The Tube (1983)

2011-01-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

Nostalgia Remember watching this at the time - People retrospectively hype The Tube as hip and cutting edge but it hardly ever had any black acts when hip-hop/electro and funk/soul/boogie where by far the most innovative forms of music during the period (early 80’s). For more classic electro links, mixtapes and re-edits join the Facbook group Let the music play - a homage to electro-funk. For westlake72’s take on the Message mashed with the Clash’s Guns of Brixton go here.

Chuka Umunna

2011-01-16T08:25:00.000-08:00

Politics I believe the next Labour PM will be Streatham’s current MP: Chuka Umunna. I was extremely impressed by Umunna’s performance while grilling the vile Bob Diamond. He exhibited three vital qualities that Ed Milliband distinctly lacks: i) Clear, concise, communication skills, ii) A passionate, and authentic, sense of right and wrong, and iii) the appearance of a sharp, intelligent, confidence while still managing to appear ‘normal’. Roll on 2020… Mr Umunna also fancies himself as a bit of a Soulful House DJ. Click here some of his choices.

Sarah Palin: No sense of dignity, No sense of shame.

2011-01-12T19:12:00.000-08:00

Politics In Sarah Palin’s video responce to the Arizona shooting it only takes Ms Palin 1 minute 30 seconds before she forgets about paying tribute to the Liberal senator Gabrielle Giffords, who lies fighting for her life and the lives of 6 others (including a 9 year old girl who she neglects to mention), and starts to make excuses for herself, and her hate filled friends in the media: Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh et al and their rabble rousing rhetoric 'tageting’ Liberals such as Gabrielle Giffords who they attempt to portray as “anti-American”. Rather than show grace, humility and dignity she bizarrely chooses to attack others for “irresponsible statements” while refusing to accept that her, and her cronies, statements could have in anyway have created an atmosphere where violence is used to attack Liberals. If this was a one off incident she may have got away with it but this is only the latest and most serious example of violence directed against those Ms Palin and her supporters in the Media and the Tea Party view as “enemies”. Gabrielle Gifford herself had already warned about the danger posed by Ms Palins tactics:

Gabrielle Giffords warns Sarah Palin there will be consequences (video)

as had others:

Elizabeth Hasselbeck: Sarah Palin's Crosshairs Ad ‘Despicable’ (video)

Even the Republican Judge John Roll had previously received Death Threats from right wingers who objected to his ruling on immigration:

Reports: Judge Roll Received Threats (text)

There are too many instances to list here of right wingers threatening, or using, violence either explicitly or implicitly against their Liberal political opponents so Ms Palin hasn’t got the excuse of hiding behind her own ignorance. In the wake of this paradigm shifting incident she had the opportunity to demonstrate both courage and humility by paying respect to the dead and injured by drawing a line in the sand, acting responsibly and pledging to refrain from using inflammatory language in the future and encouraging her supporters to do the same. Did she choose to show such courage and humility? No, she chose excuses, self justification and cowardice.

Increase the Peace

2011-01-07T18:33:00.000-08:00

Music an hour of chilled out sun-kissed soul from my podcast.

Horny Chic (Flying Away)

2011-01-07T09:18:00.000-08:00

Music Horny Chic (Flying Away) by westlake72

This Trumpet lead, soulful, nu-disco groover is the most popular download from my Soundcloud page.http://soundcloud.com/westlake72/horny-chic-flying-away

Glen Campbell: Wichita Lineman (westlake72 remix)

2011-01-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

Music Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman given an old skool jungle drum’n’bass remix by westlake72 with accompanying mash-up video.

Future Now Exhibition

2011-01-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us’ - Marshall McLuhan (1964)

All paradigm shifts in art emerge in response to social change and technological innovation. In the last 15 years information technology, particularly the emergence of the internet, has began to touch, and often reshape, every sphere of our lives. It is the electronic inter-connecting network potentially linking every human being directly to every other human being on planet. As human beings we are essentially social constructs – that is we are defined by our relationship to others – any fundamental shift in these relationships mediation is a fundamental shift in what it is to be human. It has been argued that the emergence of the internet is either A) the biggest technological innovation since Guttenberg’s movable type printing enabled the reformation, the scientific revolution and the birth of modernity B) A system as transformative as the very emergence of the written word in Mesopotamian 4th BC, or even C) a biological shift in human kind on a scale of the emergence of language itself. Therefore we are currently living through an age of technology-lead social change so all encompassing that we are presently unable to grasp the full implications of what that change may mean, other than to state simply that this social change will inevitably lead to a fundamental change, not only in what is meant by the term 'art', and what it is to be an 'artist', but what it actually means to be a human being in this emerging post-Gutenberg galaxy.

Future Now is an online exhibition featuring 5 emerging artists working with digital print, video projection, sound performance, text, digital programming, and drawing . This exhibition will create a dialogue with the monumental technology-led social/cultural shifts that have emerged in the last 10 to 15 years focussing on our changing relationships with technology and each other within the birth of the information age.

Of Grammatology

2010-07-31T18:54:00.000-07:00

Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology as Word Cloud

The English and Football

2010-06-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

The World Cup I feel most sorry for the English underclass whose lack of economic power disbars them from fully participating in a culture based on self actualisation through conspicuous conception. Enticed by multination corporations' advertising and sponsorship they attempt to overcome this humiliation through the purchase of cheap, third world produced, sporting apparel in order to try and forge a link between themselves and multi-milionare sportsmen. They hope this tenuous link will give them a sense of power and success that will obliterate their everyday reality of disempowerment and failure. England then lose 4-1 to Germany.

The Future of UK Politics

2010-05-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

Politics The LidDems should not coalition with the Tories as the Tories won't seriously offer them any real chance of PR (it would be electoral suicide for them to do so). Instead the Libdems will agree to back them over the Queens speech and budget to allow the Tories to govern. This will allow the LibDems to remain untainted by the savage cuts the Tories will make. Meanwhile Labour under Alan Johnson will be revitalised and discover their radical sense of purpose. After a couple of years of Tory cuts as a minority Government the Tory government will fall allowing the emergence of a centre left coalition who will introduce PR resulting in the Conservatives being denied forever the chance to govern the country again.

Update** A week Tory government relying on the LibDems to keep it in power is by far the best outcome we could have realistically hoped for but Glegg has made a mistake entering a formal coalition and accepting cabinet posts as the LibDems will now be tarred with association with the cuts that are coming so will probably get annihilated at the next general election that won't be far away.

Britney Spears: Toxic (westlake72 Remix)

2010-03-24T23:56:00.000-07:00

Here is a dub remix I have done for the Britney Spears track Toxic synced with the original video.

Live at the Lotus Lounge

2010-03-07T17:02:00.000-08:00

Music The latest edition of my podcast is now available to stream or download. This a live set featuring myself and New York's legendary DJ Sims (Sarah Sims Erwin) live at the Lotus Lounge NYC circa 2003. It starts with about half an hour of chilled-out Street Soul from myself followed by an eclectic mixture of Gangster Rap, Latino flavoured Jazz, and Loungecore from Sims before I come back with some Dancehall and Classic Jazz-Funk. Enjoy... Live at the Lotus

Some brief notes on Time

2010-03-07T16:42:00.000-08:00

Time: the socio-political
The ways we have marked out time, from the obelisks of ancient Egypt and Babylon to the atomic super-clocks being developed today that are said to be more accurate than time itself, the socio-economic system in place and the way human beings experience time have always remained inter-linked. It is perhaps not surprising that slave based societies such as the ancient Egyptians, owing their power to the systemization of social relations enabled by the development of mathematics, also appear to be the first societies to deploy time keeping devices. In the middle ages where man’s still relatively direct relationship to the land meant that the seasons and weathers fluctuations informed his working patterns, the micro-management of time was unnecessary. But as feudalism began to be replaced by capitalism during the Renaissance our relationship with time started to shift. In 1584 Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar that we use today propagating the centralization of papal power. Somewhat ironically Rome had been systematically replacing the God given circadian time as churches were turned into giant sundials by the drilling of a hole in its roof in order to predict the arrival of Easter. When the Gregorian calendar was finally adopted in England in 1752, in order to catch up with this now standardized European calendar from which it was lagging behind, Wednesday September the 2nd was immediately followed by Thursday September the 14th. This apparently resulted in widespread riots by angry mobs chanting ‘Give us our eleven days back!’.

The political nature of time was made explicit in revolutionary France when gunshots were fired at town hall clocks to mark a radical break from history. French Revolutionary Time was subsequently introduced where, in the enlightenment spirit of obsessive rationalization, the 24 hour clock was replaced with a decimalized system dividing the day into 10 decimal parts each of these 10 parts were divided into ten others and so on, so the hundredth part of the hour is the decimal minute and the hundredth part of the minute was the decimal second. With the emergence of globalized trading, precise time keeping for navigation became a priority. As a ships position at sea could only be determined with accuracy if a navigator could refer to an accurate clock, the then standard pendulum-based clocks originally conceived by Galileo were unsuitable for the task. In 1714 after the loss of numerous cargos (and lives) the British government offered twenty thousand pounds to whoever built a clock that would keep accurate time at sea. A young man took up the challenge by the name of John Harrison, a carpenter at the time, who on hearing of the competition dedicated his life to this quest and eventually succeeded at his 4th attempt. The government originally refused to pay up, but, after the intervention on his behalf by King George, Harrison eventually received his payment at the age of 79, becoming a multi-millionaire in today’s money.

The phrase time is money represents the commodification of time as an object to be exploited in the accumulation of greater capital, and it was capitalisms transformation during the industrial revolution that brought about the now normative adherence to clock-time we observe today, as a synchronic form of time and work discipline was imposed on workers. Up until the 19 Century British cities ran to local solar time and it was only with the introduction of the electric telegraph that enabled the imposition of a standardized single time zone (GMT) that industrialists demanded despite much local opposition. The emerging power and influence of rail companies such as the Great Western Railway sped up the rationalization and standardization of time to increase the efficient distribution of goods and materials. To placate local objections many cities ran, for a period, a dual time system. The clock at the Exchange in Bristol for instance, which is ten minutes behind London Time (or London is 10 minutes ahead of Bristol), still features two minute hands: one showing GMT the other Bristol Time.

A hyper-rationalization of time management was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor In 1911 reaching its apex in the industrial mass production methods of the Ford motor company in Detroit. It involved scientific analysis of the time/productivity relationship in pursuit of the maximization of profits e.g. the screwing of a single bolt being calculated at 15.2 seconds. Capitalisms other has a less historically linear relationship with time. The Soviet Union fetishized production as much as America and adopted an equally technological view of time. Aleksei Gastev, an avant-garde poet who wrote futurist prose eulogizing industrialization and the coming era of the new man, advocated Taylerism through ‘the movement for the scientific organization of labour’, or NOT (nauchnaia organization truda), which he described as his last artwork. These ideas, imported from capitalist America, underpinned the Soviet commodification of time epitomized by Stalins 5-year plans 1928 and 1932. Unfortunately for Gastev his own time ran out in 1938 when he was arrested on false charges of counter-revolutionary terrorist activity and shot by the KGB, and as Heidegger and others have observed death is the limit point of our social temporality.

Year Zero was declared by Pol Pot when his Khmer Rouge completed their take over of Cambodia in 1975. It was George Orwell who observed Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future. Here, a pre-industrial agrarian utopia was founded where history not only ended but ceased to exist and time stood still. Cities were forcibly emptied as the entire population was made to farm the land in organized labour camps and any expression of nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times was referred to as memory sickness and could lead to execution. This anti-technological state existed as the antitheses of the Soviet/American view of time as a site of progress – here you would be killed for simply owning a wristwatch. When the regimes rule ended, after eight months and 20 days, one quarter of the country’s entire population of about seven million were dead.

Re-posted from Time: a group exhibtion

Time: A Group Exhibition

2010-02-13T15:11:00.000-08:00

I am curating a group exhibition featuring 11 artists exploring the nature of Time from a variety of perspectives including the social, philosophical and scientific. Utilising a variety of strategies and media including interactive software, sculpture, digital print, performance, sound and text this exhibition will feature new works by:

Paul Abbott
Kate Barsby
Josh Baum
Peter Caul
Stephanie Dickinson
Tracy Gentles
Alan Jones
Carlos Monleon Gendall
Beatrice Loft Schulz
Emily Paige Short
Dan Westlake

Private View
6:00pm - 8:30pm Friday 19th of February
Exhibition open daily from 11am - 5pm
20th until the 26th February

We Are Arts Gallery, First Floor Red Lion Square
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Southampton Row, WC1B 4AP

Funky Good Times!

2010-01-16T23:40:00.000-08:00

I've uploaded a new podcaste: a funky Rare groove mix I took out to New York on one of my DJing trips in the early 2000's. The pic I took at block party I played at during one of those trips, Good times indeed, nostalgic sigh...

2010-01-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

I am participating in Some You Win, Some Deleuze a group show by a selection of MA Fine Art students at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. It is the culmination of a month long project, ArtSpace 2010, which saw this group utilise Collective, a former industrial space on Camden High Street provided by Camden Council and Camden Town Unlimited, as open studios, information hub and live art venue. The show will also be featuring new work Paul Abbott, Carolina Ambida, Kate Barsby, Fagner Bibiano, Omar Castaneda, Coral Churchill, Pallas Citroen, Andrea Giulivi, Catherine Hieatt, Autumn Marlayne Jensen, Iyvone Khoo, Tom Mason, Georgina McNamara, Ben O'Connor, Eilidh Short, Helene Sorensen, Ben Turner, Melania Yerka. The Private View for this exhibition is Friday 22nd of January, 6pm - 9pm and the exhibition continues 23rd - 29th of January, opening daily 11am-5pm. The adress is 'Collective', 37 Camden High Street (Entrance on Symes Mews), NW1 7JE

Roland Bathes: The Death of the Author

2009-11-27T10:16:00.000-08:00

The last line of Bathes text is 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author' and it is the reader referred to in the first half of this sentence that this essay really focuses on NOT a call for the annihilation of the author referenced in the second (French theorist tend to utilise bombastic leading statements to grab the readers attention and shock them out of complacent common sense readings i.e ‘The Gulf War Did not Take Place’ Jean Baudrillard or ‘There is nothing outside the text’ Jaques Derrida). Having said that it is not difficult to see why a flamboyant celebrity theorist such a Barthes would promote the role of interpreter over the role of producer. When published in 1968 the standard academic approach to literature in French academia at the time was based on the presupposition that there was a real, singlar, and fixed meaning to a piece of literature and that this singular meaning was the one intended by an author who was fully conscious of this meaning and his (it was usually a ‘his’) reasons for producing such meaning. It was the readers role simply to unearth what this meaning was. To destabilize the above can be seen as a radical gesture given the time and context (though it had been somewhat predated in less ostentatius terms by Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ published in the United States in 1946). Barthes key points are:

• The idea of authorship is inherently unstable (a text always appropriates previous texts)
• The idea of an author is inherently unstable (the 'self' is a site of permanent flux)
• Authorial intentionality does not define meaning
• An authors personal history is not the key to understanding a text
• There is not a fixed true meaning hidden in a text waiting to be discovered
• The reader is the ultimate arbiter of meaning

These central ideas espoused by Barthes during this period were a general feature of all post-structuralist critique and were actually pushed further by Derrida. The idea that a texts meaning is never entirely fixed so is therefore open to multiple readings was not just a comment on authorship but ultimately an anti-theological attack on the idea of authority (author-ity) itself (this position can be traced back to Nietzsche’s Death of God and is part of the general distrust towards meta-narratives that came to be known as post-modernism following the carnage of the second world war. This in turn lead to the vulnerability of theory to the charge of the type of nihilism and moral relativism that has lead to the emergence of religious fundamentalism). This position was the critical orthodoxy of the day by the 1980’s with the rise of critical theory and cultural studies in both Anglo-American academia and contemporary art discourse. It was then fashionable to dismiss the idea of universal values as hegemonic often leading to simplistic declerations such as ‘there is no such thing as truth’ and knee-jerk dismissals of any actual position being take as being authoritarian or even totalitarian. This line of argument taken to its absurd yet logical conclusion views the espousal of human rights as an act of fascism!

By the 90's in the context of contemporary fine art practice positions that challenged these assumptions became of interest whereby the simple restatement of these assumptions themselves was not. One of the reasons curator/critic Nicholas Bourriaud, for instance, rose to prominence was that at the time of writing the essays they came to be published as Relational Aesthetics in the 1990’s contemporary art had reached a point of postmodern inertia therefore it was seen as a refreshingly radical act to be taking an ideological position by promoting work that had a social (and unapologetic) agenda. Theory itself also began to look at a returned to direct political engagement and a return to universal or even transcendental values in the works of, for instance, Badiou, Zizek and late Derrida. The artworks that have provoked the most passionate and engaged critical engagement in the last 15 years or so are works that contain a level of explicit social intentionality with various degrees of tension between the polarities of didacticism and openness. Artist who have produced such committed pieces include Jeremy Deller, Santiago Sierra, and Mark Wallinger all of whom have not been afraid to take a position (though this does not necessarily negate a level of ambiguity or even ambivalence in the works) and artist-writers such as Liam Gillick, Dave Beech have to a degree wrestled the agenda from non-practicng critics and theorist with practices that demonstrate a reflective awareness, socio-political engagement and an embracement of authorial responsibility. The days of Marcel Duchamp’s dumb painter are over.

PS.This text has been appropriated and re-posted at the Madame Pickwick Art Blog without attribution to me - how ironic…

Abam Curtis: It Felt Like A Kiss

2009-07-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

I found Adam Curtis's new work incredibly disappointing. Unlike with all Curtis's previous works I did not learn anything new of significance. This was essentially a series of now bland a clichéd infobites such as that the CIA tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar, Rock Hudson was Gay, and Sadam Hussein was backed by America. If any of this was news to you you must have been hiding under a rock for the past 20 years. There where a few interesting titbits such as a Sadam Hussein propaganda film that glorified his roll in Bathist take over of Iraq being edited by Terence Young the director of a couple of the James Bond movies but so what? There was also some good archive clips such as a Vietnam vet confessing to American war crimes but this film had nothing of great interest to say other than that the utopian vision America presented of itself in the post-war years wasn't all it seemed and that America's covert foreign policy saw the CIA get up no good but this is hardly front page news. While a shorter version of this film was shown as part of an installation at the recent Manchester International Festival and that as a visceral experience it may have worked entirely differently in that context Curtis has specifically chosen to release (and re-cut) this version online and it fails completely to live up too previous works such as The Power of Nightmares, The Trap and, his most important work, the amazing The Century of the Self. All of these are widely available online and in providing socio-political histories of the 20th century they allow us to see just how we got to where we are today. The original Reithian remit of the BBC was to educate, inform and entertain: these three works do this.

Jeff Koons at the Serpentine

2009-07-26T10:31:00.001-07:00

What I enjoy with Koons is his ability to continuously reside on the razors edge of celebration/critique of the banalities of capitalism and how by making his products so sickly (and slickly) sweet and attractive he implicates the viewer (or at least this viewer). He does so with such bold and unapologetic, American, bright eyed, can-do, optimism contrasted to the that grim icon of greed and stupidity that can be said to be, at least to some extent, our British equivalent. It would be a mistake to view Koons' artworks as existing separately from Koons *The Artist* persona as he embodies the great tradition of artist as charlatan/showman/shaman/genius(?) (Duchamp, Dali, Klein, Manzoni, Creed et al) that imbues all his product(ions). I particularly like the doubt brought forth by the genius/charlatan opposition at play as it destabilises the the very concept of genius which I feel is an unhealthy one. It would appear that in art this role emerged with modernity and the 'Death of Painting' in the age of mechanical reproduction. This *tradition* was previously embodied by scientists in the 18 century (think of 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump' by Joseph Wright of Derby) and previous to that medicine men, witch doctors and the like. In art at least this charlatan/showman/shamen proves his 'genius' when in an the ultimate act of alchemy he (and it is always a he) turns shit in to gold (or at least dollar) exposing the absurd farce that is late Capitalism.

Santiago Sierra

2009-07-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

'In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles' said Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle (1967). With scenes in Sacha Baron Cohen's new film including a realty show judge using a Mexican person as seating and one of Michael Jackson's sisters eating sushi off the naked bodies of workmen we have evidence, if it were ever needed, of how all art however 'critical' eventually gets co-opted by advanced capitalism into mainstream entertainment and sold back to the masses. By choosing Mexican workers Cohen appears to be acknowledging his appropriation of previous works by the Mexican based artist Santiago Sierra where the low paid are humiliated for money - reflecting back to the generally comfortable (Bourgeois???) middle class viewers of artworks the essence of Capitalism - where human beings become commodified objects and like all objects have their price.

On Beauty

2009-07-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a talk at the Whitechapel Gallery featuring Dave Beech in conversation with Julian Stallabrass to launch 'On Beauty' a new anthology of writings on the subject edited by Beech. From the conversation it appeared that the conception of *beauty* under discussion was that which is considered visually pleasing/attractive/uplifting (or not as the case(s) may be) so the framing of the discussion appeared to privilege an ocularcentric perspective from the get go. I wondered if the conversation could have been directly transposed to the sonic field or for that matter the olfactory, gustatory or somesthetic? Or how about the beauty of a mathematical equation or friendship? This may have thrown light on the subjective/socially inscribed conundrum. Stallenbraus observed that a lot of writing on beauty is 'bullshit' if so I feel this may be due to the ineffable nature of the subject, maybe talking of beauty is much like describing the nature of God or explaining why a joke is funny. Maybe the real problem with beauty in art is that though we may enjoy it (a work made to be deliberately beautiful), and there is nothing wrong with that, it may ultimately be a distraction/hindrance to the experience of beauty as it perpetuates the idea that beauty is contained in 'things' and that these things exist outside of us.

Dub and NYC

2009-04-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading Michael E Veal's fantastic Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. What is so impressive is how many perspectives Veal manages to approach the subject from in such a relatively short space (338pp) i.e the social, political, aesthetic, technical, religious, historical, economic and cultural. Along the way contextualising dub in relation to the theories of, among others, Jameson, Deleuze & Barthes. Among the most interesting ideas Veal suggests are dub's fragmented narratives as a response to the collective Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder of the African diaspora and dub's privileging of space and absence providing a meditative insight into the divine. I particularly enjoyed the comparison between dub and classical Japanese music by way of wabi-sabi and Zen Buddhism. This may all make the book appear rather dry and academic and though it is certainly is both academic and scholarly in the best sense of the terms it is also clearly written by a fan and enthusiast (also in the best sense of the terms) meaning that as well as being intellectual and thorough it is always interesting and engaging. Along with the theories and histories of dub and it's influence on other genres you get the low-down on all the leading players such as King Tubby, Prince Jammy and Lee 'Scratch' Perry. My only criticism is an underplaying of the Jamaican/NYC connection. I don't feel it is an exaggeration to state that the birth of Hip Hop resulted directly from the recontextualization of the Jamaican Dub format - outdoor Sound System, DJ Toasting (Rapping) and the stripping down of records to their essential of drum and bass elements - to NYC and applied to funk as opposed to reggae by Jamaican emerge Kool DJ Herc in the late 70's. House and garage (emerging form Chicago as well as NYC) where also born of stripping down to the essentials of drum and bass of, in this case, disco records. Francois Kevorkian has attributed Larry Levan, resident of the legendary Paradise Garage, of bringing the dub sensibility to disco. If you listen to the early raw house and garage 45s by the likes of Adonis (Marshall Jefferson), Raze and Phuture at 33rpm what you hear is essentially electro dub reggae - flying symbol and all. By underplaying this vital connection I feel dubs influence may have been done a slight disservice especially when there is quite a lot about such less paradigm shifting genres such as trip hop and minimal house which are really just sub genres. I would like to have seen an exploration of the liminal post-disco/proto-house period when writer/producers such as Daryl Payne and Paul Simpson started releasing dub mixes on the flip side of vocal versions - the first time this had happened outside of the reggae context. It would also have been nice to read about dub inspired projects such as Levan's NYC Peech Boys or the Padlock ep featuring a disco/funk/soul/reggae supergroup comprising Gwen Guthrie, Wally Badarou, Daryl Thompson and Sly and Robbie mixed by Levan which I feel is the greatest dub (not dub) album of all time. Anyway, this aside, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae is along with Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner's Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music the most informative and engaging book about music I have ever read and I highly recommend that you do too if you have any interest in not only dub but hip-hop, house, d'n'b, grime, dubstep or whatever - none would exist but for dub.

Roni Horn

2009-04-28T15:09:00.000-07:00

If Roni Horn was an ice cream what flavour ice cream would Roni Horn be? Though Horn's work is often spoke of in terms of identity and memory the experience of walking around her recent show at Tate Modern was essentially visceral. Ice, water and Iceland are recurrent motifs in her work and even when her subjects are bathed in light it is the cold light of day rather than a melting Mediterranean heat. Her use of doubling in photographs, sculptures and drawings with minute differences between pairs casts a light on the space opened up between them. It is this cool, sublime, ethereal space that is ultimately the real art object. The discreetly differentiated pairs that it emerges from are ultimately it's frame in the same way that the physical space is the art object created by the threads in a Fred Sanback installation. If Roni Horn was an ice cream Roni horn would be an ice flavour ice cream.

Ornette Coleman: Meltdown

2009-04-09T14:58:00.000-07:00

Ornette Coleman is going to be curating this year's Meltdown festival at The Southbank. This is a fantastic choice!!! - so much better than another faded pop star. 78 year old Coleman is still vital today, I was lucky enough to see him play at the Royal Festival Hall last year and it was one of the best concerts I have ever seen. Plastic saxophone wielding Free Jazz pioneer Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come not only reinvented Jazz but re-imagined what music can be. If you have never heard Coleman play it at times feels like being blasted in the face by sandpaper, cats on heat scratching each others eyes out and garbage trucks colliding but always in a good way... always in a very, VERY good way.

Sound & Traffic

2009-04-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

John Cage talks here about the nature of sound and listening. I was reminded of this clip a few days ago when sat in front of this screen on a warm night like this experiencing the sounds outside my window. The sirens of two police cars in hot pursuit - two notes and glissando going in and out of sync as the distance between the cars alternated between getting slightly nearer and slightly further apart. This created a fluid merging and dissolving effect similar to Steve Reich's use of phasing but with a fluid pulse; plus the Doppler effect as the tones smoothly shifted in comparison to the distance between the cars. This in turn reminded me of the turntablist technique of mixing with pure sine wave records using only the turntables pitch control to vary this otherwise constant tone - a technique first deployed in Cage's 'Imaginary Landscape No.1' composition of 1939. Everything begins and ends with John Cage.

More Brilliant than the Sun

2009-04-03T12:17:00.000-07:00

I am currenntly 're-reading' Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction which explores the black music/technology/sci-fi interface. The term 'explored' is particularly apt with Eshun as this is not a dry academic thesis, nor a piece of (oxymoronic) 'music journalism', whereby music and/or its history and surrounding culture becomes the object viewed from some pseudo-authoritative POV. Eshun writes from inside the sounds he is physically immersed in - transcribing what he hears in synaesthesiastic maelstrom of hyperbolic neologism and Baudrillardian postmodernism. 'Re-reading' implies I have read and have started to read again but this would be a bizzare book to read from beggining to end. It is a book to jump in and out of at random - to read from start to finish such a book would be as absurd as listening to your entire music collection alphabetically. It is text as sensurial experience - a transcendental experience Roland Barthes would would have described as BLISS. If writing about music IS like dancing to architecture this is text as performance, linguistic gymnastics and Krumping!

Summer of Riots

2009-04-01T16:45:00.000-07:00

So the arrival of G20 saw the first riot (okay quasi-riot) of what promises to be a summer of unrest in this green and pleasant land. As this may be the first wave of major rioting since the 80's it will be interesting to see how the 24 hour news coverage that we now have will not only cover the riots (lots of hanging around waiting for 'something' to happen I would imagine) but, and more importantly, how it will actually effect the nature of the rioting itself. Tom Wolfe wrote a nice scene elucidating the symbiotic relationship between protest and press coverage in Bonfire of the Vanities. The pic above is a video capture for the BBC's 24 hour news channel and shows an RBS bank being attacked by two protesters/rioters/looters/soap dodgers(revolutionaries?) while what appeared to be around 50 photographers photographed, and that was from the BBC camera's POV so presumably there would have been another 50 or so on this side. So a ratio of 100 camera men to two rioters??? What will be interesting this summer is that most of the footage that ends up in the public domain will have been shot by members of the public and/or the rioters themselves. As sites such as google video and youtube exist to make a profit via advertising it would be interesting to see what targeted advertising could appear next to such footage. Interesting times ahead...

Chilled Funk

2009-03-19T06:47:00.000-07:00

I have posted a new episode of my podcast. It is a mixtape called Chilled Funk and is a chilled out funky soul mix featuring hippy, folky, country and jazzy flavours featuring mainly records I picked up and played out while DJing in New York around 2003. Enjoy!

Three Exhibitions

2009-03-05T12:50:00.000-08:00

This week I saw Altermodern curated by Nicolas Bourriaud at Tate Britain, and Annette Messager's retrospective Messengers and Mark Wallinger's The Russian Linesman both at the Hayward.

Altermodern's premise is fairly vague based around a state of post-post-modernity being defined by globalisation, increased communication, travel, migration, multiculturalism and identity which is all, to be honest, pretty much a given. It is hard to think of any contemporary artist who's work doesn't in some way touch on one or more of these topics. So despite claims to the contrary there really is no 'Big Idea' here from the man who brought us 'Relational Aesthetics'. So what of the actual show and the actual work? Its layout is, somewhat surprisingly, a bit of jumble not that dissimilar to a good degree show despite themed sections which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Thus we have lots of jarring juxtapositions between the slick and minimal such as Walead Beshty's glass cubes and the hand painted folksiness of Bob and Roberta Smith's texts. In general I was very surprised by how Sensation!(sic) a lot of the work was being, in essence, empty spectacle. There was quite a bit of the kind of tack you would expect to see in a Damien Hirst or Charles Saatchi curated show. I am though being a little harsh here as there is some very good stuff such as Loris Gréaud vibrating floor based on his brain waves and some fun to be had with such works as a nuclear mushroom cloud made of kitchen utensals and a giant accordion! In short there was a lot, and I mean a lot, of stuff. All of it was, to deploy Douglas Huebler's phrase, more or less interesting. Does this 'Altermodern' world of ours really call out for most of it? Probably not...

Annette Messager's show is great fun - the highlights being large scale kinetic installations using air to inflate and deflate organic shapes that evoke, either implicitly or explicitly, the sexual organs, and the pieces using stuffed animals, sometimes de-stuffed, often coming to mechanical (half)life. It made me smile evoking a slightly soiled and sinister version of Sesame Street - and everyone loves Sesame Street! Tip: Don't read the small texts next to the works they turn the actual pieces into nothing more than literal illustrations of very pedestrian ideas - closing off the work and killing the joke.

Wallinger's The Russian Linesman's premise is almost as all encompassing as Bourriad's but the extreme diversity of the works selected, ranging from a William Blake painting to Aernouts Mik's video installation of unused footage from the then conflict ridden former Yugoslavia, does reflect Wallengers eclecticaly catholic tastes . My three favourite pieces, Monika Sosnowska's Corridor, Fred Sandback's string arrangements and Sturtavents door ajar, are all minimal/conceptual (as one might expect) and play in the space between phenomenology and metaphysics - the gap between how we experience the world and the world as it is. In the spirit of Wallinger's sporting allusion in the title of the exhibition the final scores are:

Bourriaud - 6 out of 10

Messager - 8 out of 10

Wallinger - 8 out of 10

My First Podcast

2009-03-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to my first audio podcast. It is a short funky, dubby, house mix produced on the fly in Ableton live. It uses a lot of brass instrumentation (hence the name) processed through the expansive use of a delay filter. Though house/disco this mix is primarily influenced by the early Dub pioneers King Tubby, Prince Jammy and particularly, Scientist. The artwork I am *appropriating* here is by Tim Rollins and KOS and is from the Amerika series. Enjoy...

Playing with Horns (A toot for you a toot for you)

Bank Of America's corporate cover of U2's one.

2009-02-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

Brilliant!!! A couple of Bank of America slimeballs cover U2's One. How fitting and so much better than the soulless piety and pseudo-authenticity of Bono et als turgid corporate rock original. Let us never forget Bono’s involvement with ‘Red’ that ugly apology for consumerist greed brought to you in conjunction with that well known paragon of virtue, altruism and social justice… American Express. Let us also not forget how the lead singer of this corporate money making machine berated the Irish government for not giving enough of it's budget to foreign aid while moving U2s own tax affairs from the already extremely low tax rates of Ireland to a tax shelter in Holland. It would be a kindness to describe this man as too thick to see the incongruity between these two positions but a more accurate word is would probably be hypocrite

No water, no good.

2009-01-29T21:19:00.000-08:00

My Boiler is leaking and flooded the down stairs apartment. So now my water has been turned off. This is not good.

On that which is uninteresting.

2009-01-25T16:46:00.000-08:00

I have nothing interesting to say. What would it mean if I did have? Would an objective appraisal of *interestingness*, or otherwise, be possible? If I did have something interesting to say why would I want to share it. Would the fact that I had shared it make it more or less interesting? If I had something interesting to say but refused to say it that would, I believe, be interesting in and of itself and what ever it was that I was choosing not to say would not have to compete with its own absence. So what is the drive the drives people to share what they think is interesting with others when by sharing it that have, to a certain degree, negated its interestingness.