HIRST RAGE

Lord! Just wait until Sister Wolf sees his paintings…

http://www.godammit.com/2010/02/02/damien-hirst-what-a-fucking-cunt%E2%84%A2/

Floating Skull (2006). Photo courtesy Damien Hirst and the Wallace Collection

Filed under: COMEDY, VISUAL ARTS, WEB

MORE YOUTUBE GEMS 1

Recently we featured a list of Joe Queenan’s guide to the must-see classics tucked away on YouTube.

We thought the article was a great idea, so we’ve dug a little deeper to bring you more of the same. We’ll do some more installments over the next few days, but this first one focuses on the exploitation and grindhouse classics you can view on Youtube, with a couple of mainstream hits thrown in for good measure.

Here’s the list:

Wasp Woman!

In this Corman classic, the jelly from wasps is used by a cosmetics company and it turns everyone into Wasp Monsters. It’s a truly great exploitation movie.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ampopfilms#p/u/26/i7c29s2oMn4

I once tried to buy this great film on 8mm from Umit in Clapton, a great shop to visit if you like all film things Super-8, trashy, classic and underground – Umit’s chatty and accomodating but very serious about his movies.

On this visit, I was sternly told by a grumpy Umit that Wasp Woman was much too good for the likes of me to purchase! Strangely, I was told I could rent the reel…

The treasure trove at Umit & Son

Umit’s propaganda via Becoming Fearless

Steamboat Bill Jr

Amusement ensues here, as the effete son of a cantankerous riverboat captain comes to join his father’s crew. This film was to be the last of physical comedian Buster Keaton’s independent features, and was also one of the last silent comedies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUNZPHbwA-U

It contains some brilliant sequences, including the famous stunt reproduced by artist Steve McQueen where a building facade falls on Keaton, but he is saved because the window opening falls around him.

Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr.

McQueen’s take on Steamboat Bill Jr.

One Eyed Jacks

This film, a 1961 Western, is the only film directed by actor Marlon Brando, who also played its lead character, Rio.

Running from the law after a bank robbery in Mexico, Dad Longworth finds an opportunity to take the stolen gold and leaves his partner Rio to be captured. Years later, Rio escapes from the prison where he has been since, and hunts down Dad for revenge. Dad is now a respectable sheriff in California, and has been living in fear of Rio’s return.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k26yb93rjos

A Bucket of Blood

Another great exploitation film, this time a Corman satire on the lifestyles, despair and struggles of arty hipsters, where a bohemian artist in San Francisco finds that he must kill in order to remain successful and creative.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bgkb0-fYac

From A Bucket of Blood

Little Shop of Horrors (original version)

Sorry – yet another Corman film here, and possibly his most famous, where a clumsy young man nurtures a plant and discovers that it thrives on blood, forcing him to kill people to keep it alive. Watch out for Jack Nicholson’s debut turn in this movie as a sadistic dentist!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HABYchwBjcg

Little Shop of Horrors

Satan’s School for Girls

I’ve seen loads of pictures from the US where kids graffiti this phrase on their school buses!

A young woman investigating her sister’s suicide at a private girls’ school finds herself battling a satanic cult. It’s a bit rubbish, daft and very campy, but hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYF8hOPm_qM

Satan’s School for Girls

The Last Time I Saw Paris

This 1954 romantic drama from MGM is loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald ’s short story Babylon Revisited. A man returns to Paris to remember events he was involved in after the city was liberated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-_lzupukFQ

Carnival Rock

More from Roger Corman! In this rock and roll exploitation movie, the nightclub owner of a rock n roll venue has a crush on the club’s star singer, but she has eyes for someone else…. There’s some great songs and performances from the musicians featured.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfoKyCVMDXE

Carnival Rock

The Driller Killer

Be warned: this one’s an ultra-trashy video nasty!

In Driller Killer, an artist slowly goes insane while struggling to pay his bills, work on his paintings, and care for his two female roommates, which leads him taking to the streets of New York after dark and randomly killing derelicts with a power drill. As you do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEnFtJRxHpk

The Driller Killer

Keep watching for more YouTube gems, which we’ll feature soon!

Filed under: COMEDY, EVENT, FILM AND VIDEO, ONLINE EXHIBIT, PERFORMANCE, PHOTOGRAPHY, RANDOM BRILLIANCE, TELLY, VISUAL ARTS, WEB

DIAMONDS ON THE SOLES OF HER SHOES

Diamonds on the soles of her shoes

Bischoff/Weiss
95 Rivington Street
London EC2A 3AY

10^th Feb – 27^th March 2010

Free admission

Alicja Kwade, Matthew Smith and Raphaël Zarka in a show curated by Niru Ratnam exploring the concept of newness. How might newness enter the world? Through the alteration, distortion, translation or re-contextualisation of what already exists in the world. The three artists in “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” have, in different ways, brought new objects of knowledge into the world. And at a time when a new object of knowledge, in the form of a new gallery space, is inaugurated, it seems apt to explore this idea more.

Les formes du repos n 10 (pipeline) 2006

More information at http://www.bischoffweiss.com/exhibitions/_55/

Filed under: PHOTOGRAPHY, SCULPTURE, VISUAL ARTS

A GOOD YARN

YARN Blog and Festival Project

YARN Blog
http://spintheyarn.wordpress.com/

YARN is a brand new project celebrating story and storytelling – the festival will showcase film, theatre, music and literature and provides a platform for mixing them all up!

Admission to festival events is low-cost but sadly not free of charge, but the project is also running a blog on the events they are planning, which you might like to read for inspiration on your own approaches to literature and storytelling.

YARN is all about fun and exploration, devoted to letting the imagination run wild!

Visit the blog at http://spintheyarn.wordpress.com/

Find out more about the project at http://www.yarnfest.com/

Filed under: EVENT, LITERARY, ONLINE EXHIBIT, POETRY, WEB

MARTIN PARR: RETROSPECTIVE OF BOOKS

Martin Parr: Retrospective of Photobooks

Rocket Gallery Tea Building
56 Shoreditch High Street
London E1 6JJ

Until 20th February 2010

Free admission

A retrospective of sixty books by the photographer Martin Parr, dating from 1974 to 2009, exhibited with a group of iconic editioned photographs.

Common Sense [Las Vegas breakfast] 1998

The Last Resort [ice cream girl] 1983-86

Think of England 1995-99

More information at http://rocketgallery.com/in_ce.html

Filed under: PHOTOGRAPHY, VISUAL ARTS

MORNING POEM: THE ELECTRIC BODY OF WALT WHITMAN

Walt Whitman is often remembered as a larger-than-life poet, writing expansive poems which embrace the whole of America as inspiration.

Though this excerpt from his famous I Sing the Body Electric is quite long, its playful, intense exploration of the body is highly readable and accessible.

This celebration of the human body is captivating and its scope is vast, encompassing swathes of history, social attitudes and the wonder of nature: the lines are sometimes sexual, sometimes sad as the speaker observes slaves at auction, but often, the piece simply communicates a sense of awe at the complexity and beauty of the human body, and constructs a plea to regard it as sacred.

Image from here

Excerpt from I Sing the Body Electric
by Walt Whitman

7

A man’s body at auction,
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this wonder,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,
For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain,
In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,
They shall be stript that you may see them.
Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized
arms and legs,
And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings,
aspirations,
(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in
parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers
in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring
through the centuries?
(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace
back through the centuries?)

8

A woman’s body at auction,
She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,
She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man?
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and
times all over the earth?

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful
than the most beautiful face.
Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool
that corrupted her own live body?
For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

9

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women,
nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the
soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and
that they are my poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s,
father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or
sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the
jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the
ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger,
finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body
or of any one’s body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping,
love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and
tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked
meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward
toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the
marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of
the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

Source text at http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/126

Find out more and read other poems from The Walt Whitman Archive: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

Filed under: EVENT, LITERARY, MORNING POEM, POETRY, WEB

POETRY IN THE WILD

Poetry in the Wild: Free Verse Project

Online Project by Academy of American Poets
http://www.flickr.com/photos/poets/sets/72157615489340664/

Inspired by the 2009 National Poetry Month poster design, the Academy of American Poets invites you to capture and share your own ephemeral bits of verse: write lines from a favorite poem wherever seems appropriate and post it to the Free Verse group page on Flickr. Include the source of your lines in the photo caption.

Selected entries will be featured on www.poets.org.

Here’s some of the entries so far:

From “Going for Water” by Robert Frost

From “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot

 

 from Spirit of ‘76 by John Updike

from I sing the body electric by Walt Whitman

 
From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot

From “Never To Dream Of Spiders” by Audre Lorde

To see the full Flickr set, visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/poets/sets/72157615489340664/

 Featured entries at http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/541

Filed under: DESIGN, ILLUSTRATION, LITERARY, ONLINE EXHIBIT, POETRY, VISUAL ARTS, WEB

POLARI’S FOOTNOTES TO SEX

Polari In The Pavilion

St Paul’s Pavilion at Royal Festival Hall,
Belvedere Rd, South Bank, London, SE1 8XX

 

10 February 2010 (second Wed monthly)

Free

 

Paul Burston’s ‘peerless gay literary salon’ returns to St Paul’s Pavilion above the Royal Festival Hall. Tonight, ‘Footnotes To Sex’ with Mia Farlane, Celine Hispiche and Paul Burston. 

Polari is a gay evening of words and music, presented by author/journalist Paul Burston, and consisting of guest authors, plus a bookstore and guest DJs playing tailored sounds, louche lounge and dirty disco. Polari celebrates gay literary tradition and provides a much-needed platform for gay and lesbian authors.

Regularly attracting an audience of men and women of all ages, celebrity devotees of Polari include Marc Almond, Bette Bourne and David McAlmont. Guest authors have included Michael Arditti, Neil Bartlett, Maureen Duffy, Stella Duffy, Christopher Fowler, Sebastian Horsley, Paul Margs, Karen McLeod, Charlotte Mendelson and self-confessed ’straight gay writer’ Will Self.

Polari launched in November 2007 with authors Paul Burston and Rupert Smith, followed in December by a packed event with Neil Bartlett, author of the Costa Award-nominated ‘Skin Lane’. 

Visit http://www.myspace.com/polarigaysalon. You can also watch a film report about Polari on Homovision at www.homovision.tv/pump-up-the-polari/

Filed under: EVENT, LITERARY

DO YOU…JELLY?

JELLY – Weekly Co-Working Event

SPACE Studios
129-131 Mare St, Hackney
London E8 3RH

Weekly on Thursdays, 10am – 6pm

FREE

Thursdays at SPACE are Jelly days. SPACE provide the space, the wifi, the desks and (if you’re lucky) the doughnuts! You bring your laptop.

Jelly are casual, co-working events happening in cities across the world. Turn up, log-in, create, collaborate or work solo. It’s open source living – sharing bandwidth, ideas and elbow room.

Jelly started in NYC in February of 2006 when roommates Amit and Luke realized that they loved working from home, but they missed the creative brainstorming, sharing, and camaraderie of a traditional office. (Office politics, not so much.)

So they started inviting friends to come work from their home one day a week. They soon found that working in close proximity to new and interesting people every couple weeks resulted in new ideas and interesting conversations.

Emboldened by their early success, they made it a more regular thing. Jelly was born.

The hours are 10am to 6pm, and Jelly is free but registration is required. There will be an informal opportunity to introduce projects with tea (‘IT at high tea’) and everyone – from designers, developers, writers, artists – is welcome. It’s a great opportunity to share your talent and learn from others!

For more info, visit http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/All_Content_Items/Media_Arts/JELLY/ and http://workatjelly.com/

Filed under: DESIGN, EVENT, RANDOM BRILLIANCE, VACANCIES, VISUAL ARTS

PHOTO I, PHOTO YOU

Photo I, Photo You

Calvert 22
22 Calvert Avenue
London E2 7JP

Until 28th March 2010     

Free admission

An exhbition of contemporary artist photography addressing how the artistic production of images in Eastern Europe is increasingly influenced by the encroaching world of advertising – and most particularly the flourishing success of the commercial. This group show curated by Iara Boubnova and displays work across a range of media – video, photography and found objects – by a group of cutting edge Eastern European artists.

Anna Jermolaewa Trying to Survive (2000) and Vikenti Komitski Monument to Missed Opportunities (2009)

More information at http://www.calvert22.org/e/exhibition-programme/photo-i-photo-you

Filed under: FILM AND VIDEO, INSTALLATION, PHOTOGRAPHY, VISUAL ARTS