More photos from my mini holiday in Croatia in July.

So, I'm crap at blogging.

These are some things I've done a while ago: An illustrated Le Guess Who festival guide (November 24th-28th), new music column (p.18-21) apple crumble recipe (p.35) - Subbacultcha September issue, new music column (p.18-21) yam burger recipe (p.47) - Subbacultcha October issue, new music column (p.18-19) courgette roll recipe (p.48-9) - Subbacultcha November issue.

I will schedule some posts soon. Also, I am preparing something NEW and EXCITING, watch this space.

These photos were taken on the Croatian island, Zlarin. No cars, no phone, no internet, just bicycles, fruit, books and wild, rocky beaches!

Giovanni da Modena - The Inferno (1410) (Basilica di S. Petronio - Bologna)
This is just about the BEST postcard I have ever bought in my life. JUST LOOK AT IT!!!!

I saw two video artworks in two different places that drew a nice parallel in my mind. Nina Yuen's 'David' can be viewed at the NIMk in Amsterdam, Ada Kaczmarczyk's 'Litania' is at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw. I would have posted videos, but unfortunately none are available, so go and see them for yourself or just take my word for it.

1. Nina Yuen - David (2010)
'David' is an adaptation of a text by Carmen Delzell in which a woman enters into a pact with the devil and becomes eternally indebted to him. In the video Yuen performs a number of magic rituals to grant her wishes. The content recalls superstitions my Polish babcias enjoy believing and questions that arise from this, not to mention the implications a mantralike video loop adds to the general picture. Visually, it's beautifully disjointed and succulently coloured. The work was based on this fragment from Delzell's story: "It was beginning to get chilly. Money would really be tight when it got too cold to sell on the street, so I decided to go to a fortune teller. She lived and worked in a storefront in Chinatown. She was fat and sneaky-looking and had only one breast. But it turned out she was right about everything to come and she gave me three wishes. I wished for an apartment, a man, and an antique store...”

2. Ada Kaczmarczyk - Litania (2010)
Kaczmarczyk embedded her video in a small, garish shrine, crowned with a pair of golden high-heels. It strongly alludes to the countless Blessed Madonna chapels you can find in any crumbling courtyard or mud-splattered ditch in Poland. The playing loop portrays a set of young hands clutching what seems to be rosary beads amidst a huge pile of kitsch crap. Muttering, as many Polish babcias do everyday in their church pews, she recites her 'prayers' with great fervour - "I love spending money on crap, I love going out at night, I love painting my nails, I love ice cream sundaes with cherries and chocolate sauce etc. etc." It pangs with wit and brains and I like it.

(Images from artinfo.pl and nimk.nl)

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Apologies for the long periods of silence. I'm moving back to London on Tuesday. If anyone knows of a nice, clean, cheap, zone 2, 4 bedroom house in London, let me know! Photographs from Croatia will follow once I get them developed.

I don't wanna sound too soppy and shit, but I'm moving out of Amsterdam today and it's pretty damn sad.

15.07.2010 - It's summer, I'm doing stuff, regular posts will reappear when I feel like it!

My latest recipe was filo pastry herb pie made for Ariel Pink. We ate it with a large tomato salad on the side and a gigantic fruit salad for pudding. The recipe and illustration are in the July/August issue of Subbacultcha! magazine (p. 44-5). Got this t-shirt as a thank you.

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) - Hideaki Anno
I saw this anime yesterday and it blew my mind. It is filled with technomystic (whatever that means) Kabbalah symbolism. The film screening was a part of the Glorious Basterds film series organised by the Jewish Salon Amsterdam. The next film is in August and will be a kosher kung-fu type of thing, I am terribly sad to be missing it!

2. No Ghost Just a Shell (1999) - Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno
 French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased the copyright for a Manga figure called Annlee from the Japanese agency Kworks in 1999. Annlee was classified as a ‘cheap Manga model’ by the agency, meaning that her character complexity was less developed than others’ in the Japanese Manga industry. She would soon become redundant as a character, Huyghe and Parreno rescued Annlee from imminent character ‘death.’
The title of the art project refers to Masamune Shirow’s manga classic, “Ghost in the Shell,” which explores the possibilities of infiltrating human minds and hijacking identity. Huyghe and Parreno subsequently commissioned other artists to appropriate the Manga character free of charge and to propose scenarios in which Annlee is liberated from ownership and can explore the ambiguities of her existence.

“Each of the projects realized with Annlee is a chapter in the history of a sign, and has a 'life' in the context of the individual artists' activities and within the joint project. The 'life-prolonging' measures taken by the No Ghost Just a Shell project for a short-lived, virtual and commercial being actually raise some 'melancholy' humanitarian questions, but also undermine economic mechanisms by allowing a product that is otherwise viable only in a commercial context to be used free of charge; the artists' autonomous production conditions are another factor. The film and music industries, and the internet, face us with copyright questions nowadays. The project addresses those issues as well overlaps with questions about how identity and difference can be formulated today, given the current demand for the mastery of multiple individual subject realizations.”
In 2002, the project concluded itself when Annlee’s copyright and exploitation rights were signed to her by the French artists, thus liberating the Manga character from circulation and economic and artistic exploitation, yet also condemning her to silence, not unlike the one she would endure if she were made redundant by Kworks. The contract was displayed next to an IKEA coffin built for Annlee by artist Joe Scanlan. The fate of Annlee’s identity, figure and sign remains undetermined.

I have recently been hanging out with some cool animals.

I bought my sister and myself these excellent cocoon scarves. You can practically do anything with this thing, drape it into a balaclava or use it to parachute off a cliff. They drape extremely well thanks to their good, large measurements and supple material. 160cm is the address you should be bookmarking.

Also, my second High Places recipe (vegan crêpes and grapefruit salad) can be read here. It's real good!

1. Simon Morris - The Road to the Unconscious / The aleatory moment (223,704 words traveling at 90mph) (2003)
In January 2003, eighty-three students from York College cut out every word from Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and as every word was cut from its sentence it was spoken. On 1st June 2003, the artist Simon Morris threw the words out of the window of a Renault Clio on Redbridge Road, Dorset. The action freed the words from the structural unity of Freud's text as it subjected them to an aleatory moment.Maurizio Cogliandro and Dallas Seitz documented the action as 333,960 words erupted from the window of the car. Dr Howard Britton, a psychoanalyst, directed them to any slippages or eruptions of the real that occurred in the reconfigured text. 

2. Gold Panda - You (I like this a lot!)

Sorry about the blogging silence. I have been ill, lazy and busy this past week and I'm now in Poland for a few days. I have big essays to write and babies to kiss, so it might be quiet for a bit, but not for long.

I saw these two events this week and they were strikingly good.
1 + 3. Soap Opera - Bogomir Doringer and Dave Captain (Koningsplein, Amsterdam)
A smoke and bubble machine was placed in the chestnut tree on Koningsplein at night. It went along the lines of "Homo bulla est" and Harry Potter.
2 + 4. Metamorfoses - LeineRoebana (Orgelpark, Amsterdam)
A beautiful, intelligent and emotional dance performance that everyone should see if they have the time this weekend. This was the first time I felt bad that a ticket was so cheap compared with what we were given. The last two performances are tonight and tomorrow night at 20.15.

My band cooking column and illustration-collage has been published in the June issue of Subbacultcha! magazine (p. 44-45). This month it's courgette cake for High Places, whom I like very much. They gave me their newest vinyl as a thank you.

My friend Miguel has a gigantic room for rent in this house in London, it is available for June and/or July.

£75 per week,
Also suitable for a couple,
Ace housemates,
Large kitchen, living room and garden,
Near public transportation,
Table football in the basement,
I lived in this house and it was great.

Please comment and leave your email address if you or any of your friends are interested!

We cycled and cycled yesterday and this is what happened!

Roman Polanski - Chinatown (1974)

Aw man, this is the best film in the whole wide world. When you watch it count the whole vs. broken objects - pocket watches, glasses, wheels, tail lights, eyes.

My posting is irregular at the moment because I am learning a lot of exciting things in the library and I don't have a lot of spare time on my hands. I will share my findings once I am done. Meanwhile, enjoy the AUTHENTIC WILDLIFE.

Found these buried in my virtual stacks of shit. It's been super cold recently so I thought it was appropriate.

1. Alison Knowles - Newspaper Music (2008)
2. Long long ago, back when the world was young - that is, sometime around the year 1958 - a lot of artists and composers and other people who wanted to do beautiful things began to look at the world around them in a new way (for them).

They said: "Hey! - coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music."

And when they saw that, it turned their minds on. And they began to ask questions. One question was: "Why does everything I see that's beautiful like cups and kisses and sloshing feet have to be made into just a part of something fancier and bigger? Why can't I just use it for its own sake?"

When they asked questions like that, they were inventing Fluxus; but this they didn't know yet, because Fluxus was like a baby whose mother and father couldn't agree on what to call it - they knew it was there, but it didn't have a name. (...)

from Dick Higgins - A Child's History of Fluxus (1979) (read the rest, it is so good!)

Bologna in late April. I've got more of these babies.

Brody Condon - DesResFX.Kill (Karma Physics < Elvis) (2004)

DesResFX.Kill (Karma Physics < Elvis) is a self playing modification of the science fiction first person shooter computer game engine Unreal Tournament 2003. When plugged into a projector/monitor and power, a small custom computer starts and displays the work. The viewer is pulled slowly through an endless chasm of pink fog filled with countless floating, flailing bodies of Elvis Presley. The representations of Elvis are appropriated archetypes that represent a certain type of character; they are empty shells that one can inhabit during a video game.

The choice of pink background and the use of Presley’s image imbue the artwork with a rather humorous quality. The artist’s sense of humour seems rather dark when the observers discover that the convulsions of Elvis are controlled by the original game’s Karma real-time physics system – a type of procedural animation that applies real-world physics to video games, especially when re-enacting death animations. Movements are calculated at the moment they are executed, enabling the video game character to interact more naturally with its virtual environment. The “reality” of the game is not predetermined when using karma physics; the player alters it through his or her imagination’s comprehension of the virtual environment. Condon states that he misuses karma physics as a “new representation of death via code, not just the visual surface of trauma, but the physical dynamics of the falling figure.” [1] DesResFX.Kill (Karma Physics < Elvis) seems even darker in its subject matter when one realises that the artist is keeping the allegedly immortal ‘King of Rock ‘n Roll’ doing the eternal ‘dance of death’ in his artwork. This realisation is striking in both its gravity and lightness, where it is reduced to a simple, repetitive action in the virtual world.

(An excerpt from one of my published entries on the Art and Electronic Media website.)

Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Holy Mountain (1973)
We downloaded this film over a year ago and we could never bring ourselves to watch it. Finally, we did, but we had to watch this film in three sittings because of its overabundant use of, well, everything. Do your research first and then (decide if you want to) watch it.

I have a new cooking column and illustration in the May issue of Subbacultcha! magazine (p. 46-7).
I got this t-shirt from Times New Viking as a thank you.

Nobuyoshi Araki - (from) Sentimental Journey (1971-1991)

My recent Subbacultcha! playlists and paper-pencil-fuckabouts are here.

1. Marcin Maciejowski - Granice głupoty (2001)
2. RIP Lech i Maria Kaczyńscy?

Czekam na interpretację Maciejowskiego. Jego wystawa jest w Krakowie.