catfunt: the site they should have silenced

IKEA and Vet's Bills

There's a really interesting thread developing in the comments over at Bird about IKEA, childcare and pets. Does anyone care that Ikea's founder Ingvar Kamprad was a Nazi sympathiser? Or more bizarrely that he can't remember if he was ever a member of nazi affiliated groups:
"At first I got in touch with a pair of Nazified organisations and perhaps I even became a member, I have forgotten. However, after a couple of meetings in pure Nazi-style, I quit."

Le Doulos

So we watched Le Doulos last night, rented from our excellent video shop on East London's fashionable Broadway market where every Saturday Hackney-ites can pretend they live in Islington as we have our very own 'Farmer's style market' (this is what it's actually called). I digress.

Le Doulos is a confusing collision of noir and specifically French post-war angst that seems to be largely derived from the Occupation and themes of betrayal and trust. You do feel that with the war over for 18 years when Melville made Le Doulos they should maybe get over themselves but hey, it adds a distinctly European dimension to the whole noir project. There is a delightful obsession with noir outfits amongst the men, particularly the trenchcoat, and there are comic moments as you await the arrival of the next scene to see what they'll be wearing. Similarly with hats which you'll understand when you see the final reel (it'll probably be the only thing you'll understand the first time you see it). Anyway, I liked it a lot and am tempted to watch it again before it goes back to the video shop on Tuesday. There is a very good essay that explains the storyline, but if you haven't seen the film could be a bit of a plot spoiler.

I spy for the ... ICA

Met my insane friend Ivan "don't fuck with the" Pope to see the equally insane (but way too studied) John Bock show at the ICA. Bock is German and has filled the downstairs galleries with some kind of self-build gone wrong - roughly nailed shuttering ply divides the space into smaller rooms with photos, video projections and bales of straw with ladders and narrow crawl spaces to move around - all punctuated by the incessant unrelenting chatter of the three ICA invigilators standing in the middle of the room talking about their plans for the weekend. It felt like spying on a teenage sleep-over. The concourse gallery (ie the corridor that goes to the bar) has five of Bock's videos playing. To view them you stand at the top of a ladder, lie in a bath, climb into a wooden chamber which works well and once you've settled into your space the videos just fly past (in as much as art videos ever do). My favourite showed Bock driving a large tractor around a field in rugged artist fashion. Midway through the steering wheel comes off in his hand and there's briefly mild panic in Bock's face (Bock is the Roger Moore of performance) as he momentarily looses control. It's like a metaphor for the relationship of the artist to these huge mechanical projects that constantly threaten to lurch out of control.

Anyway, enough Bock. Bumped into Philip Dodd (the ICA's director) in the ICA bar (well, that implies that we know each other which isn't true). He was behind me in the queue and while the bar guy was doing my order, Dodd muttered "Green tea" in a knowing way with a slight nod of the head, straightened a few leaflets on the bar and wandered off. "I hate it when he does that," said the bar guy, "when will he be back? The tea's just going to sit there for ages now." "He's the boss, whaddya gonna do?" I said (see how I bond with the working man). "I don't care if he's the boss," replied my guy. Dodd finally reappeared, got a fudge brownie to go with his green tea and said "Put it on my bill" and off he went in his double vented suit (might have been a Paul Smith). "Make sure he pays his tab before he leaves," I said. "Good point" said the bar man nodding. (Dodd is leaving the ICA to set up a Chinese baby adoption scheme for childless Westerners. The Guardian gave him a free full page ad for his new business.)

Collateral

This is why I find going to the cinema such a depressing experience. I start out all perky 'Great, we're going to the movies' only to have those dreams crushed a few hours later by interminable tosh like this. Tom Cruise is a poor cross between Clint Eastwood and a Richard Gere character (any of them really from American Gigolo to Internal Affairs - both excellent films) made all the more obvious by Cruise's immaculate grey rug. It doesn't know what kind of film it is, neither funny nor scary and surprisingly for a Michael Mann production lacks the visceral thrills of his trademark loud rock music, guns and cinematic violence.

On the upside Bande a Parte is available in Fopp for a tenner (classy BFI release too) - watch that instead.

Frieze 2004

We went to see the Frieze artfair today. It was the only time I've been (it's only the second year). The first thing you notice is how badly all the work is hung - each gallery has a stand the size of a large sitting-room - but it's not that they pack them the work in, it's more that there's a single work from each of the last 12 shows they've had and they sit uneasily together. The result is a real lack of context for anything that you see except for the Wayne Hemmingway-ish question: "Would it look nice over my brown sofa?"

It's like IKEA without the philanthropy. I won't be back and they won't miss me - I was on a comp my friend got me.

In focus cigar and blurry siobhan

I know this is out of order (in the chronological sense, not the Ray Winstone sense). This is last Wednesday's opening of Alma Enterprises on Vyner Street. At the time it was London's latest gallery but since then another half dozen have probably opened - Jim tells me that there's a new one on Cambridge Heath Road between Ibid and Two TenTwo but he didn't say what it was called. I think that may be a more recent arrival than Alma though.

This marvellous photo shows Siobhan, one of the Alma galleristas, blurry in the back ground while we see the cigar of some American buyer as the point of focus in the foreground. There are no artists to be seen.

I'm just kidding around - the show is excellent and you should go and see it.

Art, art, art

For all my stalkers (and my wife mostly) I'll be at this tomorrow and Rhodes&Mann before that:

"Alma Enterprises presents 'Project 1'
The Alma Enterprises gallery opens it's doors once again for an evening of art and performance featuring the work of eight emerging artists in this new gallery space in East London.

SATURDAY 16TH OCTOBER
6pm - 9pm

ALMA ENTERPRISES gallery
1 Vyner Street
London E2
Tube - Bethnal Green

Live performances from Clare Quilty and The Welts during the evening.

'Project 1'

Alex Baggaley- presents an alphabet of ink and rubber stamps applied in a blind rush on wood. Vast panoramas, chaos, coincidence, accidental narratives, incidents, smudges, smears, shadows – executed in the moment and unedited.

Ben Tomlinson presents a series of texts and drawings that originate from the final chapter of the Dutch Translation of ‘E.T’ (the book of the film) translated into doggerel English through the sounds of an unfamiliar language.

Charlie Tweed presents the premier of ‘Lets Start Again’. A video promoting the ideas and concepts of the character and alter ego ‘Sirus Manzill’.

Manuel Saiz presents ‘Parallel Universes Meet at Infinity’. Saiz observed, selected and recorded particular animal characteristics at Dudley Zoo, choosing their best moments. He then auditioned trained and choreographed actors to recreate characteristics through attitude as opposed to simple physical mimicry.

Clare Quilty will emerge and perform 'The smell of your sweet....' His demonic imagery is a metaphor meant to rip the viewer out of complacency in order to raze the past and begin anew.

Miranda Peak presents an arrangement of small-scale paintings on card, cameos of the stuff of everyday life.
Will Daniels - ‘Vase of flowers in a window niche’ is a recreation of the painting of the same name by Dutch Master Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder painted c 1620. Will modelled a representation of the painting in cardboard, photographed the model and then used the photograph as a means to paint from.

The Welts perform a unique mix of music and visuals live within the gallery space."

"Plastics, Yolanda, plastics."

Three months after my wife graduated from her design course at St Martins we finally sat down and had the 'plastics conversation'. She was floating in the swimming pool at the time (not in the 'Sunset Boulevard' sense).

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida is dead. How come no one told me?

Tony Allen at the Barbican

You can buy tickets for the rest of the Fela Festival here.
Read about the Festival on Fly.

Tony Allen, Keziah Jones and Damian

Damian took me to the Barbican to see Tony Allen who is still always referred to as "Fela Kuti's drummer" although Fela has been dead for a million years. I remember as a teenager the NME always managed to turn a blind eye to Fela's homophobia in their many articles pouring huge praise on the man. Interestingly John Lewis in his piece in Time Out on Fela called him an "idiot' for exactly those views (as well as calling him a musical genius and other stuff. I'm paraphrasing as I can't be bothered to find the mag.) I was meant to be taking pics which got off to a bad start as the usher threatened to take the film off the man in front of us if he saw him taking pics. Anyway it was all good fun and all things considered I'm happy with the pics - arty rather than sharp (or close up). The gig was mixed - some real high points (Tony Allen, Keziah Jones, some singer who's on the Tony Allen/Damon Alburn whose name we didn't catch) and some mixed moments (Ty mostly and Damon's jogging pixie dance). Anyway, the festival continues, you can still book tickets online and there's a load of free stuff in the foyer before and after most of the gigs.

My dad...

...phones in the middle of the night and leaves a rambling message on the ansaphone. He's slurring heavily. He wants me to find the words of a poem that he learnt as a young boy and tells the ansaphone the first and last lines. He's heard that there's some serach thing on the internet that can do this. It's the last poem that Patrick Pearse, hero of the Easter Uprising wrote in 1916 the night before he was executed. The poem's called The Wayfarer:

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

Where's your wife?

I have left the wife at the in-laws and returned home on my own to go to some art event tonight. She is returning tomorrow once she has finished bickering with her family. Meanwhile all our neighbours are eyeing me suspiciously since I arrived back in the car on my own this afternoon having departed with Yol yesterday. The casual "Yol not with you?" belies their concern that something terrible has happened to her and that I am the perpetrator.

It reminds me of the story about someone called David who had a flatmate who had a cat that pissed everywhere. When the flatmate was out one day David drove the cat out to the countryside and dumped it miles away. He pretended that the cat had run away. It was David's ex-wife who told me the story so it must be true.

Unlike a cat Yol has a very good sense of direction.

Flickr!

Flickr is the greatest web product of the millennium. Why? Because you can add facetious comments to your photos. It's like being able to put sticky little speech bubbles on your photos as nobody did back in the '80s. Check this picture out by clicking on it.

Check Me Now!

As if there weren't enough baggy-arsed reggae revivalists coming out of the art colleges (or as Steve's mum would say "long-haired strokes of piss"), the otherwise excellent Fly music site has decided to adopt one of its own. Maybe he'll discover the soundtrack section or get lost in Turkish pop music. You can but hope.

Different Strokes

Different people react to stress in different ways. My wife, for example, who's just finishing off a design job to take to the printer's spent yesterday singing the theme tune from Rising Damp as she Potatoshopped and Quark-ed. Today I popped in to see if she was alright. She's singing If I Were a Rich Man from Fiddler on the Roof.

Young John Candy

I think Flickr is really cool. I'm not sure what the point of it is though. Maybe it's just to make me seem more hip and in with the in-crowd.

Today's Top Spam...

...asked 'are you looking for hungry sex girls?'. Presumably these are sex girls who haven't eaten for a day or two. What's a 'sex girl' though?

Arsenal v. Charlton

These pictures were taken just moments after the third and fourth goals went in. We haven't circled Thierry Henry, you'll just have to figure it out for yourselves - he's wearing "14". Read the Observer match report.

The Walls of Dubrovnik

If you make it to Dubrovnik go to the bar halfway down the cliffs on the sea side of the city. It's called Buza (or maybe they just tell the Brits that) and you follow a sign that says "Cold Drinks Here" through a doorway in the city walls to an al fresco bar, portable toilet and a few tables down the cliffside. I guess the doorway through the city walls wasn't there when the Venetians et al. were trying to ransack the place. This is a picture my wife took of me.

The Men Who Invented the (UK) Internet

As previously documented I spent yesterday with Steve and Ivan, the founders of Webmedia, one of the UK's first internet coffee-shop/knocking houses back in October 1994. While Webmedia exists no more, Ivan - the self-styled "Internet Pope" and Steve Bowbrick are still around like the Michael Caine and Steve Martin characters in Dirty Rotton Scoundrels. Anyway, it was a great day but I still can't find anyone who wants to buy the feature and the photos I'd planned. All I can say is that they do name names and locate all the corpses. If you're one of the guilty parties, maybe there's a fee just to keep them quiet.