Good calendars.

In the first of many themed posts (no promises), comes this. Unadulterated information packaged in great objects I would like to take home. All sourced within the past two weeks.










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Balham, Nightingale House Nursing Home.
Apparently it always says the weather is 'warm'.

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Amsterdam, faux-junk shop.
I yearned for one on left, but it was an unreasonable 25 €.

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Camberwell, Foundation Illustration installation piece.
There were unused ice cream cones next to it. What a waste.

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Nunhead, the Tsiridis fortress.
How could I forget such an unloved calendar? I had to change the date and dust this beauty.

This is what I'll be doing all summer ..

Hovering in (and out) of sketchbooks. But more importantly, basking in various parks. Frappe and Connect Four off the page.

Drawing by the great Balham-Brightonian Sally, on Wandsworth Common.

The Muziekgebouw

Before Barcelona, there was Amsterdam. I have managed to schedule 3 months of vacation into 2 weeks of holiday. I am now entering hibernation.

Hannah told me off for taking too many photos when it was cold. Couldn't help it, had to visit the place twice in 3 days; a short, passionate affair somewhat akin to 'A Brief Encounter', perhaps. Its greatness not quite captured below:



Someone on the plane recognised us from ATP and informed us of the Holland Festival, a whole host of events beautifully-bound in a well designed, rhombus-themed book, with cutaways and fluorescent pink/grey combinations.

We laid hands on the last ticket for the Warp Records / London Sinfonietta Orchestra collaboration, with a screening of Rubber Johnny (at last! But not quite as grim as I'd hoped). The next night was Mum / Xenakis. We were 10 minutes late and so missed the Radio Kamerorkest's interpretation of Analogiques A and B. I was angry - I wanted some live granular synthesis, and was completely unsatiated by our new friends' "it was abstract" conclusions. No one was willing to vocally re enact the "found sound objects", which was a shame.

Anyway, there was a man afterwards playing pop hits such as Queen's "Killer Queen" on an organ, in the foyer. We were too busy talking to Jim from r4nd()% about his iBook woes, Max/MSP and Peaceful Powerbooks. Interesting facts: (a) Apparently you don't need to speak Dutch in Amsterdam. (b) In London people don't dance at raves. (c) Money cannot be made from audio visual programming, even less from calling yourself a 'sound artist'. Who knew.

This is what the Muziekgebouw's concert hall looks like. The lights change colour at a consistent rate, and contracted ADD during Jamie Lidell's set. Seeing as the venue hadn't properly opened at this point, it felt like it belonged to everybody, and the crowd was multi-generational. What a great thing.

Sonar

Punctuated by child-manoeuvred exploding street fireworks, sleep depravation, dehydration and the entire Sonarcinema programme, Barcelona, as ever, was beautiful.













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This is the entrance to a 20 minute sound installation. Beats a set of headphones, ha. Incidentally, Richie Hawtin's haircut was discussed more than any other this weekend. Probably the only 4/4 I could love in the long term (lie), although I wish he could get a little more sparse for the suitably impressive surround sound speakers. A girl with pink dreadlocks clapped at the end. This confused me. According to those with higher heads, his Sonar-night performance was accompanied by Tarkovsky visuals and "German meat-head" dancing. By this point in the morning, I was in awe of my barely conscious state/survival within the terror that can only be described as the euro-club equivalent of Canary Wharf. Adopting tunnel vision and holding hands was my technique, and Mu was worth it.

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Messa di Voce. Third time round, upon the realisation that my admiration for this creation has spanned different time zones, I plucked up the courage and found my exhibitionist streak. Schools should invest.

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Battles settled me a little. Until this point an excess of monotonous musiqua and Crowds Of People had triggered my brain's off-switch somewhat. If Oxes got off their boxes and had fun, it is still debatable they'd be this reassuring.

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Tapies makes secret codes; amalgamations of Catalan history, Buddhism, medieval mysticism and personal histories. I like to decipher them using my own. This piece is one of my favourites. It consists of 7 x 5 concrete slabs and was made in 1985. The heat on the terrace allows you to use your fingers as eyes tracing the shapes through the brush strokes. Tapies himself would approve with his pain = understanding ethos.

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Francis Alys documents journies that he walks in the 10 blocks surrounding his home in Mexico City, in various ways. I liked these; his 45 Ghetto Collectors - small magnetised constructions that he dragged along the ground, collecting rubbish. He also made a flip book-esque film of drawings; a man tapping a stick against passing railings.

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Just before departing I managed to escape the morning heat via the tale of Donald Crowhurst and the Teignmouth Electron. Having already read Tacita Dean's book on the man who deceived his home town and lost himself alone at sea, made this landscape-narrative utterly beautiful.

A pulsating circle made my day.

Above are stills from Guy Sherwin's Cycles 1, which was screened in a Braquage-curated programme at the Cine Lumiere. For 5 minutes a white circle of light pulsates against a backdrop of varying grayscale, to a rhythmic engine-like hum. It was beautiful. Seeing as the whole experience is perceptual - the circle is in fact a white dot placed directly onto the film, the distance between each frame gradually decreasing and optically merging thanks to the 12 fps mind process-rate - I wonder whether the patterns emerging from within the circle are dictated by the individual's level of brain entrainment. I was submerged gamma-style, myself.

Guy Sherwin is also the Lux-ite predecessor of Dan Wilson, via Railings, a film in which images of iron railings are converted into sound, using the optical sound playback head in the projector. My heart has jumped.

TEA building is worthwhile visiting from tomorrow.

For this

There was a woman on the bus with 10 rings on.

No lies. Here's the breakdown:

+ 2 diamante encrusted - index finger.
+ 2 ribbed, 1 plain - middle finger.
+ 2 rocked, 1 plain - fourth finger.
+ 1 rocked, 1 plain - little finger.

I was mesmerised for a whole unsubtle 20 minutes.

Quotes of the Day:

"Do you think this exhibition is a fire hazard?" - Karolin.

There's yet another below-par third year show in our university foyer. It feels like it's Deptford Carnival, lots of draped fabrics hanging from the ceiling in a mildly alarming fashion. Below is a highlight. Despite bringing gender politics into the no-go world of geometrical patterns ("I think these designs are really masculine" - shh), it's still pretty. There's also lots of toast on the wall, with burnt-in anecdotes about the benefits of a nutritious and fruit-led diet (I don't know why either. Surface Design's gone experimental?)



"I think the first performance was better" - man outside Jerwood Space.

If I was the kind of person who scoffed, I would have scoffed here. As much as I appreciate, admire, etc John Cage's work in a historical sense, I don't reckon I'll be spending my evenings in art galleries looking at the ceiling (or Tone's smuggishly joyous, centrally-positioned face - as fun as that is) whilst listening to 8 tape-players playing surround 'sounds' for four minutes, twice. There's the outdoors for that kind of thing.

But it's alright because Raster-Noton made this: a section of Archiv 1, which is a collection of microfilms illustrating their concepts and aesthetics.



Which is shown on this: a micro film reader designed by Carl Zeiss Jena. Beautiful.

Olivier Gondry makes crafty videos too.

The "Fils De Teuphu" one is his. Quite nice, but not as polaroidy as Daniel Askill's video for Sia's Breathe Me

That's 2000 polaroid photos! Someone else can do the mathematics. It all boils down to whether Mr. Askill frequents Argos or not, really.

Mr Cooper has a blog

Of course he likes Xiu Xiu and his dad's a Beauty Pageant judge. It all makes perfect sense.