Previous: Blog January 2004 Next: Blog March 2004

19th February 2004

Stan's Cafe performed "Talk To Me" at theMAC.

18th February 2004

Saw a collection of American "exploitation" films at The MAC.

17th February 2004 The Custard Factory hosted a collection of US military propaganda films, mainly from WWII but also including films on how to survive a nuclear attack (hiding under a table is apparently a good bet). A couple of the films were scripted by the writer of Dr Seuse.

15th February 2004

Saw Misty's Big Adventure at the Jug Of Ale.

13th February 2004

The Doll's House at theRep

10th February 2004

Saw The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ( http://www.ChavezTheFilm.com ), as part of the Sheffield International Film Festival at The MAC. One of the most exciting films I've seen, as (in my ignorance), I had not followed the career of charismatic Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. A "lucky" Irish documentary film crew find themselves in the middle of a coup against Chavez. We get to see everything from the inside... Well worth seeing again.

Also showing was a very nice film of a speech by President Bush, called Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet. The speech had been cut up into individual words, then re-arranged in alphabetical order. Fascinating, in terms of language analysis, politics and propaganda.

7th February 2004

Saw "Forest" exhibition at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. I particularly liked the "landscape in an aquarium" piece, which I'd seen before at the Ikon. A mountainous landscape is recreated, with small trees, in a cubical aquarium filled with slightly milky water. The distortion of the glass and water, combined with the foggy effect gives it wonderful depth and a real feeling of a world captured in glass.

There's a wonderfully opulent feeling to the room with wax walls and ceiling. Light glows through landscapes created from thousands of sections of thin wax, forming trees, pyramids, desert hills, snowscape and deep blue sky. Really beautiful and worth making the trip to Wolves for.

The first floor of the gallery housed "Sensing Sculpture" with smellable, touchable, playable pieces. The best fun was formed from a traditional old organ keyboard and body, but with fantastical "pipes". Some keys triggered vacum cleaners hooked up to traditional pipes, some played snipped of sound or video, another triggered the beep of a metal detector. Great fun!

5th February 2004

Ikon Opening. Great light boxes and lights from David Batchelor plus a load of old junk from Lonnie Holley. The junk sculptures are very lively and well formed, occasionally with move standard stone sculputue attached.

I want a light like the strip-light encased in glowing plastic bottles produced by David B!

31st January 2004

Saw Herman Dune and Kimya Dawson at the Jug Of Ale.

Excellent but reasonably short set from HD, the ukelala coming out for just one final very quite song where David? HD stepped out into the front of the audience to play accoustically.

Kimya Dawson played some great stuff, nice lyrics with sudden unexpected endings. She had no CDs for sale, but was drawing and T-shirts!

Previous: Blog January 2004 Next: Blog March 2004

---

See Also: Web Changes for other recent updates, All Blog Pages for previous blogs

This is my blogchalk: United Kingdom, West Midlands, Birmingham, Moseley