blue_mai

gig alert: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:12:16 GMT

i've been semi-reliably informed that there are tickets on the door for some quality twee/fuzz-indie-pop tonight, at the Scala, supported by Allo Darlin' and Male Bonding, and followed by a free after-party at the Lexington. i'd be there, if it wasn't for the ex-housemate's pre-Christmas drinks i said i'd go to... eh.

erm

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:31:13 GMT

so, you know i got that new shiny phone?

it has internet on it. when i go to connect, it chooses the "Orange World" connection. i'm on Orange PAYG "Dolphin" package which gives me "free internet" up to a 50MB a month. i'm a bit new to this and all confused:
- i don't really understand what Orange World is - is it just the connection? or is it those Orange information sites about sport etc? i seemed to be able to browse anything without cost, last week, until i must have hit the limit and it suddenly ate all my credit, annoyingly. why doesn't it give you a warning that you've used up the allowance..? grump.
- so, there's supposed to be a £2 daily cap on browsing costs, but i can't work out how to opt-in, or does it only allow for looking at Orange sites? it certainly ate a lot more than £2.
- Dolphin details say "free internet on your mobile" but elsewhere free Facebook access, and when i spoke to a customer services person just now, they said it was only Facebook, Bebo, Myspace and Flirtomatic. not very useful.

hoping someone may be on Orange PAYG or just know. also, if it turns out that my "free internet" means limited access to social networking sites, what do you recommend for general internet stuff on phone? i'd like to be able to send emails, read LJ etc. ta.

too late for things

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:54:43 GMT

saw the Monsters of Folk on tuesday. felt like an age since i last went to a gig (though i think it was only late summer, Tindersticks), i finally get to see the inside of the Troxy. it was good, there is more to write later maybe.

went drinking last night with current and former office colleagues. one of the good things about this place is the comraderie and genuine affection the workers have for one another. although it takes some getting used to and has definite downsides regarding personal/professional boundaries etc. glad to see some old faces, but was super-tired all day, and 3.5 pints later was ver drunk. ah well. don't feel too bad today but a mild hangover is indicated by my lack of disposition to do anything, and frequent typos.

some of these are good: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/openletters/

and, my painter friend is in this show, at orbital comics, ends on monday: http://www.dansemacabre-art.co.uk/dm_london2009.html go see it.

now, to work out how to get to Longstowe tonight, and Burwell tomorrow. should i try and get a lift, or just accept that there will be a lot of cycling tomorrow (Longstowe-Cambridge-Burwell-Cambridge)...?

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:24:54 GMT

blue_mai fashion shock (for anyone that knows me in person, like):
today i bought black skinny jeans.
then i bought purple skinny jeans.
!!!

photog and other stuff

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:42:01 GMT

Sophie Calle exhib at Whitechapel
Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs at the British Library http://www.bl.uk/pointsofview/
Photography collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photography/
Of Dreams and Cities at BFI Southbank http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/film_programme/november_seasons/of_dreams_and_cities
Garry Fabian Miller (photo that was in the overview permanent stuff at V&A titled "Breathing in the Beech Wood, Homeland, Dartmoor, Twenty Four Days of Sunlight")
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photography/past_exhns/miller/index.html
http://www.jameshymangallery.com/pages/exhibition/760.html

nooo

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:54:14 GMT

am getting a cold again. all achey down the back of neck and shoulders and feels funny just below my ears. been a bit dopey all afternoon but then, feeling kinda distracted anyway. haven't been able to sleep well lately. gah. don't need this now. have an all-day outing with the shtewdents tomorrow, rain forecast...

links (archit)

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:58:34 GMT

look who's back: http://www.siteenvirodesign.com/ (or S.I.T.E. never actually go away...?)
the A.O.C. http://www.theaoc.co.uk/
Douglas Coupland's 2nd house (renovation in Vancouver) http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/08/12/garden/20090813-location-slideshow_index.html
http://www.arcspace.com/books/taschen/Case_Study_Houses/csh_book.html
http://www.artsandarchitecture.com/case.houses/

links (photography)

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:08:42 GMT

http://www.beardsworth.co.uk/
http://www.fstopmagazine.com/
http://copyrightaction.com/node
(to look at later)

R2

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:38:22 GMT

i find the celebrity DJs a mixed bag, frequently irritating (Michael Ball, Alan Titchmarsh, Elaine Page...) but sometimes really good. Huey Morgan and Liza Tarbuck over the summer were a lovely surprise, i was quite disappointed when Ross came back from holiday... kinda annoying but also kinda endearing Dermot OLeary just can't be reconciled with that bloke on X-Factor. Imogen Heap was great on his show at the weekend - worth trawling the iplayer to get to the bit where she sings Thriller, it's just fantastic. i might do that tomorrow actually, can't remember what sort of time it was. anyway, so John Barrowman isn't as good as i thought he would be (perhaps it's just the showtunes, not really my cup of tea), but Paul O'Grady is wonderful: dead pets, northern soul and Montserrat Caballe. in general i like people better on the radio than on tv (the same person, that is), i think it's that they talk to you on radio, you dear listener they say, not the vast impersonal audience of TV to be performed at.

links

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:02:34 GMT

archity:
http://www.horhizon.com/
http://cfd.wimbledon.ac.uk/ - centre for drawing
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/sophie-calle-talking-to-strangers

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:05:47 GMT

i think my train did the equivalent of ctrl-alt-delete this morning when we we had to 'reboot' at Royston... cue sitting in the dark and quiet for a few minutes before we start up again. in combination with problems connecting the second train at cambridge, and the go-slow from there until the reboot, we got into kingsx 20 minutes late...

not-quite-useless stuff

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:52:20 GMT

oh yes there was something else:
i mentioned before but don't quite recall the outcome. i have lots of redundant paper at work, large sheets of white plain bond, printed on one side. the ink isn't water-resistant, nor is the paper great for drawing on in ink, it's quite loose and absorbent (plotter paper) and is about 90gsm (at a guess). this is the normal state of things, some of this stuff looking a bit dog-eared and dusty, or folded in boxes. Some of the folded stuff is from the copiers, so potentially better for drawing on. Anyway, right now i have about 10 pristine (apart from the printing) A1 sheets on my desk. Anyone want them before they go under the desk to join the dusty ones?

also, someone commented the other day that with the popular demise of film photography people no longer have easy access to film cases, those marvellous multi-purpose waterproof little boxes. I, as you may have guessed, have lots. If anyone would like some just let me know.
I currently have several in my bag and by my bed, holding iron tablets, pencil sharpeners, moisturiser, a piece of solid deodorant, paper punch tips, needle and thread, scalpel blades, broken bracelet...

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:36:09 GMT

woo! last.fm just played me Best Regrets by Geneva for the first time, despite me 'favoriting' it weeks ago. haven't heard it for ages and it's GREAT (in a small way perhaps)
some of my favorites it plays quite regularly, it also latches onto slightly random songs - Slip Away by Undercover - eh? that it decides i must like even though i haven't said so. and i suppose it thinks "aha, you've listened to this 7 times, you must like it". SKIP.

Trafalgar square - London films

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:20:20 GMT

late notice i know, but from 6.30 tonight, free screening of archive short films (seems to now be a regular part of the London film fest) in trafalgar square, this year all about transport.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/events/outdoor_screening_in_trafalgar_square

wrap up warm now.

American suburb X

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:28:59 GMT

http://www.americansuburbx.com/
photography stuff, interviews, essays.

new tricks

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:51:18 GMT

we have broadband at home :)

Free Bier

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:49:30 GMT

i keep forgetting to post this:

Tonight from 6pm: Free beer and food (for the first few i would guess) at the new bierkeller on Southwark St, Hop Exchange cellars, next to the newly located Hopbine.

http://www.london-se1.co.uk/restaurants/info/727/katzenjammers

London various

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:20:08 GMT

i like this project: making useful and fun stuff from the Olympics site bright blue hoarding as the contractors are taking it down. http://superniche.org/2009/08/24/the-blue-fence-project/

also - a chance (if more tickets appear) to see the Kingsway subway, on until 8th November. http://measure.org.uk/measurenews.html

saw 3 exhibs last week:

Sarah Oppenheimer and Yuko Shiraishi at Annely Juda, very quiet when it's not a David Hockeny show... the piece of gallery floor, lifted, shaped, cut for views, looking a bit like some high-tech stealth aircraft, was rather good, wedged into the gallery. and a small maquette unfolded flat in a frame, showing the skeleton (although it was flat against the wall and looked like it should have been lifted away, like its life-size version). The Space Tea House was alright, in a way it should have been better, but it was in an airless gallery, isolated, when it seemed like it should have been installed on a rooftop (Annely Juda has some fine rooftop views) with the damp grey sky occuppying its wirey thin frame.

Castellani Flavin Judd Uecker at the Haunch of Venison - occupying bits of a ground floor wing and upstairs. i like the way those minimal installation pieces blur into the gallery - the round glassy CCTV camera in the corner, and the old lighting tracks in the ceiling, all getting absorbed into the work, no edges. There was a funny inbetween windowless room - just a small lobby between two other rooms, with open doorways into each - with green fluorescent tubes diagonally arranged on the wall (must've been a Flavin piece) which had the rather entertaining effect of making the rooms either side really pink. even when you know! brain - stop trying to white-balance the green! amazing really. and there's a funny little ping! when you leave and see out of the window and everything is normal again.

okay, lastly, Rosalind Nashashibi at the ICA. much better than i was expecting - good little incidental moments. a big room downstairs with a projection room in the middle and projectors facing 3 of the walls. peering into the projection room, what appears to be a leak or incidental reflection of the side projection, overlaid with the light coming through the fan bit (stripey), it must've been deliberate, a proper projection and a little one going the opposite way, but i couldn't work out or quite see how. starting with the glass window right infront of the projection lens tilted at about a 45degree angle though, perhaps. and the other two projectors played alternately, and while the other one played you could sit on the bench facing the non-projection - just a white rectangle painted on the grey wall, and watch the colours of the rectangle shift and change with the reflected light from around the room. Upstairs, an absolutely genius piece - so simple and perfectly executed. 16mm film of a woman, mostly seen from behind, walking around Southbank. not continuous, nicely edited, and with sound. plays as a continuous loop (here's the genius bit) on two projectors, projecting side by side. they weren't protected so it was as fascinating to watch the film wind diagonally across from one to the other, as to watch the projected film repeat perfectly and inevitably , never catching up, side by side. near the beginning there's a bit where the film judders and the projector rattles - must be something to do with the sprocket holes out of line - and of course it does it a few seconds later on the other projection. dunno why but that especially pleased me... worth seeing.

waaah!

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:03:09 GMT

so, i hadn't tried to power up my old Mac Powerbook in a while, probably a year or more but not ages and ages. Is an old black one that runs OS 9.2 i think. a few weeks ago i tried to turn it on to no avail. Even plugged in, the battery lights didn't even flicker, so i guessed it might just be a faulty power supply, or possibly the internal battery had gone flat. Anyway, i have a shinier PowerBook G4 now that runs OS 10.4 and is considerably faster, so i just thought i'd take the hard-drive out and use it as an external, since it wasn't that old - the original one went into meltdown about 5 or 6 years ago so i replaced it.
Just now (it took a while as i had to buy little star-shaped screwdrivers) i put it into an external hard-disk case and plugged it in. It powers up a green lights start blinking, but it doesn't show up on the desktop. I can't remember if firewire stuff only mounts at start-up, so i restart. Computer hangs on shutdown. hmm. After several minutes i force the power off and restart with the thing plugged in. Starts up a little slow but ok, again, nothing appears on the desktop, so i go to Disk Utility - which spins and spins for about ten minutes then says "this disk is unreadable by this computer. do you wish to initialise?" er, no thanks. hmm.
after a few more minutes i open Disk Utility again. It shows up ok, but won't mount. says, in a most distressing way "available 37.3 GB, used -". i'm seeing if it'll write a disk image right now. it's thinking about it.
i wonder what happened to it? i think everything important was backed up, uni work and portfolio etc, but not entirely sure. i actually wanted to pull some music demos of it, which i don't have elsewhere since Yahoo deleted my briefcase files... so, i'd quite like the data back. waah.

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:07:02 GMT

feeling quite chirpy this evening - all because i got the 7.15 train home! after 2 glasses of wine! woo.

Shrubman

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:25:51 GMT

came across this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/08/human-shrub-colchester
- the comments are quite an entertaining read

Silents on the streets

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:12:33 GMT

This Sunday 20th, at 8pm, Bridge Street
http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/films/2009/silents-on-the-streets/

map question

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:29:13 GMT

ok maps, right, they're nice and portable. i'm looking at an area and collecting lots of bits of info about it, some here, some there, mostly less portable or at least less easy to look at than on an actual map.
what's the best way of adding notes and markers to an OS map to be carried around? i'm not too precious about it but think that maybe scrawling over it in ink, it'll just get messy and i might end up obscuring things, but is that the only option? pencil might not be visible enough. i have some mini post-it type things, but they'll probably fall off with folding. map-pins require the thing to be kept unfolded, at home... what do you do?

not entirely unconnected things

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:08:45 GMT

went to Kettles Yard on sunday to see upside down / inside out, which was lovely, especially the Winnifred Nicolson flowers on a windowsill (hung on the wall facing Castle Hill to be seen from the pavement) with sunlight through leaves and tissue paper, the gathering in one room of Kit Wood and Alfred Wallis paintings, and in the house, particularly the beautiful black and white pinhole photos of the house by Kathryn Faulkner, hung in visual echoes, and the grouped Edmund de Waal ceramics, at once domestic and refined. actually, there were a lot of echoes, what with photographs of the place hung in the place, or in a nearby room, or captured in a little camera obscura; paintings familiar from the house hung in the gallery; repeated motifs of collected pots, fake pets, glossy black acrylic screens across different rooms... it reminded me that a similar thing happened, albeit in a much more contained way, at the Roni Horn exhib earlier this year. Bought "Light Spells" last year, and really should look at it properly.

was referred to as a "gentleman" upon entering KY house. for a moment i wonder which of us, out of Liv and myself was the lady and which the gent, but i figured since i wasn't the one wearing the partly-pink swishy skirt, it was probably me... this sort of thing doesn't surprise me when people aren't really paying attention, but the other day i was in a bar/club, can't remember where but it had a toilet attendant. i was in there washing my hands and she said "are you a boy or a girl" "what?" "are you a boy or a girl?" "oh. um, a girl" (me looking confused). bit of clue there - i'm in the ladies aren't i? meh, whatever.

Kathryn Faulkner has been up to some good stuff in the several years since the Light Spells work, must keep an eye on it: http://www.kathrynfaulkner.com/

"film artist" Rosalind Nashashibi is showing at the ICA til 1st Nov. looks good?

Slough

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:48:58 GMT

went to Slough for a meeting. strange place. not quite as strange as "this is the future that today forgot" Croydon, but still some stuff to note. didn't go into the town centre, got in a taxi from the lovely old Victorian train station and headed out to Bath Road, a big straight road with huge offices and out-of-town retail parks on either side, from Lego to McAfee, contractors and building products. mostly generic slightly shiny office blocks, but some quite striking ones, an upside-down concrete ziggurat like the Birmingham library that's about to be demolished, and some better-than-average glassy affairs. Town Hall with some interesting rather good brickwork on the front - sort of chevron patterned without the usual angled bricks of herringbone, but achieved more subtly through a quarter-bonded pattern.
back at the station - absolutely terrifying non-stop high-speed trains. they made the platforms shake and i was afraid to stand as it felt like they could blow you over...