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Open Houses

Number 45
Originally uploaded by Southcoasting

On the Brighton festival Open Houses trail - every May, the whole city of artists open their front doors on weekends to allow you to view their lovely houses, peruse their art and artistic creations, make purchases, or consume the endless home-baked cakes and coffee on offer.

A greatway to spend the weekend walking.

a head in the rain

lots of trinkets

coffee and cakes was de rigeur

the Brighton Bahai Centre

and an mp3 for the listening...

• The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street Blues (session track) mp3

another one from the Exile sessions, that isn't on the new augmented CD version. Amazon are also offering a free alternate version of All Down The Line if you're quick, but then if you're quick, quicker than me, you'll have already ordered the reissued CD!

1943

Croydon Library exhibition old pictures 2 on the nazi cross
Originally uploaded by Southcoasting

Croydon Library exhibition

Flatbush Streetart

"The sharpened edge, where day and night shall meet and not be one"

Community pride

Fall in Love

• Thunderegg - You're a writer now mp3 website

Family portrait

Family portrait
Originally uploaded by ♥Ma Sorcière

Beautiful, Helene & Sebastien plus one, and cat :)

• Smith - Baby, it's you (Shirelles cover) mp3

My Third Eye

My Third Eye
Originally uploaded by Southcoasting

A Photography Exhibition at the Red Roaster coffee shop in Brighton for the months of January and February

My Third Eye - the Musical
Originally uploaded by Southcoasting

with a wonderful musical extravaganza on John Lydon's birthday featuring

Twenty One Crows,

Kristin McClement,

Rowan Coupland

and

Mid-West Blues

a night of nu-English folk, Nicoesque vocals, Madrigals and Guitarrism...

31 Jan 2010. Doors at 8pm, first band at 8:45. ENTRY BY DONATION.

Three Stories

Partly inspired by an excellent night of readings at Sam and Jay's Tight Lip on Friday, I went searching for some old stories and poems I wrote about a decade and a half ago. These were printed up in a limited edition xeroxed book, of which probably no more than a dozen copies are in circulation (I still have a box of them somewhere). It received a nice review in Factsheet Five; and was later placed on the web, on a site which has now closed down, hence why I went searching.

Anyway, I thought for a while this stuff was tired and jaded, but I've decided to like it again, so thought I'd make some of it available here. If you want a copy of the rest, drop me an email with your address.

These three short stories were based around a theme of alienation from modern life, and were written as pseudo film-scripts for short films that were never intended to be filmed. I guess they work as visual poems rather than stories in the traditional sense.

The stories, and some accompanying music...

story 1 - women are

mp3 Cat Power - Be a good woman (live radio session)

story 2 - men are also

mp3 Magnolia Electric Company - How to love a man

story 3 - big life v spontaneity
(aka, what is it that makes modern life so exciting, so fresh?)

mp3 Okkervil River - Our life is not a movie or maybe (radio session)

39 Steps

The Guardian reports that the BBC1 is to show a new version of John Buchan's classic adventure story the Thirty Nine Steps on Boxing Day.

Written the best part of 100 years ago, this novel is still one of my favourites. Apparently, the plot has been changed yet again, with various classic scenes removed - although not from the original, but the excellent cinematic rewrites. I would love to see all of the movies in succession just to compare.

For the record, the full set is:

The novel, 1915

Available online to read thanks to Project Gutteburg, but it's a cheap enough paperback anyway.

The Hitchcock version, 1935

Stars Robert Donat as Hannay, visited by a spy being chased by assassins after uncovering a plot to steal British plans for a silent aircraft engine.

The Kenneth More vehicle, 1959

Ralph Thomas's remake stars Kenneth More who is introduced to the mystery by the death of a beautiful spy who told of a shadowy group, The 39 Steps, which stole plans for a British missile.

The Modern version, 1978

Starring Robert Powell, Don Sharp's film is set in the run-up to the First World War as foreign agents plan to bomb Parliament and kill a Greek leader. The 39 steps are the steps in Big Ben.

The BBC version, 2008

Rupert Penry-Jones, the former star of Spooks, in the lead role.

Anyway, how can you not love a novel whose opening paragraph is:

I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. 'Richard Hannay,' I kept telling myself, 'you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out.'

Here's an advert for the new comedy at the Criterion theatre in London, which has been getting good reviews:

and some irrelevant but familiarly titled experimental music

• Zeena Parkins And Ikue Mori - 39 Steps listen
  

I dropped the camera

Some pictures from the amazing 'free' graffiti underpass between Waterloo station and Lower Marsh (London, SE1)

• Revolving Paint Dream - Flowers in the Sky mp3 (thanks to The Decibel Tolls)

Book table

Book table
Originally uploaded by Southcoasting

Artists' Book Fair and exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery today. I'd forgotten it was on, but walked past and so popped in. It was a bit overwhelming - there used to be a time when I'd be really into these sorts of things, but now it just makes me want to lie down. Mind you, the great Mark Pawson was there, and that alone made it worthwhile.

• Echo & the Bunnymen - Read it in books mp3
  

The Ubu Web

The Ubu Web is a great place. The You Tube for pretentious intellectuals and people who want to discover bits of cultural history they never knew existed. I could spend hours wading through obscure avant-garde film.

Where else could you find the surrealist classic, Un Chien Andalou?

Or documentaries on the situationist international or women in alt-rock?

Or Brion Gysin's cut up sound poem I Am?

A great resource: www.ubu.com

• Pere Ubu - Final Solution mp3

• Brion Gysin - I Am mp3

Sometimes you can get swept away

by Southcoasting

Small people in Floral Street

• Felt - Primitive Painters mp3

• Bob Dylan - Just Like Tom Thumb Blues mp3
  click through the picture to my flickr site, and a better quality image

Bullet holes

• Art - African thing (1967) mp3

Originally uploaded by Southcoasting

Gormley perceives Gormley

Originally uploaded by Southcoasting

These Anthony Gormley statues are wonderful. Not for themselves, but just for their number and positioning.

They started out as part of a Hayward Gallery exhibition, all up high on the skyline visible from the London southbank, but now seem to have appeared in other places across the city, bringing with them a sense of fun and wonder. Before this, they were in Norway and other places, and are now permanently resident on Crosby beach in Liverpool, their planned trip across the Atlantic having been aborted.

• the Buzzcocks - Hollow Inside mp3
• Wire - Mannequin mp3
• Nick Lowe - 36 Inches High mp3
• Elvis Costello - Whole Wide World mp3

Some new wave tracks this week.

One from A Different Kind of Tension my favourite new Wave album when i was a lot younger. One from a band I only really discovered on a bounce back across the Atlantic, where they were appreciated far more than they were in the UK. One from the Jesus of Cool about feeling small. He has just released a very fine new CD at a grand old age. And the last, Live in Leicester in 1977, a classic Wreckless Eric song covered by one of our greatest songwriters.

Strangely coloured air

click the above picture to go through to flickr comments - click on all sizes to view large

This is a digital manipulation of a photograph of some rooftops and chimneys from the back of Hanover Crescent, a formerly posh terrace of large Victorian houses in Brighton. I really like the crayon effect, but one of the comments from a flickr pal was quite insightful - or posed some interesting questions. I did not draw any lines on this picture, but simply altered the whole print using some line detection and variation of colours and contrasts - so all of the lines in the picture were in some way present in the original photograph, albeit invisible to the naked eye.

The comment was that these probably reflect natural variation in heatwaves in the air -with the sharp hashing over the rows of heated houses, and the strong curving colours over the trees, and the sea. It's an interesting thought - as to what is invisible and yet all around us.

I've always wondered what impact all the zillions of radio waves floating through the atmosphere are having, in some small inestimable way.

A bit more music....

• Air -Kelly watch the stars
  

• Canned Heat - Going Up The Country
  
  

The Humument

I've just noticed there's a website dedicated to one of my all-time favourite books, the Humument by Tom Phillips - a treated Victorian novel which turns into an artistic wonder and odd philosophical story about a man called Toge. Genius, and a continuing inspiration!

The Humument - http://www.rosacordis.com/humument/
Tom Phillips - http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/

The Getty Center

is one of the most beautiful art museums I have ever been to.

Incredibly modern, ultra cool architecture and landscaping in a stunning landscape, perched on the side of the Santa Monica mountains with startling views over downtown LA and the 405 freeway, the Getty Centre is also a place of peace and contemplation.

Cool pure and off-white 30x30" stone-clad inter-connected
campus, arched along two competing directions tracking the
two visible ridges of the Santa Monica mountains.

Architecture by Richard Meier, and landscape design by
Robert Irwin, both equally stunning and perfectly integrated
with the Southern Californian environment.

There is a superb exhibition of photography including until February 4th 2007 Public Faces/ Private Spaces featuring some stunning work from Mary Ellen Mark (below) and Bill Owens, and until February 25th Photographs of America from the Berman Collection which is extensive and indescribable featuring work as diverse as Camilo Jose Vergara's alternative American churches and Joel Sternfield's moving photographs of the infamous street corners and motels of America's darker history.

If you love photography, you have to see these exhibitions.

mp3s

David Ackles - Oh California

Marissa Nadler - Photographs

buy

Collaging-Kristen

Artist by day, Freight handler by night... Collaging-Kristen

Lovely collage artist in Indiannapolis.

LolaT-530 on flickr.

Searching For Blue Sea Glass

Roger Stevens who blogs as Searching For Blue Sea Glass is a poet, and a writer, and an artist. He writes music. And he's in a band called Damn Right I Got the Blues. It's a free-form jazz ensemble. I know this because it says so on his blog of wonderful poetry.

Banksy in the news

Guerilla Art in the headlines. Brilliant ideas, brilliantly executed...

Good ol' Robert Banks (32-years-old, from Bristol)

Paris Hilton

See the doctored CD here thanks to Robert Sharl

Watch the act on YouTube

and Still Listen has posted one of the doctored tracks That's Hot (mp3)

apparently there are 500 versions of this CD around, so I'd suggest that paying £400 for one on eBay is not "being ironic"

The Guantanamo Bay detainee visits Disneyland

Q. How do you make the stencils so big?
B. By sticking lots of small ones together

The Elephant in the Living Room (ha ha)

From Banksy's Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles

Tate Britain left hanging here

Photos of d'art de Banksy on flickr

A guide to cutting stencils

• Think from outside the box.
• Collapse the box and take a fucking sharp knife to it.
• Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.
• It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.
• Spray the paint sparingly onto the stencil from a distance of 8 inches.

and Banksy's website

Now, where's that copy of 10cc's Art for Art's Sake?

Oh, I give up.

'take another little piece of my Art now baby'

Here's Architecture In Helsinki - Tiny Paintings