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imomus
Something really quite odd has happened. I've started watching TV again. Not on my TV -- that's become a crackling grate, a display unit for a DVD I made of a log fire last month -- but on my iMac, all zoomed up full screen. Naturally, I don't watch scheduled broadcast networks. I assemble my own evening's viewing, pretty much making it up as I go along, a bit like word association in psychoanalysis. Call it "video association".Just for fun, I tried laying out my Saturday evening viewing as if it were a TV network's listings in a TV magazine. It would make, clearly, for a pretty low-rated station. But TV Me just needs one viewer to get all the ratings it requires: me.
6.20pm: Two Short Videos by Tamy Ben-Tor
Tamy Ben-Tor is a 32 year-old Israeli performance artist. BBC Me kicks off its evening's schedule with two of her videos. In Alejandra she plays a self-centred art dealer, and in The Contractor a complaining building contractor.
6.30pm: An Artist's Talk at the Tate
Liam Gillick in conversation with Jeremy Millar at the Tate, London, 2002, when he was up for the Turner Prize. Highlights: when he attacks Sarah Kent and Adrian Searle for calling him "obfuscating", and when he describes the British habit of muttering "wanker" when someone you've been flattering walks away. Oh, and the bit where he says that the old avant garde thing was all about being the first to do something, but for his generation it's all about being the first to stop doing something.
8pm: Discovering Electronic Music
An instructional series in three parts from the early 1970s. Admire the didactic aesthetics, and wonder whether the technology merely makes new compositional techniques possible for its users, or whether it's playing them.
Discovering Electronic Music Part 1
Discovering Electronic Music Part 2
Discovering Electronic Music Part 3
8.30pm: Paul Glabicki animation
Glabicki made Daigram Film in 1978. You can see others on Ubuweb.
8.45pm: A Theme Evening: John Cage is So Soothing
During this theme evening we simply lie back and let Cage guide us through compositional technique, marvelling at how he manages to unleash such radical ideas in calm, reassuring tones rarely heard this side of Bob Ross.
1978: John Cage For the Third Time
John Cage speaks with whispering, bar-coded Richard Kostelanetz at the Center for Non-Broadcast Television at Automation House about the techniques he used in "Writing Through Finnegans Wake" (1977) and "Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake" (1977).
John Cage and Raashan Roland Kirk - Sound?? 1966
This is a classic piece of hipster cinema, in which Cage and Kirk fail to meet (except at the splice edits) in Swinging London.
Two late John Cage interviews, 1991
In Love With Another Sound
A Buttle of Coke
Cage says that no two Coke bottles are the same, because different lighting and the passage of time between our perception of one and the other make them different experiences; all that stops us hearing old music freshly is the memory of our first experience of it.
4'33"
This full orchestral performance of 4'33", performed at London's Barbican Centre in 2004, is rather extraordinary. First of all, the Barbican lights have a nice buzz. Secondly, not many people cough. And thirdly, you see two simultaneous violences: the violence of Cage telling the orchestral tradition that it's irrelevant, and the violence of the orchestral tradition saying "We can take this on, buddy. You're in the canon now, so shut up!" And the band "played" on...
Finally, Margaret Leng Tan plays In the Name of the Holocaust, a Cage prepared piano piece from 1942. It doesn't refer to the Holocaust then going on in Germany, but to a Joycean pun on "holy ghost".
11.45pm: Animation by Jan Svankmajer
We round off the evening's viewing with the great Czech animator's 1966 work, Et Cetera. Lovely lettering.
Stay tuned to BBC Me: tomorrow we'll be watching Jordan Fish's vlog entries, the new video from DJ Elephant Power (from his forthcoming album "Scratch the Hulu"), Japanese horror film Dark Water, Toog interviewing the bird artist Cagesan, and Paris fashion collective Andrea Crews making a couture collection out of secondhand clothes.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 03:26 pm (UTC)9:30 pm: Nick Currie Doesn't Know Japanese. The fourth episode of the ongoing series where global flit-about and cowbell-slapping music toff Nick Currie gets into sticky situations due to his lack of knowledge of the Japanese language. Tonight finds Nick in a recreation of a 15th century Japanese village where he has been accused by police chief Wakada of molesting the 12-year-old daughter of a powerful merchant lord in Osaka. Currie has 8 hours to find the real molester responsible before he is boiled alive in hot soybean oil.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 03:41 pm (UTC)Pressed on
Date: 2007-03-18 04:03 pm (UTC)Re: Pressed on
Date: 2007-03-18 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 04:16 pm (UTC)i too have found myself more and more bound to be in front of a television these days.. mainly umm... twin peaks reruns and universal horror movies on the CHILLER CHANNEL
or PAULA DEEN'S HOME COOKIN
really anything on the cooking channel actually..
although amerikan tv is probably infinitely more trashy than its european counterpart, i believe F is for FAKE was playing on some random (non movie oriented) channel the other week! shocking..
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 05:10 pm (UTC)And The Colbert Report (satirical news reporting). Stephen and Momus are two of my cultural heroes and it's SO confusing when they have opposing viewpoints (e.g. wikipedia, Stephen wants to hack it, Momus wants to politely overlook its vulnerabilities)
(sorry to stray off topic but did you guys see where Wiki duped a New Yorker reporter into believing one of its editors had all these academic credentials when he was really just a hacker. The NYer has not taken kindly to this disception)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 05:20 pm (UTC)Now I'm sad.
But your channel would have another viewer.
I'd just love a half hour of art video and film - new stuff, old stuff, stuff I've seen, stuff I haven't seen. And also an art world gossip show. And a comprehensive architecture show that takes on one building and goes into the time period in which it was built, the archtiect, and relevant details. And, and, and...
(But no music videos. That would be for MTV-Me.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 06:10 pm (UTC)i dont normally watch the colbert report, but my lit professor constantly has our class watch episodes so that we can deconstruct stephens arguments.. i've come to believe that stephen is really a crazy anarchist, in the purest comic sense.. as for momus, we all know he's a mo(ck)xist..
Re: Pressed on
Date: 2007-03-18 06:36 pm (UTC)I was approached by Newsnight Review researchers back in 2004 to be on the show, but never really followed up. "Come and see us next time you're in London," they said, but I never did. I watch the show, but I have some problems with its editorial slant. I used to love The Late Show in the early 90s, but The Late Show this ain't.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 08:17 pm (UTC)Take a look...
http://www.blob.rai.it//R2_HPprogramma/0,,1067022,00.html
It's rarely talked about in English, but there's a bit on it here
> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901030303-425847,00.html
"Five excruciating seconds of a half-naked, singing showgirl segues into 30 seconds of politicians shouting each other down, which cuts to the day's sappiest moment from a low-budget soap. Into this kaleidoscope of bad taste Ghezzi inserts a few news highlights, often including Berlusconi's gaffes, stutters, tirades and unfulfilled campaign promises."
There is nothing like it - not on prime time national tv anyhow!
,, ant
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 10:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 10:26 pm (UTC)I've just used it to watch the wonderful pop-glitch movies at some-pig.net
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-18 10:30 pm (UTC)--former TV teaching TA
farte farte farte scuzzi!
Date: 2007-03-18 11:36 pm (UTC)must-see!
Date: 2007-03-19 01:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-19 01:47 am (UTC)That would be an amazing way to deliver someone's selected programming. Say, on your TiVo screen or on the web or something. Actually format someone's selections like that on the fly.
Hard to get the same level of commentary in the show summaries, though -- maybe there's multiple, pre-written versions of the summaries, and through your "subscription", you choose an irony level? :)
Brilliant. Plus, WICKER MAN caught my eye, because I love it so.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-19 06:30 am (UTC)Ikarie XB 1 (Voyage to the End of the Universe) is a rather stunning piece of early electro acoustic chamber music.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-19 07:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-19 02:53 pm (UTC)So is LA cable access star John Kilduff's show Let's Exercise, Paint, and Make Blended Drinks (http://youtube.com/watch?v=PvbL_5rH1QQ)
I simply cannot stop watching this silly artist triumphing in a face of multitasking video hell!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-19 05:01 pm (UTC)Kilduff suffers from the Charlie Brooker-esque "curse of recursivity" -- he cannot help but be outstripped in absurdity by the material he's satirizing.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-19 07:59 pm (UTC)The highly Svankmajer-influenced work of the Brothers Quay is pretty awesome too, have you seen any?
momus tv adsvert
Date: 2007-03-20 10:35 pm (UTC)Re: momus tv adsvert
Date: 2007-03-20 10:37 pm (UTC)found a link for the advert, judge for yourself.
Re: momus tv adsvert
Date: 2007-03-20 10:39 pm (UTC)found a link for the advert, judge for yourself.
Daniel Lapaine
Re: momus tv adsvert
Date: 2007-03-20 11:24 pm (UTC)My transport is a lot more understated than even that car -- I went shopping today on a Devil kick scooter. Zero emissions (unless you count this piece of boasting).
Re: momus tv adsvert
Date: 2007-03-21 09:30 am (UTC)How about "false hairstyle on the Devil (kickscooter)"
Love the Faust Švankmajer made, and Skoda cars featured strongly. Fancy doing an advert.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-21 09:19 pm (UTC)Yes, I loved their 80s animations back in the 80s, and voted their "Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" one of my favourite films of 2006.