It's been a funny couple of days. The weather has been utterly insane (/hyperbole), and a glance at the BBC news website will indicate that it is causing "chaos" etc. and as a result I've been released from the clutches of work early for the last two nights, allowing me to engage in what is apparently known as "socialisation". This included visiting Klute, in Durham, a place which was allegedly voted the second worst club in Europe at some point. It's certainly harsh to say it lived up to this; it was dingy, the draught coke machine was broken, they only had cold water in the toilets, the drink was kinda expensive (and erratic - 2 quid for a gin and cranberry [no draught lemonade either], £2.90 for a bottle of Tuborg!) and the music was awful beyond belief (I mean, the music in most clubs is bad, but at least it's chosen to allow dancing; this is not the case in Klute), but the staff were nice, and didn't seem to be brain dead, unlike the staff in Fat Sam's for example (the cloak room guy was reading The Selfish Gene!). I even came across a nice bouncer - which I'm pretty sure means I have to call whatever agency he was working for and make a complaint.
Anyway, I've been in worse places.
I also went and saw Travesties at the DST, which was pretty good. I mean, the writing was excellent, being Tom Stoppard and all, and the acting was decent (although it did seem to take the actors 10 minutes or so of being on stage before acting properly), but I wasn't massively keen on some of the stage direction. However, what really annoyed me, as usual, was "other people". The problem with going to see student theatre is that the audience have a vested interest in appearing to enjoy themselves - that is to say, they want to support their friends, and they obviously take some genuine extra enjoyment out of seeing someone they know act like someone else. However, this leads to all sorts of overacting in the audience - for example, the dude sitting in front of me laughed in the most affected way imaginable, at the most inappropriate times, which was pretty irritating.
Tonight Heather and I are going to see Belle and Sebastian, with full orchestra. I'm really excited - I think I've only ever been to one sit down gig before, which was one of the first gigs I ever attended (RHCP), and it was completely lame (which may have had something to do with it being RHCP). However, I think sitting down will really suit the music and the experience, plus years of going to gigs has somewhat jaded me to the appeal of standing for hours and jumping up and down.
Portrait of Tristan Tzara (one of the characters in Travesties and a founder of Dada) by Lajos Tihanyi, 1927:
Watched Halloween last night and this was by far the best part, although there was a lot of amusing, unnecessary nakedness; the first broad who gets killed spills a tiny amount of some substance on her clothes (looks like water, she claims butter), so she undresses (in the house of the person she's babysitting for), until she's dressed only in her pants and socks, and then puts on a random shirt she finds. She then runs around outside for about half an hour until she finally gets killed (hope it's not too much of a spoiler to point that out).
It was worth watching though, if only to find out where Fallout got their "Pint Sized Slasher" idea from:
Anyway, in Durham, so more posts to come about what's been going on. I've been meaning to pick up this blog for a while now; I lost steam in the middle of documenting our European holiday and felt bad abandoning it; however, it's better to jettison this than dispose of the blog entirely. It's funny to come back to it and read the stats of how many visitors there has been to my dead blog.
On our second day in Vienna we picked up where we had left off the previous day, in the Museums Quartier. We visited the Museum Moderner Kunst, or "MUMOK", which had a large exhibition of televisual art, including a lot of works by Andy Warhol (he was a popular guy in Europe), and various other contemporary artworks; in fact, it was probably the most contemporary place we visited, with a lot of very recent work from artists I'd never even heard of.
Heather got a few great pictures of some of the highlights, including this piece featuring several vertically standing neon lights which I have been unable to attribute to any artist (I'll continue to research and hopefully edit with the creator at some point):
She took that from a balcony, which is why they look so small. This picture is a close up of Pietro Sanguineti's "Void":
Here's the whole thing:
Void was one of my favourite pieces, but the place was full of really great, forward looking and slightly confusing art.
The television art section wasn't so up to date, as it was more of a retrospective on tv art generally. One of the highlights was a whole room dedicated to "Andy Warhol's TV", a television show which was shown in the 80s on MTV, as a kind of realisation of Andy's 15 minutes claim. It was pretty amusing; I watched a sketch where a fat woman gets the wrong shoes from her parents for Christmas, so she wrecks the room she's standing in, tipping the Christmas tree onto her mother and screaming swear words before storming out. I also watched a sequence about rodeo clowns, and Heather watched an episode dedicated to boots.
To be honest, I don't remember seeing this particular video, and I can't actually watch it right now because I'm in the library without headphones, but here is a clip to give you some idea:
One thing I forgot to mention about this place was that it was completely free to students! Considering how expensive we thought Vienna was going to be generally, it was great to get in here free; all we had to do was fill in a little form about what University we went to.
After MUMOK we went to Schönbrunn Palace, which was pretty magnificent, maybe a little too magnificent for a couple of student bums. It was a massive place, the "gardens" were more like a huge park, it had it's own zoo... The maze was fun though. We went through the main maze, the kids maze and some other kind of puzzle maze, which wasn't really a maze, just a hedged in windy path. Heather has pictures of these things, but I don't think she's posted them yet.
One other note about Vienna; I think Austrians are pretty much obsessed with sex. Sex club inside an art gallery aside, we saw posters for sex shows and sex shops everywhere, even just outside the palace gardens.
Other than that, that's pretty much all there is to say about Vienna; I think it was my second favourite place on the trip. We had to eat cheaply but there was a lot to do.
The train out of Prague was nice, in a kind of Poirot/Holmes stylee, as we had to sit in a booth. There was a lock on the door, and when the ticket man/coffee man came, they knocked before entering and closed the door behind them, even though it was made of glass so it wasn't exactly private anyway. Regardless, it was a nice trip, and we had our booth to ourselves almost the whole way.
When we got to Vienna we weren't sure which station to get off at, and then when we got off and U-Bahn'd over to the correct stop, we couldn't decide on which direction to walk. We got to Hostel Ruthensteiner in the end however. It was a strange place; very nice, and pretty clean, but the staff were pretty anal about being environmentally friendly/smoking/keys etc., which was a bit off putting. Also, the kitchen was tiny and always packed full of people, making it pretty awkward to cook food, which was a problem because Vienna was probably the most expensive place we visited.
Anyway, it wasn't such a big deal, since we'd only be sleeping there, and it was still a pretty nice place. The first thing we did was head to the Secession Building:
It was pretty impressive from outside, and pretty bizarre inside. We paid about 10 euros to see two exhibitions; the first of which a crap piece of rock in the middle of a huge white room, which apparently the "artist" had slept inside or something (I'm not entirely sure, I wasn't paying much attention to it).
The second, which was what we really went to see, was this:
Gustav Klimt - Section from the Beethoven Frieze (1902):
Actually finding the frieze was quite difficult. We went in, looked halfheartedly at the rock sculpture, awkwardly asked the attendant about a cloakroom (as we anticipated a larger gallery), came back, went downstairs, saw a pole dancing stage and a seedy looking bar, got confused and went back up, asked the reception guy where the frieze was, he said "go through the bar", so we did, and we found it right at the back. However, the bar we went through, and the club built around the bar, was a swinger's club called Element 6. This swinger's club was complete with S&M equipment, like a cross with manacles, and huge screens showing porn. There was also private sex rooms, and beds lying around under palm trees for exhibitionists (including inside the room with the frieze - a room which was darker than it probably should have been for proper viewing, to accommodate the shaggers).
When we left the sex club/gallery, we saw a woman going in with her kids; I'm pretty sure the reception guy didn't bother to warn her. I took comfort in the fact that she was British, so she'd probably be very shocked and indignant about it.
After our sex club adventure, we visited the Leopold Museum. I think tiredness was generally one of the most debilitating features of our trip; we struggled to have the energy for looking around exhibitions (or at least I did, especially with a sore toe), and as a result probably didn't take the time we should have in studying the various artworks. The Leopold was great, it had some brilliant Secession paintings and posters and some amazing works by Egon Schiele, an artist I'd only vaguely heard of before going abroad:
Egon Schiele - Nude Self Portrait (1910):
Gustav Klimt - Poster for the First Secession Exhibition (1898):
Koloman Moser - Poster for the Thirteenth Secession Exhibition (1902):
I love the red eyes on the Schiele painting. His works were some of the most impressive that I saw while I was away, they were so expressionistic yet stylistic and bold.
It was raining when we came out of the Leopold, and we planned to go to the Museum Moderner Kunst after a trip to a cafe, but we ended up just heading back to the hostel, we were so tired and short on time.
The train out of Prague was nice, in a kind of Poirot/Holmes stylee, as we had to sit in a booth. There was a lock on the door, and when the ticket man/coffee man came, they knocked before entering and closed the door behind them, even though it was made of glass so it wasn't exactly private anyway. Regardless, it was a nice trip, and we had our booth to ourselves almost the whole way.
When we got to Vienna we weren't sure which station to get off at, and then when we got off and U-Bahn'd over to the correct stop, we couldn't decide on which direction to walk. We got to Hostel Ruthensteiner in the end however. It was a strange place; very nice, and pretty clean, but the staff were pretty anal about being environmentally friendly/smoking/keys etc., which was a bit off putting. Also, the kitchen was tiny and always packed full of people, making it pretty awkward to cook food, which was a problem because Vienna was probably the most expensive place we visited.
Anyway, it wasn't such a big deal, since we'd only be sleeping there, and it was still a pretty nice place. The first thing we did was head to the Secession Building:
It was pretty impressive from outside, and pretty bizarre inside. We paid about 10 euros to see two exhibitions; the first of which a crap piece of rock in the middle of a huge white room, which apparently the "artist" had slept inside or something (I'm not entirely sure, I wasn't paying much attention to it).
The second, which was what we really went to see, was this:
Gustav Klimt - Section from the Beethoven Frieze (1902):
Actually finding the frieze was quite difficult. We went in, looked halfheartedly at the rock sculpture, awkwardly asked the attendant about a cloakroom (as we anticipated a larger gallery), came back, went downstairs, saw a pole dancing stage and a seedy looking bar, got confused and went back up, asked the reception guy where the frieze was, he said "go through the bar", so we did, and we found it right at the back. However, the bar we went through, and the club built around the bar, was a swinger's club called Element 6. This swinger's club was complete with S&M equipment, like a cross with manacles, and huge screens showing porn. There was also private sex rooms, and beds lying around under palm trees for exhibitionists (including inside the room with the frieze - a room which was darker than it probably should have been for proper viewing, to accommodate the shaggers).
When we left the sex club/gallery, we saw a woman going in with her kids; I'm pretty sure the reception guy didn't bother to warn her. I took comfort in the fact that she was British, so she'd probably be very shocked and indignant about it.
After our sex club adventure, we visited the Leopold Museum. I think tiredness was generally one of the most debilitating features of our trip; we struggled to have the energy for looking around exhibitions (or at least I did, especially with a sore toe), and as a result probably didn't take the time we should have in studying the various artworks. The Leopold was great, it had some brilliant Secession paintings and posters and some amazing works by Egon Schiele, an artist I'd only vaguely heard of before going abroad:
The train out of Prague was pretty Poirot/Sherlock Holmes stylee, as all of the seats were inside little booths, each with six seats. It was pretty cool, there was a lock on the door so I guess we could have locked ourselves in if we had wanted, and when the coffee/ticket guys came they knocked and then closed the door behind them afterwards. We mostly had it to ourselves, apart from a very short way when we were joined by two women who sat in complete silence.
When we got to Vienna we couldn't decide which train station to get off at, and then when we got to the correct U-Bahn stop, we couldn't decide which direction to walk in, but we found our hostel eventually. I've actually forgotten the name of it; it was nice enough, but the staff were a little bit anal about smoking/keys/environmental friendliness etc., which was a bit off putting. It was kinda expensive for beer as well, and the communal kitchen was tiny and always packed full of people.
However, we weren't too concerned about where we were sleeping, and we headed off for our daily intake of art. The first place we visited was the Secession building,
Gosh, I should have done this much faster than I have done it, because already I'm beginning to struggle to remember what went on in each day.
On our second day in Prague, we visited Prague Castle:
We didn't go inside, in general we tended to avoid huge tourist attractions, but I figured it was worth mentioning because it's a pretty impressive building. We also made a stop at the Wallenstein Gardens, which were impressive and peaceful (apart from some idiots chasing the peacock around trying to get a picture standing next to it):
Our next stop in Prague was the Franz Kafka museum, which was pretty insane. There was a couple of sculptures outside; the one of a man pissing into the shape of the Czech Republic is by David Cerny, who is a bit of a nutter (both pictures by Heather):
[slideshow]
The Kafka museum itself was a pretty scary and weird place, but they certainly made the most of the fairly boring material they had (letters, first edition books etc.) by turning the whole place into a representation of some kind of existential nightmare, with strange noises like children crying playing behind a monotonous droning soundtrack, and various art installations. It was interesting, and well worth a visit.
After the Kafka museum we visited a pretty small art museum that I don't remember too much about at the moment, but I'll come back and edit this post later if I remember who the artists were (most of the works were by two artists).
That evening we experienced a lot more of the Czech hostility towards dummies like us who can't speak any Czech. Both days we went to the same supermarket and got shouted at in broken English by the same crazy woman. However, we had a really great meal anyway, in a place that has a name that translates into "The Whale" or something, but I don't remember the Czech.
That was pretty much it for Prague. A pretty place, but we struggled a little to find too many things to do.
The train to Prague went via Dresden and ran along the river Elbe. The Czech Republic seems like a pretty run down place, even in Prague, which isn't really a surprise; however, the Elbe was pretty and there was a lot of impressive cliffs along the bank of the river.
When we arrived we checked in at our hotel, the Dahlia Inn, which was a lot nicer but a lot quieter than the East Seven in Berlin. The guy running the place, Mark, was really nice; he gave us loads of information and we had a nice chat about music and whatnot. For the first evening we decided to just have a bit of a wander around, so we checked out the old town and wandered past a really old synagogue and a bunch of poncy shops. We also walked past the Astronomical Clock, which, amusingly, has four animated figures which were added in the 17th century, representing things hated by the Czech people at the time; vanity, Jews, death and Turks. We didn't actually bother to wait for the clock to move on the hour, because it was raining, but also because the guidebook said it wasn't really worth it.
In the evening, we ate at Pivovarsky dum, where the beer was really cheap and awesome, and the meals were slightly more expensive but still pretty good. I guess they do things in reverse to the old scam here of cheap meals and expensive drinks. I had venison, which was pretty tasty.
So yeah, not much happened on the first day; not much happened in Prague generally, although the second day was a bit more interesting.
We got up pretty late on our second day in Berlin, having flown the day before. We considered a walking tour, but by the time we got outside it seemed to have disappeared anyway, so we headed for Museum Island to see if anything was open, as prior research had indicated that nothing was usually open on a Monday. Most of the museums were indeed open, so we bought a pass for all of them and headed to the first, the Neues Museum, which for some reason only allows people in at certain time slots, but luckily we turned up right when one of the slots was beginning so we got in quickly.
Having read up on these museums beforehand, I was particularly looking forward to the Pergamon Museum, which was described in the guidebook as being Berlin's equivalent to the British Museum. However, all of the buildings were extremely impressive from the outside, and this area was one of the ones I mentioned in my last post as being a place where you walk down a regular street, turn a corner, and are confronted with an area of several huge, regal buildings. The Neues Musuem was impressive inside also, and had a very large collection of ancient Egyptian art, sculpture and several mummies and sarcophagi. It also had the iconic, 3300 year old bust of Nerfetiti, attributed to the court sculptor Thutmose:
This sculpture, which we actually found kind of scary, had a room all to itself. It was strange to see it, because I didn't know it was in the museum, and I know I've seen it somewhere before but can't think where; as if it was some residual memory from a programme I'd watched, or something I'd read at some point.
Anyway, as cool as the Neues Musuem was, the Pergamon Museum was frankly insane. If you've ever been to the British Museum, you'll be amazed by the sheer size and scale of some of the statues they have in there, like that of Ramesses II taken from the Ramesseum. However, the Germans seem to have gone a couple of steps further, taking entire buildings and putting them inside the friggin' museum. I mean, photos can hardly do it justice, but they might give you some idea:
There were also a number of huge sculptures, but it's a bit futile to post pictures of all of these things, because they can only really be experienced in person. As well as Greco-Roman and Babylonian artifacts, they have a large Medieval collection and, at the time we were there, an Islamic art exhibition.
So that's what we did on our second day in Berlin. After these two we decided we didn't really have enough time to visit the others, so we went back for the free meal that East Seven were cooking us, Mexican pasta, which was great. We also ran into some of Ed's friends, Fraser, Tom and Richard which was an extremely strange but enjoyable coincidence. We hung out with them for the evening rather than going to the Reichstag as we'd planned, and then hit the hay pretty early.
Heather and I escaped the Isle of Disappointment, Boredom and Mental Anguish for a sojourn around Europe over the last week and 'alf. In total our itinerary consisted of Dundee-Edinburgh-Berlin-Prague-Vienna-Budapest-Munich-Augsburg-Munich-Stuttgart-Paris-Calais-Dover-London-Edinburgh-Dundee.
The last part of this itinerary, from the second Munich visit onwards, was unplanned, but due to certain giant volcanic ash clouds, we had to take the long way home, travelling by train, bus and boat for around 30 hours straight to get back and relieve Matthew of the responsibilities of Jam. As well as this, we had work to get back to, and I have a poisonous toe, which required medical attention, plus we couldn't afford to sit around in Augsburg (as lovely as it was) waiting for Ryanair to put our flight back on.
Anyway, I will attempt to tackle each of these cities and towns in an individual blog post, in a very dull, holiday slide show sort of fashion, in order to document our trip to the annals of history as being the greatest holiday that ever was.
So, in the spirit of getting on with pointless and lengthy tasks:
Edinburgh.
We went to Edinburgh on the afternoon of the tenth of April, later than we should of, being forced to buy new tickets because we had to find a post office that would sell us Euros before leaving. The beginning of a trend of having to spend more money than necessary while in Britain, compared to relatively low costs in Europe.
I know Edinburgh isn't particularly interesting, but it's worth a mention because we had a lovely afternoon in the sun outside our friend Ed's flat, followed by a tasty Korma cooked by the aforementioned Ed, with an early night in preparation for an early light the next day.
This flight had a disturbing contrast between chirpy, cheerful announcements and grumpy twat staff, who repeatedly shouted at one passenger for sitting in a seat that was inexplicably off limits, rushed through the emergency procedure with complete apathy and boredom, and badgered us to hurry up and sit down so that we could get flying on time.
Berlin.
I was most excited about Berlin out of all of our destinations, and it didn't disappoint, although it was definitely different to what I expected. We wandered around lost for a while, trying to find a market that sold old Soviet memorabilia to buy a present for our cat-sitter and accidentally walked straight up to the Reichstag, without even realising where we were. The spaces in Berlin seem incredibly open, and while there was a huge line outside the Reichstag building, it was pretty much deserted otherwise; whether this was because it was a Sunday, I'm not sure. Often we'd walk down a perfectly normal street, turn the corner, and find a massively impressive building, or several all in one place, as with the museum district. I guess no one walks around anyway, they cycle or take the awesome U-Bahn, so maybe that's why there wasn't many pedestrians.
We eventually gave up on trying to find the market and went to the Hamburger Bahnhof gallery, which was the first in a day of really incredible art spaces. This place was flippin' massive, and had a lot of modern artworks by artists who, admittedly, I hadn't really heard of, but which were extremely impressive nonetheless. They did have several Warhol's, which were interesting; I never really get overally excited by Warhol, but I always find myself intrigued and/or amazed by him when I actually see his work. Included was a huge Mao print, the scale of which can only really be exemplified by showing it in situ:
There was also a couple of his Elvis prints, a James Cagney one and a large Flowers one.
Next we jaunted over to the Neue Nationalgalerie, which was, for me, probably the most impressive place we visited on the whole trip. It was full of the works of some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, including Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Edvard Munch, Piet Mondrian and many others. Here's a few of my favourite paintings from the collection; it's hard to remember them all, because I was very tired from the flight etc., so I hope to go back some time and take a lot longer to browse through:
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Potsdamer Platz (1914):
Otto Dix - Card Playing War Cripples (1920):
Barnett Newman - Broken Obelisk (1963):
Paul Klee - The Goldfish (1925):
George Grosz - The Pillars of Society (1926):
A lot of the work in the Neue Nationalgalerie focused, understandably, on the First and Second World Wars, and it was extremely interesting to see artworks from German and other European artists in person; they were certainly as full of horror and disgust at these wars as the works of ally artists like Paul Nash. Many of the works were also featured in the infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibition, held by the Nazis in Munich in 1937. It's amazing to think that the Nazis would even attempt such a thing; one would think that anyone exposed to these works would see their worth, and yet the Nazis were able to turn people against modernism and what they deemed "Jewish-Communist" artworks such as these.
The last place we visited that day was the somewhat underwhelming Kunst Bibliothek (art library), which had an exhibition on 60s fashion photography, and one featuring works by Botticelli, which we couldn't seem to find. By this point we were tired, and overwhelmed by the Neue Nationalgalerie, so perhaps it's no surprise that weren't hugely impressed.
We went and checked in to our hostel, the East Seven, which seemed comfortable and friendly. However, on the first night, we pretty much just got Chinese food and a coupla beers and went to sleep, we were so tired.
Day two of Berlin tomorrow (or later today, if I can be bothered)!
I've been listening to a lot of MM...Food recently, and it's put me in the mood for watching old, stupid cartoons. A lot of the samples DOOM uses are from Fantastic Four (naturally), and I found this rather amusing clip, featuring a crazy underwater car that walks on legs (and which The Thing refers to as a "jalopy"), and the old classic of reusing the same scene over and over to save money and time drawing new scenes:
I also found this:
It's pretty funny, because you expect the theme tune to be pretty dramatic, and it starts off like some sort of 70s cop show, but quickly turns into something resembling that of a cheesy game show. Also, it's super cheery, even though someone dies in the race that we see Speed Racer in. Even the grim look on Speed Racer's face seems to contradict the cheesy music; as if the guy who wrote the theme tune didn't even look at what the show was going to be like. Plus, Speed Racer's strange mincing walk to his car at the beginning is hilarious, and his pose at the end is incredibly awkward.
Good lord. Just watching a programme called "Pointless", hosted by Alexander Armstrong, and it's pretty strange. It's kinda like reverse Family Fortunes; you have to guess an answer which very few or no people have said in a poll, but you're not allowed to get it wrong. It's pretty terrible, for a number of reasons; the concept is pretty shit, the co-presenter is a bit of a smarmy twat who tells everyone whether they're right or wrong and adds miscellaneous facts, and the contestants are plain weird and idiotic.
For example, the question I'm watching right now is "Robin Williams Films"; i.e, you have to name films which Robin Williams has featured in, but obscure ones which people might not think of right away.
One of the guys on a team of two old men said "Alien"(!)
As well as this Alexander Armstrong asked a team, who are a married couple, how they are, and they said "well, we're happily married, but we've actually had a very stressful time of it lately and our marriage isn't doing so well, but we've had a pep talk from our 3 year old daughter this morning, so I think things are OK." This didn't seem to be a reference to an inside joke or anything (even though they've been on the show, apparently), it was just an embarrasingly open response to a fairly banal question.
I've never heard of this show, but apparently it's been on for a couple of series.
I can't believe how far Alexander Armstrong has fallen; from almost permanently presenting Have I Got News For You, to doing awful Pimms adverts, to this crap.
Went to the library this evening to begin work on my final essay; however, I was very tired and pretty much ended up just watching this video over and over again, as I think it might be one of the most mesmerising performances I've ever seen.
If hip hop seems to be the genre with the worst album covers (except maybe obscure folk), then I think jazz might have some of the coolest, as evidenced by Don Cherry's Symphony for Improvisers.
Here's a number of some of my other favourite covers (in every case, the quality of the cover seems to reflect the quality of the music, so give them a listen):
As you can probably tell, I'm on a bit of a jazz kick at the moment. It's a huge and confusing world of great music, and it's really enjoyable to search through it, try and recognise the different genres and sub-genres (I'll admit, at first, a lot of jazz sounded the same to me, but I'm getting there), and discover loads of amazing artists who are described on wikipedia as "one of the greatest musicians of the 2oth century", or "instrumental in the formation of bebop" or whatever, but who I have never even heard of before.
Last night I got a fair bit of work done on my dissertation, and it's almost finished. For my library session I bought 40 Mingus tracks off iTunes for £2.49! Insane. I was there about 3 hours listening to that one compilation and I don't think I heard the same song twice.
Today was my last ever undergraduate class at Dundee, for my Bob Dylan module, and it was as infuriating as ever; there was six people there, of which only I and one other loudmouth talked (the other loudmouth, however, didn't seem to have a clue what he was talking about, whereas I hope I displayed at least a scrap of intelligence in the points I made).
It'll be good to leave Dundee, and I'm sort of hoping I'll be able to go to Durham, although it depends how much money the AHRC offer me, if they offer anything at all. The recent student elections were pretty much the last straw; I got emotionally involved, because one of my friends was running (and he actually had great policies, bar one about a bus to Kirkcaldy which I wasn't so sure about), and he didn't get elected, whereas a hideous girl, whom I hate with a massive and unhealthy passion, got voted in to another position, despite having no real ideas and having a terrible series of massive personality flaws. So pretty much lose/lose for me. I actually had the optimism to believe my friend would win, but I suppose I put too much belief in it being a fair contest, rather than the popularity competition I knew it to be (call me bitter).
While the whole ridiculous affair was fairly upsetting (dodging canvassers was also very irritating), it was quite amusing to have prior and current candidates googling for their names along with my blog to see if I was bad mouthing them again.
Anyway, it'll be nice to move on to somewhere else, unless I get offered so much money that it would be stupid to go somewhere else. I guess we'll see.
I posted some bad album covers a while back, here's one that I found which is great, and it's from an awesome album:
If I could play like Don Cherry (or at all), I'd be a very satisfied man. If I had a jumper like this one, I'd be an ecstatically happy man. Not sure why he looks so confused/lost, if I had that jumper I wouldn't care where I was.
I enjoyed a day of cheap retail therapy today. Last night we were faced with the unfortunate discovery that we had booked our flight out to Berlin in April on the wrong day, so we had to pay 50 bucks to change it; this meant that the pipe dream of buying some new junk before leaving was fading fast. However, I was able to find a pair of really decent 20 quid black jeans in H&M, a place usually devoid of any decent clothing. I also picked up a new razor, and, as Head was closing down, a large stack of CDs on the cheap. For about £18, I purchased:
Bobby Digital - Digi Snaks,
Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life,
Yacht - I Believe in You. Your Magic is Real,
El Guincho - Alegranza,
Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends,
Popular Workshop - We're Alive and We're Not Alone,
Aids Wolf - Cities of Glass,
Outkast - Aquemini,
Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,
White Denim - Workout Holiday,
Grampall Jookabox - Ropechain,
Abe Vigoda - Skeleton.
Pretty amazing, right? This means I'll be able to completely overhaul my rather stale iPod before our trip. I have to be sure to take my time over these though; I missed out on 36 Chambers for the longest time when I got it cheap from the Woolworths close-down sale, because I simply overlooked it and put it to one side, having only paid about 20p for it.
It's amazing, the place was just full of great CDs that they'd only just put out for sale; the staff obviously weren't interested in any of this great music, and they probably figured that the general public wouldn't be, and I guess they were pretty much right. It's nice to take when CDs are cheap enough to take a few chances, and buy things that you love but have listened to so much that you probably wouldn't bother buying on CD.
I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas On a great big clipper ship Going from this land here to that In a sailor's suit and cap Away from the big city Where a man can not be free Of all of the evils of this town And of himself, and those around Oh, and I guess that I just don't know Oh, and I guess that I just don't know.
William Hodges - A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits (New Zealand) with Waterspout, 1776.
I feel kinda funny doing this, because I think Michael might have posted the second of these videos not that long ago and it might seem like I'm just bitin' his style. However, as you can see from these two videos, sometimes it's for the greater good to all to emulate others:
Dissertation seems to going pretty well. Obviously I don't know right now if I'm actually writing a load of shite, but the word count is on a steady rise, and that's good enough for me at the moment.
Anyways, I'm amazed that this even happened, never mind that I found it:
I know, it's too short.
I guess it shows how little I actually know about jazz, when two of my favourite musicians played together quite extensively and I didn't even know about it. Dolphy's last tour was with Mingus; there are a couple of stories about his death, one of which is that he collapsed on stage and was taken to hospital in a diabetic coma. The hospital attendants, thinking that he was probably just drugged out of his mind like most jazz musicians, left him alone to allow whatever was in his system to work it's way out again, and he died.
A couple of little puzzles have been solved for me recently. The first was the song "I Like to Eat Eat Eat Apples and Bananas", a song which I felt sure a boy (now man, if someone my age can be considered a man) from my school named Graham Brameld invented, but which I now know, thanks to the school I work at, is actually an old children's song. Here's a Barney version:
Irritating, I know, and that was the least irritating one I could find.
The other thing was the phrase "why's everybody always picking on me?", said in a deep south accent, which I started saying to Heather when she would complain that I was bullying her, but without knowing where it came from. I haven't ever heard this song, to my knowledge, but I guess at some point someone must have sung it to me. I actually found it because I was looking for a specific Charlie Brown strip, and there was a link to it on another blog:
OK, it's been a while since I've posted anything other than just a video or a comic strip, but there a few things which have come to my attention (unfortunately for them, me and you), so I thought I'd make this a lengthy post to make up for the lack of chatter coming from my side in the past few weeks (or months).
Let's start with this: I've watched three interesting films in the last three days, all interesting for different reasons. One musical and two comedies. The first of these was Gigi:
I admit, I didn't watch all of this trailer, because I couldn't subject myself to any more of this nonsense, but I watched enough to tell you that the trailer misrepresents the movie (surprise surprise). It gives the impression that Gigi is interested in finding a man, when in fact, the clip which shows her asking her great aunt rather sardonically about whether her family marries, is immediately followed in the film by a song about how she doesn't understand why Parisians are so obsessed by love.
In fact, this one of the longest sequences in which we actually see Gigi. Practically all of the rest of the time she is just an incredibly young piece of meat that gets handed around between her grandmother, great aunt and (by the end of the film) fiance, a rich spoiled twat who sings that everything "is a bore!" all the way through the film. I know it's the fifties, but Jesus, this film is incredibly sexist and borderline perverted, what with the opening song (sung by a very old, leery dude who is the only person to bother with a French accent in the film) being "Thank Heaven For Little Girls", the tone of which seems to be "Oh, I know we shouldn't really think about young girls sexually... but just look at them! And besides, one day they'll be old enough, so it's good to get in early and take advantage when their young and stupid, then you can shag them and dump them when they get too wrinkly/naggy/clingy/dependent." The dude who sings this is seriously scary, and everyone refers to him as being young at heart, when in fact he appears to simply be an old perv who uses money and his ridiculously shiny teeth to take advantage of young women. At one point you think he's going to settle down with Gigi's grandmother, as they have a romantic sing song, but no, after that scene, in which they appear to be quite close, you never hear of their relationship again.
As for Gigi herself, she drifts around in the background, with her incredibly obnoxious great aunt taking up loads of screen time, until suddenly the "it's a bore!" guy decides he's in love with her, and pretty much offers to buy her from her grandmother. Gigi, far from seeing anything wrong with this, objects because she'll be too much in the public eye, because "it's a bore!" is super fucking rich. However, five minutes later she comes round and decides to go out with him, they go out to dinner, he gets embarrassed for some reason, drags her home, leaves her house, comes back, proposes, she accepts even though she just got humiliated and carried home like a child, the end.
9 fucking Oscars. Kind of casts in to light what a bunch of crap we'll probably be thinking the current Oscar winners in 50 years.
The other two were The Lady Killers and Annie Hall; I won't get in to too much detail, I've wasted enough time slagging of Gigi, as it's a lot more fun to trash something than praise it, but both were pretty excellent, Annie Hall being the better of the two, or at least my personal favourite. Woody Allen is a strange guy; I found myself both repulsed and attracted to his whiny complaining and constant wisecracking throughout the film. I guess he reminded me of me a little bit, as I'm pretty cynical, but not as intelligent or funny. Here's the opening, it pretty much sums up the film, in tone, but also because it's full of these interesting moments where the fourth wall is broken and Woody directly addresses the audience:
The other things that have been bothering me around to do with the university. Now I know I said I'd stay away from politics, especially student politics, but the nominations for the 2010 student executive elections are on the DUSA website, and I can't help but notice that our old friend Craig Kelly (who, in the past, kindly and anonymously said my blog was arrogant, along with some other such things, before posting a lovely and welcoming invitation to his office under his real name, I guess so as to have a dig at me while appearing above all such nasty, naughty name calling at the same time), is unopposed as President. That means he'll walk into a paid position of "authority and power" without even having to run. I don't envy him the position, but I do envy him the pay package, which will come practically work free if the actions of the last two presidents is anything to go by, as they don't seem to have done very much (allegedly).
I guess this might have put people off from running as president:
"Nomination forms can be picked up from Anne Marie Bottoms, Executive Support, 4th Floor, DUSA during office hours of: 10:30 am – 1:30 pm. Should Anne Marie be unavailable at the time of pick up, leave her a message at extension: 81085 or e-mail her at: abottoms@dusa.co.uk"
Miss Bottom's email address would appear to be a joke one. No offence, Miss A. Bottoms.
Anyway, the other thing, which has been repeatedly rammed in my face this last week, is that the the humanities department is getting rid of one of their modules, Renaissance literature. Shock horror. There's a facebook campaign to save it, which makes it deadly serious of course, because it's so rare for someone to implement facebook as a way of expressing any minor annoyance they might have that once it happens, you know shit's about to hit the fan (/sarcasm). Both my tutors have made pleas (one in an email to everyone, one in my class today) asking people to calm down and stop being silly, as Renaissance literature will continue to be taught, and in fact will be extended, in first year modules (in fact, even if I wanted to or cared, it would be a be a bit hypocritical of me to join the campaign, since I avoided doing Renaissance in third year and only got the basic stuff in first and second year - but hey, it's done me alright). The problem for them, Aidan Day and Chris Murray, is that they are both running contentious, if, in my opinion, completely valid and excellent modules; British comic writers and Bob Dylan's song poetry. Now, some close minded nincompoops have attacked these modules, saying "duh... um... Shakespeares are important, comics ain't important, they're for kids, Bob Dylan sings songs and isn't proper england, up the Shakespeare" or whatever, which completely goes against the idea of opening new areas of research, but also displays a real ignorance about the topics in question.
So it's a bit annoying for me, because I thought I couldn't care less, but now I do, because there's a possibility that this half baked campaign about something uninteresting happening to a module I didn't even take and won't miss will actually effect modules I did take, loved and will miss. I find it easy to imagine the amount of shit Aidan and Chris get as it is for wanting to do something interesting and different, without people getting their axes ready to chop comics and Dylan to save Shakespeare, who is still going to be taught anyway (in fact, while level three Renaissance is optional, there's no dodging it in first year, so if they make it more extensive as a result of chopping the third year module, it'll probably be better for everyone).
Anyway, Heather's coming home soon and I need to go and make the tea. If Craig Kelly even bothers to run (why the hell would he?), I'll see if his campaign material is worth a cheap laugh or two and post it when it appears.
This picture was taken by Barney Peterson, and was featured in Life magazine, alonsgide an article about the Hollister riot, which I have transcribed below as it would have appeared in the magazine.
"CYCLIST'S HOLIDAY:
He and friends terrorize town.
On the fourth of July weekend 4,000 members of a motorcycle club roared into Hollister, Calif. for a three-day convention. They quickly tired of ordinary motorcycle thrills and turned to more exciting stunts. Racing their vehicles down main streets and through traffic lights, they rammed into restaurants and bars, breaking furniture and mirrors. Some rested awhile by the curb (above). Others hardly paused. Police arrested many for drunkenness and indecent exposure but could not restore order. Finally, after two days, the cyclists left with a brazen explanation. 'We like to show off. It's just a lot of fun.' But Hollister's police chief took a different view. Wailed he, 'It's just a hell of a mess.' "
The incident inspired the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One.
William Hodges - A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits (New Zealand) with Waterspout, 1776.
