Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
My impression is that I’m not the only person to have found that Web 2.0 is proving less interesting these days than it was five or six years ago. I don’t think this is simply because for my social (networking) circle the novelty has worn off. It has more to do with the fact that the web is less chaotic than it was and corporations have learnt how to better use and control social networking. Friendster fell out of favour because it kicked out fakesters (those that refused to use their ‘real’ identities) and it was continually crashing due to lack of server capacity. MySpace allowed people to adopt any online identity they felt like taking – so it appealed to the fakesters, among others. One of the things I liked about MySpace was its willingness to jump on any and every online fad going, which made it more of a culture clash than most other parts of the web – and I particularly dug the blogging features. I’ve detailed my use of MySpace in an article on the main part of this website – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/praxis/myspace.htm.
MySpace had lots of faults but it was fun for a while. The platform being bought out by Murdoch’s News Corp (via the Fox subsidiary) led to MySpace suffering a slow death, since its old media purchasers had no understanding of what they’d acquired. That didn’t stop the fools at News Corp from messing around with their new toy. Facebook took up the slack, after initially appealing to over-privileged college kids and other conservatives who couldn’t stand the anarchic nature of MySpace; and partly because one of the central features (alongside photo sharing when that was introduced) was the status update – which required less effort than writing a blog. Twitter took the status update and transformed it into pretty much the only feature on its site. Facebook quickly became a place to do little more than post links when the company made attempts to claim ownership of any original content distributed directly from its severs. No one in their right mind would want to give FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg anything too interesting to claim as his ‘copyright’. Facebook’s current revamp looks a lot like a tail-ending of the failed MySpace. Facebook is now being promoted as a place for sharing media. Zuckerberg’s site for college squares and their post-degree clones has always been uptight and preppy, but in recent months the boredom factor there has definitely increased.
I know I’m not the only person in my social networking circles to try out other sites in recent years. I’ve found the take up at Identi.Ca too low for it to work very well for me – although I’m still posting: http://identi.ca/stewarthome. VK might have turned out better for me if there hadn’t already been a number of Stewart Home fakester sites on their servers prior to my arriving there: many users assumed that I couldn’t possibly be running my own profile on ‘their’ site (a corporate Facebook clone but with more than a few toes dipped into the darkweb). VK is most popular in Russia and since my books sold very well in Russian translation, I’m well known there. So I’m plodding on with VK too: http://vk.com/id121464913. I’ve been working with Diaspora alpha but initially went to a pod that didn’t suit me. I’ve just switched to another pod that seems much better: https://diasp.org/people/36032. Fingers crossed that Diaspora takes off once it goes fully public, the potential for something really good is definitely there. I’m at many other places – including of course Google+ – but to take just one example, I can’t even remember the last time I logged in to my LastFM account: http://www.last.fm/music/Stewart+Home. I have managed to post new material at YouTube quite recently (a public reading from one of my books which I give standing on my head): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z70hEvWbaWg. I hope to update my Vimeo profile at some point in the future: http://vimeo.com/stewarthome. The same goes for my site on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewarthome/.
Instead of waiting for a social networking platform that I find viable to either appear or reach its potential, I figured I’d return to blogging here – albeit on a more sporadic basis than in the past. This is in part because I’ve found the current Guardian newspaper series on “How to build a profitable blog” by Andrea Wren completely vile. Rather than opening up the possibilities of blogging, Wren’s series is all about closing them down and reducing web 2.0 to a narrow focus. Viz, her desire to turn ‘creativity’ into money. Wren and her mentor Craig McGinty may or may not make a fortune from their blogs, with some added help from the Guardian series that is boosting them – but most of their foolish followers won’t get a pot to piss in from setting up online sites. It is only by moving away from an obsession with monetisation and hits that blogging can become in any way exciting. Search engine optimisation is so last decade, and I’m still of the opinion that content counts, alongside the quality of interaction between a site and its visitors. I’ve never focused on a single subject to the exclusion of all others either here or when I blogged on MySpace. Unvarying subject matter may or may not deliver a target audience to advertisers, but it is also the road to unadulterated tedium.
Finally – and just in case you’re interested – the revolution in plumbing (and many other areas of design and engineering) is allegedly coming to us all very soon via 3D printing rather than web 2.0. And in recent days as I went through a slew of old social networking sites I’d joined, I found that some had wiped my profiles, but many others remained just as I’d left them when I’d last logged in two or more years ago. That said, the entire Twine platform had disappeared and when I typed their url into my browser I was redirected to the Evri site (who I understand have both bought out Twine and wiped my account from the site they’ve merged into their own). Meanwhile, I was excited to discover my Tumbler profile could be be updated from my new Diaspora account. Other places I’ll start updating again – mostly with links to here – include Stumble Upon, Digg and Delicious (the latter two had both ‘lost’ my old profiles but I set up new ones). As for my WordPress site blog, Live Journal, Blog Spot and Bebo profiles (among many others), I’m curious to see how long they’ll stay up if I never log in again, let alone update them…..
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andrea Wren, Bebo, Blog Spot, Craig McGinty, Delicious, Diaspora, Digg, Evri, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Google, Guardian, Identi.Ca, LastFM, Live Journal, Mark Zuckerberg, monetisation, MySpace, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, search engine optimisation, SEO, Stewart Home, StumbleUpon, Twine, Twitter, VK, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube
Posted in Web 2.0 | 24 Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2009
The label tells it like it is – “Beat Beat Beat was a German music programme that ran during the sixties. Not to be confused with the other well known German pop programme Beat Club. Beat Beat Beat was broadcast out of Frankfurt commencing in 1966.” Well you wouldn’t want to confuse the two programmes as far as getting the DVDs of material from them is concerned, coz while the Beat Beat Beat (ABC Entertainment) disks give you classic mod, British Invasion, freakbeat, pop and even soul performances, on the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 (Eagle Vision) you apparently get Deep Purple, The James Gang, Johnny Winter, Santana, Procol Harum, Nazareth, Free, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, The Kiki Dee Band, Johnny Rivers, The Hollies, Bachman Turner Overdrive, The Doobie Brothers, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Three Dog Night. So while a mixed bag, the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 will appeal more to headbangers and others of that ilk; whereas Beat Beat Beat is a groovers kinda thang! That said, there were earlier year by year compilations of Beat Club and those for 1965, 1966 and 1967 look a lot better than the more recent ‘total overview’ disks… But I’ve only seen them listed online, I’ve not actually viewed them.
There are Beat Beat Beat DVDS running to about 10 minutes each devoted to The Small Faces, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, The Spencer Davis Group and The Hollies. Performances by these acts are not particularly rare and I’ve certainly seen enough footage of them to know the Small Faces totally rock onstage, whereas the Kinks or The Yardbirds (both of whom made records I love) tend to look too static and overall not that great. With more tunes and some groovy but less well known acts, The Best of Beat Beat Beat compilation disks are a better option, despite a really odd selections of talent.
At 41 minutes The Best of Beat Beat Beat volume 1 offers the longest running time. There’s Barry Ryan (Eloise), Cat Stevens (Granny and Matthew & Son) and Chris Farlowe (Out Of Time and Ride On Baby) lip-synching really badly to pre-recorded tracks. Farlowe in particular looks completely uninterested in what he’s doing, but remains compelling in a train wreck kinda way, especially as he is one sad and ugly motherfucker who had an obsessional interest in Nazi memorabilia (fortunately it was illegal for him to wear his fascist uniforms on German TV). There’s straightforward sixties pop from Herman’s Hermints (No Milk Today and My Reservation’s Been Confirmed) that while adequate need not detain us. By way of contrast, Casey Jones and The Govenors (Come On And Dance and Don’t Ha Ha) are a bit of an oddity.
In the UK Casey Jones AKA Brian Casser is known to music fans (but not the general public) as the bloke who booked The Beatles as his support act and briefly had Eric Clapton as his guitarist, but not really for his music. In Germany he had a huge hit with Don’t Ha Ha, hence his inclusion here. And if you like primitive beat sounds then you’ll dig the two Casey Jones and The Governors tunes on the The Best of Beat Beat Beat volume 1. It is probably unnecessary to add Don’t Ha Ha was a Huey ‘Piano’ Smith song. Volume 1 also gives us two tunes from The Trinity featuring Julie Driscoll (Save Me and Road to Cairo), with keyboardist Brian Auger’s theatrics totally upstaging his singer Julie Driscoll (who sounds great, albeit not as good as Aretha Franklin when covering her, but doesn’t have much stage presence). The best is saved for last, The Easybeats doing Loving Machine (incorporating the Batman Theme) and that old stomper Friday On My Mind. As prot0-punkers The Easybeats completely outflank Casey Jonees and The Governors.
Volume 2 is shorter but better. The Minderbenders do a Wilson Pickett medley in the form of Land Of A Thousand Dances/In The Midnight Hour and their big hit Groovy Kind Of Love; and also Don’t Cry No More and a medley of C. C. Rider/Jenny Jenny Jenny. P. J. Proby’s What’s Wrong With My World provides another spectacular train wreck; his lip-synching is terrible and the old rocker looks both off his box and down on his luck – he has to be seen to be believed! The disk winds up with two total class acts, P. P. Arnold and The Creation. A former Ikette (an Ike and Tina Turner backing singer) and session vocalist for the likes of The Small Faces, Arnold is diminutive but her voice is 100% pure soul and her two tracks here (Speak To Me and The First Cut Is The Deepest) are just fabulous.
You’d think there’d be nothing in the Beat Beat Beat vaults that could credibly follow Arnold, but The Creation are up for it! Aside from being a truly awesome song writer and musician, their guitarist Eddie Phillips also had the greatest haircut of 1966, just look at the shape of it around his ear in the footage of The Creation doing their cover version of I’m A Man! The Creation look fabulous in their dark trousers and button-down shirts with contrasting white details (buttons and belts). The shame here is that on the same edition of Beat Beat Beat (their first TV appearance) they also did That’s How Strong My Love Is and Makin’ Time, but they ain’t included on the DVD. Still you do get to see Eddie using his innovative technique of playing his guitar with a violin bow, something much imitated by lesser talents like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. What you also see here is The Creation doing Painter Man a year later, with their hair a little more grown out; the band still look really stylish but a little freakier. When I was a teenager back in the 197os I was on the lookout for some Creation vinyl for a long time, and when Raw Records stuck out Makin’ Time and Painter Man on either side of a 45 in the latter part of that decade, I grabbed a copy as soon as it came out. I really love this band, Makin’ Time in particular. And, of course, we should never forget the famous Eddie Phillips quote: “Our music is red with purple flashes.” Incidentally, after The Creation broke up, Phillips joined P. P. Arnold’s backing band.
Volume 3 of The Best of Beat Beat Beat features solid sixties pop from The Searchers (Love Potion No. 9, Sweets For My Sweet and C. C. Rider) and The Tremeloes (Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, Silence Is Golden and Here Comes My Baby). Then there are the more psychedelic sounds of The Move (Walk Upon The Water and I Can Here The Grass Grow). However, the real highlight is The Smoke doing My Friend Jack, a song banned by the BBC in the sixties because it is about LSD! My Friend Jack is a psyche classic and everything else on this particular disk looks second-rate in comparison… so surely we could have had more than one track from The Smoke!
I’ve also spotted but haven’t acquired a two band Beat Beat Beat DVD compilation featuring The Troggs alongside Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. I love The Troggs but I figure the DVD ain’t worth getting coz there won’t be enough of ‘em. Likewise, any disk you see in the Beat Beat Beat series will probably feature gawky looking teenagers dancing badly to groovy sounds… You can also see most of this stuff and much more for free on YouTube, although it comes and goes and the image is obviously heavily compressed- whereas on these disks both the audio and visual quality is really top-notch. Weird how you can see and hear so much shirt now that just wasn’t available to those of us based in London back in the old days, but I ain’t complaining! It’s like time travel for ravers…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, ABC Entertainment, Alice Cooper, Aretha Franklin, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Barry Ryan, Batman Theme, BBC, Beat Club, Brian Auger, Brian Casser, C. C. Rider, Canned Heat, Casey Jones and The Govenors, Cat Stevens, Chris Farlowe, Come On And Dance, Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich, Deep Purple, Don't Cry No More, Don't Ha Ha, Eagle Vision, Eddie Phillips, Eloise, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, Eric Clapton, Free, Friday On My Mind, Granny, Groovy Kind Of Love, Here Comes My Baby, Herman's Hermints, Humble Pie, I Can Here The Grass Grow, I'm A Man, Ike and Tina Turner, In The Midnight Hour, Jenny Jenny Jenny, Jethro Tull, Jimmy Page, Johnny Rivers, Johnny Winter, Julie Driscoll, Land Of A Thousand Dances, Led Zeppelin, Living Machine, Love Potion No. 9, Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, LSD, Makin' Time, Matthew & Son, My Friend Jack, My Reservation's Been Confirmed, Nazareth, No Milk Today, Out Of Time, P. J. Proby, P.P. Arnold, Painter Man, Procol Harum, Raw Records, Ride On Baby, Road to Cairo, Santana, Save Me, Silence Is Golden, sixties, Small Face, Speak To Me, Sweets For My Sweet, Ten Years After, That's How Strong My Love Is, The Beatles, The Best of Beat Beat Beat, The Best of Beat Club, The Creation, The Doobie Brothers, The Easybeats, The First Cut Is The Deepest, The Hollies, The James Gang, The Kiki Dee Band, The Kinks, The Mindbenders, The Move, The Searchers, The Small Faces, The Smoke, The Spencer Davis Group, The Tremeloes, The Trinity, The Troggs, The Yardbirds, Three Dog Night, Walk Upon The Water, What's Wrong With My World, YouTube
Posted in film, music | 23 Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
By the time I left school at sixteen in the late-seventies the big sound was disco. That said, the real hipsters among the kids who underwent the same non-education as me were into northern soul (rare mainly American and mainly 1960s records that sounded like Motown but never made the pop charts). I first came across northern soul in the mid-seventies because a school friend shared a bedroom with an older brother who was obsessed with a handful of northern soul platters. This big brother would come in from his factory job, put Tainted Love (later a huge hit when it was covered by Soft Cell) or some other northern favourite on a record deck, then flop on his bed to listen to the music until his mum had made his tea. For some reason this particular teenager also liked prog, so he was also the first person to play me Greenslade!
By the end of 1976, I was into punk rock (one of only two pupils in my school into that scene then), while a couple of kids in my class were regularly going to Wigan Casino for its northern soul all-nighters. I can remember them saying to me: “You should come to Wigan, it’s great, we drop a load of blues and dance all night!” My reply was: “Why would I got all that way to listen to records? I like seeing live bands.” There were plenty of blues (amphetamine tablets) around at punk gigs too…
And so that was that, I blew my chance to go to Wigan – possibly the worst decision I made at the age of 14 or 15. Tony Palmer’s 1977 TV documentary makes it very clear there was a truly extraordinary youth culture blossoming there. Space put it this way: “Wigan Casino documents an idiosyncratic scene based around the weekly club night that ran from 1973 to 1981. From elegant slow motion dance shots to fervent scenes of vinyl swapping, Palmer precisely captures the bustle and energy, as well as the overarching subcultural strangeness, of the Northern Soul phenomenon.”
If you have any interest in soul music you should have seen Palmer’s incredible dance shots used by other film-makers or simply posted on YouTube. But it is worth seeing those scenes in context, with a record dealer talking about the prices paid for northern vinyl and a girl who works in a hospital laundry explaining that going to Wigan is the only meaningful thing she does in her life. There is also an interview with the manager of The Casino and a couple of elderly Wigan residents giving their take on life. Cut into this are old photographs of industrial Wigan, and shots of factory machinery that turn with an almost Brion Gysin-like flicker effect. The contemporary scenes of Wigan, particularly images of terraced houses by a canal, make it look every bit as derelict as the rest of England in the late-seventies.
Wigan Casino may be a 32-year old piece of TV, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen in an art gallery for some time! It is on until 19 December at Space 129-131 Mare Street, Hackney, London E8 3RH. Catch it if you can…
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 1977, 60s, 70s, amphetamines, blues, Brion Gysin, dancing, disco, east London, Greenslade, Hackney, London, Motown, northern soul, prog rock, punk rock, S.O.U.L., seventies, sixties, Space, Tainted Love, Tony Palmer, Wigan, Wigan Casino, YouTube
Posted in exhibitions, film | 15 Comments »
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
On Saturday night I read at Volatile Dispersal, a festival of art writing held at the Whitechapel Gallery. The event proved so crowded and popular that it was hard to take very much in. I found this ironic because after I’d used my FaceBook account to remind people about the event (I list all the public events I’m doing initially on my homepage), among the comments I garnered were the following:
“I like the idea of ‘art writing’; its the best phrase I’ve ever come across (Barry Watten?) to describe the efforts of those of us who spend anywhere between 5 to 50 to 75 hours on one text, which is little more than a page, only to have said text become tucked away appropriately in a ‘slim volume’ which no one in their right mind will pay 10 dollars for when all is said and done… go boy!” Volker Nix.
And: “Yeah Volker, writing that nobody will read, not even if you put it online for free…I used to see that as being somehow radical (and I still kind of do)…but now I think the only real reason for engaging in these practices is simply because you enjoy it (is that somehow radical?)” Robert Chrysler.
There were various events going on in different parts of the Whitechapel Gallery, I was programmed to read in a small upstairs space alongside a whole host of other ‘art writers’, and this segment was curated by Francesco Pedraglio. Since I was on last, I was more focused on getting into the mood for my reading than paying attention to what other people were doing. That said, it is decidedly amusing that some of those engaged in ‘art writing’ are clearly unaware of experimental poetry by the likes of Bob Cobbing, so they are able to cover old ground as if it is fresh (and I guess it is for them, if not me).
What I found particularly curious about the event was that a number of people were participating in Volatile Dispersal who I knew but I managed not to meet on the night. I was able to hear Sally O’Reilly read because there was a speaker system relaying the sound from the room in which I also performed into the adjacent bar – but the event was so packed that I was unable to get into this small gallery for the majority of sessions before mine. I looked out for Sally afterwards but it was so busy it was easy to miss people, and I didn’t ‘see’ O’Reilly at all that night. Others advertised as being present who I failed to clock at all included Babak Ghazi (whose downstairs event clashed with mine) and Laura Oldfield Ford. Yet more, such as Mike Sperlinger, I spotted across crowded rooms – but in most cases was unable to attract their attention before they disappeared.
Among those I did manage to speak to were Crow, Bridget Penney, Bridget Lowe, Katrina Palmer, Maitreyi Maheshwari, Gavin Everall, Jane Rollo, Nick Thurston, Anthony Isles, Jonathan Allen, Benedict Seymour, Maria Fusco, James Brook, Chris Horrocks, Jeremy Ackerman and Hilary Koob-Sassen. I also had a reasonably extended conversation with Rob La Frenais about Toshiba ripping off Simon Faithfull in their current ad campaign. Nothing wrong with plagiarism of course, but Toshiba and the ad agency they used initially claimed this blatant steal demonstrated the commitment of both parties to innovation. Ho ho! La Frenais was telling me corporations can’t get away with this kind of rip-off in the world of Web 2.0 because tweets, blogs and comments on sites like YouTube and Facebook have spread the story around the world and forced Toshiba to backtrack – so they’ve apparently paid Simon Faithfull some wedge to say nothing, and are now claiming the ‘innovation’ was not launching a chair into space using weather balloons (as Faithfull had five years before them) but in using this for an ad! Doh! If that’s Toshiba’s idea of ‘innovation’ then I think I’ll stick to using consumer electronics made by Apple, Asus, Panasonic and Sony (among others) and avoid Toshiba (unless they send me some nice freebies). And BTW, why so few mentions of The Association of Autonomous Astronauts in regard to all this too?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Anthony Isles, Apple, Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Asus, Babak Ghazi, Barry Watten, Bob Cobbing, Bridget Lowe, Bridget Penney, Chris Horrocks, Crow, east London, Facebook, Francesco Pedraglio, Gavin Everall, James Brook, Jane Rollo, Jeremy Ackerman and Hilary Koob-Sassen, Katrina Palmer, Laura Oldfield Ford, London, Maitreyi Maheshwari, Maria Fusco, Mike Sperlinger, Nick Thurston, Panasonic, Rob La Frenais, Robert Chrysler, Sally O'Reilly, Simon Faithfull, Sony, Toshiba, Twitter, Volatile Dispersal, Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing, Volker Nix, Web 2.0, Whitechapel Gallery, YouTube
Posted in advertising, culture gossip & parties, literature, performance, Web 2.0 | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
I reported on an earlier YouTube banning of my work in a blog I posted in September, and shortly after I’d written that YouTube pulled another video of mine, Nude In Melbourne. The point of the second piece, which was clearly lost on YouTube’s half-wit censors, is that I may or may not be nude in this short: you can’t tell because anything that might break the YouTube rules is hidden by a camera… but that didn’t stop the platform from banning it. However, the video is now available again via Vimeo:
<http://www.vimeo.com/7103351>
Due to the hassles I’ve been getting from YouTube, I decided to post my recent video Two Strippers straight to Vimeo:
<http://www.vimeo.com/7217171>
Nonetheless I’m continuing to amuse myself by posting selected pieces to YouTube. Recent additions to my profile there include I Wanna Die In The TV (which realises my desire to bring back the test card back), William Burroughs In Hell (two jokes with some groovy visuals) and In The Street Today – Paris (a psychogeographical exercise inspired in part by the camerawork of Stephen Dwoskin).
Raymond Anderson recently pointed out that ‘you tube’ is a common insult in Scottish playgrounds, and thus a very appropriate name for a platform that has its brains in its arse as far as understanding its own rules on forbidden material goes. While all corporate web 2.0 operations are selectively blind, deaf and dumb, when it comes to appraising content it seems that YouTube is consistently dumb, thick and stupid….
I’ve also found it curious in recent weeks how frequently both YouTube and Facebook have been either down or failing to function properly. While I don’t want to completely ignore those whose web use is largely restricted to corporate social networking platforms, we still need to get it on with web 2.0 software on our own sites: which is, of course, one of the reasons this blog is to be found here.
And talking of corporate platforms that don’t work, the Technorati overhaul last month resulted in some major glitches. My own entry has lost all my fans, comments, and it now links to the homepage of my website instead of this blog (with the result that the feed has lost all my blog entries and all my ‘authority’). I’ve emailed Technorati to tell them this, since I’m unable to do anything about it by logging-in, but of course they’ve done sweet FA about it. I always thought Technorati was a waste of time anyway, and this just serves to underline that!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: I Wanna Die In The TV, In The Street Today - Paris, Nude In Melbourne, Raymond Anderson, Stephen Dwoskin, Stewart Home, Technorati, Two Strippers, Vimeo, Web 2.0, William Burroughs In Hell, YouTube
Posted in film, Web 2.0 | 25 Comments »
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
I finally got around to adding my banned YouTube video 10 Erotic Movies to my Vimeo account. Check it out and marvel at the fact that after 21,442 hits, YouTube banned this for inappropriate content:
<http://vimeo.com/6740722>
Despite this, I’m continuing to post the odd video to YouTube, since that platform has a larger and more active user base than Vimeo. My most recent YouTube posting is Shoreditch Shredding Machine Massacre:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJELyF3yrSs>
But if the countdown from 10 to 1 in 10 Erotic Movies is inappropriate for YouTube, then we really do need to concentrate on building our own sites well away from corporately owned Web 2.o franchises, in order to avoid such blatantly stupid censorshit. The YouTube user base has a reputation for running on a low level of collective intelligence, but my feeling is this simply reflects the way the site is managed.
I’m not a member of YouPorn, RedTube or PornTube or indeed any ‘adult orientated’ Web 2.o site. This is in part because it would be genuinely inappropriate to upload works of mine such as 10 Erotic Movies to platforms dedicated to the free sharing and distribution of hardcore pornography. However, it seems to me that YouTube could resolve some of the issues it has around inappropriate content by plugging YouPorn – so that those searching for or wanting to post hardcore pornography on YouTube went elsewhere. Doing this would demonstrate that those managing YouTube have matured a little, and until the censorship crazy zealots running this platform learn to behave a little bit more reasonably, they can hardly expect a broad swathe of their members to use their ‘service’ in a sensible manner.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 10 Erotic Movies, censorship, censorshit, hardcore, hardcore pornography, pornography, PornTube, RedTube, Shoreditch Shredding Machine Massacre, Stewart Home, Vimeo, YouPorn, YouTube
Posted in film, porn, Web 2.0 | 27 Comments »
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
YouTube has a reputation as the social networking site with the lowest level of collective intelligence among its members. That said, it also has a lot more users than a site like Vimeo, which may sustain reasoned debate but mostly offers the alternative of indifference to the cut and thrust of YouTube. I use both, but I use YouTube more.
Fed up with some of the comments elicited by my explorations of what experimental film might be in a digital age, last month I posted on YouTube a video I’d originally entitled Watching Paint Dry – both as a humorous response to numskulls and as an examination of the aesthetics of boredom. When I uploaded the film I wasn’t that surprised to discover someone else had done a series of videos called Watching Paint Dry, which were instantly linked to mine because of related tags. When I looked at these postings they appeared to be an unchanging coloured screen without a soundtrack. I’d gone to the trouble of painting weathered wood which absorbed a coat of granular solids quickly so that you could literally see it dry in less than ten minutes. I’d also put on a soundtrack and reframed what I’d done by filming it playing back on a camera monitor – so that among other things, you can see the time counted off. The message accompanying the older but fake ‘paint drying’ videos is that most of what’s on YouTube is shit and it is more interesting to ‘watch paint dry’. This is a one-line joke which reproduces the situation it claims to decry.
So far, my paint drying video has proved less popular than much of what I’ve posted, whereas the earlier fake ‘paint drying’ video has far more hits than anything I’ve done. But then I’d have rather made a good film than got 100,000 hits for a one-line joke. And while I intend to continue with the various lines of film-making I’ve been exploring on YouTube, I decided to try a quick change of tack. I’ve just put up a film called Naked Kangaroos which I made during a trip to Melbourne in 2004 when I was working as artist-in-residence at Victorian College of the Arts. While there I went on a couple of tourist trips and filmed other tourists taking pictures. One of the excursions was to Philip Island via a wildlife sanctuary and vineyard, the other was around the harbour, and I threw in a few shots from my 26th floor harbour-side serviced apartment. Naked Kangaroos was not a film I’d planned to make public, but I’m curious to see if this video of tourists proves more popular than a more considered and carefully prepared piece like Watching Paint Dry.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Melbourne, Naked Kangaroos, Philip Island, Stewart Home, Victorian College of the Arts, Viimeo, Watching Paint Dry, Web 2.0, YouTube
Posted in film, Web 2.0 | 19 Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Yoko Ono keeps popping into my life. Last week I was reading and commenting about her on the Old Rope blog. The piece in question particularly grooved me because it featured an embed of Ono’s Bottoms (AKA Four) from YouTube. Here’s a short extract from that blog followed by some of my comments:
“…Ono has taken more than her fair share of shit over the years. Richard Di Lello’s The Longest Cocktail Party, whilst being an illuminating and entertaining insight into the world of Apple, also offers glimpses of the derision leveled at Ono - even from within the Beatles inner circle.
“Though far from perfect, it must be remembered that Ono’s art was challenging and (at times) part of a wider fluxus tradition. As a woman, as an artist and being, gasp, Japanese, Yoko took flak on all fronts…
“Mister Trippy says: I always thought Cut was the best thing Yoko did, the piece where she sits still and the audience cut off her clothes with a pair of scissors. Very powerful. But her work is variable and nothing else is as truly brilliant as Cut. I remember taking in her Whitney Museum show in New York in 1989 and she’d redone these fragile 1960s pieces in bronze, mind-bogglingly terrible. But great to see the Bottoms film again… I love that one too! Didn’t realise it was on YouTube… BTW Yoko is great fun too in her only ‘roughie’ softcore porn film Satan’s Bed from before she met Lennon.
“oldrope says: Agreed, Trip. Cut certainly makes the cut. I believe it was repeated in some form many years later, but that seems a trifle unnecessary in my book.
“I was also a little disappointed with Skyladders inside St Lukes in Liverpool (aka The Bombed Out Church – you actually have to sign a form on the way in saying they are not responsible if it falls in on your head) last year. Though I quite liked the ‘instruments’ for people to play with.
“At the risk of sounding cliched, I groove on her earlier work most.
“I’ve not seen Satan’s Bed, but it sounds like a good Saturday night in.
“Mister Trippy says: I agree with you about the ladders, about the only things I liked in that Liverpool Biennial were the moving trees, but that was coz I could watch local kids being naughty by repeatedly pressing the emergency stop button once they worked out where it was. And it was conveniently close to A Foundation where I was doing a performance. Still Yoko’s work in that Biennial was no worse than say Tracey Emin.
“If you like trashy films then Satan’s Bed is a real treat – out on DVD in the UK so not at all hard to find…. BTW: Did you know that both Yoko and me appear on the recent Intermedium Records double CD compilation Tribute To Gustav Metzger. But that’s the closest I’ve ever got to her….”
The Tribute To Gustav Metzger is also an example of an item missing from my Discogs discography (and indeed Yoko’s too), as discussed on my last blog. The Metzger tribute also features Melissa Logan from Chicks On Speed and was originally done for broadcast on Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bayern 2) in Germany on 12 December 2008. It was curated by Justin Hoffmann. So that’s two things from last year in which I shared a billing with Yoko (the Metzger tribute and the Liverpool Biennial). And right now both Yoko and me are two of more than 100 ‘artists’ from around the world featured in International Fluxhibition #3: Thinking Inside The Box at The Gallery in the E.H. Hereford University Center at the University of Texas at Arlington (on until 31 July). The show is made up mainly of contemporary takes on Flux boxes, and my contribution was accepted despite not meeting the brief. It is Score for Fluxhibition #3 – 2009:
“Don’t send a work to the Fluxshow.
Tell the curator it got lost in the post.
Do it again for the next one.
No art is the best art!”
Returning to Yoko, regardless of whether you do or don’t like the stuff she does now, what you can’t knock is her sincerity. She clearly likes to make and show art, and is as happy doing so in a small gallery as a prestigious Biennial. And while Yoko’s musical output over the years has been variable too, I even find it hard to knock her on this score when you consider that she and Lennon had the good taste to employ Elephant’s Memory as their backing band shortly after arriving in New York City. Let’s do the Power Boogie….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: A Foundation, Apple Records, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Bayern 2, Bottoms, Chicks On Speed, Cut, E.H. Hereford University Center, Elephant's Memory, Fluxus, Four, Gustav Metzger, International Fluxhibition #3, John Lennon, Justin Hoffmann, Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial, Melissa Logan, New York, Old Rope, Power Boogie, Richard Di Lello, Satan's Bed, Score for Fluxhibition #3, Skyladders, St Lukes, Stewart Home, The Gallery, The Longest Cocktail Party, Tracey Emin, Tribute To Gustav Metzger, University of Texas at Arlington, Whitney Museum, Yoko Ono, YouTube
Posted in counterculture, exhibitions, music | 25 Comments »
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
On Sunday afternoon I went to the opening of a show entitled Vicky Gold Brand New Art Superstar at Guy Hilton Gallery in Fournier Street, London E1. It was actually a group show but Vicky Gould got the star billing under her new moniker of Gold, and was the main selling point. Allegedly Gould’s work was produced for her final year fine art BA show this summer, but was censored by Goldsmiths College because it focused on her sexual obsession with a lecturer called Paul Davis.
When I arrived for the opening the exhibition was still being installed. I was introduced to Vicky who was sitting on the floor making chocolate icing, presumably so that she could smear it over her body during her advertised performance. I was told she was going to do a pole dance too. On a back wall there was a large purple heart with Vicky’s name in gold. There were a variety of slogans sprayed across the walls, and some ‘pictures’ carrying statements such as ‘Die Paul Die’, a dancing pole and various other objects. The vibe was gaudy and faux-naive. On a television monitor there was a short film called Me and Teacher, which was also uploaded on YouTube when I wrote this post and to which I’d provided a link. When I checked again after uploading this blog, the film was no longer available; according to YouTube this was ‘due to a copyright claim by Emma Davidson’.
I hung around for an hour and a half at the Guy Hilton opening but nothing was happening. Eventually, Vicky Gould and the other artists whose opening it was wandered off, so I left too. I didn’t really care whether Gould’s story of being obsessed with her tutor was genuine or a hoax. A similar debate still surrounds the Chris Kraus book I Love Dick which came out in 1998. In the Kraus tome, the first person narrator Chris Kraus obsessively pursues cultural studies icon Dick Hebdige. For Kraus, sexual obsession is a vehicle for exploring her own emotions. It doesn’t matter whether the Kraus text is fictional or autobiographical, what counts is that she is able to deconstruct the obsessions she delineates. Gould doesn’t do this, and given that she’s fifteen or twenty years younger than Kraus was when I Love Dick was written, it isn’t really surprising that her ‘art’ looks shallow and unformed in relation to this earlier work.
If Paul Davis really was Gould’s tutor then he should have pointed her in the direction of I Love Dick and advised her not to attempt work of this type until she was much older. As a consequence, what Gould does very successfully is make Goldsmiths College look utterly bankrupt as an educational institution. According to its website, Goldsmiths employs a tutor called Paul Davis, but it isn’t clear to me whether the person appearing in Gould’s videos and other pieces as this individual is a stand-in or the man himself. That doesn’t matter, the representation is of a ‘geek’ who lacks the social and intellectual skills needed by anybody who is going to teach. If Gould is fictionalising her experiences and Paul Davis is not really anything like the person he is presented as being here, then this work is a cutting-edge example of institutional critique. Otherwise not only Gould, but also Davis and the college that employ him cut very sorry figures, although placed in a gallery context this sad mess still functions as inadvertent ‘institutional critique’.
These days most people see artists like Andrea Fraser – the public face of institutional critique – as terminally unhip. If Davis or whoever taught Gould at Goldsmiths pointed her in the direction of the institutional critique movement, then they cunningly facilitated this student’s lampooning of a college that taught her art not wisely but too well. On the other hand, it looks equally possible that Gould is the rather sad result of very poor teaching. So is Goldsmiths a world-class training ground for double-bluffing and theoretically astute art hipsters? Or is it simply a money-grabbing business that is utterly shameless about the substandard eduction it offers it students? Whichever answer you pick, I’m sure you’ll choose it in a knowing post-modern sort of way!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andrea Fraser, Chris Kraus, Dick Hebdige, east London, Emma Davidson, Fournier Street, Goldsmiths College, Guy Hilton Gallery, I Love Dick, institutional critique, London, Me and Teacher, New Cross, Paul Davis, south London, Vicky Gold, Vicky Gold Brand New Art Superstar, Vicky Gould, YouTube
Posted in culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 34 Comments »
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
On Thursday night I took in the opening of the Hoppy (John Hopkins) exhibition Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary at Idea Generator on Chance Street in Shoreditch. The displayed photos date from the early and mid-sixties. Mostly they seemed to be straightforward examples of photojournalism and celebrity portraiture. There were also some freak graphics by people other than Hoppy, but connected to him via his involvement with the underground newspaper International Times. So what Idea Generator presents us with is very much an official history of one phase of the London counterculture. That said, it looked a little odd in east London, when so much of what was on display depicted west London more than 40 years ago.
The opening was too packed to be able to see the images properly, but what most interested me was coverage of ‘ban-the-bomb’ demonstrations. I didn’t clock Hoppy’s Doctor Steve Abrams portraits which I’ve roundly criticised elsewhere (do a word search to get to Abrams and Hoppy on this page) for: “mimicking the depiction of male doctors and female hysterics in nineteenth-century medical paintings. Since some viewers were inevitably going to make a connection between these publicity japes and the earlier imagery upon which they so strikingly draw, Abrams left himself wide open to criticism for generating negative perceptions of both women and recreational drug users.” If these problematic images were on display, they were hidden in one of the nooks it was impossible for me to enter because of the crowds already there.
I couldn’t see enough of the show to make any real judgement of it; and beyond Joe Boyd and Hoppy himself, I spotted very few familiar faces from the sixties. I did manage to grab hold of Malcolm Dickson from Street Level Gallery in Glasgow, and as we needed to catch up, we ducked out for refreshments elsewhere. So I guess I’ll go back and see the show properly later, it is on until 19 July. The place was just too mobbed, with endless flashbulbs going off and professional film-makers getting in my way, to be pleasant.
Moving on, I hadn’t posted anything on YouTube for more than six months until yesterday because I was fed up with being censored on that site. As I’ve said elsewhere: “YouTube actually removed a parody of a Fluxus film for violating their rules. This was a countdown from 10 to 1, no images in it at all, just numerals. Presumably the problem was the joke title 10 Erotic Movies – it had more than twenty thousand hits before being taken down by the authoritarians who run that platform. If YouTube won’t allow a film like this, then Web 2.0 is a joke and we need to move on to Web 2.1, where we control the sites we’re posting on!”
But right now there is a new video of mine up on YouTube entitled Does Modern Art Give You A Headache? Check it out, and see how it emerged from an earlier blog on this site: Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org - you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 10 Erotic Movies, Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary, ban-the-bomb, Chance Street, Does Modern Art Give You A Headache, east London, Fluxus, Hoppy, Idea Generator, International Times, Joe Boyd, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins, John Hopkins, London, Malcolm Dickson, Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video, Shoreditch, Steve Abrams, Street Level Gallery, Web 2.1, west London, YouTube
Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 26 Comments »