In the past few weeks I have noticed a revival of the Funkadelic/Parliament vision of the futuristic. The DFA remix of M.I.A.'s Paper Planes, while more reminiscent of an updated clash than p-funk, has laser beam shooting effects instead of the gun shots that you hear in the original. I watched a random episode of The Mighty Boosh and the character Old Gregg had a Funkadelic funk. Old Gregg's story of how he got this funk was portrayed by an animation akin to the illustrations that are seen on the album covers of funkadelic records. The video below is Snoop Dogg having a great old funkadelic time. Hardcore fans think he is selling out by using a vocoder but I think it's genius.

Snoop Dogg 'Sexual Eruption/Sexual Seduction' (2007/2008)


Funkadelic 'I Got A Thing, You Got A Thing, Everybody's Got A Thing' 1970

I got a train last night from Cork to Dublin. Usually I would listen to some podcasts such as This American Life which intermingles stories that are true and some which are fictitious. Last night I decided to watch Control (2007 Anton Corbijn) on a 2 inch square monitor - sacrilege! David Lynch (a priest of cinema) believes that

'..you will never in a trillion years experience the film - you think you will have experienced it - but you will be cheated - its such a saddness...'

This quote is from the iphone ad (see below) in relation to watching a film on an iphone - here I am applying it to my ipod, who's screen is even smaller than an iphone. In Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century there was over 30 cinemas on O' Connell St. People went to the cinema religiously - at a guess around 3 times a week (now there is only 1 cinema on O Connell Street). Going to the cinema was built into people's everyday lives, now we frequent the cinema if we really feel a film is deserving of such an environment. Technology brought this change - Video and DVD's made it easier for people to simply stay at home. Subsequently, we have Apple products which are now defining how we watch films.

Control is a beautifully photographed film and I am actually saddened that I did not see it when it was screening in cinemas. However, my experience of watching it on an ipod and on a moving train, brought a strange sense of intimacy between me, what I was watching and what I was holding. You can wholly participate in a film through the sound of it - hearing Sam Reily (Ian Curtis) recite some of his poems was quite beautiful and this was embelished through the wearing of headphones. At one point in the film Sam Reily recounts a love letter from Ian Curtis to Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara) - something distracted me and I looked out the window. The lights of an empty funfair had caught my eye - I wondered where I was. Beside the fun fair was a flood lit stadium with a group of men striding in unison up and down the pitch - all at the same time i was listening to this poem. A kind of surreal moment but something I would not experience in the cinema - everyday life actually intertwining with a film. I may have escaped visually from the screen but what i was seeing outside seemed to fit in with what I was listening to.

Lynch does have a point, however, in my opinion there are obviously new methods of engaging with film. In the future, it is likely that we will see ground breaking film stemming from the generation that have an inborn connection to their hi-end MP3 Players.

Girls Rock! is a documentary just released in the States focusing on young girls in a Rock Camp in Oregon. The camps main aim is to learn Rock DIY style - forming bands, writing songs and building community.
The Rock camp provides a welcome break for girls being pressurised to conform and a temporary reprieve from being sexualized. The act of picking up a a guitar and making noise becomes a revolutionary act. The Majorette groups I have seen in the last few months may not be picking up a guitar but essentially they are picking up their specific tools - batons and pom pom poms and performing and representing their local community. The majority of their audience at competitions are women so I think they have a sense of good body-image. Through forthcoming interviews I will discover what they really think.

The Youtube video below is an interview with the directors: Shane King and Arne Johnson.

Roxy Cottontail is Blonde Ambition endorsing Hilary Clinton. 

This is old news but something I quite like - M.I.A. has the same shoes as The Rialto Twirlers' wear to perform. I am going to twirling/majorettte practice in a few hours just to chat with Denise the co-ordinator and show her my sketch animation to see what she thinks. After the disastrous baton twirling competition a couple of weeks ago they are now back on form and using Pom Poms for the next competition in June. I am at the stage where I realise this is going to be a very long project. I am also beginning to think I need to narrow down what I want to achieve - and focus on making a documentary. This is going to be quite a challenge - as I am one person but when needs be I am positive I can get help. With all the footage I am sure I can make experimental shorts at my leisure. This shoot with M.I.A. was shot in Kehinde Wiley's studio. His paintings are based on photographs of urban black men who Wiley sees on the street. Dressed in street clothes, they are asked to assume poses from the paintings of Renaissance masters, such as Titian and Tiepolo the result being a fusion of hip-hop and art history. This juxtaposition, classical vs. contemporary has been seen before, most noticeably Tom Hunter's photography work 'Living in Hell and other Stories' where staged photographs are derived from Renaissance paintings whilst being influenced by stories from the Hackney Gazette. However, I got a funny feeling that Wiley is doing something different.

I love Amanda Blank (I was brought to Troca Bhrama in Glasgow last Summer just to see her rhyme and sound nasty). I have seen this video a few months ago on Spank Rock's myspace - its a collaboration between Spank Rock and Benny Blanco aka Bangers and Cash. They also have a tune B.O.O.T.A.Y. which links in nicely with the Cheer music I am listening to regarding my project with The Rialto Twirlers - I doubt that that I will have them chanting B.O.O.T.A.Y. but it does have that school yard chant to perfection and the fast rhythm is worthy of cheerleading counts. All the girls in Loose did the video for free (apparently it looks good on porn resumes). However, it is a much more natural way of portraying a tired and tested aesthetic (hip-hop men flanked by scantily clad women). Amanda Blank looks uncomfortable in the setting which is one reason why I love M.I.A.'s Boyz video - she is flanked by men and a neon len lye aesthetic but it is her words 'how many boyz does it take to make a war' which makes you take notice or redeems her ranting on about boys (it is evident that there is a whole set of different rules for women but I am not going to discuss it here).

I have posted the two videos - B.O.O.T.A.Y. with Santogold and Loose featuring Amanda Blank. The Bangers and Cash EP is on repeat in my studio.

Works by Peter Campus can currently be viewed at Albion, London until April 25th. This is an exhibition I must see when I visit London next month. After all the excitement of the Irish Oscar win things have now settled down.
The Hot 8 Brass Band were great but the support act North Strand Klezmer Band were even better. I attended a conference and exhibition Art in the Life World where the two key words were : autonomy and instrumentalism.
I attended a seminar After Thoughts at The Green on Red Gallery. Here my fascination with Dublin city, and the buildings that have formed it - most notably The Central Bank - was greedily fed with a screening of The Big Bank, a 16mm film commissioned by John Sisk & Son Ltd. which documented the actual construction of The Central Bank with a disco infused sound track and cutaways to computers that were bigger than my own bathroom.
I watched Juno (its ok) played Lego Star Wars on Playstation 2, archived some 7s into sections - 60s+70s, 80s+90s, 2000s and Dancehall and finally watched the tour de force that is Daniel Day Louis in There Will be Blood.
Pics soon - I'm finished.