Here is the new Nic James mix-tape recorded for his Saturday night residency at POGO. Download it here (YSI) it's cool.

Tittsworth feat Kid Sister and Pase Rock – WTF

Fully Fitted/xxxchange – 100 million

Wiley – Wearing My Rolex

Santogold – Shove It (Switch mix)

Steve Angelo & Laidback Luke - be (dj Sega remix)

Evil nine – All the cash (Mumdance Remix)

A-Trak – Say Woah

South Rakkas Crew – Get Mad Again (dj Sega remix)

Elephant Man – We Ketch Dem

Fambo – Pon Di Pole

Mr. Evil – She Waaah

Sean Paul – Don’ tease me

Thunderheist – Jerk it

Say Wut – Go Part 2

Top Billin – Starlyte

Treasure Fingers – Cross the Dancefloor

Treasure Fingers – Cross the Dancefloor (Curses remix)

The Count and Sinden – Beeper (Fake Blood Mix)

The Count and Sinden – Beeper (A-Track Mix)

Sunship feat Warrior Queen – Quits (Sinden mix)

Lil’ Wayne – A Milli (Scottie B)

Skream – Midnight Request Line

Benga & Coki – Night

Dizzee Rascal feat Bun B & Pimp C – Where’s da G’s

Dude & Nem feat Twista– Watch My Feet (remix)

Jay-Z feat Bun B & Pimp C – Big Pimpin

Coco Tea – Barak Obahma

Anthony B – God Above Eveything

MIA feat Bun B & Rich Boy – Paper Planes (remix) 

Season Five of The Wire is coming to an end on TG4. I keep missing episodes but I just got the DVD in the post so I'll be filling in the gaps over the weekend. I am really looking forward to watching it despite having discovered some distressing plot points regarding Prop Joe, Omar Little and Jimmy McNulty. I am currently attempting 'Wire-amnesia' and expect I will be left aghast when I actually watch the scenes...

David Simon was in Dublin recently giving a talk about the Wire at the IFI. I would have liked to have attended but at the time I was getting a bit tired of hearing about the Dickensian brilliance of the Wire, although, it would have been great to hear Simon discuss non-Wire projects - he is an inspirational writer.


Below is a clip from the Washington Post as part of Down to 'The Wire': It's a Wrap for Gritty TV Series - the full article can be read here

Trellick Tower, West London. Designed by Erno Goldfinger
Photo by A.M. (aug 2008)

Ghislain Poirier released Cosmopolitan Bass (Zshare) here on September 9th. I was reminded of this mix from my previous post Brooklyn/Crumlin. The mix brings back, fond memories of Carnival (and more) as it has an eclectic mix of hip-hop/ragga/bass and more from all over the world : Montréal, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Jamaïca, Sweden, France, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Haïti, Barbados, Trinidad, UK, Senegal etc. (ra ra)

Awful video but a track that I have liked for a while. When I am at home in Rialto, listening to it, I like to exchange the word Brooklyn to Crumlin.
I do prefer the wonderful Ghislain Poirier's remix of the track - have a listen here.
Boomp3.com

I took this photograph, after my sea-swim last Sunday. The sun went behind the clouds and the sky had a menacing air. There was also a group of teens in the water. I could not help thinking of a water version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre or a scene from George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, where zombies emerge from the sea. Below is one of my favourite You Tube clips, an excerpt from the Italian director Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2.

The Mona Lisa Curse, the first film in Channel 4's three-part Art and Money season, is a timely polemic by internationally renowned art critic Robert Hughes that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. I watched The Mona Lisa Curse before the fantastic Whale night on BBC 4. I did go for a swim in the sea earlier in the day - so i'm not a total culture/couch potato. Robert Hughes does not understand Damien Hirst and harshly critisised him and the buyers of his work. He also cannot comprehend the amount of money his work sells for. Hughes turned a millionaire/buyer of Hirst's and Warhol's work into a babbling teen unsure of why he even purchased the said artists works. This was entertaining to watch but I'm sure the buyer had the last laugh as Robert Hughes exited the room - he has $$$$$$$$$$, there does not appear to be a recession among the rich. Here is Germaine Greer's response to The Mona Lisa Curse which was featured on todays Guardian

Germaine Greer Note to Robert Hughes:
Bob, dear, Damien Hirst is just one of many artists you don't get
Germaine Greer
Monday September 22 2008
The Guardian


Watching Robert Hughes shape up to Damien Hirst has been fun, but it would have been more fun if Hughes had been able to lay a glove on his quarry. The critic swung wildly but the artist was always beyond his reach. Hughes claims to be astounded that Hirst's 35ft statue Virgin Mother could be worth £5m and yet be made by someone "with so little facility". What is touching about Hughes's despair is that he thinks that artists still make things. It's a long time since Hirst actually made an artwork with his own hands. A more cogent criticism of his installations might be that the quality of the craftsmanship demanded by Hirst is really not very good. The shelves and cabinets in Pharmacy (1992) were sloppily fitted and poorly finished, but they still sold for £11m. The first time I saw Mother and Child Divided (1993), with bubbles of gas clinging to the decomposing carcasses of cow and calf, and took a good look at the structure of their vitrines, goosebumps stood up on my skin. I had a momentary vision of the whole setup exploding, showing the onlookers with floods of formaldehyde, shards of plate glass and a blizzard of jet-propelled cow parts.

Hirst is quite frank about what he doesn't do. He doesn't paint his triumphantly vacuous spot paintings - the best spot paintings by Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard. His undeniable genius consists in getting people to buy them. Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative - revolutionary even. The whole stupendous gallimaufrey is a Vanitas, a reminder of futility and entropy. Hughes still believes that great art can be guaranteed to survive the ravages of time, because of its intrinsic merit. Hirst knows better. The prices his work fetches are verifications of his main point; they are not the point. No one knows better than Hirst that consumers of his work are incapable of getting that point. His dead cow is a lineal descendant of the Golden Calf. Hughes is sensitive enough to pick up the resonance. "One might as well be in Forest Lawn [the famous LA cemetery] contemplating a loved one," he shouts at Hirst's calf with the golden hooves - auctioned for £9.2m - but does not realise it is Hirst who has put that idea into his head. Instead he asserts that there is no resonance in Hirst's work. Bob dear, the Sotheby's auction was the work.

I have known Hughes and liked him all my adult life, but I have also disapproved of him pretty consistently. I was present when he was the after-dinner speaker at the Royal Academy dinner four years ago, when he was so dismissive of any art that was not drawing, painting or carving, that I suspected him of tailoring his speech to fit what he took to be the conservatism of the academicians. I could hardly imagine that he had turned his back on all the most important movements in 20th-century art or that he was still in love with the figure of the great master whose sensibility is finer, sentiment more noble, hand more divinely driven than those of the rest of us lesser mortals. No wonder Jake and Dinos Chapman put so much energy into defacing Goya, I thought, and stumped off home.

Everybody loves it when Hughes goes off on a rant about the schlock of the new, but he is too easily seduced into blaming the wrong people. A Hughes label is crafted to stick fast to its victim. As long as that's only Julian Schnabel, who is gifted enough to survive both over-valuation and under-valuation, there's not much harm done. Hughes's love of Lucian Freud is a different matter, based as it seems to be in a perception of kindredness of spirit. He denies any pretension to moral superiority, but his condemnation of art he refuses to understand is entirely expressed in moral terms, which leaves no alternative but to see Hughes promoting himself and his favourites as morally superior. What he is most impressed by in Freud's work is, after all, its laboriousness. Hughes doesn't understand a good deal of art - doesn't get Basquiat or Baselitz, for example. What is being presented as aesthetic sensibility is, in fact, moralism, of a kind that has always bedevilled innovative artists. Sorry, Bob, but you're a stuckist, after all.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008

I am giving a talk on 'how music videos are influencing my current collaborative practice' at Studio 468, St. Andrews Community Centre, Rialto, Dublin tomorrow at 7.30pm. This is part of Culture Night. Expect a discussion about Len Lye to M.I.A. and the phenomonon of certain dance moves being uploaded to You Tube i.e. The Rolex Sweep, Dutty Wine, Baltimore club dance moves etc. For more information about Dublin Culture Night visit www.culturenight.ie

I have been awarded a studio project residency at Temple Bar Galleries and Studios in Temple Bar, Dublin. I moved in last week and already feel very spoilt. I have been mostly reading, listening to records and dancing to all my freshest MP3s, on my i-station. There are residential apartments directly across from the studio and a 'ta Ta ta' tourist shop. If anyone has seen me dancing, hopefully you got a good laugh - I probably look like Tom from Sweathearts rather than Amanda. Serious work (not workouts) coming soon - the dancing, is just part of my 'settling in' period.

I discovered today that Amanda Blank is part of Sweathearts (courtesy of Climaxxx) an imaginative trio, that will try anything for good comedic publicity. They posted some great workout videos last year. I think other band members - Rose and Tom - are the brains behind this project - Sweathearts - Amanda appears blank (sorry) in all of the sweat workout clips - a replacement Amanda also appears in the final work out installment. Below is a clip of their rehearsal art space in Philadelphia and my favourite sweat work out session. One hopes that Amanda will keep doing her own thing, pushing boundaries with her rhymes and dirty reason - I will be disappointed if she goes down the novelty art route. However, Sweathearts are much better than bands with similar traits (e.g. Noah and The Whale) as they are genuinely more fun - however, I just simply like my sound, a bit rougher.

I actually found this on Mad Decent whilst looking at photographs from Major Lazer. Diplo is obsessed with it almost as much as “I like Turtles”. Expect to hear it on a future mixtape from Diplo or perhaps it is the humble beginnings of a new hipster trend? Who can kicks burger higher? Coming to The Bernard Shaw soon....

Deadliest Catch was my nickname at the Electric Picnic due to my attire at night - my jacket kept out countryside dampness and helped during the flash flood on Sunday night - I was dry. I had not heard of my name sake - the Discovery Channel programme Deadliest Catch - until last weekend - it follows events that happen aboard fishing boats in the Bering Sea during the Alaskan king crab and Opilio crab fishing seasons. A fifth season has just been commisioned.