Sunday 18 January 2009

2009: In Blogs

Well here goes, first blog of 2009, and I'm actually writing this from my new iPhone Internet toy device. I'm still gettingused to it so that should explain any weird spelling mistakes.

Not had the best start to the year all in all. The shingles were swiftly followed by insane toothache from a bit of turkey, extreme frustrating disappointment, then had the tooth out and got dry socket. Fortunately it seems to all be gone now, so I can eat a d shave and laugh and stuff so I can finally think about getting into 2009.

Hopefully there'll be a lot of good things this year, got plans for lots of video work, vjing and the like. A bit more travel hopefully and I might actually get round to sorting my life out. Possibly.

Got an email form a guy I know who is film officer for aberdeen and he's looking into setting up a film festival for the city which aounxs like a pretty good idea all in all. There seems like big scope fpr collaboration so I popped along the proposal I outlined for the av festival from last year and he seemed quite up for incorporating that into the scheme. Hopefully it'll all come together and get something good going on.

(Just to note, I've now switched to my laptop because typing on the iPhone was too damn slow for all I have to write)

I've also noticed how many times I;ve written hopefully, so I'm going to try not to use that word again.

Preparations for Cake are going well, get the next issue back from the printer on monday and we're in talks about some sort of offbeat launch event in a field or something. Might be a bit disastrous in february, but we'll see what happens. Martin's issue seems to be coming along quite nicely, good list of artists, he had a photoshoot for the cover the other day with the big block logo he made all by himself, Mark's one is to come in soon which, knowing him and his updated website being anything to go by it will be nothing short of spectacular. So no pressure on Brady.

Inviting more people to curate at the moment to take the list into next year. A few interested parties and waiting for replies for others.

I had the idea before Christmas of trying to update this regularly, starting on new years day. This has, obviously not happened but I will try and update this a bit more regularly in the coming months. I've got a proposal in for a small residency thing and should be using this to document that, through vimeo and twitter and stuff as well.

Also, should mention something quite sad which happened today which was the sad passing of Tony Hart, he may be a butt of many jokes among artists but that joke mostly comes from a warm hearted admiration of the man. Many were inspired by Tony's shows, which were innovative at the time and provided an interesting outlet for educating children in the basics of art.

He also provided a platform for kids watching his show to have their work shown through the Gallery section of his programmes, providing much needed encouragement and inspiration to young budding artists. He was also responsible for Morph, the little orange plasticine man who lived among art materials which injected the show with light hearted humour and an inspired approach to expressing the imagination and possibilities that lie amongst the artists pallete.

It was deeply saddening to hear, back in September that he had been forced to give up painting and drawing after two strokes, it was a hard thing to hear that someone who had made his entire life about art and encouraging and teaching generations of young people about art wasn't able to do this anymore. It led me to think about my own vocation and how important all aspects of art are to me and how I could cope with not being able to do that any more, which is why I found it so upsetting.

I think Tony Hart's passing not long after being deprived of what was most important to him highlights how important artistic expression is to those of us who follow that path and how lost we would be if forced to stop. This aside the death of Tony Hart was a shock and he will be sorely missed by those generations of artists inspired by his programmes, but in those generations of artists, and in the other programmes inspired by the likes of Hart Beat, his legacy will live on and continue.


After that, well I'l up the tempo a bit with things that have been amusing me recently;

1. iPhone (It may already have been implied)
2. The Mighty Boosh live on friday.
3. The British Government's attempts at solving the financial crisis (ooh Political)(But they really are just stupid)

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