small ritual

moscow again [and again and again]

i've been to moscow three times in the last month or so working on a new project, and when i'm here i've been working late night after night, so i've had no energy for blogging. there were no photographs because the work laptop i was carrying, being windows :P was very heavy and i didn't have strength or space to lug my big SLR around as well. so this trip i bought a nikon coolpix s700 to stick in my pocket. it doesn't do a bad job, although i miss the wider angle on my SLR lens - struggling to get the whole church in across the street when i could have easily made it with the SLR - also a factor when shooting video out the taxi window, although the quality is much higher than my phone - something which isn't apparent in the compressed versions on youtube. [the other challenge of shooting video in moscow is that one is either bouncing along at 50mph or at a complete standstill for ten minutes at a time in a traffic jam between trucks.]

when in moscow one always has to work at a thousand miles an hour, because of the limited trip duration, so i tend to crash mentally and physically when i get home. but it's not all slog though - here's a glamorous moment in the city space bar [stills here]

the view wasn't as good as it could have been, because it was snowing. bar manager bek narzibekov, seen putting the finishing touches to a cocktail and explaining it to the customers, is now recovering after being poisoned, probably by a business rival. the young guy who grins at the camera is my work colleague dimitry, who knew bek when he was one of london's top bartenders/managers.

grace videos

a couple of video clips of the first and second parts of last night's grace service, 'elijah in the desert'. sadly i didn't get warning of the startling sound and video cut-up in the third part or i'd have filmed that too.

that's jenny baker on the bike demonstrating her triathlon fitness.

the second part of the service moves to the cafe for food and drink. roly miller is the horizontal dj.

the toys' christmas

this is the best window in oxford street this year. traditional, but delightful and popular.

peace labyrinth promo video

the straw-bales christmas labyrinth created by side door returns to christchurch this year - check out the promo video - it'll make you smile! great use of the stick people.

the crack

couple of videos of 'shibboleth' at tate modern:

it's behaviourally interesting as much as anything, as so often with turbine hall installations. the insides of the crack look too fake for my liking, but it's amusing enough. you could lose a phone down there - presumably they have a way of cleaning stuff out, or maybe not - time will tell. adam suggested scattering LED toys that would twinkle in the depths. how about flyers? love notes? prayers? use the crack as a labyrinth path?

greenbelt 2007 - coldcut

first word on greenbelt - coldcut were stunning - and certainly better than the last time i saw them in london. a few video clips here. there was a devastating version of 'the lunatics have taken over the asylum' but my phone was acting up so i just had to give it my unmediated attention. run dmc, 'paid in full', rage against the machine featured too.

definitely the highest point of the festival - all downhill from here.

blind light

spent saturday evening in antony gormley's exhibition blind light at the hayward. photos here and vids below - on my phone of course though i would have loved to photograph it properly. bear in mind i was keeping out of sight of the attendants.

first up is 'allotment II' - concrete cases derived from the bodily measurements of named individuals of a community in sweden. i held the phone in portrait format, and can't find a way of turning the thing upright - you'll have to turn your head or the screen.

second is my experience inside 'blind light' itself - a glass chamber filled with dense fog, brightly lit, so that the visibility is almost zero. the camera has averaged the brightness, the grey fog should really be bright white like a white computer screen. i could see far less than the camera - the people were never that visible to me - but this may have been my glasses!

i enjoyed the exhibition, but my enjoyment feels at odds with gormley's intentions. it's fun being lost in a maze of friendly concrete robots. it's fun groping about in the fog, and watching other people doing the same. space station is metal lego or a transformer. the matrices [no pictures possible] are clever and pretty and float about like astronauts. but fun or humour are never acknowledged in gormley's explanations. faced with 'mothers pride', most of us laugh and think "he ate his shape out of sliced bread!'. but the explanation is about survival of nuclear war. 'drawn' is apparently about spatial uncertainty, but most of us are thinking 'these figures are propped up on their willies!" does gormley feel that acknowledging its humour [as hirst would do] would undermine his work?

gormley's work is about the human body in space, to the point of monomania - it was disappointing to find that space station resolves itself into - you've guessed it - a giant body. the body casts are the least interesting works here. these are casts of gormley's own body, and he has a curiously generic body. it has no obvious disproportions - no fat arse or skinny legs. for a man in his fifties he is in good shape, and yet he is also not visibly toned. i wonder how middle-aged spread would have affected his art - a pot belly on those casts would certainly take them from abstract human to particular human. maybe gormley would not have used his body, or continued to use it, if it had 'characteristics'. maybe he wouldn't be happy exposing himself in that way. as it is, his self-exposure is curiously anonymous.

Tu-144

while adding the moscow taxi videos to youtube, it threw up this clip of the tupolev tu-144, the soviet supersonic airliner:

which reminded me that i have a tu-144 publicity brochure which my uncle brought back from russia in the 1970s.

in some ways i prefer the look of the tu-144 to concorde - the central engines, the angularity. it's not clear why it flew for such a short time - issues of cost, and safety i presume. did it ever live up to the brochure?

youtube stuff not working

the main one was too long for youtube - i've put an edited version up. the quality's suffered though through being edited in imovie, exported in a different format, then whatever youtube does.

next time i go to moscow i will take a camcorder and do this better.

moscow taxi videos

which could. i guess, be a new genre.

Download MOV00143.3GP [16.3Mb]

the first is a 15-minute journey from the apartment into central moscow on tuesday evening to view the new office behind the TASS building - you'll recognise where i took photographs. the route takes us across the river, past the kremlin, down novy arbat and the casinos from the january movie, and through 18th and 19th century streets past churches and mansions. the beginning is a little frustrating, we got stuck in traffic on the bridge - it's hard to keep a video interesting when stuck in traffic, but i didn't want to break it. the taxi radio soundtrack makes up for it. taxi radio is so much part of the distinctive atmosphere of a city, for travellers - the local sound.

Download MOV00189.3GP [5.2Mb]

the second video is part of the journey to the airport through the suburbs. you'll recognise some of the places i took photos in march. i made the mistake of having a window open - the phone picks up the rumble of wind rather than the radio. it's strange that the human ear works the other way round - we hear the music and not the wind. is this how the ear works or is it how the brain processes? the wind rumble spoiled another video clip, in which the taxi radio played 'boogie wonderland' as we drove past the statue of lenin. it's almost worth restaging.

by the way i've kept the videos small because they look better sharper. enlarging them seems to lose more than it gains.