Nam June Paik @ Tate Liverpool

Today whilst Wyn was at her writing course, instead of doing the usual trawl round the shops killing time and talking to the guys in Probe, I decided to put our Tate membership to good use and visit Tate Liverpool to see the Nam June Paik exhibition. I missed the private view in December because it was the day the snow came down in a rather spectacular fashion, so today was the time to play catch up. I didn't really know what to expect as he wasn't someone who had really touched my radar before, I knew he was a pioneer of video as an art form and I'd seen pictures of some of his larger installations but never really read up on him.

I have to say I was impressed, for me to spend an hour and a half on one floor and a bit of the Tate means I did a lot of looking, some of the larger pieces demanded that amount of time and what first seemed like some junk and TV's put together to show some deliberately wacky video's actually made some sort of sense and conveyed a meaning. The connection with Zen and Buddhism is obvious from some of his earlier works, as is his theme of humanising technology which is especially obvious in the robot series. The robot series of pieces were among my personal favourites on display as was the TV Garden (quite a few TVs showing the same video whilst surrounded by tropical plants.

As an exhibition it provoked many thoughts and as a newcomer to the artist, I certainly felt enlightened and understand his work as a result of the exhibition. Some of the sound from some pieces leaks into areas it shouldn't (the Tate have tried to cut the sound out in one place - credit to them there) but in others it is a distraction (when watching documentary videos for example). That said, its a minor criticism and I might go back again next week and take the free audio tour this time. Its a great exhibition and for non members it costs £6-60 (concs £5-50 - under 12's free)  and runs until the 13th of March. Well worth a visit if you like that kind of thing.

Left we have a photo I took with my iphone and the Hipstamatic App which I'm really getting to like, its the Pier head (now mainly obscured by the black shiny monolithic new office block at Mann Island) taken from the Albert Dock on my walk back to the
car park from the Tate.

Onto footballing matters, the Villa have signed two players since I last blogged, the Cameroonian international central midfielder Jean II Makoun who hopefully will adjust quickly to life in the Premier League and a man who needs no introduction Darren Bent one of the highest scorers in the league in the last few seasons. We've paid a reported £18mil rising to £24mil for Bent a transfer and figure which asks as many questions as it answers (I'm not sure what the answer to many of those questions is). On the back of those two signings (and still the possible signing of Charley Adam from the Donkey Lashers (AKA Blackpool) I'm going to go to the Man Citeh game on Saturday despite the stupid o'clock kick off time (Mr Murdoch I hate you) and the state of the railways in this country. I wasn't going to bother but I've found out I can still get there and back after work and be home in time for sleeping before the next day though I might have to miss the last couple of minutes to catch the train. Lets hope it's worth it.

Sorry for those regular readers of this piffle (thats you Marcus!) if this hasn't been up dated for a while, I've been so busy theres been nothing to say. Hopefully there'll be more time soon.

Much Adam About Nothing

First of all the Villa news and gossip. Villa have been linked today to Blackpool's lynchpin central midfielder Charlie Adam, we've apparently had a £2.5 mil bid turned down. Also turned down was the £4mil bid we made for Jean Makoun from Lyon, again another central midfielder. Why the hell are we bidding for central midfield players? I thought we were supposed to be cutting out all this wasteful expenditure on players wages who basically don't play. We already have nine central midfielders in Petrov, NRC, Pires, Ireland, Delph, Hogg, Gardner, Bannan, Herd why do we need another, it isn't a priority surely? What we desperately need is someone to stick the ball in the back of the net and a left back but Houllier appears to want to compete with Spurs to see who can have the most Central midfielders in the squad. Sure some of ours could be leaving but we wouldn't get much money for most of them, either too old, too near contracts end or not established enough (and one is a fruitcake) for them to raise much in the way of fees. Houllier does appear to like central midfielders though, so much so he put four on the bench in one game recently, though I digress. I've seen it said today that we've bid for Adam to try and force Lyon's hand over Makoun (they are said to want £8mil - when they only wanted £6ml in the summer) but I can't see it. I think we just moved on when it was clear Lyon wanted more than we were prepared to offer. The other rumour of the day was an odd story about us getting involved in some sort of a swap with Newcastle, us getting the full-time nutter, part time footballer Joey Barton and them taking NRC off our hands. Hopefully you can file that one under "made up rumour"

In other news Gerard Houllier had admitted he made a mistake in playing Pires too early in his Villa career which was a very odd thing to say on a number of levels. Its odd because its actually an admittance that he did something wrong, must say I've rarely if ever heard that from him. Secondly it's tantamount to an admission that he doesn't actually know what he's doing. Pires is still way too slow but Houllier thinks he's improved, not sure which game you were watching on Saturday but Pires was almost anonymous but if you now think you played him to early then why why oh why did you get him in the first place? The day he signed, we had a reserve game, surely you could have asked him to play in that, if you'd done that you'd have seen that he runs like he's about 50, he is simply too slow for the modern game. We supposedly signed him because we had an injury crisis and its only now you think that Pires is fit, just as the injury crisis is over! Please don't bother playing him again we've got kids there that need games under their belts and wasn't the whole point of the new direction for Villa under Houllier to be using the kids and growing the club "organically." If we keep bringing in central midfielders at this rate the kids will never get a game.

Anyway enough of the football. Yesterday we had a few guests round for a meal and we drunk far far too much and ate ourselves stupid. A good time was had by all, though I suspect everyone is suffering for it today. I certainly was but I've perked up enough to write this at least, well at the second time of asking, I deleted it once by accident! (I'm blaming that on the hangover too!)

Onto things musical now and an album recommended to me by my good mate Pete who is a sort of musical taste doppelganger of mine. Our tastes are so similar its often scary. Anyway Blonde Redhead's album Penny Sparkle has been out a few months now by all accounts but its new to me and although a little one paced it definitely has its place. Its a downtempo chilled synthy little affair with aurally pleasing laidback spacey vocal delivery. Standout tracks are Will There Be Stars (see below), Penny Sparkle, My Plants are Dead and Spain. Its not going to be everyones taste but I find it fills a gap in that when I want to listen to something slow and mellow that isn't going to overpower me and interfere in my thought process then this album is my current album of choice. Thats about all for today, hopefully back tomorrow

  Blonde Redhead - Will There Be Stars by Paulo Vieira

Sheffield Steel or was it?

Ok I've been to Sheffield today, been to see a football match, but hey I do that whenever I can. Villa were playing Sheffield United in the third round of the FA Cup, we were our usual unorganised selves but in the first half we just went 2-0 up without trying. Debutant loanee Kyle Walker got the first and living up to his name, he literally just walked through the Blades defence and passed the ball into the back of the net. His girlfriend, stood two rows in front of us, in a fur hat, just "couldent believveee itttt!" in some foreign dialect from below Watford Gap services, Walker to his credit, didn't celebrate the goal as he's a born and bred blades fan. We scored another through Albrighton on the half hour (yes that kid that Houllier keeps dropping that is in fact probably our best player this season) and all seemed rosy if a little pedestrian up to half time.

The second half however seemed to be Villa jumping out of second gear into neutral, combined with the Sheff Utd team realising that they were meant to be playing football and they had given Villa too much respect in the first half. Villa were under threat, we were losing it in the middle of the park and with Houllier playing his patented 4-6-0 formation we had no-one up front for our players to aim at? Still not sure how the centre forward playing left wing is meant to get us goals but hey, its only the cup. The ref clearly had designs on grabbing the headlines today though as he seemed to be making the rules up as he went along, making strange decision after strange decision. Eventually after many attempts to give the Blades as much advantage as he could he gave them a penalty. Yes there was contact but Greg Louganis would have been proud of what followed. They scored from the spot, then Villa defended like... I don't know what it was but it wasn't trojans. The Blades sensed an upset might be on the cards here and stepped their game up again but Villa braved the onslaught. The ref then sent off Ashley Young for two of the most innocuous fouls possible, neither was a yellow and the first was a shoulder charge! (yes I know people might struggle with the imagery there). Villa were down to ten men, mind you we'd only just gone up to eleven after Pires got subbed. Towards the death Petrov scored a great goal after coming on as sub, he was probably our most potent attacker today, he had three shots which is probably two more than anyone else, should have buried the first too but he suffered from the age old "too much time" syndrome, on that one. Anyway it mattered not with that goal the game was dead and Villa had won, which was the intention at the start (I hope?).

So we trekked back into Sheffield and resumed our berths in the pub, drank a few nice Thornbridge Ales and went home. Pete got off the train in Manchester and I had to share the table seat with...





A good day had by all and thanks to Ian and Pete for being such excellent company. On the way home, something I witnessed on Twitter last night seemed to take a life of its own and any Villa fans on twitter reading this I implore you to read this and tweet with the hashtag #reocokermustgoginger so we can get it trending. Its funny and apparently NRC has seen it and laughed. Go on, you know it makes sense!

No music today because I've been rather preoccupied with the football so maybe Monday for another Album recommendation as we have visitors tomorrow and I think I may just have to help out with the doings.

Take, Take, Take it to the Bridge

Well so far today the Villa news is that we've "had dialogue" with Man Citeh over loaning Wayne Bridge to the end of the season. Needs must I suppose and one thing is for sure, we need a left back, its one of the priority positions that need filling and Wayne Bridge is a decent player, he's better than Warnock, much better but for me Bridge represents all that is wrong with football, he's the mercenaries mercenary. His move from Southampton was a good one, moving from a lesser team to one of the big boys, is always good and his wages went through the roof, no problem with that. Then Chelsea buy his International rival for the left back berth Cashley Cole, almost straight away Cole replaces Bridge, reducing Wayne to a bit part player and as a result he also rarely appears for England. I can understand that he needed to see his contract out at this point after all, Cole gets injured, he's straight back in there, my problem with Bridge is that when that contract ran out, he chose to sign another one. No one offered him the money he was on, so he stayed at Chelsea for the money, knowing he'd rarely get a look in. That to me summed up what is wrong with British football, the players only care about their pay packets these days, that is the extent of their ambitions. When Bridge did move, he moved to Man Citeh (probably the only other team that would pay him as much) and since he now finds himself frozen out there, he's not even handed in a transfer request to them either. I'm sure there's an ABBA song dedicated to players like this. If his short term loan works for us I'll be happy and support him in the shirt but for me he's always represented what I consider to be what is wrong with the game these days.

Musically today I think I'll tell you about an album that came out about a month ago now by an old mate of mine, Dave Jackson. Dave in his time has been in a few bands from his early beginnings in 051to his first flirtations with success in the later incarnations of The Room, then came Benny Profane (where yours truly drunkenly pretended to work for the band) and after their demise came The Dead Cowboys. Now Dave has set out on his own, releasing a solo album (with John Head of Shack and Tim O'Shea providing the instrumentation / arrangements / production).

Dave was always a big fan of country music, this album proceeds most defiantly down that path with the Johnny Cash meets Nick Cave vibe in full effect. Every song is a narrative telling its own noirish story. Jerked to Jesus and 3AM are old Benny Profane songs rejigged musically (they never made it to vinyl the first time around). On a couple of songs the band are backed by a gospel choir (live, they sing on all the songs). Standout tracks for me are Red Car (see below), the aforementioned Jerked to Jesus (a sorry tale of an 19th century scientist exposed as a fraud, who ran away to America only to be hanged there for his activities as a firebrand preacher / snake oil salesman - A true story!) and the title song Cathedral Mountain. As an aside Cathedral Mountain is also the inspiration for a full length movie, Violet City currently in production screenwritten by Dave. If dark narrative and country with a hint of gospel is your thing, this might be worth checking out. Me I think its good and well worth a listen.


 Dave Jackson - Red Car by Higuera Records

Dave, John and Tim are also performing the album at De Bees in Winsford on 20th Jan, if you're in the area it might be worth checking out. Might try and make it across there myself with my camera to se if I can improve on this:-

Taken at the album launch a couple of weeks ago.

Hello & Welcome.

Well today represents both my first attempt at blogging and yet another day in the shit storm that Gerard Houllier seems to have created down at Villa Park. I'll deal with the Villa bit first. Welcome to Villa Park Kyle Walker, I'm not sure you know what you've let yourself in for and I'm not a big fan of what you represent but I hope your stay at VP is a success. To me you represent the fact that our club is in decline and unless our manager ships out one of the other two right backs, you also represent to a degree some rather messed up logic but its not personal, I'll support you every time you pull on the shirt and hopefully you'll be a success. Though it'll piss me off no end if you go back to Spurs on the back of that success, they were our rivals only last season, now they seem to be something to look up to.

Today was also the day we took our xmas trees to the recycling point. Good to know they'll be put to use in stabilising the local sand dunes (one of the largest dunes systems in Western Europe) and will help preserve the dunes so we can enjoy them for years to come.

Onto matters more musical, on a recent trip into Liverpool I popped into to my old mates in Probe Records to see if anything took my fancy and came away with an album by Laboratory Noise entitled When Sound Generates Light, an interesting title that grabbed my attention. Well after a few listens it's become a firm favourite on my 5:30am drive into work, how would I describe it? Shoegaze, well yes, ambient & ethereal, most definitely and probably a hint of psychedelia thrown in too. It's like a chilled out version of Loop with a little bit of XX and a smidgen of Slowdive & the Cocteau Twins with a bit of modern electronica thrown in for good measure.

Standout tracks for me.., She Dies Screaming, Tesla, Dream Sequence and I Can Only Give You Everything. The album is dominated by what can I'd describe as swirling atmospherics and understated vocals (mostly) in which the voice is used more of as an instrument than the delivery of a message or story. For me its a great album for that early morning drive with nothing else on the road, can't wait until nature provides its own version of a dry ice machine which no doubt it will very soon, the perfect setting for this album. It took a few listens to get into it but a few listens and I was hooked. The album can be purchased direct from the band on the above link and is a limited edition of 1000.

As a taster theres a version of She Dies Screaming from Soundcloud though its not quite as polished as the album version.

She Dies Screaming by laboratorynoise