getdancey

I help at Brownies because where I come from we all believe that the quintessential Tuesday evening should be spent with high-pitched children who enjoy shuffling. Also because I get to help kids make finger puppets, and make my own. Here is Mr Lion:

Here’s my very old video from Kinetica that I’ve just put together. Because of camera ineptitude there’s no video of my favourite part: the lights that reacted to sound, but there’s an inadequate photo of them here on Flickr.

The exhibition had a section with the pencils that rotate and make circles (above) – which drew on our ability to stand aimlessly watching pencils draw motorised circles. Something I noticed is that the holder design didn’t allow for the pencils to get shorter – it didn’t compensate by pushing defaultly against the wall, but left them suspended away from the paper when they were blunt going round in sad little circles. Perhaps I’ve got too much pencil empathy.

There’s also the small beer robot that poured you beer into plastic cups and then flashed red in an alert to tell you it’s drinking time. Lots of good stuff there.

New from OK GO – move over Honda. Bright colours and simple things for my eyes seem to be a keen trend in music videos. “No doubt an intern that did the dominoes” was my first thought, although I can’t imagine any dominoes I’d be happier stacking. I love the glasses that make up a musical part of it, although wonder if that was done separately. Ideally in a magical word each glass would contain a small microphone and sound would be directly recorded from the video filming. Perhaps not.

“Filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs over the course of several months.

“This is the Rube Goldberg machine version. In other words, a video depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.” – hellokinsella

Kinetica, a number of Saturdays ago, was a mad mess of flashing lights and things that swirled. I love that it counts as art. I spent the day joining the league of irritating people with cameras, toting an EP-1 that’s never left the house – and thus have video footage.

Beside the robot that served you beer, my favourite bit was a block of hanging lights that reacted to sound. Simple but wonderful to watch. As part of the league of camera holders the adults lined up against the wall to do camera jiggery pokery, whilst a small kid ROARED at them. It was lovely, but I failed to hit the record button or some more technical error (very sad). May have to practice my button-pressing. Video on way – my laziness with it has already delayed this brief post. It will appear one day.

A little Flickr set lives here.

I did some work (and continue to) for (untitled) over summer during which they were idly plotting Toby Triumph, art friend and cohort of graphic designer Dudley Wild, coming in to draw illustrations all over the big white studio walls. Toby does nice pictures of giraffes and fat people. He did the wall this month, and the video is lovely. With lots of posing.

I no doubt appreciate this much more after living with five lovely male housemates for the last half year; all into DJing, dubstep and drum and bass (as one must be if) from North East London. They’re all fab.

I still love this after a week – especially the Pink Floyd shorts, which terrify me.

via crackunit

I finally saw Fantastic Mr Fox this week which gives me the excuse to post Wes Anderson’s stop-motion acceptance speech from the The National Board of Review awards. I liked the film – a bit of George Clooney adventure romp in quick pace (i.e. ocean’s Eleven) and it was subtly different from the books, or what I imagined but captured the rompishness pretty well. I’m a bit of a die hard Roald Dahl fan (idly muttering “Bogis and Bunce and Bean, One fat, one short, one lean” before it came on, which seems to have embedded itself into my memory from a young age). But it was very good, as you have no doubt seen.

video via Laura

Beth Jeans Houghton played at Komedia on Wednesday. I wouldn’t have found this gig without Jonathan writing an entry for Bored of Brighton which is good because she was fantastic. She’s like Gaga’s outfit, but wonderful and singing excellent music. I can’t think of a better description than his really:

“Her songs – and Beth herself, if you take her interviews as evidence – inhabits a creative world which is winningly magical. It isn’t the wistful, wide-eyed universe of a Bat For Lashes, but rather an arch, colourful terrain which seems to owe more to Cindy Sherman or Tony Hancock than it does Kate Bush.

Her musical palette – she is a young, female, folk singer – may seem familiar at first glance, but she has practically nothing in common with the likes of Laura Marling, Emmy The Great, Florence Welsh et al. First, her voice is more interesting – an effortless, husky hum which recalls 70s icon Bobbie Gentry, and her music is informed by deeper, darker, more esoteric strains of folk, country and progressive rock; by the likes of Tunng, Pentangle and Melanie.”

Here’s my hand-held video from the gig (new E-P1 cam does far better recordings than my point and shoot, unsurprisingly, though I wasn’t expecting sound to pick it up as much as it did). Stornaway, the main band, were less exciting but Beth J Houghton & The Hooves of Destiny (her band) were fantastic.

I’ve finally got round to sorting my videos. My Mac has become sluggish because I need to restart it. It’s a terrible habit, along with my ability to accumulate 20 tabs and corresponding open notepads for each.

There’s an independent record store in Brighton called Resident. It seems very pleased with its status, very into new bands, folk and good things, and is good at sending out newsletters/blog posts with their record of the week and such, all in a lovely enthusiastic tone. They also have in-store gigs which are free and tend to be promoting real gigs taking place later in the evening at more serious venues. I’d never been to until last week (actually last Friday – this is horribly late) when I went to see Jesca Hoop in an acoustic set.

“Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night” – says Tom Waits.

It was lovely – not a ‘one man and his guitar’ acoustic sort of way, but Hoop and a guitar, two very harmonious backing singers, and er.. yes, a bloke with a guitar nipped in for a bit. It’s a small store and twenty or thirty people stood very politely. Really intimate, really nice.

And a video, of course. Taken on zoom, and I got heavy arms whilst doing an impression of an army drill with the camera, but it’s a taste:

“I really like how it pretends to be directed at women, but really it’s directed at men because it’s too silly. It’s not serious enough,” says Jamie. Perhaps related to the fact he wears old spice, perhaps not.

I like his resemblance to Peep Show’s Johnson and his cockish stupidity, although this is far less excruciating. It’s a brilliant change from a pouting chick rolling around in taffeta or David Beckham in his pants.