'In The Clock, Marclay samples thousands of film excerpts indicating the passage of time. Spanning the range of timepieces, from clock towers to wristwatches and from buzzing alarm clocks to the occasional cuckoo, The Clock draws attention to time as a multifaceted protagonist of cinematic narrative. With virtuosic skill, the artist has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to form a 24-hour montage, which unfolds in real time. While constructed from a dizzying variety of periods, contexts and film genres whose storylines seem to have shattered in a multitude of narrative shards, The Clock uncannily proceeds at a unified pace as if re-ordered by the latent narrative of time itself. Because it is synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities.

 Nigger, that's a deep cerulean, get yr shit right.

From interview with Hennesy Youngman, 'American Nigga at the crossroads of dissonant worlds'

'Can you be succesful if you’re a muslim artist?
Are you serious? Have you ever heard of this artist collective known as Al-Qaeda? They did this performance piece called 9-11. That was absolutely jaw dropping. They only performed it once, but luckily it was very well documented and can be seen pretty much anywhere on the internet. Highly recommended. Way better than anything them Fluxus or Dada motherfuckers could come up with.'

 

Square brackets+youtube+:+everything after equals in the youtube link+square brackets

eg.

From the Guardian:

What could be more festive than spending a night locked in an art gallery with a dozen reindeer and a fridge full of psychedelic drugs? Soma, Carsten Höller's current installation in a former railway station in Berlin, purports to be offering exactly that. A pen running the length of the Hamburger Bahnhof, now the city's contemparary art museum, contains 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies. Giant toadstool sculptures are planted on a mushroom clock that the reindeer can turn with their antlers, and at the centre is a mushroom-shaped "floating hotel" – a bed on a platform complete with minibar, yours for €1,000 a night. (There's also a raffle giving away free places.)

 

Sim Soo-Bong was a female singer from South Korea who was popular in the late 1970's. Her style was called 'trot' which is a sort of synthesized Korean parallel to Japanese 'enka', both of which adapted Western Jazz with traditional ballads.

One of Sim Soo-Bong great songs is "Baek Man Sung Eee, Sang Mi', (백만송이 장미) if my Korean were better I'd give an English translation, which I was given by a Korean friend a while ago. Most trot has the same 'fox trot' beat and is quite weird and boring, but this song is really evocative and uses its synths really nicely.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baek Man Sung Eee, Sang Mi-Sim Soo-Bong 

02 백만송이 장미.mp3 (4.96 mb)

While I was in Korea a few months ago I heard it again as the ringtone on an old woman's phone and I mentioned this to a Korean friend and they told me how Sim Soo-Bong was actually a witness to the assassination of South Korea's dictator Park Chung-Hee. She was one of two girls brought in to entertain the president at a private party at which he was shot and killed by the leader of the Korean National Intelligence service in an attempted coup d'etat in 1979.

  

I knew all about this because a few months earlier I had seen Im Sang-Soo's hilarious political/comedy/thriller 'the President's Last Bang' which recreated, to much controversy, the 48 hours before and after the assassination of the president. Suddenly I was able to link that beautiful Sim Soo-Bong song with the girl in the film performing for Korea's notorious dictator and it all made sense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Incidentally, Sim Soo-Bong in reality had to perform behind a screen because she was considered too unattractive for the president so this still from the film is factually inaccurate)

The other controversy about the film was that it depicted Sim Soo-Bong performing Japanese 'enka' song's by Misora Hibari to the president, which is a near blasphemous slight on the reputation of Park Chung-Hee who, despite his dictator status is still revered by some South Korean's as the father of the South Korean republic. At the same time, there has been major controversy over claims that Misora Hibari, Japan's great cultural treasure and most loved icon is actually of Korean descent.

Anyway, this little narrative came full circle when I was looking for video's of  'Baek Man Sung Eee, Sang Mi' to include in this post and the only result that came up was of South Korean 'indie' musician Chang Ki-Ha performing it as a duet with Sim Soo-Bong herself. When I was in Korea last year, I had this ridiculous moustache and all these Korean people thought I looked like, or literally mistook me for Chang Ki-Ha. So, here it is, my Korean doppelganger performing a cover of a really awesome song by a singer with a really interesting history.

     

This is so great!

The islands of Trobriand sit off the east coast of Papua New Guinea and are inhabited by mostly indigenous people. The first western explorers discovered the Island in 1793. British colonial power came to the area in the early 20th Century, seizing control of the southern portion of New Guinea. With this new settlement came many traders, missionaries and anthropologists who wanted to study this non-western culture.

Of all the new settlers, the missionaries’ influence over the islands of Trobriand became the most fascinating. They introduced the islands to cricket, which was quickly adapted to the needs of their society. Cricket became a replacement for the tribal battles.

Those participating in the game perform the same ceremonial acts (face painting, magic spells, rituals, and chants) that their ancestors performed before they went to war. Instead of fierce battles between rival tribes they play their own version of the game, throwing cricket balls at each other rather than spears and competing in teams of unlimited players. The home side always wins, every out is celebrated with a choreographed dance and a spiritual leader blesses the irregular bat and ball before every game.

 

 http://www.zoopasoo.com/

Some videos of Hirasakana Oyogu performing at Songmi Mountain in Seoul, South Korea filmed by the great guys at recandplay

 

A doco about these guys is showing at Cannes this year

From Wiki;

Staff Benda Bilili are a group of Congolese street musicians. They live around the grounds of the zoo in Kinshasa, and play music which is rooted in rumba, with elements of old-school rhythm'n'bluesr and reggae. The core of the band consists of four senior singers/guitarist, who are all disabled (they suffered from poliomyelitis when they were young) and move around in spectacularly customized tricycles. They are backed by a younger rhythm section consisting of ex-sheges, abandoned street kids who were taken under the protection of the older members of the band. The soloist is an 18 year-old boy who plays guitar-like solos on an electrified one-stringed lute he designed and built himself out of a tin can.