Now playing – strange trajectories, the 2007 ANU School of Art Emerging Artist Support Theme (EASS) award exhibition currently on at the Alliance Francaise in Canberra, is featuring the work of Michal Glickson (painting) and Anna Madeleine (photomedia). Anna is my daughter. She has two cool new video art pieces in this exhibition. She has also recently done the album art for Casual Projects new CD, No Rest, and is showing one of those images at PhotoAccess’s Open all areas 2008.

Previously:

• Play me something…

Mary Black and Shane Howard’s lovely duet version of his song Flesh and Blood. It was replayed on Rockwiz (SBS) last night.

I came across a lovely stop motion animation yesterday, the Softlightes Heart Made of Sound. It’s directed and made by an Australian animator, Kris Moyes, who has done some other cool videos, including (Wolfmother’s White Unicorn (defaced), and the The Presets’ Are You the One?.

This caused me to revisit Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, which I just loved at the time. It was made in 1986, but it still stands up pretty well; not too surprising considering Aardman’s successes since then.

It’s one of those classics you assume everyone knows, but I’ve been realizing the older you get the less likely that is to be true! The other day I posted Jan Lewis’s Execution Row (postcards of the hanging), a current and clever borrowing of Dylan’s Desolation Row, at my local discussion forum, and the only response was someone young saying they hadn’t heard the song before but I liked it…

(photo credit: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Laughing Squid is one of my long time favourite blogs; I enjoy the mix of tech and visual arts, and Scott Beale’s photos. Today Scott has the best photos of Beck’s puppets I’ve seen yet, taken at Yahoo! Hack Day.

(Photo by Special P)

Like Jose, I’ve been interested in the puppets that formed part of Beck‘s concert at the the Sasquatch Festival in Royal Gorge, Washington on Memorial Day. Previously, they had appeared at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and in Davis (there is an itinerary there). According to the SFGate Culture Blog, Beck hired the puppeteers from Team America to travel with him
and perform the real-time marionette puppet show of the band on the stage directly behind the real band, with the results shown on huge video screens. There are some cool Flickr photos and over the last few days I’ve been tagging my favourites – some lead to larger sets.

Oh and Jose, I found another video.

Oh Superman where are you now
When everything’s gone wrong somehow
The Man of Steel, these men of power
Are losing control by the hour

As well as the music and the political nature of the song, it’s also interesting because it features puppets of the guys in the band, and a host of others – Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Thatcher, Gadafi, the Pope, Michael Jackson (still black!) and so on. The puppets are instantly recognizable as being made by Roger Law and Peter Fluck from Spitting Image, the renowned British satirical puppet TV show from 1984 to 1996′s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the puppets in the video had been made firstly for Spitting Image episodes. Wikipedia has information about the song and the video.

I’ve just got around to making a Flickr set of photos of the Thredbo Blues Festival in January. Thredbo is one of the skiing resorts in the Snowy Mountains up near Mt Kosciusko, but in summer the blues festival takes over the village, casual and cool, for a weekend. The highlight for us was seeing Mia Dyson. She is a young, fabulously talented blues singer, guitarist and slide player. But we also saw the Foreday Riders, Ray Beadle, and others, and took a ride up the Kosciusko chair lift.

I’ve had two other such experiences recently. One was Antony and the Johnsons‘ song Fistful of Love. The snippet you hear there is mostly the schmaltz talk at the beginning (I am a bit dubious about that aspect of the mp3s there), whereas most of the song isn’t like that. As someone said, his voice nails you to the wall.

The other was an Australian group called Aajinta. They are a trio who make atmospheric or ambient music with cello, clarinet, didgeridoo and harmonic voices. On 6th October they are launching a CD called Harmonic Spheres which will be featured on Lucky Ocean’s ‘The Planet’ on the same night. Their address for ordering is aajinta.

Did you ever see Janis Joplin’s wonderful Maybe on the Ed Sullivan Show? I only saw it recently. It is so absolutely intense that every time I see it I get tingles and goosebumps and feel like a wrung out rag after watching it.