I’ve written an article in the current April issue of The Wire on the excellent video installations of Elizabeth Price (formerly of 80′s indie pop group Talulah Gosh). Her show at Newcastle’s Baltic Centre runs through May and she has another in the works for London’s MOT International gallery, sometime at the end of April. (still above is from her 2011 work Choir)

I’ve organised a Wire salon at Cafe Oto. Below is a short blurb (adapted from a small bite in a previous issue of the mag). I was going to use it for an accompanying reading list for the salon, but it didn’t seem necessary so it’s here now:

Visual maps flatten out the world, radically erasing all complex sensorial information so as to create clearly defined and stable regions. This extreme delineation can border on the hallucinatory, creating blind spots that allow one’s mind to fantisise about what’s there: terrorists hiding in the mountains, uninhabited and free pastures, lost cities waiting to be discovered and the like. Visual maps also stake claims, drawing out boundaries of property and creating contested zones through the arbitrary sweep of a line, a planning process that often takes place far away from – and with little thought of – the complexities of the partitioned area.

Spurred on by affordable sound recording kit and mobile technology, there’s been an explosion of online sound maps. One can sit on a bus to work and at the same time listen to far off soundscapes with a smartphone, even contribute to that map. Many take their structure from traditional two dimensional, drawn maps, pinning certain sounds to specific locations, but in many cases rather than being a specialised field, with a bit of know-how anyone can create their own sound map easily.

But how do sound maps relate to drawn maps and how are they distinct from them? Find out more at London’s Cafe Oto, 15 March 8pm, £4 on the door.

In early February 2012 I interviewed John Akomfrah, film maker and co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective. We spoke mostly about his new film, 9 Muses, his film making methods (unsurprisingly for the man who made Handsworth Songs, he takes an improvisational and musical approach) and his experiences making films for TV in the 80s. The latter subject, I’ll post about at some point in the future when I get a moment. Until then, click here for the resultant interview posted on The Wire site.

With: Me, Benedict Drew, Benedictions (Patricia Lennox-Boyd and Jamie Stevens featuring Jeremy Glogan, Steve Kado and Morag Keil).

My segments are the ‘Personal Places’ bits. They were performed by the amazing Saul Reichlin (who only insisted upon a few changes to the script).

A massive thanks and congrats needs to go out to Kate Cooper, Amanda Dennis and Richard John Jones at Auto Italia for initiating and facilitating this whole thing.

TV by artists, for artists you say? Well, why not?!

Saturday 24 September, 8pm at an artist-run project space near you!. Come down to the Magick Old Kentish Road on the night or watch live online at the above link.

An excerpt from Preston Sturges’s excellent 1941 comedy Sullivan’s Travels. It’s the story of a fluff film director John Lloyd Sullivan ‘The Caliph Of Comedy’ (played by Joel McCrea) who – to the horror of his studio bosses – wants to make a film about poverty in America. Dressed in bespoke rags made by his costume director, he hits the road ‘prey to passing prowlers, poverty and policemen’ in an attempt to find the true face of deprivation. But no matter how hard he tries to escape, he’s always pulled back into the fantasy world of Hollywood. This segment is where he (with the help of a lovely lady in the form of Veronica Lake) finally discovers real poverty and its de-humanising effects.

Doing my part for internet conservation: Uploaded from a Google Video with a description: “Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan expound on violence, alienation and the electronic envelope. The clash of two great minds. (1968)”

I thought I’d re-up it here as Google has been slowly shutting down their video section and it’d be a shame if this was wiped.

The Summer Way was an ‘intellectual affairs’ show broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Apart from this http://archives.cbc.ca/programs/858/ I couldn’t find any more info about it online. If I get the time in the future I’ll have a look around, but if you watch this and know anything about the series, please share!

I thought that since I wrote the damn things, I’d post some of the essays I stitched together over the past year. This rather rushed one is about the historian and pundit Niall Ferguson, specifically his series on the British Empire. Ferguson has a taste for authority but I have to say, having recently watched his newer series, The Ascent Of Money (get the double pun? “A scent” as in smell obvs and what must be a play on Bronowski’s still excellent Ascent Of Man) Ferguson is at his best when he’s talking about something he really loves, even more than authority: Money.
Budzinski N. – Empire of Boredom

“The film maker and journalist Adam Curtis talks to [ME] about pop trash, posh documentaries and writing with archives.”

Not included in the interview is the fact that he has a large bag with a picture of a cow on it and says “YEAH” to the TV series Game Of Thrones.