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.

“For the past four years Matmos have been re-enacting experiments into telepathy that were done in the 1960s. They were basic sensory deprivation set-ups in which the experimental subjects were unable to hear or see. The subjects were asked to recognise different shapes being transmitted to them from a table of graphic sigils. In Matmos’s experiments, they tried to transmit the concept of their new album into the minds of their experimental subjects. For this performance, each collaborator recites different transcriptions of the psychic experiments that are played through their headphones.

The performance took place at London’s Auto Italia space 19 May, 2011, organised in collaboration with Upset The Rhythm.”

Filmed by me with help from Tim Ivison.

autoitaliasoutheast.org
brainwashed.com/​matmos
upsettherhythm.co.uk