ROBOTS>>>>

Giant Robots are an artist collective based in London and the South East of England. Working since the Summer of 2009, Robots aim to shine a new light on public art, creating intellectual yet accessible interactive sculptures. Heavily influenced by comics, graffiti and the contents of skips, Robotshave captured the interest of the art world and media and have recently appeared in print in the New York Times.
Robots work predominately in reclaimed and recycled wood, old furniture and pieces that have been disregarded by others. The aesthetic of these sculptures are entirely determined by the resources available as well as being completely sustainable in a time when resources and finances need to be considered.
A 20 minute documentary filmed at the build of a large interactive sculpture at Secret Garden Party festival in July 2010.


ROBOTS>>>> I Hate Summer from Tali Clarke on Vimeo.

Awww, Gregory...

http://www.brandokay.com/

Every School I have Ever Attended.

I

I found this in my Dads filofax.

This Flower Situation.

I finished my contract at Hodder last week, and was brought some lovely flowers by my lovely (former) collegues. It was a bright and chipper sunny day, and I left Hodder Towers to stroll down to Charing Cross, where I was working the evening at the 99 Club (A heavily Canadian line-up, including Tommy Campbell, who I insulted by mistake the first time I met him [save that heart-warming story for later])

Anyway, I'm strolling down Tottenham Court Road in the sun, clutching my big fluffy bouquet of flowers, when a lady stops me in the street.

Lady: Do you know where I can buy flowers round here?

(Note, I'm not so good at sudden questions - I flap a lot.Especially when someone asks you where a flower shop is on TC Road where clearly, clearly, theres nothing but mobile phone shops everywhere)

Me: Umm, right. Yes. No. Well, I dont know. Theres a shop. Over there. A Sainsburys. That might sell flowers. It's like, 10 minutes back that way and on the left.

Lady: But not here?

Me: What?

Lady: But you don't know where theres a flower shop here?

Me: Ummm. No? Not really... ummm... Sainsburys.... up the... on the ...

Lady: (Massively exasperated by my inability to assist her with her botanical needs) I only asked you because I can see that you've JUST BOUGHT FLOWERS.

Wait. Back it up Lady... I didnt buy these, I was bought them. Why would you assume that I had to buy my own flowers? What are you implying? What does this mean?

This troubled me somewhat, but was made a lot worse later at work. Lovely Brett Goldstein is a young, hunky non-canadian comedian who was also on the bill that night. As we were clearing up after the show, Lou the AP pointed to my flowers, which I had stuck in a pint of water.

Lou : Oh no... Brett's forgotten his flowers...

Me: What! THOSE ARE MY FLOWERS! WHY WOULD YOU ASSUME THEY WERE BRETT'S?

Lou: Jesus...

However, its not been all bad press for flowers. There were a lot of flowers at  Catherine and Rob's wedding. It was the nicest wedding I have ever been to. Here are their rings.

Joaq-tastic

I'm still excited.

Project X

We went down to the frankly wicked crypts under St Andrews church in Holburn, where we planned to introduced some very excited James Bond fans to Jeffrey Deaver, who will be writing the next Bond novel.

Having hired some uber-hotties (thanks Dom, Marc and Rich! x) to stand in as guides and guards, our guests arrived at various time slots and were greeted and whisked off to the darkest part of the crypt to meet the man himself. Books were signed, Bond related questioned were asked, and each guest was given a card with a personalised code, and told to keep their eyes and ears open.

We would be in touch again soon.

A couple of Bond fans couldnt make it, so they recieved this box in the post, complete with a personal video message from Deave.

http://jamesbondprojectx.com/

INSIDE (I'm very sad indeed)

This finished its Edinburgh run yesterday. I have known for a few months that I wouldn't get a chance to see it, but now that its finished, I think I could cry. Dear Jean, Please tour this.

INSIDE is a compelling new dance by Brazilian choreographer Jean Abreu, with music by post-rock band 65daysofstatatic. This work explores violence, incarceration, solitude and hope.

Inspired by the world of prisons and the individuals confined within their walls, INSIDE touches a nerve that unsettles today’s society: violence and imprisonment. Raising philosophical and moral questions about the treatment of prisoners and the system that is there to rehabilitate them, this fierce new work deals with the relationship between prisoner and prison in a society increasingly obsessed with control.

In this physically demanding performance, Abreu uses the body to interpret the effect of incarceration on the individual to create a movement vocabulary charged with emotional content and raw expression. In this journey, Jean directs a group of outstanding male dancers to navigate their way through the piece, confronting their own thoughts and vulnerabilities to reveal the real person behind the ‘criminal’.



'INSIDE' by Jean Abreu - Teaser from Jean Abreu on Vimeo.



The reviews I've seen for it have been great, also.

Blues Brothers @ Latitude

In June, Future Cinema and a couple of vans of pews headed off to the wilds of Suffolk from Hackney with no map to take over the Film and Music arena for one night, turning it into the Hard Rock Church from the much-loved 1980 film Blues Brothers. Complete with Blues-Mobile, Blues Brothers, our very own preacher and awesome band of awesomeness Kitty, Daisy and Lewis (they were seriously awesome) we danced the night away with over 1000 happy campers.

As part of the rest of our mini-holiday at the truly lovely Latitude Festival, I also enjoyed Spoon, Frank Turner, Jonsi, Act 2 of Mathew Bournes Swan Lake, Richard Herring, Bret Easton Ellis, and a screening of Four Lions with Chris Morris.

I also enjoyed this amazing use of a piece of a drum kit.

Honda 'Live Every Litre'

http://www.liveeverylitre.com/

Honda asked people what would they do with a car and a tank of fuel. They picked 13 people and let them do it. Then they released the resulting doc online in June, and the the same time, held a live premier for Honda and the 'stars' of the film. Stunts were recreated, some awesome bands played (these guys were good http://blog.revereonline.co.uk/ as was this little sweetheart http://www.myspace.com/maxodonnellguitar), we had a naked barbecue, drank some rum, and this all took place in some concrete tunnels in Southwark.

Mathlete

One of my favorite bands provide the musical backdrop to a lovely video of a man called Duncan learning to master the ancient art of 3D animation. You can twitter Duncan @buncandrown

The song is Mathlete, the band are (were? I can't keep up) Actionier.

Yet another celebrity crap-spot. Number 8?

Matthew Horne coming out of Kings X station. It took Emily Pe and I nine whole minutes to remember his name. He looked like a vampire and was dressed like a new romantic poet.

Bubble Wrap

So this is from a TV spot for car insurance company. Its a street in Birmingham which has the highest number of insurance claims in the country. And was covered in bubble wrap for the day. I like bubble wrap and climbing ladders, so this was a good day to be me.

Jersey Shore (Head in Hands)

I've forgotten how to blog. I must have done because look, I haven’t done it in ages. It used to be easy. I just read a book or watched a film and then moaned about how stupid it was or how much it would have been better if I had written it. But I haven't done that in ages. I'm sure I've got loads to talk about.... I went to see Dylan Moran and David O'Doherty (I made him laugh. Twice). I saw La Premier Jour de Reste de ta Vie, which is possibly not spelt at all like that but made ME laugh twice... I read Johnny Magic and the Card Shark Kids, which was awesome, and David Karps One which I should have read years ago. I finally saw The Sure Thing in which John Cusack out-Cusack’s himself. I discovered Wavves, painted a shop front in Carnaby St for the good people at WeSC and got a Yoda eight-ball for Christmas. I dipped my TV-watching-toes into the terrifying waters of US reality monstrosity Jersey Shore (Seriously, Hey! America! We have reality TV too... remember when the two girls on Big Brother got upset  and threatened to hit each other, and Channel 4 cut its live feeds, called security and police, and took the girls off the show? .... they did not 1) Continue filming ACTUAL PHYSICAL FIGHTS 2) Broadcast the footage 3) Do nothing that would in any way resemble a consequence to peoples actions. America you are so strange. Or right-on... I mean, why shouldn't the little scrappers be treated like the performing monkeys they so clearly are? Jersey Shore is insanity. It’s this unbelievable hyper-escalation of real-time life. Its like the eleventh dimension. That’s the only way I can describe it. Some people go and live in a house by a beach and fall in love with each other and then fight each other and then go into another room and find someone else to fall in love with and fight and each episode is nearly an hour long just to cram in all the loving and fighting and then you find out that the entire span of the show is about three weeks. I have been alive Twenty Seven Years, and have found no one to fight and very few people worth falling in love with, but not only are these guys doing more fighting and loving than entire nations, there’s only seven of them! How does that ratio work? Put me in a room with seven people and it's probably going to be a few hours before I'm comfortable enough to chat, and there could be several years hiatus before I get bored enough to want to kill or kiss someone. Oh look, I remembered how to blog I guess...)

L-R Psycopath, Whore, Angry Midget, Fairly Unremarkable but Otherwise Likeable Dude,

CheatingWhore, Hysterical Whiner, Perky Midget, Departed but Atrocious Human Being.

Anyhow, these are the kids from Jersey Shore. There are eight of them here, but purple top girl (the spectacularly obnoxious Angelique) didn’t manage to hang around for the whole series. If you ever, ever see any of these people coming in your direction, turn and run unless you want to be violated in some unspeakable way.

Its kinda worth looking at the Wikipedia entry for the series, as it details the piles of controversy surrounding the show, and has this to say about Nicole (she’s the shortest girl one) "She is not an embarrassment to Italian Americans – she is actually an embarrassment to the entire human race". This is funny, because as far I've seen in the series, she was a contender for Most Quazi-Human Entity in Jersey Shore. Her or Vinnie, anyways.

VersesVsVerses

My friend Benny made these things out of noises. I am most partial to Lowfiful, which I love love love.

Celebrity Crap Spot # 7

Anna Friel, coming out of the Empire Cinema, L. Square. It was raining, and she brought an unbrella.

She is tiny.

Secret Cinema present Bugsy Malone

(500) Days of Summer. Again.

No one likes to realise they were wrong about something, so it's nice to be reassured, by what ever fates or mediums come your way, that you were right all the long. I recently had to watch popular indie rom-com (500) Days of Summer AGAIN, but am pleased to report that while I found more things to like about it the second time round, I still disliked it as much as I remembered. At the heart of the problem, of course, is its female lead, the eponymous Summer. The role is played by the doe-eyed ZDC, who've I explained my problems with before. The good thing about (500) Days of Summer is that it also stars Joseph Gordon -Levitt. JGL is a proper acting genius. He was amazing in Mysterious Skin, and completely carried the dribbly mess that was Brick (ask anyone, anyone what they can remember about Brick. Popular answers are 'a payphone' , 'a bridge', 'a sort of warm sunny wall', 'the girl from Lost, but she wasn't Australian' and 'Joseph Gordon-Levitt'). Luckily, no-one asks JGL to hoist (500) DOS onto his back and drag into post-production and for the purposes of this movie, nothing too taxing is really asked of JGL. He wears a very good wardrobe very well (I am sticking to my guns on this - his wardrobe is the best thing about this film by miles) and smashes a karaoke scene with a triumphant Pixies interpretation. If there was an award for Best Male Karaoke Performance within a Fairly Pointless Film, Bill Murray (Lost in Translation) would be passing it over to JGL right now.

The film had the same faults - the most interesting character {the best friend who hasn't had a girlfriend since seventh grade} still only gets four minutes of screen time, the sister still seems to have walked on to the set from a different production and I don't get the bookend voice-overs. Also whats with the title? Is the film really called Days of Summer or just 500? Like 300? "This....is.... Chicago!!"? Was it set in Chicago? I can't really remember, which is weird because wasn't the films protagonist was supposed to be an architect in love with the city? Wasn't he? Oh who cares. Your man wears two different Joy Division t shirts within two hours, for Christs sake, and then wonders why he gets dumped. In fact, I think that's the problem with the whole film. It does have some really good moments. The karaoke (JGL, not ZDC singing that song that sounds like the theme song to The Shoe People), the Han Solo reflection bit, the party expectation/reality split screen. But all the gaps between the clever bits are filled in with nonsense and non-characters with non-backgrounds.

And that is exactly the problem with the film. It's too many Joy Division tshirts mixed in with too many average tshirts. Then your Joy Division shirts stand out too much and show everything else up as tired, mediocre rubbish.

Heres the audio of the winner of the Official Best Male Karaoke Performance within a Fairly Pointless Film Award 2009

Cut-price Celebrity 'spots'

I saw this lady walking down Portabello Road on Wednesday.

Her name is Vera Filatova, and she played Elena on Peep Show. I mention this because I once had an elaborate plan to devote an entirely separate blog to my Crap Celebrity Spots, but considering I seem to be unable to regually update even this blog, its possibly for the best that I didn't extend my evil blog empire. So, I'll cram them all in here.

1) Vera Filatova, obviously. She was very short (shorter than me), had small features and seemed calm.

2) Samantha Mumba, walking along Poland Street, talking on her phone. She is very, very tall, super-smiley and seemed full of energy (so I guess that one number one hit didn't take it out of her too much).

3) Ian Brown. Greasy of hair and slumped of shoulder. He was in an off-licence in Soho.

4) Alan Carr. Oxford St.

5) Simon Amstell, different end of Oxford street

6) Lily Cole, Charing Cross Road. Very nice mittens.

It reads like the guest list for the Ant and Dec ITV Xmas Special. *sigh*

Chapter 24

Until all good thing start happening to all good people, You have to be satisfied with some good things happily happening to the occasional good person.

My friend Claire Smith is one of the good people. We met in 2007, both working for the same insane Edinburgh fringe venue production company. We ended up spending a week plaster-boarding the walls of a burnt-out building (it was a fairly big room, it was just the two of us most of the time, and our levels of plaster-boarding experience prior to that week can safely be described as poor-very poor). We pushed each other around on scaffolding towers , listened to a little radio and we shared the common ground of thinking most other people were daft or deranged most of the time. Claire was pretty shy when she wasn't ragging on other people in the safety of our sequestered work area, so I was surprised to find out that she was the front-woman and melodica player in a band. Ever suspicious and hyper-critical, I was even more surprised when I got around to hearing them and found out that they were great, she was great, everything about them is totally great. I've been to a couple of their shows over the last two years - the band manage to always sound slick and bouncy, and Claire sings like an angel and dresses like a black magic woman who has twirled through the worlds most incredible clothes shop and emerged with whispers of splendour vaguely attached to her.
They are fun, creative, enchanting, and I cant think of anyone to compare them to, but you can listen on their super-minimal myspace here.

Anyway, the good thing that has happened to them is this review from the NME. It's there, right in the middle. The review above the is The Lemonheads. Thats some hallowed space they are occupying, in my book anyway. Click on it to make it big.



Chapter 24 are playing next Thursday at the Hoxton Bar and Grill, at 8.15, for twenty minutes to the Moshi Moshi A&R peeps. Come and swoon down the front with me.

See, good things can happen to the good peoples.

The Moany-moanarium of Dr Bethassus

So The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a bit rubbish is it? Really? What tipped you off? Was it, perhaps, this trailer

Me - Ohh, Parnassus trailer
Voice of Film Reason (VOFR) - Yep.
Me - Looks cool. Nice. Colourful. CGI.Okay.
VOFR - Yep.
Me - And here's the plot summary. Nice and simple. Okay.
VOFR - Yep.
Me - Christopher Plummer. He's a bit of a budget Christopher, no?
VOFR - l'il bit.
Me - And here's Lily Cole. She's fun looking. Oh, no talking, Lily?
VOFR - No. Remember St Trinian's.
Me - Oh yeah. Good Point. Oh, here's the interesting 'lots of people playing the same part'.
VOFR - It's not really that interesting.
Me - No, not really. Isn't it funny to think that Johnny Depps actually really old? Hey, here comes the blurb clippings. 'Stunning'. Ok. 'Dazzling'. Right. Lots of little words probably relating to production design then, which come to think of it, looks very similar to the Jodorowsky Dune sketches.
VOFR - You can't prove anything.
Me - Christopher Plummer was in Twelve Monkeys. That's a good film, shall we watch that now?
VOFR - You can. I'm just here to facilitate your internet bitching, remember....?

Parnassus is currently rocking a 7.6 on the IMDB. I'll probably really enjoy it. I saw this on Tuesday, and definitely enjoyed it. It's a little too long, the editing is so-so in places, and it mixes amazing performances with ones that sort of make you wince. But it's wickedly fun (and currently rocking a very appropriate 6.6 on the imdab).