DIG LOG

I.O.U.S of A

2011-09-15T11:51:00.004+12:00

I.O.U.S of A
Neil Buddle 2011

Block Print

Paper - Recycled Bills and Business pages
Blocks - Recycled Floor Vinyl
(Sustainable Economy)

My first new print for a while (too long), came from considering my own past debt problems and the fact that the USA owes more than me! It also references the fact that I/we owe the States a cultural debt for giving the world and me so much culturally. The print includes, Hunter S thompson, Miles Davis, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson, which is a mix of counter-culture and mainstream icons. Hard to see in a scan but it also includes in gold, a mushroom cloud and the space shuttle.

If ever there was a time for NOT spending money from the future it is now.

This print featured in the Recent Whanagnaui National Exhibition and Award show, currently on at the Community Art Gallery in Whanganui.

SUPER SONIDO

2011-07-04T16:02:00.008+12:00

The Supersonido blog streams tidbits of Latin nostalgia, underground and garage. The ear-child of record LA based Joseph Franko, Supersonido is a sweet take on the vintage slew of aural gap fillers that bridge north Americanised latinification and Sud American appropriation. Music is always a two way street. This site runs along the Pan American highway pulling onto every highway and by-way along the route. For a complete fruit and nut trip try this instrumental by Luis Luis on for size. The blistering mariachi trumpet through an echo chamber.

Speaking of Latinised madness, the other day I found this surf infused Lima born gem from Los Saicos, Peruvian punks who knew? Yeahyeahyeah!

Working Behind Enemy Lines

2011-05-17T10:05:00.004+12:00

©Mikaere Gardiner AKA Eno.

Rogue Council employee loose on the art tip! All because he wanted to colour up some grey places. Lets have more of it!

13 Confusions

2011-05-09T11:19:00.002+12:00

Frieze Magazine

Revisiting Amos Vogel’s 1966 essay about the ‘everyday misconceptions’ of the avant-garde film scene

I recently picked up a copy of The New American Cinema, which was edited by Gregory Battcock and originally published in 1967. Featuring 29 essays about what people back then were calling ‘underground’ film, its contributors include the leading lights of US experimental cinema: Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Annette Michelson, Brian O’Doherty, P. Adams Sitney, Susan Sontag, Parker Tyler and Stan VanDerBeek. Many of the works discussed were then a year or two old at most, and the scenes it was trying to make sense of, from East Coast to West Coast, were still young: I imagine it felt like an urgent book at time of publication.
Reading it, I was struck by a 1966 essay titled ‘Thirteen Confusions’. Written by Amos Vogel, who founded New York’s avant-garde ciné-club Cinema 16 and went on to write Film as a Subversive Art (1974), the essay was intended to ‘represent a criticism from within, fully cognizant of the movement’s many achievements’ (although Battcock’s introduction notes that ‘there will be those from “within” who may find Mr Vogel’s criticism comes from outside and to the right’). Vogel pulls few punches. One by one, he tackles what he observed as ‘confusions’: everyday misconceptions about the avant-garde film scene held by both its champions and detractors.1 Although opinionated and polemical, some of these ‘confusions’ are now long-finished turf battles or obsolete theoretical issues. I wondered what it would be like to re-tool Vogel’s list, expanding its remit from the underground film of the ’60s to what could be called the above-ground art world of 2010. This is my attempt. Some entries are new, some are revisions of Vogel’s originals. It is ‘a criticism from within’, packed with tendentious generalizations and untrustworthy opinions.

1. Confusing cost with value
The boom years of the mid-2000s had a marked effect on the way that art is portrayed in the press: astronomical auction prices held journalists and editors transfixed; articles on contemporary art in the mainstream press began to look more like stock-market reports than art criticism; media profiles of a powerful collector class grew exponentially. Of course, for writers and journalists to ignore the ways in which economics was transforming the art world would have been to bury our heads in the sand. However, one effect of this has been to plant in the broader public consciousness the idea that the art world is only concerned with money and that the production of art and the discourse around it are just fig-leafs there to cover the vulgarities of business. Russian oligarchs’ conspicuous consumption of works by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst makes great copy but it does not help arguments for public arts funding in times of fiscal crisis.

2. Confusing publicity with achievement
Warhol would have argued that these are one and the same – visibility breeds success, which in turn breeds visibility. The contemporary art world, for all its savviness regarding the mechanics of media, is still, and always will be, a sucker for celebrity and publicity. To quote writer Dieter Roelstraete, this is partly a function of art’s ‘confusion concerning its relationship to a cultural system (one that used to be called “mass culture” or “popular culture”, but those terms have certainly lost their legitimacy) that it clearly desires to be immersed in, or just belong to: a confused desire for its own disappearance into something other, bigger, badder.’2

3. Confusing the typist with the writer
Roelstraete goes on to point out that ‘we have long known that anything and everything can be art, but […] conversely, contemporary art can be anything and everything.’3 Artists write novels, design buildings, cook meals or stage plays. On the one hand, this is an exploratory and inclusive approach to the world – a good thing. On the other, the imprimatur of art can be self-serving. Other disciplines – literature or architecture, for instance – are annexed and treated as materials like clay or paint, there to be played with or to dress up in. Deny it as we might, many still cleave to an idea of the artist as genius. As such, there’s a tendency to assume that if an artist writes a book, the fact of that alone is proof of their talent, regardless of whether the book has any merit. (‘X has made a play! How clever! Because she’s an artist, her play must be much more profoundly self-aware than those of people who have been writing plays all their lives!’) The trick is in distinguishing surface from depth.

4. Confusing a moment with a movement
In the October 2010 issue of frieze, we published a ‘hot or not’ analysis of current trends in art-making. Compiled from observations the editors had made of recurring topics or styles in art we had noticed on our travels, it was intended as a parody of the kind of lists of who’s in and who’s out found in gossip magazines. We later discovered that a disturbing number of people thought the list was serious, and that we were advocating that artists who make work using ‘piles of “cool” books’ were hotter than artists making work with antlers or W.G. Sebald in them. The fact is, micro-trends exist in art just as they do in music, fashion or design; one year we’re all talking Le Corbusier, the next Roberto Bolaño. Trends result from information being exchanged, from cross-pollination between artists. The greater frequency with which they change is the result of the deregulation of knowledge enabled by the Internet, of greater numbers of artists and curators travelling, and of capital looking for new forms to colonize. Style, as Jonathan Raban once said, is a ‘medium of consent’. The difference is between innovation and fashion.

5. Confusing politics with pictures of politics
In 2010, two major biennial exhibitions – Berlin and São Paulo – took art and politics as a core theme. Both shows fell into an all-too familiar register; video and photography depicting political activism, marginalized communities or life in areas such as the Middle East or Central Africa, and archive material relating to activist art groups from the 1960s and ’70s. This form of engagement often serves only to fetishize the dispossessed and oppressed. The idea that such exhibitions have political traction outside art circles is largely the playing out of a fantasy of being a political intellectual active in the world. In trading intellectually or commercially with the rhetoric of boundary breaking, revolution and challenges to the status quo, artists, curators, critics and dealers have all been complicit in stripping the terminology of opposition of its force and repurposing it as PR; the consequence-free language of ‘criticality’ found on museum walls and in gallery press releases. Exhibiting a video in a museum of a demonstration is not the same as participating in a demonstration, and standing at an opening with a free beer in your hand, looking at photos of refugees, is not the same as joining Médicins Sans Frontières and going to Haiti. Who are such shows for? As Jeremy Deller once remarked, ‘the art world is a great place to meet retired arms dealers.’

6. Confusing having your cake with eating it
Perhaps one reason why we might see someone flirting with political criticality but never constructively pursuing it, or proclaiming their distaste for the art market whilst selling work to collectors, is because human beings are remarkably good at holding two opposing ideas in their heads and acting on both of them. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously thought this was a good thing: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’

7. Confusing the footnote with the essay
Sociologists use the term ‘prostheses’ to describe how people use the symbolic value of the clothes they wear or items they own in order to demonstrate their cultural competence or literacy. In contemporary art, we can identify this in the referential turn – ‘X work references Robert Smithson, Martin Heidegger’s theory of dasein and the music of Donna Summer in order to …’ etc. As a strategy that has permeated the way much work is made and is signposted for interpretation, it has now entered its mannerist phase. Critical value gets transferred from the formal or conceptual functions of objects and images to the collection and arrangement of impeccably chosen cultural products, events and historical allusions. In many cases (though not all), the auratic value of a well-appointed suite of references creates a smokescreen of illusory scholarship and can falsely imply an historical lineage between the artist doing the referencing and the thing being referenced. It masks the fact that creatively little is being done such sources in the first place. It’s just pointing at things or, in Vogel’s words, ‘sterile eclecticism as artistic philosophy’.4

8. Confusing literary with visual critics
Vogel argued that film criticism was suffering because too many critics were from a literary rather than visual arts background ‘with the visual serving as illustration of an underlying literary thesis’5. Today, it’s tangentially related to the referencing problem; criticism – in part, taking its lead from curating – that privileges artistic intent, back-story or the assessment of referential sources over describing what the thing itself did or looked or sounded like. If we don’t need to know what an exhibition actually looked like, do we need exhibitions at all? Don’t let the press release become the show.

9. Confusing tourism with international relations
Your jet-set itinerary of art destinations starts in Sydney, then Berlin, followed by São Paulo and finally Yokohama. You see the same artists’ work in four different exhibitions on four different continents. What does that mean?

10. Confusing buildings with culture
Over the past decade, the architecture of museums and galleries has become as talked about as the art it houses. The iconic starchitect-designed museum has become the must-have edifice for any aspirational city, following the lessons of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. Yet, as critic Owen Hatherley notes, the success of Bilbao ‘in bringing well-heeled tourism to the Basque port has become a boosterist cliché’, whereby a dowdy city is transformed into ‘a cultural capital, replacing unionized factory work or unemployment with insecure service-industry jobs’ in the name of ‘regeneration’.6 Will the number of vast halls for contemporary art ever outstrip the supply of work? Or is there an inexhaustible stock of Richard Serras and Antony Gormleys with which to fill the space? No matter how much money cities and developers throw at them, gallery expansions cannot alone create or sustain an artistic community at its most important, grass-roots level. Affordable housing, art schools, cheaply available studio space; these are the kinds of things that nurture.

11. Confusing expertise with shop talk
To what extent does insularity shape exhibitions and their audiences? Is there a difference between ‘specialist’ languages (be they the formal visual languages of art, for instance, or the languages of interpretation – wall signage, catalogue essays, reviews etc.) and ‘insular’ languages? Much art requires specialist knowledge in order to engage with it. This might be knowledge of historical precedents, or how to spot the signposts in a work that allow you to read it, but such sophistication doesn’t necessarily equate with elitism or exclusivity. Some things in the world are just difficult to understand, others we can get in an instant. But do the pressures of professionalization in the art world indirectly breed insularity and an anxiety on the part of artists, curators and critics to ‘demonstrate’ expertise and literacy in exhibition making to their peers, or do they encourage a greater awareness of broader audiences?

12. Confusing the art world with the world7
Art professionals should remind themselves from time-to-time that contemporary art does not play a significant part in most people’s lives.

13. Confusing telephones with conversations
The ‘art world’ is many things to many people: it’s a big business or a scholarly discipline, it’s a safe place, an excuse to be with like-minds, a way of helping others or being on your own. Some of us want games, apps and email on our phones; others of us just need it for calling home. Art is a medium through which we can talk to each other and engage with the world. Its problems – confusions such as these, and the myriad of others you may or may not have – can be useful, since they might indicate where I stop and you begin.

1 Vogel’s original list was: Confusing Times Square with Manhattan; Confusing a Producers’ Co-operative with a School; Confusing Historical Continuity with Immaculate Conception; Confusing Freedom with Formlessness; Confusing Content with Quality; Confusing Non-Selectivity with Art; Confusing Good with Bad; Confusing Propagandists with Critics; Confusing Publicity with Achievement; Confusing One Swallow with a Summer; Confusing One Generation with Another; Confusing Literary with Visual Critics; Confusing Popes with Free Men
2 Dieter Roelstraete, ‘What is Not Contemporary Art?: The View from Jena’, published in What is Contemporary Art?, e-flux journal/Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2010, p.192
3 Ibid, p.193
4 Amos Vogel, ‘Thirteen Confusions’, 1966, published in The New American Cinema, ed. Gregory Battcock, E.P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1967, p.137
5 Ibid. p.137
6 Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Verso, London, 2010, p.xxii
7 Paraphrased from the title of Nina Power’s 2008 essay ‘The Art World is Not the World’, published in Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis #1, ed. Robert Garnett and Andrew Hunt, Book Works, London, 2008, pp.106–7

Dan Fox, Frieze Magazine.

The Ai of the Storm

2011-04-18T06:53:00.003+12:00

An honest background doco from American channel PBS on the missing Chinese artist Ai WeiWei who was detained by "officials" some time last month.

His disappearance comes after a series of events to censor the man who was until recently celebrated for his design of China's 'birds nest' Olympic stadium. WeiWei is unrelenting in turning the focus of his art back onto the Government. Not only does his art and writing call attention to a repressive regime WeiWei has also been able to mobilise large groups of people to help ask the difficult questions about the motivations and credibility of the State.

WeiWei has been beaten in 2009, his blog was first censored then taken down, his artist community/compound surrounded by CTV cameras and his new studio building suddenly demolished at the beginning of this year.

Still he remained undeterred he documented the demolition with his camera and video and turned it back on the Government as he created new art from the event.

See a secretively recorded talk WeiWei gave to TED one month before he was detained here.

The image posted here is taken from an excellent blog on Ai Weiwei over at Eat Pink Love run by Australian artist Santina Amato. Santina is responsible for a FaceBook campaign to raise international awareness about WeiWei's detention.

Mutate Britain and Peter Dunne's Anti Greed Give Away

2011-04-13T06:51:00.000+12:00

Take a Trip on the Music

2011-04-04T15:39:00.002+12:00

Another site for you music DIGgers, is the aptly named Lysergic Funk catering to anyone who likes to take a trip on the music and some music on the trip! Jazz, latin, funk, jazz-funk, jazz-rock, soul, all with an acid-fused flavour. I'm currently digging JazzKraut - 'Teutonal Excursions' German experimental, jazz-rock and funk, and it's an awesome and interesting ride. Some individual tracks, some albums and plenty to get you coming up and feeling fine! LYSERGIC FUNK Blog

DIG Radio - Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out!

2011-03-29T17:26:00.006+13:00

The DIG Radio Show - 60 odd shows, every Tuesday 7-10pm, Radio Piha, 2005/06.

A fantastic year of aural madness from The Reverend Y El Presidente, aided and abetted with jingles and stings, created by The Hamilton Taight Process, presented an Audiosonic Travelogue for the 3rd Ear/3rd Eye/3rd Nostril. A clash of sounds, styles, genres, spoken word, unreleased music and oddities that either followed themes or just anarchic intuition .

The show was a lot of fun and the opportunity to truly wig-out behind the decks, to a an unspecified audience of freaks and fruits. This complete show is a mellow trip into existentialism, with the customary, diversion, distraction and randomness, that still confuses me to listen to and I was 'allegedly' there! Thanks for the memories - DIG it!

DIG Radio Show 07-05

DIG Radio Show 08-05

You lucky, lucky, lucky...bastards!

Fluoride-just saying

2011-03-28T21:55:00.001+13:00

There is more fluoride in the pineal gland than any other organ in the body and flouride calcifies the pineal gland. The pineal gland is a midline structure, and is often seen in plain skull X-rays, as it is often calcified. Susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) is a new MRI technique that can identify calcification by using phase images.^[ref] Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) does not expose the patient to the hazards of ionizing radiation as with computed tomography (CT) scanners that uses X-rays. Calcification of the pineal gland is typical in adults.^[ref]

Lets go back to the history of fluoride. The G-Series is the first and oldest family of nerve agents^[ref] that was accidentally discovered in Germany on December 23, 1936 by a research team headed by Dr. Gerhard Schrader working for IG Farben. Since 1934, Schrader had been working in a laboratory in Leverkusen to develop new types of insecticides for IG Farben. While working toward his goal of improved insecticide, Schrader experimented with numerous fluorine-containing compounds, eventually leading to the preparation of tabun. In experiments, tabun was extremely potent against insects: as little as 5 ppm of tabun killed all the leaf lice he used in his initial experiment.^[ref] Treatment for suspected tabun poisoning is often three injections of a nerve agent antidote, such as atropine (found in Atropa belladonna).^[ref]. Fluorination of hallucinogenic tryptamines either reduces or has little effect on 5-HT_2A/C receptor affinity or efficacy.^[ref]

The first occurrence of fluoridated drinking water on Earth was found in Germany's Nazi prison camps. The Gestapo had little concern about fluoride's supposed effect on children's teeth; their alleged reason for mass-medicating water with sodium fluoride was to sterilize humans and force the people in their concentration camps into calm submission.^{[The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, by Joseph Borkin]}

References that should be further investigated

The following letter was received by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee Wisconsin, on 2 October 1954, from Mr. Charles Perkins, a chemist:

“I have your letter of September 29 asking for further documentation regarding a statement made in my book, The Truth About Water Fluoridation, to the effect that the idea of water fluoridation was brought to England from Russia by the Russian Communist Kreminoff. “In the 1930's, Hitler and the German Nazi's envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass-control which was submitted to and adopted by the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would produce sterility in women, and so on. In this scheme of mass-control, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place. ...”

“Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual's power to resist domination, by slowly poisoning and narcotizing a certain area of the brain, thus making him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him. [A convenient light lobotomy]”

“The real reason behind water fluoridation is not to benefit children's teeth. If this were the real reason there are many ways in which it could be done that are much easier, cheaper, and far more effective. The real purpose behind water fluoridation is to reduce the resistance of the masses to domination and control and loss of liberty.”

“When the Nazis under Hitler decided to go into Poland, both the German General Staff and the Russian General Staff exchanged scientific and military ideas, plans, and personnel, and the scheme of mass control through water medication was seized upon by the Russian Communists because it fitted ideally into their plan to communize the world. ...”

“I was told of this entire scheme by a German chemist who was an official of the great IG Farben chemical industries and was also prominent in the Nazi movement at the time. I say this with all the earnestness and sincerity of a scientist who has spent nearly 20 years' research into the chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology of fluorine--any person who drinks artificially fluorinated water for a period of one year or more will never again be the same person mentally or physically.”
CHARLES E. PERKINS, Chemist, 2 October 1954. ^[ref]

Population receiving fluoridated water, including
both artificial and natural fluoridation.

Historically, most cases of fluoride poisoning have been caused by accidental ingestion of insecticides or rodenticides (e.g. sodium fluoroacetate) containing fluoride. Currently most cases are due to the ingestion of toothpaste.^[ref] Water fluoridation is the controlled addition of fluoride to a public water supply to reduce tooth decay.

In an analysis published in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Evidence Based Dental Practice, the authors examine the water fluoridation controversy in the context of the precautionary principle. The authors note that:

There are other ways of delivering fluoride besides the water supply;
Fluoride does not need to be swallowed to prevent tooth decay;
Tooth decay has dropped at the same rate in countries with, and without, water fluoridation;
People are now receiving fluoride from many other sources besides the water supply;
Studies indicate fluorideâ€™s potential to cause a wide range of adverse, systemic effects;
Since fluoridation affects so many people, â€œone might accept a lower level of proof before taking preventive actions.^[11]

^[ref]

The flood of sodium fluoride in water and food also creates other more serious health problems that are not widely publicized, even suppressed. According to a scientific study done several years ago, Comparative Toxicity of Fluorine Compounds, industrial waste sodium fluorides are 85 times more toxic than naturally occurring calcium fluoride.^[ref] 355 million worldwide receive artificially fluoridated water. Water fluoridation's science and practice are predominantly American and in China an estimated 200 million people receive water fluoridated at or above recommended levels. Communities have discontinued water fluoridation in some countries, including Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.^[ref]

Since 1952 a slick PR campaign rammed the concept of 'fluoridation' through the Public Health departments and various dental organizations.^[ref]

In addition to fluorosis, independent labs and reputable researchers have linked the following health issues with daily long term intake of sodium fluoride:

Cancer
Genetic DNA Damage
Thyroid Disruption - affecting the complete endocrine system and leading to obesity
Neurological - diminished IQ and inability to focus, lethargy and weariness.
Alzheimer's Disease
Melatonin Disruption, lowers immunity to cancer, accelerates aging, sleep disorders.
Pineal Gland, calcification, which clogs this gland located in the middle of the brain.
Reduced IQ: 23 published studies reporting an association of reduced IQ with high fluoride exposure

Read the full article here.

The Art of the Insult

2011-03-25T12:23:00.002+13:00

'It's not often I would post email frippery on the DIGlog. However as lovers of words and language, this email footnote, amuses and rewards as well as reminding us of the power of language, artfully employed.
Rev'

These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor:
She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

A member of Parliament to Disraeli:
"Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease."
"That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."
- Moses Hadas

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend .. if you have one."
- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second .... if there is one."
- Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts.... for support rather than illumination."
- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

Another Life on Mars

2011-03-13T23:57:00.003+13:00

Seu Jorge - Life Aqautic Sessions
A friend put me onto this great artist who has recoorded a whole album of David Bowie covers in Portugese, and as a born and bred Bowie fanatic, these sublime covers really impress!

Music For Your mInD with No Ceiling!

2011-03-13T16:29:00.006+13:00

There are plenty of places to get a musical fix and sometimes for keeps on the web. Music lovers, like to spread the joy and the word around, so here are a couple of links to sites where you can discover some seriously great tunes and whole albums, spanning different genres and time. We know the moral dilemna of 'sharing' all too well, but we Have given up food for funk, what we love we buy (although, as in Sky Saxons case, screwing the artist by doing so?). We have and do spread the word, as far as DIG can. But, like Gideons Bibles, file-sharing allows us to share and spread the good news, and that news is......that the music will never stop.

Oufar Khan
Blog presenting some fantastic and obscure albums, currently giving U Reverend's latin favourite - Pucho and the Latin Soul Brothers.

Funky16Corners
And here is one from my main man and music guru El P - Funkier than a Mosquito's Tweeter!

That should keep you diggers, diggin' for sometime yet!

Local Colour 3

2011-03-12T13:41:00.002+13:00

Local Colour 3 - Whanganui by Night
Neil Buddle 2011

SKY SAXON estate sues for Royalties

2011-03-01T09:07:00.002+13:00

Monday, February 28, 2011

© Mickeys Zoo.blogspot

Sky Saxon estate sues for royalties

SKY SAXON, the singer and songwriter behind the 1960s garage-rock band The Seeds, died in June 2009. However, for most of his career and to the end of his life, he received no royalties at all from his record company or his music publishing company. The reason? According to those companies, Saxon sold his artist’s and producer’s royalties in 1973 for $350, and his music publishing royalties for $250. Despite repeated requests over the years from Saxon, and, recently, his widow, the companies have flatly refused to pay any royalties at all, and the matter is now in litigation in the Los Angeles Superior Court.

Saxon signed a record deal in 1965 with GNP Crescendo Record Co., Inc., a Los Angeles-based company that specialized in jazz recordings, run by Gene Norman, a former concert promoter and disc jockey. At that time, he also signed a music publishing deal with Neil Music, Inc., which is a sister company of GNP. The Seeds and Saxon went on to have hits in 1965 and 1966 with “Pushin’ Too Hard,” “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” and “Mr. Farmer.”

But for 37 years, since 1973, GNP and Neil Music have stubbornly refused to pay Saxon, or his heirs, any royalties whatsoever. These companies maintain that Saxon signed away all of his royalties, forever, based upon three minor transactions: A $500 payment for “Pushin’ Too Hard” in late 1972, a loan for $250 in mid-1973 (that Saxon did not pay back), for all of Saxon’s other songs, and a loan for $350 from late 1973 (that Saxon also did not pay back), for all of Saxon’s record and producer’s royalties.

The Estate has brought a lawsuit against GNP and Neil Music for rescission of Saxon’s record and publishing deals, and for royalties for the past four years. In response, the companies (which are now run by Neil Norman, son of Gene Norman) have taken the position that the three petty deals from 1972 and 1973 are “buy-outs” of any and all royalties forever. The Estate has asked the court to set aside these three transactions, on the grounds that they are so oppressive and unfair that they should be void, as a matter of public policy, that is, “unconscionable.” “Unconscionable” contracts are deals that are so oppressive and one-sided that they literally “shock the conscience” of the court and of civilized society, or which have no place in the legitimate business world. In that the alleged “buy-outs” fit that description exactly, the Estate has asked the court to set them aside. The Estate has also asked that on account of the 37-year failure of GNP and Neil Music to pay any royalties, that the original 1960s deals be rescinded, and the Estate be given back all of the musical properties.

In recent years, GNP and Neil Music have exploited Saxon’s songs and recordings to a substantial extent. “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine” has recently been used in a commercial for Axe Body Spray. “Pushin’ Too Hard” has been used for numerous film and television projects, as have other songs by The Seeds. The songs have been covered over the years by numerous artists, including The Ramones, Johnny Thunders, Billy Corgan, Garbage, Alex Chilton, Murder City Devils, and Yo La Tengo.

The motion to determine the issue of unconscionability will be heard on March 8, 2011. A legal brief filed by the Estate on February 22, 2011, which gives more information, background, and legal authority, is also available.

Bring the Noise

2011-02-25T10:47:00.007+13:00

PINK NOISE is an online zine and gallery of NZ artists founded by Katie Robinson who says, "This whole concept is non-profit, simply an interesting Art Project to promote artists and create a unique network and Art Zine along the way."
You can get involved here or contribute to PINK NOISE online auction on Trade Me to raise money for Christchurch.

A Rumble

2011-02-23T11:29:00.000+13:00

From DIG to all the Christchurch Massive Rock On

Martin Horspool

2011-02-22T16:06:00.003+13:00

Martin Horspool was one of the first people to experience ¡DIG! at the Corban Estate Arts Centre back in the day. Since then his assemblage pieces have taken on a life of their own and their creator has gone into Robo-drive trying to keep up. Below is a blurb from his website.

Martin Horspool is one of the few people lucky enough to be able to visualize personalities, hidden in disused household objects.

The development of these personalities involves some grinding, drilling and riveting, until a creation is formed, from a pile of rusting parts.

Horspool, a Welshman, attended Art colleges in Wrexham and Liverpool, where his passion for 1950’s and 60’s industrial design originated.

Now living the dream in New Zealand, his search for objects has become an obsession for him and his collection of discarded paraphernalia becomes the catalyst for the creation process.

The self confessed urban gypsy collects from kerb sides, car boots, markets, scrap yards, antique shops, auction houses and has stock piled a collection of components to make any magpie jealous.

Most Robot sculptures contain original pieces from the 50s and 60s and he finds it important for people to recognise the individual components that make up each one.

He has had sell out exhibitions in New Zealand, with sales to collectors in London, New York and Europe, and is planning an exhibition in Tokyo for 2011.
buggyrobot.com

There ain't 'arf been some clever bastards...

2011-02-22T11:48:00.003+13:00

Finding good New Zealand Art + Design to own, can be challenging. You know it's out there but where? Work is often seen at exhibitions only and trawling through some of the more generic gift-shop art and reproductions can be a soul destroying, rather than uplifting affair.

There are many websites that allow artists to promote themselves, but with an open door policy and unclear presentation, these too can be unrewarding.

So it was a delight on a random Google browse, that CleverBastards.co.nz turned up. A well designed site, showcasing some very interesting, funky, quality work from a range of emerging NZ artists, ranging from the known to the unknown and encompassing diverse media. All the work is for sale and presented appropriately.

With an easy registration and all the usual connectivity, the site is accessible and more importantly presents the wide range of quality work professionaly and creatively.

I look forward to checking out more of the work (I liked the cable-tie, spirograph homages!) and have submitted my own modest output for possible inclusion...watch this space, and check out those CleverBastards!

www.cleverbastards.co.nz/Clever-Hunting

CleverBastards - New Zealand Art + Design

Assemblage

2011-02-21T14:24:00.005+13:00

At DIG we are particularly fond of assemblage art. Dig spotted this bloke on The Cool Hunter.
Robert Bradford - Recycled Toy Sculptures

Local Colour 2 - Mosquito Point

2011-02-16T10:47:00.003+13:00

Local Colour Series #2 - Mosquito Point
Original Print by Neil Buddle 2010
Ltd. Edition of 20

Cabeza!

2011-02-12T12:01:00.008+13:00

Lovers of bass heavy, fruity and down right dutty music will love the digital -Latino- combustion blowing up at Cabeza! Netlabel. Cabeza! is a virtual label whose main goal is to distribute what they call "suburbia music."
Cabeza head honcho's Lucas Luisao and Martin "negromoreno" Moreno say they "joined forces to shape one of the least profitable projects on earth."
The Cumbia phenomena that is sweeping South America rides at the forefront of Cabeza's free downloads (that's right FREE!) It's not just a Cumbia experience either, you'll find heavy traces of dancehall, and reggaeton mashed up and rejigged in a veritable world of "rhythms that started in the slums and made their way to the dance floor."
With 33 compilations to date since Cabeza! launched in early 2008 one gets the feeling that Sud-Americas musical creatives are in overdrive. !Salud!
Cabeza! is independent and distributed for free but should you wish to koha to these generous purveyors then you can always leave a donation or buy the T-shirt. ¡Muchas Gracias!
Their latest release is by the artist Gameboy.
Game on!

Who is that Masked Man - Its Lenny Bruce!

2011-02-11T23:49:00.001+13:00

An animation of a comedic playlet,w ritten and performed by Lenny Bruce, possibly one of the first alternative, political comedians.

Saying My Prayers

2011-02-11T19:26:00.003+13:00

Feeling jazzy or jaded, check out Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the 'Multi-instrumentalist' spiritual jazz pioneer. Here his riotous version of Say A little Prayer is a revelation!

Splore City Countdown

2011-02-10T20:33:00.004+13:00

We here at Dig have s a long association with the good folk at Splore. With only hours to go until the inaugural -gap year- Splore City we're sure all good Splorers will be getting their freak garb together and getting into the vibe. The Reverend and El Presidente would like to wish all Splorestars the wickedest of times this weekend. Here's some shots from Splore to 2010 to get you in the mood....

©burgseye 2011

The Night Tripper..Zu Zu..

2011-02-08T15:11:00.003+13:00

Some vintage. Dr John, from Sun, Moon and Herbs, the Night Tripper LP I dont have, damn!

The Captain Makes a Commercial

2011-01-21T14:25:00.006+13:00

For the excellently titled album from 1973, 'Lick my Decals Off Baby', the Capt. made a commercial, he thought was commercial! This album contains 'Smithsonian Institute Blues (the Big Dig) a favourite to play on the DIG show, of course.

Together in Concrete Dreams

2011-01-21T13:58:00.004+13:00

Something for El-P. Found this remnant in Opunake, the remains of some attempt at making a port. The bottom 2 pics are pasrt of a 3 pic panorama. Included here to show Taranaki in the background to the scene. Hope you like. It's good to be back on DIGlog, sorry for the absence.

Captain Beefheart - I'm Gonna Boogiarize You Baby

2010-12-18T12:07:00.000+13:00

Sadly Gone but definitely Unforgettable. A dirty-big influence on all Digstars!

One of Dig's original contributors

2010-12-07T08:44:00.001+13:00

aids art censorship

2010-12-06T12:37:00.001+13:00

http://www.vbs.tv/blog/smithsonian-censors-aids-art

Erotica vs. Porn

2010-10-14T09:38:00.004+13:00

Erotica Vs. Porn 1/2/3
Floor Vinyl Print on handmade paper made from 50% recycled Pornography

Copyright - Buddle / Reverend 2010

As a keen commentator on various sites and occasional maker of erotic-themed art, the ongoing discussion between erotica (Art) and porn (Not-Art) fascinates me. Often I have become embroiled in discussions where people attempt to distinguish between the 2, either by content, intent, quality, style or moral reasoning. What has become evident to me is that there is no real enforceable difference. People use the word Pornography in the same way some people use the term Modern-Art, as a way to describe what they don't like, don't understand or can't tolerate.

Often the line between the 2 is unsurprisingly drawn right where the commentator stands. I like both and see them as part iof the same impulse and the same human imperative. The biggest difference is that pornography and pornographers seem more open-minded and less disengenuous than much erotica and most erotica practitioners.

These are some new works exploring this subject ...with a sense of humour.

Local Colour

2010-09-17T09:58:00.003+12:00

Local Colour 1 - North Mole

A new print based on visual research undertaken for Waterline project with ElPresidente. These prints are intended for local commercial market but are a pre-cursor to the Waterline Project due to be exhibited 2012.

The Shiver and Shake, Quiver and Quake House on Haunted Hill

2010-07-01T22:38:00.001+12:00

One of us was almost killed by a falling chandelier, one of us has been driven to the brink of absolute hysteria and one of us is dead....Don't try and escape, you can't.

House on Haunted Hill - Avian Relic Rockers

2010-06-10T12:17:00.004+12:00

Whanganui esoteric surf-trash combo, House on Haunted Hill, played their first foray into the mortal realm on May 3oth to celebrate New Zealand Music Month.

The gig one of a series organised by the Whanganui Regional Musuem, saw HOHH, play in the bird room, a display of stuffed native birds, providing an eerie locale for the first recital of this long, un-dead, musical form.

Playing to around 30-40 people of all ages, the surf quintet grave-rock'd the usually quiet peace of the Museum, filling the whare with their uniquely chilling ambience.

Here are some awesome photos of the event: Copyright-Brooke Ardell 2010

Tape Ghost No.5 and Reverend Tape Ghost, freak out!

The spooky forms of Tape Ghost Alchemist, Tape Ghost No.5 and Rev. Tape Ghost

Reverend Tape Ghost is pure apparition as he beats the skins.

Tape Ghost Scientist, experiments on his guitar.

No.5 and Alchemist conduct the whole ghoulish spectacle.

Tape Nurse may look sweet but her medicine kills or cures.

No.5 throws spooky shapes.

The House on Haunted Hill rule the roost!

THE ENIGMA

2010-06-08T14:51:00.000+12:00

The enigmatic freeforming Sun Ra offering some beat poetics and a discourse on his MO. Rhetorical advice befitting any creative... "They say history repeats itself but history is only his-story, you haven't heard my story yet..."

Doors Interview

2010-06-02T13:22:00.004+12:00

Continuing our musical snippets - This interview with the Doors is from a CBS television appearance in 1969. The Doors are in typically philosophical form as they discuss various aspects of their music.
However - I posted this because from about the 4 minute mark, Jim talks about contemporary genres and then goes on to imagine how music may develop in the future? It is here that he predicts the future of music with uncanny accuracy, and demonstrates why he was not only one of the smartest but also one of the most visonary of rock icons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wblCPj2Meg

House on Haunted Hill

2010-06-02T10:50:00.010+12:00

Discovered initally in 2003 as a hybrid of a film-makers corpse and an obselete recording format. It devolved rapidly as it terrorized New Zealands' coastlines, Australia and several European countries. In 2007 it died again, multiplied itself 3 times and then transmorphinated in to a single ghost. This year, it was discovered to have grown in to a 5 piece esoteric surf trash ensemble.

The newest addition to the Stink Magnetic roster of performing artists is 'House on Haunted Hill'. These terrifying tape-zombies play esoteric surf-trash, all frantic rhythms, pounding bass, piercing organ and reverb soaked guitars dripping sweet like honey and spitting mad like fire. Their unique instrumental sound is honed to perfection and it needs to be, for these poor tragic monsters, cannot speak; only grunts and barely audible moans are discernible from beneath their hideous visages.
Here is a review from their first official outing, beyond the walls of their haunted mansion, high on the hill.

Also see Jo Russ succinct photo review.

It has even been rumoured that the tape-ghost known only as Reverend Tape Ghost, may have pre-ressurection ties to the shadowy organisation known only as DIG, though at this time these reports could neither be confirmed or denied?

One thing that is certain is that these mutants of menace are playing soon, for your pleasure at these dates in Whanganui - Take a long walk into the dark night and see the horror and the joy for yourself.............

June 4th – Stink Magnetic Record Co., Whanganui - w/ Golden Axe

June 18th – Stink Magnetic Record Co., Whanganui - w/ Boss Christ

"whooooooooooooo

ooooooooooooooooo

oooooooaaaaaaahh"!

House on Haunted Hill

Whanganui Overground Underground Pt. 1 - The Stink Magnetic Story

2010-06-01T12:18:00.010+12:00

The Stink Magnetic Record Co. Guide to Global Music Domination

For New Zealand Music Month, we tracked down, Dylan Herkes, musician, svengali and head-honcho of the multi-national, Stink Magnetic Record Co. Our mission to find out just how a normal human being, with no clue, little talent and plenty of energy can form a band, make a record and start a record label, from literally, nothing.

For Art and Design student Dylan, the path has been a long and determined one. With Stink Magnetic Recording Co. in its 12th year, countless gigs around the country and beyond, several of his own releases and a whole host of other heroic, unsung NZ bands released through his label. The Stink Magnetic Record Co. has proved that with grit, guts, spunk and style, even the un-dead can make sweet music and become primitive rock-stars.

Dylan and Stink (As it is known to aficionados) have a strong aesthetic style, formed, re-hashed and over-heated from the remnants of B-Movies, crude garage punk records and the sound of surf music crashing on NZ’s shore in 1965. Think of werewolves, ghosts, and zombies from outer-space, guzzling hard liquor for the first time, abusing vintage instruments and expressing their raw urges in public. It sounds scary and it is…why? ... Because it works!

Over the years Stink Magnetic Record Co. has not only released many records by NZ garage, surf, Hawaiian industrial, experimental country disco, Spaghetti Western, esoteric trash, rap and stone-age punk bands but promoted countless gigs and events, which have strengthened the local scene. By helping these peripheral, wild characters achieve their dream and perfect their art, the primitive rock underground of New Zealand has flourished, far away from the fickle frippery of the mainstream.

It is this D.I.Y attitude and the idea that, ‘You can do it, because you want to, not because you can’, that fuels this most kiwi approach to making music. We tracked down, Dylan at Stink Magnetic H.Q to ‘cut the tape’ and find out where he comes from, where he is going and how we too, can blaze like an Asteroid, through the musical heavens.

Interview with Dylan Herkes, CEO – Stink Magnetic Recording Co.:

Tell us why you got involved in music and what was it like for you when you first started?

I started playing guitar just for fun. I just got interested in the instrument when I was a kid and started mucking around without any idea of how to play it at all. Before that it was a tennis racket. After pissin' about for a while some family members showed me a few chords and a riff or two. When I eventually started playing with some friends who could hit a drum and pluck a bass it was too much fun and I got hooked.

When did you first realise that D.I.Y was going to be the way to go?

I don’t know. I just like doing stuff. I don’t really enjoy been told what to do. Who does? I also saw a lot of amazing ideas happening and then going away quickly so I wanted to document things that I thought may not have otherwise been documented. I did meet a friend when I was about 16 who was dubbing tapes out of his bedroom and he gave me an example to start a record label.

What was your first band / act?

My first band with a name was playing bass for a high school band called Vendetta. I must have been shit cos I was fired after the first jam.
What was it like playing your first gig or releasing your first record?
Playing live almost every time is nerve racking for me. But there’s a massive adrenaline rush during and after a performance that I still love. The best thing is seeing an idea come in to reality and hearing your ideas come to life. Every time it’s done it’s great.

What is the biggest difficulty faced by bands starting out, particularly in New Zealand?

The only difficulties are the ones that you make up in your head. I don’t think it matters if you’re from New Zealand or from anywhere in the world. Sure, it may be better for some places rather than others for this or that but you don’t need much to get going if you take the preconceptions about how to do things away. You don’t have to measure success in terms of popularity, record sales, competency or gear at all. I’ve seen some of the coolest things happen with no money, shitty gear and 3 people in the room. It’s just about having fun and the less pressure you put on yourself, like anxieties about all that crap the better. You’d be surprised by how much fun you can have and how far you can go without all those preconceived ideas about how things “should” be done.

How have you dealt with those challenges?

One way is by playing music with people that you know really well. Because it takes a bit of guts to get up in front of strangers it helps to have the support of your mates with you and also when it comes to advancing your playin' abilities, you tend to respect the opinions of your peers the most (and also they are likely to have similar taste in music to you so you know if they think it sounds like arse then it probably does!). It’s more fun with friends and you all pick up on things faster.

Making music is a lot of work, often for a brief reward, what do you enjoy most about it?

I enjoy bringing ideas to life. It defiantly is very hard work writing and practicing music but when you go to play it just once live, it can be magic. If you enjoy making music then you’re probably a music lover which means you’re focus will be on the content rather than all the peripheral stuff. Enjoying what you do shows.
What advice would you give someone starting out from the very bottom?
Don’t be too concerned about how it should be done, get together with mates who are keen as well and just start jamming. You’ll figure things out quicker than you think.

The Tape Man Illustrated Guide to Making Music (Available as a series of lectures on 8-Track Cartridge Cassette, from all good stores)

After a long and tiring search, from graveyards to forgotten repositories of obsolete adhesives, we tracked down, the legendary Tape Man, one of Stink Magnetic’s most enduring, and elusive and esoteric stars, to give us the Tape Man Guide to Making music. (Actual results may vary)

“Howdy folks, here’s a few tips to blow the roof off your world with the mystical powers of sound.”

Step 1 – Choose your weapon
“You’re instrument could be anything. Don’t worry if you can’t play it. It could be more fun and entertaining if you choose something that you have no idea how to play for instance this shitty keyboard sliding across this stolen guitar…… Then make up a few little ideas that you can call your own”

Step 2 – Tidy up
“Now you’ve gotta show someone else, so do what you gotta do like take a shower, brush your teeth and find some flash clothes or “something a little special” to really make an impression on your audience. What are you gonna call yourself?”

Step 3 – Do a show
“It don’t matter even if it’s just your little sister in the room just rock the hell out like there’ll be no tomorrow! Hell it’s more fun than being a boring hi-tech, know-it-all muso wanker like all those other sissies!”

Step 4 – Document your band
“Make sure you get a couple of cool photos to chuck on the net and get out whatever recording devices you can find lying around. Because it’s got sound involved you wanna get a recording of that so use a digital camera on movie function, Uncle Steve’s old tape deck, headphones plugged in to the microphone input on the computer or whatever! Think; The more creative - the more ORIGINAL.”

Step 5 – Make a record
“Now release your thing on any format you want to. Don’t care if it’s digital or analogue or any of that crap just OUT IT OUT THERE! You could make a cassette tape, a CD, a DVD, a book….ANYTHING. Now take it down to most appropriate outlet in town or put it up on the internet and see what happens! “

“Good luck and all the best”
Lust, Tape Jerk

Stink Magnetic Record Co.
The Studio is situated in the Old Chronicle Building, cnr. Rutland and Drews Ave. Whanganui.

The office is open to the public every Wednesday from 12-1pm, with an amazing clutch of original records, and CD’s of all of your favourite NZ garage, surf, Hawaiian industrial, experimental country disco, Spaghetti Western, esoteric trash, rap and stone-age punk music!

Stink Magnetic Record Co. Artistes.

Golden Axe, Space Dust, Boss Christ, Full F***ing Moon, Double YAD, Knifefight, Wrongdoings, Hi_tone Destroyers, Pro-Drag, Delaney Davidson, Voodoo Savage & His Savages, Mr. Slackjaw, Bad Evil, Sheville and Tapeman.

The Continuing Adventures of Tapeman

Due to be the feature of the next blog-post from the Whanganui Overground Underground, The Ghost of Tapeman can be seen playing with his freshly resurrected esoteric trash-surf combo, “House on Haunted Hill’ at the following hip locations:

June 4th – Stink Magnetic w/ Golden Axe
June 18th – Stink Magnetic w/ Boss Christ

Stink Magnetic Record Co. Contact:

stinkmagnetic@gmail.com

Written for CREW magazine - N.Buddle 2010

Easy Rider - Opening Credits

2010-05-30T21:48:00.000+12:00

RIP Dennis Hopper

Rolling Stones Cocksucker Blues Movie Part 1

2010-05-28T19:36:00.001+12:00

The Stones as themselves filmed during the excessive Exile recordings by the photo-great Robert Frank. It's only rock n roll...and a long way from the Filth and the Fury on the Kings Road not so many years later.

Walk & Don t Look Back - Peter Tosh & Mick Jagger

2010-05-28T19:30:00.000+12:00

The choon that launched a longtime fascination with the Caribbean and more particularly Jamaica. Mick looking mighty mithered, I dare say he got collared by some heavyweight collie weed.

Proud Scum - Live 1979 - I am a Rabbit

2010-05-28T19:09:00.000+12:00

Hey hey one of the first gigs I ever attended at the YMCA, in pure D65 Kelvin and not a village person in sight.

Roadtripping

2010-05-27T10:49:00.005+12:00

Merc and I used to make many road trips together. We never had any Particular Place To Go. He usually drove, me looking for photo Ops and him seeing symbolism in every grain of sand. Much water has passed over the iron beach since those days, yet there is a collective memory in each of our workings secreted away against tide and time. Merc always said don't hide your bushel and Dali said Life's too short to go unnoticed, so I've been reshooting/resurrecting notebook doodles in an effort to create some continuity of process in these quietish days.

Since I was a nipper I've always been on the road. I lay no claim to being either world weary or a road warrior. I'd like to kid myself and say I was both but if I'm honest, I am nothing more than a tourist. Just passing through, here or overseas.

Ok, as part of my work I do get to indulge in some pretty long-winded postcards home, but hopefully they are true reflection of a place.

Sometimes said notes get filed in the journals to be Dada'd by endless layers of ephemera and idle scribbles that I paste in, in moments of reflection, doubt and projection.

And sometimes great imagery gets defiled and derailed by endless experimentation and the only tenuous link I can make between this picture and what I just wrote, is that it is a shot of a steamroller nose, that built a new section of the North Western Motorway in Auckland, a stretch of bitumen that has launched all number of travels.

©burgseye 10

Dig 2: the lost files

2010-05-26T17:02:00.002+12:00

With the first edition of DIGzine under our belts way back in the early naughties, the Rev n I thought we'd go large on issue 2 with an all colour second edition. HA! That is until the print estimate arrived. Not wanting to take advertising dollars we decided to shelve the project until we could we afford to release it. But now we're gonna revisit it on the web and post some pages from all the peeps who contributed. But first we'll begin with the cover that never was. Above is the Rev's beautiful Dia de la muerte cut, cos we were originally looking at an All Saints Day release.

These two are my sketchy sketches doodled in an old note book for further exploration at a later stage. The one above pretty much sums up the Rev and I's attitude to self publishing back then and below a kind of back cover ad for herbal inspiration.

Needless to say none of the above made the cut and I'm still racking my brains as to what did. It was a Reverential piece as I can remember. Rev?

©DIGubet

No-Yeah!! by spikedevildisco

2010-05-26T15:54:00.002+12:00

an electrocumbiaspace take on the kiwi Yeah-Nah! Sit back, relax and close yer eyes....

Captain Beefheart documentary (Part 1 of 6)

2010-05-26T08:17:00.001+12:00

In the spirit of Whanganui's current backdoor blues scene thats blowing up at Stink Magnetic and particularly the Rev's new beat at the House on Haunted Hill- I found this fantastic six part BBC doco -with John Peel narrating- on one of the dirtiest of all the white boy swamp monsters, Don Glen Vliet aka Captain Beefheart.

Picasso's Guernica Deconstructed

2010-05-25T16:30:00.000+12:00

the roadrunners - lsd

2010-05-25T15:34:00.004+12:00

while doing a quick bit of research for mr mal macca sporran, I came across this wonderful version of the pretty things tune LSD by a Lower Hutt posse called The Roadrunners on the mysterex blog. This version just thrashes the bejeebers out of the original. Hard arse punked guitars, 1966 fuzz the Cramps would be proud of.

Anyway I send the link through to Malheureuse and this is his inimitable response: I knew Chaz Burke-Kennedy(guitar/vocals on the roadrunners cut of lsd)when he was Blerta's lead guitarist...in fact, on the occasion that keyboard/sitar playing legendary casualty, Chris Seresin lost his mind, he and Chaz had arrived at my Coromandel house,tripping. It was 1973. They left for our commune at Colville, crashed the car, Chris flipped...and never came back. He has been a dero around Wellington ever since. And I remember the uproar when the Pretty Things toured NZ in 1965. Drummer Viv Prince was sufficiently out of it at departure time for the TEAL Electra pilot to have him arrested and taken from the plane. The good burghers of Napier - where I was at school - and other provincial outposts, were outraged. We loved it. I didn't go to Wellington for the concert but my mate, Colin Lum,did (later to die of an od in an Auckland motel,1974. A doctor and one of those bright young ones I referred to...in 1969 he won a scholarship to do his post grad thesis at Stanford on...wait for it...LSD. We all took our first trips that year with Owsley acid he sent back). Memories...mammaries. And I bought Chris's sitar for him in Calcutta in 1970 while undertaking phase 2 of the great ginseng scam...talk about the endless highway...

New Urban Developments

2010-05-11T12:31:00.003+12:00

A recent shot (through a window reflection) of a colossal wall of graff colouring up an otherise grey section of Auckland's CBD by a crew known as Urban Development .

Check here for a little on one of the protagonists and some choice cuts from the wall itself.

Bukowski Stamp

2010-02-24T07:34:00.004+13:00

One Week Left To Sign Petition Supporting Writer Charles Bukowski's Postage

Stamp

LOS ANGELES- In 1969, when the 49-year-old underground poet and columnist

Charles Bukowski quit his job at the Terminal Annex US Postal Service

sorting facility, he was one step ahead of a pink slip. Offered $100 a month

by an editor who believed in his work, Bukowski took the leap to become a

professional writer, and in just a few weeks produced his first novel, the

autobiographical "Post Office."

Bukowski never held a day job again. He would go on to write six more

novels, the screenplay to "Barfly" and thousands of poems, and to find

international acclaim as one of the truly distinctive voices of Los Angeles

literature. Although he died in 1994, his literary output continues with

posthumous anthologies, and he is widely known among American booksellers as

the most shoplifted author on their shelves.

In 2006, Bukowski's archives were acquired by the Huntington Library, and in

2008 the modest East Hollywood cottage where he wrote "Post Office" was

named one of the Historic-Cultural Monuments of the City of Los Angeles.

But one perfectly apt honor still eludes Bukowski: shouldn't the second most

famous American postal worker after Benjamin Franklin have his own postage

stamp?

Richard Schave and Kim Cooper of the L.A.-based literary bus tour company

Esotouric think so, and have launched a petition asking the Citizens Stamp

Advisory Committee to consider recommending that a commemorative Bukowski

stamp be released on the 20th anniversary of his death (March 9, 2014).

Currently containing more than 350 signatures, the online Charles Bukowski

Stamp Petition will remain active until March 1, 2010, when it will be

printed out and submitted to the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, the

volunteer group that advises the postal service on appropriate choices for

commemorative stamps.

To view or sign the petition, visit:

http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/bukowskistamp

If you're heading to LA any time soon check with http://www.esotouric.com

Esotouric's celebrations of Bukowski's life and work include the bus tour

"Haunts of A Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski's LA" (next scheduled on April

24), working on the campaign to have his home landmarked, and inviting

journalist Marco Mannone to host a Bukowski Salon at the October 2009

Downtown LA Art Walk. They also spearheaded the successful campaign to have

the corner of Fifth and Grand, at the LA Central Library, designated John

Fante Square, after the writer who Bukowski called "my God." (Fante Square

signs will be erected sometime in Spring 2010.)

Sourced from http://www.explosivepr.com

A New Dawn for Old Work

2010-02-03T10:59:00.004+13:00

A New Dawn
Oil on Canvasboard
1994-95?

Another one from the vaults. This was the last oil painting I did before I went to Art School (When I still enjoyed Oil Painting)!

The Sky was done from the memory of a particularly vivid sunset I saw with a friend, one evening coming back on the train from London to home. The figures depict, idealised, early-human forms, communing with nature and seeing the dawn as if for the first time. So a bit hippy and a bit colourful, but still quite pleasant and hopefully it is still in the safe hands of a good friend.

Not Half-Hearted

2010-01-27T11:03:00.002+13:00

Well back from holidays and imagine my suprise when I find myself included in an excellent local exhibition ...

Half Heartedh
WHolehearted
WHanganui

Jan 16 - Feb 19? 2010
WHMillbank Gallery
Whanganui

An impromptu exhibition to celebrate the historic decision to recognise the 'H' in Whanganui puts the issue to the fore in an eclectic and substantial show. Featuring artists such as Matt Pine, Emma Camden, Marty Vreede and Michael Tuffery and a host of locals, the show includes print, glass, paint, sculpture and photography.

It is my privilege to be included in this show. The work featured is 'Read it in the Paper' a one-off unique print featuring the 'H is of for History' series andother elements on handmade 'Wanganui Chronicle' paper. Only exhibited at the Serjeant Review Show 2008.... and on my living room wall! It will be a welcome opportunity to show this work again in a relevant forum, especially considering that the change the decision earlier this year to recognise both spellings has made.

Kia ora

Read it in the Paper
Neil Buddle 2008
Lino print and collage on handmade paper (Whanganui Chronicle)

Art Attack in LA

2010-01-26T21:06:00.004+13:00

Kim Cooper and Richard Schave

Esotouric and Downtown LA Art Walk instigators.

Kim Cooper and Richard Schave run bus and walking tours like no other in their native Los Angeles City. Their celebration of LA captures the imagination. Not only do they bring history to life, they bring a rare sense of place to a town whose repute extends largely to Hollywood and fast buck makers. Along the highways and bi-ways they uncover literary and cultural heroes that endow the basin with integrity and a richness of life beyond the glass towers and theme parks. Their portrayals of the bizarre, the ludicrous and the myriad quirky denizens -that manifest exponentially in the City of Angels- are as important to the social fabric as stories about high flying exec's or movie stars. Equally the access they provide into the studio's and creative minds of arty Angeleno's is a rare gift for any stranger to a new place to be a party to.

But apparently even the worthy and good are not immune to the likes of the over zealous Russell Brown whose civic profile, ego and weight of power he brandishes is particularly scary, especially since Kim And Richard set their attentions to exposing the double standards and duplicity of roles he performs and calling for his resignation also backed by a local newspaper.

Check here how their non-profit labours of love -restructuring and managing their own initiative, a Downtown Art Walk- has landed them in a potential lawsuit with a man who has a wealth of big business funds, big budget lawyers and the LAPD at his disposal.

If it moves you get behind them here and express yourself.

By Order El Presidente

on his way to the beach

2010-01-22T17:15:00.006+13:00

so there the Rev was, pre xmas dreaming of the waves lapping the beach, his kids dipping and diving, running amok with other campground kids, him cooking dinners of fresh caught snapper on a solitary outdoor gas stove and him gently nodding off to the inner tuneage that abounds deep within his soul. as it happens it all panned out but on his way to the beach the Rev's ailing motor coughed one least time and spat the dummy on the hill over to Tairua pulling short before the crest.

of course no amount of rapid response was going to move it. he was puckerooed and in the summer heat, the kids fried from a previous six hours of driving on such a blistering day. the first car he waves down is a beamer with a lady driver who wouldn't know a jump start from a false start, she's never had to learn. she doesn't want to appear unfriendly, thats why she stopped but she doesn't want to crack the bonnet cos she doesn't know where the hood lift is. thats the way of this planet. she accelerates onwards towards her holiday home and the rev stands jumper leads in hand awaiting and praying to his funk god for a kindly soul...

as is the way with the rev an extra strength saviour rolls into frame, Pauanui's very own "Builder With The Bedford." not only is this godsend the salt of the earth, he's also got some machine nouse, driving skills and practical know how. his verdict is not great. needless to say a dubious looking tow rope is produced -barely two metres in length- and suddenly the rev finds himself freewheeling within a gnats breath of a '78 CF Bedford's towball. For the next 20 or so perilous clicks up and over the Coromandel Range the Rev holds his breath until the crippled mazda is delivered to a workshop and is given the once over by the local mechanic who pronounces it dead, one of five that died the same way this day and he wants to take no responsibility for any of the carcasses. so it's off behind the CF back to the BWTB's homestead, where the murdered mazda now lays awaiting a wrecker with a sense of humour. and as if the call of duty wasn't already exceeded, the Rev and family are invited to camp the night in the BWTB's orchard (its camping they're here to do) and then the next morning the Rev hits the dog and bone desperately seeking solace on the end of the BWTB's handset. then the BWTB transports the Wanga Family Reverend to the hallowed sands of Hahei (a sixty plus Km roundtrip) where the Rev gets to make real his daydream and rekkie some fresh ideas for 2010 projects. and the BWTB goes home and carries on like none of it happened. goodwill is alive and well on the Peninsular and he's best known in them there parts as the BWTB.

pics © burgseye 2010

stories are all the rev's.

Kia ora, key aura, quay oarer!

2009-12-17T12:54:00.003+13:00

The Reverend is going ol' school and lo-tech for the holidays, which means I dont have a PC at home, so I wont be able to communicate for a few weeks.

So in lieu of next time......

Seasons Greetings to Hamilton Taight, Mercurius Bradburn, Dr. Benway, all DIGloggers and friends, family and followers of the Reverend Y El Presidente.

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported DIG and Neil and Jase as individual artists throughout the year, whether by support, encouragement, inspiration, networking or buying some of our creative outpourings - Kia ora

We look forward to next year, meeting new friends, reconnecting with old ones, ranting, raving, making peace, makingh war and making some new art for this ol' world.

DIG!!!

Postcards from Aotearoa

2009-12-03T11:16:00.007+13:00

The Reverend (Aka Neil Buddle) has completed a new set of 3 prints, for sale exclusively through Pauanesia Store, Auckland, New Zealand.

The 3 prints show contemporary New Zealand beach life and reference early postcards. Here follows low-res images and the accompanying blurb.

Postcard
The island nation of New Zealand is defined by its coast. From its location, between the mighty Pacific Ocean and the feisty Tasman Sea, to its native mythology, the power, and importance of the elements are celebrated and acknowledged.

The thin strip, where land, sea, and sky meet, is never far away. Here on the beach, New Zealanders are most at home. Whether fishing, surfing, swimming, or just relaxing, New Zealanders relish every opportunity to enjoy this ephemeral landscape; Where the big sky and the roaring surf are reflected in the shimmering sands and the headlands fade like a dream, into the distance…

These prints evoke this environment and the enjoyment of it, referencing the style of postcards, from the 19th and early 20th century – The 1st golden age of New Zealand tourism.

Beenie Man or Batty Boy?

2009-11-17T14:27:00.004+13:00

Legendary dance-hall performer, Beenie Man, is in the news this week, having been excised from the Big Day out line-up. Groups and individuals, including Rainbow Youth protested at his inclusion on the bill, because old Beenie Man tunes contain 'homophobic' lyrics. This was further inflamed by an impromptu Facebook group, emerging to condemn the decision. The Facebook group, surprisingly consisted of many people, who did not look like dance-hall fans, or likely to have heard of Beenie Man or dance-hall at all, before this drama erupted .

The furore over these lyrics is old news, he has already given reasons for their misinterpretaion, apologised for any hurt and made a commitment to positivity in Jamaican music. Frankly what he said or his reasons are unimportant to this argument because we are talking about free-speech. The notion of which it seems has become greatly confused with the 'Right to say what you want as long as no-one previously disenfranchised gets upset, and as long as no-one disagrees', which is a far inferior right and frankly not worth having.

What is worrying is the move towards left-wing censorship of ideas, speech, acts that express anything resembling right-wing, intolerant or offensive notions, however deep and wide those notions may go. The idea that a civillised and democratic nation cannot allow certain combinations of 'words', because of their danger to society is both frightening and indicative of a grave insecurity in the concept and the realisation of democracy. Personally I want all ideas, notions and thoughts out in the open, however unpalatable, illogical or apposite to my own views they are. That is how I can learn to understand the issues, the motivations and sometimes the logic of other people who like the rest of humanity are only trying to refine their own instincts and look after 'them and theirs'. That is also how as a society we can deal with issues, through discussion, through debate, through intelligent discourse, not through censorship and definitely not through denial and ignorance.

New Zealand was one of the last western countries to legalise homosexual relations and even then it was opposed by a majority of the public. Homophobia along with racism is alive and well in New Zealand right now, are recalcitrant Jamaican musicians, really the best place to start the fight?

Of course like many of the Facebook group, I too have too much time on my hands at work, allowing me the opportunity to wax philosophical and critique events, as if I had a clue. Maybe this is part of the problem? We have become too used to knowing a little about lots and not much about anything. Now it is so easy, you're at work it's 10am, your friend forwards you some subjective rant about something really facile and PC to side with, animal cruelty, homophobic rappers etc. You are bored and in an effort to dissipate your own frustration at your own life and the world, you start a Facebook group before lunch and lo and behold by hometime, 1000 people have joined it, they've all spewed their guts out about how shocking, appalling, obscene, offensive etc. it all is and you have become an activist and committed leader of a powerful lobby group. Imagine the surprise the next day, when the lobby group gets it's man. No hand printing pamphlets and handing them out on cold Saturday mornings in the high street, no long letter writing campaigns to government, no actual effort beyond a bit of typing and a bit of cut'n'paste from Wikipedia (Cos' you've never heard the songs and wouldn't get the lyrics if you did). In the old days you had to really fight for your cause, pay some dues, walk the talk. Now with modern technology, we can all be activists, and all without leaving our desks, doing our bit to make the world a better place or at least able to dump our crap anywhere in the world but here on anyone but us!

New Manifesto for Artists in the Business of Being Artists

2009-10-02T11:14:00.007+13:00

The Fine-Art world is rapidly becoming anachronistic, in it's effectiveness as a means of communicating ideas or as an occupation of worth. New mediums and new forms are replacing some of our traditional and even our 20th century modes of expression. More people play computer games than buy music CD's, more people watch Youtube than go to the movies, more people enjoy publishing imagery, than fine-art.

The fine art world has always had it's idiosyncracies and it's avoidance of engagement with the business of communication, is largely self-constructed. The false proclamation of creative altruism, provides many artists with the opportunity to avoid critique, the accountability to the audience and the challenges of commercial production, through an establishment-endorsed aloofness. This perceived, moral self-elevation, paradoxically illustrates the lack of esteem amongst many fine-artists, in relation to their cousins in the design and media worlds.

Although commercial success is not a measure of credibility and vice-versa, it can be said, that money and commerce are a useful tool in the assessment of worth of a product/service/idea, to the general population based upon, supply and demand. Fine-Artists sometimes act as if the work they produce is both priceless (i.e. Morally and spiritually above definition by the base tool, that is money) and worthless (Not adequately appreciated by the base collective that is the general population). This is despite many artists not producing work that communicates effectively with the general population or work that is not presented in a form suitable for appreciation by the general public. This view stems form a deep-seated doubt and resentment about their own artistic self-worth and a fear of rejection by the audience.

As always it is a case of horses for courses and the trouble only begins when an artist expects recompense for something they don't do and expects no recompense for what they do - this contradictory approach sets up art and artists to be undervalued, misunderstood and unsuccessful. Bizarrely this is completely enshrined and endorsed by the artists own establishment. Whilst this establishment is not a union, guild or other such over-arching organisation, it is this strata of the art world, that could make a difference. Alas it is this very strata, that is either involved in the collection, sale and promotion of art, or the teaching of art, that serves neither to profit nor gain from any revision of basic art business practice.

So here below are a few 'new' ideas for Artists in the Business of Being Artists. Try them, adapt them, do them well and stroke by stroke, we might just paint a new picture...

You are professional, capable and creative - Act accordingly, be smart, punctual, pragmatic, decisive and dynamic.
Art is about communication of ideas/concepts/feelings - Decide who you want to communicate with, how many and to what level?
Money is the best tool yet devised for valuing apples against oranges - It has widely understood rules, standards and units - Use it.
People don't value what is free or cheap - Charge realistically and optimistically for all of your services/products, then add 10%.
Don't Undercut Yourself - Establish a retail price for a product, (this price should be at least 3 x the cost of production and in line with other similar products). Whatever outlet, you sell work through, the price is the price. You receive that price minus the commission (Commission is an agents fee for selling your work), whatever that is? - If you sell the work privately - YOU are the agent, you get the commission! Do not attempt to speculate on the retail price in relation to the demographic of a location, it is not possible.
In Fine-Art, the 'viewing' experience is the most commonly enjoyed - Charge for it! (Yes that means people paying a small fee to view art - think about it!). The viewing experience does not require the artist to intoxicate the viewers at his/her own expense - Charge for drinks (That is how money is made in the performance world).
Marketing and Promotion are Creative Opportunities - See these activities as a creative challenge and an opportunity to describe yourself in a way that incoprorates your visual language and your 'personality' as an artist.
Be Realistic and Modest - Art is a wonderful, beautiful thing, we are privileged to be a part of it - Artists are not inherently better, more spiritual, morally superior, deeper-feeling, smarter, wiser or more altruistic than, plumbers, lawyers, traffic wardens or the unemployed (That is about how good you are at what you do, not what you do).
Don't Understate/Overstate Yourself - Art is not brain surgery/Art is not junk-mail; Dont make extravagant claims for your work (it does not explain the universe and everything in it) and do not understate it either (You are communicating an idea, not illustrating a catalogue).
Have a Sense of Humour/Be Robust (Thanks El P!) - As stated earlier, Art isn't brain surgery, it may depict life and death but it isn't life and death. Have a sense of humour about art and about being an artist, it will make it much more enjoyable, make you more fun to deal with and will stop you from dissapearing up-your-own-picasso! Be robust too: Art is personal to the artist but don't take it personally. Critique, criticism and dislike of your work will tell you more about your work than a 1000 compliments, take it on board or not, thats your decision.

This is only a collection of loosely formed ideas at present, it contains most of what I want to say and have said on this subject, to various people at some point or other. As I like to say about words at least, 'Untried Ideas - free to a good home' so take these thoughts and propogate them, let me know how well they grow?

No More Censorship!

2009-10-01T14:50:00.001+13:00

Recently I have been made more and more aware of a disturbing truth , that has rocked my perception of who I am and the people I relate to. That revelation is that, whatever peoples political persuasion, censorship is accepted, embraced and promoted by all.

I used to think that the liberal, artistic, milleu that I in some way belong to, was the bastion of the reasonable, the intellectually astute and aware, the objective ones who could see both sides of an argument. I thought my strata was the one where, people said let and let live, containing as it does, the environmental, economic, sexual, idealistic refugees from the mainstream.

How wrong I was and how disturbed I am to find out that people on both sides of the fence are mortally afraid of words and images, in short, afraid of ideas. Not only that but they are preapared to become their worst enemy to fight these ideas that threaten them.
No word or image has ever hurt anyone, only the interpretations of them have caused harm. It is those interpretations that we fear, that are dangerous, maybe because on paper they are harmless, such is their insidious power.

Recently I was dismayed to find a lot of 'pro-democracy, anti-rascist' friends petitioning to overturn a valid, democratic election result for a right-wing British Party. Apparently THEY shouldn't be allowed in a democratic forum (Which paradoxically would make it undemocratic). Luckily as opposed to freedom of expression about sexuality, religious views etc. we all know 'rascism is bad', it has been 'proved' to be 'evil', so we are free to damn it with al the scorn in our hearts, aren't we? Is rascism inherently bad? Is the instinctive, fear of the stranger, uneccessary now in our enlightened world? Curiously our instincts also tell us that mating with, strangers makes the human race stronger. Fear first, join later, seems to be the natural way to go. What is the difference between the self-protection of indigenous culture and the self-protective intent of caucasian right-wing groups - colour?

There are many bad ideas in the world and many bad intentions and none of them have ever been stopped by censorship, only by engagement. We need to hear what is being said and thought and felt, both good and bad, to understand, 'what condition our condition is in'. Know your enemy, you will learn more from one person who opposes you than a thousand who stand by your side.

So don't be afraid of images, words and ideas, soak it all up or not (You have a choice!) and let it all out, let the rascists rant, the fundamentalists chant and let the perverts groan. We should be evolved enough to stop reacting with that most dangerously erratic of organs, the heart and start thinking with the far more balanced organ that is our brain.

The PC world is the politics of victimhood, it is about mutual repression, blame, guilt and most of all it is about low-esteem. Saying to us all that; you are too fragile, too facile, too damaged to be able to withstand what you have already endured. Serving only to supress the negative, until it festers and boils over into something truly tragic. I thought that we were tougher, smarter and better than that?

venice beach 08

2009-09-28T11:24:00.004+13:00

It was Venice Beach pre Obama.

Pre economic freefall.

On this Beach Boys coast the American dream was crumbling and most of the nation was in denial.

The signposts were all pointing one way, well so it was to me. Reef ahead.

©burgseye08

Stone Secret

2009-09-24T09:45:00.004+12:00

Stone Secret

1999 - Neil Buddle

Lino and screenprint on handmade paper (Property of the Artists Parents!)

Another set of artwork from the vaults......

These prints were done from a rock found at a beach in Cornwall. Each print zooms in closer to the rock, revealing more detail. The patterns on the rock were reminiscent of the observable strata of rocks along that coast. The blue was screen-printed and the detail is of course in Lino, on early handmade paper.

A New God for New Zealand

2009-09-21T14:38:00.005+12:00

A bad picture of a damaged artwork........however today it just seems apt to resurrect this piece. Made in 2004 (Approx) this work uses piano Keys, hammers and saw blades to create a 'New God' the piano keys represent a korowai or feather cloak. The idea of a new god came from the realisation that this country is like a child still struggling for identity, still alternatively embracing and rejecting each parent by turn as it wrestles with defining itself. The struggle was to find a new identity to strive for, it's (the countries') own.

Currently the piece is missing a 'cup' on the left. One side has 2 hollows and a cup and the other 2 cups and a hollow. The hollows indicate the absence of the other. The maths of the piece imply that 1+1=1.

Perhaps the current damage is indicative of the some of the current racial dischord. That reminds me, I should really fix this up!

The H Bomb - Yet Another letter to the paper...

2009-09-18T12:37:00.002+12:00

The front-page of the W(H)anganui Chronicle today is focused on the Nat. Geo-Board NZ decision that W-anganui should be spelt with an H. The headlines featured Mayor Laws accusing the board of racism and being unconstitutional. The irony is of course if both sides applied some actual intelligence and an open-mind they would see that neither side is right or wrong, that both are right, no-one needs to 'lose' and that Wanganui could be a leading light in this bi-cultural nation, rather than it's darkest corner. Here is a letter I wrote today to the Editor, describing the 'nausea' this situation induces...

Friday’s newspaper made me queasy with that feeling you get when you know a tasteless and avoidable furore is developing. The ‘H’ debacle is primed to show the unpalatable truth about race-relations in New Zealand, and we are in the front row seats.

Like rams butting heads for supremacy, the attitudes on both sides, are stubborn and destructive. How did this become a contest between cultures? When did it become one way or no way? If in most bilingual countries, 2 languages and accordingly 2 place names are acknowledged, why not here? Wanganui and Whanganui are BOTH in common usage, they are both already valid.

Who are ‘we’ if we can’t compromise? Does a compromise mean that both sides lose? Why are so many, so bitter and insecure, that they will not give an inch, no matter how destructive, ignorant and pointless, the struggle? As this symbolic issue nauseously unfolds, be assured we will see the further entrenchment of prejudices and self-serving agendas, till we are all sick to the stomach.

A previously unpopular name for Whanganui was Petre (Peter), ironically derived (as all you good Christians know), from the word for rock. Perhaps this stubborn town was better named then, than they thought?

Digging in the Vaults

2009-09-16T11:16:00.007+12:00

For the Reverend, the last few weeks have seemingly been a time of new work and a nostalgic look to the past. Though this is rooted in a practical need to archive some of this work before it goes mouldy in this temperate climate or just gets lost. It always reminds me of directions I didn't take and threads that have continued.

I have just posted a whole load of odd prints on Picasa (View on Sidebar Slideshow) and Deviantart from before, during and after art-school.

These include the 'DIG Vinyl' (See left) which I produced especially as a commemorative print for the Blink Gallery Show with El Presidente in 2007. Along side more recent ones like that are ones like below from various stages of my art-life.

Sing Swan Song

2009-09-15T10:30:00.004+12:00

Sing Swan Song - Neil Buddle / Assemblage 2009

Entry for Wanganui National Art Award (Amalgamated Tech.)

It's been a long time since I have made any assemblage and the experience as ever has been extremely enjoyable. This piece unfolded it's own story which resulted in this take on the plight of native birds in the face of predators and eforestation. All the bird names listed on the piece are currently on the endangered list, most of them critically endangered, and there are more.

A swansong is a last performance and in this case it is the last birdsongs. The title also borrows from a song by the krautrock band 'Can'. Ironically Swans have thrived here since introduction.

The exhibition opens on Thursday 17th September at the Community Arts Centre, Taupo Quay, Whanganui.

Wales - Mushroom Central

2009-09-11T09:28:00.006+12:00

Wales - Mushroom Central (Mixed Media on Board / Neil Buddle 1998)

Through the magic of Facebook, I have recently gotten back in touch with a much loved musical compadre from Wales, Johnny Smoke (Matty Miles)! One of my best and last memories of the U.K was a trip organised by a few of my musical friends, to a home-studio in mid-Wales, nestled in the hollow of a hill called 'Drummers Hill', high up on the side of a valley. The hill had once been part of a chain of beacons, using fire and drums to communicate messages across the Welsh hinterland.

The studio, an old barn, became our home for 4 days. Before commencing to play ourselves stupid, we set out across the verdant Welsh fields in search of Psylocibe Cubensis (Magic Mushrooms). As is the way in Mid-Wales, no sooner had we vaulted the 1st farm gate, when we realised, all around us was a carpet of 'shrooms', calling out to be picked. Our planned, harvesting, became erratic as we started 'snacking' and before long we were drifting further afield in every sense of the word.

This became a huge ramble, involving some very hairy bush-crashing, and the emergence at a lake, that was identical in every way to one which I had painted from imagination at high-school. So clear was the feeling of recognition, I could barely be dragged away from this strange geographical realisation of the psyche. We eventually made it back to the studio, 'put on a brew' and 'got in the groove'. Hours, indeed days passed in the window-less studio. Once we all woke up, after a heavy, heavy sleep and it was dark, it took us a day to realise it was a day later than we thought!

I still have a murky recording of that visit, on tape, which I have spliced and re-spliced to repair. Some of my playing that week, hinted at a style, I could only then imagine, but which has since become a singular part of my sound, a deep, dark, bubbling groove, from the dark side of the mushroom.

All these guys have continued to make music together and apart, Paul and Steve as 'Staedler and Waldorf' and 'D'Booga' and Johnny Smoke is currently playing with Pete Lawrie, who is releasing his first album. But for a brief few days, we all played together, on Drummers Hill - Thank you boyos!

The artwork was produced at Art College, and aside form my obvious desire to use the shroom as my muse, I was also attempting to combine, maps, photogrpahy, paint and relief to create a cohesive image. It is hard to construct a perspective that takes you from a macro-level (looking at the mushroom) to the curvature of the earth in space, within a couple of feet, but I still think I gave it a shot! I was actually going to throw this away at the end of my course and Matty protested. He has had it to this day and it now sits in appropriately in his 'den'. Thanks to Matty for sending me the pic and reminding me of some wonderful times and some of the work, I had almost forgotten.

Wales - Mushroom Central (Detail N.Buddle 98)

Strapped for cash

2009-09-04T12:50:00.003+12:00

I recently read a very interesting article on The Big Idea entitled Cashless Creativity. The article postulates an alteration of attitude in society, from one of scarcity to one of abundance. This change it is suggested could be led by creative people.

I was sufficiently moved to respond or rant regarding what I see as 'the self-indulgence of creative utopianism'.

I would be really interested to know what any of our readers thought on this issue? So follow the link to the post and ...

'Imagine a world without money...it's easy if you can afford to'.....

Addendum: Here is a link to another web-forum (Yes I waded in!), where a similar discussion rages. It seems the first thing that we can't afford in a recession, is tolerance, closely followed by contemporary art! Maybe the swing towards 'practical politics' in tough times should be called 'recessionism', which neatly implies the certain paucity of spirit and vision, inherent in much of this attitude?

Thanks to Mr. Mercurius for supplying the link.

"All art is quite useless.' - Oscar Wilde

Rolling

2009-08-30T00:21:00.002+12:00

write on

2009-08-24T22:21:00.003+12:00

its impossible. i've been trying to write something meaningful for days. everything comes in fragments, not quite cohesive and showing slim evidence of any vital signs

days like these i drag the mind through mud, then hang out it to dry. still no thing. the keys clack clack but they're stiff with hard baked silt.

at best, ideas are fleeting, they are flashes caught from the corners of the eye...barely held, never contained.

©burgseye 2009

Under, over, within.

2009-08-22T07:41:00.006+12:00

End of the Millenium Psychosis Blues

2009-08-21T13:18:00.007+12:00

10 years ago, I had just completed my Visual Art Degree at the University of Glamorgan, Wales. Having just completed the largest body of work, I have ever produced, I was looking forward to a new life in a new country with a young family. It has taken me 10 years to get back to producing anywhere near as much work as I produced during those 3 years and to begin to see how that might be applied and developed. So now seems an apt time to review and re-present, my Graduation Show from 1999, a decade, century and millenia ago!

The show was an installation of individual artworks. All the work was made from found objects. The shape of the space was an equilateral triangle ( A 'magic' shape), which allowed everything to balance. In the centre I had built a sort of altar and tranmistter so that all the 'signals' being generated by the work could be 'amplified' and 'broadcast' throughout time and space. This concept was heavily influenced by Pythagoras' 'Music of the Spheres' and musicians such as Sun Ra. An audio-collage of found-sounds from the local environment, played from hidden speakers behind the main paintings.

I only have one piece left (A couple of other pieces survive elsewhere) and these few pics and some sketches, and somehow that suits the temporal nature of the work.

Temple of the Extraparaperceptual Process

2009-08-21T08:07:00.001+12:00

Ephemeral-temporal

2009-08-20T12:05:00.004+12:00

I've posted before about my unhealthy attraction to walls. I'm reviewing a bunch of graffnephemera for a future show and tell. The images below were all shot within an hour on a Downtown city block in LA September 2008.

Out of my Treehouse

2009-08-19T13:26:00.005+12:00

Over the last 4 weeks I have been working on a new set of prints for sale. The series, entitled Treehouse, will be offered for sale at the Next Door Gallery, Birkenhead, Auckland and through Neil Buddle, direct. Here are the 3 individual prints presented as a triptych, with the accompanying information which will be included with the prints. The Treehouse series juxtaposes two iconic ‘Kiwi’ elements; the colonial villa and a native tree.
The depiction of modest villa/cottages, references the employment of these mighty trees in building much of New Zealand’s early infrastructure and housing. This large-scale deforestation by colonial settlers has had a huge impact on New Zealand.
These prints are intended as a gentle reminder of the importance of celebrating and conserving both the natural and built heritage of Aotearoa's majestic trees.

God's Gimp

2009-08-14T13:20:00.004+12:00

Sketch print for a developing idea.

This image is less about sex and more about life, the idea of us being manipulated by some unseen power. Despite the struggle we enjoy it anyway, happily spilling seed, fruitlessly on the broken ground.

It also references the influence that christian moral values have had on western society and the rest of the world and how we are in-some-way, in bondage to them.

Dylanizm - A Dangerous Cult or Hope for Humanity?

2009-08-13T09:29:00.014+12:00

DIG, The Reverend, El Presidente, Hamilton Taight are all only part of a larger picture, a greater network of underground/overground re-active agents.

Recent communiques from Hamilton Taight, have contained some startling new intelligence from RE-Active agent Burkoffski, collected at great peril in the field. This information I will now divulge to you - Please note that DIG takes no responsibility for any enlightenment you suffer as a direct result of receiveing this classified information.

One of the most intriguing discoveries is a new movement called 'Dylanizm'. This movement seems to be terra-forming Suburbia, by subtly extracting the essence of the exceptional, from what was previously considered a barren waste of mediocrity.

No-one knows who or indeed what exactly, this Dylanizm is? However despite it's secretive origins, disciples of Dylanizm are busy propagating, their manifesto, through subliminal advertising and subscription-only publications, such as that featured here.

The only questions seems to be..."Will you join the revolution?"

(Confidential Audio-Report from Stithen-AC, by Agent Burkoffski).

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No its a Roadcraft Campervan!

2009-07-01T12:13:00.003+12:00

Here is a set of commemorative prints begun 'en route' showing the awesome Roadcraft Campervan by the Whanganui and Whangaehu Rivers and on the Central Plateau.

Kia Ora

The Wheels

2009-06-28T17:45:00.007+12:00

The Reverend scouts for the source of the Whangaehu River.

Rev at work, sketching and cutting the days quarry.

At Whangaehu lagoon, the rivers end before it hits the Tasman Sea.

Pete's house and BaseJumper @ Whangaehu Beach.

The Whanganui River road between Pipiriki and Raetihi is now mostly sealed.

Rev's caffeine fix at Tokaanu.
all images ©burgseye 2009

The wheels courtesy of www.roadcraft.co.nz

Road Noise

2009-06-28T10:33:00.011+12:00

A roadtrip is never complete without a soundtrack. With twelve hours of winter roads to drive alone -nary a hitchhiker in sight- before and after picking up the Reverend I decided to go heavy on the compilations and two relatively recent Aotearoan releases which served to provide the necessary reflective vibe for circumnavigating Te Kahui Tupu (the sacred peaks of the central plateau.

I'm not sure why but I almost always have an epiphany when listening to SJD albums. In this case two tunes from his rather excellent 2007, Songs from a dictaphone album: Black is a Beautiful Colour and Beautiful Haze sent me skyward, observing the mountains from above.
www.myspace.com/sjd
http://www.roundtripmars.com/

Back in the day, Auckland City seemed stacked with Victorian era pubs, with their glorious facades and grungy cigarette charred and spilled beer carpets, tiny stages and regular police busts emptying the places out as the main act stepped on. It was during those dirty early eighties that I remember the Clean's first Auckland gigs. The Velvets inspired Don't Point that Thing churning out from the Rhumba Bar above an empty Victoria Street (the streets were usually deserted by 10pm.) David Kilgour has come a long way since then and his choonage of Sam Hunts poetry collection Doubtless, retitled for record, "Falling Debris" is a perfect winter tonic. Especially "Everytime it rains like this," "Talking of the weather" and "They are clouds."
http://www.samhunt.com/
http://www.myspace.com/davidkilgour

Roundtripmars' head honcho and aural adventurer, music writer and voice over artist, Stinky Jim provided "Musky Moments" and "Stinkbombs" two downright exotically dirty compilations. These eclectic excursions diverge into dubbedupdownbeats, dancehall, and spacerocking fruitloops and are guaranteed to make any journey a trip. Jims compilations are like his BFM radio shows, at first challenging and then engaging, full of cut up voxpops and Stinky stings by some of the worlds biggest underground and overstanding musicians.
http://www.roundtripmars.com/
http://www.stinkinc.blogspot.com/

Norman Cook/Fatboy Slim's LateNightTales is 70 plus minutes of essential happy eclecticism from Mink De Ville's "Spanish Stroll," Hopetoun Lewis' version of "Express Yourself," "Trinity's Three Piece Suit" and Senor Soul's "Lay Your Funky Trip on Me." Makes the road between Te Kuiti and Tamauranui a much less lonely one to drive.
www.normancook.co.uk

"Lifestyle" by Ninja Tunes/Solid Steeler's, Coldcut, is another three score and ten minutes of the overlooked and underplayed. Check the Chosen Few doing Isaac Hayes' "Do your Thing," Esther Phillips 1974 conscious soul classic "Disposable Society" and Betty Harris'"There's a Break in The Road."
www.myspace.com/coldcut

Keeping it unreal is another Ninja, Mr Scruff whose Big Chill Classics comp provides the kind of soundscape that allows the mind freetime to wander both sides of the road. The ideal accompaniment to a hot bath at the Tokaanu thermal pools. It's a double album with too many quality dishes to serve on this post.
www.myspace.com/mrscruffofficial

Hiphop collective NASA's "The Spirit of Apollo" kept the van on the bitumen and the party going when the eyes were getting weary especially over the Parapara ranges. Featuring a potpourri of musical magic including the likes of David Byrne, Tom Waits, KRS One, Sizzla, Spank Rock, MIA, Chuck D and George Clinton to speak of only a smidgeon of the coterie of onboard quality.
www.myspace.com/nasa

Guerolito is the remix album of Becks' Guero and it picks up nicely where SJD leaves off, somewhere near Tangiwai, providing more twists and turns than the gravel road over Burma Hill.
www.beck.com/

As far as singalongs go it was two Ska comp albums sourced from the cheapie bins at the big red whare that stole the show and blocked out the bumps and thumps on the dirt track ascending the remote Turakina Skifield and had us skidding safely across the ice on the road up to Turoa, despite the boy racers. In fact Dandy Livingstone's "A Message to you Rudy" was playing so loud as we made incursions into Defence Dept land on the Desert Road, that it alerted a patrol to our presence and two Bro's in an enormous cammo' truck came to give us a soft hard word "You fallahs are not supposed to be here,eh!" Chur chur. The Specials though stole the show and we digressed down memory lane as progressed along the rail lines skirting Rangataua with "You're Wondering Now" and "Ghost Town."
www.2-tone.info/

The two track river road to Whangaehu Beach was swamped with primal New Orleans funk courtesy of a Soul Jazz comp. Doctor John is guaranteed to drive the Reverend to all sorts of extreme behavior and it was along this stretch of farm track that he decided to start making stills photos from the roof of the moving Base Jumper Van (courtesy of Roadcraft. Chur chur!)
www.souljazzrecords.co.uk

Sweet.

Awesome post from El Presidente who as always is a hard act to follow so from The Reverend on the decks (how does he remember where we played these???)......................

Unknown Mali music CD:
This CD was found abandoned and I can only presume it is a Mojo or somesuch giveaway. however the mellow tones and haunting melodies of the Mali blues musicians, provided a fantastic backdrop for the unfolding bush scenery and a fascinating counterpoint to the american blues tradition and the ethnographic migration of musical styles from one place to another and then back to the source to be re-interpreted again, much like our journey.

Combat Rock - The Clash:
I am a new Clash fan and the Pres is an old Clash fan. I can still detect a slight bemusement at my recent appreciation of the British behemoth of the punk years. Perhaps it is my age or perhaps my long-held dislike for English yob-punk, but my favourite Clash albums are everyones least favourite, Combat Rock and Sandanista.
Combat Rock being to me at least, perfection. An eclectic selection of timeless tunes that takes you around the world, from rock'n'roll to reggae, to funk, to the casbah and back home to blighty. The standout tune is of course 'Straight to Hell', as transcendant a piece of music as you could hear, full of obscure but evocative lyrics and the fantastic break, that recently made M.I.A's Paper Planes the killer tune it is. This album sounds as fresher and more relevant now than I think it would have on release. Know Your Rights!

Original Hip-Hop Greats:
On this trip the party never stopped and I used the evening to attempt to convert El Pres to old school hip-hop - not his favourite brew at all. Still after classics from Sugarhill Gang, Eric B and Rakim, BDP, Public Enemy, Whodini and a whole crew of cats, I could tell he was defrosting like roadkill possum on a mountain road. "Electro is your Dancehall' he said referring to his love of dancehall and my slow presidential brainwashing that has resulted in me liking it 'dutty' myself from time to time! "Word!"

DVD - MC5 -Kick Out the Jams:
Having a van with a DVD player in it was too good an opportunity to miss so on our last night we had a music viddy night. Beginning with this Sinclair produced montage of MC5 performances, home movies and trippy light show. The highlight of this being a lot of the live footage (although synced to other performances) showing the fives ballistic live performances including a free concert in an Ann Arbor park. Th energy is palpable as the five blast through their repertoire, with enough energy to power their very own 'Starship'.

The Doors - Collection:
The best thing abou this DVD is actually a previously unreleased and possibly last TV appearance from 1969, entitled 'Soft Parade'. A bearded and bleary Morrison, post Miami, almost phones in a few performances from the Soft Parade, only letting rip on the title track (The best cut on the LP anyway). This is intercut with some great footage of them recording 'Wild Child' in the studio and an interview section from the TV show in which one particularly memorable moment occurrs. Whilst being asked about the future of music, Morrison shows his innate insight and vision. To paraphrase, 'I can see in the future, all the music being made electronically by machines and tapes, with just one musician operating them and making music by himself'.

Death Disco - Post Punk Compilation
Somehow I kept forgetting this compilation, when atttempting to write up this post. however this was one of those fantastic comps that opens up a chink in music history, through which undiscovered lands can be found. This particular land is post-punk land, that fertile breeding ground after the punk years, when artists struggled to reconcile the punk ethos and approach with the changes in music such as electronic instruments, the birth of hip-hop and the last vestiges of the disco boom.
Beginning righteously with Death Disco by P.I.L and the resurrected Johnny Lydon, the doom laden 'white-boy groove' snakes on courtesy of Jah Wobble while Lydon deadpans the vocals. The next track is a real oddity with some real pedigree. Featuring Jah Wobble, Keith Levene and Don Letts (Clash DJ and Film-maker) toasting over a lazy dub, Steel Leg vs. the Electric Dread's tune 'Haile Unlikely', has Don professing...'Me don Wanna go to a Kingston, me don wanna inna Africa, I live inna Brixton" , a highly ironic confession for a British rasta.
Elsewhere on this compilation is the minimal electronic punk of the Normal and 'Warm Leatherette' (Covered by Grace Jones) alongside the electro-pop of Human League and 'Hard Times' and the alt-disco of the Buzzcocks 'I dont want to touch it'.
One of the standout tracks is 'Jezebel Spirit' by Byrne and Eno, a timely reminder of how ahead of its time the 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' actually is, with its samples, allusions to world music and electronic treatments.
Although some of the tracks here are slightly dubious, hearing Throbbing Gristles, United and the Higsons ("You ain't seen me alright!"), 'Put the Punk back in the Funk, reminds me what an unusual time it was as electronica, punk, disco, dub and funk, clashed together in the fertile musical grounds of New York and London to create a new sound, which would influence much of the following 2 decades more than punk ever did. (Death Disco at Allmusic.com)

A great trip with the Presidente and as always with our joint adventures, an amazing soundtrack!

Roadtrippin'

2009-06-25T12:28:00.017+12:00

Although the Reverend Y El Presidente are in constant contact with each other, plotting and planning, discussing and discovering, conspiring and creating, geographic location keeps these 2 brave adventurers from working together. For those that know, everytime these cats get together, something happens, something wonderful - DIG.

Luckily the planets aligned and instead of keeping the 2 compadres apart, geography brought them together again on the sequel to the 'Sightline' Project, 'Waterline'.

Here are a few shots of the dynamic duo on art-safari through the Central Plateau.

"Are you sure about this?"

"I'm not supposed to hang off moving vehicles when I'm taking my meds!"

If this was duel, the fast-shooting El Presidente would win hands down.

'Getting all the angles'

'El Presidente gets total coverage'

Viva The Reverend Y El Presidente!

Till next time Chief....................

I was asked...'What the world should know about?'

2009-06-15T10:54:00.002+12:00

3 subjects the world should know more about?

Religion - Whether you are spiritual or not, you should know abou the worlds religions, their similarities and their differences (e.g. Islam, Christianity and Judeaism have around 34 prophets in common between all 3 religions - Mmm, so why do they fight so?). Religion has shaped our national boundaries, our social structures, our moral beliefs and our grasp of science. Despite this, I was told by the headmaster at my childrens school that the NZ Minsistry of Education had decided it was too hard to write a curriculum about the worlds religions, so they just teach bible studies on the sly instead! That will really help with religious tolerance and understanding in the future.
History - No-one seems to know anything about history anymore so we are reinventing the wheel and the world in the image of our own ignorance. To tie into the first point. Many people amazingly, do not know that the Christians started a holy war against the Moslems almost 1000 years ago. This war instigated and compounded by the christian powers has continued in one form or another until the present day and its history explains events such as the Gulf Wars, 9/1, the creation of Israel and justifies much of the passionate resentment amongst Moslems towards us 'the infidels'.
Economy - Our economic model is set up to 'boom and bust' so there should be no surprise when it does just that, that is the secret to making a lot of money in business, (one mans ruin is anothers profit) not the secret to maintaining a stable and consistent economy. Business are set up to make money for shareholders and employees. Not to make the world a better place, not to provide you with the best products and services they can out of the goodness of their hearts. BP is not making the world a greener place! Human beings have been around for 2 million years and the first unit of currency was not developed until approx 5000 years ago in what is now modern Iran/Turkey/Iraq. The first metal coins did not arrive until approx 650 BC in China and banknotes were not printed in Europe until the 17th century. How did we survive before that? Q: How come we are all beholden to an abstract principle which is only 2,600 years old? A: Because people have gained power from it. (Much like some religious beliefs).

Ultimately, these things all tie into History. History is not just the study of 'what happened' in the past, it is the study of 'why is it happening' in the present and the 'What will happen' for the future. Ignore it at your peril!

On The QT

2009-06-11T03:31:00.004+12:00

Quentin Tarantino came to my town for the first time in 1992. Of the many attractions Nottingham offers, the Broadway Cinema stands proud. Tucked away in Hockley it proffers what I believe are called Art House films: the preferred nomenclature delineating the idiosyncratic and mostly thought provoking brand of entertainment, from the mindless drivel, punted down at the multiplex.

In the summer of 1992, for only the second time, the Broadway held its Shots in the Dark Festival: a feast of crime cinema, my particular bagful, and featuring a wide eyed, ever gesticulating, American gentleman showing his much anticipated debut, Reservoir Dogs. I paid £2.50 student rate and the Artist threw in a Q and us session post- viewing: a remarkable event, a fantastic film and an engaging man.

Tarantino patronised subsequent festivals and brought his equally entertaining Pulp Fiction to Nottingham as the festival's secret feature in 1994. The gaff was, by that time, well and truly blown and even a sniff of a ticket impossible. Tarantinoesque quickly became a by- word for a new cinema and the man himself the personification of knowledge, style, provocative and insightful screen writing, notably Natural Born Killers. Tarantino’s work mined the obscure, the sub-genre, alongside the classical and canonised as he reinvented the oddball cinephile as film artist, convincing us all that we too could traverse the arc from video store to the Weinstein Empire.

Of course Quentin liked the attention, the unique fame bestowed by a stellar rise, the genius discovered, the notoriety of an enfant terrible: fame, I’m told, lets him loose, hard to swallow and QT’s subsequent moves were represented by the familiar parabola describing rise in notoriety, celebrity and commercial success against a plunge in quality, substance, innovation and eventual collapse into cliché and self parody.

The taught and urgent drama, the Mamet-like dialogue, the economy of expression, the violent shocks, the black humour, the stylised yet engaging pathos of his characters, discarded for ponderous indulgence. Witness his flaccid, plodding, tribute to Pam Grier, Jackie Brown, failing to engage with the substance of crime fiction or the style of Blacksploitation. Or the un-epic Shaw Bothers cum Sergio Leone saga of Kill Bill and the RTA that is Deathproof: I found the Dukes of Hazard more substantive and engaging. His work has become an ever more elaborate litany of pastiche and plagiarism, glued together by vague notions and symbols of his own half-baked sub-genre. He is lauded by audiences for whom an easily obtained reference marks an end in itself, the cultural equivalent of a PoMo patchwork comfort blanket.

And then there came the associated industry: forests of fawning prose; popular culture bookshelves stuffed with sub-academic analysis and rejected dissertation material; the cult of personality; the procession of involved discussions led by the man himself, as dull and navel gazing as a BFI Kubrick convention and featuring another bug eyed, ADHD performance, each sentence punctuated with a million okays, double, triple positives reinforcing the complex content of his project to capture the great car chase or the interminably fine details of Beat Takeshi’s oeuvre.

The media outlets are in full chorus anticipating his latest as QT takes on the World War 2 Movie and no doubt we can expect cartoonish, stylised, ultra-violence and faintly ambiguous morality nailing its colours firmly to Pekinpah’s iron cross.... Fame: bully for you, chilly for me.

Reactive Agent Reports Activity

2009-06-04T13:15:00.004+12:00

On the western front of music, the Reverend will be active this Friday in the lower reaches of the southern hemisphere.

The second N**i Disco gig will be held at the Mutton Club, Whanganui on Friday 5th June 2009.

The 2 sonic pranksters will be 'blitzing' the audience with their unique aural assault of Tribalspacefunknoisegrimepop. The other bands are supposed to be really good too!

The group show 'Ivan Rebroff is my Security Blanket' featuring the 'Techniques for Self Sabotage' series by Neil Buddle, is on until Wed 10th june at the Federal Gallery, Whanganui, New Zealand.

this funky and ecelectic group show, features a cast of creative suspects, inhabiting the fringe of Whanganui. These include Erica Sklenars, Dylan Herkes, Bridget Tyson, Brandon Sayring, Mike Marsh, Deborah Halliday and more.

Whats in a name?

2009-05-18T09:55:00.005+12:00

Since excitedly posting on my new recent musical adventures in a band called 'Nazi Disco', I have been challenged on the reasons for the name.

For background the word NAZI was a nickname given by their opponents and taken from the letters N and Z which stood for Nationalen Zocialisten or the 'National Socialists'. The Third Reich did develop from the National Socialists, but by the time of the war all pretense of being a political party had ultimately been discarded. The catchy nickname however remained and it seems, has stood the test of time.

To qualify, I do not support, genocide, imperialism, intolerance, mass extermination, censorship or white supremacy in any forms. I do however support free speech, equality, historical awareness, tolerance, collaboration and progress.

I didn't think up the name but in its defense and as I have explained elsewhere, its not about the Germans, or the Nazis. The name is about the relentless mechanisation of the world and the widespread and continual intolerance, violence and persecution across all cultures. to this point we are all "dancing the Nazi Disco' a petrol fuelled, idealised humanity, marching, bang-bang-bang along the autobahns, towards our own destruction and trampling ourselves in its way. It is supposed to be ironic?

Alas that symbol, the dreaded swastika, despite being a 'borrowed' perversion of a peaceful bhuddist symbol, is mythologicaly powerful in popular culture . this power really needs to fade, to be ridiculed, deflated and danced on.

The Sound device which sounds more like Balinese Gamelan than the teutonic oompah of the hordes of doom happened to come into being at the same time as the band. Truthfully as a Pom I grew up on old war movies, army kitsch, hippies wearing army german surplus, toy soldiers and many a Tommy comic full of swastikas and German soldiers crying 'Achtung Englander!", much to our amusement. The device has a sort of crude technological look and could be a stolen radio device or some other esoteric secret N**i device, like many that were the basis for the post-war industrial age and economic boom (Vorsprung durch Technik), rocket flight, radio telescopes etc.

I dont just do 'pretty pictures' and I feel that as well as celebrating the good it is important to challenge the bad. Hopefully in doing so we break down some of those barriers that stop us from seeing the complex truth of our reality and history, which is never black or white. To do this one must critique and one of the most effective forms is parody, pastiche, to amplify something until its own inherent deficiencies are obvious to all.

Of course ultimately the idea is suppoed to be that the Nazis, the Swastika are not what we have to worry about. They are no danger to us now, they were beaten thoroughly and that form of unashamed supremacy, will not occurr in that brazen form again. Whatever neo-nazi groups are left are imbeciles at best and really not clever enough to be dangerous(they would be pleased at the fear and power exterted by their old logo). However the same mentality of oppression still exists, the same persecutions are going on, whether it's religion, sexuality, colour, tribe, caste, people preaching religious intolerance, starting wars for profit, exploiting the poor and on and on and on....these are the people to be scared of, except that now they are not wearing easy to spot uniforms with distinctive symbols anymore. They are sublimated through the system, through business and their borders are not defined by the old national boundaries. They still want to rule the world at any cost, they have always existed and always will.

...and remember sometimes past victims become the aggressors, the bullied become the bully and not only is that dangerous but ultimately, as inexcusable as the original offence?

So feel free to challenge me on the name, I am not going to spend too much time making the obvious point that I am not a NAZI, but I am still doing the Nazi Disco Ja, just like all of you.

Nazi Disco

2009-05-12T09:48:00.008+12:00

Saturday night, 9th May saw the first performance by tribal-noise-punk act 'Nazi Disco', comprising of the Reverend and Adam Elliot. A small but enthusiastic crowd watched the bands 20 minute set at Stink Magnetic Records HQ in Whanganui.

Despite its awkward moments and 'technical difficulties' the dynamic duo, pummeled the audience with heavy rhythms and discordant riffs, soaked in noise, enduring wolf-whistles and sardonic requests for the Eagles! The next gig will be at The Mutton Club, Whanganui - Da Sein Oder 'Square' Sein!

Experimental Sonic Research:

This menacing looking device was discovered by the Reverend in an old chest, hidden at the end of WW2, until now. This sonic weapon, utilises organic and man-made items to create an astonishing array of sound, that appears harmless acoustically, until amplified, when its true and frightening potential is made clear. A recording of this weapon in use, was found with the device, but efforts to transfer the signal to a digital recorder, unsurprisingly scrambled the 21st century technology!

Audio:
Song Recycle (Excerpt)

Metonymy 09

2009-05-06T11:04:00.006+12:00

If selected 2 new works will be exhibited in Auckland from this weekend. The Metonymy 09 Exhibition is held as part of the Auckland Writers Festival at the Edge Gallery, Aotea Centre, Auckland, 9th - 23rd May. Visual artists and writers are paired up and given 4 weeks to collaborate to produce new work.

I was teamed with Desiree Gezentsvey a poet and playright. We selected 2 poems with language as their theme (Lingua Franca and Penned In).

The paper itself was hand-made form a crossword dictionary to add to the literary reference.

Feeling the Affect

2009-04-29T07:53:00.002+12:00

Watching Pier Paolo Passolini’s Salo I was struck again by JG Ballard’s maxim that we have long since succumbed to the death of affect: we are saturated with imagery and ideas of violence, ritualised, stylised, mediated ad infinitum, and thus conditioned to treat them with the deference we reserve for the mundane. I have to disagree.
In Passolini’s film the essence of De Sade’s 120 days of Sodom is transported to Mussolini’s idealised Fascist state, Salo. Here under the auspices of Nazi troops, four members of the Italian social elite comport themselves with decadence, with zealous, experimental, abandon.
Passolini makes it clear where he stands: the ideological associations of the participants, the setting of the story, the faux-polemic, and philosophically bogus utterances of the Faschismo alumni, shows us moral bankruptcy and indulgence so foul, so sexually violent and self-annihilating , that there can be no room for ambiguity. This is, he unequivocally states, wrong.
I found the experience shocking: this is Passolini’s greatest success - affecting me with a deep-seated and brutal convulsion toward his art, infusing me with the visceral disgust I felt gazing at the horrors of his work. I have waited a while to view this sometime banned and notorious film. I attempted to approach it with the same trepidation I felt when, as a kid on the hunt for forbidden enlightenment, I was finally able to procure a pirated, videotaped copy, of A Clockwork Orange. Now I can only imagine that Ludovico’s technique comprises compulsory and endless exposure to Salo. Poor Alex couldn’t close his eyes, couldn’t switch it off. I too was unable to completely look away. Nor could I refuse reflecting upon it.
What of comparative experiences, encounters with works that have shocked me? Cronenbourg’s Crash: a car showroom; automotive fetishism; wound penetration: but there is something in the prosthetic plasticity and stylised act that lacks real power and is almost ridiculous. And it is, of course, a consensual union.
Francisco Goya’s , Great Feat! With Dead Men! show war crimes, dismembered guerrilla fighters, body parts impaled on tree branches, a torso here, a head there, discarded limbs scattered about. And here come the Chapman Brothers with their contemporary sculptured version, Great Deeds against the Dead, the meaning of Goya’s original transmuted to suit their agenda: a physical metaphor of the psychic damage inflicted by ideology, much the same intent, possibly, as Passolini’s project.
I can’t claim to like Jake and Dinos Chapman’s work; like is simply not part of the lexicon they allow us to describe it. But it is worthy of my attention and gives me pause for thought. They understand provocation, repulsion. They know how to affect. As does Marcus Harvey with Myra were children’s hand prints in primary school hues coalesce into the serial killer’s portrait, her empty eyed gaze, the same as in the thousands of reproductions of that 1950’s, tabloid newspaper photograph. It is a devastating work, the economy of expression, the simplicity of the idea, the nauseous feeling of affect.

Metonymy-Oh-Me-Oh-My

2009-04-16T10:51:00.002+12:00

Your friendly neighbourhood Reverend (Aka Neil Buddle) has entered the Metonymy 09 exhibition, which is part of the Auckland Writers Fest. This exhibition pairs up artists and writers to produce a collaborative work, including visual art and performance. The pairs are selected by the organisers and the pairs are therefore previously unbeknownst to each other.
The Rev has been paired with Wellington poet and playwright Desiree Gezentzvey. We are working on illustrative prints of 3 poems.

If selected for the final exhibition, the works will be on display on Level 4, Aotea Centre between the 9th-23rd May.
For more information goto: METONYMY

Cut Off Your Nose

2009-04-15T13:19:00.002+12:00

Here it s the 3rd Instalment of the 'Techniques for Self- Sabotage' series, entitled Cut Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face...

situationism for artsache

2009-04-07T13:44:00.008+12:00

from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SvdWk8zRrI

Art Is Tree

2009-04-02T12:18:00.005+13:00

The notion of art and artist is forever being tested and re-defined. As a self-proclaimed wannabe artist and ex-arts worker, the definitions, assumptions, cliches and stereotypes that accompany this discussion, challenge and disappoint me in equal measure.

Working with arts students as I do currently, is interesting because art school is where many people come to live out their stereotype or have them reinforced by the previous generation of dilettantes-cum-tutors. To the public, artists can be seen to be vague, lazy, pretentious, arrogant, un-professional, difficult divas. Unfortunately this is one of the stereotypes that some artists love to live out, often the less talented ones.

In my dealing with artists, time and time again, I am confronted by people asking for special help and dispensation, because they are 'creative (A hugely over-used word). These 'creative' people believe that they deserve these special dispensations, as if it is a known fact and an unwritten law of the universe. It is often at this point that I ask why do 'creative people' deserve special rules and dispensations? Are artists needs more important than that of others? Are artists superior beings, the pinnacle of humanity and above nurses, teachers, plumbers and fast-food technicians? These questions are closely followed by "If artists are open-minded, capable, adaptable individuals as is claimed, why are they/us so high-maintenance? It is usually at this point, that the art-world bubble starts to burst! They are hard questions, especially to someone couched in the comfortable assumption that they are special and the world wants to bathe in their unique wondrousness.

In my art studies one of the most influential topics I studied was the Russian contstructivists of the post WW1 period. These artists faced with a western world in ruin, dismissed the notion of art for arts sake, in favour of art for the common Good. They though that artists should get involved in social causes, politics, architecture, engineering, clothing, apply themselves to rebuilding the world in a better way through becoming integral in the processes. Their image of the artist was as creative worker, in a boilersuit, pencils in pocket; a pragmatic, creative problem solver interacting on an essential level with society. Not playing peripheral party-pooper. Espousing a life on the margins of society whilst courting and demanding the same society give attention and reward to their special gifts.

In my work often I have been amazed by how bad artists are at communicating visually outside of their art-form. If it is to do with advertising, marketing, promotion or any other form of professional networking, artists tend to either fully refuse or resist as if it is an affront to their superior moral standing and altruism or engage so badly with them as to be damaging. As with most tools and systems, they are not inherently evil. Advertising is a tool for increasing awareness of something, this is a necessary tool and as ever it is how we use it that counts. Marketing and advertising offer the artist a fantastic opportunity to communicate their uniqueness, their visual language, their approach etc. to their target audience, in advance of the actual work, in the same way an entree might whet your appetite for the main course of a meal.

One of the other damaging things is the expectation of funding/grants/support which seems like a throwback to the old 'wealthy patron'. Patronage in the arts is important but it is also a trap of sorts. Art school sets up students to believe that they will not make money, they will not be taken seriously as professionals and they will not be valued. This teaching is often based on the bitter experience of tutors who clearly followed that trajectory. With this attitude, changing whatever prejudices the professional and public world has will be hard. Funding is great and it allows for exploration of important concepts that may not be commercially supported but advance and inform practice. However what use is a generation of artists going out into the world expecting a living, producing obscure temporal art-works that preach to the converted and deter the average viewer, however 'radical' and 'new' the concept appears according to the days fashions?

Personally for me art is about communicating ideas to the largest audience possible. These ideas should be produced practically and distributed as democratically as possible. As in the time of the constructivists, we need artists to engage with the modern world and bring what ever gifts they do have to bear on society. We don't need a lot of aloof creatives, watching from the backbenches as the world turns to custard saying "I'm not a part of this".

Of course 'horses for courses'. There is room for all and that is one of the wonderful things about the art-world. However don't profess to be one thing and demand another. Don't make inaccessible works in secret and expect to be rewarded in public, however 'important' the idea. Don't sell aesthetically pleasing objects with no message and expect to be feted as an visionary artist. And whatever you do don't expect the world to beat a path to your door and give you what you deserve or expect the world to pave the way from your door to the world, just in case you condescend to walk it one day.

With gifts come responsibilities not privileges. Do your work, work hard, represent yourself well, use your creativity in all areas of your life and practice, offer all, expect nothing - you are your own reward.

Techniques for Self-Sabotage

2009-03-31T10:50:00.004+13:00

CUT OFF YOUR NOSE!

As I have currently been working on the set of prints entitled 'Techniques for Self-Sabotage', the notion has been playing on my mind. For it seems that when in life I am given the easy job, plenty of time or a free reign - I abuse it in some way. If the devil truly finds work for idle hands, I am a valued employee of Beelzebub. This instinct has always been there, even when I was pre-teen, I would be getting top grades at school and go vandalising, breaking and entering factories or setting fires after school. These petty crimes served as excitement, entertainment and challenge, all things sadly lacking from my intellectual stimulation of the time. These activities also exposed another world, a world beyond the confines of rules, discipline and moral prerogative. This world had its own rules, its own logic and its own rewards. In its chaos, especially fire there was some sense of beauty, a very natural one, the sublime beauty and awe of a hurricane vs. a sunny day.

Sometimes these self-sabotaging instincts help, burning your bridges can be a good way to make sure you move forward in life and calamitous if you ever need to retreat. So here I am 'cutting off my nose to spite my face' in preparation for the next print in the series. And if you out there are twiddling your thumbs, doing something you shouldn't be, for a thrill that the consequences outweigh, then beware for you may also a Master of Self-Sabotage.

wet night

2009-03-05T21:18:00.003+13:00

wetnight©burgseye2005

its a wet night, north easterlies, they always catch this westward looking nation off guard, they make off with the sun in a roughed up roll of cumulus, blindly running at the horizon, without plan, with little to sustain them beyond Auckland's anorexic waistline, some how they drop their plunder mid Tasman, dissolve into the ether and regroup again some place in the equatorial Pacific, random vandal winds ripping the yachts off their east coast moorings, delivering carnage across gentrified burbs, inverting umbrella's and Maralynising secretaries skirts at traffic lights, no remorse, no apology, no place like Auckland in a storm.

Do you believe in Dog? No I believe in Dig!

2009-02-19T10:32:00.006+13:00

Having not blogged for sometime, I thought I would warm myself up again with a minor topic -Religion vs. Science!

Arguments between religious and scientific factions have been going on for a very long time. The overall sense (if the protagonists are to be believed) is that the 2 are incompatible, indeed apposite to each other. The 2 camps, darwinian evolutionists and christian creationists, battle it out to score points against the enemy. The darwinians battle for evolution as a natural, physical process catalysed by chemical and physical processes, themselves set in motion by some vast historic release of energy. The creationists argue that an all powerful supernatural entity, created the universe, according to an intelligent design.

With advances in tested human knowledge, the creationists have taken big hits, from the existence of the dinosaurs to the mapping of the human genome. However what the creationists have lost to acknowledged scientific fact, they have made up for with more faith and rhetoric to back up their claim and push for their 'truth' to once again be taught to children as scientific fact.

Having spent 10 years as a child, first accepting the catholic faith, then rejecting it, I have some knowledge of the religion from the inside and have gone through all the questioning, that acccompanies the spiritual crisis. I accepted it and then rejected it and no years later find myself strangely in a more ambivalent position.

One of the things that always seemed obvious to me was the lack of need for historic veracity in religions that primarily use parable and story to instruct people in a 'spiritual' way of life. The 10 commandments as dictated by Moses, or not, are widely viewed in the western world and beyond as a good basis for basic human law and respect. The message of the 10 commandments has a clear ring of truth to it. 'Thou shalt not steal' - you can't fault it. The need to anchor this story in a real place in history, was originally more for narrative effect surely than as an attempt at documentary style accuracy.

The same can be said for the Book of Genesis vs. the Big bang. The polarity of the antagonists hinders their ability to see the similarities. In Genesis God creates the world in 6 days, starting with void/darkness, then a burst of light, a couple of days brewing up the gas and rocks, add water, basic life, vegetation etc. then on the last day, us, humans. In the big bang story, there is nothing, a void, a big bang happens, worlds form from a melting pot of gas and rock, then comes, water, atmosphere, basic life, vegetation, animals and in the last 2 million years , us humans. Now the timescale is different of course but the order of events, the rough ratio of time is consistent. The reason for the 7 day claim is clearly again a device to simplify the story for the laymans comprehension (A week is easier to understand than billions of years). Also it imbues the act with greater awe value. Really the book of Genesis is an extraordinarily accurate account of the big bang, if one is more interested in the plot than the details! The trouble comes from the from the creationists' insistence that it is literally true and the darwinians who say it is literally untrue. Neither is right and both are, there is just no reconcilliation. They may even have something to inform each others arguments if only they would try?

This doesn't resolve the existence of God, or does it? Again one could answer that evolution in the scientific sense demonstrates a natural intelligence, a purpose or at least an inevitability that propels change. Whether it exists at at a sub-atomic level or as a supernatural entity on a cloud, the obvious fact is, there is a motivational force, whether it is pure energy, phenomena, magic or miracle. The religious explanation again is much simpler for the layman, and creates many opportunities for control in the form of worship and penance. This explanation satisifes the need, borne of insecurity, that there is something larger than us, looking after us, deciding the future. This is less scary or complex to explain than energy catalysing matter and its endless permutations. Some religions like Bhuddism focus on a 'god within' us all. This tallies more easily with some aspects of science than the beliefes of the monothiestic religions, as Bhuddism concludes that we are part of a greater organism and that organism is the essence of god, ergo we are god and god is us.

Other bible stories, particularly old testament can also be considered parables of truth. The Tower of Babel and the splitting of the one tribe into many, is a story that anthropologists have proved to a reasonable degree of scientific certitude. We originally developed as a species in one main area, we grew togther, then split apart due to some need/disagreement/crisis and went our seperate ways for a long time, to reunite later, bringing together new skills, new ideas that made the species as a whole stronger and more adpatable, from which point in time, we blossomed.

The Flood, Noahs Ark, again, we know of significant climactic events in history, perhaps someone or a group of people did save many animals from disaster, repopulating an area afterwards? Again it is the message of the story, the need to preserve our fellow creatures for the common good and for the future of our species and our known world. A concept that in this time of climate awareness we are all aware of, and is supported by science, through projects like the seed bank in Norway or the Eden Project in Great Britain (which tellingly uses a biblical story to describe its purpose and its philosophy).

As usual the story of the human race is people with a common aim/goal or idea splitting hairs until different factions become diametrically opposed to each other. That is why Jews, Christians and Moslems fight, brothers fighting amongst themselves for control of the family. Science fighting religion for a truth that they have both sought, discovered and celebrated.

Now more than ever we should look to our similarities and our common needs and desires for the spirit and look to the differences in the details, the angles, to help us see the whole picture. Then maybe we can truly understand the divine science and the scientific divinity of our own existence in a universe that ultimately will always be one step ahead of our own comprehension. It is this mystery that drives both our spiritual and scientific quests, that are one and the same thing - A valiant attempt to understand and celebrate our place in the universe.

making a fist of it

2009-02-17T13:55:00.003+13:00

fist©burgseye1997

wringing the imagination for new insights and fresh angles...
me today. no-thing new there, just clearing the slate for whatever's next...
..

picnic table

2009-02-12T23:23:00.008+13:00

mercs place -for the weather too

2009-02-11T21:11:00.003+13:00

mercsplace©burgseye02(?)

another sauna of a night in auckland. sticky honey dripping, sky heavy as an upturned tank, calm closing in, lights on in the burbs -flower buds in a field of green & black...

i'm reminded of a day/night spent at mercs in the fields at muriwai out of sight of the waves. many years past many swells broken under the cliffs at maori bay...

Singers and players

2009-02-11T07:47:00.002+13:00

Junior Reid & Jah Paul @JR studios Uptown Kingston JA 1993©burgseye1993
Exploiting the fact that the legendary Micheal Rose ex-frontman of Black Uhuru is in town to play Splore's Living Lounge on 26th February, I decided to post these images of another ex-Black Uhuru front man the equally massive Junior Reid. The images were shot at his studio home in Uptown Kingston JA 1993. I had the good fortune to be travelling with the inimitable Stinky Jim whose tidal wave of musical knowledge and general good vibe won us many an interview with various stars of that time. More later.

one for the weather

2009-02-07T07:14:00.003+13:00

upnorth©burgseye1997

a one for the weather, post.
up north is one of 42 images taken from the 2002 'close to home' show at Lopdell House's Upstairs gallery, Titirangi. a book, a postcard series of images shot between 1997 and 2000, yeah right, another shelved project more like, the basis of ongoing enquiry...and still recieving enquires about it and the subsequent 'here and now' joint show at spiral gallery in 2004(?) from some who have picked up the thread latterly.

ha

2009-02-06T21:24:00.002+13:00

ha and then i realise why i haven't posted for so long cos my colour images all end up negatised on the blog. ha ha ha...man now that is art, or not...suggestions are welcome