Brighton The Brainiest City!

In Horsham yesterday i did the Chewing gum survey and completed all 16 interviews despite being a dull overcast day. Luckily the rain abated enough for me to do the survey generally dry, and most of the young respondents were happy to take part in it.

This morning did the last day of the tourist information centre job. The centre was quite busy,despite being windy dull and a bit cold. Finished all by 2pm but since i started it at 10 a.m. when they opened then it was not too surprising that i finished reasonably early.

Last night we did the Test The Nation thing on BBC1 television to see which parts of the country had the best IQ's - seventy questions in all. Anyway when the results came in and totals totted up i did better than i expected. Looking at the tables for the score against my age my IQ is 115. Lorna got 101. Also for the second year on the trot Brighton is the city with the highest average IQ in the UK. Well with all the arts and culture here,plus two universities, that isn't surprising really!!

Rex Whistler Exhibition

Popped into Brighton and Hove Museum and Art Gallery to see the Rex Whistler exhibition as today was the last day of it. However i found him to be a rather conventional artist who does nothing for me even when i did try to appreciate his art. Within the same period other artists were expanding the horizons of what art can be. Strangely in the next room from the three ones devoted to Mr.Whistler was a bronze sculpture that is best seen from above by Anthony Coro called "Table Piece",two by Frank Stella and a set of prints by Richard Serra,and a few others which escape my memory at the moment simply because i forgot to bring a note book with me.

Invisible Bands

There is an article in The Guardian from Simon Frith about how some bands remain invisible to the public. See:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1862336,00.html

Well the reason i think they are invisible is they are mostly identikit bands groups or artists without a defining quality to them,no individuality and just utter rubbish. Razorlight or The Editors mean squat all in this house anyway. Arctic Monkeys are just visible but Yo la Tengo or Mercury Rev have ben much more visible to me than many of these faceless plonkers.

Better still folks buy the WIRE on a regular basis and then you can really feel in the know about music of all hues.

Two DVDs

Well due to the paucity of good stuff on the TV i have been watching DVDs again,and after the visit to the art gallery earlier today i decided to dig out some slightly more artistic stuff.

Firstly the recently purchased "Drift" by Lee Renaldo (of Sonic Youth) and Leah Singer (video and 16mmm artist) which is a studio recorded version of his poems and texts with feedbacked guitar and soundscapes from Alan Licht and Christian Marclay with the projections by Leah. Comes with a book enclosing some of her filmic images and an interview with both of them plus the texts to each poem,and a summation by Alan Licht.

The other DVD is Brian Eno "14 Video Paintings", which is reissues of two video installations "Thursday Afternoon" and "Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan". Both of these videos have very slow long shots of images transcribed as if you were seeing paintings in a gallery. Basically it is something you can watch in intervals whilst doing something else and return to it with almost the same picture being shown. You could sit still and watch it (like normal TV or film) but Eno designed these two to be fairly static,and at 47 mins long and 82 mins long would be a mindnumbing haul for just simply watching them as you would in a normal passive enviroment. Hence the title of the DVD "Video Paintngs".