Arguably the stand-out performers at this years inaugural All Tomorrow's Parties Festival at Mt.Buller, the Dirty Three return to Australia this summer for a national tour - their first in almost four (4) years - performing their magnum-opus Ocean Songs, in its entirety. The tour will take in an appearance at Sydney's month long arts event, Sydney Festival and also the Perth International Arts Festival. In addition the Dirty Three will perform Ocean Songs at headline shows in Brisbane and Melbourne.
But that's not all... joining Dirty Three for the Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney performances will be long time Dirty Three favourites, Laughing Clowns, performing their early 'hits' package 'History of Rock n' Roll Volume One', also in its entirety. Yep, the same line-up that emerged after a 25 year hiatus to perform at this years inaugural Australian All Tomorrow's Parties Festivals - Kuepper, Wegener, Elliott, Miller and Spence - will join forces once more time to put new life into old classics such as Holy Joe, Sometimes (I Just Can't Live with Anyone) and Everything That Flies.
Full dates as follows.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010
Thursday 21st: Melbourne, Forum * Monday 25th: Brisbane, Tivoli *
Tuesday 26th: Sydney Festival, Enmore Theatre *
Thursday 11th: Perth Festival, PIAF - A Don't Look Back performance of Ocean Songs (on sale now)
* Plus Laughing Clowns performing 'History of Rock n' Roll Volume One'
Women are undergoing surgery to create perfect genitalia amid a "shocking" lack of information on the potential risks of the procedure, a report says.
Research published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology also questions the very notion of aesthetically pleasing genitals.
Operations to improve the appearance of the sex organs for both psychological and physical reasons are on the rise.
But surgeons said the report overplayed the risks of an established procedure.
Researchers from University College London reviewed all the existing studies on cosmetic labial surgery - which generally involves reducing the amount of tissue that protrudes from the lips which cover the vagina. They found there had been little work to document any longer-term side effects.
Labioplasty, as it is known, costs about £3,000 privately and is offered for a variety of reasons: some women complain that wearing tight clothes or riding a bike is uncomfortable, while others say they are embarrassed in front of a sexual partner...
Beck's Record Club: Can it get any more awesome? Yes it can. And it just did. As you know, Record Club works like this: Beck rounds up a revolving cast of guests to cover an entire album's worth of songs in a day. The results are then posted in weekly installments on Beck's website.
The latest entry in the series? Beck, Wilco, Feist, and Jamie Lidell teaming up to cover the 1969 cult fave Oarby onetime Moby Grape/Jefferson Airplane member turned acid casualty Skip Spence. The album's leadoff track, "Little Hands", is up on Beck's site right now.
We had previously reported that Beck and Wilco had teamed up to cover this album, but hey-- added Feist and Lidell? We'll take it! Sitting in on drums was James Gadson, who has drummed with Bill Withers, while Spencer Tweedy, son of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, pitched in on drums as well.
Read through hundreds of Vincent van Gogh’s revealing letters online, now translated into English with a drawings appendix.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam commissioned the ambitious Vincent van Gogh: The Letters project, an extensive and richly annotated archive searchable by chronology, place, and correspondent. Interactive tabs on the letter-viewing screen allow scrolling between the original text, facsimile images of the letters, and English translations.
The most in-depth function is filed under Concordance, lists, bibliography on the top right of the screen. Here, hyperlinks lead to historical persons and digital images of the artworks specifically referenced by van Gogh — all the cultural scraps that influenced the artist’s beautiful and tortured inner world.
A Reuters video report by Basmah Fahim posits that van Gogh was a rational man, rather than a mad genius.
A Reuters video report by Basmah Fahim posits that van Gogh was a rational man, rather than a mad genius.
In this missive to his younger brother, art dealer Theo van Gogh, dated July 23, 1890, the artist writes, “Thanks for your kind letter and for the 50-franc note it contained. I’d really like to write to you about many things, but I sense the pointlessness of it.” Six days later, the artist committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest.
A densely worded letter mentioning Pissarro and Seurat to artist fellow Paul Gauguin, sent from Arles on Wednesday, October 3, 1888. “In any event, when I left Paris very, very upset, quite ill and almost an alcoholic through overdoing it, while my strength was abandoning me — then I withdrew into myself, and without daring to hope yet.”
Paul Gauguin to Vincent van Gogh from Pont-Aven, on or about Wednesday, September 26, 1888: “In your letter you seem angry at our laziness about the portrait, and that pains me; friends don’t get angry with each other (at a distance, words cannot be interpreted at their true value).”
To Emile Bernard, from Arles, on or about Thursday, June 7, 1888: “More and more it seems to me that the paintings that ought to be made, the paintings that are necessary, indispensable for painting today to be fully itself and to rise to a level equivalent to the serene peaks achieved by the Greek sculptors, the German musicians, the French writers of novels, exceed the power of an isolated individual, and will therefore probably be created by groups of men combining to carry out a shared idea.”
In this missive to his younger brother, art dealer Theo van Gogh, dated July 23, 1890, the artist writes, “Thanks for your kind letter and for the 50-franc note it contained. I’d really like to write to you about many things, but I sense the pointlessness of it.” Six days later, the artist committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest.
A densely worded letter mentioning Pissarro and Seurat to artist fellow Paul Gauguin, sent from Arles on Wednesday, October 3, 1888. “In any event, when I left Paris very, very upset, quite ill and almost an alcoholic through overdoing it, while my strength was abandoning me — then I withdrew into myself, and without daring to hope yet.”
Paul Gauguin to Vincent van Gogh from Pont-Aven, on or about Wednesday, September 26, 1888: “In your letter you seem angry at our laziness about the portrait, and that pains me; friends don’t get angry with each other (at a distance, words cannot be interpreted at their true value).”
To Emile Bernard, from Arles, on or about Thursday, June 7, 1888: “More and more it seems to me that the paintings that ought to be made, the paintings that are necessary, indispensable for painting today to be fully itself and to rise to a level equivalent to the serene peaks achieved by the Greek sculptors, the German musicians, the French writers of novels, exceed the power of an isolated individual, and will therefore probably be created by groups of men combining to carry out a shared idea.”
"There will come a time in your life when you will ask yourself a series of questions. Am I happy with who I am? Am I happy with the people around me? Am I happy with what I am doing? Am I happy with the way my life is going? Do I have a life? Or am I just living? Do not let these questions restrain or trouble you. Just point yourself in the direction of your dreams. Find your strength in the sound and make your transition. Make your transition. Do I spend too much time thinking and not enough doing? Did I try my hardest at any of my dreams? Did I purposely let others discourage me when I knew I could? When I die, never knowing what I’ve could have been or could have done. Do not let these doubts restrain or trouble you. Just point yourself in the direction of your dreams. Find your strength in the sound and make your transitions. Make your transition. There will be people who will say “you can’t”. But you will. There will be people who will say “you don’t mix this with that”. And you will say “watch me”. There will be people who will say “play it safe, that’s too risky”. And you will take that chance and have no fear. You won’t let these question restrain or trouble you. You will point yourself in the direction of your dreams. You will find the strength in the sound and make your transition. Make your transition."
After writing yesterday's entry, I decided to let my imagination run wild with some ideas about what might unfold for art and artists over the next ten years. These are the outtakes:Artists will be the new pop stars. They'll have to tour constantly to promote their work as well as be subjected to the same sort of intrusive coverage by paparazzi as Kid Rock or P. Diddy. Bi-sexuality will continue to be trendy and Sam Taylor-Wood will dump her young husband to take up with an aging Megan Fox, whom she'll cast in a re-make of The Hours. After subjecting myself to Orlan-esque body modifications, I will become art's answer to Pamela Anderson – or Kim Kardashian, whichever. In a reversal of a trend begun by Julian Schnabel and less successfully, Robert Longo, in the '80s and sustained by Sam Taylor-Wood until this year, film directors will aspire to become artists rather than the other way around (come on down, Tim Burton).The mainstream audience will become increasingly art-savvy and Kevin McCloud will switch his attention from architects' and home-owners' Grand Designs to their aspirations as collectors. Unfortunately for artists, they'll be more discerning and demand more depth, development and relevancy in the work they actually buy.Due to the loss of rudimentary artisan skills, a tragic by-product of a thirty year emphasis on post-modern theory rather than traditional, centuries-old practice, art schools will become irrelevant and be replaced by free, widely distributed, web-based, autonomous learning resources. Artists will re-learn 15th century skills and techniques through [gasp!] experimentation, practise, online research, and by viewing work by fellow artists. Artspeak will only exist in academic libraries. The language died when a wider audience learned to translate it and discovered the banality of its messages. It will be studied by ethnologists as an anachronistic but doomed fad that owed its existence exclusively to conceptual art. What used to be regarded as conceptual art will now be mainstream and the exclusive domain of advertising agencies desperate to try anything to reach mass audiences after the death of broadcast TV and newspapers. Glossy art magazines will have replaced interior design magazines as the 'pornography' of the middle class, who will pay a premium to display them as paper editions on their Marc-Newson-for-Target coffee tables.Takashi Murakami will become increasingly jaded as his ideas about democratising work are reduced to soul-less, auto-industry-style production lines. He will commit public seppuku in the foyer of the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi (Tokyo) in a bid to restore his honour as an artist. Damien Hirst will pre-sell by auction a range of artworks to be manufactured after his death. One of the works will be his dead, dissected body preserved in formaldehyde. He will organise a world-wide, touring retrospective exhibition featuring his decaying corpse as its centre-piece – to be launched immediately after he passes away. E-Bay rather than Sotheby's will handle the Hirst auction and in conjunction with Matthew Freud and Jay Jopling, will hype the event to drive up prices: indeed, the works will be auctioned several times over, for massively increasing amounts, even before Hirst dies. He will retain ownership of a small percentage of each work so his estate might participate in the rising value forever.Dames Tracey Emin and Germaine Greer will establish an arcane cult that worships and sexually enslaves young men. Neither will see any irony in this. An ancient Jeffrey Smart will be invited to preside as High Priest over annual rites at an undisclosed location in Tuscany. (Thanks to Italian singer-songwriter, Lucio Dalla, for the title.)
