Rotten Hill Gang - City of Cold Steel

O.K.

 Ok. I start my blogs with OK quite often. but what does it mean?


OK. Hey Ho let's go; I got that from the Ramones back then and I'm old enough to remember the Ramones back then when they were alive and alive enough to remember me.


Ok. I am going to take time out.   Enough.

Cassetteboy vs The Bloody Apprentice

Not so Rotten Hill Gang and the West Born.

What a Day!  (I nicked that from my director who nicked it from a Robbie Williams song); Filming on the streets of Notting Hill with cameraman Gordon Anderson and  Farah Damji. Farah turned out to be an unwelcome arrival in my life and is no longer involved in any of my projects.


Then on to Powis Square W11 for an afternoon of music courtesey of  Pink Cigar and the delightful West Borns; who are certainly destined for greater things and considering their ages, something in the region of 13 years, have plenty of time, plus the debut of Gus Robertson and Johnny Borrell's new band topped by the irrepressible Rotten Hill Gang who were on great form.

                                          Rotting Hill Gang

I spotted Christopher Scholey; general manager of the Tabernacle, out in the crowd with his camera.

                                          Christopher Scholey


There again it was a pretty Notting hill rock n roll type thing all round.

Honesty.

'Sometimes'. said Jan by telex this evening. 'sometimes you just have to be honest. Even if it hurts'.


Listening to you feed me this bullshit is hurting Jan. I thought.


But I am too tired to do anything other than tell the truth today, I cannot pretend, I cannot lie:


I spent the day being filmed and interviewed for a viral press release.  We had lunch courtesy of the Tabernacle (always a treat) followed by a well earned siesta. The evening was spent cooking for a good friend (a rare treat up in the garret) and a telephone conversation with a Californian turf dancer friend.  How cool is that.


O.k. said Jan when he called back. No one is going to believe that.


Lie for their sake.

Turf Feinz can RIP me any day.

I have posted this, have gone against all of my principles and policy purely to demonstrate that there is so much depth to what these guys are doing.


when I go; taken out by whatever bullet modern so called civilisation sends my way I want these guys dancing on my grave!


At least I will have known I had lived.... Not dawdled through life waiting for some other fucker to do something.




.

Sunflower Tate modern fiasco update. Seeds of doubt!

Stolen from Tate Modern?

As usual Jan Nieupjur was on the button... Of course the Health & Efficiency people are going to kick up a stink over opening a giant hamster cage full of unhygenic foreign detritus to the public.  
Jan suggested via Skype this morning that they should have filled the space with all the brown M&N's that prima donna rock stars insist out of their riders. Of course then it would look just like a rabbit hutch... Same problem.


Jan went on to say that soon we will be asked to don surgical gloves before wiping our arses;  try calling that 'ART' Mr Serota.

Yoram Savion interview & poem (Stop Youth Violence Project at Youth UpRi...

Club 21 - Remaking the scene, something new is going to happen and Andy Warhol without a wig.

To the club 21 private view/launch party last night at No.1 Marylebone (you know the one time church that now has a valid use).


A refreshing antidote to the Freize rubbish down the road and for once an enjoyable 'Art scene'


Jan Nieupjur writes:


CLUB 21


Shit, me and Andy were always in that place; him to be seen and me to be styling him. He had really got into my wigs by then; he stopped me wearing them in case confusion set in. Bianca Jagger was always there deep in conversation with her lawyers (she had some cute lawyers back then) Claus Nomi would sing occasionally while Grace Jones watched attentively.


I have dug a couple of old photographs out; I am not in them because Andy had me airbrushed out of everything since the incident with the monochrome prints : http://jannieupjur.blogspot.com/2008/08/guggenheim-and-warhol.html

                                        Andy Warhol (without wig) and Marcia Mercadante

Andy Warhol(without wig), Stephen Torton, Jean michel Basquait & Marcia Mercadante 

                                          Madonna


Club 21: Remaking the scene.
One Marylebone, London NW! 4AQ
October 13 - 23, 2010


Something new is going to happen every day.

As usual Book prize goes to one of my mates!

London author and columnist named winner

12 October 2010.  Jan Nieupjur is tonight (Tuesday 12 October) named the winner of the £50,000 Nieupjur prize for Fiction for The Pentimento Question, published by Blogger.

London author and columnist Jan Nieupjur has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Oi vey Missus and in 2002 for Is it cos I is going to the right parties, but has never before been shortlisted.

The Pentimento Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be old hat today.

Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language', The Pentimento Question has been described as ‘soso' and ‘written by my mate' and as a novel of ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and networking'.

Blah blah exquisitely written blah!

Amazing facebook fact discovered.

Doctors have discovered that only 7 words are neccessary to comment on facebook.


These words are: Look how clever I think I am!


They go on to say that the exclamation mark is optional

Freize Art Fair 2010: Puckering up both ends!

Yawn.


Yes it is that time of year again when the pretentious art world puckers up both ends for a collective arse kissing at Freize.  It is always the same old bollocks; I shall enter the spirit of the moment by posting a previous years review....


No one will know the difference; all too busy attention seeking!

Frieze... But is it art...

As I stolled through 'Frieze' last week a chill cut me to the bone.

I came away from the thing feeling depressed and dissappointed Yet at the same time I was elated by the fact that, as I inspected the fornicating, gold plated pigs, my muse had sashayed up to me, giggled, and whispered in my ear. Showing me the direction I must now take.

Some of the pieces on show were good, some were even very good but they were in a small minority. surrounding this nucleus of work by established (Old School even) Artists was a bish bash bosh of dross. an assemblage of the most tawdry, lazy and crass objects I'd ever care to shake a stick at. One enormous tin of poo. It reminded me of nothing more than the wind blown detritus in a roadside hedge. This is when the muse opened my eyes to what I was looking at; this was not Art, this was at best a collection of half resolved observations on the state of art today, a drunken 'undergraduate' discussion informed by todays obsession with 'why' rather than 'what'. 

Teachers in Art schools have become preoccupied with the thought processes with little interest in the quality of the finished work. The journey is all important, the destination irrelevant. Sadly what I saw leads me to believe that most of todays 'Art Travellers' are bogged down in a scuzzy camp-site in an unknown land. 

It is not the fault of the artists. The blame must be equally shared between the cynical Art establishment and those that teach students to believe the hype. A fraction of Art school graduates have got what it takes to achieve even a mediocre greatness and they are being churned out lacking even the basic skills that might allow them to work in the commercial sector.

Is it a coincidence that a great number of young british Artists live and work in Hackney? their work is certainly hackneyed! 

At Frieze one of the works on show was a large piece of old rope snaking accross the floor... Yes, they wanted money for it! 

This article first appeared in the blog in 2008.

Sunflower seeds at Tate Modern.

About the exhibition

Ai Weiwei, one of China’s leading Conceptual artists and an outspoken cultural and social commentator, has undertaken the eleventh commission in The Unilever Series.

Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain. Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands.

Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape. Sunflower Seeds is a sensory and immersive installation, which we can touch, walk on and listen to as the seeds shift under our feet. The casual act of walking on the work’s surface contrasts with the immense effort of production and the precious nature of the material. Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.

Jan Nieupjur, in a bit of a state, demands: Since when has the bottom of a fucking hamster cage been art?  Oi Serota; No!