"The Children of Craig-y-nos”
My online book is taking up most of my time.
It’s proving to be challenging as well as interactive (over 70 people have contacted me), intergenerational ( grandparents are getting their grandchildren to help them with the technology) and collaborative ( folk get a print out from the blog and can add/change as they wish) and I have a team of people helping including assistance from an historian in The Wellcome Trust, as well as the Sleeping Giant Foundation, charity specialising in oral history in Wales, and of course, friends who are helping with interviews and repairing damaged photos in Photoshop.
checkout: http://craig-y-nos.blogspot.com
I was encouraged to read in yesterday’s Financial Times that more publishing companies are putting their physical books into a virtual, digital warehouse.
Could an electronic e-book, transform the reading world as the IPod has music?
You just download the chapter you want.
The Tramway: Curatorial pseudo-intellectual artspeak!
It’s good to see Ian Gale, Scotland’s top art critic , tackling some of the obtuse art writing in exhibition guides.
Take this from the current exhibition at the Tramway in Glasgow of Katie Dove and Victoria Morton.:
“Of Dove:”experiential reference points allow the viewer access to the work through their own experience of the moment.”
Or Morton: “Detailed and continuous composition is intended to punctuate the non-linguistic, undefined limits of our imagination.”
He says:” If such worthwhile artists as these are to be introduced to a wider audience they need some sort of coherent interpretation not this half-baked, pseudo-psychological artspeak.”
I was thinking of going to see this exhibition, on second thoughts I won’t bother.
Dahab – the power of images
Following my visit to Egypt I decided to check out YouTube.
I wish I hadn’t.
There were some very disconcerting videos of divers dead at the bottom of the Red Sea: one of a young girl curled up as if asleep in a foteal position, and another of a guy who had videoed his own death.
"Kill your little darlings!"
Fat chance! I gave the rough edit of the video I had agreed ( reluctantly) to make for a friends exhibition in France a week ago and suggested she reduce it by at least five minutes.
No she couldnt bring herself to part with her images, in fact she wanted more added at which point I got all frosty and uptight and said"no way".
Yet this is the stage where you have to be ruthless:"kill your little darlings!" was how one tutor at Glasgow School of Art summed it up; painful but necessary.
Very scary landing at midnight in a snowstorm into Glasgow airport. The plane appeared to "wobble" high over the landing strip – with all 300 passengers fresh from the Sinai dessert on board- then took off again!….A long silence followed. Where was the captain? Eventually his voice came over the inter-com. He said that due to weather conditions he had decided to "make a second landing". Eventually the plane touched down. And the passengers applauded.
