Dumb Riffs » eno collaboration

Berlinnit?

Karl Whitney — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:03:36 +0000

Just back from Berlin, where I wandered around staring goggle-eyed at the truly strange landscape of meticulously reconstructed 18th Century buildings and the postwar apartment blocks that line the streets of both East and West.

Because I spent a day at a conference in the Schloss Charlottenburg, I didn’t get a chance to see as much of the city as I would have liked. Instead, I bought a day pass for bus and rail, and spent every evening jumping from U-Bahn to S-Bahn to bus. Inevitably, I was drawn towards the bruised monumentality of the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag, but also to the seedy vitality of the Bahnhof Zoo.

Karl Whitney — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:15:30 +0000

Tomorrow I co-host (is that the right word?) a seminar in UCD about academic blogging. At the moment I’m thinking about the uses of blogging, and the question that animates me at the moment is this one: if a new PhD student was to go to my blog and scan through the posts over the last three or four years, would he or she learn anything about what it’s like to be a PhD student?

Is there a difference between an academic blog and a blog written by someone who happens to be an academic, whether a research student or a lecturer, or whatever?

One of the points I’ll be stressing tomorrow is that blogging complements and even improves your ability to write and research a PhD; that it establishes informal networks outside of your home university which sustain you and your research in ways that your own university and department often can’t. And that it’s also a place where you can write about whatever you feel, outside the constraints of academic discourse.

I’m not sure how any of this applies to this blog, and that’s why I’ve been combing my old posts, trying to see how much I’ve written about the experience of being a PhD researcher. Quite a bit, as it happens. But the posts on academic-related issues are distributed amongst all sorts of other things. So this is probably a blog written by someone who happens to be a research student, rather than an academic blog.

Karl Whitney — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:31:16 +0000

Last night myself and Laura went to see David Byrne in Dublin’s National Concert Hall. It was a quite brilliant show – drawing on Byrne’s work with Brian Eno, but transcending the fashionable concept of clapped out artists retreading classic albums in the name of nostalgia. First of all, it was a real spactacle: the band were all dressed in stark white outfits, and they swapped dance moves with three roaming dancers throughout the show – even Byrne himself. Also, Byrne performed a particularly silly version of ‘Burning Down the House’ – tutus and all – near the end of the gig (video from the Paris performance here). I also wrote a preview of tonight’s Belfast concert for last Friday’s Belfast Telegraph here.

David Byrne on the Colbert Report here.

Karl Whitney — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:31:59 +0000

Last week, a knock on my door signalled the arrival of a book I’ve been expecting for some time: the grandly titled ‘Has Man a Function in Universe?’, part of a series of books, curated by artist Gavin Wade, based on the Strategic Questions asked by Buckminster Fuller, who said:

It is my working assumption that the following 40 questions must be definitely answered before we may realistically discuss our respective philosophies and grand strategies.

My interest in the book comes from the artist Neil Chapman‘s seemingly chance encounter with an essay I wrote for my MA course about the Oulipo group. Printing out that essay on green paper, Chapman has chopped it up (it was made up of a number of free-floating paragraphs), and then integrated some of my text into the sections of the book produced by him. Rather chuffed about the whole thing, I am.

(Strategic Questions website here.)

Karl Whitney — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:07:19 +0000

David Byrne’s releasing his very recent collaboration with Brian Eno, the album ‘Everything that happens will happen today,’ online in the next few days (here). Until then, you can download the track ‘Strange Overtones’ from the site, free of charge. On Byrne’s subsequent US tour, he’ll be playing songs from the new record, as well as from his previous collaborations with Eno: the Talking Heads records ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food’, ‘Fear of Music’ and ‘Remain in Light’, and their classic ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’.

Half Man Half Biscuit lyrics to ‘Eno Collaboration’ here.