Melbourne’s La Femme were a fascinating meld of late Seventies influences:
punk, new wave, glam and hard rock. Their 1979 debut single Chelsea Kids is
one of the all-time classic Australian singles and their only LP: La Femme,
is arguably one of the best to come out Melbourne’s late 1970’s punk/new
wave scene (which included Models and The Boys Next Door). It contains many
fine examples of the band’s confident, swaggering glam-infused punk-metal
sound.
Lead singer Chane Chane was a charismatic, hyperactive front man, a
refreshing personality with a strong audience rapport. Guitarist Brett
Walker was a real live flashy guitar hero for the times, coming on like a
punk-metal Mick Ronson by pealing off large chunks of dense power riffing
when other guitarists were still going plink-plonk. The thuggish rhythm
section of Peter Kidd and Graham Schiavello played it mean and hard,
providing the relentless, driving beat.
La Femme could well have made it into the big league if they’d wanted but
swimming against the commercial tide seemed to be their raison d’être. In
many ways they were their own worst enemies. An unwillingness to play the
pop star game and the serious drug addiction, among other things, perhaps
ended up compromising the band’s drive. For an inner-city band with so much
potential, in the end they really did give it away. They toured constantly,
built up a huge support base on the suburban pub circuit, scored several
prestigious support gigs, made three appearances on Countdown (one of the
first punk/new wave/alternative bands to do so), released one of the great
Melbourne punk albums and yet they never rose above being a cult attraction.
Aztec Music’s deluxe reissue has been digitally remastered from the original
tapes. It contains 8 bonus tracks: the single edit of Chelsea Kids, their 2
non-LP B-sides (covers of I Wanna Be Your Man and All Day And All Of The
Night), 2 marvelously punky demo’s from 1978, 3 demo’s from 1979 (that you
would swear was part of the NWOBHM movement), PLUS their rare film clip of
Chelsea Kids that had been lost for the past 28 years (we just found it in
time!).
www.aztecmusic.net
EngageMedia has partnered with the OK.VIDEO Militia Jakarta International Video Festival at the National Gallery of Indonesia to distribute the festival videos online, present an online video training for video artists and participate in a discussion about video activism.
OK.Video is a biannual Jakarta based video festival that was established in 2003 by
Ruangrupa, an artists’ initiative based in Jakarta. OK.Video Festival “MILITIA” aims to explore the development of video as a medium and to build a social, political, cultural, and historical consciousness about what is that happening in our surroundings.
OK.VIDEO Militia conducted a series of video workshops in various towns and cities in Indonesia, capturing the ‘quintessence’ of each area by asking participants to explore their own questions about their social, political and physical surroundings using the medium of video.
Videos from the workshops are listed here to watch and download from EngageMedia:
http://www.engagemedia.org/ok-video-militia/
TINA GONSALVES EXHIBITION IN BERKS, UK
Feel_Insula: An interactive Installation about Stillness, Emotions and
Hypnosis. Feel.Insula is an intimate and vulnerable responsive video
installation driven by the stillness of the audience. In a darkened space,
a video is projected on the wall. It is of the artist under hypnosis.
Under hypnosis, the artist is asked to re-experience potent emotional
memories of her life. As soon as the viewer enters the space, the artist
wakes up from hypnosis. Only after the audience is completely still does
the video fall back into weaving the stories re-lived under hypnosis.
FEEL_INSULA emerges from a collaboration between neuroscientist Dr Hugo
Critchley and artist Tina Gonsalves, and was created over her artist in
residency at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, London.
Until 3 August
New Greenham Arts, The Corn Exchange 113 Lindenmuth Way . New Greenham
Park . Newbury . Berks . RG19 6HN UK
http://www.tinagonsalves.com
9TH ANNUAL DIGITAL CALL FOR ENTRIES
Digital’07 is an exhibition of Digital Prints to be held at the New York
Hall of Science.
For Digital’07, we are specifically looking at how structure and pattern
in the universe, whether visible or invisible to the naked eye, have
become the muse for many contemporary digital artists. We seek to explore
how today’s scientific fields of systems science, chaos and string theory,
fractals, nanoscience, genetics, molecular science, the wavelets or
frequency of sound, or a myriad of other mathematical data-sets have
influenced today’s artists working with 2-dimensional pattern in their
art.
And let’s not forget the oldest source of pattern, nature itself! As
Galileo is quoted to have said: “Nature’s great book is written in
mathematical symbols.” Nature is, of course, an infinite resource for the
lover of pattern.
We invite your submissions to this year’s digital print competition that
will have a physical exhibition at the New York Hall of Science, plus a
corresponding online exhibition at the ASCI.ORG website.
Deadline for entries: 20 Aug, 2007
Exhibition dates: 29 September 2007 – 21 January 2008
The online exhibition will launch on 29 September, 2007
Visit the website to view ASCI’S previous digital print exhibitions
http://www.asci.org/artikel62.html
Organized by Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI)
http://www.asci.org
MELBOURNE – POPCORN TAXI FILM AND Q&A
Popcorn Taxi is proud to present the Melbourne premier screening of Tom
Zubrycki’s inspiring new feature length documentary Temple of Dreams
followed by a Q& A with the filmmaker and the subjects of the film Fadi,
Amna & Zouhour.
A highlight of the Sydney Film Festival, the story centres around about
Fadi Rahman, a new breed of Australian Muslim leaders, who is young,
charismatic and politically ambitious. He runs a youth centre/gymnasium in
what was once a Masonic Temple. Despite his best efforts, the youth centre
struggles in the face of council planning regulations and funding
shortfalls, and Fadi sets out to solve the problems, but will the youth
centre survive?
Monday 23 July at 7:00pm, Kino Dendy
Tickets: $14/$12 conc.
Tickets can be purchased directly from the Kino Dendy Cinema box office,
situated at 45 Collins Street, Melbourne Tel 03 9650 2100 or online:
www.popcorntaxi.com.au
