Enda Mac Nally

Some Old Sketches

2009-12-04T10:08:00.001-08:00

Probably all from around 2007 some time.

Moon

2009-08-18T07:16:00.001-07:00

I should have done this blog post a while ago, because the film has been out in cinemas a few weeks already at this stage, but I really want to recommend that everyone definitely goes to see Duncan Jones' fantastic 'Moon' while it's still out, even if only to support a genuine and moving independent feature.

I've seen it twice now, the second time followed by a Q&A Duncan did at Cineworld, Dublin. He was funny and revealed some interesting points about the making of the film, which seems to have been a real labour of love. He's embarked on Q&A sessions over the last few weeks in a number of cities to help promote it. At the end of the session in Cineworld, he urged the audience to let a few other people know about it, because having spent their advertising budget already, word of mouth is the only way the film will get around.

The movie was made for $5 million (a comparatively tiny budget for a sci-fi movie), and features Sam Rockwell (an actor I've already written about here for his performance in 'Choke') and the voice of Kevin Spacey as 'GERTY'. All this plus a score by Clint Mansell which is really fantastic. Set in the near future, when mankind uses resources from the moon to provide clean energy on earth, the movie initially taps into fears about scarcity of natural resources here on earth but without being preachy or unrealistic. This is probably it's strength throughout, in fact- it is realistic to the ground. There is no improbable design or stupid premises, as comes with so many modern sci-fi films. It's sci-fi done very well, a film about people, which doesn't get lost in gimmicks, special effects and brain-eating aliens.

What's also incredible is how a film which really wears it's influences on it's sleeve (with passing references to 2001, Alien, Silent Running) can come across seeming so fresh and individual, and not for one minute derivative. Jones does a superb job, crafting a subtle and touching human story against the harsh and barren terrain of the moon. And again, Sam Rockwell gives another fantastic performance. Oscars? Hmmmm....

In Context 3- Mediation Commission

2009-07-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

I was taking alook at these videos again recently and realised that I'd never posted them on the blog! Take a look and let me know what you think. We filmed and edited these a few months ago.

Putrid Flesh

2009-07-15T02:53:00.001-07:00

Enda Mac Nally 'Putrid Flesh' (2009). Pencil on paper.

PRICK

2009-07-15T02:49:00.001-07:00

Enda Mac Nally 'PRICK' (2009). Pencil on paper.

Notebook Update

2009-05-26T03:39:00.000-07:00

Some recent drawings and ideas from my notebook, with certain passages skillfully blurred. Don't want to give everything away, you know....

I'm developing an idea called 'You Are An Idiot', which is why the phrase keeps coming up (before you start wondering why I leave myself little abusive messages).

Mixmaster Mike (Patton)

2009-05-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

Following up on voicing the creatures in 'I Am Legend', Mike Patton will apparently be the voice of Mixmaster in 'Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen'. And, to further his stake in sequels without numbers, he has also provided the score for 'Crank: High Voltage'. A film which also stars Geri Halliwell as Jason Statham's mam.

There's a great interview about his scoring process here on Ain't It Cool News.

Furniture Guy and Mattress Man

2009-05-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

Twitter

2009-05-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

Thanks to modern technology, quick updates on the minutiae of everyday life can now be discovered on Twitter. And for all the talk of people fearing hellish 'Orwellian' future societies where some evil government tracks your every move, it turns out if you offer it to them under the guise of convenience or as a useful marketing tool they'll sign themselves up.

Is this a rant? I can't decide. If it is, it's a little confused. Check out what I had for breakfast:

www.twitter.com/endamacnally

NASA ft. Kool Keith and Tom Waits

2009-04-28T02:26:00.000-07:00

Here's an odd one, but it's definitely two people I'd look forward to hearing together. It's pretty good too. Check out the link below for more details.

More on the album

......................

2009-04-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

"The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam,"

J.G. Ballard

JG Ballard (1930-2009)

2009-04-20T07:35:00.001-07:00

The hugely talented and influential JG Ballard died yesterday, which is sad to hear. If you haven't read anything by him, you definitely should. Even towards the end of his career he was consistently experimenting with literary form, which is incredibly admirable, especially as attention spans seem to continually wane. Below is a fairly succint introduction to the man, an interview from 1986:

Chris Cunningham for Gucci

2009-04-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

And apparently also doing an audio-visual set at Electric Picnic this year too!

http://www.electricpicnic.ie/html/music.html

"My Dad said I could sell the Poop Tube!"

2009-04-08T11:48:00.000-07:00

A Real Leprechaun (or maybe just a Crackhead)

2009-03-20T04:14:00.000-07:00

This is ridiculous.

Ventl II

2009-03-20T03:16:00.000-07:00

I'm attempting to mix my second Ventl EP at the moment, which I'll probably be working on while you're reading this, or at least I should be working on it, but it's just so nice outside...

You can check out some tracks from the first EP here: Ventl Myspace

The second one is lining up to be much more atmospheric and melancholy than the first one (which was maniacally energetic). It's made up mostly of discarded samples from old soul records, leaning more towards eerie, echo-ey noises. I've been playing around with some possible covers too, by toying with my scanner in ways it wasn't meant to be toyed with:

I'll post a few mp3 clips soon.

Radiohead vs. Brian Cowen

2009-03-20T03:36:00.000-07:00

Looking for something to listen to while I was working this morning, I found an hour-long video on Youtube of Radiohead playing 'Later...With Jools Holland' in 2001.

Thank god I was too distracted to actually work for the first few minutes or I might have missed Brian Cowen popping up on Jonny Greenwood's TV, and him reaching over to turn it off.

If I was more easily excited I'd probably file this under 'WTF?'.

Here's the link in case you think I altered this in any way. It happens around the 3:25 mark:

Radiohead vs. Brian Cowen vs. Jools Holland

Chris Cunningham For Dazed and Confused and Vice Magazine

2009-03-10T04:50:00.000-07:00

I picked up a recent copy of Dazed and Confused when I saw the names Chris Cunningham and Grace Jones on the cover, where Cunningham had photographed Jones as "a nubian Rubber Johnny". The photos are so clean and the alterations so effective that you don't notice for a while that in some cases she has far too many knuckles or an extra shoulder. It's a little terrifying.

One of the images has her rolled up into a limbless, glittery ball. Another is Jones with her naked breasts pressed up against a sheet of glass, her head blurred in a scream.

Chris Cunningham is an absolute genius on Photoshop.

The image he did for Vice recently is more graphic, much more, though they were both inspired by the inspid, badly lit photography of British porn magazines like Razzle. If you are curious to know what it is before seeing it, let me just say it's not so much Goatse, than GoatOCEAN. I think I can respectfully say that it is possibly one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen in my life (Not THE most disgusting, but maybe I'll do a future blog post on that monstrosity).

Chris Cunningham shoots Grace Jones (extra shots that didn't make the mag)

Chis Cunningham In Vice Magazine

And also check out Grace Jones latest album, Hurricane. It's phenomenal.

A Message From Ground Control

2009-03-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

Hello! And what a long time it's been. My! How you've grown, the last time I saw you, you were only this high... etc.

Apologies for the long break between blog posts, I've been really busy rushing around, trying to tie up loose ends and get this and that sorted. I'm spending most of my time finishing certain projects and trying to get others off the ground right now, which I'm glad to say has been going relatively well thus far. I've also been writing a bit, short fictional pieces which I will be posting directly here, as well as polishing off some music projects I've been working on for (literally) years.

For your patience, you will be duly rewarded. Keep your eyes peeled on the blog for the next while, I'm hoping you'll be pleased with what I have in store...

Enda

If You Can't Beat Em...

2009-02-24T00:04:00.000-08:00

Join em.

I recently came across the above article, about a British educational plan which encourages children to write about the July 7th bombings- from the perspective of the bombers. Why does everything that tries to bring serious issues into schools end up sounding so hilariously misguided? 'Legs Akimbo' Theatre Company from The League of Gentlemen comes to mind....

In other news....

Woman Falls To Her Death Following A Feather (www.telegraph.co.uk)

Pope Benedict on The Internet

2009-02-02T01:21:00.000-08:00

If he signs up for Facebook, I'll be the first to SuperPoke him.

Kevin Sharkey: The Naked Painter

2009-02-01T11:25:00.000-08:00

"Every item of clothes we wear restricts our movements... I prefer to be free"

Kevin Sharkey

The disclaimer on the video says "Warning- Contains Explicit Scenes of Nudity!", but the content itself probably warrants something a little milder, like "Slight Caution- Potentially Silly". It shows a naked man who walks around his studio preparing to make a painting. I say preparing, because it isn't until past the 3 minute mark that any paint actaully hits the canvas. And I say hits, because he throws it, which his wont as an abstract expressionist born 50 years too late. All of which suggests that we should view the preparation and process as seriously as the final product.

On top of being incredibly free and producing miserable paintings, Kevin Sharkey is also a very mildly onanistic softcore porngrapher now. This ludicrous video on his website which shows him painting while naked is a natural progression from the automatic way he makes his artwork. Now, I'm offended neither by his nudity or the idea of an artist making a slightly boring video of themselves working, nor is it my intention to spend too much time writing about somebody whose work I just don't like, but if I thought this kind of thing would be addressed by responsible and serious art journalists I probably wouldn't bother, but the arts in Ireland, or maybe to be more direct, the only art in this country that receives any significant media coverage, is this kind of pseudo-spiritual baffoonery.

If I thought this video constituted something challenging, I would probably be at least interested in it- but as it stands I'm just confused by its mindless self-indulgence.

It also strikes me as being a baffling side-effect of Catholicism that artists can believe splashing paint on a canvas and chanelling their emotions can see those same emotions transferred to their work, like their materials going through a similar transubstatiation as the body and blood of Christ. All well and good for the messiah, but in a commercial artist, it borders on obscene and is surely a symptom of taking art faaaaarrrr too seriously.

Thank Christ the video loops back to the start when it's over, I didn't know what to do with myself after sitting through it.

Kevin Sharkey Website (video is at the bottom of the page)

Ugg Boots For Men

2009-01-29T01:06:00.000-08:00

And once again, I beg, "Lord, rain down fire upon my brethren, for with these expensive glorified socks they know not the cringing and weeping I experience within," And if I too must be smited by the Lord and to my unending shame, am cast into the bowels of hell with his final judgement, then I say unto thee 'Grand, at least I didn't look like an arse when I died'.

......*........**

2009-01-26T03:43:00.000-08:00

*I found this among a huge pile of notes I'd written, but I don't remember writing it. Hmmm.

**No dogs were harmed in the making of this note. As far as I remember anyway.

Bodies: The Exhibition

2009-01-26T02:18:00.000-08:00

Oh, and the bodies did come, and they were weird and shriveled.

I attended a free preview showing of 'Bodies' in the Ambassador Theatre on Friday, courtesy of my friend Dr. Banana, which was nice because I didn't have to pay the twenty quid in and also because I'd been waiting to see this show for such a long time. I remember the original documentary on plastination from a few years ago, before Gunther von Hagens got his 'Anatomist' show on Channel 4.

The current show of course, isn't anything to do with Gunther von Hagens, and a lot of people seem disappointed by that, as if there's some genuine importance in knowing exactly who it is pumping plastic into these people you didn't know before you pay in to ogle them up. In reality, I assume it's because the man in charge here, Dr. Roy Glover, doesn't wear hats, isn't eccentric and merely has straight-laced capitalist interests here. It must be terrible for people viewing it that he doesn't even just pretend to be eccentric, so they could blame him in part for their curiosity.

As I was so excited about it, it's not surprising that I was a little underwhelmed. There were a few incredible things to see in the show, like the entire nervous system preserved in one piece and the long vitrine towards the end where a body is sliced into around 25 sections. There is also a woman who has been cut in half, the two halves placed facing each other, and her arms raised so she can high five herself, which displays her reproductive system. It's great to see that she gets such a kick out of it herself, but someone should tell her how nineties high-fiving is.

Being sold as it is on shock and controversy, when you get there and aren't shocked, you're left with quite a mundane experience. For anyone not swept away by the ethical problems encountered with this kind of exhibition it loses it's edge a bit, and just ends up feeling like a Young Scientist for necrophiliacs.