OLEJACK

R H I N O T

2012-02-02T19:34:00.005Z

IN September (2011) 9 members of the artreview.com group PRAXIS initiated a collage each. We mailed our piece to the group member east of our location who added to the work and sent it east again for the next contribution.
The 9 collages circumnavigated the globe returning to the originator who completes the work and will post it to Berkeley CA for exhibition. PRAXIS is one of several 'Round Table Collaboration' groups whose collage-works will be on show in February.

Collage is cutting and pasting with scalpel and glue, scissors, and fiddly little bits of paper and not at all the cut-and-paste we've become accustomed to on our computers. In exasperation no doubt, some of us resorted to painting and why not?

RHINOT : Niki Hare. . . following Marty McCutcheon's The Spindle of Necessity, and further contributions from, Daniel McKeon, W.T.Richards and Ian Stopforth. The other four of the PRAXIS group in eastwards order, myself, Mike Hinc, Cora de Lang, and Pennie Steele, subsequently made contributions and we wait for the exhibition to see how Marty completes his collage.

At least one of our completed collages has arrived in Berkeley, and mine, in 3 parts from a last huzzah of scalpel frenzy, is seen below on its last transit to destination.

Thanks-Gods-for-that I'd thought as I finished my piece. I thought that again after I photographed and packaged, put up online, and once more when I had queued up and finally mailed the packet.
TsGsforTHAT, although it's not over. Next there is the showing and attendant documentation and promotion - in some sense the 'real work' starts now.
Each collage has had 10 manifestations. The initiator's, who also concludes the work (2), and each group member's take (+8 = 10). 9 pieces will be the outcome and the 9 have 90 manifestations in total. There might be slide-shows and videos marking the progress of each piece.
Some of the works held up quite well to the process, others amalgamated, separated, and transformed utterly developing into mutli-panel spreads. At times, some were reduced to over-layered homogenous muddles. All transcend the method and the sum of the parts.
I have a new insight into my online Praxian friends. I know their work in the virtual world and through this project have seen passing it under my hands with collage after collage.
In the transition from virtual to real not all of the insight has been easy. Some of my group were slow or backed the pieces into pairs. Some tried too hard, others sought to dominate by their contributions, and some seemed to crave nurturing. I probably annoyed them in turn. Online, It is so simple to ignore these factors. Judging by their input to PRAXIS and other social and art networks, some use the virtual world as a central plank in their operation as artists.
And none of the above is 'bad'. We were not actors in a company, or musicians, none of us are performing artists. All of us function solo and artists are meant to try hard, to dominate the work with their ideas, and we all need and can give a bit of nurturing, it's just that when you collaborate creatively a lot of shit skims to the surface.

Pigeons, or Doves - painting in anger.

2011-12-26T15:11:00.009Z

Mickey Raymond, 81, mover and shaker at Colefax and Fowler lives in stately home style in a spacious bungalow in Tangier's Marshan, the plateau west of the Casbah, the hill before the Old Mountain where it gets truly Surrey-like, beyond and above which are the palaces of the King of Morocco, the Saudis and the Emir of Kuwait, and those of their wives.
The Marshan is a district of faded grand residences, one-time legations, a football stadium, hospitals, schools and the King's Tangier town house or 'office', where York Castle crumbles, the Phoenicians entombed their dead and the hip hang-out Cafe Hagh tumbles down the shady northern cliffs facing Tarifa and Spain.
Mickey's bungalow is at the eastern city end as the hill plateaus out and Tangier reestablishes back into more hectic hilly familiarity. He is hedged between a print works and an apartment block but once inside you'd not know. His seclusion is absolute, the calm disturbed by a grandfather clock and a visual assault of furniture, furnishings, pictures, murals, and objets d'art, that should but fail to preclude elegance.
Each piece and every detailing, kitschy or fine as maybe, stands alone on examination.
High windows open onto a shady and entwining garden that utterly deceives in belying its tininess.
How such a densely arrayed mish-mash fails to be the mad grotto of an eccentric is Mickey's miracle.
It is the canny gaps between the pieces that form and define Mickey's gift, and it is on two such gaps that I've been invited to paint.
I think, 'Is this wise?' On Mickey's part, wise, to crowd the space further. Wise of him to ask me, wise of me to contemplate the task and agree.
Mickey is not a scary man. Generously hospitable and urbane, he is shruggingly tolerant as you have to be to live in Tangier, but in truth he scares me a little. He is of the suave, alert, well educated, society-monied establishment that I am not. Colefax and Fowler, designers to an age and class that may have a resonance in the dreams of my parents and grandparents, are unknown to me. He refers to places I know only on the map and to folk, nay, personalities I don't know of at all. If he's testing me I'm failing but what the heck, money isn't involved and they're his doors that he wants me to adorn.
Mickey doesn't know I haven't picked up a paintbrush in anger for two years.
I tell my friends, and they tell me 'You can do this'. I have brushes, packed in a reflex for a journey that had no painting intent, and the same friends supply me with the rest of the kit.
Crowded and surrounded at Mickey's I blunder around trying to water colour wash with acrylic on a vertical surface. Astonishingly this works although it is not a recommended method and had no right to work at all. I always was a crap painter. I know nothing about and mistrust acrylic paint, I know nothing about painting opaquely impasto, or on panels, or vertically, but in two sessions and two entertaining lunches cooked and served by sweet smiling Fatima, Mickey is pleased as punch and I'm astounded.
The work is done, and now I see what he wanted and why. Freshly painted they may be, but the new panels sit in the overall scheme as if meant to be there all the time.
We are more relaxed now, both more confident and Mickey Raymond isn't finished yet.
A Noel Coward CD plays through a happy third session while we ponder the angle of light and nuances of green for trompe d'oeil roundels.
Fatima pats me lightly on the back as she serves us lunch, approvingly I believe, and drinking a lovely Moroccan wine I marvel at what has happened here.
Before I'd moistened a brush, Mickey Raymond saw it all.

2011-12-20T19:36:00.000Z

re-title 'the last days'

2011-09-06T19:46:00.004+01:00

I am leaving re-title.com.

I’ve no evidence that anyone visited my re-title.com page - ever.

No more shall I be listed re-titled in oblivion - a paying but spurious ‘inventory’ item. I won’t be there should anyone be looking.

What did I expect?
Did I expect gallery curators, lovers of the arts, investors, art-consultants and critics to review my re-titled oeuvre and be wowed, wooed, and clattering my cyber door-knocker?
Yes, I suppose I did.

This, as I was aware of at the outset, is a quite unrealistic hope.
Equally unrealistically, I’d hope to win the lottery by purchasing a ticket. I may as well have expended 2 years-worth of re-title fees in buying lottery tickets and might have reaped more reward.
It’s a hoping conceivability.

Am I bitter?
No, but I’m leaving re-title and separations are never straightforward.
De-re-titling my cyber facade is no simple matter. The re-title.com logo and link is bedded in this blog, my website and across my social networks.
Each one must go.

I wonder, while I paid for the listing, ‘whether more people linked to re-title.com through me than the other way around.’
Ha.
Well, bitter-me!
until 15 September . . .

Shooting Out the Lights

2011-05-09T19:31:00.009+01:00

A various party had been invited to meet the new couple: the old aristocracy was represented by Lord and Lady Pentreath; the old gentry by young Mr and Mrs Fitzadam of the Worcestershire branch of the Fitzadams; politics and the public good, as specialized in the cider interest, by Mr Fenn, member for West Orchards, accompanied by his two daughters; Lady Mallinger's family, by her brother, Mr Raymond, and his wife; the useful bachelor element by Mr Slinker, the eminent counsel, and by Mr Vandernoodt, whose acquaintance Sir Hugo had found pleasant enough at Leubronn to be adopted in England. Daniel Deronda, George Eliot.

I like lists . . . but not the Rich List which I've mislaid that shows an increase of billionaires on the previous year. Ms Spec Savers is well on the way, or may be one, and 'Ma'am, can you see well enough to buy a painting?' The billionaire abundance seems paradoxical as if money itself huddles for warmth against the financial chill.
Tweeters and bloggers have been busy with insurrection, revolution and billionairedom but insurgents, counter-insurgents and the Newly Very Rich don't move in my circles.
Scarlet is right, it has been quiet on some blogfronts. I had thought that it was me having a phase of non-virtual busy-ness aka disenchantment with virtuality, and whilst I'm not throwing off the shackles of petro-colonialism or making mega-dosh, it has been a busy year. Busy seeing money scuttle away to safety, busier still being broke and far too busy to be blogging-around what with all the news we've been having.
Our newly adopted good Arabs have been tweeting and blogging like demons and getting killed for their pains, biting the bad Arabs in the bum, most of whom we or our once favourite enemies the USSR have been supporting, arming and trading with quite happily for decades, and other naughty naughty Arabs are biting us (for supporting, arming and trading with our nurtured, nay newly abandoned and re-defined bad Arabs) and are getting killed as well. None killed get a trial. Bum biters got killed and to hang with due process.
We've had the wedding which went according to sun shinny plan. Crowds crowded and the perfect girl next door got her prince while we look at those next door to us and wonder.
AV, that electoral reform that was sham reform bit the dust. To give credit where credit is due, to Mr Clegg, there is no further electoral reform in the offing.

Not reforming, not quite revolting yet and not rich, tweet, back to the blogging, back to lists.

I prefer lists like Eliot's above, and Fitzgerald's Nick's list of Gatsby's house party guests. (abridged)

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck. And the Ismays and the Chrysties ( or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr Chrystie's wife ), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O.R.P.Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. The Dancies came, too, and S.B.Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga's girls.
From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the State senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence.
A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as 'the boarder' - I doubt if he had any other home. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S.W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.

Go Henry. Another tick off the list.

palm post

2011-02-07T21:13:00.002Z

Kevin Jackson - Palm
. . . Black Palms. . .
10 Paintings

wired pen, palm and asemics

2011-01-26T22:45:00.009Z

Not writing

but, painting palms ...

and asemic(s) ...
With More Wonder from Kevin Jackson

HAPPY CHRISTMAS 2011!

2010-12-28T11:53:00.000Z

I awoke with excitement. It’s the 28th of December, morning, 2010. I woke with relief.
It’s another UK shopping Holiday and New Year to come but really, it’s over.
Peace reigns. I turn off the alarm, wake again to the snooze, turn that off and slept again untroubled for the first time in . . . how long?
Since well before Christmas.
Well, since before Christmas started in November or was it October?
I calm a reflex panic twitch.
Who and what have I missed, where should I be, taking what to-whom wrapped bulky and clinking, to-where travel and what to buy on the way? Lifted all that stress, forgotten.
The cards for overseas, for the land mail, by hand tramped locally, online, the presents, the shopping, all that food, wrapping paper, the wrapping - all done.
If not done, too late and will never be done now.
I can start to enjoy Christmas at last and it's been a good one. I snuggle down and doze.
The Virgin and Christ know when He was born, but what a labour His birthday bestowed. Happy Christmas 2011!

2010-12-21T23:50:00.000Z

The Devil took the Details

2010-12-05T00:21:00.002Z

At the RiseArt launch at Gallery Primo Alonso, Hackney Road, London.

Walking the iced un-gritted pavements eastward in the snow, I realise I only ever crossed Hackney Road. I know the junctions well as nodal points in traverses of the city, but not the street as a length. Here are solid London-brick terraced properties that would grace anywhere were they elsewhere, and here is Gallery Primo Alonso.
I wonder what it was.
I’ve passed mirror shops and betting shops and a bingo hall, the odd braced looking restaurant, bright lit veg oil smelling fast food places, and establishments making furniture and handbags. There’s a shut-down children’s hospital. Haggerston Park park is smartened up.
The gallery is tiny, the works are tinier and perfectly standard sized people are giants as they stoop, peer and cross from one end to the other in four paces by seven. I checked as not many of us are here for it’s still early and a half inch (2 cms) of snow scares Britain to a standstill.
God is in the Details is the title of the show, ‘A celebration of craftsmanship and precision in fine art’, but ha, old eyes don’t do detail no more.
We early arrivers dwarfed art that could be mistaken for light-switches, and surreptitiously at first then ostentatiously wearing my strongest reading glasses, I paid sudden attention to alarm-code keypads just in case they weren’t . . . or were. The other early few are all young; they look like the gods should, bearded but smooth of face, limbs rounded, breasts held not held up, and you would have to be young to have eyes acute enough to see this ‘old as new’ show.
Making small is, when all's said and done, a harking back or yearning for absolute control and security.
This is Art made with cross-eyed-focus featuring ephemera; cassette cases (Gong Yu), a glass placenta, an embroidered super-market check out slip, asemic poetry (James Brooks), a perfectly poised sterling sliver pencil (hallmarked) (Tom Cookson), the mysteries of the prism and peek holes into 1:16 scale cardboard boxed environments.
Not being able to discern the detail renders them sterile, mind well Mijo Yoshida’s BodyCash: Placenta is triumphantly sterile with a pill-like calculator battery making the perfect touch in a starkly well made point, almost glib, but none-the-less for that. A pace and turn away, a doll exposes herself in anatomical deconstruction of self before a tiny mirror (Erica Dorn).
I felt deconstructed to disconnection. My eyes are too old for this, I physically can’t see it and even less could I do it anymore.
I used to work small, to engrave universes in miniature and noticed then that there were viewers who quite simply could not see what I was doing. It was to them what these works are to me, blurs and smudges on perfect white walls for A Devil has taken away detail.
There is something of a ‘freak show’ about miniature art - the dimensional insignificance of the works lends plenty of swinging room to the suspicion of obsessiveness in both the artist (often here admitted) and viewer. There is a rationale to scale in respect to what is being ‘said’, but this is not jewelry or micro-electronics. Can the Gospels really be inscribed on the head of a pin, and if so, so amazing . . . but so what so crafty?

God is in the Details is sponsored by RiseArt and info@riseart.com was there . . . as a giant amongst the art and big enough for me to see. RiseArt has money for staff, for organisation, for moving away from their initial virtual platform, for commissioning shows and prints and sponsorship . . . now there’s an impressive and rare thing!

Detailed beginnings, but God must be young to see them.

Switch Mask

Jasper Queens

2010-10-26T12:57:00.002+01:00

The economic cuts are coming. We don’t know what this is going to mean to ‘me’. Will ‘I’ have a job, a pension, a holiday? Can I afford to be a ‘deficit denier?’
Life has become very retro: indecision and uncertainty afflict us and whilst on hold, I look for certainties, I look back.
Will we be able to afford education or relocation, even redecoration or a life as I’ve known it? Will we be amongst the ones cast adrift from the lullings of new everythings, amongst those credit-strapped who will be left out in the cold making do?
Life has become retro: looking back, what have I done? How did we deserve this? Where have I been? But forget ‘experiences’, is there anything from experience that I won’t be able to do again?
Is there anything from experience, from imagination, that I need to do that will help me?

I’ve had a wasp colony for neighbours this past summer. Wasps and I rubbed along fine - they’re better company than flies, than mosquitos, shitful pigeons or scampering, gnawing rodents - and I’ve swept up this season’s worker-wasp corpses in numbers that impress me. I am rather awed, they are fabulously marked handsome little creatures, jasper and black, and of course they can sting but they aren’t hunting me like mosquitos, or eating my food, or at least not in so disgusting a manner as flies do. Wasps cut bits off clean, eat or take (wing) away.
It’s October now and getting colder. Jasper queens should be tucked up snug for over-wintering but they’re still cranny-hunting amongst the rafters in my studio, methodically quartering the skylights and buzzing about.
It’s getting colder and we’ve waited for October to be told, but the cuts are no more clearly understood.
Life has become very anxious: my options have shrunk and buzzing wasps busily going about house-hunting and planning ahead is unnerving me. What do they know that I don’t? Nothing useful to me, I know they’re just doing what wasps always do, but their instinctive certainty exposes my uncertainty. If we are to fail, they could take over and admire jaspers as I do, I can’t be standing by allowing a wasp take-over. It’s a species thing.
With no other clear direction, I’m stirred to do my bit in our defence.
How can you ‘kill’ at all is one question, I’m flapping to go on the offensive, but how could I kill buzzing pregnant females?

Jasper on Yellow
The words ‘wasp’, ‘queen’, and ‘jasper’ carry many various connotations. I’m not canny enough to attempt a pastiche embracing the range of meanings, although I wish I was.

WORKS ON YELLOW

2010-10-13T11:18:00.001+01:00

All That Consoles, Aniconic, Aperitif, Apostate, Before Jefferson, Crisis, Cube:1-2-3, Default, Deflexion, detail, Dots, DREN, Field, Flowers, Hatchet, He Did It, Hubris, ION, Laid Out, m;m&m, Napoleon, Nomads, Orifice, Orifice 2, Over The Sink, Pentagon, Pivotal, PLA-3, Quatra, Rooves, Rule Of Law, Scribbler, Secular, Sex, Skirls:1-2-3-4, Sleep, Smart Artist, Spirit Hovel, Squiggles:3-II-I, Text, Thud and Blunder, Tracks:1-2, Triumph, Via Dolorosa, Writing, Writing 4. 54 works on yellow.

Works On Yellow
I have been working on yellow for a decade, longer perhaps in producing several hundred drawings on yellow paper, of which for a reason now forgotten, I had an abundance.

I drew, discarded many, but the pile grew and it was with a twinge of panic in 2010 that I saw my cache of yellow paper had dwindled to single figures. This size-this Yellow became too precious to use - I have to keep my remaining few yellow sheets safe for that super-special drawing that will never come - and no good can come from that thinking. I have to find another colour, I had to run out on yellow to finish.

Works on Yellow are representative of the series as a whole - these 54 may be the cream but I don't judge that with any certainty.

In Works On Yellow I see the germ and kernels of paintings and prints, projects, stories, love affairs and loss, my attempts and speculation, campaigns; and idlings on once current affairs. I see obsessions that no longer obsess me, interests I don't remember having - and haunting, prompting me now, issues that have led nowhere to date.

The prefix 'PLA' that pervades Works On Yellow-online is an intrusive file-nomenclature which has a derivation I can't unravel. Yellow paper from John Purcell Paper.

ABOUT LAST MONTH

2010-09-25T13:18:00.002+01:00

This is about Last Month when I wrote 31 blog posts - one on every August day, each about the preceding day - of 31 Yesterdays.

ground rules *
I wanted to write of daily passions, concerns and rages. A diary of sorts, one that took account of but was not about my present mood. The first thought had been to write a daily piece about The Day Before Yesterday but trying that proved to be so confusing that I settled for Yesterday(s).
Each post had to be short and manageable, and with Twitter's 142 character-limit example, I set a daily target of approx. 140 words.

what happened
More ground rules were needed but I didn't know it when I started out.
With FB etc. fit for the purpose I should have advertised my intent, and not doing so was an avoidable error.
Another mistake was not setting aside a regular time to write each post. I left that to chance and opportunity. I had the one-a-day deadline, but with no other structure the task lurked and preyed on my mind. It became a chore to fulfill that had each day beginning with a look backwards.
It played tricks on me . . . was I attempting insight, comedy or pathos? I found myself trying to find a sensation to spice each Yesterday.
I had figured 'What Is Yesterday Now?' but I didn't know what I was getting in to. The project consumed far more time and energy than I predicted.
It set traps and I fell into all of them.
I had to be careful not to write about Today, the day of writing.
It was hard not to refer forward from Yesterday through Today to Tomorrow, and harder not to dwell on the causes of Yesterday's action.
I was disheartened during the month and several times I thought of giving it up.

then what happened
The capture of brilliant moves and noteworthy events was in my mind, but there weren't many, if any, of either in a month of my yesterdays.
I come to realise that I'm not as stable as I'd thought, that my days are very uneven. I'm not as rational, considered or as spontaneous as I'd imagined. All about my yesterdays-all about me, and I find that I do have a focus - somehow, my time does produce something. I was part reassured by that normality.
How determined or capricious had been my intent? What would have happened had I got sick or had a crisis befallen me?
I have become more adept at posting up blog-posts although many Yesterdays tested me to write and bored me to read. 31 days straight - 31 posts. A post-a-day is self-entrapment. Some posts were very rough. Were there any good ones? There was little time to edit. As I became more assured in the habit, and more confident in the mechanics of posting, Yesterday got longer and gained pictures but was there a thread? . . . and that begs the obvious question: Why would I expect anyone to want to read them? Blogger and FB friends might well have hidden me from news-feeds for over-productivity.
My answer is always the same to that: If I don't do it, nobody will have the chance and it's up to you (me) whether they get to read it or not.

(And then I wrote this.)

Yesterday :01 August 2010

*I hoped to find a voice in the 'playful environment of language: irony, flirtation and ambiguity', and weave a spell of clarification. The Academic.

CRITICISMAL FLAW - ADVERTISING MINI HAHI

2010-09-19T01:09:00.006+01:00

I've just watched a video posted by a b-uncut friend (link). I wouldn't have made it through all 3 mins:33 secs. had I not been virtually invited by the maker.

The virtual connection was probably the most telling part of my watching experience for how else would the artist have found me as a viewer, and without the virtual how might I have seen this video at all?

There is in fact nothing I wanted to say about the work which left me cold, failed to absorb me and told me nothing of the past, present or future that I didn't already know. The work isn't awful, it has merits, it is a good try and I like that.
To be gratuitously acerbic and while I have my kicking boots on: it is entirely predictable in the shaky emotive camera work, the imagery is neither revealing nor is there a surprise; the gimmickry is amateurish and the soundtrack tacked on top could equally well be wired into the ears whilst wandering around the Taj Mahal or riding on a bus. Perhaps I'm revealing too much in mentioning that the piece is entitled 'Trip'. Notwithstanding all, I 'liked' it.
I wonder though whether I'm giving the artist, the work, or me the viewer, a fair crack by seeing it in this fashion?
I'm tempted to answer my own question with a 'yes' because it is a video short made for YouTube, so on YouTube or similar is how to see it.

I could have pasted my thoughts into the comment box where you find smiley emoticons and not-all else, but, why bother going to all the trouble just to slate a piece of work in the way I have? Have any of us got the time to respond?
Everything has its own terms, and there is the argument to consider that the work with an online presence stands or falls by those parameters alone. A vid on YouTube dies or thrives on views. Merit is defined and criticism encapsulated by view figures. Why work harder, why buck that system?
Is this then the quality of criticism we must rely on for poems, prose-pieces, paintings, music and for all work put up on the web?
" Everyone says, I love it, great job, all those wonderful things a person wants to hear. That's bullshit. It can't all be good (so I must trust the judgement of those who expect more. "
. . . complains Mr Botched Resolution (link), and he's right.

'Good work', a 'like', a smiley emoticon is all you get criticism-wise online, and it is easy to like a poem, image, prose piece or clip. The painting online does not impinge on your space, the poem doesn't collect dust or boring beetles or get damp, music and videos get dropped into the software and are only missed or even remembered in random selection or when the system fails.
For a painter, viewing paintings online is the hardest. I suspect I like a lot on the screen that would grieve me if I were to see the work live. By the same token I must miss as much and when you can't trust your judgement in this way, almost any criticism seems out of place.
You have to sit through the movie, to read the whole book, to pay attention to that song . . . to plough to the poem's end before the investment in time gives one the ability, gives the liberty to criticize.
Online, if I don't like one thing - gone it is in a click and here comes the next. Why stop to examine?
The critical flaw in online criticism is that there is no middle ground, no hesitance, no lingering or gathering appreciation. If there's the slightest uncertainty we click past and say nothing. We get nothing back either, or nothing between 'its great' and a mad blast of obscenities.
Occasionally I get advertising - now that's an odd one.
'How exciting!' I think. 'I have a response' but not a comment on my work, instead: an invitation to view someone else's or to buy a something else completely.

Find more videos like this on b-uncut.net

Hands On Cold Gold

2010-09-05T12:16:00.003+01:00

Hands On Cold Gold

31: The Last August Yesterday

2010-08-31T09:27:00.006+01:00

... (fell out of bed): shaved: ate coffee: read emails.

Hustled any business.

Hustled off to the studio and harried a piccy or such.

Hurried to the pub for a beer -

Home: ate: DVD or not.

Went to bed ....

AGAIN

Again BUT not merely another yesterday.

The End of Summer Public Holiday with a gust of winter amongst the sheltering smokers huddled in holiday scanties, freezing our glowing tips off.

A Monday off is Monday delayed, a disruption cramping the week; an extra Sunday in for domesticity, out on the razz or for extra-special shopping. Service and show-biz are in full swing and so too are artists fitting in a quiet day's work. I fretted quietly on what to do next, not working.

Of a Monday, a Monday of all days to wrap this sequence up with ...

August Yesterday no: 29 or 30

2010-08-30T11:47:00.001+01:00

Mooched around trying not to think about this blog and resigned yesterday to doing just that.

Sad, or so I felt it to be.

Tomorrow's will be the last - I am certainly not going to be thinking of an August yesterday on the First of September - Do I try to go out with a yesterBANG?

And that para above is exactly what I didn't want to be writing (even though I asked the questions yesterday) The Academic talked 'diaries' at me and we maundered over loving lawyers, The Tempest and 'reading blocked'. Is writing or drawing the MAGIC of clarification? He speculated that I was doing these posts to cure a 'writing block'.

These posts were not the sort of daily where expressions of hope for the future had a part. I am, after all, writing in and of the very future of yesterday. I wanted to avoid the ' I ran out of yoghurt - bought food ' sort of thing as well, but tripped straight into the trap.

Of Yesterday: to avoid the rage or triumphs of the present, or, to put those rages and triumph into recent context. I find that Time is not so kind as to allow this caprice. Rage endures even while triumph fades.

I might have been brave enough to attempt my first idea - to write a daily piece about 'the day before yesterday'.

Yesterday Dissipated

2010-08-29T11:39:00.004+01:00

MY desktop cleared of one set of bossy .pdfs and there are new ones poking between the regular files, applications and folders.

I skirt them warily yesterday - and there are new meaningful pages bookmarked on my browser to be considered.

I'm running out of puff, painted-out for now and have lost the counting of the number of yesterdays - according to my reckoning yesterday's yesterday post should have been no.26, but blogspot numbered it as 27-

Puzzled to have missed something somewhere. I'd lost a day-behind.

( Today's yesterday is number ...

Oh, never mind. )

The last Saturday of the month and I felt demob happy, the end is nigh, nearing - I'll soon be August blog-free, off the net, done and FREE.

Sad in a way that it's coming to an end. The routine has become, like all my daily routines, necessarily routine. What will I do without thinking about yesterday every day?

'This is all about Yesterday' (approx 120 w) div style="text-align: center;" span style=" font-weight: bold;"titledivTRY THIS FOR THE MONTH OF AUGUST 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11:

12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19. 20. 21.22.

23.24.25.26.

'Two Pins' for Yesterday

2010-08-28T11:41:00.003+01:00

Blokery cont. - drinks with once-but-no-longer GrimT; spotted sat alone queening it on G&Ts at the biggest table in the The Queens Head, Inn or Tavern. I'm surrounded by Queens pubs, one called just 'Queens'.

From his recent-poverty, rich GrimT turns now to mockery of mine and my efforts.

The great ale in that pub soured, and it is a very strange pub - not straight, not gay, not family not even faye; it's style is weekend casual, scruff professional - all week - which is weird and why I meet GrimT there.

I'd draw a line under the guy; I've tried but can't be mean enough.

He's harmless, clever and also beyond-help worldly-stupid and he drives me to derangement. Now his ship's in I wish he'd sail away happy ...

That was about it: not mean to purpose yesterday.

Returned fuming not at mockings but the waste, the earlier satisfaction at grinding out the tasks of artist's statement and jpegs quite dissipated.

(Giving Yesterday Time)

2010-08-27T01:46:00.001+01:00

I wanted a fight ... agitated, couldn't settle to anything and least, the dark art of furling umbrellas.
Honed artist's statement for hours circling around something half-decent. From too short to too long, and cutting back to length left me with tatters and shreds.
Too edgy to cook, too edgy to eat, too rattled to read; fiddled in Photoshop but all thumbs and took off to the framer. The frames are perfect but need small, tight, fiddly finishing. I'd have bollocked that up.
It has been a very blokey week and I wanted to smash something, this computer for starters ... I want a fight.

yesterday done with

2010-08-26T09:58:00.007+01:00

The month is coming together

Sourced good frames and pleased by that, relieved I don't have to make them. Met C. on his huge bike as I crossed the wet road through jammed traffic. Stood in the rain brolly and helmet domed swopping summer's news and phone numbers.
The Living on this Isle paintings are there. They looked 'happy' on the studio wall and I can see nothing more to do to them.
My black eye has gone and quicker gone than I'd have thought. The black line drawings, still holding me safely still in crosshatching complexities, crawl on in spare contemplative hours, and an end is in sight to the tyrannies of this August yesterday blog series.
D. wondered at the 'discipline' of a daily post and by that he thinks the effort mad.
A few forms filled; eyed up jpegs to format and fees to pay, and the month is run.
Drafted a blah-blah artist's statement which will have to be good. So-so so far.

Given time Yesterday

2010-08-25T09:40:00.002+01:00

Drunk many-many with BR. and ML. and for the first few drunk, we talked as normality prescribes. Beyond that, the real drunk tuned in.
What were we like as adolescents; and yesterday, why we are there drinking then, the consequence of the common hell of our being pubescents together in an alien world of adulltry. (deliberately no 'e' even although adding an 'e' would make no odds)
All men become old men in pubs and we are and we could see it in our faces, watched it happening drinking around us and about to, given time.

'What a pretty women', I thought 100 times on the way home; the young oriental lady with the silver buckled shoes, of the blonde wearing specs in white pants. Folk were aware that I look and write as they are wary, preen-hostile, when they see a draftsperson drawing or camera pointing. Look. A looking weirdo!
‘Freak’ some eyes dart alarm, 'don't portray me as a weirdo’.

floods and frames

2010-08-24T00:54:00.001+01:00

THE yard up to the porch door was flooded by overnight rain. I never heard it. Never do hear crying or crises in the night or so I'm told crossly in mornings.

Swept at water and wrung and hung the mats, then fled. The place could wash away for all I care.

I wanted to see if the studio had leaked; the roof is a sieve. I've lost weeks of work, pounds and poundsworth to the elements.

All well. The rain had lashed at the sound side, the gunnels had held. Top floor studio, good height, great light, perishing in the winter, broiling in the sun, long-term secure but leaky - great space. Cheap though, but considering - it would have to be.

Relaxed.

Varnished Living on this Isle pair; set up photo gear and snapped them. Hunted hopefully through the old frames for three suitables for the Discerning Eye competition entries and failed to find any. I'll have to make or buy.

I hate frames and not just 'hated frames yesterday'. Hating frames is not a hobby. I really hate those square-cornered, up-tight-fitting dust-free delicates.

This is all about Yesterday: No. 22

2010-08-23T09:31:00.006+01:00

I WAS blissfully idle, idea free, event light, and non-momentous in any manner.
I knew and suspected that a day like yesterday would happen sooner or later.

I could have gone to church. I didn't. I could have bought something or painted something but didn't either. Or lay waste to the shrubbery - no.

I was bone idle, thoughtless, did little, and completely unmoved to inspiration in any direction. Bliss.

When I embarked on this 22 days ago I feared there would be blank yesterdays in the month, and I’d been warned:
If you are to do a daily, weekly or regular cartoon or address or post, it is vital to have a few pieces in hand to cover events; gaps in event, inspiration or concentration; and the pressures of time.
So I did. In eager, early keen moments of enthusiasm, I mapped out imaginary amalgam Yesterdays just in case the real one turned out to be too too dull.

I thought of using one.

so i write it down, stare at the words for hours, sharpen pencils, pet her spit clean cat, consider myself a moment, move on to other things, pace the floor, drink beer, tear butts off cigarettes, then watch matter and energy smolder a few inches from my face, yet not be destroyed; atomically sealed tight. you dig?

extract from Impervious by Botched Resignation

City-pastoral Yesterday

2010-08-22T12:12:00.002+01:00

Saturday stubbly, breaking through the spider webs to sit outdoor, I notice that the grass has started to grow again. I will need to plan for clearing my area of the summer growth.
Virginia Creeper, vines and ivy grasping and twining, are rioting towards the house. The drought is over, and the seasons spiders are on the prowl indoor, and meshing up every flight path from wall to frond out.
MadMog passing through, battered one spider to death in a cat kerfuffle and was most proud of herself. Not so well bred but she's too well fed to eat it.

Swung past the studio late afternoon and there, things were drying nicely so I didn't stay to watch.

Baled out half-way through a mawkish play about fighter pilots. It was the dialogue breaking into verse that did for me.

Post Hoc yesterday - after this, therefore because of this?

nervy yesterday

2010-08-21T10:05:00.003+01:00

- nervous before setting off for the studio - I don't know whether I'll like what I find there and I'm eager to be rid of the 'Living on this Isle' pair. Of a sudden, their 'mood' has passed and I've had enough of them persistently not being finished and hanging around my neck. I want them done and gone, for good or bad.

In the painting of a painting this is a good sign. Maybe I've got it - quite probably not but in so far as it goes, this is as far as I'm going to get starting from here with what I've got, and so-be-it.

I don't know if they are finished or abandoned?

I don't know, I'll never know. I'm the sob painting the wretched thing, not the anonymous plural 'one', who gets to look at it.

In the event I was more relieved by the fresh sight of them than I'd expected. It seemed so obvious - either, a bit here-bit there, bit o'cleaning, wax / varnish - sign and photo; or, chuck 'em away and start again and I wasn't going to do that.

I did a bit here and a tight little blob there, and thought the next one (bigger than, better than) and had a Guinness-ey thirst brought on by S.'s new FB profile pic. It was Friday and I hadn't had a drink for, well, some hours. I'd had enough of painting and being parental, I wanted to watch women drinking in N1 or EC1, or N16 or anywhere over the rim of a glass.

Reminded to do Yesterday

2010-08-20T11:20:00.003+01:00

M. woke me calling from his porch in NZ, on the other side of the clock 12 hour different, and quashed my hangover resolve to give up blog-a-yesterday for the day.

I was going to have a day off, but fibres stiffened by M.'s mockery and contempt for my feebleness in the shade of alcohol, laboured slowly into the morning remember-blogging the day before.

A good day not to do any damage in my studio and I realised the danger that this blog series would become a blog about blogging; along the lines of - what happened yesterday, mmm ... 'I wrote a blog about the day before.'

The mountaineer slept on and we breakfasted at noon.

He re-packed his fuming mound of ropes, wedges, harness, carabiners, nuts and screws and quickdraws and boots and shoes and chalk and bivi bag and guide books and camera and phone and wearing the cooler looking kit, shouldered it all, stuck helmet in a polybag and we headed out for his bus.

I pondered on which painting to donate to a charity auction in aid of the Pakistan flood victims. R. came through with the idea of giving one from our back catalogue as well.

J. the author HM, told me stories of spiritualists, then about the play she is co-authoring and of a loved old friend slipping into dementia.

18

2010-08-19T11:37:00.001+01:00

I struggled at the studio nearly finishing two nearly finished paintings. Later after much circling, buzzed up ticked off and blinded, I left them as nearly finished with no damage done, which was a bonus.

Nothing so useless, nothing so aggravating, so compelling, niggling and plain-bloody-annoying as an unfinished painting getting in the way and demanding attention; it may as well not be there; half done is not done is nothing done and narking.

Yesterday: I decided today that I won't paint tomorrow.

Or, at least that's what I think we decided upon in a fuddle of tenses.

A second late night talking family-us, all that good gab and more.

no solution

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solution

Do you know? ... I'm going to take a day off.

2010-08-18T03:53:00.002+01:00

I wasn't expecting visitations this August.

I wasn't going away, and whilst abandoned by the holidaying everybody-else, I'd dedicated the month to stuff ... a print project, this blog series and painting 'Living on this Isle'.

That should have been enough.

Domesticity has gone by the board.

My kitchen is calm - one filthy plate, one dirty spoon, one crusted pan - you get the idea; the rest, clean and cupboard stowed.

I know where I'm going and I go nowhere else. I can see my trails through the dust.

My dairy has emptied and I can wing it - in whenever, out for as long as - food on the hoof.

I've no-one here to talk AT me so I can talk to anyone.

Or so was the plan ... but the dust is raised, September is early and I ran from pillar to post painting as an after-thought.

Yesterday's Ruminations

2010-08-17T10:08:00.001+01:00

The summer has been fine - y'know - occasionally mounting various women, but the end of August means September and all the shit starting again. The Academic.

It was fine, once I'd levered the charred remains of the handle from the bottom of the pan with an ice-axe. The Mountaineer.

Art - an unopened parachute that you didn't pack yourself.

The painting part of the day went well - hours of solid progress.

I liked that.

jim the collector?

deadlining

2010-08-16T10:04:00.000+01:00

16 YESTERDAYS down with 15 more to do, I'm half-way through a blog-post-a-day for August. The project has made it a l-o-n-g fortnight and it is making for a longer month. Phew, and time was passing so quickly before and still the hours fly. Time slows as I write until so much is happening that I can't write fast enough.
Details I'd have forgotten or accepted in passing, impress themselves just in case I need them tomorrow when I write of today as yesterday.

Yesterday, neighbour's Mum and eldest Son argued long into the evening. He left the house in a slamming rush and she hurried after him. She must have got him for their raised voices came again, indistinct of word but the very music of rages and frustration.

Eschewing shades I brazened my black-eye, forging through the tourists at the Sunday market on the way to a short painting session. Sunday is a busy day at the studio.
Different folk paint at different times and I hear comings and goings, activities and unknown voices from studio doors set ajar I know only as locked fast in the week.

Neighbour MadMog slinked in for a bit of peace, to purr at me all the pussy-cat news. On R&R from the war next door.

Saturdays aren't yesterdays

2010-08-15T09:17:00.000+01:00

or properly a day at all.

Dreary computing shopping cleaning accounting, calendar and rain. J. to arrive here on Monday from mountaineering trashed and heavy with gear, and another J, HM the author was to come over later that evening for a 9 p.m. intimate, bottle, seminar, gossip and cackle.
I don't know how to square that ... can't cancel one and don't want to postpone t'other. I have to plan a jaunt with god-daughter E. (11), and the old-lags from the alma mater are circling for a beer or several while it's summer quiet. Huh, don't they know that while it's 'quiet', I'm busy doing a year's work in the studio - the only uninterrupted non-drinking time I get to have is Ramadan and when the trade is on holiday and the two coincide this year. Family and Friends - who needs them!
'misery curmudgeon, you can't put that last in'
'sure I can, it's online only'

13th yesterday (Friday)

2010-08-14T09:00:00.000+01:00

WHILST 'sharing' tea and a snack with Living on this Isle painting; thought that 'facts are fine, but interpretations are the problem.'

Don't shoot the messenger is fair enough, but it is the messenger who fails and not the medium.

Ruminating on that, mixed a complicated eau de nil then garnished with alizarin.

Black eye develops nicely under brow in spreading gorgeous bruise shades - prussian plus a touch of black, transparent base, carmine - edged out with white, dab of carmine again and chrome yellow. I would wear sunglasses to obscure my awful visage, but summer's yesterday here is dreary and dull and I'd bump into the architecture and suffer more damage.

Decide that my black eye is your problem not mine.

Google-translated texts for hours and set to reading The Tempest. Pondered on Caliban / Taliban post-imperialist guilt analogy and puneries.

R. goes to Morocco today (today) and we could have drunk to her departure but each too cross to. The Academic wonders if she thumped my eye - then wondered quietly aloud, some friend, that she didn't thump both of them.

Blame Game to Black Eye

2010-08-13T01:05:00.004+01:00

COLLECTED funny looks and startled glances, and checking in a fisheye comfort mirror covering an underground corner, see convexly that I sport a very large nose, domed forehead, tiny receding ears and in the bendy perspectives, a blinking black eye and I've no idea how I got it.

I'd had no collisions and I can't remember jamming shades, finger or paintbrush into my face. Not thumped yesterday. Could it be abuse or self-abuse whilst sleeping? No. No sleeping since shaving and no black eye then.

Tough, gym-toned, fit looking dudes look edgy, check around the talent for harder and looked away.

I'm not going to pick a fight with them but they aren't so sure. Women look concerned. Perhaps one of their gender did it and I might turn nasty. Perhaps they want to mother me, perhaps not.

Where do you look when you've got a black eye? How do you look out of one? Brazen is hostile. Humble I don't do. Sorted you aren't. Cool is impossible. Victim? Sporty ... buggerit, chip out the frozen peas - got any concealer?

Yesterday's Game

2010-08-12T01:45:00.010+01:00

Mixed it with an International standard Blame Game player on peak form.

A genius in truth.

I feel faultily innocent, and fault depends on who's doing the telling.

girlsonabeach.com

Yesterday Already

2010-08-11T01:33:00.002+01:00

Another Yesterday to write about already. Yesterdays happen so darnedly quickly and so often. I was just beginning to relax and get smug about the day, to feel easy with an extra last, last glass when hey-presto, the clock hit all four zeros and today has an unblogged yesterday blog to write.

I'm going to try and do this before going to sleep and get out of here blog post free, blog done in the morning, which, I still think of as Tomorrow (but that above is about today and I keep on forgetting). This is So Self-Indulgent.

Okay, 'Nothing happened Yesterday,' that's it, I'm off to bed ... but no ... self-indulgence has it's responsibilities, it's self-whittled club to tumble on my toes.

HellsBells, what happened Yesterday?

So recently it was I can't have forgotten so soon, where's my list?

List lists tomorrow.

Where's yesterday's list?

Here it is ... and I see I didn't do any of it.

feisty yesterday

2010-08-10T11:07:00.001+01:00

I got a handle on the 'Living on this Isle' paintings. After interruptions by black lines, fights, booze, indecision and disappointing printmaking, I saw them, and made the first considered marks - hitherto all random washes, dribbles and splots. I don't do so good with the random 'device'. I don't see random as well as I'd like to, but now I know what I'm doing, I can bloody-well get on and paint it.

I could see what is afoot and walked headstrong along the canal path defying cyclists and must STOP doing that - I will end up in a fight or in the water, or bitten by meandering dog just joining in the fun.

Nearing home as I passed their door, I remember Neighbour S who died. He brought me over a bottle of wine the night I was burgled.

Reaching the middle page, hit half-way in the Sketchbook Project!

http://arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject

ALL OF TODAY IN YESTERDAY

2010-08-09T18:15:00.001+01:00

Today is pressing hard and I wan't to get out there amongst it. I can't think about yesterday this morning.

Might return to this fwd-slash that yesterday later today. (see Note)

I wonder if 'good stuff' isn't worth recording and I take good stuff too much for granted. Probably words for happiness are the hardest to find.

Happy - that will do.

Yesterday was too good to blog about and now Y. is slowing me down so gotta go.

Note: this is a blog series about 'yesterdays'.

A Yesterday Off

2010-08-08T12:17:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd take a day off from the increasingly onerous task I've set myself of blogging about yesterday and do something else, like I don't know, like learn 1-10 in Turkish, or in compiling a 'previously on' omnibus edition of yesterdays into a 'This is all about last week' piece, or, have some fun for once.

Writing of Y. means starting each morning looking back. I thought I'd give it up.

Different as days are, they seem to conspire to be like one-another, to pass in a blur, to amount to something only by their accumulation of experience and progress. That dazzling day of transcendent moment makes it's own entrance and didn't show up.

But I needn't have worried.

I can write about sleeping.

Slept late, fell asleep in the tub as I thought about giving up - the yesterday blog not opening a vein, had a doze, listened to music and napped, ate and had a post-prandial snooze, woke myself up snoring as the movie ended and went to bed late, so started sleeping again earlier Today which doesn't count.

moving commas around

2010-08-07T13:31:00.002+01:00

What did happen yesterday?

The day kept me amused, kept me busy enough. I was engaged by it. Y. made me mad, made me laugh, fed me and got me from sleeping to sleep okay, but what of it?

A trash bag burst and trailed garbage around. That peeved me ... underfoot, I see we drink that much coffee and eat that many eggs. Set out late and enraged, crossened afresh from writing up the day before that.

I glowered at pretty women passers-by instead of glowing. I am discreet about it. They ignore me either way. My temper improved as the day progressed.

So: glowered, passed the time of day and nattered, painted a bit, I wrote but in fact spent more time moving commas around; a bag split open, a light bulb failed and I ate more apples than I've eaten in a month. (2)

Was that it? Yes it is.

Grand Socco

that bloody yesterday

2010-08-06T10:40:00.005+01:00

So raging that I could hardly wait for the hour hand to pass midnight to vent spleen on yesterday. R and I took the leap of faith at an ocean of experience and fell right in.

Our project isn't doomed, never say that, never think it, not 'til you really have to and not even then, no, but our project is in shambles and such is the solid, stolid main-course of the working studio week.

What a rigmarole and I blew S's ears flat telling him all about it.

The booze helped him bear it.

His water babe took him bowling, then in true Francis Drake style cast off to engage more brooding matters and left him on the quayside.

He was happy to wave.

about yesterday

2010-08-05T10:01:00.003+01:00

A single purposed Wednesday of printmaking that made no prints but produced more printing plates to be printed.

Flapped about with stencils preparing proofing paper with painted background colour and left the lot to dry.

The Sentence of the Day had to incorporate the word 'plethora' and I practised with plethora of no panache before snapping out of it, and looking to the competition gave plethora best. Opened a bottle of wine, entered LA and I for Salon Art Prize online (hello Photoshop my old software mucker, pal, partner in crime, brill fiend friend from hell) and while paying entry fee, marvelled at my finances.

Midweek and not half through the program. There are paintings calling to be moved that linger nagging on hold. Wednesday was the 'why?' day and it felt whyish from start to finish.

palm print proof peeled off press and pinned

All about Tuesday

2010-08-04T10:12:00.002+01:00

Cyprus J cut my hair and R didn't notice and if she didn't, was satisfied he'd done a good job. J had been to California for a family wedding and told me of it unstoppably on auto, jet-lag included.

Lots of Yesterday thinking about what happened the day before and getting mangled by time.

When do you write about yesterday?

Tomorrow silly. Or today.

Is note taking allowed?

No idea.

This is maddening, was maddening, is ... oh I give up.

I worried for S the Academic and his water-babe. No news. He's cradled on her swell or drowned for sure.

R studio sparkly cracking Moroccan jokes, and from having no clue what we were about, we now have too many ideas. Reflected late that her no-notice of haircut meant nothing what-so-ever.

This about Monday

2010-08-03T10:27:00.001+01:00

Walking to the train I see that C's Kitchen is closing down and collected a momento mug while making farewell. C tried to press her cookbook on me but cookbooks and I never work out. I'm to lose sight of the two women who worked the shop. The striking blonde lost to Thailand's gain and lost too her saucy eyed colleague with the saucier figure who sat outside on breaks smoking into her phone, also blonde who always blanked me and last seen with floury hand marks wiped on her black clad behind, her hands I suppose how I imagine though. No good could come of me dating any cook. There are blondes and blondes after all as Chandler said but a fine source of studio food gone, and there, I set to dribbling colour on a pair themed 'Living on this Isle' and drew more black lines and varnished a printing plate during paint drying and thought phases. My 'scotch' sentence didn't get a mention, so piqued I did a sudoku. LA is back in town. Good.

This is all about Sunday

2010-08-02T10:44:00.001+01:00

A loose wheel running amok and a prang in the pit lane enlivened the Grand Prix in Hungary, then FaceBooked and blogged a while. Wrote and entered a sentence containing the word 'scotch' (http://www.facebook.com/inasentence) and wandered out to get wine and see if I could spot S smooching with his water babe up on the hill. C came by later to show me his risque baking designs (but that's a secret) and drink the wine. We watched the brown summer thighs walking past headless and footless which with sky, is the only view my window offers.

This is all about Yesterday

2010-08-01T12:46:00.002+01:00

I walked the canal route to the studio. Neighbour S has died suddenly and I thought that I hadn't known him well.

Very hot and close in the space, changed to work pants and bare top and threw carborundum grit at the printing plate R and I are making together. The image is a mess and neither of us know what's going on with it or whether we should be working together again at all. While waiting for the grit to dry fast I continued my drawing, the parallel strokes of black ink creeping slowly down the image. It is one of a pair - ink lines on colour fields. Eyesore and dehydrated. I met P waiting for the bus, he has a work in the Jerwood - third time lucky he said. Shopped in shops for wine and fishcakes then watched Three Kings in bleary fatigue.

Give the Octopus the Golden Boot

2010-07-09T01:56:00.011+01:00

I watched Uruguay lose 2-3 to Holland at football and it came as a shock to realise that this match was one of the semi-finals of the World Cup.

It seemed such an ordinary game with the standard looking 22 blokes playing a match between 2 random countries and there have been so many of these routine international matches.

Slovakia vs, Chile vs, USA vs, Ivory Coast vs Germany, Italy, England - Greece. No Morocco or Canada, Egypt, Iran or Russia, or Scotland, but they weren’t missed or not widely. Australia vs Serbia. I could miss that easily, and not miss much at all and it happened. I might have watched.

Don’t ask me what the result was but I admit there’s curiosity, and to be honest, a touch of xenophobia. Wow never admitted to that before, it starts with an ‘x’! Really I must have known that but I’ve never put writing the word to the test.

Spain beat Germany with a goal that was described as ‘English’. For a moment I dreamt that England were still in the hunt. Football, though widely touted as universal, isn’t the same football everywhere as I’d thought. So I’m curious, and watching Koreans play football is about as close to either Korea I’ll ever get, and it makes me puff with national xenophobic pride to have an ‘English’ goal in the semi-final even if it was scored by Don Puyol.

What happened to Japan or Brazil, France and Turkey? How did Botswana do? How far did Sweden get?

Well, I don’t care. The World Cup looked like league footie of the standard weekly fare, but not of the best. Matches of mix-up, effort and disarray. The sort of late night footie for geeks and that last bottle of beer. Brothers played against each other in rainbow sides of players who could be Brazilian or Algerian playing for Germany or France.

This one plays for Blackpool or Man City but not for England, another for Real or Inter, but not for Spain or Italy. A Catalan playing for Spain scored an ‘English’ goal.

I have my team, I have my country and one team has to win and it isn’t going to be my team.

Hell I don’t care, I’m not mad for football, but the World Cup is . . . well, an event. All that spend of hope and money and I feel sorry for South Africa. One football stadium looks just like another. One match to go and does it matter where it is for it’s on TV. What time?

Oh yes, it’s in South Africa, umm . . . not planning to go . . . where so what?

I’ve been intending to blog about the World Cup, but although it has been going on forever, it moves on fast and soon will be all done.

Now, there is a blessed brief gap for reflection before the Culmination on Sunday and I’d better chop-chop, Sunday is short notice in my blogging timescale.

How I wish I’d put money on the psychic crustacean Cephalopod Mollusc (thanx DZ) and it really is TOO LATE NOW.

For The Fame of Fifteen, Bleeding Heartless and CPA

2010-06-10T17:36:00.011+01:00

In her Mica Galllery exhibition address, Saba Khan said that her involvement with the painting ends with the last brush stroke and that her work now belongs to the viewer. The 'death of the artist' elephant trap i'faith, where the art-piece takes on a life of its own independent of its creator.
Stephen the Academic disagreed: in part in seeing a painting as a window into the past, in part from the notion of 'artist as celebrity', and modern life classifies all of us as either celebrities or drones.
'In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people', Momus quipped in 1991.
I'm suffering from CPA, continuous partial attention, and I've been busy Linking-In and not blogging because 'On the web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people'.

The free facility of the Ning social network platform is being phased out next month and 'half my friends' may go with it. From August, it will be 'premium' service or nothing on Ning.
Some of the dot.nings I've swept into will pay-up to continue. ArtsReview (24,500+ members), b-uncut (1800), and The Brooklyn Art Project (8600) are the big ones I'm in, the ones where you can get completely lost in the membership and be anonymous in a sliver of the online throng.
The small folksy 'nings' are where the real action is. This is where you find sweetly hopeful aims and objectives, small communities of online folk wanting to free the world, or art, or marketing, or making a stand against the big corporation, and these mini.nings will now cost a network administrator $20 per annum.
Would you pay $20 to run a 'social network' of no more than 150 members, and what would that say about you if you did?
A successful Blog claims more attention than that, and still is for free.
Gina Bianchini, co-founder and until March of this year the CEO of Ning, is, of course, a corporate person and she looks good on it. Her successor at Ning is Jason Rosenthal.
After 30 days in post ('til them still looking good), Rosenthal wrote to the Ning employees thus:

Team,

When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what's working, what's not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.

As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I . . . etc. bleeding heartless etc.

We have got used to glorying in the freedom of the web, and for too long it seems, glorying in it for free. Facebook was motivated by sex and money, it wasn't dreamt up through altruism, nor were the others and nor was LinkedIn. Social network platforms are run by serious corporate people who have very serious corporate pressures and lifestyles to maintain. Emulating the mail, they're intent on making us pay to talk to one-another.
Facing being 'unfriended' by Ning, I've been busy Linking-In, and hardly to my surprise, and presumably to no-one-else's, to get the best from LinkedIn you better pay for the Premium Account Service.
I'm not exactly sure who LinkedIn is for: apparently for business and corporate people like Gina, who, I suspect doesn't need to be LinkedIn, but is.

Gina's (LinkedIn) Summary is:

Ning is a social platform for interests and passions. I started it.

Her Current Settings are:

Advising, consulting on, or participating in innovative projects and new companies in my areas of interest (digital content, e-commerce, viral marketing, and disruptive technologies).

Prefer board and advisory roles working with smart, passionate entrepreneurs.

I registered with LinkedIn three years ago; saw the corporate ambience and uselessness of it for a painter and forgot it until just recently when I got a first hint, online of course, that someone like me was LinkedIn too. It took ages trying and re-trying password and username combinations to log in to LinkedIn again and 'There I am'; my profile 95% incomplete or uncomplete . . . short of recommendations, short of cv, in short, short of friends.
Successful Blogs can be 'social networks' in themselves . . . look at Scarlet's!

Scarlet Blue!

(Hey Scarls, why have you blanked me on LinkedIn? That's remiss naughty MsBleu! I expect no less than a LinkedIn 'recommendation' as penance.)

And this brings me to to Rise Art, a newly up-and-running virtual platform for the visual arts.
Oh yeh . . . Another virtual art-site . . . Yawn . . . Oh, one of many, and with each launching of a new one, you can feel the pain.
Online art sites are rubbish. They deal in categories: cheap and cheaper, pretty and prettier, cute and floral; cottage, coastal and forest; ethnic; abstract sleek and slicker - and we browse: choose framing, select canvas or paper version, match wall colour and draperies, order any size to suit, view the piece in a virtual-walk-through, and, clackerty-click, it's paid for and on its way. But every new site is going to be different, to be better.
Rise Art have curators and awards. They'll Peep,Tweet, Buzz and the rest. There's a forum, and voting and selection - this is going to be better: here is where 'real art', cool stuff, or 'cutting edge' and 'affordable' or 'new' art is going to be shown and seen and featured. Just register, and it's free (to register).
Yes, sure it is, but who else other than artists who stick our stuff up on it will be looking?

see my Rise Art page :

riseart.com/gallery/kevinjackson

Vote for Me & Mine.

on the left, just past Christies from South Ken Tube

2010-04-08T09:58:00.003+01:00

contact: selen@micagallery.com

Dean’s Bar, Tangier.

2010-02-10T14:52:00.015Z

I went first in 90 or 91.

I was told to by La Directrice of the gallery hosting my exhibition.
‘You’ve got to go and have a look’ she said, and La Directrice liked bars.
‘I’m not coming I don’t like’ she’d concluded shortly.
She didn’t tell me why I should and when I went, I was none the wiser. Then, there were other bars in Tangier, wilder, rougher, funkier, classier, some Moroccan and La Directrice and I liked those better, drinking with dangerous people drinking. I didn’t understand the fading echos of Tangier’s edge of law haven heyday time; wild, exotic, cheap, corrupting, corruptible, accessible and easy to escape to and from. I saw the old guard around town, a trifle distressed I’d thought, elegant in their outmoded suits. I saw a few that evening at Dean’s Bar and more at my opening.
I’d imagined never to come back to Tangier. The world is huge, there are places else I haven’t been and I’d liked it here so why overlay the good memories by returning?
It wasn’t Dean’s Bar that brought me and it isn’t painting, but paintings I have painted of this city beckon anew with the self-same allure. It is the accident of a vacant available apartment, poor planning and so to Tangier, winter 2010, humid, cold and ready with rain.
The Medina smells of wet wool the night I go to Dean’s Bar again.
Two small rooms knocked into one. The bar still occupies one side of the first, to the right as you enter through a bead curtain. Tiles clad the walls to shoulder height, white and blue in the main, rather public lavatorial in a way and cool against a hot summer night.
Tables range down the left and all around the back space. The side tables are taken by Tangaoue, all men of course and my friends are ensconced at the back far left corner. There’s no choice but to take a seat facing them so there is less chance to observe. They are drinking, they have tapas and what bliss, they are smoking cigarettes. I order a bottle of Guerrouane which is brought to the table. Being Brit, any service in a bar catches me unawares. By my glass by the ashtray, more tapas arrives including delicious piping hot whitebait. Young Spanish fill up the remaining tables, one woman very drunk very loud, and my American friend sucks in her cheeks saying ‘Oh dear.’ She disparages the day-tripping Spanish from Algeciras and Tarifa, calling them ‘The Boat People.’ There are other boat people in Tangier all traveling one-way, strapped into blacked out high-speed inflatables and paying desperate fee for a one in x chance of gaining entry to Europe. Captured craft line the police jetty in the port.
Dean’s has, I am told, the cleanest facilities this side of the Minzah, ‘spotless’, but I had no call. The Moroccans look coolly interested and mildly unimpressed, but coming to a joint like this at all, and in a city like this, they know the score. I sense they would like more action, better entertainment and more to have to talk about and that’s pretty much how I feel about it. This is the trouble with pubs where famous people drank and famous times were had, they aren’t there now and we bring our ghosts and eke them out of the bottle.
We’re happening now and it we make it in Dean’s Bar, Tangier.

duologue

2010-02-09T00:42:00.006Z

the gallery of asemic writing.
'Document' a duologue by Aude Hérail Jäger and Kevin Jackson....

AHJ

v GOSSIP (AWAY)

2010-02-01T18:02:00.014Z

I am being walked and talked around this strange town I used to know. The gossip is a morass of names without faces. I lag, wading in clods of incomprehension. Different people share the same name and I sink over my boots.
It is so simple - she lives here, he did, they do, he’s, she’s - understand?

No. I’d hazard a yes in hope, but … no.
Not yet, I need more time on the gossip treadmill, incline-talking to fit me for social purpose.
No room for me to interject me, my I is unnecessary, I’m easily identifiable as the one who’s new and knows nothing and no-ones names.

Let the Magic Box eat Lobsters

2009-11-11T11:39:00.004Z

Buzz off I'm busy.
I'm drinking my soup.
I'm in the middle of something.
Go away!

. . . I'm eating soup and from wanting to understand 'everything', to wanting to explain 'everything' I see the impossibility of either and want to slough away this social responsibility and explain nothing at all.
It is never quite enough to play footie, to only act, or be an anything, there is the expectation to be able to talk about it and have ready the 'What's it feel like to be a (racing driver)?' answer.
My ineffectual explanations are misinterpreted at best. I acknowledge that the fault is mine, that the confusion between idea and expression is my confusion and I see that there is nothing I can do about it.
And I've tried, so 'Let the magic box eat lobsters'. I'm doing my bad bit and make of it what you can, what you may, what you care to. Make what you will of this blog, this song, that picy hanging there, here it is and that's that, you'll get no further help from me.
I know, I know, publicity can never be a bad thing but I'm not doing the post-match interview. Forget it, I've no more to say and I'm out of here!
Out, away into the night and scooting back to this screen.

I've ventured away from the virtual world and been out in public.
Perhaps you can tell?
FB and social networks went by the board and there was no time to tweet or for virtual musing and blog browsing. My emails and SMS became terse and cursory and the inbox and junk files brimmed.
It's dangerous out and about in real time. It's unexpectedly fast. I got into trouble very quickly.
I got lost looking for the Jerwood Gallery. A kind bookseller went online to point me from his screen in the right direction, and out of his life. On from the Jerwood Drawing Prize show to 100 PLUS in Webber Street aided by a chap with map-on-iphone and another in a pub taking recourse to his laptop.
'I'm getting to know this area,' I thought as we made our way to the London Group Opening although admittedly I was now in the capable company of a French person.
There, I greeted a familiar face by name of a dead man. Live-not-dead man turned out to be judging the exhibition. I had a piece in the show and was shortlisted for a prize so, that went well.
Fleeing from my gaffe, cursing silently, I rounded off the evening in the cellar of an occult bookshop so dark that denim glowed bright. Surrounded by the litter of departed witches, empty glasses and a series of paintings set on black velvet depicting scenes from the Book of Revelations, I vowed never to leave the safety of my laptop screen ever again.

I did win a prize. www.kevinjackson.net/bwCONDITIONS.html
'What's it feel like to be a loser? . . /. . to win?'

'Let the magic box eat lobsters' (Sir Terry Pratchett), is one of my all time favourite 'I'm out of here' lines. I'm in public again this Thursday evening at the ING Discerning Eye exhibition opening at the Mall Galleries where I have a piece on show.

2009-11-03T09:56:00.004Z

Thursday 12 November 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.

The Mall Galleries, The Mall, LONDON SW1

This state of affairs

2009-10-17T14:15:00.007+01:00

I've been pondering a blog post for ten days or so.
I haven't posted for ages and 'the pressure' is getting to me.
Blog Blank. No Blog. Blog guilt!
Can this be true? Can I really be stressing out on this?

Yes.

'This state of affairs' I think, 'is not good.'
Reviewing my jottings over the last weeks they reveal lists of 'to do'-s, and moans.

Moans about avatar and atavar.
What are they? Which to use? When and Why?
Am I the only one who's confused?

'The lure of digital.'
There's a lot of inconclusive moaning about that - is digi the revolution that the mass production of paper was? That sort of thing.

What happens when the power cuts off, if it will, if we let it, if we . . . but I don't want to blog moans, I'm not in a moany mood.

I like Scarlet's refusal to raise the white flag, and N, O Bestbelovéd, the white flag .gif is the one I want.

2009-10-06T09:50:00.000+01:00

THE LONDON GROUP BRAG

2009-09-09T20:11:00.010+01:00

. . . and suddenly, 'it's all worth while' I tweet . . .

There is a frisson around submitting work to an open entry art exhibition. Perhaps 'sweet' describes it, or humbling, or grim. It could be 'blithely optimistic', desperate or just brutally professional.
If my recent entrant number to the highly prestigious Jerwood Drawing Prize: three-thousand-four-hundred-and-something is to be taken at face value, upwards of 4,000 artists entered on average two drawings each in hope of winning one of 4 prizes, or inclusion in an exhibition that shows between 40 and 50 works.
8,000 drawings vie for a hang in a 50 piece exhibition giving each a mathematical 1-in-160 chance. (all figures estimated) This is as much a gamble as a punt at Epsom or Sandown Park racecourses.
160-1 are not odds a professional gambler would contemplate, but a keen punter may put an emotional quid or two on a 160-1 shot here and there amongst the run-a-day favourites. The average punter might, and casual flutterers, aka idiot punters lose money all the time this way.
But I don't understand gambling. I can't do the lottery and don't much care for playing poker for matchsticks, or Newmarket for buttons or pennies with small children.
When it comes to considering getting into the socially essential Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the odds-against that the entrant faces are simply staggering, so much so that it is widely whispered that the only reasonable chance is to have a nepotistic nobble running in your favour, an RA insider friend to give a nod, wave or wink. Basically, a performance enhancing agent.
So when trudging embarrassedly in to collect a rejected masterpiece, the artist can take comfort from the mathematics. It was always 'odds against'.
The rejection stems from something else; the arbitrary mood of the judges, the zeitgeist, the dynamics of the exhibition space, it was an indefinable mitigating against your inclusion; exclusion was nothing to do with you, with your work, or a reflection on the merit of your piece.
It never was a competition and the odds were too stupid for it to have been a bet.
Still, it is bloody galling and frays at fragile self-belief that it is worth carrying on, not least because unlike 2 quid lost on a 160-1, this 'not getting in' has come dear.
There is the entry fee of anything up to £20 per entry. That's per entry, not per entrant. There is framing and the sky's the limit where framing costs are concerned.
While most artists can make frames, few can make them with a professional touch, few have all the tools required and none the range of options a framer has, but artists just don't have the time to blunder around making frames badly. Framing is not our trade.
So there is a framing bill, and then there's transport.
'Lucky those who live in London or near an exhibition's regional collection point' many artists may think with feeling, but even living in London, traipsing around on public transport lugging clumpy artwork is no picnic. Nursing precious, delicate and heavy frames down escalators, on and off crowded buses, footslogging with it through slow shoppers, drifting tourists, brisk workers, and speedy youth is no fun.
Driving art without a chauffeur is not an option. Trust me on this.
Taxis or couriers? Yes it's the best, but see the meter cost mounting again?
But artists get there . . . arriving down backsteps to dingy areas to find indifferent staff and a smattering of fellow submittees, but not fellows, a grim fellowship for we're not only suffering and gambling, but competing in a game where the rules are indefinable and the odds ludicrous. These fellow sufferers hate you as you hate them as we all hate being there gambling and competing. They might get in, you may not. We don't know yet and if we do get in and spot him or her at the Opening, it will be relieved grins of recognition, congratulation and 'hail-well-met's, but that's for later. For now, we pay our money to the neutral smiles of the reception staff, often students under a gimlet-eyed professional and it's hard not to read condescension in their faces, hard not to sense a weary sympathy, or is that a hint of a contempt in their eyes of the sort we all recognise when confronted with the haplessly gullible?
We perform the ritual, submit the forms and write a rare cheque, gather up our packing material and speed away spotting others arriving burdened and bleakly determined. You are anonymous once more and relieved to be unencumbered and unmarked, but slope off with a sense that we're all being ripped off.
Ripped off is one thing. Rejection is worse altogether. Worse because you've set yourself up for it, and collecting your rejected pieces isn't any better for knowing you are of a company of rejects. The same students smile neutrally, glance at your slip and call up your rejecteds from the reject storage zone. You re-use the same packing material you used before for the experienced keep it bagged-ready-waiting. You nod coolly at fellow rejectees who hate you as you hate them for being rejected, for being seen by anyone as a rejected one even by another reject and out you go into the traffic and crowds, jostling with your unshown pictures now uselessly, and you can't help thinking, unnecessarily framed. There are no plusses. You are badly out of pocket and out of sorts with the world.
A petulant 'never again' crosses your mind.
I have seen rejected work abandoned, left leant against walls, destroyed with the glass kicked in. A losing betting slip tossed underfoot.
I've been tempted to do the same.

But not NOW. I got into the London Group, so none of the above applies.

The London Group
Open Exhibition 2009

Menier Gallery - dates tbc (OCTOBER)

Smug smug smug & xxx all round.

Kevin Jackson : Original Limited Edition Prints 2009

. . . not the same at all.

2009-08-11T19:42:00.006+01:00

Huh, short story. Huh.

2009-07-14T09:21:00.010+01:00

I've missed a submission deadline, which considering that I hadn't actually finished the piece wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. It is bad, but not quite as bad as having the work done and dusted and then just not getting the deed done in a collapse of admin.
Now I wonder if I shall ever find the motivation to finish that piece at all.
'Hey!' On the bright side, 'I haven't written a blog for a while.' I've been busy doing whatever it was . . . and this 'Hey! I haven't written a blog for a while,' is how I start all blog posts in behind-the-eyeballs draft form.
Come to think about it, I start most things by thinking, Hey! I haven't written in a while, or made any prints, or . . . and there's always a reason why I haven't. I've been busy doing something else or chasing after somebody or running away from the idea, which brings me back to here . . . there was a point beyond the above opening that I've forgotten now. There was to be sequencing, development, a position and point, proposition or contention . . . but it has eluded me.
Cohones!
And on the subject of balls : -

Sometimes, we're on a roll.
Sometimes I catch a pretty woman looking at me for once, when almost invariably it's the other way around. Mind you, she's probably thinking, 'OMG, that (me) should be put down out of kindness,' but I'm on a roll or was until the missed deadline deed. How I resent 'deadlines' that escape, and how unkindly sounds the word.
A 2000 word short story for a 2000 word short story competition, and I missed the so-and-so. How did that happen? Have story, know the date, drafted not honed - too long, but there-ish and drift drift drift along, and too late. Not that I may have got it in, nor was there any prize money at stake, and no doubt there will be another short story competition.
Truth be told, I'm more consumed by getting work ready for the London Group.
I had better check that bossy looking .pdf lurking ominously on my desktop to make sure I haven't missed that as well.

The London Group
Open Exhibition 2009

No, it's okay. I've got time to miss it still.
Can't be bothered with 'short story' anymore. It was titled Two-thousand-and-when, so probably no loss.

'My Love' snuggled in.

2009-06-19T10:38:00.005+01:00

'Snakes alive. Fifty five, two old guys.'

2009-06-09T20:53:00.011+01:00

(Steve Waugh, Philip King; who they?)

Every working day brings 'retirement' closer . . . a truth universally acknowl-etc.
That's normal, the way of things . . . as it should be. Kids cost more, grow up and leave home, I retire and at some point later, later being the way we want it, we die a painless and peaceful death with all the trimmings.
Retirement first though, but retirement has not been coming at a steady annual pace. It has leapt at me in five year jumps - from 65 to 60 to a de facto 55 which is where I am now.
In my twenties, Life Insurance and Retirement Annuity Policies projected that I would retire at 50, and the general expectation was that our life of work would end before 60.
The policies I took up then paid out at 50 and that's another story, but retirement was not what they paid for. I would have used the bonanza for school fees, tuition fees, or to help the graduates pay off their student loans but it was no bonanza, it went towards a few white goods and to keep the bloody car at the city kerbside paying for parking.
As for retiring, no talk of that any longer.
No thought of that. Expectations were on the turn.
Hard on the heels of racism and sexism, prefigured by feminism and universal franchise, along came ageism to mess with the retirement age and our expectation of work and who should do it and what work we variously should be doing and when we can afford us to stop work and start paying us a pension and maintain the health services to keep increasingly fit and active retired people living ever longer doing nothing.
Even before subprime pooped the party in 2008, the life-expectancy demographics were raising awkward questions about how retirement can be paid for.
All of a sudden it's, 'let's keep the old buggers working until 70 . . . or longer', and I agree it would make a sort of sense to work everybody until they drop and keep the young in education for as long as it takes until somewhere, anywhere, there's a job vacancy. After all, why waste education on the old? What's the point of providing leisure classes in The Renaissance or watercolour painting? Why bungee jump or take up dinghy sailing or golf at 55, or 60, or 70 when it's much better to do any of those in your 20s; better when the students can walk to the lecture theatre, see to paint, can understand the technology and not need a buggy to get around 18 holes.
Let the old alone to work in peace, don't hound the old and harangue them out of work.
Let the young idle, let them to think and learn, let them go through the stress of education and breeding with a bit of time on their hands.
Let the young hit balls with sticks while they have strength, reflex and flex to do it with power and style and grace and pace.
As we had, and will still have to find the money from somewhere to keep the old idle now, give that money to the futures and keep the old busy. Let's invest in the young.
I have an interest here. I'm homing in on my fifty-fifth and I'm too young to die, I mean retire. Symbolically though, I must mark this rite of passage from aged, tolerated but still useful citizen to sage-cum-drag on the coffers. I'm considering committing Twitter suicide (thanks C) or, I could 'retire' my blog . . . but would either be gesture enough?

I've just rested from this to, one: fend off a mate trying to get me to accompany him to a tribute band gig somewhere in Euston, (I hate all tribute bands, and reformings, particularly tribute bands to bands I've never heard of. Don't you?) and two: to try and work out the exact date that a 27-year-old will be 'exactly' half my age. Mind manglingly difficult mathematics for me - far beyond my capabilities.
Umm, approximately the eighth of July (more of a guess in fact), but -

Q. Given I'm 55 on 1106this and my guess is correct: what date was her 27th birthday? (1106 is 11 June here, not November 6.)
No prizes for the answer, but purchase prize for best working out in pretty colours and / or dynamic graphics. No cracks either, 'her' is a daughter.

FUTURES: now there's a TAG. . . but in the meanwhile, what of my retirement expectations I ask? What of 'my rights? '
If they're mine, I intend to have them.

Okay, cracks are fine, and will be considered.

I want that gold-watch-gesture. The change of the guard parade, the go away and enjoy yourself oh good and faithful, now useless, drone, drudge, slave, retainer and 'good riddance (go and die)', we need that sinecure you've been occupying for someone else promoted to incompetence.
Wouldn't I like the 'Free at Last', go and enjoy yourself gift from society to crown the sense of achievement from a life of dutiful work (? ) and my fifty-fifth hoves . . . I was supposed by date of birth expectation to be considering retirement.
Enjoying my work as I do and not having achieved half I want with it, I've never needed a hobby. I could never afford a hobby, neither the time nor the money, so I've nothing to fall back on see, and I don't have the money to stop working even if I wanted to . . . which I don't. Look, I'm just getting into my stride and life is short and quickly passing.
It's not just presidents of the Royal Academy I miss; entire world beating cricket teams have conquered and retired unremarked.
Retired again. Retiring, this rite of passage that doesn't know when it is, or how we can pay for it; how tiresome it is to be burdened by birthdays.
I've never liked birthdays much.
Well, I've never liked mine.
The year spins around and I've got to have one, a birthday, a token click of counting, a reflection or accounting of period passing and of survival.
But to 'celebrate' a birthday every single year, rings hollow. To celebrate 'me' this frequently seems an indulgence.
Why not once a month, like Lovers do when love is new. But not monthly for long for each year, a New Year, a Cup Final, another Christmas; one a year, every year and there's no surprise left and barely time for anticipation.
The D Day Veterans have just had their 65th and I confess to a twinge of annoyance, not at our remembrance of the trauma of a seminal day, but irritation at the number.
65 as a number. 2009 as a year. Neither a decade nor a half-century. There's no punchy zero factor to get misty eyed about - this is no millennium for sure.
What does 65 mean to young soldiers who served and died as soldiers have always died and continue to die in old mens' wars? Obviously the D Day survivors are thinning out, the veterans at youngest are in their 80s, but still, 'why the sixty-fifth anniversary? '
We used to retire at 65, is that it?
In '67, McCartney sang of 64 (When I'm Sixty-four). I guess it scanned. Or, is it a sentiment from a bygone decade where the expectation was that men retired at 65 and their 5 year younger spouses at 60, or: was it a presentiment that by age 65 McCartney would still be working as artists never retire, while none of the rest of us has the least idea whether, or when, or if we will be able to afford to retire at all.

Will I Still Love You When I'm Fifty Six?

(Steve Waugh, Philip King; who they? Part 2.)

My Love Of Em Cartoons

2009-06-02T10:18:00.000+01:00

Recovering from Kuniyoshi

2009-04-26T19:56:00.004+01:00

Women are wonderful.
I'd barely, if ever, 'be honest Kev,' I'd never heard of Kuniyoshi until Nat told me and asked me to go and see the exhibition as she could not, and when I explained this to Noughty A in the studio, that is noughty with an 'o', she immediately arranged us to go together. 'That'll do,' I thought. 'This won't be so bad after all.' The exhibition may turn out to be incomprehensible and a chore, but I shall have the company of a beautiful woman as compensation.
Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy.
Oh hell! That place again. I know, or know of, or knew too many people there, and the knowing has never helped me get a picture into their travesty Summer Exhibition. Not once. I swear it's nepotism in reverse. The RA owes me hundreds in futile entry fees and aggravation.
Worse yet, as I slunk in across the courtyard paddling around the corny water spouts, I saw with horror that the London Original Print Fair was in mid jamboree. No wonder half the purposeful striders through the tourists looked so familiar. There were the print dealers betraying their nerves looking expo cocky, printmakers looking desperate, and the printers hungry as hell.
Waiting for Noughty A, as I should wait, I mused over the London Original Print Fair flier.
The Daily Telegraph's man Richard Dorment's quote, 'By far the best place to buy prints' headed the exhibitor list of old names, re-namings and the odd unknown. The odd newcomer?
I must be out of touch. Eyestorm - and later to Safari - Google? Oh it's Them. Again.
Andrew Edmunds - hmmm. Have I forgotten? Perhaps I never knew, perhaps Andrew Edmunds is new, but no time to dwell on Andy new or not as lovely A arrived, buoyed me to attention, buoyed me up the stairs, into the lift and we were in.
Kuniyoshi.
I'd hate to admit that I could ever forget my sweet companion, but I very nearly did forget her.
Not at first though, my spirit sank as it always does when viewing old prints and drawings in museum conditions. I want to see these things, not peer tiringly at them glass encased in the dingy gloom of conservation lighting, scrabbling over and over to remove sunglasses I'm not wearing. Not that I don't appreciate the necessity and not that you can't see the work, and Kuniyoshi's shone through the dusk.
Bugger the monied grandiosity of the Print Fair below, here were prints of domestic human scale. No spurious limitings of editions, nothing unoriginal, each a commercial production of multiples from cherry wood blocks cut to print hundreds, thousands, or none if no good. The handcolouring is without any doubt skilled but shows endless human fallibility. The printing blocks are small, cherry tree scale and the images are composed of several blocks set tiled together; printed and coloured separately, the variations of washes and blends don't match across the entire image, nor does the pasting together register one printing precisely to its neighbour - this might have mattered to the printers and colourists in the print shop, now, it doesn't matter a bit.
There are lots of other printmakerly presentation tricks to enjoy: blind embossed textures, the fibrous grain of the paper giving lustre to solid colours, metalic pigments in the colour washes and inks, all good stuff of course but 'what of the images?'
The overall impression is narrative rather than illustrative. Noughty A, unforgotten, introduced me to Manga when we marvelled at the obvious post referencing in comic and graphic art. There were copperplate printing influences in the uses of block textures and wash, from Dutch engravings reaching Japan, and the feeling that there is nothing new under the sun. Standing in front of the largest pieces, tall multi-block tower block prints perhaps a meter high with slashing vertical colour marks, I overheard a man reminded of Ian Davenport's painting.
There is a series of battledores which looked like they should be taken home and cut out to shape. Another series, of clever, rather sinister graphic surrealism; of faces which on closer inspection are composed of contorted bodies.
The graphic line, so labour intensive to achieve in block cutting for relief printing reminded us of brush strokes more than the marks of nib or pencil.
But is it art? 'Probably not,' I think, but then wonder at the boldness of each composition stripped back for craft production, ease, speed and cost effectiveness, but compensated for by wild diagonals and irrational composition dominated as much by the graphic panes and seals as the pictorial content. Many of these prints were meant to be handled, left on tables or seen askew on other people's laps, they weren't conceived to hang framed on the wall. They look pretty good on the wall though and there's humour. A fight on a roof almost slapstick, and a series depicting named officials under attack. 'Number 47: Loyal Retainer Nakamura Masatatsu fending off a hurled brasier' was my favourite of the day.
I had a moment's uncertainty as I grinned. 'Was this meant to be funny?' What do I know about Japan, next to nothing and resolving to re-read Mishima, lend Mishima to lovely A and investigate calligraphy with her, we walked out into the dazzle of spring sunshine, exhausted, reaching for shades, strolling away through teeming London exhilarated as if we were the only ones there.

'What size are they?' asked Nat. None bigger than imperial (76 x 56 cms), most smaller, excepting the two tower block images. The wood block on display was approximately a foot square. (30 x 30 cms)

Kuniyoshi is at the RA until early June.
The London Original Print Fair finished today, Sunday. Whether you've missed it or anything, there'll be another print fair coming along soon.

Same same, back in the blighted West

2009-03-17T20:38:00.009Z

I haven't blogged for a while. I've been away see and I've almost forgotten how to use this computer; my fingers blunder around making typos and no sense.
So. I don't need to tell you what's been happening: jobs gone, banks going, bankers hammered, money getting printed - you know all that and it's on and off the front pages so that's that, and we're getting used to it not being news anymore. You know what's been happening, the sea level is rising and Barack is digging in, I suppose, because I haven't heard.
I left on inauguration day and missed his swearing in doing the airport tango with a check in trolley. Was it any good? I expect it's been forgotten.
The US Americans I met were bullish, Bushless at last. 'I never voted for him,' they said, 'now please like me,' they're saying.
I haven't blogged for a while because I've been away, but what sort of excuse is that?
I wasn't off the map, and if I had been I'd have been blogging non-stop: I'd have been paid to and my fingers would be razor sharp on any keyboard.
I didn't go and do anything very exciting. I went to work. I can do that, I can take my work nigh anywhere and work providing a few basic conditions can be met. I can't work on the move though; I need a table that's mine, power, light, not too cold not too hot, cheap if possible, beautiful if beautiful can be got, safe enough, secure within reason, and a constant noise level. I can't work with bangs or slabcutters grinding. Good music stops me working: I listen, bad music I have. People stop me working, but I can't do without people and there were enough.
I went to Kerala which is exciting, but I went to find all of the above in Kerala, and K provided satisfaction in an unexciting way that was ideal for working. I ignored Kerala's excitements: its backwaters and beaches, yoga, massages and aruvedic medicines, ashrams, cheap teeth and cheap opticals, resorts and fish restaurants. I missed out on the elephant parades and holy skewerings, fire walkers, nature reserves, dams and folk singing. I saw some temples and mosques, and many, many new churches built along the tsunami wrecked shore.
I took to a quiet terrace in the coconut forest with banana and jack fruit outside, with a swamp as a view; full of weed and duck and jewelled kingfishers, where the house cow went for its daily bath and into which everyone threw their trash. I bagged mine, put it out and it was thrown into the swamp for me. Learning the ropes and finding there is no alternative, I came to throw my own there.
A din seemed to chant in my ear as I woke to the predator's whine; chanting as I worked. A silent noise of frogs and crickets, crows affirming crow, nameless other shouting birds, dogs, palm fronds clacking in the wind, slap slap of flip-flop in the dirt, slapping laundry, temple bells, temple drums, a distant muezzin, and the wash of ocean surf.
Laundry hung beside the red track that ran down the hill, past my terrace and around the swamp to Temple Road and dark little shops. Auto-rickshaws gathered where two tiny, beautiful young women ran an internet cafe: fan cooled, stifling hot, connection fair, and full of mosquitos. Incense and mosquito coil smoke billowed about their saris and sweet efficient smiles. All men looked, and they had brothers and cousins at hand.
The mossies were the drawback. Too many: hungry and merciless.
Big fat brown ants walked along the power wires making highways in the sky. Little ants joined me for gin, liking the tonic best and everything else I ate except pepper and coffee. Tiniest ants swarmed in the milk pan. Not many spiders; not many cockroaches, surprisingly few flies and no snakes came indoors.
The coconuts were ripe and nuts crashed down with lethal potential. One morning, men came climbing the trunks, their bare feet bound together with tape, carrying curved edged axes to harvest the nuts in a bombardment. They pruned the fronds which tumbled crashing, blocking my stairs and blocking the track. Coconuts thumped, chipping masonary, denting the metal gates, ricochetting into the swamp and bounding, rolling together strewn everywhere.
Fresh coconut flesh, rice and fresh fish - the food was fabulous, if an ordeal to eat with my landlord's family: with hands, served alone and scrutinised, eating alone, overawed and overfed. Fair food in the tourist restaurants, I don't wish to be unfair, but not good for India, for Kerala not good, where food is of the best in the world.
It grew too hot in the end, undermining my resilience and well being and forcing me home; here, where I can sit in the cool sun, wear clothes, wrap up warm, walk at a bracing pace and not get bitten.
I went to work in Kerala, not to play, not for holiday; and work I did. At what I know, to what effect I don't. Work, 'same same' Kerala people said to people like me in Kerala.

Sitting Bum - Flaming Horror

2009-01-14T19:49:00.008Z

I try to get up from this screen, I really do.
I try to turn it off - surely I've finished with it: I log out of my networks, close down the applications, reopen mail to check mail one last time and shut down. I shut the lid only to lift it again to do the very next thing . . . to write this piece, as it happens.
With a laptop I don't have to sit back down again in that room, on that chair, or go anywhere. I don't have to find it; my laptop is with me - available, portable, wifi-ed, ethernetted if desperate, in my bag about my person - all the time.
Women organise life by their own timetables while men have never been so tyrannised by wife as by wifi, and this, a gender-centric observation is born from desperation. Crying for help doesn't mean you'll get any but we're all being out-competed by our computers: Mesdames, come and help here.
Why women should bother is another matter or course, but men never really understand why women bother so much with men anyway. Self interest, men suppose; I mean, I wouldn't bother one second about another bloke unless, (a) he supports WHU, (b) he is going to either give me a job or do one for me, or, (c ) to misquote Douglas Adams, 'absolutely nothing else'.
My boss is a woman and she supports WHU.
'WHU?' I do know; it's footie - a soccer team, and I don't care even if Barack Obama does follow them, but I bother about my computer - all of the time.
Not to mention now. Writing this is on my laptop is symptomatic of my dependence.
If this is breaking out of jail, tunneling back in is the best I can do. Smart eh.
Good moves Man. Cool, and while I'm on it, it's online and I can shop.
I can work and conference. Email, what a drag - text, but far more letters and fewer fax. No fewer phonecalls.
My old fashioned, full blooded live chums communicate with me this way as do my parents and children.
I have new friends online in professional networks, social nings and dating . . . tempted, I join a new group and find 'friends' on arrival, linked in from other networks they're on or I am.
I do my banking and pay my bills. I watch my stock free-fall and this is how I'd sell, if I should sell it, or more likely when I have to . . . if there's any value left there. This is how I bought stock and should be buying more, now, as the market falls in the old faith of risings to come.
Oh shit.
Anyways, [adv., pl., p.t.] I bought my holidays, books and music, booked my working trips, arranged the itineraries, saw the hotel poolside, my next car or sofa or computer virtually on this very screen.
I sell my 'art' from this self same screen, and when I've finished worrying work, assets and tax; working family and friends real and virtual, finished with that and want to do something else . . . to listen to music or the radio, to watch t.v. or a movie, book a ticket, play a game, reserve a seat; I roam around a bit to stretch my legs, massage my calfs and remember I'm a biped not a sitting bum; then it's back at the screen to relax.
Relaxed and ready to work again, I stay put to write, to draw, print, to order the gear and arrange transport.
I'm struggling to turn off my computer and there's so little reason to. Everything I want is on it so why turn it off, why do I want to, what else am I looking for? Country walks? Sex?
Er . . . yes, food too, and virtuality suddenly seems such bollocks; horseshit if you're North American.

Laptop Lunches
VirtualNora wrote to all her network friends, stricturing us, 'When there is a will there is away'.
It's a typo of course, I stick up for my mates, even the virtual friends in social networks where we sit safe in our smug profiles; or, is it vice versa, smug in our safe profiles; okay, sit safely smug in our smuggly safe profiles and wait in hope that someone else will do something. Even, possibly especially VirtualNora, who set up and moderates her network is waiting, but waiting for what exactly?
It is such a thrill to get any response (!!!!!), and such a disappointment when the response is, 'Hi :)'. You garner virtual friends with less than that - I haven't exchanged a 'Hi :)' with half of mine. When, in the virtual whirl, do we ever 'cut to the chase'?
Now I know there is a problem here. There is an inbuilt resistance to being identified as you, an acknowledgment that life in the virtual is not so safe as sitting solo on one's bum should be. Having a common name, I found my name is far commoner than I'd thought. Getting a domain name, a mail, or blog address with your real name is no straightforward matter; and you know what's coming here: if I want a blog with my name on it, it is going to cost me.
Life in the virtual is not so good as to come for free, so there's a surprise, but we all like 'free' even while we know that freebies are nearly always rubbish and come with a cost. But, I'm not going into expense where 'free' is an option, indeed 'free' is the name of the game. The cost is, and it's a challenge, is I've no free choice but to name myself atavistically as 'nogwinting.blahblog' or somesuch, and lucky me not to have to resort to numerals this time.
Naming myself thus . . . well . . . what can I not say? Who can't I pretend to be? What profile image can I not put up?
It's a challenge and a temptation. It doesn't matter what I blog however weird - even I can't remember my name. I become anonymous to myself and anonymity is a powerful tool.
It's a temptation worthy of challenge and it's free. Anonymous can speak without consequence, without reference to 'self'. Pure unfettered messaging is possible, and sedition is necessary to the best of societies.
The message can be pure, but Anonymous suffers from speaking without the conviction that consequence brings, without the certainty and impact that an 'I' bestows, and Anonymous is too easily dismissed as feeble minded, vandal, cowardly and disaffected.

Vital or Virtual

Is the virtual profile a persona? I cannot safely assume that my friend, VirtualNora is a 'she'. The profile picture is a hint: looks like 'she', but who can tell? 220 by 220 random pixels at low resolution is not so many to make much of. Have 'Photoshop', can photoshop, can do anything with 220 square and don't need to take so much trouble over it as that.
The anonymous option opportunity is both the strength and weakness of virtual, both part of the appeal and part of the problem.
Are people hiding something; inventing something; proclaiming a hidden side; a private side; a better side; disguising a shameful, embarrassing inadequate truth about themselves, or: is this liberation, freedom, a great unfettering outlet of a creative streak available to us all - at long last? Or are we all taking the piss?
Does it matter that there is no way of knowing?
'do u have another name?' asks VirtualUsha.
VirtualCordelia states, 'If you have to ask, you don't want to know. '
VirtualMajlinta refuses my 'friend request'. What's wrong with me? And still miffed several days on, provoked to poke, maybe 'her', I reinstate my add request. Take That!
Yay.
People or atavars, name, username, virtual name: what is this identity confusion? Is it a dilemna, or guise, or identity crisis?
VirtualNanny guides us away from vital through the strict profile form (see Privacy conditions) to submit smart favourites, cool ones, the honest ones and the cute. Finding the profile pic takes time; the one you like for this yourself if you have one; time to make some more; getting them onto the computer plus a bit of retouch; filling in the 'about you' box in 1000 words or 700 characters; deciding which your favourite movies, music, food, holiday destinations, sport, books and others are, and what this list of likes says about you.
Are VirtualNora and virtual networks an identity crisis with a friendly face?
Is there an unspoken acknowledgment that 'virtual' isn't real, (how mad is that?); that Facebook friends aren't real friends, (huh?); that social networks aren't social; that as the chase never kicks off it's not much of a network at all?
Is this 'play'?
Licensed Identity Crisis, guise or disguise, is this not a 'tease'?
Naughty VirtualNannyNing letting us stip-tease like this. It's 'fancy dress' in pretty pixels. The Masque Ball without thrills and disappointment, and as so often under laptop tyranny, I wonder if I'm missing the whole point. I wonder if I'm the child seeing the Emperor naked or whether I'm just missing the point of nudity.
Still no joy with VMajlinta and I'm not going to put up with this vicarious brush off without having my virtual say.
I'll say not . . . Message to VM whatsoever you are: 'Well B'orf! Don't be my virtual friend you Precious Pongy Pile of Perfect Atavistical Pixel Dung :(' But then again, 'Hey, get a grip nogwinting why don't I?' Like everything else, virtual may mean nothing and come to nothing, virtual is part of the vital and on that basis it's all a bit of a shrug and a bit more of the same. Better be in the virtual than not.

Bloody Nora
Better get this thing off my lap . . . I so know that Lap Dancing ain't sex.

SCARED OF GAZA

2009-01-08T10:43:00.004Z

THE GREATWORK: the novel

2008-12-18T21:28:00.014Z

I haven't been caught yet. The 'Great Work' nearly killed me and I married his oldest friend. We have two boys. That should have been vengeance enough. Honor looked after me and I hope she remembers to until her dying day. I suppose that's it really . . . a horror story and there's nothing supernatural about any of it. I'm not dead, so, it's not over. Only Owen spanked me hard enough and look at all the trouble that caused. You see, the thing is . . .

The thing is . . .

The ten thousand.

CLUTCHING AT DEBRIS

THE GREAT WORK

IN TIME

MRS SMILING

Book keeping, and beekeeping.

The novel by
K JACKSON

comment? . . . contact Kevin Jackson©2008

forthcoming:

'SOLITAIRES'
the new Novel by Kevin Jackson,

Who did That? The characters from The GREATWORK live on, delving into things they
never could have done.

Bred to Bread

2008-12-17T17:37:00.010Z

HIDDEN discreetly beneath a napkin of pristine laundering, lay a complete, perfectly sliced loaf of bread. We are eating in a traditional Turkish restaurant and there are musicians to entertain us. Oud and saz players back a young singer and she sits next to a fierce looking older man who provides percussion on a large tambour. The fare includes rice, frites and pastas of choice, lamb, delicious fish, and salad we would pay dearly for in UK.

I offer the bread basket around but there are no takers. When the three of us are supposed to eat bread, and so much of it, is not clear. We don't touch it and I wonder what will become of it.

When or more importantly, why should bread ever need to figure in our meal?

Wearily, I suppose it is the tradition of bread: the food of life, the base of sustenance, the very basis of hospitality and shelter, next only after water; one of the two things you can't refuse to share whilst a trace of humanity remains. Cigarettes come in a late but fighting third.

But I hate bread crust and crumb, and always have done ever since I just didn't like it very much and was told how much I should. I've been bred to deny my bready loathing and try to overcome my hatred at every turn and slice. I try to hide all my hatreds.

The loaf lying on our table provokes me, there-there now, and considering that I do hate bread I eat plenty of dough.

Bread 'fills you up and doesn't kill you', which is not bad. The trouble is, I've always thought 'not bad' isn't necessarily good, and 'not bad', unless used in admiration or irony, is rarely very interesting.

Each breaking wave in bread fashion gets my hopes up. Each travel where bread I haven't seen or tasted has to be offered and has to be eaten, has me wondering whether maybe here bakers have cracked it; and this time it won't be more of the same jaw stodging, tooth clogging, tongue bland indissoluble pulp.

I hate the soft and the hard, the crushed wheat and the toasted; I hate it leavened and unleavened. I hate poppy seeds sprinkled on top of ochre crust that's as soft and uncrustlike as milk skinning over a gentle flame. I hate the indigestible, uncooked, decorations of whole grains of wheat, I hate them when they fill the bag with the bread in it. I hate the sprinklings of raw flour. I hate bread bins and bread baskets for their ubiquitous smugness, their self proclaiming importance, for their pride of place, for getting in the way on crowded restaurant tables.

Will it offend efendim if I ask to have this bread taken away?

I hate communion wafers and Lord choose Jews for bad bread; dirty grey and bitter rye, and bagels and challar glazed with honey so I could weep at the waste of bee labour.

Pretzels, I hate them . . . and black bread.

I hate breadcrumbs. With each and every bready transaction, crumbs litter hopelessly, uselessly on the breadboard, sticking in the saw teeth of the bread knife. I hate bread knives, unwashed, slickly ever clean from the bread's cutting . . . never making enough crumbs to feed the birds but plenty to bring the mites, weevils, roaches and mice; never enough crumbs to bread the chicken or fish, to make the stuffing for the poor turkey; no, we buy breadcrumbs from the shops for that and I despair when I see packs of 'Fresh Bread Crumbs' for sale! I see the lurking hand of marketeers and accounting executives and imagine a sweep, scoop 'n' bag machine beneath the bread slicer. I see my child self grating a stale loaf into a big bowl in my Grandma's kitchen.

I hate pitta bread even while it has the great virtue of crumblessness. I hate peasant white, and loathe baguettes and ekmek.

I hate the ash of toast spraying from the knife, sooting over plate, table cloth, napkin and suit; carbon grits in the marmalade and butter, on kitchen surfaces and floors; skumming up the bottom of the sink; the scatter detritus smouldering in the tray of the toaster. I really hate toast, and toast is better than bread. I hate pizza base, thick or thin 'crust'.

Crust! I hate the word.

'Eat your crusts!' Yes, eat up those crusts away from the 'crumb' and butter, away from the jam on the edge of the sarnie. Just crust. And if I were hungry, I'd eat crust. If I were that hungry I'd cry out for it. The hungry die for the lack, but I'm not hating bread like that. Just crust, so uncrusty that a finger prod sees crust bounce back, or so hard and flakey, so solid, so chewily cudlike, so draining of saliva.

My heart sinks at the prospect of bread and butter pudding. I wonder what Summer Pudding has to do with summer and hate it even more if it has blackcurrants, for reminding me that nothing is ready in the summer. Summer is the ripening time. Autumn is Harvest. In summertime we eat the last stale dried up scraps from the previous year and the thin bitter early fruits, the creams of young early births. Nobody wastes fresh strawberries on bread.

Give stale bread to the goat, to the pigs or the fowl; use it as bait or let stale bread go to mould and mulch. Don't make deserts out of it. Don't add stale wine to anything - if it is inedible or undrinkable, throw it away!

I hate wafer bread, and crispbread, cornbread and ryebread, wholemeal, whole grain, malted, and I can't abide breadmakers. I hate the smell of yeast even in beer and I quite like beer. I hate the kneading, the rising, the waiting, the baking for the disappointment of getting a loaf of dullard bread: or rolls, or baps, ciabatta, brioche, cottage rectangulars, damper, flat, focaccio, lavash, matzo, or pumpernickel - all plain pan, pain plain dull.

Bakers had the good idea of sweetening bread and it had to be tried. Nutty seeds and granulars replaced with dried fruits, the dustings of flour with dusted cinnamon and sugar. Why dust the darn stuff with anything? The dust falls off and it's still grisly within, but one batch of loaves has little chance to stand out against another. Bread isn't pretty and the baker has to try every trick. Even ever-so-secure in the market place as bakers are, no baker can afford to bake bad bread, or not worse than the neighbouring bakery bakes down the road. If the flour has grit in it, or chalk, or chaff or pest, chemicals or preservatives, one baker better have no more in the loaves than in any other loaf about town.

But, what else can go wrong if you're a baker? Poor people will eat anything they can get their hands on and buy whatever cheap can be had. The rich hoof for themselves but when the bakers go bust, when the bakeries close down for want of fuel or ingredients, when no bread can be got - everyone is in deep trouble.

There's no loafing idly about town without the lumpen sight of bread on common display.

What a dull staple, but that's what it is and Christ broke bread to represent Himself. He had a precursor miracle, a rehearsal with 'loaves and fishes', and I've always thought of sardines on toast . . . which is the best way of getting bread down me. It is a nigh criminal waste of sardine but if there aren't enough, eke them out with bread.

That's what bread does, it stretches and extends, rendering the rich palatable, the bland less bland by comparison, and never making the awful better. Burger and . . . bap, see what I mean? Or, perhaps you don't. Think 'bread and marge'.

Bread fills in the corners like rubble. It's foundation material. It gets grain into us. A convenience food that satisfies our gatherer ancestor instincts, neatly bi-passing the chore of finding seeds to eat one by one. Where the local seed is rice, there's no need to bother. Rice areas are less bready but there seems to be little else to do with maize, and wheat; that strangest and most wonderful of grasses, but mill it down to flour. Flour solves the problem of turning seeds into food.

'Stottie Cakes' they're called, but Stotties are bread. What is the matter with cake and biscuit? What's wrong with scone?

Why use flour to make so much bread?

If we didn't have it, we'd have something else and, sure we'd be hard pressed to invent that something now, and, I'd possibly hate that even more than I hate bread.
I hate Indian breads less: roti, naan, paratha and puris. Chapatis work for me and the Mexican tortilla almost cheers me up, out of my hatred, for bread does possess the virtue of adaptability.

But, cinder croutons in soup, soda bread, bread sticks, ready toasted toast for the microwave, door stop sarnies, club sandwiches; triple deckers tied with sticks surrounded by chips.

Serving 'french fries' with bread says it all. If bread were any good in the first place as opposed to being brutally bog-standard essential, we should settle for it. We would, if it were half-decent instead of passingly passable compared to all the barely edible rot that bread has been before. We shouldn't have to give it out at all when, as in this restaurant in Turkey where she sings of love and loss, there already is rice, frites and pastas of choice.

If I am hungry, I'll eat anything. I'd fight for bread to get it or ensure we have it, and I offered the loaf to my dining companions again. The napkin was accepted. There were no takers of bread.

We are still hungry and eat more, still hungry but not 'that' hungry.

I am deeply suspicious of those who say they like bread.

'Oh. Yes? Just bread?'