All about Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

contact: selen@micagallery.com

Dean’s Bar, Tangier.

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.