Thursday looms

Múm - Now there's that fear again

The storm is gathering

I cycle home at dusk and watch the trace of a moon grow a little each day in the sky. I rummage in my backpack and pull out jumpers and scarves like intestines. I am feeling for an old camera, I found it buried  in a corner of our rickety house not long ago, halfway through a film. It's almost time to develop it.

I take a photo of the sky. Three more skies to go.

I found a couple of other cameras too, one belonging to someone lost. A treasure. I cross my fingers and hope for a photo of them on the film. I know there won't be any -no one else understood how to operate that clunky contraption so they were always the photographer, rarely the subject- but i'm excited. I'm impatient. I want to see the scenes that were snapped and forgotten -a glimpse of what their eyes saw and wanted to remember. But there is trepidation too. I put the camera aside, I don't want to rush it.

Adam Hurst - Unseen

Soviet bus stops

Christopher Herwig has documented the weirdly imaginative and bold monuments that are Soviet-era bus stops. They look forgotten, and a little at odds with their desert-like surroundings, like an actor missing an audience.

Also worth a look are his pictures of the Aral Sea.

The roaring

Last night I saw Mount Eerie play a set of quiet songs. I was hoping for some crashingly noisy fuzz to blow out my eardrums too, but it was just Phil and Nicholas Krgovich playing some of the softer songs in a folk venue, and getting only as noisy as one guitar and a keyboard could allow. Yet the quiet of it was brilliant. Something about the way he sings seems so disarmingly honest and humble and intimate. His lyrics are pretty delicious too.

There's quite a prolific amount of music he's made and different bands he's sung with, and never a bad song. His artwork is great too! I'm a little bit in awe of him.

Cities rise and fall

Continuing the 'space is comfortingly vast' theme. 

Gas - Microscopic (Ambient Electronic Space)

The inverted ending is nice. We are so very small, but we are vast too! if you change your perspective.

Take me 240 miles above the glittering cities

German set designer and video artist Michael Konig has made this time-lapse video using three months worth of footage shot from the International Space Station. It's ever so soothing to forget the horrors of the world for a moment, and watch this quiet, rhythmic spectacle of light. 

The station drifts far above the earth's atmosphere. The planet spins below. Storms flash, creating their own explosive light-percussion. Green silky trails of aurora spread, mist-like. Clusters of yellow city light trace a filigree map over the dark.

I am very, very small. There are beautiful things I have not seen nor even imagined.
I like to be reminded of this.


Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König.

Your name, lying just where you left it

A sky as white as clay stretches ahead for miles. The trees have been razored to the ground. A film of floodwater lies smooth and undisturbed, a sheet of mirror to the creeping, clay-white sky.

Pick up your name. Brush off the grime. Hold it in your fist and take great gliding strides. Make for the horizon.

 

Bersarin Quartett - Mehr Als Alles Andere

Dear wasp

It looks like we’re going to have to sleep in the same room tonight. Please don’t be too noisy. Tomorrow's a big day for me. And don’t do that thing where you sneak into my bed and I roll onto you and you sting me again. That wasn’t too nice. I’m still kinda upset about that. I don’t know if that was you, it might have been your cousin Jeffrey or whoever. It was dark, I never got a good look. I don’t wanna dig that whole deal up again, just don’t do it and we’ll be cool. Don’t crawl on my face either.

When the quiet deepens

Hold on.

 Javier Navarrete - Lullaby, from Pan's Labyrinth

This makes me smile

Space cartoons, handclaps and desperate lyrics.
Hailing from 1980, meet Italian duo La Bionda and cartoonist Guido Manuli.

Dirt Bike Kid

When your week takes a wobbly nosedive and you wake up feeling tender and more reclusive than usual, when you write off the day and shelve your plans, when you fill up a hot water bottle and an oversized mug of coffee and settle down to finish an escapist book, when you contemplate going out to choose another book but decide it looks chilly out and you'd have to make the effort of finding some less-hobo clothes and comb the tangles out of your hair, which you'd much rather not have to do.. not just yet.

When you want to hide in a cocoon just a little while longer.

If any of this applies, I recommend a dose of 1980s kid films. They cure many ills.

I love the dirt bike kid.  He is awesome. Truly.

Walk quietly by

Goodbye Bert Jansch, thank you for the music, it's wonderful.

"The birds fly out behind the sun
And with them I’ll be leaving"
  - Robin Williamson, October song, covered below by Bert.

 

 

I never can be sure

If we're as free as they say.

Sandy Denny - Fotheringay

Company for the insomniac

Worry needles into your sleep until you snap awake, restless.

You peep behind heavy, psychedelic curtains to guess at the time from the shade of the sky.  The air is a quiet, icy chill, tickled by the skitter of an eight-legged critter that skids across glass brushed with the dappled stain of past dirty rains.

A spindly silhouette.

It dances, it dances just for you.

Listen, listen,  from dream to daylight 

Owl creek street

 

This was a song written for 60s American television show, The Twilight Zone, a series where ordinary characters found themselves lost in strange, supernatural stories. It's sung by the actress Bonnie Beecher. Her voice is the kind that can drift through your ears, into your bones and haunt you.

Here is the clip from the weird episode it appears in, Come wander with me.
Some of the the other episode descriptions sound wonderfully bleak.

Time Enough at Last - A bookworm finds himself blissfully alone with his books after a nuclear war.  
The Midnight Sun - The Earth falls out of orbit and two women struggle to cope with increasingly oppressive heat in a nearly abandoned city. 
The lonely - A convict lives exiled on an asteroid.

Fat fingers in pies

Around the country there are buildings that lie unused, forgotten by bureaucracy, condemned and wasted. The government is considering making living in these buildings a crime. I think that's a bit rubbish of them.

At the moment squatting an empty commercial property is not illegal, it's a civil dispute between the owner and the squatter.  The process of evicting squatters is unfairly tied up in tape and could certainly be made easier for the owners.  A court order is currently needed to remove them, which is an expensive and lengthly hassle, and i'm uncomfortable with the fact that the owners have have to foot the legal bills of the squatters (although these are bills that the state would have to foot were it to become criminal). However, sometimes these buildings are so neglected it's years before the owner even realises they are being squatted, and when they do, they find it's been looked after, unharmed and shielded from vandals.

Tales of those who quietly repair a property, pay bills, organise workshops and events that bring together the local community, these tales are not so commonly heard.  It's the stories of people who wreck buildings, or sneak in whilst someone's on holiday and squat their home, that reach the press and instill fear in the public. Yet most squatters are not doing this.  

With an estimated 762,000 empty and abandoned properties in the UK, and homelessness expected to increase as the cuts in housing allowances take effect, it seems like a crime to have long forgotten buildings sitting empty. It's inevitable that desperate people are going to try and make use of them. Is it really just to make occupying such a building a criminal offence? 

Go visit a squat, government.  

Read more here
Resist the criminalisation of squatting

Last of the brooding buildings

Shanghai is bulging at the seams with all the humanity living there, and as the city modernises to accommodate it, so the spidery arm of the wrecking ball spreads.  Older buildings and neighbourhoods are being steadily demolished to make way for its steely young towers.

Photographer Greg Girard has taken some ghostly shots of these ramshackle buildings.  They lumber stoically in the foreground of glittering skyscrapers.  It's easy to personify them against that background of a thousand identical skyscraper windows and feel a tug of sympathy.  Lonely houses surrounded by a bulldozed wasteland, they look exiled.  Sitting firm in the face of their fate like old men, all weary and spent.  Just waiting to go.

Girard has some interesting pictures of what life was like in the dark depths of the Kowloon Walled city too. Go check out his website

As some background, Shanghai has a population estimated at 23 million, making it the largest city populace in the world.  It's grown to this size as a result of people migrating in to the city, as it's natural population growth rate has, since 1993, been negative due to low fertility rate.  The numbers don't leave much space for each person, hence the move, like most cities, to people living and working vertically, piled high on top of each other.  Shanghai boasts some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, and since 2008 it's had more free-standing buildings above 400m than any other city.

Possess me sometime

Tonight I watched the film Baraka, sitting in a wildlife garden, wrapped in a scarf, with a tub of curry doused in lime chutney.

The film has no dialogue, it's just a rolling wave of time-lapse photography and sweeping shots of the world. A snapshot of 1992. The music pins the scenes together. An aerial view of cars dancing between New York's grid of traffic lights, tribes chanting and jumping like pogo dancers with deadpan faces, the shift from a crowded tobacco factory to -with the crashing crescendo of a drum- a man lazily inhaling from a cigarette. It's in a similar vein to the quatsi films if you've seen any of them -Baraka's director was the cinematogropher on Koyaanisqatsi.

This is a video of the Kecak monkey chant in Bali, Indonesia. It's incredible!

The brilliantly crazy looking lead chanter is said to be possessed by the monkey spirit. Kecak has its roots in sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance, and in the 1930s it developed into a drama, depicting a battle from the Ramayana where the monkey-like Vanara helped Prince Rama fight evil King Ravana. I love this battle part of it. It's like a surreal version of the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story..

Some say the drama element was the influence of Walter Spies, a German painter and musician who intended to present it to Western tourist audiences. Others say the Balinese were already developing the form when he arrived on the island. Whatever, it's fantastic.

Drawing plans all night

A thread of blue light

Draped a brewery one night,

But here memory is murky.

From basement to roof we went.

It was with the fireworks and liqour

That my memory bent.

We wobbled back over a fence,

Skirted the river,
Handed the building to the pigeons

And to the past tense.  

Sleep covered the events,
It poked black moth-holes in the fabric,
And in a delicious muddle I woke.

I searched my pockets for clues.   

I found:
A tarot card, a map of the stars

And some dirt-caked shoes.

True story (a poet i'm not).

               














I love this song.

 ~ Scan the stars,

Spin it tight.

Measure all the angles (You make it)

Ride your bike all night (You make it right)

Read the book,

Draw plans all night,

All night ~~

Ode to a storyteller

I was listening to this reading of a Keats poem by F. Scott Fitzgerald (it's an edited version, so it says) and it took me to a memory i'd stowed away in a distant, dusty mental filing cabinet. 

It's not related to the poem itself. I do like bits of the poem. I like that beneath all the dressed up words it's about darkness and transience. Beauty and dreams mixed up with doom (can you tell I don't know quite what i'm talking about?) I often feel poems are grasping somewhere beyond my understanding. Some bigger, intellectual picture that my eyes are too shortsighted to see, and too restless to go study the interpretations.

But it's his voice. I like his voice. It reminds me of this old guy called Dai who ran a camp I went on every summer as a kid. We'd sit around a campfire in the middle of the woods and shout out songs and sup gritty hot chocolate. Then the circle would hush and Dai would tell his fables. We'd be gripped by his voice, lulled into a sort of meditative awe. And we'd believe so wholly in the characters in his stories, we'd go away determined to be as kind and thoughtful and brave as them. 

Then we'd go to sleep in our tents or a treehouse, and dream of the eggy bread in the morning. 

And the massive tactical waterfights in the woods, with bottles and tubs and buckets.

And the giant stilts, and rope swings, and woodcraft, and the zip wire. 

And at the end of the week we'd float candles down the river. Oh it was so lovely.

 

  

"And purple-stainèd mouth;
  That I might drink,
  And with thee fade away into the forest dim:  

Fade far away, dissolve, and fast forget
  What thou on Earth hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret"

Flying in the train yard

Bikes and dereliction. Two of my favourite things.

I wish I could ride like this guy. 

People of Peckham

I watch a woman with a grey beehive towering unsteadily on her head. It bobs with every movement. She stands swamped in a beige anorak that might as well be a duvet, and wide jogging bottoms that flap in nervous spasms around her swollen ankles.  She sways in the wind and sucks slowly on a cigarette. Her eyes narrow and she scans the traffic with suspicion, her eyebrows slicked into a villainous frown -two black slugs that shape her face into an arrow. The arrow points towards a distant flash of red that might just be a bus. But it's not a bus. She sucks back on the cigarette and squints some more. She picks at her purple claws.

A few metres away, leaning against a billboard, is a lycra-suited body. A yellow and turqoise geometric pattern stretches and swells over disproportionately tiny legs and hulking shoulders and breasts. The unbalanced figure balances solidly on pinprick heels, her skin dripping with gold jewellery and false eyelashes. She smiles privately at her phone, it's a dazzling smile.

Traffic grunts.
Shopfronts are dusted with dirt.
Racks of vegetable lie wilting in the wake of car fumes.

And suddenly a giant of a man is bearing down on me. He ploughs along the pavement with a clumsily attached backpack. He lurches sideways with each step and makes ear-splitting, inhuman noises. Half shout, half growl. Like a malfunctioning robot. I step out of his way and squeeze between the path of two speeding prams.

I slip down a sidestreet and breathe. In a few steps the street unfurls into leafy, bird-chirping quiet. Two worlds, so close.

The books

Are so wonderful.
And they have some of the best videos. Official ones, fan-made ones.. Oh they are brilliant and relaxing. Why not while away an afternoon watching them?

 

  Who knew golf could be this entertaining

PS. Read eat sleep. 

Be not so nervous

Thanks Bill for your songs.

Monsters, retreat

I don't think London will be sleeping well tonight. Or Liverpool. Or Birmingham. Not while there is looting and burning still spreading.
Stop breeding, moron people, there are too many of you. You are not owed any of these nice things. No-one is owed expensive trainers or TVs.

Sure, it's a tough time to be young. But in the midst of other world riots, our one seems sorta dumb, it doesn't quite add up.. Kids partying amidst violence, grown up sucked into consumerism, wanting new goods, wanting them immediately, thinking they're invincible, that they've nothing to lose. And now everyone's trying to work out who's failed these kids -the government, their families, gang culture, themselves, the whole city? It's all gone a bit awry.

I've been listening to some music that might be soothing enough to send the city to sleep, although it sounds fitting for a war / apocalyptic scene.. Here's a piece by Israeli composer Oded Zehavi: A pirate love song
Tis astoundingly beautiful.

Moth-eaten hopes and dreams

I would like to make a play with this humming through the speakers, so loud that the floor hums and your knees rattle.

The audience would duck and crawl and climb through a blacked-out labyrinth of ramps and ladders, trapdoors and shrouded, cave-like rooms. Lights will glow and pulse and seep stealthy shadows through the maze. There will be apprehension and curiosity hanging about the dark corners.

Outside, beyond thick walls, is a futuristic, authoritarian state. We are treading through an illicit drinking den, sniffing at the cloying, sweaty stench of desperation and disease. The characters are mad with fear and rebellion. The play will spin above and below and all about you. It will be sordid, tumultuous, grotesque.

The actors brush past people, pin them against the walls, curse and rant and whisper. They will drag them into the story, get them lost and bewildered in the burrows and attempt to knock them senseless with whiskey.

I will never make this. I'm just pondering and stealing ideas. Seeing an inane show five times in a day leaves you itching for some imagination, and boy am I glad there are a few passionate people actually following up their daydreams and making some frighteningly different plays.

Treadmill theatre wants your money, not your heart. Don't feed it your coins. Ignore the big bucks marketing. Seek out the stuff that cares enough to want to rip your heart out.

Huff huff huff, pastry

Yesterday was a strange mixture of tension and nostalgia, and then I found a tax rebate in my post. So today I stole some time to myself.. I woke stealthily at 5am and had coffee and pastries in the park, and sunk into a new book. It was brilliant.
Then the joggers started streaming by and I began to feel shifty, sitting there eating a box of pastries and doodling like a five year old in the midst of their shining halos of exuberance.

I watch you regain your balance

  

If you head down to the Seven Sisters cliffs, after you walk up and over the Seventh Sister you'll come upon the Birling Gap. There's a cafe and a car park and it's pretty underwhelming seeing concrete and tyres again after the unspoilt green of the Sisters. But when it's windy it's one of the best places in the world! 

There's a little platform jutting out, with wooden steps leading down the cliff to the beach. At the top you can lean out into the wind, hang over the edge and fill your ears with the roar of the waves. It's like you're in the crow's nest of a ship. The waves churn below and the wind knocks the breath out of you.    

It looks like a calm tide tricking in on a sunny day, such are my photographic skills.. Those are big waves, honest. 

 Noise therapy. Wind therapy. It's good escapin the sprawl

I should be there but i'm here. Uh oh.

Sell me your fearlessness

I'll pay you a handsome price.  

 

We rest.

Take my hand, save what you're doing for tomorrow.

You won't take any more information in tonight.
Your eyes are glazing.

Kill all the electrical things.

Take your clothes off.

Grip the sink.
Brush.
Spit.
Rinse.
Wipe the grime from your face.
Grimace back at the mirror. 

Set your alarm clock
Beyond looming dates,
Beyond a heart that lurches
Like a snapping dog.

Sleep for a week. 

 Click off the light, drop
Your head onto the pillow.

It'll take the weight. 

 

Make me less grey

Tonight I get dressed up. 

But not as spectacularly as Bjork. 

I'd forgotten to listen to her songs for a few years. They remind me of places and people I haven't seen for so long.

We squint

Hello sun, hello cider.

Apocalyptic morning

Today I look at photographs by Simon Roberts, taken as he travelled through Russia. They are exquisitely bleak. These places look very quiet and very still. Half-forgotten, becalmed. I want to step into them.

 

The images of housing blocks remind me of Pruitt-Igoe, which you can see getting partly demolished in this sequence from Koyaanisqatsi

 

We bombed it down the hills

Here are some misty views from my bike last week

Today sitting in the sun, I entered the world of Gormenghast. "This tower.. arose like a mutilated finger".  His sentences taste delicious so far.  I want to tear off the pages and pin them in my hair.

I also ate a duck egg.  I was apprehensive.  It was big.  I had to slam it hard to crack it open.  If you hold it up to the sunlight it becomes semi-transparent and etheral, like an opal.  And inside the yolk is a deep, dirty orange like 1970s wallpaper and those seat covers you get on the Bakerloo line. 

I'm beginning to like hills. Pedal pedal wheeze creak wheeze.

Then freewheeeeeeelin 

Take me to Portland Bill

So I can breathe freely and stand at the sharp edge of things. I could s-t-r-i-d-e along the cliffs, in yellow galoshes.

I'd fill a house with fossils and crustaceans and big chunks of boats. I'd nail dead birds to the rickety roof to keep out the wind. I'd boil up a muddy slug and seaweed brew, knit jumpers out of crab nets and make shoes out of dried eels (they'll sell like hot cakes)

I'd build a boat out of tourists' crumpled umbrellas and go late-night mackerel fishing. I'd spend time with rogues and fishermen. We'd belt out sea shanties, with mugs of dark rum that sloshes over fingers and sticks to wind-tangled beards.

Photo by Tony Hawkins 

  

Old Octopi

I was looking for images of vintage octopuses and found these pictures.. along with a Japanese illustration of lady-octopus sexy stuff, which um, I won't include.

The internet also tells me that all octopuses are venomous, but only the blue-ringed octopuses are known to be deadly to humans.  Octopuses have three hearts, and their beak is the only hard part of their body (Here is an anatomical diagram of our tentacled friend).  They can defend themselves with camouflage, ejecting thick black ink to aid escape, and autotomising limbs (self amputation).  The crawling arm serves to distract the predators..    

Stealth attack from above.

You are next. 

6 ships are lost to tentacled sea 
beasts every minute. Please donate. 

Farewell Sunday

Lunch is a feast that I have not had time to build an appetite for. I chew slowly.
Then i'm tidying and stacking and folding. I load grey clothes into the washing machine, I rub jellied grease and porridge skins off the pans. Things shine amidst the mess, and I am satisfied that it all looks okay for that one guilt-free minute before I turn my back and layers of hectic dirt begins to slyly settle again..

I am free until tomorrow. I bike bike bike. I fly through concrete and scrubby patches of greenery until my legs ache and then I keep on pedaling until I forget the aching. I stop to pick up a lost pound coin. I sit by the weed-tangled lake and read the last few pages of my book, wherein the protagonist slips past her jailer (lost in gin-soaked dreams), and sets alight to the house..
An ant crawls up my arm. A dog buries it's nose in my bag of bread rolls. Then the clouds sneak in and a chill hits my skin.
I pick up my bike, we leave the park and I loop round the city to home. As I ride I watch the sky darken, red-purple flames lick about the jagged edges of buildings. Streetlamps glow orange. Headlights blind me over and over again, and like a moth I never learn..
I climb the last hill, wheel on into the house and kick off my shoes.

Inside it seems dim and stale. I search for some wine and chocolate and drop down into an enormous chair. I zone out on a forgettable film. Some man gets punched a lot and then goes and shoots people he's told to shoot.

There was something else I needed to do. Something still undone..
Where do I want to get to? Who do I want? What for?
I don't remember.
It'll come back.

Twenty thousand leagues

Tonight i'm looking at underwater photographs by diver Andrej Belic. You can find more of them here. Fish with bulging eyes. Glimmering shoals. Blackened, barnacle-clad boat wrecks..

Duffel coat memories

Each year three dates come up in March. They are all strangely muted.
I remember your duffel coat, hanging infront of a window, with the sun blazing behind it. The seasons had changed, and it still hung there defiantly, empty, ready for your quick escape. But you never made it back outside.

Today also marks the Vernal Equinox, meaning the night and day are approximately equal in length. 

Things begin to bud and bloom. Hello spring.

Which way does your beard point tonight?

"Starved in metropolis
Hooked on necropolis
Addict of Metropolis
Do the worm on the accropolis...
She spent a lifetime deciding
How to run from it"

These lyrics are from Ghetto dependant, a song by The Clash
Listen here...

The voice you hear is beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Someone somewhere wrote that he sounds "laconic, ominous". I love those two words together. Indeed he does.

All dolled up

Until the cold feet come tap, tap, tapping.. Soon big black heavy boots are crunching through my head. There is a war raging in my stomach.
I sit here in my purple tights and my eyeliner and gaze down into my tea. I wonder how my legs have grown into these tentacle roots that grip my chair and lock themselves in thick tangles to the house. It has a curious iron hold. I will wipe off my make-up and start again tomorrow.

Build thyself a fort

Jim Kazanjian uses digital wizardry to merge photographs into fantastical images of crumbling structures. I want to live in one of these dilapidated, shack-like palaces. They look as though they are hovering somewhere on the edge of the world, about to drop off. And there is something very satisfying about the labyrinth geometric patterns you can see in them..

You can find more here http://www.kazanjian.net/

Into the night

Pillows, rum, biscuits, incense sticks, a hot drink, books, a leaking green biro.
A bath. Steam.
A slightly eerie soundtrack.
Plotting an extravagant breakfast for tomorrow.
These are peaceful nighttime things

We tread water

Tonight I was looking at pictures of Miru Kim. If your curiosity is roused by dereliction and shadowy glimpses of nudity, take a look here at Naked city spleen. 

 

 On a musical note, this video by The Flashbulb is like the blast of cold air that hits your face when you step outside, having been hidden within four cloying walls for too long. I will be on a mountain in May, I can't wait, it seems an awful long time away. Until then I scurry about the gritty city and gulp in the car fumes.

Be calm; sleep

Tomorrow I must awake with the birds. And put everything right. Things are awry.

Beetroot harlot

I made another beetroot cake this evening. Two hours of boiling beetroots makes the house smell alluringly earthy.  They stain everything beautifully too.  Purple seeped onto my fingers and down my wrists.  The colour was so glorious, I smeared it into two lurid smudges of blusher.

After they'd boiled I poured the vivid purple water steaming and sloshing down the drain and suddenly thought, oh, wait no, I could have used that.  I'd like to paint with beetroot one day, when I am more awake.  Here is some info on other pigments you can use: natural dyes

You can find a recipe here, for skulking into the kitchen to do your secretive nighttime baking.
And this is a slice of the disgusting coloured cake, of which I am so proud

Please, surrender

It's 3am and my fingers type requests into the internet. Feed me with visual inspiration. Give me music to dream to. Help me build a blueprint for my tomorrows. I am hopeful all of a sudden, that things will get exciting again.

Keep me company whilst those around me shift in their sleep. I will not join them, just yet. I have plans to make.