they have a job to do. this is no place for sentimentality. things will be better; yes, things will be better. after this. sightlines must be clear, the future will be clear; after this. progress - things will be better. after this.

sightlines must be clear. they have a job to do. elevations must be checked. the ground prepared. this is no place for sentimentality. space must be made for the future. after this. after this. after this.

there is a procedure. that way no one is confused. things will be better. after this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

how does a theodolite work? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite i'm not sure i'm any the wiser

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

one of my strange fantasies - this is a place in hackney wick that i call the bike cememtary; i thought that it might be an appropriate venue for my music hall character. i also like the bearsuit. post apocalyptic cabaret. waiting for godot - style.

there was a programme on rod hull and emu last night. the act simply involved a man beating the shit out of celebritys (a good thing for starters) with a lurex glove puppet, which he controlled brilliantly, in the shape of a cartoon emu.

http://povonline.com/cols/COL236.htm for a description of his most famous encounter in america, with johnny carson. he did exactly the same thing in england with michael parkinson, amongst others. but i disagree with the writer that it was his courage more than his puppet that made his fortune. it was the puppet, and the violence. i watched him avidly as a kid.

"Afterwards, I told Rod it had been hilarious.  Without a trace of ego -- and maybe even a touch of regret -- he said, "It always is...for about five minutes.  Afraid it doesn't go much farther than that."

apparently he grew to hate emu, which is even better. he tried making public appearences without the bird and no one was interested. they didn't want him without his prosthesis.  he felt that he was typecast. the documentary had a great line "..the emu became an albatross.." - i love that! probably cos i have a bit of a thing about the ancient mariner.

but i think the idea of a long decline manacled to a puppet bird is sufficiently absurdly tragic to appeal to me.

english readers will very likely know the fast show character Arthur "where's me washboard" Atkins. for those who don't, imagine Dick Van Dyke in mary poppin's speech patterns, but with a less surreally tortured accent. he's a fictional 1930's/40's variety act comedian/(i think)song and dance man. he has inexplicable catchphrases: "where's me washboard", and patter "i've seen you, putting tongue in yer dad's sandwiches on a ham day!". like all old comedians, it's now very hard to see what the joke is. which is, of course, the joke.

the point of this rambling is an idea i've just had, or which has just properly crystallised. i've used the dramatic monologue form before in performances (i don't know if i mentioned that this is the sort of art i've become most interested in making), but i've had a lot of half formed ideas and texts hanging around. i realised that what was missing was a persona to deliver them, make them hang together; a context. i think that arthur atkins holds the key: not funny/funny, surreal, tortured mockney enunciation. and the particular form has to be the musical monologue, accompanyment from keyboard and swannee whistle, pratfalls, lame jokes, double entendres.

http://www.sagamorerecords.com/gf/georgeformbylisteningroom.html another reference point - he's a bit sentimental, but i was always fond of him when i was a kid, and his films seemed to be perpetually on telly. i got off on his double entendres, even though i didn't have a clue what he was implying. he did a song called "i love bananas because they have no bones". can't get much better

http://www.forced.co.uk/archive/firstNight.html this show was brilliant, they brought out something that was quite sinister, and definitely nasty in variety, the mind reader act went from harmless entertainment to predictions as curses (directed against the audience). the make up and fixed glassy smiles were perfect.

so i've been working this evening on a couple of songs for the very embryonic act. it's moved on from being a cluster of cells and is at least nearly an embryo. one is in the person of an aztec priest finding his ziggurat only half built. here's a sample:

"I’ve got ‘arf a ziggurat

‘arf a ziggurat

wot’s the use of that?" (that's the chorus)

"I ‘ad me victim done up nice

I ‘ad me knife all sharp

I starts to drag ‘im up the steps

Heading for the top

The steps stopped short

And I was caught

I was neither ‘ere nor there

And what a proper state I looked

Still ‘olding ‘im by the 'air"

the dick van dyke parody mockney is an essential part i feel, given the amount of smug twats who now seem to live in these parts - even frequenting (for god's sake!) the bethnal green working men's club. honourable mention should go here to chas and dave http://www.chasndave.co.uk/newindex.html a novelty pop duo from the late '70's early'80's, whose work is, i feel, ripe for reassesment. plus of course madonna's bloke, whathisname ritchie for his film portrayals of lovable working class thugs

the other song is "me brahn umbrella" a cheerful song about one man's love for his umbrella. lame double entendres abound:

"Wiv me brahn umbrella

O wiv me brahn umbrella

I’m a very well known fella rahnd the tahn (that's round the town)

I puts it up, and I takes it dahn

Ooh watch yer backs

Me umbrella’s arahnd!" dick van dyke would be proud of the enunciation, i feel, as would most of the cast of eastenders

"I often gets to thinking

As I am walking ‘ome

That I get so many queer looks

Or nods and winks from some

Is it ‘cos I always puts it up

Even when it’s dry as a bone?"

anyway, enough of that sillyness. the other monologue is a piece about icarus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(mythology) from the point of view of a sidekick of his. the premise is that after icarus ("fuck you dad, i know what i'm doing!") became barbecue, it started a cult in the ancient world amongst impressionable teens and children, to the extent that it was unsafe to walk under any wall or high cliff, such was the frequency of plummeting adolescents. the narrator feels decidedly ambivalent towards the big ick, and his (death) cult. he wanders the world ancient mariner-like, telling people about his famous friend - the eternal ligger. he also points out that this sort of die young stay pretty thing is always with us, and always has it's appeal - some of it's exponents have even claimed to be sons of god. it links to the whole rock n roll suicide phenomenon. the piece ends with the narrator lip-synching to a loop made up of hendrix, nirvana, joy division, and the ruts. the only extant version of this text is on a truly lamentable video i made of it, so i need to piece it together from the unedited footage. it's better than it sounds, honest! i think it needs the stupid songs to really hold together.

so, costume: straw boater, striped blazer, spats, shirt and spotted silk scarf. and brown umbrella. and cardboard aztec priest's hat. and crap wings. white pancake, red blusher (a bit too much of it) a bit of lipstick, eyeliner, with laughter lines drawn in the corners of the eyes with eyebrow pencil.

persona: fragile, obseqious ("our only aim is your delight" where's that from?), slightly desperate, glassy smile. i keep thinking of the figures who gesticulate at the ruins in piranesi. or this:http://artchive.com/ftp_site.htm (if that works, it should be watteau's portrait of gilles).

anyway, enough of this, i'm on my way to bed.

has anyone seen this before? (link below). you have to download a plug-in, but i would say it's worth it- not for the content, or not exactly. they are 360 degree pictures that can be scrolled around, and magnified. one of the things that i found great is that your actual viewpoint, when you scroll down to see your own, or the photographer's feet, is taken up by an i-pix icon. the actual point of view is branded. it just makes explicit what photography does anyway, including photojournalism.   http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9708/diana/london.pix/

the other fantastic thing is that when combined with the text, the two seem startlingly at odds with each other - because you can see behind the photograph as well. for example:

"By early Saturday morning, the area surrounding Buckingham Palace is nearly impassable on foot. As crowds of people volley for space with packs of media, the circular area quickly reaches maximum capacity."  (how do you "volley" for space?")

if you look in what i take to be a forwards direction, there is a bit of a crowd, looking sideways and behind, there is sufficient space for people to be strolling along quite casually, certainly not "volleying". you can also see some other photographers, they are looking towards the crowd, cropping it. i saw some of those pictures at the time, and it did indeed seem as if the space was packed.

it puts me in mind of the notorious sequences purportedly showing the entirety of the population of baghdad turning out to topple saddam's statue with the help of u.s. marines.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/images/SQ3.gif i don't recall this image making it onto the news at the time

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/images/SQ4.gif we saw this one, but not from this angle. it's not exactly packed is it?

the full sequence is here http://www.dabeeeenster.com/index.php?p=34 good blog as well.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/10/war10.xml this is how the event was reported at the time, and the pictures that were aired

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/photo_gallery/2933629.stm here's the sequence again, from a different angle. when you know that it's not "thousands" of iraquis, as most of the media had it at the time, you can see that the crowd is spread pretty thinly.

this probably isn't news to anyone, and i'm not saying that a 360degree camera is going to guarantee truth in journalism, it can still be faked, photoshopped or whatever. but what this all does, from my point of view is to demonstrate how actually, the picture and the words are frequently at odds, but we believe the words. in the case of journalism, they're meant to come from someone who was actually there, to give the picture context, and the authority of a witness. i think that neither exactly describes the world, nor can they. that's why i like the branded point of view in the i-pix - that's honest.

i have an image in my head that's stayed with me for a month or more now - surveyors standing in a muddy wasteland, gouged by tyre tracks, no trees, a threatening sky. the margins of this space are delineated by a wire fence, which brightly coloured rubbish has been blown up against and caught in the mesh. that, and the luminous yellow safety jackets, helmets and equipment of the surveyors are the only patches of colour. they walk round, studying a map, one stands at a distance from the other, holding a stick perpendicular to the mud whilst the other looks through the theodolite. this device has long spidery legs. it is for measuring, and looks like it might pace out the space itself, an alien insect.

the men, the pole and the theodolite are the only things that are vertical here, everything else has been razed, is ash grey and mud brown. they and their machine look very tall. they are serious people with a job to do. the wind blows, rattling their map. it is going to rain. they are going to make things happen.

i saw these men stalking across an extensive patch of mud and rubble next to the bus stop, with their industrial yellow jackets and daddy longlegs machine. there are going to be new buildings there. loft style flats, no doubt. for cool and contemporary urban living. or something. it occured to me that maps being made means that what is being mapped is under threat. generals use maps, bomber pilots used to. property developers and estate agents use them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

so i thought this was a good place to put some of my erased maps. i did a few of them several years ago. i nicked them from places like the A to Z, and carefully removed the street names. this is done in wartime, to confuse the enemy. i found the ritual absorbing, running my computer eraser along the contours of streets that i knew very well; i only used areas that i knew very well. paradoxically, it felt like this erasure of the image, or name was preserving the thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i lived here for some years, in this tangle of streets, at several different addresses. they are like a tangle of nerves and capillaries. we call main roads arterial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and this one was taken from an old geography textbook, with the explanatory labels removed obviously. i left the aggressive arrows though.

a lot of london's nineteenth century housing was speculatively built, which meant ever smaller parcels of land were leased and then sub leased to independent builders, who would buy as much as they could afford and put houses on it to sell. the houses would be built from pattern books. details and decoration would be dictated by the builder's taste and finances. this explains why the houses in one street can vary, also why there sometimes seem to be extraordinarily short and eccentrically placed streets - it was where the land was cheaper and was subdivided many times between many builders. very frequently, they named their streets after themselves, if they had enough land to make a whole street. the street names are the record of a class. those who might have actually done most of the building however, have no memorial.

another heap below. i like the way that the scraggy vegetation behind it looks feathery. started off as builder's rubble, and then - as they always do - it accumulated a lot of other stuff, random stuff. it's like they develop enough mass to gain a gravitational field of their own, and attract more crap. like the whole area.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

what the fuck was i on about? that image, even without the wheelybin is nowhere near patience strong territory. theres the green fence for a start.

(i think i was slightly pissed and in rambling mode). also, to be truly postcard-y, the tombstones would have to be somewhere near vertical; they could lean at eccentric angles, in fact i suppose that would be expected in order to evoke olde worlde charm. broken and chucked in a corner is not it though. some vegetation would be necessary, mature trees.

so, in short, i was talking total bollocks.

anyway, whoohoo! 500 hits! that's brilliant, they can't all have been me. thankyou everyone who's reading. (comments would be good too, please? or not, if you don't want to).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

another heap- this time, it's tombstones. the yellow wheelybin adds to the overall effect, too. it stops the whole thing degenerating into sepia and good taste. the sort of meaningful yet wistful meditations in a graveyard that might get put in a book of "poems for the bereaved". the sort of inspirational shit that is intended to encourage people to affirm life or something.  heaps are rude, or i hope so - they insist on their thing-ness, objects first and foremost, and on the agency (if it can be called that) of human carelessness - they are not metaphors or an occasion for elevating thoughts. they are dumb, in several senses.

i was just looking for some links to Patience Strong, writer of inspirational verses - couldn't find any. i remember her work (if she exists, i heard a rumour that she was a pseudonym used by a number of people; a cottage industry) from posters at my primary school. picture of flower/sunset/church/thatched cottage and four lines or so culminating with the message that jesus loves you. i have several of her books, largely because i like the 1950's colours in the thatched cottage etc. images. english pastoral, but why in a largely urban population we should associate the countryside with all that's good and pure is beyond me. about ten years ago i came across a pile of back issues of a magazine called "This England"; it was published by the league of st. george, who as far as i remember are an offshoot of the national front. they were the bit that decided, without irony, to go "respectable". the magazine features images of the english pastoral, and poems by patience strong. in her brief biog, which they printed, they praise her "robust" stance on immigration. being the league of st. george it must have been pretty rabidly robust. the magazine on the surface looked uncontroversial, who could possibly object to pictures of the country and inspirational verses? but to my mind it all hangs together; the twee pastoral (archetypally english, though why that should be when most of us have never lived anywhere that had a village green, let alone played cricket on it . i know i never have) and the inspirational verse combined with the laments for an (in my opinion mythical) vanished or vanishing england seems more than a little sinister.  it's basically like the daily mail.

anyway, patience strong would have had something to say about this picture, if it didn't have the wheelybin, i think.