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Showing posts from July, 2011

Bog Standard

Terry Baker undid  the buckles of his armour plated jerkin and shook himself free.  Phil called out after him "gosh tez you have got big muscles" as he skipped out the door towards the shower block. These days life at Bog Stands (short for Bog Standard's) was getting duller and duller which pleased the boys no end. In a world bursting to the seams with magic and coincidence each of them had previously lain in their beds dreaming of the mundane - the chance to pass the time with a simple worthwhile task like mining for coal or breaking rocks or labeling envelopes even. To remind himself of simpler times Terry had kept a stash of look and learn comics handed down to him from his particularly straight forward uncle Eric who had worked as a store detective by day and was a scout master of a Tuesday and Friday evenings. Now of course no one knew what a reef knot was let alone a round turn and two half hitches. This was clearly, Terry thought, due to the saturation of life with

Old Poem

Sometimes I feel like a broken tap splurging untreated sewage. At other moments I feel elated with the rush of creative juices geezering around me. Mmm. So to speak. The following is a poem salvaged from my  OS 9 mackintosh. It is grim but I think the overall message (Really) is that we need to accept responsibility. The apportioning of blame seems to me to be a very English devise. I see david Cameron in his Big Society sitting on the throne chair in a forest clearing telling everyone how the bad people who did these bad things will be punished and then we will all be alright. Dostoyevsky lies spinning in an unmarked grave nearby. Humans are all responsible for each other. Right? Love is what remains of us. Well enjoy. Don't Blame Me Who me? looks from side to side No mate You've got the wrong man Guv its a fair cop Thats a quote from an advert Not the truth I was in all night with me mum Slag The dog ate my homework I was blinded by the light I was blinded by y

I take it back

Harry potter is culturally more significant than the mafa goldsmiths show. There was a brilliant film in the goldsmiths ma show which set two parallel written narratives to death metal. One line from this stuck in my head. Hegel is stuck in abstraction. Philosophy quickly leads to over awareness. So why did no one (with two accidental exceptions) at the MA show stride over to the exit from the hall of mirrors and show us the way out? We must concede that the value of such an exhibition is either individual genius or potential monetary value. Narrative absorption is associated with entertainment and is therefore not valid in the serious art realm. It is treated as a laugh up the sleave joke. I have just sat with a reverent audience through the last Harry Potter movie. Whilst the plot was written by an individual its relevance lies in the group endeavour that brought it to the screen. It was confused and only occasionally truly manifesting emotional depth but as a piece of art that ac

artist at work

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woman Sweeping

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Greece

The universe is more like a giant thought than a machine. So spake James Jeans . Actually what he said was "The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter." When asked if he thought life was an accident he stated that he was inclined to consider the material world a derivative of conciousness and not the other way around. I am inclined to consider the two to exist in tandem. There is no linearity - no cause and effect. We know observation changes the spin of an electron. This is scientific fact. But is it not worth remembering that scientific fact is always just the edges of our current perimeter of knowledge? This morning I had the sense that what we experience is what we believe we are experiencing. Einstein descri

Afore thought

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 ON leaving through the school gate today a lady offered me a "leaflet for our arty workshop". She may just aswell have said "a leaflet for our low guilt child care in the summer holidays". I tend to feel that the further away the "workshop" is the more guilty I feel.  I feel duty bound to earn more money to pay for their time in someone else's care. As a child I instinctively felt that being left to my own devises was a way of being arty. These days arty is prescribed. The aforementioned leaflet was on nice glossy paper so I was hopeful when I gave it a quick look. "welcome to the world of Harry Potter...". Really. Fantasy over imagination. Just think if Damien Hirst had gone to arty workshops we might have ended up with the current film influencing him. Jaws for instance. I jest. Here is a poem about my beautiful sons and my parental concerns.

Tennis Hole

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Now Murray's gone out How will we fill the hole THe sense of something gnawing Deep within the soul Cos cheering Johnny foreigner Just seems rather hollow And another nation's identity Isn't ours to borrow But I guess that we are free now To get on with our lives INstead of suspending play Like bees asleep in hives We'll wake up in the morning And wonder to ourselves Did that all really happen Or was it just some elves Who sprinkled tennis fairy dust On our knitted brows To make us feel less serious Whilst herding sacred cows