CosmiKnot

And so a petition is underway to prevent cashless scrap metal trading . Not quite so moralistic as the campaign to get us all reading but from the same genus none the less. Its past of Zizek's chocolate laxative culture. The hole in my bucket. The wireless keyboard for my ipod touch second generation. I mean a few hours ago I wanted to begin writing this but began to ponder the delights of being able to type it into my ipod touch that has scene a new burst of life this Christmas. After much searching and ebay trawling I have come to the conclusion that there is no wireless keyboard compatibility with the ipod 2g. So now I am writing this on my wife’s laptop, which I really ought to have done in the first place. So scrap metal amendment act is akin to the finger in the dyke except the finger in the dyke is committed as a last resort and there is an awareness of this in the inserter’s brain. No the petitioners for the scrap metal bill amendment are taking the moral high ground. I ...

I am very grateful to one Bill Ectric for pointing me in the direction of his article on Strindberg . It is utterly enthralling. I recommend you read it post haste. Bill was kind enough to ask me about my work for an interview on his blog . Fans of David Devant may be interested in his latest post on the recently rediscovered film The M agician . I used to think I had aspirations to being some kind of polymath until I checked out the links at the side of Bill's page. Now I see I'm more of a dabbler. Toe in the ocean and all that. But as I used to say a little knowledge goes a long way. Reading about Strindberg was a revelation because it sounds like he freed himself from the expectations for literature to remain one side of fictional divide. When I wrote The latch last month I felt I had crossed a threshold and had leapt onto a horse far too wild for my wriding abilities. I think I just about managed to hold on though. Bill Lectric's novel, Tamper , seems simply irresisti...

Once upon a time there was a race of sea monkey tadpole people who lived in the deepest depths of an ocean. Of course they did not know it was an ocean as they lived in it. And they didn’t think it was deep or dark for that matter either. One day a young sea monkey like tadpole boy called Pimico was out collecting different shells from the sea bed (gathering beautiful shells was a favourite pass time of the tadpole seamonkey people) when he came across a wall of rock that he had never seen before. It was covered in lots of plants and shells that he had never seen before. He was amazed and filled with delight as he began to make his way up the rock collecting such a wild array of delicate discarded mollusc homes as he went. I will have the best shell collection in the whole of seamonkey tadpole world he mused in a non-verbal blur. His lack of understanding of literate forms of communication did not stop the joy rising through his body with each new delightful specimen that he acquire...

This then is the second part of my Adam Ant adventure. I am no expert on the subject and feel the shadow of an early Ant's bass player fall on the page. Mr Andrew Warren, for tis he, never struck me as someone who stood for much nonsense. I feel privileged to know this punk legend. The three minute warning announces to the people of Tunbridge Wells that the band are about to take to the stage. So having recovered from my fit of snake brandishing induced hysterics I return to my seat at the front by the nosebleed inducing PA. First thrill is remembering that Adam Ant always has two drummers. Already my ticket is feeling great value for money. The band, as is traditional, make a forward foray onto the stage to clear the room of all doubters. Then the way is ready for the king/prince (no not leader that’s a very bad man). Adam takes to the stage in finely crafted Nelson style pirate’s hat adorned with peacock feathers. Chief. I was never a fan as a boy yet watching now it is immedia...

Hello this happened to me January of this year. This version (I've tried it several times) is probably still far too long and a tad rambling but to this day it still feels like an episode of The Prisoner. Mikey Georgeson I think I am at liberty to talk about this now that the felon and driver of the bandit vehicle is safely behind bars having pleaded guilty. Though I am not sure what he pleaded guilty to. The whole thing still feels like a piece of meta-fiction and having spent the last few years delving into the realms of my unconscious creativity this is hardly surprising. Several friends have indeed commented that such a colourful piece of happenstance could only happen to me. I don’t remember the impact itself (normal I am told) but I do remember stopping in a box junction once I heard a siren and saw the familiar flickering blue light in the darkness down the road.  I always used to feel somehow useful as I pulled over to let the emergency services pass. This time, however, w...

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Looking back over the sea of fog I can now report that my Mr. Solo odyssey was an attempt to live life as cheese dream. To go hither and thither wherest it may lead me. Lately I've been in search of a good sleep. I think this began when the ultimate cheese dream manifested after a Mr. Solo rehearsal. Now I can see how this may have been to do with my karmic directors being at odds with the flow of the universe. This resulted in a transit van carrying two tons of gold hitting me head on. I thank G(g)od (the universe) that I was alone but still feel that terrifying fear of being buried alive that I felt at the time from time to time. It's wearing off a little and I find I can once more see the magical side of sitting at a set of traffic lights in a neck brace trying not to rubber neck the doubloons on the road.  And so it was that I took a train journey to Royal Tunbridge Wells in search of a certain fermented dairy product style somnambulistic experience. It was a time to rea...

There is a soul shaped hole in the art world. We work around it as if it were a large dining table with jagged corners. We could all sit down around its expansive perimeter but prefer instead to manoeuvre about it using our rapier like wits to dismiss its presence. An artist could incorporate the table in their work but they would have to somehow knowingly create an alter ego who was outside of the modes of knowing analysis. Mentioning William Blake is like declaring an appreciation of antique tables that existed in more innocent times but such things are frankly no longer realistic for those who eat on the hoof. I have tried to avoid the table but it makes me sick. The art world loves its finger food.

So there I was swaying in the breeze contemplating the growing pile of fag butts in the plant pot and how I really ought to dispose of them for the sake of my karma when I realised that the click I had heard was the front door closing itself. I had no key. “I have no key’ I thought. I am ill and standing in the garden locked out feeling nauseous from the guilt of not being able to give up smoking. I knew for a fact that I had left the door on the latch. But this was no Victorian manor house I found myself suddenly exiled from – this was a late sixties purpose built ex local authority brutal semi. I still had my slippers on and my phone was inside. I remembered that I had seen the magnificent Tania sauntering home after the school run and wondered about walking around the block to her house in order to phone my wife. Oh the times I had fantasised about such an occurrence but in these reveries I did not have slippers on my feet and an eye of what I speculatively presumed to be suppuratin...

When did this all start? You know? The whole wearing a coat to school is so not cool. Except this is never articulated under any circumstances. This is stoicism writ large. Do school children act as one brain? Somehow all knowing that they must return to their respective hives and refuse to done the mantel of conformity. “I’ve cracked it.” I thought as I walked my younger coat-wearing son down the hill to school – children don’t wear coats because they are not TV advertised at all hours. Come on M&S I mused; let’s have a cool coat advert for the parents of the kids. But then on returning I enviously espied a pair of addidas gazelles on the feet of an older kid. These are not remorselessly branded onto our eyeballs by the glowing screen in the corner so why do I want them so? Ahh well advertising is branding now isn’t it? Things don’t need to be on the telly to be advertised. I mean those evil product development geniuses embed the advertising into the product. The product is a slow...

     For the past two weekends I have been trying to resolve the sale of my wife’s and mine long playing records. This is a compact way of describing the process that has been slowly unravelling since we met and so that is the plot I shall try and detail. As I type my wife has just congratulated me on “sorting the records out”. That’s more money than I thought she declares gaily dismissing three quarters of my life’s memories. Stick to the plot. Last Saturday I packed the four crates into the car and ordered the boys into the car for the drive a mile down the road. This took longer than a non-parent record collection indulging individual would anticipate and consequently we were fractionally too late for the loading bay outside the shop. After two circuits the space had become available when the Astra van pulled off. The boys and I spotted no cameras pointed at the bay and decided to take a chance. The moment we got in the space a large whale of a bus surfaced a...

  I have become a football dad. Okay I was already one last season but that was football-dad-lite and came free. For a start it was, whisper it, a church league. There was always a prayer before kick off and one of the hazards was a certain coach who seemed to enjoy asking me, in a Columbo style line of questioning, to remind him which church we went to. My son’s team, despite being an overspill squad, won the league in what turned out to be a nail biting close to the season. This season he is playing for an eleven a side team and I am suddenly one of the squad drivers. Last week in the car park one of the boys remarked on the soft suspension and I became aware of just how low I had let the tyre pressure get. Now coming from a family of panickers I always get a sinking feeling when confronted with something as simple as a flat tyre. It feels like fate has caught up with me and has decided to show me I was never meant to be a vehicle owner (Our family panicking is well founded and n...

Why does the search for the primordial experience feel harder to find these days? This was a question I half formed in my mind as, en famille, we marched with a growing throng of other villagers towards the annual bonfire (resists the urge to add bun fight). I mean all the ingredients are there – darkness, smells of cooking flesh, general hubbub of anticipation, big fire (not as big as last year – never is – will be a single match by the year 2065), alcohol, explosions and lights from neighbouring villages, mud squelching under foot, barricades… but still it feels like a simulacra of the real thing. We all know what we’re doing. Think of those kerazy surrealist dudes who took up automatic drawing with gusto only to find themselves falling into a pattern of knowing precisely what they were going to draw within a few months. Well that’s like fireworks night or rather bonfire night . I stood there remembering the previous years when I had felt all poetic like I was part of a genuinely pa...

A funny thing happened on the way to the newsagent. There I was wondering what collection of neural passages it was that led to a sense of feeling like I was where I am when I began telling myself that I could perhaps find ways of bringing a sense of the wonder I felt in the Swiss Alps to my South London proximity which might include enjoying the foliage in the local area, for example the vines growing on my neighbours boundary wall, when a leaf loomed in my field of vision and I found myself plucking a dense grape (perhaps a pinot noire) from the interwoven recesses and savouring the taste. The Lavaux vineyards are known for their pinot noire grapes and yet the Swiss, I am told, choose to find it uneconomical to export their wines. You are probably thinking I think I’m being annoying on purpose to write in such a clumsily tangled fashion and whilst I admit there is a feint echo of my previous self that sought to prod the fleshy hard drives of liberal clever clogs’ I prefer to thi...

I've just got back from the exhibition called Quand l'art fait rire at the mcb-a in Lausanne. it was great to experience a darkened room of Bruce Nauman's clown torture although in not sure it was wholly responsible of me to drag my two sons into it. I was thinking they would find it funny but they both became visibly paler and i fear i may have clumsily provided them with a moment that will haunt then for life. Nauman's group of films do genuinely transcend the cliche of clown as demonic unlike the skull with a clowns nose in the other room. and what a treat the William Wegman films were! That man has real muscle both literally and creatively. Unlike nearly every artist at frieze this year he addresses the over awareness of our age with humanity and intelligence. He seems to approach video with the same sense of wonder that celluloid pioneers embodied (l'entracte par example.) "i should go" he says in one clip picking up the arm chair and standard lamp a...

For the last few years I have made a conscious effort to avoid the above named program. Yes even mentioning its name might bring all manor of calamities upon my head. Having had my own brush with minor celebrity I was finding it`s visceral efficiency some how touched me where I didn´t want touching. In the pop world I get the feeling that once you`ve had your go you are expected to politely move aside and let some other young turk step up and take a swipe. My lingering on the edges of the playing field has become, I suspect a mild cause for embarassment" is that man still loitering?" There is something of the primal power of the mob about X Factor that disturbs me. (In an earlier blog I mentioned guilt over a radio shaped like a JPS racing car that my parents had bought when caught up in the whirl of a cheap market auction and the frenzied feeling that all of this is somehow of vital earth shattering importance not to be allowed to pass unacted upon permeates pores of this te...

There is a form of ultra rationalist art that permeates institutions. This appears to me to be a facsimile of the creative process. artists are encouraged to move through everyday life and project it back in metaphorical power points rather like computers programmed to have personalities. It seems data is fed into the artist who then makes a rational manifestation of his or her processing of the information. This does have echoes of the mystery of creativity but so does a computer programmed with data. my thesis its that Duchamp is a scratch in or collective unconscious and we are stuck on that groove. in the same way that aristotle was not proposing dogmatic annihilation of intuition Duchamp was deliberately confronting the methodology of objective rationality whilst retaining the ineffable quality of individual process. We however have taken him at face value. If a work of art does not reflect the neurosi of modern culture. i.e. violence porn nihilism materialism then it is deemed ...

Still got shingle in my shoes From saint Margarets As I step from the train doors My parachute of text books Carefully packed on my back 54321 Go Down into the city we descend A strip of grey against the stark bright sky. Like a swarm of bees on the horizon In a cartoon riffing on the follies Of urban man Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Reduced sodium and fat is it seems healthy eating. In some cultures eating and food preparation are central to a joined up unified experience of life but here in the united states of mackie dee life is so fragmented our only hope is the first lady campaigning to get restaurants to reduce the salt and fast in the food. We need to be educated to follow the guide lines watch our calories because we pretend society is equal. When you see a bbc documentary suggesting that the worlds's poorest people have a long way to go until they are like us whilst a whole extended family gleefully tuck into baked aubergine with a handful of cumin and other spices you have to wonder. The more civilised we become the more divorced we are from living. First Lady Michelle Obama: "Making the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice" | The White House Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Marshal mcluhan was inspired. This doesn't mean everything he said was gospel. I think some of what he had to say about visual image making was a little off track. He believed in short that outline was closer to our primal sense of perception than the post renaissance obsession with light and shade. I believe here he is intuiting the idea that in byzantine art the surface was a manifestation of something awesome and ineffable beyond it. My problem is that now outline is part of the surface world of The Label. The quality he is grasping for is not defined by whether or not it is outlined or not but whether or not it is felt and not preconceived. Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

As I lay on the eight foot In diameter trampoline Engulfed by her netted walls Staring down the wishing Well of infinity curve blue A small white cloud Was dropped Into the azure field of my vision Whereupon it became A tiny fluffy white feather Thousands of miles above the earth Falling silently Like a weightless bullet Onto the tip Of my right big toe. Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

With my monthly phone bill going up and up I decided to get a smart phone and a tariff I would find harder to go over. Oddly enough this has kept my bills down. Hidden within my telephonic box of delights is a sat-nav system so without going out of my way (ho ho) to do so I have now become a minor user of this wonder of the age.  A good friend is reading a book on getting lost and how we are becoming increasingly immune to its value as an experience. Or so I conject. I think you can see where this is going but my sat-nav allowed me so re-aquaint myself with the forgotten pleasures of getting lost within a safe perimeter. Although I have always considered that sat-nav as an extension of man that reduces our ability to rely on instinct and further removes us from our sensory environment, I in fact found that my first use of the devise brought me closer to my instincts. Returning home from the brilliant Supernormalfestival I activated my navigation Ap which promptly launched me off a...

Charles Hitchcock reached for his pen and began scribbling furiously. So here it is the system. If you are good with figures and the abstract qualities of money due to a deficit in imagination and/or empathy then you will succeed in business and financial matters. If you are somehow so unaware of your connection to humans around you and place no value on inter-relations and problem solving then you will succeed in management. Result - the non-empathetic leftbrain thinkers make all the decisions concerning how we solve the problem of the swathes of people alienated by this system whilst remaining wholly unaware of the swathes of alienated and literally impoverished people who don't happen to have a financial mindset.       It suits the financially gifted to foster a non tactile, abstract culture because this is how money works. Thus the non abstract thinkers forget their gifts in other more tangible areas. Abstract thinking in numerical values is rewarde...

I wanted to try and explore what I see as a misunderstanding of emphasis in Marshall Mcluhan’s thought process. in a recent blog Lance Strate writes that Marshall Mcluhan saw how the televisual environment moved us away from a characteristically linear mode of thinking. Earlier he made the point that Mcluhan, being a Catholic, down played the influence of the Guttenberg press on the Reformation. The very Reformation that was, if you chose to see it that way, the first major foothold in the triumph of the left brain in modern times. I suspect that Strate did not engage with Mcluhan’s far more visual book “The Medium is the Massage”. In this book through a less linear and altogether more cut-up style he makes it unequivocally clear that he thinks the move away from the linear mode of thinking is a good thing. Yes the Guttenberg press made it easier to share knowledge but the technology demanded that we start to conceive of it in linear chunks.This book also makes clear that any interfac...

I have in my hand a biro with a round barrel as opposed to the more familiar hexagonal bic shape - designed for ease of grip. The irony being I find the round barrel both easier to grip and more pleasing on the eye. Oh how we laughed. Lots of products would have us believe that we really are useless at holding onto things and developers build their unique selling points around their improved ability to facilitate ease of grip. Even when wet! It's obvious really but the economy is driven by innovation. Innovation cross the nation instant salvation. Or something like that. Is this the same as needs must as the Devil drives? Or necessity is the mother of invention? Really it's we need something to keep all this money making more money so let's invent a process called innovation.      I really must confess to a sense of major existential angst derived from my inherent love of a piece of gadgetry at a bargain price. There is a feeling of futilty that surrounds this. The sense...