Cock-crow

Early morning mist.
Cocks launching their challenges
across the valley.

Toilet troubles

What’s the etiquette when you find someone crying in the loos at work?

I guess it depends on how well you know her, (and I’m assuming that tears in the toilets are an exclusively feminine form of retreat).

When someone I didn’t know found me blubbing into the bog-roll last year she said are you ok? in a really worried voice, terrified that I wasn’t, bless her. I just said Men! which was nicely generic, and she said they’re all the same and left as fast as she decently could.

I had a slightly trying time earlier this year which entailed daily trips to hide myself away in the disabled toilet. Eventually a lovely colleague came through, winkled me out of the loo, asked me what was wrong, and bundled me off home to cry in peace and sleep it off. I appreciate her patience and generosity even now.

The other morning I found another colleague in the loos dabbing her eyes with cold water and pretending she had hay fever or a cold. I asked her how she was. She said the atmosphere in her part of the office was really bad, but didn’t elaborate. The atmosphere has been rather lumpy recently, what with the heat, over-work and other more random stresses, and I suspect that one of the she-witches had been just a bit too bitchy to cope with.

I asked if she wanted to go for a cup of tea, but she didn’t, so back we went to our desks and I sent her a couple of e-mails through the day. Apparently she spoke to her line manager about her problems, and hopefully, that’ll be enough.

Since then we smile and say hi with no sense of constraint that I can see, but we haven’t spoken much. Maybe she’s embarrassed, maybe we have very little in common, or maybe crying in the loos is just something that all women do at one time or another, and the sisterly thing is to be supportive at the time, but not to acknowledge it afterwards. Rather like the mayor and the chief of police bumping into each other in a brothel.

Ach, what do I know?

Up close and personal

This post started off about something else entirely, but rapidly became a reflection on reality and the falsity of reproductions sparked by a recent visit to the Kandinsky exhibition at the Tate Modern.

Prétensions sont nous. I am sorry.

It’s very easy to think of Kandinsky as a purveyor of pretty patterns, and Composition VIII below…

… shows why this might be.

I’d been looking forward to wallowing sensuously in pattern, but the exhibition is much tougher and more challenging than I expected. The exhibition is explicitly about Kandinsky’s journey towards abstraction, and when you see the later works in context you can see the darkness and violence continuing through all his pieces. What struck me the most at the time was that I wanted to see Composition VII, next to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

The Picasso is more obviously violent because the imagery is more accessible. The Kandinsky appears to be merely colour and pattern when reduced to a thumbnail or a postcard. If it was printed it on silk and sold as a scarf it would go rather well with my raspberry coloured velvet coat.

Isn’t it disturbing how much of an image’s impact is altered by these changes in scale so you can have them as fridge magnets or postcards or key-rings?

Only the original is the original. Even the versions that these thumbnails take you too, which are the largest which I could find online, are just pretty cyphers. I think I’ve seen Guernica, but of course I haven’t. My experiences are diluted and vicarious and my responses are based on lies and self-delusion.

Of course, all of the above could be written about the difference between live and recorded music. I’m struggling to remember which classical musician it was who rejected recorded music as a dead and lifeless thing and the only ones I can remember are, of course much recorded men and women. Make of that irony what you will.

I am no musical aesthete (I once found myself critiquing some Mozart by saying: it had a lot of notes in it) but I still remember the whole-body sensation of being in the Wigmore Hall and letting Debussy wash over, under, around and through me. It took about a day and a half for the feeling to wear off. Or standing in the NEC in the middle of Annie Lennox’s incredible voice, or inside the sound of Wish You were Here at a Roger Waters gig.

The point here is, once again, that reproduction does not in fact reproduce; it distances, diminishes and makes safe. A sensuous and physical response is reduced to a mental one. And worst of all, it short-changes us. We think we’ve had an experience, when in fact we have not. It wasn’t the music we heard on the radio, but a representation of the music, as is made explicit at the start of Wish you Were Here.

It is of course easier now for more people to see original art and be present when more live music is made than ever before, but that access is overtaken daily by reproductions and derivations. I’ve contributed to it myself with my thumbnails and my links.

So we have yet more examples of ways in which our lives are rich in the ertzatz, the imitation, the second-hand and the derivative, to the extent that it is more difficult than ever to see why it is worth seeking out the original, which will only be lumpy, bumpy, harder work, and more challenging.

A genetically modified strawberry, anyone?

New Phone

It wasn’t my fault, ok.Well, the being in Bristol on the wrong day was my fault, I guess. But the upgrading the mobile phone wasn’t. Really it wasn’t. I’d left at 7.00am. It was now 9.30. It was, as I said, the wrong day. Who would turn round and go hammering straight back along the motorway again on such a hot morning? A nice cup of tea and maybe a little window-shopping - where’s the harm in that? Flicking through the papers and drinking a Chai Latte, perhaps.

If they must put large signs in the street advertising the new Sony Ericsson with the 3.2 megapixel camera, what am I going to do about it?

Quite.

So here are some of the pictures I took. For a camera, it’s a bloody cool phone.

I really like living in the future.

Are noses being worn longer in New York this season?

Have you ever noticed how strong the generational influence is on portraiture?

If you look at photos from the 1920s all the girls seem to have tip-tilted noses, neat little chins and big round eyes.

It is hard to tell what any specific early 18th century woman looked like from her portrait, because they all painted to look the same: plump along the jawline, heavy-nosed and pop-eyed. Most of these portraits seem to be informed by the same ideal woman, though there is no way of knowing who the original beauty was. Likewise, 16th century portraits all feature people with long thin faces, long bony noses and sunken eyes. Since such a volta face is genetically impossible we are left with the only explanations being fashion or toadyism.

Now, more than ever before, women manage to achieve a consistent image of beauty. If you look at images of modern celebs and wannabes they are indistinguishable identi-girls; tall, skinny, broad-mouthed, with high round breasts and an expensive mane of hair-extensions. And they all have the same short little round-nostrilled nose, sometimes even a nez retroussez, though these days it is achieved with the knife rather than the brush.

But it seems that a tip-tilted nose is so last year, darling. Take a look at the noses on this lot and see what you think. (Poor Helen Shifter, she’s stuck with last season’s schnoz, and doesn’t it age her? She’s so brave about it, too).

I could draw conclusions, but you are an intelligent person and it’s late, so I’ll trust you to draw your own.

A good move, well made

Most months at about this time I am glad that I no longer work in sales.

Don’t get me wrong - I got a lot out of my time in sales, some of it in cash. I mastered the gentle art of unobtrusive questioning. I learned how to steer a conversation without it being obvious. I acquired the knack of instant-empathy and the ability to manage small-talk with someone who doesn’t do small-talk. I understood the precise ways in which a why-question will take you in a different direction than a how-question.

In many respects, I learned how many beans make five.

But on too many months at about this time a slow strand of tension would start to wind its way around the base of my stomach, tightening every time I dated a cheque, or arranged a meeting, or completed a front-sheet to send a fax. Too many times, there’d still be too much target at the end of the month.

So now, almost a decade later, I look at my watch, look at a calendar, or post a blog, and find myself thinking woohoo, its the 19th, and I don’t have to think about quotas.

It’s good when you still feel smug about a decision 8 years on.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Sun-kissed

sun and breeze touch skin
stroking the boundary between
me and the summer

反射Blog Statsの尼僧の十字

This post wasn’t pornographic so I am doing a disservice to the many people who come here to read it.

I am bored of seeing this appearing so high in my blog-stats so I have used google to translate the page into Japanese because it looks much prettier that way, and the mis-translations may amuse any passing Japanese speaker.

I’ve put the original text of the page into the comments.

There’s a sucker born every minute. I am the sucker. This is the minute.

I had been going to put up a haiku next, because I’ve been too wordy recently, but y’all have to wait for that. This is because I hate being suckered for a fool.

I bought the lies of Sandi Thom’s PR company hook and line, but at least not sinker: one of my original thoughts was how did whatever web service she was using cope with the increase in traffic? I should have followed that thought through, rather than overlaying it with the thought rags to riches, aaahhhh, that’s nice.

Thank’s to Gord’s comment on my previous post that the webcasts were a hoax thought up by her PR company to get good old fashioned print and TV coverage, I started digging around to see what the word on the web is. I particularly like this comment - a good point, well made:

If that bitch plays in the basement she has to be really sexy to attract that many people. Since she wasn´t shavin it live… why the buzz. In context. (Scroll up for the start of the conversation).

And anther one:

…Technorati.com does provide an authoritative view of global conversation on the web. According to Technorati data, this was no viral sensation. Just a very well-crafted PR set-up for a new album. In context.

A great one-liner:

Sandi Thom — such an underground sensation that even the people in the underground hadn’t heard of her! - In context.

And this final piece of wonderfully spiteful and possibly libellous venom refers to the story in the Irish Press that Ms Thom has had a private arrangement with a very wealthy Scottish backer for some time:

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you’re the Scottish investor who’s ponying up money for this singer, who I’d presume you’re banging. You’re entirely within your right to make as much money off your waifish girlfriend as you can make. No god is going to stop you; George W. Bush’s continuing rise toward global domination is living proof that no benevolent force in the universe will do anything to stop you or any other villain from your evil, selfish deed. But does that make it right? Those of us who, as a result of your investment, are confronted with the horrible screeching waifnoise that is the music of your girlfriend, Sandi Thom, will not only loathe your girlfriend, but we will loathe the person who spent money to put her in a position to wage war on the eardrums of the world. In context.

I do find well written invective so soothing…

Anyway, the thread I pulled all of this from degenerates into flaming and trolling, and I could not be bothered to read it right through to the Nazi-post.

I am slightly embarrased that everything I’ve been recycling here comes from one thread, and none of the above is evidence of anything at all of course, though all of it is plausible and obviously none of it is mine. Sometimes google is quicker than thinking.

I dislike being lied to: I particularly dislike being lied to by artists, but I guess an artist can be as deceitful and conniving as the next scamster.

I am reminded of a guy I worked for once who seemed to think that it could be true then it wasn’t a lie. Unfortunately he had no sense of reality or proportion and he appeared to think he could have been a technology millionaire before he was 20, been parachuted into Nicuagrua while in the marines and, at the same time, run a consultancy company with three thousand people on the payroll. The fact that none of it had happened outside his own head was neither here nor there in his revisionist world. He even had the nerve to lecture me on ethics.

Oh, and the disingenuous mendacity of all of this sits pretty unpleasantly with lyrics that read:

When music really mattered and when radio was king
When accountants didn’t have control
And the media couldn’t buy your soul
And computers were still scary and we didn’t know everything

…

When record shops were still on top
And vinyl was all that they stocked
And the super info highway was still drifting out in space

Well, I think computers are pretty fucking scary, and much fucking scarier than ever they were then. But that is another post for another day.

Internet natives

Lord Saatchi the other day described people under the age of 25 as Net Natives and people over that age as Net Immigrants. He didn’t mention the third category of Net Pioneers which is how I’d describe myself, though I was a pioneer who arrived on the East Coast and settled down to a douce and limited life in New England in the 18th century, rather than a pioneer who went shooting and whoring their way out West in the late 19th. I should probably abandon this metaphor while I still can.

What interests me is the quality of ideas which the Net Natives have. I’ve been lagging behind the netgeist, sitting in a rocker on my virtual front porch making quilts and admiring my picket fence, so it was a week or so ago that I became aware of Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage which is genius, what used to be called a killer app (remember them?) and is an idea that could only exist online. Oddly enough, on the same day I heard about Sandi Thom’s arrival as a Punk Rocker with Flowers in her Hair; Sandi web-enabled the idea of let’s put the show on right here in the barn in a way which was of orders of magnitude more effective more quickly than anything Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland ever did. Only yesterday I read about Kyle Macdonald’s One Red Paperclip. Macdonald, like Thom, takes a real-world idea and transforms it online. The pages I’ve linked to explain their stories.

These are the ideas of people who feel instinctively that the web is a place of boundless possibilities. None of them got rich quick, all three worked extremely hard for their suppers. But they fundamentally get the Internet. I had been going to say they understand how the Internet is qualitatively different from what came before, but I am not sure that they do. I suspect that they can no more imagine what it was like before the Internet, than I can imagine what it was like before electricity.