Postcards

Charmouth, Dorset

In theory, it's the time of year when holiday postcards start arriving from friends and relations, but with each new year these seem to grow more infrequent.  Email and social media have pretty much replaced that pleasant and venerable custom.  Not surprisingly -- an old friend is currently travelling in South East Asia, and his blog and Facebook posts are considerably more current, informative and entertaining than any dog-eared, hastily-scribbled bit of card could be that has survived weeks, sometimes months, of travel through the world's postal services.  What's more -- given the difficulty of getting a decent phone signal or internet connection in not-so-far-flung places like Bristol, and the impossibility of getting any at all in mid-Wales -- I am amazed to discover that buses in Vietnam have free wifi.

St. Catherine's Hill and St. Cross,
Hampshire

But I do still like the postcard as an object, and hope that they will continue to exist as a cheap, portable souvenir, even when so few of them now get inscribed, stamped, and entrusted to the mail.  In the age of the smartphone and the selfie, though, this really can't be taken for granted; if no-one buys them, no-one will make them.  Yet another good reason to ban all photography in museums and art galleries...  What would really seal the postcard's fate, I suspect, is if souvenir shops started offering an instant upload of an image from your phone to produce a real, personalised postcard, delivered anywhere in the world, in a street-level version of a service like Touchnote.  Perhaps they already do in Vietnam.

Artist Tom Phillips has had a long fascination with the photographic postcard, and has amassed a unique collection which he donated to the Bodleian Library a few years ago.  This was generous and public-spirited, but as an ex-cataloguer my heart sinks when I contemplate the scale of the task that will have landed on someone's desk.  Library directors love quirky and munificent gifts; library staff dread them.  They've clearly been getting on with it, however, and Tom and the Bodleian have already published various themed selections from this card cornucopia.  To get a free taste you can see a regular selection on a Twitter feed called "We Were The People" (you don't need to have signed up for Twitter to see them).

Father's Day

Majorca 1970

Yesterday was Father's Day, and today would have been my mother's 92nd birthday, so naturally I've been thinking about them both.  No matter how happy your upbringing was -- and mine was very happy, in the main -- there inevitably comes a stage in your life when you realise that your parents were less than perfect, and may even sometimes -- whisper it -- have been idiotic or irresponsible.  As Loudon Wainwright III put it in that great tearjerker Your Mother and I, "your parents are people, and that's all they can be".  Crazy people, maybe.  Well, the past is a crazy place, and that's where they met.

All fathers are weird, I think; it's a weird job, believe me.  Though it was considerably more weird back then.  It took me years to realise my father was, under his easy-going manner, a wary, frustrated man.  You could never quite take him at face value, particularly when he expressed an opinion or made a joke.  Often, when he said one thing, he meant quite another, but he was so fond of certain well-worn ironies that you would eventually not notice their intended obliquity.  Take bourbon biscuits.  I will now never know whether his pronunciation of "bourbon" as "berben" in the American style was one of his little jokes, or a slightly mistaken bit of Besserwisser one-upmanship.  Whatever, within our family "berben" was the Authorized Version.  So I will never forget the day one of my partner's parents requested a bourbon biscuit, pronounced slightly pedantically in the full-on French manner, and I got a severe, spluttering case of the giggles.  Thanks, Dad.

Until you could spot and step past these multiple barriers of irony, he would keep you at a safe distance.  Few people ever made it through, and as a consequence he was a man with few friends in adult life.  In fact, in retrospect, it seems that this was a feature of male adult life in general.  You simply stopped having friends when you acquired a family; to have friends was somehow juvenile. The oddness of this didn't strike me until I was well into adult life myself.  When he died, admittedly at an advanced age, I couldn't think of a single living person to invite to his funeral not related by blood.  I understand this is not uncommon, and there have been cases recently where social media appeals were made to recruit potential mourners for some lonely old man who died with no friends or relatives left in the world.

Of course, there were reasons.  Like most of his generation, he had left school at 14 despite abundant academic ability.  In the 1930s it simply cost too much to stay on at school beyond the statutory leaving age.  That was tough for him, I think.  He was easily bright enough to have managed university, but that was so far out of the question, socially and financially, as to be unthinkable.  Then, after just a few years of apprenticeship and employment, he was required to spend six prime years of his life in the systematic limbo of active military service, with the occasional enforced descent into the chaos of active military hell.  By the end of the war, he was pushing 30.  Not exactly past it, but no longer young in those days.

Now, a conscript "citizen" army teaches good men the arts and habits of "dumb insolence" and a passive-aggressive, veiled hostility towards lesser men given unchallengeable disposal over their lives.  You do what you're told, sort of, but make sure in the doing that the teller realises you think he's an idiot, quite possibly by sabotaging the outcome by following the letter, not the spirit of your orders.  Anyone who seeks an explanation for the craziness of industrial relations 1945-1975 need look no further.  After the war, back in civilian life, ambitious and able men of my father's age found themselves blocked from significant advancement at work; at first by those very same lesser men, with their schooling and their connections, and then by a more highly-qualified, leap-frogging post-war generation, for whom free higher education came up with the rations, as they would have said in the army.  After rapid promotion from the shop floor, Dad spent his entire working life in the lower reaches of middle-management.  Again, this was typical for that frustrated generation, and a resigned, sometimes cynical, self-defending irony was the natural response.  The genius of someone like Spike Milligan was to find another, new and more creative way forward.

But I suppose the main culprit was what sociologists would call the "performance of masculinity".  Dad's generation was locked into possibly the most constricting, mutually-policed version of maleness ever known in Britain.  Any scope for flamboyance, emotionality, self-expression, or any other suspiciously feminine forms of behaviour was strictly channelled into acceptable modes of dress and conduct.  The gulf between the pre- and post-war male was very, very deep, and rarely crossed.  Even a good, intelligent man like my father found the post-68 appearance, behaviour, and beliefs of his son hard to accept.  Which, I suppose, was the point.

Now these guys in the photo below are performing their masculinity really well.  But that little one at the front is pushing it a bit with that tie...  And isn't that suit a bit ...  Italian?  Ah well, he's just become a father, and that'll soon sort him out.

Burma Reunion 1947

Crow Country III

So you thought you were pretty far out, huh?  Read this and you might change your mind.  Ow.  Not to mention Whisky Tango Foxtrot...

Crow Country II

A Ducky and a Horsie

I have always had a strong tendency towards pareidolia, the ability to see meaningful images within random patterns of line, shape and shadow.  In some ways, this is merely the flipside (or perhaps a precondition) of the ability to draw.  What is a drawing, after all, other than patterns of line, shape and shadow contrived and intended to evoke a significant image within the viewer's brain?

Exactly a year ago, I was in front of a TV camera in the Fotoforum gallery in Innsbruck, Austria, trying to explain the nature of my work being exhibited there to a charming young interviewer who, luckily, spoke better English than I speak German (not unusual in the German-speaking world, I am ashamed to say).  Now, I tend to take a certain level of pareidolia for granted, so drew her attention to this image from the Boundary Elements series:

I said something like, "This photograph is of a corroded metal box attached to a door and, although I really like the delicate balance of tone and colour here, what I mainly see is a Japanese-style horned dragon whipping its head round, with its snout now pointing to the left, don't you?"  She looked puzzled, then an expression of childlike delight crossed her face, "Oh, yes!  A dragon!"  Now, being English, and maybe having watched too much Graham Norton, I was on the alert for irony and sarcasm, but detected none.  She simply didn't see what I saw until I pointed it out.  Which made me think.

I've been thinking ever since.  What I have been thinking is this:

My favourite kind of photography involves the creation of a picture by isolating evocative shapes and colours from the real world.  You might say these are the semi-abstract paintings I'd make if I wasn't too lazy to make them, in the well-established vein of Klee, Kandinsky, and Rauschenberg.  I am sometimes mistaken for a practitioner of the Gospel of the God of Small Things -- best summarised as "He draws our attention to the small, everyday things we are too blinkered and busy to notice" -- which I find annoying.  I don't care whether you notice small corroded metal boxes or not.  No; if I draw myself up to my full height of pretension, I prefer to consider myself more of the Blakean tendency:

What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.
William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgement

A ducky and a horsie be damned, Sir!

And yet, without cues like a nudging title ("A Ducky and a Horsie Go Boating #5") or my personal presence behind the viewer's shoulder to point them out, it seems that my intended points of reference are never as obvious as I had thought.  Of course, this is a general issue with abstract or semi-abstract art.  Take this print from Matisse's late "cut-out" phase, published in his wonderful book Jazz:

Les Codomas, Henri Matisse, 1947

Lovely, isn't it?  But how obvious to you is it (or was it when you first saw it) that the image shows two trapeze artists above a safety-net, surrounded by spectators?  It probably doesn't matter if you can't see it without prompting, but Matisse had an intention here, which the nudging title makes clear -- he hasn't called it "Untitled Abstraction #47", after all, but the equivalent of "The Flying Burritos".  The fact that our first take might "see", let's say, tadpoles in a pond surrounded by stylised weed, beams of light, reflections, and even a lurking octopus is not to mistake the image, but to engage with its nature.  The realisation of the "correct" interpretation gives a focus to our other responses, but it doesn't invalidate them; they can all fruitfully exist at the same time.  But this is like explaining how to bowl a cricket ball:  if you're going to be able to do it at all, you can probably do it anyway.

But the path this led me down was this:  If my intentions are not clear, why not make them clearer?  Why be inhibited by the photographic "facts on the ground"?  Why not make intentional pictures sourced from multiple photographs, or bits of photographs collaged together with bits of drawing, in the same way Matisse assembled pictures from his cut-up pieces of painted card, rather than relying on pictures presenting themselves whole and ready-made to my camera?  Despite the many precedents -- Max Ernst's Une semaine de bonté, for example, or more recently John Goto's under-appreciated work -- this still feels heretical, and calculated to lose what little audience I have gained over the years for my work.

But consider a photo like this, which I took last week, strolling behind the big-barn retail outlets of West Quay in Southampton:

Not brilliant, but a good example of the kind of thing I do when working in an "abstract" vein.  Yes, it does happen to be another corroded metal box attached to a door, but I am not a "photographer of corroded metal boxes" in the way that Bernd and Hilla Becher are photographers of grain elevators and water towers.  It's nice enough in itself, but what makes it compelling to me is that it suggests a large, weighty, telephone-box-shaped object plunging down into deep water trailed by a stream of air-bubbles, or, rotated 90 degrees, a shotgun cartridge discharged into a blue sky.  There is dynamism in those accidental marks.  Your mileage may vary, as they say, but I took the photograph because I saw and liked the pictures that my mind conjured from those superficial elements.

So, it seems to me that one way to use my hyper-pareidoloid tendency to good effect is to exploit it as a means of drawing, using the real world as my palette, and Photoshop as my canvas.  I'm having a lot of fun discovering techniques to do this, and I'm very pleased with some of the early results.  But if you do come here because of the photographs, don't despair -- I have no intention of giving up "straight" photography.

(But, hmm, that bit on the right will make an excellent milky-blue summer sky crossed by vapour trails...  Just add a few crows...)

Clumsy Guitars

A good musical instrument is a wonderful thing to handle.  You don't need to be able to play it to appreciate the aesthetic and haptic qualities of its build, fit and finish, or even to get a sense of its acoustic properties.  A good instrument declares itself to your senses in the same way as a well-made, ergonomically-sound camera does.  It is fit for purpose.

I am reminded of a day when I was about 8, when a friend and I went over to a nearby recreation ground, just to knock a tennis ball back and forth.  It was deeply frustrating: he had a full-sized racket borrowed from his brother, half as big as he was, and I had a toy racket, downsized for a child.  Despite its unwieldy size he seemed to be able to effortlessly whang the ball, whereas my every stroke ended in a dull, wrist-jarring thud.  I was clearly no good at tennis.  We then swapped rackets, and I experienced a moment of revelation.  I discovered the joy of the good tool: the ball sang off the taut strings of the "real" racket, and the impact was damped to nothing by the cleverly-constructed frame.  It was the same difference, I subsequently discovered, between our plastic Tommy Steele guitar with its untunable strings and weightless body and our neighbour's gorgeous sunburst Epiphone Casino.

If you do play an instrument, you absorb a whole repertoire of tell-tales that announce the quality of any particular example, even before playing it.  Take an acoustic guitar, for example.  Is the soundboard made of one piece of timber or two?  What about the back?  How deep is the gloss of the varnish?  How well has it taken wear and tear?  Are the fittings -- the bridge, the nut and the tuning heads -- solidly made or cheaply mass-produced in plastic and pressed steel?  How much care has been taken over producing the paper label pasted inside the body -- is the instrument numbered, or even signed?  Are the "binding" and the sides of the frets smooth and flush with the body?  Does the whole thing exude understated class, like an Audi, or is it the equivalent of a boy-racer adorned with go-faster stripes and spoilers?

Which may lead you to wonder why I have been drawing these "clumsy" guitars, harps, lutes, and other imagined instruments which, as I said in earlier post, appear to have been made by blindfolded luthiers wearing oven gloves and equipped only with blunt Stanley knives.  I think the trigger for my current enjoyment in drawing these odd stringed figments was a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford last year. The instruments collected there are the very opposite of quality items.  They are the worst sort of ethnic tat from the global attic: warped, cracked, dusty, mouldered, and shedding pieces of wood and leather into the bottom of the cabinet.  They could never now be played, and probably never were played.

Such dud instruments turn up in museums everywhere.  All the musical life has slowly been dried out of them, until they have become a ghastly mummified parody of the original.  Instruments need to be played, to be loved, to have new strings fitted at least once every fifty years... I am reminded of the rubber bands our postman delivers most days, and which we cannot bring ourselves to throw away.  They hang on a hook for weeks, months, years until one day there is a need for a rubber band, and it then turns out that all the decent ones have perished, and break at the first tug.

And yet, these dead instruments have all the right bits in the right places, and somehow stand in for all the ancient music we shall never hear, but which was the fabled ancestor of all music.  Like them, these clumsily-drawn harps and guitars might be said to be playing that unheard ur-music, the song that goes on for ever, generation to generation, enchanting and holding together the universe.

Lions

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Oddly, Hungarians can definitely talk, and yet I can't understand them, either.  Is that because I don't understand Hungarian, or because I can't understand Hungarians?   And does this mean they are lions?  Ah, philosophy...

Rain Theory

Crow Country

Classic

I swear, by Zeus and by Toutatis, that I have not added Monty Python-style eyes to the head on the left, although I have reversed it laterally.  It's a bust in the Ashmolean, and it really does look like that:

Classic!  And proof that moronic expressions are cultural, and not universal.  To a Roman, this man is probably conveying stoic fortitude in the face of an unfortunate toga mulfunction, or perhaps that is the standard Latin lover's longing look of lust.  Odi et amo, baby...

Moreover, the latest thinking seems to be that those classically cool and restrained marble and bronze sculptures were all actually rather gaudily painted up, so that a temple like the Parthenon would have resembled nothing so much as a fairground ride.  Next thing, they'll be telling us that togas had zips (conceivably the best explanation for our friend above's expression).

In the interests of full disclosure and general enlightenment, I thought you'd want to know that the pillars and architraves in this image are derived from the eroded yellow lines painted on the kerbside of a favourite Southampton carpark.

Free With This Issue

For some while I have toyed with the idea of creating a set of faux cigarette or tea cards, to be collected and stuck into an album that I would create using Blurb or some other POD service.  For many of us, those covetable card miniatures were our first introduction to the pleasures of visual art, not to mention the completist joys and frustrations of collecting.  They were also a last flourishing of a childhood free of the visual bullying of film and TV tie-in strategies and disneyfied branding. Like most such ideas, however, the concept of making a set of cards is more fun than the execution.  After all, it's not as if I could give away a free card tucked inside the wrapper of every blog post.

My children's generation collected stickers; not trade giveaways but sealed packs bought from a box kept safely out of the reach of shoplifters behind every corner-shop counter, usually football teams or those inescapable film and TV tie-ins.  But I was quite impressed by the innovative design of certain sticker albums where the sticker filled a gap in a whole-page illustration, rather than sitting in a conventional "album" frame.  So you might regard the picture above as a draft page from the collection Great British Roadkill, with three stickers in place.  Why not collect all fifty?

Incidentally, I noticed that the previous post was post number 1111.  That must mean I have racked up something like half a million words over the seven year life of this blog, which is the equivalent of about five novels. Admittedly four of those novels were unpublishable prentice-work, and the fifth is still going the rounds collecting rejection slips.  Apart from the fact, that is, that I haven't written any of them. Hmm...

Stage Fright

Here's one for any performers out there.  May you never find your guitar transformed into a clumsily-drawn cardboard replica and the stage ankle-deep in water.  Though it's bound to happen sooner or later.

I haven't spent much of my life on stage, though I have often delivered an artfully-crafted PowerPoint presentation to various tough crowds, and have performed often enough to know that it is both an addictive and a terrifying experience, best left to those needy few whose appetite for applause is insatiable.  One early stage experience in particular made a permanent mark on me.  Or rather, non-experience.

At primary school we were supposed to be putting on a play.  I can remember very little about it, apart from my one line:  "No, Peleus, wait!", sternly delivered with an upheld, admonitory palm.  From that tiny piece of surviving dramatic DNA, I deduce that the play had some sort of Trojan Wars theme, Peleus being the father of Achilles, though I think I can be pretty sure that a bunch of primary-school kids were not enacting the premeditated rape by Peleus of Achilles' mother, the shape-shifting sea-nymph Thetis.  Whatever it was supposed to be, the main thing was that the play never took place.  Why, I don't know.  Our school had a strong record in dramatic productions, and as far as I can recall in every previous year there had been a well-received school play put on by the final year pupils.  It was simply something that happened with a certain periodicity, like morning assembly, Sports Day, and visits from the Nit Nurse.

My suspicion is that certain principals failed to learn their lines, or bottled out.  Whatever the reason, the play never even got to the dress rehearsal stage and was quietly abandoned, so those of us who had learned our lines -- "No, Peleus, wait!" -- were left with a nagging sense of anticlimax, and the disquieting thought that we had somehow, collectively or individually, not lived up to expectation.  That year -- our year -- there would be no school play.  Or would there?  Nobody in authority ever really settled the question.  Had we forgotten to turn up for key rehearsals?  Had we been so bad that the thing was silently euthanized?  This sort of thing bothers you when you are ten, and still haunts the milder end of the spectrum of my anxiety dreams, along with the unwritten essays, missed trains, and public appearances in pyjamas.  To this day, part of me expects to be called upon suddenly and unexpectedly to deliver my one line:  "No, Peleus, wait!"  But I'm ready, and have been for fifty years.  I need closure!

Actually, there was another similar experience around the same time, during a family summer holiday in a caravan situated within a holiday camp on the English east coast, somewhere near Walton-on-the-Naze.  But the world is not yet ready for the story of my abandoned preparations to sing "I Remember You" by yodellin' Frank Ifield at a holiday camp talent show.  That one sits slightly further up the anxiety spectrum.

Crow Guitar

I'm not sure why, but this "clumsy guitar" really sings for me.  It's a reminder that a tortoise shell has been used since ancient times as a resonator box for stringed instruments, such as the lyre and the mbira ("thumb piano").  Tortoiseshell -- in the sense of marbled brown and amber plastic -- is, of course, still a fundamental part of the design of modern instruments, from picks to pickguards.

I won't spoil the effect by telling you what my drawn "tortoise shell" is derived from, but a little lateral thinking may reveal it to you.  The whole thing, obviously, is a mash-up of diverse elements.

Heart of Glass

The Avon Gorge, on a less than

beautiful day

I spent most of this past week in Bristol, where we are establishing a new branch of the Idiotic Towers franchise, due to a change in the location of the employment of our senior partner.  I suppose, if you're going to have a second home, it might as well be somewhere worth living, and Bristol is certainly that.

Bristol is where we spent the last decade of our kidult existence, 1977-87 B.C. (before children).  Those were mainly fun years in a characterful city in the era of squats and punk and reggae, tempered by a dawning realization that the Thatcher Years were not going to be a mere blip in the inevitable historical progress of society towards a socialist utopia. I alternated much of my time between work in the university library, political meetings and demonstrations (I was a union activist in NALGO, the local government union), and sweaty nights in small music venues and pubs.  Well, we made our own fun in those days.

Then there was cinema.  Bristol has two arthouse cinemas, at the Arnolfini Gallery and the Watershed arts centre, and those years were the great years of independent cinema.  Herzog, Fassbinder, Tarkovsky, Jarman, Greenaway...  Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive; I'd sometimes see three new "foreign" movies in a week.  You would gradually tune in to something astonishing like Tarkovsky's Mirror, ignoring the shuffling and muttering of those who didn't get it and who left after 20 minutes, ending up blissed out in a half-empty auditorium, with the impulse to exchange addresses with everyone else left in the place when the lights went up.

The music was pretty good, too.  We saw many now-legendary acts -- the likes of Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and the Clash, though I mainly recall an outstanding gig by jazz-fusion masters Weather Report, and two by the amazing Graham Parker -- and most pubs back then had a decent jukebox, regularly refreshed with the latest sounds.  It is a toss-up now whether the title "Heart of Glass" calls to mind the film by Werner Herzog or the chart-topping single from Blondie.

The city has changed, of course, as has the sophistication of the entertainment demanded by the young.  Mall-blight is becoming evident in the more peripheral streets, where many venerable shops have closed and become nightclubs and restaurants.  I was particularly appalled to discover that George's Bookshop -- once a rival to establishments like Blackwell's in Oxford -- is now a Jamie Oliver restaurant.  It's all still reassuringly shabby, however.  My daughter remarked, as we drove through town a few weeks ago, that it was quite like Brighton (where she lives) but much grungier.  Which, if you know Brighton, is quite an achievement.

Leaping Lions

I first encountered these hunted lions from Nineveh in the British Museum last year. Now they've found a new home in one of my digital collages.  What I really ought to do is to follow the example of Grayson Perry and get these produced on computer-controlled looms as wall-sized tapestries...  Wouldn't that be something?  But, until I can afford that, A3 inkjet prints will have to do.

Terrible Twins

Never mind a new portrait of Shakespeare*, here is a rare shot of the mad twins who govern our neck of the universe.  You really don't want to anger these Kosmic Krays...**

* Silliest. Non-story. Ever.  See here for the post I would have written.
**  I can't believe I'm the first person to make this joke (Kray Twins / cosmic rays, geddit? Heh...) but apparently I am, at least according to Google.  Good name for a band!

Dream House

Do you have recurring dreams?  I understand most people do.  Certainly, I seem to have dreamed variations on the same few scenarios most of my adult life.  There have been many changes of personnel, shifts of location, and a varying balance of anxiety and serenity -- becoming a parent introduces a whole new level of anxious terror into the mix -- but, most nights, I seem to revisit the same old scenes and storylines, like a complex role-playing videogame where I can never seem to progress beyond level three.

The Dream House is one of mine, and I believe it's a classic scenario, shared by many.  The Dream House is a strangely familiar, multi-storey dwelling, with a shifting complement of rooms, passageways, inhabitants (both welcome and unwelcome), in which I am sometimes a guest, sometimes the owner, and sometimes something anxiously inbetween.  I am forever finding new rooms, an unknown basement (what, another one?) or stairways that take me into unsuspected corridors, where Tarkovsky-style shifts of mood and ambience take place.  Sometimes the house is more like a block of flats or a college; sometimes it's a weird amalgam of various places I've lived; occasionally it is somewhere I have never lived, but have perhaps often passed in the street.

Playing around with these two digital collages, I realised that I was building versions of the Dream House.  That is, quite real-seeming edifices, but constructed out of disparate elements, always on the verge of dissolving into some new arrangement, and haunted by disconcerting presences. Nothing is quite what it seems.  These may not be places where I have ever actually lived, but I suppose might be said to be places that inhabit me.

Guitar Hero

A couple more digital constructions using my "clumsy guitar" drawings.  I'm finding that one quite satisfying way to do this is to use photographs all taken on the same day in the same place.  For example, the one at the top memorialises a snowy February day in 2009, wandering in the Oxford Botanical Garden.  If nothing else, having a ready-made unity of light and subject matter -- not to mention having the same image size and resolution using files from the same camera -- eases the work of layering and blending.

By contrast, the second one brings together image files from widely different occasions and cameras.  A lot more effort was required to unify the whole, but in the end only I need to know that was the case.  As someone once said, no-one cares how hard you worked.  What matters is the result.

Why the guitars?  Perhaps because, like so many of my generation, for most of my life I've been a guitar noodler.  As a left-hander who self-taught on a cheap instrument borrowed from a friend, I have terrible technique, not least because I play upside-down i.e. holding a guitar conventionally-strung for a right-hander in the left-handed orientation.  This has taken its toll, and a year ago I realised I was developing arthritis in certain fingers, and a variety of tennis-elbow in my right arm.  Well, as the doctor says in the old joke, if it hurts when you do that, then you should probably stop doing it.  So I did.  I was never that good, but I do miss the sensations of playing, in the same way I missed the sensations of rolling and smoking a cigarette.  It'll pass.

N.B. I'm away for a few days over the Bank Holiday.  I'll schedule a post or two to keep things ticking over, but I'll be back mid-week.

Orpheus

Yet another series of digital images is coming together, on the theme of Orpheus.  I found myself drawing crude stringed instruments, some of which resembled guitars constructed by luthiers wearing oven gloves and blindfolds, some of which had more in common with ancient radio sets than lyres.  I liked them, but felt they needed more context.

What I like about this digital collage approach is that I can finally find a use for those "end of roll" style images that speak strongly of something, but are not complete enough in themselves to stand as straight photographs.  It's a lot of fun assembling something new out of the various elements that come to hand.

I particularly like the combination of hand-drawn and photographic elements.  It seems to evoke a 1940s/1950s sensibility that lurks just below the surface of my mind.  Unsurprising, really, as -- like anyone born in the 1950s -- I grew up surrounded by that Festival of Britain aesthetic.

Doubles

Another thing I've been filling the idle hours with is drawing.  As I have written before, drawing was my first love, and -- like any first love -- has been the subject of many a "what if?" fantasy in the subsequent years.  On balance, though, I'm content with the choices I made.  Most successful artists, in my observation, are either completely reckless in their self-belief or have a soft trust-fund cushion to fall back on; ideally, both.  The rest teach.  There is a huge amount of survivor bias in tales of artistic success ("I believed I could do it, and that's why I succeeded!").  Well, maybe, but it ain't me, babe.  Given the need to earn a living, the oddly toxic atmosphere of the mid-1970s, and my Groucho-Marxian constitution (a reluctance to join any club that would have me as a member), it was never really an option.  Besides, I suspect I'd have struggled eternally with that dissenting-protestant-heritage misgiving that drawing pictures doesn't count as a proper job.

Now, of course, I can afford to be a reckless, if backdated, trustafarian, or "pensioner" as we generally call my new tribe.  I suppose I may have left it a little late, and am aware my tastes may have been permanently fixed somewhere around 1978.  Nonetheless, I've been filling various sketchbooks, and to my delight have found that moderately high-resolution scans of these small original drawings (1200 dpi on my Epson flatbed) reproduce very nicely indeed enlarged on plain paper.  Once I can find a suitable paper stock (perhaps a Japanese paper like a medium-weight kozo, provided it can survive the journey through the printer) I'm going to try editioning some of these as digital prints.  In the end, there's no better test of whether you are just a superannuated Sunday painter than asking hard cash for your wares.

This may be doomed as an enterprise, but people tend to value only what they have paid good money for.  There are fewer more deflating sights than seeing a drawing or photograph of yours, given as a gift, unframed and dog-eared, and blu-tacked to a wall in a guest bedroom.  This lack of regard for the cost-free is reinforced by the prevailing business model of the internet, i.e. that content is free.  This radical undervaluing of creativity -- hey, everyone's an artists now! -- is spreading into the real world.  There may originally have been some sort of libertarian inflection to that word "free", but now it just means that nobody gets paid for colouring in the blank spaces on the advertising hoarding that is the Web and social media.  Musician, photographer, writer, film-maker, journalist...These used to be highly-competitive, reasonably-paid careers, not sanity-saving hobbies for pensioners and the under-employed.  That dissenting-protestant-heritage reflex mentioned above seems to have triumphed:  wait, you want to be paid for this?  OK, I'll find someone else...

Fallen Angels

Two more angels, equally literary, but this time of a more fallen variety.  In the first, you may recognise Satan's words from Book 1 of Paradise Lost, debriefing and regrouping his fallen angels with the mission statement to end all mission statements:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That Glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deifie his power,
Who from the terrour of this Arm so late
Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; since by Fate the strength of Gods
And this Empyreal substance cannot fail,
Since through experience of this great event
In Arms not worse, in foresight much advanc't,
We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal Warr
Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in th' excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav'n.

In the second, you may equally recognise the famous opening tercet of Dante's Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

(In the middle of our life's journey I found myself in a dark wood, where the straight path was lost)

I knew it would be worth holding on to that rubber bat...

Book Buying

This is really a temporary post that I will probably take down after a while.  I need to establish whether Blurb is returning an accurate account of book sales.

Have you bought one of my Blurb books in the last year?  If so, it would be useful if you would let me know which, and roughly when, using one of the email addresses in the profile above right ("Since you ask...").  This would include e-books and PDFs, as well as conventional paper books. In fact, e-books are of particular interest.  Did you buy yours direct from Blurb, or via Apple's iBookstore, for example?

It would also be helpful to know if you had declared your intention to buy one, e.g. in a comment, but never actually did.  I really don't mind (I only make about £1 profit from each sale, so I'll get by...) but it's useful to know.  This could be the source of my impression that there have been more sales than are showing up.

Of course, the best test would be if I could persuade you to buy a book now, using the "My Blurb Bookstore" link, also over on the right.  If you have an iPad or iPhone most are also available as e-books, which are very good value at just a few pounds/dollars each.  If you then let me know that you have done so, I can monitor Blurb's sales account. But please don't feel I'm turning this into a disguised sales drive!

Books?  We've got a few ... In every room...

Angels

Nothing to do with Robbie Williams, obviously.  At least, I don't think so.  In my recent dabblings with digital imagery, a theme of "angels" has started to emerge.  There is a slightly disreputable vein of modern thinking that has revived the ancient figure of the angel as a "messenger" between different domains of discourse, for example in the work of philosopher Michel Serres, Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), or Tony Kushner's Angels in America.  The idea of these mercurial envoys, faithfully and patiently transmitting communications between realms appeals to me, perhaps in part because of my father's wartime trade as a despatch rider.  The emblem of the Royal Signals is Mercury, wing-heeled messenger of the gods, known to all as "Jimmy".

The words inscribed on the image above are the opening of Rike's first Duino Elegy:  "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?" (Who, among the ranks of angels, would hear me, if I cried out?).

Electioneering

No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.  Remember that one?  Rarely has it seemed so true as it does this morning.  Even if Labour had won, or there had been some improbable-but-intriguing "coalition of the losers", it would still simply have meant five more years of the same dreary branch-office managerialism; "tough decisions", implementing whatever dispensation gets handed down from the offices of Global Enterprises Incorporated.

Someone at BBC Radio 4 carried out a brilliant piece of scheduling this morning.  After intermittently listening to the election results from 05:30 to 09:00, I found myself listening to a repeat of The Reunion, a programme chaired by Sue MacGregor, where participants in some notable past event are brought back together to reminisce.  Today, it was Peter Brook's revolutionary 1970 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, described at the time as "Best. Shakespeare. Ever", or words to that effect.  What a contrast; talk about "look here upon this picture, and on this..." (sorry, that's Hamlet).  That all-too-brief decade of post-1968 revolutionary turbulence provided my generation's formative years.  Unfortunately, in contrast to the now 90-year-old Brook and his generation, who brought about that shining time, it seems all we were capable of delivering was Tony Blair.  To a large extent, then, this is all our fault.  Our best and brightest refused to get involved in anything short of a proper revolution.  They're all out there, somewhere, still waiting.

Your blogger tends the People's flag, 1978

It all made me think of Miliband.  Not poor old Ed -- did anyone really imagine him as Prime Minister? -- but his father, academic Marxist Ralph.  His book, The State in Capitalist Society, was required reading for the serious student revolutionary back in my university days. Not that I ever read it -- I suppose I was at best a frivolous student revolutionary -- but I think his view can be summarised as: "The Labour Party is not a revolutionary party; parliamentary democracy can never change the balance of power between classes".  Well, right enough.  Presumably his boys Ed and David either thought him wrong or were more fascinated by the pursuit and exercise of power within those despised bourgeois institutions.

Did you ever read One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse?  I'm not going to summarise it here -- I don't think I could -- but it was one of the few "political" books I did actually read as a student back in the mid-1970s that made any sense to me.  "Free election of masters does not abolish masters or slaves" is only subtly different from the Ralph Miliband line; but the idea of "repressive tolerance" and the shift of emphasis from organised "class struggle" to freeing oneself from psychological and technological domination seemed more radical (and distinctly un-Marxist) and seemed to chime with my own experience.  Of course, the really smart guys were all way past that easy-reader Frankfurt School stage -- Feyerabend's Against Method was the hot read, I seem to recall -- but, having somehow arrived in the political-philosophical powerhouse and career launch-pad of Balliol College, Oxford as a know-nothing Mirror-reader (whose only real talents were for reading poetry, drawing, and telling amusing stories) I was badly in need of some remedial reading.

Other cult classics I managed to digest were Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown, the Illuminations collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, and various of the post-structuralist books of Roland Barthes.  I tried to read Marx and Lukacs and Althusser and Lucien Goldmann at the urging of Terry Eagleton and others but it was like eating porridge oats straight from the box.  To be honest, I much preferred Carlos Castaneda.

A windy day in the Wilson-Heath years, 1974

I have no problem with being an intellectual lightweight.  I did a few rounds with some genuine heavyweight title contenders back then, and quickly realised I was fighting in the wrong ring.  I discovered I had better intuitive understanding than them, could more easily tolerate illogical, irrational and contradictory ideas, and was considerably better at making the unlikely leaps and links between apparently unconnected subjects that make for an amusing conversation.  I was an artist, essentially, not a scholar or a politician. A piss-artist, others would have said, with some justification. But our rock-solid common ground was a conviction that the world needed to be changed, and could be changed.

Forty years on, I think very few people would still argue that "classical" Marxism offers an adequate critique of what is wrong with the world, and how to fix it.  The world has changed, along lines that were better predicted by thinkers once discounted as outsiders and inconsequential oddballs, people like Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan, and even Fritz Perls and Wilhelm Reich.  How?  In the film The Usual Suspects, Verbal Kint, speaking of the disappearance of Keyser Söze, says "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist" (actually Baudelaire: "La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas").  By shedding that giveaway top-hat and donning designer jeans, international capital has pulled off the same trick.  But sometimes those standing back outside the crowd can better observe the moves of the ideological shell-game.  They can more easily see the con that is perpetrated on those who stare fixedly at the moving cups, those who believe, "Next time I'll get it!  Let's have another go!"

Perhaps now the essential political task, once more as in Peter Brook's time, is cutting through the illusion that this is all there is.   Getting back the conviction that things can be different.  Having the courage to try different things, and fail, without fearing the media backlash or the poll ratings would be useful.  It would also help to figure out where the real battle is, and between whom and over what, then choose a side and stick to it.  Winning elections is not enough: Miliband senior was probably right -- it may not be where the real political fight is happening, if it ever was.  To despise and destroy those who stand in opposition, and to dance joyfully on their graves -- as we did in 1997 when Thatcher's exhausted Tory Party was finally and definitively trashed by a Labour landslide -- is never more than a short-term goal.  We should never forget that Blair's Labour Party was handed a massive opportunity, three times, and wasted it, three times.

I do think some questions need to be asked at the BBC.  For months, the broadcasters have talked up a predicted "hung Parliament", cutting off politicians attempting to present their policies, with a "Yeah, yeah, we know all about that, but what deals are you willing to do when nobody wins?"  Everyone knew there was going to be a hung Parliament: why waste our time pretending there wouldn't be?  The only interesting thing was who would get into bed with whom, and on what conditions.  The rush to premature analysis -- to exercise hindsight in advance -- and the attempt to trip politicians into mis-speaking a headline are so much more fun for highly-paid media folk than simply providing a platform for mere here-today-gone-tomorrow politicians to peddle their wares to the voting public.  Well, it seems "everyone" was wrong.  Power without responsibility, I think, is the phrase I'm looking for.

Same old new dawn...

Amber Blues

Junked metaphors

Lately, I keep feeling a nostalgia for the vocabulary of the analogue world I grew up in.  A certain linguistic vigour seems to be fading away, as the old connections between language and the real physical world are replaced or weakened by more intangible digital equivalents.

Our most vivid vocabulary tends to leak into everyday use from other domains -- mainly the worlds of work, domestic labour, and entertainment -- and in the days when most work involved bashing and bending, inking and blotting, sieving and sorting, and a thousand other precisely named actions and processes, there was a lively, physical, real-world turn to our metaphors and similes.  Everyone still sort of knows what it means to blot our copy book, to go through something with a fine-tooth comb, or to get up a head of steam; such expressions have a vivid materiality that can outlive their real-world application.  But the digital, electronic world is itself already almost entirely a world of metaphors, where most user interfaces rely on quaint analogue gestures to perform mysterious digital tasks.  You page through a menu, dial in a setting, press the button, and complicated electronic stuff just happens.

Naturally, old figures of speech do get replaced by new ones; as we might say in 2015, they eventually reach their sell-by date.  But it's the wider vocabulary I'm talking about.  So many finely-tuned verbs, nouns and adjectives have been usurped by all-purpose equivalents, in a parallel process to the inflation that turns "tremendous", "terrific", "outstanding", "brilliant", "excellent", "amazing" and "awesome" into mere synonyms for "quite good". I was recently amazed to overhear someone describe an action as "quite dainty".  Dainty!  I half expected them to be dressed in a frock coat and top hat.  It's hard to imagine a word like that, with the degree of delicate discrimination it implies, in the vocabulary of many contemporary Britons.

Take colours, for example.  In the digital world, we can actually be very precise about a particular shade of orange, say, using the RGB (Red Blue Green) values used on a computer screen.  Oh, let's say, #FFA310  -- nice!  Designers, of course, have long used the Pantone system to specify colours for CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black) devices like offset printers, which might be seen as a sort of digitisation avant la lettre. Pantone 130 is a very similar orange to RGB #FFA310. But while this precision is an advance and incredibly useful to the specialist it is utterly meaningless to everyone else. Colours need names.

Colours have names, of course.  If you've ever owned a decent paintbox or set of coloured pencils, you'll recognise Prussian Blue, Chrome Yellow, Gamboge, and Crimson Lake -- less precise than Pantone, but far more evocative.  If you've ever been unlucky enough to help choose what colour to paint a room, you'll also recognise names like Nile Green, Terracotta, Duck Egg Blue, and the ubiqitous Magnolia.  And yet, despite this readily available nomenclature, colour names are increasingy rarely heard, and imprecision is the norm;  "kind of blue" is not just the name of an album by Miles Davis.  I particularly miss hearing the names of those interesting midway shades like "buff" and "tan" and "fawn" in everyday speech; they've all been subsumed into "sort of beige".  And who now would even think of using a word as precise as "amber" to describe the sort of orangey-browny colour of the middle traffic light?

Name that colour!

Bang!

I'm going to try and get through this post without mentioning Proust, but -- oops -- it seems I have already done so.  Impossible not to, really.  I was making myself a cup of coffee, and had laid on the worktop the plastic screw-cap of a litre bottle of milk.  Something about the colour and shape of the knurled green top lying there triggered something deep in my memory and -- bang! -- suddenly I had an overwhelming sense-memory of a long-forgotten acrid smoky smell.  Caps!

A set of vivid images and sensations heaved into view: caps, cap guns, cap bombs...  Once, from about the age of five to the age of ten, I had been quite the gun-nut.  I had a drawerful of sidearms that might have alarmed even a particularly paranoid Tea-Party Texan.  There was a Buntline Special, long in the barrel, a Luger, a Derringer, multiple versions of the western revolver -- variously decorated with indian heads, bucking broncos and elaborate scrollwork -- and a selection of snub-noses and automatics, as packed by various TV detectives, spies, and law enforcers.  Some were water pistols, a couple were spud-guns, and a few merely went "click", but most of them fired caps.

Guns have largely disappeared from the toy repertoire in recent decades.  There seems to have been an outbreak of parental pop psychology in the late 1970s that predicted that heavily-armed toy-gunslingers like me would probably go on to carry out acts of mass slaughter.  I imagine cap guns are kept under the counter in toyshops, these days, along with the catapults and the pierced and tattooed Barbie dolls.  But in the 1950s and 60s, the production of toy weaponry must have been a significant industry.

Armed and mostly harmless, 1962

OK, I'll take it...

An important part of running a decent armoury, of course, was ensuring a proper supply of ammunition. Caps came as a tightly rolled paper strip, like a watch-spring, generally green but sometimes red, with regularly spaced black blisters of percussion explosive.  You would usually break open the gun, place the roll inside the gun onto a spool, and then feed the free end up through the feed mechanism and between the hammer and the strike-plate.  When properly loaded, pulling the trigger would cock and release the hammer, exploding the cap with a snap not unlike a Christmas cracker, and feed the roll through so that the next cap came up into the firing position.  After a firing frenzy you would end up with a pall of that glorious reeking smoke and a slightly annoying strip of spent caps protruding from your gun.

Back then, caps came in little round cardboard pillboxes with crimped lids, like bottle-tops.  I think they cost one penny a box, and out of my vivid Proustian reverie emerged a practically photographic memory that the brand we bought in our local sweet-shop had the words BROCK'S AMORCES crudely printed on the lid.  Brock's were a well-known fireworks company, but I have just looked up "amorces" -- it's the kind of word you take for granted at age eight, but not at sixty-one -- and it turns out to be a synonym for "caps".  Well, of course.

My most vivid memories, though, concern cap-bombs.  You could buy cap-bombs in the sweet-shop, too.  The crudest ones were made out of moulded metal, but they were generally a finned, rocket-shaped plastic projectile, with a spring-loaded plunger in a sort of cage on the nose end.  You would place as many torn-off single caps as you could get under the plunger, and then either toss it into the air or hurl it at the ground.  Where it went bang -- we were easily amused, I suppose.  The best place to do this was on the concrete driveway between two rows of garages, where the surface guaranteed an explosion, which the metal garage doors would amplify and reverb gratifyingly.  P-tangg!

The best cap-bomb of all, though, was made by finding a suitably large metal nut and two matching bolts.  You would screw one bolt in partway, pack a wad of caps in (or match-heads), and carefully -- very carefully -- screw in the other bolt on the other side.  Done just right, the thing made a terrific noise and stayed in one piece; done wrong, it flew apart at lethal speed.  Or exploded in your hands as you were tightening the bolt.  We discovered that parents would get inexplicably and unfairly exercised when they found out what was going on.

An advanced seminar on the merits of roll caps

versus the new plastic ring caps, 1973