IkoStar

Ok, this one doesn’t really count either because it is non-local in space and time, and part of a bigger thing… so I don’t actually visit it when I’m in that country etc - but I do attempt to take a photograph of it whenever I see it, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

It’s the Scene from Casino Royale (which is the best James Bond movie ever) just before the really hectic car crash… James’s chick (the one with the pointy nose) gets kidnapped and he realises only seconds too late and they go driving off in pursuit into the night (which is a bit of a stretch to be honest - I mean how did the baddies know that James would twig right at that moment?… with just enough time to tie up the pointy nose chick and leave her tied up in the middle of the road. What if some other car had come along? Or a truck? Or a steam roller? Mmmm? What then? What about one of those street-sweepers with the massive spinny things? It doesn’t bear thinking about)

Anyway, this shot is beautiful… it’s this silver-blue bit of road snaking off into the darkness and these two sets of taillights go flying (like tye fighters) down it into the distance etc. The shape of it is aerodynamic - it looks like heat-trail left by a slalom skier… it probably (as is always the way with these thing) resolves to a simple 3d quadratic equation. My brother says it’s probably this racing track in France, and he should know because he made TreeBeard off Lord of the Rings.

Treebeard off Lord of the Rings

I’ve never managed to photograph the actual tail lights. It’s quite difficult - you need to set up a tripod and make a couple of trial shots to get the light right. Just pointing and clicking is too hit and miss. Point + Click = Hit + Miss. I always panic and hit the button multiple times etc.

Here’s another photo of a racing track in France. Just for the sake of it like.

It’ near Marseilles. I took it out the window of a plane a couple of years back after the French conned me into eating sea-urchins, which was a massive massive mistake.

Ok, this is where I live

And I can’t possibly afford it. The only things I actually own in this photo are the wires on the floor. They’re good wires. This is the same place from the outside:

And this is a picture of the plant thing that loft style contemporary urban living spaces always seem to have. Everything is designed etc. Nothing is an accident.

Right now, I’m upstairs in the loft bit having not got out of bed all day because I drank about 4 bottles of the finest wines known to humanity last night, and wound up throwing up the crab thing I’d eaten previously, which was a shame in a way becase it was an excellent crab thing. I’ve worked out that I need about £600,000 to live like this forever. Right now though I’ve got… ooh, about -£4000 - which may seem like a lot, but it’s not. I’ve paid off pretty much all my debts now - 4k I can do in one hit. I (like most of my countrymen) have spent most of the 00s paying off credit card debt. At it’s peak it was about £30,000 so 4k is manageable. It’s almost a relief.

But it’s not 600k. So I have to work etc. Fair enough. I like working. It’s all I ever do in fact. I’ll work all night to night.

So anyway. I used to live in a squat in Camden. I used to live in the back of a car. In the back of several cars in fact… and although things have improved dramatically on the income/stability front - to the extent that I really don’t have anything to worry about ever again etc, I feel like the picture below, pretty much all the time:

This is pretty much the only pub that I’ve been banned from in the whole of Australia.

And I wasn’t even doing anything wrong, apart from that thing with the brooms - and that was hardly my fault and it was in slow-motion anyway. And a year ago. I took this photo about an hour ago… if you look closely you can see me not sitting in the window etc. I don’t think I’ll go there again. I’ll just hover about across the road all night taking photos.

I don’t know what it it with these people. Australians are so sensitive.

This is Henry Wriothsley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton… or more accurately, it’s a picture of him that I found on the internets, the original being in the National Portrait Gallery (which has a good caf upstairs) and which I visit every time I’m anywhere near Trafalagar Square.

The NPG is across the road (almost) from St Martins in the Fields, where I was Christened back in the day when you needed to do that to save your soul from eternal damnation etc. God knows how my folks pulled that one off, but they did. Most of the stuff in this blog isn’t actually made up - just enough to offer a smokescreen against various accusations further down the track.

Anyway, this is my fav picture in the whole place and I basically ignore all the others and just look at this one. He’s beautiful (in a crafty Elizabethan sort of way)… utterly charming, but with a stone-cold killer look in his eyes. I think Shakespeare dedicated a sonnet to him or something.

He used to hang about with Elizabeth the First’s lot, managing to piss her off by sneaking off and marrying someone she didn’t entirely approve of (sanctity was actually sacred in those days) and eventually was implicated in a plot to dethrone her. Robert Devereux (who (I think) rented the Palace of the Bishops of Ely from her for the price of a single red rose a year) was executed, Henry wound up in prison in the tower.

He stayed there for a bit (the picture above is him in his cell/apartment in the tower) his wife brought him his cat to keep him company which is cool. Eventually QE1 died and KJ1 took over and pardoned him. I think he eventually fell prey to the plague while fighting the Spanish in Holland or whatever. Fleas man. If I went back in time I could definitely cure scurvy. I don’t know about bubonic plague. Fleas aren’t so easy to control.

There used to be this abandoned Maori meeting house up the road from where I used to live - here…

we used to visit it sometimes because all the original carvings/wickerwork etc were still there… anyway, flea eggs are set off by vibrations… you’d walk in, look up at the carvings etc and within about 30 seconds your legs would be covered by loads of tiny little newly-hatched 100 year old fleas. When these fleas were laid, aeroplanes weren’t even invented yet. Now that IS a tomb-protecting curse. You basically need weapons of mass destruction deal with certain parasites, and even then the little shits still manage to get though… which is another reason why free-market-fundamentalist, economy-as-natural-selection dipshits are wrong wrong wrong.

Whatever. Although I could probably go back in time, chances are there’s not a lot I could do to save Henry.

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At one point I fancied having a proper oil-on canvas version of that painting with the cat so I blew it up and printed it on canvas… looked pretty good actually. So far I haven’t gotten round to getting it a frame, so it’s sat on the backseat of my car in a cardboard tube for the last 3 years. There’s probably some eerie parallel there - going from imprisonment in a tower to imprisonment in a cardboard tube, but I don’t really want to get into that here. You can take these things too far I think. I’ll get it a proper frame next time I’m back in New Zealand.

The cat’s name is Trixie

Ok - time I started going on about something else… and this time it’s bits of art that I keep coming back to again and again etc. These are scattered all over the place, and they rock. Anyone who disagrees is a blithering dick-pot and can go and do something peculiar to themselves. I mean that in a nice, caring, compassionate sort of way obviously.

There’s probably too much ranting etc accompanying each one to fit in one thing, so I’ll break it up.

Anyway, the first one I don’t keep going back to because it isn’t there anymore… and it was only there for a couple of months in the first place. It’s this

Holy crap, I’d never seen anything like that in my life - and never seen people to react to art like that in my life either. They sat there for hours. They lay in front of it. They took their unborn kids to see it. It was this massive primal Wagnerian sun thing and I was gobsmacked.

Olafur Eliasson did it.

But anyway, that’s not really on this list.

The first is this thing in the British Museum that I’ve been visiting for the last 28 years. I’m not going to include photos because it scares the shit out of me - and I don’t want to wind up with a haunted PC. I don’t want to invite that one into my inner space. Here are some links:

Link

Another Link

It belonged (in a sense) to a priest named Horned Jiseff (which may be spelled wrong, but as it was originally written in heiroglyphs, who’s to know?) and I first saw it when I was about 14 - jumbled in down the back with all the other sarcophogi. In the 90s they rearranged the egyptian bit… and it was moved into its own big glass box thing, in the middle at the front - so even as a 14 year old I knew a good sarcophogas when I saw one.

It’s massive - it kindof leans over you and is covered in white heiroglyphs… probably telling you not to look at it or else you’ll be eaten by crocs etc. There’s something nasty waiting for you out there in the nilotic mud… and it’s been waiting a long time… and the hour, my little friend, is gradually winding round…

Actually once you’ve opened the image, you’re doomed anyway because it’s in your cache. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Or not. He may have been a nice old man with a terrible sense of humour - and to be fair, I’ve never met an Egyptian I didn’t like… although so far that’s only been three of them. They were hilarious. They weren’t all together - two were in the markets at Covent Garden (where I once had a stall) and the other was in Tallinn.

Anyway, there you go. Whenever I go to the British Museum - which I do about once a year, I go to see one thing. That.

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PS:

This is me at my market stall, innocently selling stuff.

Ok, I live in Crows Nest in Sydney now - right in the middle bit where all the shops etc are. I would provide a photo, but I don’t have one - so here is a picture of some yellow things wrecking a building back in NZ

Which has nothing to do with anything really, but there you go.

I’ve moved out of my loft-style contemporary urban living space in Wellington and moved into a loft-style contemporary urban living space in Aus. This one may be better than the Wellington one actually. There are certainly a lot more TV channels, although I’m not actually watching TV at the moment, because I’m writing this.

There’s a pub in Crows Nest called “The Crows Nest” - because that’s how Australians name things. They’re kindof direct. If a beach is sandy, the call it Sandy Beach. I used to live opposite a sausage shop in Melbourne, run by a woman named Sue - so it was called Sue’s Sausage Shop, and why not?

Anyway - we were at The Crows Nest about this time last year - and they hadn’t quite got their no-smoking-inside act together yet so the smoking room was actually this massive broom closet which was open to the sky etc - behind the bit where the pokies are. So obviously if you are fairly drunk and there are brooms etc you have a broom-fight - you play light-sabres with them, which is innocent enough. No harm done etc. It’s all in slow motion anyway.

Unfortunately there were cctv cameras AND The Crows Nest is the only pub in NSW where the bouncers are allowed to carry guns on account of there being a couple of armed-holdups recently by people weilding axes. I kid you not.

So the door bursts open and there’s all these really chunky looking blokes who reminded me a bit of the gay sailor things off The Fith Element (which is annoying)… and I can’t find a picture of those either, so here’s a picture of some little monkey things which kindof capture the vibe.

So I instantly piss myself with laughter and they get even more serious and physically man-handled us out of the building. We rolled around on the pavement outside asphyxiating with hilarity etc. The entire evening was a huge success.

Anyway, that was last year. This year (last night in fact) I got thrown out of the same place again for reasons I can’t quite fathom. I’m sure it was all a simple misunderstanding etc. On the way home (it’s about 50 yards from here) I noticed that you can see my front window - and it did cross my mind that I should moon up at myself - only I wasn’t there so it would have been a wasted-moon, and besides, I simply don’t do that sort of thing. It’s a bit uncooth etc, and I’m cooth. Probably a bit too cooth I suspect - and that maybe why the bouncers objected to me this time around. It was that whole coother-than-thou vibe I was projecting.

I feel a bit shot-away at the moment to be honest. I can hardly string a sentence together.

I’m in Australia and I don’t know where I am. In Australia. Somewhere - my sister has gone out for beer and it will be a miracle if any of them come back.

Here is my friend. Pretty much my only friend, apart from my sister who has gone for beer and who will never come back:

He’s a bit like birdy num num of whom I spoke earlier, but he’s green and orange and comes from Australia. And he sits on yer finger and eats toast.

My sister has come back without beer. I feel doomed.

I can do 35 push ups.

May not seem like much, but this time last week I couldn’t do even one. I’d just lie face down on the floor, unable to move and unable to reach the remote control to the TV which meant I had to watch all sorts of tedious dreck about people renovating houses etc, and actually listen to the adverts, which I never ever ever do. No one in my family does - it’s a trans-generational tradition. No Taylor has ever been exposed to a TV advert - except for those rare occasions when we can either not find, or not reach the remote.

So anyway. 35 pushups.

I’ve found that it goes up by 5, every two days… which means that if I keep this up, I’ll be doing about 5000 a day by the time I’m 70, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. It would take 1/2 the day - on a good day.

So that’s why I’ve stopped doing them and have gone back to playing bloons instead. I can beat it on the hardest level - without using super-monkeys - which takes a fair bit of doing, believe you me. I’ve got a “can-do” attitude when it comes to that sort of thing.

So yes - a close call there.

I’m in a pub in my hometown Wanganui - Angie is playing on the stereo and I am drinking champagne for breakfast. I’m going to Australia in a week - my sister says she will give me a haircut when I get there, which will be a relief because I look a bit of a wreck at the mo. Maybe I ought to do before-after photies.

There was this girl I knew once - went to a fancy dress party with her friends, all dressed as giant mice etc. They dropped some acid on the way there so it would be kicking in when they arrived etc.. and then got arrested.

Spent the night in the cells, dressed as mice, on acid.

There’s something about acid - the unreality often seems to leak. The first time I nearly met Keanu Reeves was on acid. In a transvestite nightclub in London.

Ok, I think maybe the reason that google has stopped indexing this site is that it’s running on an old version of Wordpress that gets hit with invisible spam.

So I need to upgrade it, which is annoying because I’m extremely busy and irresponsible and I simply don’t have time for that sort of thing.

Similar to the phobia I have about accidently being transported back in time to the 13th century, I sometimes find myself trying to explain my life (as I gather it’s called) to my grandparents. “yea” I’d say “my blog is being hit by invisible spam - google’s stopped spidering it”. These people fought Hitler. They’d have absolutely no idea what I was talking about

And The Internet. Try explaining the Internet to someone who’s never heard of it before. It’s not even that old - I was using a browser that couldn’t display images yet in about 94. The scale and the rapidity of the change is absolutely phenomenal - and the amazing thing about this incredible glittering world-changing utopia-machine is that a good 80% of it is a massively annoying (or boring) pain in the arse and the whole thing is riddled with hassles and pitfalls.

Like invisible spam.