You’d look like this
Your hair looks like this:
And that’s on a good day. It’s not art, it’s just annoying.
It’s a coincidence though because the workings of your mind (during your rare pensive moments) look either like this:
or this:
But that’s ok, because you have quite good taste in music, and whenever I think of you, I feel like I feel when I’ve lent back in my chair and gone too far.
Everything’s going to look like this:
Which will be quite good I suppose. What could possibly go wrong? It’ll be like living in a giant BMW advert but with more massive floaty robots.
Instead of laptops we’ll have things like cellphones with built in projectors, probably made out of laser beams and everything will be covered in smart-paint, and none of it will fucking work. There will be paint-on solar power generators, and plants with advertising on their leaves. In the future every tree will have it’s own gardner. Every gardner will make their own dirt and biodeisel out of rubbish stolen by specially trained crows.
And we’ll run out of helium. There’s nothing we can do about that really.
So that’s these floaty things fucked then. Unless they use hydrogen, which means they’ll be far less likely to take over the world because they’ll be constantly exploding, so that’s a silver lining.
1) It isn’t happening
2) Ok, it is, but it isn’t our fault
3) Ok it is our fault, but there’s nothing we can do about it
4) Ok, we can, B’b'b’but… Ch’Ch’Ch’China…
5) Ok then we can but if we do, we have to do something that environmentalists are really going to hate, otherwise it will look like they’ve won. Nukes in other words.
And that’s it in a nutshell.
The people who voted for this guy:
…haven’t gone away entirely… and I’m not entirely convinced that their confidence has been shaken in the slightest. They’ve just shifted their catastrophic wrongness about everything onto something else. Why are there so many fucking idiots in the world? I don’t get it.
I mean I know that 50% of the population has less than average IQ, but that’s no excuse for active, deliberate, orchestrated stupidity. It’s a bigger problem than terrorism… you’re far more likely to be injured or killed by someone who’s really fucking stupid than a terrorist aren’t you? Look at the numbers… 9/11 killed about 3000. Utter fucking stupidity has killed how many? I’ve lost count.
has your life been affected by stupidity? If so, help is at hand. Ring the Victims of Stupidity Hotline on 0102 321 321 123, 24/7
I’m not sure that this one counts either because I don’t actually know where it is, yes I do, it’s at Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris which is in Paris, and I’ve never heard of it. But it’s quite famous etc. I looked it up on the internet.
It’s called La Madonne au coeur blessé and is by Pierre et Gilles and I first saw it in London back in the 90s - It only cost about 30k and I came sooooo close to buying it, but I was living in the back of a transit van at the time so was a bit strapped for cash etc.
The next time I saw it it was blown up 100 times the size and plastered all over the sides of double decker buses advertising Harvey Nicks (where I go sometimes. My mate Anne Marie used to work there and sometimes I go and hang out at the bar upstairs which is as creepy as fuck because everyone there is a prostitute in some way or other). Anyway, they’d strategically arranged it so a large round bolt thing was right where her nose was which kindof messed with it.
The Harvey Nicks window displays are quite often works of art in their own right - or they used to be when I was there last.
This little pic doesn’t really do it justice - it’s quite big and absolutely beautiful - and not to be confused with the other Madonna who looks like she smells etc. If I knew where it was I’ go back and see it again and again etc - but I don’t know where it is… I don’t always trust the internet.
I expect I’d go find it if went to Paris etc. I could ask the blokes in that gallerie. If they’d talk to me. They might know.
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:
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.
