IkoStar

It’s a zen thing.

Anyway I was going to put that one about dust in the wind next, but those mindless fuckspuds have blocked embedding (why? Do they think I’m going to go out and buy a record in frustration? mmm? Is that what you’re thinking? is it? Because I’m fucking not) so obviously the next thing was ELO, but the first one I tried was a bit annoying and that bloke’s hair is absolutely massive and it’s weighing him down and he looks old and tired so instead here’s another one:

AND IT’S MUCH LOUDER THAN THE ONE BEFORE

Which is slightly better and it reminds me of being in Dover in 79 when I was living in a van again and it was really hot and every thing smelled of petrol but which makes me feel all nostalgic now. The smell of petrol I mean. Petrol and Chips. That’s Dover.

Here’s another song about Dover.

Which is one of the greatest songs ever, so someone’s made it into a sort of home-movie… and I’m not sure if anything happens because I’ve never seen it all the way to the end because I have the attention span of some sort of tiny rodent, out of its mind on whizz like a proper cartoon one.

Anyway I have to play this song with headphones because it fucks up the cat.

If you click on it, you can see how big he’d look if you were like… well, a mouse. No worries though. He gets fucked up by mice as well, which is another thing that Jimmy Cliff and mice have in common.

And that, my friends, is the real meaning of life.

I wonder where Thompson is. She should have been here by now.

You see the sort of thing I have to put up with?

(in more detail) (and tinted blue, for no particular reason)

How do they do that? WHY do they do that? Unbefuckinglievable - you put them in your bag for a bit and 1/2 an hour later there’s been some sort of wire-fight and the mutinous little shits have got all intertwined.

It’s little things like this that push you over the edge.

This one’s excellent, I don’t care what they say.

see?

It’s at the far end of Charles’ Bridge in Prague - the whole Bridge have loads of statues of saints and whatnot,

although they look like mad nightmare chess-pieces to me - in that one where you’re the only prawn and you’re being surrounded by massive rooks and bishops and queens and so on.

Brrr…

Anyway, my one isn’t on the main bridge, it’s off to the side and down a bit. I go see it every time I’m in Prague, which is quite a lot because I like it etc.

Prague’s got that whole Eastern-European wild-west vibe going on, and it has the most beautiful women on the planet, especially that one that worked down the caf in Brighton with long blonde curly hair etc. I asked her who this statue was, but she didn’t know - or pretended not to… but why would she do that? I don’t understand it. I wasn’t being a pest or anything, I’d just sit there coworking on my own etc - much as I’m doing now in fact. That’s the trouble with women. They’re never straight-forward. There’s always some sort of subterfuge going on.

Whatever. There’s no point asking anyone round here because this is NZ and I might as well ask the cat, and besides, they’re all fat birds constantly eating cake etc. Cake cake cake, that’s all they think about from the moment they get up in the morning to the time when they eventually pass out in front of the infommercials, covered in cake crumbs etc. What an existence. What an existence.

So yea - I’m down the caf and obesity epidemic is particularly severe today… That’s another thing they failed to predict in Star Trek. I’m beginning to have my doubts about Star Trek actually. I lie awake at night racking my brains… but still can’t seem to think of one single solitary thing that they predicted correctly. What’s the point of them?

–

There’s only one more of these art things left. I probably ought to find some more. Not today though. Busy. There’s a massive black monolyth thing in Te Papa in Wellington which is pretty good. I don’t go back to it constantly though.

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: