Grow up

Why hello, internet beast. As ever, it has been a while. I was actually going to start by prattling about the student protests and the UCL occupation. I'll be honest; I have my opinions on it all, fed and nurtured by news, views and having a sneak peak around the scene myself, but I don't really feel they should just sing out into cyberspace just yet. I have no idea why I brought that up, even. Probably just to mention that one day I SHALL be happy enough to have all my opinions heard anywhere/everywhere, like some kind of hysterical firework.

Recently I have been spending a lot of time trying to make sense and move forward. Trying to make tidy, sweeping statements about getting older, like "You know you've grown up when you do what you don't want to do, without having other people make you do it" or "being grown up is buying your own Christmas tree" or "when you stop snoozing your alarm that is when you've GROWN UP" or some other quaint little sentence that is supposed to make me feel better about all the chaos. Of course, no one ever actually grows up. It is an imaginary state, some kind of stick with a couple of carrots attached, like being allowed to drink alcoCOOL or rent a car abroad. Not even mothers and fathers are grown-ups. They still see themselves as wayward teens who feel like they just discovered important stuff like lying can sometimes go unpunished and everyone is at the very least a little bit shit. My, I'm all about the examples today.

ANYWAYS, here is to family!

Work to be done

My mind could make cloud ash
Look like violent violet victory-
I’m a desert storm scene,
A drunken craving-
The husband
Home from the pub,
his sly sneak up your back with an
insistent snake hand,
While you pretend to sleep away the matrimony.

I gave every neuron to the drama,
Stilled my coiling scenes with more flesh,
Flesh from my face and hands
And even meat minced from my mind.
But why should I not? You squeezed me out,
Yellow and wheezing,
Prickly all over like the sinner’s grin-
A sad sack of sallow.

Then you gave another to the world.
The Other One,
who tries to stomp two-footedly
Into the paw prints I leave behind.
My paws that clawed at your mothermilk
Before leaving, stretching paths to another country
and "pursue better opportunities”.

So now you are my work, bloodthing.
You are the tiny drip that leaves me inadequate,
A stalactite searing my spine.
It is more unfair than wolves or drowning
To labour you further over the loss.
I left you in disrepair and shabby,
How could you not grow crooked,
into a wind-whipped sapling
clinging to the rock face,
my face and
Memories.



The first stanza is preambling ambling, the next two addressed to mama and the last to ma soeur. I'm a drama queen.

I probably wont write before Christmas. So I'll wish you happiness, tinsel, twinkle lights and whatever the opposite of weltangst is, to see you into the new yea(H)r.It's going to be a good one.The Schmutzli told me.

"Death's in the Goodbye"

Well mother internet, here I am reporting back after a lifetime, or rather death time. Yes, as you should be able to gather from that sentence, I was in a death defying car crash and am now probably immortal (that IS the way those things pan out). But I'm not going to go into it, because it is actually a little bit boring with the whole rolypolying in a Peugeot 107 down a hill-side, being horrendously desperate for just one more day on the merry-go-round, realising that when it comes down to it I am an animal pulsating with adrenalin and will not allow myself to end. I promise you, death is about as unoriginal as you can get. It's been done billions of times billions of ways, and counting. All I can say about it is that while it's right in front of you with its mouth gaping open waiting to gobble and you are feeling extremely real with all the "ALERT!!!!" pituitary is dumping in you, you may babble "O Grandma, what big teeth you have" but secretly you know that you are going to slap that wolf upside the head and, if need be, crawl out of there piece by piece. You know this with complete certainty at the time, which isn't to say much other than you expand on your idea of certainty. When death approaches our concept certainty becomes pregnant with all sorts, and in the moment survival becomes its bastard offspring. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but basically all I meant to say is that rather than beg to live I demanded it, and so I am still here. If you don't learn to bend concepts a little they will break.

Now I am just left to mourn my Mr. Biggleworth Peugeot107 Esquire, ipod (most likely stolen by the POPO that later arrived on the scene) and a pretty pair of shoes. I have upgraded the lost latter two already and it has helped heaps in allowing me to move on.Nothing quite like trading in experience for materialism- you can list what you lost and replace it all with something better. You can eradicate all the traces of horror with trinkets found at bargain prices on ebay. Our ideas of ownership are really practical for that. They have turned out to be our framework for everything- trading, relationships etc... the idea that you can "have" something, imbue it with some kind of quality that makes it durably yours even if you turn your back on it and someone else then stumbles upon it, is grotesquely genius and uniquely human. In fact it is definitively so. Ownership is what makes us FUNCTION- any human act or relationship boils down to trade, which is only possible if both sides own something they can do swapsies with. Our emotions are commodities,our minds are assets, our bodies are stock. And it is all losing value by the day as we tick toward oblivion. At the moment we are rich because we are still relatively new and have a way to go yet (accidents withstanding)- so hurry up and barter wisely, my beauties. Barter for DRAMA, frippery and general intensity.

Although, having said that, apparently there are only 36 dramatic situations in life, as set out by Georges Polti in 1895, that perpetually pepper human existence. I don't think crashes feature in any kind of explicit manner, but apparently " 18) Discovery that one has had one's sister as a mistress" does. Those were different times, to be sure, and only all the way at number 28) on the list does the most hackneyed dramatic situation "Obstacles to Love" feature. That one alone could probably make up for 60% of life's troubles, but even if we have a pretty good go of it, drama is in shockingly short supply, it seems. One life will buy you exactly 36 different dramatic situations if you are very lucky, and chances are that should you score that variety you will probably be too apathetic to feel them as fully as you should. I mean, think about it. In the past (that be any time between pre-history and the renaissance) people merrily meandered around with broken legs and heinous diseases- for any emotion to be able to propel people THAT resistant to outside stimuli to do anything it would need to be absurdly intense. It makes me wonder whether they felt them stronger than we do, whether the fact that most of the time I'm pretty "meh" about most things (other than when I suffer from a flare up of immature annoyance about something petty) is because the 36 dramatic situations are not enough or have been done too much in every book, film or acquaintance's life. But right now I'm nomming Snackajacks, admiring Mr. Blue's handy DIY work that gave me a new SHELF, have my slumbering, snuffling catterling curled up and warming my toes, and I can feel happiness reasonably intensely. Nothing compared to the drama of having a sister for a mistress, though. I'll work on that.

Days and Clichés

Well, I have finally accepted it. I can't punctuate. But that's all right- it'll just give subjectivity more leeway in whatever I write, as it'll be even less apparent what I'm prattling about. Like Mama Sartre said: "with a world turned outward, we cultivate our own subjectivity". And how our little world has turned outward. Or maybe it's the other way round, and Berkley go it right saying that we are trapped by it. Either way, subjectivity is an ideal you'd do well to pander to.
The story in the last post was meant to be a (badly punctuated) cliché- the little protagonist is so cool and different that he is just the same as everything he is terrified of. I hope there were some cringe worthy emo-esque bits. But anyway, ultimately he got over it, and hopefully realised he doesn't have to cling to his superiority like a despondent something-that-clings. We are all wonderful clichés and that's why they are brilliant- little floating islands in our sea of subjectivity.The whole thing was meant to be one silly, subjective contradiction.

Anyway, moving on. Or trying to stand still, rather. I'm not liking time. I've been getting horribly homesick, at first for things I remember; a song here, a picture there and I'm a yearning mess. It is true I have a brilliant subconscious, it's always on the repressive war path. I forget the bad quickly and find myself crawling all over my memories like a spider- and I want those days back! The other day I drove past my old house and stopped to see how the current inhabitants had changed the door, put a recycling bin outside, and had a bike instead of a car. EVILERS. I was a bit drunk and definitely should not have been driving; I was going somewhere in convoy with some friends and ran away back down memory lane, or Overton Drive actually. I sat still and parked up my car, a maniacal stalker, stalking something intangible and great. And then it all came rushing back, angry and panting gripping at my mind. I was never happy there but the way I see things now I could be, could I go back. I think that's the point. But then, when I think of nothing and lay back, eyes closed and wanting, the bad I'd made myself forget comes tearing back out of the mist, hideous leviathans, not threatening per se, but there and huge.

So I've began wanting things I haven't had yet, and I see them so vividly with my memory eye- leaning over a pier far away where everything is inoffensive in grey, greyer and white, and it's freezing too- I'm looking for Orcas. Or sitting in a beer garden, much older, it's sunny and I have a little girl called Anais Esmeralda Caruana Golder (I call her Nissy for short). Everything's wonderful in that moment in that world, filled with children's things and a young mother's love. Or driving across empty desert scenery, that is so barren it would make me feel jubilant in my complexity. I'm driving toward some danger, Yellowstone nature reserve maybe, in a rented mustang, waiting for sunset. There is a lot to look forward to yet. I have seen every one of those scenes, snatches out of everydays approaching cautiously from downwind. So I'm looking forward, looking back, a "pendulum soul" between the will and was. But as the days wriggle in and out of each other and I'm busy thinking of "then", I am still just defining myself by happenings. I don't even know what I want. Whether I want a snappy suit or a gypsy skirt, or some hideous hybrid, in preparation for what's to come. Whether I should take heart or take heed.
Nothing is ever going to make me happy if I'm always waiting for the next chapter to tell me what the book's about.

What if butterflies smoked?

Here is a story I wrote the other day instead of my essay on our engagement with fictions. I don't think that my tutor would appreciate it though.

Every story I write for some reason features people doing weird things with cigarettes. I thought about why that is, and I realised that it's because I think they stand for all the the dark facets in humanity, their industry and their consumers.

Butterflies

They told me that I could never be like the “everyone”- they breathed it at my mother after they had cut her open to let me out. They implied it with furrowed brows when they listened to my troubles as I had paid them to do- but when I stood there finally unravelled and open like a wound, they closed their eyes and ignored it.
I do not like people. I find them too predictable and quaintly broken, forgotten to themselves and all the self-knowledge and control they could have if they would forgo the ego that keeps them moored in their predictable patterns. Makes them be a cliché, or a repetition, or worse; leave them stranded alone.
I went for too many years before my first attempt to draw myself out of this mess, wring myself out through my wrists. The adrenalin made laugh out loud when the blood began to squirt, and I pressed the razorblade side on against the slit to hide its snarly, spitting grin from me.
After I survived that, survived myself and the raging despondence, I grew calm and sealed.
Kia brought me coffee in the moonlight in a McDonalds, and she carried herself like she could fill your pockets with emeralds for no other reason than to make you forget about her. There was nothing in her that spoke or wanted to be heard: she was silent. Her silence was fierce and disconcerting, and the everyday seemed offensive and wild next to her. I came back each night for a month to watch her; cleaning the floors, saying “thank you, have a nice day”, checking the toilets for outrage. All the nuances that she had in her were laid bare in every minute and it was always just the one, or strange variations thereof: death. A nothing. An ANTI.
I knew her then, after the month. And she knew me, though we never spoke a word or made it the way it should have been. Followed the patterns of speech and recognition, eventual arrangements, wandering around together, engaging our natural responses to each other, wondering why she hadn’t rung then or kissed me then, then to one another until our habits blurred and made us attracted enough to want to be part of each other indefinitely and for nothing. It could all have been so predictable. But I was silent and she was silent, and in our shy glances and the lazy lick of her yellow gaze that didn’t speak or listen, we had done it all before and come to this.
“You can come out with me tonight”, she said on the my 31st visit to her work place. It was the first words we had spoken and they didn’t seem predictable or aware of that- she knew why I was there and had been for the month, what I wanted and that she would pass it on to me. A Chinese whisper that could make me dull and walled high inside my prison cell, a punishment more than a body, with a mind attached that reeled with constant wants that bored me.
I expected to follow her to an “out” that she had selected for us, a place outside of the ring of mutual recognition we had set onto ourselves. I must have misunderstood though, because I realised that she had meant out of the McDonalds only. Where I went after that was my choice, and I followed her through two misbegotten streets, parallels drawn between similarity upon similarity. She did not protest and I confess that it was the same old human hum that drove me- I wanted to know,and then by knowing own. Perhaps eventually even to conquer too, in the way that comes typical to a man.
We arrived at her door and she looked round at me at once distracted and unsurprised that I had followed her, but unlocked the door carefully while I watched. She stroked it roughly as if to calm a spooked horse before throwing it open, and dimly I was aware that this would produce fear in the everywoman, a strange man who followed them to their haven. But it was not fear exactly that lit her quick steps across the dark linoleum floor, it was an understanding that lay between stupidity and indifference, but more than anything I understood that she had no feeling of ownership in her, that the flat we moved in now could have been hers or mine or anyone’s thus holding no safety anyway.
She flew to the window, but didn’t turn on the lights. I looked around us to see grotesque shapes littering the walls, outlines of beasts and smudges of colour that made me sad to see so unexpectedly in the peace of the inky wallpaper. I heard the hiss of a match behind me and knew she had a lit a cigarette. “I do it though I don’t like it. When I smoke I am a smoker, when I am not smoking I am a non-smoker. It’s always a flip of a coin from one instant to the next which one it will be”. She breathed out slowly and loudly, pretending to savour it to herself.
“Why do you have nothing in your flat apart from those butterflies on the wall?” It was the first thing I had ever said to her after I’d woken to the sunlight. Last night raised itself from the murk of my memory like an imposing mountain, snow and ice framing its fierce peak- we had lain down together in the dark, in her bare living room, or what would be taken to be a room for living if someone did any living in it. I knew she felt the very name of that room irritated her, a nasty presumption “living room”, somehow a bumbling bully insensitive and unaware. I was sure she felt such things. She had smoked all night and stubbed out the cigarettes on the floor, the sparks going out like little meteorites.
She looked back at me after I had spoken, squatting on the floor and scooping all the ash from the night before into piles. She looked up at the walls undeterred in her action, and stared at the butterflies. Some were stencilled onto the wall, some were painted and some were stickers. But most were life-like, oversized ones made out of paper, intricately folded in parts, different colour paper mashee stuck down onto it. “I collect.” She said, “You can be that one.” I got up and walked towards the largest and most spectacular butterfly in luminescent green, following her index finger. There were scraps of unused paper lying on the floor below it, as if it had only just broken free of its cocoon, and the empty shards lay idly at my feet. “Thank you”.
I waited for the bus playing with the cigarette she had given to me just before our parting. We had not said anything, but I knew I would not be seeing her again. I had watched her silently scrape all the butts and ash into a little bird-feeder, snapping shut the cap like a coffin lid, and hang it from outside her window in clumsy determination as if mocking something else she should be doing. She kept her back to me for a whole eternity before I finally turned, galloped down the stairs and out of her front door, then onward past a children’s playground, lively and vulgar. Our story had already happened and ended, been forgotten, repeated – become boring. It didn’t matter to her that we were “soulmates”, like the stories promised, as it shouldn’t to me. It was just another trap into another useless riddle. But even though I understood the reasoning and felt all her thoughts exactly, I could not help but see that she was a little more ruined for the world than even I was. Though, I could surely follow her there, as I had out of the McDonalds.
I dropped her parting gift onto the sodden concrete, and looked up into the hooded face of a pubescent boy. He was gritting his teeth and rummaging around in his tracksuit pocket before he spat “Gimme your phone and your wallet, wanker, or you’ll fucking regret it.” He shook slightly with the vehemence of his threat, and if I had managed an aggressive enough display he probably would have balked. He would never had done it again. But as it was, I decided to write his life for him. Allow for the feelings of inadequacy, presumed quotidian exposure to violence, morbid curiosity and desperate need for any kind of interaction with someone who would respect and remember him, and his power. I gave all that to him without a fuss and grinned at him kindly. “Yeah, fuck off” he said, as he limped off forcefully, but I caught the unguarded seed of a smile spring into his eyes in response to mine. I watched him walk off with some silly trinkets of mine and gave him my oppression, boredom and sickness on his way. My destruction. He could have all that weight now and do his silly limp under the strain. The hoodie’s bleak future stamped his eyes shut, so he would not be able to understand anything, least of all himself. It was rare to see everything so clearly so as to suffer for it the way Kia does and I should. But I deserved to be that butterfly on her wall; sought, chosen, redeemed.
I crumpled my remainders like the cocoon down onto the concrete by the bus stop, empty and forgetting and got on the 123.

Words That Talk Too Much (or NOSTALGIA)

There are definitely too many of those, words that go on talking and nattering, asking questions even when the lights go out and I thought I'd pinned them to a page. I just thought that I should probably apologise for the rant- the lengthy and silly rant, and leave it with the fact that BBC iplayer and programs about Russian Art incense me more than the average viewer.

(As a peace offering, I bring you this:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/01/art-is-useless-because.html
in regards to Oscar Wilde who I dropped in the finishing sentence last post and then did not even explain myself fully. As we know, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde states that "all art is useless". I hate to question genius, but I think he meant rather, that beauty is useless, and as art is a complicated mixture of that and many things which I try and fail to catch out and label, I'll let it go to the party, drink cider and fornicate. Because in the end, that is what all concerned parents must learn to do. So anyway, this here site I have shown you is truly the most amazing internet find. It's letters from all sorts of interesting people about interesting things, previously unseen and rounded up for your pleasure and distraction. I thought the snippet I selected quite appropriate.)

My favourite word is probably "and" in case you had not noticed. I loathe to let a sentence end, each one a microcosm that should really be allowed to stand on it's own. But it always gets it's value from the before and after, apart form if it's a quotation, to be drawled, dumbed down, de-constructed and re-construed, misconstrued and everything in between. Actually no, I think I will stick to my point. A sentence is it's before and after. As I am, was, will be. I've been thinking about Switzerland a lot lately, and how when I was young I was so much more mature than I am now. Hardened, wizened to the world and an incredible pessimist, but I found worst-case scenarios kind of epic. I would prance around my school, Burgmatt Schule, where it is no hyperbole- I am sometimes a bit liberal with the dramatics- when I say that I had not a single friend or even someone who was not openly hostile toward me. Wait,I did have one secret friend actually, let's call her Beige, who used to be nice to me only when no one was around and I was never allowed to tell. In front of the other kids she would join in the name-calling and ripping up my books or whatever, but we would look at each other across the classroom and I would feel like I had defeated the others a little bit, because I knew something about one of them that they did not. She comes and visits me here often, even surprising me on my birthday.
But anyway, I was met with scorn even by the teachers. This is due to 2 things I think, 1) that I was foreign to their little hamlet 2) that I was somewhat strange.
I can remember bad things happening to me, many, but I don't need to talk about them because the prevailing feeling about that time now is that I was utterly alone, with my mum being off at work and whatnot, and yet had a world more alive and more wonderful because I kept myself company, and my internal projections of everything were shamefully romanticised. The walks to and from school were the best, provided I managed to get away from the beasties before they could "get" me. But even when they did, I met them with such fierce, unflinching stoicism that it makes me happy when I think back on it, and I would walk off along the "Bach" (small stream) telling myself stories to the sound of the gurgling water, staring at everything, but mainly at the ground in front of my feet with all the little sticks and gravel- my cinema screen.

Somehow I shook offthe stoicism, but I kept my silly, dreamy, romantic ideals. I watch the world around me more now, and mostly I like what I see. Two women shouting filth at each other on the bus is beautiful and intense, or coming home and focusing on a light switch that seems completely weird and unexpected when you give it your full attention, is a nugget of pleasure in the everyday. I urge everyone to try it- just pay really close attention to the exact appearance and position of a light switch, run your finger along the sides of it and remember it. If for nothing else, just so you can find it again when you're grappling around in the dark.


Cinema
And here I thought I'd be alone again,
And remember
How I always wanted to be my own mother-
A caring that begot my own conception,
Threw away all the keys and misery company-
I could have made myself anything then:
A child who wore nothing that did not look like flowers,
And I would have breastfed myself forever and never touched a fruit,
Riding the milk train sun in/sun out along the tapestry,
Dusk glazing orange on the walls.
I could have taught myself to smoke those hollow twigs* properly and lip-read all of Marilyn's lines;
I would never have stopped listening to Willy Alberti, or dance
On the balcony lit by raging candles until the wax stained the floor.
I would have worn out my purple camouflage dresses until the threads screamed "murder!",
And spun them anew from their grave.

I would have begun and ended, circled and fallen, all in a day and a night
Like a Bluebottle fly. I would have worn my end like a badge of honour
And meant it-
Honour and finality, and knowing "forever" in a day.






*There were little hollow branches of this bush that the cool kids smoked in the forests in Switz, and I always thought they were the epitome of rebellious chic.

Art's Army of Naked Emperors

Look here. I am angry and I will share with you why I am angry. And before I start, please forgive some obvious hypocrisies...

There is a thing called First Thursdays, which in art circles means basically you may go and see a preview of some perversion or another, and drink wine that is meant to be free, but where they insist on you coughing up the overpriced "recommended donation" anyway. And that is the embodiment of exactly what's wrong with art today- not that there hasn't been a reckoning overdue for the best part of half a Century, mind.

Sorry I started at the end, as usual. BASICALLY what I have seen at these exhibitions is laughable and yet very, very sad. It's not the Shoreditch whores who amble around hoping someone will notice how desperately irreplaceable they are in their individuality, nor the garish creature that stalked attention dressed up as a Lichtenstein painting at one preview (I'm ashamed that I actually RAN FROM IT. But it was terrifying and I am very easily unsettled).
It's what's displayed and lauded there, mainly the work of young art "students"- self indulgent tripe they manage to evacuate from themselves. I also had a walk around Teal's uni and was a bit taken aback at the fact that the entire building sacrificed to their "creativity" was littered with scrawled drawings of vaginas and crap made out of corks. I had a particularly tepid exchange with some inadequate, who told me that her "piece" (scribbles on the wall of a real life office, complete with post-its and magazines hung up for no reason whatsoever) was all about "making something out of nothing". Erm...well done there. You successfully managed to give a rudimentary description of every piece of art ever made, and tar it with your own particular brand of MORON. When I drew attention to the fact that it was a bit sub par, really, she answered "it's not about being good or bad". What a way to take criticism. Instead of trying to face up to failure she just goes on and undermines an entire institution of evaluation necessary to make her choice of metier even possible. I told her this, but I think she was too baffled by the fact that someone had actually told her the thing she made was shit to even defend herself properly. It may eveb have been a joke. Yes! It was all a lovely joke and I can now move on and be happy and ignore the whole debate it sparked in my mind about modern art and the damned naked Emperor.

It is such people with not even the hope of a grasp about what they are doing who make up the "art" that's floating about these days. Every time I hear of some new contraption I hang my head in despair. Why, in the name of Duchamp (pun intended), are these people allowed the arrogance to assume that whatever thought they dress up in ridiculous deserves the title of art? If Moliere was right and the "gentleman should beware of the itch to write" then those disillusioned children definitely need to beware the itch to make just to avoid certain templates society has laid out for them. Responsibility can kill, or rather the means you choose to avoid it. Just ask Lautrec! They turn themselves into a stereotype just to fuel their own narcissism. Really it's a wider problem in our society, like Twitter it is a manifestation of the self-obsession that doesn't let us concentrate and engage with anything properly any more.

There have been interesting concepts and ideas recently perhaps, and some are intelligent I'm sure, but what do they have to add to the symptoms of value in the human condition? The humanity, creativity and slow progress to something that could eventually evolve to be perfection? Why have we stopped looking for that and now serve up period blood stained bedsheets in place of some kind of thing that we could find solace and hope in? Why are they all so focused on their would-be disestablishmentarianist (ha!four more letters and that would have been the longest word in the dictionary! WOO!) banality that they don't realise they have stuck themselves in a rut in one niche of one genre of art that every other medium of communication got out of already! But even if you ignore all my sentimental babble and brush it off with "o but you don't understand it..." (I could murder at the arrogance in that line) you still can't explain away the fact that all the things I see/hear of/google in the way of modern art, apart from the ones that are a direct pastiche from the great masters perhaps, are UGLY. And worse than that, UGLY ON PURPOSE.

I'm not saying that the pursuit of ideal aesthetics should be the only thing one considers when on the art quest- rather it should maybe be the incarceration of a zeitgeist in one medium or another. Or even better, a zeitgeist yet to come.

For example; I'm sure it is no coincidence that landscape painting hit it's climax in the 17th Century (in Europe, I mean) just before the general opinion turned against the pomp of the ruling classes and there began to be a serious clamouring for change and equality ie going back to rural basics. Or maybe how art was involved in bringing about the Russian revolution. See the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. It's something I find personally to be stunning even though I think Rothko is a DOUCHE AND SHOULD DIE AGAIN, and some of his work appears to be practically identical to Malevich's. But the Black Square is so compelling because it was painted to pin down a feeling- one of apocalyptic hurricanes of change approaching. And now after all the slaughter and many more noteworthy historical happenings I can still look at that and be spooked by it. Though even through the terror of his dark prophecy, you can see the lighter cracks of a promising future in the oil. Goes without saying he was endlessly mocked for it, as the vogue at the time was brainlessly copying European portraiture and Baroque/Rococo styles apparently. But he said this "None of you will ever wander as far and as deep into the wilderness as I have, and there only can transformation take place. Rise up fools, and liberate yourself from the tyranny of objects!" Great man indeed.

I can't tell you what art is exactly, but I can tell you that it becomes it. Either when someone sees it for the first time or hundreds of years later with the educated eye of an art historian cast over it or something, but it does not start out that way. This is why artists should be rare and the making of true art should be a sacred kind of pursuit, because art colours our history and civilisation all kinds of shades, and it takes a heroic person to plod off into that wilderness. So artists, please! Make something valuable, touching and worth remembering, something that is POETRY to the current pretentious masturbations of art that are at best only witticisms to be spouted at some would-be intellectual dinner party. STEP UP TO THE MARK. If for nothing else, just to prove Wilde wrong: art IS useful.

Whip of Whimsy II

More of the whimsy and small picture: why in God's name is there an exhibition for DISPOSAL ie things that UCL has been hoarding in the museums but thinks it should get rid of? They give you some stickers upon entry and you have to ax something-either the soil samples or hippo skeleton, or the formaldehyde critters. Why can't we just go around hoarding in peace anymore? Hold on to all the things that seem so unimportant you wouldn't even give it a name until you don't have them anymore. Like being a fresher, or Barney the formaldehyde geko. Here's some food for thought: Get some stickers and put them on the things unworthy in your life, and I mean when pondering from a place of NO SENTIMENT. You'll end up with a toilet, knife, fork, possibly a spoon and some blue tack. Blue tack is a dirty, unsentimental fiend.



To Be Polite
You dissolve into sand and make a mess on the floor:
Breaking up with anyone is always the same
trying to pry
Blue tack off the wall
praying it won’t make a stain.
Then trying to tear up the pictures,
lonely memory keys.

Rip them down and pick
The lock-
Make a statement to that wall!
Show it how you roll your dice,
And how they sweat hidden in your fist.
Next time you won’t be the parrot and say it back,
You won’t be the “i do” or “the one” for
One summer or a smile.
Attack taxes less than your charade
(True it’s easy to make someone happy
When they are afraid,
But it’s always easiest to make
Someone miserable. Misery
pulls its own weight).