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).

The Whip of Whimsy

O what a spur!
Let's say our favourite quotations are CARY GRANT or perhaps that our influences are Rilke AND Byron. Let's be facking random. Things that influence us are definitely not selected on the base of needing to promote yourself, though. Just a small side note. And if you do name them then they are doing a pretty poor job of influencing you.

(I'm saving that critique for some chump whose gig I will attend tonight. His "influences" on musical myspace read like the "Who's Who Of The Most Commonly Misused Geniuses By The Pseudo-Intellectual". A long title for a list, but then the list IS long. I intended to go dressed at Nietzsche to make him feel ridiculous, but as I can't find an ostentatious enough moustache I'm just going to have to go in some damnably ostentatious head attire.)

NB I wrote the above about 2 weeks ago and saved in draft, because, most of the time, I am confused. So the chump has been observed, mind-ridiculed, and I have now semi moved on. Although, upon occasion I do find myself wandering about my memory lane and chortling about it looking out of the bus windows. People tend to move away to a different seat when I start up that ol' mental deficiency. You know, SMILING. ON a BUS.

Anyway, the whip of whimsy. If I had to say what influenced me right now I would say probably Parsley, my basil plant on my kitchen window sill. He is one hideous plant, speckled with disease and discolouration, but he has a jungle going on in there. In his little universe/pot. And he made it all himself! That is truly inspiring. He is the plantification of a crack addict, and he has himself some mould, some animals (disgusting, but I allow them. They may provide amusement for Catty) and an odd kind of hateful symbiotic thing going on with Basil, the parsley plant who dwells next door to Parsley. Eventually they shall make the journey to the bin, but for now they are in their Eden on my window sill, blissfully unaware that the fact I can't use them in my culinary explorations will end them.

Sigh. I think I'm really roly-poling down the ladder of interest at an alarming rate here. Mostly I do have things to report, I just don't. I prefer sitting on the 134 and debating whether or not I kind of stabbed my whole romaticised notion of being 'a basement writer', a 'closet feeler', in the back by trying really hard recently to achieve a career in it/ go out there and trumpet it. I wanted desperately to be a broken, lonely, little Parsley, working in a shop and scribbling my poetry on ripped receipt paper stolen from the till.

How funny that you can just buy into adulthood like that- it's so easy to sell yourself these days; one padded CV, one clear goal, one splurge on some pleasing faux Cath Kidston coasters. Your mistake will manifest itself in conversations about some kak 'celebrity' such as Zac Affron or whoever,which earned me affected comments from Yellow, laden with the connotations that I have turned into something monstrous and superficial. ESPECIALLY when I threaten to pounce on the Friendly Fires with the intention of interviewing them for my newspaper The Sanctuary, as they were in the queue for a club behind us. Or Carl Barat, also recently spied. Monstrous definitely, but then why not believe in all that? It's not like there is anything else to believe in, and there is so much belief lying about that can be usurped by the asinine. Asinine is so hot right now.

So, basically, with a few ambitions I've really done that- within a week. But don't pretend you haven't noticed them around, the scenes that steer towards the tides that made me mad. I guess one problem is I just never saw the crime in how being can make you miss counting all the stars, while you have the chance. Your ONE CHANCE. I've spent myself occupied with the smaller picture.

An (Accusatory) Crayon To Tar

Response to the statement: (paraphrased) "you shall not be remunerated for your poem about "money" BUT you will receive pride for having been published" Yes. Very much paraphrased. It was a lot more concise than that.

A careless mirage of crayon on the tar

strikes me like a snake-

I forgot the forceful minds that took me here

Who told me to write about “money”

And offered me pride instead of “money”

And were ashamed they had no “money”

To wash away the creep of it.

I seldom reach the grain that drew the spark

Out from the ground.

I like to whittle the edges,

Make a picture and

Picture it through the sound-

A rainbow on asphalt maybe, or

A pear shaped like a child.

These things make me happy

When I fail at really going to town.

DID YOU KNOW that soon there will be baby-shaped pears for £5 at the local supermarket? The most recent addition to the novelty fruit market, if you believe in such a thing. That's what happens when the birds and the bees and the pears get bored and let us play at it for a while.

I think Bukowski would rape them.There has definitely been too much of him lately. A scene of unexpected debauched anal rape springs to mind, which I read with the best part of Blue's refined family in the room. I felt dirty and plagued. Women that book is called. Charles is making me less articulate, I can feel it. Nevermind winning by manymanymany points at Scrabble recently. I should like to play the him at my new invention FONETIC SCRABEL. Swords out, pistols at dusk.

Hail, Misanthrop!

My mum said to me today that she hates students because they have a feeling of superiority she cannot abide. There was a boy, years ago, who met her while visiting me here. He sat on our balcony and told her how "we are the elite" and that "where we have been we have been taught how to be it." My mum didnt really do school and worked and worked instead. She is someone now. But having a boy who had it all thrust at him from angles unknown to her drink himself stupid on her balcony, throw up in her toilet and pollute his mind under her roof telling HER that HE was the elite struck a nerve and she did not forget it.

This elitism is a twisted trait to have as a human being- a using others as stepladders to make yourself feel taller, using yourself as a tool to fall into line with an ego who never was your friend. I think people are wonderful and I think i have always held them a bit in high regard. It ebbs and flows this opinion- I am not without my seasons. Well I think highly of them compared to others I've met who believe "90% of the population should be burned". We are sick and marvellous and should not be cinders. It is a child's view-a very short child's view. And who would the child be without this 90% that make it so happy with itself? We hate eachother and hate ourselves, we selfdestruct and selfindulge and my god is it good to do so- provided you know some obscure artists and bands to segregate yourself from the surplus population all about doing the same thing. That you try hard is a given, and that you are afraid. Doesn't matter if you would base yourself to lay with one of them just to feel your height, you my child, are one cut above the rest.

The people that I see in denner...I should by rights feel very stroked in my special ego place. I especially enjoy the bitching of the past-it older women in laguages I understand but with motives I do not. What drama that makes for.

Here are my top 10 daily-Dennerites:
1) Gremlin man. Yes you, with the huge droopy ears and frightening visage- who cough and splutter, run in panting like a wild beast to buy your 30p beer every morning 8am sharp. You are a punctual fairy tale.
2)Whiny girl and anorexic mum- I enjoy your straw hats/ straw bags and all your things straw. You are a peadophile's wet dream.
3) Junkie who likes to play with his false teeth- the suction noise it causes are so very sickening. I resist asking why you have a complete set of false teeth at the relatively tender looking-age of forty.
4) The obese lady who gets all the 50% off meat- you wear the same stripy top and leggings EVERY SINGLE DAY. You do not smell, but they are not flattering. I have some questions for you.
5) Mullet-man who enjoys tidying the shelves ferociously. You do help us, but you are a little weird. But I believe in sayings, so best not look you in the mouth, horse man.
6) The at-home woman who is astounded at finding the same toothpaste and things she has "at home" dwell at the shop also. I want to tell you there are many toothpastes of the sort. And you are quite mad.
7) The english-haterman.You screamed your disgust at the filthy "englis rag-pack" the "root of all modern and ancient evil" unprompted into the silent tram at 7am, and then turned up at m yvery own till 2 hours later in a white lab coat and bought 10kg of flour. Suspicious.
8)The clairevoyant. You are strange looking it has to be said, but your way of keeping your dog barking outside all through your sejourn at the shop so you know he has not been dognapped, is INGENIOUS.
9)Miss rollerblades- every daily shop in your roller blades. And you have never even knocked over any wine bottles. I have. 9litres of red wine look like a massacre.
10)Lady with the hair in traditional looped-roud-head plaits. You came in twice in two different dresses the same day to buy all the same things. I liked both of them.

Now who can look at this list and declare their hatred for humanity? Sometimes I am moved to tears.Sometimes I dream that I will go up to a group of strangers, ask for a light and imply a real one but really mean a metaphor, sit down and tell them everything about me. And then just leave and they'll remember me for not just being a failing monster.

Ketchup

kI have not written in ages, there have been too many things afoot.
1) The isles of Orkney where we drove 12 hours to see the whales I was determined dwelt there: they do not. Magnus and Magnus (apparently everyone is called Magnus) told us that Old Sam Jenkins or some such goes out on his boat everyday and in 30 years has only seen them thrice. O the disgusting lies of the Scottish tourist board.
2)Spain with Blue and famille. I met a tiny catling in a bar, she was shaven and missed an eye. I plotted all manner of things in my head so I could take her home, another one to add to the Miss-meow collection, having acquired the first as a reaction to my "swine flu". In the words of Lulu-love "the ultimate impulse buy".
3) Denner work. in switzerland. in their equivalent of asda.It is the place where the mad congregate; the OAA (over age anorexics) prostitues, the men who talk instead of thinking, the woman who does her shopping everyday in roller skates. I spend 12 hours a day trying to rise above, pretending the boxes of goods I open to fill the shelves are all Christmas presents and I am excited to see what's inside. I feel like I smell Denner on me, I even dream of my fly rescuing endeavors, where I try and save the ones who persist in crawling over the cheese/yoghurt in the giant fridge and freeze to death. It's their idea of heaven. As everything, they are ever determined to get and stay there.

Anyway, as I said I have not written in a while. maybe it's because some things are sacred and I feel like I would have to save up for years to have enough of anything-skill, thought, eloquence- to stamp it onto something. I think what I mean really, is that I wish I would write more these days; write it and feel it less. Switzerland is not treating me kindly, and I miss my Mr Blue. I couldn't really find the words to wring for the emotions that are just sitting on their little throne and at present wish me to suffer. But now, an itch in my fingers, a hum through me and TADAH I am a vocation.The breath catches purple when it has something to say, and I know my voice has changed.Changed itself, or been changed by a riot or really "feeling it" or something cruel. I don't know yet.
This preserving of thoughts is only an arrogant self-love anyway. And I do hate people who love themselves. Shouldn't trust people who fall in love so easily.

Mirrors In Switzerland

O a mirror! The delights thereof! Thanks to it everyone knows precisely what they look like, and have no idea who they are. And why should they, when they define themselves by their glass twin?

Mirror
I can stare at your bambi brown,
and return to my base coordinates;
stare at spiderweb capillaries
made from something strong enough
to keep the thoughts in-

I can't help but want for rain
to water me, and let me
grow roots. Then
I could have all the secrets spring up
around it, like mushrooms
in the bark:
there's magic in them.
Like when you listen to tears
and turn your world into a singing carousel;
or who you are when the chips are down and burried-

We spend our days staring at each other
centimeter glass and one dimension away from another
who we wish would know herself better.

Tonight back to merry london and my blue. I have done what I came to do,found and secured my job, which now I desperately need having lost many pennies missing many flights and being caught travelling black (swissism for being on public transport without a ticket).

The weather was the moodiest part of the trip, one second shining and smiling, the next thunderous. Although I know more than I did before about weather; walking through thunder and rain in skimpy sandals when it's warm can feel like holding your feet into an angry sea. It's quite beautiful really, the arrogant resilience of it. I think if it could only wipe Switzerland clean of it's people then this country and I could be very good friends. It was lovely watching it in the sunny rain. The light shone through the drops and lit them up like prisms. It looked as if God was sending us diamonds. It looked as if he might exist. There was a man with down syndrom sitting on a bench playing "My heart will go on" on a flute in front of a tent containing some art by the Bahnhof. A little kinder egg surprise of art in the middle of the city to watch, from my secret park&-green-tea perch. Like I said, Switzerland and I could be very good friends.

I even know it well by now: all it's public buildings smell the same- of stern authority and bleach- and flowers decorate every remote tram station in their pots. Sometimes it's quite unsettling to see them there so purposefully. They seem important signs somehow; flowers to commerate the dead. The suicides. There are many of them littering the tracks here.

But I like to think that they are there for all the people who wander their sterile streets thought-screaming "JUST FUCKING LOVE ME" into themselves. Sick with a needy virus.
I have their germ.

Make The Days Count

Well, here to the subject I originally wanted to deal with in my blog most.

I love writings (mainly Plath, Poe and recently Rilke) and I have written words for years and years. Notebooks full of them. All testaments to something a little more than disillusioned with how most of my hopes found me. Poems and stories hide me.

The most important thing about words is that they are about as subjective as you can get. And not a kind of subjective that you can ever explain. It's a kind of subjective you would not necessarily know of or tell of. It's hidden in the connotations; it's in how we build the words and their precise meanings for us. We learn all our words differently, and every time we hear them said we build on that meaning. It stems directly from our experiences; it makes them as personal and varied as secrets.

Here are some of mine:




Ignorance
For today, I'll have a soul
to
hear hoof prints in the musk,
And I will paint the whore before I see her;
A painted face with pointed tones,
she rides with bells on her
Toes
And shades herself from the sun
with her fancies.
I will soil that girl

I want to know one thing in my
Grammatical twirls
One thing that would be a fact
That could still iron it’s shirt at the edge of the world:
That would be a gentleman to
Never break my conviction
And be a savage; ruthless and always
Halve my belief.
I curl a page about my hair
And I wear it like a halo;
I suffer to silence
And suffer to hellos.
At the edge of my world I really know very little
And force out of myself
Repetition and rhythm and rhyme
And every refuge of wit
That danced off my tongue arm in arm
With doubt.
No one should believe the halves that perform on my stage;
All my shirts stay creased.




This is in reference to something my dad always liked to tell me. "You can tell the measure of a man by what he would do if no one ever found out" ; if you were stranded alone on a desert island and still washed your hair and ironed your clothes (with a heated rock or some such), kept your sanity with your hygiene and let that keep you human, you would be a little more than what everyone else is.
Here I am saying that I am not. Here I am saying that I really have no idea what the fack I'm going on about most of the time.

Make The Days Count
Faces in the rocks
like to smile, and stay smiling
and trace their shapes into the dirt.
Their races are silent with their permanent grins,
and I ask
why anyone would want to carve something
that stays forever;
that sings for no woman's ear
and smiles for each of her tears.



A smile will change you and how you see some person's action. That is something that really is quite worthless when you think about it, and it definitely is not something that you should try to hold onto forever. Forever is something even more worthless than that. So all I want really is to make the days count. Do something worthwhile everyday. The last two lines are just meant to show how emotions become irrelevant when it's coupled with the concept of eternity. I only say "woman's ear" instead of "no one's ear" as a bit of a feminist point. People still say "man" when they mean "people". This is just a bit of a sad dig at how our language turned out.

So here are two, not particularly special, poems of mine. But on the subject of feminism; I went to see Annette Messager's exhibition at the Hayward Gallery a few days back. The main theme running through it was definitely very feminist, but the whole feel of it was something I could really relate to. She forces children's scary world into an adult perspective so well. She makes it creepy. She makes it angry. She makes it new. Even 30 years after she first made the art, it still feels very relevant and alive. And that is rare with modern art. The newer it is the quicker it seems to get outdated. A favourite: "Les Enfants aux yeux rayés" (children with eyes scratched out). She carefully put together a whole photo album of random children of different ages out of magazines and newspapers, until one day she couldn't handle all the unknown eyes staring up at her "testifying to her lie (lack of children)". She violently scratched out their eyes and now she says "they are truly my child".
Not every woman wants to be a mother.

The Pictures On the Wall

I like them there. I do not often like to see things in front of me, that throw reminders at me. But the pictures I put on the walls to see, out of choice or obligation, are the links in my chain and they keep me tethered down, lest I should fly off like a balloon and forget my places.

I say places, there never really was just one to call my place. There are so many people and pictures and houses and memories, and feelings I ought to feel for all of them; but mostly I do not, and I kind of like it that way. I am ungrateful and often I am unhappy. I have a lot of faces and I jump into every open arm and rock myself to sleep with anyone who'll have me, provided they promise me everything will be alright. And what's funny is that I HATE alrights.

I haven't written any poems in a while; although yesterday would have been perfect for it. I threw up terribly next to a bus stop in York, under the most perfect night-sky I have seen in a while. The clouds folded themselves over the moon like a protective blanket; as if it was his night off but he couldn't quite give up the responsibility and kept peeking through them to see if they were doing everything right. The guarding the dark. If I were the moon I would also loathe to abandon my post.

So, being up in the Yorkshire countryside, visiting "family"; breaking damns and making myself angry; losing at trivial pursuit; being reminded of being 15. That is one of my places. I have at least 4 pictures on my wall that make that place.
There is Switzerland, and there is also here. There are a lot of people who are very important and they live in these places and make them. I change what I want from them all the time, and I change what I want from myself. What I want to want. Second-order volitions make me a wanton; the strongest of them make me go with the options that will make me want to be what I want to be at that moment. It keeps changing.

I am a rainy day girl. I am someone who often just doesn't care. I am someone who is so deeply selfish but who would pack up all of my house of cards, move it on just to save something. I am one awful contradiction.

Why do we put pictures up? Why is the camera one of the greatest things ever invented? It is, but I want to know why. We get many moments and people and places, I am not alone in struggling to put all of that in order. But I think cameras make us greedy, they make us lazy. They make us able to keep our lives on a wall and lock it in a frame; make us exhibit everything we've already had and the people we've known and places we've been.

As if that's enough for a life. As is next time we change our minds about everything and everyone, and about us we'll really rip them down, learn our lesson and start again with our collection. As if our photo album of feelings is really ours for the collecting.

Waltz With the Monsters

There were protests in the city today.

People gathered to save their earth. They all came together to write witty signs, and dance and make promises to each other and everyone watching. I was curious to see it all. I don't think it was entirely what it should have been. People took out their iphones and took pictures of the revolution, to make their own news. April fools. Everything seemed to be waiting when I got there, and I read the word war too many times. The only person who tried to cover it up was Yellow. He was ashamed of that red tape with "Capitalism means war" on it. He said it's fine; everyone's a hypocrite, because everyone has to eat and work.

Our needs make us equal and they betray our causes.
Just like with the anarchists, who try to give back the laws they say they are not their own. But a society is not something you can join like a club. It's something you are forced into by truncheons and shields. I never felt more part of mine than today.


I had a nightmare a few weeks ago about being trapped on a bridge with thousands of anxious protesting faces all around me, but I didn't know any of them. Then out of nowhere disease descended upon the crowd. We were sent plagues and diseases instead of bullets to put us down and keep us down. I was petrified in my dream, just as I was today when the riot police came out of their walls and orders and trapped everyone in "their" street. This is called catteling, and they didn't care whether you were a hypocrite or someone who liked to throw stones from far behind the front lines for what you believe in, or whether you believed in anything at all. Every single one of them seemed angry, and their faces were set in the war that read on every sign and sticker. I think I would have liked myself to be braver and not have found gap in the wall to scarper through like a rat. Maybe one day I'll go back with the right kind of clothes and the right kind of attitude and really be a change in something. But getting that last part right just seems too difficult.

And it's funny how a self protecting mechanism caused me this cowardice; it's not a mechanism that usually works with me. But there's something in being reminded of my nightmares in broad daylight and being frightened of things I didn't even know existed for me until today. It made me feel really young; it made me feel really normal.

There are many things that are going wrong for me. I seem to tide myself over on my blackboard in white chalk, and I have my hand hovering over too much these days, ready to wipe it all off. I retract, and regroup. I make the riots, and I chant "new start, new me" at myself in the street, but I'm still missing the attitude. I deliberately refuse to know myself better and teach myself better. It makes me worry about everything all the time.

There are the exams, and a looming future, friends and families and and the fact that I kind of like to start in the middle and end at the beginning of everything. To be honest, I think I just prefer seeing life from over my shoulder.

Ruins

I once heard it said you grow up the day you realise you wont live forever. I don't know why this is something we aim for. The growing up. But the realisation of our own mortality can surely only be a good thing. It motivates.


I am a nomad. I like the sea. I like places, and I want to see as many of them as I can before I am faced with my sell-by-date. Although what you see in these places is the same; it's people and their home, and the symbols that embody them. It's the feel of it you go for.

I especially like ancient civilisations, and I shall start with the feeling of them. There is a lot of comfort in standing next to ruins of unfathomable genius; people understood their world and left a mark on it. They became great. They fell. They made a circle, and though there is an innate feeling about our civilisation that it wont follow their example, we are just continuing what they started. They tell us endings are fine; they have loads of them. But never an end.

In a few days I am venturing to Cairo with Mr. Blue. I have always wanted to go, for as long as I can remember. And not just because a psychic once said I was an Egyptian Queen reincarnate, with an old soul and a thousand lines on each palm to tell my stories. I have always wanted to go because it was truly the greatest of societies, well the Old Kingdom anyway. You have to respect their ability to wow a world where people have learned to fly and make machines to build wonders for them, c. 2000 years after their decline.


Knowledge is an amazing thing. It's also slightly addictive; the more of it you have the more you are made aware of how little you really own. I always found it strange that we need to pick up newspapers and know the details of tragedies that happened when there is nothing we could possibly do to help.

I happen to really like knowing things, even though most of the time I get what I know wrong or forget it again, or am confronted with the question whether it is ever truly possible to know anything at all, and if so how. With all the sceptics and the hard determinists. Between them there really is nothing left apart from standing next to something ancient and great, to touch it and be close to the million others who were there and came before without knowing. Without any controlled choice about your having come there or leaving; but just a feeling about it all. Maybe that should be all we take from experiences and knowledge. From every film we see and every book we read, and every person, and place and day.

In the end we are all just explorers though, with our helmets on and our fixed opinions and changing minds. Discovering everything, for the last time, for ourselves.

Fairy wings to SAVE THE WHALES

I forgot that I had signed up for a parachute jump to save the whales. Actually, that is a lie BUT I thought I'd clicked exit before I sent the request. I wanted to think on it some. But they have already written to me in an email full of exclamation marks and gratitude. So it looks like it shall be done.

To begin with my flying endeavors to help those most noble of animaals, after a beautiful bbq (served up in the backyard on an ironing board) and lemsips; friends and me doused ourselves in glitter, gowns, ties, feathers and fairy wings. They are a flying tool. We spontaneously planned to go on a drive around London at 1am, taking pictures with every London landmark as we went. We did so.

We beeped at strangers and shouted and thrust our feathers out of Bigglesworth and tried to make him fly too. We saw Big Ben chime. We got chased away by a guard woman from Buckingham Palace, whom we told we loved. We got told people are trying to mine gold on the moon by a father, because our world is lost now. I trampled my slippers raw around Piccadilly screaming "Happy Christmas and SAVE THE WHALES!" and my friend, Red (I shall name them all in their own colours henceforth) collected kisses from strangers as if they were tokens of their affection. We even got followed by an MI5 camera outside the MI5 building when we tried to get to the Thames in the dark.



We lost almost all the pictures we took on that trip due to technological malfunctions. Above is one that remained. I think that made me a lot unhappier than it should have done.
I am a hypocrite.


Friday we went to Lightbox. It's an amazing club! It's completely full of little lights and they shine in all different colours in time with the music. I saw a lot of people there I would not have expected to, like Harry Windsor and other Eton type snobs. We had a close encounter with one by the cloakroom. We were told of his rank and how many "in line" he is to the throne and how much money he has, told how lucky we would be if only we could screw his arrogant feeble-minded self. Red replied "we live in a meritocracy nowadays, mate". Apparently the cited reasons should be enough to make women want to roll in the hay with any unfortunate-looking fortunate. Money and rank And they say feminism isn't relevant anymore. De Bauvoir turns in her grave.


Sometimes being in clubs is a depressing thing, even if you go with your best friends. Even if they are Red, Green and Blue. Everything is loud and dark. You are cutting off most of your senses and alter the ones that survive. And really you go there for the people. I saw a few very old people in the club too, all alone. An elderly lady, with wrinkles carved into herself and smoothed over with powder and makeup. She held a bottle of water. Responsibility in a sea of kids all needing to grow up and grow old, grow disheartened. Those places are full of them. Kids wanting to make a choice, make themselves pretty, make themselves valuable. Make a move. Build futures and build trust.Find eachother, and dreams, and forget them again.
Dry their eyes and disappointments and give out their numbers and ask "are you having a good time?".

And they all dance in that loud darkness with all the little lights, doing shots and hoping. Being templates and wanting everything they haven't had yet. Thinking they can find it all in Vauxhall on a Friday night.

On the predatorial nature of the Sun

Apparently only bores tell people their dreams. Jean-Dominique Bauby said that. I agree with him. Though I thought the film " The Divingbell and the Butterfly" which tells his story based on his book, (dictated by blinking the letters!!) was vaguely lacking. I would like to have been more touched by it. Still worth watching.

Yesternight was particularly nightmareventful, so I awoke feeling dazed and like I had not slept at all. I dreamt of people burning, and underground crypts where a witch was trying to throw every evil up her cloak sleeve at me. Smiling serpents, and dying loves.

Anyway, finally awake at 2 in the afternoon, there was sunshine everywhere! Baldyknees had cleaned up the kitchen and his room so all was pretty light on the journey from his bed and I made myself some Coco Pops and enjoyed them in our back yard. He put the music on really loud, with songs that I was most interested in hearing. But the crunch of the cereal in my ears kind of made it hard to do so from where I was standing outside and away from the speakers; but I refused to give any of the two activities up. Either the eating or the listening. So both of them were considerably less enjoyable. There's a moral in that I'd wager.

I danced a lot in the back yard with my pyjamas on. All the neighbours could probably see me out from their window, but it made sense. The sun is like snow, it changes everything. They are oppositely the same. I can't think of many things that I would rather do than frolic in either.

I have been snuffeling this new google streets map thing for London. I found my very own window, and I could even see into it a little! Now I know where I can find me.

But where to find anything else? I looked it up, see:

LOVE: yes this is apparently where love is in london
HAPPINESS: and this what happiness looks like
TEARS: and where the tears live.

The Place is Alone

Sylvia said: I talk to God, but the sky is empty.


I think it's an unfair thing to say. Maybe she should not have looked for people to talk to in the sky, but rather focused her verbal endeavors on something closer to her home. Maybe she should just have talked to herself a little more. Actually, I do not doubt that she did that one bit. Selves give the best answers, and most of the time they know better about what you really want to say than your words do. No one else hears you like you do.
I rarely think about the things I say. Not even when I say them to myself.

A blog is a funny thing. You are trying to talk to people you don't know and the only one whose reaction you know and can understand and need to know and understand are yours, because you sit alone while you write your things. But still you are trying to shake their hand, say your name and your age and your interests and want to make them listen.
We talk to the internet, but God is empty.

I got given a leaflet today advertising God like a takeaway, and his love and so on. They said that he loves us more than anything. They quoted a bit from the bible: "where there is love God dwelleth". I don't know much about other people's God or Gods and their conception of things holy and comforting that demand absolute conviction and belief. To be honest I would rather never talk about them and be coherent about opinions and arguments, though to say God lives in our love kind of belittles both concepts.

I have terrible nightmares. All the time. I see things that I've never seen awake, and hopefully never will. I see things that terrify me and they leave those feelings lingering, to follow me through the day. They dictate the pace and the views and the worries of it.
The minutes after I wake up are always the worst because I remember everything exactly and the feelings are strongest, stretched so far over me that I see nothing else. Though the things that have caused me them are all gone. In those minutes I am capable of believing anything.
I would never mock anyone for believing anything ridiculous. Not even that man who says the Queen and other world leaders are secretly lizards dressed up. You don't need reasonable reasons for believing things, you just need a gut feeling and a mind that likes to read too much into nothing. Belief is probably the best self preservation tool we have.

I left the God-leaflet in the 176 bus. Maybe it'll tell someone more than it told me.