all the young punks

So we retired to the world's end pub where Aragorn got to show off his new trousers to some of the locals, who were probably also tourists. No thats not aragorn's hair, although you could be forgiven for thinking it, it actually belongs to the punk to whom he is trying to send a trouser weasel.
Greenman just wants to get the whole sordid business paid for.


new boots and contracts

inherited sense of the blessed liege

this phrase, proffered in conversation with Lucy this weekend, is just great. We were talking about the victorian idea of a gentleman who was part adventurer, part philanthropist and part estate manager. in addition to the plague of conscience that we suffer, this sense of the blessed liege, inherited from our victorian forbears, causes us to stay our capitalistic killhand when it comes to trading with third world countries. we also lamented the apparent loss of this sense amongst the rich and powerful who, by way of self justification, have somehow corrupted the position of blessed liege into something more like naturally selected predator with flock of subservient minions.
that was the gist of it anyway. maybe it was some sense of community that motivated me to sign away my organs to the NHS on thursday. or maybe it was just the brainwash behaviour pattern of form filling. tick here, "any part of my body" and sign beneath. Thats great, you may now make an appointment to visit with the doctor.
All i want is to have my creeping leprotic patches with their weeping necrotic sores analysed at a safe distance by a professional, who can then point me to the correct pharmacy counter at which to empty my wallet. I want to give the NHS my money. really i do. They deserve it for looking after my health, and that of millions of others. But my organs? now i'm not too sure about that. i could probably sell them and get better healthcare at the same time...

also saw aragorn this weekend, spending loads of his hard earned cash on old records and stuff. caught him and greenman coming out (hehe) of this
little underwear boutique in Camden.
1. Notice the name (pink piranha)
2. and the type of stuff they sell.
3. draw your own conclusions about what these two were doing

thats right! shopping for underwear!

art that makes babies cry

went to an exhibition on sunday, at the hayward gallery, called "africa remix". according to the brochure, it was intended to be an anthology of art from across africa and not necessarily the best of the well known artists.

first off, let me say that there were many good individual pieces and a great range of styles from the most simplistic trash sculptures to the most sophisticated multimedia engrossments.

South Africa was over represented and some countries were not represented at all. I suppose this is to be expected, because many african nations obviously don't have the luxury of artistic leisure while they are busy starving and fighting wars.

this brings me to the reason for this post. Although i was dead impressed by some of the work, and i'll get to that in a moment, the whole tone of the exhibition was, typically enough, "oh poor, starving, war torn, politically abused africa, whatever are we to do?" Fortunately they stopped short of actually putting out a collection plate, but if someone had, and had made an installation of it, I for one would have appreciated the cynicism.
but alas, that was not to be. While not actually schmaltzy, and i shudder to use that word, the tone of the whole thing was a little too patronising. African countries are proud and strong, thats why they're always fighting. The art too, is proud and strong, it doesn't pull any punches. Why not celebrate it instead of
wringing our metaphorical hands?

Some of it was pretty sophisticated, and had cultural reference that is impossible to appreciate without some history. "Ubu tells the truth" for example, by William Kentridge, was a gut wrenching examination of the atrocities of the apartheid years, as exposed by the TRC, through the medium of chalk and charcoal animation. Heavy, very heavy.

A darker piece which I know i did not understand, was the Barthelemy Toguo series of watercolours. According to the guide, "the Dream Catcher series celebrates the human body in all its splendour". You could say that, but having seen the painting it would be like saying a great white shark on the end of your foot was a pesky annoyance.

there were many more, such as the famous sculptures made of guns, that had very political content. naturally, the political sphere is predominant in most african societies and this is reflected in its art. Sometimes it was all i could do to abstract myself and not go rushing for the nearest donation centre.

back to the title of the post. One video installation i was dreading looking at, was emitting a series of quasi orgasmic pained screams and moans. you'd steer clear right? well, i did but finally, after i heard babies crying somewhere in the space, i went to look. did i see a birthing, or systematic consensual rape with a barbed wire dildo? nope. it was a video of a naked girl punching the crap out of a punchbag. needless to say, i worried how such obviously feminist claptrap got mixed up in this exhibition. i couldn't bear to watch such meaningless drivel, so i left. i was glad that it wasn't as bad as i had expected.

the exhibition ended on a positive note with a really good painting of two wrestlers hidden in a field of black and white symbols, and a great (huge) sculpture of a shark / dolphin / crocodile made of a single tree trunk. it was not intricately carved but was unmistakably a swimming thing. sadly, i can't bring you pictures as i was not allowed to take any.

i seem to have shaken the bullsh!t from earlier this week, please forgive my self indulgence. probably something to do with sunshine ;)

could this be a mid life crisis?

i'm feeling kind of depressed. i don't know whether its a long term thing or whether its one of those passing phases. i hope the latter, but unfortunately i suspect the former.
Analysis at this stage is probably a bad thing, but then catharsis is probably good. so i'll start with the problems:
the perfect number is irrational. this wouldn't be such a problem if it didn't just typify everything thats screwed about the way we perceive the world. our system of mathematics, in all its elegance and never ending curiosity for the secrets of the universe, can't accurately represent something that a simple snail does unconsciously.
Which brings me to the next problem. Unconscious. I can't seem to get it right anymore. i gave up drink, drugs and cigarettes and now i'm pestered by an addiction to caffeine. problem is i don't sleep properly and end up awake, thinking about things like how to construct a dodecahedron in linear perspective. no link, because i'm too depressed to try.
This in turn brings me to a deeper problem, and i think this may be the nub of it: i'm dissatisfied. that's right, for all the exercise and yoga, i just can't seem to shake a nagging feeling of inadequacy. it could be that my job is no longer challenging, if it ever was, or that so many things i would like to do are beyond my reach, or maybe just because i don't actively participate in anything like a community anymore. Who knows eh?
I can't seem to communicate with people i call friends. i don't get any social contact beyond family and i can't seem to get out of the intellectual desert i've been languishing in for the past fuck knows how long.
oh, and my retarded boss beat me at chess. thats the proverbial straw. i mean it was more like beating myself really, but there it is.
Actually its probably safest to blame the city. as soon as you think you've shaken winter, and your spirits start to lift, the northern winds come to howl through your filthy streets, bringing cold sky piss to turn the dirt to muck.
or maybe its the skin condition i am nurturing. what the fuck is with that? we can split the atom, make angels dance on pinheads, and estimate the age of an infinite thing to trillionths of a second, but can we figure out what causes eczema? can we fuck.
why not? i mean one day, no problem. next day, an itchy foot. one year down the line and its colonised both feet and is moving on to my arms.
or maybe its debt. what unholy thing is a city that i have to pay enough to feed several third world families just to inhabit conditions only marginally better? council tax is truly a sin. i already pay iraq war tax through my right nostril, and heroin addict tax through my left, now i have to pay streetsweepdodging tax through my anus!!
someone has to pay the street sweeper i hear you whine. well, I WAS A STREET SWEEPER, hence i speak from personal experience when i say that pay and street sweeper shouldn't be housed in the same sentence. that i was marginally happier in that job speaks volumes about my current one.
over 80% of the water i bath in, and drink, has been recycled through other people. yup, fish would be afraid to fuck in it.
maybe thats why my skin is enflamed, and developing sores on its sores. or maybe its God, reminding me to smell the roses, which i would if they weren't currently contracting aphids out to my coriander, which is supposed to drive the fuckers away.

oh yes folks, it sucks in my world. the principle reason for this is reason itself. if you have it, your lot is to be dissatisfied. this is an unreasonable shithole world.

i'm sure this catharsis has done me good. i am now going to take my shivering carcass to bed again, to lie in the dark until its less dark.

okay its been a while but...

who cares HAHAHAHAHA no-one ever reads this shit anyway.
Was interested, while doing the housework for some weird reason, in why exactly it is that all the cool stimulants hail from rainforests. I was thinking, while sweeping, that it could be because the rainforests are just so damn competitive and that the stimulant mature of some plants made sure that they would be eaten by animals (and humans) and thereby more widely spread.
i wonder what cocaine users would think of the idea that plants were actually controlling everything? hmmm
so i typed "why do stimulants such as coffee, coca and cacao grow in rainforests" into my favourite search engine and up came this organica news article on chocolate.

This is a fascinating read about the basics of cacao/chocolate and some of its composite chemicals.
No wonder i love the dark stuff so much!