The Fifties Party Part 1.

 Up in the tenement flat on a grey street in the awkwardness of autumn. The succession of strangers who have traipsed through this flat, shuffling over its carpets, takes a toll on one. Sometimes you are suddenly introduced to the friend of a friend, who you never see again, and yet you're with them in a photograph that somebody took.

I'm not sure if I like these impermanent relationships, although they seem to be all the rage with the smart set. People encounter you and then completely forget you, or there's the embarrassment of encountering someone who you encountered drunk or in a compromising moment, now sober and formal. Somehow all this was a source of pain to me, these masks and other selves that people wore. 

Now the job of getting a flatmate to share with; the succession of strangers increases, becomes a flow. Some bring their mums, who do all the talking. A Chinese girl arrives, a blonde German girl, a dark German girl with a bumbag and a Pink Floyd T-shirt, a cheerful Russian girl, an Argentine, a Nigerian, a girl from New Zealand. A native Briton who has brought his sister and approved of my C.D. collection. A garrulous girl who brought two friends, one a very tall fellow. A Latvian girl, and her friend, another Latvian girl, who said she would take the room and then didn't.

I saw them all without favour or prejudice and usually it was obvious which would align with the flat and myself, and which would not. The best flatmate is one who is studious and quiet and is there to sleep and then removes themself in the morning, to school or work. Girl flatmates are not necessarily a problem, in fact they might be preferred as girls are calmer and sometimes more civilised. 

Here the impersonal relationship is to be encouraged.

This flat is supposed to be Bohemian, and that was the atmosphere I tried to cultivate. Bean bags and jazz and I looked at wonderful pictures of Bob Dylan in the East Village in the early sixties. 

In fact, far from the sixties, we go back into the fifties: I got the Fifties source book from the library, and was repulsed and fascinated by the horrible cadillacs and the glossy sheen of Elvis Presley's face, his skin that looks like pink airbrushed plastic. Even to look at these things makes one feel nauseous and strangely full of desire. When you get a hold of old 1950's magazines the most interesting things are always the advertisements, far more interesting than the articles. Because the ideal in them is always to be perfect, plastic, shiny, and presentable, glamorous but respectable, sweet-smelling but with a maximum of artifice. 

Boards and bulbs should be bare. A Dansette record player can be included. Beatnik poverty cultivated in contrast to the technicolour luxury in the magazines and in the source book. 

From a cheap book I took a cheap black n white photograph of Gene Vincent. Cheapness again you see, in contrast to the luxury. 

Gene is emblematic and significant because proletarian and naive. He has a sickly smile, a semi-cripple of some kind from a Virginia seaport, habitue of sailors and unsophisticated. He is very pale and his hair is slicked back except where it falls in a bunch of greasy hair on his thin forehead. 

I thought by association that Gene was a sort of sailor or longshoreman. Even his leather jacket was a simple one, of basic type. He was poor but aspirational; he didn't have a car but he could get it. You felt that his persona was bluster, that he was not really a greaser or a biker, but was just a boy, essentially naive and pure-souled. Above all he should not be made fashionable or hip. 

The theme for the fifties party should be: Those parts of the 20th century that have gone out of fashion and in fact have been forgotten. 

I Am The Great North Sea!

I am the Great North Sea 

The same under the stars

That rolls eternally

Witnessing endless wars, 

Never a surge without reason,

No storm worries me,

Only the flood in every season,

Where the waves make free. 

Deep, deep down in my depths,

There whispers a joyful sound,

Where the first secret is kept

In a gold casket bound. 

Only the song remaining, 

For the box has lost its key, 

Where all the waters draining

Unite in a symphony,

I am the world's waning,

I am the Great North Sea.

2.

 I am the Great North Sea,

Awash with the primal note,

The note of eternity

That God on the waters wrote. 

Bound by the rocks and islets,

Yet restlessly wearing them down,

Full of original silence, 

In which all the doubters drown. 

I am the Great North Sea,

I encompass the world around.

The Importance of Trees in Landscape Art

The importance of trees in Landscape art.

The smudged and shadowy trees you see in baroque paintings, in any old paintings from the 16th century on, in whatever context, have become that way over time, where the oils have darkened from their original luminosity and freshness, becoming sombre. This sombreness and shadowiness only serves to enhance them, however, or reveal an aesthetic quality the painters did not guess at. The shadows depicted are strangely like the shadows seen on a slightly out-of-focus camera obscura, an upside-down image projected into a closed room from the world outside. The camera obscura images in turn are oddly like the shadows that haunt the fringes of memory itself, and distant childhood memories in particular.
Man first saw the trees as spiritual things or abodes of spirits, in his early animist days which were like his early infancy. Trees seemed to move with the wind but also independently of it, and in the wind-swept leaves of a summer tree were born eddies and counter-eddies which seemed like the nodding of wise heads and sounded like the crashing of the sea.
This was the tree as distinct from the forest, the tree on its own, on a hill, exposed, but in the summer given the right conditions blooming to fullness and presenting a picture of multiplicity in unity, each leaf tribally attached to a stem from a branch or sub-branch of the main trunk, and this tree of life functioning together, though individual leaves may fall, and branches may weaken and wither.
This idea which always appeared awesome to man led him to conquer the tree, to enter the forest and to clear it, to burn the branches and use the wood to build gates, fences, tracks, roads and posts. But in his symbology he still had names and spirits and characteristics which he attributed to each tree, trees of the woods and riverbanks and now trees planted by meadows and on lone hills.
This tree planted on a lone hill took on significance as unencumbered by neighbours it spread wider and freer. It is the large spreading oak which can be seen in neoclassical landscapes, surmounting some tragic or decorous scene, serenely surveying some battle or surrender or siege, always with the stern browns, now turned dark, and the dark clusters of leaves, impassive and harmonious.
It was in fact this same ancestral tree growing decoratively above a scene, which later was depicted on its own and for its own sake, giving life to an otherwise flat landscape, and with the wind animating it also imparting movement, beside a meadow, a cultivated field, or an old farmhouse, granting both multiplicity, graceful movement, harmonious colour, and vertical structure to a scene. This tree even shorn of symbolism remained a tree of life, if only because it was a token of one's earliest childhood, almost of an eternal time before consciousness, in that its shadows, tones and chiaroscuros so clearly recalled an antedeluvian realm before knowledge, and its sound and movement, the relentless crashing of the waves on the first shore. Thus it its that the trees in the old paintings are so easy to recognise, though the passing scenes below them may seem foreign and strange to us, or obscure, the old symbols enduring when all else is subject to gradual change.

The Case Against Summer

Now it gets dark at 10 o'clock, technically, though the sky is still blueish thereafter for a while, strewn with great dark clouds.
Alone I must be the only one who sees the beauty of lamplight on trees, the trees that in the afternoon are shimmering, every leaf like a little hand applauding.
In the afternoon the heat is like a physical force you struggle against, the hissing in the long grass grown wild.
In late June and early July the grass pollen releases, and I become a victim of the pollen scattered on the breeze, swelling my eyes and irritating my nose. At first it used to affect my throat, and I'd wake up with an itchy throat only five cups of hot tea could soothe. Sometimes my eyes would swell up. Then the sneezing; the relentless flow of mucus trickling inside the sinuses, the peculiar irritated tickle bordering on pain, and then becoming pain.
The head under the shower method. Back home, change all clothes and flush the pollen out of your sinuses. Anti-histamines make one drowsy, in the new sheets I fall asleep and dream of a serial killer who has posted a series of videos on Youtube, lined-up grey from his prison cell..
My dad told me that in the 80's he was in Muswell Hill, he and a friend were looking for a place to park one night. They noticed that up one street there was a large gap in the cars, so they parked there. They came back the next night, and the following nights, and the large space was still there, and they parked there again, wondering why no-one was using it. Eventually someone told them they had been parking right outside the flat of Dennis Nilsen, the serial killer...

Plus points for summer: The landscapes are full and look nice to draw from, the colours are vivid, though the blossom is long since gone from the apple trees and they're given over to a uniform dark green. Purists say the winter tree has more character, and that the summer trees "look like brocolli". So what, I replied, people like brocolli, brocolli is delicious. Brocolli trees in a painting will remind them of food. I recalled the early Edward Hopper I had seen, a lady by a window, the paint looked strangely delicious, like food. The browns looked like chocolate and the reds, like candy.

Bad points for summer: Hayfever and psoriasis flare-up. Emptiness. You are meant to be on holiday, the offices are abandoned, even when occupied they feel empty. In the old days they'd abandon the television schedules even.

People gets seasonal affective disorder in the autumn/winter, but not me. I think there's something depressing about summer, and I prefer the winter.

Down by the Burn Part 2, First Day of Spring Edition

Down by the burn, 17th of March

Sketch from January

A Glimpse Into The Garden

A Blackbird From Last Summer

Bus crash

But it's back to Glasgow for me. Busses are my preferred mode of travel, much more so than trains, and for this reason; you travel in proximity with more interesting people. Now some neds traipse on and sit in front of me, drawling wideboys on their way to a party somewhere, I see the shorn backs of their necks, their baseball caps.
Endless bus travel, listening to the dramas of neds or the stories of old ladies, in fact, no choice but to listen. You can feign sleep and envisage a stage, on which the conversations around you are enacted, a grand narrative of the pettiness of their lives. The bus is the most democratic mode of transport, and its passage is like the passage of life. But a peculiarity left over from childhood: Whenever I cross a bridge in a bus I always imagine the bridge collapsing and the bus plummeting into the water. What if the driver suffers a heart attack or a stroke or a fit or is drunk and passes out at the wheel. What if you suddenly veer from the motorway and over the crash barrier down a steep grass verge, strewn with daisies or heather or rocky crags, and the neds in front stop babbling panic for a moment to hear me say one word as I'm tossed and jolted about: "Shit", and your stomach hits your ribs like in a rollercoaster as you plummet down the slope to a road running parallel to the river and then carry on straight into the deep water of the midnight river.
Like the quiet scenic Tay or the dark Clyde. Too many disaster movies, linked to fears and childhood bus migrations. What happens to the bus underwater? Kick the windows or skylight as hard as you can, maybe one survivor will make it to the surface.
Thereafter try n get help. You run onto the nearby road and try to flag down a car, but it's late and the few cars passing ignore you, a drenched, weeping, bruised maniac. One car, full of young guys, slows to a stop but as you approach pulls away and then stops again. This is repeated a few times until it finally accelerates away, its bright yellow tail-lights disappearing over the scrubby back-road, the sound of arrogant, cruel young laughter, strangely mirthless and hard, just audible over the booming music.
So you travel on into the city, getting closer to its commercial centre. It's Friday night and you can see activity outside clubs, people milling drunkenly around. The cops in their luminescent yellow jackets are out in force, there to intervene in drunken conflicts, hostilities between doormen and impulsive punters, maybe even arbitrate the rivalries of screeching girls, spilling out into the vacant, echoing wilderness of the post-club streets and plazas.
I've seen girls rolling about on the floor, on cold concrete floors, girls with hot, flushed faces wretching up the contents of their stomachs, all dignity lost, empty hedonism, binge-drinking, another concern for the Daily Mail writers and conservative politicians, in their obsessive search for moral outrage.
You think of approaching the cops but they all seem uninterested, louche, insolent, swaggering around, armed with their yellow jackets and huge walkie-talkies worn like badges of honour. They stand and crack jokes at streetcorners for all the world like common schoolboys. This is a busy time for them, and they are the kings of this godless nocturnal terrain, seen coldly on CCTV footage. A mere glance at them reveals their ruthless, opportunistic cynicism.
In a far-off lamp-lit street you see a female cop push a drunk in a sweaty shirt against a wall. A wide, wind-swept, empty street. She's searching him or handcuffing him, forcing his hands behind him, but in a grim, official way, preoccupied and businesslike. And, dripping wet, scared and scarred, looking for help, you think: She looks like a girl I know.

No Doubt Part 2

I find in myself a flame,
A flame of persistent light,
That steadily burns in your name,
And never is quenched outright;
And I do not know, and I do not care,
Whether sacred or profane
Is the source of this passion rare,
Whose flickerings never wane.
But that it will burn on endlessly,
And that it will never go out,
In this world and the world to come,
Of that I have no doubt.

Barbary Macaques

Fallen Angel Seen in the Cemetery

Swan Preening, 25th of July

A Screen of Trees, April

Urban Exploration

Urban Exploration

Armed with a water pistol, I go hunting for an old friend. We go to the abandoned estate, dismal now where the student flats were.

Set down in a low part of the city, squeezed between industrial estates, lies a student building purposely built for accomodation, sixties style, brutalist grey architecture, corridors and landings.

The flats themselves are odd. Maximum use is made of limited space, the rooms are strangely vertical in orientation. Descending the steep staircases one comes on the right to a long livingroom, grey curtains concealing the grass and low bushes outside, somewhat with the atmosphere of a hospital or other institution. In here is a telly and beer cans. 

The interior of the flat is somewhat reminiscent of the design of the lower decks of a ship, in terms of utilisation of space. The bedrooms are no more than bunks, narrow rooms almost like cupboards, just room enough for a bed and a narrow desk. 

They are going to knock this edifice down. And with it all the memories therein. Invading old bedrooms, where old friends lived, looking for a girl in abandoned places who doesn't live there anymore... In industrial estates, concrete plazas, past concrete bollards, overwhelmed with dirt and decay, with every kind of rust and debris and mess. The chaos that you always thought you wanted to see is actually repellent, and you find yourself instead wanting to fix the place up... 

But we are going over the wall and into the deep places, and into the creeping dirt. 

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I thought suddenly of an old college I once used to attend, and had a sudden sharp memory of the outside of it, the north face of this old sixties building, dating from around 1966 when hopes were fresher and more poignant. This architecture then was called modernist. The students moved in, the lecturers too, with their black-rimmed glasses and practical jackets... 

I thought for no reason of the exterior of the building, it's north wall, studded by grey windows and looking out onto its carpark bordered by an ordinary suburban road. Up in the top room when I was an art student and doing life drawing at the easel I would look out and see friends come in late. Ambling casually toward the entrance. 

I thought too of that long room where we did the life drawing with its cold floor and the great dusty drawing boards in a shelf off to the side. Everything functional and well-designed. My memories dwelt not so much on the people as on the structure of the room, the shelves and the floors and the grey windows that let in the light. The setting appealed to me, perhaps only for banal reasons such as that I was younger then and more naive. 

After pondering this for a long time I thought I would look at the actual building again, that actual north face which I thought teasingly somehow no longer existed. Somehow I thought it impossible for it to still exist. 

I went to Google Streetview and traced the path as I walked it all those mornings up the hill and past the garage and the McDonald's and to a forgotten roundabout, past suburban gardens and council houses decorated with satellite dishes... By an arms factory, underneath a familiar railway bridge adorned with ragged weeds....

Of course when I got to the place where the college had been I remembered that they had knocked it down years ago, and put up a row of sullen soulless flats in its place. The windows of these awfully "modern" flats looked down, mocking me for my naivety, instilling in me the strange idea that the college had never existed, that I had dreamed the whole thing. 

That exterior, that north face, does not even seem to exist in photographs as it was too ugly to capture, or too inconsequential. And I don't feel sad even slightly, or even surprised, on the contrary, it's as if everything is too expected and routine, but I do feel a peculiar loss, a loss which is almost entirely in me and related to me, and hardly at all in the exterior world or related to it. That strange loss, of a thing you didn't care about, weren't interested in, and would disappoint you if you still had it.... That inevitable loss of a functional unglamorous thing which nevertheless strikes you as meaningful and poignant. The kind of loss you find viewing old photographs of insignificant possessions, the sun shining in a certain spot, a fleeting look on a face now changed. 

And the odd thing was that I knew all along that the building was no longer there, with one part of my brain, but I went looking for it anyway.

A Screen of Trees, February

A Screen of Trees, November

How the Internet Works (Technical)

This is going to get technical but please stick with me.

The "Internet" is the net that is formed when all computers and phones worldwide are linked up by special beams of light. These light beams are invisible beams of energy which are able to penetrate walls and other surfaces, depending on their density. 

These beams travel through the air instantaneously all over the earth. They exist in the ether, but their use has recently been discovered and their power harnessed by man. The beams shine like a laser into your home, straight through walls, furniture, and people, without their being in the least aware of it, and quite harmlessly, much like the radio signals which can be picked up by your radio receiver.

Inside your home there is a special apparatus called a router. Attached to the router is a cable which carries to the machine a special gas called "broadband". This "broadband" (so called because the vats in which it is stored by the Internet companies are surrounded by broad bands of steel) is a natural gas which is mined on the ocean floor, bubbling up from the core of the Earth. When the router is touched by one of the invisible beams of internet force, it transmits an invisible gas called broadband which disperses itself throughout the atmosphere of your home. Inside your computer or pocket telephone is a special, tiny machine which is super-sensitive to the particles of broadband gas which hang heavy in the atmosphere, and is able to convert the particles of gas into displays of colour on your computer or phone screen. The broadband gas is able, by its wonderful properties, to encourage tiny liquid crystals behind the screen to form itself into whatever patterns it is instructed to by the tiny machine located deep within your computer, or the even tinier one in your phone.

Deep within your computer is an ingenious clockwork device which is specially made by artisans in the mountains of Switzerland. A tiny replica of this device is also present in your pocket telephone, thanks to advances in recent technology which has enabled miniature microscopes to be utilised in their construction. The artisans employed in this work are specially bred to have small hands to aid in this intricate work, and are fiercely proud of their skill in working at such small scales. 

This clockwork device contains a special cog which is fabricated from a unique dark gold mined in Brazil. This rare gold reacts with the Broadband gas to make the minute liquid crystals jump into place, to form the images and words you see on your screen. If you look very closely at your computer or telephone screen, you will see that the images are formed from minute rare crystals of different colours, which the teeth of the special cog forces into alignment mechanically according to input from the keyboard. These crystals are harvested from various deep caves in Borneo. The red colour, however, is made of a special kind of coral which is only found off the coast of Australia. 

The Broadband gas itself is mined deep in ocean trenches in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. From there it is carried in specially reinforced cables to various centralised locations in America and Europe, where it is stored in enormous vats, strengthened by "broad bands" of steel (hence the name). Despite concerns, this broadband gas is quite harmless to human health, though repeated exposure to the raw product, before refinement, may result in minor emotional disturbances and disorientation. 

The Internet force beams, before they get to your home, are first stored in massive metal relaying towers which are able to transmit, receive and store enormous quantities of internet energy before passing it on. These internet relay towers are dotted up and down the countryside and double as nesting places for colonies of migratory birds.

You will have noticed that sometimes your internet mysteriously "goes down", that is, stops working. The reason for this is that a unique sea-dwelling mollusc has adapted itself to feeding off the broadband gas, for which reason they are given the name "broadband worms". These molluscs are really more like a snail or a leach than a worm, but they possess three sharp fangs with which they are able to penetrate the undersea broadband cables and siphon off the gas, which leads them to swell up to a great size, where they can often be seen bobbing in the ocean currents. This is the reason that your internet is sometimes disrupted. 

To tackle this problem, a race of miniature sub-aqueous divers has been specially bred to constantly monitor the underwater cables. This race of small creatures are sometimes derisively called "Internet goblins", but we should not make fun of them as they do a sterling job in maintaining our internet connectivity.  With their tiny hands and keen eyes they are able to patch up the punctures made by the broadband worms in the cables, and ensure a free flow of gas to the router in your home. They have adapted to undersea conditions by means of a secret government program which accelerates evolution, and have developed gills and webbed feet to assist in swimming and breathing underwater. They prefer to be mounted on seahorses, and are armed with special prongs to dissuade the broadband worms from gnawing at the cables, whom, however, they are forbidden to kill in too great quantities, as the species is endangered.

Of course, when you don't pay your internet bill, an employee at the local internet warehouse simply turns a wheel and shuts off the supply of broadband gas to your router. This closes the valve and interrupts the flow of broadband gas.to your home. When your internet is slow, it may be because the cable that carries the broadband gas has become tangled up with other cables, or perhaps because it has become clogged with a residue of that metallic dust which is a byproduct of the gas. If this happens regularly, please call your internet company and ask them if they would please dispatch a special team of trained internet goblins to secure and clean your broadband gas cable, and make sure it is untangled and free of residue. 

The view to the south, 21st of April