FIRST-O-FEB
Today, many many years ago when we were kids, the pinches and punches came hurtling in from every angle in the playground only to ease up at noon, unless of course, the school meathead showed little respect of the clock and continued to persecute you until his hyperventilation got the better of him.
Today, as adults, we are pinched and punched by direct debit and standing orders on the first of the month and the meathead has grown into a scholarly millionaire, no doubt. Either that or he’s nailing his hand to a fence post in rural Suffolk.
Dates are anomalies. But they do provide a framework for process and order. Today is beginning of the final week of a group show at LACE art gallery in Los Angeles of a project called The Open Daybook. I only know because the curator asked me to contribute a piece to the book and the exhibition. If you’re in the vicinity pop in, if not, you can pretend you went by going here:
http://www.welcometolace.org/exhibitions/view/the-open-daybook-exhibition/
LOST ON PURPOSE
We are sad.
Sadder than ever.
Longing for the opposite, longing for happiness.
We’re not all anhedonics, although Woody Allen claims he is.
It’s self-imposed, this sadness.
It’s a choice.
It stems from a cancerous form of behaviour.
The controlling cell that cannot stop dividing within us.
The one that has to be talking to multiples, tracking variables and holding hands with tangibles.
But this connectedness is self-strangulation.
A communication and information ivy.
If we sever it at its base, it will wither and die within weeks and suffocate us with an avalanche of sadlessness, which may over time lead to isolated states of happiness.
How will we know we have done this?
Easy.
We will become lost by chance, by luck or even better, on purpose.
Eat the map.
Shit the map.
Blunder into the wilderness, it’s everywhere.
ATACAMA NEXT
The Atacama desert in Northern Chile has to make do with a single millimetre of rain a year.
Until now.
Brazil, Mevagissey and Queensland are just pawns in the great meteorological equation.
In March 2013 there will be a flood in the driest place on earth.
A year and a day later, India’s Cherrapunji will suffer a drought and lose its tag of wettest place on earth.
This sounds cataclysmic. It’s everything but. This is the beginning of climate stability. Extremes will fade away as we slip into a global mediocrity so mundane, we will start to pray and kill for storms.
HOW TO RUIN TED WILLIAMS
They shaved him.
They groomed him.
They normalised him.
Yet his nine children radicalised him and living rough made him different.
The media is the darkest drug of all.
EUROPE’S FLAB
Among the many wonderful things on the radio today, I heard that more than half of European adults are overweight, bordering on obese.
If like me, you’re one of the aforementioned fatties, keep on eating and eventually they’ll have to recalibrate the parameters of obesity.
Fancy a doughnut?
SECRET TUNNEL WHISTLEBLOWER
The Halzephron Inn is up for sale.
It’s a truly lovely pub in the village of Gunwalloe, Cornwall.
Should you view it, ask the agent about the alleged tunnel.
If he/she blushes, pursue with questioning and stamp heavily upon the floor until you hear an echo.
Open up the trap door and crawl as far as your torch or the light on your phone will allow.
When you reach a second door, knock three times and ask for Roger.
THE FRONT OF BEYOND
It’s where the back used to be.
Then something changed.
Perceptions.
Status.
The climate.
The economy.
Now, the hermit in the sticks leads the city dweller’s hand into the future.
Pop by.
It’s where at’s at.
NOFEST
Fests. They’re everywhere. Every subject know to man is being made into a fest. The word is becoming as irritating as that bark at the end of ‘who let the dogs out’. The name is stale. Fest it starting to fester. We could sit here and put up with the stench, or we could do something about it.
Nofest is that something. It’s a protest against every fest alive. It is an event where nothing happens. No beer is drunk, no pills are popped, no music is heard, nothing is sold. People just gather. And sleep. For a very long time. As long as they possibly can. And still wake up one day alive to a world without fests.
There are no tickets and no date. People will know when. You’re one of these people. See you there. Bring a pillow.
UPSTAIRS AT THE HAYWARD
Plugs aren’t really my thing but every once in a while, you just have to shout one up. Step forward Ernesto Neto. The way you dressed the Hayward from the ceiling down was enough to make a grown spy cry. I climbed, rolled and play-suffocated for 2 hours with my daughters and lady. It’s a seamstress’s dream. Tights and stockings will never be the same again. Thank you for making a polyester utopia. We love you more than your good lady wife.
http://festivalbrazil.southbankcentre.co.uk/ernesto-neto/
THE GIGANTICISM OF ISLAND LIVING
Today, at the living miracle that is the Eden Project, I read that trees on islands are prone to giganticism. Naturally I thought about man in the same context. If each of us had an island to live on, nothing too ideal, just enough to get by, would we become taller, stronger specimens? Not Lilliputian, but contenders for the Harlem Globetrotters perhaps. Are we stunted by the competitive gene of our fellow man to fight for our next meal, for our scared patch of earth, no matter how hard we try to share it in a civil manner. If this strangely bovine instinct is tugging at my ethical udder, I bet I’m not the only one.
And finally, a word from our sponsor:
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