The Man.

London Underground.

The London Underground song.


There is a rich use of Anglo-Saxon English in this video... Do not watch it if you are prudish, squeamish, uptight, over 70 or a tube driver.  It is however an accurate observation.


Full Marks to the Amateur Transplants.

North East nightmare... The Olympics 2012.

last night was a nightmare...


Doing a 'reading' in a bar in North East London, simple enough you would think.


Think again.  It was pissing with rain as I travelled across town by tube followed by a ten minute drenching walk. Wet miserable and broke is a great way to start an evening.  Then I am told that there is a tube strike starting at 9.. pm. Which meant that no-one turned up for the thing - we had an audience of 6. Ouch. Andreas later described it as intimate.


It took me 2 hours to get back across town, once again in the pissing rain! including an hour long bus journey surrounded by idiots yabbering away on mobile phones.


Sometimes London is a joke, not a funny one, a sad one.


Note to self: Never again.


One thought arises: What is Boris going to do when the tube drivers decide to strike during the Olympics? Then there is the Terrorism that Tony Blair has brought to this country.


I will not be in London for that particular fiasco.

The Harrods of W2 and Conkers.

Savage weather is on its way apparently.

For those returning to school this week, there won't even be the consolation of savage grudge conker matches. According to the Campaign for Real Conkers, there is a shortage caused by the dismal August weather, when many fell early from the trees and rotted on the ground. Most of those still on the trees will not be ripe and robust enough for the sport when the gales topple them.

Keith Flett, the serial Guardian letter writer and a spokesman for the group, explained: "The conkers are nowhere near ripe enough yet and people won't be able to get their practice in. When you whack a conker before it is ripe it will crumble to bits.

Things to come... The Event 24th September.

Details to follow shortly.

Mike Edwards Killed by a hay bale. Eldorado of sorts.

As a young man I enjoyed the eccentricity of early ELO and am saddened by this news. I am also saddened by the fact that he had to be identified using youtube and photos... No one there.

Mike Edwards, 62, was a founding member of ELO and played cello with the group from their first live gig in 1972 until he departed in January 1975.

He quit to become a Buddhist and later changed his name to Deva Pramada because of his religious convictions.

Mr Edwards died instantly when he was hit by the bale which weighed nearly 700lbs.

He was driving along a road when the bale careered down a slope in a field and flipped over a hedge - smashing down onto his roof.

The circular bale is believed to have been in a steeply-sloping field beside the road when it somehow rolled and jumped 12ft to 15ft into traffic.

Police said the accident happened at around 12.30pm on Friday on the A381 between Harbetonford and Halwell in Devon.

Steve Walker of the Devon and Cornwall police traffic unit said they were trying to contact his family.

He said: ''This was a tragic accident and we have now identified the victim as Michael Edwards, a founder member of ELO.

''We have used photographs and YouTube footage to identify him but we now need help contacting his family for formal identification.

''We don't believe he was ever married and we have identified an ex girlfriend but she is currently aboard.

''We think he may have a brother called David in the Yorkshire area and we obviously need to contact him.

''Michael has no immediate family but we believe he may have taught some cello in Devon and would ask his students to contact us if they know of any relations.''

Mr Edwards had been living in Totnes, Devon. After he left ELO, he was replaced as cellist by Melvyn Gale.

I guess he has found his Eldorado..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Bre3HF8_Vw&feature=related

Dogs do not paint their arseholes red.

I was called an old man tonight. That's fine if it comes from a youngster.


But.


I was called an old man by a middle aged woman with bleached hair and a nasty pinched mouth; you know, the kind of mouth that looks like a dogs arsehole, but less attractive. 


There is a reason why dogs do not paint their arseholes red.

Tony Blair. Arrested for War crimes?

I'll keep this short and to the point.


Why has Tony Blair not been arrested and charged with war crimes?


He is the living embodiment of everything that is rotten in our society today.

Meanwhile Gardens by Charles Caselton.

One sometimes finds strange things in familiar places, or familiar things in strange places; Charles Caseltons Meanwhile Gardens manages to do both.


In reality Meanwhile Gardens is a plot of land in the shadow of the Trellik tower, adjacent to the Regents Canal. The goldborne road helpfully points to it. It is the kind of place (the name helps too) to sit, watch and wait for stuff to happen; Frequently in life stuff tends to happen elsewhere. Meanwhile in Caseltons novel  is all go.


Marion, the central character, escaping a life she would rather do without and hoping to find some answers, arrives in the neighbourhood; more specifically the cemetry further down the canal. So begins a rough and tumble adventure in North Kensington, an adventure that is larded with wonderful characters in an almost fairy tale world. Surrounded by a 'rag tag' family of strangers she sets about a quest of sorts. Naturally there are highs and lows, there are some great villains too. Tragedy strikes and she must somehow pull through. Of course we must not lose faith.


Caseltons West 11 is not quite as it should be there is the air of a circus to it. There is a lightness of touch to the writing and I get the sense that here is a storyteller who knows his subject (and his manor) well.


Meanwhile Gardens was originally published in blog form. Nothing wrong with that; if Dickens were alive today he would be doing the same, he'd probably nick a few of caseltons characters to boot. There is however a greater sense of pleasure to be gained from holding and digesting a slab of book! 


I'm off to Meanwhile Gardens to wait for stuff to happen...


And before you accuse me of plugging a friends book, I bought my copy, happy I did, which allows me to speak my mind.  It is available in all good book shops.

Legal coke in Notting Hill? Balaclava's for Afghanistan.

Jan Nieupjur writes:


Yesterday as I was openly enjoying my drug of choice; alcohol it occurred to me how silly things have become: Alcohol; Freely available 24 hours a day 7 days a week, endorsed (and used) by the government, cause of more deaths and crimes than all other drugs put together, taxed to the hilt to provide revenue for, among other things, the police, in order that they can spend the majority of their time dealing with alcohol related crime and anti-social behaviour.


When they are not doing that they are obliged to persecute poor underprivileged young people for possession of the drugs of their choice; drugs they use to escape the miserable elitist society we live in. 


Carnival time is a good example of what goes on.


The police state that a 'number' of arrests were made over the weekend, some of them drug related. You can bet that they were picking on the easy targets; the poor black kids with their bits and pieces rather than the thousands of well heeled, predominantly white, coke heads and pill poppers with their pockets full of Colombia's finest!


The bars and parties of Notting Hill were awash with coke, they always are, yet the police do nothing because doing something would be tantamount to opening a massive can of worms.


Because...


The so called drug fiends are in fact middle class society today... Every one is doing it; newspaper editors, the BBC, ITV (what the hey, all TV), the Law, MP's, everyone. 


If they raided one of the smarter places and turned all pockets and bags out there would be enough coke to supply Lithuania's dentists for a year.


But hey, that is not what the police force is for is it! The police are here to protect us from the nasty social no-hopers in their sink estates.


Solution: Legalise drugs. Tax the fuck out of the rich users and spend the revenue on improving the lot of the underprivileged... They wouldn't need drugs then!


We could all sleep safely and happily then. Except of course the coke heads gurning and yabbering the night away. 


Hey, they could knit balaclava's for our boys and girls in Afghanistan while they are at it.

Cheating, gamesmanship, on line Scrabble and the 'Cheat detector'.

I'm a bit busy right now with the forthcoming event. Jan has offered to fill in for me on the blogging front for the next couple of days.  I would like to make it quite clear that his views are not necessarily my views... I take no responsibility for what he writes; he is an old man with an old mans temperament.  Here goes:


I have, in my dotage, taken to playing on-line scrabble (the on-line scrabble arena these days is where the blue rinse brigade try to hook up with widowed accountants and Filipina's look for potential husbands).


I pose as a retired bank manager and have posted a photograph of my least favourite nephew! I find it hard to get through an evening without at least one invitation to 'tea in Eastbourne' or a tryst in the local Holiday Inn. 


One thing I have noticed is that a lot of these demon scrabble players cheat! And if they don't cheat they use gamesmanship tactics that would make Terry Thomas blush. My method of dealing with this is to send them a message of admonishment then immediately withdraw from the game; leaving them with a somewhat hollow 'victory'.

                                                                       Wilson Hsu


You see they are all 'stats' whores; they care more for the records of 'games won' than the actual game... In fact they would much rather not finish a game; finishing a game is incredibly time consuming and invariably ends in defeat.


The 'non English speaking' competitors are obliged to resort to computer programmes to play the game resulting in an extraordinary spurious vocabulary a lot of which is gleaned (by the computer) from scientific dictionaries.  These poor souls do not realise that they have become just another part of the computer software... they are not playing the game, they are purely 'interfacing' between myself and their computer. They receive a stiff message from me which requires no computer programme to understand.


I have a feeling that they will not 'Love me long time' after reading my missives.


I did however 'chat' with a wonderful woman who now lives in a dug out home (literally dug into the ground) in australia. I wish there were more like her!


I am resolved to invent a cheat detector... I sense a fortune coming my way!

Corrine Day. RIP. Another sad, untimely death.

 

Corinne Day, whose frank, unadorned photos of a teenage Kate Mossin the early 1990s helped inaugurate a new era of gritty realism in fashion photography that came to be called “grunge,” died Friday at her home in Denham, a village in Buckinghamshire, England. She was 45.

Dafydd Jones/WireImage

Kate Moss, left, and Corinne Day at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2007.

The cause was a cancerous brain tumor, Susan Babchick, her agent, said.

Ms. Day’s passion to record the most profound human experiences with a camera was never more evident than the day in 1996 when the tumor was discovered after she had collapsed in New York. She promptly asked her husband to shoot pictures of her, and they continued the project through her treatment and decline.

“Photography is getting as close as you can to real life,” she said, “showing us things we don’t normally see. These are people’s most intimate moments, and sometimes intimacy is sad.”

Ms. Day built her reputation on unrelenting visual honesty. She refused to airbrush the bags from under models’ eyes or de-emphasize their knobby knees. She eschewed pretty locations or even studios in favor of shooting people in their own environments.

It added up to a startling detour from the glossy world of supermodels — “subversion,” in Ms. Day’s own phrase.

There were two defining moments along the way, both involving Ms. Moss. The first was in 1990, when some of the first published fashion photographs of Ms. Moss, taken by Ms. Day, appeared in the British magazine The Face. One showed Ms. Moss topless; another suggested she was naked. She wore a mix of designer and secondhand clothes and no makeup over her freckles, and her expression was sincere. The photos seemed to usher in a new age of anti-fashion style. Artlessness became art. Some called it “grunge.”

The second moment, in 1993, was a shoot for British Vogue that featured a pale and skinny Ms. Moss in mismatched underwear. A public outcry ensued, as some claimed that Ms. Moss’s waifish figure seemed to imply she was suffering from an eating disorder or drug addiction.

On her agent’s advice, Ms. Moss stopped working with Ms. Day, with whom she had become close friends. Ms. Day said she was tired of taking fashion pictures, anyway.

“I think fashion magazines are horrible,” she said in an interview with the British newspaper The Observer in 1995. “They’re stale and they say the same thing year in and year out.”

The grunge aesthetic took hold for several years in designer imagery of the 1990s, most visibly in Calvin Klein’s influential fragrance and jeans campaigns, and also in street fashion, with the throwaway style of flannel shirts and distressed jeans, as popularized byKurt Cobain and the burgeoning Seattle music scene.

Ms. Day eventually took fashion photos again, including ones of Ms. Moss that are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. But her aspiration was to document the lives of the people she knew best, and her “Diary,” published in 2000, told visual stories, including those of a single mother struggling to survive.

Corinne Day was born in 1965 in Ickenham, a town in west London. She said that her mother had run a brothel and that her father had robbed banks. They divorced when she was 5, and her grandmother raised her. As a girl, she said, she liked to spend hours in the photo booth at Woolworth’s with her friends.

Ms. Day left school at 16, worked briefly as a trainee in a bank, then flew around the world as an airline courier. A photographer she met on a plane suggested that she take up modeling, and she did, for Guess Jeans.

In Japan she met a filmmaker, Mark Szaszy, who taught her to use a camera — they would later marry — and she began taking pictures of the drab private lives of her fellow models, who seemed so glamorous in public.

“There was a lot of sadness,” she said in an interview with The Guardian in 2000. “We couldn’t buy the clothes we were photographed in, couldn’t go out and do the things we would have liked to do as teenagers.”

She took her work to the art director at The Face, who asked her to shoot some fashion pictures. She prowled the modeling agencies with a Polaroid and found Ms. Moss, whom she likened to “the girl next door.” They lived, worked and prospered together for three years.

“Corinne’s pictures, you might say, made Kate, and Kate made Corinne’s reputation,” The Evening Standard said in 2007.

Ms. Day is survived by her husband as well as her parents and two brothers.

Even at the height of her celebrity, in 1993, Ms. Day told The Guardian that her personal sartorial goal was to look “unstyled.”

“I don’t take fashion too seriously,” she said.

Pinball.

A few years ago I was asked to restore an old pinball machine for a friend... It was part of her degree show at St Martins college of Art.

The playing field graphics are by Natasha Griss.