Ahh it’s good to be back. I have been attendant at my sister’s wedding where I have been eating lots of things like this:

Anyway, the grand event was at Woburn where there is a safari park. I  love animals so I had to have a gander, despite my latent fears of monkeys defecating all over my car.

I was glad I went because  there were lots of great animals. For example:

Look at those crazy bastard horns. Generally the animals looked a hell of a lot happier than in zoos. It may seem obvious to say so. But they really looked like they were having a nice holiday in the sunny English pastures. Fuck knows what they must have thought of the irregular and weird stream of metal boxes snaking through their lives.

I also saw another of my favourite things: a grotesque / abstruse / rude sign. This one was fantastically lurid. And in the lion enclosure as I am sure you could imagine.

I like:

a. the comedy arm

b. the gnarly teeth

c. the health and safety regulation blood, printed in red, not black, for extra effect

d. the pathetic car contrasting with gnarly lion and said gnarly teeth

Although I think I got the message, I have to admit that at first I though it was telling motorists not to offer the animals shitty necklaces. And surely if a lion went for your hand it would eat the whole thing, not just let a little blood.

The sign was clearly a load of bollocks though. When we saw a pride lying in the sun it was clear they would not hurt a fly:. Aaaaahh.

Amazing. How can one single band be the band from absolutely everyone’s youth?

Radiohead’s old music sounds a lot more modern and interesting than a lot of the drivel pumping out of Jo Whiley’s miserable bandwagon. Their run of good records is stretching their whole career, it looks like. They adapt what is going on in the fringes of music and bring it to the mainstream, as Bjork does. And Thom Yorke’s lyrics have just the right amount of ambiguity in them to stop them being preachy or pretentious (well maybe not). I cannot stand the fact that he spells his name ‘Thom’.

Anyhow, this was Radiohead in Victoria Park:

There was a great atmosphere at the gig. Open air events are often nicer than arenas because they are so much less claustrophobic, people are less worried about grabbing space because there is so much more of it, and you can always wander off and sit down on some grass if you fancy. Ironically, since the public venue smoking ban in England, it feels a lot smokier than indoor gigs.

Check out this girl who got chatting to us during the concert. She was really nice and friendly, as was her boyfriend, but she had the most outlandishly mannered facial expressions when speaking. It felt like I was on laudanum:

Her boyfriend looked like he knew why I was photographing her.

 He said he knew Ben’s doppelganger, who is a apparently a televisual sex-adviser/magician.

One of the best things about the location was the aeroplanes. There was a pretty constant flow of small, lower flying aeroplanes flying to London airport at bigger Heathrow-bound jumbos much higher up. They looked great banking in the sunlight, quietly swimming past each other. It seemed to go pretty well with the music.

I was walking around Chelsea late on a Saturday night  with my camera a few weeks ago. It is an amazing area to perambulate. Of course you feel the annoyance and amazement at the stultifying prices and wealth in the area. But it does seem like the place where no expense is spared, and you can get a weird and fascinating glimpse into the lives of people who will spend a tenner on a slice of fabulous cake, and who feel a lot better because of their postcode.

Inevitably, next to the ornate shops filled with thousand pound teapots and the devastatingly expensive bars, I found someone sleeping rough on the street. There are quite a lot of homeless sleepers around Chelsea. I once agreed with Serena that I would probably sleep round those well-heeled streets if I was in such an unfortunate situation. Not so many people on their way home from the pubs pissing on your patch. They are all too posh.

Anyway, because I was photographing everything I saw that evening I took a snap of this person. I didn’t want to disturb him so I made sure there was no flash. When I reviewed the photo later I found there was a silhouette of a figure who must have been between some car headlights and the wall at the right moment. It adds a lot to the picture, I think.

On a similar theme, I saw this anti-homeless sign in a shop selling London tourist-tat on the Strand. It seems a little cruel to stop people sleeping in front of your shop. The shop would be closed anyway, and it’s not like there would be late-night window-shoppers deterred from returning the next day to buy a London bus mug. It would not be because they saw someone sleeping by the shop window, at any rate.

The image struck me because the red of the sign reflected the red in the buses. It seemed to make a point about London.

On an entirely different note I though I would post a photo I took last night from my rooftop:

Now I think that it could be said that the picture is attractive because of the light and colours of the sunset. There is a modest element of aesthetic quality from the composition using the silhouetted buildings. But as far as I am concerned, such photos are show no skill.

If you look on all the submit-your-own flickr photo competitions, many of the submissions are of sunsets, each one as worthless as the last. Sure they look pretty. But the art of photography, I would suggest, is capturing energy (light and human) in interesting ways. A sunset essentially is a facile shortcut in the pursuit of aesthetically-pleasing light. The sun is the most fascinating and important source of light we have. Clouds and the thicker atmosphere splinter the light randomly as the sun approaches the horizon. It is beautiful to capture on film, but shows no skill. Point and click. And it will always be more beautiful in the flesh, partly because it is transitory, yet it will return, and partly because our eyes are far better at capturing the myriad wavelengths.

I think a skilful photographer finds beautiful configurations of light and situations which resonate with human emotions in places and moments we normally overlook. We don’t need photographers tell us a sunset is beautiful.

Rant over.

Some painfully unimaginative property developers have put up these banal ‘lifestyle’ flats on the North End Road in West Kensington:

 Charming, I am sure you will agree.

The North End Road can be a bit rough in parts, and I love it for the combination of hopelessly crap old shops and great ones . Crap shops like the shitty video store that only appears to sell second-hand Barbara Cartland novels and sun-bleached adult dvds. Great shops like the Portuguese caff which sells lovely rich coffee at a pound a pop The place makes you feel like you are properly abroad when you step inside. Mind you, some of the food in there looks a bit dodge. Last time I went in they had a greasy pile of fried eggs lurking in the refrigerator. However, the food generally improves after the proprietor returns from holiday with lots of hams and goat’s cheeses she has found in the countryside near Porto.

Anyway, above new development obviously needed some signature art. Just to give it that classy air, that dez-rez jenesaisquoi. Unhappily, the developer’s lack of aesthetic insight is extended to the choice of three underwhelmingly small ‘standing stones’ dumped in in a clump of foliage. It looks pathetic.

I was amused to see that the locals must assume they are crap which must have been fly-tipped there. They seem to be attracting a bit of refuse. Don’t people recognise Art when they see it?

Clearly not then.

It is the summer solstice already. The weather is still grey, damp, and distinctly un-Summery. Fuck. I might have to emigrate to the sun at this rate.

There is not much hope of having a more satisfactory Summer here. I recently read Tacitus’s description of British weather two thousand years ago: “Their sky is obscured by continual rain and cloud.” He also describes the manifest British religion of Druidism. Not much has changed by the looks of things (except that the Druids aren’t ripping out human entrails with golden sickles). 

The last (and only time) I went to Stonehenge was three years ago by my reckoning. It was an interesting experience not so much for any earth-womb spiritual malarky. It was interesting because the flock of rag-tag pikeys and trustafarians (dreadlocked middle-class hippies with public school educations and trust-funds) who descend on the soggy plains near Salisbury exemplify a strange aspect of modern British subculture.

Apparently 30,000 people descended on Stonehenge for the solstice last night. When I was there it must have been a quarter of that figure. I was in Bristol and at some point late in the evening Dave the Craggg and I decided to jump in the mighty Steed and motor on down to the fields of the crusty folk.

I remember that Dave packed two of his comfortingly-battered old canteens, filled with deliciously sweet, milky tea. I also remember discovering that he had hastily munched down a pungent pasta with tomato sauce when he let out the most incredible belch in the car. I do not remember ever having to open the car window before just because someone had burped, and I reckon I won’t ever have to again. Then again, never say never…

Anyhow, we stopped in the middle of the Salisbury plain for Dave to orate some poetry about stars while I grumbled about how polluted the night sky is in London.

When we got to Stonehenge, it took a moment to recognise the stones because they were covered with punters (the solstice is the only time when the prehistoric monuments are accessible to the public. I could see that half the cred-lock crowd had decamped from Bristol to slum it with genuinely penniless hippies. There were big plastic bottles of scrumpy cider swilling from mouth-to-mouth, heavily pierced cyber-chicks twirling poi and fire-sticks, and generally loads of munters stumbling round with plastic bags full of intoxicants. It was the usual scene. It was like a big after-rave party with abnormally few casualties.

The pikeys were having lots of fun threatening the rather un-amused policemen with their lewd bottles of cider. I remember a vegan activist talking with joyful anger to a druid about one of the things that irritated her about the world. My friends who I bumped into were confused as to whether or not they should be raving, and whether the lack of the music mattered to this point. All in all it was a curious event, neither a party nor a spiritual occasion (at least for the majority).

What I find interesting about hippies is not their hypocrisy. Condemning commercialism, capitalism, and materialism whilst their lifestyles are underwritten by the bank accounts of mummy and daddy. That just gives a good reason to give them the abbreviated name ‘hippies’. Fifty years ago these young ladies and gentlemen would have had good late-imperial careers ahead of them. Now there is nowhere for them to put their idealism.

A lot of the politics which goes along with the modern hippy culture in Britain is preposterously conspiratorial. The environmentalism is great. But the often severely judgmental view of popular culture, economics, and politics is helping no-one.

For this drifting element of our society, the Solstice is the time for them to have their say, to dance on a boulder without getting pushed off by the police, to feel proud of their opinions. Either that or it’s a good excuse to get fucked up on cider and crap their underwear in public.

In the end no-one new exactly when the sun rose because it was so cloudy  (like last night I gather). It was a bit of an anticlimax as you would imagine. Sporadic fits of cheers spread over about half an hour is not quite what I had in mind. Bah. Nevertheless, wiser for the experience, Dave and I left the muddling crowd to their boggy revels as we clambered back in the Steed and home to Bristol.

I am slowly getting round to updating the content on the rest of my website. Of late I have been focussing on the portraits. I want to get more photos and music up there, as well as open up more pages on the site.

I recently wrote the music for a play called ‘Briefing’ which ran throughout April at the Camden People’s Theatre. It was very well received and reviewed, as was the music, to my relief!

From my perspective it was great working with the director and cast (all top notch graduates of Ecole Lecoq) particularly because they used the music to build the play, not just have it in the background. In this way the dramatic and musical elements of the production developed together. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of working on ‘Briefing’ and felt really proud to have been part of such an outstanding production, to be perfectly honest.

Click the thumbnail below, and have a listen to some of the music. You may get a taste of the play’s atmosphere.

North End Road 11am

The local dodgy mobile shop has branched out into men’s grooming. This sandwich board is utter genius. And entirely serious. I think the proprietor’s son must have pretensions of becoming an artist, turning his back on the family phone-unlocking and hairdressing empire.

Good enough for Ming the Merciless, good enough for me…

Check out the services on offer too:

I love the idea of going in and asking: ‘I’ll have a shape-up and eyebrows please. And while your at it, give me a price on all these phones I found.’

I dread to think why a boy’s head becomes so much more expensive to cut between 12 and 14. Maybe puberty makes your hair tougher. Apparently the barber is superstitious and refuses to serve 13 year olds.

Sand’s End 12pm

This Polish builder dreams of buying a farm back on the rich eastern plains.

For now he can make do with a sprouting onion, floating in a torn up can of Kronenberg. Well it’s a start, isn’t it?

Hammersmith Polish Centre 1pm

Sex chat. Musical sex chat.

My friend the artist Miss Lucy Ward has been documenting her tea drinking habits with the assiduous scrutiny of a serial killer. Check out this excellent artpiece website: http://everycupofteaieverhad.co.uk/.

Now I am pretty sure it is not quite every cup of tea Lucy has ever had. But it is certainly every cup since last October. However the name certainly has a good ring to it, it scans quite nicely. I approve of good scansion. Ahh the trochee …[blahablahablahabalah]

I love how she has used scraps of paper with different prints/ marks on them. I love how they are like abstracted photos, with excellently curt commentary. And I also love the Englishness of marking your life with the passage of tea. Eliot once wrote: ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’, which aptly…  [yakyakyakyakyakyakketyyak]

Go yonder and have a look at the site, it is really fun. Incidentally, if Lucy’s other half, Jack Frost, had to draw ‘everycupofteaievermade’ it wouldn’t take him long. Not because he is a speedy draughtsman, but because he simply refuses to make tea out of principle. He is now stuck. He cannot break his principle after all the hard work he has put into nagging others to make tea (usually in preposterous circumstances). Pah.

I found a couple of cups of tea I had shared with Lucy (below is one from New Year’s Day).

Immortalized in a tea chronicle. Hows about that then?

Some wealthy residents who own a big fat house in Hampstead have bought a trampoline for their children. They have also taken the sensible precaution of gaffa-taping spikes all over the frame. Just in case their children cannot figure out a more hygienic place to leave their eyeballs while they go for a jump, I imagine. But it’s okay: if the police come by, or their children decide to litigate when they are older, the parents can always say theystuck the spikes on just in case a bird shat on the trampoline. And bird-shit can be hazardous.

New portrait added to the series 2 page:

For the rest of the series click on the thumbnail below:

Have a look around, why don’t you