Insomnia

In the words of Faithless. I can't get no sleep.

It seems like time is slipping through my fingertips. The last week has passed in a haze of galleries, seminars and buying used travelcards, of the British Library treasure room and of managing to negotiate our way into a Royal Academy private viewing. Night cityscapes overlooking Canary Wharf from Greenwich, making it into the wood workshop and building Colin, a pinhole camera. The exposure times were so prolonged that it turned this idea of capturing a single moment on its head, it was almost capturing a narrative. Even the images that didn't develop held this kind of unspoken narrative, a trace of something. Stopping for a camera you become almost a caricature of yourself, forced smile, holding a pose. Yet with an exposure time that spans for more than ten minutes it felt more appropriate, more real perhaps.

Ideas ideas ideas. Its that time of night where I can't sleep for overspilling thoughts. Also a time where I wish I had a scanner. And that I hadn't given Snappy Snaps a blank film to develop. And that I hadn't spent £2.10 on an average hot chocolate just so I could sit in the warm for an hour and wait for a film to be developed that hadn't even been exposed.

This is my week in a list. David Hockney film, amazing Bradford accent, artist as melancholic figure debate, film screening, sleep inducing, the word soporific generally, wood glue, studio pearls of wisdom, pinhole, darkroom, ICA, photography, vowing to never again go shopping in Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon, wishful thinking (thank you Royal Academy), rain, cinema.

Avatar was pretty good. The best description I have heard so far is that it is like Pocahontas but with blue people.

Royal Academy show highlights for me (from what I could transcribe from the scrawl on my hand afterwards) included this and this. Prints on newsprint and copperplate etchings caught my eye too.