Night blues

One living room. A trumpet, a guitar, rainymood.com. Shut your eyes and pretend you are in a jazz bar in downtown Chicago in the fifties, everything in black and white, smoke escaping from pursed lips and permeating the worn carpeted interior. A mix between Mad Men and that really great Jonathan Creek episode where the blind trumpet player turned out to be not so blind. I obviously don't know enough things about trumpets if that is my first reference obviously.

Also you can never go wrong with an improvised song about John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Simon and Garfunkel.

Peckham

Sitting in a cut up Hard Rock Café tshirt on my bunk bed. It is somewhat of a den.

I want to be better at writing, at creating beautiful images of the mind. But they just end up sounding as tacky as new age posters with dolphins with singular words festooned beneath. C A L M or T R A N S I E N C E or something.

My past two weeks. Huxley's fictional worlds where people are green, where organs emit scents and trumpets colours seems almost on a par with Peckham, the colours that spill out in the fruit on the roadside, of the flourescent lights advertising phone unlocking and foreign calltime. It's buzzing. Chinese minimarkets that sell fresh lychees, noodles in every shape and size and a really peculiar drink that I thought was melon juice transpiring to be a winter melon tea. Pleasant was not the word for it. My favourite things about Peckham so far include the pigeon I saw eating fried chicken. Cannibal. The brothel purporting to be a twenty four hour massage parlour, pretty much opposite the church on Old Kent Road with a black exterior and a neon sign flashing the 'Holy Ghost Zone' and the man that we met at Camberwell Green at four in the morning that had been to four weddings in one day. He assured us there was no funeral.

Art wise. Francis Alys. There was such a saturation with video, I was finding the whole thing a bit mind numbing. Just as I was about to give up completely the room of tiny illustrative paintings embedded themselves into my conscience. The content was so fragile yet displayed on heavy looking materials, with resins, varnishes, spills. The disparity was endearing. The tornado video blew me away. HA HA HA. I'm sorry. It was pretty incredible, the physical representation of being completely engulfed, being rendered completely useless by something that was bigger than you, that you have no control over. When I write this now it makes me think of emotion, I know that's probably not the point, but it resonates completely, the idea of not being able to reason with it, it has to lead you on a tumultuous course.

These past two weeks have been cluttered with furniture hunting and failed bartering, job hunting, manipulating the photocopier once more, a bit of Woody Allen box set action. Bananas was awful. Me and Marie watched it whilst falling asleep and I thought the slapstick was due to me slipping in and out of consciousness. It wasn't. It was inherent. House meals, balloons in the bath, the National Portrait Gallery for the BP Award and the Camille Silvy exhibition. The £4 spent on the entrance for Silvy seemed to pay for respite from the hustle and bustle of the Portrait Award than anything else. The exhibition was a bit like a serene history lesson, conducted under warm mood lighting and green paint, most of the photos within have now been rendered slightly kitsch. I couldn't really appreciate how groundbreaking they may well have been in the mid-nineteenth century. I was merely picturing how much fun it would be to cut them up and collage them. For that end a CV session in Greenwich served these means particularly well, finding myself in an old bookshop, leaving with ten pounds worth of collage worthy material including a particular gem on birds by the RSPB. My best book find of the past two weeks has to be an old ladybird classic entitled 'The Camera.' I am intending to actually learn how it works. It has illustrations of photographs instead of actual photographs. Which seems weird. We are also now a household with a record player and some amazing vinyls. I bet not many other people get to indulge themselves in the Shaft soundtrack while they are eating dinner.

Perhaps the most relevatory discovery of the past few days is the discovery that I'm employable and may be soon heading to a catering event near you. I was having daydream reveries of working in an art bookshop. It would have been like High Fidelity. With the same need for list making but with no relevance to music. I dug out the old VHS copy of it the other day. It was brilliant.

The question is, 'what did come first, the music or the misery?'

.

I have built up so much to write about that I can't even get it out.

Wolves

My life has been packed up into varying ikea bags and boxes and stowed away in the back of a transit van, making its way southbound. The idea of leaving Wolverhampton made me want to document my favourite bits. The matchbox pinhole worked well until, being a woman and all, I played around with it and promptly broke it. I need to stop fiddling. Luckily matchboxes are seventeen pence and I have enough black electrical tape to last a lifetime. So, Wolverhampton. Described by blandness, patterns, line. Dusky colours, freestanding walls that have been waiting to be demolished for at least two years, my favourite ever typography in sign form on a hotel that in my twenty years I have never seen anyone go in or out of. I think that's being demolished too. Walls with barbed wire that look like they belong in East Berlin and signs that incite the possibility of apocalypse any day now. Come to think of it, my cycling always gets a bit uneasy at this point.

Manhattan

'Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people.' Manhattan.

The subtle optimism that glazes the final scene of Manhattan seems to have seeped through to me. I found myself half skipping down Swan Bank whilst re-falling in love with the Mystery Jets and Behind the Bunhouse. Everything feels good. Especially with Blaine's heartfelt choruses and bike rides at dusk, the lights cutting through the clouded blue. In keeping with my aim to be more in tune with art and culture and stuff I am half way through Brave New World. If I ever took soma and spent a night in a wistful state that no crippling emotion could penetrate I'd be willing to bet that if it had to take a musical form it would resolve itself in Four Tet's 'Everything is Alright'. Closely followed by Blur's 'Badhead'. Washed down with some Tesco peach sparkling water and visualised through a disposable camera form.

I'm captivated by Woody Allen at the first time of asking and I'm only one sixth of the way through the box set. I hope the same rings true for Hitchcock.

Sleep

continues to elude me.

It is most likely because I insist on watching 4od until the early hours of the morning and unwittingly (who am I kidding) fantasize about Richard Ayoade.

Quote

It makes me want to embroider.

'Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle, everything I do is stitched with your colours.'