Category: black hole

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Fish eggs

My friend F paints duck eggs. Not in the Easter/pagan sense of applying pigment to shell but in the canvas-on-easel oils-on-palette sense of depicting them. This bowl, these eggs, are not from her studio. They are in her kitchen. On her black work-surface against her black wall. Awaiting culinary rather than representational alchemy (in both disciplines F is an artist).

a bowl of duck eggs

I can utterly understand the obsession. (She’s painted quite a large number of different permutations of eggs.) Taking the photograph was exciting enough – the textures, the colours, the subtle gradations of hue, the shapes, the way the light fell on and thereby changed all these things. And all I did was twiddle a couple of knobs, position the camera and click the shutter. Imagine the challenge, the possibilities of building up an image from nothing.

It is F’s birthday today. She is one of eleven pisceans sufficiently near and dear to have their birthdays entered in my calendar, the first of whom (February 21st) is 1st son and last of whom is me.

Are pisceans reputed to get on particularly well together? or is this bulge (yes, it’s far and away the biggest clump of nearest-and-dearest birthdays, I went through the aforementioned calendar to check it wasn’t merely “I’m a piscean” bias), is this bulge (I restate since the previous parenthesis was so long you might have forgotten the original question), a statistical anomaly?

Anyway, the explanation, should one ever conclusively be demonstrated, matters not at all. I merely wish to celebrate and salute my fishy sistren and brethren.

(And for the terrier-fancying fish among us – yes, that means you, Fresca – there are more pictures of the lovely Maizy from yesterday’s impromptu photo-shoot here, here and here.)

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Small is, of course, beautiful

I think I’ve become a microblogger. Either that or I’ve got 140 characters < block (more than 140 characters and I have nothing to say, although of course this post is disproving that; but it’s the exception that proves the rule and, let’s face it, there are probably only 140 characters in this worth reading).

The above link is to identi.ca because I much prefer the community but there are still some cool dudes who (inexplicably) only hang out on twitter so I cross-post there.

So, in the absence of meatier matter of words I’ve set up a weekly digest of dents (identi.ca version of twitter’s tweets) which, if the plugin and my programming thereof work, should appear on a Sunday evening under the category “dermal denticles” because it’s a summary of the abrasive surface of life. (And because ever since labelling drawings of dissected dogfish in biology lessons at school I’ve loved the sound of the phrase “dermal denticles”.)

And while I’m venturing into the complexities (comparatively speaking, of course) of a fully-blown blog interface here are a couple of pictures which I took today and which, entirely coincidentally, both fall neatly into the strictures of this week’s Photo Friday challenge, ‘White’ (which I first clocked at Maria‘s).

outside macdonalds

In London the white dove comes pre-smirched with feral grey. But are you surprised when you see the Stygian stream from which it drinks? (That’s 137 characters btw.)

moon snooker

The pollarded stumps of the plane tree line up like cues to strike the white ball of the moon. (95 characters.)

Yup, my photographs are dents too.

(This post was powered by white wine, possibly to excess. Editing may take place in the bright white wineless light of morning.)

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Positive and negative

Each leaf which fell after the sleet has sheltered a frozen mirror. Scuffed aside the secret is revealed of their cold embrace, but the short slant light of day cannot make it melt.

ice print

People from the past drift through my dreams and drop into my e-mail in-box. These I can ignore, but when they ring on the phone interaction is required. I’m talking six to sixteen years past. My number is unlisted, but despite this someone I’ve never met rings it, on the advice of someone I last saw eight years ago, and asks for advice about a forthcoming job interview. Surreal. The positive is the surprising equanimity with which I deal with these unasked-for interruptions.

The unmistakable scream of a swift from the ice-blue sky has me screwing up my eyes against the red-pink of the huge winter setting sun, searching in astonishment for a seriously displaced summer visitor. A starling stares back down from a television aerial silent for a few seconds before repeating its borrowed screech.

Last night I dreamed of buying clothes. A snappy little tailored jacket, to be exact, and a cunningly constructed skirt. This is the first time for years that my attention, conscious or unconscious, to garments has gone much beyond whether they are sufficiently warm and sufficiently clean to be either useful or respectable. Unfortunately my budget for clothes is zero, but luckily I already have considerably more than necessary and have a long neglected wardrobe to explore.

Mice are gone, lice are back.

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Punning pee

Oh dear. I couldn’t resist this. And then Maizy stuck her head into the picture and perfected it.

dog pee

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What a year!

How did she phrase it? that it had been a weird year? or strange? As we sat on the edge of the stage watching the crowds disperse Hg and I realised that yes, it was indeed only a year since we’d first seen Laura Marling play, at the memorable event we now refer to as the gig in the gutter where she took to the street outside the Soho venue having been barred from playing after the management discovered she was not yet 18 years old.

tuning

Well, she’s 18 now. Still gamin, but oh what a difference a year has made. The voice has grown, matured, mellowed, gained immeasurably in confidence, and so has she.

While still obviously painfully shy (there were several self-deprecating references to her inability to “banter”) the full-on touring schedule, both national and international, has strengthened her stage presence. She was backed on about half the songs by the new “team Laura Marling” – keyboards (Pete Roe), violin/ukelele (Phil Renna), bass/double bass (Graeme Ross), percussion/accordion (David Sanderson) and, on a couple, a backing singer called Emma – but whether alone or surrounded she was, gracefully, in control.

laughing

Both Hg and I had, it transpired, been worried that the gig might suffer from end-of-tour ennui, material polished to beyond perfection and/or delivered with the lack of zest which comes from repetition and over-familiarity. But no, it was quite the reverse. Not only were the album tracks fresh and zingy both in delivery and arrangement, there was a wealth of new material, “as new as songs can be” she explained while apologising in advance for any roughness. One, Hope in the Air saw her putting aside the familiar guitar and accompanying herself on the banjo.

banjo

Lyrically the new songs seem to be returning to the darker places from whence much of her early material came, but from her position of greater depth and experience. I continue to be impressed (to the point of slack-jawed awe, quite frankly) by Laura Marling’s prodigious talent which shows every sign of continuing to develop. I can’t wait for the second album.

Some links:

* Evening Standard review of the (previous night’s) Scala gig on 11 November;
* The Guardian review of that same gig;
* Interview on ClashMusic.com;
* the rest of the pictures (no, I’m not going to moan about my camera still being broken yadda yadda).

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Service update

falls

Inspired by the wonderful postal poetry. It could be improved, considerably probably, but it’s good enough to be going on with and I have neither the time nor the inclination to do anything more to it.

I have had so little time, what with one thing and its inseparable companion the other, I haven’t even touched a knitting needle for more than a fortnight.

Gadzooks! Zounds! To the tricotage, Parker, and don’t spare the horses.

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Journaling

I’ve been thinking a lot about memory recently.

road closed

I wrote something for qarrtsiluni which the editors have been kind enough to publish anonymously.

vex

It’s called Apocalypse Regained.

The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek “apokálypsis” meaning “something disclosed which was not previously realised”.

Writing is good for you.

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Of late

I keep starting blog posts and never finishing them.

Shit’s been happening and lovely stuff’s been happening. Light ‘n shade, innit.

six legs

sprawling

The lovely stuff has involved other people, food and the extraordinary autumn sunlight of the last few days.

blue chair

listening

It’s also included my pusher enabler leading me astray from my blanket

broken rib

but that’s probably a good thing because the blanket was driving me seriously insane. I’ve done five of the twelve strips so it’s not been entirely deserted.

There’s been art, too, and “art” (aka pile-of-shite) and wine and beer and chocolate. And flasks of coffee. And I had a lucid dream!

Speaking of which, it’s getting late and I must go to bed.

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America, land of the free

Been looking at some extraordinary photographs the last couple of days. Like these

and these

The former are from the Pictures of the Year International website where many more fascinating features about, generally, the American underbelly can be found in the archives of the winners galleries in the Community Awareness Award category.

The latter is in a new(ish) online documentary photography magazine, vewd, “continuing the tradition of storytelling through a visual medium”.

I took some picutures in Chinatown today, out and about with Neha and the-boy-who-was-off-school-because-of-the-burst-water-main. They don’t tell a story.

(The new category, “black hole”, is derived from what my camera is called by the boys on the grounds that light goes in and, they claim, doesn’t come out.)