but it's still, still life....

Do you remember back in the day when the purpose of a weblog was to share links to other interesting websites?  Yeah?  Well, tonight we're going to go old school.  So let's get the atmosphere all 2004: how about a playlist?  "Milkshake" by Kelis, "Hey Ya!" by Outkast, "These Words" by Natasha Bedingfield, maybe? "Mad World" by Gary Jules? "All This Time" by Michelle MacManus? "F*ck It (I Don't Want You Back)" by Eamon?

Enough?  Yeah.  Probably.

I bought my first iPod sometime around here and downloaded my first song too.  Good times.

Anyway.  Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.  Where are those links?

The first is to the story of a self-proclaimed ‘anarchist philatelist', Angus McDonagh. Angus is a 64 year old man from Somerset who started making his own stamps, all featuring his own image and a number of made up currencies, and then using them to send letter as far afield as Australia.  Apparently, after sending more than 100 letters using these stamps, only one was ever returned as not being legal (which seems astonishing when you look at some of the rather outlandish designs).  He says that he used to send cheques to the Royal Mail to compensate them for lost revenue, but they were never cashed.  Don't look too far down into the comments (and I deliberately ignored the link to the Daily Mail story on the subject)... you don't have to get too far before the first rather self-important "but other people are having to pay for this man's stupidity" remarks.  Better to instead focus on the off-beam creativity that led to the idea in the first place.  You can buy a book that documents all of the stamps, if you like.

The second story is, in its own way, even more remarkable.  This is the story of the strange old man from Kyjov in the Czech Republic who made his own cameras out of cardboard tubes, dressmaker's elastic and lenses he had ground himself from plastic discs using toothpaste.

Apparently, he would wander around his hometown taking mostly surreptitious pictures of women.  He was a well known figure about town, and perhaps because of his tramp-like appearance and the cobbled together nature of his equipment, no one really took him seriously and lots of people humoured him as he pointed his cardboard tubes at them to 'take a picture'.  Turns out he was quite good.

In a way his pictures are a bit creepy: lots are taken of women at the local bathing pool, some taken through a wire fence and many with their subject presumably completely unaware.  Some of the photos are extraordinary, though, and Miroslav Tichý has won awards and been exhibited in places like Zurich, Seville and Paris. The photos are blotched and gritty from dust in the camera and imperfections in the developing process, but they are also very striking.

Director Radek Horacek of the Brno House of Art, which held an exhibition of Tichý's photographs in 2006, describes them thus:

"They are all very careful observations of women from Kyjov and of everyday trivial activities. But soon you realize that these trivial situations such as someone sitting on a bench, women waiting for a bus, someone taking a T-shirt off at a swimming pool, are somehow extraordinary. Tichy managed to give this banality a feeling of exceptionality and rarity. Just part of a female body in his pictures can look very esoteric. There are so many magazines that offer much more nudity than Tichy but his photographs are different. A woman's tights between a knee and a skirt or a swimming costume in his pictures look somehow mysterious"

Tichý himself described his primitive methods more simply: "First of all, you have to have a bad camera", and, "If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world."

Fascinating.

Anyway.  As you were.

what are we doing here if romance isn't dead?

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly".
—Banksy

As I walked to work after dropping my car off at the garage the other day, I saw some graffiti on the subway that took me underneath the Clifton flyover.  I quite like graffiti.  It can be childish, poorly spelt and with apostrophes missing all over the place.... of course it can.   But done well, it can be witty, defiant and an all-round enhancement to otherwise oppressive and downright ugly functional concrete architecture.

The message above is on a tunnel underneath the ringroad from one industrial estate to another.  I don't know how well-travelled it is, but there isn't anything residential for miles around.  Probably the biggest source of pedestrian traffic through here are the people on their way to the five-a-side football pitches.  I don't wish to cast any aspersions, but I rather fear that the average clientele of Powerleague aren't all that fussed by the politics of over-population.

Still.  I like it.  It's well drawn and it's got a message.  It's maybe not the best way to bring about a radical change in the global population, but it's better than staring at a concrete wall.

This particular bridge has form: this was up here in 2006.

Graffiti that references both Juvenal ('Quis custodiet ipsos custodes') and Alan Moore?  What's not to like about that?  Am I dreaming a similarity in the handwriting there?

My favourite piece of graffiti here was quite different through:

That's funny, for sure - especially as it must have been seen by thousands and thousands of rush-hour commuters in their cars - but it's also a beautifully drawn momento mori; time's winged chariot is drawing near... why shouldn't his chariot be a tricycle?

The council paints this stuff over.  Well, I suppose they must prefer beige paint over concrete to graffiti of any kind, no matter how interesting.  Now, I'm no art critic, but..... this isn't just brainless tagging, is it?  But what do I know?  Maybe the council have their own in-house Brian Sewell to pass judgement on each according to their own merits?  Well, you can see what they're thinking: one day someone will tag one of these characterless concrete carbuncles and totally ruin it.

full of fun, seems to be the ideal....

I'm learning more about my new colleagues with every day that passes.

Colleague: "So, did you watch X-Factor at the weekend?"
Me: "No".
Colleague: "Do you ever watch anything like that or Britain's Got Talent?"
Me: "Not really.  I watch BBC4".
Colleague: "There's a BBC4?"
Me: "Yes".
Colleague: [shrugs] "I didn't know the channels went up that high.  I like BBC3 though".
Me: "BBC4, darling.  BBC4."

Hmm.....or possibly, they're learning an awful lot more about me.

Let's consider the evidence: I live in a pleasant, leafy suburb of Nottingham; I have a vegetable box delivered; I considered voting Green in the last local elections (but didn't); I listen to the kind of talk radio shows that don't have adverts; I buy CDs; I cycle to work; I consider carbon off-setting my flights until I see how much that actually costs.

Good heavens.  When did I become one of those people?

Y'all don't know what it's like, 
Being male, middle-class and white....

Sham on.

new york state of mind....

A couple of months ago, I finally discovered a really good use for my iPad.

I've had it for about a year now, since my generous wife brought it back for me from her business trip to the USA. Oh sure, I've used it for all the obvious stuff: browsing websites, playing Angry Birds, reading my email and all that jazz, but I hadn't found the thing that made it really indispensable (although I did very much enjoy watching Jaws sitting next to a mesmerised seven year-old on a flight back from Paris).

Then I subscribed to the New Yorker.

I like the New Yorker. I like the idea of the New Yorker. Every time I've been in the Big Apple, I've picked up a copy, read it from cover to cover and then toyed with the idea of subscribing... only to look into it and realise it's a very expensive and impractical way of getting hold of a weekly periodical.  Given that it's such an obvious idea, it took me a really long time to realise that the iPad might be my answer: one £29 subscription later and I was on my way.

It's a bit of a challenge to find the time to work my way through all the content every week, but it's fantastically stimulating with an array of wide-ranging articles. I've read fascinating articles on some diverse subjects: an in-depth profile of a Mormon Innovation consultant; the story of the hapless American drifter who found his niche in Cuba and ended up as a commandante in Castro's revolutionary army; a detailed analysis of the stunning Republican U-turn over the individual mandate; a look at some of the climate change reversal theories scientists are working on (big stirrers to lift the colder water from the bottom of the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than the warmer water that was above it, anyone?); a brilliant, in-depth review of Mark Ruffalo's performance in the Avengers movie by FILM CRITIC HULK; a terrifying interview with the Tupelo evangelist and broadcaster who is both staggeringly arrogant and staggeringly ignorant - Hitler as a homosexual socialist with an army of gay Storm Troopers who would obey his orders far more readily than heterosexuals, for instance - quite why he thought he'd come out looking good from a profile in the New Yorker, I have no idea... the writing is uniformly pretty good, but the sheer breadth of stuff here is amazing.

Slightly to my surprise, I find that I like the fiction - every issue contains a short story - the best. It's not always to my taste, but it's never boring and several times has almost inspired me to write something myself. Yeah. So it's a great read and I've enjoyed very much making the time to read it every week, putting down my iPad feeling slightly better informed than when I picked it up... which isn't really true when I've been playing Angry Birds. I've even put an entry into the famous cartoon caption competition (my caption, incidentally, far better than any of the winners. Maybe these wise-ass New Yorkers just don't get my sophisticated British humour?)

I truly didn't think that it was possible, but it seems that I really have found a way to make myself an even duller conversationalist....

so hip it hurts....

I was wearing my Ho Chi Minh t-shirt last weekend.

I searched long and hard for this when we were in Vietnam during the August of 2010.  Clearly t-shirts of Uncle Ho are as common as muck and as cheap as chips over there, but I was looking for something a little out of the ordinary... well, and something that might last me a little longer than the first wash.

In the end, I stumbled across exactly what I was looking for in a small shop called "Papaya' down by the river in Hoi An.  It wasn't the cheapest by any means, but the t-shirts seemed to be a very high quality and - best of all - they were fair trade.

Here's a snippet from their website:

"Purchasing a papaya t-shirt you can be sure to help and also be involve in the building process of an equitable system where both, the worker earns a living wage so he can provide for his family’s daily needs, and you, the consumer can be sure of having purchased a quality product that will bring satisfaction and that he has done a good deed.
Our Policy: No children labour freedom of association safe and good working conditions reasonable salaries and benefits sharing reasonable working hours equal opportunities employment security respectful treatment of employees".

The label "Made in Vietnam" is used here as a badge of quality.

I wear my Uncle Ho t-shirt with pride: he's an iconic figure and it was a fantastic trip to a beautiful country (plus it's WORTHY, too... what's not to like?).  The great man only appears on the t-shirt in silhouette, but the guy in our local picture framing shop recognised it immediately on Saturday and commented approvingly.  Well, I suppose he would: he's both exactly the right sort of age to identify such an iconic figure AND he framed the Vietnamese publicity posters that we brought back with us (including one of Uncle Ho).  Hmm.   Now I think of it, he's also just framed a North Korean propaganda poster advertising an art exhibition in Vienna that we went to).  Yeah, so I guess he had some context.  But still....

A little later on, I was enjoying a beer in the bar at the Broadway cinema when someone else approached me about the t-shirt.  Now, the Broadway is the art-house cinema in town, and it has a pretty good bar: if you can find hipsters anywhere in Nottingham, you can find them here.

"Excuse me"
"Yes?"
"Do you mind if I ask you who that is on your t-shirt?"
I summoned my most nonchalant look and replied, "It's Ho Chi Minh"
"Ah."
Pause.
"...that was a great episode of Top Gear, wasn't it?"
He then went into what I assume was a Jeremy Clarkson impersonation, making some remark about how they'd now made it further north than the Americans, but by now I'd looked away disdainfully.  To be honest, I was a little embarrassed on his behalf.

Seriously.  I bet he wasn't there to watch a subtitled film either*

(* we were there to see Dark Shadows, btw... but he doesn't need to know that)

say my name....

"Yeah, so I can't go to the team thing after work on Thursday.  Why not?  Because I've been invited to a book launch.  Yeah.  Maybe I can catch up with you guys later."

Contrary to what some people at work now inexplicably seem to think, I don't go to book launches all the time.  In fact, last week's was my only one to date, but I'm lucky enough to be friendly with the Nottingham author David Belbin.  We met through friends and have bumped into each other at gigs for a few years now.  He's best known for writing Young Adult fiction, but I read 2008's "The Pretender", his first 'adult' novel, and was very impressed. 

Last year, David had a number one in the Kindle chart with "Bone and Cane", a crime novel set in Nottingham in the run up to the 1997 General Election.  It's a great read, and I was pleased to be able to contribute a five star review on Amazon (apparently these things help to trigger the algorithms that recommend books on Amazon and thus contribute directly to increased sales).   But hey!  I now knew a number one bestselling author.  How cool is that?

A few months later, David mentioned to me that the sequel would be coming out on Christmas Day, and asked if I would like a pre-release copy for my kindle in exchange for another review (to try and trip those algorithms again). 

Of course I would!

I'm pleased to say that I enjoyed "What You Don't Know" even more than it's predecessor: the plot is darker, but the book doesn't deal in a black and white world of clear-cut rights and wrongs and understands that the world is made up of shades of grey.  I genuinely thought it was a fantastic read and was more than happy to post another five star review.

For some reason, although the kindle edition was released in December, the print edition was only released last week.... hence the book launch.  I nearly didn't go: I'm the kind of guy who stands in the corner at parties checking out the bookshelves and CDs, and I find socialising with people I don't know a little stressful.  But hell - do I get invited to so many book launches that I would be happy to sit at home on my own instead?  No.  So I went.  It was good... and apparently I'm on the launch video.

I've already read the book, of course, but I felt moved to buy another copy to support my friend and to maybe get an autograph too.  I joined the queue.  Did I want it personalised or just a signature and a date so I could stick it on Ebay?  Oh, come on!  I'm not going to stick it on Ebay. Personalised please.

I walked away, delighted that my friend... the number 1 bestselling author... had just dedicated a book to me, someone who had made a small contribution to his success. 

I looked at what he'd written.

Ah.

Now I remembered that, from time to time, David calls me Ben.  I've only really got myself to blame, as I don't blog or tweet under my real name, and when he's done it before, I've never really corrected him as it's always easier to just let it slide.  But now I had a book dedicated to a Ben.  I nearly did nothing, but in the end took the bull by the horns and went back.

David was a little embarrassed, but he immediately knew what he'd done and what my name really was.  He reached for a new book, but I stopped him.  This one's fine.

So maybe this isn't worth a damn on Ebay, but it really works for me. 

If I ever get too full of myself, just all me Ben.

It's a great book.  Go buy.

and we cry when they all die blonde.....

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;"

Ah, probably the most famous Shakespearean soliloquy to be delivered by a man whose very name was a toilet joke. What Shakespeare doesn't go on to say in that speech is that, not only are men and women merely actors, but that in our own heads, we're all playing Hamlet: we're the stars of our own dramas and everyone else in our lives are merely the supporting cast. If you're the star, then the absolute most that everyone else can hope for is that they might get to play Gertrude, Horatio, Ophelia or even Claudius in the drama of your life. More likely though, most people will end up playing the third spear carrier on the left. We Hamlets define the world by how it impacts on us, and not the other way around. When something happens, or when someone does something, we will immediately view it through the lens of how it affects us. Somewhat annoyingly for us Hamlets, then, the supporting players in all our lives are often played by terrible hams; the kind of actors who take it upon themselves to try and steal some of our limelight and to attract attention away from us, the stars of our own productions. It almost as though they thought this play was about them.

Surely this Hamlet complex is the only way to explain why so many people seem to be so wrapped up in themselves and their own lives and so insensitive to the needs of others. I'm sure we all see countless examples every day of our lives: the people who jump the traffic lights, as though red lights somehow don't apply for them and that it's okay for you to have to wait at a green light until they have gone through; the guy in the pool who ploughs up and down the lane you're sharing at a speed of his choosing, showing no consideration at all to your needs or the speed at which you're swimming, wrapped up only in his own requirements; the people you work with who will happily take credit but are quick to duck responsibility and to apportion blame; the guy who elbows his way to the front of the bar queue and gleefully gets served in front of you.... life sometimes seems to be a succession of little acts of rudeness; death from the thousand cuts of someone else's lack of consideration for another human being, or at least by their decision that their own needs are more important. Well, when you're the star of the show, it's you who should be getting the plaudits. Why worry about the little people?

Only life isn't really like that, is it? As Shakespeare goes on to say in the same soliloquy:

"And one man in his time plays many parts,"

He's referring, of course, to the seven ages of man; our journey from "mewling and puking" infant to decrepit old age, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". What he might also add is that, whilst we might all be playing Hamlet in the dramas of our own lives, we're also simultaneously playing all of the other parts in other people's dramas. You might be Polonious to your brother, Rosencrantz to your boss and the third spear carrier on the left to your neighbours....Everyone might be Hamlet in their own head, but we'd do well to remember that we're no more than a supporting character in everyone else's. To mix my metaphors, wouldn't we do better to think of life as a team game? No matter how good a Ronaldo or a Kaká might be, no matter how inspirational their individual brilliance on the football pitch might be, they still can't win a game of football entirely on their own. Even people in the apparently individual pursuits like tennis or golf will still rely heavily on their own support teams if they are to succeed; their coaches and their caddies, their physiotherapists and their psychotherapists.... even their families and friends.

As a contemporary of Shakespeare, John Donne, wrote:

"No man is an island, entire of itself
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
It tolls for thee."

I like the idea that we're all connected simply by being human. We're all in it together, aren't we? Anything we can do to help make all of our rides a little easier have got to be worthwhile, hasn't it? Isn't that a much nicer way to think about the world and the way we relate to each other? We're all ultimately in the same show and not just the stars of our own matinees. Wouldn't it be nice if we all tried to behave a bit more like it?

Of course, the somewhat inconvenient problem with this argument is that I'm not so selfless myself as to be beyond reproach. By railing against traffic light jumpers, swimming pool hogs, unscrupulous colleagues, queue jumpers at the bar and the like, I'm merely casting my own judgement upon them all; a judgement based entirely upon how the behaviour of those people has impacted upon me and how it has inconvenienced me. By acknowledging that fact, am I not also acknowledging that I am guilty of casting myself as Hamlet?

As Shakespeare also said:

"A pox damn you, you muddy rascal, is that all the comfort you give me?"

Pah.

graffiti bridge.....

My normal route to work involves taking an exit off the big Nottingham ring road and driving down to a complicated looking roundabout underneath the Dunkirk flyover. Well, it's not really very complicated, but it has a lot of roads sweeping away to various places above it on towering concrete pillars, and it looked so forbidding on a map that when I first moved to Nottingham I actually lived on the other side of town purely to avoid having to drive around it. Anyway, as soon as I released that it wasn't so bad really, I soon moved to the nicer side of town and decided it was probably best never to mention this marvellous piece of decision making to anyone. So keep it to yourselves, eh?

Anyway, as I trundled down the sliproad towards the roundabout and the start of my Monday morning in the office, I saw something interesting on the pillar directly in front of me at the traffic lights: some graffiti....



We've had people tagging down here before (this, for example), and if you look at that pillar carefully, you can see that the council have made it their business to put some sort of special paint on the bottom couple of metres so as to better deter vandals. It's been there unchallenged for a couple of years, but it looks as though it's only now that someone has decided to put this magic paint to the test.

It doesn't look as though it's up to the task. Even better, though, we look to have gained a quality piece of work too:



I suppose that the person who did this was actually committing a crime, but you can't tell me that this hasn't enhanced this dingy, damp, concrete filled piece of roadway. If Banksy has achieved anything, it's surely been to show to the world that street art like this can be so much more than just mindless vandalism.

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly".
—Banksy

Banksy's work is widely celebrated, of course: it's funny, it's playful and it's also often bitingly satirical. Go and have a look at some of the stuff that Banksy painted in New Orleans during his recent trip there... there are some pretty powerful statements in there. He might not like to be called one, but he's a proper artist.

This isn't a Banksy, although it looks to be very much from the Banksy school of stencil art (as much as I know anything about it). I really like it, and I rushed to get a photo of it before the council come and efficiently (but humourlessly) paint over it. It's funny -- Death on a tricycle, what's not to like? -- but it's also as true a momento mori as you are likely to see, and it reminds me of "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell. In the poem, Marvell hails the beauty of his love and tries to convince her that she should go to bed with him because life is short and death is never very far away. "Had we but world enough, and time," he says, then he would be more than happy to spend an eternity cataloguing her many virtues,

"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity".

So, he concludes, in what must be one of the most optimistic chat-up lines of all time, you should sleep with me immediately, just in case you should die before you get round to it:

"Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run".

Or, to paraphrase: "Get your knickers off, love, and Carpe Diem"

Metaphysical poetry on a Monday. Too much.....?

Well, you can't outrun death, so you might as well enjoy the life you have.

It made me smile, anyway, and I need all the smiles I can get on a Monday morning.